He was walking along Adlerstrasse. It was six o'clock in the evening. He had been looking all day for a room and had found nothing. Wearily he had decided to give it up for today.
The section was badly devastated. Row after row of ruins. Listlessly he walked on among them. Then suddenly he saw something that at first he could not believe. In the midst of the devastation, stood a small two-storied house. It was old and a little crooked, but it was entirely undamaged. A garden lay around it with a few trees and bushes coming into leaf, and everything was untouched. It was an oasis in the wilderness of ruins. Above the garden fence lilac bushes were budding and not a single picket of the fence was broken. Ten paces on either side the lunar wilderness began again; but this tiny old garden and this tiny old house had been spared by one of those miracles that sometimes go with destruction. Inn and Restaurant Witte was painted over the front door.
The garden gate was open. He went in. He was no longer surprised to find that not a pane in the windows had been broken. It almost had to be so. The miraculous always lies in wait close by despair. A brown and white hunting dog lay sleeping beside the door. A few flower beds were abloom with jonquils, violets, and tulips. It seemed to him as though he had seen all this once before. He did not know when; it seemed a long time ago. But perhaps he had only dreamed i it. He walked through the door.
The taproom was empty. There were only a few glasses standing on the shelves; no bottles at all. The tap was shiny, but the sieve under it was dry. Three tables with chairs around them stood along the wall. A picture hung over the center one. It was a Tyrolean landscape. In it a girl was playing a zither and a huntsman was leaning over her. There was no picture of Hitler; nor had Graeber expected one.
A middle-aged woman came in. She was wearing a faded blue blouse with sleeves shirred at the shoulders. She did not say: "Heil Hitler." She said, "Good evening"—and there was actually something of the evening in it. After a day full of good work it was the wish for a good evening. Once there used to be things like this, Graeber thought. He had only intended to get something to drink, the dust of the ruins had made him thirsty, but now it suddenly seemed very important to spend the evening here with Elisabeth. He foresaw it would be a good evening, beyond the dark circle of destruction that lay as far as the horizon on all sides of this enchanted garden. "Can one get supper here?" he asked.
The woman hesitated. "I have coupons." he said quickly. "It would be wonderful to eat here. Perhaps even in the garden. It's one of my last days before I have to go away. For my wife and me. I have coupons for both of us. If you like I can bring canned goods as well to trade."
"We only have lentil soup. We're really not serving any more."
"Lentil soup will be splendid. I haven't had any in a long time."
The woman smiled. It was a quiet smile that seemed to take form of itself. "If that's enough for you, then come. You can sit in the garden too, if you like. Or here if it's too cool."
"In the garden. It will still be light enough. Can we come around eight o'clock?"
"With lentil soup you don't have to be too punctual. Just come when you like."
A letter had been stuck under the doorplate of his parents' house. It was from his mother. They had forwarded it to him from the front. He tore it open. The letter was brief. His mother wrote that his father and she were going to leave the city next morning with a transport. They did not know yet where they were being taken. He was not to worry. It was just a precautionary safety measure.
He looked at the date. The letter had been written a week before his furlough. There was nothing in it about an air raid; but his mother always was cautious. She was afraid of the censors. It was unlikely that the house had been bombed on the following night. It must have happened earlier; otherwise they would not have been selected to go with the transport.
He slowly folded the letter and put it into his pocket. So his parents were alive! He was as sure of it now as one could be! He looked around. Something like a wavy glass wall seemed to be sinking into the ground in front of him. Suddenly Hakenstrasse looked like all the other bombed streets. The dread and torment that had hung over Number Eighteen had been silently blown away. There was nothing more there but debris and ruins, like everywhere else.
He took a deep breath. He fe!t no joy; only a profound release. A burden that had oppressed him all the time and everywhere had suddenly dropped from his shoulders. He did not reflect that now he would probably not see his parents during his furlough; the long uncertainty had already buried that hope. They were alive; that was enough. They were alive; with that fact something was terminated and he was free.
During the last raid the street had received a few hits. The house of which only the façade had been standing had collapsed. The door with the Ruins Journal was now propped up, a little farther on, between the piles of rubble. Graeber was just wondering what might have become of the mad air raid warden when he saw him coming from across the street. "The soldier," said the warden. "Still here!"
"Yes. You too, it appears."
"Did you find your letter?"
"Yes."
"It came yesterday afternoon. Can we strike you off the door now? We need the space badly. There are five applicants for it."
"Not yet," Graeber said. "In a couple of days."
"It's high time," the warden declared, as sharply and severely as though he were a schoolteacher rebuking a disobedient child. "We have been very patient with you."
