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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Erich Maria Remarque: War was everywhere. Everywhere, even in the brain and the heart.
Erich Maria Remarque: War’s conqueror worms
Erich Maria Remarque: With the melting came the dead
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Erich Maria Remarque
From A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1954)
Translated by Denver Lindley
He stood in front of the ruins and looked up. The green armchair was missing. Someone must have taken it. In the place where it had stood a few newspapers protruded from the ruins. He climbed up and pulled them out. They were old papers filled with victories and famous names, faded, torn, and dirty. He threw them away and went on searching. After a while, between two beams, he saw a little book, yellow and wilted, lying open as though someone had just left it there. He pulled it out and recognized it. It was one of his schoolbooks. He leafed through the pages to the front and saw his name in pale writing on the first page. He must have written it there when he was twelve or thirteen years old.
It was a school catechism, a book containing hundreds of questions and the answers to them. The pages were spotted and on some of them were notes he himself had written. He stared at them absently. For a moment everything seemed to tremble and he did not know what was trembling – the ruined city with the quiet mother-of-pearl sky above it or the little yellow book in his hands that contained the answers to all the questions of mankind.
He put it aside and continued his search. But he found nothing more – no other books nor anything else from his parents’ home. It would have been unlikely in any case; they had lived on the third floor and their things must have been buried much deeper under the rubble. Probably in the explosion the catechism had been blown high in the air and then, because it was light, had slowly fluttered down. Like a dove, he thought, a lonely white dove of assurance and peace, with all its questions and answers, in a night full of fire and smoke and suffocation and screams and death.
He sat for a while longer on the ruins. The evening wind sprang up and turned the pages of the book. God is merciful, he read, all-bountiful, all-mighty, all-wise, all-knowing: He is infinitely kind and just –
Graeber felt for the bottle Binding had given him. He opened it and took a swallow. Then he climbed down to the street. He did not take the catechism with him.
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