Just before the sun rose, the snow began to fall. Georg squatted in the reeds and looked upstream. The ice had gone soft by the bank, and there were no rocks in the water and no branches. He walked back and forth between the trees until he found two thick sticks. They were each as high as his shoulder, and one of them was forked at the bottom. He took off his boots and his socks, and he tied the laces together and set them like skates around his neck. He wasn’t sure how deep the water was at the center, and so he took off his pants, too, but not his underwear because he didn’t want to stand naked in the cold air. Max had stripped plenty of times, even in winter. “It’s only water,” he’d say. “Last I checked we’re not made of sugar,” and if Georg hesitated, Max laughed and called him sugar boy, and once he’d pushed him in and Georg’s best boots were ruined after that. The soles warped, and they smelled like herring even after Mutti had scrubbed them clean.
He took a deep breath and stepped in. The shock left him wordless as a baby. He coughed and his eyes brimmed and he almost dropped his sticks. The water rose from his knees to his hips and then to his belly. It pushed the wind out of him, and for a moment he wanted to yield to it. He wanted to dive under, but he shook his head clear and pushed the sticks hard into the bed. When he reached the other bank, his capacity for cursing came back to him. He shouted and hopped from one foot to another. He put his pants back on and his dry shoes. He was hot now that he was out of the water, and he sweated even as the snow fell against his hair. He missed the old woman and her stone hut and most of all he missed her stove, which crackled and hissed and dried the air.
He stopped to cough. He pressed both his palms against a tree trunk and bent low. The snow was falling harder, and though sweat ran down his forehead and into his eyes, he shivered and held his collar shut. All day he’d felt a burning in his chest, but coughing did no good and brought up only ropes of yellow spit. It was the damp that clogged his lungs. It squeezed out all his air, and he walked only a few kilometers before he had to lie back down.
The path crossed a paved road and curved between the trees. He walked the road because it was less likely to take him to another bridgeless river. He carried the shotgun over his shoulder. He walked during the day now. His discipline was gone. He had no patience for walking in the dark. He thought of stories in case someone stopped him or asked him where he was going. Trucks came down the road every hour. Trucks and the occasional car and he didn’t look when they drove by. He kept his head low. He was a farm boy walking to his uncle’s house. He was on leave and helping his mother, who had no one else at home. His name was Markus, and he didn’t have his papers. His name was Müller, and he had four older brothers and they were all fighting, but not together. They’d been sent to different places, and it wasn’t good to separate brothers like that, to keep apart the ones who knew each other best.
He sat beside a birch tree and ate from the stash the old lady left him. He went behind the trunk so that nobody on the road could see him. He rationed out the food tighter than the ladies who worked the stands. Three thin pieces of sausage and a half apple and a single slice of bread, which was soggy and went down hard. Everything tasted wrong. It tasted like metal, and his throat hurt when he swallowed. He drank from his canteen and wiped his mouth and when he heard sounds on the road he pushed his back against the trunk, but only partway, so he could see. Every day now he had vanishing dreams. He wanted to disappear like his ladies, to be palmed and hidden away.
A truck stopped near the trees. It was a fuel tanker, one of the snub-nosed Opels he’d dug out from the mud when he was at the wall. The driver climbed down. He wore field gray, but his uniform had no bars and no badges. He kicked the right front tire and cursed at it. “Useless,” he said, loud enough for Georg to hear, “what useless shit they give us.” He climbed the side to reach the spare. He was high on the rear wheel housing when Georg began to wheeze. It started in his chest, that terrible tickling, and worked its way up, and he set his fist against his mouth to keep the cough inside. The driver squinted into the falling snow. He waved toward the trees. “It’s no use hiding,” he said. “I see just where you are.”
The driver stood with his arms on his hips. His cap was low on his head and Georg saw only his lips, which were thin and pressed tight together. Georg stood motionless behind the tree. He thought about running the other way. He could take his rucksack and run to the trees. He could take his gun and his rucksack and chances were good the driver wouldn’t follow him. He wouldn’t leave his truck to chase him down. Georg reached for his gun, reached for it out of habit, and then he set it back. It was the pull he felt, had always felt, that strange inevitability, and he didn’t run. He went to the driver, who was waiting for him.
“My spare was leaking,” the driver said. He talked to Georg as if they knew each other already. “The lieutenant didn’t listen. Shortages, he told me, shortages all around.” He took the hubcap off and then the lug nuts. “I found a good spare and took it for my own.” He jacked the truck up, huffing with each pump. Georg could see that he was old now, almost as old as his father, and his hands were spotty. “Right from the lieutenant’s own truck I took it.” He smiled at that. He looked at Georg, and his eyes were tinged yellow.
Georg held the wrench for him. He looked to see if the old man had a gun, but he didn’t see a holster or even a knife. He pointed to the other tires. “They’ve all gone thin,” he said.
