The air was full of dirt, he was gagging on it. He fell to his knees and started frantically to dig. A man was tapping on the wall with a stone. Then he put his ear to it, listening. Another man was digging too; the two of them tore at the bricks with bare hands. A woman was putting bits of cement and stone into a bucket. She did it very slowly and delicately, as though handling porcelain. He observed her while furiously scooping out rubble. His ears suddenly did something peculiar. Noises rushed in, very loud, a whooshing sound and a man’s voice right next to him.
“Stand back! It’s going up.”
The fireman’s face was black. Nicolai carried on digging. The fireman pulled at his shoulders and made him stand up.
“They don’t answer. They’re gone. Everybody out of here!”
“But we can get water on it—cool them down—it’s so hot—”
“They’re dead. The whole city’s on fire—the fire brigades are coming from Bremen and Lübeck and Kiel. It was on the radio.” The fireman shook his head. The sweat running down his face made him look as if he were crying. Lore took Nicolai’s arm, and they ran through clouds of smoke so hot that his face burnt. There was ash and smoke everywhere, and all the people had black faces. A woman with her clothes on fire, burning bright like a torch, ran past them and he jerked Lore to one side. Phosphorus. One touch and her clothes would ignite. Another woman was screaming, pregnant, huge-bellied and completely naked. A man tore off his clothes, which were burning with jets of flame. They ran back towards the lake, past a woman who was laughing hysterically, her shoulders shaking, her eyes wild. The heat took all his breath away; his skin was burning.
At the water’s edge, Lore knelt and took off her coat and plunged it into the water. She put it over the two of them. Long tongues of flame were coming out of the houses. The hot wind blew and the flames suddenly changed direction and leapt out sideways. Still the bombs were falling and the sky was ever brighter. On they went, fast, turning away at the next corner. The fire was coming their way. It was a live creature that leapt hundreds of feet one way and then reared high and saw them and chose the new direction, determined to catch them.
He saw shops, a bank, a clothes shop with an elegant mannequin intact next to a blackened mess open to the sky. Lore pulled him into the shop and they went over the broken glass. She led the way down the stairs to the cellar. He stumbled over glass and brick. Still she pulled him on.
“Quick, Nicolai.” At the bottom, a dividing wall had partly collapsed and, stepping over the lowest part of it, they found themselves looking into the vault of the bank. She was pushing him now, through the wall and into a smaller space where there was a circular steel door two metres wide. No people were here, just the two of them and Nicolai thought that it was strange, very strange, that a substantial basement like this was empty when so many people were crammed into other ones just along the road and that she was clever to find it.
“Go, crawl, get into the vault,” she said, pushing his arms into the coat and shoving him into the dark space. “I’ll close this. Get as far as you can. Then it will pass over you.” Then he understood; there was no way, on the smooth inside of the vault, which had no handle, of pulling the door to behind him.
“Not without you.”
“It needs my strength to keep the door shut.”
He started to rise up against her, but she pushed him back down.
“I can’t go on. Don’t make me,” she said, with such anger, such fierce command that he recoiled.
“I’m staying with you, Lore, don’t do this—”
“You will do this for me. You must.” He held her hands, to prevent her from pushing him, but her face was so desperate that he could not bear it and at once let go. She saw then that she had won.
She smiled at him and touched his cheek. “Thank you, now go quickly, as far and as fast as you can.” Then he was crawling in the dark to the back of the vault with his own breathing echoing loud and the coat, heavy, dragging, but cooling him down. He went round a corner. He went until he could go no farther and huddled, drawing the coat over him. He could hear something, beyond his own rasping intakes of breath. She was talking to someone. She was a distant voice, crooning in the dark.
The door closed. Somehow, she had found the strength to shut it. A great rushing sound and whistling dinned in his ears and then something came up and thumped him.
