Woman at Gunpoint, 1945

By Emma Venables

Alpine Fellowship 2020 – Writing Prize Winner

The gun shakes and, for a second, it looks like the gun itself is afraid rather than the man holding it up to my forehead. Artillery fire goes off nearby. The remains of our apartment briefly chatter amongst themselves. I bend my knees, stabilising myself against the impact. Perhaps the Russians will decimate Berlin, decimate us, before my husband does.

I know better than to speak, plead, cajole, but I’d like to walk towards Horst, one foot right in front of the other, and push the gun down so it threatens only the floorboards. I’d like to walk towards him, to press my ear to his chest one more time, to listen for his heartbeat, because I know he possesses a heart, know it races away somewhere beneath his uniform. My husband is not a machine; I know that, or at least, I just need to know it one more time.

I begin to shake – knee tapping knee, hand knocking thigh. I didn’t think I would, or, rather, I didn’t think that Horst would allow so much time to pass, leaving room for hope, for doubt. I recall last night – a diversion tactic – when I laid my head upon his chest in the remnants of our bedroom. The sheet covering where the window once was billowed with the rumble and thrust of street fighting. I had whispered all the questions I felt I needed to ask: about escape routes, about relatives in the countryside, about pulling emblems and badges from breasts, about burning uniforms and portraits of the Führer. I even suggested burning our wedding photograph, scorching ourselves out of existence, but Horst didn’t want that. As the artillery fire grew louder and the ground beneath us began to shake with more vigour, I began to wonder if Horst had become so knitted into the fabric of the Party that he could no longer decipher where they ended and he began.

I look at Horst. His arm has ceased trembling, as if he has dug deep into himself, into his training and teachings, summoning some strength from a time long past when he never could have imagined moments like this one, where his wife, not a stranger, stands staring down the barrel of his gun. I wonder if the point of impact, the bullet through flesh, will smart as much as his gaze upon my forehead. He moves his eyes to my chest. I bite my lip, wonder if he has eyed other women in this way, trying to decide where to create the fountain from which their life will flow. I consider saying his name, move my mouth in preparation for the first syllable, but the noise beyond the bedsheet drowns out my attempts. Men shouting. The shattering of brickwork. The crunch of a tank making its way over the rubble.

I watch the bedsheet, the makeshift wall, waft into the room and back to its resting place. I’m not afraid to take my eyes off Horst, off his gun. He will not shoot me when I’m not paying attention to him. Perhaps it would be easier if he did, but he has always enjoyed recalling the eyes of his victims, telling me of deep blues and unique greens; he has shared these final glances with me in the moments before sleep, and I have carried some sense of guilt, of grief, of helplessness since our wedding night. Now I stand before him, biting my lip, seeing him as they did.

I turn back to Horst. He stands statuesque. I want to ask if his arm aches, whether it hurts more to stand there as he does now or to repeatedly pull the trigger. I have never fired a gun, but once, as a child, I pretended to shoot my father. The action – index and middle fingers straight as a barrel and little finger curled as a trigger – fired a look into my father’s eyes which I hadn’t expected to see. His legs bowed. My mother, pinning washing to the line, dropped a white sheet on the grass and ran across the lawn. No, Bettina, she said, yanking my arm down. Now, after thirty-five years and two wars, I thought I understood what battle does to a man. I thought I understood the wet patch on the front of my father’s trousers, my mother’s hand on his back as she led him indoors, away from child’s play. And yet, as I watch Horst, I realise I don’t understand at all. War has done something totally different to this man who stands with his pistol aimed at my chest.

I consider telling Horst to put the gun down, consider the tone I would take. Gun down. Please put the gun down. Stop. I want to see a crisis on his face – a nervous lip, a creased brow, flared nostrils. One day they will make museums about this moment in history and I can almost believe Horst will still be stood like this when that time comes, ready to be picked up and set down on a newly-laid floor. German Man Under National Socialist Rule. And me? Perhaps I will just be a photograph. An unnamed woman sprawled, bullet-holed, on the ground.

The apartment shakes. I look up at the light shade, watch it quiver; it’s already cracked and I can’t imagine it’ll be much longer before it shatters. Will I get to witness that moment? It seems a lifetime ago since I watched Horst, balanced on a step ladder, fitting the damned thing. A gift from his mother, because an elegant light fitting is central to any household, or some such nonsense. I held the ladder for him, watched the muscles bulge beneath his shirt sleeves and his face redden with the effort. Done, he’d said, stepping down a few rungs. He’d smiled at me then, a smile that said: I’ve done this for you, aren’t you happy? I clasped my hands, smiled back.

