Chapter 20 The Winding Stair
THE WINDING STAIR
“Oma,” Alix said. “That’s awful.”
I relaxed my fingers on the handle of the teacup. I’d long since finished my tea, and had been unaware I was still holding it. “Yes,” I said. “It was indeed frightening. I wasn’t the most frightened person in Dresden that night, though. I was sheltered, and I believed my family was, too.”
“What happened next?” That wasn’t Ashleigh, or Ben, or anybody you’d expect. It was Dr. Bauer, the curator, who’d surely forgotten herself with that outburst.
I said, “For that, I think I should take you through to the other cellars. It’s hard to describe. If that is allowed, of course.” I was surprised, somehow, to find myself not stained with tears and soot. I was even more surprised to find myself not sixteen.
“Yes,” Dr. Eltschig said. “If you feel capable of it. If not, perhaps we can postpone this until tomorrow.”
“Oh, no!” Ashleigh burst out. “How can we wait that long to find out what happened?”
“I could, of course, simply tell you.” I’d recovered my wits and was once more ninety-four, and in no danger at all. “Without the atmospherics.”
“It’ll be so much better, though,” she said, “with the atmospherics. That’s what makes this such a great story!”
“I wouldn’t want to deprive my eager public,” I said, and rose to my feet.
Sebastian had a hand under my elbow as I did it. He said quietly, as if only for me, “We really don’t have to do this today. It’s been a lot. There’s no reason you can’t rest before the next part.”
“No,” I said. “I need to do it now.” I didn’t say, “It’s a pilgrimage. Or possibly a quest, and I need to finish it now, just as pilgrims need to find their way through the summer heat to Mecca.” It seemed too absurdly dramatic.
The Long Corridor was much the same as in the past. A hundred meters long, and lined with cases holding hundreds of firearms. Rifles and muskets and pistols dating back to the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, together with the heads of red deer, roe deer, sika deer, wild boar, and other beasts I couldn’t name, animals that had presumably been crowded out or hunted to extinction long before I was born.
“This corridor was built to connect the palace to the stables,” I told the others as I held Sebastian’s arm and concentrated on the rooms we passed. “Hunting wild game was solely the prerogative of the nobility in past centuries, and many noblemen’s chief passion.”
“But didn’t regular people need to hunt to, like, feed themselves?” Ben asked.
“Indeed they did,” I said. “A very inefficient system. Another way in which society has progressed.” The room had been nearly at the end of the corridor, and on the right. Would I recognize it without the huge old desk, the hunting scenes on the walls, the shelves of leather-bound folios?
Four from the end. No, this didn’t look right. There was no fireplace, for one thing, and there had been one in that other room. Surely I remembered a fireplace.
What if the fireplaces had been removed, though? What if I couldn’t find the right room? I’d only come this way once.
Concentrate. Three from the end. Still wrong. But we were nearly at the end of the corridor.
I stopped dead. Sebastian said, “What is it?”
I asked, “Were the fireplaces removed?”
“Some of them,” Dr. Bauer said.
Wait. The bookcase. If it had burned, there would be no latch and no way to get in, would there? I didn’t know how such things worked.
Two doors from the end, I found the room. At least, there was a fireplace. And on either side of the fireplace … empty bookcases.
“How did they not burn?” I asked. “There was fire here. I saw it.”
“The bookcases on this side were scorched,” Dr. Bauer said.
“You can see the marks here. They must have been empty. If there had been books in them, they would surely have gone up along with everything else in the room. They are made, again, of very old and very hard wood. Mahogany, in fact, first exported to Europe in the early eighteenth century. One of the strongest of the hardwoods.” How much she knew about the palace. Much more than I ever had.
And she was right. The bookcases holding the folios had been along the other wall, hadn’t they?
I couldn’t remember. I went to the bookcase on the left, started to crouch down, stopped, and told Sebastian, “I’m not as good at kneeling on floors as I once was.
Perhaps you’ll feel for the latch, underneath the lowest shelf. ”
He did, and almost immediately, the latch clicked. The door opened a crack. And I had to put a hand against a shelf and breathe a minute.
“I had no idea,” Frau Bauer said wonderingly.
“I imagine,” Dr. Eltschig said, “that that was the idea. This was a bolt-hole. Rulers had many enemies in those days.”
“Rulers still do,” I said. “And there were cells down here as well for prisoners. There was probably another staircase and another entrance at some point. Perhaps there still is. I’m sure I’ve seen devices that can see through walls in films. Is there such a thing, or is that a convenient fiction?”
“There is such a thing,” Dr. Bauer said. “And we’ll be using it.”
“There are no lights here,” I realized suddenly. “We’ll need torches. Flashlights.” I felt suddenly bone-weary. Another wait for those to be fetched.
Lights sprang out all around me, because every single person had pulled out a cell phone and switched on a light. I said, “How convenient modern life is. Now we go down. It’s a long way, and very steep. You must stay on the outermost edge where the steps are widest.”
“Is this safe for you, Oma?” Alix asked doubtfully.
“If all is as it was,” I said, “I only have to go down. I don’t have to climb back up. That, I fear, would be beyond me.”
