APRIL

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

nly the dead have seen the end of war.

 

Plato

 

 

 

 

* * * *

 

 

 

 

EIGHT

 

 

 

 

 

April 1, 1945, 0930 hours

With the Eighty-third Infantry Division, Ninth Army

Holzminden, Germany

 

 

he fat burgomaster’s eyelids flutter. he brings up two thick hands while he takes a step backward. He’s an ostentatious man; he’s dressed himself in a dark suit with bow tie and a velvet and silk sash across his chest. Bandy thinks of the Tennessee State Fair and the livestock judges.

 

On the wall behind the man’s desk Bandy sees a place where the paint looks warmer, fresher. A picture has been taken down. Hitler, no doubt.

 

The burgomaster has a .45 Colt pistol pointed at his nose, behind which stands an American infantry captain.

 

The captain speaks in fluent German. The pistol has a universal voice.

 

The burgomaster backs until his desk rides up against his fanny. With no room to retreat, the man’s eyes go big as Bing cherries. The American captain smiles while he talks. Except for the gun and the raised hands and the glisten of scared sweat, everything is pleasant. The burgomaster seems very agreeable.

 

Bandy limps to a chair and sits. Twenty-two stitches went into closing the gash in his leg. Only yesterday did he take his left arm out of the sling. His left leg aches for having to take up the slack for his bandaged right, his right shoulder throbs from doing everything for his hurt left. He’s sore from head to toe. This makes Bandy happy. He’s been shot and busted up. He has achieved the sense with his gimp and bad wing that he belongs among the fighting men now more than he ever has. Charley Bandy has plunked his body down on the table, he’s anted up.

 

Though the language is German, Bandy knows what’s being said by both parties here in the burgomaster’s large office. This is the third town in the last two days where the Eighty-third Infantry has done this. Something like:

 

—You might want to pick up that phone, sir, and call ahead to the next town.

 

—Ja, ja, ja.

 

—Tell them to do just what your nice little town did. If the burgomaster there wants the place to still be standing when we leave, he needs to get everybody to hang out white sheets from their windows.

 

—Ja.

 

—If there’s any German soldiers around, or any of those crazy bastard kids, tell ‘em to get out of town or lay their guns down.

 

—Ja, ja.

 

—Tell him we mean business.

 

-Ja.

 

The captain lowers the gun. The burgomaster, who has by now bent himself backward over his desk, straightens up. He adjusts his sash and collar, clears his throat, some rituals of dignity before he acts in his official capacity as traitor. Bandy had to agree not to take any pictures of these scenes before the captain would let him watch. Too bad, he thinks, there’s precious little comedy in war.

 

The burgomaster dials and reaches his counterpart in the next town, Bevern. According to the Eighty-third’s maps, Bevern’s just a little village five miles to the east on the two-lane road.

 

But it’s a German village.

 

None of the American soldiers wants to die or get wounded this close to the end of the war. To have made it this far through all they’ve endured and then be gunned down by some fanatical teenager waiting around a bend. Or blown up in your jeep by a kid hiding in a grove of trees who found an unused Panzerfaust. That would be too much, too wasteful, with the war decided. But Hitler has raised a whole generation of children to do just this, to be his “werewolves,” boys and girls who will bleed into a cup for the Führer. There’s not a single fifteen- or sixteen-year-old in Germany who’s ever known any leader but Adolf Hitler. They can’t imagine a world without him.

 

No. Today is not the day to take chances. Especially not on Easter Sunday.

 

The burgomaster looks at the floor while he talks to the next burgomaster. The man is animated, waving his free hand in the air telling the next burgomaster how gigantic the American force is. Hundreds of tanks! Thousands of artillery guns. Thousands and thousands of men! The fat official glances up at the captain, currying favor with his eyes and quick, furtive nods, then back down to concentrate on his fairy tale.

 

Bandy rises, pushing off on his left leg, careful to protect his left arm. The burgomaster gives the okay sign to the American captain, who returns the sign and holsters the Colt. A GI will be left with this burgomaster for a little while just to make sure a trap hasn’t been laid in the village up the road.

 

Bandy moves outside to the town hall steps. Holzminden looks like a nice small burg. Main street. Shops. Red-tile-roofed houses, gardens. A square with a fountain and statue. A pretty church with a steeple you can see from most of the town. It’s good that Holzminden didn’t have to be blasted and looted. That’s the rule here in the waning days of the war, the days of fast-rolling men and machines, thirty-five-mile-a-day progress, unprecedented advances into enemy territory. If the GIs have to fight for a town, they treat it roughly. Artillery, bazookas, tanks, any firepower it takes to reduce the threat, even if it reduces the town to ruins. These skirmishes are rarely with regular German army units; the Wehrmacht sees the writing on the wall and is surrendering in droves. A half million of them have laid down their weapons in the surrounded Ruhr pocket. Instead, the Americans’ confrontations are almost always with Waffen SS stragglers, zealous Volkssturm, or Hitler Youth caravanned down from Berlin.

 

Regardless of who’s shooting back, when the fighting is over, the GIs feel obliged to loot. They walk past whatever corpses they’ve made with callous disregard, the proper disdain for fools, they think. Never do the GIs take more than they can fit in a backpack—jewelry, wine, silver. The favorite booty is Nazi memorabilia. Eyes are always peeled for Lugers, swords, pins, flags. The surviving citizens are well advised to stand aside and shut their mouths, especially if the Americans have taken casualties. But if the town surrenders quietly, the populace is handled with much better care. Often the German civilians are glad to see the Yanks, hosting them to meals and drinks, inviting them to sleep in their beds, packing the soldiers off with gifts. You are welcome here, they say, because you are not the Russians.

 

The German citizens impress many of the soldiers, Bandy too. Villagers and townsfolk seem educated and hardworking, cleaning bricks and sweeping streets, selling items and food from carts when their stores are destroyed. They stand beside the roads and dirt tracks, jaws dropped at the displays of Allied might and mobility. They lift up their children to see over the crowds. The kids wave, loving trucks and noise and unconcerned with friend or foe. Bandy snaps photos with the 35mm Leica. The big Speed Graphic takes two hands to operate fast enough to catch the breakneck pace of the Allied advance. His left shoulder isn’t up to it just yet.

 

Inside the burgomaster’s office the negotiations have been concluded. The captain comes out on the steps beside Bandy. The day is bright. No one has died here this morning.

 

Easter bells ring in the church steeple.

 

“Mr. Bandy?” the captain asks. “You a believer?”

 

Soldiers and citizens alike gather in the street to enter the church doors. Services will begin in a few minutes at 1000 hours.

 

Bandy does not wrestle with the soldiers’ paradox of God. He does not ponder how God can save you from doom via prayer when that same deity allows so many cruelties to exist. Why would God save you from Himself? Bandy is satisfied that his role is to take pictures of God’s design. Bandy spreads news of God’s Word, because in Bandy’s life so much of His Word has been War. Bandy suffers no moral dilemma. In his logic, God rewards him for his faithfulness by giving him Victoria and Tennessee and the Leica.

 

He smiles at the captain. “You go ahead.”

 

The officer chuckles and walks down the steps. The man says over his shoulder, “Lot of other fellas might become believers after a bullet misses their nuts by two inches.”

 

Bandy watches the mingle of soldiers and citizens at the church entrance. He raises the Leica with one hand and fires a few frames. As always, he’s drawn through the lens to the story behind the picture. He decides to go inside the church. Hell, he thinks, it’s Easter.

 

He picks his way down the town hall steps and enters the street. He winds up limping to the church beside an old man with a cane. The man offers Bandy his cane. Bandy declines, using some of his smattered German, “Danke, nein, danke schön.” The man insists and hangs it by the loop over Bandy’s wrist. The old German stands there gesticulating like a man shooing goats out of the road, wanting Bandy to use the cane, impatient that the American resists. Then he turns away and outwalks Bandy to the church.

 

Inside, the church is full with a few hundred worshipers. The pipe organ plays an entry tune. Soldiers and citizens sit in pews shoulder to shoulder. Rifles are laid rattling on the floor at the soldiers’ feet. Children fidget and giggle when GIs smile and make faces at them. Candy bars are broken in pieces and handed out. An American pastor stands at the altar beside a German counterpart in a white robe. Bandy finds a place in the last pew near the door. He’s glad of the cane when he folds to sit.

 

The service takes place in both tongues. Throughout the service some silent signal tells the gathering to kneel and then return to their seats. Bandy can’t do it and stays in the pew. When the times come to stand, he finds the cane a lifesaver. He can’t take pictures in here. He grows bored.

 

The private next to him seems particularly hard-praying. During a German part of the service when the boy is taking a break, Bandy taps him on the leg and whispers.

 

“Son?”

 

“Yes, sir?”

 

“Mind if I ask you what you’re praying so hard for?”

 

The soldier is not troubled by the query. Bandy sees gentleness on his young face. He wonders what other expressions have rent these smooth features, what rage and killing-passion, shattering panic, doubt?

 

“No, sir,” the soldier whispers in return. “I don’t mind.”

 

Bandy waits. The boy looks into his own lap, as though to repeat his prayer out loud requires the same bowed head.

 

“I was askin’ God for two things.”

 

“Uh-huh.”

 

“First, I want Him to let me git home all in one piece. I figure everybody’s askin’ for that one.”

 

Bandy nods at this and senses the bandage around his right leg. He concurs, a good request. -

 

“And two, I wish for God to bring this country down to its knees so bad they never try to make war again.”

 

The boy seems ashamed to have asked this. He does not lift his eyes to Bandy’s. But Bandy understands. From the mouth of this young soldier has come the wish that’s been shared by every fighting man across history, in the aeons before history: May the war he is fighting be the last one. May the sacrifices of his comrades be for a purpose, and the destruction be enough to make men turn away forever from warfare.

 

The soldier is ashamed because he doesn’t pray for peace, for everyone to join hands and forgive and fashion a new day. That would be a better, more Christian and charitable prayer. But this American boy has seen too much and realizes too much to believe that even beseeching God for peace will make it happen in this world of men. So he asks instead for the right thing, the brave thing, the prayer that will most likely work: that God be sufficiently vengeful and desolating to make us stop ourselves.

 

This soldier, Bandy thinks, knows the truth. What he doesn’t know is history. There’s never been a final war.

