The liquor jars came out before the coffee pitcher had gone cold. It was getting late in the season, but Ilse still had elderberry and juniper and a half jar of plum. The ladies reclined in their chairs and sat with their hands across their bellies. It was warm in the room. The light went rosy as they drank, and their talk fell into the familiar rhythm. A letter from Georg had finally come while Etta was in the city. Josef had thrown away the envelope so she didn’t know when he’d sent it, but he was well, her boy, he was alive and he’d made it out from the Hürtgen Forest. Thank God, they all said, thank God in heaven. Both your boys are alive and soon you’ll have them home. They raised their glasses.
Maria had more news. Fischer was back at work. He was clearing roads up by Lohr and the officers were making him shoot now, too, and they’d set a ring around the barrel of his rifle so he could hold it with his stump. Poor Beate, they said, and just when she thought her boy was home for good. Young Dr. Ackermann was still in the East somewhere. He wrote when he could, and all he ever talked about was snow. It was a world of sun and snow, and the cold worked its way through the soles of his boots because they were made of cardboard and not leather.
“No proper boots for the boys out there,” Maria said. “Not even for a doctor.” She stopped to sip from her cup.
Etta cleared her throat. “I’m going back. I’ll find a room and stay for a while.”
Maria set her glass down. “People are leaving the city. Wait a while longer. Wait before you go.”
“I can’t do anything here,” Etta said. “They don’t answer my letters.”
“My sister left,” Maria said. “Three weeks ago she took the train and she’s in Hafenlohr where it’s safe.”
Ilse held up her hand. “It’s the right thing. They’ll listen if you’re there.”
Maria still looked doubtful, but the others all agreed. They sat like conspirators around the table. You need to pester them, they said. You need to show your face. Write letters and bring them to the hospital in person. Better still, befriend the nurses. Bring them bottles of wine, and bring the director the finest liquor you can find and wrap it with a ribbon. Be pleasant and smile, but don’t yield when they say no; don’t bend, not even a little. They nodded as they spoke. You’ll have him home before summer. He’ll be back with you and eating at your table.
“I’ll cook for Josef while you’re gone.” Regina set her hands flat on the table. “He’ll be lost in the kitchen without you.”
“Keep your food,” Etta said. “I’ll cook ahead. He’ll be fine with what I make.”
It was too much. They shouldn’t be giving away their food, especially not to Josef because he was picky and he wouldn’t be gracious. He’d give them trouble no matter what they brought him, especially Ilse.
“I’ll take Wednesdays,” Regina said. “And Fridays, too, if nobody objects.”
They fought for the chance to feed him on this day and that one. Even Maria agreed to bring a plate. He’d be fat from their cooking by the time Etta came home. The dirty plates would be piled to the ceiling. There was no fighting them and the plans they made. When they left, Regina squeezed her hand. “You’ll cook for us when he’s back home. You’ll make lunch for every one of us.”
“That’s right,” Etta said. “You’ll eat your fill,” and she couldn’t look at them because she didn’t want them to see her cry.
Ilse waited until the others had all left. “Don’t bring him home,” she said then. She refilled both their glasses. It was the last glass of the day. The clouds outside were going to gray. Women were on the streets finishing their errands. They were racing the sun. Time to go home. Time to set the table.
“The director doesn’t answer when I write,” Etta said. “Who knows if he even reads my letters.”
“Bring him here instead.” Ilse’s eyes were bright. All that liquor and she wasn’t even a little drunk. “He can stay at Ute’s farm. He’ll be safe up in the hills.”
“Josef doesn’t miss him. He sits and sleeps by the radio and doesn’t say his name.”
Ilse narrowed her eyes. “We’ll go at night, and nobody needs to know.”
Etta clasped her hands together. The cousins and the colleagues and the students in the city, they fell aside, and she saw only Ilse. She saw her when she was young and her hair still had its color and all her fingers were straight. She’d left the bank that day because it wasn’t right the way they teased poor Willi, it wasn’t right to take his book. Even then she’d been kinder than the others. She had a grace about her. They were old now, the both of them, but they looked out at the world through the same eyes.
Etta drank the last of the liquor and licked the syrup from her lips. Max would stay in the hills. He’d eat good food, and he’d work outside in the springtime air, far from the hospital and from Josef and his sour looks. She’d visit him twice a week and sit with him on the folding chairs Ilse’s daughter kept outside her door. The work would bring the shine back to his eyes. She sat with her friend and it was thin as a thread, this hope she had, thin as a filament, and she reached for it.
