Georg watched Ingrid work the stove. Father Zimmermann was at the nursing home across town, and any moment now he’d be back. He went to the home on Wednesday mornings because some of the old people there couldn’t walk to services. He sat at the long tables with them and visited the ones who were sick in bed, and the sickest ones he anointed with the oil he carried in his case. Lunch was ready for him when he came back. Ingrid was like Mutti. She served at twelve exactly.
Zimmermann lifted all the lids when he came into the kitchen so he could smell the meat. Before he went back to his room, he waved his hand at Georg. “You bring me the tray today,” he said. “We’ll eat together.”
Ingrid nodded at Georg when the plates were ready. She spooned out a little more gravy and gave him the tray. “Don’t talk too much,” she told him. “He can be prickly sometimes. It’s better just to listen.”
Zimmermann was waiting in his chair. The lights were all on, but the room was dark anyway and the curtains were drawn. He pointed to a round oak table by the window. “Set that table,” he said. “And take the dishes off the tray. I don’t like to eat on trays.”
Georg fumbled with the silverware, but Zimmermann didn’t seem to notice. He reached over to turn the knob on his radio. The reception was spotty in his room. The radio crackled and faded and sometimes there was nothing but a humming sound like bees, but Zimmermann listened anyway and the way he sat reminded Georg of his father, who listened to the announcers but never to Mutti. She’d have better luck if she found a way to speak to him through the radio, Georg had thought this more than once. The old man would pay more attention if he couldn’t see her face.
Georg sat across from the priest, with his back to the window. He tried to eat slowly, but it made him nervous to sit so close to the priest, and it was easier to eat than to find something to say. He looked around the room while he ate. He took a closer look at the books that were stacked along the nearest wall, more books than even his father had, and the shelves sagged at the center from their weight. Aquinas and Amort and Albertus Magnus, the sermons of Faber and the mystical works of Hildegard von Bingen, Zimmermann had them all. He’d wedged them between Latin grammars and anatomy texts and gardening books, and the overflow sat on chairs and on the windowsill. Georg could have spent months beside those shelves. He’d learn his declensions again and the constructions he’d forgotten since leaving school, the ablative absolute and all the contrafactual clauses and when to use ut non and when to use ne instead. The nuances would come back, and the other things would fall away and he wouldn’t have to know about rifles anymore or the Panzerfaust.
“I built them myself.” Zimmermann pointed his fork toward the bookcase. “I built the table, too.” He cut a potato into quarters and dipped a piece into the sauce. He was methodical as a surgeon, clearing one dish before proceeding to the next. His fingers were long like a surgeon’s, too, and his eyes sloped downward and made his face look sad even when he smiled. He finished the potatoes and started on the cabbage, and he blinked the whole while, as if eating were an effort for him and not a pleasure. “You’re looking better,” he said. “It’s those herbs she picks. She’ll walk all day for a basketful of leaves.”
“Yes, sir,” Georg said. “She knows about plants.” He smoothed the front of his pant legs. “She’s better than a doctor with all those compresses.”
The priest lifted his glass. His Adam’s apple moved up and down while he drank. It was big as a goiter, and Georg couldn’t help but watch. The music had stopped and the announcers were talking about Dortmund. The city was in ruins, they said, only ashes were left. There was no counting the dead because most of the bodies were gone. They were burned and the wind carried them away. Pforzheim was hit, too, and another seventeen thousand were dead or missing, and Zimmermann shook his head then. He turned the knob so he wouldn’t have to hear. “Just last year they hung a man. Three days they left him on the branch.” He pulled the toothpicks from the rouladen and licked them clean. “They’d have left him longer, but he was drawing flies.”
“I’ve seen men hanging,” Georg said. “I’ve seen it myself.” It was only a few months ago that they ran. They ran and Müller didn’t and they were all gone now anyway, and it didn’t matter what they did, it seemed to him, because there was an inevitability to how things came out. One boy walked along the road and lived, and another died only a few feet away. All their work on the wall, and it wasn’t enough to keep their enemies from crossing. Their boasts and their quibbles about uniforms and who was the best shot and who was fastest around the track and none of it mattered because the pattern was working its way out.
