It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim light of the wood. She knew the clearing where Herr Muller worked and wound her way there at a half run, barely registering the brambles scraping her legs, tearing at her skirt.
Not until she was almost to the clearing did Benita realize the sound of the ax had stopped. She could hear voices. She paused and strained to listen over her own ragged breath. It was Herr Muller and another man. A Russian. And the exchange did not sound friendly.
She was too late! The thought struck her physically. It was impossible. She could not be. She would not allow it. She plowed forward into the clearing. At the center stood two men: Herr Muller and a Russian soldier with blunt, stubby features, wearing a bedraggled Red Army uniform. He spoke in a harsh, guttural voice.
“Herr Muller!” Benita called, and both men whirled to look at her.
“I came to tell you”—she panted—“to go back.”
Confusion spread over Herr Muller’s face.
The Russian grinned. “Shlyukha,” he swore. Whore.
This word Benita knew.
More Russian followed—words she did not understand, but she grasped their meaning from his leer. For a moment, the Russian seemed to forget about his fight with Herr Muller and moved toward her.
Staring at his ugly, smirking face, the acne pits half covered by a growth of stringy beard, Benita felt something inside her explode and this man, advancing on her now, became not just the prisoner who had reached Herr Muller before she could, but every other man who had ever called her a whore. Every man who had ever pummeled and beaten and clawed his way into her with stinking breath and rancid sweat and rage about things for which her body had no responsibility. Of course he had reached Herr Muller first! How could she have imagined herself powerful enough to intervene? She was nothing but a lump of flesh to be tossed between fighting dogs. She was half-dead already, torn up, chewed on, spat out. This was how he saw her. She could see it in his eyes.
But it was not true! She was a mother with a son, a woman who had escaped once already. She was the wife of a resister, a friend of Marianne von Lingenfels. She was no longer little Benita Gruber—a pretty, expendable peasant girl with no money, no father, and no power. She drew herself up and spat as hard as she could at the man’s feet.
The look on his face turned from amusement to irritation. He did not understand. He saw only her old self. With a torrent of fury sweeping through her veins, she reached into her pocket for the knife.
Chapter Twelve
Berlin, Late April 1945
Benita’s first time was not the worst. The soldier had been clean, relatively speaking, and had given her food—a roll, with jelly even—and beer. He had taken the satchel of belongings she carried and steered her into the courtyard of a bombed-out building in Neuk?lln. She had not even made it home from the prison hospital. He chuckled and grinned and rubbed her feet like a devoted husband. Never mind that the outcome of his advance was fixed. It didn’t matter if she acquiesced. He tried to win her over anyway, which, under the circumstances, seemed tantamount to romance. When he finally pressed her against the courtyard wall, he was disgusting but not cruel, only avid and self-absorbed.
During the second, third, and fourth times Benita came to really know revulsion. And pain—such bloody, cramping, screaming pain as she had not imagined possible outside of childbirth.
This was still the beginning of The End, when there was fighting in the streets—blasts of machine-gun fire, skirmishes between the last terrified Wehrmacht holdouts and the Allies who had them surrounded. They fought for control of the city, block by block. But the Russians on Meerstein Strasse knew they had won. They tramped up and down the building’s staircase bedecked with stolen watches, drinking looted whiskey, searching for girls. The grandmothers on the sixth and third floors of her building hid their granddaughters in the bomb cellar and treated Benita and the other women who went outside during daylight as lepers. But Benita couldn’t remain in hiding. How would she find Martin if she was hiding in the cellar? And she didn’t have a mother or grandmother to slip her drinks of water and scraps of bread. Frau Gruber, bless her poor, stolid heart, had been dead for five years.
You too? Four times? Six times? The Mongolians are the worst. No, the Cossacks. They broke her leg. She cannot pee. She lost her mind. Everyone talked of it. Talk, talk, talk . . . and the questions. Not from the victims, but from the old women and the men. The men, the few who remained, were the worst. They feigned sympathy and anger but really only wanted to listen, to imagine. It made her sick.
And still there was no Martin, and no one to ask for help. Every passing day Benita felt her will to live fading. The Nazis who had taken her son had now vanished into the night. The Russians knew nothing of the stolen children and had no interest. What was another lost child in this war that had already killed so many?
There was a soldier who “loved” Benita: a tall, skinny boy from Georgia with a wide grin. He brought her chocolate and sardines and canned peaches—delicacies his unit had raided from some local Nazi lair. He wanted her to be his wife. This she deduced from his mix of broken German and pantomime. He was a naive boy when it came to anything but killing people. He had grown up with nine siblings in an apple orchard.
It was with his help that Benita gained access to the “captain” of the district, the only man who seemed to have any contact with the world beyond this measly corner of Berlin.
The captain was a large, stern man from St. Petersburg—a real Red Army official, not a ragtag conscript from some country that had become a province of the Soviet Union. As a teenager, he had taken part in the October Revolution. His men were awed by this fact. He was a real Bolshevik. And the Bolsheviks, Benita understood, wanted to annihilate the Germans.
The captain had set up shop in what had once been Mulman’s Bakery, on the ground floor of an intact building around the corner from 27 Meerstein Strasse. When Benita was presented, he rose from behind the flour-clouded counter like a general rising from behind a great desk. He had a shrewd, intelligent face. Standing before him, she felt naked and unnerved.
Ah, he said, bowing his head when she finished explaining her search for Martin. I will make inquiries. Then he looked at Benita and her Georgian escort. It was clear that he was not a man who did favors for nothing. So this was how she became “his,” which was, in its way, a mercy.
He was a hard man, but not a cruel one. And his affection, if it could be called that, protected Benita from the others. The Georgian was forced to retreat, tail between his legs, back to his dreams of the apple orchard.