From Ashes Into Light: A Novel

by Gudrun Mouw

  I experience the wonder of a warm wind propelling us with ease as we fly south and east. I am exhilarated and astonished at the sensation of lift from the air underneath me. I see unfamiliar things below, similar to my long-ago dream visions, and understand that Phoenix is teaching me things beyond my years. I see that we, the first people, are not the only ones to survive. Many creatures have found refuge under the debris of dead trees, in the cracks of crushed and pressed rock, and along the cold, damp sides of what seem to be an endless number of rectangular Spanish buildings, proliferating through a strange landscape of noisy indifference.

  The Phoenix - East Prussia

  I follow the journey to where great need pulls me close. The baby, nicknamed Friede, travels in a wheelbarrow pushed by various family members—Anna Pulver and her five daughters and two sons. The youngest Pulvers, the boys, are ten and twelve years old.

  An icy trek torments refugees moving through the land in the winter of 1945. Bombs explode day and night. Cold first pains, then numbs. Shuffling people carry heavy burdens of dread and hunger.

  Drunken infantry emerge from behind a curtain of snow without warning. Soldiers crash through the group of stunned refugees, shove, hit, and threaten. One soldier overturns the wheelbarrow; it’s to be confiscated.

  Friede topples out. A huge black boot steps on her chest. She has trouble breathing. Underneath the snow, a rock jabs her right shoulder. Marta screams, rushing towards her daughter. The soldier grabs the mother. I burst forth with a loud call. Just then the troop commander yells and the men hurry off.

  * * *

  That night Marta wakes from the cold and I see she’s anxious. She isn’t able to lie still, and paces back and forth between two pine trees. The oldest sibling at twenty-four, Marta has spent many restless days and nights.

  The forest stands hushed. I sit on a low branch. It is too quiet. The creatures and everything else seem to be listening. The moon shines above the glade where Friede’s family is sleeping. Friede, sensing her mother’s absence, begins to cry. Marta retrieves her daughter, squats against a tree, and places Friede to her breast. Tension lines along Marta’s forehead disappear as she nurses with an ever-diminishing supply of milk. Her tight shoulders soften.

  Friede closes her eyes. Pressing her mother’s skin with her fingertips, she almost falls asleep. Marta snuggles her baby closer, and a delicious warmth flows between mother and daughter that even the cold can’t penetrate. Moonlight glimmers between branches all around and the snow sparkles.

  As Marta tucks the blanket more snugly around Friede’s head, a twig snaps behind her. Marta quickly stands up, turns, but it’s too late.

  A soldier pulls Friede away from her mother and flings her to the snow. He seizes Marta by the hair, holding his other hand over her mouth. Marta tries to wrench herself free. Friede has landed on her back, her arms and legs flailing in every direction like a crab who wishes to right itself. Friede screams and cries.

  Hearing her granddaughter, Anna Pulver places a hand on Rebecca’s mouth. “Stay quiet,” Mrs. Pulver whispers. She knows that stealth is their only weapon in the face of a gun.

  The drunken soldier stares at the noisy child for a moment, as if he hadn’t anticipated such howling. He shoves Marta to the ground. He doesn’t notice the rest of the family lying in shadow. Pointing his rifle, he teeters towards Friede.

  Rebecca lies still, unable to move. Her second oldest sister, Olga, is awake, her eyes wide open. At twenty-one, Olga knows rape. She bites her lower lip, tenses her body, ready to jump. Her lips quiver as Marta’s shrieks disperse any remaining grogginess.

  “No!” Marta yells, trying to divert the soldier away from her daughter. She jumps up. The soldier turns back and points his rifle at Marta, motioning her along the line of his vision as he peers at the infant.

  The soldier’s reddened, hate-filled face looms in front of Friede. He exhales noxious fumes; his eyes roll wildly. He jabs the child with the rifle.

  Quietly, Olga rolls over the snow to circle the glade. She approaches the soldier from behind, hiding behind a tree. She raises herself on her hands and knees behind the trunk, but she is still too far away to get at him. She sees the shadow of her younger brother, Wilhelm, peering from behind a tree across the clearing. She looks for a rock. Nothing.

