Lotte was snoring as usual, but Anna thought she heard steps outside the window. She grabbed her coat and boots from the end of the bunk bed and tiptoed to the door. The figure walking to the edge of the compound was slight, shoulders hunched, heading for the streets. When she caught up with him he didn’t seem surprised.
“Go back,” Ulli said, “you’ll get into trouble. Leave me alone.”
“No, YOU’ll get into trouble. Someone’s on patrol out there.”
“It’s Rainer. He’s okay. He knows.”
“Where are you going, Ulli? I’ve seen you leave before. What are you doing? Please tell me.”
“If you must know, I’m mailing something, and no, I don’t want to do it through the box in the office. That’s just the point.”
“I’ll come with you. I need a walk. Can’t sleep,” and she fell in beside him, her boot laces trailing along, Ulli looking at her sideways.
“You don’t care, do you?” he asked after a while.
“About what?”
“Getting in trouble. You seem so safe, so sure about what you do. You just do it.”
“Really? I don’t think —”
“I have always wanted to feel that way. Wanted the — the certainty, you know. Belonging safely and forever where I was, but I was never able to get there, to feel that way.”
Anna waited.
“Then I thought it was just part of growing old enough to be able to make some sort of serious contribution. Then they would let me belong with them.” Ulli stopped again. “But I realized that my parents never seemed to feel quite right either. Like someone had a key to a box with all the answers and wouldn’t share. Does any of this make sense to you?”
“Yes, well, I’m thinking about it. I don’t know — but,” they walked in silence for a while.
“No, I need to think about what you said. And I had no idea that I seem so safe. Because it just isn’t like that anymore, hasn’t been for at least four years. People who appear ‘so safe’ may only think they have answers. Who knows what questions they are asking? I left the church three years ago — went to the principal and asked how to go about it.”
“Oh boy, what did he say?”
“She. She was horrified, called my English teacher into the office. They wanted to know why I would do this.”
“And? What did you say?”
“I told them I had seen the newsreel at the movies the night before. There were these priests and pastors, blessing new artillery installations, and I got terribly upset. I left the movie and ran home.”
“Anna, I don’t want to upset you again, but this is the sort of answer I’m talking about. What if the English and French pastors and, you know, priests and such, what if they are doing the same thing over there?”
“That’s what my English teacher said. They do — but don’t you see that this is the whole point? There are hundreds of thousands of innocent people being killed in this war, men, women and children, and the churches cheer them on?!” Anna was shaking.
“My parents were very, very disturbed about what I did, but then they left me alone, when I explained.”
“This is a difficult one, Anna. I mean we never went to church or anything, but I was baptized, you know? Did you talk to a pastor about it?”
“I don’t know one. We never went to church either. Lilly does, though. But she was away at her Grandma’s then. She cried when I told her later. She said it’s an honoured tradition — for hundreds of years the churches have blessed weapons.”
“Well, shouldn’t they support their side, show solidarity with the troops?”
“Well? Should they really? ‘Right or wrong, my country’?”
“Sssssh - we are yelling.”
“Look, Ulli, I don’t have an answer for what you said, like not belonging and that, but I know exactly when I lost that sense of being part of a large, exciting sort of group or whatever. I was twelve. Our school was in this evacuation programme and a lot of us were sent up to the Baltic Sea, to this almost abandoned coastal village for six months. The Polish management and staff at the old hotel were awfully good to us, tried to be like a surrogate family. Some of us were very homesick, but no air raids, no bombs, lots of fresh fish, lots of friends. It was a good time. One of my sisters was there too. One day I was marching along in formation with the others to salute the flag, and singing, when it was like I heard the words of the song for the first time. I was really listening to myself, to what the words said. And I remember exactly that moment when I thought, ‘No, those lyrics, that’s an error! I don’t think that can be true.’ And I almost stood still, it hit me so hard. I couldn’t keep marching, you know?”
“What were the words?” asked Ulli. In the middle of her story Anna had realized that she dreaded this question, which was sure to come, of course.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said feebly, “the issue is something else, the part where I lost the sureness, the belonging, and beginning to sense that it was a terrible discovery, not something harmless.”
“What were the words? It matters to me,” said Ulli.
“Well, they were stating…”
“What were the exact words? I know you remember them, Anna.”
And she did. She said, sang, the line in their familiar song. “‘A nation’s fortunes must be won by bloodshed’,” and Ulli joined in the last three words, so familiar were they to all of them, growing up with the Hitler Youth in their lives, away from family and school.
They were walking past the darkened houses now, along the deserted street, Ulli aiming for his mailbox. He dropped the letter in and turned.
“The air raid’s due. Do you want to run back or hide in the cemetery?”
“They’ll miss us when they go into the shelter,” said Anna.
“Will the girls snitch?” asked Ulli.
“Not snitch, but they might get worried,” said Anna.
“Lotte will fix that,” said Ulli and they laughed.
And two minutes later, at the sound of the sirens, Lotte was to say, “don’t be ridiculous. Anna takes care of herself. Shut up.”
