7
FILIP WAS THE FIRST to reach the bridge.
“You wanted to see the world. There it is.” Galina came up behind him, waved an open hand toward the city rising in stately grandeur on the far bank of the river.
Even the slight hill leading up to the bridge was enough to leave her puffing like a long-distance runner. She carried a bundle of clothes tied in a bed sheet across her back and shoulders, the ends secured in a knot under her breasts. She brought her right hand back to her chest to steady her breathing, while the left rested in its habitual place, on the small but unmistakable mound of her unborn child. Filip found this gesture, this mute confirmation of an experience only women could know, vaguely irritating and even embarrassing.
“To see the world? Yes. But not like this.” He set down his suitcase as if wanting to deny any affiliation with its shabbiness. “Not as a beggar.”
They stood, waiting for the rest of the ragged band of travelers to catch up. The sun, climbing in a cloudless February sky, caught on distant cathedral spires and laid a veneer of warmth onto the aged roughness of the stone parapet over the languidly flowing Elbe below.
After months of trudging through the German countryside, shunted from factory towns to village farms, wearing the degrading OST patch that marked them as conscripted laborers from the East, here was a city. Filip admired how the buildings of more recent construction, their limestone facades still to be tempered by time, fit seamlessly into the orderly design, lining the cobbled streets in harmony with their more weathered neighbors.
The place exuded history and culture. And possibility. Who knew what opportunities lay ahead there for a young man of nearly twenty with a quick wit and an adaptable mind? Even without formal education, he believed he understood how buildings were made. He felt ready to learn how to build an arch, construct a bridge, raise a spire, calculate the proper spacing for a staircase. His heart filled with desire to make something, something beautiful and grand, from wood, stone, iron, glass; something no one had imagined before in quite the same way. I can, I will be an architect. Just give me a chance.
From stamp collecting he had learned attention to detail, which translated readily into an aptitude for record keeping—an aptitude the Nazi camp managers seemed to value out of all proportion. His gift for languages had assured him of at least sporadic interpreter duties, sometimes resulting in extra rations.
And yet, since leaving Yalta, calling on these skills had amounted to nothing more than a kind of maneuvering, a way to evade the mindless degradation of hard labor. So far, it was only a way to stay alive without quite knowing for what purpose. But here, in this glowing city, with its trade schools, its university, its countless offices and ateliers, here a clever man who knew how to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut could find his chance, seize it, and begin to live.
He turned to his wife and was about to speak, then stopped. Was that a hint of mockery he had heard in her remark? There it is. He decided not to share his nascent hopes with her. He would surprise her. He would surprise them all, as soon as something concrete developed that would prove his worth beyond all doubt. “Where are the others?” he asked instead.
“Trading news with some people traveling from another town.”
“And you didn’t wait to hear the news?”
“We’ll hear soon enough. I wanted to be with you.” She said it simply, looking not at him but at the placid river, its path carved out of the land in broad curves, its blue-gray waters mirroring skeletal leafless trees growing along the banks. “I wonder what makes a river flow the way it does, moving this way and that. Is it just rocks and boulders the water can’t move out of the way?”
Filip could not admit that he really did not know. “Taking the path of least resistance,” he guessed. “Like us.”
“Us?” She turned from the landscape to look at him with a quizzical smile.
“Yes. We are alive, and together.”
“That’s just luck, don’t you think? We could have been separated, or died a hundred different ways.”
He lit a cigarette and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the parapet. “Not just luck. It’s knowing how to bend, like this river, when faced with obstacles or pushed around by forces we can’t control.”
“If you’re saying we worked for the enemy, it was only to save our lives, and your child,” Ksenia had come up soundlessly behind them. “But have we ever informed on or knowingly endangered another person? No.”
The trunk they had brought from home had become too cumbersome for foot travel; they had sold it at a country bazaar along the way. A large wood-framed basket now contained their household items: two small pots, a frying pan, cutlery, a few plates, cups, and bowls, and some rudimentary supplies—salt, flour, rice. Ksenia sighed and sat down carefully on its edge, resting her head in her hands.
Filip went cold. He dragged deeply on his cigarette, hoping no one noticed the shudder that made his shoulders shift and fingers shake. Again, he saw the lamppost, Borya’s body rotating slowly in the balmy breeze of a perfect Yalta afternoon, the damning word PARTISAN painted on his shirt, bare feet level with Filip’s eyes. Who would take a dead man’s shoes? he asked himself, outraged anew at the callousness, the disrespect for his young friend’s extinguished life. Anyone. Anyone would. A dead man had no need of shoes.
Was I to blame? After months of dormancy, the question rose once again in his mind, surfacing like a drowned cadaver suddenly freed from weedy depths, rolling grotesquely with unseen underwater currents. What an idiotic thing to say—How’s life in the woods, Borya? Finding any mushrooms?—on a crowded street in the middle of the day. But had anyone heard, or paid attention? “Surely not,” he said out loud, as if in answer to Ksenia’s question, forcing the thought away.
The day was bright and chilly. Patches of powdery snow lay here and there on the ground, sliding down the eaves of red-tiled roofs to trim their edges with lacy ice. A fine mist hung over the river, swirling and rising in gentle waves toward the same sun that made the ghostly vapor vanish into the morning air.
“A change in the weather,” Ilya said. “Snow is coming.”
“How do you know, Papa?” Galina challenged him, smiling. “What do any of us know about snow, except how beautiful it is, and how cold?”
“Well, the temperature is dropping, and my bones ache from the humidity,” he replied, matching her smile. “And one of the other people said so.”
“Then we must cross the bridge and see what we can see, right away.” She took his arm and they set off, leading the rest of the group toward the sentry at the far end.
“Papiere.” The man was not young, and clearly bored with the monotony of his duties. He cast a disinterested glance at the passports and work papers each person proffered like a charitable offering, standing single file, not moving until passed through by a careless wave of the soldier’s hand. “Twenty-four hours,” he repeated, stamping each passport with a red-inked date. “Twenty-four hours.”
Filip stopped. “What does that mean, twenty-four hours?”
“It means you transients cannot stay in Dresden more than one day.” He looked up, frowning like an irritated schoolmaster. “One day, or there will be consequences.”
“Where do we go then?”
“Go where you want. Back where you came from, but not here.” The guard pushed them on, already reaching for the passport of the next person in line.