  The soldier examines the crying child as if he doesn’t understand why she should be crying. He teeters back and forth on unstable feet. Olga continues circling. Friede lies in a pool of moonlight, too young to run away. She does the only thing she can do. She stops crying.

  She looks at the soldier earnestly. Her expression is alert and intelligent. The soldier steps back. For a second he appears unsure. Behind his rage, a brief susceptibility flickers.

  He tries to rearrange his expression and almost manages to look determined before he drops to his knees in the snow. He tugs at the blanket still somewhat wrapped around the child, who does not make a sound. Her eyes remain steady and her gaze penetrates. A small, reddish feather floats to the snow next to Friede. I join Friede in her stare and together we burrow deep into him; the soldier hesitates. Time seems to stop.

  Saqapaya whispers as though he were the wind: “Friede, little one, see how the soldier’s hate grabs the air! Like a fish that swallows a hook and is pulled inside the tomol, he gasps for breath. His hatred burdens the middle world. See the red daggers flying out from his body. He clenches his stick but has forgotten how to make it explode. Don’t look away, Friede. The soldier’s rage cannot free itself. See him tilt. Hold on, Friede, and do not let fear make you unsteady.”

  Friede’s eyes grow large. Her eyes burn with Saqapaya’s teachings. Challenged by Friede’s full moon eyes, the soldier confronts something he can’t explain. He forgets what he meant to do. He curses and pushes himself up with his rifle. His knees buckle. He falls. His hot, contorted face melts snow. He passes out.

  Friede hardly breathes. She has learned how useful stillness can be. Her life force grows. She hardly needs nourishment in a place beyond hunger and fear, where her spirit enters another world, a translucent world of secret sustenance, where those who have been before continue to speak.

  The family moves on. We are weary and exhilarated all at once.

  Ruth

  One morning I head for Uncle Franz’s room without knowing what I will do. I am fourteen now and feeling restless; I want an explanation. But who dare I ask here in Vienna? And what is the question?

  I stand in front of the bookshelf, looking to escape anger, helplessness, and fear. I touch the spines of the blue, gray, green, and black volumes, choosing a book by Martin Buber, Ekstatische Confessionen, a collection of ecstatic writings. My hands tremble as I take it to my cot. I sit down to examine the fluid, sea-green shapes and coral splashes on the cover, looking like underwater life I once saw in an aquarium.

  Not always understanding what I read, yet gripped by the writing, I whisper some of the words out loud, words like “ardent soul” and “Ramakrishna.” I am filled with a strong prickling sensation. I sense something strange and liquid and holy.

  Reading a Rumi poem, I feel as if it was written just for me:

  “…I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Parsi, nor Muslim.

  I am not of the East, nor of the West…”

  I sway back and forth, reading the entire poem again and for a third time and a fourth. Tears come with recognition and relief.

  “Thank you for these words,” I say. “Thank you for bringing prayer and praise back to my heart.”

  Later, I come across an odd description. I try to figure out what Plotinus meant by a process called gazing.

  The passage reminds me how, staring for a long time in the mirror, I once saw faces different from my own. It was as though I had seen some of these faces from a different time, and the faces knew something unnamable, something I couldn’t describe, something beyond anything I could think, something that is no longer thought but larger than thought and beyond thought.

>   I take my mother’s mirror off the dresser. Risking her disapproval, I prop the mirror up against books on the bed, then sit on the floor. The mirror isn’t very big, not like the gold-rimmed one we had at home, the one stolen the night of the attack in Salzburg. I still hold to my former life in dear Salzburg with a fierceness that makes me tremble.

  From the parlor I hear the radio. Music plays, an anguished sound that continues, strangely sweet. My breath merges with the music. I follow the tempo as it changes, as it becomes more urgent and more searching.

  Another face appears in the mirror and another, faces not mine but alternately older and younger. I see a boy wearing a feather crown and a baby girl lying in the snow. I become the witness, beyond dread, beyond anger. I become so quiet that something stirs inside, something like a joy that depends on no other person, no event or lack of event. I cry with surprise, with disbelief.

