Max held his head when the pain started. He stayed in bed instead of racing along the streets. His eyes lost their focus, and Etta gave him aspirin and set a cool washcloth across his forehead. She rubbed ointment into the scratches on his arms. She needed him to get better, to come back to himself. When the aspirin didn’t help, she went to the forest to pick feverfew for his tea. She knew where the best bushes grew. She had gone since she was a girl, pulling branches with her mother and picking rosehips and berries. Come along, she’d tell her boys when they were little, come with me and help, but they had no patience for picking. They longed for the sea instead, for the salty water. Who knew why, when the sea offered so little, no mushrooms and no berries, no shade under the branches, nothing but cold water and cold wind and a shore that stretched ahead, unchanging. Might as well long for the moon.
She took the paring knife from her basket and cut the fattest leaves. She tasted one out of habit and spit it out, puckering her mouth at the bitter taste. It was stronger than chamomile and aspirin and peppermint, stronger than any medicine. When the basket was full, she pushed herself up and brushed the bark and the needles from her skirt. A brown owl called from high in the branches. It turned its head around and its eyes shone bright as lanterns. People said owls bring bad luck, especially in the daytime, but the bird was beautiful and she was happy to see it. Etta took her basket and her walking stick and went back along the path.
She made tea for Max when she came home. She brewed those bitter leaves. She added honey and sliced him an apple, and he was still tapping his fingers when she brought him the tray. His books were stacked unevenly on the table, another one and the whole tower would fall. He was fixing the dictionaries, is what he told her. The languages weren’t right. They were missing words, and he was filling them back in. He emptied his cup and didn’t complain, but his eyes stayed cloudy. The pain came and went of its own accord.
The next time Max left the house, she went with him. He was going to walk the six kilometers to Rothenfels, and though she knew he wanted no company, she buttoned her coat anyway and came along. She wanted to see him when he was outside, away from his books and his bed. They walked beside the tracks, and it wasn’t easy keeping up with him. “Slow down,” she told him, “my legs are shorter than yours,” but he didn’t listen. The train passed them by, puffing steam as it rounded the corner toward Hafenlohr. The trees grew thick over the track in places. She had played in them when she was little. She sat high in their branches and waited for the train, and when it came she couldn’t see her hands anymore or her friends or the tracks below. Everything fell away, and the air smelled of sulfur and milk.
She gave Max her hand. They were at the old furniture factory and Rothenfels proper, with its stone houses and its steeple, and they climbed the steps that went to Bergrothenfels high on the hill. The old castle was up there, and it housed German refugees from the East who’d lost their homes and all their things the year before when the Soviets pushed their way through. The sandstone was slick from the rain. Max went first, and she held on to the railing. She should have pulled a pair of socks over her shoes, the way the ladies did in wintertime to keep from slipping. They passed the Kreuzschlepper, Christ carrying his cross up the steps, and they came to the top and sat together on the bench the way they did in better days when both her boys were home. A dog barked somewhere below.
“Do you know what the Greeks do?” Max found a small pebble on the wall and cupped it in his hand. “They dig up their dead. They wait a year and they dig them out of the ground and polish all the bones.” He let the pebble fall and found another.
“You’re making things up,” she said.
“They polish them like furniture and set them into piles.” He smiled a little. “It must reach the sky by now.” He looked around for another pebble, and she gave him one.
“You should rest more,” Etta said. “All this talk about graves will give you strange dreams.”
“I found plenty of bones,” he said. “I gathered them up.” He spoke slowly, with the measured rhythm of a teacher or a priest. He spoke more than he had in all the weeks that he’d been home. They’d been fighting outside Stalingrad, along the Volga River. The city was burning. He hadn’t seen the sky in weeks. The nights were hot as the days, and the smell of the dead and of gasoline and burnt powder and ash was so thick that it caught in the men’s throats and made them gag. So much ash, and who knew where it came from. It fell like snow on the men. They tried to spit it up, tried to clear their throats and breathe, but the dust was deep inside their chests and could not be dislodged. Worse still was the noise, of screams and grenades and the tanks rolling over the dead and the dying and crushing their bones into the dirt. The ground was covered with a paste made from men.
