A Perfect Madness (44 page)

Later, when Anna climbed into her bed
for the cold night, Hiram sang songs to her, ones that he and Julia
had learned as children, and told her stories she had never heard
about her mother. Some were true and some weren’t, but all were
told to make Julia more real to her than some distant face that
dimmed with each passing year. No stories were told, though, about
her father, and later Hiram thought it strange that Anna asked no
questions as to where he was or even who he might be. All Angie
would say, when Anna did ask, was that her father was off fighting
in the terrible war like her mother somewhere far away, and that
seemed to satisfy her. In time, the question was no longer asked of
her, and he was forgotten.

When the time came for Hiram to return
to the air base, he held Anna close for what seemed an eternity,
not wanting to let her go. His last embrace was for Angie, whom he
had grown to love as Julia had. The day he first met her, Angie was
everything that Julia said she would be, as God-like as one could
become while walking this earth. From the very beginning, he felt,
had she been younger in years, or himself older, he would have
loved her in a far different way than the gentle love he felt for
her now. She was a fine, full-bodied and handsome woman, not
attractive in a pretty way, but in a magnificent way that always
held her grace before your eyes. It covered her like the skin she
was born with from head to toe. And when he told her that God must
have showered her with such grace, she turned beet red for several
minutes before finding the words to answer him. “The grace of God
doesn’t rest easy on a person you know. The most we can hope for is
to breathe it in from time to time, because we can’t hang on to
it.”

When they parted, no one said
goodbye.

“
It was too harsh a word
to use,” Angie said.

Hiram knew she was right. The fields
of our memory are unbounded, and we can never forget those we have
loved and who have loved us in our lives. For him, what he would
remember most was that Angie’s soul sang like a bird at
dawn.

The green light having flashed to go,
Hiram started the engines a second time and began to taxi in
between other planes moving in a row down the long runway towards
the take-off point. When he reached it, Hiram turned the nose of
the plane into the wind, opened the throttles full with the brake
on until it seemed like the fuselage would shake apart, then
suddenly released them, propelling the big aircraft down the runway
like a sling shot would a rock. In seconds, he could feel the
aircraft lift from Mother Earth and begin to groan as it rose
higher into the night skies with its heavy load of explosives.
Rising every few seconds like flights of frightened blackbirds
taking wing, hundreds of bombers soon filled the sky, circling the
town of Reading thousands of feet below. As the war’s end seemed
imminent, Hiram still could only hope this would be his and the
crew’s last mission. Each day when the news came, it seemed there
would be no more targets left in Germany to bomb; but what was to
follow no poet’s words could ever describe had there been a
thousand lines written.

Hours later, Hiram took the plane down
to two thousand feet to start the massive bombing run with the
other planes on Dresden. Looking down, he could see clearly the icy
country roads and darkened woods and fields surrounding the
beautiful city, appearing to the eye as if they had been painted
there a thousand times or more by God himself. Ahead of him, de
Havilland pathfinders had swooped in low over the city marking
targets with bright flares. To Hiram, the city seemed unprotected.
There was no antiaircraft fire, no dreaded searchlights that always
froze a plane momentarily in the skies for enemy eyes to see and
fire on. When no enemy night fighters rose to meet them, Hiram knew
the city was undefended and doomed, with mercy its only escape.
Ordering the bomb doors open, he watched as the thousands of
incendiaries dropped by the planes ahead slowly began to build
their own little pockets of hell across the city. It was as if he
were watching something out of a beautiful but frightening fairy
tale, as tiny dots of light would twinkle on, then suddenly burst
into flames. Dresden was beginning to burn like ancient Rome did,
only more horribly, and in a way that only an angry God would
allow. When the second wave of bombers followed two hours later,
acting like a huge vacuum pump, their fresh hail of incendiary
bombs pulled the spreading fires into one gigantic
firestorm.