  Joy opens like a fragrant flower unfolding, or like the words of a song descending upon waking. Slowly, joy gathers strength, even as a difficult future nears.

  The Phoenix

  East/West Border

  I do not follow the family into the iron-ore mine but wait outside. I stay near and see through thick layers of earth and metal with my phoenix eyes. Time has passed since I last saw them.

  Marta Pulver-Mai squats inside the mine where the family hides from Russian soldiers. Though the war is over, in the early years of the victor’s takeover the non-Russian population is to be driven through hunger and internment into submission. Marta arranges a tattered skirt around her bare legs and hugs her knees. “It’s so cold,” she says to no one in particular and peers up at a saucer-sized hole in the ceiling. A sliver of light shines through.

  Emma Pulver coughs. “Let’s not stay any longer,” she says, “we’re getting closer to the border, away from this nightmare. Maybe we can get through this time.” She is sick, standing on bare, bleeding feet. At twenty, Emma’s dark eyes, once bright and audacious, now look unfocused at the earthen floor. She tells her sister, “We have to keep going west before things get any worse. We can’t possibly survive another internment camp.”

  Marta snaps at Emma, “Friede is only three. She can’t walk another kilometer; I can’t carry her so much anymore. And you’re in no better shape than the rest of us. We’re still too far from our aunt’s house in Berlin. Who knows if they’re even still there?”

  Emma slumps to the ground. She is too weak to argue.

  Rebecca, the third Pulver daughter, takes Friede’s hand and tells Marta, “She’s turning blue.”

  Marta cradles her daughter. The Pulvers and Mais heap together for support, for warmth.

  * * *

  It seems I have been flying through the smallest corridor of light for months. The Pulver family has managed to survive since the Russians broke through Germany’s Eastern Front in January of 1945. Friede has left a signature on the land and I look back over the family’s journey.

  From north of their Insterburg, East Prussian homeland, they followed the river Pregel to Wehlen and the river Alla. They walked through forests in moonlight and searched abandoned farmland for potatoes. They shuttled back and forth through bombed-out towns and ruined villages, seeking to hide from tanks, gun-wielding platoons, and hidden snipers. Sometimes they were questioned and let go. They were interned and escaped. They passed through the Polish Corridor that was West Prussia before World War 1.

  Now, undernourished, in rags that were once clothes, the family is disoriented and discouraged. I observe their slow movements and haggard appearance. They have become unsure, confused, not knowing how to survive in a land that is being hurriedly restructured and renamed.

  Everywhere below me, post-war chaos is mingled with a powerful hatred and thirst for revenge by the victors. With my bird’s eye view, I know this will pass in time. But, for now, things are about to get worse, even as the Pulver and Mai families are seeking comfort from each other.

  Arms, legs, backs, and heads stay in contact, as though each family member were resting on a spider web; every breath, every vibration connects the Pulvers, Marta, and Friede Mai in such a way that the slightest movement alerts everyone at once. Hours later Teo wakes up, shivering, feverish. Driven by a nervous energy that threatens to give out quickly, he whispers to his brother, Wilhelm, “I want to check outside to see what’s going on.” The others stir. The web has been disturbed.

  Friede, lying close to her mother, awakens. She is having difficulty breathing. Her nostrils are swollen with mine dust.

  Teo returns from his exploration. “It looks clear,” he says, “and I think it’s dark enough. This might be our only chance.”

  The family rouses itself, and Friede pulls at her mother. “No,” she says firmly. “Stay here.” Startled, Marta’s eyes widen.

  “Hurry,” Olga tells Marta. “We don’t know how much time we have. We might not get another opportunity.”

  “We can’t stay. We have to find food. Come.” Marta takes Friede’s hand.

  The family spills out of the mine like sleepy field mice emerging from a mound in the earth. They emerge under a moonless, wet night into the unexpected path of oncoming soldiers. Marta stumbles over a broken branch, slipping in mud. Three soldiers, laughing, herd the family into yet another internment camp they have so desperately tried to avoid. I follow behind, as inconspicuously as I can.

