The Willow Wren by Philipp Schott (free ebook reader for iphone txt) 📕

I wished that Theodor had not gotten ill so that I could share my grief with someone. I did not want to attract attention to myself by crying in front of the others, so I excused myself to go to the privy where I wept for several minutes. If I was honest with myself, I did not really know her all that well. She had been an important figure in my life when I was very small and was raiding her wardrobe for sweets, but I had not seen much of her in the last few years. She had been sick for quite a while and children were not encouraged to visit her while she was going through treatments and so on. Even so, for some reason, her death made me very sad and it launched me into a long period of dwelling on morbid thoughts in general.

Thus far I had not been exposed to much death, even though I expect more people were dying in Europe at that moment than at any point since the Black Death. There were those three bodies covered with blankets after the big bombing raid on Leipzig, but they did not seem real and were easy to dismiss from my mind. And two or three years before I had stumbled upon a dead dog in the forest, in the tall grass on the riverside not too far from Old Greybark. The dog was a blond cocker spaniel who looked like he was just sleeping on his side but for the fact that his eyes were missing. His body was otherwise uncorrupted and did not even smell, but something had already eaten out his eyes, so I was presented with the horror of the empty black sockets, which looked disturbingly depthless and infinite in an otherwise beautiful soft face. This type of dog was rare in Leipzig and his owners would not have been difficult to locate. No doubt they were in distress about their missing dog and would have been grateful for any information, even if it was sad news. I knew all of this, but I did not tell anyone, not ever. I do not know why. Perhaps it was because I was very shy with strangers, or perhaps I feared I would be blamed for his death, or perhaps it was because I did not want to do anything that would bring that nightmarish image back into my mind’s eye. Yet it did not make me think about death, not directly anyway. Yes, the dog was clearly dead, but the terror I felt looking at the dog’s eyeless sockets felt separate from any thoughts about the nature of death and dying. It was more a primal fear arising from disgust, akin to the disgust of touching feces. This was an animal after all, and its death, while sad, did not feel like it was in the same realm as a human death.

But Oma Flintzer was human and now she was dead. She had been alive all of my life and now would never be alive again for the rest of my life, not even for one brief moment. She had existed one minute and then had not existed the next. This was incomprehensible to me and I felt something very cold constricting my heart. If Oma could be made to not exist like that, could not Mama? Or me? It was as if each person were a book, steadily accumulating pages until one day suddenly, arbitrarily, the book was completely shredded or burnt to ash or dissolved in lye. It seemed so senseless and wasteful and unjust. All that knowledge and experience extinguished. I tried to imagine not existing and it was as if the floor suddenly opened before my feet, revealing a bottomless void. I never felt so scared before in my life, not even when the bombs were falling. The bombs could easily have killed me, but at that time death was a dim abstraction. Now it was a reality, dimensionless and invisible but at the same time keenly felt. For some people death is a large black bird or a tall hooded figure or a dark formless monster, but for me that day it became a sense of an infinite nullity, like deepest space beyond all the stars and galaxies.

My family was crumbling under the combined forces of death, dislocation and women who were not my mother kissing my father.

This feeling was underlined by the events of February 20. I had been fervently looking forward to being accompanied by my mother to see my father at our home as antidote to the chaos and dread and death. There, at least for one special day, the old world of peace and order and family would be recreated for me. But of course this was not to be. Seeing my childhood home opened like a ripe melon cleaved by an axe confirmed all my worst fears.

Chapter Fourteen

February 1944

I had only been back in camp from my failed birthday visit to Papa in Leipzig for a day and was still recovering from the shock of seeing our apartment left gaping like a doll’s house when another shocking event occurred. It had snowed heavily for most of the day, so the camp, which normally looked so worn and old (but not in a charming historical way), suddenly looked clean and new in the long slanting late afternoon light that broke through the now-rapidly scattering clouds. It was another exceptionally cold day. I probably should not use the word “exceptionally” because by February of 1944 it was no longer so exceptional. Since the war began the winters had all been hard, as if the gods saw how people were tormenting each other and decided that they must demonstrate that they still had the power to torment us just as effectively. I am of course referring to the old pagan gods, not the allegedly just and forgiving Christian God. He was nowhere