by Mario Puzo
The blond man said, “Please join us in our late supper. On your business, Wolfgang, I cannot help. But surely, a man with such a fortune in cigarettes as your friend can give me a little business for other items besides scrip.”
Mosca said gravely, “That is very possible.” He smiled, and the others laughed as if he had made a very clever joke. They went into the dining-room.
The servant brought in a platter on which was a large, dark-red ham such as was sold in American Army commissaries. On a silver dish there were 6venly cut slices of fresh white American Army bread. It was still warm. Wolf buttered a piece, raised his eyebrows in complimentary astonishment and said, “I see yours is delivered even before it gets to the American commissary.” The blond man made a gesture of delight, laughing meanwhile. The servant brought several bottles of wine and Mosca, very thirsty from the long walking and feeling much better, drank his glass down in one gulp. The blond man was amused and pretended to be pleased.
“Ah,” he said, “a man to my taste. Not like you, Wolfgang, a cautious sipper and plodder. Now you see why he has five thousand cartons and you do not.”
Wolf smiled back at him and said banteringly, “Superficial psychology, my friend, very superficial. You forget how I eat.” And he started to help himself from the ham platter and then the long dish on which lay a dozen sticks of different kinds of wurst. From the cheese and salad dish he treated himself liberally and then looked at the blond man, saying, “Well, Honny, now what do you think? What can you say now?”
Honny, his blue eyes sparkling with pleasure in his freckled face, almost shouted with great good humor, “I can only say one thing. Good appetite.’
The red-haired woman laughed as did the rest of them and bent down to feed the huge dog lying beneath the table. She fed him an enormous slice of ham, and then from the servant took a large wooden bowl into which she poured a whole liter bottle full of milk. As she was bending, she let her hand slide carelessly along Mosca's leg and then pressed his thigh to lift herself again to a sitting position. She did it casually with no attempt at concealment.
“You're too fond of “that dog,” Honny said. “You really need children. They would be an interest.”
“My dear Honny,” she said, looking him straight in the face, “then you must change your tastes in love-making.” But the sweetness of her voice flooded the words.
Honny murmured, “And that is too high a price to pay.” He winked at Wolf. “Every man to his tastes, eh, Wolfgang?” Wolf nodded, continuing to chew on the enormous sandwich he had made for himself.
They ate and drank. Mosca, watchful, ate more and drank less. He felt fine. There was a long silence, then the woman snapped out of her moody trance and said with sudden verve, excitement, “Honny, shall we show them our treasure? Please?”
Wolf's face appeared alertly, comically, from behind his sandwich. Honny laughed and said, “No, no, Wolfgang, there is no profit in this. And besides it is very late and perhaps you are too tired.”
Trying not to sound eager, Wolf said cautiously, “Tell me what it is.”
The blond man smiled at him. “There is no gain involved. This is a curiosity. In our back yard I am building a little garden. The house from the other side of the street is destroyed and part of it flowed over my property. I started to clear it away and I was enjoying the exercise. But then I found something very strange. I found a hole in the rubble and underneath it the basement is intact and the rest of the house has fallen into it. Now. This is interesting. By some freak some beams have fallen in such a way as to hold up the building and form a great room underneath.” He smiled and the red freckles stood out like blood on his face. “I assure you it is unique. Would you care to go?”
“Sure,” Mosca said and Wolf nodded his head with indifferent consent.
“You won't need your coats. It is just across the garden and once underneath it is very warm.” But Wolf and Mosca took their belongings from the other room, not wanting to go out defenseless and not wanting Honny to know they carried weapons. Honny shrugged. “Wait till I get my flashlight and some candles. Will you come, Erda?” he asked the woman.
“Of course,” the woman said.
The four of them went through what was to be the garden, the blond man using his flashlight to show the way. The garden was a square piece of hard ground bordered by a brick wall so low they could step over it with ease. TTiey climbed a little hill of rubble and could see over the top of the house behind them, but a cloud hung veil-like before the moon, the city below was invisible. They descended into the valley formed by two mounds of shale and fragmented brick and came to the wall which supported and hedged in another heap of ruins.
