Ilse was waiting at the milk stand the next morning, her eyes ringed in blue. She had grown as sleepless as Etta in recent years. “Look how old we are,” she would say, and they laughed at how true it was. Etta stood behind her and watched the stragglers come. They had finished their breakfast dishes and were coming with their pitchers and their shopping bags. Maria Keller was there and old Frau Schiller and Hansi Bollinger and Hilde Zeister, who’d never married because no one had asked her. They all stood around like soldiers and waited for their milk.
Ilse took Etta by the elbow. “How is Max? God bless your boy. I hope he’s well.”
“He’s sleeping,” Etta told her. “He’s been sleeping since yesterday evening, and I don’t want to wake him.”
Ilse nodded. “Let him rest. Sleep is better than food for him.”
A few other ladies stopped to say hello, to pat Etta on the shoulder and congratulate her because her boy was home. Our best to Max, they told her. Thank God in heaven he’s back. Bring him by, bring him by so we can see him, and they were happy for her and sad for themselves and they went back to their places in line.
“They took the Hillen boy.” Ilse spoke in a whisper, and Etta had to lean in closer so she could hear. “At four in the morning they came and took him from his bed.” Nobody knew where he was now. Poor Ushi, poor Ushi who cried for her boy all morning on her steps. Why take Jürgen, why take him, with his sweet face, and Etta just shook her head.
A group of six German League girls passed by just then. They wore crisp blouses and dark blue skirts and the lucky ones had climbing jackets nipped tight at the waist. Ilse stopped talking when she saw them.
“It’s turning,” Etta said, watching the girls. “It smells like more rain.”
“It’s come early this year,” Ilse agreed. “I could tell from the crows, how they gathered on my tree.”
“The earwigs came in August this year and not in October,” Regina Schiller said from the front of the line. Her hands shook, but not from the cold. She had the shaking disease just like her mother. “It’ll be stormy this winter. There’ll be no place to put all the snow.” She shuffled toward the stand.
The German League girls cut through the line, and they were worse than the HJ boys, how they behaved. They pushed their way through without apology, and one of them stepped hard on Etta’s foot. They walked in a bubble. They laughed and nudged each other, and their legs were pink from the chill. They should be in school. They should be learning their lessons, but they wore uniforms instead and walked along the streets. They were organized into squadrons and groups and battalions. Disciplined as cadets. They cleared fields and ran around the track and went to the depot to sort through donations, the old coats and scarves and silverware and all the wool the ladies had made from unraveling socks and sweaters. They had a shine in their eyes, those girls, and they walked past the old women and gave them no greeting. “You’ve got no manners,” Etta said. She said it in a low voice so nobody else could hear. “Your mother didn’t raise you right.”
Ilse was at the barrel now. She set her pitcher on the table, and Etta stood behind her. Farther back the ladies had begun to barter. Eggs exchanged for a single square of chocolate, fresh churned butter for tea bags, sausage links for colored wool. Deprivation made them hard. They’d saved and skimped and worked for years, and all they had now was ration coupons and runny milk and what they could get from their families up in the hills. All their frugality had come to nothing. They should have married farmers. They’d be eating then and their pantries would be full, and still they contented themselves. Things could be worse. Thank God they weren’t in the city, thank him twice over, because that’s where the bombs fell. Emmerich was gone and thousands dead, Emmerich and Kleve, and these cities were far away but what difference did a few hundred kilometers make when the enemies flew their planes across the country from one side to the other.
Etta tapped Ilse on the shoulder. “I want to have a klatsch.” There were more reasons to mourn than to celebrate, but she wanted the ladies around her table again. There had to be at least two cakes for the table in better days. Two cakes and coffee and real black tea and, once the cakes were gone, a bottle of bocksbeutel wine or fruit liquor to keep the conversation going. The good tablecloth came out and the silver serving pieces, and all the ladies sat together and drank from dainty cups. They knew whose husbands drank or chased the cleaning girls in town, whose boys had brought home unsuitable girls or no girls at all. They knew which houses were messy and which ones loveless and which ones strapped for cash, and still they drank their coffee and talked of other things.