Josef watched her pack her bags, and it wasn’t right how she was humming. He sat in the living room, and she didn’t check on him like before. She left him to his radio and his pipe. She was happy to leave. Happy to go to the city without him. He set his pipe down. How long had it been since he’d gone to see the doctor? How many weeks had passed? The days were all the same. All those mornings she went to the milk stand, and she stayed for hours because that’s where the ladies all were, and who knew what they talked about. They saw each other in church and by the cemetery, and still they greeted each other like long-lost cousins. And now she was leaving and he’d be alone in the house.
The doctor’s fat face had made him nervous at first, how soft it was and his hands were soft, too, and hairless, and Josef talked more than he wanted because it was so quiet in that office. No typewriters or radios, not even the ticking of a clock.
“Someone moved my buckets,” Josef had told him. “I won’t lose them again.” He held his walking stick across his knees and looked at that round face. “Next time I’ll make a note of where they are.”
The doctor was polite, how he listened. He sat like a student and took notes in his book. He nodded when Josef paused. He smiled and waited.
“I want to work,” Josef said. “I want to help since my boy can’t.” He gripped his stick tight. “He talks nonsense.” Josef leaned closer to the doctor, who had stopped his writing. “He talks about fires sometimes and water behind the windows. He sits in the cemetery for no reason.”
The doctor had questions. “Tell me about the visions,” he wanted to know. “Tell me what he says and when he sleeps.” They were scientists and scholars, the both of them. They were learned men. Together they’d find the truth, and Josef sat a little straighter in his chair. He cleared his throat and talked like the teacher he was, and Kleissner picked up his pen again. He dipped it in the well and wrote down what Josef said, wrote it down and listened and he asked questions that made no sense. “Tell me about your parents and their parents, about your brothers and sisters. Tell me about your other boy.”
Josef moved his chair closer to the desk. He tried to see what the doctor had written, but the paper was too far away and the doctor covered it with his hand. Down the hill the church bells chimed, calling the ladies to afternoon mass. The doctor asked his questions, and Josef answered them. He’d see about getting Josef back to work. They needed men, especially now. He’d do his best.
Kleissner was polite when he reached for Josef’s hand. He shook it the way colleagues do. He shook it with respect. Josef should have been relieved once the meeting was done, but he was restless instead. He went the long way back. Down the hill and along the bank so she wouldn’t see him from the stand. He swung his stick and scared away the birds, and all the doctor’s questions and all his promises, too, they slipped away. They faded like photographs, and Josef set them aside.
Etta knelt by the liquor cabinet and pulled out all his best bottles. She took out the Ettaler liquor from the cloister and the Jägermeister and far in the back the Asbach Uralt brandy that Josef loved most of all. She gathered up the bottles and dusted them clean and tied a ribbon around each of them. She was no better than a thief, the way she took them. Ilse gave her the last of her jars, too. “They don’t have this in the city,” she said. “Poor people living in those houses without any plum trees or berries to pick. Those gardens they have aren’t nearly big enough.” Etta rolled the bottles in sweaters and wadded stockings in between. Her bags were heavy with all the liquor.
She cooked red cabbage for Josef before she left because the ladies might forget or he might not like what they brought him. She cored the cloves to keep the bitter out and set the apples in the pot, and she looked to the cabinet while she worked. How long until he noticed? How long until he saw the empty spaces where his bottles had been? “Give me some yellow,” he’d say even now, “give me the green,” which tasted like herbs and burnt grass. The monks knew just which ones to pick and how to brew them. “It’s medicine,” he’d say, “it’s good for the heart,” and he was almost tender when he held the cup. She hoped he’d be too lazy to reach for the cabinet while she was gone. Let him sit by the radio and write in his journal, write just what the announcers said and forget about everything else.
He ignored all her packing and her preparations. He didn’t talk about her trip, but when the bags were by the door and her coat was buttoned, he fidgeted in his chair. “There’ll be someone different in the house every day,” he said. “I won’t have any peace.”
“It won’t be long,” she said. “Two weeks and I’ll be back.” She kissed the top of his head, and he didn’t resist for once. He pressed his head against her belly and touched her hand.
“It was wrong how they took him,” Josef said. “They came like thieves into our house.” She pulled away from him and looked at his face, but he said nothing more. His eyes were dark like his father’s, and he closed them.
She found a room in a third-floor apartment off Ludwigstrasse in the northern part of old town, not too far from the university and the clinic. She slept on a child’s bed. It creaked under her weight, and green paint curled from the metal frame and fell to the floor. The windows were boarded shut, and the electricity stopped and started and stopped again. The old woman who lived in the flat took no money from her.
