Graeber got up and went out. After the cool semi-darkness of the church the light outside burst upon him as though it were trying to shine through him and were already an instrument of the Gestapo. He walked slowly through the streets. It was as if he were walking under a bell-glass. Everything around him was suddenly strange and unreachable. A woman with a child in her arms become a picture of personal safety that inspired bitter envy. A man sitting on a bench reading a newspaper was an example of unattainable serenity; and two laughing people seemed like beings from an earlier world that had suddenly been destroyed. Over him alone hung the dark shadow of fear, separating him from others as though he were plague-stricken.
He entered the Gestapo building and showed the summons. An S.S. man directed him along a corridor into a side wing. The passages smelled of unaired offices and barracks. He had to wait in a room with three other people. One man was standing at a window that opened on the courtyard. His hands were behind his back and with his right hand he was tapping out piano notes on the back of his left hand. The two other men were slumped on chairs staring straight ahead. One was baldheaded and had a harelip which he kept covering with his hand; the other wore a Hitler mustache and had a pale, spongy face. All three glanced over quickly at Graeber as he came in and then immediately looked away again.
An S.S. man with eyeglasses entered. They all got up at once. Graeber was nearest the door. "What are you doing here?" the S.S. man asked in surprise. Soldiers were usually under the authority of the military court.
Graeber showed him the notice. The S.S. man read it. "This isn't for you at all. This is for a Fräulein Kruse."
'She's my wife. We were married a few days ago. She works in one of the State industries. I thought I could attend to this for her."
Graeber got out his marriage certificate which he had brought with him out of foresight. The S.S. man bored into his ear with one finger, reflectively. "Well, it's all right with me. Room Seventy-two, cellar floor."
He returned Graeber's papers. The cellar floor, Graeber thought. The cellar floor was the most infamous place of all in the stories about the Gestapo building.
He went down the stairs. Two people coming toward him stared at him enviously. They thought he was going out a free man while they still had it all to face.
Room Seventy-two was a large hall with filing cases and partitioned offices. A bored official took Graeber's notice. Graeber explained to him why he had come and showed his papers once more.
The official nodded. "Can you sign for your wife?"
"Yes."
The official pushed two sheets of paper across the table. "Sign here. Write under the signature: Husband of Elisabeth Kruse. And add the date and the registry office of your marriage. You may take the second form with you."
Graeber signed slowly. He did not want to show that he was reading the printed matter, but he did not want to sign blindly either. Meanwhile the official was looking about in one of the filing cabinets. "Damn it! Where are those ashes?" he shouted finally. "Holtmann, you've got everything in a mess again. Bring out the Kruse package."
Someone behind the partition grunted. Graeber saw that he had signed a receipt for the ashes of Bernhard Kruse, prisoner in protective custody. In addition he saw on the second form that Bernhard Kruse had died of heart disease.
The official had gone behind the partition. Now he came back with a cigar box that had been wrapped in a too-small piece of brown paper and was tied with a string. On the sides was the word "Claro," and part of the bright cover of the cigar box was visible; it was a coat of arms in red and gold held aloft by a pipe-smoking Indian.
"Here are the ashes," the official said, looking sleepily at Graeber. "Since you are a soldier I hardly need to tell you that the most complete silence is mandatory. No death notice —either in the papers or sent as an announcement through the mails. No funeral service. Silence. Understand?"
"Yes."
Graeber took the cigar box and left.
He decided at once to say nothing to Elisabeth. He would leave it to chance whether she found out later. It was not likely; the Gestapo did not repeat its messages. For the present he felt it was enough to have to leave her in a few days; to tell her in addition that her father was dead would be an unnecessary cruelty.
He walked back slowly to the Katharinenkirche. The streets seemed suddenly full of life again. The threat was past. It had transformed itself into death; but it was the death of a stranger. He had only known Elisabeth's father in his childhood.
He felt the cigar box under his arm. Very likely it did not contain Kruse's ashes at all. Holtmann could easily have made a mistake; and it was hardly to be assumed that people in a concentration camp took much pains with such matters. Besides, it would not be possible with mass incinerations. Some stoker would shovel out a few handfuls of ashes and pack them up, that was all. Graeber could not understand why it was done at all. It was a mixture of inhumanity and bureaucracy which made the inhumanity all the more inhumane.
He considered what to do with the ashes. He could bury them somewhere in the ruins. There were plenty of opportunities for that. Or he could try to get them into a cemetery; but that would require a permit and a grave, and Elisabeth would find out.
He walked through the church. In front of Pastor Biedendieck's confessional box he stopped. The absent sign was out. He pushed the green curtain aside. Josef was looking at him. He was awake and sitting in such a way that he could have kicked Graeber in the stomach and run away instantly. Graeber walked past to the pew near the sacristy. After a while Josef came. Graeber pointed to the cigar box. "It was that. Her father's ashes."
"Nothing more?"
"That's enough. Have you found out anything more about Pohlmann?"
"No."
