They walked single file, and the youngest boys were in the back, kicking up leaves. Georg cupped his hands over his ears. The wind blew hard across the lake, churning its waters and bringing up whitecaps. It was time for their winter uniforms. Time for the ski caps and the long woolen pants. Fall came fast in the valley. It came fast and was gone, and the winter would last until April, but the others didn’t mind. They shot their rifles and climbed on their bellies in the mud, until their skin went pink and then red from the cold and sweat ran down their foreheads and into their eyes. They chopped wood, too, and fixed fences and worked like farmers because it was good for young men to work in the countryside, especially for the city boys in the group who had never milked a cow before or wrung a chicken’s neck. Drafted into the Jungvolk at ten and the Hitler Jugend at fourteen and they were almost soldiers now. Just one more winter and their papers would come.
Who knew why they’d wanted him at the Hitler School. His eyes were brown and not blue. He was fat even before he came, and he’d gotten fatter still because the food was good. They fed their cadets fresh meat and thick slices of bread, and there was butter at the table and sometimes even chocolate. They taught no math and no languages at the academy, no painting or poetry, because they needed soldiers and not scholars. The instructors talked about the Slavs in class and how primitive their faces were and how to use the Panzerfaust, they talked about the Jews and how they had to be rooted out from German soil, and nothing they said made sense. There weren’t any Jews here and not in his class back home either. He wasn’t sure how long it had been since they’d gone away. Helga Weinstein with her pale eyes and the Stern brothers who lived in the finest house in Heidenfeld and went to Würzburg every week to study violin, they’d stopped coming to school from one day to the next. They’d gone to their cousins in the hills, some people said. They’d gone to America, and Georg was jealous at the thought. He looked at the maps on the wall instead of listening to the lectures. He measured how far he was from home, how far from Mutti and his room. Not even two hundred kilometers if you went straight, but Heidenfeld was as far away as the moon, Heidenfeld and the schoolhouse there and all the things he’d learned, all his Latin and his Greek.
He walked now behind Little Graf, who swung his arms by his sides. The wind blew down leaves, and they fell slow as confetti. He stopped to catch his breath, and the others passed him in the line. “Come on, old man,” someone said, “you’re almost there,” and a few laughed. Georg laughed with them. He knew humiliation. He knew all their jokes. They teased him because he was fat around the belly and his shoulders sloped. They teased him because he lingered over his old magazines. Youth and Homeland and Der Pimpf and The Young Fellowship, he had them all and knew the pages with the best photographs. The boys were perfect in those pictures, caught in a perfect moment when the light fell soft across their skin. They threw javelins. They jumped and ran and shot their bows. They looked beyond the camera, toward the finish line, toward the sky, and they were graceful as cats the way they moved. “Those old things again,” someone would say when he pulled them out, “why not look at something new.” They shook their heads because he was a hopeless case, and sometimes they didn’t let it pass. There was a strange tone to their teasing then, but he pretended not to notice, and once Müller had come in and sat with him. “Give me one,” he said, and they read together, and the others went quiet and left them both alone.
The boys came to the schoolhouse and found their spots by the long table. The classroom was empty and the teachers were gone for the day, and it was time for cleaning. All their rifles lay in a line, their bronze brushes and rags and jars of oil. Georg dipped his patch in the bottle. He loved the smell of the solvent, thick as liquor and sweet. He was scrubbing out the bore when the droning began. It was distant at first, and no one looked up. They were accustomed to the sound. Every afternoon they heard it. They had gone to the shelter the first few times, huddling close in the cellar under the town’s only hotel, but it was worse in the shelter than it was outside. The old folks gasped for air down there and fanned themselves with pieces of cardboard. Babies cried, and mothers shoved one another to find a place. They stopped going after a while, a few at first and then more and more still, until they all stayed in their rooms and worked right through the noise. “Damn wasps,” one of them said, “that’s all it is.” They measured the sound in wasps, saying that wasn’t too bad. It’s three wasps at most or maybe four. But they were nervous even as they laughed, and the sound worked its way through them until they quivered like tuning forks.
