by Anika Scott
Jakob eased himself beside a locker full of mining junk—rusted pick, leather hat, blasting caps. He found a shovel long enough to prop under his arm, a sturdier support than the branch. He held his breath, mindful of any explosives he may have missed, until he lifted the shovel clear of the locker.
Upright, he oriented himself. To the left, a brick archway, blasted and tidied. On the right, a proper doorway with iron fittings. He chose the tunnel to the right. The concrete walls and floor reminded him of an air-raid bunker. Wires and pipes ran along the ceiling, and there were faded labels on a few of the doors: Communications, Command Center.
He called, “Thanks for leading me in here, friend.”
He told the invisible stranger what the shit-faced farmer’s sons outside had done to him before they rolled him down the rock hill as if he were a bowling ball. They had thrown away his trousers and his wooden leg and worst of all—and wasn’t this a sign of the times?—they had stolen his backpack. With the pork. Which he had organized fair and square after months of negotiation at a nearby farm. After the slaughter—illegal, but nobody had to tell the black-market squad, right?—he’d chopped up the pig himself in the farm’s steaming washhouse. He’d dreamed of roasts, sausages, stews thick with bacon, half of it funneled directly into the bellies of his poor sisters, one pregnant—a mistake, but he couldn’t blame her for lack of judgment. He had inherited most of the sense in the family. Anyway, for that pork, he’d traded his dead brother’s shoes, his dead sister’s communion dress, and his dead mother’s gold chain.
“That’s what the world has come to,” Jakob said. “The dead have to pay to feed the living. Rotten world, eh?” He directed his light into the first open doorway he came to, and gasped. “Jesus, Maria, and Joseph.”
Boxes. Wall-to-wall, unlabeled boxes as far as he could see, stacked in perfect geometric towers. He counted fifty-six, but maybe there were more where his light couldn’t reach. He didn’t know what was inside them, but he did know this was a dream. The bump on his head was making him see what he most needed: a roomful of something he might sell or trade or keep for himself. His fingertips tingled with anticipation as he touched the cardboard. Real enough. He tore it open. Tins gleamed in perfect circles like little mirrors. He groped for the opener that usually came in such boxes, and used it to bend back one lid. The rich smell of black bread drilled a direct line to his stomach. He shoved a fistful into his mouth. How much was here? Twenty tins times fifty-six boxes . . .
He plunged into the next room. More boxes, full of packages this time, crispy zwieback good for years if well packed. He reeled into the next room. Sacks of noodles and rice. In the next, tubs of Linz marmalade and ersatz honey. He nearly wept for joy in the room full of cigarettes, the new money, the hardest currency in Germany. They were Luz brand, worth two or three marks a stick. He couldn’t believe his luck as he stuffed his pockets. This was a black-market warehouse, no doubt about it. Maybe the cologne-soaked stranger from outside was a racketeer.
“Hey, friend, you still here? Look, I know people. Can unload this food for you no problem. Profits in the stars, I’m telling you. Naturally we’d keep enough for ourselves. I mean, you can’t sell all of it. Too hard to transport, and besides, winter is here. Remember last winter? If I ever see a turnip again, I’ll bludgeon somebody with it. But this place . . .” Jakob passed the open doors and wished he had his backpack, a wheelbarrow, a truck that could haul these glorious calories home to his family. “This place will save us. We’ll stuff our families all winter. You got a family?”
A low voice said, “Hands up, thief.”
The hairs on Jakob’s neck tingled. The voice came from out of nowhere, the empty tunnels. “Seen that film too, friend. Gangster shoot-out. Bang, bang.” He bit open a pack of cigarettes and tipped one into his mouth. He wasn’t dumb enough to light it in a coal mine, but the feel of it soothed him. “Why don’t you come out and let me shake your hand? You helped me outside. I appreciate that. We got a lot to talk about.”
Wherever the stranger was, he kept out of the beam of Jakob’s lamp. “You’re not that crippled.”
“I love it when people tell me that. You going to show yourself?”
The stranger’s voice had rust on the edges like a machine that needed oiling. “I said hands up.”
“Can’t. I’d fall over. War wound.”
