The Cannibal

LOVE

“Stella sings like an angel,” cried the crowd, and the Bavarian orchestra played all the louder. Some of them were shocked, some annoyed, others opened their big hearts and wanted to join in the chorus, while some looked out into the sultry night. The largest of them were eager waiters whose black jackets showed here and there with darker patches of velvet from stains, whose stout arms bore platters of beer and who paused near the kitchen doors to hear the new singer. The officers in their new grey tunics were slightly smaller and the girls were smaller yet — but still were Nordic women, straight, blonde, strong and unsupple. Even the vines on the trellises were thick and round, swaying only slightly out in the heat. Heads nodded close together at the tables in the garden. In the brightly-lit room the wooden chairs and tables were uncarved, unornamented, and the white walls and pillared ceiling were remote. It did not seem possible that enough blue smoke and shadow could rise to make the hall alluring. The men talked together, the clatter of cups intruded. Their backs were straight, they nodded cordially, and the light gleamed on undecorated chests. But it was only ten, still dusk, still formal. They smiled. Stella twisted the handkerchief in her fingers, squeezed it strongly into her damp palms and continued to sing and to smile. Then she found it simple, found that her throat opened and her head could turn and smile, that she could move about and thrust into her shoulders the charm of the song. They listened, turned away, then listened again, and like a girl with breeding and a girl with grace, she made them look and sang to them. First, sadly, then with her eyes bright and her shoulders thrust backwards:

“Dass du mich liebst, weiss ich.”

Some of them laughed and twisted in their seats. She shook her hair loose, she felt like telling them they could come to her, that they could send flowers.

“Must I then, must I then come back to your heart And smile again?”

She moved as if she had a sunflower just beneath her bosom, as if she could draw them sailing on a sacred lake, and first a crackling chicken, then a duckling, then a head of cheese fell under her swoop. But always she looked directly over into their eyes startled from eating, or eyes large from some private imagination. Her bosom, larger than her hips, swayed with pleasure. And only a moment before she had stood in the left wing, hidden by dusty curtains and sheets of music, feeling that never in the world could she face the lights and attention of the drinking hall. The Sportswelt Brauhaus, austere and licensed, patronized and rushed upon, coldly kept her out for a moment, then with a smart burst from the accordion, drew her down, deeply as possible, into the fold. After the summer broke, she had come, and tonight she stood before them all, her body slowly showing through the gown, more and more admired for her stately head, singing,

“All my body blossoms with a greater …”

They clapped, chuckled, and slowly the undecorated chests slid open, the lights swirled about in the fog, while Stella, arm around the accordion player, sang anything at all that came to mind. Her ancestors had run berserk, cloaked themselves in animal skins, carved valorous battles on their shields, and several old men, related thinly in blood from a distant past, had jumped from a rock in Norway to their death in the sea. Stella, with such a history running thickly in her veins, caught her breath and flung herself at the feet of her horned and helmeted kinsmen, while the Bavarians schnitzled back and forth in a drunken trio.

In an alley behind the hall timbered with consecrated ash, the darkness and odor of wet stone rose in spirals of steam as from below a horse on a winter’s day. The sound of the violin, jumping dangerously along the length of the alley walls, merged with the basso wheezing of a lascivious merchant and swept overhead into the heat of the garden.

Ernie, the Brauhaus owner’s son, shuffled his feet to two dry spots, leaned his shoulder against the slippery rock, and steadied his face covered with dueling scars, down into the green darkness. Stella’s unknown, unnamed voice, beginning to reach the crown of her triumph, leaped straight from the small bright window behind his back and fell about the heads of those in the garden, dumb with love. Ernie wiped his hands on his trousers, leaned back and looked up into the sweltering night, his pockets stuffed with hundred mark notes, his eyes blind to the flickering sky. He saw only emptiness in the day’s returns, felt the scratches from a skillful bout burn on his cheek. His tongue was thick and numb with beer. The Merchant, barely afloat in the humid atmosphere, still cradling jade and ivory blocks in his arms and girded with a Turkish robe, made a perfect soft target in the darkness. Ernie breathed in and out on the same air, the pig’s tail lay heavily on his stomach, and he gave no thought to steel blades or the Merchant’s fat bulk. Howls of laughter were muffled inside the hall, low voices floated over the garden wall in tones that said there was something to hide, and the heady smell of tulips, roses, German-valor-petals, hydrangeas and cannon flowers sank into the pea-green pit of stench at his feet. The flowers turned their pistils out to catch the rain if it should come, the Merchant’s breath drew closer, and the moon shone once in the heavens, loaded like a sac with water.

Ernie squeezed his left hand, the hand with the last two fingers gone from a hatchet stroke, into his pocket tight with bills, and turned back towards the light, towards the free men of the hall. He would sit on a worshipped pile of granite, a small duelist in the hall of kings. The Merchant tried to follow but, like a laboring hind, slipped and fell, his fat body dragging along over the stones. He could not call out and each time he moved he slid deeper. Ernie heard his thudding fall and walked faster, trying to find again a place for light and song. He measured his steps and seemed to tread upon the whole world of Germany as he walked, half-consciously, back near the aurora of tabled clans, disciplined faces, and all the irony and fellowship of his men-at-arms. A man in grey staggered past, ready with malice or with a bow at the waist, and far in the back of the alley Ernie heard him trip against the fallen Merchant, heard a muffled word against the background of summer nightbirds.

Ernie, because of the fingers gone from his hand and the ugly sight of three remaining claws, could never ride a black mare into the din of volleying balls, or crawl hand over hand through the wet fields of Belgium. He touched the middle and forefinger with the thumb and heard the woman’s voice crying out to the men young in soul. Inside he sat at his father’s table under the shadows and far to the rear, and melting into the crowd became nondescript, feigned to strike out with ignored curt expressions.

Stella, like her father, held them at bay; and, losing one by one those traits that were hers, absorbed more and more the tradition that belonged to all. She did not lisp when she sang, but boomed the words in an unnatural voice. And the gestures she developed came with ease. She walked from the archway of her father’s house to the audience of the Sportswelt transgressing natural thought as clearly as she passed the stages of the months. She, the sorceress, sent them boiling and held them up for joy, feeling pain only in the last moment before sleep, half-dressed, on the bedroom floor. Gerta, the nurse, thought the Devil had come a long way from the forest to find her. Every dress she owned, every male plate of armor, every bone comb and silken ban, was stamped with the seal of the camp follower, and screaming in nightmares to the dead ears of her sleeping father, she followed the weeks of 1914. Beneath her eyes she had painted indigo stains as if she had been beaten, and her eyes swept from tall black trees to the glaciers of dead warriors, green with the tint of pine trees, sober with a longing that came of eighteen years of summer patios and a partition of a princely nursery.

