“The important matter is a good rousing romp. With a crashing climax.” Magda touches my damp hair that I washed with the last piece of soap. “I must talk to him. If only for a minute. Alone,” Magda pleads.

I look at Magda’s towel. Behind it is the mystery I seek, all her men, all those ardent Berlin nights, all those SS Stallions. Even the ones who like men never refuse Magda.

I promise to arrange a five-minute meeting with Adi just before the wedding.

She opens the towel and draws me into her cave, into the familiar womanly bond of soft flesh. It’s breast against breast, furry mound against mound.

“It’s all so simple, my Bavarian Fräulein,” she whispers, “it’s all so simple.”

Magda begins to lick my neck.

“The tongue?” I say. “Is that it?”

“Quatsch. What rubbish.” She puts a fleshy finger in my ear.

“Fingers? Is that it?”

“Of course not.” She pulls her finger away.

Magda’s navel opens and closes as she moves. Her skin is not soft but elastic, a creature’s hide from a warm languorous climate. It’s a cruel and grimy skin that breathes me in, takes hold of me by all its greedy lynx pores, a pelt that throbs, billowing into every fold of my body.

“Listen closely,” she whispers in my ear, her tongue lingering there. “Throw away the Russian-shirt-nightdress we made. Get up a sweat and wear only your stinking skin. Put your hair up under a worker’s cap.” She rips a folded factory hat pinned to her towel, a souvenir from Josef’s marching days, and throws it dramatically on my bed. “Sprinkle dust under your arms. Make sure there’s vinegar on your breath. Don’t you know, Eva, the only thing he ever wanted was to gain the heart of the German workers.”

Magda is a silk snake. She slowly swallows me in tiny gulps, her mouth my center, her tongue a curling rosette of quests up and down then in between my thighs. I’m overcome by hulky magic as she dimishes me in a light as refined and sifted as white salt.

Magda pulls away abruptly as I gasp for air. “Do all the things I’ve shown you. Then one last final touch. Give off the smell of many men.” Leaving naked, she trails the thick long towel on the floor not bothering to look back at me.

I will take Magda’s advice. I won’t wash her lovers from my body but wear her frothy substance like perfume.

Bormann knocks, and I let him in. I have only a short time before the wedding. Everything is arranged, everything is in place. But he must tell the Führer to see Magda for just a few minutes. He says it’s impossible. I say it’s not impossible. Looking at me with a pinched mouth, he remains defiant. But I’m minutes away from being Adi’s wife. Soon he must learn to answer to me.

“Bormann, just do it. Am I understood?”

Bormann shakes his head in weak acceptance. But I also use diplomacy as Adi does. I show him my silver dress, the one I didn’t give to the War Relief, the one with fox trim that I selfishly kept because I couldn’t part with it. “Take this gift for your wife. I won’t be needing it.”

“The Führer gave you that.”

“It’s mine to give away to somebody who will be able to use it after the war.” That dress has memories attached to it, times and places that no longer exist.

Bormann holds the dress protectively in his arms as if it were one of Göring’s rare paintings that must be shielded from the air and light. Clothing is propaganda, Goebbels says, and Magda’s gowns won him as much obedience as his speeches.

“Make sure the Führer’s final schedule has five minutes alone for Magda. Five minutes. No more.”

Nodding his head, Bormann opens the door carefully, thrusting out his arms with the dress so that it will leave first. Because he rides in ambulances, he knows how to transport proper loot. He pauses to ask: “Do you still love him, even now?”

“I loved him in his good fortune. How is it possible to love him less now?”

My wedding night. My wedding dress makes my waist look small. Coming just below my knees, it shows off my firm trim legs. How I dreamed about this. Me, a girl from the deepest province in Bavaria. I touch the wooden model of Linz that Speer gave me on my last birthday, resting my hand on the house where Adi once lived with his mother in Linz at Humboldtstrasse 31. I’m jealous of every day and every moment I haven’t known him. I think of Klara, the mother he loved for so long. She called him her “leg son” because he’d help take off her long wood-wool socks, her tired limbs escaping and bursting from the elastic like white sausages. Then he’d massage her tired feet, over and over, his finger kneading that space between her toes until she gave a startled litany of: “Ja… ja… ja… ja… oh…. ja… ja… ja… ja… ja… ja… ja… ja!” A final “JA” left her limp and rested on the bed.

