The Driver

From the cycle “The Limbo Zone”, Story Two

They drove through the Sudetenland as though passing through a vast garden that had not yet cooled after summer. The roads were clean, and along the verges stood living people — warm, real. They waved, wept, laughed, and all of it seemed meant for them, for him, for Kurt Zimmer, a small wiry corporal from the Oranienburg motor pool who had suddenly become part of something immense and radiant.

He loved that feeling.

The steady vibration rising through the steering wheel into his palms. Warm, rhythmic, alive. It meant the engine was running. It meant the road still lay beneath the wheels. It meant he was moving — and as long as he moved, he did not have to think. To stand still was worse than anything. Stillness brought waiting, and waiting brought memory.

He tried not to remember Elsa standing on the threshold in her green apron, her belly already rounded, saying quietly, “Be careful.” In those two words there was more weight than in any sergeant’s order.

He looked at the road and saw only the road — simple, straight, paved with cobblestones, leading into an unknown city. Warm pastel facades, stucco ornaments, cast-iron balconies, curtains stirring behind windows. People stood on the sidewalks and watched the column pass without cheering or cursing. They watched the way one watches a swollen river: with respect for its power and quiet certainty that someday it would recede.

Girls threw flowers.

Asters, dahlias, late gladioli flew into the cabs and onto the hoods — bright, desperate splashes of the dying year. Each flower felt like a promise.

His was white.

It traced a quick, weightless arc and landed softly on his lap. A white aster, delicate as a snowflake from some other, gentler time. It carried no smell of flower, but of something forbidden: faint perfume, warm skin, and the sharp-sweet scent of October cinnamon buns. Thin rays spread from its golden center like the last light of autumn.

He did not see who threw it.

Or rather — he did, out of the corner of his eye. A red-haired girl standing near the pharmacy with the green cross. She stood with her hands behind her back, laughing openly, looking straight at him through the windshield as if the entire column, the entire occupation, did not exist. In her green eyes there was neither fear nor caution — only pure, misplaced, childish mirth.

He closed his fist around the flower. It crunched softly. A single petal came loose.

That evening the city hummed like a disturbed hive. Yellow light and the smell of fried sausages poured from the beer halls. Kurt stepped outside to smoke. The cigarette trembled slightly between his fingers — not from cold, but from the low hum that lived inside him.

“It’s not good to smoke alone, Herr Soldier.”

He turned. She stood there, separated from a small group of girls by the confectioner’s window. In a simple green dress that made her eyes even greener and her hair even more fiery.

She walked up, took the cigarette from his fingers without asking, took a drag, and returned it, blowing perfect smoke rings into the velvet air.

“My treat,” she said and laughed, as though they had known each other for a hundred years.

“It’s you,” she said with a light, lilting accent. “The soldier with the flower.”

She told him her name was Martha. He told her his was Kurt.

She laughed again — loudly, joyfully, as if tomorrow did not exist.

The next morning he met her by chance near the market. She was carrying a basket of large, red, waxy apples and singing softly to herself. The melody belonged to no march and no hymn. It belonged only to her.

“Kurt with the flower!” she called. “Are you buying apples?”

“I’m going to drills.”

She laughed. “There are no drills in Karlsbad. This is a spa town. People come here to be cured.”

She took him by the sleeve and led him through streets he did not know—past steaming springs, white colonnades, and parks where maples burned in red, orange, and copper flame. The whole city seemed to be quietly on fire, warm and glowing.

She talked. About the hot spring called Vřídlo, about Goethe who had fallen in love here three times after the age of sixty, about emperors and poets who had once breathed this same air. She talked because he was silent, and someone had to fill the space between them.

“You talk a lot,” he said at last.

“Because you are quiet,” she answered. “Someone has to speak.”

He laughed—for the first time in many days. A real laugh, light and unexpected.

In the evening she took him to her small apartment. There was a grand piano against the wall, covered with a thin layer of dust. Martha opened the lid, sat down, and began to play without looking at the keys.

The music was slow, viscous, full of lingering notes that trembled like raindrops on glass before falling. It smelled of autumn, of fading light, of something beautiful that already knew it would not last.

When she finished, he asked what the piece was called.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I wrote it myself when I was fourteen. After my father died.”

She laughed again, as if death and music were equally light.

On their last morning she waited for him on the porch in a wool dress, holding a basket with sandwiches, apples, and a bottle of cloudy homemade wine. They climbed the hill above the city. Below them Karlsbad lay warm and golden, smoke rising from chimneys, music drifting faintly from the park.

They sat on the grass, ate, drank the sour apple wine.

“Tell me about your wife,” she said quietly, lying on her back, eyes closed, red hair spilled across the grass.

He was silent for a long time.

“She is expecting a boy,” he said at last. “She is serious. She is… everything I have.”

Martha did not laugh this time.

“Except for me,” she said softly.

“Except for you.”

They lay in silence. The sun was warm. The wind moved through the grass. The city breathed below them.

When the column formed in the square the next morning, she stood alone on the sidewalk. Red hair in the wind. No friends. No smile.

Kurt took the dried white aster from the glove compartment — fragile now, petals like thin parchment—and slipped it into his breast pocket, next to his heart.

She raised her hand. Not a wide wave. Just a quiet lifting of the palm, then lowering it.

He nodded.

The column moved. The Kübelwagen vibrated. Cobblestones creaked beneath the wheels. Karlsbad grew smaller in the rearview mirror until the red-haired girl became a small, solitary point on the sidewalk.

He had promised her he would write. He had believed it himself that last evening under the old chestnut tree, while golden leaves fell on their shoulders like coins.

“I’ll keep the flower,” he had whispered, kissing her freckles, her cinnamon-scented fingers, her laughing lips. “I’ll look at it and remember you. Always.”

But he never wrote.

Not because he forgot.

Because Elsa was waiting. Because of the boy stirring beneath her heart. Because there are things that cannot be written down, cannot be kept in letters, cannot be carried forward. They can only be remembered — somewhere between “oil level” and “crankcase,” between a march and a waltz, between that autumn and everything that came after.

Autumn 1939. Silesia.

The forest rushed at the car like a madman. The country road jolted wildly beneath the wheels. In Kurt’s head the slow, viscous music still played — the rain on piano keys, the lingering notes that refused to fall.

The blow came not from outside but from the air itself.

The windshield suddenly bloomed with a delicate, jeweler’s pattern of cracks, dissolving into sparkling dust. And in that shimmering suspension, Kurt did not see the bullet or the metal fragments.

He saw her face — red-haired, freckled, laughing.

And a white aster lying in an envelope addressed in careful handwriting:

Karlsbad, Mühlbrunnstrasse 22.

← The Limbo Zone. Prologue