After the last chorus of the song, she bowed straight-legged from her flaring hips, flushed to their applause, and made her way to old Herr Snow’s table, storing appreciation up in her heart, storing each face beside the photograph of the white flaking head of Gerta, the nurse. Blue smoke floated above the sawdust and the tide of conversation rolled in the lion cage. She sat where Herr Snow, with his red beard, indicated, felt his wrists slide her smoothly forward until she touched the table. She looked from face to face. “You were excellent,” he said. “This is my son, Ernst, who enjoys your singing so much.” Ernie, thin and more alive with beer, pushed back his chair and nodded, fixed her as he might have fixed a rosy-cheeked sister, adult and come alive from his free past. “And,” said Herr Snow, “this is Mr. Cromwell, a guest of mine.” Mr. Cromwell smiled with an easy drunken grace and filled her glass. He did not miss the charm of London or of the English countryside rollicking in summer but slept late and heard no cocks crowing in the early dawn.

“You’re English?” asked Stella.

“Yes, but I particularly like Germany. The lakes and cities seem like vistas cut into the ice age. You sing well.”

Herr Snow was proud of Ernie because his other son, a boy of nine, forever wore his head strapped in a brace, and the words that came from the immovable mouth came also from a remote frightening world. Old Snow, prosperous and long owner of the Sportswelt, looked with hard admiration on Ernie’s face, saw his own eyes and nose staring resentfully back. With mute excitement, Stella followed each jagged crevice of the scars, noticed how they dug beneath the cheeks highlighting the bones, how the eyes were pressed between encroaching blocks of web-like tissue. She waited for the three claws of the left hand to close talon-like just above her knee, grew warm to the close-kept face down in its corner. The orchestra filled out the room behind her, roasted apples fell from the bosom of an oracle, burnt and golden, and gradually the three men drew closer, warm with all the taste of a chivalric age. She covered the glass before her with the golden hair and saw for a moment in its swirling depths, the naked cowardice of the fencer, the future fluttering wings of the solitary British plane leaving its token pellet in the market place, her mother’s body rolling around it like a stone stained forever, the stain becoming dry and black as onyx.

The rain had begun to fall and the summer thunder drifted over the wet leaves, coursed over the darkened glistening steeples. The carriage rocked to and fro, water splashing from the wheels, dripping from the deep enclosures of passing doors. They traveled slowly down die Heldenstrasse, hearing only the soft rain, the chopping of the steel hoofs, the smooth movements of leather. Oiled gunmetal springs swung them easily through the June night while Mephistopheles, crouching in a choir-room, circled this eighteenth day of the month in red. He, in his black cowl, called the sleeping swans to pass by them on the lake in the park and the coachman flicked the whip over the horse’s ears.

“Why did you want to take me home?” she asked.

“I’m fond of the color of your hair and eyes.”

Stella felt nothing near her, could feel no man or beast or spirit lurking under the rain, no hand crept towards hers. She could not even feel or hear his breathing, only the steady turning of the axletree. No man in the world, sitting as Cromwell sat, soft felt brim curling with rain, fine straight features and wide nostrils drinking in the lavender, no such man or leader of men could have caused a single ripple in her even tone.

“Why didn’t you stay home, in your English home?” Her hair was becoming damp and heavy.

“Home? Why I don’t really have a home, and in fact, I don’t believe anyone has.” Now, with a change of wind, she could smell his scented breath, but he was foreign, unreal, was a humor she could brush away with her white hand. “I feel that I am one of those middle-aged men whom, in a little while, people will call an expatriate.” In full light he looked a little old, resembled a smart but tottering wolfhound guarding its own grave. And Cromwell, like a change of mind or a false impression, like an unexpected meeting or a mistake in the dark, filled Ernie’s place and caused in Stella a fleeting disbelief; she expected to see the lacerated face aloof in the corner of her carriage. He rode as an Archduke, unconsciously wiping the rain from his waistcoat, smiling slightly with lonely intoxication. Stella looked beyond the figure of the fat coachman to see the angular street unwind.

“I think that everyone has a home.” Her voice was musical like the axletree.

When he spoke, it was not quite as if he wanted to talk to her. His throat was hidden by an upturned flowing collar.

“I, for one, don’t even remember my mother’s face. England is a land of homeless people, but the Germans, though just as homeless, are a little slow in realizing it. And besides, they have a beautiful capacity for ideals of conquest, a traditional heroism.” His mouth was becoming heavy with a very sour taste of sleep, a taste of finding it still dark beyond the raised shade, the sourness accumulated from many unwanted meals, and still he kept his head in a smiling manner, looked into the flowering darkness with a pleasant friendly way of practiced youth.

“The bedclothes, curtains, my mother’s gowns, the very way I looked as a child, were always unfamiliar. Unfamiliar.”

The slight layer of accent beneath his perfect speech began to disrupt her isolation. The soft ribbon of street started to break up into glaring bricks, into actual corners, into black patches of shadow against the curb, the horse stumbling and nodding. The rain shook in the linden trees.

“You should have stayed home,” she said. Stella thought that she was too precious for this journey and counted, one by one, the statues of Heroes that lined the street on the park side and wished she could recognize the stone faces. They seemed like metal behind an angry crowd, as if they might step out to march up the stifling street, rain falling from their foreheads. Almost like man and wife they plodded along in silence, the late night growing smoky, their clothes wet as if they had been playfully wading in the park lake. How wonderful that they had all liked her singing, that they had clapped and looked after her, that she could sing to State heroes. Somehow she thought that Cromwell had not clapped at all. Again she could almost feel the three claws just above her knee, would offer her firm leg to their frightened touch. Cromwell, though he seemed to be easily considering the black early morning, found that he could not settle back, resigned to the rain, easily riding in the Duchess’ carriage, but felt a vague general pain as if the Heroes followed him. He wondered what the Krupp gun would do to Europe, saw the Swiss sliding down the mountains on their seats, saw the English bobbing in the Channel, and saw the rest of the nations falling in line like a world-wide pestilence.

She had seen Ernst for the first time a few mornings ago, out in the empty garden behind the Sports-welt, watching the blue shadows give place to the bright rising sun, neither English, Swiss nor German, but a fighter without his trappings, dangling his legs from an upturned chair. She knew he was a coward when the old man screamed out of the window, “Ernst, Ernst,” in a loud bellowing unhappy voice that did not have to command respect. But he jumped, stared at the quiet blank wall of the building, and then she knew that it might have been she herself who called, and she laughed behind the shadow of the open window when it bellowed again, “Ernst, Ernst, kommst du hier.” She could tell by the way his head moved that his eyes must be frightened, that all his frail arms and legs would be trembling. He was magnificent! She watched him throw the foil from him and it rolled into a flower bed, lay beneath the drooping petals. But she knew that his face was tough, she could see that the blood would be rising into his head, that his ugly hand would be twitching. The garden became Valhalla, he could kill somebody with a single quick movement, and she wanted to be with him in Valhalla. She heard the door slam and the old man’s voice rolling angrily out. The flowers turned very bright in the sun; she could, at that moment, sing her heart out. When she saw Herr Snow a while later he was perfectly calm.

