“But that’s impossible!” cried Minus-Two into the soft transparent night.
So whose head could he offer up to the Great God of Universal War so as to ensure finding tomorrow a juicy stub of genuine tobacco, the kind your Party higher-ups sometimes throw away? Crescent moon, inspire me! The head of Herr Blasch, sergeant of the elite corps’ home guard, in charge of security of recovered dwellings, Führer of the neighborhood lout patrol… Tac-tac-trac-tac, the music of machine-gun fire rang out in the distance among the fresh or refreshed ruins. Herr Blasch and his henchmen — on orders from above — were busy liquidating the seriously wounded, or looters caught red-handed, or some crazed old granny who started mouthing off… I’m a lucky bugger to have only two limbs left, thought Minus-Two.
And for a little shot of schnapps, what would you give for that, Franz? For a cheery draught of Pomeranian brandy? Your Iron Cross? Oh la la! I’ll throw in the colossal Stone Cross they’ll be raising over the tomb of the German people, and the columns of the imperial chancellery for good measure…
“What’s impossible?” From behind came a voice as bubbly as a lovely brook running through green grass — if there still were such things as brooks, grass, cows, pearly green horizons.
“Princess!” Minus-Two exclaimed as he swung around. “You’re incredible.”
“It’s true,” said Brigitte.
She came closer, belted into her white coat, her curls blond in daylight, now the shade of metallic ash, her neck slender, her gaze unfocused. She was always looking elsewhere or beyond, so that Minus-Two had come to conceive of her eyes on the model of classical statuary. He leaned conveniently against a tidy stack of bricks made by the Schools Reconstruction Organization (thanks to Strength through Joy, of course).
“Come here, closer, white fairy.” Brigitte came. With his living arm he pulled her toward him, heatedly. “When this war is over, Brigitte, I’m going to marry a rich woman, a very rich woman. We won’t have kids. Because of the next war, d’you see. My wife will look like you.”
“I am rich,” Brigitte said gently, “but I won’t get married.”
The crippled vet’s horsey head, with its hairy nostrils and soft angry mouth, was calling. They kissed, mouth to mouth until they ran out of breath, their breath returning as one single breath.
“Why won’t you get married, Brigitte?”
“Because of love. It would be too hard to explain. I don’t really understand it myself. I’m going home. Good night, Franz.”
“I’ll go get some water for the sick, see you later,” the man said, or didn’t say, perhaps only thinking the words, suddenly knocked down by exhaustion, like a human animal concussed in the vicinity of an exploding mine. It erases you in an instant and you come to dazed, drained, unable to grasp that life is continuing, or yours is at least, with a frenzied carillon of blood booming in your temples, your rib cage, your limbs, your skull scoured by a wind of fire… With the metal pincer of his right hand, he held the can under the spigot while pumping energetically with his left, it worked, hallelujah! Good old pump, it was holding up better under the circumstances than the western front, the eastern front, the Italian, the oceanic, and the home fronts! The water of this well seemed to have remained pure, even though twenty feet away the sewers were vomiting up stinking slime through a large crack in the asphalt. Some rats scurried up and began lapping at the puddles around the pump; they grew strangely thirsty after each bombardment. Drink your fill, nasty animals, brother rats, you are like us, we are like you.
If there had ever existed, if there still were, some other place, another reality, the children had no way of knowing it. They grew, they played, they died (in large numbers, with even larger numbers surviving, the scientists couldn’t understand it) in a ghostly city bristling with the skeletons of churches lashed by sky, wind, rain, and fire. Oases of habitation robbed the destruction of a few torn, eerie patches of domesticity… Wherever life could take hold, whether in basements or in bedrooms carefully refurbished in the very heart of chaos, some on higher floors propped up by what looked like concrete stilts, households restored a sense of intimacy: pictures and portraits on the wall, doilies on broken-legged furniture, makeshift brick ovens standing on the buckling parquet, access ladders with rope handholds, trunks and bed linen, maxims embroidered by an aged aunt, since evacuated: “Do Good and Thy Soul Shall Leap for Joy.”
The earth shuddered, smoke crept across it, people dwelt in a volcanic realm of sudden explosions, smoldering dormant fires, smoky eddies of soot, dust clouds, the stench of reeking corpses, charred and splintered trees that persisted in budding and even put out, here and there, tender pale-green leaves as though nothing were amiss. Squads of women or schoolboys cleared the ghostly path of streets where no street remained, restoring empty grids like the layout of an archaeological excavation, shoveling human debris from under a mangle of timbers to be borne away on dirty stretchers toward tumbrels disinfected by men in face masks… The children could not have dreamed that another urban landscape was possible, and they found this one simple: terrifying by night, terrifying by day when the routine horrors occurred, pleasant and packed with surprises at other times… On sunny mornings the children emerged in their clean clothes like baby scorpions scuttling out from under a stone to bask in the heat; out came the children to roll marbles, throw balls, skip rope, and play war. They played at escaped prisoners, who were chased, caught, and solemnly shot, yet despite the inevitability of this outcome they all wanted to be the prisoner… Their playground encompassed the deep rubbly crater that yawned behind the little olive-and-yellow house, almost intact, that belonged to the post office subdirector, and a mountainous redoubt they called the Sierra, a mysteriously vast domain where apartment blocks owned by the Patria Life Insurance Company used to stand. The treasure hunters struck out into the Sierra, careless of the official ban, to climb the Himalayas and Chimborazos of destruction; they posted a lookout in the Mount Rose hidey-hole to watch out for the little policemen in the green uniform or the more formidable guard with the white armband; a discreet birdcall was enough to make the energetic heads of girls and boys duck down behind the spurs of Kazbek or Popocatepetl… Because Professor Schiff, skipping the chapters on cosmology and basic physical geography, lectured his pupils passionately on the geological cataclysms that gave birth to mountain chains, on subterranean fire, on earthquakes, on the submersion of entire continents beneath the seas: for example Atlantis, mentioned by the divine Plato, northern Laurentia, Gondwanaland to the southeast… The earth was replete with lost continents.