Zimmermann pushed his plate aside. “They’re gathering up the old men and the boys,” he said. He was dainty as he folded his napkin, and it was hard to believe he was the same man who stood so tall on the pulpit, whose voice rolled like a wave over the parishioners and rose high as the rafters. “You’ll need to see them now that you’re better. They’ve got a table at the school where they keep the names.” He looked toward the window. “That’s where you need to go.”
Ingrid walked the hallway at night. She said it was the sounds that made her nervous, the marching and the shouting and all the men shooting their guns. They were exercising in the fields every day and some were leaving in groups, going as far as Trier and Koblenz. They’d be coming back soon, everybody knew. They’d be coming back in bandages if they were lucky, falling back to their towns. The wheels were turning faster now, people could feel it. All those years when nothing happened, nothing but notices and funerals and planes overhead, and from one day to the next they smelled burning in the air. They could hear the first shells already, and the sky shone red some nights as if the world had reversed itself and the sun were rising from the west.
She forgot to give him a fork with dinner. She spilled the water and burned the bread. “We have only a little time,” she said. “Another week and the town will be full with them.”
“They’ll want my papers,” Georg said. He didn’t want to leave again. He didn’t want to start his walking, but he didn’t want to stay either and give them his name. He’d pick a cap from the table and a rifle if he was lucky. He’d march with the old men and the altar boys, and what difference did it make. Home or the uniform, these were his choices. They had always been the choices. Home meant being with Mutti, seeing her eyes again and sleeping in his bed, but the old man would be there, too, and they’d know just what he’d done because they always knew. They saw it in his face.
“He’s gone all day today.” She sat down beside him. “He’s visiting the monastery again and won’t be back until late.”
“They’ll ask me where I’ve been,” Georg said.
“You could pass for fourteen.” She reached for his hair. “Thirteen if we comb your hair down low.”
She had no relatives left, no husband or brothers or uncles, and so she worried for him instead. Somebody might ask for his papers and if he didn’t have anything to show, they might take him from the station. He could wear a sling on his arm. She could dress him in a young boy’s clothes, and nobody would notice him if she did it right. He was just another boy going to the hills, going to see his grandparents who lived far from the fighting.
There might be dozens of soldiers on the train or none at all. They might be looking for men and boys because the posters were up and a few had even been called down from the old people’s home. It was a scandal the way they took men whose eyes were bad, who hobbled on canes and could barely hoist themselves up, and when they did their joints all cracked.
“I’m tired,” Georg said. He set his head on the table. Home or the uniform, these were his choices, and he wanted only Müller. He wanted a chance to visit with the dead. Every day he felt the pull of their voices. They were sitting in the hall and joking like before. Schneider was reaching for his book and they looked together at the pretty ladies and it was always the same how the talk went. They were at the table and in the gymnasium and down by the trench, and they were complaining about the buckets and the sergeant and the food. It needed seasoning. It needed butter, and the dumplings were cooked too long. Müller sat with them. He sat at the center, and he laughed at all their talk and closed his eyes. They were ghosts around the table, and sometimes they saved him a spot. They called him fatty and butter boy though he was thin now from all the walking he’d done. “It’s not enough,” they said, and pointed to his tray, “you’re a growing boy and need more bread.”
All the people he knew, Müller and Mutti and Schneider and even Maus, all the living and the dead and the people from his books, they were jumbled together. They were telling the stories they always told and they looked just the same, and it was hard to remember sometimes where he was.
She tapped his shoulder and smiled when he turned around to look. The windows had gone dark. She was done with the kitchen work. The dishes were washed and the counters wiped, and it was time for bed.
“We’re leaving early,” she said. “It’ll be dark still when we go.”
