Back then
I was studying chemistry at Braunschweig. We were all full of ideas,
rivers of forward. We bubbled over like test tubes. Visionaries,
scientific housekeepers; we swept up cobwebs knitted across thresholds
of thought. On weekends we would walk for hours in the Altstadt, before
the bombs ripped apart the wooden structures, left cracks stamped in
like aimless arrows zinging the streets.
Back then we fought world hunger, starved for praise. Our passion for
the people—der Volk!—led us to research disposal of
crop-eating pests. Back then we were learning to interrupt the
functions of the insect's nervous system. Making muscles seize and
stay. But that winter, a mistake: a single drop of gas spilled onto a
lab bench. We fell, faces smooth and dead as the grey tile. Choked off,
it took us three weeks to recover.
They built me a Wehrmacht laboratory In Wuppertal-Elberfeld, down in
the Ruhr valley. While I worked, the Cathedral in Braunschweig was
named a national shrine. Fires lit the turf around it; it was a
strangely antique hero in the story of progress we made. It makes me
laugh like anything to think of it now. I find myself chasing inward,
days backward, to when we walked along the banks of the Oker River. We
picked wildflowers, and you sent them floating downstream. You said you
meant to telegraph our joy to the ships sailing in the North Sea. You
said you always meant to send a nice message home.
