cover it. What else? Half of Berlin was underwater, and transportation was at a standstill; distribution of the day’s papers threatened to turn into a nightmare.
Miklós offered to detour into the Erzgebirge on his way to Prague and send back a story. Eisner’s secretary came in with the news that the Tempelhof airfield, near the building housing the new Ullstein printing press, was underwater. “You could sail a boat on it,” she said. Eisner looked at Miklós and said, “All right, yes, go there, send me a report.” Meaning a report from the Erzgebirge, Miklós understood, not from the flooded airfield.
* * *
As they neared Pirna, he and Zita noticed signs warning that the macadamized road running along the Gottleuba and Müglitz Rivers had been washed out. Miklós took his foot off the accelerator pedal, letting the car slow. He was undecided: Should he turn back, since they would be unable to get to the scene of the disaster by motorcar, or should he keep his promise to Eisner? They came to a village, and he parked the Bugatti in front of the Rathaus. Children were running around, shrieking, kicking a ball back and forth. As soon as his back was turned, he knew, they’d be all over his car with their dirty feet and sticky hands. “It’s only a machine,” Zita said, and he said, yes, but it was new and didn’t have a mark on it. She licked her thumb and wiped it across the hood. “Now it has a mark,” she said. “Do you feel better?”
“Not much,” he said, and laughed.
A dog barked; the Rathaus clock struck the hour; a goat tethered on a patch of grass lifted its head and stared at them. He got his camera case and his jacket out of the Bugatti, and after asking directions from a woman sweeping her garden path, he and Zita set off on a trail leading up through a pine forest. It was a steady uphill march in the heat. Zita wiped sweat off her forehead and said, “Miklós, are we lost?” He thought it possible. “Listen,” she said. Somewhere up ahead, quite close, there were motorized vehicles, and when they walked out of the forest, they were passed by a convoy of army trucks en route to the disaster. Miklós flagged down the last truck, showed his press card to a Reichswehr corporal, and they were invited to hop in. They sat on a bench in the back of the truck with two young soldiers and piles of sandbags, tarpaulins, and shovels. They stopped at a village on the banks of the Gottleuba River, a peaceful mountain stream transformed overnight into a torrent that had inundated the village. The saturated air had a green tinge, and the roar of water was deafening. The floodwater carried along house doors, window shutters, furniture, an overturned farm wagon, uprooted trees. The carcass of a cow. An infant’s cradle. Soldiers were carrying the bodies of drowning victims on stretchers from the river to higher ground. A young woman’s arm had been torn off at the shoulder, exposing a knob of bone and gristle. A man appeared to have been flayed alive. A little girl of about three, hair streaming water, feet bare beneath the hem of her nightgown, seemed carved of wax. Zita took a step back. Miklós could see that she was shaken. And this was Zita, who liked to think she could maintain an almost inhuman coolness and reserve in any emergency. He put his arm around her. Everything seemed unstable, shifting, in a way that reminded him of the war, when he had seen villages reduced to rubble, people displaced from their homes. She shook her head, her eyes filled with tears. “I’m going to see what I can do to help,” she said.
He changed the lens on his camera, framed the scene, pressed the shutter, advanced the film. A man in a plaid jacket and a peaked cap came over and introduced himself as Richard Houghton, a journalist with the New York Times. He was working on a feature on the Erzgebirge region of Saxony for the travel section of his paper. Yesterday he’d photographed centuries-old stone houses, and in the night those houses had been swept off their foundations. This morning he’d talked to a man whose five daughters had been asleep in their beds when the water rose, flooding the first floor of their house. “Not one of his daughters survived. What do you