Men were on the road the whole night long, and Georg walked with them. Mountaineers and infantrymen, old men and boys in sandals. They marched together, and some had no uniforms and wore only hunting jackets or sweaters. Their backs were rounded from all their gear. They carried rucksacks and blankets, one or even two if they were lucky. They carried mess kits and canteens and packs of cigarettes and a few found sticks in the fields and tapped as they went, tap-tapping like blind men. They stopped when they were tired. They sat under the trees. Droplets fell from the branches and rolled under their collars and they slept anyway, and sometimes they lay down and didn’t get back up. Georg tried not to look, but still he saw them. A man was dead under a beech tree, and another stopped and pulled the boots from his feet. “He has no use for them anymore,” he said. No point in letting them go rotten, and his eyes were dark like well water.
The sky went from black to pink to palest yellow. Georg left the road. He went through a potato field, and none of the men seemed to notice. He slipped once and sat down hard in the mud, cursing at himself because his was an advanced form of clumsiness. It could not be taught, not even to the willing. He wiped his hand across the front of his pants. He found a rock and sat on it and waited for the rain to start. The clouds were already beginning to cluster. Snow, rain, snow, rain, every day the sky was heavy, and he wanted only sun. It bred weakness, this endless succession of gray days. People squinted in the summertime and shielded their faces. They said how nice to see the sky, how blue it was, but they were delicate like ferns and they covered themselves.
He opened his bag. He had one Franconia chocolate bar, three smoked sausages, a tin of sardines, four pieces of dark bread wrapped in a napkin, and butter cookies broken to crumbs. Water was the only thing he didn’t need to worry about. Water abounded. He spread his food across his blanket, and he thought of Maus. He saw her room, with its closed windows and its closed door and the bowl half filled with water. He saw the apple slices he’d set beside her blankets. He stood up and sat back down. He shouldn’t have shut the door when he left. He should have left it open. He should have told someone where she was. He rubbed his eyes. She’d be all right without him. She’d go mousing in the room. It was a big room, and she’d eat her fill, and he cried because he knew it wasn’t true.
All the boys who were gone, all the ones who fell up north and were buried, and he cried now for a cat. Müller was dead and how many others, and he cried for a stray. She’d have died for sure if Graf hadn’t found her. She’d have frozen out there by the wall. A fox would have gotten her or the other boys, who were quick to grab their shotguns when rabbits came too close. They’d shot a tree full of starlings once because they were in a killing mood and could find no bigger birds. She’d be long dead by now, but he cried anyway because she was his and he had left her.
It rained the second night, and Georg rested in a woodshed behind a barley field. The farmers had probably just harvested their summer grains a few weeks before and now the land looked shorn. He lay between the woodpile and a rusted-out barrow, and it felt sweet to have a roof above his head, even if the thatching had gaps and let the water in. He fell asleep though he tried hard not to. He slept and he didn’t dream and it was light already when he woke. He ate a piece of his dark bread, listening carefully for any footsteps. He wanted more bread and one of the cookies, but he wrapped his food back up and set it inside his sack. He had just stepped outside to stretch his arms when he felt a dirt clod land against his shoe.
“Get out, you thief.” An old man was shouting. He was close, no more than ten meters away and coming closer. He wore a leather apron and a farmer’s cap. “Out with you before I get my gun,” and he threw a rock this time and it bounced off the dirt and hit Georg in the shin. He reached down for another rock, looking all the while at Georg.
Georg didn’t answer and he didn’t stop to set his pack over his shoulder. He held it tight against his belly and ran through the field. He didn’t stop when he reached a grove of spruce trees. He kept on running until his breath grew raspy and he went down to his knees.
Just a few days of walking and he was far from the soldiers and the paved road. He was coming to the forest, he could smell it already. He knew all the trees and the plants that grew. He knew the fringed leaves of the chamomile bushes and the field lettuce and which mushrooms were good and which ones poison. He learned these things from Mutti, who said the names of the bushes and the berries while she picked. Every week they went together so she could gather beechnuts and boil them into oil. “Poor man’s butter,” she’d say, “might as well spit into the pan.” She was slow to fill the basket, and she picked leaves sometimes and tasted them and spit them out. She scolded him when he fidgeted. She wagged her finger, but she understood, and she bought him a cider afterward at the old gasthaus. They sat under the antlers and the pewter plates, and sometimes she closed her eyes and dozed a little in the chair, and all the lines on her face went smooth.
He found a spot behind a spruce tree and took off both his boots. His feet were swollen from walking. He couldn’t feel his ankle bones anymore, and there were blisters along the bottom of his heels. He worked his fingers through the holes in his socks and rubbed his arches. All that training and he was lame from a few days in the field. A deer came to him just as he lay down. It looked at him with eyes so dark and unafraid he was struck still. The only beautiful thing he’d seen in weeks. He was lonely when it left.
The moon was nearly full when he awoke. It shone on the puddles and the rocks in the field. He rolled to his side and pushed himself up. His neck was stiff because he had no pillow. It was too cold to use his jacket, and the leaves were wet and he didn’t want to sleep on them. He cut another piece of sausage and set it on his tongue. He broke off a piece of chocolate, just a single square, and he sliced the sausage extra thin because he had only one left and he needed it to last. He hummed a little while he ate. He hadn’t heard another voice in days, not since the farmer had shouted at him, and he hummed now just to hear something. He talked nonsense sometimes, too, and snapped his fingers.