“Help me pack instead,” she told Etta. “My son is gone already. He’s gone to the country with his wife and daughter. Help me bring the boxes to the station. Better you than somebody else. Better you than having it lie empty.” The woman shook her head though because it made no sense that anyone would come to the city. People were leaving from every neighborhood. They took trains and buses and the poor ones walked with their babies, and they all went toward the hills where the planes didn’t fly. The old woman had rolled her rugs and set her best pots in boxes, and only the furniture remained, pushed to the corners and covered with blankets. She sat in her kitchen in the afternoons and watched the shadows grow across the floor.
“What a shame I’ve lived this long,” she said. “Better to die than see the city burn.” She set her hand across her mouth and rocked in her chair, and once the sun had set the sirens started again, and people ran along the streets.
Etta made an appointment to see Herr Selig, and she took the new bottle of Asbach Uhralt with her. She wore her mother’s pearls and pinned her hair and wet her fingers to keep the curls tucked back. She’d taken her wedding band from the cord around her neck and forced it back onto her finger. Selig made her wait a half hour before he came for her. He was younger than she expected, no more than forty, but the veins had broken across his nose and his hair was thin as a baby’s and waved like wheat every time he nodded. She sat across from him with the bottle in her lap.
“There’s been a mistake,” she said. “Max belongs at home.” She tried to take the shrillness from her voice. She tried to smile.
Selig steepled his fingers and sat back in his chair. Papers lay across his desk and on the ledge by the window, neat stacks set one beside the next, and atop each was a glass paperweight. Max’s papers were somewhere in there. She’d give her house and all her precious things to have that file, to set it in her purse and leave with it. The doors would open for him then.
“There was a mistake,” she said again.
Selig rubbed his chin. He nodded while she spoke and furrowed his brow. Just outside his window men were pulling hoses. They pointed and ran between buildings, and others followed with shovels and buckets. A woman lost her shoe by the curb. She slipped once, twice, and fell to her knees, and all around her people worked. The dirt had started to heave early. It made a mess of all the streets and the fields. It’s worse than ice, they said, the way it slicks the road. The woman was up again, and her skirt was brown from the mud. Water sprayed against the windowpanes, but Selig didn’t turn at the sound. It was a world of water out there, of running people, and he couldn’t see it where he was. Peaceful as an altar boy, the way he sat and looked at her.
“He was gone for two years,” Etta said. “His boots fell to pieces from all the walking he did.” She held the arm of her chair. “He’s home not even five months now. Not even five months and he’s gone again.” She forgot all the things she meant to say. She’d noted them before she left her room, and still she forgot them and new words came in their place. He’d won medals. He fought where it was cold even in April, where the snows didn’t melt. Two years without boots or warm coats and sometimes he fought hungry and there was only ice to eat, he’d told her this himself, and men lay where they fell and he climbed over them. “He’s war sick,” she said. “He needs his bed and his books.”
Selig waited until she was done. He cleared his throat and said all the things he’d written in his letter. “It’s a serious condition,” he said. They didn’t know yet how long the treatment would take. They might have to send him someplace else. She should go home in the meantime. They’d send her letters to tell her how he was doing. Every week she’d get a letter. “Go home, Frau Huber,” he said again, and his voice was almost gentle.
“Better to save his spot for someone without family,” she said. She held the bottle of liquor. It was heavy in her lap. She held the bottle by its neck and thought of ways to turn the talk around. “All those sick people and not enough beds.” It was a matter of duty to free the beds for those who needed them most, that’s what it was, and her voice picked up. “I’ll do just what you say. I’ll give him all his treatments.”
He didn’t let her finish. He rose from his chair and held the door for her. She wasn’t ready yet. She set the bottle on his desk and went anyway, and the ladies were typing still, filling in those forms, one after the next, rolling them around the bar and pulling them out and setting them in piles, and the room echoed with the sound of the keys. She had his medals in her purse. She had his Iron Cross. She reached inside but didn’t take it out. She hesitated and they were past the ladies now and Selig was extending his hand, but he looked over her shoulder and toward the door where people were waiting on benches.
She was in the hallway when one of the secretaries found her. She was almost at the steps. “You forgot this,” the secretary said, and gave Etta back her bottle.
Every time Etta came to visit there were fewer patients in the beds. Sometimes in the morning gray buses drove behind the hospital and pulled away again, and she walked a little faster then, unsure if her Max would still be there. She gave the rest of the liquor to the nurses, but they fussed anyway and weren’t any nicer. They frowned when she came to visit and when she brought him food. “It’s too heavy for him,” they said, “he can’t digest it all.” They fed him only oatmeal made with water and not with milk. It wasn’t even warm when they brought the bowl, and it needed sugar. It needed honey.