Blunt died there and Steinmüller and Henrichs and both the Schmidt brothers. He said their names, and he lingered on Blunt because it was sad how it went with him. Blunt took a shell and bled out, and his face was sweet just then, as if he’d seen something strange and beautiful above the branches. A wife and a baby son, and he didn’t say anything when he died, though Max leaned in close to hear. Fischer was there, his classmate from the gymnasium, and it was good to have someone from home even if they didn’t know each other well. He didn’t sleep at night. None of them did. The wind and the smoke made it hard, and the clouds were orange from the flames. Dogs howled and ran to the water. Who knew where they came from, those white dogs, but there was no crossing the river. Their heads bobbed in the eddies and were gone. “Saddest thing I saw,” he told her. “The saddest thing. I’ve been other places, too. They dug their own graves and nobody tried to run. We shot them where they stood. Partisans, the lieutenant called them, but they looked like ordinary people.” He rubbed his eyes, and it seemed for a moment that he wanted to say more, and then he turned away.
She touched his cheek. “Let me cut your hair,” she said. He’d feel better without all that weight. He needed to stay home with her until he started acting like himself. He needed to stay inside so people wouldn’t talk. “Come home with me. We’ll take the train back together. I’m too old for all this walking.”
He sat still for her when they came home and let Etta shave his beard. She was gentle with the razor, scraping it lightly against his skin. He hummed while she worked, a strange atonal buzzing that sounded like an engine or a wasp, and he opened his eyes only once, to look at the birdcage she had set in the hall. It was warmer there than in Georg’s room, where she kept the door shut and lit no briquettes.
“I don’t like that bird,” Max said. “He’s dirty.”
Etta wiped the razor. “His cage is cleaner than a kitchen, the way I scrub it.”
Max didn’t answer. He closed his eyes and let her work. When she was done with the razor, she cut his hair, too, that beautiful hair of his that was so soft and curled around her fingers. He’d been born with all that hair, and people had all told her they’d never seen a baby like her Max, with his dark ringlets and those eyes blue as cornflowers and always watching.
“You look like yourself again,” she said. She rinsed the razor and dried it. When she turned around to see him, he was gone already from the kitchen, and it was almost midnight before he came back home.
Josef walked alone to the schoolhouse. Kids taught the classes, no older than sixteen from the looks of them, and they showed him no respect when they talked. They called him old man and not Herr Lehrer, which was how they should address a teacher, and he could feel the blood pound in his temples at the insult. They pulled out rifles, taking them apart and cleaning them and explaining how things worked and who would do what. He listened to them and concentrated on the instructions until sweat drops rolled down his brow, but the words jumbled one into the next. They ran like water through his fingers. He let them go, the words, and listened like a foreigner to their rhythms and their strange harmonies.
Things were better when it was time for their exercises. He focused on the motion, arms bent at his sides, breathing in, breathing out, swallowing that damp air. He was good at training. The instructors had always singled him out when he was young. “Look at Huber,” they said, “that’s how it’s done.” It had gotten harder for him once he was in the field, where none of the exercises mattered anymore, where there was no pattern to things, no set time to sleep or to eat or talk things through, no order at all. Faces came close in the trenches and went again, and all the food tasted sour, and still he wanted to go back.
He felt a hand against his arm. She was always stopping him from his exercises, talking nonsense about the chill in the air or trying to feed him. He ignored her touch, but the hand did not let go, and he turned around to look. It was a boy, the youngest of them, no older than Georg. He was saying something, frowning at Josef and shaking his head. The sounds were muffled, as if the boy were underwater, and Josef caught a glimpse of a bubble as it rose from his lips and floated over their heads. He concentrated on the words.
“Time to stop,” the boy said. “You’re holding up our lunch.” Time to stop and come inside. The others were all watching him. They waited by the door.
He went in where the food was. His eyes watered from the warmth in the room. He had wanted to tell them something, something important, but the words didn’t come. The room smelled of soup and cooked blood sausage. He waited in line for his bowl. This was his room. He knew all the desks and where the troublemakers sat. He’d rap his walking stick against the floor when he saw a mistake, and they all jumped a little at the sound, and if they were unruly, he’d bring out his willow branches and snap them hard across their hands, right where the skin was the thinnest and the veins showed. He cut his branches down by the bank where the river ran slow. That’s where the best ones grew. His students didn’t complain when he took out his sticks, though the welts came up quick and their eyes brimmed. Even Georg had been brave when he held out his hands. How sweet to be back and how strange it was. The room should have folded itself up when he left. It should have disappeared, but everything was in its place, and the light still came through the windowpanes and the desks were just the same.
