A schnauzer twists in its collar.
Suddenly frantic, I pat myself down, spinning round, but I am not on fire.
It is the docks that are burning. Not Hamm, not Hammerbrook!
‘Why is that man laughing …?’
He is no more than five or six years old, in short trousers and long stockings, a cloth cap. What is he doing out so late? His hand extends into his mother’s. She pulls him away, her other hand steers a pram laden with suitcases and oddments, a child in a grubby bonnet. Is the city being evacuated?
The boy is right.
I am laughing, silently, without an audience now, mouth curled in a grin, grimacing like an idiot, only now do I emit a sound.
It is Tuesday, 27 July 1943. The time is twenty-one minutes past eleven in the evening.
I can see right through the hole in the sky.
To the blue of night.
Is it this simple? Do I love her? I start to whistle.
I am twenty-seven years old.
Eline Schlosser is twenty-four.
Am I spontaneous?
Do you like me now?
_ _ _
Now I am here, in the growing darkness. The ash as it settles on Dimpfelweg.
There are no lights on at number six, but no lights are allowed. Verdunkeln! Der Fiend sieht dein Licht. I climb the step, the brass nameplate next to the door: 3rd Floor – Prof. Schlosser. Are they gathered there inside, the professor and his wife, and their blonde-haired daughter, or have they retired to bed? Have they gone down into the basement, have they packed their air-raid bag, their sandwiches and toothbrushes?
Why do I not ring the bell?
I step down and go back onto the street, stand at the wrought-iron railing and peer up at the windows in case a chink of light has escaped from behind the blackout curtains.
But there is none.
Did she get my letter? Has she accepted? Will she marry me?
I look down at myself. The brown stains on my uniform, Klaus Maier’s blood. My filthy hands. My shame.
I panic as the front door opens.
I dart into the garden and duck behind a clematis.
My mind is short-circuiting, my pulse is screaming inside my head.
A trap! Manfred is inside waiting for me …
I hear voices from the stairway within, a dark female voice: Gerda Schlosser. And a brighter, ringing inflection, that familiar hint of irony: Eline.
A gentleman appears, in a dark coat, a civilian with a fresh complexion, a fawn trilby hat.
It is not Manfred.
Eline comes out as well, at the man’s side.
She too is wearing a coat. They exchange remarks.
They leave together!
_ _ _
‘Do you think we’ll make it?’ Eline says.
I can see her hand, from the knuckles down, her long fingers extending from her sleeve. She is not holding his hand.
‘Yes, but we haven’t got much …’
He halts directly in front of me. I can hardly comprehend that they can fail to see me behind the clematis.
Should I step forward?
‘I thought I heard something,’ he says. ‘Didn’t you hear it?’
Her face. Her chin is a chalk-white triangle as she stretches her neck and tilts her ear towards the sky.
‘No, Ernst. There’s nothing there. Come on …’
And now her hand slips into his.
My breathing stops.
Her hand flutters from his again to brush ash from his lapel, to smooth the cloth.
‘Best get a move on,’ she says. ‘Otherwise we’ll be late. And you wouldn’t want that, would you?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Have you got your shelter card?’
They head along Dimpfelweg.
‘Yes,’ he pats his breast pocket. ‘It’s right here.’
They pass the Wagner home, its forbidding ivy.
The whitewashed kerbstones stand out in the dark.
They pause at the showcase outside the cinema, then continue on.
No, suddenly they veer off.
By the time I turn the corner they are gone.
The rumbling darkness, the oil blazing in the docks, the long shadows.
No smoke, only the reek of it.
There they are, already a good way along Hirtenstrasse. She looks up at him as they walk.
His fawn trilby hat.
They pause again, to look at the advertising pillar in front of the church. She laughs.
I cross over, and they turn again.
_ _ _
Eleven thirty-eight.
Kleinalarm over the loudspeakers on the street corners: Enemy aircraft over German Bight … I start to run as the third signal sounds soon after. The streets fill up, and at once the sky is illuminated.
I run in the glare of the searchlights.
_ _ _
I am halfway along Hammer Hof when the Fliegeralarm sounds, followed by the distant rumble of the planes. There must be hundreds, thousands. The first bombs fall, miles away yet, the searchlights poke into the night, scanning the darkness. In a moment the first of the bombers will be bathed in light.
Anti-aircraft on the ground, 88s.
A heaving swarm of people on the corner of Meridianstrasse. There must be a shelter there. No one says anything as I edge my way into the queue, all that exists is the noise of the engines, the surge of the throng, jostling citizens with grim faces, an infant wrapped in a shawl, expressionless. All of Hamburg burrowing into the ground, down into the catacombs – why couldn’t they give us more notice? – and there, some twenty metres further on, his bobbing hat.
‘Get a move on, for God’s sake!’ I yell, clawing my way forward. ‘Gangway!’ But I am making no headway through this wall of flesh, this teeming swamp of human beings, and at once the searchlights begin to sweep without direction, randomly, feebly, and now I am able to see what it is that’s causing the radars to fail: a glittering snow of brilliant confetti descends upon Wandsbek and Hammerbrook, shimmering shreds of silver, a shower of aluminium.
And then, high above our heads, captured in a beam, further illuminated by crimson red explosions of flak, the master bomber, scattering iridescence from its belly, a series of lazy, green, phosphorescent flares.
Christmas trees.
People look up, hypnotised.
A rain of festive baubles.
The plane breaks to the left, its right wing disintegrates, it descends into a spin, fuselage torn apart in a flickering blaze of light.
Immediately, panic breaks out, people are