  The camp looks like several others the refugees have known. Uninhabitable, shelled out farm buildings are surrounded by armed guards and hold more humanity than can be expected to survive without food, water, or latrines. Sickness and starvation are steadily reducing the population.

  I watch helpless as the boys are taken away. Teo only lives a few days. Marta and Friede are separated from the rest of the family and brought inside a barn where a hundred women and children crowd together in a space meant for a dozen or so animals. Friede lies on a thin layer of straw.

  The straw prickles and crawls with vermin. Children scream day and night, but they are not the only ones. From an interrogation tent nearby, other screams penetrate the walls. Terrified, Friede tries to hide, but the straw isn’t thick enough to cover her.

  During the night drunken soldiers grab women and take them away. Sometimes soldiers march through, cursing, yelling, beating. Sometimes they kill. Marta and Friede have seen this before at other camps, with the residents of other towns, villages, and farms that no longer produce anything to sustain the once-agrarian population.

  Perhaps potato peels will be found in the guards’ garbage. Perhaps water will be reclaimed from rain puddles or abandoned, rusted, and dented containers. Perhaps Friede will see me.

  Too weak to move, Friede stares at the spot where two walls meet the ceiling. The corner begins to shine, even though it is dark all around. Rays emanate like a huge, golden Y. Friede’s eyes remain fixed on this light even as her mother is dragged off. Later, after Marta is brought back, Friede is still gazing beyond sorrow, hunger, thirst, and fear. I sit on a wire, looking with her into the light.

  Close by, a four-year-old boy pees in the straw. The stench of urine mixes with other odors of blood, vomit, excrement, and death. The boy’s mother lies motionless. A gash runs from her hairline and zigzags like lightning down her cheek. Flies swarm on the wound, which is encrusted with dark clumps of blood. More flies land on the mother, sitting as though at a feast. The woman lies there a long time until a guard discovers her among the many other dead, among many others barely alive. Commanding two prisoners from the men’s quarters, a guard yells, “Over here!” He holds a dirty handkerchief to his nose.

  Friede and I are one; we see a young soldier approaching. He is different from other soldiers. He doesn’t tilt or teeter. He doesn’t swagger.

  He steps out of fog with a fresh, round face. Blond cowlicks have not been flattened by the soldier’s cap he holds in his hands. His blue eyes notice and do not harden themselves against the pain of others.

  The young soldier walks a muddy t
rail down from the main house where the guards sleep, past horse stalls where male prisoners lie weak from hunger, and past the equipment shack where soldiers bring women prisoners selected for the night. He carries the stain of the camp on his boots, but the mire doesn’t reach his heart. Perhaps he will reach the barn where Friede lies later that day, perhaps tomorrow. Friede and I watch him from high above the barn beams and beyond, where a luminous light hovers.

  The next morning the young soldier arrives. He bends down and looks closely at Friede. He notices her eyes seem more amber than green, and though the child’s bones poke against her nearly transparent skin, she emits a kind of strength that startles him.

  Few children remain alive for long in the camp and he is determined to do something. Taking the canteen from his belt, he unscrews the cap and slowly trickles water between Friede’s lips, but the water runs off. He waits for her cracked lips to soften; he waits until her dry lips part.

  Friede swallows, slowly. Her parched throat hurts and the young soldier waits patiently, because he has seen many such children. He has learned to move carefully. He is reminded that his youngest sister is not much older than this starved girl. Friede moves her head slightly. She recognizes the young soldier she has been expecting, and the light in her eyes expands.

  The young soldier’s chest contracts. He turns to Marta. “Yours?” he asks in broken German, pointing at Friede. Marta nods. “She is beautiful. I think of my sister.” He examines Marta, noticing her right eye is swollen shut. Bruised and broken skin has turned blue, purple, and red. “I will get medicine. Also….” He can’t think of the word. He pretends to eat, spooning imaginary food to his mouth with his fingers.