Read Online Lore by Rachel Seiffert - Free Book Online

armband as once he had displayed his arm. He speaks the
Führer
’s rhetoric through the train doors and windows; fate and bravery and the glory of the
Götterdämmerung
, striding alongside the refugees. Some people spit, some curse or cry, others agree, still others join in.Mostly they ignore him, staring beyond the glass of the carriage windows, beyond Helmut, with their dull, bruised eyes.
    The refugee masses flood back through Berlin on foot, too. Feet caked with mud, cheeks hollow with walking. Helmut takes their photos and welcomes them home, but, like the trains, they don’t stop. Resting in the hollows of bombed-out buildings for one night, maybe a day, or perhaps even two, but rarely longer. Lifeless, but driven forward by the threat from the east. They describe an army the size of a continent, angry and brutal and without mercy. These people speak of punishment, and bring with them a faint sense of deserving. As they pass they tell tales of emaciation and ashes, of stinking smoke and pits full of bodies. Some say they have seen these things, others dispute it. Their voices halfhearted, matter-of-fact. Vague, hungry, and weak.
BERLIN, APRIL 1945
    Helmut assembles his brigade on the rubble they have been piling up all afternoon. Their heroic barricade, backbone of the Reich. The sun is lower now, and the light just right. He takes one photo of them, and then one of the others takes a turn behind the camera so Helmut can be part of the group in the next exposure. With the fat boys and the boys with bad teeth, the old men and amputees. Helmut has a shovel in his left hand, and his right arm hangs loose and twisted, crowding his chest, which has narrowed again with the hunger of late wartime. All of the group look tired, most of them look serious. But the three or four who are looking at Helmut—their photographer having his picture taken—they are all smiling.
    Helmut stands between them, relaxed, shoulders crooked, hisface upturned and proud. The city behind him is destroyed and soon to be divided. In a matter of days, a suicide will speed the Soviet invasion; the small mound of broken building beneath his feet will mark the line between what is British, what is French, and Helmut will not recognize his childhood home in the Berlin which is to come. But in this photo, Helmut is doing something which he never did in any of the many pictures lovingly printed by Gladigau over the course of his childhood. Helmut is standing high on his rubble mountain, over which Soviet tanks will roll with ease, and he is smiling.

Part Two
 
LORE
BAVARIA, EARLY 1945
    Lore lies on the edge of sleep in the dark bedroom. She heard a noise a while ago, fell asleep, then woke again. Lying still, with the night wrapped quiet around her, frost-flowers blooming across the windowpane. Lore’s limbs are warm and heavy. She’s not sure now if she only imagined it, watching the walls and window and ceiling unfolding, and beyond them, the room of dreams.
    A door slams, and the walls are back again, solid along the edge of her bed. Keeping her eyes closed, Lore listens. Hears her little sister breathing. Whispers.
    —Liesel? Anne-Liese?
    No reply: just the long sighs of sleep. Lore drifts. One minute, two minutes, ten. She doesn’t know how long before she hears the noise again.
    Doors and voices. Lore is sure now, eyes open, waiting for the crack of light from the hall. The house stays dark; the whispers come from downstairs; she slips out of bed to listen.
    —What is happening?
    —It will be fine. Over soon. You will see.
    Vati is here
. In uniform at the foot of the stairs. Mutti has her arms around him, a soldier stands to attention in the open doorway, and behind him Lore sees a truck parked in the road. The cold night slips over the threshold and through the banisters, settling around Lore’s bare feet. Her father fills the hallway. Her mother’s hands gripat his sleeves and he calls her my Asta, strokes her hair, and she cries