Ilse turned around. She looked at the line behind Etta. They were all the way to the butcher market already, and soon they’d be turning the corner. They stood in their walking boots and their thick stockings, and all around them the air went damp and the first drops began to fall.
“All the ladies can come,” Etta said.
“I don’t know.” Ilse squinted. “People might talk.” The old woman filled Ilse’s pitcher, careful not to spill. She brought it back to the table and took Ilse’s green rationing ticket and her money, and her hands shook the whole while.
“Let them talk.” Etta set her empty pitcher down. There wasn’t anything wrong with having a klatsch even now when food was scarce. It was the company and not the pastries that mattered. It was having the ladies round her table. “I’ll make my cake.”
Ilse tilted her head. She was tempted now, Etta could tell. Ilse was quick with the serving knife. All bones and no meat, and still she ate more than the other ladies, and when it came time to bring the sweet liquor out from its cabinet, she jumped from her chair to fetch the bottle. What a sweet drop, she’d say, setting her hands across her belly. “People might talk,” Ilse said again now, but her voice had turned doubtful, and Etta smiled then because she knew.
Max was restless as a puppy when he finally woke. He walked with Etta along the streets, and people nodded at Etta and stopped to shake his hand and to wish him well. He’s back, they said, God bless you both, and she thanked them, but when she stayed to talk, Max tugged at her arm. They were on their way to church, but he wanted to see the river first. He wanted to sit by the bank. He walked fast, setting his hands inside his pockets. A few times he stopped and turned around to see. He looked at the butcher-shop window and the ironwork balconies with their flowerpots, at the fountain and the old linden tree where the boys went in summer to play. It was all just the same. The church steeples and the pharmacy with its polished countertop and the waterspout down by the square. He looked at all these things, and he reached out to the sandstone walls and smiled.
He had slept for almost forty-two hours. He awoke once or twice and waved to Etta from his bed and then fell fast asleep again. He slept even when the floorboards creaked and the clock chimed by his door. Josef had grown impatient when Max didn’t wake up. He went fussy. He paced around the kitchen, then out to his workshop, once, twice, three times, and finally to town, to drink at the gasthaus with the other men who were too old to fight but could talk of little else. There was not enough soap or butter or wool, there hadn’t been in years, but there was plenty of watery beer in town, and the few men left did their best to drink it. They sat at their table and bickered, and after a while old Herr Scherber brought out his deck, and then they didn’t leave until dinnertime.
Max tugged at her hand and they passed the steps that led to the bridge, following the path by the bank where the reeds grew and the river grasses. Farther along the ferryman sat waiting on his boat. Even on Sunday he worked. Ten pfennig to cross, seven for the pretty girls, and he talked while he rowed and whistled through the gap in his teeth. “Faster than the bridge,” he’d say, “much faster, and you get my singing, too.” The air was soft and buttery, warm as April and not October. The sky had cleared, and the sun shone on the water. A few fishermen tended to their barrels, and tomorrow the ladies would come and haggle, pointing to one fish and then another before reaching for their purses. Farther down little boys ran along the bank, jackets open because there wouldn’t be many days like this, a few more and then the damp would come and the river would run to gray.
They came to the benches and sat together. A boat came by. It was a big one this time, and it sounded its horn when it came close. Men were uncoiling ropes in the front and the back. They shouted and waved their arms. Just last year a crowd had come and looted all the ships. She knew the old men who did it. Nimble as boys they jumped aboard and threw down what they found. It was only ribbon in the crates. Bolts of seam binding in yellow and purple and cornflower blue, strange bright colors that were nothing like the clothes that people wore, especially now, when fabric and dye were scarce. How strange it was, men on canes and little boys and women holding babies to their chest, all shouting and shoving each other to catch the ribbon as it fell. A pair of old women fought over a red bolt, their lips pulled back from their teeth, and they looked like wolves and not women, wolves fighting over a bloodied piece of meat. They kept pulling even after the ribbon had come undone between them and they’d stomped it into the mud. Girls wore dresses made from the binding afterward. Their mothers had split the ribbon lengthwise and knit with it, and they pretended the yarn was theirs. All this time it’s been in my cupboard, they said. I remembered it just now. They should have been ashamed for stealing. They should have hung their heads, but people didn’t feel shame anymore. They lied and after a while they believed the lies they told, and this is how it went.
