THURSDAY, 29 JULY I915
Elfriede Kuhr listens to nocturnal singing in Schneidemühl
It is dark. The air is warm. A late summer night. She does not know why she wakes up. Perhaps it is the bright moonlight. Because of the heat she is sleeping on a chaise longue out on the veranda. Everything is silent, utterly silent. The only sound to be heard is the reassuring tick of the grandfather clock in the living room. Quite suddenly Elfriede hears singing, faint but melodious and coming from the railway station next to the house. She pricks up her ears, does not recognise the tune and listens for the words. She hears more and more voices joining in and the singing grows stronger: "Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rat, dass man vom Liebsten, das man hat, muss scheiden."*
The song rises ever stronger, ever more sonorous and clear into the bright, starry night sky, while she sinks, deeper and deeper and deeper. We are always reluctant to leave childhood and we do so step by step; at this moment Elfriede has been affected by one of those insights from which a child never really recovers and which an adult always laments. She curls up on her chaise longue and she weeps:
Why were the soldiers singing like this in the middle of the night? And why this particular song? It wasn't a soldier's song. Were the people singing it actually soldiers? Perhaps it was a transport train reaching our town and carrying army coffins with fallen men? Perhaps their mothers and fathers and widows and orphans and girlfriends were on the train? Did they weep as I wept?
Then she hears something from her grandmother's bedroom—the sound of someone blowing their nose. Elfriede gets up, tiptoes carefully in to her grandmother and says beseechingly, "Can I creep into bed with you for a while?" At first her grandmother is reluctant, but then she lifts the covers and says, "Come on, then." She cuddles up with her grandmother, presses her head to her grandmother's breast and sobs. Her grandmother's forehead is pressed against Elfriede's hair, and Elfriede can feel that she is crying too.
Neither of them explains why, they make no excuses and they ask no questions.
* "It is determined in God's plan that one must part from those one loves most."
~ From The Beauty and the Sorrow by Peter Englund, p. 143