Old Frau Focht pulled a file from her pocket and worked the hatchet head, starting at the cutting edge and moving inward, taking out the burrs. She worked the metal like his father worked his wood, with an easy hand. It was warmer in the barn but the light there was no good, and so she worked outside instead.
“The heads are coming loose,” she said. “I’ve been soaking them in buckets, but the wood won’t swell.” She gave up squatting and knelt in the dirt. Sharpening was hard work and called for leather gloves, but she had only mittens and she didn’t wear them while she worked. The skin on her knuckles was cracked, and her eyes watered, but she didn’t complain, and when she was done with the file, she looked up. “Go get me the whetstone.”
The wind was starting up, and Georg walked fast, setting his hands deep inside his pockets. She was impatient when he came back. She took the stone and didn’t thank him. She moved it in circles against the blade, sharpening first one side and then the other. He offered to help, but she didn’t trust him with her hatchet heads. He’d make them uneven. He didn’t have gentle hands, and if the heads cracked there’d be no fixing them.
“Don’t just stand there,” she said. “Tell me more about that fat captain.”
He’d told her so many of the stories already, but he started again with one of his favorites. There were these scorpions. They glowed at night just like fireflies do. They had poison in their stingers and they were quick the way they hopped, and Münchhausen whacked their tails with the axe he carried. He chopped them all to bits, and even then the stingers were still moving and stuck fast to his boots. She shook her head. “That can’t be right,” she said. “Bugs don’t glow,” but she smiled anyway as she sharpened the heads. He was her radio. She shook her head when he talked about generals or the places where the fighting was. She didn’t know those names, but she knew the spaceship Sannah and all the men and women on its crew and where they went and the creatures they found.
“Tell me another,” she said when he stopped. “Tell me one I haven’t heard,” and he stomped his feet to keep warm and set the collar up on his jacket.
How easy it would be to stay with her and to work her fields when spring came. She’d cook for him, and he’d wear the clothes her husband had worn, and there’d be no fighting and no soldiers and no border police in their green uniforms. They’d be alone as shipwrecked sailors. They’d plant potatoes and carrots and fat red beets, and he wouldn’t go to school anymore or listen to the radio. There’d be no books in the house except for the Bible she kept inside a drawer with her spare blankets. She’d shown it to him once, that old leather book, and inside there was a photograph taken years before. She was proud of that picture, he could tell, proud of how young she was and how she looked straight at the lens, and both her eyes were clear and pale as sea glass in the light.
Going home had its dangers. The old man might send him back. He might shut the door on Georg or report him to the schoolhouse where they kept the list of names, and not even Mutti could sway him then. Not Mutti or Max or anyone else could change his mind. And still he felt the tug. He felt it when the old woman looked at him and when she oversalted her stew and especially when he told the stories that Mutti had read aloud. Max was at school and the old man was in the classroom, walking up the aisles, and it was only Mutti with him in the house. She rocked in her chair, and the sun shone behind her and haloed her dark hair.
Irmingard nicked her thumb against the blade, but she didn’t curse or tend to the cut. The wind blew harder. The bare branches swayed, and he covered both his ears.
“Go inside,” she said. “No use having us both out here.”
He ignored her. He watched the winter birds circle the pond and told her about the nearest comet and how warm it was. Even the wind there blows warm, and strange fruits hang low from the trees. A shrike settled on a branch over his head. It trilled and chattered and tilted its head, and Irmingard kept working but Georg stopped at the sound. It was a butcher bird. He’d seen them in the Heidenfeld churchyard spiking crickets and sometimes mice high on the thorns. He found a rock and threw it against the tree, but the rock fell short and the bird didn’t move.
He rubbed his hands together. He turned back to Irmingard. “It never rains there,” he said. “It never rains and it’s never cold, and the sun shines even at night.” The stories needed Mutti’s voice and not his. They needed the chair and the window and the chiming of the hallway clock, but he stayed outside with the old woman and told them anyway because he liked the company. He liked the way she shook her head and squinted. “Your stories make no sense,” she always said. “That’s not how things work,” and she smiled when she said it.
