Fischer looked earnest as an undertaker when he opened the door. His face was sharp, as if cut from wood and the carpenter had forgotten to smooth its fine planes. Etta took his left hand in both of hers and tried not to look at his empty sleeve. His mother had pinned it just below the elbow. Poor woman. She’d have plenty of sewing to do, stitching all his right sleeves shut so nobody could see. “Mutti isn’t here,” he said. “She’s at the warehouse sorting wool. Every Wednesday she goes.”
“I’m sorry I missed her,” Etta said. She stepped inside. “You’re thin.” She took off both her mittens. “You all come home so thin.”
She gave him the meringues. She’d used the last of her eggs to make them, and she set a walnut on top of each. The other ladies tried to bake them like hers, but they had no luck. Theirs were too dry or too chewy, and they’d complain then about how their ovens weren’t working right or the eggs had been stringy. It’s the eggs that do it, they’d say, it’s all in the eggs, but they were jealous because it was such a simple thing making meringues and still it was hard.
They sat at the table and Fischer ate the cookies and his mouth was white with powder. “They’re good,” he said.
Etta took a cookie. She ate it slowly and thought of how to ask. She looked around the room, anywhere but that pinned sleeve. There were plates on all the walls. Beate had painted them herself, working for hours with brushes so tiny they had only a few bristles. She painted violets and snowdrops and finches, though she was better at flowers than birds. She made the heads too big, and the eyes looked strangely human. “Max says hello,” Etta said.
He nodded. “I’m starting to play again.” He reached for another cookie. “I’ve got music already.”
“You should come by and see him.”
“It was written for the left hand. For the left hand especially.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “If I run out I’ll write my own.”
“Does it hurt?” It was rude to ask, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“It itches,” he said. “And sometimes I can feel my fingers. Where they were.” He flexed his left hand and spread his fingers wide. They were long as a surgeon’s and fine-boned. She looked down at her own hands. All those Sundays he’d played in church, even when he was just a boy. His mother had set books on the stool those first few years so he could reach the keys. He played for himself and nobody else and he sat so straight, and even Regina shook her head in wonder. “There’s nothing I can teach him,” she said once, “he knows exactly how to touch the keys.” He was remembering, not learning. He was born with the music already in his head.
“Max has been home six weeks already,” Etta said. “He talks about bones sometimes. He talks about collecting them.”
“Have another, Frau Huber.” He pushed the plate toward her.
“What did he do with bones?”
Fischer slumped a little in his chair. The light from the lamp cast shadows on his face, and his eyes were dark as sockets. He looked old. How strange to see a young man grown old like that. The thought made her tired. “He brought them back,” he said at last. “He brought them so we could bury them.”
She started to speak but changed her mind. Best not to interrupt because he might tell her something that could help. She sat by the table and looked out the window where Frau Fischer saw her finches. It was getting dark already. The branches swayed in the wind.
“They fell faster than he could find them.” Fischer tugged at the pins in his sleeve. Max brought the dead back, he told her. He carried them on his shoulders. He pulled them through the dirt and ran with them. It was cold where he was, and when the bodies froze in the dirt and there was no lifting them, he brought something anyway. His hands were never empty. He brought their tags back or their helmets. The dead were buried all together. Sometimes the men gathered flowers and branches and set them on the graves, and all the fields were full with markers. “I was sorry when he left,” he said. “The others weren’t nearly so good.”
“You came home before he did,” Etta said. “He didn’t leave until October.”
Fischer shook his head. “It was June when he left, maybe July. They sent him farther east. They sent him to a punishment post.”
She leaned across the table. “What do you mean, a punishment post? Punishment for what?”
“I didn’t see anything.” Young Fischer smoothed his sleeve. “I wasn’t there when he left.” People came all day long, he was saying. They came and they went again and most groups had a trembler or maybe even two. All the pounding had rattled something loose inside their heads. It was real as a bone break when it happened. Their eyes went funny, cloudy like milk glass and unfocused. Max didn’t tremble, but he laughed when he shouldn’t and he said things that made no sense. He disappeared once and nobody could find him. The lieutenant didn’t like Max, everybody knew it. He didn’t like anyone, the lieutenant. He was always moving his men from one post to another. He made decisions too quickly and changed his mind, and nobody ever knew where they’d go next.
“Did he hurt himself? Did Max hit his head on something?”
Fischer shrugged. “Sometimes people bleed when they’re hurt, and sometimes they don’t.”
