Unforgiving Years (26 page)

Ashamed of being healthy and well-fed herself, Daria murmured, “Right, of course. But how to go about it?”

“Oh, there’s no end of tricks,” Mitrofanov said. “The proletariat knows them backward and forward. If there weren’t such tricks we’d have been done for years ago, take it from me, there’d be precious little left of the proletariat by now … Well, got seventy minutes left for my beauty sleep. Good night, Citizen.”

Back home, Daria lifted the sacks covering the little window. It was just before dawn, though the night gave no sign of it. This spiral suction deep inside is hunger — spreading like frost through the entrails. And this stabbing emptiness in the depth of my being, that’s loneliness. Hunger and loneliness, two tentacles of death. I too am beginning to die, almost painlessly, with no bitterness, in a house full of industrious lives ebbing toward death. No other kind of abode exists in this besieged, half-perished city. The awesome might of the half perished! If there is to be a victory some day, it will belong to them … The Mitrofanovs will have pulled through yet again. They will be vengeful, they will be barbaric, they will be cruelly, bafflingly tender, full of breathtaking sagacity … They will deploy an instant flair in the fight for life, not dissimilar perhaps to the instincts of Ice Age primitives. What’s more, they will have the enterprising brains of civilized men who have been cured of refinements. They will have the great yearning for warmth and fraternity of disaster survivors, in the knowledge that primal heroism is redemptive only when it is underpinned by communal egoism. What will we make of this peerless energy, for ourselves and for the world? A lever, or an ax for splitting skulls?

This question was tied to the shadow of Sacha. The thought of being back in the office the next day among military men who ate their fill, strutted their medals, computed the precise amount of shed blood, projected foreseeable casualties from hunger, cold, and fire, making this work into a rather placid profession, never uttering a living word, filled Daria with revulsion. Because I belong to the generation of those who were shot, the unadaptable generation! she said bitterly. What if I applied for an intelligence assignment with one of the partisan units operating behind enemy lines, in the snow-blanketed forest? Farewell, Klim. After the war, Klim. After death, Klim.

And Klim appeared to her under formless trees thickly veiled in purest white. “Come with me,” he said, “I’ll light us a big fire. Come and be happy … Tomorrow we’ll begin killing, because we love the earth, mankind, and life. Come, I love you …” “You mustn’t love me,” Daria answered through gathering mists of sleep, “I am a half-dead woman. I mean yes, you must love me … I’m a half-dead woman.” A wolf cub with a gallant plume of a tail and strangely understanding little eyes watched her from behind a screen of green-needled pine boughs, the kind that are placed on coffins with red ribbons.

¹
Written by Josef Utkin (1903–1944) for Sergei Esenin (1895–1925).

²
“Okay” is spoken in English in the original French text.

I
F THERE
ever had been, if there ever were, somewhere in the world, another reality, it now remained in human memory as no more than a recollection, tinged more by doubt and sadness than by nostalgia. The past marked the older people most deeply, and some of them needed no prompting to talk about it, harping ad nauseam on the good old days. It was understandable that they could not avoid being intoxicated by the past, and that it pained them even more than it pained the people who wished they would shut up. In their chatter, periods and wars got mixed up: Let’s see, was that before the first war or the second? Was that under the Kaiser, the Revolution, Weimar, Versailles, under Brüning or the Führer? Explain yourself! How many wars have there been, sir? The revolution was also a war, you must realize that! The clearest answers — coming from people who seemed to have lived through so many events in the half century that they were probably exaggerating — remained obscure; and the price of a good dinner or the comfort of a railway journey came to sound like preposterous yarns or, more exactly, the gibberish of half-wits. So when Frau Krammerz, down in the bomb shelter below Kellerman’s Rathskeller under vaults glistening with saltpeter, took to reminiscing about how life used to be — the Sundays in the country, the exquisite pastries one could order from the cake shop, the party for Gertrude’s first communion — some of the adults looked at her with hatred; and they were delighted when a little girl took her grubby fingers out of her mouth to declare, with withering finality: “S’not true.” “Quiet, you snot-nose little guttersnipe …” The child went on with her irresistible “s’not true.” Nobody got up to give her a smack, in part because the ground was shaking (bombs were raining down on the other side of the canal, there being nothing left to flatten on this side, the connoisseurs explained, so it would be murderous bad luck if … ), but mostly because she was, quite obviously, right. Frau Krammerz suddenly realized it herself. Her face, more wrinkled than an empty bottle, skin crudely decorated by primitives, crumpled as she brushed away her tears and admitted, with a pitiable attempt at a laugh, “No, it’s not true,
mein Gott
!”

