Departures

“You ask me, it’s big enough for damn near anything,” Gimpel said. The Great Hall, built sixty years earlier in the great flush of triumph after Britain and Russia had gone down before the guns and tanks of the Third Reich, boasted a dome that reached over two hundred twenty meters into the sky and was more than two hundred fifty meters across: sixteen St. Peter’s cathedrals might have fit within the enormous monument to the grandeur of the Aryan race. The wealth of a conquered continent had brought it into being.

The dome itself, sheathed in weathered copper, caught the fading light like a great green hill. Atop it, in place of a cross, stood a gilded Germanic eagle with a swastika in its claws. Atop the eagle, a red light blinked on and off to warn away low-flying planes.

Willi Dorsch’s shiver had only a little to do with the chilly weather. “It makes me feel tiny.”

“It’s a temple to the Reich and the Volk. It’s supposed to make you feel tiny,” Gimpel answered. “Set against the needs of the German race or the state, any one man is tiny.”

“We serve them, not they us,” Willi agreed. He pointed across the Adolf Hider Platz toward the F?hrer’s palace on the far side of the immense square. “When Speer ran that one up, he was worried the size of the building would dwarf even our Leader himself.” And indeed, the balcony above the tall entranceway looked like an architectural afterthought.

Gimpel’s short laugh came out as a puff of steam. “Not even Speer could look ahead to see what technology might do for him.”

“Better not let the security police hear you talk that way about one of the Reichsvaters.” Dorsch tried to laugh, too, but his chuckle rang hollow. The security police had to be taken seriously.

Still, Gimpel was right. When the F?hrer’s palace was erected, another huge Germanic eagle had surmounted the balcony from which the Germanic Empire’s leader might address his citizens. The eagle had been moved to its present position on the roof when Gimpel was a boy. In its place went an enormous televisor screen. Adolf Hitler Platz had been built to hold a million people. Now when the F?hrer spoke, every one of them could get a proper view.

A bus purred up to the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht building. Gimpel and Dorsch filed aboard with the rest of the officials who greased the operation of the mightiest military machine the world had known. One by one the commuters stuck their account cards into the fare slot. The bus’s computer debited each rider eighty-five pfe

The bus rolled down the broad avenue toward South Station. Berlin’s myriad bureaucrats made up the majority of the passengers but not all. A fair number were tourists, come from all over the world to view the most wonderful and terrible boulevard that world boasted. Blas? as any native, Gimpel normally paid but scant attention to the marvels of his home town. Today, though, the oohs and ahhs of those seeing them for the first time made him notice them also.

Sentries from the Grossdeutschland division in ceremonial uniform goose-stepped outside their barracks. Tourists on the sidewalk took photos of the Fuhrer’s guards. Inside the barracks hall, where tourists would not see them, were other troops in businesslike camouflage smocks, assault rifles in place of the ceremonial force’s obsolete Gewehr 98s, and enough armored fighting vehicles to blast Berlin to rubble. Visitors from afar were not encouraged to think about them. Neither were most Berliners. But Gimpel reckoned up Grossdeutschland’s budget every spring. He knew exactly what the barracks held.

Neon lights came on in front of theaters and restaurants as darkness deepened. Dark or light, people swarmed in and out of the huge Roman-style building that held a heated indoor pool the size of a young lake. It was open at all hours of the day and night for those who wished to exercise, to relax, or simply to ogle attractive members of the opposite sex. Its Berlin nickname was the Heiratbad, the marriage baths, sometimes amended by the cynical to the Heiratbett, the marriage bed.

Past the pool, the Soldiers’ Hall and the Air and Space Ministry faced each other across the street. The Soldiers’ Hall was a monument to the triumph of German arms. Among the exhibits it so lovingly preserved were the railroad car in which Germany had yielded to France in 1918 and France to Germany in 1940; the first Panzer IV to enter the Kremlin compound; one of the gliders that had landed paratroops in southern England; and, behind thick leaded glass, the twisted remains of the Liberty Bell, excavated by expendable prisoners from the ruins of Philadelphia.

Old people in Berlin still called the Air and Space Ministry the Reichsmarschall’s Office, in memory of Herma

“Could be anything,” Gimpel answered. They both laughed. The roof of the ministry had been covered with four meters of earth, partly as a protection against aerial bombardment, and then planted, partly to please Goring’s fancy (his private apartment was on the top floor). The old Reichsmarschall was almost half a century dead, but the orgies he’d put on amid the greenery remained a Berlin legend.

Willi said, “We aren’t the men our grandfathers were. In those days they thought big and weren’t ashamed to be flamboyant.” He sighed the sigh of a man denied great deeds by the time in which he chanced to live.

“Poor us, doomed to get by on matter-of-fact competence,” Gimpel said. “The skills we need to run our empire are different from those Hitler’s generation used to conquer it.”

“I suppose so.” Dorsch clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I envy you your contentment here and now, Heinrich. I almost joined the Wehrmacht when I was just out of the Hitler Jugend. Sometimes I still think I should have. There’s a difference between this uniform”-he ran a hand down his double-breasted greatcoat-”and the one real soldiers wear.”

“Is that your heart talking, or did you just all of a sudden remember you’re not eighteen years old anymore?” Gimpel said. His friend winced, acknowledging the hit. He went on, “Me, I’d fight if the Fatherland needed me, but I’m just as glad not to be carrying a gun.”

“We’re all probably safer because you don’t,” Dorsch said.

“This is also true.” Gimpel took off his thick, gold-framed glasses. In an instant, the street outside, the interior of the bus, even Willi beside him, grew blurry and indistinct. He blinked a couple of times, returned the glasses to the bridge of his nose. The world regained its sharp edges.

The neon brilliance of the street outside dimmed as the bus passed by the theaters and shops and started picking up passengers from the ministries of the Interior, Transportation, Economics, and Food. More uniforms that don’t have soldiers in them, Gimpel thought. The buildings from which the new riders came were shutting down for the day.

Two of those ministries, though, like the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, never slept. A new shift went into the Justice Ministry to replace the workers who left for home. German justice could not close its eyes, and woe betide the criminal or racial mongrel upon whom their omniscient gaze lighted. Himself a thoroughly law-abiding man, Gimpel still shivered a little every time he passed that marble-fronted hall.

The Colonial Ministry was similarly active. Much of the world, these days, fell under its purview: the agricultural towns of the Ukraine, the mining colonies in central Africa, the Indian tea plantations, the cattle herders on the plains of North America. As if picking that last thought from Gimpel’s mind, Willi Dorsch said, “How many Americans does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

“The Americans have always been in the dark,” Gimpel answered. He clucked sadly. “Your father was telling that one, Willi.”