by Ann Regentin
(02/28/07)

Andreas stood in the sunshine of the Neumarkt in Dresden, staring at the Frauenkirche, the Church of our Lady. A celebrated, international reconstruction project, it had been completed and reconsecrated in 2005, and was now open for services and tourists.

Last time he'd seen the Frauenkirche was on his honeymoon, when it was a charred hulk, forlorn fragments of walls surrounded by overgrown rubble, preserved by the Soviet Union as a monument to the destruction the West was capable of. Now it was newly rebuilt, and what was left of the old church, much darker than the surrounding yellow-cream sandstone, had been incorporated into the new one. The blackened spots were a different kind of reminder of the firebombing of Dresden.

Only the famous dome, known as the Stone Bell for its distinctive shape, was free of smudges but it, like the surrounding Baroque buildings with their orange-tiled roofs and dormer windows, looked too raw and new. It made Andreas uneasy.

Andreas did not marry his first lover, he married his third. Kati was, hands down, the most dynamic and interesting of the three, and Andreas, who was at that point earning his doctorate in physics, needed someone like her. Most women bored him, and he was painfully aware that he bored them, too. Every time he talked about his work, their eyes glazed over and their brains disengaged. Kati, working on her own degree in chemical engineering, could follow where he went and even inject informed opinions of her own. She also had something to talk about besides clothes, men and babies, something similar enough to what he did to make sense but different enough to be interesting.

She was a bit harder than some to woo but disinclined to be coy once won, something he would later come to understand was a side effect of her love for him. She needed to be sure he would stay. To make love to him and lose him would have killed her then.

He remembered their first night together as uncomplicated, good primarily for the fact that she was there, in his bed, without restrictions or limits, the consummation of months of longing and steady, delicate persuasion. To see her smile under his touch turned him into warm butter. She was the most perfect person on earth that night, unmatched by any woman who might have had larger breasts, a firmer belly or a smaller nose, and she kissed him back with a mix of joy and enthusiasm that thrilled him.

It wasn't her first time, either, and he was old enough to be grateful for that. The taking of a woman's virginity, he knew, was rarely pleasant, much less transcendent, and could even be traumatic. Kati, though, had gotten that well over with before he met her, and looked forward to sex with nothing worse than a woman's native caution. Once that was eased, she was a willing, eager participant, running small, curious hands over his body, nuzzling his neck, wrapping her legs around his. She sunbathed topless when she went to the sea with her parents, so she was reddish-brown everywhere except around her hips and pubic bone, and her skin glowed in the lamplight as he traced the hollows of her collarbones. Her short, dark hair felt like feathers in his hands.

He had lain on top of Kati many times before, but never naked, and she felt marvelous, miles of soft, sweet girl-skin under his hands and mouth and body. They didn't talk at all and even their moans barely broke a whisper. The air itself had become sacred, trembling with the anticipation of heaven so there was no room left for their voices. The scent of Kati's perfume and the musk of her arousal filled his nose just as her small breasts filled the inside curve of his palm, while his erection nuzzled anxiously at her thigh and groin.

He was not surprised, when his hand drifted to her cunt, to find her wet, and her whole body moved in response to his fingers as he stroked her. He was still months away from learning to make her come. The idea that he could do it deliberately hadn't occurred to him yet, but he did want to please her and took the young man's route of filling her with his fingers. She showed her appreciation by laying her hand on his cock, the heel of it pressing on the sensitive underside of the head and her fingers resting lightly on the shaft.

Kati didn't really know what she was doing, either, but it didn't matter. He was still too caught up in the novelty of having an actual woman in bed with him, much less the one he really wanted. It didn't matter that their foreplay consisted mostly of exploratory caresses.

He loved it that Kati wanted to explore him, that those agile, delicate fingers found his cock and balls interesting enough to trace their shapes and heft their weight, and that she found his neck and shoulders worth kissing as she did it. Every nerve was stretched and quivering with anticipation, every kiss and touch pulling them tighter.

Tonight. It would be tonight, and he wanted it to be good.

