Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [106]
During the last days of April the Falkenstein family and all their neighbors locked up in their cellars as SS officers from a nearby camp made a last-ditch stand in the Dahlem District. The whine of bullets, the crash of mortars, and the burst of shell made them flinch and cover through the pitched battle.
Fear made them forget hunger. In the Falkenstein cellar there was a new sound, unheard for years—the voice of Bruno Falkenstein praying.
Their minds had grown hazy. Radio gone, toilet unworkable, a single candle left, no water, no food.
There was a short and violent exchange of gunfire early in the third morning of the battle, and then great, unearthly silence. The quiet lasted for what seemed hours; no one could remember such silence for years.
The longer the stillness held, the more terrifying it became. The four of them, grimy, stinking, starved, sat in their stupor for over an hour without uttering a word. At last Frau Falkenstein creaked her large body from the cot and labored up on a stool to look through a window on the level of the street. She drew the boarding and blanket aside and squinted into an eternal grayness that revealed nothing.
“What shall we do, Bruno?”
“I don’t know,” he rasped.
“We must find food and water or we’ll all be dead.”
“I’ll go up and see if anyone is there,” Ernestine said. Her father protested, but she insisted she was better able to move around than the others. “Don’t come up looking for me and don’t leave here until I get back.”
“For God’s sake be careful, Ernestine.”
She climbed the steep stairs, shoved the trap door open, and glanced about the shambles in the hallway. Her body was slight and deft. She hoisted herself out carefully, dropped the trap door down, and as an afterthought dragged a carpet from the anteroom and covered the door.
The living room, shattered long before, was boarded up from the rest of the house. She pushed open a temporary door and peered outside. Not a sign of life in the streets. The scars of battle were much in evidence, the street smoldering from one end to the other.
She decided to try a dash straight across the way to their neighbors the Kaisers. She ran, moved even more swiftly by the sound of her own steps.
In the middle of the street her heel fell into a small mortar hole and she crashed to the pavement, twisting her ankle. She emitted a cry of disgust and pain, rolled over onto her hands and knees, and tried to lift herself. The foot gave way. She gritted her teeth and tried to drag herself, when she saw, out of the corner of her eye, someone moving.
Ernestine peered up slowly. A few yards away, at the intersection, two men with tommy guns over their backs stopped and watched her. They wore crossed bandoliers, bloomered brown trousers, short boots, and red stars on their caps. Russians! They moved at her cautiously, smiling.
Her ankle throbbed; she stifled the impulse to attempt to run. One of them now had his weapon pointed at her. Both of them seemed to be boys in their late teens; one was a blond and rather husky, the other dark with a shaggy growth of hair.
“Kumm frau,” the blond said, sneaking up to her. “Kumm frau.”
“Tick, tick, tick, tick,” the shaggy one said, pointing to her wrist. He leaned over, grabbed her arm, tore the wrist watch off, and put it to his ear and laughed. ‘Tick, tick, tick, tick.” His comrade listened, also amused.
She tried to crawl away while they played with the watch, but they walked behind her taunting, “Kumm frau!”
Ernestine sprang to her feet, tried to run, staggered blindly, limping on the pained ankle. The blond one snatched her long hair and flung her ruthlessly to the pavement again. “Kumm frau!” he repeated, looking about for some place to take her. As he reached down she saw the eyes of a wild man and heard the breathing of a dog in heat. She lashed at his face and tore it open with her fingernails. He wrestled her to her feet, banded his arms around her, and dragged her toward the garden plot in the Kaiser yard. She dared not scream for that would have