Thunderclaps sent huge waves through the earth; crackling outbursts transmuted into great surges of heat, as though invisible ripples of fire were pulsing outward from a fiery oven, somewhere nearby, to one side, deep underground. “We’re going to be baked like potatoes in ashes,” an old man calmly remarked. Fits of helpless whimpering started up in the children’s corner. “Can’t the little snots get used to it? Pipe down, it’s over, stop bawling and wipe your noses!” Brigitte made her way across the cellar toward the children, holding a cloth-wrapped object. It was her find of the morning, the reward of hours spent picking through the fresh rubble, and aroused much excitement among the small-fry. There was barely any light to see by, as the electric bulbs had just died and the shelter had fallen back on candles, but their eyes, accustomed to the dark, discerned everything in rich detail. Brigitte unrolled a doll wearing an old-fashioned military outfit, with a tall bearskin calpac, a green tunic, a white plastron and buckled gaiters, a soldier of Frederick the Great’s at Rossbach — that’s a glorious piece of History, the Seven Years’ War! Whereas these days, it feels more like the Thirty Years’ War … “For me, for me! Here, Brigitte!” chorused high voices which a string of massive but distant impacts could not drown out. (“You see, they’re going away now … all gone … finished …”) “Not for you and not for you either,” said the young woman. “We’ll hold a draw.”

“S’not real.”

“Not real, what do you mean, you silly minx?”

“Yes it is real, look, I’m playing with it …”

“Listen all to the song of glory!” proclaimed the amiable, if strident, voice of the disabled veteran, for the sirens were sounding the all clear. That sardonic voice always brought peculiar results: now one of the lightbulbs went back on, spreading sepulchral cheer. The invalid was crutching his way over to the stairway, humming to himself. “I’m off for a breath of air …” he called. “Excellent for the health. A poetic night, my friends. I’ll try to bring back some water for the sick …” The water can jangled against the complicated prostheses whose manufacturer, according to him, deserved to be summarily hanged. He had lost his left foot and right arm in some insignificant battle on the eastern front, but he managed nimbly enough on one foot, two contraptions, and a stick salvaged from the rubble that did excellent duty as a crutch, just the right length and burned to a convenient lightness. He even attended sessions at the Vocational Rehabilitation Center, charming but compulsory charades … The sick no longer left the basement shelter. They groaned for a moment, then fell quiet. During the bombing they remained silent, except for chattering teeth; the minute it was over they fell to tossing, spitting, coughing, pissing, and wanting a modicum of attention — but not for long. The disciplined character of the average man who knows there’s nothing to be done about it soon reasserted itself. Besides, this beer cellar made an agreeable shelter with its tapestried walls and elegant furniture, and there were sheets on the mattresses.

Franz, the disabled vet known as “Minus-Two,” hauled himself up the stairs, limped along a narrow corridor, skirted a bulwark of sandbags, struck the high notes of a piano keyboard with his prosthesis as he went by, making it blurt out a cracked lament, listened to this fragment of
lied
fade away, and continued on, with a little apprehension now because there was always a risk that the entrance to the underground system might be blocked by fresh debris. It wasn’t: silvery clouds opened against a dusting of stars. Minus-Two whistled between his teeth the triumphal march of King Frederick’s fifes. A steel-sharp sickle of moon illuminated the becalmed street, that is to say the line of building façades behind whose gaping windows lay a deepening void, some mounds of collapsed masonry like fossilized monsters, and the dark black outline of a tall, thin slice of building still standing around the axis of its chimney. The four jag-toothed floors of this tilted saw leaned fifteen or twenty degrees south by southwest; if they ever collapsed, they would fall on the uninhabitable rubble of the White Hunter Inn. If the collapse were gentle enough, someone might be able to grab that fine gold-knobbed metal bedstead clinging to the parquet of the fourth floor; as for the oval mirror framed with brass bows on which rays of sunlight sometimes played, there’d be nothing left of it but the frame, and in a sorry state at that. Broken mirror, bad omen! We can expect yet another bad omen … For now, the mirror up there was merely the augury of a bad omen. Minus-Two pondered how nothing changed: order.

