Chapter 2
I woke before the light and lay still, listening for the creak that meant the ceiling was ready to fall.
Thankfully, it didn't come; there were only the small, thin breaths of my brother and the restless scrape of wind against cardboard.
I eased off the old mattress and tucked the blanket around Klaus's shoulders.
He slept with one hand under his cheek the way he had as a baby, lashes black against hollowed skin.
Six years old and already he knew the rule: if he woke and I wasn't there, he stayed put.
No wandering. No talking. No opening the door for anyone.
The apartment had been grand once. I remembered it scrubbed and shining because my mother used to clean here, and sometimes, she'd taken me along.
Inga, hold the bucket; Inga, wring the cloth; Inga, look how marble becomes a mirror when you polish it.
Now half the walls were gone, and what was left leaned at odd angles, like a drunk who'd fallen asleep standing up.
The marble was gray and would make my mother roll over in her grave if she had one.
I'd patched the gaps with planks, flattened crates, and sheets of cardboard scavenged from the bar.
The wind still found a way in. Dust had worked itself into everything: our skin, our hair, the mattress springs.
But at least here, no one looked for us. The ruin was too ruined to bother with. It might collapse at any hour, and people preferred buildings that pretended they wouldn't.
I pulled on my Kittelschürze—a sort of apron with pockets made to be worn over dresses to keep them from getting too dirty.
It was June; normally, there would be a hint of spring in the air, but there was only ash.
The air coming off the canals was a bit chilly, and shards of open rooms could be damp and sharp at dawn, a chill that would settle in your bones if you let it.
I pushed my feet into shoes that had belonged to someone richer and dead, kissed Klaus's hair, and slipped out.
Outside, the courtyard was filled with rubble.
Brick heaps crouched like sleeping animals.
The streets were already thick with people heading in the same direction I was, moving quietly, shoulders forward, the way you do when you've spent years flinching at sirens.
No bombs fell now, but the city still walked like it expected them.
You had to line up early if you wanted your ration, earlier still since the Russians closed the roads and rails.
They said the Americans and British were flying in food, sacks and sacks of it, and coal would come too.
I believed it because I'd seen the planes grumble across the sky and slide down into Tempelhof like silver fish returning to a dark pond.
I believed it because I had to. Belief and bread were both thin, but one made the other easier to swallow.
The queue outside the grocer's looped around the corner, thin bodies wrapped in thin coats.
A little cough here, a sniffle there, just enough to prove we were alive.
I found my place behind Old Manne, who nodded without turning.
He'd come back six years ago with one arm and a face that looked carved from a softer kind of stone.
He kept the stump of his sleeve pinned neatly, the way my mother had kept ribbons straight.
"Morning, M?dchen—girl," he said. "You look tired."
"I worked late," I replied. "Some English pilots came in and stayed late."
"Good tippers," he nodded with a sideways smile. "Bad singers."
"Very bad," I agreed. Some were worse at other things, but Manne and I knew not to say this out loud. These men were our liberators. But he was right, they did tip well.
Money didn't buy much now, but tips still meant cigarettes to trade or a bit of meat if you knew the right person or the right back door.
Mother Olga stood three people ahead, a sturdy woman with a baby tied to her chest and four more children orbiting like hungry moons. Her husband, like my father, was missing in Russia. Missing meant you kept a plate on the shelf and a story at the ready. It meant the ache never scabbed over.
The line shifted, a quiet, stubborn inch.
Further up, I saw Elke on tiptoe, craning to see how much stock the shopkeeper had.
She spotted me and sent a quick wink. Of everyone I knew, Elke had the fewest ties left.
Her grandmother and mother had both been killed when the Russians came through, and her father and several uncles were either dead or gone.
She was pretty in a way the city still recognized: clean collar, sharp cheekbones, a laugh like a dare.
Berliner M?dchen are the prettiest, my mom used to say.
Elke worked with me at Die Ecke—The Corner—bar, and she had a plan for her life that involved leaving Berlin on the arm of anyone with a uniform—French, English, American—she didn't care as long as they took her away.
I didn't judge her for it. She wanted a ticket out.
I wanted a roof that didn't fall and a stomach that didn't ache. We all wanted something.
"Did you sleep?" Elke asked when I edged close enough.
"Some, I finished at midnight."
"Midnight," she huffed. "I was finished at ten, and then I wasn't." She rolled her eyes. "Americans. One of them promised me Chicago. Have you heard of Chicago?"
"It sounds far."
