We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [327]
During the first few hours, they saw no signs of war. The road ran through flat marshland sparsely dotted with farms. The main road ahead of them was still empty. Bluetooth grew tired of running about and climbed onto the lap of Old Funny, who'd miraculously conjured a bottle of rum from beneath his blanket. Wally always maintained that Herman's wheelchair had a false bottom that concealed a stash of booze.
Later that morning they reached a village. Seeing smoke emerging from the chimney of a house, Knud Erik walked up the garden path and knocked on the door. No one came to open it, but he saw a face staring at him from behind a curtain. They continued: the first bomb craters appeared in the road, filled with water and reflecting the blue spring sky. Soon they found themselves skirting craters and burned-out transport trucks. They were nearing a town, and people began to appear on the road, while unshaven soldiers in filthy uniforms trudged along indifferently. It was hard to decide whether they were on the run or had merely been sent on a mission they no longer believed in. Horse-drawn carts rumbled past, piled with towers of tightly packed furniture and mattresses, followed by dead-faced people moving with the mechanical steps of prisoners in a chain gang. Others struggled along with wheelbarrows and pushcarts. No one spoke: they kept their eyes on the ground and seemed lost in mute introspection.
"Look, a horsie!" Bluetooth cried out in his baby English, pointing a finger.
They hushed him—not for fear of standing out in the growing crowd, but from a worry that in the midst of this silent, funereal traffic, any exclamation of joy was out of place. Soon, though, they realized that they were no different from anyone else. A man in a wheelchair with a child on his lap, a woman, and a group of men trudging along: just another motley crew of refugees. The main roads of Europe were teeming with people like them, who'd lost a home and were on the lookout for another that hadn't been wrecked by war. But they had two things that most of the others didn't: they had hope, and a fixed goal. They must keep a low profile: if they showed any curiosity or raised their voices, they'd attract attention. Knud Erik had feared that Absalon's black skin might give them away as foreigners, but in the end no one paid them any heed. The Germans were too busy with their own wrecked lives and dreams, oblivious to anything but the blind onward trudge from one blasted city to the next.
They arrived at a town. Most of it had been destroyed by bombs, but they'd seen ruins before, in Liverpool, London, Bristol, and Hull. In some places the house fronts were still standing, four to five stories high, their sooty walls punctured by empty windows. In others, even the façades had crumbled, exposing the gaps between the floors. They looked into rooms, guessing at which had been bedrooms and which kitchens. They kept expecting the people they saw in the streets to return to the half-houses that had boards nailed across the doors and start a new shadow life that matched their dead faces and downcast eyes.
Bluetooth was used to ruins. He thought houses were meant to be burned out. So for him, it wasn't the somber, ravaged landscape that stood out, but the big white bird sitting high up on the spire of a shelled church.
"Look," he said. "That's Frede."
He said it in Danish. He switched freely between that and English. They'd told him about the stork on Goldstein's roof, but they never mentioned Anton's attempt to kill it. Now he thought he was seeing Frede.
"No, it's not Frede. It is a stork just like him."
Knud Erik couldn't help laughing. A passerby stared at him as if his laughter was a kind of high treason, and he'd cursed Hitler in a loud voice.
The stork took off and flapped heavily above the street. They followed it. When it reached the railway station, it landed on its damaged roof as if showing them