Life Will Have Its Way (10 page)

I asked Anja later if she’d ever gotten her father to tell her where he took the people that had stayed with them.

“Oh, yes,” she replied enthusiastically before excusing herself to go check on the children. I could hear muted voices coming from the other room. I was surprised anyone was still awake. She hurried back into the kitchen. “I think the kids will be fine for a second while we go take a look at something in the cellar.”

She walked to the door, opened it quietly, scanned the hallway, then gestured for me to follow. When she reached the back exit she held up her hand signaling for me to stop. After checking the area that separated our building from the back alleyway we headed for an old wooden set of doors built into the side of the foundation. Anja jiggled at the loose knob, with a gentle pull the door flung open and the air around us filled itself with a thick, musty odor that I found oddly intoxicating. It was the smell of nature at its most primal level. It was the smell of earth, old, raw earth. She tugged at a string hanging over the stairwell, a dim, flickering light came on and she started down the stairs instructing me to pull the door closed behind us.

“Careful now,” she called back, “these steps might be slippery.”

I found myself frozen at the top of the stairwell reluctant to join her, unable to decide which might be a worse fate, trying to explain to our neighbors what we were doing fussing around in the cellar on a cold, rainy night or blindly descending into the dark, smelly unknown. Anja yelled up at me in an irritated, throaty whisper and I knew I had no choice but to follow. At the bottom half of the stairs something came into view at the corner of my eye. I suspected it was a moth that had been brought in by the light and raised my arm to swat it away, but once my eyes adjusted I realized it wasn’t a moth at all, but rather an enormous, black spider swinging back toward me on an impressive length of silk that hung from the rafters. Certain it had landed somewhere on my shirt, I screamed and jumped to the landing, skipping the bottom three steps. I wiped at my clothes and flipped my hair into the air trying desperately to get away from the spider.

“Get it off of me! Get it off me!” I screamed.

Anja rushed over and threw her hand over my mouth.

“Quiet!” she said. “Stop this nonsense, someone will hear you.”

She pulled her hand away and looked me over turning me around to make sure the spider wasn’t there, she went through the motions of inspecting me thoroughly, even though I could tell she thought I was being completely ridiculous. “All better,” she said with a cynical smile.

I pulled my arms in close and looked tepidly about the room, if the spider wasn’t on me, I knew he had to be somewhere, lurking, waiting to string his web across my path when I least expected it. I looked to the ceiling, to the myriad of cracks and crevices and shuddered. The room was quite a bit different than I had imagined, up until then, the only cellar I’d seen was my grandmother’s which was little more than a space the size of a very small car dug away under the back edge of her house. The doors ran flat against the ground and covered a primitive handful of stairs that were little more than a few planks of wood shoved into the dirt at evenly spaced increments. This cellar was much, much larger and far more interesting.

Anja stood next to the old boiler and motioned for me to come closer. I moved my arms across the space in front of me and only when I was sure there wasn’t a spider anywhere in my path did I dare move forward. There were several support beams that ran floor to ceiling and platform shelves that attached to most of the walls. The shelves were covered with a loose assortment of household items and boxes, some that had been carefully sealed and labeled, others heaped with dust-covered junk. A child’s bicycle had been overturned in the corner next to a television set missing its tube, a large set of antlers were propped against a stack of used car tires and a rusted stove partially blocked access to the back half of the cellar. 

“You wouldn’t imagine how much time we spent down here,” she held her hand out to direct my attention to an area against the wall. “My father always had to have something to read, he never wasted an opportunity to do something productive. He would sit right there in his little fold up chair,” she pointed to a spot next to one of the support beams, “and my mother, well, she probably would have preferred to just sit and read too but she had my sisters to keep entertained. She played little made up games, told them stories, sometimes she would have a sweet for everyone.”

The dusty, silted dirt beneath my feet, the dim, yellow lighting and the undeniable odor made it easy for me to imagine what it must have been like during an air raid. Anja’s family came to life as she described them. For some reason the image of her mother stood out most, from the very little I did know about her, I was stuck with the impression that she would have been the one most out of place in a bomb shelter. I imagined she would try to handle the occasion with grace and dignity, never letting a hair out of place, always making sure her children stayed clean and well behaved.

