“Killers!” the elderly woman shouted, and whether she was looking at the sky or toward Hitler’s chancellery at the heart of Berlin, Michael couldn’t tell. “God curse you, you killers!” she shrieked, and then she sobbed again with her hands over her face, unable to bear the sight of ruin.
Ahead of the wagon stretched a landscape of destruction. On both sides of the street, buildings had exploded, burned, and collapsed. Smoke hung in layers, too heavy for even the wind to tatter. Factory chimneys jutted up, but the factory had been crushed like a caterpillar under a steel-soled boot. The rubble was so high that it clogged the street, forcing Gunther to find another route south into the Tempelhof. Off to the west, a large fire raged, spitting up whirling red flames. Bombs must have fallen last night, Michael thought. Mouse was sitting slumped over, his eyes glassy. Michael started to touch the little man’s shoulder, but then he drew his hand back. Nothing could be said.
Gunther found Mouse’s street and in another moment stopped the wagon at the address Mouse had given him.
The row house had been made of red stones. There was no fire; the ashes were cool, and they spun in the wind past Mouse’s face as he got out of the wagon and stood on what remained of the front steps.
“This isn’t it!” Mouse said to Gunther. His face was slick with cold sweat. “This is the wrong address!”
Gunther didn’t answer.
Mouse stared at what used to be his home. Two walls had collapsed and most of the floors. The central staircase, badly scorched, ran up into the building like a warped spine. A sign near the jagged, burnt hole where the front door had been warned DANGER! ENTRANCE FORBIDDEN! It was stamped with the seal of the Nazi party’s inspector of housing. Mouse had a terrible desire to laugh. My God! he thought. I’ve come all this way, and they won’t let me into my own house! He saw the broken shards of a blue vase in the wreckage, and he remembered that they’d once held roses. Tears burned his eyes. “Louisa!” he shouted, and the sound of that awful cry made Michael’s soul shrivel. “Louisa! Answer me!”
A window opened in a fire-scorched building across the street, and an old man peered out. “Hey!” he called. “Who’re you looking for?”
“Louisa Mausenfeld! Do you know where she and the children are?”
“They took all the bodies away,” the old man said with a shrug. Mouse had never seen him before; a young couple used to live in that apartment. “It was a terrible fire. See how it burned these bricks?” He patted one for emphasis.
“Louisa… the two little girls…” Mouse wavered; the world, a brutal hell, was spinning around him.
“The husband died, too, in France,” the old man continued. “That’s what I heard, at least. Are you a relative?”
Mouse didn’t answer, but he did speak: a cry of anguish that echoed between the remaining walls. And then, before Michael could leap out of the wagon and stop him, Mouse started running up the spindly staircase, the burned risers cracking under his weight. At once Michael was going after him, into a realm of ashes and darkness, and he heard the old man shout, “You can’t go in there!” before the window slid shut.
Mouse kept climbing the steps. His left foot smashed through a flimsy stair; he pulled it loose and kept going, gripping the blackened railing and pulling himself along. “Stop!” Michael called, but Mouse didn’t. The staircase shook, a section of the railing suddenly breaking and tumbling down into a pit of debris. Mouse balanced on the edge for an instant, then grasped the railing on the other side and continued up. He reached a floor, about fifty feet above the ground, and stumbled over a pile of burned timbers, the weakened floorboards shrieking under him. “Louisa!” Mouse shouted. “It’s me! I’ve come home, Louisa!” He went on into a warren of rooms that had been sliced open by the destruction, revealing the possessions of a dead family: a soot-coated oven; shattered crockery, and an occasional dish or cup that had miraculously survived the concussions; what had once been a pine-plank table, now burned down to its legs; the frame of a chair, springs rusting like coiled guts; the remnants of wallpaper on the walls as yellow as patches of leprosy, and against them the lighter squares where pictures used to hang. Mouse went through the small rooms, calling for Louisa, Carla, and Lucilla. Michael couldn’t stop him, and there was no use in trying. He simply followed Mouse from room to room, close enough to grab him if the little man fell through the floor. Mouse entered what had been the parlor; there were holes in the floorboards where burning debris from above had settled and gone through. The couch where Louisa and the girls liked to sit was a burned tangle of springs. And the piano, their wedding gift from Louisa’s grandparents, was a horror of keys and wires. But there was the fireplace of white bricks that had warmed Mouse and his family on so many frigid nights. And there was a bookcase, though few books remained. Even his favorite rocking chair had survived, though badly scorched. It was still there, just as he’d left it. And then Mouse looked at the wall, next to the fireplace, and Michael heard him gasp.