When I look at Horst, his eyes are on the light and the gun rests against his thigh. I watch him, his mouth slightly open, and wonder if he too recalls the day he put the light up. He scratched the floor with the ladder and I waved his apology away. I can see him now, toeing the scar on the parquet with his socked foot. Perhaps if I’d caused a fuss, withheld forgiveness, fretted over how I would cover up the damage, then we wouldn’t have come to this. I look to the marked spot, but it is covered in plaster dust, brick dust, life-in-ruins dust.

  I watch Horst roll his shoulders back and forth – a slow, barely there, movement – and realise the effort it must have taken him to lower his weapon, to acknowledge his aching muscles. He looks at me, stills himself. I wonder what he sees: a woman with a dress hanging off the ghosts of her curves; his accomplice, who was sure to put dinner on the table whenever he managed to find his way home; who tried to birth babies for him; his property, to drag from one world to the next; a hiding place for his guilt – for he must feel guilt, must sense he has done wrong, must know he is beyond atonement, to want to die. I clutched him to my chest last night, wanted to offer him something, a reprieve, a hope, but I know what he has done, know he cannot come back, cannot become the man on the stepladder, face illuminated by the light he has just turned on. And I cannot minister what he needs – a clean slate, a time machine – but I want them more than I can bear.

Haven’t we spilt enough blood, Horst? I try and utter the words, but my tongue lies like a beached whale in my mouth. A beached whale in bombed-out Berlin – I wish I could remember how to laugh. Horst continues to stare at me. Is he waiting for me to say something, for me to beg him to put me out of my misery? I don’t doubt that he’ll raise that gun, aim it at my forehead once more, and pull the trigger. I’m looking back at him now, eye to eye, blue on blue. The war grows louder. Horst looks in the direction of the noise, the gun flinches in his hand.

I want to say that I don’t want to die. There has been too much death. Horst hasn’t been here every night, hasn’t sat through every air raid, hasn’t stumbled through the dead bodies every morning. I once offered a woman sat on the pavement a hand getting up – her clothes were torn and her eyes were wide – and it wasn’t until I crouched down, looked closely, that I realised she was dead. A fly crawled across her upper lip. A fly knew better than I did. As I walked along the street, climbing over shattered lives, I wondered who that woman had been only hours earlier. Did she have children and a husband in uniform? Were her children still alive, or under the rubble? Were they loyal to the Party until their walls splintered apart, until the air clogged up their lungs? Are they better off now? The chatter at the standpipe suggests they are – the stench of unwashed women and children won’t deter the Russians when they arrive.

I run a hand through my hair, feel some strands come away in my fingers. I can’t remember when I started to lose my hair – this year or last year? Was it when the food shortages began or when the air raids forced us underground into lives fit only for rodents? I hold my hand out, slowly move my fingers so the strands loosen and float to the floor. One day I will pull the brush from the cupboard, dirty my knees and elbows sweeping up the dust, the castaway strands of me. I see myself performing this task, righting the apartment, letting in the glaziers, scrubbing the curtains and bedsheets until the stains have faded. I see myself talking of these days with people I’ve yet to birth, explaining the sun and the shade that make up their bloodlines, their inheritance.

‘I don’t want to die, Horst,’ I say. ‘Not now.’

I step towards him, the wood protests beneath my feet. I’m not sure why I have this sudden need to be closer to him, but then again, I know what’s coming and we’re all drawn to tragedy, aren’t we? I’ve imagined every pair of eyes, every bullet hole, Horst confided in me. I crouched and stared at the woman in the street long after I realised she was dead, looking for the site of impact on her corpse.

Horst frowns – a movement so slight that it’s barely there, but I’ve spent years examining his face and I can’t miss the expression, this flash of hurt. My hand shakes. I want Horst to reach out, rub his thumb across my knuckles, like he used to do when we disagreed in the early days of our marriage, but back then our differing opinions did not concern life or death, or separate ways.

Artillery fire, louder than ever, erupts. The Russians must surely be only a street away, if not already making their way through the rubble of our road. I want to look, want to walk to the edge of our apartment and lift the bedsheet, but I can’t turn away from Horst. He nods at me, lifts the gun to his temple; the sound of his death assaults my ears.