Georg dozed and woke and dozed again, and each time he opened his eyes a young woman was sitting by his bed. Her face was dimpled and flushed from the heat in the room. She raised his head from the pillows so he could drink the tea she’d brewed. It was lung moss, she told him, and she picked it from the beech trees behind the cemetery.
“I scraped the fattest lobes for you,” she said. She brewed it fresh, and even with the honey she added it was bitter enough to make him spit.
He tried to talk, but his throat was swollen and no sound came out, not even a croak. He looked around the room, at the cross beside the door and the curtains that she’d opened. It was raining. The wind blew the drops slantwise and he saw no streetlamps outside and no trees. She laid his head back down, and her face leaned over his and she looked like Mutti the way her eyes slanted upward. He tried to follow what she was saying, tried to listen because she was pointing her finger and her eyes were solemn, but he caught only a few words. “Sleep,” she was saying. “Sleep a little longer,” and her fingers were rough against his cheek.
He shivered under the down comforter. He burned and shivered and drenched the sheets with sweat. He heard Mutti’s voice while he slept. She was sitting beside him and reading from his books, and there were bells in every story. They rang so loud he couldn’t hear her voice. He knew the girl’s name was Ingrid when his fever broke, though he didn’t remember talking to her. She lived in the rectory and cooked for the priest, and he remembered the priest’s name, too—Zimmermann—and how his face was thin and had no softness to it.
She led him to the kitchen when he was better. She took him by his arm because he didn’t want to leave his bed. “Bed is where people die,” she told him. It wasn’t true, he knew this and she must have known it, too. People don’t die in bed. They die in distant places, on the field and in trenches and up in the hills. They die at the dinner table and in shelters, but he got up anyway and went with her.
She had the water ready for him, and every time he tried to talk, she shooed him back beneath the towel. “Don’t waste the steam,” she said. “Don’t waste the chamomile I dropped in fresh.” She talked as much as Frau Focht, but her voice was young as a girl’s. He’d slept so long she’d started to worry. He slept through the ringing of the bells and a storm that rattled all the windows. Any longer and she’d have called the doctor. She’d have brought out the salts to wake him up. Another few days and the priest would be back. Every month he went to the monastery. “It’s good that you’re up,” she said. “He’ll want to talk to you when he comes back.”
Georg coughed over the bowl. His lungs were clogged tight. They were dry as they’d been when he was ten and he’d slept all summer in his bed. He sat in the chair, and twice he had to hoist up his pants. For the first time in his life his belt was loose.
“It’s the last storm of winter,” Ingrid said. She was working by the sink. He could hear her work the knife against the cutting board. “It’ll start to turn now.” She spoke a funny German, the way she rolled her r’s. Just a few more days, she was saying, just a few more cold ones. She could tell from the way the clouds hung, and just yesterday she saw the first snowdrops poking through. Spring would be short this year and the summer hot, and so it goes.
He stayed under the towel and closed his eyes and her voice rose and fell the way young girls sang when they were skipping rope. It made him dizzy just to listen to her. The priest didn’t eat enough and her husband had been gone too long. It made no sense how they sent him east, when the fighting was so much closer. All winter she’d worried about him because the snows there were different. They were heavier than the ones she knew. They could work their way through boot leather and freeze a man’s foot to the bone. There’s no telling why he’s there and not here, she said, and there’s nothing I can do anyway.
He worked through his stories while she talked. He set aside the ones he’d started on the road. They were too elaborate and didn’t sound right, and he began again with what he knew. He was at the wall. They sent him north for just a day but the truck was hit. They walked together all night and into the morning, and he lost them when he stopped to rest. He woke, and they were gone, and it was luck that brought him to the town and to the steps where Ingrid found him. It sounded true as far as it went, but he had no answers to questions about his parents. Let’s write a letter, the priest might say, let’s send your parents a wire. Where are your papers? Tell me about your unit and your commander and what happened to your uniform and why don’t we call your group. It won’t be a day and you’ll be back with them. Georg tried to think of answers, but he needed quiet and not the sound of Ingrid’s voice and the closing and opening of the cupboard doors. He needed time alone.