“My knees hurt,” Schiff said. “I don’t like all this hopping.” He looked around for sympathy, but no one was listening. The men sat at the desks and ate their soup, and it was quiet in the room.
“Wipe your nose,” Josef told him. “It’s dripping again.” Almost sixty, and Schiff still whined like a schoolboy. Josef dipped his bread. He looked around at all the men. He saw them in the beer hall every week and listened to their nonsense, and he’d taught their children and their children’s children. Most of them he knew from earlier still, when they were little and walked to school together, and in summertime they raced their toy boats and ran along the bank to see, but the boats were always faster and outstripped them and shrank from view, until they were just a few colored dots in the water and then were lost to the ripples and the sun. How hard it was to look at them now, all those gray heads leaning over their bowls and the spotted hands with their enormous knuckles, shaking, shaking as they held the spoons. They’d been soldiers once and strong. He straightened in his chair. They needed discipline, not soup. Time to go back outside and work the muscles.
They cleaned their guns when the meal was done. The barrels would foul from the primer if the men weren’t quick to clean them. They worked in the courtyard and by the gate. The lucky ones sat on benches, and others knelt on the stones. Josef knelt apart from the group. The solvent soaked into his skin and under his nails, and his fingers went stiff from the cold. The sun was going down. He stopped for a moment to watch it drop. It hung just above the hills before it went, throwing colors on the clouds. The men looked at their guns and not at the sky, and they didn’t see.
“Look at that,” he said. “Look at it fall away.” He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. He’d caught a fish once, unlike any carp or river eel, and it turned colors on the hook, thrashing from blue to violet to red and finally to gold. He wanted to show his boys. He packed up all his gear and went home fast, but the fish had gone dark by the time he reached the door. They wouldn’t have believed him anyway because fish don’t change colors when they choke on air. He closed his solvent jar and gathered up his patches.
They called them up one at a time and gave them their bands. The tallest boy, the one who’d called him an old man, handed them out as if they were a trifle and meant nothing. When Josef went up, he stood extra straight, to show them how a soldier stands, and he took his armband, red and white and black, and put it on his arm. It had two eagles on it, their wings stretched wide. The old men had no uniforms. They had only their rucksacks and their garrison caps. Etta had found his old steel helmet, too, and he held it against his chest. He waited until the distribution was done, and he gave them a crisp salute. He felt young as a boy, and it didn’t matter that the wind was blowing harder now and the others had turned to leave.
It was late and she’d be waiting, but he went down by the river when the ceremony was done. He walked fast toward the bank, where the dirt was wet. He cut a few branches with his folding knife, feeling them with his fingertips to make sure they were smooth and had just the right amount of spring. They had to be green enough to bend and snap against the skin. He didn’t use the branches they had at school, which were too brown and brittle and would break sometimes before he was done. He looked to his left and his right, but he was alone there on the bank. He tucked the best branches into his satchel before walking back home.
It had been hot the day he came back home to her all those years ago. Even now he could feel the heat and the bumping from the train. He had slept for most of the trip, turning first one way and then the other against the hard bench, his satchel wedged like a pillow under his head. He awoke just as the train left Wertheim, and he blinked the sleep from his eyes and watched through the window. Women were working barelegged in the fields. The hills were still green, and the river looked just the same. Farmers were plowing as if nothing were wrong, as if there were no fighting just beyond the horizon, no fires and no gas that came in clouds and smelled of rotting hay. He pressed his fingers against the glass and thought of Etta’s face. Her voice had faded from his memory during his time in the trenches, but her face remained, and her eyes, he could see them even now, how they turned up when she smiled, so dark, black almost, and shiny as cherries.
They had sent him home because he was sick, trench fever, they called it, and it sapped him dry, leaving him cold and shaking even in the summer heat. He ignored the signs at first, the headaches and the chills, but then his legs grew stiff in his boots and the visions came, strange devilish dreams that unspooled inside his head and kept him from sleeping and from waking, too, until he couldn’t remember where he was. He began to make mistakes, sending out the shells too early or when the winds were wrong, and the gases made his own men fall to their knees from the burning in their eyes. They knew it then and sent him to the infirmary, where he made a quick recovery, and he went back to the trenches. But the fever returned and went away and returned again, and they gave up and sent him home.
