Moving Parts

Stretchers glide by bearing discolored fatigues, school uniforms, pure wool suits riddled with bullet holes, flowery cretonne frocks. With an infallible eye the orderly tells life from death and points the bodies in the appropriate direction. One of the stretcher bearers limps as if he were dancing. He miraculously managed to save his walkman and headphones and he himself also miraculously survived, plucked out of some African backwater from which no one else emerged alive. The other stretcher bearer steps behind the first, seeing nothing, clinging to the stretcher. From the plight he found himself in, probably somewhere in the Caucasus, he saved everything except his sight, and now he raises his feet high, afraid of stumbling. They go back and forth; at a certain moment they will bring in Fojchtmajer’s wife with a round hole in the back of her head, dragged by a military policeman from a cart full of people and shot to death on the spot. The children are riding on among strangers. The narrator will find it hardest to conclude the matter of the children. Since the Fojchtmajers stopped at nothing, accepting every kind of humiliation, willing to bear anything for their sake, the children ought to be spared. But the lowest floors of the hotel know no pity. Here no one has the time or the inclination to worry about individual fates. There is no way of counting how many women have passed through the place, each with a round hole in the back of her head, taken from buses and trains in which their children continued on. In the lobby there is a feverish commotion: The center of the room must be cleared, right away. The walking wounded hurriedly push the last mattresses against the wall, for those lying on them are delirious from fever and cannot help. Gazes stray upward and are lost beneath a ceiling so high it cannot be seen. But they at least latch onto a dark shape gradually descending ever lower. A substantial hull can already be made out. The orderly makes a call, trying to arrange something; he shouts into the receiver, but at the other end of the line it seems he cannot be heard. A German gunboat slowly drops onto the floor, a rusty white waterline on its side; it is full of dead sailors in navy blue uniforms and round caps bearing the inscription Kriegsmarine. The boat settles with a groan and tilts over, creaking at its seams. The captain, immaculately dressed, is still on the bridge; his wide-open eyes no longer see anything through his gold-rimmed glasses.