He puts his head back down, hidden behind the tall gully grasses, and rolls over onto his side. The ground is hard and damp, and Stefano grew cold during the night. He raises his eyes, then sits up suddenly. Lying close by is a woman. On her back, she appears to stare at the sky, and he wonders if she was there when he first lay down in the field. Under a quarter moon he had not seen the dullness of her coat, the gray scarf wrapped around her head. But she is not the sole object of his curiosity. Beside her, sitting and watching him, is a small boy, clutching a basket that holds a bundle of linen.
Stefano stands up carefully and walks nearer, the boy eyeing him warily.
“Are you all right?” he asks, but the boy only stares, eyes heavy with resignation and rimmed in red.
Stefano edges near the woman, slowly, so as not to upset the boy, and crouches to examine her. She has her eyes partially open, the color unseen, disappearing to the backs of her eyelids. She is rigid.
He has seen many dead bodies before, but this one is different: there is no obvious cause of death, no shrapnel embedded, no cotton saturated with blood. She is intact.
“Is this your mother?”
The boy says nothing.
“Where is your father?”
The boy says nothing. Stefano tries French and asks the same questions, but still the boy says nothing.
“Are you hungry?” Stefano asks once again in German.
The boy nods. Stefano retrieves some pieces of chocolate from his satchel. The boy takes them eagerly, shoves the palm of his hand to his mouth, and chews, forgetting all else but the food that will barely fill his stomach. He is ravenous and has likely been this way for days.
Stefano looks around him to the empty spaces, the fields that go on forever. The lack of humans, the lack of anything that will give him answers to the plight of the boy. The group has now passed into the distance. There is nothing he can do here, he thinks. He will have to leave him, hope that a farmer finds him, a soldier, someone to take him in. He looks back at the dead mother, then the boy, and shakes his head gently. There is nothing Stefano can offer him.
“Are you from Berlin?” he asks the boy, who is sitting and watching Stefano’s pack, knowing now that the satchel holds more of the food he yearns for.
“You must go up that way,” Stefano says, standing up and pointing north, “where there are houses. Knock on doors.”
He walks backward a few paces, and the boy starts weeping, bottom lip forward and the fingers of his free hand plucking nervously at the side of his shorts.
“Good luck!” Stefano says.
The boy starts to whine and lays his head on his mother’s chest, the food now forgotten, his despair reignited. With the basket now slightly tilted, Stefano can see the contents: a baby’s forehead and nose exposed, skin blue and bloated with death. And Stefano feels something gnaw at the soft belly of his human condition, at the piece of his makeup that can still feel pity, the same piece that made him stop to help the Trümmerfrau.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” he says more gently, presuming that she is. “You must go on without her. Find help, yes?”
The boy keeps one arm across his mother and the other holding tightly to the handle of the basket. He bends down to kiss the baby’s forehead, and Stefano has to look away, unprepared for the small lump that has formed at the back of his throat, at the sight of the gesture, believing he’d grown immune to such things.
“We should put her coat over both of them to keep them warm in the night,” Stefano says, thinking of his own mother. And the boy sits up to watch as Stefano takes off the woman’s coat and uses some force to bend the limbs that are stiff and empty of life. Then he lifts the almost weightless linen bundle from the basket to lie beside the mother and places the coat over both faces. That at least, so they are not staring into the sun.
The boy watches all this silently.
Stefano is about to say a prayer, then changes his mind. It is too late for prayer. He sighs, wishing he had chosen somewhere else to stop, before turning to walk away. He is of no help to the boy. Not now.
As he steps toward the main road, the boy jumps up to follow him with the now-empty basket. He is wearing shorts, long socks that have no stretch, and shoes that are battered with wear.
“Wrong way!” Stefano says, pointing back in the direction he has come. “That way!” When the boy doesn’t move, Stefano steps forward, touches his shoulder, and feels the warmth of him; the living warmth a sharp contrast, he thinks, to the mother and baby he also touched.
“You must not follow me,” he says. “I have far to go.”
Stefano turns back to look at the long quest ahead, then back down at the boy.
The boy fiddles with the tips of his fingers, looks back at the pile that was his mother and baby sibling, and Stefano knows he is thinking the same. He has no one now.
“What is your name?”
A small frown appears on his face, and the boy looks down briefly, then back at Stefano.
“No name? How old are you?”
Still nothing.
“Five? Six? Four maybe?”
The child nods.
“Four?”
He nods again.
“Do you have a tongue?”
Nothing.
“I can’t take you. I have things to do.”
Nothing.
Stefano sighs. He rubs at the dull ache at the front of his head, thinks briefly that he could trick the child, tell him that he will return and leave him there, before deciding otherwise.
“Come with me,” he orders, suddenly frustrated, and the boy follows him back to his mother. Stefano bends to search the woman’s coat pockets. There is nothing to say who she was, where she is from, who the child is. “You must leave the basket,” he says. “It will only slow you down.” But the boy grips it harder.