 

Bandy thanks the GI with one more finger’s touch on his leg. The soldier returns to his private dialogue with heaven. Bandy takes up the cane and leaves the church.

 

In the street in front of the church, the Eighty-third Infantry of the Ninth Army readies itself to surge forward. Bandy was moved by the boy’s sad and sage prayer, but now he lets out a fresh laugh at the Eighty-third.

 

A vast collection of vehicles stretches from the central square out past the town limits. Though the Eighty-third is an infantry division, they’ve gone mobile through another clever tactic. In every German town, whether surrendered or fought for, the division commandeers a quota of vehicles. The Eighty-third’s Major General Macon has given the order: “Anything that moves, no questions asked.” The men dress up the vehicles with a fast coat of olive drab paint and slap on a white U.S. Army star. Then the ten thousand-plus soldiers climb on board and off they go in a startling convoy of captured Wehrmacht jeeps and Mark V or Tiger tanks, civilian and staff cars, motorbikes, buses, and two fire trucks. One of the fire trucks leads the motley parade, displaying behind it a large banner reading: next stop: berlin.

 

Bandy has cast his lot with this inventive, hell-bent-for-leather bunch. Formerly it was called the “Thunderbolt” Division; American correspondents have renamed it the “Rag-Tag Circus.”

 

Like the Eighty-third, the weight of the Ninth Army has set its sights on the final prize of the war, the German capital. The Ninth’s commanding officer, General Simpson, has issued instructions that he wants an armored division and an infantry division set up on the Autobahn above Magdeburg on the Elbe River as fast as possible. From there, he wants to move on Potsdam, “where we’ll be ready to close in on Berlin.” Every division in the Ninth that isn’t involved in reducing the surrounded German force in the Ruhr pocket has laid its plans for heading to Berlin. The Second “Hell on Wheels” Armored Division is moving pace for pace on the Rag-Tag Circus’s left flank. The Second is so ponderous a force that reporters say it takes half a day to move past a given point at two miles per hour.

 

Elsewhere along the Ninth Army’s fifty-mile-wide front, just slightly behind the Second and Eighty-third, course the legions and weapons of the Fifth Armored “Victory” Division, plus the Thirtieth, Eighty-fourth, and Hundred and second Infantry Divisions. Taken together they form an inexorable thrust plunging east across the German interior.

 

Bandy looks over his chosen Eighty-third. He’s saddled them up and races them to Berlin against all the others, a jockey on a crowded track. Right now the Rag-Tag Circus is in a tight heat, a close second to the Hell on Wheels boys.

 

Holzminden has offered up two tractors with attached hay wagons, two more buses, a motorcycle with sidecar, and a dump truck. Out in front the fire truck sounds its siren. To Bandy the thing looks hilarious painted green, it still bristles with ladders and hoses. At the loud blast the last soldiers file out of the church and surrounding buildings. For the ninety minutes they’ve been in Holzminden making sure the town is secure and gathering up all weapons, the Eighty-third has about doubled the town’s population. Bandy waits for the captain to come out, and waves to him. He asks the officer if he might have the space in the motorcycle sidecar. It will give him 360 degrees of open air to shoot his photos. And no one will jostle his tender shoulder or leg. The captain cheerfully agrees and finds a driver for the bike. Bandy climbs into the sidecar with delicate motions. The driver, a corporal, locates two pairs of goggles in the sidecar’s luggage boot. He and Bandy slip them on over their helmets. The young man enjoys revving the bike’s engine. He grins and shouts to Bandy that he’s in ecstasy. He says he’s from Jersey.

 

When all the GIs are mounted, the fire truck begins the parade. The hundreds of trucks, cars, motorbikes, and tractors of the Rag-Tag Circus lurch out of Holzminden issuing every kind of mechanized sound, spits and backfires, a clanging bell, diesel coughs, and the hums of many Mercedes engines. Bandy and his Jersey driver wait for several minutes before they begin to pull forward. Citizens line the road and stand on balconies. Their send-off is divided about in thirds, Bandy observes. Some folks smile and wave goodbye, some grimace, some are stunned.

 

Bevern is only five miles off. By the time the lead vehicles of the Eighty-third reach the village outskirts, the last soldiers will have just rolled out of Holzminden. Bandy and his driver are in the second half of the convoy, about three miles behind the wind-rippling sign on the tail of the lead fire truck. The road is a tarmac and gravel two-lane strip through easy hills and unfilled farmland. Wooded patches worry Bandy, especially near bends in the road. Bandy won’t even hear gunfire over the roar of the motorbike. But the Eighty-third’s fleet takes up both sides of the road and fills the horizon fore and aft. An ambush would be suicide. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen. It has happened. The size of the division simply placates Bandy’s worry; there are many other targets besides him.

 

The plan for the day—so long as the connect-the-burgomaster game keeps working—is to follow this road through three more villages and bivouac for the night in the town of Alfeld. Tomorrow the objective is to enter the city of Braunschweig. At this rate, without any serious scrapes with the enemy, the Eighty-third should have a good shot at being the first division to reach Magdeburg on the Elbe, the staging ground for the final push to Berlin. There, the Rag-Tag Circus will leave the back roads and hit the highway, Hitler’s Autobahn.

 

Bandy loads a fresh roll into the Leica, no small feat with one good hand and a rattling lap. His instincts tell him to stay ready, everything has gone too nicely the past few days.

 

The moment he snaps closed the camera back, his Jersey bike driver dodges in a quick shift to the left, rocking Bandy in the sidecar. Bandy grits his teeth at the shear of pain from his stitches, right through his groin, it hurts so much he has to hold his bladder. He curses the driver, knowing the kid won’t hear him. The soldier pivots in his bike seat and waves forward a long black Mercedes. The car pulls alongside, scooting fast between Bandy’s bike and a farm truck loaded with GIs beside them in the other lane. The Mercedes is a German staff car, flying twin swastika banners from the front bumpers. Bandy thinks the car must have been requisitioned at the last moment in Holzminden and there was no time to paint it green and yank off those flags. But the man driving the big car wears a chauffeur’s cap, black gloves, and a fretful look. In the rear seat, a well-dressed civilian careens from window to window gawping at the American column on both sides of him.

 

The chauffeur leans on the horn and weaves through traffic. Each vehicle in turn pulls aside and lets the Mercedes through, each American soldier stares in amazement at the lost German staff car. Bandy shakes his head; apparently the Eighty-third has captured so many German vehicles that this misbegotten staff car mistook the Rag-Tag Circus for a Wehrmacht column. Bandy starts taking pictures. There is too little real comedy in war.

 

A burst of machine gun fire brings the Mercedes to a halt. The convoy slows around it. A jeep escorts the car to the shoulder of the road. Passing, Bandy recognizes the German-speaking captain, pointing his pistol again, smiling again. The Mercedes will be painted green in about five minutes, and those Nazi flags will be tucked in some soldier’s backpack.

 

The procession moves east at less than ten miles per hour. The Jersey driver keeps heaving the rpm’s on the motorbike, wanting to peel out of the pack and go touring with Bandy locked at his hip. Bandy doesn’t know the driver’s name, and takes his picture as an anonymous Italian boy fighting overseas. He’s got a great face, Bandy thinks, swarthy and all lit up, American as apple pie because he looks so European.

 

The road ahead is straight and unobstructed, and green vehicles packed with soldiers fill every inch of it. Riding in the open sidecar like this, Bandy senses the power of the Allied advance. Beyond the fields and heights on all sides of him there are other American and British divisions on the offensive, knifing into central Germany, every minute taking more miles of enemy land under occupation. Bandy wonders, Why do the Germans resist? Why do they make us wreck their towns, why do they blow their own bridges, why do they sacrifice themselves? Bandy wants to ride the Rag-Tag Circus all the way into Berlin and nab that sick fuck Hitler, get the Kraut-speaking captain and his .45 Colt and ask these and a few other questions.

 

The column proceeds unimpeded. This is a good sign. If Bevern had plans to resist, the shooting would start around now, with the green fire truck in the lead nearing the village outskirts. Another burgomaster has seen the common sense of surrender.

 

So have a small group of Wehrmacht regulars standing beside the road. Ten German soldiers in a line on the left-hand shoulder have their hands in the air and rifles at their feet. Every olive drab truck, tractor, car, tank, motorbike—Bandy snaps the men’s picture in his turn—bus and jeep sliding past thumbs them to the rear, telling these quitted enemies to keep walking west and give up back there, we’ve got no time to stop, read the sign, pal, BERLIN.

 

After twenty minutes on the two-lane road, the first cluster of dwellings appears. These are small farmhouses with roofs of red clay tile or thatch. Those barns left standing appear ancient, weathered to a lovely woody gray, pleasing to Bandy’s farmer’s eye. Other outbuildings are scorched to the ground, just ridges of charcoal in the dirt like the spines of long-dead giant beasts. The Jersey boy slows the motorbike. A canopy of bare branches over the road marks the outer boundary of the village. f

 

The convoy comes to a stop a quarter mile out. The driver rolls the throttle under his hand in impatience. He looks down at Bandy. He gets a nod.

 

The motorbike leaps out of formation and takes the shoulder of the road. Horns honk at them bouncing past. Bandy hears the objections through his own low grunts as the sidecar jars his sutures.

 

The Jersey driver twists the bike however he must through the parked vehicles to get Bandy into the village. In a minute they are in the center.

 

The motorbike is shut down. The Circus’s green fire truck has stopped in the square, behind it a hundred vehicles bunch up. No soldier has dismounted. No citizens are out to greet the Americans. The idling of the many motors sounds like an ill wind.

 

All around the square, white sheets hang over the banisters of verandas, out of second-story windows, they are draped across electric lines. The laundry and the iced silence give the hamlet a cool, snowy guise.

 

Bandy steps out of the sidecar. The Italian boy lifts his goggles but does not follow.

 

On both sides of the main street, outside a bakery, a lawyer’s office, a sweets shop, a leather tanner, are strung up bodies. There are twelve of them. They’ve been hung from lampposts and high iron railings. Five elderly men and five women. Two boys.

 

Around their necks, lapped over the nooses, are signs scrawled in a thick black hand: vaterlandverhãtor.

 

Traitor to the Fatherland.

 

Bandy stands in the middle of the empty street. Since he has walked forward, he hears at his back several coming bootsteps of soldiers and officers. The Americans will cut down these civilians, lay them out, and step back to let the townspeople cover them.

