Deadfall in Berlin Read online

“Don't. George needed a little shaking up. Besides, you were simply taking care of yourself. Don't worry. Now calm down.” She took a deep breath. “Relax. Just relax.”

  I rolled my eyes up, counted to three. And listened to her count and begin the you're-getting-lighter routine. My body continued to pulse and seethe, however, and all the time, I wanted Alecia closer. Fuck professional distance. I wanted her to take my hand and squeeze it and tell me everything would be okay, I wasn't a geek, and that perhaps she admired me. Even just a little bit.

  “Four. That's good, Will. You're doing great. Breathe in, breathe out. Five.”

  “No,” I muttered. “Go back to three again, would you? I'm kind of stuck at two. This is taking a while.”

  “That's okay. It'll come. Three…”

  Concentrating, I keyed into her chanted words, her rhythmic breathing, and finally I could sense the pounding of my heart soften and slow. At last I felt the hardness of my muscles ebb, the tension dissipate, evaporate. I thought it would never come, but minutes later I sensed that vacuum again. I took a deep breath, a door opened and I floated right through, sucked into that wonderful, tranquil world.

  “Oh, this is nice, this is what I needed,” I said, full of relief.

  Alecia asked, “Are you there already?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Surprise. “Good.”

  Oh. What tranquility. But how fleeting that could be. A good trance was also the perfect truth serum. No, not serum. Rather, it always gave me the strength and the confidence to go directly to the fundamental issue and say exactly what I'd wanted to all along. Yes, hypnosis made me honest to my soul.

  “We need to talk,” I said, unable to restrain myself.

  “I'm right here. I'm listening” came the voice from outside.

  “I'm being consumed by guilt.”

  “Yes, Will, and that is a heavy burden for you. You have to remember, though, that when your mother was killed you were only a little boy—a little boy caught in the middle of a world war.”

  Well, not really. I'd been vastly older than my years. War does that to children.

  “Yeah, but I was supposed to watch out for my mother and younger brother. I was the ‘little soldier’ of the house.”

  “Will, you grew up during a very difficult period and experienced something quite terrible. You felt so responsible for so many things, but no one is as powerful as you thought you were. You need to look at the limits of—”

  “Alecia, I just can't live with myself not knowing—or rather, not remembering—who killed my mother. And that's not the only reason—for my own safety I have to find out who killed her. Now more than ever I have to look that dark face in the eyes and see who did it.”

  Yes, this constituted the little hamsters that had been gnawing at my mind all these years. Unless I discovered what really happened back there in late February 1945, I would never find peace. The war would continue festering within me until it or this mystery man killed me.

  “I can't go on not knowing.” I took a deep breath. “I have to find out who killed my mother and then tell someone so justice can be done. That's the only way I can lay her to rest, finally and forever, thirty years later. Then I'll deal with whoever is after me.”

  “I'm proud of you, Will” said Alecia. “I admire your courage.”

  “Charmed, I'm sure,” I quipped. “So I have to go back again. I accept that.” My ultimate nightmare—the black face of my mother's murderer—began to bubble up in my mind. Shit. All that was evil was represented in those smoldering eyes, in that hot breath. “I'm… I'm just afraid. I mean, it was a miracle I wasn't murdered along with my mother.”

  “Will, you have to remember two things. First, you survived that night and the war and nothing will ever change that. Do you understand?”

  Yes, teacher. “I guess so.”

  “I mean that. It's something you're going to have to learn to accept: you can't change what happened.”

  But I didn't want to believe that.

  “Second, you will be returning to that time in a very special state of hypnosis. You will become little Willi again, but you will have new and valuable insights. You will be a child with the perceptions of an adult, and that will shed a great deal of understanding on everything.” She added, “And, Will, I'll be with you the entire time. Don't worry, I'll bring you out of the trance if there's any danger.”

  I took a deep breath, readied myself for launching. “Okay, I'm ready.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. There's only one thing, oh Wise One.” I took a deep breath as I lay in my suspended animation. “I don't want to do any of this in and out shit. It's too hard. I just want to return to Berlin and not come back until… until…”

  “That's fine, Will. I have no more appointments. Nothing the rest of this evening. No one will disturb us. And I'm quite sure George won't be back.”

