Bormann sends out a runner to bring Major Otto Jantsch to the Bunker.

When Major Otto Jantsch arrives, his hobnailed boots making sparks on the concrete, Adi instructs him to return immediately if there are serious obstacles on the way.

Otto towers above Adi. He’s over six feet tall with a bulging chin slash from the defense of Schweinfurt. He carries his authority with a casual easiness, walking up to the Führer in that effortless manner of a professional soldier and giving off an aura of luck and good humor.

A sudden blast brings powdery concrete from the ceiling onto Major Jantsch’s uniform. Ignoring this, he salutes Adi with great formality without dusting the concrete flakes from his epaulettes. Happily he reports destroying a consignment of consecrated hosts smuggled into Berlin by French priests.

With a slight bow, he presents Adi with 30 lipless chemical beakers he’s found. They make elegant dinner glasses.

“There’s a terrible lack of saluting up above, Mein Führer. When they salute, the arm’s not properly straight and stiff.”

Adi is only concerned about me. How I thrill at his devotion. I wish to stand forever in his glare of pure protection. Demanding that Otto’s only duty is getting me back safely, he hurries off to the map room.

Otto suggests that he alone should secure my dress. But he’ll never find Renate’s apartment that is a construction built by her parents when the bombing stated. More a tunnel than a flat, it would be impossible to find. I desperately want to see Renate and watch her whole body stiffen in disbelief when I tell her I’m going to be Frau Hitler. In those days when I never knew if he loved only me, it was Renate, not my mother, who said he would never marry me.

Not having a good girlfriend down here is difficult. It’s not the same with Adi’s secretaries who are so loyal to their Führer that even when they can no longer find typewriter ribbons, they continue to pound the keys to please him. I’m regarded as just another woman in his inner circle but the lucky one. All I ever wanted was to be connected to him in an official way. It’s all I ever dreamed about. Yet Renate knew me before Adi when I was dreamy Fräulein Eva who only fantasized that someday a prince would come into her life. Renate married a butcher and has a boy with crossed eyes who had to wear glasses at the age of three. For I believe the men who come into a woman’s life can be predicted by her body. A woman needs only to read herself. Poor Renate has a thick neck, her hair is drab brown, her eyes a flecked green. I encouraged her to exercise that neck in the pool, moving her head from right to left as she swims, but Renate has no talent for water. She struggled without moving her face. Hence her destiny with a butcher husband while looking like a bulldog even in my special chiffon dress.

Magda comes in to the dining room in a filmy batiste nightgown, her top uncovered because of Heidi who is really too old to be breast-fed. Breast-feeding, Magda feels, keeps her succulent. And wasn’t the Führer breast-fed until he was five?

There’s a shortage of rubber nipples for nursing bottles, Magda tells us, but that’s no worry for her. “Major, how is the war?”

Major Jantsch looks at her strong erect nipples in open admiration. “War is merely a continuation of policy by other means, Frau Goebbels.” Smiling, he shows side teeth filed to cannibal points.

“Would these two be acceptable as… other means?” Magda holds out her breasts.

“But of course, Frau Goebbels. The good German woman.”

“I’m one German woman, nicht? Please don’t lump me with all the others. No two women or two breasts are alike. Even my own two differ, one from the other. The right is slightly larger.”

“I only see perfection, Frau Goebbels.” The major points to her breasts. His index finger was destroyed in battle, and he uses his middle finger to fire.

Magda’s eager smile creases her brow as she stares at his firing finger while lifting up her breasts. “Both are frisch and munter.”

“Ja. Healthy and hardy.” His likewise hardy erection is visible as he adjusts his tunic, his legs slightly bowed.

“Major Jantsch has no time for that.” I’m determined not to let Magda get away with her tricks. “The major is on assignment. He’s taking me out for my wedding dress.”

I try to stand between them, but Magda moves in closer to the major.

“Some believe my Heidi is too old for mother’s milk. But sucking does good things for the tissues.” Magda purses a mouth smeared with Paris lipstick rumored to be made from sewer grease.

The major touches her right breast assuring her of good tissues.

When Magda’s dead, when she’s in her coffin and hunkered under grass and deep dirt, the spiky swastika over her grave will grab at the trousers of young men going by.

