Snow on Alexanderplatz, 1940

by Emma Venables

You take my hand as we walk across Alexanderplatz. Snow on the ground, so well-trodden it's lethal. I slip, grip your hand despite myself. I would pull away if I didn’t think I would fall. I want to tell you it doesn’t matter if you’re you or my mother or my sister or Volker from the apartment across from ours. I would take any hand right now—familiar, strange, old, young, bombed-out, yours. You know that. I feel it in the way your thumb presses against the palm of my hand: an additional anchor point lest I should find my footing and flee. But your hand will be gone soon, won’t it?

I pull my hand from yours, slip it into my coat pocket. Your hand remains in the gap between us for several seconds, fingers still curled as if my own were still there, sharing warmth. But war wants you more than I do. She calls for you because her life depends on you and yours, and you have no choice but allow yourself to be gathered in her skirts. I know this. Does your mother? She has always gathered you in her own skirts like her life depended on you. I hope you don’t expect me to check in on her when you’re gone. Her tongue always finds its tut when I’m around. Is that what comes next on this January walk through Mitte? A plea for Saturday visits to Krautstrasse? I’d rather kiss Volker. Perhaps I will. My sister thinks he works for the Gestapo. Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to kiss him, consider all the power and prestige in those puckered lips. Then again, perhaps I won’t kiss anyone ever again. I’ve rarely kissed you, after all. And yet, despite this, you proposed in the snow just now.

A child runs between us. His excitement skims my coat, almost spins me around. I catch my breath, feel the burn in my lungs, feel your grip on me tighten and release. You scold the boy, look around for his parents. I can just about imagine you as a father with your words of caution and wisdom falling on deaf ears. Could I be the mother of that child? Could I wrap that child up in mittens and a scarf, button up their winter coat, kiss their nose, tell them tales of the battles you’re fighting to keep us free, safe, German?

The boy runs off. You offer me your hand once more. I shake my head. Your mouth drops. Just a fraction. An expression only someone who has witnessed you over the course of a lifetime would notice. Weren’t we lifelong friends, occasional lovers, before you knelt in the snow on Keibelstrasse? The Hitler Youth boys wolf-whistled as they marched past us. The snow bled through your trousers. I watched your teeth clench. I could choose my own ring, you said. You could afford something nice. I bit my lip until I tasted blood. You stood up in our silence, stepped towards me, rubbed away the ruby bead so it stained your fingertip. You’ll wash it away later in your mother’s sink, making room, readying your skin, for all the bloodstains to come. I see you with soapsuds up to your elbows. You’ll never be clean again once you’ve buttoned up that tunic, left Berlin. I want to say this to you, consider pulling you close and whispering it in your ear lest anyone else should hear. But you already know. I told you years ago when our friends started disappearing. I told you when war was declared. But off you go. Chin up. Shoulders back.

A snowball flies through the space between us. If you were an inch closer to me it would have collided with your ear. Will you be so lucky next time when it’s a bullet your helmet can’t protect you from? I turn to look at the hand from which the snowball was launched–it belongs to a little girl whose hat is askew on her golden hair. I want to watch the next one’s trajectory so I can pull you into its path, witness snow meet flesh, witness your gasp and wince, your scolded skin turning puce, but the girl’s mother takes her by her snow-flecked hood and steers her in the opposite direction.

When I turn back you are looking at me as if I hold your fate in my hands and I think this is the image that I’ll take with me when we part ways, head to our different fronts. You. Fists clenched. Cheeks rosied by winter’s touch. Lips pursed with all the pleas you want to make to me and my better judgement. If you were a man with the ability to rage, it would bounce off every building, draw people to their windows, cause me to cover my ears with damp gloves. I await this, want this, want you to challenge my refusal. But you are a man resigned to his fate here on Alexanderplatz.