 

This is the work of retreating SS men. They will not allow surrender.

 

With the street filling now, the citizens of Bevern materialize in their doorways and on stoops. Bandy leans on his cane and walks forward through these decorations of the occasion of war, among the dangling bodies, among the sheets of surrender, and now the running women who drop and wail below the swinging feet of innocent loved ones.

 

The last body at the end of the street hangs from a flagpole. Bandy guesses the building behind the pole is the town hall. The corpse is dressed in a suit and shiny black shoes. A velvet sash stripes the chest. This was the burgomaster.

 

While Bandy stares, an old woman shuffles past him. She does not touch the rope that has killed the old man. She stands for a moment looking up at his heels as she might were he a flag. The woman contemplates something, what? That he was an old fool? That he should have stayed hidden and quiet like the rest of them who survived in Bevern?

 

She lowers her head. Below the bright black shoes, she folds to the ground. The woman lifts her open palms to her face like washing from a stream, and sobs into them.

 

Bandy takes her picture, the body hovering over her head. He thinks of a prayer he heard that Easter morning and composes a caption:

 

“Germany, brought to its knees.”

 

~ * ~

 

 

 

April 1, 1945, 7:20 p.m.

Grolman Strasse

Charlottenburg, Berlin

 

 

lottie grips the long knife carefully. she has it by the hilt, backward, laying the blade along the meat of her forearm.

 

She hurries behind her mother. Freya skitters close to the charred facades of the buildings, donning their darkness. Both she and Lottie are cloaked head to toe in black dresses with black shawls over their heads and shoulders. Freya’s wrap flutters around her striding form, she is a raven, like Lottie, ebon with the night and the sagging wreckage.

 

The knives stay hidden beneath the shawls. Freya spent an hour running the blades against a kitchen steel to bring out their sharpest edge. Once the foot of night was fully down over Berlin, she led her daughter out of the house.

 

Lottie has to walk fast to keep up. She is afraid of the cool blade in her hand, scared too of being out after dark against the law. Goebbels has issued another proclamation, to keep night looters from wandering the city. So far mother and daughter move unseen; no cars or trucks navigate the road, there’s no more gasoline in Berlin. What fuel there is gets reserved by the Party bosses and their families, funneled into their cushy cars and headed south out of Berlin to the mountains, or secretly west to throw up their hands in front of the Amis.

 

Mutti is obsessed, Lottie thinks. To be doing this, with knives and breaking the law and dragging me along to help. But the Jew must eat.

 

So must Lottie. Her hunger of late has shed pounds off her already slim frame. In the mirror her eyes have taken on the scooped look of birds’ nests. Her golden hair has gone brittle and her stamina, especially on the cello, is shriveling. There would be just enough food for mother and daughter without the Jew. But they are not without him. So Lottie has learned the trick of heading to bombed areas as soon as the all-clear sirens quit to snatch up emergency ration cards and a bowl of soup. Freya has become a marvel at securing black-market victuals, even without money or anything to barter. Lottie no longer leaves the house when Mutti takes the meager meals down the basement steps to Julius. She stays in the living room or in her bed. She has stopped playing the Galiano in the house. She saves her strength for the BPO concerts, which have gone unabated, three and four days a week. There’s been no talk among the musicians of the plot to escape, not even a rumor. Lottie is concerned that the plan may not have blossomed to a reality. But if there is a plot, it can’t be spoken of. She will have to wait and see and worry.

 

At home there is no thought of making the Jew leave. There is no more talk of suicide. Those issues are long settled. Sometime in the next few weeks, Lottie will go from Berlin with the orchestra. Until then she has resolved herself to helping Mutti find food because if she does not, she fears her mother will feed the Jew and her daughter and let herself starve.

 

Freya halts at the corner of Savigny Platz. Lottie moves beside her, still hugging the wall of the last building. In peacetime this little park is a green and pastel gem, brimming with umbrellas, tables, and vendors. All that is gone. Tonight there’s nothing in the plaza but a dead horse and children playing.

 

Three days ago the skies changed over Berlin. In the mornings, the Americans continue to arrive on time with their B-17s. At night—perhaps even tonight in another hour or so—the British and their Mosquito bombers return. The afternoons have always been calm, at least in those parts of town not on fire. But three days ago the Russians claimed the high sun as their own. They punish Berlin not with whistling bombs but with screaming, low-flying fighters, blasting wing-mounted machine guns onto streets and squares. There are no warnings before the Soviets whiz overhead, they come so fast and low, and from such a short distance away, that radar doesn’t catch them soon enough in advance. Berlin’s antiaircraft batteries must fire almost level with the ground to reach the fighters, spraying almost as many bullets on the city as the Reds. Lottie has seen the pilots in their cockpits, red stars painted on tails and wings, the ground ripping beneath them. After four years of bombings, this new and sudden plague rising from the east is hardest for Berliners to bear. These are the first armed Russians in the city.

 

This Easter afternoon the Soviets attacked Charlottenburg. They seemed to home in on Savigny Platz, just two blocks from Freya’s house. Again and again Red fighters dove to strafe this open common. Lottie; can figure no military reason for their selection of target. It was wanton. They just wanted to ruin a nice spot in Berlin.

 

One of the businesses surrounding the Savigny Platz was a carnival shop. Its windows and front have been demolished in the raid, an uncountable number of pockmarks spoil the walls. Tonight a pack of children have ransacked the busted shelves. These are Goebbels’ littlest looters gallivanting in the plaza. They dance, trailing colored paper streamers, they wear spangly hats and wave yellow and blue lanterns in their play. Some children slide down a fallen girder, just the right size for their tiny rumps.

 

The horse is what brings Freya here. With the dearth of gasoline in the city, all ammunition is shuttled to the flak towers by horse-drawn carts. The animals are gaunt from too much work and not enough feed. This one was caught out and gunned down in the Soviet raid. Freya has come to butcher it.

 

Freya hands Lottie her knife.

 

“Stay here.”

 

“What? Why? Where are you going?”

 

“I don’t want the children to watch us.”

 

Lottie thinks these children see plenty in Berlin, they gambol in and out of the windows of a busted shop, they prance around a dead horse. They’ve certainly seen human bodies. Ach, she thinks, Mutti.

 

Freya puts both hands under her shawl. She cowls her face beneath the inky lace. She creeps into the plaza, ducking behind shattered tables and benches until she’s close to the kids. They do not see her until she raises her black-wrapped arms over her head and moans like a terrible ghost. Freya runs into the middle of their game keening and waving, and chases each of the children out of the square. The children squeal, some laugh, but none of them drop their stolen baubles and treasures running away home.

 

Freya stands over the fallen horse. Lottie approaches and hands over the knife. Freya smiles, breathing hard from her effort. She has been the children’s protector, herding them off even though Lottie thinks it was silly and needless to do that. Lottie just wants to do what they came for and go.

 

Freya catches the disapproval on her daughter’s face, for she says, “Ach, Lottie.” Her grin falters. She bends to the dead animal.

 

Not until she kneels too does Lottie see how miserable the horse is. The thing was starved, its frame evident everywhere. It is a dark animal, a cordovan color. Its rib cage strains to contain a bloated abdomen, bulging stupendously. Several bullet wounds are easy to see in the dark, marked by white gobs of maggots. Mature flies buzz in nuggets over these holes and the horse’s cloudy eyes and lolling, thick tongue. The smell is rotten but after a wince Lottie bears it. Freya runs a gentle hand over the carcass. Lottie touches a fingertip to the brown flank. The hide is cool and stiff like a rug. The two women kneel on a coating of black, crumbly blood.

 

On the ground Freya lays her knife and a cloth sack she has folded under her belt.

 

Lottie feels disgust cramping in her throat.

 

“Mutti, how can we eat this thing? It’s been dead since this afternoon. It’s covered in flies. I won’t touch it.”

 

Freya ignores this. She takes up the knife and moves to hunker behind the horse’s neck at the shoulder and backbone.

 

“I was told the best meat is along the spine. Lottie, we’ll just have to cook it until it’s fine to eat. Now help me. Please.”

 

Lottie draws a deep breath of reluctance and shuffles beside her mother. Freya makes several tries at gripping the knife’s haft until she is comfortable that she can handle it with strength. Lottie thinks her mother has no idea what she’s doing.

 

The blade goes in between the horse’s shoulders. Freya pulls it to her, the hide makes a rasping noise like cutting burlap. Lottie expects blood but there is none. The beast’s heart has long stopped, his blood has all dried or bled out. Freya’s incision is only a half inch deep, barely parting the flesh. Her hand shudders a little on the first pass. When she draws the knife again along the trough, this time deeper, her grip is firmer. Mutti digs her free hand into the incision and tugs. A flap of skin and meat peels outward. Lottie watches her mother grow bolder.

 

Now that the insides of the horse are exposed, the hidden smell rises. It is a putrid, pinching stink. Lottie leans away from the carcass but she will have to wash this odor away later. A cloud of flies is disturbed. They do a fast circlet above a wound in the leg where bone bits protrude. None of the flies land on Lottie nor do they switch to another gory hole, they seem to have their bounds on the horse and retake their spots.

 

“The rump.” Freya does not look up from her work. “Do it just like this. Cut and pull.”

 

The slab Mutti tugs from the horse is two inches thick. It is red and pliable, like steak. If it proves to be edible, they’ll have a gorging meal.

 

But if the SS or Gestapo happen by, the two will eat a few meals in prison, if they’re lucky. Carving up a horse on a public square under the sheath of night will be considered looting. At best it’ll be judged a display of poor morale. An admission that they are hungry and desperate. That they are defeated. Lottie worries also, what happens if they’re caught, stuffed in a cell for a week, and the BPO chooses that time to flee Berlin?

 

It’s clear Freya will not come away until she has enough meat. The faster they finish, the sooner they’ll return home. Lottie slides to the rear where a few pitiful cubes of manure were the horse’s last act.

 

There is no life in this horse, she thinks, only meat. Only food. Cut.

 

Lottie tips the blade into the flank near the hipbone. She pushes hard on the handle to puncture the hide. Her nose curls at a fresh waft of putrefaction. A fly investigates the new gash but swirls away to nibble elsewhere. The knife scribes a reddening line, tracing the hump of muscle in the horse’s rear. With her left-hand fingers Lottie claws into the cut and yanks, drawing the knife along the lifting meat. She has to go in again with the knife to fillet the flesh away from the white bone and network of clinging fibers.

