How does Goebbels stand it, constantly surveying bombed cities to examine ruins?

Between broken gas pipes, tiles, window frames and smashed high-tension cables are twisted linden trees. In all Germany there is the saying that when the linden goes, so goes Berlin. I was a school child who warbled, “As long as the old trees still bloom on Unter den Linden, nothing can defeat us.”

Few birds are left in Berlin. Flying at crazy angles, sparrows and wrens twist their heads to one side. One drifts on its back through oily waves of black and yellow smoke as if it were leisurely bobbing along on water. I visualize floating on my back by its side, both of us in a different, calmer ocean.

I’m told that the zoo has been hit by 36 bombs. Smoke slowly fades, undressing the red pagoda entrance cluttered with wounded and dying animals that gasp and limp past gutted burnt trucks. Heading down the Linden, they quack, snarl, growl, howl, their vivid colors refusing to blend with debris.

A giraffe, his neck nearly severed in strings of bloody clots, pushes blindly into creatures covered in plaster and brick dust.

With a man’s leg in its mouth, an elephant plods onward with the fin of an unexploded shell sticking from its side.

“Poor elephant,” says Ernst, “I know him well. His trumpet woke me up every morning with the church bells. Now the poor thing has no idea that he wasn’t born to carry a human stump in his mouth.”

Peacocks, bobcats, a whitetail deer move by the heap of bricks once the Ufa-Palast Cinema.

Soaring wildly, an owl with wires sticking from its eyes aims for the blazing Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church before dropping into the fire.

“That owl was born on my birthday.” Ernst’s voice quivers in sadness.

Beavers breathe bubbles of blood from their noses. An antelope with its hindquarter gone. A seal—forelegs burning. A stampeding hippopotamus with swollen eyes rams a Biedermeier-like lamppost in agony, its rear full of shrapnel. As the warthog and its baby try to burrow in twisted ironwork, Tiger tanks and Panther tanks mingle with real tigers and real panthers.

I walk in the direction of the zoo knowing Adi will not be annoyed that I leave the Bunker entrance to assist animals. I instinctively follow behind Ernst, cowering the way I have done so many times in the past when I was afraid to be seen, feeling a former shame like an amputee feels a lost arm. But Ernst pulls me forward, and we walk boldly.

“We shouldn’t go too far from the bunker.”

“Don’t worry. Some of the animals have wandered very close to here. And I’ll protect you.”

“Not too long.”

“I’ll have you back in no time.”

After just a few minutes, we stoop to sooth a pregnant deer. Dying, the creature heaves from a wounded head, liquid from her brain seeping through both nostrils. Ernst knows how to attend such births, this wonderful Zoo Fritz. When the mother suddenly dies, closing pale yellow eyes with a spastic jerking of her sharp bones, he isn’t delicate or careful as he pushes roughly with his foot on her belly to force the infant out. To show compassion, I put the Mutti’s head in my lap. I wonder what it’s like to have a child. Leaning over, I feel the warm speck of her nose on my cheek. The baby pulses from the mother’s womb, coming out in slow motion to rest motionless and wet in mud and glass.

Feeling the slippery dew of birth, I take the child in my arms. What would it be like if Adi and I were to create a new life? Perhaps this little infant is ours, as much a part of our union as any newborn human could be.

Taking the newborn from me, the Zoo Fritz lays it tenderly on the ground—then shoots it. This is the most merciful way.

“Perhaps there should be a bunker for animals,” I say softly.

Ernst holds my hand in this lost city, the Berlin I will never be able to love.

I know Adi has tried to evacuate the zoo animals. There’s so little time with all the work of the second Ardennes. His beloved creatures are in pain, suffering, starving, dying. Some are destined to be food for housewives as everything goes in their stew pots—goldfish, eggshells, shoelaces. Left over goat-grease thickens the hair of crafty Berlin women. Pets of Ernst-the-Zoo-Fritz will become bone meal or lard. It’s good that Adi can’t see this final indignity and arrived at the Bunker with the blinds pulled down over the windows of his Mercedes. It’s good the Führer rarely comes out of our cement submarine.

Returning to the Bunker area, we step over a dead German soldier in a slit trench dug so tight it fits him like a uniform. About to fall into total despair, I go to the lookout tower and see Bormann sitting on a merry-go-round horse. On the horse’s tail flies the Blood Flag, the banner carried in the Putsch. The weathered carousel is all that’s left of the zoo, a carousel with its gaudy colors swirling, its tune loud and clear. Proudly wearing the Frontkampfer Cross, Bormann’s beefy body is rigid, his thick neck stretched up as he goes round and round to a glockenspiel. Our German Reichstag secretary, who only comes to Adi’s nose, is waving to fleeing people and crippled animals—showing all Berlin that things are not over yet, letting us know the Reich is still alive.