I glanced around the cellar and tried to imagine the others. I knew there would have been a very nervous older man filled with pessimism and driving everyone to insanity with his incessant gloomy predictions, his shy, quiet wife would say nothing to stop him, do nothing to console him. There would be other families too, most certainly a disheveled mother who had lost all concern for her appearance and cared little about what her children did. The others would roll their eyes with irritation but never voice their complaints when her children fussed and screamed. I tried to picture Anja. I thought she might be the perky teenager sitting solitary in the corner, biding her time, recording the details of the moment in a well-worn diary. I wanted to ask her if my assumptions were correct, but then thought not to. I quite liked what I had imagined, and didn’t want to ruin things with any input from reality.

“Other than the fact that it’s a little stuffy and suffocating down here,” I looked around, “to be honest it isn’t nearly as bad as I had imagined.” I said.

“Oh, I suppose compared to some things maybe it wasn’t all that bad,” Anja replied, “but don’t get me wrong, it was definitely no walk in the park either.” She went on to tell me how much they dreaded hearing the sirens, how intrusive it became. She said after leaving your warm, comfortable bed in the middle of the night to drag yourself down to the cold, dirty shelter it left you utterly frustrated when nothing went on outside. She said it was like going to the doctor and being told nothing was wrong, of course you didn’t want the doctor to tell you something was wrong, but at least it would make you feel like your efforts were worthwhile.

“But, on the other hand, as soon as something did start to happen outside, as soon as you heard the planes roaring somewhere in the distance, you’d say your prayers and beg and barter with God to send the planes elsewhere.” She swallowed heavily and leaned against one of the shelves, pulling an open box toward her. “The very worst of it came when the building right next door took a direct hit. One of the enemy fighters was shot down overhead before it had dropped its load.” She reached into the box, and held up a small toy car, “The plane crashed into the building and exploded, the building was blown to bits. It was literally disintegrated. It was as though it had never existed.” She put the car down and continued mindlessly sifting through the rest of the junk without looking up.

Anja said the noise was so loud, the shaking so violent, it felt as though two freight trains were driving simultaneously into the cellar, eventually crashing together right there in front of them. She said she’d had her eyes closed so tightly the entire time that it wouldn’t have surprised her to have opened them to see those very same freight trains piled together in a giant mountain of burning, twisted steel.

When the all clear was sounded, everyone went reluctantly into the night. They chattered nervously as they climbed the stairs, no one really wanting to be the first to go outside. Most were sure they had been injured, refusing to believe they could have lived through such an explosion without being seriously hurt, some were afraid the world had ended and they were the only survivors, others feared they were already dead. Their eyes and ears were filled with dirt from the cellar, dirt that had rained down on them as the building above them shook, dirt that had flown up over them as the earth beneath them churned. Everyone was in a state of shock, Anja remembered people leaving the cellar, walking out into the alleyway with empty, confused expressions. What they had known as their city only moments earlier was no longer there. 

“The city was covered in thick, grey haze and fine sifted powder fell like rain, it covered everything.” She pushed the box away, finally looking up. “It was mounded in giant heaps over the rubble of the blown out building.” Her hands moved, palms down, back and forth in front of her, arching occasionally to illustrate what it looked like. “It was as if someone had taken giant erasers and clapped them together in the sky.” She stopped and bit the side of her lip, “That was the night Thomas’ father announced they were leaving.”

“Why?” I asked.

“What do you mean why?” she replied.

“I was just wondering why they would have decided to leave that night.”

“Oh, yes, of course. Well, you may not have thought about it, but they’d had to endure the explosion in the hiding space.”

She was right, I actually hadn’t thought about the fact that Thomas and his family, or anyone else that stayed with Anja wouldn’t have had the luxury of going to the bomb shelter during air raids. I felt goose bumps cover my skin.

“It was just more than they could take.” Anja said, her voice quiet, “It was more than anyone could take. They left early the next morning.”