Georg took a fresh patch from the pile. He reached across the table for the solvent. “Something’s different,” someone said, “they sound different this time.” There was a moment of perfect stillness in the room, and all the air went heavy. Before anyone could rise from the table, the walls shook, and the windows shattered. The glass came down onto the worktable, and it fell in pieces against their heads. Some of the boys were cut, and the blood matted their hair and ran down their cheeks. They knelt together in the center of the room and waited for the rumbling to stop, and when it did, they went outside and looked to the sky. Smoke rose in pillars from the town center. It drifted lazily toward the hills.
They walked together toward the smoke. The youngest boys ran, and even the ones who were bleeding came. Ash floated in the air and fell soft as powder on the buildings and the streetlights. Townspeople stood on the curbs and gathered around the buildings that were hit. Men were high on the piles already, pulling out bricks and planks and tossing them down. Old women fetched buckets and shovels and barrows. They ran fast along the streets, those gray women. They were accustomed to cleaning up. A girl sat at the side of the road and held her head in her hands. Two friends spoke to her and stroked her hair, but she began to wail anyway and the sound carried all along the piles.
The older boys climbed on first and pulled the young ones up. They scaled the rubble as if they were going for a hike on a hill and not climbing over bricks and wood and broken glass. They passed the debris piece by piece down the side of the pile until it reached the bottom, where it was sorted and put in barrows and carted away. It was hot on the pile. Georg could feel the heat through the soles of his shoes. He’d have blisters for certain when he was done. All the air smelled of metal, and even when he drank from his bottle the ash burned in his throat. Little Graf worked just below him and took his bucket when it was full. He gave it to the next boy, who passed it down the line.
“What a mess,” Little Graf was saying. “What a waste.” He looked around for someone to agree, but nobody listened. He was compact like a gymnast, and his voice hadn’t changed yet. It was high as a choirboy’s, and so the boys all called him Little Graf, because Graf means “count” and they thought that was funny, having a Little Count in school with them. “Next best thing to a Little Prince,” they’d say, “just about as good.”
Georg pulled shingles from the pile and jagged stones, and farther down he found coins and leather purses and envelopes that crumbled between his fingers. He worked, and the pile revealed itself. It yielded all its treasures. He dropped a shoe into his bucket. It looked like one of Mutti’s walking shoes, built of stiff brown leather and thick laces that she pulled tight around her ankles. The heel had broken off clean. Where was she, this lady? Where had she gone? He reached inside the rubble. She might be watching barefoot from the street below where the children and the injured had gathered and the ladies with their coal shovels. She might be waiting inside her house or pushing barrows with the other ladies. But he knew. He knew where she was, this lady who wore brown boots. She lay inside, deep below where the wood and the stones had fallen first. He was standing over her. The piles were like the pyramids, and people were buried inside with all their things. They were buried and could find no air. The boys went quiet as they worked. They were stepping on graves, and it wasn’t right to shout.
His eyes burned and stung. He rubbed them but it did no good. He wanted to be done with the digging. He wanted to pull away all the things and throw them to the street, and still he was scared to see what lay beneath. Max had told him once that people woke up inside their coffins. It was a scientific fact. A poor woman in Köln was buried alive, he said, she was buried in her coffin, and no one knew. His eyes shone in the telling. Her name was Bischof and she was young, and a pair of grave robbers saw the marks she’d left. All the papers talked about it and the radio, too, how she’d scratched at the sides of the box and her fingers were raw with splinters. Imagine how many more there might be—Max had laughed then—imagine how many more and no one will ever know. He could tell that Georg was scared at the thought, he could always tell, and so he laughed again and told him not to worry, there were special coffins with telephones and alarm bells just in case. That’s what you’ll have, he said, only the best for you. He had a way of saying things, his brother. He made his own trouble.
Georg knelt by the pile like a parishioner. He filled his bucket, and Graf grunted below him, and their faces went shiny from the heat. The girls were setting up the lunch truck on the street. They were bringing out the soup pots and slicing loaves of bread.
