No word was spoken. When they reached him Galina took her husband’s arm, keeping her head down to conceal her tears. She had not meant to shame him, but was gratified to see that he, too, could not ride while the others walked.
As the trek wore on, the crowd spread out along the road, afraid at first to leave its relative safety for the unknown perils of scorched fields and denuded woods. Some stopped to rest; others, weighing the value of their paltry belongings against the chance to get an early start on their liberty, cut away, vanishing into pine thickets or turning onto roads leading who knows where.
The rest, walking as in a trance, watched the country come into view like images projected by a magic lantern onto a dusky sky: a village, people moving in blurry silhouette against still-burning buildings; a family sitting in a barren field, surrounded by scattered possessions including, inexplicably, a bed; a tractor, its rear wheels buried under a fallen tree, the smoldering engine gasping its last puffs of fumes. The desolate, eerie silence was broken by the sudden crash of a collapsing roof, or the mournful lowing of an abandoned cow. Now and then, a dog howled. Once, Filip was sure he heard the plaintive notes of a harmonica. He raised his head to listen, but the sound was gone; only a chill wind remained, carrying a prickling of early snow.
The family reached the camp well after midnight, among the last ones to arrive. Ilya’s cough had worsened, aggravated by smoke and exertion. Time and again, they had stood with him while he struggled to regain his breath, unable to offer him help or comfort. Predictably, the barracks had been ransacked. In their haste, it seemed, the thieves had left—or overlooked—most of the things Ilya, Ksenia, Filip, and Galina cared about.
Galina examined the scattered contents of her suitcase. “They took my extra shoes and my green dress. But they didn’t take our pictures.”
“Why would they?” her father replied. “Here’s a piece of luck—they missed my toolbox.”
That thing is heavy as six bricks, Filip thought. Who would want to lug it around?
“Let’s sleep a little now,” Ksenia suggested. “We can pack up in the morning and decide what to do.”
In the morning, early, they gathered in the camp kitchen. Filip took charge.
“We can’t stay here. This area is too industrial; the Allies are sure to come back to finish the demolition job. As you see, most people are already gone. Berlin is out of the question. Do I have to explain why?”
“It’s the seat of government, a primary target.” Ilya sat back in his chair, arms crossed.
“Right. Frankfurt is a transportation center. Also not a good place to be.”
“Where, then? And why go to a city?” Ksenia, rummaging in the bare pantry, emerged with half a jar of soured milk. “Aha. Breakfast.”
“That’s where the work is. And there are more people; it’s easier to blend in.”
“Maybe Herr Doktor Blau could help us.” Galina held the cup her mother offered, sipped at the bitter stuff with unconcealed distaste.
“Blau? Blau’s long gone. Don’t ask me where. I don’t know.” Filip read the shock on his wife’s face. “I thought you knew.”
She turned pale, then burst into tears. “He was kind. And those sweet little girls . . .”
“Maybe they’re safe somewhere, with relatives,” Ilya said. But no one believed it.
“Well. So,” Filip resumed, “the place to go is Dresden. They make porcelain and cigarettes. It’s a cultural center, historic but not strategic. Even the Germans say it’s a safe city.”
“How do you know so much?” Galina, still sniffling, dried her eyes on her sleeve.
“I have ears. Germans may bark at us, but they like to talk among themselves.”
“We go north, then, and east.” Ilya rose to look out the window. The last few stragglers were at the gate, hoisting their bundles onto their backs, calling to their children not to fall behind. “It’s as good a plan as any.”
“Yes.” Filip pushed his cup toward Galina. “You drink this. You need it more than I do.”
7
FILIP WAS THE FIRST to reach the bridge.
“You wanted to see the world. There it is.” Galina came up behind him, waved an open hand toward the city rising in stately grandeur on the far bank of the river.
Even the slight hill leading up to the bridge was enough to leave her puffing like a long-distance runner. She carried a bundle of clothes tied in a bed sheet across her back and shoulders, the ends secured in a knot under her breasts. She brought her right hand back to her chest to steady her breathing, while the left rested in its habitual place, on the small but unmistakable mound of her unborn child. Filip found this gesture, this mute confirmation of an experience only women could know, vaguely irritating and even embarrassing.
“To see the world? Yes. But not like this.” He set down his suitcase as if wanting to deny any affiliation with its shabbiness. “Not as a beggar.”
They stood, waiting for the rest of the ragged band of travelers to catch up. The sun, climbing in a cloudless February sky, caught on distant cathedral spires and laid a veneer of warmth onto the aged roughness of the stone parapet over the languidly flowing Elbe below.
After months of trudging through the German countryside, shunted from factory towns to village farms, wearing the degrading OST patch that marked them as conscripted laborers from the East, here was a city. Filip admired how the buildings of more recent construction, their limestone facades still to be tempered by time, fit seamlessly into the orderly design, lining the cobbled streets in harmony with their more weathered neighbors.