Mouse didn’t move for a moment; then, slowly, he crossed the creaking floor and went to the framed Cross of Iron: his son’s medal.
The frame’s glass was cracked. Other than that, the Cross of Iron was unmarred. Mouse lifted the frame off the wall, his touch reverent, and read the inscription of his son’s name and date of death. His body shook; his eyes glinted with madness. Two bright spots of crimson rose in his pale cheeks above the dirty beard.
Mouse hurled the framed Cross of Iron against the wall, and fragments of glass exploded across the room. The medal made a tinkling sound as it fell to the floor. At once he rushed forward, scooped the medal off the floor, and turned-his face swollen with rage-to throw it through a broken window.
Michael’s hand clamped on Mouse’s fist, and sealed it tight. “No,” he said firmly. “Don’t throw it away.”
Mouse stared at him incredulously; he blinked slowly, his brain gears slipping on the grease of despair. He made a moaning sound, like the wind through the ruins of his home. And then Mouse lifted his other hand, balled it into a fist, and struck Michael as hard as he could across the jaw. Michael’s head snapped back, but he didn’t release Mouse, nor did he try to defend himself. Mouse hit him again, and a third time. Michael just stared at him, green eyes aflame and a drop of blood oozing from a cut on his lower lip. Mouse pulled his fist back to strike him a fourth time, and the little man saw Michael’s jaw tense, preparing for the blow. All the strength suddenly drained out of Mouse’s shoulder; his muscles went limp, and his hand opened. He slapped the face of Green Eyes, a weak slap. And then his arm fell to his side, his eyes stinging with tears, and his knees sagged. He started to fall, but Michael held him up.
“I want to die,” Mouse whispered. “I want to die, I want to die, oh God please let me…”
“Stand up,” Michael told him. “Come on, stand up.”
Mouse’s legs had no bones. He wanted to fall to this floor and lie there until Thor’s hammer destroyed the earth. He smelled gunsmoke on the other man’s clothes, and that bitter aroma brought back every horrifying second of the battle in the pine forest. Mouse wrenched away from Michael, and staggered back. “You stay away from me!” he shouted. “Damn you to hell, stay away!”
Michael said nothing. The storm was coming, and it would have to whirl its course.
“You’re a killer!” Mouse shrieked. “A beast! I saw your face, there in the woods. I saw it, as you killed those men! Germans! My people! You shot that boy to pieces, and you never even flinched!”
“There wasn’t time for flinching,” Michael said.
“You enjoyed it!” Mouse raged on. “You liked the killing, didn’t you?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“Oh God… Jesus… you’ve made me into a killer, too.” Mouse’s face contorted. He felt as if he were being wrenched apart by inner tides. “That young man… I murdered him. I killed him. Killed a German. Oh my God.” He looked around the decimated room, and he thought he could hear the screams of his wife and two daughters as the bombs blew them to heaven. Where had he been, he wondered, when the Allied bombers had dropped death onto his loved ones? He didn’t even have a picture of them; all his papers, his wallet, and photographs had been taken from him in Paris. This was the cruelty that drove him to his knees. He scrabbled onto a pile of burned rubble and began to search desperately for a picture of Louisa and the children.
Michael wiped the blood from his lower lip with the back of his hand. Mouse flung bits of wreckage to either side, but he kept the Iron Cross in his fist. “What are you going to do?” Michael asked.
“You did this. You. The Allies. Their bombers. Their hatred of Germany. Hitler was right. The world fears and hates Germany. I thought he was mad, but he was right.” Mouse dug deeper into the debris; there were no pictures, only ashes. He scrambled to burned books and searched for the photographs that used to be on the shelves. “I’ll turn you in. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll turn you in, and then I’ll go to church and beg forgiveness. My God… I murdered a German. I murdered a German, with my own hands.” He sobbed and tears ran down his face. “Where