He pulled a plank from the pile and slid it down the side. When he turned back, he saw a hand curled like a crab where the plank had been. He looked at it for a good while. It was real as his own hands and would not be denied. He turned around and waved. “I’ve got someone,” he shouted down the pile, “I’ve got someone here,” and all the nearest boys climbed to his spot. They pulled out wood and piping and broken bricks and threw them down the side, forgetting the buckets and the people below. They followed the hand to the wrist and then to the elbow.
One of the young boys didn’t want to wait. He took hold of the wrist and tugged. No one paid any attention. He tugged again and fell backward. He let out a shriek, holding it up like some terrible trophy, that arm that ended in nothing and was connected to nothing, and he ran down the side of the pile. He held tight to the hand, resisting when two older boys tried to take it from him. “Don’t touch it,” he said, “let me go,” and he was shouting still when they led him away. After that Georg didn’t look at what he found. He set things in buckets and didn’t look. They worked until dark, and when they left, the ladies were still sweeping the streets with their long twig brooms.
They didn’t talk about the piles that night. They didn’t pull out their decks or magazines, and when the lights went out, they turned to the wall and slept. Graf was crying again. Every few days he cried, but he didn’t remember when he woke, and if somebody mentioned it he walked away angry and didn’t listen. Georg waited. He set his hands behind his head, and his fingers were sore from working the piles. He knew the sounds the other boys made. He knew Müller and how he breathed and how Schneider cracked his knuckles, and farther along the wall, the Heller brothers rolled and twisted in their blankets. He knew all their nighttime sounds and feared that they knew his.
He went to his rucksack once the last of them were asleep. He rolled to his side and reached for it like a friend. He had three sausages tonight, a slice of buttered rye bread, and a single spotty pear. He ate the bread first and then the pear. Schneider talked in his sleep two beds over. He laughed and spoke low in his dream language, and Georg understood none of it. He ate the sausages one after the next. His cheeks bulged big as a trumpeter’s, and he was ashamed and contented both. He thought of home when he ate. He thought of home and how the kitchen smelled. The pork fat was soft against his tongue, and though he was thirsty from the salt he lay back down when he was finished and belched under the sheets. He kicked his blanket and rolled around to find his spot. His sleep was uneasy. It always was when his belly was full. His dreams were strange and fleeting, and he sweated from the heat of all that food, and when he awoke he was hungry again. He was first in line for breakfast, and at breakfast, he thought of lunch, and so it went. It was a beast, his belly, and it had to be fed.
They liked to sit around the table after dinner. “Who’s prettier,” someone would say, “Brigitte Horney or Zarah Leander?” and they’d lean in close to bicker. She’s too dark, or she’s too pale, she’s klotzig, that one, and her bones are big. They wagged their spoons and elbowed each other to make their points. Actresses and boxers and planes and battle tactics and Churchill who was fat like a turnip. Spartans against the Romans, who would win if they fought? And what about the Vikings? The Vikings would beat them both. They argued about all these things, and they shouted sometimes and laughed. They were alien to Georg as moon men. They were fifteen years old, just like him. He’d left them in the dining hall and gone back to their room.
He knelt by his headboard and reached between the mattress and the metal frame. The pouch was where he’d left it. Its leather was soft and had gone dark around the edges from wear. He unwound the string, and the ladies tumbled into his hand. Five perfect Lady Liberty half dollars, gifts from his uncle Fritz, who had left Germany years before and settled in Milwaukee. He’d written and told them about his travels, about the Indians he saw and enormous red rocks and San Francisco where the sun shone even in December and all the pavement sparkled. “It’s the quartz,” he told them, “there’s quartz in the streets and everything shines in the city.” Georg and Max fought over his letters, reading them and rereading them until the paper went soft.
Of all the gifts his uncle had sent, Georg loved the coins best. He loved the smell of them and their feel against his skin, and the look of the ladies, all vertical lines and fabric draped across lithe bodies that walked toward the setting sun, their arms held high as if making an offering. Max had taken them first, of course. “Respect your elders,” he said when he took them. He kept them in his pouch, and he turned down all the things Georg offered him in trade. I don’t want your stamps, he’d say, and I’m too old for marbles, and what would you do with them anyway, these shiny new coins, but just before he left he gave them all to Georg. “Take them,” he said, “take them for luck,” and he tossed the pouch and laughed when Georg missed the catch.
