The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (73 page)

Lottie looks on.

Freya works her hands. “The black market. I traded on it.”

“I know.”

“Child, I traded sex.”

Lottie shows no reaction. Even she is surprised at her own stillness. This declaration should have jolted her backward. Her mother is a secret whore. For months men have paid her in packets and tins. She’s saved a Jew, she’s fed her daughter, and become a slut. Lottie waits, poised, waiting to hate her mother.

Lottie looks back over the past months and thinks she might have guessed this. She might have wondered at things and asked. She could have seen clues. Could have been concerned. But she wasn’t.

Lottie sits in the kitchen chair. Mutti stands before her, awaiting judgment. Lottie says nothing, no verdict. She feels scoured. There is no reproach in her for Mutti. There’s not even indignity for Papa’s memory. She sits under this bombshell from her mother the way she sat beneath the Russian shells. Lottie is resigned, curled up into a ball like a man taking a beating, she feels each blow a little less than the one before it.

Lottie gazes up at her mother. Without emotion, she thinks: This is an extraordinary time, and Mutti has clearly become extraordinary with the war. Lottie has stayed behind. Now that music has been taken from her, and the cello stays locked in its case, she’s been exposed: not exceptional at all. Mutti has sacrificed and dared without boundary to help her daughter and a stranger survive. Lottie, for all her brilliance, must be such a disappointment.

Lottie rises, spilling more hair onto the floor. She brushes clinging curls from her skirt. She lifts the chair and takes the scissors from Mutti’s pocket. They’ve barbered Lottie’s hair in the front room so Julius wouldn’t hear them. She knows this without being told.

Carrying the chair and scissors back to the kitchen, Lottie walks past the yellow door. A thousand times she’s done this and the silent door has reached to her every chance. The life of the man behind it always trips her with its complexity. The discipline of the Jew. His peril. His woe.

Not today.

Today Lottie’s sacrifice is greater than the Jew’s. The woman who debased herself for them was his protector. But she is Lottie’s mother.

She sets the things in the kitchen and strides past the basement door with a new sensation. At last, Lottie’s life and her own danger are equal to what sits in the dark on the top step. He is a Jew in Berlin, yes, and that has been a terrible thing. But Lottie is a young woman in Berlin. The Russians are here now. They will not come looking for Jews.

She speaks to the door.

“Julius.”

He is there.

“Yes.”

“Did you know that Mutti was selling herself to feed you? You and me?”

“Selling herself?”

“Yes. Sex. For black-market food.”

The door pauses.

“No.”

“No, of course not.”

Lottie steps away.

“Did you?”

She stops.

“No. She just told me.”

“What would you have done? If you’d known?”

Lottie doesn’t have to answer. She has the right not to answer. But he doesn’t.

She asks, “What would you have done?”

“I would have stopped her.”

Lottie smirks. “How?”

“I would have left.”

Yes, he would have. Because that’s who this Jew is.

“Lottie, she’s your mother. What would you have done?”

She gazes at the broad yellow panel of the door. Come out, she thinks, and I’ll slap you. I’ll choke you, I’ll throw you down the stairs.

But the answer inside her is not like the Jew, it lacks his discipline to stay in the darkness any longer. It does come out.

Nothing. She would have done nothing.

She sees in her mind her mother beneath a Nazi. Lottie sits beside the bed eating a biscuit with only her cello between her legs.

Lottie’s knees weaken. She stumbles against the wall.

“Lottie? Lottie, are you all right?”

The Jew would emerge from the basement if he thought she was in trouble. He would try to protect her, at his own risk.

Like Mutti. She has done everything to safeguard her daughter. So much, that by her own words she can’t do any more.

Lottie has done nothing.

Nothing but wish for protection. Nothing but whisk herself away in her heart, contemplate suicide, fantasize, and complain. She hasn’t lifted a finger to deserve protection. And that’s why now she does not have it. The Jew can’t help her, no matter how brave or selfless a man. Mutti will be defenseless when the Russians come. But they try. They suffer for each other, for her, and they try.

The reality is obvious, a simple calculation, another blow. There is no protection for Lottie. She has never been worth protecting.

Not like Julius.

And Mutti.

Lottie is nothing.

She rights herself against the wall. She steadies her voice.

“Julius.”

“Yes.”

“I want you to know. I would have done nothing.”

She expects the yellow door to grow narrow, like a disapproving eye. But the voice behind it says, “Yes, you would have. Of course you would.”

Lottie walks away, into the parlor. She’s relieved that the Jew is wrong. She feels better knowing this, that he fools himself like anyone else.

Freya is on her knees gathering the last of Lottie’s hair. Stacked on the sofa are a pair of pants and three sweaters. Beside the table stands a pair of battered boots.

