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 onit, 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 ticketto 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.
Berlin — June 30, 1948, Wednesday
Wednesday night,and for the first time all week, my name did not appear on the flight board. I'd racked up nearly fifty hours since Sunday—flying the corridors into Berlin, skimming low on approach to Tempelhof or Gatow, then turning straight back toward the western zones, Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Celle, or Fassberg. Filling up on flour, coal, sugar. Rations measured by the ton. The same shattered city beneath me every time, until Berlin still glowed red and white behind my eyelids when I tried to sleep.
The brass called it efficiency.
I called it penance.
The thing inside me—call it instinct, or dragon, or just some fucked-up part of my brain that needed to be in motion—didn't know what to do with a slack leash. My senses were still tuned to engine whine and ice in the slipstream, to the pulse of the Berlin skyline stitched bysearchlights and burning in the haze. I caught myself pacing the tarmac in front of my barracks, boots crunching over gravel, and tried to ignore the tug in my chest that wanted to climb straight up and disappear into the night. The dragon itched to be let out and take flight. I told myself I was just cold. I told myself a lot of things.
The other pilots were trickling back from the night flights, still high on adrenaline and cheap American cigarettes. Even from ten yards away, I could hear their laughter, bright and tinny. Someone had a wind-up phonograph out near the steps, and a German singer's voice,Lale Andersen, I thought, floated over the drizzle like a broken lullaby. The song, calledLily Marleen, was popular with the troops. It was a scene I'd seen a hundred times, but tonight it felt staged, like we were actors in a play where everyone said their lines a little too loud, a little too fast. The only thing real was the hunger, and I wasn't talking about food.
Most of these guys were kids, good kids, some of them, but still kids. They'd signed up at eighteen or nineteen, saw a year or two of Hell from the air, and now we were feeding Berlin instead of flattening it. The turnaround would have given anyone whiplash. One month, they're dropping bombs on anonymous cities in the lines of fire; the next, they're ferrying sacks of sugar to the same streets, and all the rules about the enemy are suddenly gone.
Me? I'd learned there were no rules. Not for people like me.
"Griffin!" I heard my last name, and when I turned, I saw Carter hustling toward me, already halfway through a Lucky Strike and grinning as if he'd just won the lottery.
