The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

114 Broken Bridge 1945

They were ferried across the river on a military barge. The past few days were lost in a mist. Dad had crossed half of Poland in his sleep and remained awake at night, staring into the black sky and grey woods, numbed by war and consumed by thousands of burning corpses. He had accidentally plummeted into hell, and finding his way out wouldn’t be easy.

We had all been living through years of war and accumulated many atrocities, but these men had actually peeped below the war and seen that mankind had written its history out of the books and into the fire, to a place where the beginning and the end resided and the only inhabitants were the devil and God. And man had appalled both. The history of mankind had been made void, and Dad, of all people, had been unlucky enough to stare into that great void. It had been opened to him with the cracking of a bulging womb. He had peered into the horror.

But now he was slowly recovering his senses. Now he was beginning to recognise his surroundings. The boat carried them over the tranquil river, a hundred Russian soldiers. He stood watching the bridge, contemplating the ruins, bare pillars and shattered floors, and remembered passing it three years earlier as a ‘young’ soldier on his way to the east, heading for the highest echelons of the Nordic Studies faculty of the University of Moscow. There were just a few details that had to be dealt with first. And now he was on his way back to Germany on a slow boat marked with a red star. He had ploughed through bloody fields, shot into the eye of war, lost one friend after another, and seen the fire inside Hitler’s soul, smelled its stench, the stench of Hitler’s ideals and his own, but it wasn’t until this moment that he saw the total futility of war.

The World War had achieved nothing, brought nothing. Nothing had been won, nothing gained. Germany was still Germany, and Russia Russia. Between them lay Poland. Tanks had pushed borders to the east and west, but soon everything would fall back into their original positions. Because within a few weeks it would all be over. After years of clashes with guns and steel, everything was to be the same again. All that had happened was that the bridge had broken. The river was the same, the trees the same, the sky the same. Nothing had changed but the bridge. It was broken.

Yes, of course, 50 million lives had been lost. Or was it 70? What’s 20 million between friends? Yes, that’s 160 Icelands.

Now they were inside Hitler’s Germany, and Dad had stopped talking. He said nothing else. His brothers in arms, however, cursed every field and every tree and spat on every stone. On the first night they stayed on a wealthy-looking estate, which the owners hadn’t had time to burn, except for the bread in the oven. All the cupboards were full here, the buildings dry, and all the furniture palatially luxurious. Even the stables were more elegant than the hovels back home. All that Teutonic order deeply irritated the Russian soldiers. They stomped through the rooms with their guns in a rage, ripping paintings off the walls and kicking furniture. Their fury reached its peak in the pantry: one of the comrades stormed back into the kitchen, flour white, yelling, ‘Why the fuck did they have to invade Russia!? They had everything here!’

He then grabbed a four-pound loaf of rye bread and started beating it against the wall, cursing until the loaf broke and he himself burst into tears, falling on his knees on the red tiles, invoking his mother, wife and daughter.

‘Mamushka, mamushka… Dashenka, Dashenka…’

Three hours later they were all full and dead drunk. They congregated in the toilet while Dad sat in the kitchen. They had never seen a water closet, and one of them washed his face in it. How about that! Dad stared into his glass, wondering where his daughter was now. No, she was safe with her mother in Lübeck. They’d had luck on their side. Hadn’t the town been liberated? Oh, Massa, oh, Massa. Come to me with your great thighs.

At midnight, two privates appeared, a tall and a short one, clasping two German girls with quivering lips and weeping eyes. They were dragged into the living room and thrown on the table. It all started with the shrieks and cries of the girls but ended in their total silence. Dad didn’t know which was worse, but sat through it all staring at his fingers, five and five. His intellectual hands had turned into those of a gladiator. Was he perhaps the first Icelander in eight centuries to have turned into such a… murderer? Had he killed a man? Yes, probably in the battle alongside the Dniester, the first one. Suddenly a soldier reentered the kitchen, buttoning up his trousers before he collapsed on a chair by the table full of glasses, shaking his head and muttering to himself.

‘Ne mogu, nikak ne mogu… I can’t… fuck, I can’t… that… fucking hell…’ Then he looked at Dad and held out a glass. ‘But I can drink! I can drink their fucking schnapps even if I can’t screw their women! Fucking, fucking Germany! May it be damned for eternity! Vypjem!’

Dad raised his glass.

‘You don’t say anything, Hans. Have you lost your tongue?’

‘What tongue?’