The telegram came from Berlin. It sat a full two days before the postman found it. “It fell against the wall,” he said. “I didn’t see it until I bent to tie my shoe.” Ingrid took the paper and didn’t read it, and when the postman turned to leave, she tried to keep him at the door. There was fresh bread. It was cooling on the rack, and he should come inside and have a warm meal, but he shook his head. He’d brought the paper only because the party official was in Bretten and wouldn’t be back for few days. Georg stood in the hall and listened, unsure of whether to leave or to stay.
“I’m sorry,” the postman told her. He touched his hat and bowed. His hands were scabby and his fingers bent. There might be a picture of the grave, he was saying, they might have sent it already, but she had to be patient because it took weeks sometimes or even months and other times it didn’t come at all. He looked at her feet and at the doorframe and the iron handle, anywhere but her eyes, and he squinted because the wind was starting and the raindrops blew against his face.
She watched him go down the steps. He held the railing to keep from slipping. When he reached the bottom she shut the door. She went to the kitchen and cut three fat slices of bread, and when Georg tried to say something, to find a word of comfort, she put her finger to her lips. She wrapped the slices and put them in his hand. “Hurry,” she said. “He walks fast for an old man.”
She stayed inside her room that night. She didn’t open the door, not even for the priest. Georg heard drawers opening and closing again, and just after midnight she began to move things, heavy things that scraped along the floor. When she came out the next day her face had settled into creases. She peeled potatoes and set the herring in a bowl, and she looked like a drier version of herself, the way he imagined her mother or her grandmother. Grief had etched lines into her face from one day to the next. It was real as a disease, the way it changed her.
She didn’t wait to sort through all her husband’s things. She set them in boxes and in crates. His socks and his pants she gave to Georg, who resisted at first and relented only when her face went quivery and she began to shout. The shoes and the work boots and his winter coat went to the old people’s home, and his best pipe she threw on the compost heap so no one else could smoke from it. She carried the telegram while she worked, in her apron pocket or tucked inside her bra. She carried it as if it were a lock of hair or a tombstone rubbing, and she went peevish when he noticed. Time will make things better, he started to say, and she shook her fist. Going to God, freeing the spirit, leaving the stage, finding peace, joining the angels. So many ways to say it and all of them meaningless. “He belongs here,” she said. “He belongs with me and not with the God who took him.”
She had trouble picking a poem for the notice cards. None of the verses sounded right, she told him. None of them was true. In the end she chose a simple couplet. He gave his utmost, it said, and I gave my happiness. She had no patience for poems about courage and the afterlife and eternal rest. They were just words, she said, and they gave no comfort.
He helped her with the notices when they came. He folded them lengthwise, and she addressed the envelopes. The cards were thick and rimmed in black, and each had a photograph of Richard in his dress uniform and his winter cap. He was younger than Georg expected. His front teeth were crooked, and he smiled anyway, broadly as a boy.
She was left-handed just like Mutti, and sometimes she smeared the ink. She looked up from the cards every time he coughed. She frowned over her glasses and scolded him. He coughed too much and the priest didn’t eat what she cooked for him and the postman should have seen the notice sooner. Her voice went hard. That was no way to handle the telegrams, she said, letting them fall into a crack. And what about all the letters she hadn’t sent. She should have written every day and not just twice a week, especially once the omens turned. She’d known for at least a month before the notice came. Dogs barked when she passed, even dogs that were old and friendly and knew her voice. Crows gathered by the door and didn’t move when she threw stones, and just two nights before the postman knocked she’d dreamed of her grandmother, her mother’s mother who had passed on years before. “You’ve married a good boy,” she told Ingrid, “a real fine boy, but he’s too thin.” The dream was real as her wedding band or the crucifix on the wall, and still she didn’t write.
“I brought him bad luck,” she said. “I wasn’t minding the signs.”
“We never know how things will be,” Georg said. “God doesn’t give us clues.”
“You’ll understand when you’re older. When you’re married.” She reached for her handkerchief. “If you ever get married.” There was something spiteful in her voice, he was almost certain, but when he looked at her, she was rubbing her eyes.
He cut his finger on the edge of one of the cards. He wrapped a napkin around the cut and kept on folding.
“What about your mother,” she said. “When was the last time you sent her a letter? She’ll want to know you’re well.” She looked at Georg and pointed her pen at him, and he didn’t want to think about writing to Mutti because his father would be there, too. He’d be sitting at the table.
Georg finished the first stack of cards and began with the second. He didn’t meet her eye, but she watched him anyway and he could tell she wasn’t going to let it go. There’d be no peace until he lifted his pen.
