Though Fräulein Manzialy’s cards are the same, the Bunker changes. People rush in and out. Many of the soldiers have rough weather lines so deep their mouths just look like more creases. Yesterday I heard loud laughing and a group of SS came down the staircase carrying a Russian soldier. Entering the dining area, they threw the captive on the table. I was drinking coffee while Goebbels was expounding on Chaucer. We moved back against the wall with our coffee cups to stare. The SS ignored us. The Russian on the table was a woman holding up a torn picture as she whimpered in German, “Mutter, meine Mutter.” A German Thiele watch was on her wrist that the men removed gently. Soon the SS men laughed as they roughly stripped her, greased her breasts with motor oil, and tied her up so she dangled over the table from a metal chain under her arms—another chain around her middle was attached to spikes on the concrete ceiling. The woman was stocky, her hips fleshy, her thighs thick and muscular. You could see the endless steppes of Russia in the rough ridges on her hands. Crumpled on the floor was her mother’s picture. The men stared silently at their prisoner who they referred to as a Flintenweiber, the most fanatical of Soviet soldiers. The Bunker was suddenly still. For once the Goebbels children were quiet. Adi and Bormann were busy over their maps. Moving the cup slowly to my lips, I sipped the now tepid coffee—coffee so watered down and so unlike real coffee that it tasted like old brown blood on my lips. Goebbels said the woman had hips that probably were like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. As the chains creaked, the Russian woman’s windmilling legs tried to reach the floor.

One SS jumped up to her body, his mouth open and angled to suck in a breast, his legs straddling her. The others followed. SS attached themselves to her like bees on a hive. Swinging, swinging… they were clustered together as Goebbels gawked with undisguised approval. The woman screamed, but the screams died away. Goebbels grew bored and went back to reading The Canterbury Tales as I quickly walked to my room where all I heard were distant grunts.

I know that our men died with frozen feet and hands on the Eastern front. German wives lost their husbands. German children lost fathers.

This morning, the chains were gone from the dining area. There was no trace of the Russian woman. When I start to tell Adi about the incident, he stops me. “When we’re winning, we can be humane. War simplifies morals, and bestiality is vital. Napoleon said at his coronation, ‘Dieu me la donne, gare à qui la touche! God has given it to me, let him beware who shall touch it.’”

“But you don’t believe in God, Adi.”

“My pretty little Evchen, I believe in Napoleon.” Then he reminds me that during the French Revolution, the women were the most ferocious. But he adds sympathetically, “That Russian female had no rank. I know what it’s like to be a noncom.”

“But she had a mother. You most certainly know what it’s like to have a mutter.”

“The ancient Roman army captured their enemy and brought them back to fight lions to the death. Would a mother prefer that?”

“No.”

“The old Greeks killed all the adult males of a conquered country.”

“Yes. You’re right. We’re more advanced.”

Leaning over suddenly, he clutches his stomach in pain. He’s gasping and falls to the floor rolling with his knees drawn up.

“Adi,” I say, having seen all this before, “let it go.”

He continues to squirm at my feet.

“Let it go!” I yell.

“Nein! Nein!” Hunched into an agonized ball, his thighs press against his chest as he tightens his back.

“It’s just stomach gas,” I shout

“Nein!”

“It’s only intestinal wind, Adi.”

More struggling and then he stands, calm now, reassured his body has not had its way. “I’ve mastered it.” Reaching for a map, he says with bitterness that he has to note the positions of his troops from foreign radio news since his own generals give inaccurate information or none at all.

A young company runner provides a happy distraction, tracking wet shoe prints on the concrete and shaking white dust from his uniform. Wearing a spiked helmet pushed down over his forehead, he arrives in a whirlwind exciting everybody including Blondi. His eyes behind thick goggles are inflamed with panic. He reports that the zoo was hit. Animals are running wild in the city. Shopkeepers are chopping down the two giant wooden elephants that support the zoo entrance carrying off trunks and spangled tusks like ordinary firewood. In a solitary cone of brightness, he saw a frightened bear cub curling up alongside women and children who were drinking from a horse trough.

The young private’s father is the zookeeper and he himself has lived all his life with his family in the Keeper’s House next to the pigmy elephants. Except for the last six months in the army, the zoo was his only home. People call him the Zoo Fritz or the Fritz with 5,000 pets. He goes by his mother’s name for after World War I, the government made a law that women who lost brothers during the war could legally give their maiden names to their children in order to perpetuate the family heritage.