“This is a noncom’s war, Major, as Russians are near us in battalion strength.” Magda authoritatively assures him of her official connections. “Here in Berlin as well as everywhere, we in the Bunker are not so concerned with the delicacies of an officer’s war now that our retired lance corporal Adolf Hitler has taken complete command of the military.”

“Ja, Frau Goebbels.”

“The Führer has turned our great country into the raw sensuous beauty of a farmer’s dream.” Magda moves in close to the major’s chest dreaming of Germany as one huge estate. The swaying nude bulb above casts a freak golden glow on her hair, as if she had staged it that way.

I tug at the major’s sleeve, but he ignores me, his eyes transfixed on Magda’s nipples that seem to grow larger and larger like dark seeping beer rings on a table. She tells him softly that German officers are beautifully educated, and that she admires. But they often have too narrow an outlook. Officers should consult psychology. But if they were psychologists, then perhaps they would be less soldiers. Such is the paradox of war. The Führer is the only one equipped with depth and first hand experience. He’s the only one with untainted understanding. He sees war as a checker game with live pieces. Chance inspires him. Taking suggestions from noncoms, he acknowledges those very soldiers who officers tend to believe are inconsequential. The Führer accepts ideas from anyone. Even a private. Especially a corporal. Even a fortune teller.

“Yes,” Otto says. “The Führer has a love for amateurs.”

Moving one nipple along the buttons of the major’s jacket, she knows that Our Leader understands mobile armored forces are a necessity, but they can’t replace the foot soldier. “Our Führer has special plans. Defeat is not possible.”

The major’s afraid to look down at Magda’s breasts against his chest for fear he’ll lose what little control he still has.

“Enough about the war,” I say. “The major knows all that and…”

“Do you believe, Major, as our Japanese friends do, that sex before battle makes a soldier more fierce?” Pulling away, Magda smiles at this man before her who is conquered and mesmerized.

“I know so little of the Japanese,” he says weakly.

“You would do well to study those who plan to help us. They did us a great favor with their surprise attack which caused panic in America. As you must know, our friend Japan has never been vanquished in three thousand years.”

“My comrades tell me those yellow people pick their nose with the baby finger because their nostrils are so small. And there’s Bushido, of course, Frau Goebbels.”

“Prime Minister Tojo stated in his declaration of war that the key to victory lies in a faith in victory. The Führer agrees.”

“Yes, yes, as I do,” the major says.

“All great countries learn their truth from war. Fed in war. Starved in peace. Wisdom from war. Deceit from peace. Delivered by war, abandoned by peace.”

“You know that, Frau Goebbels, but does every Heinz, Otto and Rolf know?”

“The Führer ordered the major to take me to Renate’s apartment. Time is important. We must go,” I snap.

“Leave in fifteen minutes,” Magda says. Her children are sleeping, and Josef is traveling to Hamburg—a city on fire where they say not even one rat has survived.

Magda will be a good German woman and help the troops. Taking the major’s hand, she leads him to my private bedroom to enjoy his shrapnel-dimples.

“But that’s my room.”

“Have a cup of coffee, Eva. The dining area is lively. We won’t be long.”

In a trance, the major follows. He doesn’t try to hide his erection in full bloom. He’s about to experience the Führer’s concept of a farmer’s battle. Classical rules and stratagems have given way to an earthy war.

No time to feel jealous for tonight I’ll have my own glory as Frau Hitler. As I hear their moaning, I open the door halfway to see the talents of Magda in action. She has a body most men want but not Adi. Though artists like a plump stomach and meaty thighs, Adi likes taut athletic flesh. I see Magda’s chunky arm deliver a wide flung stroking caress, a movement she learned from officers playing stylish tennis. Increasing like a constant drumbeat, their sighs grow louder. Under an armpit is the bright tattoo of the major’s blood group. His torso is bare, and a scar shows where he was sabered in the back. Magda’s beefy white thighs like spongy walls surround him as he pumps, his medals rattling.

The major guides her hand to an old grenade wound on his thigh that sometimes gapes opens.

“Yes,” she moans. “It’s opening.”

“I suppurate shrapnel. Is shrapnel leaking out?”

“Oh, yes.”

Defending Germany from all directions, the major advances loyally, his hands cupped under Magda’s large walrus rump.