He lay in blackness listening to the sound of his breath. Nicolai opened his eyes. He saw nothing. He reached out, touched something hard. He was lying on the ground, which was warm. He was not at home. He lay for a long time hoping that Lore would come, though he also knew that she would not. Perhaps she had gone to find water. He was so thirsty. He waited for a time, feeling dizzy and sad. There was something wet on his head. When he came to again, he realised how silent it was. It was all over. He was inside the vault. His head hammered; the air might give out. With an effort he made himself sit up, crawl forward. He felt his way to the front of the vault in the pitch-dark. Now, at last, he felt something that was round and that had to be the big steel door, which he put his shoulder to, wrenching it. Then he flopped onto his back and kicked at it as hard as he could, his strong boots shoving, for it did not move at first, he was trapped. Terror gave him strength for the thing formed a faint grey rim, which turned into daylight. He came out into the cellar where he had left her, gasping for breath.
The black thing he was looking at—that was not her. Lore was wearing a blue dress. The little mummified doll had nothing on at all. She was very small, smaller than him, the size of a child. Her dress had had flowers on it, blue flowers on a pale background. Vergiϐmeinnicht. She had told him once that this was her favourite flower. Nicolai sat for a long time and looked at this funny person with no clothes on. The legs and arms were shrunken, and the wizened little face was a brown monkey’s face. Lore had a very pale face. He laid the still-damp coat over her. There was something in the pocket, which had to be saved. The overwhelming smell of hot bricks and cement made him feel sick. The sky had entered the building or, rather, there was no building left, just a pile of smouldering rubble. He climbed an incline of loose bricks and pieces of metal into the street. A chain of women were passing buckets from one to another. An old man covered with fine white ash seized his shoulder and shook him.
“Genieϐe den Krieg. Der Friede wird fürchterlich sein.”103
He was grinning, teeth white in a black face.
So many buildings were reduced to ruins and there were no place-names or signs. He wandered slowly along, trying to work out where he was going. The heat came off the ground in nauseating waves. In an open space, people were lying on the ground, others passing had terrible burns on their faces. Farther on he was surprised to see a whole pile of wood stacked up, which surely would have burnt up straight away. Looking closer, he saw it wasn’t wood but bodies. He carried on. The church had lost its steeple, just as the poet had predicted. An army truck was giving people water. He stood near it for a while, for he had no cup to drink with and no energy to ask. A man noticed him and took a cup, offering a drink. He realised that he was very hungry and thirsty.
“You all right, pal? What about your head?”
When Nicolai touched it, it was extremely painful. His hand came away wet and sticky.
“Better get it seen to.”
“I need to get to my unit,” he said. “They’re in the cellar over there.”
“I see,” said the man.
“I’ll be off then. Thanks for the water.” He walked along. The man shouted something about his head. Nicolai knew that the river would lead him home. His body ached, but he knew not to stop, for if he sat down he might never stand up again. He plodded along the Elbchaussee to their turning.
Though their neighbour’s house was rubble, theirs appeared intact. Close up, he saw that a bomb had collapsed part of it. The front door remained firmly closed (Lore had the key), while Wolfgang’s bedroom was gone and Sabine’s, on the floor above. The
wallpaper looked fresh and clean, though, and his brother’s shelf of trophies stood intact, blinking in the sun. The stair went up one half-landing and cantilevered into a void. He walked around to the side and climbed over the bricks into the dining room, went into the hall and down to the cellar. The stone steps held firm. The cupboards stood at a crazy angle off the wall and many jars had slipped down and broken, but he found a jar of peas intact and another with carrots. It took a long time to get the lid off, but he managed. Thirstily, he drank the sweet liquid. He lay in Lore’s little room with the green window, smashed long ago. In the little piece of mirror his face was black all over. Then for a long time he came to himself and went in flashes of light and dark.
