Mother Night

42: No Dove, No Covenant ...

I went upstairs to my ratty attic, went up the oak and plaster snail of the stairwell.

While the column of air enclosed by the stairs had carried in the past a melancholy freight of coal dust and cooking smells and the sweat of plumbing, that air was cold and sharp now. Every window in my attic had been broken. All warm gases had been whisked up the stairwell and out my windows, as though up a whistling flue.

The air was clean.

The feeling of a stale old building suddenly laid open, an infected atmosphere lanced, made clean, was familiar to me. I had felt it often enough in Berlin. Helga and I were bombed out twice. Both times there was a staircase left to climb.

One time we climbed the stairs to a roofless and windowless home, a home otherwise magically undisturbed. Another time, we climbed the stairs to cold thin air, two floors below where home had been.

Both moments at those splintered stairheads under the open sky were exquisite.

The exquisiteness went on for only a short time, naturally, for, like any human family, we loved our nests and needed them. But, for a minute or two, anyway, Helga and I felt like Noah and his wife on Mount Ararat

There is no better feeling than that

And then the air-raid sirens blew again, and we realized that we were ordinary people, without dove or covenant, and that the flood, far from being over, had scarcely begun.

I remember one time, when Helga and I went from the head of a splintered staircase in the sky down into a shelter deep in the ground, and the big bombs walked all around above. And they walked and they walked and they walked, and it seemed that they never would go away.

And the shelter was long and narrow, like a railroad car, and it was full.

And there was a man, a woman, and their three children on the bench facing Helga and me. And the woman started speaking to the ceiling, the bombs, the airplanes, the sky, and to God Almighty above all that.

She started softly, but she wasn't talking to anybody in the shelter itself.

'All right — ' she said, 'here we are. We're right down here. We hear you up there. We hear how angry you are.' The loudness of her voice jumped sharply.

'Dear God, how angry you are!' she cried.

Her husband — a haggard civilian with a patch over one eye, with the recognition button of the Nazi teachers union on his lapel — spoke to her warningly.

She did not hear him.

'What is it you want us to do?' she said to the ceiling and all that lay above. 'Whatever it is you want us to do,' she said, 'tell us, and well do it!'

A bomb crashed down close by, shook loose from the ceiling a snowfall of calcimine, brought the woman to her feet shrieking, and her husband with her.

'We surrender! We give up!' she yelled, and great relief and happiness spread over her face. 'You can stop now,' she yelled. She laughed. 'We quit! It's over!' She turned to tell the good news to her children.

Her husband knocked her cold.

That one-eyed teacher set her down on the bench, propped her against the wall. And then he went to the highest-ranking person present, a vice-admiral, as it happened. 'She's a woman ... hysterical... they get hysterical ... she doesn't mean it ... she has the Golden Order of Parenthood ...' he said to the vice-admiral.

The vice-admiral wasn't baffled or annoyed. He didn't feel miscast. With fine dignity, he gave the man absolution. It's all right,' he said. 'It's understandable. Don't worry.'

The teacher marveled at a system that could forgive weakness. 'Heil Hitler,' he said, bowing as he backed away.

'Heil Hitler,' said the vice-admiral.

The teacher now began to revive his wife. He had good news for her — that she was forgiven, that everyone understood.

And all the time the bombs walked and walked overhead, and the schoolteacher's three children did not bat an eye.

Nor, I thought, would they ever.

Nor, I thought, would I

Ever again.