After visiting his wife, he squirms back down the tunnel. The broken stones barely bother him any more. They abrade and poke the stuff that used to be his flesh, but what little damage is done is soon undone by the malevolent force keeping him alive. The mud he stirs up by his passage still smells of dynamite. In the central corridor the ceiling is shattered, gaping and drooping, held up only by the thick blobby concrete stalagmites that have dripped from the holes in the ceiling to the floor. He swims three meters down a flooded passage before surfacing in the wine cellar, whose massive oaken racks have partly shielded the room from full collapse. He stretches his body as thin as he can and twists himself into the hole in the wall.
          He doesn’t know how long he’s been digging, but he’s made considerable progress, despite the occasional cave-in, some of which have kept him trapped nearly motionless for days. At the beginning it seemed just a matter of patience: Dig! dig! Upward, ever upward! He still remembers the despair he felt when he first scraped through to the ugly white masses of concrete that must blanket the ruins. If the concrete extends to the surface it is ten or fifteen meters thick at least. He could chip away at that until doomsday and he would still never see the sun again. Since then his direction has been downward! ever downward and away, like a dwarf digging for gold.
          He digs until most of his fingers have broken off, and now must rest. He returns to the wine cellar. He does not drink or eat. He waits, not patiently.
          After some days, a low growl echoes through the ruins. His head perks: he whistles. Something approaches on clicking padding feet, and peeks warily into the cellar.
          The dog’s front paws are worn down: her forelegs terminate in two cracked white spears of bone, excellent for digging. He doesn’t remember the last time he saw the dog; he had commanded her to dig in other areas of the ruins and not to return until she had found a way out.
          She steps partway through the door, partly eager, partly shy.
          Impatiently he gestures: Komm, Blondi, komm!
          She approaches, lowers her broken jaws and drops the gift in his lap: a human hand, small, probably a youngster’s, bitten from the arm, and fresh. It reeks of clotted blood, some of it still wet.
          The emotion he is experiencing is joy, but he no longer has words to identify it. He pulls the dog closer.
          Braves Mädchen, he tells her, stroking the bone ridges of her spine. Braves, braves Mädchen.
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