What a long life I’ve lived. People would say I’m young, yet what Adi and I have had together is more than one lifetime, and I feel old. That’s how it is when you love a hero. He’s been with me longer than with Klara and Geli and that elates me. If your life flashes before you at any time, it has to be when you marry. For marriage is even more important than death. Especially marriage to a genius. I think back to that first day when we met at the photo shop, how handsome he was without the tension of war creasing the skin around his eyes and mouth. We drank hot chocolate together in the back of the shop. I made it myself, thick and creamy. He declined coffee or strong stimulants but had an occasional cup of tea.

Adi enters handsome in his uniform with the Iron Cross on the left side of his tunic. He has a calm, accepting composure. My cousin once saw him for five minutes as he walked from an office building. She said he resembled no person she had ever seen before, appearing in no way human yet exceptional.

“It’s bad luck to see your bride before the wedding,” I tell him.

“Luck no longer applies.” He holds out capsules. “Pills we will take. They were given to me by Himmler. I can’t trust him so these have to be tested.”

Canine handler Sergeant Fritz Tornow meets us at the dog bunker. Blondi jumps up excitedly against Adi’s leg as he pats her, ignoring me as she always does when her beloved master is present. Her babies begin to yap. Lifting up Wolfie, his favorite, Adi looks carefully in the pup’s eyes before dropping him down.

Adi wrestles open Blondi’s mouth, but she’s persistent in clamping it shut and drooling on his hands. Grabbing a pliers from a nearby shelf, Sergeant Tornow pries her mouth open and crushes the cyanide tablet against her teeth. Blondi falls over dead, her body instantly relaxed from not having to please the Führer she loves, finally relieved of him.

Tornow takes out his pistol and shoots the puppies, then leaves abruptly fearful to show his tears.

Adi says softly, “You must be certain that you want to remain here. It’s still possible to leave.”

“I’m staying. With you.”

His eyes, though not bright, are still the most beautiful I have even seen and remind me of happiness and sweet cool breezes. He displays no sorrow and doesn’t look down at Blondi one last time or cup her limp head in his hands. I’m the one in grief. After all the times I’ve been annoyed by this silly creature, I suddenly miss her. That sloppy tongue licking my cheek was the same tongue licking his. Those walks in the mountains when I was lonely, Blondi was all I had of him. But the waiting deceived me. He never really left me. As long as my heartbeat went on without premeditation and without effort, He was present.

When I’m wed, I’ll be the only thing in the universe that can claim him. And when he dies, He’ll be with me in that one final way.

Adi jabs Blondi with the tip of his foot, her doggy legs twitch as if in memory of the Berghof—those long walks in the wildflowers. Lifting her up by one ear, I look into bulging eyes and say softly, “Remember the ladybug the Führer took from your mouth and put back on a blade of grass saying: Blondi, you must never forget to be tender.” I let her face fall back to the ground.

“The capsules work.” Adi puts a leather strap that holds the cyanide around my neck. “Cyanide. The ancient Egyptians called it death by peach.”

“I’ll wear it to our wedding.” My voice is strong without a hint of hesitation, my fingers stroking the small container in its leather holder that’s stitched in blue.

“There’s no need to swallow. Just bite down.”

The hand that touched flowers and mountain trees and threw a ball to Blondi, the hand that touched the thirty cameras of Leni Riefenstahl now gently pats my cheek.

“Sometimes, Adi, I think about death and…”

“You’re not to think about the trivial caprice of death,” he screeches angrily. “That’s my duty.”

“I’m not afraid, of course. You’ll be with me.”

“This final week,” he reports, “I’ve deliberately signed papers illegibly. So there’s no last minute autographs for the allies.”

“Goebbels told me about the sky-burials of Tibetans. Their bodies are cut up and fed to the birds.”

“Birds have better things to do.”

“But I sometimes wish you believed in heaven.”

“A genius,” he tells me, “can’t tolerate such tranquility.”

But I know that he hasn’t lived like an ordinary man, and he will not be dead like one.

Our black ashes will glow and sparkle like the Olympic torch he invented.

Adi leaves to receive the justice of peace. I look at Blondi who is no longer my rival, now unimportant, like a throw rug that was used in a back room, like something too inconsequential to have ever mattered.

A single shot. Tornow has killed Renate. I’m without any rival as I’ve wished though my selfishness has hurt him. Where did it go, those feelings he had for Blondi? One less living thing loves him.