“Mutti, sit down with me.”

Freya moves to the sofa. Lottie joins her and sees her mother has been crying. Mutti lifts one hand to her mouth but cannot stifle herself. Lottie has nothing to hand her to sop the tears. She reaches for one of the wool sweaters and lays it over Mutti’s lap.

Lottie puts a gentle hand to her mother’s back.

“Mutti?”

Freya turns with red eyes.

“Mutti, does Julius still have the yellow star?”

Freya shakes her head. “I sold it for food. Like he asked.”

Lottie imparts a smile. “Did you get him his holiday potatoes and parsley?”

“Yes. And more for all of us. I did.”

Mutti says this to convince her daughter that some of the food they have eaten was purchased with money. Lottie eases her mother’s shame with another stroke down her back.

There is a small cache of candles and matches in the table beside the sofa. Lottie slides over to fetch a taper. She strikes a match, the burning wick lights the parlor. Night has crested in Berlin.

Freya calms slowly. Lottie watches the shifting shadows in the parlor.

She says to her mother, “He’ll try to defend us.”

Freya’s damp eyes gleam. “Yes. He will.”

Outside of the cellar, without his cloth star—that emblem of despised Jewry for so many years, now an ironic passport to survival—Julius is just another German man. A soldier out of uniform. A deserter. A Nazi. To the Russians, these are the German men.

“They’ll shoot him.”

“Yes.”

“We’ve got to keep them away from the basement.”

Freya purses her lips. She makes to bring her hands again to her mouth—-such sad worry—but drops them to her lap. One more tear slips down her cheek.

“Lottie. Please hide.”

Now it is the daughter who does not heed.

“Go back to the door. Tell Julius not to come out, no matter what he hears. Tell him the Nazis plan to take back this block and he has to stay hidden. Just a few more days. Soon. Until it’s over.”

From the street beyond the parlor window, Russian voices intrude through the curtains. Lottie doesn’t need to decipher the tongue to know the men are drunk.

“Mutti, go!”

Freya leaps from the sofa to hurry down the hall. Another flashlight beam, like the one in the bomb shelter, flashes across the window.

The voices outside gather. Lottie’s breath shivers. She runs both hands over her head, through her stiff tips of hair. Her mouth goes dry waiting for Mutti to return.

There’s a knock at the door.

Not a knock: a kick.

A voice. Ganged laughter. A call.

“Frau.”

More laughter. Some Russian words, a short argument.

Lottie closes her eyes.

One soldier’s voice is insistent. He’s sure there are women inside. He’s seen them go in. This is what the voice says, in every language, in ancient tone. Lottie does not jump when the next kick strikes the door.

“Frau. Komm!”

Lottie rises from the sofa. She moves into the hall, to the outer reach of the candle. She stands in the foyer. A dark eye, lit by the sallow beam of a flashlight, blinks at her through the bullet hole in the door.

“Komm!”

Freya bustles into the hall beside her. The two women stare at the eye in the door.

“Julius knows it’s Russians. I told him the Nazis were chasing them. He’s hiding.”

“Good.”

The locked doorknob is jiggled. Another kick pounds the door.

Freya grips her daughter by the shoulders.

“This is going to be hard.”

“I know.”

“Liebchen,
forgive me. Do you . . . Dear God, I can’t believe I have to ask you like this. Do you know ... ?”

“Yes, Mutti. It’s been a while. But yes.”

“Just let them. Just live through it. I’m so sorry.”

“Open the door, Mutti.”

Freya draws herself up. She runs a hand down her daughter’s arm.

Four Russians push through the opened door. The moment they step into the foyer Lottie is repelled by the smell. Their uniforms are splotched with dirt, their breath is sodden in vodka. They all bear large rifles. Three are young men with slender faces. They mount dumb, menacing expressions; their leers are theatrical, as if forced, to show these two German women whom they’re dealing with. They swagger around Lottie and Freya, swathing them in Russian and odor and flashlight beams. One points his weapon at Lottie’s shorn head and jeers. The fourth soldier stands aside. He is older. He’s their leader, the one who kicked the door and called out for women. He looks to be the most ignorant. He is thickset and dark, his head is poorly hung on his neck from too much liquor. He says nothing now, only grunts, looks up through shaggy eyebrows.

Lottie can see these soldiers are driven by anger, with deep scores to settle. They want plunder, the victor’s prize. It means stolen watches and sex, also revenge and unbridled power, dream things denied these peasant soldiers for years of war. Tonight and tomorrow and until they’re stopped, they will shame every German man, every soldier of the Reich dead or alive, by taking Berlin’s women, the ultimate primal victory.