"Are you the editor of this Journal?"
"An air raid warden is everything. He maintains order. We have a widow whose three children have been missing since the last raid. We need a place to announce it."
"Then take mine. Apparently I get my mail at the ruin over there anyway."
The warden took down Graeber's notice and handed it to him. Graeber was about to tear it up, when the warden seized his hand. "Are you crazy, soldier? You don't tear something like that. If you did you'd be tearing up your luck. Once saved always saved, as long as you keep that notice. You really still are a beginner!"
"Yes," Graeber said, folding the notice and putting it in his pocket. "And that's the way I'd like to stay as long as I can. Where are you living now?"
"I had to move. I found a snug cellar corner. Live there now as the sub-tenant of a family of mice. Very entertaining."
Graeber looked at the man. His haggard face betrayed nothing. "I intend to found a society," he announced, "for people whose relations are buried under the ruins. We must stand together, otherwise the city will do nothing. At the very least, each place where people are buried must be blessed by a priest so that it will be consecrated ground. Do you understand that?"
"Yes. I understand."
"Good. There are people who think it's foolish. You, of course, haven't any reason now for becoming a member. You've gotten your damn letter!"
The haggard face suddenly fell apart. An expression of bewildered pain and rage seemed to break it into pieces. The man turned around abruptly and stomped back along the street.
Graeber looked after him. Then he went on. He decided not to tell Elisabeth that his parents were still alive.
She came alone across the square in front of the factory. She seemed very lost and small. The twilight made the square bigger than usual and the low buildings beyond it more bare and menacing.
"I'm going to get some time off, she said breathlessly. "Again."
"How long?"
"Three days. The last three days."
She stopped. Her eyes changed. They were suddenly full of tears. "I told them why," she said. "They gave me the three days right away. Perhaps I'll have to make them up later, but that doesn't matter. Afterwards nothing matters. It's really better if I have a lot to do."
Graeber made no reply. The realization that they would have to part had struck in front of him like a dark meteor. He had known it all the time, the way one knows many things—without actually realizing them or completely feeling them. There had always been
so much in between. Now all at once it was there by itself, big and full of a chill horror, and it was radiating a pale, penetrating, skeletonizing light —like X-rays that pierce through the charm and magic of life, leaving nothing but the bare residue and the inevitable.
They looked at each other. Both felt the same thing. They stood in the empty square and looked at each other and each knew what the other was suffering. They had the feeling thai they were reeling in a storm, but they did not move. Despair, from which they had found escape again and again, had finally caught up with them, and they saw each other now as they would really be—Graeber saw Elisabeth, alone, in the factory, in an air raid shelter, or in some room, waiting without much hope—and she saw him returning to war for a cause in which he no longer believed. Despair shook them, and at the same time like a cloudburst there descended on them a fatal tenderness, to which they dared not yield because they felt they would be torn to pieces once they admitted it. They were helpless. They could do nothing. They had to wait until it passed.
It seemed forever before Graeber could speak. He saw the tears were gone from Elisabeth's eyes. She had not stirred; it was as though they had flowed inward. "Then we will be together for a couple of whole days," he said.
She smiled. "Yes. Beginning tomorrow evening."
"Good. Then it's as though we still had a couple of weeks, if we count it the old way—a couple of weeks with you having only evenings free."
"Yes."
They walked on. In the empty windows in the wall of a house the red of evening hung like a forgotten curtain. "Where shall we go?" Elisabeth asked. "And where are we going to sleep?"
"We'll sleep in the cloisters of the church. Or in the cloister garden if it's warm enough. And now we are going to eat lentil soup."
The Restaurant Witte emerged from between the ruins. For a moment it seemed odd to Graeber that it was still there. It was as improbable as a fata morgana. They went through the garden gate, "What do you say to this?" he asked.
"It looks like a patch of peace the war has overlooked."
"Yes. And that's the way it's to stay for this evening."
The flower beds smelled strongly of earth. Someone had recently watered them. The hunting dog came around the house wagging his tail. He was licking his chops as though he had just eaten. Frau Witte came toward them. She had put on a white apron. "Would you like to sit in the garden?" she asked.
"Yes," Elisabeth said. "And I should like to wash if that's possible."
"Certainly."
Frau Witte led Elisabeth into the house and upstairs. Graeber went past the kitchen into the garden. A table, with a red and white checked cloth, and two chairs had been made ready. Glasses and plates stood on it and a faintly frosted water pitcher. He drank a glass thirstily. The water was cold and tasted better than wine. The garden was larger than one would have thought from outside. It consisted of a patch of lawn, which was already fresh and green, elder and lilac bushes and a few ancient trees in new leaf.
