Something flashed in the light. It was a switch plate he saw, maybe even copper though it was too dirty to tell for certain. Georg reached for it and felt the familiar sting. He sucked the blood from his thumb. All along the pile he could hear the curses of men who cut themselves. There were no bandages below, and so they stayed in their places and dug. Best to let it bleed. Let the ash staunch the flow. Ten days after the bombing and the ash was falling still. It floated down from the branches and stung his eyes, and no matter how much water he drank he felt a strange burning in his chest. They were all coughing. The men working the piles and the ladies with their push carts, they wheezed like asthmatics. They spit up dark clots and gasped for air, and one man choked in his sleep, his fingers wrapped around his throat and nobody could pry them loose.
The city he knew had vanished. He’d come out from the shelter that night and nothing was the same. The detonating bombs had opened the buildings and the incendiary bombs that came next had lit them up like torches. The bombs had fallen between Neubaustrasse and Hofstrasse, on Theaterstrasse and Bahnhofstrasse and in the Hofgarten and over the St. Laurentius church with all its flowers from the forty hours’ devotion that had ended the night before. They landed on Winterhäuser Strasse and on the Katzenberg and right by the river, and the buildings shook and buckled. The people outside wandered along the wrecked streets. They stepped over the bodies that lay across the broken stones and some of them sat down like visitors and watched the fires grow. The St. Stephan church was burning and the university buildings, the houses, all the houses in old town with their wooden timber frames, and Georg ran toward the river, which was black even as the city burned.
Georg waded knee-deep into that cold water. An old woman beside him slipped in the mud and he took her by the hand. “Let me go,” she told him, pulling her hand away. “Better to drown than to burn,” and there were people all around him. They stood together in the water. A little boy jumped from the bridge and others lay dead on the riverbank, and somebody must have found a wine cellar with a few unbroken bottles. The ladies carried them to the river, two and three at a time, cradling them like babies against their breasts. They drank while the city burned. They drank and wept and shook their heads, and Georg took one of the bottles and finished it.
The old Ludwig station was gone when he came out and all the letter bags that sat outside its doors. The English Institute and the University Church and St. Michael’s had burned, and the nuns died in their convent and one was thrown up into a tree from the blast and flamed like a torch between the branches. The nursing school and the regional archives were gone and all the files for all the patients. Anyone who had stayed too long in the shelters was dead. They’d choked on the fumes. Thousands dead, thousands under buildings and in the streets and nowhere to put them because the cemetery had burned, too.
Some of the survivors walked the back roads toward Zellingen and Höchberg and all the little towns along the river and up in the hills. Their faces were black from the smoke, and their eyes were black, too, and looked straight ahead. Others climbed the piles instead and looked for each other in the ruins. They wrote messages in chalk. Has anyone seen the Becker family?, they wrote, Has anyone seen Jürgen Schiller? Here rest in God the residents of Marktplatz 5. God rest the Melzers, and Mariette Heissler, your parents are at 147 Helmstrasse. The notes they wrote covered all the walls that were left in the city.
Georg was so close to home. Just two days walking and he’d be there, but it was walking toward the Amis and not away from them, and so he stayed instead and dug in the piles and pulled out what he found. Every now and again the men looked west over the river, and the clouds were brown from smoke. The city was calm and no wind blew, but they felt the strange charge in the air. It was coming from the west. Coming like a wave, and soon it would break over them.
Georg reached inside the pile again and grabbed hold of the copper plate. He didn’t look down at the street because that’s where the bodies were. He looked up instead at the yellow sky. He should feel anger at the Amis and the English who burned his city. He should feel sorrow for the dead, but he felt nothing at all but the need to sleep. At night he lay on the ground with all the other men and boys who had no place to go and he closed his eyes but sleep didn’t come and during the day he worked the piles in a daze. Russian prisoners cleared the bodies out. Even now they were looking. They found them by smell and marked the spots with circles, under fallen doorways and in cellars where people had suffocated. The Russians stacked them high like firewood. They dug the graves and rolled the bodies in, and they threw lye between the layers. The old women waited with their shovels and their barrows. Not even a blanket to wrap them, not even a marker for their names. God help them, the women said, God give them rest. Let the earth fall light upon them. They crossed themselves and waited for more.
Georg filled his bucket, and the men grunted around him, and their faces went shiny from the heat. “They’re coming to Kassel.” The old man below him was shouting again. Every morning he claimed his spot, and sometimes he laughed for no reason and clapped his hands. “Any day now they’re coming.” He smiled at Georg, and both his front teeth were gone.