Georg took the honey he’d filched in a napkin from the dining hall and worked a little into his palms. The school had real honey and not the kunsthonig the soldiers had to eat. Mutti would shake her head if she knew. What a waste of good honey, what a shame it was. He rubbed his hands together until they were warm. He had good hands for magic, fingers plump as sausages and straight, with no windows between them that might betray the workings of his trick. He palmed the coins to warm up, and when he was ready, he took a deep breath. He looked straight ahead.
“This is an old trick,” he said. “Kalanag did it years ago.” He raised one eyebrow for emphasis. It had taken months before a mirror to get the eyebrow right. He’d never met the great Kalanag, of course, and besides Kalanag was a big-tricks magician. Entire cars vanished from his stage, and ladies dressed in satin, and once he’d even levitated a locomotive and all the audience gasped. It was just patter. It was what he said to give the trick its rhythm. Only the coins mattered and the crowd he imagined there in the room with him. They were watching him with eyes wide because that’s how good he was, and all the men and all the boys were jealous of the way he worked his ladies.
He set his left hand over the coins and his right hand flat on the desk. He shut his eyes and exhaled. When he lifted both his hands, a coin had moved to the right side. He held his hands over the coins again, like a healer or a holy man, and when he lifted them, another had jumped across. The trick grew harder for him here. The third coin always fell from his palm no matter how hard he squeezed his muscles together.
Someone rattled the door and pounded hard against the frame. Georg jumped up from the desk. They were coming back early today. He dropped the coins into his pouch and pushed it down his shirt, but the drawstrings trailed behind and caught on his collar buttons. He opened the door and stepped aside.
“Why’d you lock it?” Müller looked all around the room and at the desk especially. They were bright and impenetrable as church windows, those strange gray eyes he had, and he fixed them on Georg.
Georg stepped back. He moved toward the desk and thought hard of what he should say. He set his hands inside his pockets, and just then he felt the ladies start to move, down his shirt and under his loosened belt and straight down his right pant leg. He reached for his knee. He tried to stop their fall, but it was no use, and they landed on the shiny linoleum floor with a musical sound, four of them, four of his ladies, faceup in the light from the window.
This was not a good development, no, not at all, he knew this already, but all he could think of as he stood there was how strange it was that they had landed faceup like that. What were the odds of that? Surely less than one in four, no, it would have to be one-half multiplied by one-half four times over, or one in sixteen, but that didn’t sound right either. He had paid no attention when they learned probabilities in school. He doodled in his notebook instead and looked out to the treetops. They were a strange thing anyway, probabilities, with their permutations and combinations, as if things could be figured in that way when everyone knew that there was no pattern to things, none at all, and that things happened all the time for no reason. No, the probability that the ladies would fall faceup was one hundred percent. It was as inevitable as Müller coming back early from dinner and finding him there in the room.
Müller knelt down and picked one up, holding it between his thumb and his index finger. “An Ami coin,” he said, “you’ve got an Ami coin.” He stood up straight.
Boys were in the hallway, opening doors and closing them, and somewhere someone laughed and said “Idiot, you’re an idiot.” The others would be back soon from dinner. They’d be coming to the room, arguing still and pushing their way through the door. Georg wanted to reach for his ladies and put them back in their pouch. He wanted to leave Müller and the rest of them and walk down by the trees. He knew where the barn owls were, all their secret places, and he wanted to go see them. They perched by the fence posts behind the track and sometimes by the well. He pushed his hands deep in his pockets and stayed just where he was.
Müller was looking at the coin in his hand and Georg was looking at Müller, and the fifth lady slipped from the pouch and fell between his feet.
“Are there more?”
Georg shook his head. “That’s the last of them.”