“How often do the headaches come?” Etta set her arm around his shoulders. She could see the fine blue veins in his temples, and she wanted to lay her fingers over them to feel the beat of his blood. “Are you better now that you’ve slept?”
He looked toward the water and the bend where he’d gone swimming when he was little, where the vines grew around the trees and the bravest boys swung like monkeys from the branches. He always made a mess when he came home. “Just look at the mud you brought inside,” she’d say, “look at all the water,” and he left his shoes by the door and walked barefoot through the house.
“I haven’t seen any planes yet,” he said. “Not a single one.”
“It’s early still.” The planes came in the evening. They flew low sometimes, and once they dropped bombs over the fields and scared the women who’d gone digging for potatoes. God help us, they’re coming. They jumped into ditches and covered their heads. God help us, we’re dead for an apronful of potatoes. And not the good potatoes either, but the small ones the farmers threw aside.
She took his hand. Good that he was sitting outside. His skin was translucent, the color of invalids and angel heads and the ivory church saints, and he needed sunshine to bring the pink back to his face. She set his hand between both of hers and squeezed.
“I’m worried about Georg,” she said. They’d taken him from her once already. They took him to the school and the next time they took him they’d send him to fight, and who knew when he’d come home then. He wasn’t even shaving yet. No whiskers on his cheeks, and they were making him into a soldier.
“I can hear them.” Max watched the boat come to dock. A few old men onshore were lining up to help with the crates. They were bringing carts and straps.
“It’s quiet today. It’s only the boats you hear.” She shifted on the bench and thought about what to say to him and what to ask.
“They’re coming over the hills,” he said. “Any moment they’ll be coming and then we’ll burn to ashes.” He pulled his hand from hers.
They walked together up Obertorstrasse just as the bells began to ring. They rang at St. Laurentius in the center of town and then at the smaller evangelical church on Friedenstrasse where the Protestants went. When he was done in Heidenfeld the ringer rode his bicycle up to Rothenfels and climbed the towers there. He rang them to mark the hours and before confession and evening mass, and when people died he rang them extra slow, those passing bells, and everyone stopped to listen. Not even thirty yet, and he was deafer than a grandfather. The bells were his salvation. He stayed home when all the other boys left to fight.
Max flinched a little at the sound. “It’s another sour milk day,” he said.
“The milk’s not sour.” She pointed to the shuttered stand. “It’s closed today. We won’t have more until next week.” It was strange the way he talked. It made her uneasy. She didn’t let her milk spoil. Her food was fresh and her kitchen clean, and he wasn’t making any sense. She wished Josef were there with them, but he had stopped going to services years before, except for obligatory visits on Easter and Christmas Eve, and even then he griped about the priest. “That fat old mule,” Josef said, “he’ll choke on a sausage, God willing, and then we’ll have some peace.” She scolded him when he started in. Pfarrer Büchner was a fine speaker. And Josef would be fat, too, if people brought him the best cutlets and wine by the case. He’d be round like a barrel.
A few ladies came up to say hello, but Max looked right past them. He tilted his head and smiled.
“He’s tired still,” Etta said. “He’s tired from the train.”
Max stepped back from the crowd and looked up at the dome. She stepped back with him. It was fat and round as an onion and it didn’t reach for the sky like the grand spires did in the city. All its beauty was hidden inside. Masons had worked for years on the arches that ran to the altar, all those hands working the stone, and it was spun fine as sugar.
He almost forgot to dip his fingers when he came inside. She took his hand and set it over the water, and he remembered then and crossed himself. They took a pew near the center. She sat there every time she came. All the people had their regular places, women on the left and men on the right, but the rules had loosened with the war, and so she sat beside Max now and nobody minded. She sat in the middle and Ilse was up front, and some of the ladies came twice each day and they sat closest to the back so they could see who came late and who didn’t come at all. They were the scorekeepers. They shook their heads because people weren’t devout the way they should be. The boys and girls in town hardly ever came to services because the HJ and the German League took up all their time, and the adults weren’t much better. Ilse was inside already, just beneath the stained glass window of Kilian the missionary giving food to the poor, who looked more confused than grateful for his help. Etta could see her gray kerchief pulled tight around her head. They would see each other afterward. They’d walk together to the cemetery and tend to the stones.