 

In minutes Lottie has carved from the horse a round chunk of burgundy muscle, thick, cool, and heavy. The meat itself is not so awful, just a huge steak with a brown leather backing. The gaping hole in the horse’s flank is a wrenching sight. The animal’s hip joint and femur are laid bare; the strings and levers of all bodies are supposed to be hidden and they seem horribly wrong when exposed. Now the flies have discovered the ease of feeding in such a capacious crater. Lottie leaves the hunk on the horse’s bloated belly and stands to ease her knees from the pavement. She steps back. Freya is a black place, a congealed piece of night, bent and hacking at the spine. The white of ligaments and bones—growing with each pass of the blade and Mutti’s tugs—and of squirming larvae seem to usher the poor dead horse out of the night and away from this dark world. Lottie and Mutti wear black and bear knives and hunger. The horse, she thinks, is disappearing. The horse may be better off.

 

Lottie lapses into impatience now that she has cut the flank as instructed. Let’s go, she thinks. How much meat does Mutti need to take back, the whole horse? The stuff won’t last the night without refrigeration, and there’s neither ice nor dependable electricity. Mutti will be up all night cooking the flesh until all the bacteria is out and it’s palatable. She’ll put the meat into stews, sausage and dried jerky, patties and paste, she’ll feed the rest of the block if she can and we’ll be famished again in three days. Every second they stay in the plaza is another tick on the clock of danger, of being nabbed by the authorities.

 

“Mutti,” she hisses, “are you done?”

 

“Is there enough for us?”

 

This is not Freya’s voice. It seeps from the dark, from another unstaked shadow, moving across the plaza.

 

Freya looks up from her trenching knife. Four shadows step forward, more women clad all in black. They too have come for the horse.

 

“Yes,” Freya says, “of course.”

 

With no more words, shawls are swept back from arms and long knives appear. It’s too dark to recognize any of the women, Lottie does not know the voice. The women gather on their knees about the animal and now there are five slashing at it. A pair attack the front shoulder. Lottie observes no finesse or attempt to slice away just the meat, these two will drag away the entire leg. The third goes to the head. She nips off the tongue with one strong flick and drops it onto waxed paper. This woman twirls the knife edge beneath the eye to dig out the cheek muscle. The fourth woman takes Lottie’s place at the rump and proceeds to find the meat that is left.

 

Lottie stays back. The kneeling black five strip the rotten horse.

 

The women work competently. The front leg is severed and dragged away from the carcass. The rump is worked for whatever meat clings around Lottie’s pit. The horse’s face is ruined where one black woman digs for delicacies. Freya lifts long fillets from the spine and drops them into her cloth bag.

 

Lottie can do no more. She stands aside. She is repelled by the smell and the insects and the hacking knives and the wet sounds of plopping horse-meat, the risk of arrest, but mostly by the sheer degradation.

 

Within minutes of the arrival of the new butchers, the women must roll the horse over to get at the other side. Lottie stays back and does not help. Rolling over a stiff, dead, diced-up, three-legged horse is too wretched. No.

 

The five women arrange themselves by instinct around the carcass. Freya and two others each take a leg, the remaining two women lay their hands beneath the distended belly to push it over when the horse tips and rolls. The sac of the gut founders around in their arms like a water bag. The women shove all at once, the horse begins to revolve. The thing’s remaining legs are like iron bars, straight and frozen in rigor mortis. The belly does not roll with the horse but lies behind, cumbersome and reluctant, flopping out of their hands. One of the women stands away from it, considering what to do. Out of breath, she counts for the others. “One, two, three ...”

 

She lunges with straight arms to force the bag to roll along with the rigid legs and torso. She puts her hands in the middle of the bubble. The sac pops with a damp yawn.

 

What emerges is the most horrifying reek Lottie has ever smelled, beyond anything she could imagine. The air is fetid with stench. The horse’s intestines have spilled out and the pushing woman trips into them when the other women let go and run. Lottie’s knees buckle. She stops herself from collapsing and stumbles backward, both hands rushing the shawl over her mouth and nose. Lottie doesn’t stop until she has left the edge of the plaza. There, she dares to lower the cloth to take a testing breath. She gulps clean air as though she’s emerged from a deep pool of filth. The other women are scattered. Lottie cannot see where they retreated. Where is Mutti?

 

With a shouted whisper, she calls across the plaza, “Mutti? Mutti?”

 

Around the square, Lottie hears voices and coughs, strangers in their flats who’ve caught wind of the erupted, rancid gas. “Gott im Himmel! What is that stink? It’s that horse! Sheiss!”

 

Lottie moves into the ring of fetor. There’s no breeze and the odor hovers. She takes quick, small steps and hunches to stay low. She feels like a buzzard hopping towards the carcass.

 

She hisses, “Mutti?”

 

Near the horse the smell threatens to overpower her again. She swallows a retch.

 

“Mutti, we’ve got to get out of here.”

 

From one of the windows above the plaza Lottie hears a querulous old biddy say to someone in her flat, “Call the police. Right now! Do something!”

 

Out of the darkness three of the women hurry forward. They do not speak but grab the severed leg and the bits on waxed paper and stalk off. The fourth woman, the one with guts on her, stays away.

 

Lottie creeps closer. The horse has rocked back to its original position, it is split open and even more horrible. Mutti lies face up where she has fainted, the knife still in her hand. Lottie’s eyes water. She breathes through a knot of cloth pressed against her mouth.

 

Lottie jumps beside her mother to shake her shoulder with her free hand. Freya does not rouse. Lottie must use both hands to drag Mutti away where she can awake. She fills her lungs through the cloth, clamps her lips tight, and hooks her fingers under Freya’s armpits. She hauls backward, the knife dribbles from Mutti’s fist.

 

Lottie tugs her mother to the rim of the plaza, whispering madly at her, “Mutti, wake up! The police are coming! Mutti!”

 

Freya remains out. Lottie stops and catches her breath. She knows they can’t sit here in the open like this, even in the dark, if the authorities show up. They’ll be stumbled over in a minute. The police will see the dropped knives and cloth bag of meat strips, and they’ll be arrested as looters.

 

With all the strength she has left, Lottie tugs her mother farther from Savigny Platz along the sidewalk of Grolman Strasse. Only twenty meters from the plaza she runs out of steam. With her last effort, she tows Mutti behind a large metal garbage bin. She removes her mother’s shawl, folding it into a pillow for her mother’s head. With Mutti safe in the shadows, she runs back to the plaza. She does not think to be quiet, just quick.

 

In seconds she returns with both knives and the cloth bag of meat. She slides down the wall and lifts her muttering mother’s head to cradle it in her lap.”Shhhh, Mutti,” she whispers, stroking the chilly forehead.”Shhhh.”

 

Police do come. Lottie hears boots, then echoing voices discuss the stench and what to do with the damn horse. Neighbors around the plaza shout down suggestions. Lottie hears the biddy again call out, “Do something!”

 

Mutti sputters. She will sit up in a moment. Lottie will keep her quiet.

 

Lottie pushes away from her the bag of spoiled meat. The smell of the garbage is better.

 

~ * ~

 

 

 

April 1, 1945. 7:30 p.m.

Conference room adjacent to the office

of Marshal Stalin,

the Kremlin

Moscow

 

 

he feels weightless. his boot heels rise off the polished floor, he has to clamp them down, cling to gravity.

 

But the sense of power rises under him and up come his heels. He clasps his hands behind his back, as though to fold wings, and strides from his office door to his seat at the head of the long, narrow conference table. Stalin is on tiptoes, giddy.

 

At the head of the gathering he lays his hands over the back of his chair. His teeth grip the stem of his favorite British Dunhill. For this most important of meetings Stalin has dressed in a plain mustard uniform, red stripes down the trouser seams, one decoration on his chest—the red ribbon and gold star of a Hero of the Soviet Union.

 

The men around the table, men who dare look nowhere but at him until he speaks and sits, are the most important men in the Soviet Union. The most feared. Beria, the NKVD’s chief bastard. Malenkov, Communist Party Secretary. Foreign Minister Molotov. Marshal Bulganin. Ministers Kaganovich, Voznesensky, and Mikoyan. From the army staff, Generals Antonov and Shtemenko. They form the GKO, the seven members of the State Defense Committee.

 

At the far end of the table, impassive but surely impressed, sit Stalin’s two warriors on the Oder River, rival Nazi-killers. They are the reason for this meeting. They are Marshals Zhukov and Koniev.

 

Stalin sweeps his gaze over them. Stalin resides on top of them all. The combined power in this room is nothing more than a pedestal for his own. He can make them tear out each other’s throats with a single command. He has to keep Beria from doing it anyway.

 

Stalin nods to his creations. They return the inclination and mumble greetings. He takes his seat.

 

Pulling the pipe from his mouth, he points the wet end at Zhukov.

 

“How are things with the First Byelorussian Front?”

 

Zhukov reports that preparations in his army are proceeding apace. The roads and earth are drying nicely. The men are eager and ready. Everything is in order.

 

Stalin asks Koniev how fares his First Ukrainian Front and receives an equally enthusiastic response.

 

“Good.” Stalin parcels this out in equal portions to both marshals. “Very good.”

 

Stalin adopts a chatty tone, intending to snatch it away soon enough.

 

“I have received information that the Allies’ plans are less than ... allied.”

 

This garners a satisfied chuckle from the room. Beria at Stalin’s left hand has a wet laugh, a chesty snicker.

 

Stalin continues. “The soyuzniki intend to get to Berlin ahead of the Red Army.”

 

Stalin does not mention Eisenhower’s message of the previous evening. He indicates General Shtemenko. “Read the telegram.”

 

The general rises. Stalin thinks the man’s legs must tire from lifting all that honor pinned to his chest. Shtemenko adjusts his spectacles and reads.

 

The paper in his hand is a report from the Soviet mission to Eisenhower’s headquarters. Shtemenko intones that the mission has learned the details of the Western Allies’ intentions. First, British and American forces that have surrounded the Ruhr pocket will destroy all enemy positions inside. After this is accomplished, the Allies will advance southeast to Leipzig and Dresden.