The blond man crouched down. “Through here,” he said, and showed a hole in the wall that looked as dark and opaque as a deep shadow. They entered in single file, the blond man first, then the woman, Wolf, and Mosca.
Unexpectedly, when they had taken a few steps inside, they wore going down steps. Honny called out a warning behind him.
At the end of the steps Honny waited. The woman lit two candles and gave one to Mosca.
By yellow candlelight they could see before them, below them, breaking away from the concrete on which they stood as the sea breaks away from cliffs, a great subterranean room, three candles lighting it as a lighthouse the ocean, leaving great depths of shadows. There was a shifting floor and sloping walls of rubble. Another staircase in the middle of the room led upward and disappeared, blotted out by the ruins which had fallen into it, as if someone had built stairs running blindly into a ceiling.
“This was an SS billet when they made a hit, your bombers. Just before the war ended,” Honny said. “They have been buried now over a year. How glorious.”
“There may be something valuable,” Wolf said; “have you searched?”
“No,” Honny said.
They dropped off the ledge, their feet sinking into the floor. The woman remained by the wall, resting against the end of a huge wooden beam, one end of which had fallen and jammed into the floor, the otto: end wedged against the ceiling. She held the candle high, and the three men spread out into the enormous room.
They moved cautiously, their feet dragging through a treacherous shale of glass, dirt, and pulverized brick, like men wading through a swiftly moving stream. Sometimes when they hit a soft spot and sank alarmingly into the rubble their frantic scrambling was like treading water.
Before him Mosca saw a shiny, black boot. He picked it up; it was unexpectedly heavy. He realized there was a leg inside it, the top sealed off by a cover of pressed brick and stone glued together with blood and marrow of crushed bone. He let the boot drop and went to the farthest corner, sometimes sinking down through the rubble halfway to the knee. Near the wall he stumbled over a long body trunk with no head or neck or legs or arms” He pressed against it with his fingers, the black cloth unrecognizable, and inside it he felt flesh out of which all the fat and blood had been squeezed by the enormous pressure of the falling building. The flesh felt very firm against the bone, but he could feel the bonelike rods: underneath. The two extremities of the trunk were sealed off in the same way as the boot
There was nothing horrible in these remnants of human beings. No sight of blood or flesh. They had been so crushed that the clothing they wore had been pressed into the place of skin. The blood had been absorbed by the tons of brick turned to blotting dirt. Mosca kicked the rubble around a bit and, when his other foot began, to sink, moved away hastily. Wolf was busy alone in a far corner, without illumination, almost invisible.
Suddenly Mosca felt oppressively warm. A hot dust rose in the air and a curious smell, like charred flesh, came from that dust, as if under the shifting floor, underground fires were raging all through the city, hidden by similar ruins.
“Give me a light,” Wolf said from his corner. His voice was like a great hollow whisper. Mosca threw his lit candle across the room. It made a great arc of yellow flame and landed beside Wolf. He le
t it rest there.
They could see Wolfs shadow fumbling with a torso. The quiet voice of Honny said conversationally, “It is very curious that these bodies have no heads. There are six or seven I have found, some have a leg or arm, but none have heads. And why have they not decomposed?”
“Here,” Wolf said, his voice reverberating now from the far corner, “I have something.” He lifted up a leather holster in which hung a pistol. He drew the gun out of its holster and parts of it crumbled away and fell into the shale of the floor. Wolf flung the holster away from him and resumed his poking around, meanwhile speaking to the blond man.
“Like the mummies, those old mummies,” he said. “All the stuff pressed into them. And maybe they were sealed off and the building just, shifted so we could get in. And their heads were crushed right into the floor, into little bits, shreds, part of the floor we walk on here. I've seen that before.” He had worked himself away from the candle and was now deep in the far corner and he said again, “Give me some light.” The woman at the wall lifted her candle high and Wolf held something aloft so that the weak yellow ray would fall on it. At the same moment the blond man swung his flashlight toward him.
