Still, you could breathe here. The wounded city, just a few miles away, had already begun to fade, hidden by the trees and suburban houses, the way an anesthetic blotted up pain. He should have taken notes. But what was there to say? The story had already happened. From the looks of it, building by building, old men and teenagers sniping from doorways. Why had they held out? Waiting for the Americans, he’d heard. Anyone but the Russians. The peace will be worse — Goebbels’ last warning, the only one that came true. So, the final madness. Whole streets on fire. There’d been roving packs of SS, hanging boys from lampposts as deserters. To make an example. In the camps they’d killed people right up to the last hour. Here they’d even turned on their own. Not war anymore, a bloodlust.

Jake hadn’t filed a real story in two months, not since the camps; he had been waiting for Berlin. Now he felt that Berlin would defeat him too, that all the copy would end in Ron’s lunar landscapes and decayed teeth, inadequate attempts at scale. He had run out of words. personalize it. Not the thousands, just one. She’d be here. It wasn’t too much to hope for, one survivor. He looked again at the garden. Near a shed in the back, a gray-haired woman was hanging wet clothes over an improvised line of rope. A hausfrau.

“But what are you going to do?” he’d said. “Come with me. I’ll arrange it. I’ll get you out.”

“Out,” she said, dismissing it, the word itself improbable. Then she shook her head. “No, it’s better.” She’d been sitting at her dressing table, still in her slip, perfectly made-up again, her nails red. “I’ll be a hausfrau,” she’d said almost casually, putting on lipstick. “A good German hausfrau.” She lowered her eyes. “Not this, all the lies.”

“They’re not lies,” he’d said, putting his hands on her shoulders.

She looked up at his face in the mirror. “The lies to him.”

Down below, the gray-haired woman had spotted him in the window.