She hollowed out his book for him. She took his bird book and cut through the pages a few at a time until there was a hole, and when she closed the covers it looked just the same. She set apple slices inside and boiled eggs, sausage and pieces of hard cheese, all the things Ilse had given her for the trip. She sat by his bed with the books on her lap, and when the nurses left, she brought out the food. She hurried him. “This is no time to be picky,” she said. “Be quick before they come and see.” She stood between him and the door, and when he pushed the food away, she gave him a look. She wagged her finger, and sometimes she sat on the bed and fed him. He pressed his head against her lap then and opened his mouth for her, and when he was done eating, she rocked him in her arms.
People were walking outside when she left the hospital. She took off her mittens and her coat because the breeze was blowing warm from the hills. She didn’t look up at the sound of the first planes. Not even dinnertime and the sky was clear and still they came. Every day more planes flew. They came with the thaw. They came just when the birds began to sing again and when the crocus leaves pushed through. The Marktbreit and Seligenstadt trains were hit and the Gemünden station destroyed, and people climbed aboard again as soon as the tracks were cleared. “If it happens,” they said, “it was meant to be,” but they were nervous anyway and the trains were quiet as schoolrooms because people were looking out their windows to the sky.
She didn’t go straight back to her room. She went to the movie house instead and waited because she wasn’t ready yet to sit with the old woman, who had nothing good to say. The Lady of My Dreams was playing in color, and A Night in Venice and Music in Salzburg, and in another week, The Orient Express would show every day and twice on Sunday. She paid her money when it was time and sat at the back, and the weekly newsreel came on first. All the Volkssturm soldiers gearing up, the women sorting boots and sweaters and coats. Everyone smiling, the old men with their rifles, all those gray and balding heads, and the German refugees coming from Prussia, thousands of them pushed out by the Soviets, and they smiled for the cameras, too, and none of it made any sense. It was too much, these pictures, and she stopped watching halfway through. She looked at the people in the theater and not at the screen. It was all women and a few small children sitting in their chairs. They looked like angels in the dark, their eyes silver in the light from the screen. Just two rows over she saw a little boy who curled his hands like Max and another with Georg’s round face, and she had to stop herself from reaching for them.
She walked circles around old town when the movie was done. None of the clocks was working in the city. The clock on the Domstrasse tower stood still at 8:28 exactly and didn’t start again, and other clocks stopped in trolley stations and down by the post office and at the St. Adalbero church and the Grafeneckart. And after the electric plant on Theresienstrasse was hit, the electrical clocks stopped, too, and half the people in old town couldn’t hear the radio anymore or play records. They sat home and waited, they didn’t know what for, and all around them a strange sound worked its way through the walls and into their darkened kitchens. It pulsed from beneath the streets and inside the building walls, steady as a heartbeat, that intake of breath and the release.
The old woman was in her spot when Etta came back. She was watching for the door. “I hear it again,” she told Etta. “Every night I hear it.”
Etta nodded. “I hear it, too.” She pulled a chair to the table. The noise unnerved her and made it hard to sleep. Who knew what it was. It’s birds, some people said. They’re on the roof. They’re in the walls, caught in the plaster. Or maybe it was the tower out by the barracks. Experiments or signals from the planes.
“It’s the waiting that does it,” Etta said. The waiting made people strange. Just yesterday she saw an old man wander the streets in his pajamas. Women carried around water pumps and set sandbags beside their doors. They walked with gas masks in their shopping bags. Three reichsmarks, those masks had cost them, and though they’d grumbled at the time, they were glad to have them now. There’s no knowing when the gases will come, the ladies said, best to be ready. They’ll come rolling in waves beneath doors and around window frames, and the air will turn golden and then brown. They set their masks across their laps and waited. And even on quiet days, when planes flew overhead but no bombs fell, people shook their heads. Shoot them down, they said, why don’t they shoot them down before they come back, but the planes kept coming and the city lay open as a flower.
“Go home to your husband,” the woman said. “Go to him while you can.” She pushed herself up from her chair.
“There’s time still.” Etta set Max’s hollow book on the counter. “I’ll get him out, and we’ll leave together. We’ll be taking the train.” She’d been in the city ten days already, and she had two Heidenfeld tickets. Two tickets when she only needed one. “We’ll leave together,” she said again. She spoke louder than she meant to because it wasn’t right, what the old woman was saying, but when she turned around from the counter the woman was in her bedroom already and didn’t hear.