“Mein Zoo Fritz, why is a private wearing white gloves?” A serious line of wrinkles appear on Adi’s forehead.

“A courtesy to the animals, Mein Führer.” Taking off his helmet reveals pimples on his forehead. Large pink ears lie flat against his head. He had to reinforce the top of his boots with the tread of an old truck tire.

Adi angrily shouts, “If we hold Berlin, our civilians will stand up and fight from their porches. From their front yards. Berlin is a porcupine to be defended to its last hair, its last quill, its last bristle and awn.”

He scolds the boy for wearing a World War I helmet and for missing hobnails on his boots, threatening to send him to a penal battalion for not wearing a proper uniform. A uniform is sacred. But Adi finally relents and lets the youth keep the helmet as that’s all the boy can find to shield his head. Adi admits to me later that the runner, though babbling and misinformed, made him nostalgic for when he was a young soldier himself in the List Regiment during the First World War when he won the Iron Cross. His war stories tend to get more detailed and longer with each telling, but I think a woman is able to appreciate repetition more than a man. I listen patiently to how he survived five years on the Western Front and was in 50 battles and got wounded. Those stories remind me why he has yellow teeth and awful breath so that being near him is very earthy. I pretend his heroic foxhole dust is in my hair, that his arms have blisters and there’s gore on his cheek. I want to kiss war scabs on his neck and hold his head with its battered bloody cap in my lap. When I was a little girl, I had nosebleeds and my papa would carry me on his shoulders all around the backyard to calm me, and I would see my blood dripping onto his hat. Bloody hats, to this day, make my thighs feel warm.

The company runner called the Zoo Fritz says his real name is Private Ernst Schmidt. I have a cousin named Ernst with blond hair and for that reason I feel close to this private. Adi reaches in his pocket, takes out three potato dumplings wrapped in paper that Fräulein Manzialy gave him for his afternoon snack and holds this gift out to the runner. Ernst takes the Führer’s gift gingerly and in awe. For the last year he has only seen a soldier’s “iron rations” of raisins, nuts, milk soup, an occasional can of headcheese and the dark hard Kommissbrot so different from his mother’s baked bread.

“Your Magnificence, is this for the bear cub?” Ernst asks.

“I like that, Private. Not thinking of yourself.” Adi’s lips relax in a smile.

“Thank you, Herr Führer.”

“A bear should not be measured by man. Bears are in their own superior rank, a rank that man aspires to in the world order.” Adi leans forward until his face is close to the boy’s cheeks. His nose twitches, and I can tell he smells the soot and oil on the youth’s skin.

“Before I joined up, I smelled of hyena paste as I had to clean the hyena cages every day though I didn’t have to clean the oxen as they hose themselves down with their own urine. But now, Mein Führer, I smell like a soldier.”

Adi smiles and pats his shoulder.

“My zoo keeper father calls animals our other Reich.”

Adi is pleased. “A zookeeper can have more capacity to understand his country than a general. And you never know what a cub can bring. It brought you.”

Adi has a sudden desire to confide in the boy as he says, “You have no idea how even a Führer needs to hear faith and courage from one who believes.”

“I believe. My father believes.”

Adi quotes from Ruskin: “All the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war; no great art ever rose on earth but among a nation of soldiers.” Adi feels Ruskin is England’s wisest spokesman.

“When Napoleon was a young school boy, probably no older than you, Herr Fritz, his comrades would pull him out of the library to lead them in snowball fights.”

“Mein Führer, where can I find snow at this time of year?”

“In Ruskin,” Adi says softly.

The bicycle bell of little Helmut Goebbels tinkles softly as he rides in and out of the dining room while balancing a tin of pudding in his hand. Even when Napoleon was banished to St. Helena, Adi says, he took 72 porcelain dessert plates with him. There are no dessert plates in the Bunker.

Goebbels says the Führer is as obsessed by Napoleon as Napoleon was obsessed by Charlemagne.

A beef carcass over his shoulder, a soldier descends the stairs, eyes down, as he makes his way to Fräulein Manzialy’s chopping block. He unfastens the flap of his holster to show earnestness and grabs a butcher knife. Adi dreads the hacking sounds that will soon come from the kitchen. As a child, Klara read him Das Gespensterschiff, the story of a ghost ship and its captain nailed through the head to the topmast by his rebellious crew. With the sound of carrots, squash or carcass being chopped… ump… ump… ump, Adi hears the captain screaming.