The next day I took my sorrowing father to the station. I was fool enough to snap to attention as the train pulled out — a gesture which I’m sure gave him no pleasure. I watched his anxious face pull away from me, into the hot June evening. I wouldn’t see him again for two years — two years so full of experience they might as well have been a century.
As soon as my father was gone, I ran to the Neubachs’. I excused myself for not having introduced him, explaining that we had only been together for a very short time. They understood perfectly, and were not in the least offended. As I was clearly bursting with impatience, Frau Neubach gave me news of Paula. I was extremely disappointed to learn that she would be away until the afternoon of the following day. This was hard to bear. We had already lost twenty-four hours plus a day and a night: in the seven or eight days I had left, this counted for a great deal. I ate with the Neubachs, maintaining a gloomy silence which they understood and respected. Then I left them, to walk the streets, in the hope of meeting my love. I walked for about an hour, until the air-raid sirens drowned out the clocks, which were just striking eleven. The city filled with the sound of their long-drawn-out howling, and the few lights which had remained in the blacked-out streets disappeared. Our fighters were already climbing into the black sky above Tempelhof. The roar of their engines swept over the roof tops, and their trailing exhaust left occasional pink traces in the darkness. The sidecars of the territorial defense were ploughing through the streets, urging the few pedestrians to take shelter. I was still on the street, obsessed by a single idea, when we were suddenly enveloped in the heavy throb of enemy bombers.
I knew that the first-aid teams would turn out as the first bombs began to fall, and that perhaps then I would see Paula. I slid into a doorway opposite the entrance to a shelter under a low building beside a canal. I could see quite far down the canal to a large horizon washed in light fog. The sky to the northwest glowed in the light of an improbable-looking curtain of fire, which was probably concentrated on the big Spandau factories. Everywhere, little points of light crackled like fireworks. The numerous anti-aircraft guns defending the capital some of them firing from the terraces of houses — were erecting a lethal barricade against the approaching rain of death. Each brilliant light flaming suddenly in the sky and then falling to earth marked the death of an enemy plane. A thudding and hammering of incredible violence shock the wall of the stone porch against which I had pressed myself. Forcing my eyes to accept the brutal contrast between the darkness and flashes of light, I stared down the street and along the quai, where a few laggards were still running for shelter. Then a cacophony of breaking glass marked the blanket of bombs falling across a section of the city about a mile ahead of me. A hurricane of displaced air ran over the surface of the canal, whose water responded in a pattern of sinister waves.
I could hear thousands of objects falling all around me. In spite of my intense desire to stay in the street, an irresistible fear made me run to the shelter. The pavement trembled under my feet like a piece of badly attached plating on the hood of a moving truck. In no time, I was in the midst of a crowd of desperate, anxious people. The atmosphere was suffocating. A loud roaring which seemed to emanate with equal strength from above and below shook loose pieces of plaster from the ceiling. People looked for some reassurance on faces as tense with fear as their own. Children asked questions of childish innocence: “What’s making that noise, Mama?” — while the mothers caressed the small blond heads with trembling fingers. The lucky ones, who believed in some God, prayed. I was leaning against a pipe which transmitted every sound and vibration from the street. The roaring noise grew suddenly louder, crushing the air in our lungs. The room filled with cries of pain, and then with an intensified din, like the sound of a thousand locomotives. Horrifying screams of terror, like screams from hell, rang through the darkness. The electric lights came on. Then the entire shelter filled with thick black dust, which poured in from the outside and engulfed us. We could hear some men shouting: “Shut that door!”
The door slammed. We felt trapped in a communal grave. Some of the women broke down from nervous tension and began to howl and wave their arms wildly. We felt the floor shake five or six times, as if in the grip of some overpowering force. We were all terrified, and clung together, despite a hideous sense of suffocation. An hour later, when the storm seemed to have died down, we left that ghastly hole. We were confronted by a scene worthy of Dante.
The dark waters of the canal reflected the numerous fires ravaging its banks and destroying the structures which had given it some point. What was left of the tidy street and its white-edged sidewalks lay strewn with rubble between two giant crevasses. A constellation of sparks ascended into the summer sky in a rising column of acrid, suffocating smoke. People were running everywhere, and as at Magdeburg I was immediately impressed into a cleanup squad.
After an exhausting night, and most of the next morning, I finally found Paula, who was just as done in as I. The happiness I felt when she told me she had worried about me during the bombing erased the miseries of the night in a single stroke.
“I was thinking of you too, Paula. I looked for you all night long.”
“Really?” she asked, in a tone which told me that her sentiment was as strong as mine.
I felt giddy with emotion. My eyes remained fixed on the young girl before me. I wanted passionately to take her in my arms, and knew that I was blushing. She broke the silence.
“I feel like a limp rag,” she said. “Why don’t we go out to the country, somewhere around Tempelhof? It might make us feel better.”
“That’s a good idea, Paula. Let’s go.”
I rode out with my first love in a little motorcycle taxi to the sandy countryside near the civil and military airfield at Tempelhof.
We left the autobahn and climbed onto a small hillock covered with a kind of spongy lichen onto which we collapsed with delight. We both felt crushed by exhaustion. It was a marvelous day. Less than a mile away the ground was cut up and crisscrossed by the network of airport runways from which Focke-Wulf trainers leaped into the sky with astonishing speed. Paula lay on her back with her eyes closed, as if she were nearly asleep. I leaned on my elbow and stared at her, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist.
My head was filled with things to say to her — a thousand amorous communications — but my mouth remained ludicrously shut. I felt that I should and must say everything to her right away, that they could wait no longer, that I must take advantage of this ideal moment and make her understand, that it was idiotic to be so timid…. Perhaps Paula was being deliberately silent, so that I would have a chance to speak. Time was passing — especially the time still left in my leave: but, despite all these considerations, my love for Paula imposed silence.
She murmured: “The sun is so hot.”
I stammered a few stupidities. Finally, in a surge of courage, I slid my hand toward hers. The ends of our fingers touched, and I lingered for a moment at this delicious contact. Then I screwed up my courage so that my breath almost stopped, and Paula’s hand was entirely mine. I grasped it fervently, and she didn’t try to withdraw it.
My shyness had presented me with a problem more taxing than finding a safe passage through a mined field. I lay stretched on my back for a moment longer, recovering my strength. I stared at the sky, overwhelmed with happiness, lost to the rest of the world.