26 September 19395 [8] 26 September 1939! What a gruesome date!
I walked out into the strangely, unnaturally silent street. How weird! No whine of falling bombs. No crack of bursting bombs. No swish of shrapnel. Just corpses, corpses, corpses everywhere . . .
Rotting and stinking human and equine corpses lying unburied for three weeks. Crows had left them untouched because they too had abandoned this city doomed to annihilation. Yes, even those creatures that feed on death had left. Over the streets, buildings, and ruins of this once beautiful city there now reigned a single, all-powerful ruler—Death.
She6 was lurking in the unexploded shells. She was ready to suddenly fall down on you in the form of a brick. Or bury you under a collapsing wall.
You knew this was Her kingdom. Oh, you knew it!
Rubble, bricks, and bullets on the streets. Whole streets strewn with corpses. The colour of red flashed before your eyes at every step. Raw red. Blood red. You could not see any buildings. There were no buildings. There were only corpses, corpses of buildings. Red and jagged edges of destroyed walls and foundations. Bloodied with brick [9] dust—rent asunder, dead.
Sticking out above all that, up from under the rubble, from under the eerily twisted veins of coils and wires, is a dead leg. Its only moving part is the pant leg fluttering in the wind.
Who knows whence and why this wind has come to us—to the dead. A skeleton. A skeleton of a building—as if eaten clean of its flesh. Roofless. It looks out with its hollow, burnt, blackened eye sockets of windows. Blackened by fire and smoke, its walls did not hide its interior. They did not obscure what was behind them. The naked corpse of a girl reveals a shapely, young body. Its womb and full breasts are pallid, but woundless, flawless. Except the hip, where you can see a small spot. That’s where the shrapnel entered. And those eyes! Those eyes!! Staring as if ripped open in deathly pain and fear. Bottomless eyes with all the pain and fear of death preserved in them. The eyes of a human. Alive and testifying to death. They will exist as long as there are wars. Another corpse nearby. The corpse of a man covered with bricks and plaster and stained with