The musty odor of the wet carriage mixed with the lavender of Cromwell’s hair, the Heroes passed out of view.

“I don’t think you should have come with me,” she said into the coachman’s back.

“You must give me a chance,” Cromwell answered, thinking of the vast Rhineland, “after all, I’m homeless.”

On a few isolated occasions in his life, Ernie had been swept into overwhelming crisis, and, after each moment of paralysis, had emerged more under his father’s thumb than ever. He remembered that his mother, with her tight white curls and slow monotonous movement, had never succumbed, but had always yielded, to the deep irritable voice. Her kind but silent bulk had slowly trickled down his father’s throat, easing the outbursts of his violent words, until at last, on a hot evening, they had laid her away in the back yard, while his young brother, head already in the brace, had crawled along at their sides, screaming and clutching at his trousers. His father loved him with the passionate control of a small monarch gathering and preening his five-man army, and only used him as a scapegoat to vent an angry desire for perfection. The old man would have wept in his hands if anything had happened to Ernie, and, as ruler of the Sportswelt and surrounding Europe, had given him every opportunity for love. Ernie, dwarfed at his side, sat every evening at the back table in the hall, until, when the stately patrons rolled with laughter and the father became more absorbed in them than in his son, he could slip away and match swords with those as desperate as himself. “You’ll get yourself killed,” his father would say, “they’re cutting you apart bit by bit.”

His father had forced one of the few small crises himself the only time he saw his son in combat. They were fencing in a grove several miles from the city, the sun raising steam about their feet, fencing with a violent hatred and determination. They were alone, stripped to the waist, scratches and nicks bleeding on their chests, heads whirling with the heat. The Baron, young, agile, confident, drove him in and out of the trees to stick him a thousand times before actually wounding him. Ernie was sick, fought back, but saw blades through the fogged goggles. Herr Snow came upon the scene like a fat indignant judge, his face white with rage. He wrenched the weapon from the Baron’s hand and beating him without mercy across the shoulders and buttocks, drove him screaming from the grove, tiring his thick arm with the work. “You’re a god damn fool,” he told his son.

Ernie walked in a dark trimmer’s night for a long while and in the Sportswelt heard the bees buzzing with a low vicious hum. Since he was a Shylock, his face grew tight and bitter and Herr Snow took to keeping a lighted candle by his bed. Even asleep, Ernie’s feet jiggled up and down as they had danced in the grove, the bulk of the noble crushing swiftly down on him, and in a frenzy Ernie jabbed quicker and quicker at the raging white face of his father, fell back weeping beneath the heavy broadsword.

“Well,” and the words pushed themselves over the end of a wet sausage, “why didn’t you take her home yourself? You’ll not get any women just sitting with me.” Ernie made a move to leave.

“Wait. Just let me tell you that once your mother looked at me, there was no other man.” He held the stein like a scepter. “You want to go for these,” his hands made awkward expressive movements around his barrel chest. Herman Snow had not only used his hands but had made tender love to the silent woman and asked dearly for her hand on his knees that were more slender in those days. He thought her sad face more radiant than the sun, and worshipped her as only a German could. On the evenings when she had a headache he stroked her heavy hair and said, “Ja, Liebling, ja, Liebling,” over and over a hundred times in his softest voice. They had taken a trip on a canal barge owned by his brother. Herman had propped her in the stern on coarse pillows, away from the oil-smeared deck forward and the guttural voices of the crew, and she had looked warmly with interest on the passing flat country as if they were sailing on the Nile. Herman gazed into her face, held one of the strong hands.

“A little aggression is needed,” said the old man. Ernie lost his head in the stein and remembered the fat Merchant, like Herman, like papa, sprawled out in the alley with a string of women behind him and children gorging themselves on attention, sprawled like a murdered Archduke, his face in the bile. The hall was finally game, the troops screamed and stamped feet, dolls with skirts drawn above pink garters perched on elephant knees suggesting the roar of mighty Hannibal. Old Herman made fast excursions into the crowd, urging, interested. “Hold her tighter, more beer, more beer,” and returned to the stoop-shouldered Ernie with his face alive in enjoyment. Several times Ernie thought he could hear Stella’s voice above the howling, and like an assassin under floodlights, he shivered.

“Don’t be such a fearful Kind,” said Herman, puffing with excitement, “join the chase.” He smiled momentarily at his son above the strenuous noise of the orchestra. When he left the table again to encourage a maenadic blonde and an old general, Ernie rushed from the prosperous Valhalla.

Rain filled his eyes with warm blurred vision, filled his outward body with the heat of his mind, and running until his breathing filled his ears, he clattered past opulent swaying wet branches, past windows opening on endless sleep. “Ernst, Ernst,” the summer evening cried and he dashed zig-zag up the broad boulevard, raced to outrun the screaming, raced to catch the dog who rode with her away, raced to coincide with Princip in Sarajevo. He ran to spend energy, tried to run his own smallness into something large, while far in the distance he thought he heard the carriage wheels. If he could spread before her the metal of magnificence, if he could strike lightning from the sky, if he could only arrest her for one brief moment in the devotion he felt whirling in the night. But then the past told him the Merchant, or the Baron, or Herman would steal her off to a nest of feathers — before he could speak.

He felt that his belt would burst, and so, just before reaching the line of Heroes, he stopped in the park. He thought that his mother would see, would stand looking at him in the dark, so he pushed behind the foliage, behind a bush that scratched at his fumbling hands. The rain became stronger and stronger and still he was rooted behind the bush, desperation on his face to be off, to be flying. Then he was running through the shadows like a flapping bird. When he passed the line of statues, each Hero gave him a word to harden his heart: love, Stella, Ernst, lust, tonight, leader, land. He felt that if old Herman ran at his side, he would tell him to get her in the britches. Already the guns were being oiled and the Belgians, not he, would use that Merchant as a target.

“Tomorrow you’ll wake up and find we’re in a war,” said Cromwell. The carriage was turning the last corner, he turned his ready benevolence on the cruel castles, thought he’d like to tell his old father, but that was impossible.

“Then you’ll go home?” she asked.

“No. I think I’ll stay. It is pleasant, in moments such as these, knowing with certainty an approaching catastrophe, to view the whole incident that will probably extend fifty years, not as the death of politics or the fall of kings and wives, but as the loyalty of civilization, to realize that Krupp, perhaps a barbarian, is more the peg where history hangs than a father who once spoke of honor. If I could get into my father’s house, past his fattening memory, I would tell him what’s coming and leave him something to carry away with him.”

