He climbed over the foot of the bed. Elisabeth turned the switch on and reached for a dressing grown. The electric light made her shy. "Don't look at me," she said. "I don't know why I did it. Usually I'm not this way."
"You are fine that way. And you are right. You don't belong here. So it's all right for you to do a little smashing once in a while."
"I wish I knew where I do belong."
Graeber laughed. "I don't know either. In a circus, perhaps, or in a baroque mansion or surrounded by steel furniture or in a tent. Not here in this white, girl's room. And I thought that first evening you were helpless and in need of protection!"
"I am, too."
"We all are. But we manage to get along anyway without protection or help."
He took a newspaper, laid it on the floor and pushed the splinters onto it with another one. In doing so be saw the headlines: FURTHER SHORTENING OF THE LINES. HEAVY FIGHTING AROUND OREL. He wrapped the splinters in the paper and put it in the wastebasket. The warm light of the room suddenly seemed doubly warm. From outside he heard the hammering and drilling of the search party. On the table stood Alfons's gifts. Sometimes you could think of a lot of things all at once, he thought.
"I'll just clear this up," Elisabeth said. "All of a sudden I can't look at it any more."
"Where will you put it?"
"In the kitchen. We'll have time before tomorrow evening to hide what's left."
"By tomorrow evening there won't be very much left. But how will it be if Frau Lieser comes back earlier?"
"Well then she'll just come back earlier."
Graeber looked at her in astonishment. "I'm surprised myself how much I change every day," she said.
"Not every day. Every hour."
"And you?"
"I too."
"Is that good?"
"Yes. And even if it isn't good it doesn't make any difference either."
"Nothing makes any difference, is that it?"
"No."
Elisabeth turned off the light. "Now we can open the vault again," she said.
Graeber opened the window. The wind came in at once. The curtains waved. "There's the moon," Elisabeth said.
The orb was rising, distended and red, over the roofs opposite. It was like a monster with a glowing head eating its way into the street. Graeber took two water glasses and filled them halfway with cognac. He handed one to Elisabeth. "Let's drink this now," he said. "Wine is no good in the dark."
The moon rose higher and became more peaceful and more golden. They lay for a time in silence. Elisabeth turned her head.
"What are we really," she asked, "happy or unhappy?"
Graeber reflected. "We are both. And probably that's how it has to be today. Unmixed happiness in our times belongs only to cows. Or not even to them any more. Perhaps only to stones."
Elisabeth looked at Graeber. "That doesn't matter either, does it?"
"No."
"Does anything matter?"
"Yes." Graeber looked into the cold, golden light that was slowly filling the room. "We are no longer dead," he said. "And we are not yet dead."
CHAPTER XVI
IT was Sunday morning. Graeber was standing in Hakenstrasse. He noticed there had been a change in the appearance of the ruins. The bathtub had disappeared; so had the remnant of the staircase, and a narrow path had been shoveled out leading around the wall into the courtyard and from there obliquely into what was left of the house. It looked as though a clean-up troop had started to work.
He squeezed through the cleared entrance and came into a half buried room which he recognized as the former laundry of the house. From there a low, dark passage led further. He struck a match and let the light fall ahead of him.
"What are you doing there?" someone shouted suddenly from behind him. "Come out at once!"
He turned around. He could not see anyone in the darkness and walked back. A man with crutches under his arms stood outside. He was wearing civilian clothes and a military overcoat. What are you up to here?" he barked.
"I live here. And you?"
"I live here and nobody else, understand? Certainly not you! What are you snuffling around for? Something to steal?"
"Man, don't excite yourself," Graeber said, looking at the crutches and the military overcoat. "My parents used to live here and so did I before I joined the Prussians. Now are you satisfied?"
"Anyone could say that."
Graeber took hold of the cripple by the crutches, cautiously pushed him aside and went past him out of the passage.
Outside he saw a woman approaching with a. child. A second man was following her with a pickax. The woman had come out of a shack that had been put up behind the house; the man was approaching from the opposite side. They took up positions confronting Graeber. "What's happened, Otto?" the man with the pick asked the cripple.
"I caught this fellow here. Snuffling around. Says his parents used to live here."
The man with the pick gave an unfriendly laugh. "Any more to the story?"
"No," Graeber said, "just that."
"I guess nothing else occurred to you, eh?" The man hefted the pick in his hand and raised it. "Disappear! I'll count to three. Otherwise there'll be a little case of a fractured skull. One—"
Graeber sprang at him from the side and struck. The man fell and Graeber tore the pick out of his hands. "There, that's better," he said. "And now, shout for the police if you like! But probably you don't want to, eh?"