Müller picked the fifth coin up. He was solemn as a choirboy, the way he set them on the desk. The silence from Müller was a terrible thing. The news traveled through it, Georg could feel it rippling outward through the school. The administrators would come running and the Bannführer with his badges. There’d be consequences. They’d send him home. They’d send him east, because that’s where the punishment posts were, and he’d have only himself to blame. He should have brought his aluminum coins. He should have brought his pfennig pieces, but he had left them home on his desk and taken the ladies instead because they were beautiful. “I need them,” he said at last. Müller was still looking at him, and he had to say something. “I need them for my vanishing tricks.”
Müller considered this. Georg looked for surprise in his face but found none. “Show me something,” Müller said, folding his arms.
“I’m out of practice.”
“Show me something easy then.”
The sun set in the window. Its rays came across the desk and lit up the ladies as if they were on a stage and all the lights shone down on them. Georg took one in his hand and pressed her tight against a fold in his pant leg. He yanked the fabric over her. He lifted his hands, and she was gone. The trick was a simple one and meant for small children, but Müller smiled.
Georg took the ladies and set them back in their pouch. People usually wanted to know how the illusion worked. They wanted to see the mechanics of it, the inner workings, and they pestered him when he said no. Do it again, they’d say, right now, not later, do it slow this time, and sometimes they were angry because it was an insult to see something and not to understand. He held the pouch by the strings and waited, but Müller was looking at where the coins had been.
“You’re funny,” he said. He reached for Georg’s wrist and squeezed it hard. He was the best boxer in the class, and he could grapple, too, wrapping those legs tight around his opponents. He knew how to choke them out, knew it from instinct and not from the lessons they took together, and the poor kids who fought him went down on the mat and twisted round themselves like carnival pretzels. Their eyes bulged, and their faces went red, and all the others leaned in to watch. He came so close that Georg could see the blond whiskers that grew along his jaw. “No wonder they give you trouble.” He let go of Georg’s wrist all at once.
Georg put them to bed when Müller left. He slid the pouch back under the mattress. He went through all Müller’s words and his inflections and found hidden meanings in them, and though he should have been scared that Müller knew about the coins, he felt relief instead. He was unburdened.
It took days for the bruise to fade to green, those five circles that Müller’s fingertips had left when he’d grabbed Georg by his wrist. The next time he took the ladies out, Müller sat with him and watched, and though Georg knew the tricks and had done them all a hundred times before, his hands shook anyway.
Mutti had given him the book when he was ten, going on eleven, and sick with a lung infection that kept him in bed all summer and into fall. She kept the curtains drawn to keep out the heat and the bugs, but the flies still came inside and she ran after them with her swatter. She brought him tea and apples and thin butter cookies. She sat with him and her fingers were cool against his wrist, but he didn’t move under his blankets. He didn’t answer when she spoke. The breeze from his window was heavy with the smells of summer, of soap and sweat and the linden trees in bloom. Outside boys shouted. They played ball in the street and climbed the apple trees that grew between the houses, and he slept through all their noise, the laughter and the shouts, the feuds and the reconciliations that followed. He slept, and the sounds fell away. He was hungry for sleep that summer. It was better than food to him, and the more he slept, the more he wanted to sleep, resisting Mutti when she leaned in to check on him. “Wake up, Georg,” she’d say, “have some tea and talk to me,” and he’d close his eyes all the tighter and try to get back to that dream place where the flies didn’t buzz and the air was cool.
She didn’t give up so easily, his mutti. She brought him books and left them open on his table. He fought her at first, but then she began to read to him, and he was caught. Who knew where she had found them; she must have taken the train to Wertheim to buy the stories he loved, or maybe she asked Max to bring them when he took the train back from Lohr. Distant Worlds, The Tunnel, The Hands of Orlac, The Amazon Queen, she read them each in her steady voice that never rose or fell, with all the solemnity of a priest giving a sermon. She sat so straight in the oak chair by his bed and read to him of spaceships and water tunnels, of platforms floating in the sea. Her voice wound like ivy through his dreams. He was with Professor Schulze and Captain Münchhausen, who was fatter even than Georg, and Lord Flitmore and all the rest of the crew aboard the spaceship Sannah. He was with them on Mars, and they walked along its craters. They saw legless beetles there and flying snails. They saw the glowworms that lived under its snows. She read to him, and there was no resisting her or the stories she told. He opened his eyes. He sat up against his feather pillows and listened, roped in by her voice, which pulled him through those dark days of summer.