“I, on the other hand, star of maidenhood, having found love, want to tell my father nothing, and if your prophecy should fall on our heads, could do nothing but protect my own. If in this hour of crisis, we must ride side by side, I will become, as you wish, your Archduchess for the people, but where your eyes and theirs cannot look, I am arrogant.”

They were none the closer when they heard his running footsteps, when they looked in fear, back to the road they had just traveled, looked quickly over the low rear of the carriage. He ran up to them gasping out of the darkness, clutched the side of the carriage as if to hold it in his hand, and at that moment a bevy of disturbed birds chirped vividly in fright. They did not recognize him, did not speak, and for a moment, Cromwell waited to see the short muzzle of the pistol, to feel his ears enveloped in concussion, and on impulse almost took her in his arms for the last time. But the carriage continued, the coachman sleeping, and the assailant was dragged, half-running, half-stumbling, veins exploding around his eyes. Then, in great deliberation, she leaned and touched his fingers.

“Come, get in,” she said.

“No, no, I cannot.”

Cromwell was a fool. He wouldn’t move, but back straight, hat over his eyes, he sat and waited. His gloved hands trembled on his knees. “I’ll come back,” Ernst said and once more took to his heels as the carriage reached the curb and a crowd seemed to gather. Stella knew, in this dark disrupted haze, that she was somewhere near her greatest love. Francis Ferdinand lay on the seat of the carriage, his light shirt filled with blood, his epaulettes askew and on the floor lay the body of his departed wife, while the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, ran mad through the encircling streets. Obviously the advent of the great war would not throw them all together, make them friends, or even make them enemies; Ernie was ready, even in the throes of love, for a goal of religious fanaticism; Cromwell simply longed, desperately, to fit into the conflict somewhere; and Stella knew only that she was climbing high and would someday lose him. It all started as simply as the appearance of Ernie’s dangerous, unpleasant face. When the people found out, the people of Bosnia, Austria, and the Hapsburg monarchy, they caused a silent, spreading, impersonal commotion over the body of Ferdinand.

“Thank you,” said Stella.

“Oh, I’ll be around.” She did not turn to watch Cromwell go back to the carriage.

The University was black, impressive, most of its archives and bare rooms encased in a drawn restless wine-stupor, part of its jagged, face grey, menacing, piled backwards on itself in chaotic slumber. The rain came down in broken sheets covering first one roof, then a ledge, then splashing against a swinging door, sluicing down the crumbling channels, smothering dust-filled caves crawling with larvae. The center of revolution, dogma and defeat, it drew the city into its walls with a crushing will; and behind its ancient and topheavy porticos and crags, behind small windows and breathing flues, lodged the uninhibited, the young, the old. Ernie crossed a hollow court, dodged down ecclesiastical alleys past flowing fonts, made his way past stone connecting arches and hybrid walls, hastened beyond a mausoleum of brain to where the stone eruption gave way to a wooden comb of corridors. Resolved to upset his dying fall, he finally lunged at a solid door, smelled the dank unvarying stench of huddled students and counted forward five doors while the summer rain rolled thickly down the stained windows, and his footfalls still called back from the stone. The door was covered with the prints of ancient nervous fingers, was damp with the palms that had slipped in and out for centuries. Heavy furniture and eaten rug, iron candle holders and unused loving chair, were pushed into dust-covered heaps lining three walls, leaving the scarred floor a wide cold arena, colorless beneath the only lamp that burned in the University, peopled by the only waking men. They slouched, sleepless, like a band of raiders in a thick wood, drinking a colorless water that caused the lungs to heave, the skin to burn, that brought violent images before the eyes. The single light threw stiff unyielding shadows on the horse-collared masks, on the molding chest mats, protective of bowels, front and loins, covered with dry rust and rattling buckles, grey wire-like stuffing from rough slashes.

The Baron, older in time, more vicious and less proud with his bastard Spanish-German head thrust back and upwards at the agony-carved rafters, more hot and princely and dog-like under his eyes and stripped arms, waited until precisely the proper moment when the eyes found their two-sided common target, when the arena drifted with unraked ashes, to slip to his knees and draw as in sleep a weapon from the debris. The onlookers let the liquor trickle down their nostrils, coughed, rubbed their collars, stared with their mouths open in hate. These were the agates that could not grow.

In the first moment their bodies lost form, clashing like roosters with spiked heels, aiming at brief exposed patches of white, striking for scarecrow targets. They struck at the Physik of limbs. In the second moment, the arena stained with drops of ink, walls resounding with blows, they aimed at the perilous eyes and ears, the delicate tendons of the neck, fingers, stabbing at the Kultur of sense, and a blade-tip sang past his lower lip, splitting the skin the length of his under jaw. In the third moment they found the groin, and he felt a pain from the accidental flat of the blade that traveled from the abdomen to his throat in a brief spasm, the original Unlust. He stooped, and the bell of the saber rang through the ashes, dropped to the floor in a finished scoop. Then gradually he began to fall from a high, blunted indefinable space where the Hero’s words: love, Stella, Ernst, lust, tonight, leader, land revolved out of relation, until he finally reached particulars too extreme to comprehend. Brine filled the hollow of his gum, the cuticle of one thumb bled into a purple half-moon, and an internal kink filled him with pain from the stomach to the blind gut. “Go outside, if you must,” said the Baron who sank down among his comrades. Someone threw him a towel and, wrapping it about his head, Ernie managed to get into the corridor and hold to the wall. Inside they sang, one voice after another, in a very slow meter, the Horst Wessel Lied. “Get back to your room,” said an old caretaker moving around him in the darkness. Finally, his head white and bulky in the towel, he made his way out into the rain, leaving a sharp odor of sickness outside the room with a light.

Stella, golden tresses gathered about the waist, a calm determination to survive and to succeed grown upright in her mind, waited for his return, sure he would come, sure she would have to give warmth. She was prepared to make him as happy as her instinct would allow, would overrule the rights of anyone in the house for her own demands. But Gerta was a woman quick to injure. Stella listened to every sound, fought with the desire to dream, and thought at some hour of the night that she heard marching feet. When Ernie finally did come, it was in desperation. “Come in, you poor creature,” she whispered, and held the toweled bundle in her lap. He left soon after because a bright excited day was beginning to break, and harassed or jubilant cries echoed up and down the drying streets.

STELLA

The conquered spirit lies not only in rest but in waiting, crushed deep in face-lines of deprivation, in fingers that no longer toil, the one thing that shall lift, and enlarge and set free.

