A Man Without Breath

‘And if I’m arrested, what then? I’ve only just been released.’ Meyer shook his head and laughed. ‘Besides, it’s probably a false alarm. Hasn’t Fat Hermann promised us that this is the best-defended city in Europe?’

The siren continued to wail outside like some dreadful mechanical clarion announcing the end of a night shift in the smoking factories of hell.

Siv Meyer sat down at the table and clasped her hands tight. ‘If you’re not going, then I’m not going.’

‘Neither am I,’ Klara said, sitting down beside her.

‘There’s no time to argue about this,’ said Meyer. ‘You should go. All of you.’

‘He’s right,’ I said, more urgently now as already we could hear the drone of the bombers in the distance; it was obvious this was no false alarm. I opened the door and waved the four women toward me. ‘Come on,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Siv. ‘We’re staying.’

The two other sisters glanced at each other and then sat down alongside their Jewish brother-in-law. This left me on my feet with a coat in my hand and a nervous look on my face. After all, I’d seen what our own bombers had done to Minsk and parts of France. I put on the coat and shoved my hands in the pockets so as to conceal the fact that they were shaking.

‘I don’t think they’re coming to drop propaganda leaflets,’ I said. ‘Not this time.’

‘Yes, but it’s not civilians like us they’re after, surely,’ said Siv. ‘It’s the government district. They’ll know there’s a hospital near here. The RAF won’t want to risk hitting the Catholic Hospital, will they? The English aren’t like that. It’s the Wilhelmstrasse they’ll be after.’

‘How will they know from two thousand feet up in the air?’ I heard myself utter weakly.

‘She’s right,’ said Meyer. ‘It’s not the west of Berlin they’re targeting. It’s the east. Which means it’s probably just as well we’re none of us in Rosenstrasse tonight.’ He smiled at me. ‘You should go, Bernie. We’ll be all right. You’ll see.’

‘I expect you’re right,’ I said and, deciding to ignore the air-raid siren like the others, I started to take off my coat. ‘All the same, I can hardly leave you all here.’

‘Why not?’ asked Klara.

I shrugged, but what it really came down to was this: I could hardly leave and still manage to look good in Klara’s lovely brown eyes, and I was quite keen that she should have a good impression of me; but I didn’t feel I could say this to her, not yet.

For a moment I felt my chest tighten as my nerves continued to get the better of me. Then I heard some bombs explode in the distance and breathed a sigh of relief. Back in the trenches, during the Great War, when you could hear the shells exploding somewhere else it usually meant you were safe, because it was commonly held that you never heard the one that killed you.

‘Sounds like it’s north Berlin that’s getting it,’ I said, leaning in the doorway. ‘The petroleum refinery on Thaler Strasse, probably. It’s the only real target around here. But I think we should at least get under the table. Just in case a stray bomb-’

I think that was the last thing I said, and probably it was the fact I was standing in the doorway that saved my life, because just then the glass in the nearest window frame seemed to melt into a thousand drops of light. Some of those old Berlin apartment buildings were made to last, and I later learned that the bomb that blew up the one we were in – not to mention the hospital on Lutzowerstrasse – and flattened it in a split second would certainly have killed me had not the lintel above my head and the stout oak door that was hanging inside it resisted the weight of the roof’s metal joist, for this is what killed Siv Meyer and her three sisters.

After that there was darkness and silence, except for the sound of a kettle on a gas plate whistling as it came slowly to the boil, although this was probably just the sensation in my battered eardrums. It was as if someone had switched off an electric light and then pulled away the floorboards I’d been standing on, and the effect of the world disappearing from underneath my feet might have been similar to the sensation of being hooded and hanged on a gallows. I don’t know. All I really remember of what happened is that I was upside down lying on a pile of rubble when I recovered consciousness, and there was a door on top of my face which, for several minutes until I recovered enough breath in my bomb-blasted lungs to moan for help, I was convinced was the lid of my own damn coffin.

*