“Where?”
“You’re looking at it. Left leg.”
“I meant where were you when you got wounded?”
“Stalingrad. Look, you going to come out?”
“Nobody got out of Stalingrad. The German Army died a heroic death fighting for the Reich.”
“A few of us got out, a few surrendered, and the rest died eating shit. You going to come out so I can see who I’m talking to?”
The stranger stepped into the tunnel. He held a fistful of darkness Jakob knew was a pistol. And he wore a tunic, field gray, the eagle and swastika over the breast pocket. For the first time in his life, Jakob let a cigarette fall unsmoked from his lips. Field gray was forbidden. The swastika was forbidden. “Dressed for a party, are you? Brits’ll lock you up if they see you like that.”
The stranger tilted his head away from Jakob’s light. The miner’s tilt, as Papa had always had even in the open air. “Name, rank, and unit.”
“What?”
“Name, rank, and unit.” The soldier’s voice wavered, deep one moment, cracking the next.
“Wait a minute. How old are you?”
The soldier extended his arm.
“All right, I’ll play along. Jakob Relling. Was a corporal. Twenty-Ninth Infantry, motorized. Wiped out in Stalingrad, and if you call that heroic, I’ll split your lip.”
The soldier straightened his back, parade-ground stiff. “Corporal Relling, in the name of the führer, I arrest you for stealing from the German Army.”
“Listen, kid, any adults around here I can talk to? Who owns this stash you’re sitting on?”
“You’re my prisoner. Quiet.” The soldier gestured with his gun at the tunnel behind him. “Move.” He stepped backward without looking where he was going. In the face of that gun, Jakob’s pains flooded back, all the places he hurt, all the places that would hurt if the boy pulled the trigger.
“Be reasonable, kid. We can talk—”
“Quiet. Move.”
They went down new tunnels, passing new rooms, new vistas of food and supplies. Jakob spotted packets of dried pudding and tins of coffee-flavored chocolate. He thought he heard the soft whir of a machine. A pump? Electricity?
The soldier called for a halt. “In there.”
“What’s behind that curtain?”
The boy stared at him from under his steel helmet. Jakob drew back the curtain himself. Beyond was the dark of places he wanted to forget he ever knew. Cracks in the earth where tanks buried men. Bullet-riddled rooms and rat holes. Tunnels strung with wire. This was the dark of the sewer and the bunker. War dark.
“Hey, how long you going to keep me in there?”
Inside, something rustled. Like wings.
“Until the war ends.”
6
Clara finally crept out of the freezing hovel where she’d spent her second night on the run. Only then did she see it was a pigeon coop, a miniature wooden house with a dusty red curtain in the window space. Whoever owned this luxury enclosure had loved his pigeons. They were gone now, only feathers scattered on the floor over splatters and stains. She brushed her coat of dried droppings and then limped, holding her hip, out of the yard and into the street.
Here was a solid block of brick houses dark with soot and grime, so anonymous, so much a part of every industrial city in the region, she couldn’t be certain where she was. Before the war, she would have thought the street ugly, but not now. The houses were still standing, one after the other, down the entire row. This was the best she could hope for after the bombardments—an intact street. She hadn’t seen many since jumping out of Fenshaw�
�s truck. That night, she’d ducked in and out of the ruined buildings of what she later learned was Gelsenkirchen, on Essen’s northeast border. She’d had to be fast and silent, avoiding the lights of Fenshaw’s men as they searched. In the end, she had burrowed into a mountain of debris right in the street and stayed completely still until the men dispersed. From there, she had headed west, she’d hoped, slowed by pathways blocked with rubble, hiding in the ruins when she heard the rumble of a vehicle in the road. By dusk, she had climbed into the pigeon coop out of exhaustion, and slept until daylight. She’d seen no signs that signaled she had reached Essen. For all she knew, she had wandered in circles.
The few people outdoors, mostly women, led their children toward the end of the row where a large gate and a pit tower rose out of the light fog. Clara hesitated to speak to them, but then realized she looked torn and dirty enough that no one would recognize her. She stopped a woman in a flowered scarf. “I know this is a crazy question, but I need to know if this is Essen or Gelsenkirchen or—”
“Got hit in the head a little hard, eh?” the woman said, without much interest. Her boy was tugging at her hand.