 

The general lowers his eyeglasses to the bridge of his nose. He looks up from the report, galvanizing to him the men at the table. “But on the way,” he says, “they intend to take Berlin.”

 

Stalin grunts, an indignant rumble. Everyone turns to him but he keeps his own eyes on Shtemenko. “Continue.”

 

The general pushes up his glasses. The report goes on to say that, under the guise of “helping the Red Army,” Western troops commanded by Montgomery will attack north of the Ruhr and drive via the shortest route directly for Berlin.

 

“According to all the data and information, this plan—to take Berlin before the Soviet army—is regarded at the Anglo-American headquarters as fully realistic. Preparation for its fulfillment is well advanced.”

 

Shtemenko lowers the paper, removing his glasses. Stalin gives him a sideways nod, the general sits.

 

The Soviet mission has done a wonderful job, Stalin thinks. They have gotten hold of Montgomery’s telegram to Eisenhower. Thence by autobahn to Berlin, I hope.

 

Stalin lays his hands on the tabletop. He is so short, he barely has to lean over to do this. He looks past the men on either side, the idlers, the bureaucrats and bootlicks. He nails his eyes on the two warriors, Zhukov and Koniev.

 

Zhukov. Began his career in the Czar’s Imperial Dragoons. In 1917 he switched sides to join the Revolution, fought for the Red cause with a fury. He’s always been more Army than Party, very little politics for Zhukov. That’s how he’s survived the purges of all the Czarist chaff in the Red Army. Loyal, imaginative, bold, brutal. He’s risen through the ranks to become the hero of Moscow and Stalingrad. He wants finally to be the conqueror of Berlin.

 

Koniev, taller and more brusque than Zhukov, stands in his way. They’ve been promoted at the same pace. In many ways their careers have been parallel; Koniev also changed allegiances from the Czar to the revolutionaries, but unlike Zhukov, who joined the Red Army as a private, Koniev became a political commissar. Although he switched to military command twenty years ago, Koniev bears the taint of the former apparatchik, viewed by Zhukov and the soldierly brethren as something less than career military, someone to be wary of.

 

Stalin has handpicked these two from the kennel of young generals to be his attack hounds. Zhukov and Koniev share many traits: brilliance, Party soundness, an unforgiving hatred of the Nazis. Openly, mercilessly, Stalin pits one against the other. The men have developed, to Stalin’s pleasure, a mutual dislike.

 

Both marshals sit bolt upright under the stare of the vozhd.

 

“Well now,” he says, “who is going to take Berlin? We or the little allies?”

 

Koniev rises first to the bait.

 

“We will,” the big man claims, “and before the Allies.”

 

Stalin licks his moustache. He leans even more onto his hands flat on the table.

 

“So, that’s the sort of fellow you are.”

 

Koniev has spoken very quickly, Stalin thinks. How will his force capture Berlin from the south? We’ll see just how eager he is. Then we’ll get from Zhukov what we can.

 

Stalin asks, “How will you be able to organize a proper strike group for it? Your main forces are on your southern flank. Wouldn’t you have to do a lot of regrouping?”

 

Koniev does not falter in the face of Stalin’s doubt.

 

“My front will carry out all the necessary measures, Comrade Stalin. We will regroup in time to take Berlin.”

 

“May I speak?”

 

It is Zhukov. His tone drips with condescension.

 

Stalin turns from Koniev. Zhukov does not wait for permission.

 

“With due respect,” he says, inclining his head to Koniev, “the men of the First Byelorussian Front need no regrouping. They are ready now. We are aimed directly at Berlin. We are the shortest distance from Berlin.”

 

Zhukov pauses for effect. One hand on the table curls into a fist. He shakes it.

 

“We will take Berlin.”

 

Stalin eases his palms from the tabletop. He settles back into his chair. He has gotten what he wants, a declaration of competition from the two vast Red armies on the brink of Germany. He has gotten his race for Berlin.

 

“Very well. You will both stay in Moscow and prepare your plans with the general staff. I expect them ready within forty-eight hours. Then you can return to the front with everything approved.”

 

Stalin observes the shock staggering across the brows of both his marshals. He knows the problem he’s handed them. The assault on Berlin was until this meeting planned for early May. Now that Stalin is convinced that Eisenhower is a liar and Montgomery is charging for Berlin, he has decided to move the final offensive up by two weeks.

 

Koniev faces an immense logistical challenge. His force is spread out all over the south. He’s short of men and supplies and must rush everything he’s got to the Oder. He’ll have a transportation nightmare meeting Stalin’s demand.

 

Zhukov too is far from ready. His front is badly depleted from the fighting for the citadels, with many divisions at less than half strength. He’ll have to find replacements fast. Those men will be raw. Just as well, Stalin thinks, let them catch the bullets first to protect the better soldiers.

 

Stalin stands. The meeting is adjourned. The others rise in congregation. Zhukov and Koniev have fallen jaws, they still reel from the command Stalin has laid on them. Forty-eight hours to prepare the impossible.

 

Stalin is not done turning the screw.

 

“Marshals Zhukov and Koniev?”

 

“Yes, Comrade Stalin?”

 

“I must tell you that we will pay special attention to the starting dates for your operations.”

 

The two men lower their eyes in acquiescence, then flick glances at each other as though crossing swords. Stalin lays the pipe stem on his tongue and sucks once. The Dunhill is warm in his mitt, it is a fine pipe. He turns on his heels. Again they feel so light.

 

He steps across the polished floor to his office. The men at his back file out of the conference room without conversation. That’s the way, Stalin thinks. All of you, at each others’ throat.

 

At his desk he composes the first draft of his response to General Eisenhower. In an hour it is wired to the Allied Supreme Commander.

 

He informs Eisenhower that the Allied plan to cut the German forces in half by joining with Soviet armies “entirely coincides with the plan of the Soviet High Command.” He agrees the linkup should indeed be in the Leipzig-Dresden area, and the main blow of the Soviet offensive will be in that direction. The date for the Red Army’s launch into Germany from the Oder River is to be “approximately the second half of May.”

 

In the third paragraph, Stalin sets the hook. Echoing the sentiment of Eisenhower’s message, believing he is simply volleying lie for lie, Stalin writes: The Soviet High Command plans to allot secondary forces in the direction of Berlin.

 

Berlin has lost its former strategic importance.

 

~ * ~

 

 

 

April 5, 1945, 1:15 a.m.

Six kilometers west of Küstrin

Seelow Plain, Germany

 

 

“tell him i’ll kill him.”

 

Misha brings his lips close. He whispers in German.

 

Ilya holds his face only inches from the enemy. The words he speaks to Misha are pronounced around the shaft of a knife bitten between his teeth. His chest is pressed flat against the enemy’s uniform, nailing the man backward into the dirt wall of the trench. Ilya holds the soldier’s arms spread wide, a violent dance partner. He squeezes his right fist around the man’s wrist until he feels something in the mechanics of the soldier’s arm give way. The enemy fingers go limp, the Luger drops to the ground. Ilya smells cabbage on the man’s breath, thinks he sees fright in the wide-open pupils. Everything is sallow under the light of flares and search beacons.

 

“Tell him if he makes any sound I’ll kill him.”

 

Misha brings his lips closer to the trembling ear. The little sergeant’s teeth are nicotine yellow around his hiss.

 

In Ilya’s arms the soldier’s body loses tension, Ilya almost has to support him. Crumpled at their feet is a dead German, this man’s companion. Farther up the trench is another. Their throats are slit, done by the knife in Ilya’s mouth. The blood from the killings is on his lips. Ilya watches the man’s eyes flutter down to his comrade. The corpse’s fingers are curled, as though in the last moment they reached for something and missed. The living soldier locks his eyes again on Ilya. He draws a laden breath and nods.

 

Ilya lowers his hands and backs off a step. He puts the knife in his fist, wipes his mouth on his sleeve. The German soldier leaves his arms plastered against the dirt, staying spread-eagled. Misha produces a length of cord. Ilya mimics what he wants the man to do, bring his hands together to be tied. Obeying, the character of the soldier’s breathing swells, becomes a pant.

 

Misha steps in front of Ilya to bind the prisoner.

 

Misha recoils, bumping into Ilya.

 

“Ah, fuck. He’s pissed himself. Look.”

 

The front of the German’s pants is spotted, and there is sodden soil at his boots. Ilya smells the urine.

 

Now the soldier thrusts out his hands, blinking, afraid to speak and apologize but eager to be tied by his captors and led away, alive. Misha retreats, keeping his voice low.

 

“No, no, Ilya. I don’t want to cross no-man’s-land with this.”

 

“We came out here to take a prisoner. We’ve got one. Tie him up, Misha.”

 

“No. He’ll stink. Kill him. We’ll get another.”

 

Ilya looks at the frightened, shamed soldier whose fists are balled tight and held out as though already tethered in Misha’s rope. He nods, Yes, yes, take me, I won’t do anything more wrong.

 

“Tell him to take off his pants.”

 

“What?”

 

“Do it, Sergeant.”

 

By saying this, Ilya makes it an order. After the siege of the Küstrin citadel he was given a field promotion to lieutenant. Misha was not.

 

“Tell him. And you take the trousers off the dead one.”

 

Ilya sheathes his knife, the blade slides away with a menacing sibilance. Misha does not move to obey. Ilya flexes his hands open and closed once in warning. Misha spits.

 

“Fuck, Ilya. Fuck.”

 

Misha mutters to the German. The soldier is thin and young, no more than twenty or so. He reacts to Misha’s words with stifled, frenzied happiness. He suppresses a laugh.

 

Ilya watches the effort of stripping and dressing. Misha is careless with the corpse, whipping the boots and pants off it and leaving the body in disarray. The head lies still while the body is twisted about, Ilya’s gash at the throat was deep.

 

When the soldier is in clean trousers, Misha wraps his wrists with the cord. After this is done, the soldier catches Ilya’s eye. He smiles in gratitude and nods.

 

Ilya flashes out a hand, gripping the German’s throat—his hand is so large, the white neck is almost encircled—-and pins the soldier backward against the trench wall.

 

Ilya says nothing. He glares into the popping eyes. Ilya doesn’t hate this man. He hates everything.

 

He finds he is squeezing. The soldier’s tongue is out. He hears Misha whisper, “Go ahead.”

