Dissonance (27 page)

‘Bombing us.'

‘Unlikely,' Madge replied.

‘Possibly.'

‘I wouldn't know about that. Either way, this is none of my doing.'

‘So you keep saying.'

‘We came here for the music.'

Perhaps, Madge thought. Perhaps. Bowing her head.

‘Funny to be killed by one of your own, wouldn't it?' the girl said.

‘No one's getting killed.'

The girl kept looking at her. ‘So, who do you go for?' she asked.

‘Go for?'

‘Us, or you?'

Madge had to think. ‘Neither. I wish it would just blow over.'

‘For the music?'

‘Yes.'

For the next few minutes they listened as the drill became real, as plane engines grew louder in the mid-distance.

‘Is that ours or theirs?' Madge asked the girl.

‘They're Lancasters,' a man said.

‘Wellingtons,' another argued.

Madge wondered what she should do. She stared at cracks in the concrete floor. Then she stood up and said, ‘I need to go up. Mrs Hennig is still in her room.'

The air raid warden, a retired postman from 3A, looked at her and said, ‘Not possible … else we'll have two people to dig out.'

‘Why didn't you fetch her?' someone else asked, and the girl beside her asked, accusingly, ‘Yes, why?'

‘She can decide for herself,' Madge said, starting to move off.

‘Sit down, please, Mrs Hergert,' the air raid warden warned.

‘I must go.'

‘I can't allow you.'

‘I must.'

Two of the older men stood up.

Madge sat down and listened to the engines growing louder. Then a light globe jumped on its fabric cord and the air seemed to shift in a single, solid wheeze; there was a hushed murmur and the earth rumbled. A few mothers drew their children closer, one old man shook his head in disgust and the warden felt the walls as if this might console the women and children.

‘That's a way off,' the old postman said, tipping his cap.

But there was another bomb, and another, getting closer, louder and more threatening. There were no more words – just a few moans and the clicking of someone's rosary. Madge imagined how it might end: a sulphur flash, her head thrown back against the wall, the smell of burnt hair and leather as she gasped her last few breaths of hot air. She noticed a seven- or eight-year-old boy staring at her, his eyes set narrow and mean.

‘Miles off,' the warden explained. ‘It's deceiving.'

The all-clear was given just after lunch and they filed out of the basement. As they climbed the stairs to the ground floor they could tell something was wrong. Brick dust filled the air. Voices were raised. Someone was screaming and people were running up the stairs in twos and threes. Two policemen were carrying buckets of water but most of this spilt onto the steps.

Madge stopped to watch the activity. ‘Please, no,' she mumbled to herself. She climbed the stairs, pushing herself up two at a time on swollen ankles.

A crowd had gathered on the second floor. The door to 2E was open and the warden stood silhouetted in dust and sunlight. Madge could see past him, and she could see sky and clouds, a bird in the distance and the wall of the guesthouse on the opposite side of Blumweg. She covered her mouth and took a deep gasp of brick and mortar dust. ‘Mary, Mother of Jesus.' She hobbled towards the warden and said, ‘Mrs Hennig is my friend.'

He scowled at her. ‘Well, you should've fetched her.'

‘I tried but she wouldn't come,' Madge replied.

‘There's no point going in now,' he said, folding his arms.

‘I knocked and knocked,' Madge cried.

He looked at her. ‘Go on then.'

He moved aside and she took a few cautious steps over the threshold. The sitting room was almost intact, although powdered entirely white. A snowdome and a small porcelain ballerina had been knocked from a shelf, but apart from that, nothing. The breadboard was still on the table with a loaf of black bread, a few slices cut but not eaten. There was an unwashed tea mug full of a white, syrupy liquid, a scarf over the back of a chair and a book that Madge had given Sara to read. Madge picked it up, blew dust from the cover and put it back down.

The radio was still on, quietly, so she turned it off. She walked over a wet mat where the police had put out a fire in a chest full of blankets, wool and some of Sara's unfinished knitting, a nearly complete man's jumper sitting black and burnt on top. She picked it up and held it in the air. Yes, it would fit Erwin. It was heavy with water so she wrung it out and tried to fold it.