The house where the two sisters lived was like an old trunk covered with cracked sharkskin, heavier on top than on the bottom, sealed with iron cornices and covered with shining fins. It was like the curving dolphin’s back: fat, wrinkled, hung dry above small swells and waxed bottles, hanging from a thick spike, all foam and wind gone, over many brass catches and rusty studs out in the sunshine. As a figure that breathed immense quantities of air, that shook itself in the wind flinging water down into the streets, as a figure that cracked open and drank in all a day’s sunshine in one breath, it was more selfish than an old General, more secret than a nun, more monstrous than the fattest shark.

Stella combed her hair before the open window, sunlight falling across her knees, sometimes holding her head up to catch the wind, as wide awake as if she had slept soundly through the night without wild dreams. A few scattered cheers and broken shouts were carried up from side streets, windows were flung open, dust-rags flung out into the spring morning like signal flags. Brass bands were already collecting in the streets, small groups of old men surrounded by piles of shiny instruments. A crowd was gathering about the front of the gated house and she could hear them stamping their feet and clapping each other on the backs, thumping and pushing, waiting for the chance to cheer. She felt completely at rest, self-satisfied, pulling at one strand of thick hair and then at another. She knew her father would be dressing, powdering his cheeks so he could speak to the crowd, and she had reached the time of a strange discovery. If it were not for the idea of love, if her father were a man she did not know at all, how distasteful his fingers would be, like pieces of rotting wood; how unpleasant his white hair would be, a grey artificial mat that she could never stand to kiss; how like an old bone would be his hollow shoulders. Stella enjoyed thinking of her father as one she did not know. He was so old he never understood. Voices shouted at her, she eased her chair to follow the moving sunlight. Gerta came in throwing the door wide.

“Damn that woman, damn that old fool!” Gerta stared about the room. “Always I say I’m not at home, I’ve gone away to the country, I’m sick, but there she sits, down there with the cook in the kitchen waiting to pounce on me.” The old woman raged about the room, hovered over the chair a moment to see if Stella listened. She snorted at the golden head, ripped into the closets, threw forth bundles of soiled linen. She gasped.

“You’re no better!” The comb slid up and down, the nurse trembled in the pile of linen.

Down in the kitchen sat Gerta’s friend, a new maid from several houses away who traveled across back courts and had paid a call, for no reason, carrying a bag of cold buns which she munched while trying to become friends with Gerta. Gerta was afraid and angry and could not understand this woman who, dressed like an imbecile girl, wore her thin hair plastered to the head, who had no name and talked forever. Gerta would not touch the buns.

“You’re no better. And don’t think,” the voice was a whisper, distorted and low, “that I don’t know what went on last night. Don’t forget that!”

Her father fussed with his collar, a rouge color filling in flat cheeks, her mother directed him from beneath the sheets, the crowd screamed when a manservant hung a faded flag from the very narrow balcony.

Stella turned, face shrouded in gold. “Get out. Take the clothes and leave.” The old woman raced from the room hauling the delicate silks and wrinkled trains of cloth, stumbled and ran, and the hairbrush sailed through the door over the mammoth baluster and fell in a gentle curve to crash many floors below on the hard marble. She turned back to the light. The insurrection passed lightly as the brush, she was bounded by the pale bed, the brightening walls, and summer. The cook howled for more butter from a stuttering girl, the visitor chopped a bun. There on the floor, there beside the small proper bed was the spot, now in shade, where she had held him in her lap.

Despite the dark brown symmetry and shadows of the buildings outside, the air was filled with a light green haze. It patiently and warmly lifted itself over the sagging branches, weakened beneath the load of fresh young leaves scattered on trees caught between the walls and sidewalk. The morning with its widening haze, voices wrangling over the fences, brushes and rags fighting with the furniture, tousled girls scraping and whispering on their knees, the house filled itself with boys and tremendous baskets of fruit, hauling in, it seemed, crowds of people out of the city, awoke with cries and attention. That was the moment to sit in the sun with soft hair falling about one’s waist, to doze and wake, nodding and smelling the sweet air, collecting thoughts for years to come or gone by, like an old woman hooded in black in a doorway.

A half-dozen birds, caught in the leaves, tried to make themselves heard and far down the hall she could hear Gerta talking to her father who was trying to dress. The air was like honey to wave beneath her nose; she called forth her own pleasure, plucked anywhere from the moving number of summer sensations. She waved her hand, even on the opening day of war, the public’s day, and a gentle lusty swell crowded her head, shoved the half-dozen murmuring birds out of reach. In winter, the snow fell where she wished, in great dull even flakes, in smooth slightly purple walls where far in perspective she was held like a candle, warm and bright. In summer, alone, it was she that breathed the idea of naked moonlight swimming — divers together in the phosphorescent breakers, leaves as clothes on the silver beach — she that breathed the idea of brownness, smoothness into every day of June, July, August, who created hair over the shoulder and pollen in the air.

Her mother, a long mound beneath the sheets, had lost all this, terribly aged with a cold pallor, strong and indolent, unhappy in the oppressive heat. The mother lay in bed day after day, the spring, summer, years dragging by, with only her head two hands long above the sheets, her eyes fastened together, motionless until some forgotten whim, surge of strength, drove her from the bed. And in that hour she would shop. When she shopped, she ventured on the streets in gowns from another date, walked in steady steps, and took Stella along. She never liked the world she saw and her old husband never knew she was out of the house.

A hundred strokes, a hundred and five, the hair quivered in the space of gold; she changed hands, her skin as soft as the back of a feather. Her brothers, a pair of twins, fifteen-year-old soldiers dressed in stiff academy blue and trimmed in brass, walked past her open door, eyes ahead, arms in parallel motion, and she heard their miniature spurs clanking down the wide stairs. The boys never saw their parents, since the old man and woman had been the age of deaf grandparents at the time of the brothers’ remarkable conception. The brothers ate and lived alone. The jingling sound hung in her ears, one of the birds had become audible, and she thought of a parakeet with long sharp nails bathing in a blue pond where the green grass swayed and the sun was orange. There was no shock in the day, but the same smothered joy crept up with the morning’s trade and old flags that were unfurling along the guarded streets.

“Breakfast, breakfast!” Gerta called, wearied and harassed, from the center of the first floor lobby, lips drawn down, clutching a fist of silver, calling to wake the whole house into an even greater activity. The shabby crowd was growing restless, howling with round faces scrubbed cheery and proud, while inside the high walls the elaborate process of serving the isolated meal began. Twenty thousand feet in the sky, a sheet of wind flashed over the city cold and thin, while below, warm air rolled over the lake in the park, and swans opened their necks and damp feathers, bumping softly together in stiff confusion.

