The planes hovered in the air, and everything was still. Only the bombs were moving. They fell from the sky. Georg saw them fall, slowly, slowly, saw them glint for a moment and pick up speed. The thunderclap came next, a rumbling that seemed to start in his belly, the sound of rocks rolling down a hill. Boys jumped into ditches. They lay on their stomachs and covered their faces. Four trucks lifted from the road and their fuel canisters popped. The debris blew out in all directions and hit the boys who’d been walking closest. Their jackets fluttered like birds and fell to the ground. Things arced and pirouetted and shot flames. They moved with a strange grace.
Georg held his hands against his ears. He lay under the trees, and Graf was there beside him, but he didn’t know where Müller was. He hadn’t seen him since the early afternoon. When the sky was quiet again they ran to the road. They found Schneider first, and two younger boys beside him. They were black from the heat, and their eyes were flat and had no shine. Dull as fish the way they looked toward the branches, not even surprise in their faces. Georg touched Schneider’s wrist. He held it and set it back down.
Graf didn’t look at Schneider. He was on his knees, spitting into the mud. Farther up boys shouted and wept. A lieutenant came and gave them shots for pain and pinned the empty syrettes to their belts, and they went quiet. Their skin was blistered and hung from their legs in strips. It was an awful thing to see, and still Georg was jealous. They’d be home soon, where they could lie in bed all day, and their mothers would bring them all their meals and sit with them and read them stories while they rested.
Georg pulled Graf to his feet. He shook him by the shoulders. What was wrong with him, falling down like that and crying. He wanted to slap him, to pull him by his ear. “Get going,” he said, “we need blankets,” but all the focus was gone from Graf’s eyes. “Blink,” Georg said, “look at me,” but it was no use, and so he walked the road alone. Some younger boys brought blankets, and Georg helped cover the dead. A few lay where they’d been walking, and one had gone upward into the branches. Two boys were up already in the tree, shaking the pieces loose.
Georg looked at each of the bodies before he covered them. He breathed deep and looked. He saw a boy who was burned and blistered, and his hands reached up toward the sky. He saw another boy he knew. His knew his face but not his name, and he looked so peaceful there, as if taking a rest from the buckets, just a rest and then he’d be back and filling them with his shovel. His face had no marks. He wasn’t burned or cut. Who knew what strange trajectory had brought him to the sharp rocks and not the dirt and the pine needles that might have cushioned him.
Georg walked up and down both shoulders of the road, and then he went between the trees because there was no telling where the boys might be. His legs were shaky. He took off his jacket and tied it around his waist. He was a doctor. He was a hunter and a surgeon and a scientist. He felt nothing when he saw them. This is what he told himself. All those Saturdays hunting with his father and Max had taught him about blood. “Be brave,” the old man said. “Blood washes clean.” He looked at the boys the way he looked at the bucks his father shot. They were reduced to their elements, reduced to bone and muscle and skin, and he felt no sorrow, not even a twinge. He was angry when the others wept. “Be quiet,” he wanted to say, “stop your crying,” but his right eye began to twitch and his knees didn’t stop their shaking, not even when he went to bed.
Müller came in just before the lights were out. He took his spot and he closed his eyes before Georg could talk to him. Georg cried then. The tears came because Müller was alive and not lying beside the road, and what grace there was in the world, what perfection, was safe for a little while longer. It was there in the room with him, three mattresses over.
Trucks came the next day and took away the bodies. Georg and Müller helped with the birch crosses. Georg held the planks, and Müller nailed them together. “We’ll need more,” Müller said. “Ten isn’t nearly enough.” The rain began to fall while they hammered them into the ground where the boys had fallen. The wood turned black from the water.
A captain came especially from Karlsruhe to speak. He said their names and how old they were, would always be, and the names of their parents and their towns. Abt, Adler, Bader, Durr, Eichel, Fränkel, Gersten, Meissner, Schreiber, Vogt. He said these names as if casting a spell, as if saying them aloud raised the dead from their boxes. “They were brave,” the captain said, “they were all brave,” and Georg wanted to correct him. They weren’t brave, he wanted to say, they were unlucky. They were walking back to camp when they died. They were thinking about dinner.
Georg held his cap against his chest. He bowed his head. The boys stood in rows, and the youngest ones were at the front and Graf was with them and not with his group. Something was strange about him, Georg could tell. Something wasn’t right. Graf looked at the road and not at the captain, and when it came time to sing, he stayed quiet. The boys knew all the words. “I had a comrade once,” the song went, “none better could you find,” and Graf stood perfectly still and looked at those black crosses.
Müller lit a cigarette. They had been granted leave, only for a day, but still it was a day away from the buckets, and it felt like freedom. They climbed together after lunch. They were at the summit by half past two, and the mist rolled below them and made islands of all the hilltops. Müller smiled at him with a thievish detachment. Georg was close enough to see how pointed his teeth were and how yellow from the smoke. “Give me one,” Georg said, though he was no smoker and it burned in his throat and made him cough and spit. Müller laughed then and shook his head. Georg laughed with him, embarrassed but happy, too, because they were alone there under the trees. The others were too lazy to climb. They napped on their straw mattresses or walked the streets and waited for the café to open. Müller was the only one who came along when Georg had asked at breakfast. “Why not,” he said, “I’m sick of beer already. I’m sick of this sorry town.” They climbed without stopping to rest, and their breath went raspy before they reached the top. The valley and the supply road and the trench, they were gone in the mist, and only Müller was left, only Müller and his cigarette.