Etta tried to think of more questions. She needed to know what was wrong so she could help her boy. She sat with Fischer and looked at that strange face he had, which should have been beautiful with its fine lines but it looked unfinished instead. There was nothing more he could tell her. Her boy collected bones. He brought them back. All his life he’d been carrying things. He’d always been the one who lifted others onto his back. He’d carried Georg once, when they’d been skating together and Georg’s blade caught on a twig. His knee had gone one way and his ankle the other, and Max brought him home on his shoulders. Georg wasn’t a small boy, not even then, and Max climbed the hill with him and carried both their skates in his hands. He came home smiling. He was gentle like a doctor, the way he set his brother down.
Fischer held the door for Etta when she left. He stood by the steps and waved. “I’m lucky,” he said. “If it had been my left, there’d be no music for me now.” He promised to come visit. He’d spend some time with Max. They’d go out walking. It wasn’t true. He’d stay where he was, they both knew this, but she thanked him anyway and put on her wool mittens.
It started to snow as she walked home. A gust took the scarf from her head and lifted it to the trees. It caught high on a branch. She waited for it to come back to her, but it was stuck fast, and it was there still two days later when she walked by.
Josef walked from the schoolhouse to the church steps and back behind the cemetery, but he couldn’t find the buckets and the shovels. This was only his third week working and someone had taken them when he wasn’t looking, he knew this for certain. Someone had snatched them to make trouble, and he’d spent the whole morning retracing his steps, looking behind buildings and woodpiles and digging up fresh snow with his hands because they could be anywhere and he needed to find them before the lunch bell rang. He was kneeling in a snowbank when one of the HJ boys came up to him and led him back to the schoolhouse. They thanked him for his work there and let him go. Josef told them it was early still, it wasn’t even ten, and he had an idea of where the shovels might be, or at least the buckets, but they just shook their heads. No, they said, no need to look any further, and they thanked him again for all he’d done and told him to go home.
The other men were still clearing snow as he walked past the church. Even old women were out there in the cold with their shovels and their picks, throwing ashes and moving the snow before it got too heavy. They were making a mistake letting him go. They needed him, they needed every boy and man because the Bolsheviks were coming closer and the Amis, too. He walked circles around the town without noticing where he was going. Past the pharmacy and the bank and the post office and the fire brigade with its red shield, past the shuttered butcher shop and he was at the old stone bridge now and at the train station and he went inside and bought himself a ticket. He rode to Wertheim where people didn’t know him and he spent the afternoon in the empty movie house. He had no interest in movies, but there was a newsreel first and it showed the Panzers fighting the Bolsheviks in the East, new Panzers every day rolling over that white landscape, and the SS troops fighting at the Oder bridgehead, fighting to keep the Bolsheviks out of Europe, and he could watch the footage all day, the Führer proud as any father pinning medals on a young airman, the tuk-tuk of the artillery and the rocket launchers rearing back like horses, all the dead Bolsheviks on the road, the broken buildings and the fires and the planes in the milk-white sky, the German soldiers in their helmets smiling for the camera. He’d come back tomorrow and the day after that. He’d come again and again and he’d sit there forever if he could and watch those flickering pictures.
He went to see Dr. Kleissner on his way back home. He needed a paper, only a paper from the doctor, and then they’d take him back and he’d be clearing the roads again and getting ready for the final push. He tapped the stones as he went, and he wished all the ladies well. He asked about their sons, who’d been his students once. He stopped to rest halfway up the hill. He leaned against a lamppost. Look at those students, look at those girls up there and how they walked. They cut off that old woman by the nursing home. They walked around her on both sides and squeezed in tight, and she almost fell. If they were in his classroom now, he’d whip them and not just on the palms. He’d hit their knuckles too and split them open. He took his glasses off and wiped them with his handkerchief. No order to the young and how they acted. They shouted in the classroom. Just last year they’d stopped answering when he called their names, and they laughed when he turned to write on the boards. It only got worse once they were older. All their uniforms and their marching and they were wild underneath. They were uncivilized.
He stepped away from the post. He swung his arms as he walked the steepest part of the hill. He looked for those girls, but they were gone already and the old woman was gone, too, and he was breathing hard by the time he reached the doctor’s office. He was sweating in his coat. Dr. Kleissner smiled when Josef came through the door. He held out his hand as if he’d been waiting all day for the visit.
Dr. Ackermann came up the walk, his head low because the wind was blowing. Etta let him inside. “He’s upstairs,” she said. “He’s resting in his bed. He’s tired from all his walking.” She took the doctor’s hat and coat and hung them on the hook.
“Let’s see him.” He smiled at Etta, and he looked like his father and his son, all of them doctors, and who knew if there’d be another. She wanted him to hurry, and she wanted him to wait. It was better to know. It was always better to know, and still she went up the stairs more slowly than usual. She hesitated at the door. She hoped for just a moment that Max would be gone when they came inside. That he’d be walking outside, and Ackermann would have to come back some other time. She took a breath. She pulled the lever and turned on the light.