Rats were everywhere, big fat brown ones kept popping up all the time. They could reach the food from the broken jars that lay beneath the cellar floor, though he could not. In any case, he did not like to stand, because it made him giddy and sick. Long ago, water came out of the taps. The flies, fat iridescent green ones, liked it here. Hamburg belonged to the animals. The flies, first of all, were the lords of creation. They sat on the splinters of glass in the hot sun and they shone, just as the glass did. The sound of the flies humming was the first thing that he heard in the morning. They rustled and hummed all day long. He was a little boy who shinned down trees, because the stairs were gone. He was a child who liked trains and who would unpack his train set and place it in the centre of his room and watch it grow to the periphery until there was no room for anything else. Meanwhile he lay still so his head would not hurt and watched the rats run wild from the garden into the house and out. They were his friends, they and the child. He kept the photograph from the pocket of Lore’s coat propped up near him. The child looked back at him with her wise and charming face. He had a wonderful image of her mother, which he would go up and look for in a minute; he was sure he would manage to climb the tree up to his room, when he was not so tired. He liked the dark. In the dark, he felt that he was truly himself. He sank into it and with soft fingers felt through his small blind world. On the day when his mother came quietly stepping down over debris she screamed because of the rats. That woke him up. Then, stumbling to the bed, she cried.
When he woke up properly, he was lying in a white room, on a white sheet, spread on an army mattress, a metal bedstead. His head was bandaged and a young girl was looking at him, very pretty and noticeably pregnant.
“Don’t move,” she said.
In a moment he remembered who she was.
“Wolf ?”
She shook her head. “Don’t speak,” she said.
So he lay perfectly still and looked at her.
Clara’s parents had been killed in the big raid on Lübeck and she had come to live with them. Wolfgang had wanted to marry Clara, who had written to tell him that they were expecting a baby, but he had not come back. There was no news of him at all. Sabine came to the military hospital, hopped from one foot to the other and told him things. They were going to be evacuated and live on a farm. She had every reason to hope that there might be lambs. Certainly, there would be chickens to feed and pigs, whose backs she could tickle with a stick.
His mother sat beside his bed and tried to control her tears. She wept for him, for her mother and Wolfgang and for all the miseries crowding upon them. He wanted to tell her not to cry, for it quite destroyed her small remaining beauty, but he did not have the strength to talk. Even when she heard that his injuries and his youth exempted him from further service, she cried. It was good news, Sabine said, clapping her hands together; she and Clara were so happy that he was to go with them. Nicolai said nothing. Just looking at these three, his womenfolk, took up all the strength he had. He needed to husband his energy to fight the daemons that came at night. Sometimes they were huge-bellied women, burning like torches, with his grandmother’s face; sometimes little men with black faces who spoke in Lore’s voice and said such wicked things.
The station apart, the centre of Hamburg was unrecognisable. The sweetish stench was bodies decaying under the ruins; the silence, where he remembered screams, was eerie. On the day they finally took the train east on the first leg of the journey to a rural billet near Schwerin, it fell to the man of the family to push through the lines at the station to get something to eat for the journey, to brandish his mother’s MUKI104 cards in the faces of the grumblers. The train was a special one, crowded both with evacuees with their suitcases and those with empty rucksacks going out of the city to “hamster,” to barter cash or belongings for food. He fought for a seat for Clara and then for one for his mother, who took Sabine on her knee. Sabine soon left to go to Clara, for she was totally fascinated by her. He could understand that. She was white and pink and gold and long-lashed, succulent as a peach.
Nicolai stood in the corridor, endlessly buffeted by those making their way up and down the crowded train, looking out at the black sea of rubble that had been their city. People talked in hushed voices of the disaster, claiming that the firestorms had consumed anything from twenty to fifty thousand people. An old man spoke in a quivering voice of Sodom and Gomorrah. Everything had been swept away; loved ones had died, some bodies would lie forever where they had fallen. Yet the train rocked from side to side, and people swayed and knocked against one another and apologised and ate whatever they had with them and breathed garlic and belched, just as though none of it had happened. He carried with him a few Reichsmarks, the green leather book of his father’s sketches, the photograph of the child he had never met and the package of photographs snatched from his demolished room. Head pressed against the glass, staring out, he knew only that he was with the wrong people and that he was going to the wrong place.
