Apparatus 33 by Lawston Pettymore (bearly read books TXT) 📕

own sarcophagus, as diaphanous and delicate as the expensive lingerie from Paris. Each glass cairn, as the victims of Pompeii, blended into the same glass that carpeted the forest floor, suspending the remainder of 6th Trophy Battalion NKVD Motor like prehistoric insects in amber.

Sparkling, radioactive amber.

AGGREGAT 3

SEQUELAE

Assimilation

While the Wermut capsule settled into its lunar orbit, Raynor Zerrissen, Halina and Nicolaus, each sought out individual post-Bunker lives earthbound. Zerrissen was brought under the aegis of the Allies’ war criminal investigation board, and the children absorbed by re-location services organized by the Red Cross to reunite separated families.

Zerrissen was never a member of the SS nor an ardent Nazi, all that mattered to the Allied occupation managers, and was subsequently released to the State after a brief interrogation, which was also willing to overlook the question whether he was more than an innocent farmer, or as another version claimed, a shopkeeper.

Zerrissen could not distinguish between a breast plow and a fromard, so his claim to have been a lowly farmer was suspect. On the other hand, Zerrissen’s facility with math and both electrical and mechanical engineering should not be punished either. Everyone had a secret during those days and there was a new Cold War to fight, so his conflicting stories were venial compared to those with the more difficult-to-ignore SS tattoo of which Zerrissen had none.

The State chose instead so order him into a program of Communist indoctrination that the Soviets called de-Nazification. Finding his memorization of anti-Capitalist slogans and mastery of Soviet history acceptable, Zerrissen was absorbed into the Workers’ Paradise and was put to work as a mechanic at a state-owned automobile repair shop in a heavily damaged neighborhood near the River Spree now known as East Berlin. There, he would be left to his own to emerge as a Marxist Superman and an inveterate alcoholic, his guilty pleasure being the ubiquitous and affordable Russian vodka, but only because it was less expensive than milk and beer.

Having no families by with which to be reunited, Halina and Nicolaus handed over to an order of nuns, kinder, gentler than the order of Schwesterkriegerine which the Holy See tucked away somewhere in the basement of the Vatican until needed again.

As was its customary practice, the Vatican stood mute behind the privilege of clergy, knowing that in time all traces of the order, like Die Kuppel itself, would disappear into the tapestry of history, along with the beliefs in unicorns, gargoyles. For now.

This gentler breed of nuns searched the bulletin boards and boarding houses for the two children’s surviving families, a task made hopeless as neither of the children carried last names. Both Halina and Nicolaus eventually became wards of the state and placed into separate gymnasiums, separated by their genders and a hundred kilometers of torn landscape. The nuns remarked that Nicolaus was easy on the eyes; a courteous, well-read boy, who would be a charming dinner guest and a good catch for a high-placed German, or perhaps even the daughter of a Soviet apparatchik someday.

Being a female who was not only a brace-legged Pole, Jewish, and who could not, or would not, speak, Halina and her interests were less relevant. She was assigned work for which women were known to be suited: cleaning and filing papers. She attended a school for the mute during the day and cleaned offices and factory floors on her off hours to repay the State. Only months later everyone on the planet was receiving a polio vaccine, ironically created by a researcher who was both a Pole and a Jew, and the scourge became extinct only a decade after she and a generation of undesirable children were sent to places like the Bunker to be stashed out of sight. Such was the timing of the advancements of mankind.

Halina was eventually assigned as a cleaning woman for a State-run apartment complex known as a Khrushchyovka19, managed by a man named Ulf who secretly spied on inhabitants for the secret police, the Stasi. She was not allowed to apply to the few positions open at any of the prestigious East German upper schools, but when a slot in an unheralded welding and metal working institute opened, she grabbed it immediately.

As for Nicolaus, his conditions were much better. Hearing live music for the first time at a State-sponsored field trip to the East Berlin Philharmonic, he became infatuated with its storytelling power. Music used a language that everyone in the world could understand and told stories that no other language could. He fell headfirst into opera, absorbing its history, structure, and heroes, learning the architecture of a libretto, of instrumentation, and the polyglottal portfolio of grammar, spelling, and conjugation; dialect, enunciation, and pronunciation; and idiom, contraction, and elision.

All of this happened with the approval of the State in its quest to demonstrate the excellence of the Communist way of life over the decadence of the West, the paltry competition being a trivial song by four English bourgeoisie crowing about wanting to hold someone’s hand.

How could Capitalism hope to compete with Prokofiev, Chekhov, or Tsiolkovsky when this was their best contribution to the arts, and exploding American rockets to the sciences? Every woman on Earth would now want to do more than just hold hands with Yuri Gagarin.

In his Bunker days, Nicolaus learned how to wheedle extra slices of ham, and to play on the instincts of the SS guards or Schwesterkriegerine for extra ten minutes in the shower or in his cot. His natural ability with languages and attracted the attention of the State and qualifying him for the Extended Secondary School of East Germany, the EOS, where his placement among the top 3 of his class nominated him for the very few slots available at East German University.

Nicolaus excelled at University in the arts, not so well in maths, and somewhere in between in a required sport, eventually being placed on the University’s 1,500 freestyle swim team.

Nicolaus made a few friends