Rushing from the Chancellery garden and crunching scattered glass under his boots, Lieutenant Conrad Henek Kerscher reports that the Führer wishes to see me in his quarters. The lieutenant has just returned from Frankfurt where the saturation bombing made even the asphalt burn. Many of his fellow officers who were marching in the streets are now incinerated inside the streets. He carefully adjusts his carbine with a small needle-type bayonet folded along the barrel.

Saluting Lieutenant Kerscher, Ernst puts his right toe behind his left heel, swivels briskly to an about face, then runs through an SS cordon of rubble to chase a hysterical flamingo charging toward Wilhelm Göringstrasse.

“Oh, Herr Lieutenant Kerscher,” I say, “look at Bormann.”

“Sehr gut. Sehr gut.” The lieutenant’s shoulders stiffen in pride as he watches the carousel. Taking a flask from his pocket, he rushes across a patch of debris to three dead German soldiers and pours whiskey down their mangled throats. “Everyone must celebrate.” He reaches into the pocket of each dead soldier to take out their soldat bunch.

Nearby, two old men from the civilian Freikorps dig communal graves with their helmets. The dead, some with open staring eyes, seem to watch their own burial.

“So many civilians killed,” I say when the lieutenant returns to my side with an empty flask and the identification books of the dead soldiers.

“Fräulein, dead soldiers were once civilians.” He doesn’t flinch the slightest when two flies crawl around his neck, their greasy little legs against his skin.

“But Lieutenant, these civilians aren’t in uniform. Yet they carry firearms. Goebbels himself told me they’re not protected by the Geneva Convention and if captured will be quickly executed.”

“Ja. But they realize the dangers they face.”

“My cousin is in the Freikorps Sauerland, lieutenant.”

“Our recruiting drive has been very successful. What an honor for him.” His voice becomes unsteady: “So many children dead.”

“Lieutenant, dead soldiers are the children of their own life?” I pat his gunner’s hand, rough with calloused palms.

As an old woman with scorched hair stoops in the street to separate good buckets from smashed ones, she screams, “The world has come to an end.” A little girl, her hair the color of a soldier’s uniform, carefully hunts for whole chairs among the shattered ones. On the ground in one orderly line—in the same line they had been standing to get bread—people lie dead.

Before Lieutenant Kerscher ushers me to the stairs, he tells me his father has been called up for service in a Volkssturmeinheit, the people’s Storm Unit. “And me… from the Brandenberg division. We both do our best.” He touches the medals on his jacket. “I’ve learned neither the Knight’s Cross with Swords nor the Iron Cross guarantees promotion. We are merely looked on as a soldier-hero. And when there’s enough of that, we’re sent back to the front because that’s where the war is the fiercest and where we can best be displayed. ” He looks at me sadly. “Goodbye. The Führer has presented me with a trench stove. I’m going to Russia. You don’t return from there.”

“Try to remember, Lieutenant, the future comes one day at a time.”

“Ja. Of course.”

“Let yourself think only of victory.”

“Victory exists for the sole purpose of making defeat possible.”

“You must not let yourself think like that, lieutenant.”

“I only think, Befehl ist Befehl. An order is an order.”

As I walk slowly toward the steep Bunker steps, it suddenly becomes very quiet, as if for just a moment the heart of the war has stopped beating. Silence. It’s like a wedding gift.

Dying Berlin makes me think of Geli. Both so loved by Adi. Both once had everything.

For no reason, Adi will cry out, “Germany became my bride after Geli.”

Geli is dead. Berlin is dead. Lieutenant Kerscher will soon be dead.

Will I finally be Adi’s true bride? Or will Geli always float above him, flagging her presence like dead Berlin?

21

COMING FROM THE MAP ROOM, Adi smiles. It’s not often I see him smiling. I take his hand, something he doesn’t often let me do without permission, not in the open, not when it’s daytime. But I’ll soon be his wife and there are plans to make for our wedding. Because he’s in good humor, I don’t even care if there’s bad news about the war. As his “Volk” fingers touch mine, I see a laborer’s face in his hands. I treasure that sweet hollow by his thumb, a place his mother loved, a place where he once cut himself and she washed the raw slit with her own saliva continuing to suck for hours like an animal, savoring the proud flesh saying, “This is where you can feel like a woman.”