Chapter 21 In the Land of the Dead
IN THE LAND OF THE DEAD
I showed them the hidden wall in the stones and the cavern beyond, with its stone-walled cistern. I didn’t focus on the cistern. “There’s a privy here, too,” I said. “Through here.”
“There were prison cells down here,” I said.
“There probably still are. I never saw this place in the light, and I don’t know how far it extends on either side.
There must have been guards once as well, though.
Even if they only gave the prisoners a bucket, they would have needed someplace to dump the contents.
I’m fairly sure this emptied into groundwater, and then probably to the river.
There was a splash when one used it. A faint one, as if from far below. ”
Ben said, “That sure gives me an appetite for dinner. Gross.” He picked up something hanging from a nail. “Is this toilet paper?” He felt the gray sheet, and it disintegrated in his hand. “It seems really rough.”
“Oh, toilet paper was very rough in those days,” I said, “at the end of the war. When one could come by it at all. Some people were desperate enough to resort to books. My parents would have seen that as sacrilege, but then, they still had toilet paper.”
“I can think of a book or two I’d have used,” Sebastian said.
“Mein Kampf springs to mind,” Dr. Bauer said, and I laughed in surprise. It was the most human she’d sounded. Perhaps it was easier in the dark.
“Have you read it?” I asked. “I confess I never have, beyond the first chapter or two. I don’t consider myself an imaginative woman, but it seemed to me that poison dripped from its pages.”
“Very turgid and confused in composition,” she said, “and expressing a common idea, not novel at all. Blood-and-soil nationalism: the ideal of a racially defined body of people sharing the same ancestral home. Imperial Japan was much the same. Hitler was exceptional only in the extremes to which he carried the concept.”
I said, “Let’s go on.” I was tiring, and I wanted to finish this. I’d dreaded revisiting these places for months now, since I’d brought up the idea to Alix, and the only way to get over a dread like that is to go ahead and do the thing.
Another heavy door, also unlocked. “Dr. Becker had the key to this one,” I said, “and you see, here it still is in the lock, as we left it.” I couldn’t help a little thrill of anticipation.
Surely, if all of this was still here and undisturbed, the tiara was here as well.
I still hadn’t mentioned the cistern. Perhaps I was keeping back the knowledge of its whereabouts until I saw whether I was believed. “And now,” I said, “the tunnel.”
It was the same, if even more spidery, and my ugly shoes crunched over dirt and possibly rodent bones. I didn’t want to know. We didn’t see any rats, at least. Hopefully they were fleeing ahead of the light. I really felt that rats would be the last straw.
Up we trudged, and I was glad of Sebastian’s arm. There was nothing to mark the end of the tunnel except that it ended. Abruptly, so much so that Sebastian and I nearly hit the wall. “The door,” I said. I found the handle, pushed it down. We stepped out, and I remembered.
I’d been with Dr. Becker at the time. He’d said, “We must leave the children for a while. I need to see what the situation is. We can’t make a plan without that.”
The children were awake, hungrily eating bread and cheese from my rucksack and drinking water.
Andrea looked up, her hair mussed and her face pale and pinched in the faint pool of yellow from Dr. Becker’s flashlight.
Her dark eyes were wary, and I expected her to object, but she didn’t. She just went still.
“You will take care of your brother,” Dr. Becker told her.
“You will both be brave. I’ll be in no danger, and I’ll come back as soon as I can.
” Then he showed me the tunnel, and we walked up the sloping path to its end, where he switched off his flashlight, released the latch of the hidden door, opened it the tiniest crack, and waited in silence before finally opening it far enough to look out.
“Come,” he said, and I did.
The first thing that hit me was the burning, stinging smoke, which instantly made one’s chest tighten and one’s eyes water. The second was the smell.
Burning wood, like a bonfire, or something less savory. Rubbish, perhaps. And burning … rubber? A caustic, chemical smell. Something else, too, something sickly sweet. I didn’t want to know what that was, but there was no escaping it.
It was the smell of dead people.
Just past six in the morning. The sun wouldn’t be up for an hour yet, but the air was gray with approaching dawn. Even in the smoke and the dim light, I knew exactly where we were. The crypt of the Hofkirche, the cathedral. The burial place of my ancestors.
Of course the tunnel came out here. Of course it did. What could be a safer escape route for a fleeing prince? A church had always meant sanctuary.
