Necessary Lies(51)
The children who went into the ruins alone were asking for trouble; among the debris, no one would hear their screams. Warned so often, they walked alert, ready to run away. “Vampires” and “werewolves,” they whispered in the dark, recalling their parents’ words. The boys knew the routes to old bunkers and cellars. In the dark they whispered about German spies they had seen, and one of them would always try to frighten the rest with a scream. Sniffing the moist, mouldy air of the bunkers, they searched for German schmeissers or Russian kalashnikovs, for steel bullets that could be polished with a piece of cloth until they shone.
It was from these trips that they brought back German coins, lapels with SS runes, blue, red and purple stamps with swastikas or Hitler’s moustached face, rusted helmets filled with slime and rotting leaves. In the evening dusk, they hit the granite pavements with steel bayonets setting off blue sparks, or plunged the sharp steel tips between the stones, lifting the granite cubes from sidewalks and rolling them down the street.
Anna remembers standing by the living room window, counting the huge trucks, roaring below in the street, carrying the rubble away. Sometimes twenty or thirty passed in the morning. “Good riddance,” Mama sighed with relief, thinking of mines, of unexploded bombs.
Yes, her mother was pleased when the burnt out fa?ades of the buildings were pulled down. Pleased when the giant statue of Frederick Wilhelm I was pulled from his horse and smashed to the ground. When Frederick Wilhelm III gave room to the Polish playwright, Alexander Fredro. When Strasse der SA became the Street of Silesian Resistance Fighters, and Kaiserbrücke, the Grunwaldski Bridge. When the bricks from German ruins, cleaned and sorted, were taken away to rebuild Stalingrad and then the Old Town in the heart of burnt-out Warsaw.
Returned to motherland, the slogans of her childhood said in big red letters. Slogans spread on thick, concrete pillars, on white billboards. Slogans perched on the roofs of houses, on the bays of bridges, their red and white background flashing in store windows. We haven’t come here, we have returned. Returned to the ancient Piast capital of Lower Silesia which, too, was a Polish province. To think otherwise would have been a betrayal.
Yet, even when the last of the rubble was cleared and carried away on trucks, children found something — flattened toys, bent silver spoons, broken knives, forks with missing tines, pieces of green and blue glass, shards of white and blue porcelain, black gothic German lettering still intact.
If William were here with her on the train, he would look out of the window and, as with all their journeys together, he would draw her attention to the strange assortment of objects lying in people’s backyards: old bathtubs, piles of rusting pipes, concrete blocks, old buckets. He would point to dogs chained to little wooden doghouses. He would notice how square the houses were, like shoeboxes perched in the middle of muddy roads, with no lawns or flower gardens, but with useful rows of vegetable plots and fruit trees. He would point to women riding black, old-fashioned bicycles, their heads wrapped in big, woollen kerchiefs. To village children standing at the railway crossings and waving at the passing trains. To groups of men in quilted work jackets and dark blue berets, drinking beer under a tree. Or he would say that forests here have only two kinds of trees, birches and pines.
Ursula’s words hover over her, It’s our souls, darling. They cannot stand letting go of the other lives they could have led. Words like a flock of birds over ploughed fields. What troubles her is their accuracy. She would rather they could be dismissed.
“You have to think about yourself,” Marie told her before they parted. “You are only thirty-eight. You have a whole life in front of you. You cannot change what has happened.” No, Anna thinks, but what has happened changes you, pushes you where you would never go. And over that you have no control.
The train approaches Wroclaw slowly, in the dusk of a late afternoon. The carriages shake and tremble in the rhythm of cluttering wheels. Cigarette smoke drifts through the doors; it is everywhere. It has already penetrated the fibres of her clothes, it has lodged itself in the pores of her skin. For a long time, Anna stands in the corridor, outside her compartment where the two men have dozed off, their heads bent backwards.
The Polish city and its German double. Filled with shadows. Hers and William’s :
“What’s your name, lad?”
“Willi.”
“Come here, Willi. Take a look. Take a good look. This is the end of your Heimat.”
He hadn’t liked to talk about Breslau, but some memories came in spite of this reluctance. Death fascinated him, he told her once. The absolute, motionless stillness he could not comprehend. His mother could have covered his eyes with her hand when they passed deserters hanging in the trees, but he would wiggle away from her grip. Later, at home he would lie down on the carpet, close his eyes, and wait for something to happen.
Führer befiehl, wir folgen. Order us and we shall follow.
“Where is my father,” he asked his mother one day.
It was a harsh winter day, and he had to wear a fur cap with flaps that covered his cheeks and that he hated with a passion. He wiggled away from K?the when she tried to put it on. That’s when he heard the sound of muted drumbeats, and a man’s voice, high, serious, rising over the static of the radio. The battle of Stalingrad has come to an end. Then came the music, sweet, tender sounds of cellos, the Andante con moto of Beethoven’s Fifth.