been better. I wouldn’t have hurt people.”
Her legs were cold and stiff, and she tucked them under her blanket. “I don’t know what that moment was. I might have listened to my mother and married a nobleman and had babies all through the war. That’s nothing to feel guilty about, is it? Having babies, even if the Reich would have sent them away.” She sadly remembered Willy in his Jungvolk uniform, so proud of the tie and the sig rune on his sleeve. “I was nineteen when I started working for my father. Maybe that was the moment. I shouldn’t have been so interested in production schedules or logistics. Should have kept up my ballet lessons instead. Or run off to Paris to be an artist. Something harmless . . .”
Jakob smiled faintly, the first sign he’d been listening to her. “We all think about this, you know, about what might have been.”
“I could have emigrated when the war started. I could have gone to England and written pamphlets to be dropped over Germany. Resist the Reich. Sue for peace. Why didn’t I do that? What’s the sorrow and anger and guilt about abandoning your family compared to a clean conscience?”
“Nobody gives up their life so easily. We put up with a lot to try to keep it going how it always did.”
“I’m not talking about what I put up with. I’m talking about what I did. Or didn’t do.” She looked up at the new snow drifting from the windows. “I could stand up and tell everyone how I resisted the regime; I could make it sound like I was some kind of a hero. What risks I took. How courageous I was. I might even fool some people. But I’d know. I’d know how utterly inadequate I was.”
“Come on, liebling. You tried. That’s more than most of us can say. It’s all right to acknowledge that. You’re not a devil just because you could’ve done more.”
She wasn’t so sure. It was hard to know how to weigh the contradictions inside her. She reached for his hand and he let her take it. “You said yourself, the Collapse is the chance for us to be someone new.” She thought of Blum and her life in Hamelin. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted that.”
He smiled, wide, spontaneous, warm. And something kindled inside her, deep, where the fire couldn’t reach.
Air
Finally.
Willy poked his fist through the hole he had made in the snow. He wiggled his arm around until the hole was the size of a ship’s porthole. He put his eye to the hole and his eye watered and the water turned to ice. It felt as though somebody was piercing needles into his eyeball. His head was aching, his hands were cold—the mine had everything but gloves, imagine that—but he had to ventilate. With a shovel, he made the hole bigger and the light became sharper and whiter and brighter until it cut into the tunnel. The wind swept in—at last! The tunnel was windy again. This was a good thing, a very good thing, and he sucked in breaths of fresh air. But the odd, cloudy feeling in his head didn’t go away.
He jabbed the shovel at the snow again and pushed it outward, and when the hole was the right size, he climbed out of the mine. His lungs swelled up. He dropped the shovel and grasped his knees. Every breath hurt, and the light, the hot light in his head . . .
And there was snow. Snow all the way down the slope and over the marsh and onto the river over the still, flat surface of the river, and out to the opposite bank and over the hills way over there. Snow on the tall grasses and hanging from the trees, on the cliffs, clumped in the rock and on the clean, flat ground at his feet. It shone like a mirror, all that snow.
If he went home, he could build a snow fort in the garden. If he went home, he could make a tiny ball of snow and melt it in Gertrud’s bowl. He could drink something warm at the window and look at the snowy world, if he went home.
But he couldn’t go. Not after what he’d done.
He scrambled back into the mine, the soothing dark of the mine, and when his eyes adjusted, he went to Gertrud who was waiting for him on the footlocker. He was shaking with cold