I thought that for fifteen seconds, until I saw the first body.
The crypt looked nothing like its usual self.
The stone tombs were the same, but the floor was littered with abandoned items. A suitcase, a flask, a man’s hat, and most incongruously, an empty baby carriage.
And beyond it, a pile of heavy stones with a hand sticking out from underneath.
A woman’s or a man’s, I didn’t look to see.
I didn’t want to look at all. A tumbled area of more stones, and the upper halves of two women beneath them, as if rescuers had tried to dig them out and had abandoned the effort when they realized it was fruitless.
An older woman and a younger one, both in headscarves, their faces battered, their coats threadbare and rusty with age.
I remembered the two women I’d seen the night before, holding onto each other and running.
Refugees from the East, looking for sanctuary.
Dr. Becker said, “Come.” We skirted the pile of rubble, and he looked cautiously up the stairs to the main body of the church. That was when I realized.
“Herr Dr. Becker,” I said, “you must take off your star.”
He stared at me, uncomprehending. “To take it off means death,” he said. “And I’m well known in Dresden.”
“To leave it on is worse,” I said. “You must take it off, don’t you see? The children’s, too, or the Gestapo will surely take you.”
He sucked his teeth, and then he nodded.
He had streaks of white in his hair, I realized now that I could see him better, and his face was hollowed and drawn.
Hunger, probably, and worry, and grief. He pulled at the star, tried to rip it off, but it resisted as if it didn’t want to give up its hold on him.
“Take off your coat,” I urged. “Put it back in the tunnel.” It was a February day in a brutal winter, but the air was so warm, it was like opening an oven to slide a loaf of bread inside. So much must still be burning for the air to be as warm as this.
I waited, and in a minute or two, he was back with me.
We ventured out with utmost caution, but there was nobody sheltering here anymore.
I stopped in the aisle out of habit and crossed myself, and tried not to look at the fallen stone, the shattered windows, tried not to feel the crunch of the bits of glass under my feet or to notice the broken pipes of the huge organ from which the music had swelled so beautifully only a few weeks ago, on Christmas, the strains of Handel’s Messiah filling air scented with incense. None of that mattered now.
To the enormous double doors, then, one of them torn off its hinges and lying on the ground. “We’ll go around the walls of the palace,” I said. “Maybe there will be a door open.”
Dr. Becker looked at me strangely. “The windows will be broken,” he said gently. “We’ll be able to get in.”
“Oh,” I said. “Of course.”
What does a soldier feel, the first time he sees combat? The first time he sees bodies lying sprawled on the earth and realizes he’s cheated death? It must be something like this.
Things were burning in the street. Lumps of things. People wandered here and there, and soldiers stacked the things into piles. A man scooped up a lump with a shovel and deposited it in a wheelbarrow.
“What is he doing?” I asked.
“I think,” Dr. Becker said, “that he’s gathering up the remains of his family.”
The lumps were people. People burned to the size of dolls.
I realized that the street was hot, the pavement sticky. An auto stood askew in the road, abandoned. Its tires were melted.
“Their shoes would have melted, too, as they tried to run.” Dr. Becker sounded so tired. “What damnation can man wreak. What a Hell has been visited on the world.”
I tried to swallow. My eyes stung and burned, and so did my chest. I said, “We must find my parents. The others.”
“Yes,” Dr. Becker said.
We went on, and nobody paid us any attention. We were just two more lost, wandering souls.
It was like climbing a mountain, a mountain in the land of the dead.
We scrambled up and down and around the debris, the bodies, climbed up piles of stone that nearly burned my palms, they were so hot still, and slid down the other side.
I knew I would be bruised, that I would be in pain, but there was nobody else to do this for me, and nothing to do but move forward.
So I scrambled on and tried not to look.
Not at the things on the street, and not at the fires flickering everywhere, especially not those in the palace.
I kept doggedly on around the perimeter of the palace until we got to the area, where the stairs to the kitchen led down.
The wrought-iron palings lay on the ground now, twisted into unrecognizable shapes, and I still had space to wonder at the heat that could have caused that.
Down the stone steps, a matter of handholds and footholds amidst the debris, and to the door.
It was gone. Burned.
There was a hollowness in my chest, a pain in my throat. I stepped into the kitchen.