The driver ignored him. He grunted and pushed the spare into place. He took the wrench from Georg. He tightened the top lug nut and then the bottom one, and he crisscrossed his way around the wheel. When he finished with the wrench, he tucked it inside his belt. “Why were you in the trees?” He reached for Georg’s wrist. He was quick like a snake, the way he pounced. “What were you doing out there?”
Georg pulled at his hand, but the old man was stronger than he looked and didn’t let go. He held fast to Georg’s wrist and looked up and down the road, and Georg could smell his sour breath. There were no other trucks in sight and no cars and nobody was walking. It was quiet as a cemetery, and only the snow was falling.
“How old are you?” The soldier was breathing hard, and all the muscles of his face had gone loose.
“Thirteen. I’ll be fourteen in May.” The lie came easily to him. He was thirteen and not fifteen. He was only in his third year at the gymnasium. He hadn’t been called up, he never went to the academy or worked at the wall. He nodded at the soldier. He looked into his eyes, and he wasn’t ashamed.
“Thirteen,” the old man said. “Not even any whiskers yet.” His mouth opened a little and his eyelids fluttered. Their breath steamed together in the cold air. Georg stepped back to get away from the smell of him, that strange sour smell of vinegar and sweat. He moved, and the soldier moved with him. The wind picked up. It blew beneath the skirts of the evergreens and made them dance.
He saw how dirty the man’s nails were, as dirty as his own, and he tried to pry those fingers loose. All the pain was gone from his chest. He could breathe again, and he saw things with a strange clarity. He should have taken his gun. He shouldn’t have left it leaning against the tree. The fingers tightened their grip. He wanted to pull the old man with him, to buck against his touch. He’d seen a deer once with a trap around its leg. The steel bit through its fur and into the bone, and it ran anyway. Max needed three shots to bring it down, and he was quiet afterward. “Sometimes it’s hard,” he’d told Georg then. “It’s hard to do what they tell you.” The soldier pulled him closer. Georg looked at those eyes. This is what it’s like, he thought. Sometimes boys are walking beside the road when the planes fly by. Sometimes they’re caught sleeping by a stream and the police bring them back, and this is what it’s like. Look for mercy, look for kindness and for charity, but there’s only steel, only steel and bored eyes. He shouldn’t have coughed just then. He shouldn’t have stopped to rest. The soldier laughed. He threw back his head.
Georg moved quickly then. It wasn’t anger he felt and it wasn’t fear. It was something more elemental, this need to break loose. He brought his heel down hard across the soldier’s foot. He felt the grip loosen around his wrist. It released for just a moment, and he pulled free and he was running.
The soldier followed him at first. He ran halfway to the trees before stopping. “I know what you are.” He bent at the waist. He set his hands on his knees and gasped. “They’ll find you,” he shouted with his last air. “They’ll string you up high.”
Georg went between the nearest trees. He ran away from the road and the truck and he stayed in the hills until it was dark. When the moon was out he came back down and went in circles looking for his gear. The trees all looked the same at night, and it was hours before he found the spot. His gun and his bag were gone, his HJ traveling knife, too, and his blanket, and only the crust was left from his bread. He knelt by the tree and looked to the road, and he wished that he’d shot the old soldier with the sour breath, shot him in the back while he changed the tire, shot him when he reached for the toolbox he kept inside his truck. He’d lost all his things. Only his ladies were left, only the four he carried in his pocket.
He walked that night and didn’t sleep. He went away from the road and walked in the fields instead because he didn’t want to see any more trucks. He had no gear, nothing to carry, but it was harder now than it was before. The burning came back to his chest. He didn’t feel his feet anymore, not even the blisters along his heels, and as he walked, the lie set roots. He wasn’t fifteen anymore. He was thirteen because he’d been thirteen once and he wanted to be thirteen again and because people would believe him when he said so. Bless his fat face, his fat soft hairless face and his rounded chin, and bless those hands of his, too, plump as any girl’s.
It was the softness that bothered his father, he knew this. It was a flaw that only Mutti could forgive. He’d joined the Deutsches Jungvolk when he was nine. He’d been proud of the uniform that looked just like Max’s. He’d trained and marched with the other boys and learned to shoot a rifle and how to put out fires. He’d done everything he was supposed to. The DJ at nine and the HJ at fourteen, but the training didn’t toughen him up. He’s too soft, is what his father always said. Nothing good will come of it. Work is what he needs. Time away from home. Sometimes it takes heat to harden things up. Heat from the fire and a quenching afterward. For a teacher he was quick to find inspiration in the handicrafts and in labor, in the language of carpentry and smithing and animal husbandry.
They’d been in the kitchen together, just his mother and father, but Georg had heard them through the door. “All that running will hurt his lungs,” Mutti said. She ran the water and turned it off again.
“There’s nothing wrong with his lungs.” The old man rapped the table with his knuckles. “It’s his head where the problem is.”
“The doctor will write a letter.”
“Let him go with the rest of them,” his father said. He was getting impatient now.
