Junge uttered a cry of pure anguish. His tagalong retained the memory of all Junge had experienced. Now that Junge and the tagalong were pulling apart, the life the tagalong had believed to be his own melted away. “No,” he wailed, “it can’t be!” He rubbed his face with his dirty sleeve. “But I—I believed it all, believed in it all—the Fuehrer, the Reich—”
That was the tagalong talking. I said, “Hitler’s dead, the Reich is finished.”
“But—I believed—and my son!” He came slowly to his feet, and for a moment it was as though Herr Junge had elbowed the tagalong aside. “Eugen! My son was at Stalingrad!”
I gripped his arms, just below the shoulders, and pushed him back down. “Another man’s son,” I said to the tagalong.
“My family! I must go to—”
I slipped my arms around him. Our faces were inches apart. I spoke quietly and quickly. “You don’t really belong here. You were just along for the ride. The life you led here wasn’t your life, it was all phantoms, and now you’re leaving it behind. Your own life’s waiting for you to reclaim it.”
“My son! My son!”
He struggled to rise. I tightened my embrace and resorted to another command. His jaw worked, he continued to sob, tears streamed down his dirty face, but he said no more and stopped trying to stand up. I held him close, rocking slightly and making soothing noises.
The Kid came in ahead of half a dozen confused-looking soldiers. He shook his head when he saw me holding the blubbering Junge. He said, “I see he’s taking it well.”
I relaxed my hold on Junge. He leaned against the wall and whimpered to himself. To The Kid, I said, “There are few pleasures like the joy of a memory reclaimed.”
The Kid parked his people along the wall and stood back, arms akimbo, to survey them. Most of the soldiers weren’t Volkssturm but regular army. He said, “You gotta wonder why anybody’d wanna ride around inside a Nazi’s mind.”
Or a dinosaur’s, I thought. I said, “To observe history up close.”
“Still. It’s gotta be like living in a sewer.”
I had to agree with that.
“But you gotta give the Nazis credit,” he said after a moment.
“For what?”
“They had the coolest uniforms. Even the grunts.”
We waited to let our people rest. Afterward, when our hosts rejoined the westward-fleeing throng, if they remembered this little detour at all, they’d remember only a moment’s dazedness, dizziness, disorientation. I stepped outside to take a last look around. The Kid followed me. The refugees plodded on, toward the bridges. I noticed a young woman and a little girl as they drew abreast of us. They held hands tightly as they walked. The girl kept looking up at the woman’s face, on which was written every emotion a mother must feel when she takes her child for a walk through a burning city. It’s always the here and now for non-time travelers, and linear time can be a bastard. The girl wore a dark green coat and looked to be about the right age; though her hair was the wrong color, I had to wonder.
I glimpsed two Shturmoviks skimming low and fast above the broken skyline to the east, where flames licked at the gray sky. The planes banked and disappeared from view. About half a minute later, one of them came roaring along the thoroughfare at breathtakingly low altitude. The sound it made drowned out the screams of civilians as they scattered in every direction. Soldiers scrambled down off tanks and out of trucks to flatten themselves on the pavement. A terrified horse bolted past, sending the young woman and the little girl spinning in opposite directions. The little girl landed on her belly, almost at my feet, and burst into tears. I scooped her up and crouched there clutching her to me and murmuring, “Don’t be frightened, don’t be frightened,” as the second Shturmovik came our way. Like the one before it, it didn’t strafe or drop bombs—either the Russian pilots had expended their ordnance or else they were only having a last bit of fun. The second plane, however, flew even lower than the first, almost at rooftop level, and made even more noise. I could not hear the girl crying into my ear. The plane wagged its wings derisively as it passed overhead, then pulled up sharply, turned south, and was gone.
The young woman came limping toward me with an alarmed expression and her arms outstretched to reclaim her little girl. I gave the girl a gentle hug, handed her over, and backed off. The throng began to reassemble itself.
The Kid was peering off in the direction the planes had taken. “Man,” he said, in English, “this is better than Richmond,” and laughed. In that place at that time, he could not have made a more inappropriate sound.
“Keep it down,” I warned him.
“How can you give all this up? You gotta love it!”
The young woman was trying to get the little girl to walk and calm down at the same time. I turned away to go rejoin my people in the building, and as I passed him I said to The Kid, “I love the last day of any war.”
