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And do you remember when we ate pistachios, when we ate those lemon ices
shaped like flowers? When you said
. . .
All spring the bombers come, every single night, their only goal seemingly to burn the city to its
roots. Most nights the girls hurry to the end of the block and climb into a cramped shelter and are
kept awake by the crashing of stonework.
Once in a while, on the walk to the factory, they see bodies, mummies turned to ash, people
scorched beyond recognition. Other times, the corpses bear no apparent injuries, and it is these that
fill Jutta with dread: people who look like they are a moment away from rising up and slogging
back to work with the rest of them.
But they do not wake.
Once she sees a row of three children facedown, backpacks on their backs. Her first thought is:
Wake up. Go to school. Then she thinks: There could be food in those packs.
Claudia Förster stops talking. Whole days pass and she does not say a word. The factory runs
out of materials. There are rumors that no one is in charge anymore, that the copper and zinc and
stainless steel they’ve been slaving to collect is being loaded onto train cars and left on sidings for
no one.
Mail stops. In late March, the machine parts factory is padlocked, and Frau Elena and the girls
are sent to work for a civilian firm cleaning the streets after bombings. They lift broken masonry
blocks, shovel dust and shattered glass through strainers. Jutta hears about boys, sixteen- and
seventeen-year-olds, terrified, homesick, with trembling eyes, who show up on the doorsteps of
their mothers only to be hauled howling out of attics two days later and shot in the street as
deserters. Images from her childhood—riding in a wagon behind her brother, picking through trash
—return to her. Looking to salvage one shining thing from the mire.
“Werner,” she whispers aloud.
In the fall, at Zollverein, she received two letters announcing his death. Each mentioned a
different place of burial. La Fresnais, Cherbourg—she had to look them up. Towns in France.
Sometimes, in dreams, she stands with him over a table strewn with gears and belts and motors.
I’m making something,
he says.
I’m working on it
. But he doesn’t go on.
By April, the women speak only of the Russians and the things they will do, the vengeance they
will seek. Barbarians, they say. Tatars, Russkis, savages, swine. The pigs are in Strasbourg. The
ogres are in the suburbs.
Hannah, Susanne, Claudia, and Jutta sleep on the floor in a tangle. Does any goodness linger in
this last derelict stronghold? A little. Jutta comes home one afternoon, pasted with dust, to
discover that big Claudia Förster has chanced upon a paper bakery box sealed with gold tape.
Blots of grease show through the cardboard. Together the girls stare at it. Like something from the
unfallen world.
Inside wait fifteen pastries, separated by squares of wax paper and stuffed with strawberry
preserves. The four girls and Frau Elena sit in their dripping apartment, a spring rain over the city,
all the ash running off the ruins, all the rats peering out of caves made from fallen bricks, and they
eat three stale pastries each, none of them saving anything for later, the powdered sugar on their
noses, the jelly between their teeth, a giddiness rising and sparkling in their blood.
That cowlike, petrified Claudia could achieve such a miracle, that she would be good enough to
share it.
What young women are left dress themselves in rags, cower in basements. Jutta hears that
grandmothers are rubbing granddaughters with feces, sawing off their hair with bread knives,
anything to make them less appealing to the Russians.
She hears mothers are drowning daughters.
She hears you can smell the blood on them from a mile away.
“Not much longer now,” says Frau Elena, her palms out in front of the stove as the water refuses
to boil.
The Russians come for them on a cloudless day in May. There are only three of them, and they
come only that one time. They break into the printing company below, hunting liquor, but find none
and are soon bashing holes in the walls. A crack and a shudder, a bullet zinging off an old
dismantled press, and in the upstairs apartment Frau Elena sits in her striped ski parka, an
abridged New Testament zipped into the pocket, holding the hands of the girls and moving her lips
in soundless prayer.
Jutta allows herself to believe that they won’t come up the staircase. For several minutes they
don’t. Until they do, and their boots thump all the way up.
“Stay calm,” Frau Elena tells the girls. Hannah and Susanne and Claudia and Jutta—none of
them is older than sixteen. Frau Elena’s voice is low and deflated, but it does not seem afraid.
Disappointed, maybe. “Stay calm and they won’t shoot. I’ll make sure to go first. After that they’ll
be gentler.”
Jutta laces her hands behind her head to keep them from shaking. Claudia seems mute, deaf.
“And close your eyes,” says Frau Elena.
Hannah sobs.
Jutta says, “I want to see them.”
“Keep them open, then.”
The footsteps stop at the top of the stairwell. The Russians go into the closet, and they hear the
handles of mops being kicked drunkenly and a crate of dictionaries go thudding down the stairs,
and then someone rattles the knob. One says something to another and the jamb splinters and the
door bangs open.
One is an officer. Two cannot be a day older than seventeen. All are filthy beyond
comprehension, but somewhere in the previous hours, they have taken the liberty of splashing
themselves with women’s perfume. The two boys, in particular, smell toxically of it. They seem
partly like sheepish schoolboys and partly like lunatics with an hour left to live. The first has only
a rope for a belt and is so thin, he does not have to unknot it to slide off his trousers. The second
laughs: a strange, puzzled laugh, as if he does not quite believe the Germans would come to his
country and leave a city like this behind. The officer sits by the door with his legs straight out in
front of him and peers out into the street. Hannah screams for a half second but quickly muffles it
with her own hand.
Frau Elena leads the boys into the other room. She makes a single noise: a cough, as though she
has something stuck in her throat.
Claudia goes next. She offers up only moans.
Jutta does not allow herself to make a single sound. Everything is strangely orderly. The officer
goes last, trying each of them in turn, and he speaks single words while he is on top of Jutta, his
eyes open but not seeing. It is not clear from his compressed, pained face if the words are
endearments or insults. Beneath the cologne, he smells like a horse.
Years later, Jutta will hear the words he spoke repeated in her memory—
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