The old man, always seated first at the table, held his head high and rigid so that it trembled, pure white eyes staring and blinking from a skull like a bird’s, the whole area behind the thin tissue eaten away and lost. Sometimes he ate his melon with the fork, or spoon, or knife, or pushed it with his pointed elbow so that it fell to the floor, pits and meat splashing over his black curled-up shoes. The moustache fell to his high collar in two soft sweeping strands of pale gold, his long legs were a mass of black veins. His face, narrow and long, was covered with bark and was deep scarlet, and clots of blood formed just under the glaze of fine hair; and he would fall, slipping and breaking in every part at least once a week. But each time the clots would dissolve and be churned away, down the grass-smelling passages, and he would recover.

The table was so short, with the twelve leaves piled out of sight in dust, that she could almost smell his breath, with scarcely a bare foot of candelabra, bowls, tongs, green stems and silver trays between them. When she sat down, his head, like a brittle piece of pastry, tried to swim over the breakfast things, searching as every morning, but was blocked by a twisted maze of fern in an azure vase and a pyramid of butter patties topped with dark cherries. “Stool,” he said in a high voice because he could no longer pronounce her name. They sat close together in the middle of the long dining room, the man with his ninety years and the young girl with her peaches, while overhead, set in one of the domes, a large clock struck eleven. Gerta hurried in and out pushing a little cart laden with napkins, rolls, knives, sauces of all kinds and pans of under-done, clear boiled eggs. “Poor man,” she said, dabbing at a long run of fresh egg water on his tunic, turning now and then a look of wrath on Stella as if the poor girl herself had shaken his freckled hand and made the long translucent string slide off onto his chest. Stella frowned back, scattering crumbs over the little table and knocking the goblet so that a mouthful of water sizzled on the coffee urn.

“Watch what you’re doing,” snapped Gerta, her slippers padding angrily on the rug.

This morning he was able to get the pink slices between his fingers, but, slipping through their own oily perfume, they constantly fell back to the tablecloth in irregular heaps of quivering jelly. Stella thought of Ernie and smiled across the floral table at her father, looked with delightful interest at his slippery hands.

The boy didn’t realize what he said, 1870, it would take many dead men to encircle Paris, and the responsibility, that’s what he didn’t understand or no one could speak in such a manner, pride on the heights. “War,” her father said, and there was a terrible fire in his eye through the ferns. “War,” and he leaned slightly forward as if to strike her, but his arm only raised part way, shivered, and dropped back on the plate. She stopped smiling.

“Where is the railroad station?” he asked.

Stella watched his questioning face for a moment then continued to eat. She was sorry.

“He only wants to go to the bathroom,” said Gerta, and throwing herself under his thin erect frame she led him out, the white lace duster fluttering on her head. The two boys clanked by in the hall, stepped in a single motion out of the way. The cook worked frantically to heat more rolls in the oven like a boiler, kept a flame under the pot of coffee, ran from cupboard to cupboard collecting more juices and spices, threw a large ham on the spit. Stella pulled the long brocaded sash and heard the bell jingle out amid the clatter of pans, the swirl of water. Gerta’s friend came in, still wearing her brown shawl and hat covered with violets, still clutching the paper bag with grease on her fingers.

“More toast,” said Stella.

“Ah, toast,” said the woman and disappeared.

Stella thought that her father suffered very much. Some parts of the day she would walk with him up and down the beautiful quiet hallways, his hand resting only lightly on her arm, a smile about his shriveled lips. Sometimes she suffered herself, though usually in the evening in the blue shadows of her room, never in the morning, for she knew that at dusk she would see him half-hidden and in full stately dress behind the tall lighted candles. The dining room walls darkened with nightfall, the silverware lighted by the flames, the immense shadows falling over him from white flowers instead of ferns, covered him with an illusory change that frightened her. In these evenings Stella remembered how, when she was a small girl, he had talked to her, before his voice disappeared, and she heard his voice talking of sieges and courtships, and emerald lands, and she wished him to be a father still. At night she could not tell. From a few long talks with her mother she knew that for five generations the men had been tall, handsome, discreet and honorable soldiers, all looking exactly alike as brother eagles, and all these men had died young. Her father had so outlived the features of those other men and his family that he no longer existed and could not even speak. The man hidden behind the candles made her wonder for all his years.

“You don’t have to tell me where he needs to go,” she murmured, and Gerta’s friend returning with the toast was confused by her words.

The hair nearest her neck was hazel, the rest lemon, and when she walked it was fitfully gliding as if she were already there — there in the mausoleum where he lay in plaster, where rose petals were swept under her prayer. For in the hottest part of the noon, the house was withered away and his white face was in a lasting repose, the idiot of breakfast, the marshal of dinner, become an old masked man in the heat of the sun wherever she walked. She would gladly cut the epitaph herself for just one glimpse before they latched the door — the noon heat made her feel the marble dust as if it were fresh. Never in the world could she know him, only scraps from her mother’s carefully guarded chest. Sometimes, when Stella looked most beautiful, she felt that she would collapse with the house around her when he finally left.

Her room nearest the slate roof was warm, the seascapes, spaced regularly over the walls, filled it with blue, the birds had become silent under the window. Jutta, an ungainly eleven-year-old child, was taking her nap at the end of the corridor in a cubicle small and low that might have belonged to a boarding school or nunnery white and bare. Her mouth was open and she breathed heavily, thin legs apart as if she were riding a horse. Stella fastened the bonnet with pink and yellow ribbons, drew on her white gloves, started down the stairs, and stopped to listen to the low ugly noises of the sleeping child. Outside she found herself caught in front of the house in the silence of the crowd, and all eyes looked upward. There on the narrow balcony, squeezed side by side, was her father still leaning on Gerta who smiled, laces fluttering against his uniform. All at once he spoke, and the single word fell upon them hushed and excited. “Victory.” For a moment they waited for more, watched, listened and then broke out in screams of appreciation while the old man was led back inside the house. They did not realize that he thought the war, which had just begun, was over, and they took up the word and sent it flying along the street from one startled citizen to the next. Stella began to walk, her parasol catching the shade of the enormous line of trees.

Men tipped their hats, drays rolled by with heavy rumps nodding majestically between the shafts, chains clattering, whips stinging; small flags hung limply in shops as if it were a holiday. A tremendous stuffed fish grinned out at her, sunlight skipping between its blue fins, small clams grey and moist piled about like its own roe on the chopped ice. An awning covered part of the street with orange, passers-by parted into even chattering lanes, and children going to the park grinned, tugging ahead. In the Krupp manufacturing works, huge steel barrels were swung by chain and arm, covered with pale green grease and pointed through barred skylights towards the summer sky. In the jail, prisoners looked out into the white limestone yard, carriages skimmed by on frail rubber wheels, and lapel after lapel spotted with a white flower passed by her side. In the thrill of this first warm exciting day with posters going up all over the city and mothers proudly patting their sons’ heads, Stella’s aunts and uncles, less fortunate cousins and acquaintances, fanning themselves in desolate drawing rooms or writing down the date in diaries, wondered how the beginning of hostilities would affect her father’s position, and donning bright colors, prepared to call.