The place exuded history and culture. And possibility. Who knew what opportunities lay ahead there for a young man of nearly twenty with a quick wit and an adaptable mind? Even without formal education, he believed he understood how buildings were made. He felt ready to learn how to build an arch, construct a bridge, raise a spire, calculate the proper spacing for a staircase. His heart filled with desire to make something, something beautiful and grand, from wood, stone, iron, glass; something no one had imagined before in quite the same way. I can, I will be an architect. Just give me a chance.
From stamp collecting he had learned attention to detail, which translated readily into an aptitude for record keeping—an aptitude the Nazi camp managers seemed to value out of all proportion. His gift for languages had assured him of at least sporadic interpreter duties, sometimes resulting in extra rations.
And yet, since leaving Yalta, calling on these skills had amounted to nothing more than a kind of maneuvering, a way to evade the mindless degradation of hard labor. So far, it was only a way to stay alive without quite knowing for what purpose. But here, in this glowing city, with its trade schools, its university, its countless offices and ateliers, here a clever man who knew how to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut could find his chance, seize it, and begin to live.
He turned to his wife and was about to speak, then stopped. Was that a hint of mockery he had heard in her remark? There it is. He decided not to share his nascent hopes with her. He would surprise her. He would surprise them all, as soon as something concrete developed that would prove his worth beyond all doubt. “Where are the others?” he asked instead.
“Trading news with some people traveling from another town.”
“And you didn’t wait to hear the news?”
“We’ll hear soon enough. I wanted to be with you.” She said it simply, looking not at him but at the placid river, its path carved out of the land in broad curves, its blue-gray waters mirroring skeletal leafless trees growing along the banks. “I wonder what makes a river flow the way it does, moving this way and that. Is it just rocks and boulders the water can’t move out of the way?”
Filip could not admit that he really did not know. “Taking the path of least resistance,” he guessed. “Like us.”
“Us?” She turned from the landscape to look at him with a quizzical smile.
“Yes. We are alive, and together.”
&
nbsp; “That’s just luck, don’t you think? We could have been separated, or died a hundred different ways.”
He lit a cigarette and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the parapet. “Not just luck. It’s knowing how to bend, like this river, when faced with obstacles or pushed around by forces we can’t control.”
“If you’re saying we worked for the enemy, it was only to save our lives, and your child,” Ksenia had come up soundlessly behind them. “But have we ever informed on or knowingly endangered another person? No.”
The trunk they had brought from home had become too cumbersome for foot travel; they had sold it at a country bazaar along the way. A large wood-framed basket now contained their household items: two small pots, a frying pan, cutlery, a few plates, cups, and bowls, and some rudimentary supplies—salt, flour, rice. Ksenia sighed and sat down carefully on its edge, resting her head in her hands.
Filip went cold. He dragged deeply on his cigarette, hoping no one noticed the shudder that made his shoulders shift and fingers shake. Again, he saw the lamppost, Borya’s body rotating slowly in the balmy breeze of a perfect Yalta afternoon, the damning word PARTISAN painted on his shirt, bare feet level with Filip’s eyes. Who would take a dead man’s shoes? he asked himself, outraged anew at the callousness, the disrespect for his young friend’s extinguished life. Anyone. Anyone would. A dead man had no need of shoes.
Was I to blame? After months of dormancy, the question rose once again in his mind, surfacing like a drowned cadaver suddenly freed from weedy depths, rolling grotesquely with unseen underwater currents. What an idiotic thing to say—How’s life in the woods, Borya? Finding any mushrooms?—on a crowded street in the middle of the day. But had anyone heard, or paid attention? “Surely not,” he said out loud, as if in answer to Ksenia’s question, forcing the thought away.
The day was bright and chilly. Patches of powdery snow lay here and there on the ground, sliding down the eaves of red-tiled roofs to trim their edges with lacy ice. A fine mist hung over the river, swirling and rising in gentle waves toward the same sun that made the ghostly vapor vanish into the morning air.
“A change in the weather,” Ilya said. “Snow is coming.”
“How do you know, Papa?” Galina challenged him, smiling. “What do any of us know about snow, except how beautiful it is, and how cold?”
“Well, the temperature is dropping, and my bones ache from the humidity,” he replied, matching her smile. “And one of the other people said so.”
“Then we must cross the bridge and see what we can see, right away.” She took his arm and they set off, leading the rest of the group toward the sentry at the far end.
“Papiere.” The man was not young, and clearly bored with the monotony of his duties. He cast a disinterested glance at the passports and work papers each person proffered like a charitable offering, standing single file, not moving until passed through by a careless wave of the soldier’s hand. “Twenty-four hours,” he repeated, stamping each passport with a red-inked date. “Twenty-four hours.”
Filip stopped. “What does that mean, twenty-four hours?”
“It means you transients cannot stay in Dresden more than one day.” He looked up, frowning like an irritated schoolmaster. “One day, or there will be consequences.”
“Where do we go then?”
“Go where you want. Back where you came from, but not here.” The guard pushed them on, already reaching for the passport of the next person in line.
“Consequences,” Filip muttered. “What the hell does that mean? Why would they care where we stay? Everyone knows the war is not going well for Germany.”
“That’s true,” one of their traveling companions chimed in. “But between the Red Army approaching from the east and American and British air raids, where is a safe place for us if not here? It’s just that there are too many of us for a city this size.”
