The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

63 Funny Corpse 1942

The shot had struck the heart, and blood spurted out of it onto the dirty floor like black wine. When the soldier had left, I edged towards the body. We were alone in the hall. Air-raid sirens sounded in the distance. I peeked at the half-man, who was now fully dead. His eyes were completely open, perfectly ‘lifelike’ but so utterly empty inside, like eggs that had just cracked, staring at what had just flown out of them. I gave a start and backed off into the hall. Seen from a distance, the body looked like a small black sack that had fallen from the sky and from which the black contents were now leaking.

I looked alternately at him, at the ticket office, and out at the city, squeezing the grenade in my skirt pocket, and no longer knew what to do. All of a sudden I burst into tears. And the beaver’s snout was back in my throat knocking against my gums.

I edged back to the unmoving half-man. I bent over him and closed his eyes the way I’d seen a farmer do once, back on the islands, when he had found a body on the shore. His right hand twitched, as if the body wanted to thank me for the service. I took it, and then took his left one, too, and dragged him like a long-armed ape into the corridor of the toilets and tried to mop away as much blood as possible on the way. There I left him, in the same spot where my father had left me the day before. I couldn’t bear the idea of Mum meeting me over a corpse. Then I went back into the hall and tried to sleep the night away, pulling the steel jewel out of my case and wrapping myself in the red scarf that Mum had knitted for me earlier that year. In that way I carried both of them with me. Mum’s blood flowed around my neck, and my father’s heart pounded in my pocket. Finally I managed to catch some sleep between rounds of explosions and dreamed of dwarfs dancing on a green meadow, where a baroque-bearded poet laureate recited poems in a white tunic.

At quarter past six the station started to fill with people, mainly women and children, who for some unknown reason felt it was safer to come to Hamburg than to stay in Kiel. Some of the women gasped at the exit when they caught sight of their city. A number of them turned back into the station with one or two children in tow and vanished down a platform again. This was a nation in turmoil. People were prepared to settle anywhere so long as there was hope of shelter from the bombs. I enviously eyed the girls who had a mother’s hand to hold. And continued to struggle with the lump in my throat.

A grey-haired, uniformed woman with glasses finally opened the ticket office from inside. I decided to wait there in front of it, but so as not to obstruct the ticket-hungry customers, I moved to the front of the canteen, which the Germans call the Imbiss. And there I waited for a whole day. With a hand grenade in my bag and my head full of Mum.

She never arrived. After twenty-four hours’ guard duty in front of the Imbiss, which included a long conversation with a bag lady who stank of fish, and an obscene offer from a fat officer’s son, I came to the conclusion that my mother was stuck under the gable of a fallen house, but that she had luckily had her knitting with her and was now sitting all dusty and humming in the shadows of the ruins, knitting herself a jumper, because the nights are cold by the Mecklenburg Bay.

It crossed my mind to buy a ticket back to Friesland. After all, I could still have a shelter at Frau Baum’s, I who had left her my good old sexy box. In his confusion, however, my father had forgotten to give me any money before he left. But maybe I could sell the grenade for something? Finally I swallowed the lump in my throat and gave up on the chance of Mum’s coming to meet me here. I took my case and headed down the corridor to the toilets one last time. Two rats were now sniffing the body. I let them be – we all have our part to play – and I bid my friend farewell from a distance, asking him to watch over me. Then I moved back into the main hall, passing the lovely flower lady, who was still in good contact with the heavens above, and stepped out into the war.