She asked him questions once the water had gone cold. “Where are you from?” She set her hand on her hip and cocked her head. “Tell me about your mother.” But when he tried to answer, she waved him down. She took the bowl from him and emptied it. “It’s better not to know,” she said, and she left him in the kitchen.
They went upstairs together when she came back. Georg went with her because he wanted to see Zimmermann’s room. He was at the monastery still and would be gone for another two days, and she looked happy when she said so. Those trips were a blessing, she told him, because she could listen to the radio announcers then, and they might have news from where her Richard was. It was dark inside the room because the winter curtains were drawn, but Georg could see the radio on the table even in the half-light. It was a Lumophon just like the old man’s, ten years old at least and shaped like a cathedral.
“I almost dropped it last time,” Ingrid said. “It slipped when I took the stairs.” She knelt below the table and reached for the plug.
Georg helped her carry it down. She went backward and he went forward, and he looked around the room as they left, at all those books on the shelves and the armchair where the priest kept his notebooks. “He’s messy with his papers,” she said. “I sweep around the piles because he doesn’t let me sort them.”
They put the radio in the kitchen. Georg sat over another pot of steaming water. She wouldn’t let him sit down unless he breathed in steam. You don’t want a lung infection, she told him. You need to loosen up your chest. She got anxious every time the announcements began. She remembered all the places from the letters Richard had sent. She wrote them down and kept the list inside the pantry. She tilted her head when the announcers spoke, worrying their words around like rosary beads. She closed the cupboard doors too hard when the alerts were done and she was almost spiteful, the way she worked her kitchen knife. “He’s gone already from all those places,” she said. “And I don’t believe them anyway with that strange German they talk. They sound like criminals.” She whacked the knife against the cutting board.
Georg nodded. “Maybe you shouldn’t listen anymore,” he said. “We can put it back upstairs.” He missed the quiet of Frau Focht’s stone house. He missed not knowing things, but still he was drawn to the sound. He sat like his father and listened. Lodz and Tarnów and Kraków were lost and Budapest was falling and Warsaw, too, and the boys were coming home for the final push. Belgium was gone and the Amis were pushing on, past the wall, toward the Mosel and the Rhein, but wait until they come closer, the announcers were saying, wait until they cross. They’ll see then what trouble they’re in. Our boys are falling back on purpose. They’ll squeeze the Amis like a snake.
A march came on the radio next and then trumpets followed by an announcer with a solemn voice. To commemorate the twelfth anniversary of his coming into power, he said, our Führer will now speak to the nation. It took Georg a moment to realize who it was when Hitler began talking. Even through the radio his voice was tired. It lacked the fire from his earlier speeches. The Bolsheviks want to destroy Germany and all of Europe, he said. The Bolsheviks from the outside and the Jews from within, but we won’t let them take us down. No, it was up to the people now, every person in every city and village. We expect every healthy man to fight with his body and his life, and we expect the sick and the weak to work with their last strength against the Kremlin Jews. People in the city must forge the weapons to fight and the farmers must feed them no matter the cost, no matter the hardship, because they will destroy us and all we represent. Together we will overcome this calamity, and Ingrid’s face was pinched. She whacked the knife harder now, so hard Georg was certain the blade would break loose from the handle.
He went back under the towel. He breathed in more steam and coughed over the water. He didn’t want to hear the rest of the speech. He could see already how things would go. The Amis had crossed the Moder and the Sauer, and the Rhein was next. They’d cross at Köln or Bonn or Koblenz, and if the bridges were gone they’d make their own. They’d build new ones and come across. They rolled across the fields like waters from a flood, and it was just the same in the East, where Danzig was gone and the Bolsheviks had crossed the Oder, and soon the waves would meet. They’d surge to the center. They’d cover all the towns and the cities. Bombs over Nürnberg and Goch and Kleve, over Kalkar and Reichswald and Karlsruhe and now Dresden, Dresden where a hundred thousand people burned, maybe more, and the announcers kept talking just like before and the music played. Fight more, the Führer was saying. Fight harder, as if winning were a choice when everyone knew it wasn’t. Priests spoke from the pulpit and ladies came with their coupons and their net shopping bags. They went about their business and they kept quiet because what good was it to say what everyone already knew.
