Unforgiving Years (27 page)

“I am rich,” Brigitte said gently, “but I won’t get married.”

The crippled vet’s horsey head, with its hairy nostrils and soft angry mouth, was calling. They kissed, mouth to mouth until they ran out of breath, their breath returning as one single breath.

“Why won’t you get married, Brigitte?”

“Because of love. It would be too hard to explain. I don’t really understand it myself. I’m going home. Good night, Franz.”

“I’ll go get some water for the sick, see you later,” the man said, or didn’t say, perhaps only thinking the words, suddenly knocked down by exhaustion, like a human animal concussed in the vicinity of an exploding mine. It erases you in an instant and you come to dazed, drained, unable to grasp that life is continuing, or yours is at least, with a frenzied carillon of blood booming in your temples, your rib cage, your limbs, your skull scoured by a wind of fire … With the metal pincer of his right hand, he held the can under the spigot while pumping energetically with his left, it worked, hallelujah! Good old pump, it was holding up better under the circumstances than the western front, the eastern front, the Italian, the oceanic, and the home fronts! The water of this well seemed to have remained pure, even though twenty feet away the sewers were vomiting up stinking slime through a large crack in the asphalt. Some rats scurried up and began lapping at the puddles around the pump; they grew strangely thirsty after each bombardment. Drink your fill, nasty animals, brother rats, you are like us, we are like you.

* * *

If there had ever existed, if there still were, some other place, another reality, the children had no way of knowing it. They grew, they played, they died (in large numbers, with even larger numbers surviving, the scientists couldn’t understand it) in a ghostly city bristling with the skeletons of churches lashed by sky, wind, rain, and fire. Oases of habitation robbed the destruction of a few torn, eerie patches of domesticity … Wherever life could take hold, whether in basements or in bedrooms carefully refurbished in the very heart of chaos, some on higher floors propped up by what looked like concrete stilts, households restored a sense of intimacy: pictures and portraits on the wall, doilies on broken-legged furniture, makeshift brick ovens standing on the buckling parquet, access ladders with rope handholds, trunks and bed linen, maxims embroidered by an aged aunt, since evacuated: “Do Good and Thy Soul Shall Leap for Joy.”

The earth shuddered, smoke crept across it, people dwelt in a volcanic realm of sudden explosions, smoldering dormant fires, smoky eddies of soot, dust clouds, the stench of reeking corpses, charred and splintered trees that persisted in budding and even put out, here and there, tender pale-green leaves as though nothing were amiss. Squads of women or schoolboys cleared the ghostly path of streets where no street remained, restoring empty grids like the layout of an archaeological excavation, shoveling human debris from under a mangle of timbers to be borne away on dirty stretchers toward tumbrels disinfected by men in face masks … The children could not have dreamed that another urban landscape was possible, and they found this one simple: terrifying by night, terrifying by day when the routine horrors occurred, pleasant and packed with surprises at other times … On sunny mornings the children emerged in their clean clothes like baby scorpions scuttling out from under a stone to bask in the heat; out came the children to roll marbles, throw balls, skip rope, and play war. They played at escaped prisoners, who were chased, caught, and solemnly shot, yet despite the inevitability of this outcome they all wanted to be the prisoner … Their playground encompassed the deep rubbly crater that yawned behind the little olive-and-yellow house, almost intact, that belonged to the post office subdirector, and a mountainous redoubt they called the Sierra, a mysteriously vast domain where apartment blocks owned by the Patria Life Insurance Company used to stand. The treasure hunters struck out into the Sierra, careless of the official ban, to climb the Himalayas and Chimborazos of destruction; they posted a lookout in the Mount Rose hidey-hole to watch out for the little policemen in the green uniform or the more formidable guard with the white armband; a discreet birdcall was enough to make the energetic heads of girls and boys duck down behind the spurs of Kazbek or Popocatepetl … Because Professor Schiff, skipping the chapters on cosmology and basic physical geography, lectured his pupils passionately on the geological cataclysms that gave birth to mountain chains, on subterranean fire, on earthquakes, on the submersion of entire continents beneath the seas: for example Atlantis, mentioned by the divine Plato, northern Laurentia, Gondwanaland to the southeast … The earth was replete with lost continents.