He wanted to leave, and he wanted to stay. This is how it was, how it always was. He wanted Mutti but not the old man. He wanted his room and his chair and his magic table, and he wanted Kaspar pecking in his cage. He wanted to see Max again, too, who was touched by some strange grace. Max had caught a bird in his hand once, caught it in midflight and then opened up his palms. He’d leapt off the woodshed, too, and somersaulted in the air. A whole group of them squinted into the sun to watch him jump. He finished the turn early and seemed to hover above them for the longest while, and when he landed on the balls of his feet, he just smiled and wiped his hands against the side of his pants. Georg clapped along with them. He was proud of his brother, who waved down the applause. He was proud and sorry both because things came so easily to Max. Why couldn’t it be him for once instead of Max? How sweet to be at the center of things and not outside, to hear the applause like Max did, to brush it aside and walk away.
Irmingard stood up straight when she was done with the second hatchet. She pulled her mittens on and gave him the file and the whetstone. “You’re a credit to your mother,” she said. She walked quickly to the house, without waiting for him or turning back to look his way.
There were four empty jugs by her door. He saw them and knew it was time to go to town. Her house had no plumbing, and the water from her well was sour. It was better for washing than for drinking. Might as well drink rainwater. She liked her water fresh from the spout. “It’s worth the walk,” she said, “it’s worth the shoe leather.” Its minerals were good as medicine and helped with rheuma and the gout. It came from a deep well, she told him, drawn from the same sort of spring that flowed to Bad Nauheim and Bad Orb and all the other famous resorts where people with money went to cure themselves.
He didn’t want to go. He resisted and tried to think of reasons to stay inside her hut. People might see him and wonder who he was and why he wasn’t fighting, but she shook her head and gave him two pitchers to carry. “It’s only old ladies in town,” she told him, “old ladies like me and they won’t pay you any mind.” They walked along a footpath too narrow for cars or buggies. She walked fast, swinging the empty pitchers at her sides, and he fell into rhythm three steps behind her. She sang to pass the time, her voice clear as a soldier’s and low. Though the melody was familiar, the words she sang were new to him and sorrowful as a dirge. “Evening has come,” she sang, “time to ride the train. The dry branches break, but the green ones remain.” She knew no happy songs as far as he could tell.
He waited until she was finished. “What’s wrong with the trees here?” He pointed to the nearest oaks. “They don’t look right.”
“They’ve got weevils.” She was cheerful the way she said it. “They bleed from their branches, and the weevils come and eat.”
“Trees don’t bleed,” he said. “Maybe it was sap you saw.”
“Serves them right.” She shook her head approvingly. “They wanted to cut them, and now the wood’s rotten and there’s nothing to cut.”
He caught up to where she was, and they walked side by side the rest of the way to town. They crossed the stone bridge—it had only four arches and not six—and went to the square where the waterspout was. The houses were half-timbered and built close together, just like the ones in Heidenfeld. There was a shuttered butcher shop and a pharmacy and a gasthaus with empty tables. The women on the street looked the same and the balconies and even the grasses by the bank. What was to keep him from walking into the schoolhouse here and starting his lessons, from having an apple juice at the café or going down to the river and catching frogs? What was to keep him from staying, he thought, when things were the same everywhere, when the towns blended one into the next, with their church steeples and stone roads, their ironwork and their cemeteries and empty flower pots, all the town shields swinging over all the doors and the ladies who walked with their heads held low. The buildings and the people inside them, he knew them already. He felt for a moment that he’d uncovered some great secret, a pattern hidden in things, and then the feeling was gone, and he knelt down by the spout and filled the pitchers.
If the water were special in the town, it didn’t show. The ladies he saw were in sore need of curing. Their legs were bent from age and the damp air, and they looked like wishbones and not women. They greeted each other on the street. “Smells like rain,” they said, “or maybe snow,” and they raised their fingers to see how the wind was blowing. They waited in lines for milk, for bread and flour and sugar, and they looked to the sky where fat clouds were gathering. “Better hurry,” they said, “better run if we want to beat the storm.” They pounded the last of their comforters and brought them back inside. The town was in mourning, it seemed to Georg, it was covered with a shroud. There were only women left and babies and he didn’t see any men, not a single one, not even grandfathers or crippled veterans.
