Page 44 of Hell to Pay
21
IN THE LAND OF THE DEAD
I showed them the hidden wall in the stones and the cavern beyond, with its stone-walled cistern. I didn’t focus on the cistern. “There’s a privy here, too,” I said. “Through here.”
A rough door, a small room. “This seems old,” Frau Bauer said immediately. “Much older than 1945.”
“There were prison cells down here,” I said. “There probably still are. I never saw this place in the light, and I don’t know how far it extends on either side. There must have been guards once as well, though. Even if they only gave the prisoners a bucket, they would have needed someplace to dump the contents. I’m fairly sure this emptied into groundwater, and then probably to the river. There was a splash when one used it. A faint one, as if from far below.”
Ben said, “That sure gives me an appetite for dinner. Gross.” He picked up something hanging from a nail. “Is this toilet paper?” He felt the gray sheet, and it disintegrated in his hand. “It seems really rough.”
“Oh, toilet paper was very rough in those days,” I said, “at the end of the war. When one could come by it at all. Some people were desperate enough to resort to books. My parentswould have seen that as sacrilege, but then, they still had toilet paper.”
“I can think of a book or two I’d have used,” Sebastian said.
“Mein Kampfsprings to mind,” Dr. Bauer said, and I laughed in surprise. It was the most human she’d sounded. Perhaps it was easier in the dark.
“Have you read it?” I asked. “I confess I never have, beyond the first chapter or two. I don’t consider myself an imaginative woman, but it seemed to me that poison dripped from its pages.”
“Very turgid and confused in composition,” she said, “and expressing a common idea, not novel at all. Blood-and-soil nationalism: the ideal of a racially defined body of people sharing the same ancestral home. Imperial Japan was much the same. Hitler was exceptional only in the extremes to which he carried the concept.”
I said, “Let’s go on.” I was tiring, and I wanted to finish this. I’d dreaded revisiting these places for months now, since I’d brought up the idea to Alix, and the only way to get over a dread like that is to go ahead and do the thing.
Another heavy door, also unlocked. “Dr. Becker had the key to this one,” I said, “and you see, here it still is in the lock, as we left it.” I couldn’t help a little thrill of anticipation. Surely, if all of this was still here and undisturbed, the tiara was here as well. I still hadn’t mentioned the cistern. Perhaps I was keeping back the knowledge of its whereabouts until I saw whether I was believed. “And now,” I said, “the tunnel.”
It was the same, if even more spidery, and my ugly shoes crunched over dirt and possibly rodent bones. I didn’t want to know. We didn’t see any rats, at least. Hopefully they were fleeing ahead of the light. I really felt that rats would be the last straw.
Up we trudged, and I was glad of Sebastian’s arm. There was nothing to mark the end of the tunnel except that itended. Abruptly, so much so that Sebastian and I nearly hit the wall. “The door,” I said. I found the handle, pushed it down. We stepped out, and I remembered.
I’d been with Dr. Becker at the time. He’d said, “We must leave the children for a while. I need to see what the situation is. We can’t make a plan without that.”
The children were awake, hungrily eating bread and cheese from my rucksack and drinking water. Andrea looked up, her hair mussed and her face pale and pinched in the faint pool of yellow from Dr. Becker’s flashlight. Her dark eyes were wary, and I expected her to object, but she didn’t. She just went still.
“You will take care of your brother,” Dr. Becker told her. “You will both be brave. I’ll be in no danger, and I’ll come back as soon as I can.” Then he showed me the tunnel, and we walked up the sloping path to its end, where he switched off his flashlight, released the latch of the hidden door, opened it the tiniest crack, and waited in silence before finally opening it far enough to look out.
“Come,” he said, and I did.
The first thing that hit me was the burning, stinging smoke, which instantly made one’s chest tighten and one’s eyes water. The second was the smell.
Burning wood, like a bonfire, or something less savory. Rubbish, perhaps. And burning … rubber? A caustic, chemical smell. Something else, too, something sickly sweet. I didn’t want to know what that was, but there was no escaping it.
It was the smell of dead people.
Just past six in the morning. The sun wouldn’t be up for an hour yet, but the air was gray with approaching dawn. Even in the smoke and the dim light, I knew exactly where we were.The crypt of theHofkirche,the cathedral. The burial place of my ancestors.
Of course the tunnel came out here. Ofcourseit did. What could be a safer escape route for a fleeing prince? A church had always meant sanctuary.
I thought that for fifteen seconds, until I saw the first body.
The crypt looked nothing like its usual self. The stone tombs were the same, but the floor was littered with abandoned items. A suitcase, a flask, a man’s hat, and most incongruously, an empty baby carriage. And beyond it, a pile of heavy stones with a hand sticking out from underneath. A woman’s or a man’s, I didn’t look to see. I didn’t want to look at all. A tumbled area of more stones, and the upper halves of two women beneath them, as if rescuers had tried to dig them out and had abandoned the effort when they realized it was fruitless. An older woman and a younger one, both in headscarves, their faces battered, their coats threadbare and rusty with age. I remembered the two women I’d seen the night before, holding onto each other and running. Refugees from the East, looking for sanctuary.
Dr. Becker said, “Come.” We skirted the pile of rubble, and he looked cautiously up the stairs to the main body of the church. That was when I realized.
“Herr Dr. Becker,” I said, “you must take off your star.”
He stared at me, uncomprehending. “To take it off means death,” he said. “And I’m well known in Dresden.”
“To leave it on is worse,” I said. “Youmusttake it off, don’t you see? The children’s, too, or the Gestapo will surely take you.”