 

Ilya releases the soldier. The young man reaches his tethered hands up to his neck. He coughs, then looks up, begging to be forgiven for the cough. The soldier straightens and struggles to swallow. He does not look up again, but locks his eyes on his boots.

 

Ilya stares at Misha. He licks his teeth.

 

“Let’s go.”

 

Misha hazards only one glance at Ilya, a puzzled flicker. The look says, You’ve left us, Ilyushka.

 

The three make their way to the far end of the forward observation trench. There lies the first German body, the dead soldier still holding a canteen. Misha clambers out onto level ground. He will lead them, retracing their path across no-man’s-land, avoiding mines. Misha has an uncanny ability to read a map once and recall its every contour. Plus, his German has improved steadily. These are the reasons Ilya brought him on this mission. Ilya needs no other help.

 

In single file they hurry from cover to cover, tree trunk to boulder to ditch. When flares burst overhead, they drop and freeze, facedown. The German captive moves cooperatively, he steps stride for stride in Misha’s track. He too knows there are mines all around.

 

They have five kilometers to return to the Soviet bridgehead that stretches across the river Oder. At their backs, ten kilometers to the west, is the Seelow Heights. The German town of Seelow resides on a seventy-meter-high ridge forming one boundary of a flat alluvial plain. The valley between the Heights and the river—the Germans call this the “Oderbruch”—is fissured with creekbeds and spring-fed water holes. For centuries the land has been tilled by the Poles and Prussians, depending on which regime in history ruled this cold quarter. There are few trees and scant roads. The ground oozes from runoff and flooded streams, the Rasputitsa, spring thaw. It is over this arduous tract that Marshal Zhukov’s First Byelorussian Front—with Chuikov’s Eighth Guards Army in the van—will attack with a million men and ten thousand tanks. They will strike due west, aimed only at Berlin.

 

From their heavily armed, high plateau in Seelow, the German defenders keep vigil over this flat and highly visible patch of earth. During daylight the two sides watch each other with ease. The trees in the plain have not yet broken out in leaf. Digging in has become an impossibility in the soaking soil; every shoveled hole fills with water in minutes. At night, German spotter planes drop flares to light up the Oderbruch, and soldiers in the forward trenches record what they see of Red activity. In addition to the aircraft, giant searchlights in Seelow beam down on Soviet positions in the Küstrin bridgehead, observing the shifting of troops, artillery, and tanks into assault positions. Zhukov has ordered Soviet artillery not to fire on these beacons, hoping to avoid betraying the guns’ location and density. The result is the Germans know every move the Reds make. The Soviets are aware that every approach to the Heights has been presighted by hundreds of enemy guns. To counter this, Zhukov has ordered the taking of German prisoners for interrogation.

 

With Misha in the lead and the German sandwiched in the middle, the three move quickly beyond the German network of trenches. In twenty minutes they reach the dead zone, where there will be no one else out tonight except other Red patrols returning from forays. A fresh flare sparkles above the valley. They’ve come far enough now that there’s no need to drop and hide. Ilya presses them onward.

 

Twenty more minutes of silent plodding follow. Their boots cake with mud. The sucking clod-step of heels is the only noise, save for the fizzling of flares above. The young German hangs his head, his slender shoulders are rounded. Ilya walks the entire time poised to kill the man if he bolts left or right.

 

Under the flare Misha pivots to tread backward and face the German. The scar across his cheek glows pustulant in the nervous ocher light.

 

Without lowering his voice, Misha asks the prisoner, “Wie heisst du?”

 

The soldier makes no reply. He glances over his shoulder at Ilya, who warned him earlier that to make any sound would be to die. The eyes seek: What do I do? I’ve been asked a question. Ilya doesn’t care now, they’re out of danger. He can see the silhouettes of cannons and tanks lined up a few hundred meters farther off in the burgeoning bridgehead.

 

Ilya shrugs.

 

The German turns his eyes back to Misha, who injects a little frolic in his backward skip over the Seelow plain. Misha repeats, “Wie heisst du?”

 

“Ho . . .”The soldier’s voice fails him. He hasn’t been able to clear or rub his throat where Ilya choked him. He’s been petrified with fear for forty-five minutes. He tries again.

 

“Horst.”

 

Misha grins, still prancing backward.

 

“Well, Horst.” The little sergeant looks over to Ilya to see if he’ll get away with whatever it is he wants to do next. Ilya just walks.

 

Misha grabs himself in the crotch. He brings his hand up to his nose and apes disgust at the smell. “Ach, Horst, du bist ein Baby. Phew!”

 

Misha laughs and skips higher. Horst’s helmeted head drops to his chest. His feet drag.

 

Misha makes a squeal like a piglet. He brings up his hands to his chest, folding his fingers in weak little fists. He knocks his thumbs together, implying some stupid animal motion.

 

“Horst! Horst! Du bist ein Ferkel.”

 

The soldier marches head down, hands bound.

 

“Hey, Ilya. Ilya! I told him he was a little pig. A little scared pig who pisses on himself. Fucking German. Huh? They’re going to kill him anyway after they interrogate him.”

 

Misha speaks to the soldier again. By the inflection in Misha’s voice Ilya guesses the little backward sergeant has told this to the soldier as well. You’re going to die anyway, Horst.

 

Ilya stops walking.

 

“Horst.”

 

The German halts his bowed gait. Misha comes to a stop but continues to weave from foot to foot, reluctant to quit his fun.

 

Ilya draws his knife. The blade whispers.

 

“Horst.”

 

The prisoner turns, putting his back to Misha. Now his head is up.

 

Ilya sees the soldier well. Several days’ growth of sparse black beard mar his cheeks and chin. His eyes are blue, sockets smooth. His fettered wrists bulge with bone, dirty nails are black crescents at his fingertips. Ilya steps forward.

 

Misha bounces. “Gut the piggy, Ilyushka.”

 

Ilya takes the young soldier’s trussed hands and yanks him close, as close as they were in the trench. The soldier’s bottom lip trembles, but nothing else flinches.

 

“Genug,” the soldier says into Ilya’s face.

 

Ilya leans nearer. He speaks past the man.

 

“Misha? What is genug?”

 

“It means ‘enough.’”

 

Ilya tells the soldier, “Yes, Horst. Genug!’

 

With the knife, Ilya slashes.

 

The soldier’s hands are free. The cut rope falls like a dead snake to his ankles.

 

Ilya makes a very small jig with his head, in the direction of Misha.

 

The soldier wheels and leaps at Misha. The little sergeant’s rifle is strapped over his shoulder and he cannot grab it. The soldier smashes his fist into Misha’s scar, smacking Misha back several paces. The rifle falls to the soupy ground. Horst advances and delivers one more full blow into Misha’s mouth, punching the smaller man down. Misha scrambles on his backside, coating himself in mud.

 

The soldier grabs for the fallen rifle. He rises with it in his hands, pointed at Misha.

 

Before he can pull the trigger, Ilya shoots him dead.

 

Misha stops backpedaling in the muck.

 

“Ilya!” he sputters. “What ... fuck!”

 

Ilya hoists his submachine gun and straps it over his shoulder. There are echoes; the report from the blast takes longer to die out here in the Seelow plain than did the soldier Horst.

 

Ilya lifts Misha’s rifle out of the untied hands. He holds it for Misha to stand and reclaim.

 

Ilya looks down on the young German. There are five leaking holes ripped in his narrow back.

 

He died with a gun in his hands. He died fighting. So he counts.

 

But Horst was wrong.

 

There has not yet been enough.

 

~ * ~

 

 

 

April 5, 1945, 8:05 p.m.

Prime Minister’s residence at Chequers

Buckinghamshire, England

 

 

churchill sips a dram of champagne. he sets the tall flute carefully in its spot, forward and to the right. The glass sweats, he wipes dewy fingertips against his vest. The bubbles cast up white hats like happy sailors.

 

Closer on his right a brass ashtray supports a smoldering fat cigar. Gray fog wreathes his head, manufacturing his favorite kind of air, redolent of back rooms, politics, men. By his left elbow there’s a warm platter of lamb and chutney, garnished with pickles and rice. Behind that, crackers and black Russian caviar. At the head of this meal, holding the top of the circle, stands a photograph of his wife, Clementine, and daughter Sarah.

 

Directly in front of him lies a short pile of cables and messages. The sheets are white and starchy, inedible, undrinkable, unenjoyable. He’s surrounded the papers with a ring of his favorite things, allies of succor for these private, trying moments.

 

Outside the circle waits a pen and a ream of crisp PM’s stationery. Farther outside the ring lies the open, ticking Turnip.

 

The telegrams are arranged in order of arrival, by time and date. The greatest adventure of the twentieth century began with trust and cooperation, with hope for a better world, but it has all been poisoned, and the sheets in front of him are the white pills that did the deed. Jealousy, ideology, suspicion, glory; these have overwhelmed hope like jackals sicced on a pup. Churchill lifts the first flimsy page. Through pince-nez glasses, he reads it again.

 

General Eisenhower’s telegram to Stalin. SCAF 252.

 

After first seeing this cable a week ago on March 29, Churchill immediately called the General on the scrambler telephone, near midnight. He didn’t mention SCAF 252, just asked for clarification of the Supreme Commander’s intentions. Churchill stressed to Eisenhower the continuing importance of Berlin as a target, arguing for Montgomery to be allowed to continue his northern assault with the Ninth U.S. Army in his quiver. Churchill restated his strong view that it was vital for the Western Allies to capture Berlin before the Reds. Eisenhower listened and replied, “Berlin is no longer a military objective.”

 

Churchill puts this cable aside. History, he thinks, will not set it down so lightly.

The next page carries the date 30 Mar. 45. General Eisenhower to Prime Minister. In this letter Eisenhower put the content of his telephone conversation into print for Churchill. The Elbe River will be his goal, south of Berlin, to cut off enemy forces heading that direction and divide the German army in half. The main thrust lies in Bradley’s zone, and he will have the Third, First, and Ninth Armies to carry it out.

 

Eisenhower’s letter relegates the entire English force to protecting Bradley’s left flank. Monty loses the Ninth, enfeebling his Twenty-first Army Group. Later in the offensive, Eisenhower explains, once the success of main thrust is assured, Montgomery will get to mop up the northern seaports.

 

Jolly, Churchill thinks. Mopping-up duty. The English maid.

