Garden of Beasts

many important questions facing us, not just here, but everywhere in the world. Sports are . . . well, they’re frivolous.”
    Paul replied, “So is strolling down the streets of Berlin on a nice summer evening. But we’re doing it.”
    “Ach,” Käthe said testily. “The sole point of education in Germany now is to build strong bodies, not minds. Our boys, they play war games, they march everywhere. Did you hear we’ve started conscription?”
    Paul recalled that Bull Gordon had described the new German military draft to him. But he said, “No.”
    “One out of three boys fails because they have flat feet from all the marching they do at school. It’s a disgrace.”
    “Well, you can overdo anything,” he pointed out. “I enjoy sports.”
    “Yes, you seem athletic. Do you body-build?”
    “Some. Mostly I box.”
    “Box? You mean the sort where you hit other people?”
    He laughed. “That’s the only kind of boxing there is.”
    “Barbaric.”
    “It can be—if you let your guard down.”
    “You joke,” she said. “But how can you encourage people to strike each other?”
    “I couldn’t really tell you. But I like it. It’s fun.”
    “Fun,” she scoffed.
    “Yeah, fun,” he said, growing angry too. “Life’s hard. Sometimes you need to hold on to something fun, when the rest of the world is turning to shit around you. . . . Why don’t you go to a boxing match sometime? Go see Max Schmeling. Drink some beer, yell till you’re hoarse. You might enjoy it.”
    “Kakfif,” she said bluntly.
    “What?”
    “Kakfif,” Käthe repeated. “It’s a shortening for ‘Completely out of the question.’”
    “Suit yourself.”
    She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I’m a pacifist, as I was telling you today. All my friends in Berlin are pacifists. We don’t combine the idea of fun with hurting people.”
    “I don’t walk around like a Stormtrooper and beat up the innocent. The guys I spar with? They want to do it.”
    “You encourage causing pain.”
    “No, I discourage people from hitting me. That’s what sparring is.”
    “Like children,” she muttered. “You’re like children.”
    “You don’t understand.”
    “And why do you say that? Because I’m a woman?” she snapped.
    “Maybe. Yeah, maybe that’s it.”
    “I’m not stupid.”
    “I’m not talking about intelligence. I only mean that women aren’t inclined to fight.”
    “We aren’t inclined to be the aggressor. We will fight to protect our homes.”
    “Sometimes the wolf isn’t in your home. Don’t you go out and kill him first?”
    “No.”
    “You ignore him and hope he goes away?”
    “Yes. Exactly. And you teach him he doesn’t need to be destructive.”
    “That’s ridiculous,” Paul said. “You can’t talk a wolf into being a sheep.”
    “But I think you can if you wish to,” she said. “And if you work hard at it. Too many men don’t want that, however. They want to fight. They want to destroy because it gives them pleasure.” Dense silence between them for a long moment. Then, her voice softening, she said, “Ach, Paul, please forgive me. Here you are, being my companion, doing the town with me. Which I haven’t done for so many months. And I repay you by being like a shrew. Are American women shrews like me?”
    “Some are, some aren’t. Not that you are one.”
    “I’m a difficult person to be with. You have to understand, Paul—many women in Berlin are this way. We have to be. After the War there were no men left in the country. We had to become men and be as hard as they. I apologize.”
    “Don’t. I enjoy arguing. It’s just another way of sparring.”
    “Ach, sparring! And me a pacifist!” She gave a girlish laugh.
    “What would your friends say?”
    “What indeed?” she said and took his arm as they crossed the street.

Chapter Eighteen
    Even though he was a “lukewarm”—politically neutral, not a member of the Party—Willi Kohl enjoyed certain privileges reserved for devout National Socialists.
    One of these was that when a senior Kripo official had moved to Munich, Kohl had been offered the chance to take his large four-bedroom apartment in a pristine, linden-lined cul-de-sac off Berliner Street near Charlottenburg. Berlin had had a serious housing shortage since the War and most Kripo inspectors, even many at his level, were relegated to boxy, nondescript folk-apartments, thrown together in boxy, nondescript neighborhoods.
    Kohl wasn’t