Clara touched her forehead and winced at the bruise. “I fell off a streetcar.”
“Uh-huh. Well, it’s Essen all right.”
Clara forgot her bruises and pains. She was home. This was a street in her city. She was home, and now she had an advantage. Captain Fenshaw had every other advantage—guns, men, transport—but this was her place. Hers, from the smokestacks over her head to the mining tunnels under her feet.
She walked the street slowly, getting to know it, letting it sink in. There were no signs, no nameplates on the walls. She didn’t know what district she was in, but she assumed she was in the north where most of the working-class neighborhoods had been built near the steel mills and factories and mines. At the end of the street was a junction. The view stopped her short.
A field of frost-covered rubble. It made her dizzy, the vast emptiness, the mind-boggling randomness of the destruction. The intact street behind her, the seemingly intact mine in front of her. And then, no-man’s-land. Maybe a factory had once been here, but also houses, shops, a school perhaps, all leveled in the bombardments. In this city, there was no separating industry from life, and the Allies knew it. She had heard on the news that they were thinking of letting Essen die as a lesson to the world, to show what happened to war-mongering industrial cities.
Turning away from the ruins, she felt the same sorrow as she had when looking at her family photograph.
She continued toward the gates of what she knew by the familiar smell to be a coal mine. No one sat in the gatehouse to check who came and went, so she joined the people flowing into the paved yard, women and children mostly, buckets and pitchers in their fists, the children a gaggle of tiny legs and missing teeth. She felt keenly how she belonged to no one, while everyone else belonged to someone. Men in the plain coats and drab caps of miners threaded through the crowd looking for their women, picking up their children slowly with aching backs. She smelled potato soup coming from the open double doors of the canteen in the distance, and she suddenly felt light-headed and drained. She hoped this mine wasn’t far from Elisa’s house. But which one was it of the many across the city?
Again, there were no signs on the gatehouse, the canteen, or the other buildings surrounding the yard, so she wandered to the pithead and watched the wheel turn. It felt good to be back on familiar ground, in a living mine. Eleven years ago she had started her first job in one of the family’s own, light secretarial work at first. She’d taken it as a lark, to annoy her mother. Elisa was a great help, teaching her the finer workings of an office, its systems and rhythms, all the little ways to increase efficiency. And Clara had been surprised by how much she liked it, earning her own money, acquiring responsibility. Papa was amused by what he teasingly called her “unbridled ambition,” but he began taking her to meetings, introducing her to people who mattered. Her mother tolerated it all as long as Clara reported every detail about every meeting, every bit of office gossip, every contract or important document that crossed her desk.
She lined up with the women outside the canteen and listened to their chatter, expecting them to talk about her escape, whatever news the Allies had put out there about the events of two nights ago. Dangerous woman escaped from British custody, rewards for her capture. But the women had more important things to discuss. The shop allegedly selling ham. How to scrape together a Christmas dinner. The shortage of rat poison. She wished she could join in as she’d done at her first job. Now and then she had taken a meal at one of the canteen’s long wooden tables, and the miners and their families had crowded the benches around her, everyone wanting a chance to sit with Fräulein Falkenberg. They were curious, and asked all sorts of questions. What was it like to drive a Mercedes? What did champagne taste like? Were the bath fixtures at Falkenhorst made of gold? She had turned the tables, just as interested in them. What did they do on Sundays? What songs were they rehearsing in the local choir? What books were they reading? And then: What worried them?
When they told her that medical supplies were low or the food subpar, she talked to the officers of the mine, who made changes based on her wishes alone. They assumed she spoke for her father.
Finally, she interrupted the women in the line. “I’m a bit turned around today. Which mine is this?” At the odd looks the women gave her, she took a guess. “Is this the Sophia shaft?” A Falkenberg mine named after her grandmother.
“Hope you gave him as good as he gave you,” one of the women said, gesturing at Clara’s face.
Clara touched the bruise on her left cheek, a dull pain under her glove. “A soldier roughed me up. A Tommy.” She added a harder edge to her accent to show she was a local. “Think they can do whatever they want with us girls.”
