The grandfather clock in the hall had just finished tolling its twelfth somber note when you stirred from uneasy dreams, the silk of your nightgown whispering against your skin like the ghost of better days. Through the crack in the blackout curtains, no moonlight dared intrude upon Berlin's martial silence - only the faint glow of the television's cathode eye, casting its silvered shadows across the parquet floor. The flickering images showed Casablanca, that American decadence smuggled past the censors, where Bergman's trembling lips met Bogart's world-weary smirk in a kiss that tasted of exile and lost causes. How fitting, you thought, that this forbidden fruit should play tonight of all nights, when the wireless spoke only of retreats and the Eastern Front's insatiable hunger for young men.

There, wreathed in the funeral shroud of his own cigarette smoke, sat Sturmbannführer Franz, the silver threads at his temples catching the television's glow like frost on a grave marker. His uniform jacket lay discarded over the chairback, the death's head insignia watching you with hollow eyes, while his loosened tie hung like a broken noose about his collar. The fingers of his left hand - those elegant, surgeon's fingers that had signed so many deportation orders - tapped absently against the armrest in time to As Time Goes By, while his right brought the cigarette to lips that still remembered the taste of French champagne and Russian snow. The screen's light carved his profile from darkness: the Teutonic blade of his nose, the cruel perfection of his jawline that had made the Berlin salons whisper "Lohengrin in SS black", the faint scar along his temple where a partisan's bullet had grazed him outside Minsk.

"Can't sleep, Liebchen?" he murmured without turning, his voice the rich baritone that had once recited Rilke to you in the Tiergarten, now roughened by too many nights shouting over artillery fire. The television's glow caught in his Totenkopf ring as he reached to adjust the volume, the skull's empty sockets seeming to leer at you from his finger. Outside, a distant flak battery coughed its metallic hymn to the night sky, the vibrations making the cut-crystal ashtray tremble beside his service pistol.

You watched as Bogart made his noble sacrifice onscreen, that most American of sentimentalities, and saw Franz's mouth twist in something too bitter to be a smile. "They think love is something you choose," he said softly, more to the ghosts in the smoke than to you, "as if duty and blood don't whisper in our veins." The cigarette burned down to his fingers, but he didn't flinch - you'd seen him stand motionless through worse pain at the Wolfsschanze, watching the situation maps turn crimson.

The telephone rang then, that shrill harbinger of midnight summonses. Franz exhaled a slow plume of smoke toward the ceiling, where the chandelier's crystals shivered like frozen tears. When he finally rose to answer it, his polished boots clicked against the floor with the precision of a metronome counting down the last measures of a doomed symphony. The television's glow caught the Ehrendolch at his belt as he passed - the honor dagger's swastika gleaming like a black sun in the artificial light.

Somewhere to the east, the Red Army continued its westward march. Somewhere in the cellar, the radio operator would be decoding messages from crumbling fronts. But here, in this fragile bubble of cognac and cigarette smoke, the war existed only in the way Franz's shoulders tensed when the phone rang, in the way his hand lingered on your waist for half a second too long before he left to attend to the Reich's dying gasps.

The television's snow-filled screen reflected your face back at you as the film ended - pale, sleepless, beautiful. Like a Klimt portrait left unfinished when the bombs began to fall.