“Yes,” Georg said, “yes, they’re coming for certain.” He dropped the plate into his bucket. Even in the heat the old man talked without stopping to rest. He heard things down at the station or along the cots where the officers slept. He repeated them throughout his shift and embellished them. Kassel and Gemünden and Rieneck, they were taking them all, but not Hammelburg. No, the Amis ran back like women there. They choked on their chewing gum. He looked up at Georg and smiled again. The city burned from below. It wasn’t the bombs that did it. It wasn’t the planes. It came from the tunnels and not the sky.
Georg pretended to agree, “That’s true,” he said, “you’re right,” and he wanted to finish the pile so that he could move away from the old man and all his strange talk. It would be weeks before the trains were running. Weeks or months, and the Amis were coming anyway. The crazy old man was right about that much. Any day now they’d be here, and what would it matter then if the tracks were fixed.
Someone shouted from the street below. An HJ boy with dark brown hair was waving his arms. Men gathered around him. They were leaving their carts and standing in line. “Don’t go,” the old man said. He drew his fingers across his throat. Georg looked up and down the street. There were dozens of Wehrmacht and Volkssturm soldiers at both ends, and who knew where they had come from. They were ready to defend the city. They were going to keep the Allies out. “Russians this way,” they were saying. “Russians and women to the left and Germans to the right.” The soldiers swung their rifles high. They were gathering up all the German men and boys. An old woman shook her fist. “Idiots,” she called to them. “What have you done to us,” and she set her scarf around her head, but they didn’t listen. They pushed her along.
Georg climbed down. He looked for openings between the men and boys who stood in line, but they were grouped tight together all along the street. Even the old man with the missing teeth came down, but only after an HJ boy shouted at him and began to climb the pile. They walked together to the station, where a sergeant examined them in turn. They waited in lines, soldiers and men with gray hair and boys whose voices hadn’t cracked yet. One of the soldiers scratched under his dressings. “It’s these lice,” he said, “look how they itch. They’ve worked their way inside,” and Georg stepped away from the soldier and his blood-rimmed eyes.
He tried to look like a sorry specimen. He stood crooked, and he would have crossed his eyes, too, or limped to the inspector, but his courage failed him, and he signed his name on a stained sheet of paper and went on to the next table. An officer gave out tunics and steel helmets from the Faulenberg barracks, and they changed their clothes right on the street. The helmet didn’t sit right on his head. He pushed it to one side and to the other. More men kept coming in. They’d pulled them from all the piles and from the nearest towns. By noontime the courtyard was nearly full. There was no leaving this time. The Russians were gone and the women, too, and Georg didn’t know where they went. Only German men were left in the city, as far as he could tell, German men and German boys.
Georg took a rifle from the table. All this talk of shortages and look how many there were. Old hunting rifles and farmers’ guns with cracked stocks and even a few good ones that hadn’t lost their shine. He carried it on his shoulder. It was heavy already, and he wanted to set it down. They gave him guns at the academy and at the wall and even old Frau Focht had a gun for him and he set each one aside and walked away and there was always another.
Men coughed while they waited. They rubbed their eyes. An infantryman stretched his arms and bent at the waist, and the light shone on his hair. He turned around, and he looked nothing like Müller, but Georg watched him anyway. I’ll go see your grave if I live. He reached for his ladies. He squeezed one in his palm and made promises to his boy. I’ll bring news from your family. How good it would be to meet his parents and his brothers and all the people who loved him best, to see the lines of his jaw again and to sit with them and eat from their table. I’ll plant flowers for you. I’ll change your wooden cross to a stone one and set a wreath of evergreens around it, and your marker will be the best one in the field. Everyone who comes will see it first. They’ll wonder who lies under that fine stone.
A Wehrmacht officer climbed the steps. His uniform was clean compared to the ragged jackets of the men in the crowd. He had two green stripes under his garland, which meant he was a first lieutenant, and the youngest boys looked at all his badges. They elbowed each other so they could get closer to the steps. It was time, the officer was saying. The orders came directly from the city commander, from Oberst Richard Wolf himself, who wanted them to fight for every street. All this waiting and now they were taking the city back. It was only dust and jagged stones, but it was theirs.
The boys up front cheered. They knew no better. They didn’t want to go home, not when they could fight, and so they whooped and waved their arms, and there was no lonelier place in the world than here inside this crowd. Soldiers from the 173rd engineering battalion and firemen and small Panzer groups from Erlangen and Bamberg and Grafenwöhr, infantrymen in tunics and boys in sandals and everywhere the old men, those gray heads and stooped shoulders and eyes that watered and had no focus. They stood together and listened, and the sun shone down on them through the broken roof. They were standing together in a temple, this is what they probably thought. They were Romans on the Colosseum, and not boys standing in rubble.