The man who had had the pick got up slowly. His nose was bleeding. "You'd better not try it again," Graeber said. "I got some training in close fighting from the Prussians. And now, tell me what you are doing here."
The woman pushed in front. "We live here. Is that a crime?"
"No. And I am here because my parents used to live here. Perhaps that's a crime?"
"Is that really true?" asked the cripple.
"What else? What is there to steal here anyway?"
"Enough for someone who doesn't have anything," the woman said.
"Not for me. I'm on furlough, and I'm going out again. Have you seen that notice outside in front of the door? The one asking for news about a father and mother? That's mine."
"Is that who you are?" asked the cripple.
"Yes, that's who I am."
"Well, that's different. You understand, comrade, we're suspicious. We were bombed out and fixed things up for ourselves here. After all, you have to have some place to live."
"Did you shovel all that out by yourselves?"
"Partly. People helped us with it."
"Who?"
"People we know who have tools."
"Did you find any dead?"
"No."
"Are you certain?"
"Yes, certain. We didn't. Perhaps there were some there earlier, but we didn't find any."
"That was all I wanted to know," Graeber said.
"You didn't have to smash another man's face to find that out," the woman said.
"Is he your husband?"
"That's none of your business. He's not my husband. He's my brother. And he's bleeding."
"Only his nose."
"His teeth too."
Graeber lifted the pick. "And this? What was he going to do with this?"
"He would not have attacked you."
"Dear lady," Graeber said, "I have learned not to wait till I'm attacked."
He threw the pick in a wide arc onto the rubble. They all watched it. The child set about climbing up after it. The woman held him back. Graeber looked around. Now he saw the bathtub too. It was standing beside the shack. The staircase had probably been used for firewood. In a heap lay empty cans, flatirons, broken crockery, odds and ends of torn cloth, wooden boxes, and fragments of furniture. The family had moved in, had built the shack and now obviously regarded everything they could scrape together out of the rubble as manna from heaven. There was nothing to be said against it. Life was going on. The child looked healthy. Death had been overcome. The ruins
had become a shelter once more. There was nothing to be said against it. "You worked damn fast," he said.
"You have to work fast," the cripple replied, "when you have no roof over your head."
Graeber turned to go. "Did you find a cat here?" he asked. "A little black and white one?"
"Our Rosa," the child said.
"No," the woman replied defiantly. "We did not find a cat."
Graeber climbed back. No doubt even more people lived in the shack; otherwise they could not have done so much in so short a time. But perhaps, too. a commando crew had helped them. At night prisoners from the concentration camps were often sent into the city to help with the clearing.
He went back. It seemed to him that he had suddenly become poorer; he did not know why,
He entered a street that was entirely undamaged. Not even the big plate-glass windows of the stores had been broken. Walking ahead absent-mindedly, he suddenly stopped short. He had seen someone coming toward him and for a moment he had not realized it was himself striding forward in the diagonal side mirror of a clothing store. It was strange—as though he were looking at a Doppelgänger and were no longer himself now but only a memory that would be wiped out as soon as he walked a step farther.
He stayed where he was and stared at the image in the dim, yellowish mirror. It was pale and undulating and gray. He saw only the hollows of his eyes and the shadows beneath them, not the eyes themselves. And it was as though he no longer had any and was already a death's head. A chill, alien fear crept upon him. It was not panic and not revolt, no urgent, hasty cry of existence for flight and defense and alertness—it was a tugging, cold, almost impersonal dread, a dread that admitted no hand-hold because it was invisible and intangible and seemed to come out of a vacuum where monstrous pumps had been installed which were silently draining the blood out of his veins and the life out of his bones. He still saw his image in the mirror, but it seemed to him as though it must soon grow indistinct, wavy, and the outlines must dissolve and be absorbed, sucked up by the noiseless, cosmic pumps, drawn away from the surface and out of the accidental form that for a short time had been called Ernst Graeber, back into something limitless that was not simply death but horribly much more than that, extinction, disintegration, the end of the self, a vortex of meaningless atoms, nothingness.
He stood there for a time. What remained? he thought, deeply shaken. What would remain when he was no longer there? Nothing but a dying memory in the heads of a few people, his parents, if they were still alive, certain friends, Elisabeth perhaps—and for how long? He looked at the mirror. It seemed to him he had already become as light as a piece of paper, thin, wholly shadowy, something a breath of wind could sweep away, drained by the pumps, now only an empty husk. What would remain? And to what could he hold fast, where could he drop anchor, where find purchase, where leave behind something to hold him so that he would not be completely swept away?
"Ernst," said someone behind him.