Stefano links his hands behind his head, paces in a circle, and curses under his breath, regretting again that he found the child and is now burdened with the task of finding him a home.
The boy looks at him with eyes that tell him nothing. He is lost, like I was, thinks Stefano suddenly. Life has turned its back on him, too.
“All right,” he says. “The basket, too.”
Stefano continues heading south, the child half running to keep up with him. Twice he stops at houses to ask for accommodations for the boy. Twice he is rejected. He is told there are many orphans now, and beggars, and the people who open their doors are quick to close them again.
The child grows weary and drops back several yards, his small legs slowing. Stefano stops to wait for him to catch up this time, the traveler frustrated now that he has to slow his pace.
They stop at another house, the front door missing. Stefano checks his map and enters curiously. There are bullet holes in the walls upstairs and traces of blood at the top of the stairs. He is certain there were bodies here that someone has moved, and out the back there are mounds of earth and crosses above them to suggest where they might now lie.
The previous evening he saw Dresden in the distance, across the river, scorched earth and stalks of buildings reaching up to escape the detritus of war. Farther east, the signs of damage lessen in towns and villages clustered between the river Elbe and densely wooded cliffs.
They reach a village that appears unbroken. A working clock in a tower in the center square, surrounded by square buildings with more windows than walls, announces that time hasn’t stopped here. Shop doors are open, and people converse in doorways, in groups, a sight rarely seen publicly since early in the war.
There are still signs, however, that the town has yet to stand on its own. Russian military vehicles, small trucks and vehicles in camouflage green, are parked on the street. A hotel is boarded up with a sign advising that the owners will be returning, but it doesn’t give a date, and a bakery, though open, does not have bread or cakes on display in the windows. A fish shop, its shutters wedged shut with age and time, has words scrawled angrily across
a faded wooden sign: “No Fish.”
Farther down is a café more inviting. Its sign reads “Open” at least. He steps inside, and the woman behind the counter views Stefano suspiciously. She has already surmised that he is not German and that he does not belong here, and there is curiosity, brief, about the child, but only that. It is perhaps the look of him, battle scarred and weary, something he does not need to feign, that makes him less of a threat, along with the child. But there is no mistaking the distaste and distrust in the lines between her eyes. In his head he reminds her that certain rights have been forfeited, that arrogance is one of them.
He asks what is available since there is no menu visible, only a doorway to a kitchen and the smell of boiled cabbage. She is at first reluctant to respond, to move. He opens his bag and holds out some German marks. She says there is talk of a new currency, and these marks will be worthless soon. She takes them anyway. The way she stared at the money too long told him that she would. And though a foreigner, darkly Mediterranean, he is better than no customer at all.
“Is the child ill?” asks the woman, looking over the boy.
“No,” says Stefano, then wonders himself. “What do you have?” he asks her.
She steps aside to point to a chalkboard on the floor against the wall behind her. Most of the handwritten items have been crossed out and new ones written with a careless, resentful hand.
Perhaps a lack of company and conversation drives her to talk regardless of her prejudice and suspicion. She tells him that she attracts many beggars that she has to send away. The Russian military police come there, too, which is the only reason she can stay in business now. They used to harass her and other shop owners, but this happens less now. They seem to have other things to do. However, the relationship with them is still tenuous. Sometimes they pay, and sometimes they don’t. She says she grows her own vegetables. She says her husband came back from the war changed. He is old, she says. He was not worth imprisoning, but he is even more useless now, she says.
There used to be fish, but the river is poisoned from the Russians and the bombs and their Russian piss. They are uncouth, loud, they drink too much, but they come to her café. Her café is reputable at least. There are no dogs on the menu. She repeats what others say because she knows very little, he thinks. She is walled in, surrounded by gossip.
She wishes that things were the way they were in the war. Her café did well, frequented by soldiers and civilians with money. The tourists were mostly German, which was better, she says, though she does not look at him at this point. She has not forgotten to whom she speaks. There are no pictures of Hitler, but her loyalties still lie with the country before the surrender.
“The town is busy. Have new people moved here?”
She asks him to repeat the words. He is unsure if it’s his accent or if she is hard of hearing. He asks the question again.
This time she shrugs and shapes her large lips into those of a fish. She does not care to provide an answer, though she likely has one. She is happy to say only what she wants to.
He doesn’t think ill of her. She is too ignorant. Perhaps she is miserable enough as it is. He thinks about asking if she will take on the child, but the thought of him with her is almost as bad as leaving him with his dead mother. There is little compassion, little interest in the child so far.
The boy and Stefano share a thick pink-red soup with a strange chicken flavoring that attempts to mask the bitterness of the underripe beets. He has to grab the wrist of the child at times to stop him from rushing the spoon to his mouth and spilling some of the contents, but he gives up this battle halfway through.
He orders some milk, but the owner says that they haven’t enough and offers some coffee instead. It has a tinny, bitter taste, and something added that isn’t caffeine.
