And finally, London in June 1944, as the nightly German rocket attacks, the “buzz bombs’’ dampen elation over the D-day landings.
Kate Zweig is “The German Woman’’ of the title, a young English nurse who treats wounded men at a field hospital near Wilno, along with her husband Horst, a German physician.
“It pained her to think of the future’’ the wounded men “would inherit,’’ Paul Griner writes, even more “to imagine the future [they] might construct’’ out of the devastation they had survived.
Kate and Horst become suspected of being spies, but manage to escape in a train crammed with refugees fleeing in the shuddering aftermath of civil war in the Russian Empire.
In Berlin they see that “at every corner people were gaming - dice and cards - while others argued politics. Pacifists hawked pamphlets, yelling that Germany’s leaders had lied them into war, and former soldiers tried to drum up support for new units, the freikorps, to defend Germany from the Reds.’’
At a nightclub, Kate dances with five men in officers’ uniforms, “backs rigidly straight, uniforms impeccably clean,’’ all blinded, their wounds “showing behind dark glasses.’’
Horst himself is blinded when a terrorist’s bomb shatters the windows of a café whose fancy pastries had enticed them inside. And in his mother’s flat, when they go on to Hamburg, Kate dances with him - “Close your eyes,’’ he says. “So you’ll be dancing blind too. You’ll see. It’s not so bad.’’
At 81 pages, this section would be an emotionally taut short novel. Indeed, the London story, more intricately plotted, could also stand on its own. Horst has died in Hamburg. Kate says only that she had left him there. She had been a nurse in German-occupied France, and is now - with the first of many gaps in her story - at a hospital in London.
The defining image in June 1944 is the impersonal terror of the buzz bombs, “[emerging over the city] from thick clouds to the south, engine rattling, tail fire turning the night sky a lurid orange.’’