  “You had this all planned out, didn't you?”

  “Well, several variations, anyway.” Her voice more soothing than ever, she said, “Don't worry. Everything's going to be fine. We'll get through this. I'll be your guide and you can go back and discover all that you need to.”

  “Sure,” I responded from a stupor of a trance. She didn't, however, know the all of it. That was my fear. “But…”

  “Don't worry, you'll wake up if there's any real danger.” She went silent for what seemed like a year. “Now, Will, you're already in a good trance. You know how to proceed to the next step.” Air hissed delicately over her lips. “That's it. Breathe in. Breathe out. Relax. Deep, deep relaxation that carries you dee—”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “I mean higher and higher with a wonderful sense of lightness.”

  I pictured myself in a fluffy white cloud above the earth. Higher. Higher. I had to seek the ultimate vantage point to experience it all, see it all. Smiling, I sensed myself growing younger, saw myself ascending. Cool gusts of wind rushed around my prone body. I looked at myself. A boy's body, lean and leggy. I touched my knees. So knobby!

  “God, I'm so little! I mean, I'm kind of tall for a ten-year-old, but I'm just so much smaller as Willi.”

  Willi, the scrounger of Berlin, his mother's conniving messenger. Willi, invincible, determined. And goofy. I laughed, and felt myself rising like some magical plane through the stunning white clouds and into the next universe. I did a loop like a fighter, breezed up and around, let the wind rush over my face. I couldn't stop giggling. This was fun.

  Enough. I had to go back. Back. There was work to do. A terrible place to visit. A painful truth to learn. And the light began to fade, to grow dark…

  “Well,” I began, my man-boy voice thinner and higher, “all this took place at the beginning of the end of the war. It was the… the last week of February 1945, just a few days before the full moon, the night she was killed. The moon was so huge that night… but I'm getting ahead of myself. I should tell you about the Russians—they'd smashed through Poland, killing everything in their paths, and had already taken large chunks of Germany. And the Americans were already on German soil to the west. It was just a question of who would reach Berlin first.” My body shook, was rocked by a distant rumbling. “Yes, everyone knew the end was only weeks away. Do you hear the bombs and the ack-ack of the flak guns?”

  “Just follow that feeling, Willi. Follow it like a string and it will lead you to the truth you are seeking.”

  I sensed the next level. The next vacuum. Ripping, tearing, sucking me back… back… back.

  “Oh, God!” I cried.

  My beautiful trip was suddenly shattered by an explosion. As if I'd been shot down, I was falling from the sky, tumbling through the heavens and into a nightmare of a city and a time. I came crashing to the earth and into a dark cellar. I screamed out again because a bomb had just fallen on a building across the street, blowing the block to pieces.

  And then there was an enormous explosion, this one directly overhead, and I hollered, “Ah!”
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br />   Chapter 8

  I heard nothing, however, not even the crude noise that ruptured from my own lungs, not even the cries of terror from the other kids and their parents huddled around me. I looked up the cellar stairs, saw the door come hurling inward, blasted from its hinges as if effortlessly kicked in by some terrible giant. The next instant the wooden ceiling dissolved into splinters and exploded with dust. I looked over, saw Frau Schulenberg and a stranger in a long wool coat lunge for shelter beneath the staircase, saw my friend Klaus dive with his father to the floor. Mein Gott, we were all going to die!

  “Go on, Willi, it's okay. I'm right here. Just let your mind tell the story that will reveal the truth.”

  A beam came crashing down toward me. All at once I realized that my mother would never know if I died here. I'd been out scrounging a ruined store, filling my pockets with treasure, then stopped at this building because Klaus was ten, too, and Konrad was just a little younger and… and I had to live! I dove to the side, threw myself beneath the stairs, covered my head, and the first, second, third and fourth floors came dumping down on us. Nearby yet another bomb exploded and we were assaulted by the blast's enormous pressure, then robbed of air by its absolute vacuum. Roar. Dust. Mortar. More bombs. Pressure-Suction. The air was so hot I couldn't breathe. Fire! My hand pushed through a collage of rubble, rocks and boards that scraped at my body, tried to pull me into a grave.

