— Come stand where I am.
— You can lean on me.
— That’s it… over there… that bit of horizon down there, which will soon light up like a red, glowing heart. Well, then, it was out of that very heart, Grandmother, that we came swooping down three years ago behind the sun, pushing its rays in front of us to blind the British, who were just sitting down to high tea. Yes, through that pinkish aperture slipped fifty airplanes all at once that have since become a legend, making the Australian lookout who was sitting here waiting for the sunset wipe the lenses of his binoculars and wonder why they weren’t getting any cleaner, because suddenly he saw a whole lot of bright little dots. Who but a dedicated suicide pilot could have thought that such a fantastic operation was possible?
— No, Grandmother, we didn’t think so either — that is, the handful of us who could or wanted to think at all. I’m not talking about that pack of young wolves that has been convinced since ‘36 that the whole universe is a playground in which it can kick the globe around like a football. If you had parachuted them into Calcutta to take the English high command there, they would have done it as blithely as they charged into Poland and Holland. But we, I mean the handful of us who still could and wanted to think a bit, sat huddled under our helmets, looking down in horror at the smooth water racing beneath us while asking ourselves what demonic power could be taking us to this strange, distant island if not the wish to see the best of us slaughtered on a self-propelled altar of grandeur and thus scare the wits not only out of the world but out of Germany too. Suddenly, Grandmother, I began to shake with sheer sorrow for my life that was about to be shot right out of the sky. I thought, yes, Grandmother, I thought of Uncle Egon and even envied him for having managed to be dead already…
— Yes, I did think of him, Grandmother, and it so upset me to imagine the fresh sorrow awaiting you that the stretcher strapped to my body began to twitch, and our battalion commander, Oberst Thomas Stanzler, a most wonderful and much looked-up-to man who was sitting across from me with his helmet in his hand, a ray of sunlight from a porthole falling on his bald head, smiled a bit because he must have seen the vibrations, laid a pitying hand on me, and said, “You, Private Bruner,” he said, “look like some strange kind of bird, like Icarus who tried flying over Crete. But don’t forget, Bruner, that your wings are made of steel and won’t melt in the sun like his…” And then, Grandmother, I thought of that story, and my eyes filled with tears of gratitude to our knowledgeable battalion commander, who was soon to be mortally wounded, for having taken the trouble to remind me of the myth of Daedalus and his son, which made me think of that old tutor you once brought me…
— Koch… right you are, Grandmother, Gustav Koch… that old classicist with his stories of Greece and Rome…
— Exactly. Exactly.
— Of course I remember him.
— No, I was not too young to understand. He was the first to call for casting the rusty anchor of German history back into that sea you see down there, because there, he used to say, was the warm, true, blue womb of the German genius. Be more careful, Egon, he would shout at me when I mixed up all those mythical characters, those are your own ancestors, our poor Europe was born from them, if only the Teutonic tribes had pressed on to Greece fifteen hundred years ago instead of stopping in Rome, damn its soul!…
— Don’t you remember how he sometimes used to swear?
— You mean he taught Uncle Egon too? How fantastic…
— True. And so all at once, Grandmother, in that growling, pitching airplane that was losing altitude now, all bundled up with my parachute and my knapsack and my stretcher and my rifle, with my helmet down over my ears, and my glasses, which I was too stupid to stick deep in some pocket, tied to a shoelace around my neck, I suddenly lost all fear and had an actual attack of ecstasy, as if savoring the real taste of war for the first time, Grandmother, and I actually became a physical link in old Koch’s rusty anchor chain that had been flung over the Alps with such marvelous force onto the heads of our mythical ancestors, stirring the moss of black forests and the fumes of Hunnish swamps into those warm waves until the Teutonic dreams haunting us found their meaning in the sculptured white marble of Hellas… And so, when the red light went on, and the bell rang, and the dispatching sergeant began to bark, and the whole pack of wolves jumped to its feet with a great shout and put a bullet in the barrels of its schmeissers and disappeared one by one through the hatch with its legs out, I shouted as loud as I could too, Grandmother, I shouted for old Gustav Koch, that grade school classicist, and I went whooshing out into the space that you’re looking at right now…
— Exactly.
— Right. From up there to down there…
— In a second. Just be careful, because this step is a little high for you. Here, give me your hand…
— By that olive tree, because that’s our first station. Now look carefully at what you see and think of me, jumping with a great shout from the churning belly of that plane and carried off by my own private wind, which was waiting as though just for me, first to wildly snatch away my glasses and then to pull a white chute out of me while tugging at the stretcher that was now sticking straight out like the big, single wing of a strange bird. In no time I was whisked over that very coastline that you see there, floating among my comrades’ cries of pain and surprise, the howls of the wolf pack pinned down by enemy fire between the sky and the earth, and flung sideways over that hill, toward those white houses scattered on the hillsides, those over there, Grandmother, which look like the sugar cubes that Opapa liked to suck in bed at night, and right smack into the branches of an olive tree surrounded by goats that greeted me with an indifferent silence…
— There… over there, Grandmother… those black dots out there…
— Exactly. That same flock of goats, so help me, has been standing there for the last three years. Day and night, summer and winter, it keeps reduplicating itself from the bushes…
— Yes, Grandmother, many men were shot dead in the air, thus saving their souls the return trip to heaven… most of my company, Grandmother, was wiped out in less than two minutes…
— You’d be surprised, Grandmother, what two beastly Australians with one machine gun can do. And where do you think they were, Grandmother? Come on, guess!
— Nevertheless, take a look around you and guess… after all, you’re the widow of a famous fighting man…
— Nevertheless, try to guess…
— Wrong, Grandmother. The answer is: right where you’re standing this minute! Here, their position was right by this rock. If we were to dig a little in the ground, we’d still find three-year-old cartridges. And now you see why I insisted on taking you up here, so that you could understand the whole story, right from the beginning.
— But why should they have told you about losses? It would only have spoiled your good mood and made the Austrian Genius look bad. Just remember, though, Grandmother, that a whole lot of men were killed in the operation. Months went by before we realized the full extent of it — gliders that crashed with all their occupants, dozens of men drowned at sea, parachutes that never opened, or that caught fire, or that got tangled up with each other. It was a miracle that I survived, and maybe I should thank the stretcher, Grandmother, which carried me far away from the rest of them, back behind that hill over there. In fact, if I hadn’t wound up with my parachute straps caught in the branches of that olive tree, bruised all over, half-unconscious, and worst of all, without my glasses, I too, Grandmother, would probably have gone running off to look for some Englishman or Australian to put a bullet in me. But instead I stayed trapped in that thicket of branches, looking out at a soft, round world of bearded black goats whose shepherd had taken to his heels. They lifted their heads to look at me too, with a quiet tinkle of their bells — and I, Grandmother, who had never seen such black goats in my life, was more afraid of them than I was of an Englishman’s bullet or some Greek’s knife, because how did I know they weren’t about to climb that tree and take a little bite out of me, eh, Grandmother?