Ulli and Anna had found a stone bench in the older part of the graveyard, hidden from view by a large headstone, and were looking up at the sky. There might be up to a thousand planes somewhere, flying so high they could barely hear their motors. The high hiss of the spitfires, and those loud, low growling motors of the Wellington bombers in the early war years, those were the British.
“Remember, back in 1942, when they sent seven or eight planes that dropped a few bombs and leaflets all the time? With rhymes on them and silly pictures of Goebbels?” said Anna.
“No, we never got to see them downtown. They were gathered up before the all-clear, our janitor told us.”
“I found some in the woods when I was out picking blueberries once. The flyers were soggy. No significant information, though,” said Anna, “but I got all excited just the same. I mean, here was the enemy trying to communicate with us.”
“Well, yes, mostly dropping bombs in the poorest parts of the city, the working class quarters. Notice how your suburbs out here are practically untouched?” said Ulli.
“How could we miss it? My father says that’s where the bombs do the most damage, downtown, with buildings so close together, multi-storeys —”
“And you get ten times more civilians with one bomb,” said Ulli.
Neither of them realized at the time what Anna’s neighbour would explain a few days later: that the suburbs were spared for future use by the enemy. The military had no intention of living opposite a rat-infested heap of rubble for the next ten or twenty years, no matter how proud an achievement.
In daytime raids the sun would occasionally reflect off the metal doors opening to release the bombs, and send little sparks of a terrible beauty to kids watching below, waiting, not wanting to stay in the shelters, but being shooed back in. It was shrapnel from the FLAK that was hissing out of the sky everywhere, secret manna out of space, even when the bombs were falling in other parts of the city, the coveted shrapnel kids evaluated with cool expertise, collected on the way to school in the early mornings. Feverish transactions would take place during recess: three little ones for one truly big piece of shrapnel.
Right now they were about to drop more bombs on Ulli’s old neighbourhood, and the zoo, the big railroad terminals, schools, churches and hospitals.
“Doesn’t history teach that wars are often a turning point for a civilization, the start of better times, more prosperous for all the people?” said Ulli.
“And did it? After 1914-18? It doesn’t teach that, not to me. And you don’t believe what you just said. You’re challenging me. I have thought about this so much. There is no excuse for starting wars. Any aggressor deserves to lose.”
They watched the shafts of search lights dancing in the sky.
“You talk like a pacifist. If anybody heard you.”
“I don’t care. I’ve become one. At first, you know when I discovered I had lost my faith, so to speak, I tried to tell my best friend. We shared a room. I woke her up in the middle of the night when I realized the words were no error, they were a lie, deliberate lie, to make us, make us — go along.”
“Sssssh, you’re yelling,” said Ulli, and Anna had been.
She took his arm. “Is there someone over there? By that shed?”
“Yes, pay no attention. Just ignore it, forget you saw him,” Ulli said. “What did your parents say?”
“My parents? You don’t imagine I talked to my parents about this!” said Anna. “My father was at the front, and I stopped long ago saying anything upsetting to my mother. She can’t take it at all, at all. Cries all the time. Do YOU tell things like that to your parents?”
“I don’t know if I would. They’re dead. My father fought in France, but I know I can tell anything and everything to my aunt, the one I send the poems to. She’s raising my little sisters. She’s the best.”
“Oh Ulli, I didn’t know, hadn’t heard you lost your parents.”
“She lives near Düsseldorf. My uncle is a nurse in a hospital. They don’t have any kids of their own. I was going to go there too, but these guys called me up.”
“How did they find you in your ruin? I heard your building was demolished last fall?”
“Oh, they find you, believe me, they find everybody. But I was already doing emergency service, remember? I crawled out of my hole in the basement every night and joined the other guys in the bunker. It wasn’t like the postie knocked on the cardboard with a letter or anything.”
“Yes, right. That’s how they found me too. But we lived at our address.”
“They fed us all in the bunker. I had no money, no ration cards, nothing for the cat.”
“You had a cat?”
“Not our cat. She just found me down there and decided to stay. I brought her scraps from the soup kitchen. She ate everything, even potato peels. Rats.”
They looked straight up at the innocent sky.
“This aunt, Ulli, do you think she can help you gain this certainty you’re talking about? Like you said earlier?”
“Do you believe one can learn that? Be honest, do you? I think she and my uncle both know exactly who they are and what they want to do. And it’s so strange, but one of my little sisters was born with a kind of determination. She sees everything, never cries. She has a sort of inner order already.”
“Lucky girl. Do you get along?”
“They both think their big brother is a boy wonder. It gets a little intimidating, such expectations.”
“You know, Ulli, I believe we CAN get self-assurance as we grow older. Things should fall into place. I wish I could lend you some of my parents’ books. Those are blacklisted, you know? They hide them in a row behind other titles in my father’s textbook library. They don’t know I’ve found them. For a while I thought there was something wrong with my mind, when two of my girlfriends couldn’t understand what I’d discovered about the song and what that meant. I felt unbelievably alone, until I found those books. When I read these books I felt incredibly relieved, because I saw that someone else had had these thoughts and feelings, talked about things that I wanted to believe in and had a hard time putting into words. You need to see those poems, Ulli.”
