WHEN WE HEARD Dresden was destroyed by firebombing some of us thought of the time our fathers took us to the market there, the pink heads of pigs all in a row. Or we thought about the time we toured towns by train with our parents, riding through the dense conifers of the Black Forest, arriving at a small town, a name we can’t recall, watching an older man cross the street in lederhosen, just like a postcard, and how the tall mountain framed him. One shop had all the quaint cuckoo clocks in the glass storefront timed exactly, and at noon on a Monday afternoon we watched as the balcony doors of fifty tiny wooden houses opened in unison, and fifty windup birds popped out and made the same resonant cu-ckoo.
THE BUILDINGS OF Dresden we saw in the newspaper were now the skeleton constructions of stage props—only one side of a church, a bank, and city hall stood—it was a city of leaning towers with steel wires hanging down from the fifth or fifteenth story like willow branches. But also it was a city of statues appearing desperate and ominous above the rubble, including Hercules, Martin Luther, and several pairs of lions with long flowing manes.
A CITY, GONE, and the Allies did this. We asked some of the wives, Can you believe it? Dresden! And some women said, Thank goodness! They should just bomb Germany to bits; nothing else is going to stop the war. And some women said, Isn’t it just awful. It was times like this we found an excuse to borrow a horse and head south and down to Edith’s house under the Otowi Bridge, because unlike us she moved to New Mexico years ago to avoid the pressure for success she felt in the East. We were introduced to her through the Director, who had invited us for dinner at her place: she occasionally hosted an invitation-only restaurant. Edith, and her Indian friend Tilano, who on holidays gave our children bows, arrows, and turkey feather headdresses, and for us, fireplace brooms and bundles of piñon kindling tied with red ribbon.
IT WAS RUMORED she had a nervous breakdown and her parents agreed to let her go west instead of continuing to be a teacher. She read everything, was often writing in a journal, knew the names of every bird and plant we saw, kept a vibrant garden, was curious, listened as if she cared, and rarely said a bad word about anyone. She was an island of culture in the wilderness. Tea? she would ask us before we got off the horse, and soon we felt better.
BUT WAR NEWS was inescapable and frequent: by late February, U.S. troops had raised their flag at the top of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima, where the rocky slopes were red with the blood of soldiers and civilians.