  “No!” I cried, never wanting my mother so much.

  “That's right, Willi, there's something in Berlin you must learn. And you won't stop until you discover it.”

  I fought back. I would not be slowly roasted in the ruins of the apartment house where the Schulenberg kids resided. I must escape! But those screams! Those tight, high-pitched, animallike screams. What were Klaus and Konrad and their two spoiled little sisters doing back here? After the Hamburg firebombing that had killed tens of thousands, all my friends—all the Mütter und Kinder—were evacuated; the Schulenbergs had fled to the east, to their Uncle Otto's. Oh, but the Russians. The Russians were coming, and Klaus told me how they'd been evacuated a second time, returned here like rejected freight. Arrived just this afternoon because his mother wanted nothing more than to be back in Berlin, wanted nothing more than to be back home…

  Something squirmed next to me, someone yelled, “Give me your hand!”

  I grabbed the big stiff appendages of a man's hand, squeezed, felt a desperate, terrified flex in response. Then somehow I was being tugged toward the staircase. Yes, there were stairs all buried in brick. I hung on to the hand that belonged to whom I didn't know, was pulled upward. Yes, up, scraping against bricks and nails and boards and death. We had to get up and out. Away from this crushing mass of destruction, this suffocating heat.

  This huge manly figure and I gathered frantic speed as if we were under water and we'd run out of air and our lungs were empty bags. We pushed and shoved, pulled and dug through pulverized mortar. The heat became more intense. We were nearing the street. The man heaved aside a board. Yes, escape! From the dark clouds of dust and into the fires around us. The stranger clambered over the bricks, tumbled. I popped out right after him, fell. He caught me. We collapsed on the ruins and I clutched this unknown person, wallowed in his big safe arms. We were alive. Our building wasn't ablaze. Just the rest of the street, just every other street, just the entire district of Schöneberg. And the bombs were still falling, still raining down on us, exploding with deafening pitch. Eight bombs to a cradle. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb. A pause. A momentary pause until the next batch was dumped, laying the Bombenteppich, the carpet of death, over us. PressureSuction. PressureSuction. In the distance I heard the flak guns chattering away. ACK-ACK! ACK-ACK! ACK-ACK!

  I pushed away from the stranger, glanced at his wide face now smudged with dirt, his fair hair now black with grime. I tensed, wondered why he seemed familiar. He clutched me by the arm. Looking into his eyes, I could tell he wanted to say something. But I was all right, everything still attached, and I turned and gazed across the street. Wild tongues of flame licked out of windows, crackled in the night. Stunned Berliners, driven like rats from their destroyed homes, wandered aimlessly, mumbling, pleading, collapsing in death. I'd been so close so many times to death. It was all around me, right at my feet, every day. But never had I come so near to being really swallowed.

  Behind me I heard a voice curdle with terror. Klaus’ mother—the one who used to make that wonderful torte with Belgian chocolate—was all blackened and bloodied and crawling on her hands and knees like some monster.

  “Otto? Otto?” she screamed. “My babies! My husband!”

  The wind stormed right out of me. Not Klaus. Not Konrad. And those two bratty sisters? I cringed. They were all trapped in the cellar! I glanced up, saw an undamaged piano perched on a narrow ledge; that was their apartment and not long ago I'd played some horrid little song on that thing. The bombs faded in the distance, and I was flushed with a horrified realization. Yes, somehow I had known this tragedy would happen.

  But perhaps there was still time. Both the strange man and I scrambled over and started pulling a huge chunk of beige stone all carved with flowers. Desperately digging, we then gingerly removed boards for fear that more rubble would collapse into the cellar. Heaving aside brick after brick, Frau Schulenberg was crazed. Her maternal radar pulled her down, and she dug like a dog, desperately pawing until she finally reached a voice, a hand. In seconds, a little dust-gray girl emerged, eyes glazed, arm and head oozing blackish fluid. Frau Schulenberg put her aside. One safe, three to go. Then came a voice. A deep pitiful voice. Crying. In minutes the heavy figure of Herr Schulenberg emerged, a round man, moustached, speechless, a dirty potato just dug from the earth. He reached out with one hand. We pulled—Frau Schulenberg, the stranger, and I. Attached to his other hand was a little girl, the real whiney one, her red hair gone black. They clambered out, collapsed on the ruins as if they were the softest of featherbeds. But his wife didn't stop.