Anna didn’t know as yet that it was Erich Kästner who had stood by in the famous 1933 news photo, in his trench coat and hat, and watched his books being burned by the S.A. And so she couldn’t tell Ulli about it.
“Have you read Theodor Körner?”
“Yes, bits, at school, I think. ‘The People Rise/The Storm Unleashed/Men and Boys…’ but I don’t like his ideas. All this passion, look at us, we’ve heard so much of it.”
“Is it maybe that you can’t relate to the big issues of the day, 1813, around there?”
“Yes, I suspect that’s a big part of it. I thought it was about 1848. No? You’re right.”
“Are your parents hiding a lot of books, then?”
“Yes, a fair number. By the way, Theodor Körner was in my father’s library too. The old soldiers read him a lot, I think. There was also a novel about the World War, called ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, by Erich Maria Remarque. It’s devastating. My father made lots of notes on the margins.”
“What did he say?”
“I wish I could read them. It’s all in short-hand. He’s done that since university. Maybe he didn’t want a nosy person to find out about his reaction to that book. It might mean trouble, though I really don’t know. What is it that you like about Körner?”
“Not sure. I guess I feel closer to my Dad…”
The night had been very quiet for some time, the search lights down and the All Clear would soon be given. They walked along the row of graves, forty years old some, with huge headstones.
“We have no books left. The bombs got everything, you know. I would give anything for a chance to talk to my Dad about, well about everything that matters to me, ask how he felt about being in the infantry, about invading the country of his ancestors.”
“You mean, you mean —”
“One of my French forefathers marched to Russia with Napoleon’s army and stayed in Germany on the long way back. I think he was really sick and they left him behind in a village, and he just eventually stayed.”
“Was your Dad buried in France? Do you know?”
“Yes, my aunt has the papers.”
“When I saw you leaving the other night, I thought you might be taking off. I’m pretty sure the Sergeant saw you too, but —”
“The Serge knows. He caught me the first time, thought I was deserting or something silly, but — promise not to tell anybody —”
“I promise, Ulli.”
“He just cared about whether I knew what I was doing, had a solid plan, safe place, I think, didn’t give me any bull, you know?”
“Oh my God, he could be in such trouble.”
“I know, but he stopped just short of — he told me he had a fourteen year old boy at home.”
“We wondered about that, about kids. You can tell the others aren’t married, can’t you? Even without looking at their hands.”
“Yes, right.”
“And did you ever consider? You don’t have to answer that, Ulli.”
“What are you talking about? Betray my Dad?”
They stood in silence until the all clear sounded, the single note less grating than the rising and falling yowl of the alert, the disembodied voice of authority, like the radio, announcements at railway platforms, and much later the pilots: ‘We’re heading into a bit of weather, so —’ one-way information from on high.
On the way back Anna stopped and turned to Ulli.
“That man in the cemetery. He was watching us. He looked scared, very nervous, pacing back and forth.”
“He is. He’s hiding from someone, something, maybe from everybody. No, someone brings him food. I watched him pick up a brown paper bag just inside the gate the other night.”
“Do you go there often?”
“No, I just walk around a bit. It’s so peaceful out here almost, so intact. It looks like a safe place, from before the war. I wonder about the people who live here, who they are and what they expect will happen to them.”
“Well, totally safe it isn’t, of course. A few weeks ago a bomb was dropped very close to where we were sitting. It partly demolished the house of the Hitler Youth Leader, girls’ division. But we heard she wasn’t home, no one was. We don’t feel really safe out here, and many people have bombed-out families from downtown living with them. People have no gas for their cars, but they may be driving one of those bizarre wood gas cookers that have to be re-loaded every few kilometres. Most don’t have enough to eat either, like the rest. Or they may not be here, may have gone West, to escape from the Russians. But yes, most have more choices than the people around Gesundbrunnen or Wedding or—”
“Yeah, more choices.”
“That man in the cemetery. Isn’t it horrible to be bombed from the air and hunted on the ground as well? He must wonder where HIS people are, HIS friends.”
“Maybe he’s found them. Maybe they’re right there, in the cemetery, maybe he feels close to them there.”
“And maybe he just found a hiding place. I mean, everybody wants to live.”
They walked.
“I just wonder how long I will be waiting, waiting. You know, for fate to happen, or for someone to make me move on, do this, avoid that. Time is such a mysterious thing. I want to grab it sometimes, force it to hold still, be the present until I’m finished with the moment. Ready, you know?”
“Yes, I think so. Just a few weeks ago I felt a kind of glowing happiness, one afternoon and evening and I thought, ‘funny, I know that I’m happy. Please, don’t go away. Let me hold on to this.’ Is that what you mean?”
“Yes, sort of. I think so.”