Officials said later that the neighboring building had collapsed upon itself. Everyone in the shelter, possibly as many as thirty people had been killed immediately. Engineers had decided it was too dangerous to remove the bodies but most people in the neighborhood thought it was more likely that there was nothing left of them to remove.

“Are you trying to tell me they’re still there?” I asked.

“Well of course
they
are not still there,” she scoffed.

“You know what I mean.”

“Well then yes, they’re still there.”

The owner of the building had lived in one of the first floor apartments along with his wife, mother-in-law and three beautiful children. For whatever reason, he’d been out of town the night of the raid and although he may have personally escaped his fate, he returned to nothing.

“We watched from the window the day he returned,” Anja started. “My mother wouldn’t let us outside. He was insane with grief and rage. It was an image I had a horrible time trying to get out of my mind. The visual of him standing in the street where his building, his family, his entire life had been only days earlier. I just couldn’t stop thinking about him. I didn’t know how to stop thinking about him. How horrific if must have been for him.” Anja rubbed her fingers thoughtfully across her forehead. “I’ve always wondered what became of that man, how did he possibly go on? How could someone go on after something like that?” She shrugged her shoulders, “I don’t know. I just really don’t know.”

Anja looked away again as she spoke, now fidgeting with something in her pocket, “I had heard later that he went a bit mad, he didn’t want to sale the land and was wildly opposed to having anything built on the site. He wanted it to be a garden. A memory garden for his girls.”

After the war, the city fought him, they were threatening him, trying to force him into a sale, trying to force him to give up his land. They said they needed to rebuild the apartment building, people needed places to live, they didn’t need memory gardens. Anja said she didn’t hear anything more about the man, but several months later, the rubble and heaping piles of dusty, grey powder were cleared away. She assumed construction would soon be started on a new building, but for some reason the lot remained empty, alternately covered with dirt, weeds, or mud, depending on the time of year. It wasn’t until fifteen or twenty years later that the vacant lot was converted to a memory garden, just like the man had wished.

Anja started away from me heading in the direction of the abandoned stove, turning sideways she carefully squeezed herself through the open space, nodding to indicate that I should follow. We made our way to the backside of the shelving units.

“Doesn’t it ever bother you to know they left the bodies there?” I asked, “I mean, don’t you find that just a bit creepy?”

She nodded, “For many years I found it quite troubling. I thought of those people every
day, as a matter of fact, once our apartment was repaired and we could get back to our usual sleeping arrangements, I was often visited by one of the girls I’d known from the building.” She paused as she always did whenever she’d thought she’d said something provocative that might warrant an enthusiastic reaction.

In this case my reaction could only be genuine. “What?” I gasped. “Are you serious?”

“Oh yes,” she replied with a hint of pride, “a few times a week I would wake up abruptly sensing someone was there. It was the same every time, I would feel startled, but not scared, and open my eyes to see a girl standing in my room, a thin, hazy, transparent girl. I knew right away who she was. Her name was Katherine. She wore the same simple plaid dress belted at the waist that I’d seen her in a hundred times, her hair hung in long braids over her shoulders just like it always had. She would be there only long enough for me to see her, only while I remained in a half sleep. The thing I remember most is the fact that she always looked so sad.”

“How long did that go on?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe for about a year or so.”

“Why did she come to you? Were you friends with her? Were you close?”

“No, no, actually we weren’t that close. She was a few years younger than I was. Of course we went to the same school, would see each other on the street, at the market, you know, that sort of thing.”

“Then didn’t you wonder why she was trying to connect with you?”

“I did, I did, but I thought maybe she was coming to me, well, I thought she might be coming to me simply because she could.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe I was the only one that could see her? Maybe she wanted her father to see her, and he couldn’t. Maybe that was what made her sad. Perhaps I should have tried to find her father, gone to him and told him about her. But truthfully, what could I tell him? How could I tell him that I got to see his daughter and he didn’t? How could I tell him that she was so sad?”

I nodded as I listened. I thought anything I could think to say wouldn’t sound right. I could feel Anja’s emotion, after all these years it was still very real. She faked a quick smile, then waved her hand in front of her, hoping she could clear the air and wipe away the thoughts that she’s fought so many years to get away from.