Thunderclaps sent huge waves through the earth; crackling outbursts transmuted into great surges of heat, as though invisible ripples of fire were pulsing outward from a fiery oven, somewhere nearby, to one side, deep underground. “We’re going to be baked like potatoes in ashes,” an old man calmly remarked. Fits of helpless whimpering started up in the children’s corner. “Can’t the little snots get used to it? Pipe down, it’s over, stop bawling and wipe your noses!” Brigitte made her way across the cellar toward the children, holding a cloth-wrapped object. It was her find of the morning, the reward of hours spent picking through the fresh rubble, and aroused much excitement among the small-fry. There was barely any light to see by, as the electric bulbs had just died and the shelter had fallen back on candles, but their eyes, accustomed to the dark, discerned everything in rich detail. Brigitte unrolled a doll wearing an old-fashioned military outfit, with a tall bearskin calpac, a green tunic, a white plastron and buckled gaiters, a soldier of Frederick the Great’s at Rossbach — that’s a glorious piece of History, the Seven Years’ War! Whereas these days, it feels more like the Thirty Years’ War… “For me, for me! Here, Brigitte!” chorused high voices which a string of massive but distant impacts could not drown out. (“You see, they’re going away now… all gone… finished…”) “Not for you and not for you either,” said the young woman. “We’ll hold a draw.”
“S’not real.”
“Not real, what do you mean, you silly minx?”
“Yes it is real, look, I’m playing with it…”
“Listen all to the song of glory!” proclaimed the amiable, if strident, voice of the disabled veteran, for the sirens were sounding the all clear. That sardonic voice always brought peculiar results: now one of the lightbulbs went back on, spreading sepulchral cheer. The invalid was crutching his way over to the stairway, humming to himself. “I’m off for a breath of air…” he called. “Excellent for the health. A poetic night, my friends. I’ll try to bring back some water for the sick…” The water can jangled against the complicated prostheses whose manufacturer, according to him, deserved to be summarily hanged. He had lost his left foot and right arm in some insignificant battle on the eastern front, but he managed nimbly enough on one foot, two contraptions, and a stick salvaged from the rubble that did excellent duty as a crutch, just the right length and burned to a convenient lightness. He even attended sessions at the Vocational Rehabilitation Center, charming but compulsory charades… The sick no longer left the basement shelter. They groaned for a moment, then fell quiet. During the bombing they remained silent, except for chattering teeth; the minute it was over they fell to tossing, spitting, coughing, pissing, and wanting a modicum of attention — but not for long. The disciplined character of the average man who knows there’s nothing to be done about it soon reasserted itself. Besides, this beer cellar made an agreeable shelter with its tapestried walls and elegant furniture, and there were sheets on the mattresses.
Franz, the disabled vet known as “Minus-Two,” hauled himself up the stairs, limped along a narrow corridor, skirted a bulwark of sandbags, struck the high notes of a piano keyboard with his prosthesis as he went by, making it blurt out a cracked lament, listened to this fragment of lied fade away, and continued on, with a little apprehension now because there was always a risk that the entrance to the underground system might be blocked by fresh debris. It wasn’t: silvery clouds opened against a dusting of stars. Minus-Two whistled between his teeth the triumphal march of King Frederick’s fifes. A steel-sharp sickle of moon illuminated the becalmed street, that is to say the line of building façades behind whose gaping windows lay a deepening void, some mounds of collapsed masonry like fossilized monsters, and the dark black outline of a tall, thin slice of building still standing around the axis of its chimney. The four jag-toothed floors of this tilted saw leaned fifteen or twenty degrees south by southwest; if they ever collapsed, they would fall on the uninhabitable rubble of the White Hunter Inn. If the collapse were gentle enough, someone might be able to grab that fine gold-knobbed metal bedstead clinging to the parquet of the fourth floor; as for the oval mirror framed with brass bows on which rays of sunlight sometimes played, there’d be nothing left of it but the frame, and in a sorry state at that. Broken mirror, bad omen! We can expect yet another bad omen… For now, the mirror up there was merely the augury of a bad omen. Minus-Two pondered how nothing changed: order.
Out of idle curiosity he cocked an ear to the noises of the city. A few searchlights were still crisscrossing the sky. Keep searching, keep searching, my friends, for something that leaves no trace, according to Solomon’s proverb: a fish in the sea, a man in a woman, a plane in the sky. They’re far away now. From somewhere a final, bad-tempered burst of antiaircraft fire spat out it’s flak flak flak drak drak drak. “Stupid idiots!” muttered the crippled vet. He heard ambulance sirens and motorcycle engines yapping brokenly, way over in the new part of town, where the no-go underground factories and the model workers’ housing and the railway junctions were; there can’t be much left of all that, at least not above ground; below, they can still hold out. Under the ground or otherwise, the Third Reich will hold out to the end of the millennium, that’s certain.
Minus-Two halted before a stretch of wall that had been cleanly sheared off as though there had never been anything above it; new grass was sprouting on top of the neatly raked rubble of Billingen’s Pharmacy! He practiced writing with his left hand in the moonlight, tracing each word in block letters with a piece of chalk: “One Führer, One Volk, One Tomb! Heil Death!” (This to enrage Herr Blasch.) He judged his calligraphy to be improving; faster too, I’m making progress… If only I had a cigarette butt left! Whose head would I most gladly give for a butt? There was no shortage of choices. In his book, the number-one hateful head still belonged to a tank captain he’d run into around Poznan, a rattlesnake head — monocled, helmeted, shaved, and powdered with gray, rapping out completely unfulfillable orders like: “Take out that machine-gun nest with silver tweezers for me, no getting your fingers dirty, then goose-step across that river for me, keeping dry on the tiptoes of your boots; the valiant soldier scorns all obstacles or I’ll have him court-martialed!” The Russians must have already ground that head into head cheese for the worms long ago… It’s sweet to amuse oneself with private jokes, isn’t it, Captain? Me Minus-Two, you Zero-Minus-a-Thousand, honorable Captain-Baron-Minus-Head, Minus-Balls, Minus-Joke, Minus-Everything! But if I ever learned that you didn’t get blown away by a 177 shell up your ass, I’d have to conclude that not even the shadow of one-eyed justice remains here below…