Mendelssohn is on the Roof (24 page)

Cities turned to ashes. One hundred thousand big guns thundered out day and night in the capital city of the Reich. They destroyed houses, they blew up long-darkened street lights. The victorious Soviet Army made its way through the ruins, breaking down the furious resistance. It reached the concrete bunker, the last hiding place of the bloody madman. The waters of the river flooded the underground passageways, and tens of thousands died within, the wounded, women, children. The flag with the hammer and sickle flew from the ruins of the Reichstag, and the flags once accompanied by fifes and drums and horsetails now fell to the dust at the feet of the victors. They lay in the dirt and mud and mire of the thousand-year Reich. The proud statues that lined the Alley of Triumph collapsed and their 
broken limbs lay on the ground. The Arch of Triumph caved in. The people who survived crept by the fallen, gaping heads and looked down at the ground. But the ground was a desert of stone. Nothing grew on it. It was dead under its cover of dust and rubble.

The bloodstained keys remained on the table. The keys were mute. Even the blood couldn’t make them speak. Adela and Greta lay on the ground. Their lips still seemed to be moving.

‘In the forest,’ Adela was saying.

‘In the forest,’ Greta was repeating.

Nearby, just a few steps away, murmured the forest. Trees were growing out of seedlings, casting roots in the ground, holding fast against storms, against whirlwinds, against thunder and lightning. Insects fell upon the trees and conquered them. But blackberry brambles and
blueberries
began to sprout at their bases. Pine needles fertilised the ground so that life would spring up even after their death. When the fire overcame them, they twisted and turned, their ashes fell to the ground, and the forest grew out of the ashes even more radiantly green. Everything flourished in the forest – mushrooms, raspberries,
strawberries
, blueberries and blackberries, shade and moisture and even warmth that came when its trees were felled and split into firewood and the countryside was redolent with its smoke.

The trees kept growing, victorious and deathless. They held firm, they served, and when they were forced to die they died standing up. They weren’t engraved on memory in cold stone, to threaten or remind. They were the life that overpowers death.

‘In the forest,’ whispered Adela and Greta, dying. They were there in the forest at the hour of death.

Jiří Weil was born in 1900 in Prague, and was one of the best-known writers in Central Europe in the 1930s and the immediate post-war years. In 1942 Weil escaped transportation to the Nazi camps by faking his own death. He remained in hiding for the rest of the Second World War and his novels
Mendelssohn is on the Roof
and
Life with a Star
are based on these experiences. Weil died in 1959.

Life with a Star by
Jiří Weil is also published by Daunt Books

A
LSO BY
J
IŘÍ
W
EIL

Life with a Star