He saw her right away, standing there so straight. He stood on the platform and she pulled him close, and though he tried not to weep, the tears came. She sang for him that night so he could sleep. She sponged his face with cool water.
For months afterward he dreamed of mud and parapets. On rainy days when the air smelled fresh like dirt and the river rose on its banks he went peevish and couldn’t sit still in his chair. He didn’t want to sit with his mother or drink coffee from fine cups. He didn’t want to pray in church. The smell of the mud was what he wanted. Cold coffee and sour water and all the men squeezed in close. They didn’t let him go back. He petitioned twice and filed his papers, and they didn’t even reply.
His brothers had gone to the Kriegsakademie in München and they were promoted to first lieutenant, all three of them in turn, and they received the Iron Cross, Second Class and then First Class, and his mother was proud and clipped the announcements from the paper. She kept their death notices, too, as they came. Their comrades wrote later with the details, and she kept those letters, too, but she read them only once and didn’t look at them again. She was angry when Josef found them. She took them from his hand. Erich had taken a shell to the neck and bled out on the field. It was quick the way he went. He closed his eyes and slept. Oskar brought three men to safety before succumbing to the fumes. And Richard, her youngest, the one who looked most like her husband, God rest him, had only a sore on his foot when he went to the infirmary. It festered for weeks, and no matter how much they cut, the gangrene was faster than the surgeons.
After Richard died she went into her room and didn’t come out, not even for the memorial service, which was held at ten in the morning in the old Heidenfeld church. Hundreds of relatives and parishioners came, and the church choir sang the requiem in voices so clear and beautiful they raised the hairs on his neck.
She wasn’t the same afterward, his mother. She threw out her furniture for no reason. “Out with it,” she’d say, “out with it all because it has the woodworm and there’s no fixing it.” She tossed the pewter, too, because it had tin pest and was starting to dissolve. He checked and told her it was fine, but she didn’t listen. On All Saints’ Day she’d take out pictures of her three boys. “Who’s going to tend to their graves,” she’d ask, “with them so far away?” She hung their medals in a box on the dining room wall, and when he looked at them, he saw only the reflection of his own face in the glass.
Etta sat in Ilse’s kitchen drinking coffee, and before their cups were empty Ilse went to the cupboard. “Let’s drink something better,” she said. “We’ll have just a little glass.” They should be at the cemetery preparing the mounds. In another day it would be All Saints’ Day, and they needed to get the graves ready, but the wind was blowing and they sat inside instead. Ilse brought the jars to the table. She poured the liquor, careful not to spill, and it was dark like wine. She picked elderberries right after the first frost, when they were sweet from the cold. She had a gift for steeping, and not just with elderberries. She picked rhubarb and plums and apples, and one summer she steeped a handful of rose petals, but the ladies had wrinkled their noses at that. “It smells like perfume,” they said, “you’ve made perfume and not schnapps.”
Etta drank slowly. It burned a little in her chest, and it worked its way through her like medicine, loosening all her joints. “Something’s not right with Max.” She didn’t mean to say it, but the words came anyway. “He doesn’t listen to me or to Josef either. He pounds the walls at night.”
Ilse nodded. “I see it when he walks.”
“Are people talking?”
“They always talk. Tomorrow they’ll talk about something else.”
“Nothing helps with his headaches,” Etta said. All the herbs she brewed and all the tablets, and nothing eased his pain. They’d take him away if they knew how bad it was. They’d take him just like they took the young Hillen boy, and nobody knew where he went.
“I’ll go to Dr. Ackermann.” Ilse finished her cup and poured herself another. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow.” If anyone could help Max, it was Dr. Ackermann. There was no better man in Heidenfeld, Ilse was saying. “Poor man. He hasn’t heard from his boy in months. Every Sunday I bring him a warm meal, but I don’t let him inside my house. He doesn’t eat from my table.” Her Walther might see. He’d be angry if another man sat at his spot. He’d been gone for twenty years now, but sometimes his chair still rocked and the curtains fluttered even when her windows were all closed. “He’s just saying hello,” she’d told Etta more than once, “he’s just letting me know he’s here.” Spirit roaming, she called it, he’s spirit roaming today, and so the doctor came only as far as her door.
