Page 56 of Hell to Pay
“Where to now?” Sebastian asked. Patiently, for he was a patient man. I wasn’t very patient myself, but I’d married a patient man, and it pleased me that Alix was doing the same. Looks fade, wealth can be lost, but temperament is forever.
“We should go in,” Ashleigh said, “so you can tell us what happened once you got here.”
“Why would we go into the terminal?” Ben asked. “It’s not like it’s going to be the same. It looks crazy modern.”
Ashleigh said, “Hello? For atmosphere?”
“That’s what I mean,” Ben said. “How is this going to be atmosphere?”
She sighed. “Look. You can’t shoot a good video of somebody talking in a car. You have to give people something to look at. If it’s modern inside, that’s just, like, contrast.”
“Fine,” I said. “We can go in.” I’d wanted to do this, after all. To tell my story.
I opened the car door, but Sebastian said, “I have a better idea. I’ll drop you off at the terminal, then swing back around and park.”
“We can get a snack, at least,” Ben said.
“We ate about two hours ago,” Ashleigh said.
Ben said, “So?” and I laughed. How I was enjoying being around young people again, even when they squabbled.
The interior of the airport was indeed modern, with a huge arching roof covered by glass. It was full of the usual ticket counters and hurrying travelers, and Ashleigh said, “See? Atmosphere. I’ll film this separately and cut back and forth in editing. Sit here, please, Frau Stark, and tell us: what happened once you got to the airport?”
“We thought we were settled, as much as we thought anything,” I said. “But, of course, we weren’t.”
We were given a slice of bread with jam for breakfast the morning after our arrival, and ate it sitting on our cots. How I regretted losing the pillowcase of food! The bread was most odd. I asked the woman on the next cot, “What is this made of?”
She looked startled. “What?”
“The bread,” I explained. “What type is it?”
Now, she stared. “The same as always.Kriegsbrot.”War bread. “Are you not in your right mind, then?” She tapped her forehead, and I felt mine. A bandage had been taped over the stitches yesterday. It felt gritty under my fingers from the ride in the open truck through the dust and smoke.
Dr. Becker said quietly, “It’s made of a number of things, not much of it wheat. Rye, potato meal, oats, barley, sawdust … whatever there is. You mustn’t ask questions like that. People will think you’ve been buying on the black market.”
My neighbor scoffed a little. “We’ll think? No, we’ll know. I’d buy on the black market if I could afford it—who wouldn’t?—but you don’t want the Gestapo hearing that. Least said, soonest mended, no?”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
There were many hundreds of us in the room—an airplane hangar, I believe—but the Army organized things quickly enough, to the point where I was soon queueing at a hastily assembled eye clinic for a look at my still-burning, still-blurry eyes. Many others were in the same boat or worse, the whites of their eyes red with hemorrhage. Damage to the eyes, I was told, was the most common injury among the Dresden refugees, which I supposed meant that most with worse injuries had succumbed to them. In some cases, the eye itself had been pierced by glass or shrapnel, and the patient was told to “see an eye doctor as soon as possible.” These people couldn’t even feed themselves. How were they to find an eye doctor? There was some grumbling about that, but not too much. What use to complain?
In another room, Party officials had set up tables and were processing documents and so forth, and here I queued with Dr. Becker and the children until he got his chance to explain about the “loss” of our identity papers and ration books in the scramble to escape our fictional burning cellar. He did it very well—I could feel the horror of realizing I was stepping on others, the fear of being pushed from behind and falling myself, the panic and agony of being trampled. “I had my son in my arms,” Dr. Becker was saying, “but lost hold of my daughter. I feared the worst.” He was practically trembling by the end, for it was all too easy to imagine after the stories we’d heard.
The official, an older man with the kind of intelligent, ascetic face that one sees on Jesuit priests—what had he been before the war?—listened without comment, then began to fill out paperwork in a precise script. He asked without looking up, “You’re not of Jewish descent or mixed race?”
I had Andrea by the hand, and now, I squeezed. She squeezed back and kept her mouth shut. Dr. Becker said, “No.”
The official lifted his head and met Dr. Becker’s eyes. I could see the sweat on Dr. Becker’s upper lip and hoped the official didn’t notice. It was hot and stuffy in the little room, though, so perhaps …
Maybe the official had his mind on the next person already, or on his lunch. Perhaps he suspected and decided to let it go. A sympathizer, or just somebody who’d had enough? I never knew, but ten minutes later, we had newKennkartenand ration books, and our fictional names had been entered neatly into a log. I’d made myself eighteen in this reinvention. It seemed wiser, somehow. Part of me thought,At least I won’t have to be in the BDM anymore!Was the BDM still going on? Well, why wouldn’t it? Even as the very fabric of civilization crumbled around us, here the officials were still, being official.
We were turning away when the official said, “Wait.”
How my heart pounded then! I didn’t dare look at Dr. Becker. The official reached into a drawer, and I held my breath and feared the worst. He brought out a few slips of paper, handed them to Dr. Becker, and said, “Extra coupons for milk. For the children. They look as if they could do with it.”
Dr. Becker said, “Thank you.” His voice was steady. A triumph of will. I was beginning to guess how often he’d had to exercise that will over the past years.
As we made our way back to the main room amidst the crush and stink of too many unwashed bodies, I said, “How extraordinary.”
