Mother Night

15: The Time Machine ...

If the pale, ringless hand on the railing below was the hand of my Helga, it was the hand of a woman forty-five years old. It was the hand of a middle-aged woman who had been a prisoner of the Russians for sixteen years, if the hand was Helga's.

It was inconceivable that my Helga could still be lovely and gay.

If Helga had survived the Russian attack on the Crimea, had eluded all the crawling, booming, whistling, buzzing, creeping, clanking, bounding, chattering toys of war that killed quickly, a slower doom, a doom that killed like leprosy, had surely awaited her. There was no need for me to guess at the doom. It was well-known, uniformly applied to all women prisoners on the Russian front — was part of the ghastly routine of any thoroughly modern, thoroughly scientific, thoroughly asexual nation at thoroughly modern war.

If my Helga had survived the battle, her captors had surely prodded her with gun muzzles into a labor gang. They had surely shepherded her into one of Mother Russia's countless huddles of squinting, lumpy, hopeless, grubbing ragbags — had surely made of my Helga a digger of root crops in frosty fields, a lead-footed, splay-fingered clearer of rubble, a nameless, sexless dragger of noisy carts.

'My wife?' I said to Jones. 'I don't believe you.'

'It's easy enough to prove I'm a liar, if I am a liar,' he said pleasantly. 'Have a look for yourself.'

My pace down the stairs was firm and regular.

Now I saw the woman.

She smiled up at me, raising her chin so as to show her features frankly, clearly.

Her hair was snow-white.

Aside from that, she was my Helga untouched by time.

Aside from that, she was as lithe and blooming as my Helga had been on our wedding night.