She used a plain wooden walking stick, planting it into the ground with every step, and when they stopped to rest, she leaned on it as if it were a banister. He struggled with his rucksack because it was bigger than he was used to and pulled him backward. He held the straps in both his hands to lighten the load. She’d given it to him just before they left and filled it with her husband’s pants and his clean undershirts and socks that she knotted together and pushed down the side. Every place he went, he wore dead men’s clothes. She packed apples and dried plum slices and pork sausages, thick slices of smoked ham, a bar of hard cheese, three tins of sardines, and half a stollen left from Christmas that smelled of rum and butter. She gave him flat bars of grape sugar, too, for energy, and a bar of milk chocolate, which was much better than the Scho-Ka-Kola bars he ate in school. “That dark stuff’s no good,” she told him, “it’s medicine and not chocolate. It’ll make your heart thump hard inside your chest.”
She knew the trees and the rocks the way other people know houses and streets and shops. She pointed things out to him with her free hand: where the lung moss grew and the tree where Richard had proposed seven years before, the mushroom path and the skating pond and the spot where old Herr Melzer had fallen from his cart and died under the trees.
“He didn’t tell his wife where he was going,” she said, shaking her head. He might have lived if she’d known where to look. He was careless instead and his wife lived only a few years longer. Loneliness is what did it. His going took away all her air. That happened sometimes, she said. People were like trees. Their roots grew together, and there was no untangling them.
He stopped to drink from his bottle and she stood beside him, tapping her fingers against her stick. She combed his hair across his forehead with her fingers, first one way and then the other.
“It’s good you look so young,” she said.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Soft as a girl is what my father always says.”
“You don’t look like a girl.” She pulled his cap down low on his face. “You look like a schoolboy. Not even sixteen and they take you from your home. The grown men will be all right and the little boys, too. But I worry for the ones like you.” She cupped her hand against his cheek. She kissed him on the lips. She kissed him like a mother, and he didn’t pull away.
It wasn’t even noon yet when they came to the first houses. “Look like nothing’s the matter,” she told him. “If you look that way, people will think it’s true.” She looped her arm in his and pulled him by the crook of his elbow. They passed the post office and the bank and a pharmacy where three old women stood in line. A young woman was washing windows in the warm air, wiping them down with a white dish towel when she was done. She’d rolled the sleeves of her housedress up, and droplets flashed in the sun as she wrung out the rags. They walked past two inns that sat across one from the other. Each inn was its own world, Georg knew, and the boundary between them was real as the boundary between the town’s two churches. Men drank in one and not the other and worshipped in one and not the other, and the circles around people grew smaller and smaller still.
The train station had its own lobby and a small café. All Ingrid’s talk about soldiers and there wasn’t even one on the platform. There were only women and a single old man who talked to himself and pointed to the trees. It was a revelation how thin the people were without their winter coats, how knobby they looked and haggard. Only the priests ate well, the priests and the farmers and the officers at the academy. The best cuts went to a few, the finest meat and butter cakes and noodles. He shifted the bag on his shoulders. For the first time he was ashamed of the food he had.
Ingrid stepped up to the agent and bought a ticket. Georg reached inside his pocket out of habit, though he had only his ladies and no good money. She waved him down. “I’ve got nothing to save for,” she told him.
They sat together at a small round table and drank apple juice. “You’ve been good to me,” he told her. “Better than I deserve.” He almost reached inside his pocket again to give her a coin, but he needed four for his tricks. Three wouldn’t be enough.
She looked at her fingernails. “I’ve got a washerwoman’s hands,” she said. “He wouldn’t recognize me if he saw me. He’d walk right by.” She looked young just then. It was the way the light came across her face and how pink she was from walking.
“He’ll know your eyes,” Georg said. “He’ll spot you right away.” People don’t change, he wanted to say, not at their core. He’d know those grey eyes if he saw them again. All the time he had left, everything good that might come, he’d trade it all away to conjure them back. He drained his glass.
She stayed with him until boarding time, and even after he was in his seat and the other ladies had left the platform, he could see her still, waving at him with her walking stick.