Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [98]
“Drink! I must have a drink!”
“Dietrich! Wake up, darling! Wake up!”
“Drink! Give me a drink!”
“Oh, my darling. Please let me help you. Please don’t shut me out.”
“Help me tomorrow, woman. I need a drink now.”
“Darling, let me love you. Please! Please! Let us marry ... tomorrow ... now.”
“Marry you? How humorous! I am married to the SS. I have no room for another wife.”
“Oh God, dear God.”
“Stop your bloody weeping and get me schnaps!”
“Now you listen to me, Dietrich Rascher. This war will end one day. I don’t know what you have seen or how it has hurt you, but you will need to forget. I will be waiting here to help you. I will wait until time runs out ... until my heart stops ... I will never stop waiting and I will help you forget.”
The all-clear sounded.
They trudged up to the demolished street. All of them stood in the dusk’s fading light and stared at their broken house. Once it had stood two stories, square and solid. Most of the top floor was gone. The rest was riddled with holes, gouges, smashed and broken windows. The pretty little flower garden, so meticulously nursed by Frau Falkenstein, was destroyed. Falkenstein’s auto was in flames, gutted beyond use.
The neighbors crawled from their cellars one by one and began to dig through the rubble. Reimer’s house down the street, which had taken a direct hit, was flattened to the foundation. The rest of the street was a shambles. Once it was a nice street, lined with shade trees and neatly cut shrubs.
“I had better go to the store and see if there is anything left,” a voice said.
“Don’t bother. The store took direct hits.”
“Frau Winkelmann and both her children are dead.” Perhaps it was better for them, Falkenstein thought. Frau Winkelmann had been crippled in a raid a half year earlier and the children had become a burden to all the neighbors. Her husband had been killed long before in Tunis.
“Someone get over to the defense command and find out about the water main. There is no water coming into my house.”
The air was grimy with unsettled dust, fires burned, and the sirens screeched all around them, hauling off the wounded, digging for the dead. There was little time for either sympathy or contemplation or to mourn dead children, broken homes, or look for bread or fill the water buckets. They knew that the American fires from the day would light a path for the British bombers by night, and when darkness came the raid would go on. Nights were somewhat better. The Americans picked an area to precision-bomb. If you were caught in the American target, like today, it could be ghastly. The Lancaster Bombers of the British tried to saturate the entire city with incendiaries so their target was spread and the chances of survival better.
The value of survival was becoming questionable, anyhow. If you lived through the British raid at night the Americans would come tomorrow and continue their checkerboard destruction ... Dahlem ... Wilmersdorf ... Charlottenburg ... Köpenick.
People were fleeing Berlin by the tens of thousands, but where to go? Perhaps, Bruno Falkenstein thought, find a nice large cathedral and stay there. The Americans were sentimental about bombing churches. Perhaps they would get a rest tomorrow. Perhaps another part of the city would get it. Lord! The Americans had come for a solid month with three hundred bombers or more and the British had come in behind them.
Their beautiful beautiful street had become a rubbish pile, like the rest of Berlin. What the hell is the use of hoping, any more.
Frau Falkenstein’s mind was geared to more practical things. She sent the girls to the reservoir with buckets while she searched for something to eat. She was wily to the ways of survival, knew the short cuts around rationing, played the black market, knew how to hoard and barter.
Ironically, the postman delivered Falkenstein the latest issue of the Berliner Illustrated during the respite. They returned to the cellar