There is a thud as the first green weight lands only metres away, followed by another, and another still.
A mesmerising sparkle of phosphorus.
Smouldering circles of light, inextinguishable.
They are dropping their markers here.
We are the target.
_ _ _
And now they are upon us, a crashing wave of heavy British bombers, Avro Lancasters, Halifaxes, Wellingtons.
The drone of the engines, millions and millions of flies, rattling cogs, the roar of the pistons, the first fragmentation bombs descending through the air, plunging.
The sky is streaked with incendiary bombs, my gaze sucked towards the blazing light.
I cannot move. My head bent back, I stare up into the night.
A piece of sky breaks off, a roof splits open, black, flashes of light, glittering glass.
Everything is on a new scale.
I am ripped from the air.
_ _ _
Only a moment has passed when I come to my senses. Total silence. There is the entrance to the shelter. They are closing the steel door. Rubble, figures staggering, muffled sound now, a rush of noise in my ears, my eardrums must be ruptured. My shoulder is numb. Explosions, a hail of glass. I duck, and reel with each blast. The buildings shudder. At once I am alert, and now I run, through a storm of incendiaries; their slush of rubber and burning petroleum. The leaping flames of phosphorus as a tree ignites into a web of blazing white. Sounds become clearer to me, I am at the door and am stopped by a square-jawed warden. I shout out, but am unable to hear my voice in this screaming pandemonium. I yell through the noise: POLICEMAN HERE! He nods to someone inside, turns to find me again. A woman comes running towards us, gripping a little girl by the hand. Abruptly she is hurled through the air, speared by flying debris – the child is flung across the street, and then I too am let inside, the door pushed shut, bolted, while something outside slams against the steel.
The woman’s body?
‘The child …’ I say.
‘She’s dead, you didn’t see,’ says the warden calmly.
He places the flat of his hand against the door. I grip his wrist.
‘No, she fell, that’s all … it was the mother … You must let her in, for God’s sake! She wasn’t hit. She wasn’t …!’
I am thrust down the stairs, the space is crammed with people. I feel a blow to my jaw, someone holding me down, a hand pressed against my neck. My frenzied breathing.
‘No more to be admitted!’
I stare into the barrel of the warden’s pistol. Two men grip me under the arms.
‘Are you going to calm down?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you?’
‘I … am … quite … calm.’
_ _ _
The sign down the stairs: Luftschutzraum, max. 200 persons.
Grey, silent faces. There must be more than a thousand.
All of them looking up, listening.
We can hear the explosions, the dull pounding.
Someone turns the handle of the air filter. It wheezes, like lung disease, an ice generator.
I cannot see Eline in the tightly packed mass.
I cannot move.
‘Is it here?’ someone whispers behind me.
‘No, it must be Wandsbek.’
‘Nothing can happen to us here. There are gas filters.’
‘But they cast their markers here …’
A couple of minutes and they are silent again.
It is here. The ground trembles. Plaster and dust fall from the ceiling.
‘Eline …’ I breathe. Then louder: ‘Eline, are you here? Eline Schlosser!’
‘You shut up, now …’
‘Eline! Eline Schlosser …’
The filament flickers, the light goes out.
The luminous walls sway. Waves of light.
It is now.
_ _ _
The earth shudders. Hands over ears, sheer noise rips through my body. I curl up, arms clutched tight around my torso. The barrage of my heart, the quaking structure, and now my head, breaking, noise searing in my brain, I am the noise, it tears everything out from within, everything I am …
_ _ _
From somewhere far away, someone finds my hand. The cold of a wedding ring, an elderly hand, the pulse of a woman’s fingers. Ninety-three, ninety-four, ninety-five … The only sound in a world torn asunder.
She is crushing my hand.
She cannot help it.
‘Can you hear it?’
The voice of Zarah Leander, whirling within the storm.
‘What?’
The words are wrenched from within me, shredded, they come to nothing.
‘Can you hear my heart?’
All I can do is move my lips, without a sound.
‘Yes …’
‘Can you hear something else, too?’
‘Something else?’
‘Listen.’
Her pounding pulse. And now, within: a beat still faster, another heart.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s yours, silly … your heart inside my own.’
The blast as the bomb hits the shelter. The hand is torn from mine. A deluge of bodies engulfs me, a hail of shards, dust enshrouding.
Face peeled away.
I cannot move my legs.
The woman is gone.
_ _ _
A moment later I see Eline over by the entrance.
She does not see me as she staggers through clouds of dust.
‘Eline!’
Blood trickles from her ears. She reaches the street and begins to run.
‘It’s me, Heinrich!’
I too emerge and see the fleeting grey of her shadow amid whirling flame.
The wind is a storm. It howls.
_ _ _
I hug the fronts of the buildings so as not to be sucked into the firestorm. Roofing flies through the air. The asphalt is bubbling, I see blue flames of burning oil. A young woman scuttles for the other side of the street. It is not Eline. Her shoes stick in the molten surface, she steps out of them and tries to go on, comes to a standstill and stiffens as she ignites.
_ _ _
And then I see her. She has crossed through
