Here in Berlin: A Novel - Hardcover

Lilacs were blooming in Cracauerplatz. The Visitor felt disoriented and alone, an outsider, lost without a map. Her atrophied German stuck in her throat. Thirty-one years had elapsed between her last stay in Germany (for an ill-fated job in Frankfurt) and her return to Berlin in late middle age. The city struck her as post-apocalyptic―flat and featureless except for its rivers, its lakes, its legions of bicyclists. She found herself nameless: nameless in crowds, nameless alone. Another disappearance in a city with a long history of disappearance acts. The Visitor's arrival in late April wasn't auspicious. Her luggage was lost for two days. The skies remained overcast. Their vast bleakness heightened her malaise. The apartment in Charlottenburg, on the west side of Berlin, was exactly what she'd wanted: a white cube with nondescript furnishings and a bedroom barely big enough to sleep in. A modest balcony overlooked the Kaiserdamm. The U-bahn was a block away, as was the Lietzensee, a picturesque city lake. After all her careful planning, everything was as she expected except for this: her staggering loneliness.

On her twelfth day in Berlin, a young father asked the Visitor for directions in German, to which she correctly replied. A turning point. Soon she'd be talking to people in parks, at museums, along the Spree River, in the city's many acres of outdoor cafés. Thus, her mission began.

Helmut Bauer
Moths

By the end of World War II, 91 of the 3,715 animals at the Berlin Zoo had survived. These included two lions, an Asian bull elephant, a cackle of hyenas, a hippopotamus bull, ten hamadryas baboons, and a rare black stork. My father, Klaus Bauer, had been the zoo's last keeper before he was called off to war. This was after a severe firebombing had boiled alive the remaining crocodiles and tortoises at the aquarium, and a puma escaped through the flames, only to be shot by a frightened housewife in Lützowplatz. Opportunists benefited from the destruction, partook of crocodile-tail steaks and fashioned sausages from the charred bear meat. But the rats are what most thrived in Berlin.

Thank you for accompanying me this afternoon, Kind Visitor. I do enjoy a walk through the Tiergarten, even on drizzly days. Once, I saw an old man club a duck to death with his cane at this very spot. It was just after the war, and, next to him, on a burnt-out tank, was a fly-poster advertising dance lessons. The times were extraordinary, rivaling anything I've ever read in books. The zoo is near here, in the southwestern corner of the park. I permit myself entrance every month or so―nobody bothers charging me―to visit the tropical aviaries and the lonely polar bears. Perhaps you've heard of the cub born in captivity here some years ago? Millions swarmed the zoo to get a glimpse of Baby Knut. Unfortunately, the poor creature collapsed and died after five short years.

Today, I promised to speak to you of my father, and so I shall. My earliest memories of him are at this zoo, where I helped him feed the animals on weekends. How he'd loved the antics of the cockatoos―as cunning as our politicians, he used to say―and the idiosyncrasies of Jupp, the elderly cheetah, who insisted on having his hindquarters scratched with a rake. It was from the cockatoos' aviary that Vati "borrowed" Miamor, a Cuban Amazon parrot, in order to save it from starvation. But in the commotion of an air raid, Miamor disappeared from our apartment, most likely for someone's dinner.

When the Reich drafted Vati for an army reserve battalion late in the war, he was arthritic and nearing fifty. You might say that my life―or the heart of it, anyway―stopped on the day he left. A peeling poster on our apartment building showed a woman and boy battling a fire with buckets of water. I pretended that they were Mutti and me, and dreamt about stealing a little wood gas car, too. In my fantasy, I drove us to safety, though I could barely ride a bicycle then. Most nights, we raced into the air-raid shelter, to the shrill sound of sirens. Mutti was profoundly deaf, the result of a childhood fever, and she was no longer pretty to anyone but me. As the bombs fell, she rubbed her sternum as if she were erasing a mistake. Sometimes I feared she'd erase herself altogether.

