Chapter 52 The Raid

The sirens began at a quarter past seven in the evening, and by eight the sky over Helsinki was full of aeroplanes. Margaret heard them before she saw anything: a sound like fabric tearing somewhere above the clouds, patient and enormous, the sound of four hundred engines not hurrying. The anti-aircraft guns answered from the islands with flashes that lit the frozen harbour in stroboscopic pulses, so that the whole city appeared and disappeared, appeared and disappeared, like a message being read out letter by letter. In the cellar beneath the church they sat with their backs to the stone and their hands flat on the floor, because Erik had told them that stone tells you through your palms what your ears will not believe yet, and the stone was telling them that the bombs were falling north of the river and east toward the working districts, block after block, patient as rain. Edith counted. She could not help it; she had spent five years keeping the chain's records and counting was what her hands did when her mind wanted somewhere orderly to be. "Eleven," she would say, into the dark. "Twelve." Once she said "thirteen" very quietly and did not say anything else for a while. Erik sat upright against the wall with his book of hands inside his coat, and he did not count, and he did not pray as far as Margaret could tell, though his lips moved from time to time with the patience of a man checking old arithmetic. Brennan stood at the foot of the stair with his coat on, in the one place in the room where he could feel both the door and the two women, and he watched the ceiling the way he had watched ceilings all his life, waiting for the crack to choose its direction. The church took its blow at half past ten. It was not a direct hit; it was an incendiary cluster walking up the churchyard from the wall, and the stone carried the sound of it down through the floor into the cellar, a long tearing clatter like a handful of nails thrown across a tin tray. They went up with buckets and found a fire burning in the snow among the graves, white and furious, spitting rods of flame across the path toward the vestry door, and they beat it out with earth and sand and wet coats while the sky overhead roared and the searchlight on the hill swung its great slow blue eye across the rooftops. A warden came over the wall, a boy of perhaps sixty with a steel helmet two sizes too large, and worked beside them without one wasted word, and when it was out he stamped the embers flat with his boots and said, in careful English, that the harbour was burning and that God was evidently protecting the empty lots again, because the bombs loved the empty lots, everyone knew the bombers' maps were years old. By midnight the raid had passed, and the city lay smoking under a red-black sky, and the bells of the ruined blocks to the east were ringing the all-clear in voices that cracked. They stood in the churchyard in the falling ash-snow and looked at the glow over the water. Margaret held the machine's case against her chest with both arms. The machine hummed. All evening, through the worst of it, she had been aware of the hum under her ribs, steady, indifferent, a small warm animal sleeping through weather, and she had hated it, and she had pressed her wrists against it anyway, the way you hold a thing that is yours in a world that is taking everything else. "That is the third time tonight someone has tried to help you carry that," Brennan said quietly, at her shoulder. She turned. He tipped his chin toward the church steps, where a tall man in a good overcoat and leather gloves was standing with the twin machine's crate balanced easily on one hip, talking to Edith. Steam rose off his shoulders. He had been in the bucket chain; his gloves were scorched at the cuffs; he set the crate down on the step exactly where the light from the doorway fell on the lock, and then he stepped back from it, unhurried, a man making a display of having no interest in a thing. His name, he said when he reached them, was Karsten Lindqvist, of the Swedish legation. His English had very few edges. He had been driving past with blankets for the wounded — the legation sent blankets everywhere after the raids, he explained, it was cheaper than opinions — and when he saw the churchyard burning he had stopped, because hands were short and he had two of them. He hoped the church was insured. He hoped the winter would be merciful. He wished them all a quiet February, and he lifted his hat to Margaret — not to Edith, not to the warden, to her — and drove away into the smoke in a car that made almost no sound on the snow. "He asked which case was the instruments," Edith said slowly, when the tail-lights had gone. "Before I told him. He asked which case was the instruments." The fires burned until dawn, and the dawn itself came up grey and hard, and the newspapers spoke of damage that was light, of civilians who had been calm, of empty lots doing their duty once more. But Margaret spent the morning among the ashes of the churchyard with her hands in her pockets, reading the ground the way she read a page, and by noon she had assembled the pattern and did not like it at all. "The sticks walked up the path," she said to Brennan and Erik in the cellar, with the map of the churchyard open between them and her pencil marking falls. "Six clusters. Every one of them closer than the last to this corner, where the vestry stands above our room. That is not a bomber crew's map being old, Erik. Old maps miss a church by miles. These men corrected onto us, run by run, like gunners bracketing a target." She looked up. "Somebody told the Soviet air staff that there is something under this church worth a stick of incendiaries. And last night somebody helped carry the evidence out of the fire, wearing gloves, and asked which case mattered before anyone showed him." Erik sat looking at the pencil marks for a long time. The raids had aged him overnight more than twenty years of weaving had managed. "Then the collectors have stopped collecting politely," he said. "Get me paper, Miss Crane. If I am to sign that book on the third of March, I will spend the weeks I have left writing down everything the loom knows, so that the knowledge cannot burn twice."