A swallow dipped suddenly down into the center of traffic, and up again, successful. It was then that the headache began. It came as a dull burn might come in noon hours on the beach, a soft sensation in her eyes; pleated under the yellow hair, it coursed slowly down the small of her neck, and made mouthfuls of spit shimmer above the policeman’s white-lady gloves. She held her hand to her breast because the headache was so tiny and almost caught in her throat. “Oh, yes,” she said to herself, “I’ve seen so many artists,” and indeed she had once passed a man slumped over a table scratching the fleas. The seascapes about the walls of her room reminded her of the warm south, of islands where the white sun hurt the eyes, of pebbles like the tips of her fingers that were pearl grey. She could never laugh at anyone, a velvet shoulder brushed quickly by, sharp blues and reds hurried along the street. “Your father was a wonderful brave loving man,” her mother would say. Dogs barked and howled, she glanced from yellow walls to white, creating as she walked small impressions which remained precious and a source of continual inspiration, catching a swift dark eye of possible European fortunes, pitying the shoe with the twice normal heel. The buildings, low, gilded, with their spires thrust a ludicrously short way into the sky, all trying to fall upon the street, protected by iron spikes, cast a yellow fog against the clouds. When her face was serious, when she watched the drays or passing blurred numbers cut into stone, watched the street as it moved, when her face was vacuous, it was a little flower, as if the larger girl had walked away to find Father. But when she smiled the mouth was tense, desire lost upon the waving of her arms. Gerta, when the moon was starting to sink, used to carry her away from the mother’s bedside; and, awake with the nursemaid guarding the door, she could hear the old man snoring fitfully somewhere in the corridor. The sun hurt her eyes; it was certainly more difficult to hear now that her head hurt her so. “Your father was a tall man and we went to the mountains before they had railroads.” When, infrequently, she talked to her mother, she was speaking through her, as through a black unsteady ear-trumpet, to a very old man who sat listening, pallid in a rocking-chair, some thirty or forty years ago. Now in his toothless eye she was to him some rifleboy with a sack of powder at the hip. “Victory,” somebody shouted, and a boy came running down the smoke-filled street without his cap.

The tail end of the park was a narrow stretch of scrubby green caught tightly between high walls in the center of the city, an acre where the sun rarely fell, and low office men smoked at all hours. Strangely enough, today it was bright in the sunlight, and there were more clerks than ever, black and limpid. Stella walked up and down between two benches that left slat marks on shiny britches. Twisted black toes of shoes, stuck by the loungers into the narrow path, touched the hem of her gown, her head fluttered beneath the ribbons, pained worse, and a huge dog with black and white spots trotted by. The sky would darken for a moment with a smudge of cream, then would roll back to sheer white, turning the patches of grass to straw. Once she had hidden from Gerta beneath her mother’s skirts, had felt the overpowering comfort of her ruffles, and that was a strange experience. The mother had thrust heavy hands under the folds, caught the wriggler, and handed the daughter over to the nurse, who always gave bad advice, to be secured in a strict manageable grasp. “Your father wouldn’t like you to behave like that.” Stella shut out all the city but this one pasture, shut out all the light but that which ached in her head, and high above the whispering clerks realized she loved Ernst very much. City and keeps and roadways in the heat, he, by a forest of young hair, protected from that which is dying. She waited patiently.

“My God, simpleton, why don’t you sleep?” The mother spoke from a throat puffing over the edge of the sheet drawn tightly above her bosom with both hands. The father, back in the shuttered room with his tunic unbuttoned, wandered more bent and drawn around the three sides of the bed, his fine Roman nose twitching with excitement, the top of his scalp a sullen red. The room was sheltered, warm, an auburn fuzz glowed through the shutters and darkness. The old woman was white and still in the bed and about her the black wood was inlaid with bits, broken wings, of silver. The father was in one of his reveries, counting very slowly some outlandish or important number on his yellow fingers that would never total. Though one body was heavy and the other frail, though one voice bullied and the other barely mumbled, though the man wavered in agitation and the woman lay in state, they both were very much the same, because on both the hair had receded and become pale, leaving the foreheads, eyes and mouths expressionless with old age. A palmist looking at their hands would have seen no life for all the mazes of fine-drawn yellow lines, overlapping soft pads and untaken crowding roads. “If only he would slip off into the light of Heaven,” she thought. “Sit down,” she said, but he paid no attention, and she could hear only the long-legged rustling of his uniform, the unbearable sun pressing above them on the roof.

Jutta awoke and the room was filled with black shapes.

The heat seemed to grow more determined, even the clerks panted, whispering closely in each other’s ears, and Stella believed the sun would never fall flaming through the torpid clear sky. She wondered how the strange wild cannibals on tropical islands or on the dark continent, running with white bones in their hair, dark feet hardened in the shimmering sand, could bear, in only their feathers, this terrible sun. For the headache made her drowsy. She saw those men, carrying victims high over their heads, as tall, vengeful creatures who sang madly on their secret rock, who even at night slept on glistening pink stone in fire, who stretched their tall bodies whether in repose or in chase, and who kept wives bare from the waist up. Their ears were pierced, insects buzzed low over the children, the islands kept rising up out of the sea. Even when she was tired and desperately warm and even in such a trembling state, she loved him. Her temple throbbed, the clerks were watching. Her fired heart and sweltering faith were beginning to fall away, swept by impatience. She was tired of this park filled with noise, so close to the passing horses that wore skull caps with holes for the ears. She was afraid of being left alone. Then, before she had a chance to meet the image come too sudden before her, before she had a chance to guard against this reflection which she had searched for in all the shop windows, and guard against the terror of herself, she saw him running across the street and up the path, turned half sideways, thin, excited, smiling wildly through the fresh bandages round his head.

“Stella!”

“Ernst!”

They walked for twenty minutes under the yellow and green leaves and passed the cool pond as clear as the sky, smelled the berries cultivated by the park authorities, a few beautiful dripping flowers, and passed babies who screeched, dwarfed in the carriage. Then he took her home, left her, feeling at last the approach of twilight, feeling his heart full and as vague as water.

