“Oh, I’ve no intention. The Special Troops had planned to raid it tonight, but they won’t get to it till tomorrow, there’s so much to be done around the cathedral!”
“I can imagine,” said Minus-Two, and he contemplated the low cloud, darker now, that crawled under the flayed spire.
There was lots of horizon. The city was full of horizons.
Brigitte stood engrossed in the play of light and shade. The city was dappled with it, as though covered by a fantastic lacy veil. Sunbeams shining through rows of high windows projected a brilliant checkerboard on the white dust of streets and cleared rubble. The shredded, gaping masonry threw down the queerest shadows whose contours spoke of mythic monsters, Eastern temples, works of art no artist could ever imagine, born of the amorous fray between a tangle of bared rafters and the sun. Schoolboys and People’s Defense teams were working to reinstall the telephone lines and other cables lying on the ground, sometimes marked with warnings: ACHTUNG! HAZARD. LETHAL DANGER. They’ve got to be kidding, just another little lethal danger! Day after day these diligent spiders rewove the torn web, and now they were mounting a loudspeaker against what was left of the beer hall… Soon the news will be broadcast, sibylline communiqués on lost battles in the east, the west, the south, and every other point of the compass, reports on the destruction of London which weren’t of much comfort (and “How are we going to pay for that?”), along with marches and fanfares (apparently good for morale) and occasional snippets of grand opera: The Twilight of the Gods…
Brigitte climbed the ladder to her roost and spread out some gritty bread, a sausage, a dollop of sweet fruit paste, and some wrinkled prunes on the white tabletop. A childish order reigned over this room, hanging over several voids: she was fond of it. The fancy stores downstairs had been burned out; then the side walls, brought slithering down by furious thunderbolts, had blocked up the shop spaces, warping the parquet here above and spearing it through the middle with the end of a beam. There were corpses in the last stages of decomposition in the cellars giving off, through the cracks in the floor, sudden whiffs of sickly, fetid odor, more marshy than human, but corpses are everywhere, and there’s so little difference between them and us! They don’t bother anybody anymore, no longer provoke embarrassing pity, they are there, we are here, we’re all together, the least we can do is try to feel homey at home, or no more uncomfortable than we have to be. The stench didn’t linger in Brigitte’s room because the cracks in the walls allowed for good ventilation and insured a permanent connection with the great outdoors, the rain, the wind, as if under a golden tent in the middle of a verdant meadow. The daffodil-yellow muslin curtains at the window framed a picturesque field of rubble in shades of rose, white, and black. The next-door house, painted pink, had crumbled into the little garden, the flames had smudged the broken walls with charcoal and half consumed a young oak tree, whose other half was turning green; a square of wallpaper still cheered the eye, turquoise sprigged with gladioli. “My garden the air,” thought Brigitte… Her possessions included a sturdy virginal bedstead, a round iron table scavenged from the garden, and a little rusty mirror, strangely cracked in a way that unsettled her. In it she looked quite unlike herself. Can this be me, this girl with a livid, greenish complexion, lips swollen with dark blood, cavernous cheeks, bulging eyes too deeply ensconced in their dark-shadowed sockets, dilated pupils half open onto the night within? The planes of this face had slipped out of line, the smile itself was crooked, the left side remaining stern as the right softened. Only the hair, in tight tresses rolled into a low bun on the nape, seemed not to have changed or been betrayed… “Lying mirror, shame on you!” It had been a present, hadn’t it, but from whom? Given when? Brigitte’s forehead crinkled in a helpless effort to remember. She saw herself fleeing through a tempest of ashes with the mirror under her arm, afraid of tripping, it would break if she fell. There was only one thought in her head: save it. Now what should she do with it, break it? You don’t break a mirror. There were women in the market square who’d gladly pay for it. It was worth, said Franz, “at least four slices of pressed horse, dog, rat, or other novelty meats…” Should she perhaps give the lying thing away? That would be wrong. “Some night I’ll have to bury it,” she decided, “deep enough so that neither the children nor the cleanup squad can uncover it.” Suddenly the mirror brightened, Brigitte recognized herself and pealed with laughter, unreasonable joy bubbling from her heart into her throat, what in heaven’s name came over me? Laughing to herself, she searched through the drawer for her embroidered blouse, hummed a tune as she made herself up with lipstick and powder; some artistes put golden glitter on their eyelids, now that would look lovely on you, Brigitte… She ate quickly, holding an intimate, sparkling conversation with herself throughout the meal. Then she sat straight-backed upon the bed, her face upturned, her eyes half shut, picturing the notes of a score, while her lively hands played a keyboard of air and the charm of a Mozart concerto vibrated softly through her, bathed in silence; the strains of music drowning the thunders reverberating throughout the world. Brigitte’s eyes opened again, her hands sank to rest on her knees, her shoulders drooped forward as though with lassitude. A stealthy tremor was starting up at the base of her being, like the buzzing of malevolent insects in the gloom, like the approach of a solitary bomber in the sky. It was only the approach of the nameless terror, senseless, bottomless, lightless, lifeless and deathless, unspeakable, unendurable, ungraspable, imponderable; a wave rising from the very depths of darkness… Brigitte was tearing something to pieces, trying to rip the smallest shreds between sore fingers until her nails were tearing at one another. What more to destroy, how to sleep, where to disappear? She began reeling about the narrow room in short, crazed lunges.
Night fell. There was a tap at the door.
“Who is it?”
The terror was ebbing away. A man’s voice said, “It’s me… Günther.”
Brigitte opened the door. The penumbras of inside and out coalesced over a helmeted figure erect on the ladder, tall and braced, yet seeming to sway.
“Oh, so it’s you,” she said without surprise. “At last.”
A flurry of gunshots rang out and died into the unknown. A screech, nipped off like that of a slaughtered animal, fell into the emptiness.
“Who are you? What do you want?” she said in a sharp voice.
Was he real, did he have eyes under that helmet? With a careful forefinger, she touched his chest. She thought she discerned a reflection in the shape of a skull.
“Ah, it is you…” she said dreamily. “I’ve been waiting so long. Come in.”
He stepped up and over, lifted by the emptiness beyond; lithe, solid, remote.
“Is there no light in here, Fraülein?”
“Light? You know very well there’s no more light. No sun, no electricity.” (She giggled.) “You mean the candle?”