She looked up. The internal walls were gone. People were watching her from the windows of buildings across the street. Madge used her hands to try and shoo them away but they just kept watching.

‘Careful,' one of the policemen said to her. ‘Don't get too close to the edge.'

A cliff in Sara's living room. Madge moved to the edge anyway, and stopped. She looked down. There was Sara, two floors below, still asleep on her bed, half-buried in a quilt of bricks and mortar.

She turned and walked back to the door. ‘What about the girl?' she asked the warden.

‘Someone said they saw her leaving this morning. You related?'

Madge took a moment. ‘Yes,' she replied.

Madge took Erwin's jumper and returned to her apartment. With her hands trembling she searched a small notebook for the number of the conservatorium. She dialled, but then stopped, seeing Sara's leg jutting out of the rubble, her stockings torn, her shoe half off.

What will I say?

Madge disliked death immensely. It was entirely beyond her control. Full of waiting, and brooding, and moments of high drama. Dragging on and on.

She could still see Jo's sallow, yellow face, hear his faint, breathy voice and smell the shitty, pissy sheets she'd make him change. She remembered Sam and Grace visiting and afterwards, Sam saying, ‘The kind thing would be a bullet.'

As Grace tugged his sleeve. ‘He's not a cow.'

‘Cattle have a better death.'

A better death, she thought, as she put her shaky finger into the 3 and dialled.

‘Hello?' she managed. ‘This is the conservatorium?'

‘Yes.'

‘I need to contact a student.'

‘Not possible.'

‘It's important.'

‘We have two hundred students. They come and go.'

‘There's been an accident.'

There was a pause. Madge heard the woman covering the phone and then returning. ‘Is there anything else?'

‘Her name is Luise Hennig.'

‘Who?'

‘The student.'

‘Which student?'

‘There's been an accident,' Madge repeated, raising her voice. ‘Her mother's been killed by a bomb. Now, you need to find her.'

‘Could you repeat that name?'

Madge gave the details again. ‘Please, don't tell her what's happened.'

Then she left her apartment, locking the door and head­ing towards the warden at the door to 2E, now closed and roped off.

‘I have contacted the daughter,' she said.

He stared at her. ‘Where will she stay?' he asked.

‘With me,' she replied.

Then she went down the stairs a step at a time, holding tightly to the handrail, occasionally wiping the dust from her palm. She walked out onto the street, stopping to survey the six-foot-high pile of rubble with four wooden posts sticking out the top. Sara's body had been covered with a plain white sheet and more rubble had fallen on this.

‘Not too close!' another warden called.

Madge looked up. The inside of the Hennig's apartment was exposed. It reminded Madge of a doll's house she'd once had – walls opening out to reveal bedrooms, nurseries and tinsel-trimmed lounge rooms. She could remember playing with little figures that Sam had made out of wood: a wooden Grace and Sam, her and the dog. Until one day Sam, trying to move a wardrobe out of her room, fell back and crushed it into a hundred pine splinters.

She kept staring, disbelievingly. Not only the indignity of a public death but Sara's life on display too: her taste for furniture, and prints of her childhood in Osnabrück; her washing drying on a rack beside the fire as a few bricks, still attached to a piece of torn wallpaper, blew in the morning air.

She knew where Luise would turn the corner into Blumweg. Her feet and legs were sore so she took one of Sara's wooden chairs from the pile, faced it towards the corner and sat down. People were still looking up into the apartment, and at Sara herself, but they'd stopped standing about. Now it was only worth a glance. Nothing unusual. Poor soul. Move on.

When Luise turned the corner she was already running. She stopped and covered her mouth, and then sprinted towards Madge. She arrived, dropping her books on the ground. The scores blew open in the breeze and music ­scattered across Blumweg. It blew flat, or onto its edge, or corner, scraping along like sandpaper. Mozart giving up on black dots that represented sounds. Music filling the air. A ‘Pie Jesu' she'd tried but given up on, waiting until she saw Erwin again, so he'd rewrite it for her in a lower key.

Donna eis requiem
 …

A child's voice singing a silent Requiem, filling Blumweg, every alley and baker's shop, the guesthouse and beer cellar.

She looked up and saw what remained of her apartment. She looked at Madge. ‘Where's Mum?'