She went through the books last. They were in his trunk, and it wasn’t easy bringing it up from the cellar. Georg pushed from below and she tugged at the handle and together they hauled it up the stairs. She looked for marks he might have left in them, for scribbling in the margins and slips of paper he might have forgotten, but he kept his books clean and she found only a braided green ribbon that he’d used once to mark his place. She sent the books to the schoolhouse, all except for one that she saved for Georg. It had maps of the provinces and the cities from the French border all the way to Freiburg and Sulzbad, and alongside each map were pictures of cars that someone had glued in one by one. Cruising with Abdulla—Through the World!, it was called. Abdulla was a cigarette and not a person and so the ladies in the back seat were smoking, those glamorous ladies in their hats and gloves. They were smoking as their driver took them to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and the Roland Fountain in Hildesheim, to the Hofbräuhaus in München and the harbor in Hamburg. They went past the Acropolis, past quarries on Malta and those famous steps in Rome and the racetrack in Monte Carlo, and from one page to the next they were in America, in Arizona and Colorado and the forests of Arkansas. The maps bore no relation to the picture plates, and so the map with Dresden was framed by pictures of Kansas and Massachusetts, as if to say, look how big the world is and how different one place from the next.
“He smoked a lot of cigarettes for these pictures,” Ingrid said. “His teeth were brown by the time the book was full.” What a waste, she must have thought, look at all the places he’ll never see.
Georg flipped through the pages until he found the map with Heidenfeld. He pointed to the spot, and she looked at it and shook her head. “It’s not so far,” she said. “It’s closer than I thought.” She pulled the book away from him. “It’s yours if you want it. Write a letter to your mother, and it’s yours.”
She had the paper ready, and she left it on the table. She took the paper away before lunch and set it back afterward, but she didn’t pester him or remind him about the book. He knew she was right. He should write to Mutti and tell her he was safe. He could tell her that and nothing else, and it would be enough. He had known this even at the wall, but he always found reasons not to. He didn’t write because he had nothing interesting to tell her, because he was unhappy and she’d sense his misery even if he only said hello. He didn’t write because Müller was with him and later because Müller was gone and because they might open his letters and read what he had written. They had offices that looked at the mail and they stamped it when they were done just so people would know. There was always a reason.
He took the paper and went to his room. He began and stopped and threw away the sheet and began again. One version told the truth and said how he had run, and in another he wrote about the fighting as if he’d been there himself. He pretended he was Müller, who was alive and with his group and they’d fallen back from Vossenack. They were out of the forest now, where it was dark even in daytime because the fir trees were old and leaned one into the next and knitted themselves together. It was a different world under the branches. Sometimes the compasses spun around for no reason, as if the polarity of things had been reversed, but he was healthy and he was with other boys he knew, and it was easy writing as Müller. He’d thought so much about him and how things might have gone. The repetition brought familiarity, and over time this familiarity began to feel like truth, and so the words came and he wrote them down. He folded the letter when he was done and gave it to Ingrid.
She left the book on his pillow. When he was alone in his room, he took a piece of string and measured the distance to where Müller’s family lived. He traced the finger lengths across the pages and wrote each number in a column. He added them all up and checked his work, and he dreamed of maps that night, of maps and wooden crosses and those ladies in their convertible driving along the shore.
The Amis had Köln now and the last of the Westwall, too. All that work digging, all the boys who’d been sent to fight, and none of it mattered. The Germans had flooded the Rur valley, but how long could they keep the Amis out? Any day now they’d cross the Rhein, too, and their planes would fly over the cities and drop more bombs and those cities would burn and all their people. Ingrid didn’t listen anymore when the music stopped and the announcers came with their reports. She scrubbed the floors and cooked the old priest’s meals and she didn’t sing anymore either or stop to chat with Georg. He helped her in the kitchen as best he could. He peeled potatoes and scrubbed the dirty pans and he worried for Max because the Russians might have him. They might have taken him prisoner. The world was spinning, faster, faster. The world was burning, but it was calm inside the rectory, and the rain turned to wet snow and the flakes melted on the street.
Men came knocking after the notice came out. Old men and veterans on crutches and soldiers home from fighting, they all came, and she opened the door for them and let them inside. The sounds carried all the way to his room, gasps and the bedsprings creaking and sometimes things knocked against the wall, and only the priest didn’t hear, old Zimmermann who slept on the other side of the rectory and up the stairs. She looked just the same in the morning. Her hair was pinned back and she wore the same sweater and the same housedress with its faded collar, and she never said anything about the men who came to see her, all those men who knew just when to visit and when to take their turn. She took her anger and made them moan, and it was hard to look at her.