The previous evening he saw Dresden in the distance, across the river, scorched earth and stalks of buildings reaching up to escape the detritus of war. Farther east, the signs of damage lessen in towns and villages clustered between the river Elbe and densely wooded cliffs.
They reach a village that appears unbroken. A working clock in a tower in the center square, surrounded by square buildings with more windows than walls, announces that time hasn’t stopped here. Shop doors are open, and people converse in doorways, in groups, a sight rarely seen publicly since early in the war.
There are still signs, however, that the town has yet to stand on its own. Russian military vehicles, small trucks and vehicles in camouflage green, are parked on the street. A hotel is boarded up with a sign advising that the owners will be returning, but it doesn’t give a date, and a bakery, though open, does not have bread or cakes on display in the windows. A fish shop, its shutters wedged shut with age and time, has words scrawled angrily across a faded wooden sign: “No Fish.”
Farther down is a café more inviting. Its sign reads “Open” at least. He steps inside, and the woman behind the counter views Stefano suspiciously. She has already surmised that he is not German and that he does not belong here, and there is curiosity, brief, about the child, but only that. It is perhaps the look of him, battle scarred and weary, something he does not need to feign, that makes him less of a threat, along with the child. But there is no mistaking the distaste and distrust in the lines between her eyes. In his head he reminds her that certain rights have been forfeited, that arrogance is one of them.
He asks what is available since there is no menu visible, only a doorway to a kitchen and the smell of boiled cabbage. She is at first reluctant to respond, to move. He opens his bag and holds out some German marks. She says there is talk of a new currency, and these marks will be worthless soon. She takes them anyway. The way she stared at the money too long told him that she would. And though a foreigner, darkly Mediterranean, he is better than no customer at all.
“Is the child ill?” asks the woman, looking over the boy.
“No,” says Stefano, then wonders himself. “What do you have?” he asks her.
She steps aside to point to a chalkboard on the floor against the wall behind her. Most of the handwritten items have been crossed out and new ones written with a careless, resentful hand.
Perhaps a lack of company and conversation drives her to talk regardless of her prejudice and suspicion. She tells him that she attracts many beggars that she has to send away. The Russian military police come there, too, which is the only reason she can stay in business now. They used to harass her and other shop owners, but this happens less now. They seem to have other things to do. However, the relationship with them is still tenuous. Sometimes they pay, and sometimes they don’t. She says she grows her own vegetables. She says her husband came back from the war changed. He is old, she says. He was not worth imprisoning, but he is even more useless now, she says.
There used to be fish, but the river is poisoned from the Russians and the bombs and their Russian piss. They are uncouth, loud, they drink too much, but they come to her café. Her café is reputable at least. There are no dogs on the menu. She repeats what others say because she knows very little, he thinks. She is walled in, surrounded by gossip.
She wishes that things were the way they were in the war. Her café did well, frequented by soldiers and civilians with money. The tourists were mostly German, which was better, she says, though she does not look at him at this point. She has not forgotten to whom she speaks. There are no pictures of Hitler, but her loyalties still lie with the country before the surrender.
“The town is busy. Have new people moved here?”
She asks him to repeat the words. He is unsure if it’s his accent or if she is hard of hearing. He asks the question again.
This time she shrugs and shapes her large lips into those of a fish. She does not care to provide an answer, though she likely has one. She is happy to say only what she wants to.
He doesn’t think ill of her. She is too ignorant. Perhaps she is miserable enough as it is. He thinks about asking if she will take on the child, but the thought of him with her is almost as bad as leaving him with his dead mother. There is little compassion, little interest in the child so far.
The boy and Stefano share a thick pink-red soup with a strange chicken flavoring that attempts to mask the bitterness of the underripe beets. He has to grab the wrist of the child at times to stop him from rushing the spoon to his mouth and spilling some of the contents, but he gives up this battle halfway through.
He orders some milk, but the owner says that they haven’t enough and offers some coffee instead. It has a tinny, bitter taste, and something added that isn’t caffeine.
He says danke as they leave, to which she nods. He stops at a grocery store and the pharmacy to ask several questions, one about a place for the child, but there is none. He also stops at the post office.
“You are going the wrong way,” says the postmaster while customers view the newcomers curiously. “You had best head back toward Dresden if you are looking for transport.”
He is back on the road. It has grown hot. A truck speeds past them, and its engine roars suddenly. The child ducks and falls to the earth.
“No more bombs,” he tells the boy. He reaches down to take his hand, and the boy looks at it, for a length of time, as if it is something he hasn’t seen before, then tentatively takes the larger hand. He helps the boy upright, then crouches down beside him and tells him to climb on his back.
He continues his journey, with short, thin legs looped under his long arms, the boy’s head resting against Stefano’s back, the basket now carried by Stefano, whose steps are slowing, his limp more noticeable.
They both have weight they must carry. Stefano thinks back to the bombs and the bullets and the fire, and he looks down at his bandaged hand. It is no longer a wound. It is now a reminder, among many scars, that will be with him forever.
CHAPTER 3
ROSALIND
In the quiet of early morning, a dog barks from somewhere across the river, and the plock of a broken cuckoo clock and the piping of a goose herald the start of Rosalind’s day. They are just several sounds of time that alert her to the surroundings, beckon her from bed, and push her into the drudgery that is now her life. She lowers her feet to the cool stone tiles and heads toward Georg. At the top of the narrow stairs, she walks immediately into Georg’s attic room, with its vaulted wooden ceiling, which expands the length of the house. His bed sits against the room’s only window facing the wood. Light enters the crosshatched, partially boarded window at daybreak, stamping squares of pale-yellow light across the room’s shades of early morning gray.
Georg, lying on his back, emits an evenly spaced burst of gargles from the back of his throat. Gangly, his long legs take up much of the bed, his toes hanging over the end. Rosalind lifts up the sheet and climbs in next to him. Lying on her side, she watches him sleep, studies his profile, the mixture of pale-red strands in his hair, and his skin, youthful and firm like hers. He sleeps rarely, sometimes haunting the house at night, but when he does, his slumber is deep, like a baby’s.
“You need to tell me what’s in your head,” she asked him several nights earlier when she had awoken just after midnight, and, like many other nights, found him pacing the room and whispering to himself. Communication has been difficult with his new state of mind; his mind can only be reached intermittently now.
“I don’t know,” he had answered, shocked at the interruption. “There are things I need to do.”
“There is nothing you need to do right now.”
“But she’s in danger.”
“Who?”