Out of idle curiosity he cocked an ear to the noises of the city. A few searchlights were still crisscrossing the sky. Keep searching, keep searching, my friends, for something that leaves no trace, according to Solomon’s proverb: a fish in the sea, a man in a woman, a plane in the sky. They’re far away now. From somewhere a final, bad-tempered burst of antiaircraft fire spat out it’s flak flak flak drak drak drak. “Stupid idiots!” muttered the crippled vet. He heard ambulance sirens and motorcycle engines yapping brokenly, way over in the new part of town, where the no-go underground factories and the model workers’ housing and the railway junctions were; there can’t be much left of all that, at least not above ground; below, they can still hold out. Under the ground or otherwise, the Third Reich will hold out to the end of the millennium, that’s certain.

Minus-Two halted before a stretch of wall that had been cleanly sheared off as though there had never been anything above it; new grass was sprouting on top of the neatly raked rubble of Billingen’s Pharmacy! He practiced writing with his left hand in the moonlight, tracing each word in block letters with a piece of chalk: “One Führer, One
Volk
, One Tomb!
Heil
Death!” (This to enrage Herr Blasch.) He judged his calligraphy to be improving; faster too, I’m making progress … If only I had a cigarette butt left! Whose head would I most gladly give for a butt? There was no shortage of choices. In his book, the number-one hateful head still belonged to a tank captain he’d run into around Poznan, a rattlesnake head — monocled, helmeted, shaved, and powdered with gray, rapping out completely unfulfillable orders like: “Take out that machine-gun nest with silver tweezers for me, no getting your fingers dirty, then goose-step across that river for me, keeping dry on the tiptoes of your boots; the valiant soldier scorns all obstacles or I’ll have him court-martialed!” The Russians must have already ground that head into head cheese for the worms long ago … It’s sweet to amuse oneself with private jokes, isn’t it, Captain? Me Minus-Two, you Zero-Minus-a-Thousand, honorable Captain-Baron-Minus-Head, Minus-Balls, Minus-Joke, Minus-Everything! But if I ever learned that you didn’t get blown away by a 177 shell up your ass, I’d have to conclude that not even the shadow of one-eyed justice remains here below …

“But that’s impossible!” cried Minus-Two into the soft transparent night.

So whose head could he offer up to the Great God of Universal War so as to ensure finding tomorrow a juicy stub of genuine tobacco, the kind your Party higher-ups sometimes throw away? Crescent moon, inspire me! The head of Herr Blasch, sergeant of the elite corps’ home guard, in charge of security of recovered dwellings, Führer of the neighborhood lout patrol … Tac-tac-trac-tac, the music of machine-gun fire rang out in the distance among the fresh or refreshed ruins. Herr Blasch and his henchmen — on orders from above — were busy liquidating the seriously wounded, or looters caught red-handed, or some crazed old granny who started mouthing off … I’m a lucky bugger to have only two limbs left, thought Minus-Two.

And for a little shot of schnapps, what would you give for that, Franz? For a cheery draught of Pomeranian brandy? Your Iron Cross? Oh la la! I’ll throw in the colossal Stone Cross they’ll be raising over the tomb of the German people, and the columns of the imperial chancellery for good measure …

“What’s impossible?” From behind came a voice as bubbly as a lovely brook running through green grass — if there still were such things as brooks, grass, cows, pearly green horizons.

“Princess!” Minus-Two exclaimed as he swung around. “You’re incredible.”

“It’s true,” said Brigitte.

She came closer, belted into her white coat, her curls blond in daylight, now the shade of metallic ash, her neck slender, her gaze unfocused. She was always looking elsewhere or beyond, so that Minus-Two had come to conceive of her eyes on the model of classical statuary. He leaned conveniently against a tidy stack of bricks made by the Schools Reconstruction Organization (thanks to Strength through Joy, of course).

“Come here, closer, white fairy.” Brigitte came. With his living arm he pulled her toward him, heatedly. “When this war is over, Brigitte, I’m going to marry a rich woman, a very rich woman. We won’t have kids. Because of the next war, d’you see. My wife will look like you.”