I find myself thinking of death, of when your time comes. You will pull my photograph or memory out of some crevice, love or loathe me in that moment. And I’ll find out about your indelible absence from your mother or my mother or my sister or the newspaper, and I imagine I’ll only love you in that moment of handkerchiefs and half-tinged regrets. I’ll think of you here, snow-surrounded, disappointed. I’ll think about the last time we kissed, in the folds of the curtains in your mother’s living room. Better these thoughts than the worry of how I will feed, clothe, raise our children, how I’ll bear the role of war widow in a city of war widows. If I told you this you’d call me defeatist, remind me—warm breath on my neck—that buildings have ears as well as people these days, press your finger to my lips. I have always hated you doing this, have always hated the gesture that stilts protest and resistance. Perhaps just this once I’d gnash my teeth, catch your fingers off guard.

You cough. Either the cold air has got to your lungs or it’s an attempt to get my attention. I smile at you, just to check that I still can. You smile in return but do not take a step, nor do you indicate our pause has gone on long enough. I find myself looking for signs of knees about to bend, of overt gestures, of repetition. None. You stand, alert, as if you were already in formation. I imagine the muscles in your neck showing themselves beneath your scarf, imagine how your skin would goose-flesh were I to remove the checkered material and run my fingers over the tension.

The ground crunches beneath your feet as you step towards me. You frown, say my name; it sounds heavy in your mouth as if your jaws and throat were snow-laden. A child cries. A bird takes flight overhead—I listen to the flap and spread of its wings—but all the while I’m watching you. Could we stay here, rooted in white, as Berlin lives her lives around us? I laugh. You return the sound in the manner of someone who has missed the joke and I allow myself to love you fiercely for a moment for your refusal to let me alone. But it’s just a moment, it can’t be a lifetime no matter how long we have left. You nod. I press a finger to my lips, worry I have said my thoughts aloud through clouds of cold, before I notice the elderly couple walking past us with their arms linked, their feet navigating the cobbles in tandem. You watch them, slipping here and there. I can see your fingers twitching with the urge to help them, to offer your own arm, to walk alongside them to wherever they need to go. But I’m here and I can’t walk to places undefined with you and complete strangers. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could?

The woman looks back, smiles at us in the way the old do to the young when reminiscing of days gone by, of hope gone by, of all the avenues of life explored and left behind. You wave at her. I turn away.

There is a tram I could catch up ahead. I move. Left foot in front of right. You’ll know where I’m going, what I’m doing. You’ll understand. I won’t turn around again. Perhaps you’ll write to me. Perhaps I’ll write back. Perhaps I’ll put the photograph of us from Christmas just gone in a frame and touch your face every morning, every night, until it begins to fade. Perhaps you’ll come home, intact or broken, and I’ll let you lean on me on snowy days, sunny days, rainy days, those days when the sky devours the roofs.

I’m almost level with the tram now, my fingers squirming in my coat pockets in search of loose change. You grab my wrist just as I’m lifting my foot to step onboard. I topple backwards, elbows into your torso. The ground rumbles beneath us. I hear you exhale over the tram’s departure. You turn me around so we’re nose to nose. Are you sure you won’t? you ask. I feel the chill of your forehead against my own. Yes, I say. I press my hand to the places I imagine a bullet can do the most damage—temple, chest, stomach. You sigh as if the life were leaving you right here, on Alexanderplatz. I squeeze your hand, count to ten, and then let go.

Someone tuts at us, young lovers, lingering in public. You kiss me then. Defiant. Desperate. Goodbye. I taste the cigarettes I didn’t know you smoked mixed with the coffee we shared at my apartment before the proposal. When we break apart, I’m left running my tongue over my teeth, savouring the dregs of you.

You walk away, head down, hands in pockets, and I bear witness until I can’t differentiate you from the other Berliners going about their snow day. I shake my head, attempt to dislodge the anger I feel at your ability to accept, to walk away, and my inability to accept, to step onto the tram that’ll take me home from Alexanderplatz and you.

About the author

Emma Venables's short and flash fiction has been published in magazines and journals such as Mslexia, Lunate, and The Cabinet of Heed. Her short story "Woman at Gunpoint, 1945" was a runner-up in the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2020. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and has taught at Royal Holloway, University of London and at Liverpool Hope University. She can be found on Twitter: @EmmaMVenables.

About the illustration

The illustration is Berlin, Siegesallee im Schnee, photograph, 1933. In the collection of the German Federal Archives. Used here under the ShareAlike 3.0 Germany license via Wikimedia Commons.