Wolfs scream was short, more one of surprise, the woman's hysterical, trilling off to a sob. Caught in the light of the flashlight and candle, was a gray hand, tremendously elongated fingers patinaed with paintlike dirt The light of the candle fell away from it almost in the instant Wolf flung the hand away. They were silent, all now feeling the heat of the room, the oppressiveness of the air from the dust they had stirred from the shifting floor. Then Mosca said to Wolf teasingly, “Aren't you ashamed?”
The blond man laughed softly, but it echoed through the room. Wolf said apologetically, “I thought the goddamn thing was a rat”
The woman by the ledge said, “Let's go quickly, I need air,” and as Mosca started to move toward her and the light, part of the wall shifted.
A wave of rubble swept him off his feet His head fell against one of the torsos. His lips touched it and that touch told him there was no cloth over the body, but skin burned and charred hard as leather. Underneath that skin the body was hot as if already burning in hell. He pushed away with his bands and when he tried to rise a great black wave of vomit gushed out of his mouth. He heard the others moving to help and almost screamed, “Stay away from me. Stay away.” He knelt, clutching great handfuls of the sharp fragments of glass and brick and bone and vomited out everything, the putrified food, the alcohol turned to bile. He could feel his hand stinging as the rubble cut into his flesh.
He was empty of everything. He rose. The woman helped him up to the ledge out of the room. By the light of die candle she held, he could see on her face a strangely distraught look of excitement and pleasure. She held on to the back of Mosca's short coat as they went up the stairs.
They came out into the cold night air and breathed deeply. “It is good to be alive,” the blond man said. “That, below, that is the after death.”
They climbed the little hill of rubble from the defile they were standing in. The moon was out across the city and made it like a gray deserted fairyland, with wisps of fog and dust interlacing, spinning cobwebs to form a room above the earth, as if everyone were sleeping in a living death. Up the slope of the hill on which stood the Polizei-haus they could see the yellow light of a streetcar climbing slowly, and they could hear lightly on the winter air the soft, muted tone of its bell, cold and crystal clear. Mosca realized they must be quite close to his billet in the Metzer Strasse for he had seen this streetcar often at night, climbing the same hill, hearing the same bell.
The woman clung to the blond man as they stood there on the rubble heap and asked, “Will you come in for a drink?”
“No,” Mosca said and to Wolf said, “Let's go home.” He felt lonely and afraid, afraid of the people he was with including Wolf, afraid that something had happened to Hella alone in the billet. Now, completely sober, it seemed a very long time ago that he had left Eddie Cassin drunk and alone in the Rathskellar and started the long walking through the streets with Wolf.
He wondered if Eddie had made it home all right, and how late it was, surely long after midnight. And Hella would be waiting up for him, alone, reading on the couch. He thought for the first time with emotion of his mother and Alf and Gloria, of their letters, that he hadn't read. For the first time he knew that the safety he imagined they felt, they did not feel; they dreamed in their own terror. Suddenly he felt they were all in danger, everyone that he knew, and that there was nothing he could do about it. He remembered his mother going to church and knew what he wanted to say to her that would explain everything and make him accept everything, because it was true. “We are not made in God's image,” and that was all of it, and now he could go on living, trying hard to make himself happy and Hella, too.
Tiredness washed everything out of his mind. He started down the hill of rubble, his chin buried in the collar of his coat, feeling the cold, the ache in his bones, and as he and Wolf walked through the streets, the pale flooding light of the moon showed the wounds of the city as cruelly as the sun, but without color or pity, bloodlessly; as if it were a light shed by some lifeless and metal instrument, mirroring its own image in the earth, its own arid craters and lifeless scars.
thirteen
The brilliant morning son of early spring washed the ruined city in colors of bright yellow and gold, glinting off smashed red brick; a light-blue sky curtained maimed and disfigured buildings on the horizon.
Yergen's daughter pushed the cream-colored baby carriage, her sad little face proud and happy, yet concerned; her pretty blue dress matched the sky. Yergen walked beside her, watching her, enjoying her happiness, sensing the coming alive of the great city after a long, terrible winter.
