We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [328]
The puddles on the stone floor inside the station suggested that it had rained recently, and there were people all over the place, lying and sitting on piles of rubble as though they were benches and chairs supplied by provident authorities. The majority had to be homeless. They didn't look as if they were going anywhere. Where would they travel to anyway? To the next bombed-out railway station?
In a corner someone was handing out coffee and bread; a notice announced that later that day soup would be served. Though they were hungry, the former crew of the Nimbus avoided the bread line, afraid of giving themselves away. Knud Erik went off alone with a pack of cigarettes and returned shortly with a loaf of bread, a sausage, and a bottle of water. Bluetooth bolted his share eagerly, but the others chewed theirs for a long time. They didn't know when their next meal would be.
They spent the night in the railway station and took a train to Bremen the next morning. In Bremen they'd change for Hamburg. They had no tickets, but Knud Erik's cigarettes solved that problem. The platform was overcrowded, so they used Old Funny as a battering ram. People moved out of his way, doubtless presuming him to be a tragic war invalid. All that was missing was an Iron Cross pinned to his chest.
A woman in an oversize winter coat was standing in the middle of the platform: she didn't seem to be headed anywhere, but just stood I there. Her pale, emaciated face, half-covered by the scarf tied under her chin, wore the most lost expression Knud Erik had ever seen. She wasn't withdrawn so much as absent: her eyes were completely blank. She was pushed and shoved from all sides by the blind throng, and the suitcase that she carried in her hand suddenly sprang open and an infant fell out. Knud Erik saw it clearly. It was the burned body of a little child, withered and practically unrecognizable, a mummy shrunk by the heat of the same fire that had clearly devoured its mother's mind too. A man, focused on the train, pushed her away, and without even noticing where he put his feet, trod right on the tiny corpse that lay in front of him. Knud Erik turned away.
"Look," Bluetooth said, "the lady dropped her Negro doll."
As they approached Hamburg, for almost thirty minutes they traveled through nothing but ruins. They thought they knew what bombs could do to a town, but they'd never seen anything to compare with this. No ghostly scorched façades rose from the piles of rubble: there was no guessing what streets might have once existed there. The devastation was so complete that you could barely believe it was caused by man. But it didn't look like a natural disaster either: that would have left something standing, however randomly. This destruction was so systematic that it looked like the work of a force that knew neither earth, water, nor air, but only fire.
For the first time in almost six years of war, they felt they'd existed only at its periphery. Like the other passengers in the overcrowded train, they averted their gaze: they couldn't bear the sight. The scale of the city's destruction was so unfathomable that they gave up trying to understand what neither their minds nor their eyes could take in. They knew that if they stayed here any longer, they'd end up like the people around them, and lose the hope that drove them on. Even Bluetooth looked away and started fiddling with a button on his coat. He didn't ask any questions, and Knud Erik wondered if it was because he was wise enough to fear the answers.
AT FOUR-THIRTY in the morning on May 3, 1945, they stole a tugboat from Neustadt Harbor.
They'd planned to go to Kiel but had to accept the transport options that presented themselves. Knud Erik's last carton of cigarettes secured them places in the covered bed of a truck that was going to Neustadt. The harbor was deserted; they walked the length of the wharf and looked for a boat that would fit their purpose. Bluetooth was sleeping, curled like a puppy on Old Funny's lap. Anton decided on a tugboat named Odysseus. When they'd