“So I couldn’t be faithful to him,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard. “But I don’t want to hurt him. Isn’t it enough to leave him? Now we have to be policemen too? Waiting here, like spiders, to trap him.”
“Nobody’s trying to trap him. According to Bernie, they want to offer him a job.”
“Picking his brain. And then what? Oh, let’s go now. Leave Berlin.”
“Lena, I can’t get you out of Germany. You know that. You’d have to be-”
“Your wife,” she finished, a resigned nod. “And I’m not.”
“Not yet,” he said, touching her. “It’ll be different this time.” He smiled at her. “We’ll get new dishes. Stores in New York are full of them.”
“No, you only want that once. Now it’s something else.”
“What?”
She turned her head, not answering, then leaned against him. “Let’s just love each other. It’s enough now,” she said. “Just that.” She started walking again, pulling his hand lightly with hers. “Look where we are.”
They had turned without noticing into the end of Pariserstrasse, the heaps of rubble like pockets of shadow along the moonlit street. The washbasin was still perched on the mound of bricks where Lena’s building had been, its porcelain dull in the faint light, but Frau Dzuris’ notice had fallen over, the ink now streaked by rain.
“We should put up a new one,” he said. “In case.”
“Why? He knows I’m not here. He knew it was bombed.”
Jake looked at her. “But the American who went to Frau Dzuris didn’t know that. He came here first.”
“So?”
“So he hasn’t talked to Emil. Where did you go after?”
“A friend from the hospital. Her flat. Sometimes we just stayed at work. The cellars were safe there.”
“What happened to her?”
“She died. In the fire.”
“There must be someone. Think. Where would he go?”
She shook her head. “His father. He would go there. Like always.”
Jake sighed. “Then he’s not in Berlin.” He went over and righted the notice stick, wedging it in the bricks. “Well, we should do it for her, so her friends can find her.”
“Friends,” Lena said, almost snorting. “All the other Nazis.”
“Frau Dzuris?”
“Of course. During the war she always had the pin, you know, the swastika. Right here.” She touched her chest. “She loved the speeches. Better than the theater, she used to say. She’d turn the radio up loud so everyone in the building would hear too. If they complained, she’d say, ‘Don’t you want to hear the Fiihrer? I’ll report you.’ Always the busybody.” She looked away from the rubble. “Well, that’s finished too. At least no more speeches. You didn’t know?”
“No,” he said, disconcerted. A lover of poppyseed cakes.
A truck roared into the street, catching Lena in its headlights.
“Look out.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the bricks.
“Frau! Frau!” Guttural shouts, followed by laughs. In the open back of the truck, a group of Russian soldiers, holding bottles. “ Komme!” one of them shouted as the truck slowed.
Jake could feel her freeze beside him, her entire body rigid. He stepped into the street so that his uniform was visible in the light.
“Get lost,” he said, jerking his fingers at the truck.
“ Amerikanski,” one of them shouted back, but the uniform had its effect. The men who had started to get off the back stopped, one of them now raising a bottle to toast Lena, someone else’s property. A joke in Russian went around the truck. The men saluted Jake and laughed.
“Beat it,” he said, hoping his tone of voice would be the translation.
“ Amerikanski,” the soldier said again, taking a drink, then suddenly pointed behind Jake and shouted something in Russian. Jake turned. In the moonlight, a rat had stopped on the porcelain basin, nose up. Before he could move, the Russian took out a gun and fired, the noise exploding around them, making Jake’s stomach contract. He ducked. The rat scampered away, but now other guns were firing too, a spontaneous target practice, hitting the porcelain with a series of pings until it cracked, a whole piece of it lifting up and flying away like the rat. Behind him, he could feel Lena clutching his shirt. A few steps and they would be in the line of fire, as unpredictable as a drunken aim. And then, abruptly, it stopped and the men started laughing again. One of them banged the roof of the cab to get the truck moving and, looking at Jake, threw a vodka bottle to him as it drove off. Jake caught it with both hands, a football, and stood looking at it, then tossed it onto the bricks.
Lena was shaking all over now, as if the smash of the bottle had released everything her fear had kept still. “Pigs,” she said, holding on to him.
“They’re just drunk,” he said, but he was rattled. You could die here in a second, on a trigger-happy whim. What if he hadn’t been here? He imagined Lena running down the street, her own street, being chased into shadows. As his eyes followed the truck, he saw a basement light go on-someone waiting in the dark until the shooting passed. Only the rats could run fast enough.
“Let’s go back to the Ku’damm,” she said.
