Stella by Takis Würger

Author:Takis Würger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2020-12-14T21:21:08+00:00

June 1942

More than one thousand bombers in the Royal Air Force bombard Bremen for seventy-five minutes. The last Jewish schools in the German Reich are closed. Paul McCartney is born. With few exceptions, half-Jews are no longer permitted to study at university. The sixth of Dr. Joseph Goebbels’s Ten Commandments for Every National Socialist is issued: “He who defames Germany defames you and your dead; punch back.” The U.S. Congress approves $42 billion for armaments. The Reich Health Office extolls a drink called “Biomalz,” made by the Patermann company, as important for the “Development of strong youth for the march into the future.” Hot plates found in the possession of Jewish Germans are to be confiscated. In Berlin shop windows hang signs that say: “Attention! Spies! Mind your words!” In Munich, Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell found a resistance group and call it “the White Rose.” Reinhard Heydrich dies of peritonitis, likely caused by a piece of his car seat that had penetrated his abdominal cavity after the explosion. As retaliation for the attempt on his life, German policemen kill the male residents of the village of Lidice, deport the women and children to a concentration camp, and bulldoze the place. The assassins had no connection to Lidice.

*

Only a couple of weeks before, we had listened to music together and laughed about Schwanenwerder. Now all was quiet.

She was protecting her family. Could that be wrong?

I was a young man with money and a Swiss passport who had thought he could live in the middle of this war without having anything to do with it. I had come as a tourist. I had been stupid. I kept silent because everything I thought of saying sounded wrong. I didn’t tell Stella about Tristan because I didn’t understand what he was up to. Not fully.

She lay in bed with her back to me. Her skin was hot, as if she had a fever. Stella took my arm and pressed it against her stomach.

“I can’t be intimate tonight.”

I kissed her neck.

“Will you hold me?” she asked.

We lay awake like that for a long time. I thought of home and of the sunflower field of my childhood, or maybe I dreamed it, it made no difference.

Later Stella trembled in my arms. The curtains in our bedroom stayed open. The sun lit up the room in the early morning.

“Are you asleep?” Stella whispered.

“Yes,” I said.

I filled the bathtub with warm water for her, and when she sat in the water, I washed her underarms and her back and washed her carefully between her legs. She looked at me while I went about it. I helped her get dressed. She took one of the chocolates from her handbag and ate it. I helped her get into her suit. She put on her little Tyrolean hunting hat.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You don’t need to know,” she said.

I kissed her eyelids. “I’m your man now.”

I felt my heart leap as I said that. I didn’t know if I was saying it for her or for me.

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