  “Klaus? Klaus? Konrad? Konrad?” She screamed, “Klaus, Konrad, answer me!”

  But there was no answer. And I knew. I knew what Frau Schulenberg feared, what she would mourn for years to come: not only the deaths of her two boys, but the loss of their bodies.

  Horrified, I rose. If only I'd thought earlier, faster. I might have… if only.

  “Willi, remember that even though you've returned with perceptions far beyond this time and place, you can't change what happened.”

  Frau Schulenberg shot me with a scream: “Dig, you little bastard! My children are down there! Dig!”

  I had known but at the same time hadn't realized it. And now it was too late. I stared at her, at the stranger who was digging so hard, and shook my head and started off. I touched my bulging pockets. At least my secret prize hadn't been lost. I needed to go back to our little bunker bar buried beneath all this horror. There I could pretend as if Klaus and Konrad had never come back to Berlin. There I could listen to Dieter on the piano, drink in my mother's song. Everything would be all right.

  I hadn't gone more than a few meters when I stopped and touched my forehead. Blood. Thick and gritty, brackish like old motor oil. The blast had stunned me and I was slightly confused. But I was essentially unhurt.

  A thick acrid cloud of smoke swirled up and around, filling my lungs with coarse soot and charred pieces of Berlin. I gagged, caught my throat, rushed on. Away. I had to move on, had to find my way home. But where was I? The raid had rearranged the neighborhood, removed buildings and store fronts, lampposts and cars.

  I heard a shriek of a scream behind me and turned. A burning man emerged from a Hinterhof—a courtyard of small buildings built inside a city block—and dashed by me. His clothing and body were on fire and the tar of an incendiary bomb was stuck all over him. First the explosive bombs fell, cracking open the homes and exposing dry wood and forcing people from their cellars. Then the incendiaries. Little stick ones. Bigger ones. Filled with blobs of gum
my coal tar. Gasoline-soaked rags. Whatever the Brits had used this time. And this poor bastard had been splattered, and now he ran and ran and ran, the sticky flames clinging to him like sugary syrup. A fleeing torch. He streaked for his life down the street, stripping his clothes off with each step.

  I found part of his blue shirt on the ground, picked it up, smelled it. No gas. No black spots. I waded it up and dashed to a burst water main, soaked the rag in the wonderful water. I drenched it like I'd learned and clamped the cool fresh dripping piece of cloth over my mouth. I looked upward. The planes—undoubtedly British because it was night—were blowing away like gray, metal clouds, leaving behind a bloodied sky. Torched Berlin had flown up and was still raining down on me. Ash. Glowing ash, falling everywhere like a hellish blizzard. How beautiful. Berlin was a total bonfire. Red it burned. Yellow it oozed. Orange it pulsed. What were Hitler's words? Oh, yes. GEBT MIR FUNF JAHRE UND IHR WERDET DEUTSCHLAND NICHT WIEDERERKENNEN! Give me five years and you will not recognize Germany again…

  As I passed a windowless building, a phone began to ring. I saw a woman with a candle clamber through a room; no electricity, no gas, no water. But somehow still phones. The woman picked up the receiver, and cried with joy: “Liebling!” So a child or father had survived. This time.

  Bruised and dazed, I came to a crossroad. Ahead of me, the charcoal remains of a bus lay turned over, dented like one of my little brother's toys. Like all the other wandering lost souls, I clambered on, making my way over smoldering piles of bakeries, food shops, bodies. On the very highest pile I stopped, the wet rag to my mouth. Off to my right, the sky above the central district glowed a greenish red. More phosphorous bombs. It looked as if the entire area round Unter den Linden had been doused with them. One of the monstrous firestorms was brewing over there, that one looking particularly fearsome. It would grow in intensity, of course, as it gobbled up every single molecule of oxygen, then charge on with gale winds in search of more. Suck. Suck. It would suck the oxygen from the lungs of the people hiding in the shelters. Tomorrow, I guessed, cellars full of suffocated people would be found, tipped over as if they'd merely gone to sleep. Forever.