Forty days had passed since Christmas. Forty days since Christmas and another forty until spring. It was time to bring the baby to the temple, to light the candles to mark his name. The ladies wore their good hats and carried their candles for the blessing. Most had white tapers that they bought in town, but a few were lucky and carried beeswax candles from their people up in the hills, and they smelled sweet as berries when they burned. Etta brought her candles for the whole year, thinking it better to bring too many than too few because it was a long time to wait until the next blessing.
Etta unbuttoned her collar as she walked. Water ran down the stones, and she slipped in her leather shoes. The ice in the river had already gone soft at the edges. It cracked like bones breaking, and the water came up black from beneath. In the afternoon snow slid down from the pitched rooftops and fell on passersby. The ladies cursed the sun then and the melting ice. They wished for fresh snow, enormous drifts of it, and winds that blew down across the hills. If it warms, they said, the Amis will come. The sun will shine down on them and warm their shoulders, and they’ll cross the fields from here all the way to Kassel. Let it stay cold. Let the snowdrops freeze on their stalks and break, keep the buds from the trees. They wore their coats and their scarves. They wrapped themselves in felt and wool, and all around them the air went soft and the sun shone on the river.
Pfarrer Büchner stood at the pulpit and blessed the candles. “Light our hearts,” he said. “Light them as we light our candles.” The sun shone through the windows, and all the saints in the glass were lit and threw their colors across the altar. He read from Luke. He told the story of Joseph and Mary bringing the baby to the temple. Simeon took the baby up in his arms and blessed him. “O Blessed Mother,” the priest said, “the sword is in your heart.”
The ladies stood together on the steps when the service was done. They wanted to know if there was any news. Every time Etta saw them they asked the same question. “Did it come?” Ilse asked. “Did a letter come?” The others gathered close to hear.
“Nothing. Not even a note.”
It’ll come and with good news, they said. This is the week. He might not be in the city. They probably have him working. In the fields, that’s where he is, that’s where they always take people, in the country where the air is clean. They looked up to the sky. She looked with them and wished for clouds, but the sky was clear, and the Allied planes flew undisturbed. They flew over the river, over the hills and toward the city, and everywhere new posters were on the walls. Frankfurt is the new front city, they said. Together we must defend it, and how could this be? she wondered. How could this be true, when Frankfurt was only eighty kilometers away?
Etta checked the mailbox twice a day, and still she was surprised when she saw the letter. She set her finger under the flap and worked the envelope open. She read the letter twice on her stoop and once more in the kitchen. Max was at the University Psychiatric Clinic in Würzburg, it said; he’d been there for weeks. All this time and he’d been in the city. He’d been there when she’d gone to see the cousins. The doctors had him just a few blocks away. The letter spoke of treatments and therapies and the uncertain prospects for recovery. The words slipped away from her. She read the same sentence three or four times and was still unsure of what it said. The signature at the bottom was smudged, and it took her a good while to make out the name. Franz Selig, it said, chief administrator for the intake section. It wasn’t even a doctor who wrote to her about her boy, not even a doctor or a nurse. Just before the closing sentence, which wished Max a quick recovery and freedom from suffering, someone had scratched out a few words. They had used a pen with a thick nib, working their way across the words upward and then across until a black box covered what had been written there.
She went to the window and held the paper up to the light, but she could see nothing. She was certain that there was something important inside that blot, and so she took to rubbing it with her fingertip. She licked her finger and when that didn’t work, she took a damp rag and wiped against the paper. What had they written there? she wanted to know, what had they said before changing their minds? She pushed harder and harder, and she stopped only when she had worn a hole through the paper. She smoothed the letter then and set it out to dry.
Sometimes the feeling rose inside her and took away her air. It came while she was washing the dishes or peeling potatoes or sweeping the snow from her stoop. It rose inside her chest, and she wanted to shake Josef then. She wanted to tear his books from their shelves and break his radio and burn all his precious papers, but she pushed these thoughts away. Anyone could have gone and told. All the people who saw Max on the streets, who saw him at mass or pacing in the graveyard and talking to the stones. The town kept no secrets, and still she looked around the empty house and the tightness came to her chest like great iron bands strapped around her ribs and it left her gasping. She fought the feeling when it started. She lived in a new world now, a world she didn’t know, and the time for tears had gone and the time for softness, too. Be resolute, she told herself. Be hard like the rock and quick like the water so she could bring her boy back home.
Josef speared the last herring from the bowl. “I’m hungry still,” he said. “Fish doesn’t stick. It doesn’t fill me up.” He mopped the juices with a piece of bread. She could tell he was thinking of dinner already, of the plate she would fix for him.