"That's the point," she said, grinning. Then her mouth softened. "How's Klaus?"
"Sleeping. He knows to stay put." Saying it out loud didn't make the fear smaller.
The building could crack itself open while I was gone.
A stranger could step through the cardboard and find a boy too obedient for his own good.
I kept talking anyway. "He was three when the war ended. He learned quick."
Elke murmured. "As if the war ever ended, as if it ever will."
Old Manne nodded his agreement and sighed loudly. We were quiet after that. The city made you superstitious. If you said you were safe, the ceiling fell. If you said you were hungry, you learned quickly that hunger could get worse.
Rumors cracked like ice beneath our feet.
The Russians had closed everything—roads, rails, barges—because the Western sectors had changed the money, because the Soviets wanted Berlin to kneel, because men who never had to line up for bread liked to show how big their dicks were.
Some said the Americans would fly food in forever; some said they'd stop as soon as it got hard.
Some said the Russians would take the whole city any day now and that the Red Army would come house to house like before, taking what they wanted and killing what they couldn't carry.
My mother died in the spring, three years ago.
For me, the rumor wasn't rumor. It was a memory that liked to wake with the dawn.
The line breathed forward again. The shopkeeper stood behind a counter that had once held pyramids of oranges.
Now there was a chalkboard with numbers on it, and a pair of scales he polished as if they were a church relic.
Rations were written in little squares in a booklet, boxes ready for stamps, grams and grams that added up to hunger: flour if you were lucky, a smear of fat, ersatz coffee that tasted like burnt rubber.
The new money from last week looked crisp and untrustworthy.
People still traded with cigarettes and favors and the careful nods that meant you owed someone a little piece of your future.
"Your Kittelschürze is thin," Old Manne observed.
"So am I," I retorted, and we both pretended to laugh.
I thought of Klaus under our scratchy blanket, the mattress springs that squeaked if you breathed too hard, the way I'd propped one leg of the bed up on a brick to make it level.
I thought of my mother's hands, slick with polish, rubbing at a marble sill until our faces appeared in it like ghosts.
I thought of the roar of planes overhead and the men in their cockpits who had flown to kill us and now flew to keep us alive.
Someone at the front of the line lifted her chin. "Listen," she said.
We all did. It was a sound we'd learned to tell apart in the war: friendly or enemy, bomber or fighter, low or high.
This one came like a steady hum, growing to a throatier growl, then slid lower as if the sky were exhaling.
A plane taking off at Tempelhof. Another after it.
Another after that. Every two minutes, people whispered.
Every two minutes, another belly of sacks of flour, salt, milk powder, dried eggs, sugar—the most essential necessities.
"When the pilots wiggle their wings, they'll drop sweets for the children," Mother Olga's oldest boy said, wide-eyed. "I saw it last night. He did it just for me."
"Not for you, Hans," she scolded gently. "For all of us."
I imagined Klaus's face when I'd tell him about the candy parachutes.
I imagined him believing it, which was sweeter than the chocolate itself.
He liked to stand on the broken balcony and wave at the planes, as if his small hand could tug them closer.
I hated leaving him, but it would be worse to drag him here and let him yawn for hours and watch my cheeks burn when we reached the front, and there was less than we'd hoped for.
"We'll manage," I whispered, to no one and everyone, to my mother and to the city, to the ghost of myself who used to carry buckets up clean stairwells and think the world was heavy but fair. "We always do."
Elke bumped my shoulder. "You hear about Die Ecke? The owner says Americans from the airfield will be coming more often. More tips."
"More hands," I said.
"Take the money. Keep your hands to yourself," she snickered, which was as close as anyone came to a prayer anymore.
I nodded. I wasn't going to marry a uniform.
I wasn't going to trade myself for nylons or chocolate or a ticket to anywhere.
Survival was not the same as surrender. I would stand in line and count grams, keep our patched walls from falling, and teach my brother how to stay quiet and small until it was safe to be loud.
In the distance, the familiar sound of jackhammers started up as another day of putting Berlin back together began.
The line moved. The scales dipped. When it was my turn, I set my ration card down, smoothing the wrinkled edge with my thumb, and watched as my booklet thinned by a few squares. When I stepped away, I held a sack that felt too light for the hope I wanted to put in it.
Outside, the engines rolled over us again, and I lifted my head. The plane slid like a silver knife across the gray. For a moment—just a moment—I let myself imagine the man inside looking down at our street, at our ruin, at me.
Then I tucked the sack under my arm and went home to wake my brother.