Frau Focht talked while he worked the spout. She stood with another woman who wore only black, and they looked toward the bridge. “Every time it’s more,” the lady from town was saying. “They ate all my chickens. And my laying birds, too.”
“They’re passing through,” Frau Focht said. “They come and they go again.” And while she spoke the horns began to sound.
The trucks came from the west. They crossed the bridge and rumbled up the street, more than Georg had seen since he left the supply road, two dozen at least, with others still coming. Opel Blitz trucks and towing tractors and half-tread cable tractors and fire tanks with their hoses wrapped neatly behind them, one after another they came, and the old ladies raised their handkerchiefs. They stood on the curb and down by the bridge and waved like schoolgirls. The trucks were muddy and the soldiers were muddy, too, and they looked tired and didn’t wave back. A driver shouted when a woman crossed the street too soon. She dropped her shopping bag at the sound. “Idiot,” he yelled, “damned woman,” and the wheels ran over the bag, crushing it flat against the stones. Her bread was gone and her sugar, and the flour was just a puff of white smoke under the treads.
Georg knelt behind old Frau Focht and raised his arm by his head, but one of the soldiers noticed anyway and turned around to see him better. He stood up in his seat and shaded his eyes though there was no sun, and Georg could see how he opened his mouth into a perfect O. Against his better judgment he met the soldier’s eye. They looked straight at each other for the longest time, and then the truck rounded the corner by the church and was gone. They were going eastward. They were falling back, back from the border and the fighting, and soon they’d be in all the fields and sleeping in the houses and the barns.
Irmingard didn’t look. “They’re just workers,” she said. “They’re going north. They’re going away from here and won’t be back.” She said these things without conviction, and Georg nodded without conviction, too. “Yes,” he said, “you’re right,” but the soldiers were faster than he was. They moved like a river over the land, and there was no outrunning them.
The woman who’d been careless before knelt on the street. She cleaned up the mess, sweeping the crumbs and the torn paper and the broken tins that dripped their juices, and threw it all away. The last of the ladies went inside then and drew their curtains against the clouds and waited for the storm.
She led him outside when they were back at the house. They set their jugs down and walked past the oak trees and the pond. All the ice had gone soft and water flowed over it. He looked for his shirt, certain that it had come to the surface again, rising through the water like a drowned sailor, but only twigs poked through. She took him toward the hill where the trees grew thicker, and when she stopped he saw four crosses. They had settled into the dirt, and one was crooked and leaned away from the others.
It took him a while to understand. She had buried her boys like soldiers. She buried them in a field and not in a cemetery where they belonged. Who knew how she’d done it. Bodies were supposed to be kept at the house for only two days. Two days in their beds while their families sat with them and then they went to the corpse house in the cemetery and were buried. She must have bribed the gravediggers and the coffin maker. She must have given them cigarettes and wine, just like Mutti when she wanted to find her mother a better room at the old people’s home or when she needed a favor from the priest. Chocolate pralines and wine and oranges, plum schnapps and marzipan, this was the currency in all the towns and cities. Old Frau Focht had paid them, and they brought her children home. And still how hard it must have been to see those crosses every day and watch their wood go to silver.
She knelt by the nearest marker and brushed the snow and dead leaves from beneath it. “I set them here so they’d be close,” she said. This one was her youngest. He was walking before he was one. Every night she had to chase him around the house to put him to bed. He was never sick, not even for a day. Never sick and always hungry, this is how he was, until that last morning when he choked on his food. Choked on the milk and the potatoes she mashed, and then he went blue and she left all her babies and ran for the doctor, along the path and into town. It took a while to find him because it was lunchtime and he wasn’t in his office. The doctor closed her baby’s eyes when he finally came. He set his hands over those blue eyes and rolled them shut.
“That’s all they ever do,” she said. She rubbed her palm along her skirt. “They’re useless, doctors. They have no cures.”
