The Dark Arena - Mario Puzo [66]
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