He says danke as they leave, to which she nods. He stops at a grocery store and the pharmacy to ask several questions, one about a place for the child, but there is none. He also stops at the post office.
“You are going the wrong way,” says the postmaster while customers view the newcomers curiously. “You had best head back toward Dresden if you are looking for transport.”
He is back on the road. It has grown hot. A truck speeds past them, and its engine roars suddenly. The child ducks and falls to the earth.
“No more bombs,” he tells the boy. He reaches down to take his hand, and the boy looks at it, for a length of time, as if it is something he hasn’t seen before, then tentatively takes the larger hand. He helps the boy upright, then crouches down beside him and tells him to climb on his back.
He continues his journey, with short, thin legs looped under his long arms, the boy’s head resting against Stefano’s back, the basket now carried by Stefano, whose steps are slowing, his limp more noticeable.
They both have weight they must carry. Stefano thinks back to the bombs and the bullets and the fire, and he looks down at his bandaged hand. It is no longer a wound. It is now a reminder, among many scars, that will be with him forever.
CHAPTER 3
ROSALIND
In the quiet of early morning, a dog barks from somewhere across the river, and the plock of a broken cuckoo clock and the piping of a goose herald the start of Rosalind’s day. They are just several sounds of time that alert her to the surroundings, beckon her from bed, and push her into the drudgery that is now her life. She lowers her feet to the cool stone tiles and heads toward Georg. At the top of the narrow stairs, she walks immediately into Georg’s attic room, with its vaulted wooden ceiling, which expands the length of the house. His bed sits against the room’s only window facing the wood. Light enters the crosshatched, partially boarded window at daybreak, stamping squares of pale-yellow light across the room’s shades of early morning gray.
Georg, lying on his back, emits an evenly spaced burst of gargles from the back of his throat. Gangly, his long legs take up much of the bed, his toes hanging over the end. Rosalind lifts up the sheet and climbs in next to him. Lying on her side, she watches him sleep, studies his profile, the mixture of pale-red strands in his hair, and his skin, youthful and firm like hers. He sleeps rarely, sometimes haunting the house at night, but when he does, his slumber is deep, like a baby’s.
“You need to tell me what’s in your head,” she asked him several nights earlier when she had awoken just after midnight, and, like many other nights, found him pacing the room and whispering to himself. Communication has been difficult with his new state of mind; his mind can only be reached intermittently now.
“I don’t know,” he had answered, shocked at the interruption. “There are things I need to do.”
“There is nothing you need to do right now.”
“But she’s in danger.”
“Who?”
The question was out before she had time to stop herself. She knew the answer despite the fact it wasn’t spoken. He was thinking about Monique, worrying about her. She had become his obsession after the war.
Monique can take care of herself, she had wanted to say but couldn’t, because she’d tried that once before, and his reaction was frightening. The mention of her name these days can cause him anxiety and set about events that Rosalind is sometimes unable to control. To keep him somewhat stable, since the war took part of his mind, she has found a solution to his depression and his outbursts. But lately his mood has worsened. Lately he has raged and broken things, frustrated by thoughts and images in his head.
Rosalind rests her head on the side of his pillow to ponder. His mouth is open, suspended with the effects of sleep. There are blue veins around the edge of his jaw and down the side of his neck. With her fingers she traces them. This is his good side, how he looked before his final campaign. On the side that is hidden, there is a puckered red scar that runs from the top left-hand side of his temple to halfway across the side of his head, making a track through his hair.
He stirs; his eyes flutter slightly. His body is warm, and she shifts several inch
es closer. She wears a lavender-colored silk chemise that finishes just below her knee. He bought it for her as a gift on their wedding day, three years earlier. Apart from her gold wedding ring, it is the only precious item she has. Other things, other jewelry, her collection of books, her parents’ wedding china and silverware, have all been abandoned, and her parents’ life, her life, is now just rubble in a street in Berlin.
Georg opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling, adjusting to the new day. She wants him to look at her, but he doesn’t turn his head.
With her hand she forces his chin toward her, but still his eyes do not find hers. They stare over her shoulder to something his mind doesn’t really see. She lifts herself up on one elbow so that he can look into her eyes. Visual stimulus works the best with Georg, and soon his eyes are focusing as green stares into blue.
She remembers the first morning after they were married. She remembers the first time he looked at her. He must have loved her then. Did he? It was just later when other things got into his head.
She reaches under the cover and slips her hand into his shorts. She rubs gently at first, and his body shifts slightly, his eyes closing involuntarily. He is partially aroused, but she knows that little else will happen. Even though his body reacts, his mind and heart aren’t hers anymore, even in this state. Perhaps they never were.
“I love you,” she says, eyes welling with tears.
And he looks at her vacantly. He doesn’t recognize her, not this morning, and not the ones before.
1933
“Here she is,” said Rosalind’s mother, Yvonne, lips flattened together. It wasn’t said like a genial introduction, but the tone of it, the way the words sank at the end, suggested Monique was something now they all must bear.
The Road Beyond Ruin Page 2