 

Churchill scoops some caviar onto a cracker. He washes it down with champagne. Those old Russians who first married caviar with bubbly certainly knew what was what.

 

Eisenhower is still on a wild-goose chase. He continues to be obsessed with the specter of German resistance burrowing into some mountain fortress in the south. Weeks ago British intelligence judged this to be a rumor. Why, Churchill puzzles not for the first time, can’t the Americans take their teeth out of it? How can they allow something so unsubstantiated to dictate such major strategy decisions?

 

The champagne tangs his tongue. He reaches for the cigar and sucks deeply, meshing the several flavors, making them squabble in his mouth, that’s the way to relish.

 

Churchill is not getting upset surveying these cables. He told himself even before he instructed Jock Colville to assemble them on his desk, and again before he embarked through them with his dinner, that he would not. This is merely a review parade. A farewell.

 

By contrast, he’s heard in the wind that Eisenhower, short-tempered in the best of times, is furious at being challenged by the English. A flurry of telegrams to Marshall, Montgomery, the Joint Chiefs, Bradley, everyone involved, displays his anger at being questioned. Churchill likes Eisenhower the man, but is committed that the General’s decision in this historic instance—handing over Berlin to the Reds—is quite dead wrong.

 

But what can one do? Churchill sighs and makes the only move available to him, like a chess king in check. He sets the cigar in the ashtray, licks his lips, and flips to the next page.

 

On March 30, the British Chiefs of Staff sent a lengthy complaint to their opposite numbers in Washington, D.C. This was done without first having it pass muster with Churchill. The English generals were miffed primarily that Eisenhower circumvented proper channels when he made direct contact with Stalin. This seems to Churchill a sideshow to the real topic, Eisenhower’s unilateral dismissal of Berlin as an objective.

 

Next page. The Americans’ riposte of the same date. They firmly state that Eisenhower’s communication with Stalin was appropriate and an operational necessity. They give their support to aiming the main offensive thrust to the southeast, saying it’s in line with approved strategy and exploits military opportunities.

 

the battle of germany is now at the point where the commander in the field is the best judge of the measures which offer the earliest prospects of destroying the german armies or their power to resist. . . . the single objective should be quick and complete victory.

 

Blah blah, thinks Churchill. Single objective. There is no single objective in war. That’s what soldiers never can see. It’s not over when a man lays down his gun. The question remains as to which fellow will pick up the weapon next. That’s politics.

 

Churchill catches a wisp of testiness in his thinking. No, no, he calms himself. You are looking for an end, not another chapter. Drink. Smoke. Chew. Better, that’s better.

 

He rubs his nose where the glasses ride. He settles deeper into the leather desk chair. Next page.

 

Eisenhower’s cable of March 31 to Montgomery. Antagonism coats every word like scum. Eisenhower gives vent to his distaste both for the debate over his decrees as Allied Supreme Commander and for the British Field Marshal:

 

i must adhere to my decision about ninth army passing to bradley’s command. . . . you will note that in none of this do i mention berlin. that place has become, as far as i am concerned, nothing but a geographical location, and i have never been interested in these.

 

Montgomery could make no response to his military commander’s very direct orders. He was slapped down good and hard. If there are operations beyond the Elbe for Monty’s Twenty-first, they will be simply to clear the northern seaports, nothing else. Definitely not Berlin. But Churchill could talk back, and did. On the same day, he cabled Eisenhower again, refuting every point.

 

Churchill lays the cable from Eisenhower on the growing, sloppy sheaf with the others he’s reviewed. He picks up his reply, written in language as tart as what Ike pointed at Montgomery:

prime minister to general eisenhower 3 i mar. 45

 

very many thanks. it seems to me personally that if the enemy’s resistance does not collapse, the shifting of the main axis of advance so much further to the southward and the withdrawal of the ninth u.s. army from the twenty-first army group may stretch montgomery’s front so widely that the offensive role which was assigned to him may peter out. i do not know why it would be an advantage not to cross the elbe. if the enemy’s resistance should weaken, as you evidently expect and which may well be fulfilled, why should we not cross the elbe and advance as far eastward as possible? this has an important political bearing, as the russian armies of the south seem certain to enter vienna and overrun austria. if we deliberately leave berlin to them, even if it should be in our grasp, the double event may strengthen their conviction, already apparent, that they have done everything.

 

2. further, i do not consider myself that berlin has yet lost its military and certainly not its political significance. the fall of berlin would have a profound psychological effect on german resistance in every part of the reich. while berlin holds out, great masses of germans will feel it their duty to go down fighting. the idea that the capture of dresden and junction with the russians there would be a superior gain does not commend itself to me. the parts of the german government departments which have moved south can very quickly move southward again. but while berlin remains under the german flag it cannot, in my opinion, fail to be the most decisive point in germany.

 

3. therefore i should greatly prefer persistence in the plan on which we crossed the rhine, namely that the ninth u.s. army should march with the twenty-first army group on to the elbe and beyond berlin. this would not be in any way inconsistent with the great central thrust which you are now so rightly developing as the result of the brilliant operations of your armies south of the ruhr. it only shifts the weight of one army to the northern flank.

 

Churchill leaves this page flat before him for several seconds. It was a fine effort, he thinks. He freshens his champagne glass and toasts himself. History will not accuse him of slacking, he thinks, history will not say Winston Churchill stood idle while the bear gobbled Berlin off an American silver platter.

 

The next two pages he turns over quickly, just perusing them. He has a dislike for this cable, a lengthy and kissy missive to President Roosevelt. It was Churchill’s first mentioning of the SCAF controversy to Roosevelt. In it he repeats for the President point for point the rebuttal he sent to Eisenhower, but the message this time is couched in careful, courtly terms.

 

Everyone in His Majesty’s Government admires the great and shining qualities of character and personality of Eisenhower. The good Supreme Commander is to receive heartfelt congratulations on the glorious victories and advances by all the armies of the United States Centre in the recent battles on the Rhine and over it.

 

Before Churchill even ventured to mention to the President his difficulties with Eisenhower’s conduct and judgment, he’d written a full page of homage to America and begging excuse for England. After so much stroking, finally brooking the troubles, he did so like a burglar cracking a windowsill, entering with stealth and a light tread:

 

having dealt with and i trust having disposed of these misunderstandings between the truest friends and comrades that ever fought side-by-side as allies, i venture to put to you a few considerations upon the merits of the changes in our original plan now desired by general eisenhower. it seems to me the differences are small, and, as usual, not of principle but of emphasis.

 

Churchill gently reminds the President of the agreements made at Malta. In those preparatory meetings to Yalta held by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the capture of Berlin was singled out as a priority, and Montgomery’s northern track to Berlin was approved by all.

 

Churchill forks a bit of lamb, slides it through the slurry of chutney and lays it on his tongue. He sets the emptied fork down on the plate, ringing the china. The food in his mouth is the last he’ll eat tonight, his appetite is gone. Appropriate, he thinks, it was the lamb that finished him off.

 

The following page is Eisenhower’s response to the Prime Minister, dated April 1. The General insists that he has not changed any plans at all. At all times since Normandy, he claims his intention has been to cross the Rhine and disrupt, destroy, or surround the defending German forces. This is as far as any strategic projections from him have gone. Eisenhower maintains that he has done nothing more than what he always said he would do, exploit opportunities and enemy weaknesses as they appear.

 

Eisenhower explains again to the Prime Minister that he must first concentrate in the center with Bradley. To shift forces north to Montgomery now would be to allow himself to be dispersed by attempting to do all these projects at once, and that he cannot allow. But if the German resistance should crumble, if at any moment collapse should suddenly come about everywhere along the front, we would rush forward, and Lübeck and Berlin would be included in our important targets.

 

Transparent, thinks Churchill, a clear attempt to mollify the Prime Minister and shut him up on the topic of Berlin. Eisenhower as much as said it: if there is collapse everywhere along the front, we’ll go after Berlin. Shy of that miracle—which will not come to pass so long as Hitler is alive, and Hitler will stay alive so long as Berlin is unconquered by someone!—don’t bother asking again.

 

There are three pages left.

 

The first is Stalin’s response to SCAF 252, received in London April 2. Stalin informs Eisenhower that Berlin has also lost its status as a critical target for the Soviets. Churchill guffawed when he read this the first time. Stalin give up Berlin? He’d sooner abandon Moscow!

 

Churchill peels this page away with a shake of his head. Who could believe this nonsense? Only those who want to. The Americans.

 

The Turnip ticks with impatient taps on the desk. Churchill pours himself one more tall glass of champagne. He will not drink it, he’s had enough, he simply enjoys the cheer it sends up from the flute.

 

But Churchill is not buoyed by the fizz, the pink, the moist odor hovering over the last two pages lying before him. He knows the unsatisfying place this story leads.

 

After Stalin’s reply Churchill tried one last time to convince Eisenhower to move on Berlin. His logic was, if Eisenhower wants to behave as though he is conducting a candid and truthful correspondence with Stalin, then the General ought to be encouraged to rely on Stalin accordingly:

 

prime minister to general eisenhower 2 apr. 45

 

thank you again for your most kind telegram. ... i am however all the more impressed with the importance of entering berlin, which may well be open to us, by the reply from moscow to you, which in paragraph 3 says, “berlin has lost its former strategic importance.” this should be read in light of what i mentioned of the political aspects. i deem it highly important that we should shake hands with the russians as far to the east as possible. . . .

 

again my congratulations on the great developments. much may happen in the west before the date of stalin’s main offensive.

 

Much may happen in the West before Stalin’s attack. Yes, indeed. Much has happened. The German defense in the west is thin and disjointed. The Allied armies in the north—especially Simpson’s Ninth U.S. Army, now operating under Bradley—-have made spectacular leaps, dashing eastward almost unimpeded. They grow nearer to the Elbe every day. Before the week is out, at this pace, they’ll be within striking distance of Berlin with only shaky resistance before them. But will Eisenhower unleash them to cross the Elbe and rush for the German capital, as he promised in his letter? Will the Allies beat the Reds to the punch?

 

The definitive answer came on April 4. Top Secret and Personal from the President to the Prime Minister. It was clear to Churchill that Roosevelt’s hand was not in this message. The language had the unmistakable terseness of General Marshall, lacking at the end even the informal, friendly closing the President always adds in his messages to the PM.

