Death's Head [antikvár]

i sometimes surprised him that he was still alive; that his >ody, üke somé flawed machine, continued to function of ts own accord. It had nothing to do with the lack of food ind the sickness he frequently felt; it was the simple fact that beneath the surface of his brain and body there was no real reason for his life to go on. The idea of death and dying fluttered every so often on the darker edges of his mind, as if it were somé kind of wounded butterfly seeking its last glimpse of light. And yet death terrified him because it brought still one more unanswerable question: what is it like not to exist?He lay for a time with his eyes open, staring at the broken shaft of sunlight that came through the hole in the masonry. Outside was a large expanse of rubble, a desert where there had once been a city. He could hear various sounds - someone moving across the stones, a foreign voice screaming an order, the rattle of a passing truck. Not far away the Untergrundbahn used to run through the Alexander-Platz and he recalled the crowded red and yellow cars without affection. Everything then had been efficient, murderously so, the people moving with the sort of insane regularity you associate with clockwork.He did not move for somé minutes. There was nothing to move for. There were no special events that differen-tiated one day from the next. His environment, the architecture of his life, had become the stark remains of the bombast of the Third Reich. Fallen concrete eagles could be seen amongst the ruins, looking like birds that have always been too heavy to ily. Stone swastikas that rang when you struck them with slabs of brick, as if they retained fading echoes of the millión voices that had once