“Come with me to the city,” she said. “We’ll go together. We’ll talk to the doctors.” He was a teacher and they’d listen better to him, but only if it was a good day and his eyes were clear. He’d wear his wool suit and they’d take the train, and they’d walk together just as they did when Max was in school there and renting a room on Lindenstrasse. They’d gone every other week that first year. She brought Max food and did his wash and scrubbed the floors, scolding him because his room was messy and he didn’t fold his clothes. “What a slob I raised,” she told him. “You’re living in a rat’s nest.” He spent his money on books and beer and not on a cleaning girl, and he laughed when she complained. He held up both his hands.
“I’ve got work,” Josef said. “Maybe next week we’ll go.” He licked his knife clean and set it back, dissatisfied. He looked to the cupboard where she kept the hard candy and the licorice sticks, but she ignored him. Let him get his own. Let him lift a finger for once. She cleared the table, looking straight at him as she took his plate. He squirmed a little then, and his face went puckery. She looked at him as she washed the dishes and as she dried them and set them back in their places.
“You can take a few days,” she said. “They’ll understand if you need some time to see about your son.”
He looked at her for the longest while, squinting as if trying to understand.
“They don’t need you until April,” she said. “That’s when you go back.” She heard it from Maria, she told him, Maria who couldn’t keep any secrets, not even when she was a girl. “There’ll be no resting when they call you back. You’ll be working every day.”
He scratched his chin and nodded, but reluctantly. He pushed back his chair. “I’m tired,” he said. “My knees hurt.”
She scrubbed her counters and cleaned the sink and wiped the table down. She wanted to say things that would hurt him, that would make him look her way. She wanted to tell him what she knew. You lost the buckets and the shovels. You spent the whole day retracing your steps, looking behind buildings and digging up fresh snow with your hands. They sent you home when you couldn’t find them. They took your armband and your gun. All the men knew. They came home and told their wives, and now she knew, too. She wanted to say these things, but it wasn’t any use. She’d have to bring her boy home without anybody’s help.
He was back in his chair, his pant legs pulled high over his ankles. She set a briquette for him and drew the curtains. He nodded at the radio. A few boys spoke, their voices earnest and upbeat, and some hadn’t broken yet. They sounded like choirboys and not soldiers. “It’s an honor,” one of them was saying, “a real honor to be here.” And Josef nodded, yes, an honor is what it was. He shut his eyes when the music began. She left him to his song. She pulled her step stool to the cupboard and climbed up. She reached behind her tins and her empty canisters of sugar and flour. There were only four squares left, and she had no other bars. She broke him off a single square. She set the chocolate and two hard candies on a saucer and sliced an apple so the plate looked full.
He ate the candies first, sucking on them until they went soft. When announcers came back on, he tapped his feet. “That’s right,” he said, “just right. That’s what I want to hear.” He looked like his father then, and his jaw went slack. She tried to stay angry while she watched him. She tried to keep herself sharp like a blade, but it was no use. He was falling away from her. He reached for her like a man pulled by the current, reached for her and pushed her away.
Sometimes when he slept she could still see the young man he’d been when he left for the front thirty years before. She’d gone with him to the Würzburg station and he waved his hat from the window like every other soldier on the train. They waved hats and handkerchiefs and the women on the platform waved back, and only women were left in the city after that, women and children and old men. Every letter that had come from Josef while he was gone, every smudged letter was a gift, and she read them all until she knew the words by memory. The land was a moonscape, he’d told her, with no trees, no flowers, nothing green or growing and no birds in the sky, only rats and mosquitoes that sucked the blood from the dead and the living alike. She wrote back with news from Heidenfeld and from his teachers and from church. She didn’t tell him about the boys from town who had died or how food was getting scarce. She focused on the silly things. The Hankels’ shepherd wandered into the gasthaus and stole a sausage from the mayor’s table. Just as the mayor raised his glass in a toast, the old dog made its move. The Baiers and the Mecklers were still fighting about the boundary between their land and everything was just the same and he needed only to come home. He stumbled on the platform the day he came back and she caught him by the sleeve, and he wasn’t himself, she could see this, but he was with her and he was alive and that was enough.
She roused him when it was time for bed. He sat upright in his chair, his chin tucked tight against his chest, and his snoring was louder than the radio. “I’m not sleeping,” he told her. “I was just resting my eyes.”
“Better to rest upstairs,” she said. “You’ll give yourself a crick.”
He grumbled a little and pulled his arm from hers, but he went with her anyway. They climbed the stairs together. He walked fast just to show her that he hadn’t been sleeping, and when they reached the bedroom he took off his shirt and his pants and handed them to her. By the time she had hung them on their hooks and changed into her nightgown, he was snoring in his bed.
He was still sleeping the next morning when she left for the station.