Bad luck settled over her house after that. It brought the crying disease. She lost her other three in as many years. They were gone from a fever, gone from a lung infection, from stomach cramps. And then her husband had his first gout attack, and his legs swelled up fat as sausages and he couldn’t work the fields. Each time she fetched the doctor and each time he did nothing, and now they were buried and she had no need anymore for doctors or for nurses. “Boys always leave,” she said. Georg didn’t understand what she meant, but he nodded anyway. “Easier growing oranges than boys.” She wiped the wood on each of the markers and ran her fingers where the names were carved.
She was in a funny mood at dinner, setting her spoon down as if to say something and picking it up again. She waved him aside when he started to tell a story. “I’m tired tonight,” she told him. “You’re not the first one who’s come to my door. You’re not the only one. I’m an old lady, but I do what I can.” She left him alone at the table and went outside to sweep her stoop. She went to bed when she was done and snored loud as a man through the thin curtain.
He waited in the kitchen, poking the log in the oven and listening to it burn. He wasn’t sleepy yet. He waited for sounds outside, for the turning of wheels and shouts from the soldiers, but it was quiet. They were gone to wherever they were going. They were sleeping somewhere else tonight and not in her field and not in her barn, but another few days and they’d be coming to her door. Almost thirty years since they’d come last. He looked around the room, and he could imagine how it was. She wasn’t young then but she wasn’t old yet either, and she let them inside. She opened her door and her eyes were clear and the house was warm. Maybe she cooked for them. Maybe she washed their clothes and brought out the soaking tub. Her boys were buried already and her husband was gone, and the soldiers were falling back. They were coming home, the fathers and the grandfathers of the boys who were knocking now. They ate her food and smoked their cigarettes and brought mud into the house, and she outlived them all.
He went to the window. No sign of rain yet. The moon was bright behind the clouds and threw long shadows. It was a night for walking. Mutti took him to Rothenfels on nights like this or farther on to Lohr, to visit her aunt or the cousins who lived past the quarry. He was only five or six and he’d fidget in his chair when the talking went late. He fell asleep right at the table, and Mutti roused him when it was time to go. She lifted him and buttoned his jacket, and he breathed in the smell of her and pulled at her pearls. They walked the last part home, down the stone steps and along the river, and sometimes the gypsies were there dancing by their wagons. Mutti covered his eyes then and ushered him along, but he saw them anyway and they were beautiful, how they arched their backs and swung their skirts around. He held tight to her wrist. He walked but was only half awake and had no memory of taking the steps, and then he was home again and in his bed. He pretended to sleep so she would pull his blanket up for him, and her hands were soft when they touched his face.
He pulled his rucksack out and began to pack his things. He took one of the old woman’s blankets and rolled it up tight and pushed it to the bottom. He went to the cupboard. It was wrong to take her food, but he’d eat it anyway if he stayed with her and so what matter if he took it from her now. This is how he thought of it, and he opened the cupboard door. He stepped back at what he saw. On her shelves there were dried apple slices and a half dozen cured pork sausages, a fresh loaf of bread and a handful of sugar lumps. She had set them on napkins for him and filled his lard tin. She’d packed his food for him. She must have known that he’d be leaving, if not tonight then the next night or the one after. There’d be no more stories when he left and nobody to help patch her roof, and she’d packed for him anyway.
He took the bundles and set them inside his bag, and when he went for his shoes there was an old shotgun leaning beside them. She’d set it there so he wouldn’t miss it. It probably belonged to her husband once, that old Behr gun, and years before he’d tied a leather sling around its barrel and its stock and carried it in the fields. Georg could see only two shells for it, just the shells in the chambers and none more. The barrel had no engraving, no antlers or scrollwork or stags, and the wood had dried in places and begun to crack, and still he was grateful and set it over his shoulder.
The old woman’s breathing was deep now and slow, and every now and again she talked into her pillow. He set four of his ladies in his pocket and the last one he left at the center of the table. He snuffed the lamp and dipped his fingers in the blessed water she kept beside the door. He closed the door gently so she wouldn’t wake.