In Berlin, life as a U-boat is an erratic journey. Unpredictable day to day, moment to moment. They are on the move again, Rashka and her eema. The Aryan whose root cellar they were hiding in has demanded more money. Either more money or permission to rape Rashka. He was a smelly old party comrade who ran a butcher shop above them. Rashka heard him make his proposition to her mother. He wasn’t shy about it. “Either another three hundred,” he said and tossed his head in Rashka’s direction, “or a taste of the girl. But only if she’s a virgin. It’s bad enough I must dirty myself with a Jewess, so she must at least be chaste. I won’t be soiled by a slut.”
The look on her eema’s face as the man spoke? It was like she was Lot’s wife the instant before she calcified into a tower of salt.
“I’ll get you the money,” Eema said flatly, her voice losing all its tone. But Rashka knew she wouldn’t.
Perhaps even the party comrade knew this, because he frowned morosely at Rashka standing in the corner of the cellar, arms clasped in front of her waist. “One or the other,” he said, “when I come back tonight.”
And so they had vacated the butcher’s cellar immediately and were walking through their shoes again on Berlin’s pavement. The winter had been cold but at least bereft of heavy snows, as if all of Germany’s allotted snowfall had been sucked east to freeze the armies entrenched outside all those Russian cities they had not managed to conquer. It had given Rashka some little satisfaction that if
But only a little satisfaction.
Days and nights. Weeks turn to months. A fledgling Berliner spring is peeking through the gloom. By midday, the sun is yellow and bright and warming the streets. Winter recedes, revealing a shabby wartime town stripped of joy by shortages and surreptitiously disheartened by a growing yet unspoken fear. The unspoken fear of defeat that is underscored by the bombing raids launched by the so-called British Air Pirates. Though oddly, Rashka feels safest when the bombers invade the skies, sending the population scrambling underground. The U-Bahn stations become air raid shelters, and nobody much questions who’s an Aryan and who might be a Jew when the world above them is being hammered by tons of high explosives.
But raids on Berlin continue to be spotty at this point, like occasional heart attacks. Gestapo men checking papers indiscriminately are more of a threat than bombs to U-boats. Berlin, after all, has been declared “Jew-free” by no lesser a personage than the Little Doctor himself, Reichsminister Goebbels. How embarrassing would it be for him to find that it’s not quite the truth. This is her feter Fritz’s little joke, spoken in a low whisper as they share a table in a café up the Friedrichstrasse. Eema, as usual, is mortified by his little jokes and glares as if she has just stepped on a nail but must keep quiet about it. Feter Fritz gives his niece a conspiratorial wink, sharing his little joke with her, even at Eema’s expense. Those small moments of power over Eema? Rashka appreciates them, though without her uncle there, she is without a scrap of power. She is a piece of luggage that must be lugged.
And so it goes. From hour to hour, day to day, week to week. Rashka loses her sense of days. Monday? Tuesday? Thursday? Who knows? But her sense of hours, even of minutes passing, sharpens. Each hour spent in an attic, cellar, toolshed, or U-Bahn station is distinct. Each minute divergent from the rest, spent in silence inside a closet or an empty flat. Calculable and stowable. Sitting so very still so as not to prompt a floorboard to creak and alert the neighbors belowstairs. She has found a discreet silence in herself, a silence that is so powerful, she has
Her mother finds them shoes. They don’t fit. They’re too small and pinch Rashka’s toes, but they’re better than the shoes they have, which have separated at the soles and flop like lazy crocodile jaws. Also there’s a woolen dress that’s too big, but at least it’s not going to tatters. Food is usually a few moldy potatoes often eaten raw with a package of Knackebrot, or—on the rarest of occasion—a wax-sealed pot of processed “meat.” Sunlight is often something that is only remembered or hinted at through cracks in leather-faced blackout curtains or painted-over windowpanes. This ghost existence between the dimensions of oblivion and daily life carries them through summer and into the autumn when, in the course of two nights, the British RAF rains down the fiery lightning of Zeus upon Fortress Berlin. It’s bombing on a new and devastating order that will soon become routine.