“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
“Mareth, what is it?”
She had her head on his chest. Without looking at him she said, “I just hate the war, Max—the war and the bombing and you
being gone. Every night I think that I won’t be able to stand another day of it, but then I do. It goes on and on and I do
stand it.”
He rocked her gently, kissing the top of her head as they kept their tight embrace. “We’ve made it this far,” he offered.
“We just need to keep going. It’s the only choice we have.”
“Maybe.”
“Trust me.”
“I do trust you, Max. I do. You know that.”
Max broke their embrace and put his hands on her shoulders and looked her in the eyes. He whispered, “Mareth, I have something
very important that I need to tell you.”
“What? What is it, Max?”
“I’m freezing.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “I have a room for us in a gasthaus at the Alexanderplatz.”
“Good,” Max said. “That sounds good. We can get warm.” She kissed him.
Mareth hung a phosphorescent button around her neck and put one around Max’s as well, which annoyed him and made him feel
like a child. “Why do I need this? It doesn’t help me see.”
“It keeps other people from knocking you over. Just follow orders, sailor.”
They groped their way along the street, in a constellation of phosphorescent buttons, the true believers wearing ones shaped
like swastikas. They found the U-Bahn and rode it to the Alexanderplatz, where Max almost took a header on the stairs as they
surfaced once again into the inky dark. They walked the two blocks from there to the hotel; Max came close to getting into
a fight with a streetlamp. He signed them in separately at the gasthaus. There was no use pretending to be husband and wife
because both of them had to present their identity papers. That was the law. The security police reviewed every hotel register
in the country every day.
Once inside the room Max tossed his cigarettes onto the end table, pulling off his heavy overcoat and tunic. He gave Mareth
a hungry smile, pulled off her coat, and pitched it into the corner. Then he saw that she was also wearing a uniform.
“Mareth!”
She sat on the bed. “I was going to tell you, write you. It just never…”
“What are you doing? Aren’t you still working for your father?”
“Yes, yes—this is just two nights a week, a six-hour shift.”
“What? Doing what?”
“I… I’m in the flak auxiliary.”
“The flak auxiliary! What in the name of God… Mareth! The flak auxiliary! What are you thinking?” The flak auxiliary manned
the anti-aircraft guns that ringed Berlin, most operated by young teenage boys—Kinderflak, the Berliners called them. Many
of the gun positions were out in the open, near the massive ammunition dumps that supplied the countless shells pumped into
the sky by the quick-firing guns. Dr. Goebbels claimed that a thousand batteries defended Berlin, not that many believed much
of anything he said.
Mareth took his hand. “Max, it’s not dangerous.”
“Not dangerous? How can it not be dangerous? What the hell do you even know about it?”
She stood up and stepped away from him. “What do I know about it? Max, would you have me do nothing? Is that what you want?”
“Yes. I would have you do nothing.”
“Have you ever even been through an air raid?”
Max looked away.
“On nights when the British come, they fly over in a cloud with a noise like a thousand steam shovels and the bombs come down
like rain—like rain, Max.” She spoke loudly, almost shouting. “Am I supposed to just sit back and take it like a dutiful German
girl? Just watch my city be destroyed? Max, they’re blowing up everything—everything! I can’t put it all in my letters—it’s
too dangerous, you don’t know who’s reading them. One of the wings of the Bendlerstrasse was blown up a month ago. Father
told me twenty general staff officers at the Central Army Office were killed.”
“The Bendlerstrasse? That’s impossible. It’s built out of blocks of stone.”
“That doesn’t matter! Some of the bombs are two thousand kilos, they can blow up anything. The KaDeWe was practically blown
to pieces; Kranzler’s was hit two weeks ago and completely destroyed. Remember the Gloria Palast, where we saw
Sons of the Desert
?”
Max did remember. Mareth loved Laurel and Hardy; she had walked around for the next three months saying, “Well, Max, here’s
another nice mess you’ve gotten me into!”
