morbid voyeurism, but because it was impossible for my brain to process without further study. A bomb crater yawned across the whole width of the street like a monstrous mouth with broken pavement for teeth. At one edge, the blast had sheared away the front wall of a building but left what was inside mostly intact. It looked like a doll’s house, its interior rooms all exposed to the street: the dining room with its table still set for a meal; family pictures knocked crooked in a hallway but still hanging; a roll of toilet paper unspooled and caught in the breeze, waving in the air like a long, white flag.
“Did they forget to finish building it?” Olive asked.
“No, dummy,” said Enoch. “It got hit by a bomb.”
For a moment Olive looked as if she might cry, but then her face went hard and she shook her fist at the sky and yelled, “Nasty Hitler! Stop this horrible war and go right away altogether!”
Bronwyn patted her arm. “Shhh. He can’t hear you, love.”
“It isn’t fair,” Olive said. “I’m tired of airplanes and bombs and war!”
“We all are,” said Enoch. “Even me.”
Then I heard Horace scream and I spun around to see him pointing at something in the road. I ran to see what it was, and then I did see and I stopped, frozen, my brain shouting
It was a pyramid of heads. They were blackened and caved, mouths agape, eyes boiled shut, melted and pooled together in the gutter like some hydra-headed horror. Then Emma came to see and gasped and turned away; Bronwyn came and started moaning; Hugh gagged and clapped his hands over his eyes; and then finally Enoch, who seemed not in the least disturbed, calmly nudged one of the heads with his shoe and pointed out that they were only mannequins made of wax, having spilled from the display window of a bombed wig shop. We all felt a little ridiculous but somehow no less horrified, because even though the heads weren’t real, they represented something that was, hidden beneath the rubble around us.
“Let’s go,” Emma said. “This place is nothing but a graveyard.”
We walked on. I tried to keep my eyes to the ground, but there was no shutting out all the ghastly things we passed. A scarred ruin belching smoke, the only fireman dispatched to extinguish it slouched in defeat, blistered and weary, his hose run dry. Yet there he stood watching anyway, as if, lacking water, his job now was to bear witness.
A baby in a stroller, left alone in the street, bawling.
Bronwyn slowed, overcome. “Can’t we help them somehow?”
“It wouldn’t make any difference,” said Millard. “These people belong to the past, and the past can’t be changed.”
Bronwyn nodded sadly. She’d known it was true but had needed to hear it said. We were barely here, ineffectual as ghosts.