Below, people scurried back and forth
in every direction with no discernable pattern of direction, much
like a disturbed nest of aimless ants running helter-skelter,
seeking a hiding place that was nowhere to be found. Many reached
the cellars of their homes, only to die there from asphyxiation, as
the building firestorm drained the oxygen from the air to feed its
hungry stomach. Like a raging tornado, the howling firestorm
grasped and tugged at everything, seemingly pulling the entire city
into its fiery mouth to devour. Buildings along the streets,
shattered first by the bombs, collapsed in the swirling wind. Many
people that could find no shelter died where they were, or were
dragged bodily by the growing vacuum into the fire along with
chunks of wood and metal and blazing tree limbs.

His bombing mission complete, Hiram
banked the plane to climb into formation for the long journey back
home. He could feel the searing heat from the lapping tongue of the
raging firestorm far beneath him, which was turning all the clouds
and smoke around him into a fiery red. Looking below one more time
at the hell they had brought to Dresden, Hiram hoped, as he always
did, the little children would be spared the horror. War is not for
children, he had argued one night in a pub, it is only for adults
who play games with it. Yet, had he known of the horrors in
Auschwitz and the other camps across Germany and Poland, he might
have thought differently. There were rumors of such truth, but
everyone knew the Germans loved children, so they could only be
false.

Moving into the thickening clouds
closing in on the plane, a fast-moving shadow seen only for a
second by Hiram smashed into the midsection of his aircraft,
slicing it in half before both aircraft burst into a ball of fire.
To those who could see it, the flaming death of the two planes and
their crews seemed like an old exploding star in its death throes,
finally surrendering its long-held place in the universe. What it
had been, its shining existence, was no more. So it was with
Hiram’s life, now nothing more than a thousand pieces of burning
ashes floating on the firestorm’s wind to no particular place. Only
Julia and her cousin Abram would remain to tell those who would
listen about their proud family and its long existence in
Prague.

Standing in the broad meadows by the
Elbe River less than two miles away from the burning city, Erich
saw the huge fireball from the colliding planes briefly light up
the night sky before plunging silently to the earth. He had arrived
only moments before, exhausted and cold and hungry from his own
distant journey from Auschwitz. When he drew near to Dresden,
walking with a scattering of refugees he had joined a hundred miles
back, the winter darkness before him began to redden as the sea of
flames raced unchecked through the old city, engulfing everything
in sight. Soon an unchecked blast of warm air spread out across the
ancient river, lifting the siege of winter momentarily. The
blackness that had been the night around him now glowed in such an
eerie color that no artist could have captured it had he dared to
try.

A deafening noise made of wailing
screams and yelling came towards him from across the river. For a
second Erich could see nothing. Then hundreds of human figures
emerged from the shadows racing to the Elbe. Some sat down at the
edge of the river, desperately inhaling between loud sobs the
drafts of fresh air coming from across the river, where Erich stood
watching them. Others who could scarcely see, their eyes swollen
and blackened with soot, walked into the river a little ways and
began dousing their face and body with the icy waters, as if they
would be born again.

Erich made his way to a large rock a
few feet away from the river’s edge and sat down to watch the
apocalyptic scene unfolding before him. With the burning city as a
backdrop, only whispering shadows of the actors could now be seen.
In time, calmness descended and some began walking back and forth,
searching for their families. Many still stood alone, crying softly
until someone came and led them away. They knew what was still
happening there, of the burning bodies and the cries of the dying
and the stench of the dead. Few would sleep that night, or even
dare to try. The ending of the nightmare was still too distant to
see.

When the first light of morning came,
Erich roused himself from a grassy bed he had fashioned back in the
meadows to try to capture some sleep, though all he found himself
doing was shivering uncontrollably through the remaining night
hours from the bitter cold, wondering what was left of the city he
loved. His father was safe in Berlin, he was sure. But his mother
would have suffered through the bombing alone in the cellar of her
home. And it was her life he cared about.