Georg blinked hard and looked to the ground so nobody could see his face. He remembered his Latin for the first time in months. The words from Horace came back to him. How sweet it was, and right, to die for their country, his father had waved aside the volunteers and recited the poem himself. He read his favorite passages to the class without looking down once at the page, and his voice dipped and rose with the meter, and Georg was certain he’d find him in the crowd now if he looked carefully enough. His father and young Schneider who was alive again and reaching for his book because the Bannführer was coming. He was at the door already. The wall and the city and all those places in between, they were just the same. Men stood and listened for orders. They filled out their papers and gave them to ladies in hats. They pushed barrows and dug in the dirt and saluted when their commanders passed, and nothing changed for them. They’d fight until the fighting broke them.
The officer waved his arm over the assembled men. He divided them into three groups, and boys came down from the steps and stood in the crowd so the lines between the groups were clear. He left with a flourish. He walked between the divided groups, and Georg saw his face as he went by, how soft it was and hairless. He called out once more to the boys before he went. “It’s up to you now,” he told them. “Your country lives or dies with you.”
“Back to his bunker,” an old man said in a low voice after the lieutenant had left. “Back to where it’s safe,” and someone in the back laughed so hard at that he got the hiccups, but the young boys didn’t laugh. Eleven years old, some of them, and they were certain they’d beat the Amis when they came. This was all part of the greater plan. Little by little it would be revealed. Georg watched them, and he hated how eager they were and how different from Müller.
The men all sat in circles that evening and watched for signs in the sky. “I think I see lights,” someone said. “Just past the bridge there’s something burning.” They walked and stretched and tightened their boots. They cleaned their rifles with bootlaces and torn pieces from their shirts because their patches were long gone and it was better to go shirtless than to let their barrels foul. They worked and scared each other with their stories. The Americans made their way through walls. They blew holes in houses, and they set off smoke bombs sometimes and moved quick like ghosts through the vapors they made. Yes, someone said, I’ve seen the smoke myself, how it floats across the water. There’d be nothing left of the city when the Amis and the Tommies were done. Spiteful as Bolsheviks, that’s what they are; they’ll burn us in our buildings. Georg didn’t want to listen, but he heard the stories anyway. He sat upright. He pulled the laces from his boots. They’d broken in places, and he knotted them so they’d hold a little longer.
A few rows over, an infantryman—an ordinary landser—named Krauss waved down all the talk about the Amis. “Better here than in the East,” he said. His face was peeling in spots, and his brows were white from the sun. “Anything is better than the winter over there.” Men wrapped their feet and wore two pairs of socks, he told them. They sealed their boot soles with wax, and still the water worked its way inside. Canteens froze and their horses died, and they pulled their own sleds then and cursed at the clouds. “Poor bastards,” he said. “They’d trade with us ten times over.” Not even a fire to warm them because someone might see. Better here than there. Better the Amis than those Slavs who shouted like Indians when they attacked. Urrah, they called, urrah, and other times they went quiet and moved easy as wolves between the trees.
Georg set his boots aside. He came closer so he could hear. “It was only luck that I lived,” Krauss was saying. In a single night a dozen others died. They lit a fire when they shouldn’t have. They were cold and lit a fire, and the Russians saw. He was grazed across his hands and ribs, and all his things had holes. His canteen was hit, and his jacket and his mess kit and even the heels of both his boots. The only thing that wasn’t pocked was his lighter.
“God bless it,” he said. “It’s my lucky charm. It brought me here and now it’s spring and there isn’t any snow.” He rubbed his chin. The men all laughed at that. A lucky trench lighter, they said, who ever heard of such a thing. They left and came back and left again, drifting around him while he talked. His voice pulled them in. They lay down and listened.
“Do you still have it?” Georg spoke in a low voice because some of the men had fallen asleep. They were curled up on their jackets. “Your lighter, I mean.”
Krauss tapped his pocket. “I keep it close,” he said. “Even when I’m sleeping I know where to find it.” He rolled out his blanket and lay down and he laced his fingers as if to pray, and when Georg spoke again, he didn’t answer.
The men slept while they could because any moment now they’d be leaving. They needed to start marching early, before the Amis could cross the river and make their way westward through the city. They’d surprise the Amis at the bank. They’d fan out and defend the broken city. Georg went back to his spot. He rolled to one side and then the other, but he couldn’t sleep. He heard Mutti’s voice as he lay there. She sat beside him, and a breeze was coming through his open window. Outside boys were playing. They shouted from the branches. She pulled the chair closer and turned the pages, and he shut his eyes and listened. She kissed his head when the story was done. She laid her hand against his cheek.