“Then you shouldn’t go down,” Alix said instantly. “You can tell us how to find our way.”
“No.” I knew I sounded stubborn. Also irrational. But this was what I’d come for, and I was going to do it. “If the way out is blocked, I’ll … I’ll …”
“I’ll carry you up on my back,” Sebastian said.
“Dude,” Ben said, “I can’t even see the bottom. It must go down, like, forever.”
“And Marguerite weighs about ninety-eight pounds,” Sebastian said. “Excuse me. I believe I’m a football player.”
“You’re a kicker,” Ben said.
“Do you want to fly home in coach?” Sebastian asked. “No? Then stop dissing me.”
I laughed, and it helped. “Let’s go down, then,” I said. “Into the darkness.”
It was like arriving at the train station, but in reverse.
Seeing buildings that had been smoking hulks and were now miraculously restored had made me feel as if I’d entered a time machine, like that night had never happened.
Going down those stairs and reaching for the handle of the heavy oak-and-iron door, though, it was the fourteenth of February, 1945.
My mind knew it wasn’t true, but my body didn’t.
“The door isn’t locked,” I said in some wonder.
“I forgot to lock it after me when I came back through it, half-choked by the smoke. My father had just told me hours before to be sure to keep it locked, to keep Dr. Becker and his children safe from discovery, and I didn’t do it.
I don’t even remember what I did with the key. ”
Alix said, “Well, to be fair, if the palace was burning, I don’t imagine a whole lot of people would have been rushing in to find the secret entrance.”
I wasn’t listening. I still had hold of Sebastian’s arm and was feeling my way along the stone wall with my right hand, just as I’d done on that night.
Turning at the corner, then walking so far that part of me wondered if I’d lost my way.
Except that it was, of course, a rectangular room, however large.
Sure enough, there was the next corner, and I turned to my left. Five steps, six, and I stumbled.
I would have fallen without Sebastian, but he grabbed my arm hard and held me up. “All right?” he asked. “If you bruise as easily as Alix, probably not. Are you hurt?”
“No,” I said. My voice was shaky, because what I’d stumbled over, I saw in the light from all those phones, was a pallet.
One of two on that wall, the muslin falling to bits and the straw within nearly dust. “This is where they were sleeping that night,” I said.
“Andrea and Gerhardt, the children. Has nobody found this place, then? Here, Sebastian—around these pallets and across to the far wall.”
“Was there no electricity down here, then?” Dr. Eltschig asked.
“There was,” I said, “though not when I was here. It had gone out during the first raid, and it hadn’t come on again by the time we left.
I know that, because the switches will have been left on as one does in a power failure, and whatever bulbs were in the fixtures will have long since burned out.
You can come down again later with better lights and find the switches, change out the bulbs, and have a better look.
” I stopped again, because Sebastian’s light had picked up something else.
Another pallet, the one I’d slept on during those last hours, before I’d known I was an orphan.
And beside it, two suitcases, one made of yellow tweed and one of leather.
I said, “We left these. The leather is mine and the tweed Dr. Becker’s. We had to be ruthless, you see, in what we carried. Who knew how far we’d have to go on foot? Will you open them, Sebastian?”
He crouched down and did it, and nine phone lights shone on the contents.
“The pajamas,” I said, “belonged to the Beckers. Funny how one leaves home, even for the most uncertain of fates, and packs as if for a hotel. Some of the children’s extra clothes, and a hairbrush and comb that belonged to Andrea and Dr. Becker.
We took only my brush and comb and shared them amongst us.
The textbooks and exercise books were the children’s.
It was a wrench for Dr. Becker to leave them, I think.
They were his … his wish, his pledge for his children’s future. That they would have a future.”
“Was this a teddy bear?” Alix asked, picking up a grubby, droopy thing that looked as if it had been chewed by mice. It probably had been. I only hoped it hadn’t been rats. “The little boy’s?”
“No,” I said. “Mine. I’d packed it in my air-raid rucksack for comfort, because I went down to the cellars during each of those air-raid warnings as a child still. When I left the palace that night, though, I left childhood behind. There was no choice. And look! There’s the key.”
Sebastian picked it up. It was as large as I remembered, the size of his palm. I handed it to Dr. Bauer, and it felt like more than a key I was handing over. She said, “Thank you,” but quietly. Perhaps she understood.
“And these.” Dr. Eltschig pulled out a little pile of fabric scraps and held them in his palm.
“The star,” Sebastian said. His voice was blank. It’s one thing to know a thing has happened. It’s another to be confronted with the proof of it. Yellow six-pointed stars, the ragged threads still clinging where they’d been sewn onto clothing. On each one, the one word printed in faded ink.
Jude.
“Yes,” I said. “I picked them off their clothing with Fr?ulein Lippert’s sewing kit.
My mother’s maid. What do people take to the cellars when everything may be destroyed?
The things they use and value most, even if those things seem silly to others.
Was Fr?ulein Lippert going to mend my mother’s wardrobe down there?
No, but she took her sewing kit as I took the teddy bear.
And when she didn’t need it anymore …” I let out a breath. “I took it.”
“Tell us,” Dr. Eltschig said, “what you did when you woke up. Tell us what happened next.”