We began to forget the war.—
I have described this idyll on the other side of the abyss so
precisely because perhaps a way can be found leading back from there to
the past we have lost.
Sometime late Saturday night or Sunday morning Misi woke me up. She
was calling from upstairs: “Don’t you hear it? Wouldn’t you rather get
up?” I had slept through the alarm; in the heath, it is only when the
direction of the wind is favorable that you hear the sirens
caterwauling in the far-off villages. Besides, over the years we had
become used to staying in bed when the alarms sounded and not getting
up until increased antiaircraft fire suggested that an actual attack
was at hand; a habit that cost many people their lives.
I was about to give an irritated reply and turn over on my side when
I heard it. I jumped out of bed and ran barefoot out of the house, into
this sound that hovered like an oppressive weight between the clear
constellations and the dark earth, not here and not there but
everywhere in space; there was no escaping it.
In the northwest the hills on either side of the Elbe stood
silhouetted against the narrow twilight of the departed day. The
landscape cowered, holding its breath. Not far away stood a
searchlight; commands were being shouted that immediately lost all
connection with the earth and scattered in the void. Nervously the
searchlight scanned the sky; sometimes it met with other shafts that
were also swinging to and fro in wide arcs, so that for a moment they
formed geometrical figures and tentlike structures, then quickly, as if
startled, flew apart. It was as if this sound between heaven and earth
were sucking up their light and driving them senseless. But the stars
shone as they do in peacetime, straight through the invisible calamity.
One didn’t dare to inhale for fear of breathing it in. It was the
sound of eighteen hundred airplanes approaching Hamburg from the south
at an unimaginable height. We had already experienced two hundred or
even more air raids, among them some very heavy ones, but this was
something completely new. And yet there was an immediate recognition:
this was what everyone had been waiting for, what had hung for months
like a shadow over everything we did, making us weary. It was the end.
This sound was to last an hour and a half, and then again on three
nights of the following week. It hung steadily in the air, and remained
steady even when the much louder din of the defense intensified to a
drumfire. Only at moments when individual squadrons descended for a
strafing did it swell and graze the earth with its wings. And yet this
terrible noise was so permeable that every other sound could be heard
as well: not just the reports of the antiaircraft guns, the bursting of
grenades, the howling roar of bombs, the singing of shrapnel, no, even
a very soft rustling, no louder than that of a withered leaf dropping
from branch to branch, and for which there was no explanation in the
darkness.
The sound immediately drove me back into the house. It is possible
that Misi called out to me from above, and that I answered something or
other—I no longer remember. It wouldn’t have been more than a few
words; for this sound made a lie of all talk, it disarmed every word
and pressed it to the ground. It was half an hour after midnight. The
windows of the cabin couldn’t be shaded; we got dressed in the dark and
kept bumping into furniture. Then Misi came downstairs with the two
suitcases. I lifted the trapdoor, squeezed through the opening and
climbed down the steps until only my head was above ground level. Misi
handed me the two suitcases and who knows what else, and I carried
everything down. In the cellar I bumped into a shelf; a glass bowl that
didn’t belong to us fell down and broke. The sound was already in the
cellar too, yes, it may have been even louder there, the walls vibrated
from it; the ground carries sounds far in the heath. We lit the votive
candle, which we had placed inside a small flowerpot. I believe Misi
extinguished it soon, to preserve it. I ignored the plea in her
question: Wouldn’t you rather stay down here too? I left her sitting
there, alone on a little footstool, wrapped in blankets. I climbed back
up and closed the trapdoor above her. Or maybe Misi closed it herself,
thinking she would be safer that way. But safe from what? And how
separate we became by setting those thin boards between us! All this is
senseless, and thinking about it fills one with infinite pity for all
creatures, and one falls silent because the words threaten to become
sobs. Even today we are still unable to listen to music, we have to
stand up and go away. When I say music I mean Bach’s Air or something
like that. There is something consoling in it, but it is precisely this
consolation that makes us feel naked and helpless, at the mercy of a
force that wants to destroy us. During those nights I walked back and
forth on the narrow strip between the vegetable garden and the wire
fence that enclosed the plot; there the view was unobstructed toward
the north. Sometimes I stumbled over a molehill; once I fell down
because my foot had got caught in the raspberry bushes.
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