Elisabeth came back. "Just how did you find it?"
"By accident. How else could one find something like this?"
She walked across the grass and fingered the buds on the bushes. "Lilac buds already. They're still green and sharp. Soon they will bloom."
"Yes," Graeber said. "They will bloom. In a couple of weeks."
Elisabeth came to him. She smelled of soap and fresh water and youih. "It's beautiful here. And it's strange— I feel as if I had been here once before."
"I felt that way too when I saw it."
"It's as though all this had been here before. You and I and this garden—and as though there were only a tiny something missing, the last little bit, and I would be able to recall everything exactly as it was then." She laid her head-. on his shoulder. "It won't ever happen. One is always stopped just short of it. But perhaps we actually did live all this once before and will go on living it over forever."
Frau Witte came out with a soup tureen. "I would like to give you our ration coupons now," Graeber said. "We haven't many. Some of ours .got burned. But these will probably be enough."
"I won't need them all," Frau Witte declared. "We had the lentils from before. I need just a few for the sausage. I'll bring back the rest later. Would you like something to drink? We have a few bottles of beer."
"That's magnificent. Beer is exactly what we'd like."
The sunset was now only a pale glow. A thrush began toeing. Graeber remembered he had heard one at noon. It had been sitting on a station of the cross. Since then a lot had happened. He lifted the cover of the tureen. "Sausage. Good Bologna sausage. And lentils, cooked thick. A superb dish!"
He filled the plates and for a moment it seemed to him as though he possessed a house and a garden and a wife and a table and food and security and as though there were peace. "Elisabeth," he said, "if you were offered a pact .that you could live I this way for the next ten years—with the ruins and this garden and we two together—would you sign it?"
"Instantly. And for longer."
"So would I."
Frau Witte brought the beer. Graeber opened the bottles and filled their glasses. They drank. The beer was cool and good. They ate the soup. They ate it slowly and calmly, looking at each other.
It grew darker. A searchlight cut across the sky. It poked at the clouds and slid on. The thrush had stopped singing. Night began.
Frau Witte came to refill the tureen. "You haven't eaten enough," she said. "Young people should eat heartily."
"We have eaten all we could. The tureen is almost empty."
"I'll bring you some salad too. And a piece of cheese."-
The moon came up. "Now we have everything," Elisabeth said. "The moon, the garden, and we have eaten and still have the whole evening before us. It's so beautiful you can hardly stand it."
"This is the way people used to live all the time. And they didn't consider it anything special."
She nodded and looked around. "You can't see a single ruin from here. This garden is arranged so that you just don't see them. The trees cover them. To think there are whole countries like this!"
"We will go to them after the war. We will see nothing but undestroyed cities and in the evening they will be lighted and no one will go in fear of bombs. We will stroll past shop windows full of lights and it will be so bright we'll actually be able to recognize one another's face on the street at night."
"Will they let us in?"
"For a trip? Why not? The Swiss, for instance."
"We'll have to have Swiss francs. How can we get them?"
"We'll take cameras with us and sell them there. We can live on that for a couple of weeks."
Elisabeth laughed. "Or jewelry or fur coats that we don't have."
Frau Witte came with the salad and cheese. "You like it here?"
"Yes, very much. Can we stay a little longer?"
"As long as you like. I'll bring you coffee, too. Malt coffee, of course."
"Coffee as well. Today we're living like princes," Graeber said.
Elisabeth laughed again. "It was in the beginning that we lived like princes. With pâté de foie gras and caviar and wine from the Rhine. Now we are living like human beings. The way we will live afterwards. Isn't it beautiful to live?"
"Yes, Elisabeth."
Graeber looked at her. She had seemed weary when she came from the factory. Now she was entirely restored. That never took long with her and it didn't require much.
"It will be beautiful to live," she said. "We're so unused to it. Unused to so much. That's why we have so much before us still. Things that are a matter of course to other people will be a great adventure to us. Even air that doesn't smell of burning. Or a dinner without ration coupons. Stores where you can buy what you like. Cities that haven't been bombed. Or to be able to talk without first looking all around. Not to need to be afraid any more! That will take a long time, but the fear will grow less and less and even if it comes back once in a while it will be a joy because we w
ill know at once that we no longer need to feel it. Do you believe that?"
"Yes," Graeber said with an effort. "Yes, Elisabeth. If • you look at it that way, there's still a lot of happiness ahead of us."