Looking to Dresden, the thick smoke of
the diminishing fires still spiraled upward, masking much of the
sunlight, making the morning seem like the twilight of evening.
Several German police could be seen moving among the stirring
crowd, cautioning everyone to stay the day by the river until the
major fires were extinguished. When they saw Erich and the doctor’s
insignia on his uniform, they beckoned him to come with them back
to Dresden. Few doctors were alive, they told him, to treat those
that might live. But strangely to Erich, they seemed in no hurry to
leave, and waited until shortly before noon to do so.

As Erich and two of the police began
to make their way along a back road to the city, they asked nothing
of him. He was among the refugees fleeing from the advancing
Russians, they supposed, and asked no questions. That he was a
doctor was all that mattered at the moment. They had traveled only
a short distance towards Dresden when the deafening roar of
approaching bombers shook the countryside around them. It was the
Americans’ turn to squeeze from the dying city its last breath.
Bombing in the daylight provided newer targets that had somehow
escaped the fury of the two British raids, bringing death to
thousands more who had emerged from their shelters into a new day,
thinking all was safe again. Buildings that had survived the night
and firestorm now crumbled, trapping and killing hundreds more in
their wake.

Without any kind of shelter near him,
Erich quickly lay flat on the ground, as everyone else was doing,
hoping an errant bomb would not find its way to them. When the
bombing finally stopped, one lonely plane taking photographs of the
carnage appeared, circling over the city like a giant condor, its
great wings casting eerie moving shadows on the dead below. As
people got to their knees to stand, some whispered that Armageddon
had come and they had not been chosen, and they wondered why God
had passed them by. But most said nothing, drummed into a deafening
silence because they knew that only desolation and death lay ahead
of them in the city.

Erich’s route to his home took him
into the old city square past a massive water reservoir that
dominated the square. Rescue crews were working feverishly ahead of
him when he arrived, tossing bodies like bales of hay to the
street’s sides so large bulldozers could begin the greater task of
clearing away debris and rubble from the crumbling building.
Looking at the reservoir, Erich knew the story of Dresden’s fiery
death was there before his eyes. A macabre ring of charred corpses,
young and old, circled its walls. Many lay across the reservoir’s
walls, with their arms outstretched in one last attempt to fling
themselves into its cool waters. They would have died there,
though, in a worse death perhaps. Hundreds had plunged into the
reservoir as their last hope to survive, but soon found themselves
unable to breathe in the relentless heat sweeping over the
reservoir from the raging firestorm. Many, unable to swim, drowned
in the ten-foot waters, dragging others down with them. During the
long night, most of the water evaporated from the reservoir,
causing the dead to collapse one by one into an unimaginable pile
of quickly rotting flesh.

Erich turned away and would look no
more. The scene was too close to that of the deep ditches filled
with burning Jews and gypsies at Auschwitz. These were Germans, and
that did seem different to him. No one looked at him, or cared who
he might be, as he proceeded on through the smoldering devastation
to his home. Along the way, bodies were being carried from almost
every damaged building to add to the growing dead littering the
streets. Many intersections were already filled with large stacks
of the dead, some reaching ten feet high, waiting to be carted to
the ancient city square by horse-drawn carts where they would be
doused with gasoline and burned. Later, because there were so many
bodies, flamethrowers would be used to burn them, painting a
surrealistic scene that would last a lifetime for the people
watching. Only those being carried from the cellars of the homes
and buildings could be identified, if there was someone left to do
so.

After twenty minutes making his way
across town, Erich stood looking at what once had been one of the
finer homes in Dresden. From the days of his great-grandfather, the
Schmidts had lived in this beautiful home, envied by all those
around. There was little left of it now to see. The roof and top
floor had imploded from the bombing, collapsing onto the first
floor before bursting into flames. It was the cellar Erich sought,
though, where his mother might be and other neighbors who might
have sought safety with her.