That winter, we watched the city camouflage itself with false treetops in raised netting and decoy buildings to deceive the British bombers. There were rumors of a fake capital being built to the north, but nobody had seen it. Rumors, Kind Visitor, were what we lived on. My friends and I played in the ruins, when we could, taking turns blowing on a beat-up trumpet we'd found. It was our greatest treasure. On the rare evening when there was no Verdunkle, my mother permitted me, against the rules, to light her incandescent lamp. Its hypnotizing hot wire drew an astonishing variety of moths to its flame.

One day my friend Kuno Schulz triumphantly brought home a hunk of horsemeat. Kriegsglück, everyone said, coveting a bloody piece. War luck. On another occasion, Kuno happened across a dead British pilot whose plane had crashed into a building off Nollendorfplatz. As a crowd cautiously gathered, Kuno stole away with the pilot's unopened parachute, a windfall of silk for his mother. Later, Frau Schulz bartered swaths of the silk with the other mothers as they busily converted their Nazi flags to Allied ones. Before long, these were hanging from what was left of their balconies.

In the last weeks of the war, Hitler Youth patrolled our neighborhood with rifles, and some of the older boys we knew rode rickety bicycles into battle with Panzerfausts attached to the handlebars. Of them, only Markus Achziger survived―but without his legs.

The day the Russians reached Berlin, my mother gave me a pair of my own unraveling socks embroidered with the number 9. I'd forgotten it was my birthday. For supper, Mutti and I ate nettles soup (though I dreamt every night of mashed potatoes sprinkled with crisp bacon) and prayed to God for mercy. In the final terrifying days of battle, my ordinarily meek mother joined a band of housewives who looted whatever they could. Never mind that such behavior was punishable by death. Kind Visitor, what once had been inconceivable became commonplace; grace and disgrace, one and the same.

I watched camels and shaggy Cossack ponies trudging down Unter den Linden. Russian infantrymen in tunics and fur caps rode gypsy wagons and phaetons and every manner of conveyance. People whispered that the Ivans were lighting campfires in the Reichstag―our Reichstag!―and violating women of all ages. Here, at last, were the savages we'd been taught to fear. That summer, the Americans arrived in their gleaming jeeps. How awestruck we were by the black GIs! We crowded around them for chocolates and chewing gum, which they handed out more freely than the other soldiers.

Miraculously, Vati returned home after the defeat. In our district, I was the only child with a living father. He and I toured what was left of the zoo: the burnt-out elephant house (where a bull had frantically trumpeted the coming doom); the scorched treetops where dozens of monkeys had perished. We spoke of the leopards and panthers, jaguars and apes that had escaped after a particularly bad raid, the snakes slithering through terrified crowds fleeing the fires and bombs. And yet, I felt lucky. Most of my surviving friends were raised by their widowed mothers. Those who'd lost both parents got by as best they could, digging through the rubble, fighting over scraps like wild dogs. Who knew what became of them? Even the savvy Kuno, with his Kriegsglück, disappeared without a trace. Knowing him, he probably ended up in your San Francisco driving a fancy Cadillac.

My father? Kind Visitor, you must understand that, once, Vati had been a man whose happiness had seemed to me as predictable as the sun. Upon his return, he fell into a catatonic state that was impervious even to Mutti's devoted ministrations. And the blisters on his feet, the ones he got from his long march home, never healed. Whatever hope we had soured to futility.

At his funeral in 1951, two members of his battalion showed up from Hamburg to pay their respects. Mutti insisted that I show them around the dilapidated zoo. To my surprise, one of the old lions was still alive and weakly roaring. The veterans drank and drank, shedding no light regarding their duties on the Eastern front. Instead they shook their heads dully and took turns clapping me on the back, repeating the same stock phrase: Your father was an honorable man, the most honorable among us.

Sometimes, Kind Visitor, I long to send letters to the past . . . but who would write back?