They both looked at the package. "A cigar box," Josef said. "Usually they use old cardboard boxes or tin cans or paper bags. A cigar box is really almost like a coffin. Where are you going to put it? Here in the church?"
Graeber shook his head. It had suddenly occurred to him what to do. "In the cloister garden," he said. "That's really a kind of cemetery."
Josef nodded. "How about you?" Can I do anything for you?" Graeber asked.
"You can go out through the side door over there and see whether anything suspicious is going on in the street. I have to leave; the anti-Semitic sexton is on duty after one o'clock. If you don't come back in five minutes I'll assume the street is clear."
"All right."
Graeber stood in the sun. After a while Josef came out of the door. He walked by close to Graeber. "Good luckl" he murmured.
"Good luck."
Graeber walked back. The cloister garden was empty at this time. Two yellow butterflies with red dots on their wings were playing around a bush covered with tiny white blossoms. The bush stood beside the grave of the cathedral capitulary Aloysius Bluemer. Graeber went up and examined it. Three of the graves were sunken, but Bluemer's in such a way that a hollow seemed to extend under the grassy surface. It was a good place.
He wrote a note saying these were the ashes of a Catholic prisoner from a concentration camp. He did this in case the cigar box should be discovered. He rucked the note under the brown paper. With his bayonet he cut away a piece of grass and cautiously enlarged the crevice under it until the box would fit in. It was easy to do. He pressed back into the hole the earth he had scraped out and arranged the grass over it. Bernhard Kruse, if that's who it was, had thus found a resting place in consecrated ground at the feet of a high dignitary of the Church.
Graeber went back and seated himself on the cloister wall. The stones were warm from the sun. Perhaps I have committed a sacrilege, he thought, or perhaps it was only a gratuitous act of sentimentality. Bernhard Kruse had been a Catholic. Cremation was forbidden to Catholics; but the Church would no doubt have to overlook this because of the unusual circumstances. And if it was not Kruse at all in the box but the ashes of various victims, among them, perhaps, Protestants and ortho
dox Jews, even then it would probably be all right, he thought. Neither Jehovah nor the God of the Protestants nor the God of the Catholics could very much object to that.
He looked at the grave into which the cigar box had been slipped like a cuckoo's egg into a nest. At the time he had not felt much; but now after it was all over he experienced a deep and boundless bitterness. It was more than just the thought of Kruse. Pohlmann was in it and Josef and all the misery he had seen and the war and even his own fate.
He got up. He had seen in Paris the grave of the Unknown Soldier, ostentatious under the Arc de Triomphe on which the great battles of France were chiseled—and suddenly it seemed to him as if this sunken plot of grass, with the funeral slab of the cathedral capitulary Bluemer and the cigar box underneath, was something of the same kind, and perhaps even more so—because it was not surrounded by the rainbow of glory and of battles.
"Where are we going to sleep tonight?" Elisabeth asked. "In the church?"
"No. A miracle has happened. I was at Frau Witte's. She has a spare room. Her daughter moved to the country a few days ago. We can stay there and perhaps you can even keep the room after I've gone. I have already taken all our things over. Did your vacation come through?"
"Yes. I don't have to go back. And you don't have to wait for me any more."
"Thank God! We'll celebrate that tonight! We'll stay up all night and sleep until noon tomorrow."
"Yes. We'll sit in the garden till all the stars are out. But first I am going to hurry and buy a hat."
"A hat?" Graeber asked.
"Yes. This is the day to do it."
"What are you going to do with a hat? Do you intend to wear it in the garden tonight?"
Elisabeth laughed. "That, too, perhaps. But that's not the point. The points is to buy it. It's a symbolic action. A hat's like a flag. It can mean anything. You buy one when you are happy or when you are unhappy. You don't understand that, do you?"
"No. But let's buy one if that's the way it is. We'll celebrate your freedom with it. That's more important than dinner! Are there any stores still open? And don't you need clothing coupons?"
"I have them. And I know a store where they have hats."
"Good. We'll buy a hat to go with your golden dress."
"You don't need a hat with that. It's an evening dress. We'll simply buy any sort of hat. It's absolutely essential. Buying it will do away with the factory."
Part of the store window was intact. The rest was boarded up. They peered in. There were two hats there. One was trimmed with artificial flowers, the other with bright feathers. Graeber regarded them doubtfully; he could not picture Elisabeth in either one. Then he saw a white-haired woman locking the door. "Quick!" he said.
The owner led them into a room behind the store where the windows were blacked out. She immediately began a conversation with Elisabeth of which Graeber understood nothing. He seated himself on a fragile gold chair near the door. The owner switched on the light in front of a mirror and began to bring out hats and materials from cardboard boxes. The gray store suddenly became a magic cave. The blue and red and rose and white of the hats flamed out and, shimmering among them, the golderi stuff of brocades made them seem like crowns being tried on for a mysterious ceremonial. Elisabeth moved back and forth in the flood of light in front of the mirror as though she had just stepped out of a picture, and the twilight that shrouded the rest of the room closed like a curtain behind her. Graeber sat there very still, observing the scene which seemed unreal to him after all that had happened that day. He saw Elisabeth for the first time fully detached from time, by herself, absorbed in an unconstrained and profound play, bathed in light and tenderness and love, serious and self-possessed as a huntress testing her weapons for battle. He heard the quiet conversation of the two without listening to it and it was like the murmur of a spring, he saw the bright circle that surrounded Elisabeth as though emanating from her, and he loved her and desired her and forgot all else in this silent happiness, behind which stood the unseizable shadow of loss, making it only deeper, more glowing and as costly and fugitive as the glints on the silks and brocades.