When he was strong enough to come down to the kitchen for his meals, she brought out a package and set it by his plate. He could tell it was another book. He undid the twine and tore away the paper and let it fall to the kitchen floor. Conjuring Made Easy, the cover promised, A Magic Book for Everyone, by Ernst Firnholzer. There were photos inside, dozens of them, and detailed explanations of every sort of trick, not just the regular ones but strange ones, too, that required silk string and doves, apples and sugar cubes. He pushed his plate aside and thumbed through the pages. “It’ll take forever to learn all these,” he said.
“The good things take work.” She wiped her hands dry on her apron. “They’re a sharpening stone.” She made no sense sometimes, the way she said things, but he was used to it. They all were. They ate and let her talk, and they nodded sometimes to show that they were listening. Yes, they’d say, yes, and they’d reach for the ladle or the bread basket.
Mutti left him and went out to the garden, and he sat with his book. It must have taken old Firnholzer years to pull the tricks together. He went through the pages and imagined the author and just how he was. He was old, Georg could tell from the way he wrote, and he probably lived high on a hill. Moonvine grew in his garden and primrose and angel’s trumpet, and all the flowers opened up at night because that’s when he worked, that’s when the coins and the cards moved best beneath his hands. What a sweet life he had, old Firnholzer. What a sweet life to make things vanish.
He kept the book in his room. He tried the tricks, but he was lazy about it and undisciplined. He left his coins where he had dropped them. “Something’s wrong with them,” he’d say, “they’re too big and these ones here are too thin and they slip between my fingers.” He went peevish at the coins and cursed them, and he set the book aside and went back to his stories.
When the carnival came in October, Mutti took him because he loved the games there and the hawkers with their fresh pretzels and their bouncing balls. She gave him a few coins and left him by the gate. He walked tall through the crowd. His legs were shaky from all that time in bed, but still it was good to feel the sun shining on his head. An old man was there that day, stooped low over his accordion, and though Georg wanted to play darts and buy a goldfish in a bowl, there was something in the old man’s face that stopped him. His eyes were shut tight, as if he were sleeping in his chair. He played a mournful song, a song that didn’t belong at any carnival, and the accordion wailed and quavered and beat like a heart between his palms. The old man was communing with the angels, Georg could see it in his face. A strange power was working its way through him and pulling all the people toward the sound. Georg wondered how it would be to stop people like that, to stop them where they were and make them listen.
He left the carnival with the coins still in his pocket. He didn’t want goldfish anymore or caramels. He picked up old Firnholzer’s magic book when he came home and read it from the first page to the last, and when he was done, he read it again. He set aside part of his room as his studio, and Mutti found him a little folding table and a piece of black velvet. She brought him whatever Firnholzer called for, sugar cubes and extra-soft pencils and silk thread spun fine as a spiderweb. She found it all. She let out a sigh when he asked her for a bird, but then she gave in and brought him a yellow parakeet. She’d gone three towns over to find the bird, and all the people had looked at her when she carried it back on the train. He’d wanted a fat gray dove and not a parakeet, but he was happy all the same, and when he practiced there in his room, with Kaspar whistling and pecking in his cage, time stopped for him, and he was content.
He took his coins everywhere he went, even to school, and as he walked he held them tight in the fold of muscle between his thumb and his palm, so tight that he could swing his arms from side to side and wave at old Frau Fader as she swept her stoop and the coins would not come loose. He checked the tricks off as he learned them, and each time he’d call Mutti to his room. “Come see,” he’d say, “come quick,” and she sat in his chair. He’d clear off his table and smooth out the coverlet and rub his hands together to warm them up. He watched Mutti as he worked, to see whether she was looking in the right places. He could tell from her eyes just how the trick had gone. He worked early in the morning before he left for school and after dinner and on weekends, too, and all the pages came loose and fell across his floor.