He laced his boots again and began to walk. The road rose gently ahead and fell, and rose and fell again. His stomach rumbled while he walked, and his hands were cold. He saw things only in silhouette and in shadow. He saw black branches against a black sky and solitary lights between the trees. Each time the road branched he took the easterly route. He took narrow roads and not the paved ones and footpaths when he could find them. He had no map and no compass, but he knew he wanted to go east because east was away from the wall and the men that walked the road. It led home. It led to Mutti and her kitchen.
Twice he stepped into a puddle and the water soaked through his boots. “Verdammt,” he said. He stopped to tighten his laces. He should have paid attention when they went walking. He should have listened to his father and not just Mutti. “Here’s a lark’s head and a bowline,” the old man would say, “here’s a half hitch and look how easy it is to tie.” How to set traps and find kindling even when it drizzled and how to recognize the constellations and to build a shelter from branches and from snow, he showed Max and Georg all these things, but only Max had listened. Only Max watched and asked questions and remembered what the old man said, and Georg felt all the lonelier then. He walked behind them and didn’t answer when they talked.
Planes flew overhead a few times during the night. He stopped to look but there was nothing to see in the sky, and he couldn’t tell where the sounds were coming from or which way the planes were going. He counted his steps to pass the time, but quietly, in case someone else was walking. He stopped at random numbers, at one hundred forty-seven and three hundred twenty, and he began again, and his steps were like the buckets by the trench. They needed counting.
He stumbled just before sunrise and dropped his light. A brand-new Daimon torch and it fell against a stone and though it wasn’t cracked and nothing rattled when he shook it, it didn’t work after that. He sat down on a stump and cupped it in his palm. He’d been saving it for the darkest nights, for when the moon was new and he couldn’t see the road, and now it was broken and he didn’t know how to fix it. He left it on the ground and walked a little longer before stopping again to sleep.
Every Saturday he’d gone hunting with his father, even when it snowed. Max came home from the university when he could and joined them. “This might be the one,” he said. He reached for Georg’s head and tousled up his hair. “I have a good feeling.” He walked beside the old man and turned back occasionally to smile at Georg, who was always a few steps behind. Just a little longer, he was saying, but Georg didn’t return his brother’s smile. He wanted to be done with these trips. He wanted to bring one home, so the old man wouldn’t tease him anymore or push him to come along. He prayed on his tenth birthday and his eleventh that this would be the year. Let me get one, and then I can stay home. Even if it’s a baby, or lame from a trap. He carried his rifle over his shoulder, and he didn’t listen when his father showed them things. There was never any peace with the old man. Even the forest was a classroom.
Max saw it first. Georg felt the air go sharp, and he looked where Max was pointing. All day they’d been walking and twice they lay for hours in the needles, waiting beside a stream, and still his neck went tight when the moment came. He gripped his rifle by the stock. His thoughts wandered, spiraling outward, tempting him to laugh, to throw down his rifle, to shoot into the air. He wanted a clean resolution, an end to the long arc of disappointment that he felt himself traveling but was powerless to change. He looked down the barrel. He could feel their anticipation, could hear it in their breathing. He waited, he had no idea what for, and the sweat rolled down his neck. His finger shook on the trigger. The old man nudged him. Quick before it goes. It smells us in the air. Be quick now.
The sound of the discharge shook the sparrows from their perches. It was a shoulder shot and clean. The deer lay twitching, its hind legs kicking hard against the ground. He felt pride at the hit and looked to his father. It was only then Georg realized he had felt no recoil from his rifle. The old man stood straight. He brushed the needles from his pants. His rifle was smoking still, and the air smelled of burnt powder. Georg followed him to the deer, staring at his back and wishing he could burn a hole straight through his wool jacket and into his heart. He could have made the shot. He needed more time. Just a little longer. He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles.
He tried to be strong when they gutted it. He tried to be brave. He’d skinned rabbits before. He cut around each back paw and defrocked them easily as pulling off a sweater, but when it came now to dressing the deer he went queasy. It was the smell that did it and the way his father cut upward through the belly. Its insides were shiny. They were coiled like snakes when they fell out.
Max came to help. He reached for Georg’s shoulder and pulled him up. They brought it home together. They tied it to a sapling and carried it out. The roughness of the fur surprised him. He had expected it to be soft. He looked at the ground and not at the deer as they walked. “By God, that’s a nice one,” Mutti said when they came. The house smelled of stew and warm bread that whole week, but he couldn’t eat any. He set his spoon on the table and left the bowl untouched. It was only later that he learned the old man had kept the secret. He’d told his friends at the hall that his boy had bagged his first deer. A ten-pointer, he told them, but bigger than any twelver he’d ever seen. The revelation only compounded Georg’s shame.
The trees were growing denser, and the air was clean and smelled of sap. He had only the sardines left in his bag and he didn’t want to open them. He knelt along the shoulder instead and drank from his canteen. A figure was moving between the trees. He stood to get a better look. It was a woman in black. She was shooing away the crows, waving her arms and hissing. The birds flew around her head and up to the branches. They flapped their wings and swooped back down, unafraid.
She saw him move by the road. “Come over here,” she called to him. “Come and help me.” She squinted when he came close. Her left eye was cloudy with cataracts. She lifted two buckets half full with water. When he hesitated, she stopped and threw him a look. “Don’t be slow.”
“I’m going that way.” He pointed back toward the road.
“There’s nothing up there,” she said. “Town is the other way.”
“Which town?”
She threw her head back and laughed. “Which town, he wants to know. Which town. That’s Ettlingen up the road. Ettlingen and Gaggenau and then nothing for a good long while.”
She turned away. She stepped through the puddles and the clumps like a boy of twelve and not a gray-haired lady in a skirt. She looked over her shoulder again. “I’ve got stew,” she said. “If you want to help an old lady.”