Essays from the Nick of Time Read Online Free

civilization, recently unearthed, or to a child’s sand castle, broken by the tide. On the bullet-chipped walls and columns of the Reichstag, now a blackened shell, Russian names, scrawled by the living, memorialized those who had died for victory. Somehow making her way to the Chancellery through that heaped, smoldering city—whether alone or accompanied I don’t remember—Beatrix Turner arrived to discover that Russian engineers had already burned the hinges off the heavy steel doors facing the smoking garden.
    She leaned forward. “You know, of course, that Adolf Hitler shot himself in his bunker beneath the Chancellery.”
    I began to say something, but she waved it away.
    “Oh, that’s all bosh about Paraguay and Argentina,” she said. “He shot himself. Eva Braun took arsenic.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    Beatrix Turner took a sip of tea. “I was one of the first ones down,” she said.
    I don’t remember if Beatrix Turner told me how she talked her way past the guards that day, nor can I be certain whether the image I have of her descending those endless, pitch-black stairs by candlelight or flashlight is based on the description she gave me or the ones I’ve read since then. In the entry I wrote in my journal later that night, there’s no mention of the cold, dank smell of extinguished fires, of the charred picture frames, like overdrawn metaphors, still hanging from the walls, of the black water, ankle deep, that covered the carpets.
    But one memory remains as clear as on the night I wrote it down. Sensing my skepticism, perhaps, Beatrix Turner put down her cup and saucer and went to a closet near the front door. “I have something to show you,” she said. “A little souvenir.” I stood up, thinking to help her, but she was already carrying an ordinary cardboard carton. Placing it on the table, she opened it, removed another, smaller carton, and from this a carefully folded wad of tissue. Unwrapping this bundle, she revealed a fragile piece of cloth with a strange, almost Egyptian-looking pattern, marred by an ugly dark stain.
    I looked at the thing, uncomprehending.
    “I cut this piece out of the sofa in the bunker,” Beatrix Turner said. She pointed. “That’s Adolf Hitler’s blood.”
    Before I could say anything, she was leafing through an old issue of
Life
she’d brought out of the closet with her, and suddenly there it was: a photograph of correspondents, one holding a candle, inspecting the richly patterned brocade sofa on which Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had committed suicide. In the photograph, one could see the pattern of the sofa clearly, a repeating motif of male figures dressed in traditional folk garb standing next to huge, orchidlike blooms, or fanciful palms, or exploding fireworks. Each figure held a sort of leash that dipped in a lazy
U
to the neck of a prancing stag.
    On the right armrest, a dark, vaguely phallic bloodstain had soaked the brocade, obliterating half a leash and half a stag. I looked at the piece of cloth I now held in my hand. The stag was nearly gone; only its hooves and hindquarters remained. The pattern matched.
    I left the apartment soon afterward. Waiting for the elevator, I noticed a door at the far end of the hall. I pushed it open. Four flights down a badly lit stairwell brought me to a locked door. Looking around, I saw another, smaller door. Forcing it open, I saw that it led out onto a fire escape. A fixed steel ladder dropped twenty feet to the alley below. I climbed out, soiling my jacket against the rusting frame. Even today I can remember the good strong sting of the rain against my face. At the bottom of the unlit, cluttered alley, rising like a canyon to the sky, I pushed open the heavy iron gate to 69th Street and started to run.
Coda
    Pleasure and pain are immediate; knowledge, retrospective. A steel ball, suspended on a string, smacks into its brothers and nothing happens: no shock of recognition, no sudden epiphany. We go about our