Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [79]
At the top of the rubble pile she could see over a neighboring row of rubble, just enough to find the flak tower near the bird sanctuary. She had her directions again. She carefully descended the wreckage, her shoes slipping on the damp bricks and concrete pieces. A swallow flitted by once, then again, perhaps looking for a recognizable place to land. A piece of torn camouflage netting caught her ankle, and she stumbled just as she reached the sidewalk. She caught herself on a telephone pole and started north.
She passed heap after heap of debris and one gutted building after another. She could ignore only so much. Her city—the destination of youthful dreams, the sacred place of her marriage to Adam—lay about her, trampled and burned, no more resembling a city than a rock quarry. The symphony of the city had been stilled. With a finger she dabbed at the corner of her eye, but there was no tear. She pressed the corner of her eye. Still no tear. She had shed the last of them, she supposed. And she was not alone. Berlin was beyond tears. Now only fear remained. Fear of Bolshevik soldiers, so close their campfires reddened the eastern clouds at night. Fear of the American and British bombers, which returned with numbing punctuality. Days and nights of fear.
Berliners wore their fear like a uniform. As she walked toward the park, passing many pedestrians doing their anxious errands in the predictable pause between bombing runs, Katrin realized Berliners had grown to look alike. Drawn, bony, wan faces. Stricken expressions. Bent, furtive walk, like mice scurrying from one safe spot to the next. And as if by agreement, Berliners had surrendered their right to color. They wore gray or black, the clothes of mourning.
Ahead on the street were three wooden barricades. An errant bomb from the run on the Alkett tank plant m Ruhleben had blasted a hole in the street precisely the street's width. People waited in line to cross unsteady planks that had been rigged along the edge of the crater, which was filled with murky water from a burst main. Katrin stepped behind a Red Cross colonel in black boots, a slate-gray greatcoat, and a peaked hat. Even the Red Cross looked like the Wehrmacht. She waited her turn to use the planks. Buildings near the crater had been raked back by the blast. A dead horse was bobbing in the crater. A man in a chef's hat was in the water, pushing the horse carcass to the crater's edge, where a cart waited. A restaurant would be serving it by nightfall.
Katrin held her hands out like a wire walker as she negotiated the plank. The Red Cross colonel turned to offer his hand, and she used him for support the last few steps. She nodded her thanks, then waded through a knot of refugees waiting to use the plank, heading in the other direction. She glanced at her watch. She had twenty-five minutes.
A child's cry brought her up, a piercing wail. Huddled near an overturned Auto-Union truck was a boy, maybe four years old, wearing three gunnysacks for a shirt and a pair of rolled-up man's pants held around his waist by a rope. His face was screwed up with the realization that he was lost, that his parents had moved on without him. In his hand was a crudely carved toy truck. Porous shoes had allowed water to wick up his pants almost to his knees. Dirt or ashes smudged his face. The boy dragged a sleeve across his eyes, streaking the dirt.
What was one more lost child? One more orphan? Berlin was full of lost children. They go somewhere, eventually, she figured, though she didn't know where. Wars had their price, and children paid their full measure.
Katrin took three more steps