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crossed over the line into Hannover-Brunswick airspace, and that Berlin, that vast, rambling city, is all-clear.
    —
    The explosions had seemed so close in the cellar, so intimately connected, that Sigrid half expects to be greeted the next morning by a streetscape of destruction. But as she walks to the bus, the damage appears modest in their block of the Uhlandstrasse. A few buildings with blown-out windowpanes. A roof, pockmarked by splinters of flak shrapnel from the Zoo Tower guns, is being patched by a gang of workers up on ladders. A crack here, a hole there. Some smoke hovering farther up. Then she turns the corner and is faced with a scene that no roof and window gang could hope to mend. The façade of the white brick apartment house with the pretty garden terraces has been sheared off completely, exposing the interiors within. There was a time when she imagined Kaspar leasing them a place in this building, with its fanciful scrollwork and clean, whitewashed face. She had often speculated about what the flats might look like on the inside, and now, thanks to the Royal Air Force bombardiers, she can see them clearly. The wallpaper from floor to floor is pinstriped, floral print, woodland. The family pictures are hanging askew. Furniture is coated with plaster dust. Two women and an old grandpa struggle in the morning drizzle to carry a horsehair settee over the rubble to the curbside, where they have piled a few lonely, surviving possessions. A coffee table. A toilet seat. A dining-room chair. A chipped soapstone bust of Beethoven. The maestro scowls at the rain as Sigrid passes. The air smells burned and bitter. She tastes ash and keeps on walking. It’s a chilly morning under brackish green skies. Her scarf is tied over her head. Her breath frosts lightly as she spots her bus lumbering down the street toward her stop. She enters the end of the queue and concentrates on nothing as she stares at the back of people’s heads.
    There aren’t many buses running in Berlin these days. Petrol is a military priority, and the Wehrmacht has commandeered hordes of city vehicles. But the No. 8 T-Line bus, with its dingy coat of BVG yellow, still rolls onward, three times a day, from the Badensche Strasse to the Alex and back, as part of the clockwork of the city. More Berliners pack the aisles as the bus trumbles onward. An odor of human dank deepens. A familiar bouquet by now. It is the smell of all that is unwashed, stale, and solidified. It is the smell that has replaced the brisk scent of the city’s famous air. The ersatz perfume of Berlin, distilled from all that is chemically treated and synthetically processed. Of cigarettes manufactured from crushed acorns, of fifty-gram cakes of grit-filled soap that clean nothing. Of rust and clotted plumbing. Damp wool, sour milk, and decay. The odor of the home front.
    Passengers on the bus are lumped together like potato sacks. A few aging men with their newspapers, though mostly the city has been left to its women. Under the new conscription decrees, regiments of husbands, uncles, and brothers have been mobilized and Berlin has become a city of women. They fill the bus, as always, concentrating on their knitting or clutching their heavy handbags in their laps, while the advertising placards extol the virtues of the Ski-Nelly brassiere with extra wide straps, and Erdal shoe polish. But last night’s return of the bombers has had its effect. There is an undercoating of tension hidden by the masks of business as usual slapped on people’s faces. The newspaper headlines are high-strung and victimized. AIR ATTACK ON BERLIN WORKING-CLASS DISTRICT and AIMLESS BOMBING OVER BERLIN RESIDENTIAL AREAS the morning editions cry. The
Morgenpost
claims to know WHAT CHURCHILL INTENDS TO BOMB IN BERLIN.
    She writes a few words to Kaspar on the special stationery issued by the Feldpost, using her purse as a desktop and her father’s Montblanc fountain pen. She has grown rather proficient at