Georg sat against a tree. He drew his knees up and hugged them. A few times the mist blew clear, and he could see the steeple and the trucks below and the schoolhouse where they slept. He squinted. He tried to make out who was walking the road and who was talking to the girls by the gate, but everyone looked the same from where he was.
“Baumgartner’s out of the hospital,” Georg said. “He’s at home already and walking with a cane.”
“I heard that, too.” Müller pushed back his sleeves. He tapped his cigarette pack against his palm. He set it in his pocket and took it back out. He was fidgety today, and his hands were never still.
“There’s more papers coming,” Georg said. “Any time now they’re coming.”
Müller shrugged. He closed his eyes and opened them again. “Bring any coins?”
Georg shook his head. It had been weeks since he’d taken them out. He didn’t have time to sit by himself anymore. The doors were always open, and he never knew when the others would come. “I’ve forgotten all my moves.”
“Then you should practice more,” Müller said. He reached for Georg’s hand and held it up high.
“Not until I leave this place,” Georg said. He wanted to run like the three who went into the forest. Müller would come and they’d leave the trench and the buckets and the crosses on the hills. Müller’s grip was loosening on his hand, and so Georg pulled him closer. He reached again for Müller’s face.
The kiss tasted of onions. It tasted of onions and tobacco smoke and salt from the climb. Georg closed his eyes. He should have been afraid because they’d hang if anybody saw. He was fat and had no grace and Müller could see his belly and how it hung over his belt. He should have been embarrassed, but he felt only wonder.
The wind began to blow, but they didn’t climb back down. They talked about where they’d go once the fighting was done. They talked about school and finding rooms in the city, small rooms that were close to campus, and they’d walk together to their classes. They’d be engineers. They’d study languages, and Georg would remember his Latin and his Greek.
“Leave with me,” Georg said. “Let’s leave before our papers come.” Müller smiled at that and reached for his cigarettes.
Graf came to Georg at dinner. He sat down at the table and waited until the others had left. “I need to show you something,” he said. He looked at Georg, as if gauging his worthiness. He tapped his fingers while Georg finished. It was distracting to have someone watching, and so he didn’t take any food from the table. He’d be hungry tonight, and it was Graf’s fault.
They went to the basement together and down a long hallway. Graf took him to a supply room that nobody used. It smelled of urine and mothballs inside. There were two windows high on the wall, with narrow panes of rippled glass, and one of them was cracked and let the cold air in.
Georg saw the blankets first and then the pink ears, giant as bat ears and pointy, with skin stretched so tight the capillaries showed. The thing yawned and stretched one paw straight in front of it. It was a red cat, no longer a kitten but tiny still. Graf rubbed its chin. Its fur was paler there, the color of apricots and honey.
“Where’d you find him?”
“Out by the barrows.” Graf reached into his pocket and pulled out a stained napkin. “She’ll eat anything, this one will.” He fed her stew beef from lunch, long stringy pieces, and she reached for them with her paw.
Georg leaned in to see. He took a piece and fed her himself, and she bared her little teeth at him.
“Will you feed her when I go?”
“Why me?”
Graf gave him a sly look. “You’re good at taking food.” He folded the empty napkin and put it back inside his pocket. “She’ll be nice and fat with all you bring her.”
Georg ignored that last remark. “They won’t take you just yet.” He watched the cat lick her paws and circle around before finding her place. She stretched and then lay down, looking at them through half-closed eyes. “You’ll be the last one here,” he said. He knelt by the blankets and stroked the cat’s belly. He could feel her heart beating through her fur, and he wondered how it could pump so fast even as she rested, how it could go on like that for years, when it was only a little knot of muscle and blood.
“I’ll be seventeen next month.” Graf sat back against the wall.
Georg looked over at him. How could Graf be almost seventeen? He looked twelve, the way his jacket hung from his shoulders. “What’s her name?”
“Maus.”
“That’s no name for a cat.”
“Too late now.” Graf stood up. He set one of the blankets over her, and only her nose showed and her white whiskers.
He didn’t go into the room again with Graf, and neither one spoke about the cat, but Graf looked relieved regardless. He sat at the table with the others, and when they talked about who was leaving and when the next set of papers was coming in, he went quiet and looked down at his plate.
It was the middle of October when Graf slipped at the trench. He slipped and drove a pickaxe clean through his foot. The ground was slick, and all the boys slid and stumbled in their leather boots, but some talked anyway about how Graf fell. They gave each other knowing looks. He screamed the whole way back to camp, Georg heard. He screamed worse than a girl, and no medicine and no shots quieted him. They put him on a truck the next morning. Georg was there to wave goodbye, and for a moment Graf met his eye, and then he was gone. Georg fed Maus after that, sometimes more than once a day, and he spoke to her like a friend. Müller came along when he could, and it was their secret, this room in the basement and the cat inside, and they sat together against the blankets and watched the windows go dark.