She sat by the window and watched Ackermann work. He took a thermometer from his bag and then a stethoscope, and he listened to the beats of Max’s heart. It raced fast as a puppy’s, she knew this from sitting beside him and holding his wrist on her lap. It raced even when he rested because he worked at a higher pitch than other people, and she wanted to lay her hand against his chest and calm him. You’ll wear it out. You’ll use up all the beats God meant to give you and then there’ll be no more.
She opened the curtains and straightened the coverlet and waited, content in the gentle way the doctor touched her boy. Max was quiet while the doctor worked. He raised no fuss, not even when Ackermann lifted him from the pillow and listened to him breathe. Ackermann shone a light in both his eyes and looked into his mouth and checked his knees and his elbows with a rubber mallet, and Max did everything the doctor told him to. And then Ackermann waved her outside and he stayed with Max for a good while in the room, and Etta heard voices through the door and Max’s laughter.
The doctor came into the kitchen when he was done. She poured coffee into his cup and sat with him. He was quiet for a long while, and when he finally spoke, his voice was clipped.
“I can’t tell you for certain what’s wrong with your son.” He held his cup but didn’t drink from it. He talked of tumors and diseases with strange names, of schizophrenia and depressive disorder and psychosis. These things can run in families, he told her, they often come just past childhood, in the bloom of youth. Soldiers are susceptible. “I’m no psychiatrist,” he told her. “There’s not much I can do.”
She nodded. Yes, she said, yes, but he was wrong. Max had no tumor and no brain disease either. The doctors might not know why he was sick, but Etta knew the reason. It was the war that brought it out, that gave Max his strange visions. Max’s sickness and Josef’s forgetting, they were different one from the other but they led to the same place. She looked at Ackermann’s satchel and its engraved clasp. There was nothing inside that could help. All those fine instruments and those vials of powders and pills. They had no reach behind those eyes. And still it was a relief to sit in her kitchen and speak openly about her boy.
She shook his hand when he left. His fingers were chapped as a washwoman’s from clearing the roads. “Keep him at home,” he told her. “Keep him at home for as long as you can, and don’t sign any papers.” All his learning, and he told her what she already knew.
She didn’t mention Dr. Ackermann’s visit to Josef when he came home that night or when they sat together at the dinner table. He was in a strange mood, and it was better to wait. Max stayed in his room, and it was only the two of them at the dinner table. Josef fidgeted while he ate. He kept looking at the switches he’d brought home a few weeks before. He’d left them leaning by the door. She asked him about his day working on the roads, but the questions made him prickly. He waved her down. They’re idiots, the lot of them, he told her, and he turned toward the window though it was dark already and there was nothing outside to see. He was in a forgetting mood, she could see it in his face. He left the table before she’d finished eating and turned on the radio as loud as it would go.
Forgetfulness ran in the Huber family in the way of freckles or knock knees or red hair. Josef’s father the head schoolteacher had been absentminded. His students and his drinking buddies had all joked about it. Look at him searching for his pen when it’s right there, tucked behind his ear. He’s misplaced his wallet again, they’d say, and can’t pay for his beer. Even Josef had laughed. But then the old man’s eyes went dark, it seemed to happen all at once, and the jokes didn’t feel right anymore. He was verkalkt, the townspeople said. He shouldn’t have eaten all those egg yolks. He smeared too much pork fat onto his bread. “Who are you?” he’d say when Etta came to visit. “What are you doing in my room?” Other times he reached for her hand. “You never come to see me, it’s been too long,” but he looked at her with frightened eyes because he knew. How lonely it must have been for the old man, who was lost inside his living room.
Josef came along sometimes, if she pestered him enough, but he didn’t talk to his father and he didn’t reach for him, and when Josef began to forget, she recognized the look in those pale eyes of his. She had never seen the resemblance before, but he looked like his father. He sat just like him in his chair.
“There’s no shame in forgetting things,” she’d say when the lapses came. Josef drew himself straight then and squared his shoulders, and he seemed to grow taller in his anger. “I remember everything,” he told her. “What people said twenty years ago and when they graduated and were married and when they died. Don’t talk to me about forgetting.” Yes, she’d say then, he remembered things she’d forgotten long before, the names of cousins and colleagues and former students and all the dates from the history books. He remembered all the details and wrote them in his journal. He was absentminded is all it was, just like any good teacher should be. And though he nodded at her words, she knew they were no consolation because it was working its way through him. It wound through the Hubers like a black vein, through Josef’s parents and probably his grandparents, too, and up through all the branches of their tree, and it had no name and it had no remedy, this strange forgetting. It was relentless as the sun.
She checked on Josef when she was done with the dishes. He was asleep already in his chair, his journal open in his lap. He’d left his pen on the paper, and the ink bled through the pages. She took it from his hand and capped it.