The day he left for the academy, when his trunk had been packed and she’d walked with him to the station, Mutti set the book in his hands. She’d repaired it with binding tape, page by page, a job that must have taken hours. She’d cupped his face in her hands and gave him a kiss on each cheek, and she was waving still as his train pulled out and rounded the corner.
Graf was wet from the lake. He shivered in his chair at the mess table, and Georg handed him a napkin to dry his face. They staged their boat fights even when it rained. They fought for fun when their classwork was done. They wrestled for a spot on the boats. What’s the cold to us, they said, what’s the cold to soldiers, and they puffed their chests. They rowed together toward the center, shivering until the work raised their blood. Their hair was damp and stuck to their foreheads, and their breath rose gray as smoke. Georg watched from the shore usually, unless he was feeling brave. He stood by the reeds and the grasses, and the only sounds he heard were the eagle owls high in the trees and the oars slicing through. When the boats came together, the leaders in the front touched oar blades. They were gladiators then. They fought like old Romans. Boys reached across and grabbed arms and oars and sometimes hair. They nudged the other boat and tried to turn it over. They were mostly quiet while they worked, but sometimes one shouted as he went in, and the sound rose from the water and was gone.
The others came to the table. They looked at Graf, who sat dripping in his chair, and they teased him and jabbed him with their fingers, but it was a gentle teasing and left no marks. “We’ve got a mermaid at our table,” they said. “A pretty little fish.” Graf rolled his eyes and laughed with them, and he raised his soup bowl and drank from it.
They set their elbows on the table. They leaned in close to talk, and a few went back to refill their plates. When the table went quiet, Schneider pulled out the book. The World’s Great Beauties, it was called, and he kept it in his bag. “Not that old chestnut,” someone said. “It’s older than Methuselah, that book, and the ladies are, too.” But they turned the pages anyway and looked at all the photographs because they were beautiful, all those ladies from Finland and Austria and France. There were exotic ones, too, from India and China, from Argentina and islands in the Pacific, and they had smoky eyes and waves in their hair, and their lips were shiny as lacquer. The boys knew them all. They gave them names like Liliana and Isabella and Fatima, and they argued the merits of each. She’s horsey, that one, and her eyes are too small, and this one is moon-faced, and on they went, and Müller laughed the whole while. He laughed at them and leaned back in his chair, and Georg looked at Müller and not the book.
They were leaning in to see when Bahnführer Frisch came in. They were all the way to Pomerania and Portugal when he called them to attention. He stood by the front table. He was a tall man and his face was angular, and there were shadows under his cheeks and in the hollow of his throat. He spoke a high German because he was from up north, and his words had none of the softness of the southern dialects. All the boys in the hall sat straighter when he came into the room. Schneider moved quickly. He was deft as a magician, the way he pulled the book under the table and set it back inside his bag.
Frisch was talking, and the whole room was quiet. “It’s time to fortify the wall,” he said. “Time to shore it up.” They’d go west. They needed to repair the Westwall to keep the Amis and the British out. Six hundred and thirty kilometers of ditches and pillboxes and cement to keep out the enemy tanks, and they needed to get them ready. The efforts were already under way in places, but there was much more to be done. The work wouldn’t be easy. Long hours digging and hauling dirt and rocks and laying down wire, but they weren’t little boys in knee socks anymore. No, they were soldiers now, and their country needed them. They’d be in towns near Karlsruhe mainly, and a few would go even farther. They’d stay for ninety days at least, depending on how fast the work went, and they’d be paid just like soldiers. They’d get their eighty marks.
Georg looked at Müller and Graf and all the boys across the table. He heard what Frisch was saying. He heard every word, but it wasn’t until he saw their faces that he understood. The youngest boys set their hands on the tabletop. They pounded their palms against the wood, and there was a strange light in their eyes. A shout went up in the room, and the boys stood together in a single motion. They rose from their chairs. They threw their arms around each other’s shoulders, and someone in the back shouted. “Finally,” he said, “we’re finally going,” and Frisch stepped back and let them celebrate.