“Why safe? What makes Dresden different?” Galina turned to ask. They were standing at the foot of the bridge, at the top of wide stone stairs leading down to the main square, the city’s streets laid out before them.
“No strategic targets. Why waste bombs on a cigarette factory or porcelain warehouse?”
“What about the river bridges? And the railroad,” another man said. “They can’t fight if they can’t move.”
“True enough. But see, the railroad station is still standing, and the tracks appear undamaged. If it was so important, the Allies would have hit it long ago.”
By noon they had walked well into the town, down a wide avenue lined with shops, small hotels, and multistory apartment buildings, the cobblestones smooth as bread loaves beneath their feet. Some went to see about gallery seats for the afternoon circus performance; one couple headed for the art museum.
On the street, people moved briskly, with worried looks—the only sign, it seemed, that here, too, life was not entirely normal, touched by the war’s shortages and anxieties. But there was still ersatz coffee and real tea, they saw in passing the glass doors of numerous cafés, and a tray of soft buns in a bakery window.
“Oh,” Galina exclaimed, unable to ignore her hunger or to stifle her desire for the luxury of fresh bread.
“Wait.” Ilya sat down on a bench facing the bakery door, pulled a small spool of wire and his ever-present pliers from his pocket. Within minutes, he had looped DRESDEN 1945 in fluid script out of the pliant coil, then added the name of the shop and a curlicue for garnish underneath. A few more snips and twists to attach a sharpened prong to the back, and the pin was done.
He entered the bakery, pin in hand, removed his cap and approached the woman at the counter. She looked up. They saw a shadow pass over her face when she took in his impoverished condition. She was pretty, past the bloom of youth but not yet middle-aged, with short curly hair and a large-breasted, well-proportioned figure. The group watched in silence, seeing the woman shake her head and begin to turn away, then stop, her head inclined attentively while Ilya worked the pliers on another length of wire.
“Give me a cup,” he said to Ksenia, poking his head out of the shop, his expression triumphant. A few minutes later he emerged, holding a newspaper cone filled with buns. “Breakfast,” he announced. “And this is for you, little mother.” He handed Galina a cup filled with steaming milk.
“All this for a Dresden pin?” Galina held the cup with both hands, taking long, grateful sips.
“And her name. Also her sister’s and two godchildren’s. I will need to find more wire now.”
They ate, chewing slowly to savor the bread’s fresh goodness, knowing it would be gone all too soon, while the hunger, their constant companion, would reappear like a whiny stray dogging their existence with maddening regularity.
“Thank you, God, for this bounty,” Ksenia said, crossing herself when she had done.
“And thank human vanity, too,” Galina added, wiping the inside of the cup with the last of her bun.
“Where shall we go, then? We have only this day.” Filip was glad he had not shared his thoughts with anyone. At least he was spared the humiliation of having his splendid plans fall apart for all to see.
“The circus?” Galina pointed to a colorful poster pasted to the outside wall of a news kiosk. Plumed horses shared the ring with dogs, acrobats, and clowns; a lone elephant held a young woman in the curve of its upturned trunk. “No, that would cost too much,” she said quietly before anyone could object. “But there’s a sign for the zoo.”
“First we must see about the train, for tomorrow.” Ksenia looked at her daughter kindly, with a shadow of a smile.
They pooled their money, hoping there would be enough to buy standing-room passage out of the city. “Maybe I can earn a little more,” Ilya proposed, pocketing the sum. “The day is young.”
They followed the stream of refugees to the train station—people with hungry eyes, bedraggled like themselves, sunken-cheeked and none too clean, clutching their pathetic bundles, their stuffed cardboard suitcases bu
lging with items too precious to leave behind.
What do you take on a journey into the unknown when the door to your homeland closes behind you, and the prospect of returning is more frightening than the flight? Your wedding ikona, with tarnished silver filigree around the Madonna’s halo? Photographs, heirloom jewelry, no matter how gaudy, a favorite toy, your grandmother’s shawl? Each bag a struggle between nostalgia and practicality, with an instinctive eye to items that can be traded or sold: these embroidered pillowcases, stitched by your mother’s hand but also useful—a souvenir of home, a touch of beauty, a bargaining token against the difficulties of a hazardous meandering journey.
The cavernous waiting hall, full to bursting when they arrived at the railroad station, was a veritable Babel. The air was thick with languages: Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Tatar, and other tongues they could not name floated in a frenzy of communication, while children raised the universal wail of the lost and confused. Galina took hold of Filip’s arm, her eyes wide. “Skol’ko naroda! How can so many people leave in one day?”
Her question was answered when a train pulled in; passengers thronged the platform, climbing into the empty cars before the wheels had stopped turning, shoving and dragging their children and belongings with them. In the momentary space that opened with this departure, it was possible to see the railroad windows and discern the lines of people queued up for tickets. “Where can we go?” Ksenia asked.
“What difference does it make?” Filip loosened his wife’s grip on his arm, took a small tobacco pouch from his pocket, and rolled himself a cigarette. She missed, or chose not to see, the way his lip curled in disgust. What difference does it make?
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