Schiff was a very old man. He wore a frock coat singed rusty from the time his house caught fire; the atlases he brought to class were singed around the edges like old books from a corsair’s booty; during breaks darkened by rain (or when he felt like it), Herr Schiff told stories about the end of the world, the Flood and Noah’s ark, the San Francisco earthquake, the annihilation of Saint-Pierre de la Martinique under sulfurous clouds that melted the very bronze of the church bells, so imagine what it did to soft human flesh,
meine liebe Kinder
, my dear children! They were beautiful tales and easy to understand. “Remember when the dike broke, sir, it was like Atlantis in the shelters around there, wasn’t it? Like a flood! And three families got away in an ark, sir, people saw them!” The teacher suspected that the boy who had spoken with such aptness was a Jew hidden by a Catholic family, and felt a combination of pitiful sympathy and insurmountable repugnance toward him but reacted benevolently in appreciation of the boy’s correct understanding. “You have a point,” he said, inclining his head to rest it against his open palm, “but of course the end of Atlantis was the end of an entire world. All the towns, all the fields, even the high mountains, and all the people of twenty tribes … It’s rather hard to imagine.” He was a splendid teacher of drawing, writing, and discipline, who greeted his classes of ten- to fourteen-year-olds with martially outstretched arm and a resounding
Heil Hitler
! that could compete with the great rallies in Nuremberg. As a result his classes performed the smartest, proudest salute of any school in town. It was common knowledge that his two sons had died like heroes, one in the Libyan desert, the other in the forests of Courland, and hence every pupil was familiar with the location of these important countries, justly conquered … Schiff interrupted the writing lesson to demand in stentorian tones: “Hans Büttel! What is the one and only immortal power?” Hans stood up obediently to recite a formula no one quite understood, inspiring hilarious parodies by wise guys, but which brought a look of peace onto the master’s fraught countenance. “Sir, each of us is merely mortal, but the Aryan Race, is im-mor-tal!” Instructed by his mother, wan little Claudius plunked himself in front of Professor Schiff’s desk, between the color poster of cereals and the portrait of the Leader-of-the-Party-and-the-People-who-is-guiding-us-to-Victory, and asked, “My mother wanted to know, sir, is victory near?” “My dear boy, fetch your pencil and write.” Professor Schiff dictated: “Our victory does not reside in earthly space or time, but in the deathless principle of the Race.” Frau Sonnecker framed these lines in gold paper and hung them above her son’s bed … It was a pleasant schoolroom, lacking only one corner of the roof; the hole had been patched with corrugated iron. Six gilt chairs from the confectioner’s shop added a touch of glamour, but they were not to be sat on, the school will return them to Frau Deinecke when that lady comes back, after the war.

The master turned a blind eye to his pupils’ expeditions, and, when they brought him books, gravely acknowledged the gift. The warrior-explorers, Argonauts, Conquistadors, Knights of the Round Table, or Teutonic heroes, as the fancy took them, unearthed all sorts of trophies in the volcano zone … The great trick was to detect a cave, unblock the entrance, and worm your way inside … And if, at the edge of the dark emptiness, you suddenly spied a convulsed hand or some grayish hair clinging to a bleached skull, you closed the lair and continued your explorations. Bad luck! Sometimes you penetrated into a kitchen or a bathroom, or the corner of a bedroom where the most extraordinary objects preserved a virginity appropriate to treasure troves. There might be a bag of potatoes, an umbrella, some books, a photograph album, a pretty fan decorated in faded watercolors (Charlotte and Werther … ), a slightly crushed camera, repairable and salable, clothing holed by bits of metal but still usable … Needless to say you had to watch out for the owners, real or pretend, the latter being the more vindictive; they materialized without warning, able to spot “their stuff” at twenty yards, they snatched the treasure, boxed your ears, and stormed off to complain to the parents or Herr Schiff! They were nicknamed the Winged Vampires. Fortunately, three-quarters of the Winged Vampires had disappeared. On the flank of Chimborazo a precisely printed sign proclaimed
LOOTING IS PUNISHABLE BY DEATH
,
Todestrafe
, but that applied chiefly to inferior races, the escaped Poles, Russians, and Serbs who were rumored to be living deep underground, well below the level of cellars and shelters, creeping forth at night under cover of the bombs to attack the SS and people in uniform and to steal marmalade. The twelve-year-old explorer felt rather proud to be braving the
Todestrafe
,
DEATH PENALTY
.

* * *

If in truth a different world had ever existed, Brigitte would have retained a more convincing memory of it. Nonetheless, she did not doubt that the city had once been completely different, disoriented though she was by the changes being wrought by wave upon wave of destruction. Last week, the flat half-moon edifice of the chamber of commerce was still in its place, at the bottom of Grand Elector Plaza. The carcass of a bus sat rusting next to the kiosk that provided sweets, cigarettes, newspapers, and a wash-room. The bronze Grand Elector lay on his back on the lawn, his comical paunch swelling upward; the female figure from the pedestal had also fallen over and was sleeping on her side with her eyes open; she was holding a laurel branch and the Grand Elector, a book; they lay back to back is if they were quarreling. The main shopping artery still paraded its wounded façades and signboards over its vanished businesses. After last night’s hurricane, the artery was buried under a desert of scorched, blackened rubble, dusted with a powder as fine and light as mineral dew. The recumbent statues, the shell of the bus, the friendly news-and-chocolates building, the chamber of commerce itself were nowhere to be found: the whole square had slid sideways before being erased. Brigitte found herself wandering through an unfamiliar neighborhood where the downstairs of redbrick houses were still inhabited and some men in uniform were assembled in a conclave outside the door of a tavern,
Bierstube
. Someone shouted, “Hurry up there, Fraülein, the cleanup squad …” She nodded, yes, yes, and walked on. Soon she came to a mobile kitchen handing out soup to about a hundred people, several of whom were elegantly dressed. Humiliated at losing her way, Brigitte asked for directions. “Go right as far as Westphalia, then third left, that’s Marie-Louise Strasse.” But there was no left or right, no way of identifying Westphalia Strasse;
Volkssturm
roadblocks were inexplicably set up across steep dunes of rubble. A haze of gray smoke rose toward the noonday sun. Instinct led Brigitte back to her familiar territory.