“It’s good to have somebody.” Etta set her glass down.
“Keep him inside in the meanwhile,” Ilse said. “Keep him away from the windows so people can’t see.”
“What are they saying?”
Ilse shook her head. “Keep him inside even if he wants to leave.” She looked at Etta for the longest while, and there was something strange about the set of her face. She was lonely, Etta thought. It was the wine that brought it out. All the scrubbing and the washing, the mopping twice a day, and time passed so slowly, especially now. It was probably easier in the summer when she could work her beds. She grew herbs of every sort and beets and turnips, and for a short while she kept bees, which yielded a strange honey that was pale and tasted of clover. She had the heart of a farmer, Ilse, but none of the greed. She poured Etta another glass, and though she wanted no more liquor, Etta drank it.
Ilse took Etta to the cellar when it was time to go. She took her down the stairs, past the straw beds where she kept her apples and her plums, and lifted her oil lamp high. Etta blinked and her eyes adjusted, and she stepped back at what she saw. There were silver candleholders and serving platters and fine inlaid tables. Clocks ticked in the silence of that room, porcelain mantel clocks and larger wall clocks propped up one against the other. A grandfather clock stood improbably in the corner, and she wondered who had brought it around the house and down those narrow stairs. There were tea sets and goblets and dressing combs, cigarette cases and leather-bound books. Porcelain dolls with fine painted faces sat in a row, their blue eyes open and unblinking. Things were stacked neatly against all three walls—wonderful lustrous things that were the pride of their owners, that belonged on dressers and piano tops and dining room hutches and not in a cellar that was dark and smelled of earth and hay.
“By God,” Etta said, “it’s a museum you’ve got here.”
“They’re not mine.” Ilse drew her hand across a blue silk dress. “I’m watching them.”
It had started with old Frau Singer, Ilse told her, who had come for a visit five years before and sat in her kitchen. Ilse looked around the room. Her voice was low when she spoke. She looked at the clock and not at Etta, and her voice shook a little from the liquor. The old lady had been nervous and held her purse against her lap. They drank coffee together and talked of little things, and when the coffee pot was empty, Frau Singer waited a good while longer before asking. Frau Weinstein came next, and then the young Frau Stern, who had the grandest house of all, high on the hill where the tower stood. They came to her and asked for the same favor, and each time Ilse agreed because it didn’t seem right to say yes to one and no to another. She waved away their offers to pay. “Keep your money and your gold,” she told them, “I’m an old woman and have no need for them.” Her cellar became a warehouse of beautiful and cherished things. She came down and dusted the piles every week, and she wound the clocks and polished the silver because it tarnished fast in the damp air.
“When they come back, they’ll thank me.” Ilse nodded as she spoke. “They’ll thank me for taking good care of their things.” And even as she said it, they both knew it wasn’t true.
Maybe it was the liquor or maybe the coming rain. The roads looked narrower than usual when Etta walked home. The wind bit through her scarf. She thought of those dolls in their patent shoes and all that fine silver and the clocks ticking in the cellar and Ilse keeping watch, just Ilse and her whiskey jars. How hard to be in that house, alone with all those things. The air must be thick with ghosts. How little she knew about Ilse. More than forty years together and church every week. They drank their coffee and birthed their babies and knelt together at their family graves, and they were mysteries one to the other.
Etta stopped once by the bridge and wound her scarf across her mouth. People were inside already. They were drawing their curtains and snuffing out their lights. They huddled close to their wood-burning stoves, which sent up smoke into the sky, gray on gray. People were born in Heidenfeld and buried there and their children, too, and their children’s children. They lived in the same houses, one generation after the next, and went to the same schoolhouse and worshipped at the same churches. The buildings outlasted them all. And still people went away. They went away sometimes, carrying only a satchel or a trunk. She’d seen it herself. The Weinsteins and the Singers and the Sterns who left behind their things. The two sisters who were prone to twitches and to fits, twins who dressed alike and worked side by side for Frau Ebing the seamstress, and they climbed aboard the train one morning and never came back. Young Hillen with his baby face was gone, and the gypsies went somewhere, too. They were gone from one day to the next, and there were no more bonfires by the riverbank then and no more dancing. How easy it was to forget them. Things changed and the mind adjusted, and it was an act of will to remember anything at all.