 

as to the “far reaching changes desired by general eisenhower in the plans that had been concerted by the command chiefs of staff at malta and had received your and my joint approval,” i do not get the point. for example, the strength and all the resources agreed upon for the northern group of armies were made available to montgomery. following the unexpected remagen bridgehead and the destruction of the german armies in the saar basin there developed so great a weakness on those fronts that the secondary efforts realized an outstanding success. this fact must have a very important relation to the further conduct of the battle. however, general eisenhower’s directive of april 2, it seems to me, does all and possibly a little more to the north than was anticipated at malta. leipzig is not far removed from berlin, which is well within the center of the combined effort. at the same time the british army is given what seems to me very logical objectives on the northern flank. . . .

 

i appreciate your generous expressions of confidence in eisenhower and i have always been deeply appreciative of the backing you have given him and the fact that you yourself proposed him for this command. i regret that the phrasing of a formal discussion should have so disturbed you but i regret even more that at the moment of a great victory by our combined forces we should become involved in such unfortunate reactions.

 

So that’s it, Churchill thinks. When words like regret and unfortunate reactions and I do not get the point crop up in correspondence; when it was agreed at Malta between all parties that Berlin was a principal target and now to read that such was never the case; when Montgomery’s mission— along with British prestige, sentenced to second-class status—has been relegated to what is called logical objectives; these are clear and present signs that this particular affair has gone too far. Churchill has wheedled and scolded, made arguments of logic and emotion, and been rebuffed each time, at every level. Time, as the Americans say, to “take the hint.”

 

The Americans have done a masterful job of hiding political and personal agendas behind sound military strategy. Without ever saying it, they do their master’s bidding, as they should. Their master is the President. For his own well-known purposes, over Churchill’s well-documented objections, Roosevelt wants Stalin to have Berlin. So Stalin shall.

 

Churchill lays the final page of this sad series to the side. He pulls to him a sheet of stationery and his pen. The blank paper beckons a fight for one more round, it is full of possibility with its whiteness. The tick-tocking Turnip says there’s time left, still time to pick up the cudgels again.

 

But this game is lost, Churchill thinks. There will be others, many others, to follow.

 

He writes an end, feeling mealymouthed.

 

prime minister to president roosevelt. personal and top secret 5 apr. 45

 

i still think it was a pity that eisenhower’s telegram was sent to stalin without anything being said to our chiefs of staff or to our deputy, air chief marshal tedder, or to our commander-in-chief marshal montgomery. the changes in the main plan have now turned out to be very much less than we at first supposed. my personal relations with general eisenhower are of the most friendly character. i regard the matter as closed and to prove my sincerity i will use one of my very few latin quotations, “amantium irae amoris integratio est.”

 

“Lovers’ quarrels always go with true love.”

 

Churchill changes his mind about the champagne. He reaches for the tall glass and drains it in one hoist.

 

England has quit the race for Berlin. It’s over. He rings for Jock to come clear his desk of plates and apostasy. Churchill grinds the cigar between his incisors, waiting for the secretary. Capitulation makes him want to do something, take some action. All he can do in this case is chew the cigar. There’s one chance left. Not Montgomery. The British are ruled out.

 

But all this chicanery is taking place behind the scenes, through top-secret cables and letters. Maybe some plucky American commander in the field, who doesn’t know he’s not supposed to, will take the bit in his teeth and go, go so fast past buckling German resistance that he’s in Berlin before Eisenhower and Roosevelt can stop him. That would change everything.

 

Whoever you are, Churchill thinks, if you are: Godspeed.

 

~ * ~

 

 

 

April 12, 1945, 1:00 p.m.

The Little White House

Warm Springs, Georgia

 

 

“please, mr. president,” the artist says. “try to sit quietly. just a while longer.”

 

Roosevelt clears his throat and attempts again to be still.

 

“You look very handsome today.” The woman painter daubs the canvas at her easel. Roosevelt has noted the tinge on her bristles right now is sanguine. His face must be showing good color.

 

“Better than yesterday?”

 

“Yes, Mr. President. Better than yesterday.”

 

He expected her to backtrack, to be mindful of his ego, but the artist eyes her portrait’s details and says no more for the moment.

 

Roosevelt composes his head and shoulders, then risks lowering his gaze to the newspaper on the desk in front of him. A copy of the Atlanta Constitution displays the headline: “9th—57 Miles from Berlin.”

 

The Second Armored Division of the Ninth U.S. Army has reached the Elbe and is preparing to establish a bridgehead south of Magdeburg. The Ninth’s Eighty-third Division is only a day behind and should reach the river in stride.

 

No reports have come in yet that the Soviets have jumped out of the gate from their positions on the Oder. The impossible has happened. American troops are as close to Berlin as the Reds. Remarkable, when they were two hundred miles out just a week ago. The U.S. forces in place are strong enough to have a go at the city.

 

Is some crazy commander in the Ninth going to make a grab for Berlin without orders? Roosevelt imagines tomorrow’s headline: “Berlin Falls to US. Army.”

 

If that happens, if that even looks like it might happen, Stalin will erupt. Churchill will fan the flames. Hitler will head for the hills. Everything will tilt way out of balance.

 

Roosevelt lifts his eyes from the news page to the painter. He’s glad to find he’s not concerned. Like this artist staring at her canvas, confident, touching texture and tint to the whole one jot at a time, Roosevelt has crafted the situation in Europe carefully, a dab here, a stroke there, years of vision and coddling. Politics and the military, blended on his palette. Everything will sit still and the final portrait will be captured just the way he’s envisioned it. Nothing is going to change that. Not the Ninth U.S. Army, that’s for certain.

 

He looks to the faces of the women in the room with him. He loves this rustic cottage, the Little White House. He can sit in any spot and demand privacy just by closing his eyes, receive attention just by opening his mouth. The women adore him. He’s even charmed this painter, a Russian lady, Shoumatoff, into a chatty intimacy. Today is a fine, warm day, and the warmth seems to permeate him, it’s there in the looks of the women, in the clement colors the painter puts in his face.

 

What to do with Stalin? This nasty business about the secret meeting in Bern. Uncle Joe has certainly shown himself to be a sharp-tongued jerk along with being a dictator. In an April 4 message, Stalin as much as called Roosevelt a liar. Or an old fool, take your pick. He claimed that the President of the United States has not been fully informed about events in Switzerland. Stalin insists that something rotten is being done by his allies behind his back, no matter how strongly worded the denials have come from the British and Americans. Roosevelt spat back, deciding it was time to give Stalin as good as he gave for once. He opened his response with: I have received in astonishment your message. . . . The note finished on an equally stern footing: Frankly, I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.

 

It’s always tempting for Roosevelt to fall in line with Churchill about the Soviets, and Stalin in particular. He even sent Churchill a quick cable, agreeing that a “tougher” stance with the Soviets might be appropriate now in light of their own armies’ lightning progress on the Western Front.

 

Stalin did not apologize for his accusations, but he did relent. In a cable dated April 7, Joe refuted that he had any intention of “blackening” anyone’s integrity. He even sounded a little wounded:

 

my messages are personal and strictly confidential. this makes it possible to speak one’s mind clearly and frankly. this is the advantage of confidential communications.

 

if, however, you are going to regard every frank statement of mine as offensive, it will make this kind of communication very difficult. i can assure you that i had and have no intention of offending anyone.

 

That telegram confirmed Roosevelt’s initial beliefs about Stalin, Churchill, the war, politics, and people. It’s a matter of style. Just minimize the problems, procrastinate if you have to in order to buy some time, take as few hard stands as you can manage, and obstacles will most often resolve themselves. Dissolve, more like it, just run out of juice and fade away. This one has. This morning Roosevelt dictated to Stalin one of the few telegrams he’s written himself during this stay at Warm Springs, telling the Marshal that vital message word for word:

 

thank you for your frank explanation of the soviet point of view of the bern incident, which now appears to have faded into the past without having accomplished any useful purpose.

 

there must not, in any event, be mutual mistrust, and minor misunderstandings of this character should not arise in the future.

 

Ambassador Harriman asked to take out the word minor before presenting the cable to Stalin. He was concerned it might be misinterpreted in Moscow; the incident was, in Harriman’s opinion, a major one. Roosevelt insisted on leaving the message as written, wanting the episode depreciated. After drafting the Stalin message, Roosevelt sent a copy to Churchill, repeating his advice of conciliation: . . . these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day, and most of them straighten out, as in the case of the Bern meeting.

 

The incident is over and done because Roosevelt kept a muzzle on Churchill and a firm but friendly face towards Stalin. He didn’t give in to Churchill’s rashness and exhortations to stiff-arm the Soviets, and he’s not going to now. The journey into the postwar period is about to begin. Roosevelt is committed to embark on that journey—in order to continue— peacefully.

 

The butler enters the room. He begins to set the table for lunch.

 

Roosevelt wants to end this posing session. He doesn’t like being so stationary. Too much of his life already has been robbed of motion, he doesn’t flourish with discipline and silence. Not when it’s so warm and pleasant. He wants to eat lunch, take a ride in the open car in the sunshine with his women, and have a nap.

 

It is very warm. He can’t sit like this much longer. He looks at his watch.

 

“We’ve got just fifteen minutes more.”

 

It’s not warm, it’s hot. A prickle runs up the back of his neck, it feels like a scuttling centipede with scorching legs. He wants to stop now but he promised fifteen more minutes.

 

He must be sweating. He lifts his right hand to mop his brow.

 

The hand will not move smoothly. It seems to flick in and out of his control. It jerks across his brow once, he tries again, another twitchy gesture.

 

His breath snags in his chest.

 

He lowers his head, to look down at his legs. You, he thinks. You. And with speeding shock he realizes, This isn’t you.

 

A woman’s voice. Close to his face.

 

He doesn’t catch what she says, doesn’t see. A fog has sprung in his head, between his eyes and his understanding. But he lifts his head. The fog is burning hot, steam.

 

Says, “I have a terrific pain. In the back of my head.”

 

Lifts his left hand to show the voice, kind concerned voice, where it hurts.

 

It hurts everywhere. Explosive hurt.

 

Opens his mouth to speak more, more, get it out, fast. Time! Memory! But the fog becomes blackness, faster than words or regret or hope.

 

It is horrible; then it is beautiful because everything completed is.

 

* * * *