He pulls a key from his pocket. She remembers then that he is a civil servant; he must work here at the town hall. Werner hurries her through the marble front hall. “There’s a bunker,” he explains, “out back. We’ll be safe if we can get there.” But the cavernous hall magnifies the screaming, the drone of planes, the hum and crashes, and as awful as it is to be outside where people are groveling and dying, it is far worse to be in here, to feel the walls tremble as though they’re as fragile as parchment paper.
They come to a door leading outside into a garden planted with gnarled apple trees. At the side of the building is a trapdoor that Werner hauls open. Wet air rushes up from the darkness below, foul smelling.
“It’s the cripple,” comes a cry, and a piece of wood crashes down on Werner’s shoulders, sending him to the ground. Behind him stands the drunken soldier from earlier, gasping and reeling. His jaunty cap is missing, but Bettina recognizes his dark hair, the boyish face. He raises his arms to strike again, and she throws herself at him with all the strength she can muster.
“Leave him alone,” she screams, tangled in his army jacket, his flailing arms, breathing in the smell of his ripe body, the alcohol that seeps from his pores. “He hasn’t done anything!”
He throws her down so easily, pinning her to the ground, digging his knees into her shoulders. “Silly girl,” he huffs. “I’m not interested in . . . in him . . .”
Underneath her, pebbles pierce her clothes, and she rakes at them frantically with her hands, flinging up fistfuls, shredding the skin on her fingers. She screams as loudly as she can, but no one can hear her. The man begins dragging her toward the opening of the bunker.
“You’re a fighter, yes, yes . . . I like that! We can . . . let’s fight some . . . you and I will fuck like rabbits, and the others can all go to hell.”
Bettina looks up at him and sees the pinched concentration on his face melt into incredulity. His nose is too long for his otherwise stubby features, and his mouth is slack and open but silent. He flops forward, almost gracefully. His own army-issue knife sticks out from the side of his neck, plunged in so deeply that only the deer-antler handle remains visible. Blood spurts from the wound, running in rivulets over his shoulders.
The heat of his body and his blood, warm and wet, is on her skin. He is heavy and motionless, but the blood seems alive like lava. Bettina writhes and twists, trying to free herself. She hears only the crashes, the faraway shrieks of the dying, the unending roar and whistle of plane and bomb.
“Help,” she cries. “Help me!”
A handkerchief passes over her eyes, clearing her skin of debris and blood. It is Werner again, kneeling. He drags the soldier off her, the body slumping heavily as though the muscles have dissolved. Werner’s round face is ashen, contorted with pain, his hair sticking out from his head. “He’s dead,” he says quietly. “Herein! Come on—get in here, quick.”
Bettina stumbles into the dank bunker.
Hours later when Bettina and Werner emerge, their secret—their murdered soldier—is buried in the mounds of chipped and shattered bricks, the tumbled trees. A ringing sound pings through Bettina’s head, and she cannot hold on to her thoughts. It is impossible to believe that the marketplace, surrounded by medieval stone buildings and grand redbrick businesses, will ever be normal again. There is no sign of the podium, the truck, or the young oak tree. The musicians and their instruments are gone. Paramedics have arrived, and they work quietly and quickly, turning over bodies to check for signs of life, ignoring the dead, sorting the injured men and women into two groups: those who need transportation to the hospital in Bergen and those who suffered only superficial wounds. Werner is stunned, eyes blinking. There is dried blood on his hands. Thick rays of light from torches illuminate the scene. The moon is briefly obscured by a cloud, and under the impenetrable black sky the ruined town looks hateful.
Bettina refuses treatment for her hands or the gash in her calf but accepts a ride home in a van lined with wooden benches. Werner helps her into the back, clutching at her hand in an effort to recapture her attention, his doleful eyes searching hers. “Bettina!” he says urgently. “Will you be all right?”
Before they are jostled apart, she reaches down and holds her fingers lightly to his cheek, as though he is a child. This man helped her. His eyes are kind, and he does not want to let her go. An elderly woman climbs gingerly into the van and sits next to her. A fur stole is wrapped around her shoulders, and she is hatless, her thin hair covered in dust. The van begins working its way through the blocked streets and alleyways at an excruciatingly slow pace.
The force of the blast in the town center has shattered some windows in her neighborhood, but the cottage is still standing. Her father is safe. Bettina jumps from the van and races in, calling out to him. Even here, the air smells acrid, and there is a sense of tension, of time trembling on a broken continuum where everything and nothing is normal.
Jürgen Heilstrom is sitting up in bed, sheets pulled to his chin, lips parted in a rictus of fear. Father and daughter hold each other close, sobbing. She says nothing of the soldier or what he tried to do to her or that it was Werner Nietz, the man from the shop—the one who comes every Friday—who saved her. Her thoughts are incoherent, and she cannot latch on to anything that makes sense. She has lived with war for years already, she has already experienced death, and yet on this day something inside her closes up tight.
2
Papa lives another twelve months, but he does not live to see the end of the war.
It is not yet morning on the day of Bettina’s eighteenth birthday. Her eyes open before day breaks, and she is not able to fall asleep again. A week earlier her father’s body was removed from the house. Her sister, Clara, has been coming as often as she can to help out, but it is hard for her to get to Saargen given the severe shortage of petrol. Before the war she was a secretary in the chalk mines, but she no longer has work. Her husband, Herbert, suffers fevers and nausea from an infected wound in his arm. There is no penicillin to be found, and the sulfonamides cause blisters so big they weep. Clara might as well be living in another country.
Bettina is trying to warm herself by the grate in the kitchen, which she has filled with twigs gathered at night from the edge of the nearby forest. After their fish shop was destroyed in the bombing, she worked only on keeping the two of them fed and warm. On making her father comfortable, reading to him from Schiller and Hauptmann, and even, toward the end, Thomas Mann, frowned upon by the authorities but adored nonetheless. Day after day she read aloud the passages from Death in Venice describing Aschenbach’s exotic journeys. They talked of adventure and the fullness of life while hiding in the tight-ceilinged rooms of their cottage. He made her promise to be watchful, cautious, but he did not know that he no longer needed to urge her toward withdrawal. They were both waiting, praying that Hitler would be killed, that this war would be over. His daughter washed his body daily and, as they felt the end drawing close, slept curled up beside him on his sickbed, listening to the sound of his breath receding. When Clara was there with them, it was just about bearable. Now that she’s returned to her village to nurse Herbert back to health and Papa is gone, the house echoes with their absence.