Pfarrer Büchner and the servers stood by the altar steps. He’d gotten even fatter now, and his robe was big as a curtain around his belly. “Introibo ad altare Dei,” he said, his words clipped, hard as hail hitting a roof the way he said the t’s and the d’s, still foreign to her ear after a lifetime of Sunday services. Max had learned Latin in the gymnasium, and Greek, too, and he could understand the priest’s words, and Georg was better still the way he learned his languages. He memorized the conjugations and the constructions, all the details the others complained about were the things he loved best, and he wrote out the grammar exercises though he’d already done them all at least twice before. He took languages apart the way others dismantled an engine or a clock. And when she asked him why—why dead languages and not something living—he was serious when he answered. “Because they give me no cause to talk to anyone,” that’s what he said, and he went back to his books. If only he were home now, too, the house would be complete.
Büchner began to confess. “Confiteor Deo omnipotenti,” he said, and she understood none of it. She squeezed Max’s hand. His skin was smooth, soft as the hand of a child and not a soldier’s hand, not the hand of someone who had marched in the cold and the dark, who carried a gun and knew how to shoot. She wondered for a moment what those hands had done. What he had seen so far away and why the officers had sent him home. All the other boys were leaving, even ones who were young like Georg and hadn’t finished school yet. They were leaving and Max was coming home and the letter never said why. The priest kissed the altar and then stood straight, his back to the people. The servers knelt on the steps leading to the altar. “Kyrie, eleison,” the priest said, “Christe, eleison.”
A few people coughed or shifted on the hard wooden stands. Etta looked over at Max. He was wide awake, his eyes still focused on the stained glass window, as if he were in a movie house and not in church. She had seen that look before, the time they had gone together to the big planetarium in München and they sat close together in that dark room. He laughed when he saw the stars come into focus. Mutti, look how close they are, he’d said. The sky’s come down, it’s come into my hand. He was quiet that night on the train. He sat with his back to the window and closed his eyes, and he looked so young while he slept. Another year and he was gone. They sent him east, and when Etta saw the stars at night she wondered where he was and if he saw them, too.
“Gloria tibi, Domine,” said the priest. Someone near the front of the church sneezed violently, paused, and sneezed again. She looked to Max, suppressing a smile, but something wasn’t right. His lips were moving. He began to speak, quietly at first and then louder, so the people beside him could hear. He was speaking in Latin, in Greek, in all the dead languages they’d taught him in school. People turned to see. They turned around and looked at Max, and old Herr Gerberich’s mouth was open wide because no one had interrupted mass before, not even when Henriette Mayer the diabetic had gone into sugar shock. She fell back against the pew and her head hit the wood, but she fell quietly, with decorum. Men carried her out like an old plank. They hoisted her up and carried her, and old Büchner went on with his sermon and didn’t stop once to look.
“Maxima culpa,” Max called out. He stood up and pointed to the altar.
“Be quiet, Max. Be still and sit with me.” She reached for him. People were staring. Even Büchner had turned to look at them, tilting his head at the disruption.
Max looked up at the window and started to laugh, his mouth open wide. His eyes were clear like water. They were too pale to be human eyes. No, they were angel eyes, lit from within. “Mea maxima culpa,” he called out, reaching up with his hands. She didn’t recognize his laughter, it was not her son’s laughter, not the way her boy laughed, had ever laughed.
“Max, what are you doing?” She spoke low. This was madness, it wasn’t happening, and all the people looked at her. They’d take him if he acted this way. They’d take him away like they took Jürgen Hillen and nothing and no one could help then, not even his father and all the people he knew. She led him by the arm. He did not resist her touch. He went with her. She took him down the aisle, and when he refused to turn away from the window she pulled him backward, through the doorway and out to the steps.