Madge's eyes shifted to the pile of rubble, and the sheet.

‘Mum!' the girl cried.

She ran towards the small hill and started climbing it.

‘Get away!' the warden thundered.

‘It's her mother,' Madge screamed at him.

Luise arrived and pulled the sheet away. She saw her mother's face, but didn't scream or cry. She started moving rocks, as if it was a rescue mission.

‘Why didn't you help her?' she asked, looking down at a dozen or so blank faces. She managed to lie down on the bed beside her mother. She took her in her arms, rocking, clearing hair from her white, bloodied face and kissing her. She looked down again. ‘Why didn't you help her?' she repeated.

‘She was dead,' the warden said, as if he was explaining geometry to a schoolgirl.

Luise didn't reply. She just sat there, rocking, mumbling, for ten or fifteen minutes, as the onlookers drifted away and the warden kept repeating, ‘Come down now or we'll have two to cart off.'

Eventually an ambulance arrived. Two men waited as Madge climbed the hill and brought Luise down. Then they placed a stretcher on the bed and rolled Sara onto it. Madge and Luise watched as they covered her and paused to light a cigarette.

‘Put that out!' the warden screamed, but the man in white told him to get fucked.

Luise sat down on the chair as Madge gathered her music, sheet by sheet, groaning every time she had to bend over. After a while Luise joined her, taking the sheets and putting them in order, eventually saying, ‘They're all here except twenty-three.'

‘Maybe it blew away,' Madge suggested, as rubble continued to fall from the broken walls of apartment 2E.

Madge took her around the shoulder and they went in, climbing the stairs, passing the roped off door and waiting as Madge searched for her key.

Luise looked at her. ‘Why didn't she go down?' she asked.

Madge shrugged. ‘I knocked. She came to the door and said she was sick of drills. She had a headache and wanted to lie down.'

‘You should've made her.'

Madge was silent. She felt the key in her pocket and opened the door. They settled on the lounge and Madge made her coffee. They sat together for an hour, only occasionally whispering something.

‘What were the chances … our place?' Luise said, crying, resting her head on Madge's shoulder, realising what she was doing and moving.

That's life, Madge wanted to say. Random. Cruel. Get used to it.

‘Why were they bombing us?' Luise asked.

‘There's a war on,' Madge replied.

Luise looked at her. ‘It's your lot.'

‘Who?'

‘That killed her.'

‘It's not my lot. My lot grow grapes in the Barossa.'

Luise scowled at her and then realised there was no point. ‘You should've dragged her down,' Luise said.

Madge shook her head. ‘How?'

Just after two o'clock a loader and a truck drove into Blumweg. They got started on the rubble straight away. Soon the street was full of exhaust and fine dust. Luise watched from Madge's window, searching for bits of a broken life that had suddenly become rubbish: the cracked timber of her bed, her grey mattress, her wardrobe and dresses that might have survived.

‘I'll go down,' Madge offered, coming up behind her.

‘No, I don't want them,' she replied.

Don't be silly, girl, what are you going to wear, she wanted to say.

But then she saw the garments stretching and tearing in the mouth of the loader.

‘Erwin,' Luise said, almost smiling. She opened the window and called his name loudly. She waved. ‘Up here,' she said.

A few moments later he came in the door, carrying page twenty-three of her ‘Pie Jesu'. ‘Where's your mum?' he asked.

That night Luise and Erwin explored the shell of 2E by torchlight. Erwin held a box and she filled it with the remains of her old life: a set of combs and brushes that Sara had given her, some underwear, almost dry beside the fire, photos of her parents and grandparents (all dead before she was born), a few books, rolls from a long lost pianola, cutlery, pots and pans, a few unbroken plates and cups and a bag of old dolls that Sara had been keeping for her granddaughter.

They returned to 2A and laid these things out on the floor. Erwin found a rag and they wiped them clean, eventually packing them back in the box where they'd stay until her future was decided.

Then Erwin sight-transposed the ‘Pie Jesu' and Luise sang it. Halfway through she stopped and walked over to the drying rack where the burnt jumper was hanging. She picked it up, returned to Erwin, and held it against him. ‘It was going to be a surprise,' she said.