"A cap," Elisabeth said. "A simple gold cap that fits close to the head."
CHAPTER XXIV
STARS filled the window. A wild grape vine had grown around the little rectangle and a pair of its tendrils hung down and swung in the breeze like the dark pendulum of a noiseless clock.
"I'm not really crying," Elisabeth said. "And if I do cry, don't worry about it. It's not me, it's just something in me that wants to get out. Sometimes crying is all you have. It isn't sorrow. I am happy—"
She was lying in his arms with her head pressed against his shoulder. The bed was wide and made of old, dark walnut. Both ends were high and curved. A walnut dresser stood in the corner and in front of the window were a table and two chairs. On the wall hung an old glass case, containing a bride's crown of artificial myrtle, and a mirror in which the vine and the pale, wavering light from outside moved, dark and bright.
"I am happy," Elisabeth said. "So much has happened in these weeks that I can't press it all into myself. I have tried. It won't go. Tonight you must be patient with me."
"I wish I could take you out of this city into a village somewhere."
"It doesn't matter where I am, when you're away."
"It does matter. Villages aren't bombed."
"Sooner or later they are certain to stop bombing us here. There's hardly anything of the city left standing. I can't go away as long as I have to work in the factory. I'm happy that I have this enchanted room. And Frau Witte."
She was breathing more quietly. "I'll be through with me right away," she said. "You mustn't think me too hysterical. I am happy. But it's a fluctuating happiness. Not a uniform cow-happiness."
"Cow-happiness," Graeber said. Who wants that?"
"I don't know. I think I could stand quite a lot of it for quite a long time."
"So could I. I just don't like to admit it because for the present we can't have it."
"Ten years of safe, good, uniform, middle-class cow-happiness—I believe even a whole lifetime of it wouldn't be too much."
Graeber laughed. "That comes from living such a damned interesting existence. Our forebears had other ideas; they longed for adventure and hated the cow-happiness they had."
"Not we. We have become simple human beings again with simple desires." Elisabeth looked at him. "Do you want to sleep now? A whole night of unbroken sleep? Who knows when you'll have the chance again after tomorrow night!"
"I can get enough sleep while I'm on my way. It may take a couple of days to get there."
"Will you ever have a bed?"
"No. The best I can hope for after tomorrow is a field cot or a sack of hay from time to time. You get used to it fast enough. It's not bad. Summer is coming soon. Russia is only horrible in winter."
"Perhaps you'll have to stay there for another winter too." "If we go on retreating this way we'll be in Poland by winter or even in Germany. Then it won't be so cold. And it's a cold you're used to."
Now she will ask when I'm coming back on furlough, he thought. I wish we had all that behind us. She has to ask and I have to answer and I wish it was over. Already I am no longer wholly here, but what there is of me here feels as though it had no skin, and neverthless it can't really be injured. It's just more sensitive than an open wound. He glanced at the vine swinging in front of the window and at the shifting silver and gray in the mirror and it seemed to him as though & mystery stood close behind it and must in the next moment reveal itself.
Then they heard the sirens.
"Let's stay here," Elisabeth said. "I don't want to get dressed and rush off to a cellar."
"All right."
Graeber went to the window. He pushed the table aside and looked out. The night was bright and motionless. The garden shone in the moonlight. It was an unreal night and a good night for air raids. He saw Frau Witte come out of the door. Her face was very
pale. He opened the window. "I was just coming to wake you," she shouted through the noise.
Graeber nodded. "Cellar—Leibnitzstrasse—" he heard.
He waved. Then he saw her go back into the house. He waited a moment longer. She did not come out again. She, too, was staying at home. He was not surprised. It was almost as if it had to be that way. She did not need to. leave her house; garden and house seemed protected through some unknown magic. It was as though they remained noiseless and untouched in the fury that roared over them. The trees stood still behind the pale silver of the lawn. The bushes did not move. Even the vine outside the window had stopped swinging. The little island of peace lay under the moon as though in a glass shelter from which the storm of destruction rebounded.
Graeber turned around. Elisabeth had sat up in bed. Her shoulders shimmered palely and where they rounded there were soft shadows. Her breasts were firm and bold and looked larger than they were. Her mouth was dark and her eyes very transparent and almost colorless. She had braced her arms behind her on the pillows and she sat in bed like someone who had suddenly come in from far away and for an instant she was as alien and quiet and mysterious as the garden outside in the moon confronting the end of the world.