So inexorably did the present annul the past, so simply, so mercilessly did this present perpetuate itself, that no room was left for the anticipation of any other future. The linear direction of time was scrambled, the calendar lost its meaning, the everyday milestones of existence were gradually effaced. Of the past Brigitte retained nothing but a handful of images, devoid of substance, as implausible and yet tenacious as those of recurring dreams. Reality commenced this side of a frontier defined by glowing summer evenings which weren’t prewar, but already wartime, since He was dead. The sirens started howling after midnight … Brigitte got up without any fear. What was there to be afraid of, now that He had ceased to exist, He who may never have existed but in His letters and the wonderful slumber that came before reality? A spreading sound of hurried steps told of the tenants making for the shelters. “Order, order … !” The sirens stopped and an absolute hush fell, like the cradling of the world. Brigitte took the little suitcase containing His letters, underwear, and money, but instead of going downstairs she went up … Ascend, she thought; that’s what you should do, poor souls, ascend toward the stars, (ascend toward Him); the neighbors she tried to tell this to pushed roughly past her muttering
Was? Was?
What? What? She climbed the ladder to the roof and went to lean her back against a chimney. All the constellations were glittering at once, even the faint Northern Crown was clearly visible, and surrounding them, beyond them, the deep pure blue of celestial space, grander still for containing secret constellations that could be discerned only by the most powerful telescopes … And the dark earth, blossoming all of a sudden into an immense flashing star emitting rays, spears, scimitars, and fans of light. The whiteness wove a tissue of radiance around the city, around the entire planet: the planet in her wedding dress. A bright cupola rose above Brigitte’s rapt, thrown-back head. She wished for cricket song: the crickets sang. Trac-tac-tac, tractac-tac-tac, trrraac, their song grew louder, the crickets all died in a millionth of a second and a deafening buzz of elytrons blew the shredded sails of great maddened ships in every direction of the compass as they plied the rocking firmament. “Good God, great God, Lord God!” stammered Brigitte, alone at the apex of a city turned into a dark, petrified gulf (daughter of a social-democrat academic, she was not a believer, but since His death she thought she half believed, not in the
words
of the faith but in the inexpressible intuition the words tried vainly to express … ). A white-hot symphony of steel struck up. A thousand motors droned in the cold incandescent furnace of the sky. Brigitte glimpsed dull fragments and even a metal fuselage briefly captured in the searchlights: the fragments and fuselage got away … No light, however murderous, is a prison! At the foot of the electric beams garishly colored firebirds soared and fell in triangles of night … The thunders crashed. Was there a beginning? Did they all crash together? Was it a single bouquet of lightning bolts multiplying through space? The black prostrate city did not cry out, despite the continuous shaking of the ground and the unendurable flashing of yellow-and-gold bursts over by the freight yards. The cathedral spire glittered darkly like a piercing scream. Geysers of green water spurted from the disemboweled river, Brigitte could see them clearly. “My God, if only the bridge … Oh, surely there is no more bridge, no quays, no river … All the water sprites have faded into radiant death … Why weren’t you one of them, Brigitte!” Now black waves arose. The lightning struck closer, but strangely in the opposite direction, with long, crackling reverberations, but nothing was visible, over there lay White Queen Park, populated by bronze antelopes and musicians’ busts … From there, oppressive clouds of black yet sulfurous smoke twisted into the air, spreading as they rose. Brigitte breathed in warm air full of nauseous odors … The bouquets of this demented dawn broke apart, some falling to earth, crashing in dark fields. Holes appeared in the sky where the calm sand grains of constellations were insanely still. The Northern Crown was shining again. “Lord God, hear me! Let us all die, all of us, down to the last innocent babe in its loving mother’s arms!” So Brigitte prayed, rigid yet calm, her eyes still dazzled by the inhuman revelry of glimmers and flashes, now convulsing spasmodically, now abating, on the verge of expiring, and bursting back to life like a firebox short of fuel … The thundering symphony stopped all at once. Stray searchlights swiped the air with wounded wings and flickered out. The darkness spread in stony waves over the gulf of the city, but clouds were crawling like wild beasts over the rail yards and the industrial district emitting dull roars and nauseating smells … Sirens proclaimed the all clear …