Coupled Strassenbahnen made a great clanging as they went through the streets, filling the golden morning air with a sound of bells. Turning into the Metzer Strasse, Yergen saw far down the street Mosca and his Mends working on a jeep. Then he saw Heila standing under a tree. Coming closer he saw that Mosca, Leo, and Eddie were loading the jeep with Mosca's possessions. There were suitcases and Val-packs full of clothing, a wooden box full of tinned food, and a small coal stove which he, Yergen, had procured for them.
Yergen touched his daughter's shoulder. “Giselle, push the wagon right under their noses,. surprise them.” The little girl smiled happily and pushed faster. Hella saw them first and Yergen could hear her squeal of delight before she took a few awkward running steps to meet them.
“How do you like it?” Yergen asked with pride. “Isn't it every bit as good as I promised?”
“Oh, it is wonderful, Yergen, it's beautiful,” Hella exclaimed. The thin, serene face had such a look of joy that Yergen was really and truly touched. He looked at the carriage again and saw that it was beautiful, low slung with lines like a racer, its lovely, creamy paint, framed by the green earth on which it rested and the light-blue sky above them.
“My daughter Giselle,” Yergen said, “she wanted to bring it herself.” The shy little girl bowed her head. Hella knelt clumsily, the loose overcoat she wore folding around her onto the earth. “Thank you very much,” she said and kissed the little girl on the cheek. “Will you, help me bring it to my new home?” The child nodded.
Mosca came over from the jeep. He was dressed in old, wrinkled sun tans. “I'll pay you later, Yergen,” he said, barely glancing at the carriage. “We're moving over to Kurfiirsten Allee. Why don't you walk over there with Hella and the carriage? We'll be there soon as we get loaded.”
“Of course, of course,” Yergen said. In high spirits he lifted his hat to Hella and said in German, “Dear lady, may I accompany you?” She smiled at him and took the arm he offered. They let the child go before them.
They walked into a spring breeze that smelled of flowers and grass, and Hella buttoned her coat. Yergen could see it stretch tight across the front of her stomach and felt an unaccountable content mixed with
sadness. His own wife dead, his daughter without a mother, and now walking beside the mistress of the enemy, he thought of how it would be if Hella belonged to him, her tenderness and love given to him and his child and carrying a new life within her that would belong to both of them. How sweet it would be on this sweet morning, how the sadness and fear would wash away inside himself and how Giselle, too, would be safe. And as he thought this, Giselle turned her head to give them both a smile.
“She looks much better now,” Hella said.
Yergen shook his head. “I am bringing her away to the country this very day. For a month. On the doctor's advice.” Yergen slowed his walk so that Giselle would not hear what he said next. “I think she is very ill. It was a bad winter for her.’
Giselle was far ahead of them now, pushing the carriage through a great patch of sunlight. Hella slipped her arm into Yergen's again. He said, “I must get her away from the ruins, anything that makes her think of her mother's death, away from Germany.” He hesitated and then matter of f actly, casually, as if repeating something he did not even remotely believe, “The doctor says she may become insane.”
Giselle was waiting for them where the shade of the street began again, as if afraid of walking alone among the shadows of a tree. Hella walked ahead of Yergen so that she would come first to the little girl and said to her gaily, “Do you want to ride in the carriage?” Giselle nodded and Yergen helped her into it, letting her long legs dangle over the side. Hella pushed, saying laughingly, “Oh, what a big baby I have,” tickling the child under the chin. Then she tried to run to make an impression of speed, but she was too awkward. Giselle didn't laugh, but she was smiling and making little sounds that were the shadows of laughter …
They came to a long row of white stone houses beaded along the Kurfiirsten Allee. Hella stopped by the first house, by a little gate that barred a cemented path leading to the door. Hella called out, “Frau Saunders,” and a woman appeared at the open window. She had a sad, stern face with the hair severely done, and they could see from the upper part of her body visible to them that she was wearing a plain black dress.