Georg pressed closer. They argued almost every week. They argued about school and money and the lease for the hunting grounds, which cost more than everything else combined, and Mutti had to turn every penny around twice because a teacher needed a substantial tract, a place where he could bag a roe buck every winter and all the people could see him cart it home. Georg leaned against the door and almost pushed it open.
“Not even fifteen yet,” his mother said, but the fight was gone from her voice. She’d pack his bags when the notice came. She’d take him to the station.
The old man tried to find the toughness in Georg. He tried to grow it the way farmers grow their crops. The branches he kept by his desk, the hours scouting together for deer and the rifles they shot, these things left no mark. Georg was as soft at fifteen as he was when he was eight, and he’d be just as soft at twenty. His father was a teacher and not an alchemist. All his efforts were bound to fail.
And still Georg tried. Every year he went to see the gypsies. It was best to watch from a distance, so he couldn’t see their smudged faces or the tangles in their hair. They were just a blur then, all color and movement and brown skin flashing. They wrapped scarves around their waists and let the ends hang loose, and when they danced the fringes swung. They wore bright leather shoes, red and yellow and cobalt blue, but no stockings, and the old ladies in town shook their heads in dismay at the sight of those bare legs. He’d come especially to see them. He waited until Mutti was distracted, until she left for town or was working her beds, and then he went down by the water. He sat with a book and pretended to read, but he watched them instead. He waited for a twinge.
They came through town twice a year, once in spring and again in fall just as the weather started to turn, and they camped down by the river with their wagons and their carts. Their fires lit up the sky at night and shone on the water, and the townspeople could smell the meat cooking all the way up by the cemetery. Watch for your wallets, they’d tell one another when the wagons came, watch your chickens and your milk pails. Lock your children inside. They’d take the blond babies, the women were sure of it. They’ll take our babies away. They visit the cemeteries at night to steal from the dead. Gold teeth and leather shoes and burial suits, they’ll take it all and cart it away and they’ll leave the dead naked and dishonored in their wooden boxes.
They stayed no longer than a week or maybe two, and he missed them when they left. He missed their music and their dancing and the way they clapped and shouted. He missed their naked brown legs. And still they didn’t help. The gypsies didn’t move him, and old paintings of naked ladies didn’t either, and not even the magazines that Max had left hidden in his room. Max had strapped them under his bed so Mutti wouldn’t see when she reached down with her duster. Georg had found them the summer Max left. He took them and looked at every page. The pictures were sharp and clear, and the ladies wore garters and black underpants and they looked straight at the camera with no shame in their eyes. Some sat with their legs spread wide and cupped their breasts in their hands, and he waited for the stirring but it didn’t come.
Two nights walking and two days sleeping in fields and empty barns, and he drank only water from the streams he found. His boots had holes already and his socks, too, and his bare toes poked through the leather. All those years that Frau Focht had kept her husband’s clothes. She washed and ironed them, and they were ruined now. They were worn through, and she wasn’t here to fix them. Maybe Mutti could stitch them again and fix the holes when he came home. He’d bring them back to old Frau Focht then and thank her for her help. He’d bring gifts, too, marzipan and picture cards and maybe some books because it wasn’t enough just having one Bible in the house. Mutti would come, and it wouldn’t be far if they went together. Just a day on the train. Mutti liked taking the train. She always sat beside the window and looked outside, and sometimes she reached for his hand. “It’s not so much money,” she’d say, “and look how far we can go,” and she seemed almost sad when she said it.
On the third night he couldn’t swallow anymore. He went back to the road even though trucks might still come. It was straight, and he could see the trucks coming long before the drivers could see him. He told himself the road was safe along this stretch, and so he walked along the shoulder and tried to ignore the tickling in his throat. He stopped when it grew stronger. He knelt on the ice and choked like a drunkard. Nothing loosened in his chest. He gasped for air and spit himself dry. Another week or two and he’d be home in bed, and Mutti would sit beside him. His room would be warm. He pushed himself up. He rolled back on his heels, and he saw a solitary light farther up the road.
He was shaking with fever when he came to the town. The lights were out in all the houses and the streetlamps were dark save one, and though he stifled his coughing, there was no one on the streets to hear. The snow had gone soft as he walked, and a steady rain began to fall. The sting was gone from the wind. Every time he stepped he felt the water rise between his toes. He should have hurried, but he was tired and he wanted to take his time, to walk the streets when everyone else lay in their beds. He looked at the windows as he passed. He looked for shadows, for a fluttering behind the curtains. He heard sounds with a peculiar sharpness. He heard the pinging of water from the gutter spouts and door signs swinging in the wind, and somewhere behind the houses a dog began to howl.
He came to a church and sat on the steps. It seemed no bigger than his house back in Heidenfeld. It was built at an angle, straddling the two roads that went through the town. I’ve found a town of dwarves, he thought, a town with houses and churches and roads all built on a three-quarter scale. He was certain he’d hit his head against the streetlamps if he stood up straight. He’d rest for a little while. Time to stretch his tired legs. He lay back and closed his eyes.