“A bomb hit it last week. It’s just a pile of bricks and stone. Everything we knew is gone, Max. Everything. Max, people I
know are being killed, friends I love buried in the rubble. Loremarie lost her house and her entire studio with all of her
paintings last week. You remember my friends Sisi and Kurt? We had dinner with them before you went to
Graf Spee
. They were killed three weeks ago in a raid, with their two children. It was a direct hit on their building. Max, don’t you
understand? Whole areas of Berlin simply no longer exist. Charlottenburg is gone! It’s nothing but rubble. I have to do something.”
She was yelling now.
Max faltered. It had nearly killed him to be stuck in Argentina for those twelve months while others defended the Reich. But
war wasn’t for women.
He nodded. “I forbid it.”
She let out a brief laugh and shook her head.
“I mean it.”
“Fine. Go ahead and mean it.”
“What are you saying, that you refuse to quit?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. You forbid it? Like some Prussian field marshal? You don’t even know what you’re talking
about, Max. I’m not out in the open like the Luftwaffe flak units. It’s not dangerous. I worry about you day and night on
your U-boat and I’m not even in a dangerous place. I’m working in the Zoo Tower.”
“The what?”
Mareth sat on the bed and took a cigarette from his pack on the nightstand. When they were together she always smoked his
because a woman’s cigarette rations were only half of a man’s. “They’re building six flak towers around the city. Mine is
the first to be finished. It’s over by the zoo, so they call it the Zoo Tower. It protects the government buildings around
the Tiergarten—Father’s office and the High Command headquarters and the other ministries and the Chancellery offices. The
tower walls are three meters thick, Max. It’s a fortress. And we have everything—a dining hall, a hospital, supplies to last
for weeks. Everything is bombproof. The police president tells me it’s safer than the Führer bunker.”
Max did remember reading something about the Zoo Tower in
Signal
. He took a cigarette for himself and lit it. “What do you do?”
She ruffled his hair. “I don’t think you have this job on the U-boat.”
“What?”
“I work in the storeroom. I watch over all the paintings and sculptures and everything else emptied from the museums. You
cannot imagine the treasures under my care. Kaiser Wilhelm’s coin collection, Gobelin tapestries from Sans Souci, paintings
by every great master in Europe. We try and protect everything from damage caused by the concussions when the air raids are
on. Max, I’m taking care of the treasures of Germany.”
He put his cigarette out half smoked. God knows a storeroom in a reinforced concrete tower was less dangerous than a U-boat
on war patrol, and everyone had to help the war effort. They were up against the British, the Russians, the Americans, the
Canadians, and anybody else the U.S. could bully into joining the Allies. Besides, Mareth would do what she wanted no matter
what anyone said. That’s what he loved the most about her. He switched off the light and lay down beside her on the bed. “You
will show me your Zoo Tower tomorrow, yes?”
_________
Late the next afternoon, arm in arm, they strolled down the Unter den Linden, bundled against the cold, leaning into each
other. The lime trees that grew in the median were bare now, sticks against the gray sky, but the crowds on the sidewalks
were bright in scarves and hats, the women elegant despite the war. Only the men looked different in their uniforms, and because
this was close to the government district many wore the uniform of the Nazi Party. A good way to get out of fighting, shuffling
papers in some Berlin ministry. Meanwhile, some men thumped the sidewalks with crutches, an empty pant leg rolled up and pinned
into place. Others had empty sleeves hanging limp at their sides. One man was missing an eye and a leg. Please God, he would
rather die than end up like that.
They found a small restaurant and had a long dinner, lingering over their food, something Max hadn’t done in months. Most
of the menu items weren’t subject to rationing, so they had to use ration coupons for only the bread and butter, and for the
eggs and sugar that would go into a small cake for dessert. Max had been issued extra coupons with his leave papers, so Mareth
didn’t need to spend any of hers. The waiter took Max’s large, multicolored coupon cards—the orange one for rolls, pink for
butter and skim milk, green for eggs, white for sugar—and cut off the necessary squares with a pair of scissors. Every waiter
in Germany now carried scissors alongside his bottle opener.