“Serves you right for going with one of them.”
“I wasn’t going anywhere with him. That’s what got me into trouble. Which mine is this?”
“You almost got it right. It’s Heinrich shaft two.”
Clara smiled her thanks. This was excellent news. A Falkenberg mine, named after her grandfather, who was rumored to have been buried in an iron coffin. It was one of the ghoulish family stories Clara had loved as a girl. As she left the mine, she filled in where she was on her mental map of the city. Nearby she would find Falkenbergstrasse, the main artery of the city as she knew it, the northeast axis where goods and people flowed south to the city center and the southern rail lines and back up to the northern districts, ending at the family iron works. She guessed she was about twenty minutes from Elisa’s house, a villa in the Sophienhof housing estate. Her grandmother had begun building the estate for Falkenberg workers forty years ago. After she died, the workers claimed she was the reason not a single bomb had dropped on Sophienhof all through the war. Grandmother held a protective hand over the homes she had built. The family was a power to be reckoned with even in death.
SHE LEFT FALKENBERGSTRASSE at a stone arch, the entrance to Sophienhof. Chimneys were smoking in some of the semidetached cottages. There was even glass in some of the windows, lace curtains, carved shutters, swept doorsteps, everything as she remembered. Just as it should be.
The fog was lifting. On the horizon, a vertical line pierced the sky like a black spear thrust into the clouds. That was Hans—Tall Hans—the tallest smokestack in the city and the heart of the iron works. He was always part of the horizon at Sophienhof, enduring as a mountain.
“Hello, Hans,” she said, not feeling at all foolish to be talking to a smokestack. When she was little, Papa used to point up and say things like, “Hans is coughing a lot today,” or “Hans needs a wash.” As a girl she’d been sure the factories, power plants, and machines in the Works had lives. Had souls. The Works itself had been a great, humming, living creature. At the end of the war, it was silent, devastated by the bombs, but Hans defied them. He was still standing tall, towering over the cottages
her family had built. The war hadn’t taken that.
At a curve in the road, she detected a new scent in the air: the smell of old smoke and soot. The houses she could see were intact, curtained, groomed, yet there was that smell, a deep memory of the bombardments. She quickened her step, passing through the wood that separated the cottages from the villas for the higher employees. There used to be linden trees here, but now it was a forest of mossy stumps.
Her hip and shoulder were flaring with pain, her hands and feet numb with cold. She needed a hot oven and warm food. It was finally hitting her how profoundly Captain Fenshaw had changed her situation. She wasn’t just in hiding anymore, she was on the run. She was homeless. She had no identity card, which meant in this world, she didn’t exist. She couldn’t check into a hotel, yet she couldn’t spend her nights in pigeon houses, not when the air was growing sharper and the temperature dropping.
She needed to shelter with Elisa, to rest and heal and think about what to do next. But she worried she would pose a risk to her friend and to Elisa’s son, Willy, if Captain Fenshaw discovered Clara in their house. She didn’t know what he would do to them. Separate them, perhaps, Elisa in his custody, her son alone. He would be a teenager now but still, Clara couldn’t allow that to happen. For a moment, she even considered finding her mother. Clara didn’t think Anne would betray her to Fenshaw, but there was a chance she might use her daughter to gain something from her fellow Brits just as she’d done at those Fascist rallies and marches in England years ago. Clara hadn’t trusted her mother since that incident at boarding school—her reaction, her treachery. No, she wouldn’t go to her now. She had to take the risk with Elisa, but cautiously.
At the end of the wood, she saw what was left of the villas, and gasped in dismay.
The first house on the street, Elisa’s house, was a ruin, smashed as if a great fist had pounded it from the sky. Two floors, brick and stone and glass, shattered. The roof had collapsed; the walls were fragments of what they used to be. The villa had been a wedding gift to Elisa from the Falkenbergs. Elisa had told her the house keys had appeared in an anonymous silver box as if delivered by elves. Clara had brushed off her thanks, as her mother advised. A house was nothing. The family had so much. Why not give to an employee who was so loyal?