Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [151]
“I am told by her mother that she lies there day after day and that she screams in her sleep.”
“My dear Herr Falkenstein. Yesterday, the Amis released the information that they, along with the British, dropped seventy-five thousand tons of bombs on Berlin in forty days of continuous air raids at the end. She has been brutally raped by Russian soldiers. Her fiancé is dead and her brother is in a prison camp. Anything she has ever known of a normal life is gone. The illness that afflicts her is mental exhaustion.”
“Is that a reason for her to refuse to see me?”
“Have you not noticed, Ulrich, when someone speaks to you they do as I. They look into the shadows on your right or left, but never into your eyes. To some of us you are the mirror of German conscience, the living reminder of what we have done.”
“I have had a long time to wonder, Dr. Hahn, who are the guilty? I cannot blame her for the Nazis.”
“Nor can you keep her from blaming herself. The true guilty draw a curtain on the past. The most innocent assume the guilt. Unfortunately there are too few Germans like that girl.”
“I must go to her,” Ulrich said.
“Be careful.”
Ernestine heard him come in and cringed into the folds of the bedding.
“Ernestine,” he said.
“Please go, Uncle.”
“Ernestine.” He reached out and touched the girl and she began to sob softly. “You must turn around and look at me now.” His hands were firm. He dried her tears. There were large black circles beneath her eyes.
“Is it true?” she asked.
“It is true.”
She slumped back. “I am so ashamed,” she whispered. “Dietrich ... shot them down in cold blood. I loved him. He shot them down in cold blood.”
“You did not know, child.”
“Because I did not want to know. No one could have lived in Berlin in these years and not know.” It was not so hard as she believed to look at her uncle. At the moment it seemed a burden was lifting.
“Every German must face the past before he can face the future. Otherwise, there can be no redemption. You have taken the first cruel step, my child, and tomorrow you must start all over again.”
She reached for his hand and pressed it to her cheek,
“You can sleep now,” he said.
Chapter Eight
NEAL HAZZARD, AMERICAN COMMANDANT, was the most gregarious of the brass and the best-known occupation officer in the city. The Berliners loved his gruff bravado, his showing up at rubble-clearing sites, in beer halls, schools, union meetings, churches. Mostly he traveled alone and unarmed, a distinction in Berlin.
From the start the rules of the four-power Berlin Kommandatura were stacked against the West by the presence of a veto. He was compelled to accept all the Russian entrenchments before American arrival.
Even though Hazzard operated in a deep hole, he took a personal liking to the Russian Sector commandant, Colonel Nikolai Trepovitch, who, like himself, was from the ranks and had held fighting commands. Trepovitch was the most outgoing of the Russians, having a sparkling pixyish sense of humor.
However, the meetings of the Kommandatura often as not turned into a nightmare, with translations and conversations going in senseless circles for hours. What would, on the surface, appear to be a routine matter could suddenly turn a session into hairsplitting, bickering, and endless dialogue. Trepovitch and his deputies could haggle for hours and neither Hazzard nor the other Western commandants knew from one time to the next what the Russians had in store.
Hazzard realized that Trepovitch was allowed little room for flexible thinking, having to carry out his directions to the letter. He never pressed the Russian when he knew he could not give; Trepovitch appreciated it.
Hazzard was unable to achieve this silent rapport with the British colleague, Colonel T. E. Blatty, who would argue for hours for no other purpose than to keep the game by the rules. The Englishman, a classical officer, would never anger, never raise his voice, never become vexed. His endurance was the antidote to Trepovitch’s