He whirled around. A one-legged man on crutches was standing there. For an instant Graeber thought it was the cripple from Hakenstrasse; then he recognized Mutzig, a classmate.
"Karl," he said. "You? I didn't know you were here."
"Been here a long time. Almost half a year."
They looked at each other. "You wouldn't have imagined this, would you?" Mutzig said.
"What?"
Mutzig lifted the crutches and set them down again. "That.''
"Well at least you're out of all the crap. I have got to go back."
"Depends on how you look at it. If the war goes on for a couple of years, then it's luck; if it's over in six weeks it's a damn bad break."
"Why should it be over in six weeks?"
"I don't know. I only said if—"
"Well, of course."
"Why don't you stop in and see us sometime?" Mutzig said. "Bergmann is here too. Both arms at the elbows."
"Where are you?"
"In the City Hospital. Amputees Section. We have the whole left wing. Stop in sometime."
"Good. I'll do it."
"Really? They all say that and then not a single ass turns up."
"Positively."
"Good. It will amuse you. We're a lively crowd. At least in my room."
They looked at each other again. They had not met to three years; but now they had already said everything there was to say. "Well, take it easy, Ernst."
"You too, Karl."
They shook hands. "Did you know Siebert was dead?" Mutizg asked.
"No."
"Six weeks ago. And Leiner?"
"Leiner? I didn't know about him either."
"Leiner and Lingen. They fell the same morning. Bruening went crazy. Have you heard that Hollmann got it too?",
"No."
"Bergmann heard that. Well, take care of yourself, Ernst! And don't forget to visit us."
Mutzig hobbled away. It seemed to give him a definite satisfaction to talk about the dead, Graeber thought. Perhaps it made his own misfortune less. He glanced after him. The leg had been amputated high up on the thigh. Mutzig had once been the best runner in their class. Graeber did not know whether to pity him or to envy him. Mutzig was right; it depended on what was coming.
When he came in, Elisabeth was perched on the bed in a white bathrobe. She had twisted a towel around her head like a turban and she sat there beautiful and still and entirely self-contained like a great bright bird that had flown in through the window and was now resting in order to fly on again.
"I have used up all the hot water for a week," she said. "It was a great luxury. Frau Lieser will set up a fine howl."
"Let her howl. She won't miss it. True National Socialists don't bathe very often. Cleanliness is a Jewish vice."
He went to the window and looked out. The sky was gray and the street was quiet. Opposite, a hairy man in suspenders was standing to a window yawning. From another window came the notes of a piano and a harsh female voice singing scales. Graeber stared at the excavated entrance to the cellar. He was thinking about the strange, cold terror he had felt to the street in front of the clothing store and he felt chilled again. What would remain? Something or other ought to remain, he thought, an anchor to hold him so that he wouldn't drift away and fail to return. But what? Elisabeth? Did she belong to him? He had known her for only a short time and he was going away again for years. Would any of this remain? How could he keep her and himself through her?
He turned around. "Elisabeth," he said, "we ought to get married."
"Get married!" She laughed. "Why?"
"Because it's senseless. Because we have only known each other a couple of days and because in a few days I have to go off again; because we don't know whether we want to stay together and actually could not possibly know in such a short time. That's why."
She looked at him. "You mean because we are alone and desperate and have nothing else?"
"No."
She was silent. "Not for that reason alone," he said.
"Then why?"
He looked at her. He watched her breathing. She suddenly seemed very alien to him. Her breasts rose and fell, her arms were different from his, her hands were different, her thoughts, her life—she would not understand him, how could she after all, when even he himself did not clearly understand why he all at once wanted it.
"If we were married you would not have to be afraid of Frau Lieser," he said. "As the wife of a soldier you would be protected."
"Would I?"
"Yes." Graeber grew embarrassed under her glance. "At least it would help some."
"That's no reason. I'll take care of Frau Lieser all right. Get married! We haven't even time."
"Why not?"
"You have to have papers, permits, proof of Aryan blood, health certificates and I don't know what else. That takes weeks."
Weeks, Graeber thought. She says that so lightly. Where will I be then?
"With soldiers it's different," he explained. "War marriages go faster. In a coupl
e of days. I've heard about it at the barracks."
"Is that, where you got the idea?"
"No. I believe it only occurred to me this morning. But in the barracks they often discuss the subject. Lots of soldiers get married on leave. Why not? When a soldier from the front gets married his wife is entitled to a monthly subsidy, two hundred marks, I think. Why make a present of that to the State? If one has to put his head on the block why shouldn't he at least take what he's entitled to? You could use it, and otherwise the State will keep it. Isn't that right?"