“Oh, there—”
“Listen.”
“The noise of all those wings.”
Dusk, and they’ve spread their blankets in the field: Heike leans against Tilli, makes finger wings; Wilhelm sits on Tilli’s knees; Kalle and Lotte whisper, their heads close; while Sabine and the beekeeper make sure to sit at a proper distance from each other.
Tilli is the one to draw us all together, Kalle thinks.
“The starlings.”
“Like a storm.”
Heike pinches her nostrils. “They stink.”
Tilli pinches her nostrils. “They stink worse than sheep.”
“Because there are so many,” the beekeeper says. “They gather in one huge cloud before they go down to their sleeping grounds. Because of the predators.”
With her free hand Heike pinches Wilhelm’s nostrils shut, but he swivels his head, shakes her off.
“Don’t do that.” Heike catches his face between her palms.
“Let me help.” Sabine lifts Wilhelm from her.
“Wilhelm,” Heike cries, “hold your nose shut.”
Starlings tumble from the sky in fabulous and iridescent formations that scatter as birds of prey—falcons on tapered wings, hawks on broad wings—give chase to this feast of starlings that veers and dips and soars as it enfolds its loss; and if you have not encountered such loss, you may assume the flock has always been like this, whole, the sum of all transformations, as it flings its devastating grace and splendor at the heavens. But what if you don’t understand what you’re about to lose? With her own girl Tilli should have known. Worst thing is you cannot know until after. Like the morning before the drowning when the Jansen family reveled in their happiness and Venetian candy.
Wilhelm lifts his face to the black swirls. Tastes his amazement like sugar on lettuce.
Kalle drinks in his son’s wonderment. “The starlings,” he tells him, “are so tired that the urge to sleep is greater than caution. They know they must get down to the marshes swiftly, together, to be safe.” He describes how Raubvögel wait for the starlings to descend. “Falcons attack from the sky, hawks from below. Most—”
“Hawks need to eat too,” Tilli says.
“Falcons, too,” Heike says.
“True. Most starlings pass through the attack of the hawks and reach ground.”
“Yes,” Lotte says. “They clutch reeds, one claw here, the other claw there, and press down the tops to stabilize them, make a pouch of leaves where they hide and rest through the night.”
Heike swats at mosquitoes.
“They must sleep one meter above water because of the ground predators,” says the beekeeper. “Foxes and weasels swim out during the night to eat the starlings, but they can’t climb up the reeds.”
Lotte raises her arms, forms a cloud as Sister Sieglinde did in this very field when Lotte was a child. Sabine’s fingers fly up, graze Lotte’s, and their hands plummet together. Fly up again.
And in the plunge Lotte links her fingers through Sabine’s. Asks, “Can Wilhelm stay at your house tonight?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you. And part of tomorrow?”
“What should I be asking you?”
“Whatever you want to ask.”
“Where will you be?”
“Südfall.”
Sabine waits.
“My cousin Nils needs help with…”
“You promised to tell me if—”
“I am telling you.”
Sabine shakes her head.
“We need to help my cousin on Südfall.”
Tilli and Heike make their own clouds, pull Wilhelm into their radiance, and the three laugh and bump into grown-ups and one another. Tilli’s cloud separates into fingers that shiver and fly and she’s a starling now who must hide in the night. As Wilhelm wiggles his fingers, it comes to Kalle how—in this twilight flicker of wings and hands—the birds and humans belong to one migration.
It was like that when he and Lotte took their first baby to watch the sun turn black with birds. As they carried Hannelore through the fields, sun slanted from the right. Ahead of them, marshes. They spread some hay across the muddy ground. There they wait. He twirls a hollow stem between his fingers, blows into it to make the wispy hairs on Lotte’s temples rise with his breath. She smiles. Clasps Hannelore to her breast till her eyes close. Together they bundle their sleeping baby and back away from her on their knees, soundlessly, into the deeper grass behind a stand of reeds, from where they can still watch her. There, they love one another, loosen each other’s clothing just enough to stroke, to merge, half-covered if Hannelore were to wake up.
They can finish in two minutes.
Can take two hours.
All day and again as in their first year of loving. Hiding from parents and nuns and teachers and neighbors; only now it’s their baby daughter they’re hiding from. Sun, deeper and glowing, dips behind the reeds, hones their silhouettes, miniature trees in Japanese drawings, each leaf suggested. While Hannelore sleeps, a fine ribbon of milk on her throat; while her parents love one another in the deepest grass, screened by a stand of reeds.
Hannelore. She’s here, Lotte thinks. Hannelore is here. We are ready. Soon.
The beekeeper says, “Starlings sleep squeezed next to one another.”
“Feather to feather…” Heike says.
“All the starlings. That’s why it gets so hot.”
“How hot?” Wilhelm asks.
“Over one hundred degrees,” Heike says.
“No, no,” Tilli says. “You know what happens at one hundred degrees.”
“Water boils?” Heike asks.
“Good. And at zero degrees?”
Heike nudges Tilli.
Tilli whispers to her.
Heike says, “Water freezes.”
Wilhelm hums.
“Forty degrees Celsius,” the beekeeper says, “that’s how hot it gets in the center of the flock when the starlings sleep.”
“Forty degrees is still very hot,” Heike says.
“Like the hottest day of summer,” says Tilli.
“The starlings come here because it’s easy to catch insects with all that water around,” says the beekeeper.
“Rain, too,” Heike says. “Do they eat sleeping bugs?”
“Sleeping bugs and awake bugs,” Tilli says.
“Where do they go from here?”
“As far north as Sweden and Norway,” Tilli says.
“Finland, too?”
“Finland, too.”
When we walk from the darkness into our house, my daughter shouts, “Wilhelm is here.”
Tilli says, “I’ve already made up a bed for him on the bench by the Kachelofen.”
Already? What do you know? I search Tilli’s face, but her eyes flicker away.
“We’ll be back middle of the day tomorrow,” Lotte tells me.
I feel the tug of our friendship and know she feels it too, is just one slip of one word away from telling me. “Please, Lotte—”
But there’s Kalle with a chair from the table. He sets its back against the bench. “Climb in, Wilhelm.”
“No!” Something’s not right not true not right—
“It’s your favorite spot,” Heike reminds Wilhelm.
“Climb in,” his father says.
Wilhelm pretends to try. Slides off, limp arms and legs. “I can’t.”
“You do this all the time by yourself,” Heike says.
“Carry me,” he wails and lifts his arms to his mother. Hides his face in the dip between her neck and shoulder.
Heike tickles him behind his knees. “You’re not a baby.”
“Go home…”
Lotte’s eyes are on Tilli.
Who nods. Says, “Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” Lotte whispers to her.
“I’ll stay here with you,” Tilli promises Wilhelm.
“Me too.” Heike pulls him from Lotte, swirls him around—cries of protest, then laughter—before she plops him onto the bench.
“Let’s check what’s happening here. Lie down.” Kalle pulls up Wilhelm’s shirt, plants a kiss on his belly.
Wilhelm giggles.
“I think we missed a spot here.”
“And here,” Wilhelm says and pulls his shirt higher, pokes a finger into his belly.
More kisses. “Tomorrow, you and I’ll check your belly again.”
When Lotte tucks Wilhelm in, his body eases.
I slip my shawl from my shoulders, cover him.
“We’ll bring you a surprise,” Kalle promises him. And when his son nods, something deep within Kalle opens toward him.
Tilli beams. “A surprise beyond anything you can imagine.”