He stayed under the towel even after the water was cold. He didn’t listen to the announcers when they came back on. He didn’t want to hear any speeches, any voices from the front or the names of the newly dead. He stayed there coughing until she tapped his shoulder, and together they carried the radio back upstairs.
Father Zimmermann came back late Saturday, but he made no effort to see Georg. On Sunday Ingrid told him not to come to services. “Stay inside,” she said. “Stay where nobody will see you.” He needed warm air. It was cold outside and damp, and he should stay beside the oven, but Georg went anyway. He was restless, and he came through the doors just as the bells began to ring. He sat in the back with the old ladies and a man with a cane. He set his hands together.
Zimmermann’s voice was an instrument of uncommon power. His hands shook when he talked. His face went red and his eyes bulged, and Georg was certain the old priest was not just communing with the angels but had swallowed them whole. He spoke of duty in his sermon. He spoke of Abraham and his sacrifice. Georg knew the story and all the verses, and still he leaned in to hear.
“God told him to take his son, his only son Isaac, and to lay him down.” Zimmermann raised his hands and looked at the parishioners, who looked back at him and some of them nodded in rhythm to his words. Three days it took to reach the mountain, three days and three nights, and they built the altar together and gathered the wood, and Abraham offered up his son. He didn’t waver. He held the knife and raised it.
Women should have wept at the story. They should have wiped their eyes, but they were hard, even the ones who wore their mourning coats, and they weren’t moved by sacrifice. They knew loss already. They knew about altars and dead sons. The priest drew himself up. He looked even taller in his robes and he spread his arms wide. “Lay not thine hand upon him. For now I know thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.” And so Isaac is spared but not Jesus. One son dies while another lives, and don’t try to understand. There is no understanding perfection with our imperfect minds.
Ingrid was in a sour mood after the service. She didn’t like talk of butchery and knives and strange tests of faith. What kind of example is it, what kind of story, where fathers have to kill their sons? She shook her finger at Georg, who shouldn’t have gone outside. Winter wasn’t done yet, and why bother with compresses if he was going to breathe in that cold air? And besides people saw him in the church. They turned to look when he came in. She swung her iron in the air, and the coals crackled and hissed.
“He thought he had no choice,” Georg said. “God told him what to do.”
Ingrid shook her head. “It might have been the devil talking and not God. You’ve got to do the right thing. You’ve got to use your mind,” she said. “That’s what the real God wants. People should do the right thing but they never do.” She’d learned this when she was little, she told him. She learned it from her father’s mistress who lived just across the street and the whole town knew. She bore him two sons and they wanted for nothing, and she never worked a single day, and when the old man died, and wasn’t even cold yet in the ground, she came for his things. The woven rugs and the fine table linens were piled high, and she filled a cart with them. The silver, too, and the good clock, she took it all because Ingrid’s father had made arrangements for his sons, and all the neighbors watched from their windows. They were doctors now, both those boys, and they lived in Karlsruhe in fine stone houses with housekeepers and nannies and motor cars. One of them even had a cook. It was almost too much, that final detail. It just went to prove that there was no moral reckoning in this world.
Georg stood up and walked to the window and came back again. She shouldn’t be saying things about her father and how he had a mistress. He was uneasy with her talk of private things. He tried to think of the stories he’d polished while he was walking those days after he’d left old Irmingard’s hut. He tried to remember their details.
“I know about you,” she said. “There’s no shame in it.” Her voice was low and easy and absentminded, the voice of a woman sharing a recipe or looking at the clouds and predicting snow. She held the priest’s trousers by their cuffs to make sure the pleats were straight. “I wish my Richard would run, too, and bless every woman who helps him on his way.”
“I’m going back,” Georg said. He pushed his hands into his pockets. “As soon as I’m better I’ll find my group.” He tried to make his voice convincing, but she knew just what he had done. He could tell when she looked at him.