_ _ _
A pop as something explodes, a cork, a bottle-top, and something hits me, a hard, wrenching pain. Are my ribs broken? And then at once, there is water everywhere, a fire hydrant uprooted, and I am in its fountain, a pluming geyser ejected into the sky. Its showers collide with the heat above, condense and turn to steam, but here in its midst a torrent of icy cold water on my skin, I scramble to my feet and stand upright, enclosed within a cylinder of sea, fire all around me.
_ _ _
When I come round my eyes pick out a passage close by, a darkness leading away towards the ruins of what had already burned to the ground the day before. I make a dash for it and emerge onto a boulevard, cross towards the storm and reach the bridge over the canal, my strides, long as a giant’s, reverberating on the cobbles.
The drowned and the drowning, a tangle of limbs.
I have forgotten them.
I am in the park now, on the great lawns. Bent double, hands on knees. It is already so much cooler here. The heady rush of pure, refreshing air. The green grass. I look around me. People, blanketed by dust, burnt, coughing, saved.
Hardly ten minutes have passed.
A densely populated island of white-eyed survivors.
‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ I ask a young woman with her arms around a small boy. I try to smile, but have lost all expression. My face remains stiff when she replies with a not at all and makes room.
It is an exchange from a different world.
_ _ _
‘Would you like some, Herr … Herr …?’
The little boy gives me a nudge. He is almost hidden in his mother’s arms. He holds a jar in his hand.
‘What?’
‘My mummy made it, it’s jam. Plum.’
‘Cherry plum,’ says the woman, looking at me, gleaming eyes in a sooted face, and at once I am awake.
‘I carried it all the way,’ says the boy and hands me the jar. ‘I held on tight, even when I fell in the water. I didn’t drop it.’
‘I couldn’t, really,’ I say, and yet my eyes devour it, my throat is parched, my entire body overheated, screaming for liquids.
‘Please, have some,’ the woman says. ‘You don’t have to eat it all.’
I accept with a nod, and feel immediately embarrassed. I weigh the jar in my hand as I unscrew the lid, the sweet aroma of the heavy mass inside. I slobber as I suck the viscous jam into my mouth, as it runs down my chin.
‘Oh …’
‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry … I don’t know what got into me … I …’
‘Emma Biermann,’ she says. ‘And this is … say hello to the gentleman, Wolfie.’
‘Hello, Herr …?’
‘Maier,’ I reply without thinking. ‘Klaus Maier. That’s the best jam I’ve ever tasted … hardly the right time to say so …’ I add with a vacuous smile, throwing out my hand to indicate the scene, as though everyone here were redeemed while the fires rage about us, as though I were buying a round for the whole crowd down at the Beim Schwarzen Ferkel, which must also be gone, as though all this were pleasant, and I throw out my hand again, as if to test the feeling. And indeed, it is pleasant, we are on top of the world, looking out on the burning city that is so oddly distant, as though it were all a film, a cabaret, a circus of leaping flames and flying elephants. ‘Would you care for a cigarette, Frau Biermann? That would be nice, don’t you think? A Greek one to puff on. Don’t you believe me? Oh, but I can assure you they are indeed from Greece, what’s the place called, Thessaloniki, that’s it! There you go!’
I extend my German Efkas, and both of us stare at the packet.
She giggles, quite as vacuously as myself, shameful.
‘No, thank you. No more smoke for me, thanks.’
She begins to sob.
KLAUS MAIER
So it goes
There is no morning. The sky is black with smoke. The sun is a small, furious pinhead. The city looks like the moon, made of nothing but minerals. The stone is burning hot. Everyone else in the district is dead. So it goes.
_ _ _
The mother and her son are asleep, clutched together. I take off my coat and cover them up, then stand and stare. The boy’s lips are blue with cold, but he is alive.
I study them for some time before going back into the ruins.
Long shadows, drifting. Someone says Moorweide. Behind the Hauptbahnhof, near Dammtor, the university.
‘They say there’s water there. Survivors.’
I must have scraped my watch