The meal might not have cost many coupons, but the price in reichsmarks was steep enough. Max’s pay had gone up by half with
his promotion, but the already high income tax and war surcharge tax swallowed up most of his raise. Max didn’t worry. The
money was well spent. Beef, pork, and chicken were impossible to get because all supplies were consigned to the Wehrmacht,
so they started with a rabbit stew. This didn’t seem so strange to Max—he’d eaten rabbit all the time as a boy—but Mareth
had never tried it before and was shocked to learn that he had. Their main course was two boiled lobsters from France. Deep-sea
fish were unattainable because the fishing fleet had either been sunk by the British or commandeered by the Kriegsmarine for
minesweeping, but French shellfish were still in good supply. French wine, too, was plentiful and cheap, unlike German beer,
which had become expensive. So they drank wine and bitter acorn coffee. Mareth screwed her face up as she tasted the acorn
brew. “I can’t drink this,” she said. “I try to, but I can’t.” Max poured all their skim milk into her cup and she tried it
again, shaking her head. “Don’t tell me you drank this stuff as a boy.” They laughed.
“I’m glad the Sergeant Major brings us real coffee,” Mareth said, using her nickname for Max’s father. “Where does he get
it?”
Max smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “Best not to ask my father questions like that. He knows what he’s doing.”
Mareth took his arm again when they left the restaurant. “I don’t want a simple country lad like yourself getting lost in
the blackout,” she said. Around them night had fallen and it was almost pitch black, the only illumination coming from a weak
moon. A stranger who didn’t know his way around would be lost in a moment. You couldn’t read the street signs, couldn’t see
the shop windows or addresses, couldn’t see much of anything. You knew where the sidewalks dropped off only because the curbs
had been dabbed with thin lines of phosphorous paint at each intersection. You could hear the trams but couldn’t see them,
their only illumination a thin strip of purple light on the front. Mareth knew two men in the Foreign Ministry who had been
run down. And as for motorcars, there were none, save for a handful belonging to the military. These were equipped with cloth
covers over each headlamp; small slits in the center of the covers allowed a narrow beam of light to pass through. So this
was the capital of the Reich: everything dark, everything rationed, everyone in uniform, everyone fighting. Max could never
have envisioned this.
He buried his face in Mareth’s hair, moving his hand around to the inside of her thigh until she slapped it away. She always
seemed so sophisticated to him. In Paris she could pass for Parisian, in Berlin she seemed like a Berliner to anyone who met
her. She’d been raised in the countryside outside Bad Wilhelm, but attended gymnasium in Berlin and spoke German like a Berliner.
Berlinerrisch, they called it. Even the cabdrivers thought she was a native so they didn’t cheat her. Compared to Mareth,
Max
was
just a country boy. Yet the navy had given him confidence beyond his provincial roots from the beginning. Going aloft in
a three-masted barque and reefing a topsail forty meters above the deck in a Force Ten gale had a way of improving a young
man’s self-assurance.
They passed through the Brandenburg Gate and entered the Tiergarten, so green in spring and summer, but covered now with snow,
the evergreens trim and clipped. At least the park foresters were still on duty. Everything else in Berlin looked shabby and
unkempt; the formerly spotless streets now filthy. When they were some distance into the park he stopped Mareth and kissed
her, his nose cold against her cheek.
Reading his mind, she gave him a stern look and said, “No.”
Her lips were soft and warm against his. He slipped his hands under her coat.
“Max, no.”
The evergreens and the darkness provided plenty of cover. He led her into a thicket off the path and spread his thick naval
great-coat on the snow. She shook her head but a little smile played at the corners of her mouth. “Damn you,” she said, lying
down on the coat, her fingers already working on his belt buckle.
He collapsed on top of her and the two of them lay giggling in the cold, their hot breath escaping in clouds, when the air
raid sirens shattered the brittle winter atmosphere. It was a long, undulating warble so loud it could wake the dead. Mareth
pushed him up. “Come on,” she said, “that’s the red warning.” There was a thin edge of panic in her voice.
He pulled up his pants and struggled into his greatcoat. She had him by the arm, dragging him out of the trees. “We have to
get to the Zoo Tower. Run!”
In the distance Max could barely see the tall flak tower rising above the trees. How far was it? A half kilometer, three-quarters?
Running was difficult in their heavy winter clothes, the snow frozen into rifts impossible to see in the moonlight. They ran
without speaking. Mareth stumbled, recovered. Max steadied her, then tripped himself, sprawling on the snow.