Andreas had never needed the condoms he always kept with him, a small investment in hope. This time, though, when they reached the point when they usually stopped, he reached over the side of the bed, fumbling for his pants pocket. He wasn't really inept with condoms but his hands were shaking and it felt like ages before he had the stupid thing on and could settle back onto her body.

She did the honors herself, lined up his aching cock so that all he had to do was push while she arched up to meet him with a faint, startled gasp. Her fingers tightened on his shoulders and he laughed again because he couldn't help it, it was either that or cry. She was finally, entirely, his, and they moved together like great bells in slow, measured swings that rang deep and rich at the end of each arc.

He wasn't sure if it was his affection or hers, or if it was both combined, but even his first hadn't felt so good. Inside Kati, he became an acolyte, charged to worship and protect her for the rest of his life.

He opened his eyes, found Kati already looking at him. There was more in her eyes than he thought he could bear, raw emotion like endless, silent galleries of pale air and golden light. He locked his mouth down on hers and dug deeper, but he could not shut it out. Those reverent halls filled with sound, the ring of pipes and voices in glorious, ancient harmony, echoing off painted walls and the carved, gilded wings of angels. It was intolerable. He came much sooner than he would have liked, and Kati murmured happily in his ear, wrapping herself around him as he collapsed, his mind completely blank and his body drenched with sweat.

He stayed that way for too long and had to grab for the condom before he lost it inside her, which made her giggle, but nothing came of it. He got up and tossed it in the garbage, then peed and cleaned up before he came back to her, and in spite of a handful of similar mishaps, she didn't get pregnant until five years later, when they wanted her to.

Andreas stood in the Neumarkt and stared at the embedded remnants of the old church, remembering how they had stood twenty-five years before. A few meters away, a young couple stared along with him, and he watched as the man put his arm around the woman and she snuggled in under her lover's shoulder, her own arm wrapping around his waist.

Andreas had a sudden vision of his own honeymoon, of a plain bed in a cheap hotel room with paper-thin walls and intolerant neighbors, of Kati astride him making the best of the squeaky bedsprings, and of her mischievous laughter as someone banged on a wall and yelled at them to be quiet. He was certain then that nothing he could do would ever make her leave him, and he had no idea that with that certainty, he was giving himself permission to do terrible things.

The rebuilding of the Frauenkirche had been something of an obligation given the nature of the bombing. The factories on the outskirts of Dresden were largely untouched and the railways were back in operation within days. It was the old Baroque city that was targeted and flattened instead, fifteen square kilometers of homes, schools, shops, banks, theaters and churches, mostly wood-frame buildings that went up like torches in the clear night. The population was swollen to a third again its normal size by refugees from the Eastern front, and the piles of the dead were made up of women, children, the elderly and wounded soldiers, some burned, some crushed and some smothered as the fire devoured all of the available oxygen while turning Dresden into a hell on earth. The air inside the Frauenkirche heated up like a kiln, reaching 1000 degrees Celsius and warping the pillars and walls.

The Frauenkirche withstood two nights of bombing, but at 10:00 am on the third day, its sandstone pillars glowed angry red before they exploded, sending six thousand tons of stone crashing through the floor and into the substructure, where three hundred people had huddled together, seeking refuge from the incendiary bombs. Thankfully, there was time to evacuate them before the church that had protected them shattered into ruins.

Now it stood again, rebuilt, and much of the old city was being rebuilt along with it, but however reverent and lovely the result, reconstruction could not bring back the church Georg Bähr designed in 1722, and Andreas knew that whatever second chances he might have now, they would always be something other than what he had given up. He also knew that he had no one but himself to blame. While he may not have ordered the destruction personally, he had set the stage for it.

Underneath the firestorm of his rage, hurt and resentment was the cold, hard knowledge that Kati had not divorced him without reason.

Twenty-five years ago, she stood with him, her arm around his waist, staring in silence at a pile of scorched stone, and then he led her down the square in search of a quiet meal and a glass of wine, both of them still blissfully ignorant of how much pain they could stand.

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