FIFTEEN
Cannes, August 1943
Ilse pulled on a cotton blouse and skirt, tiptoed past Marie-France, who in this heat slept naked, a Mediterranean Venus with silky, sprawled limbs. She went past Maman Bonnard’s bedroom, through the parlour with the pull-down bed Fernand used to sleep on, before he left for the maquis in January. That very week Marie-France had offered her a home, masking her kindness with a shrug. “Our flat needs three people,” she had said. “Besides, I’ll need company with Jean-Baptiste gone.” Leaving the Bonnards’ address with Monsieur Mallemet, Ilse had moved the next day. She wheeled Marie-France’s bike from the hallway into the brilliant light and inspected the tyres. Early as it was, the heat was searing. She hoped the tyres would last. A used one in reasonable condition cost five cartons of cigarettes and she had no spares. She cycled down and across the Rue Meynadier. Approaching the Mairie, air-raid sirens wailed their screech. Traffic stopped and the streets cleared. In the nearest shelter, people sweated, listening to the flat concussion of anti-aircraft fire somewhere to the east.
“Americans,” said one girl. “Probably Cap d’Antibes.”
They smiled at one another. Everyone had hope these days. When the all clear sounded at last, Ilse stepped out into the beautiful day. In the atelier they were packed like sardines and at home, grateful though she was to be there, she was always with the two women. Every train and tram was crammed full, the town crowded with refugees and soldiers. To be alone and freewheel along the coast was an exquisite luxury.
The road towards Antibes was extremely steep in places. There was almost no traffic. Pedalling blithely on, she absorbed the blinding dazzle of the sun on the greenhouses where vegetables grew and marvelled at the extreme beauty of the coast. Her white skin burnt much too easily. By eleven o’clock, Ilse had to stop and rest. Up ahead was a villa with a magnificent view. All along the coast, workers were constructing a wall to repel an Allied invasion from the sea. The beaches bristled with anti-personnel mines and barbed wire; now they were building blockhouses and setting booby traps. Observers would be making precise notes on any obstacle that might stop landing craft from coming in. Yet others would be risking their lives, relaying that information in Morse to the Allies.
Nearer the villa a group of men were turning cement mixer
s. She pedalled the last few yards and stopped under the shade of a tall pine tree, unclipping her water bottle. The villa was aptly named Bellevue. Her legs shook from the exertion. The water was warm. She took a big swig and let it gurgle down her throat. This villa was being bricked up, turned into a blockhouse.
“Mademoiselle!”
One of the workers from the Organisation Todt,105 sweating in thick winter trousers with no shirt, had seen her. He put down his shovel and sauntered a few steps in her direction. “Trop chaud pour travailler, Mademoiselle!”106 he said in an accent she knew at once was Polish. It was not too hot to flirt, however. She wore no brassiere under the thin cotton blouse; evidently, he noticed. He was very muscular, smooth-skinned and deeply tanned from the work outdoors, with wonderful blue eyes.
“J’ai beaucoup soif,”107 he said.
She held out the bottle towards him.
“Je remercie, Mademoiselle.”108 He came closer, took a very modest drink. He spoke very quietly. “Can you help me, Mademoiselle? And my friend, he’s an Armenian? And there’s another, Hungarian? We want to fight in the maquis.”
Why had he picked her? His eyes, which were very clear, looked at her with an almost defiant expression. Over his shoulder Ilse saw a second man, his friend. They were all being watched by an armed guard cradling a machine gun. He came round the side of the house and started walking towards them. She backed off. The Pole returned the bottle and stepped back a pace.
“Merci, Mademoiselle!”
He stood, just watching her. Ilse got back on the bicycle and set off. The macadam was so hot that the tar was melting, it pulled at the tyres as she coasted downhill. Things were blurring. The day of pleasure was spoilt. It was too late, she no longer knew anybody, she could do nothing for anyone. She was perfectly useless. She could not stop thinking about the Pole, how he smiled and that the blue of his eyes was the exact same colour as François’s and that she would not help him and he knew it.
The Children's War Page 37