By the end of the next week the first thousands were far into enemy land, ammunition trains roared all through the night, the city burned late in tumultuous but magnificent organization, and the house was full of callers trying to pay respects to her parents in the bedroom. All seeking on their padded feet to scale these, her walls, to climb over them in a house that was no more hers than theirs, to seek out the mother, flies over the white sheet, for knowledge of the venerable man, they crawled exactly as she crawled. She caught, unwittingly, scraps of words, part of love during the seven days and forgot about the cannibals. “We met in a beautiful copse on a summer’s eve, smelling the dew.” But through the hours, while Gerta stamped about serving tea to them in the anteroom, where they still wore their monstrous hats, she felt for some reason as if these short-winged creatures, all but strangers, had come to mourn, and that mourning, visiting with the dead, was the last desperate attempt, the last chance for gossip. She felt that they were taking away the joy of sunshine, casting a blot, like an unforgivable hoard, on the very search and domestic twilight peace that she did not understand. The seascapes lost their color, in the midst of this remarkable mobilization she began to feel cheated. Ernst was gone for that week, and the old house was sealed tight though they squeezed through the doors and windows. Jutta was more rude than usual.

The seventh morning was freakishly cool. All the light was gone, the fruit flat, the clatter of servants obtrusive and harsh, bands playing in the park were loud and off key. They settled down. The old man beat about the empty halls quicker than usual, the brothers whispered, the entire ring of dark chambers was gathered, not wistful but strained, unhappily into the tight present. Men were pushed first on one shoulder, then on the other, off into the grey line, and the whole house from rafters of teak to chests of wine began to shiver. That morning the mother stepped out of the bed as if alive, stared for one moment about her in the unpleasant shadows and with exact stoic movements began to dress and became, gradually, monstrously large. She was dressed in a long black gown, heavy grey gloves, a tight ruffled collar, and a hat with an enormous drooping brim that made the dark patches around her eyes and in the cheeks more prominent, more like injuries to hide. At one time, years ago, the mother had left the father and had come back three months later thin as a rail, lovely. Now her age hung upon her in unlovely touches, though she stepped out today as if to make one last effort to slough them off. Her black patches were fierce and when it was known that she was up, the house fell into silence, though the father still moved fitfully, getting in the way, as if something were wrong. The mother had somewhere forgotten about morals, self-conquest and the realm to come. She was too weighted down, it was time to go, for age filled in the lacking spaces.

Stella carried the deep basket, the streets were empty, a few luminous clouds blew hastily across the horizon beneath a smoke-black overcast thousands of feet higher. She took her mother’s arm in a gesture, warmly, of confidence.

“I will have those lemons, please.” The bald-headed man dropped them in, flapped his apron at a pink-nosed dog. Flies hung over the blue meat.

“Potatoes.” They rolled among the lemons in dust. The silly girl spilled the money on the counter, it grew darker.

“Apples.” From the trees, the branches, sprinkled with water, green leaves. The basket began to fill, the vendor limped.

Live fowl in a dirty cage were silent, claws gripping the rods caked with lime, eyes blinking at each movement.

“Melons, your father likes melons.” They were scarred and green and made the basket heavier. The grocer’s boy peeped out from behind a hogshead of cheese, red tongue wagging, bare feet scuffing the sawdust.

The mother and girl began to cross the street.

ERNST

Behind them one of the chickens began to scream, and a speck appeared in the sky.

“I think I must stop and buy some flowers.” A few loiterers got out of their way, the old woman considered her list.

“You don’t want to make yourself tired, Mother.”

The day was peculiarly uninteresting, a deliberately cold day with all the summer bugs taken to cover, a few shrubs turned under and splashed dismally with a final blue, all open windows shaded, sleepers uncomfortable, a few omnibuses swaying to and fro, empty, unhurried.

“I think I’ll get …,” said the mother, but spoke nothing more, looking with the utmost distaste upon her desolate native avenue, facades smothered with an uneven hand, scant twigs swept into the drains, not a single mortal. That was all.

The policeman’s call faded into nonsense, into unutterable confusion as the speck fell quickly from the sky, two small leathered heads trapped in smoking holes, the engine, no larger than the torso of a man, blasting, whistling, coughing stupidly. It swooped over mother and girl, flapped its fins once, and crashed, typically English, on the other side of the Platz. Paper and wood burned quickly, consumed the flyers, leaving the isinglass still intact over their eyes. In so falling with its mechanical defect, the plane sent a splinter flying into the mother’s breast that knocked her down.

The policeman kept pushing Stella by the shoulder while the half-dressed crowd asked again and again, “What happened to the old trumpet?” What happened was that they stumbled out into the street and came upon an old dead woman, kicked around, bent, black. “What are you pushing me for?” The sweet grass burned back in the passageway of the street, the old medium was so wrapped in smoke that the father’s second voice, this mother, was choked, mute, with cinders in the cleft of her chin and above the open lips.

“Gavrilo,” Stella murmured, “what have you done?”

The birds twittered in angelic surmise, reeled high and low, fed, nested, called beyond the curtains in gentle mockery, and the days passed by with the temperate clime of summer stones. The marble dust fell in rest; leaded curtains, lately drawn, hung padded and full across the sunlight, keepers of the room. The seascapes were gone, no shadows were on the walls, silver flukes that seemed arisen from the past hushed their soft seashell voices and at every dead night or noon, she missed the chiming of the bells. Her mourning was a cold wave, a dry flickering of fingers in departure, a gesture resting softly in her throat that barely disturbed the gentle shift of light passing on its way. It was always dusk, rising, waking, falling with indolence, resounding carefully in her sleep, reporting the solitude of each day past. Stella thought the bier was close by. That perpetual afternoon clawed about her knees, each day the spirit grew more dim, sheltered behind the heavy lost mask of falling air, the thick south receding.

Those ships that had once rolled in on the breakers were cold and thin and had traveled far beyond her sorrow. The mother’s hands were crossed, the wrinkles had strangely deepened until the face was gone, the flowers were turning a cold earthen brown. Her black collar was aslant on the neck, her own mother’s ring before her was tucked into a hasty satin crevice by her side, wrapped in paper. They sprinkled water about trying to keep the air fresh, and the trimmings began to tarnish. In the evening the face changed color. Sweetness arose from the little pillows; she wore no stockings or shoes and the hair, brittle and thin, clipped together, was hard to manage. The eyelids swelled and no one visited.

Stella waited, awake on the chair, listening to the hushed footsteps, her face in the constant pose of a circus boy, misshapen, cold, her isolation unmoved with memory, numb with summer. The mourning of the virgin, as if she were swept close, now, for the first time, to the mother’s sagging breast for her first dance, was heightened in a smile as the orchestra rose up and they glided over the empty avenue, the old woman in starched collar leading, tripping. Those dry unyielding fingers brushed her on, poised, embarrassed by the face that never moved. She did not stop, seeing many other eyeless dancers, lured through her first impression of this season, clear and rare, but she waited, sitting, hour on hour. Those fingers rustled in the dark. She heard the perpetual scratching feet of insects who walked over the coffin lid with their blue wings, their dotted eyes, and an old bishop mumbled as he ran his fingers over the rectangle of edges closed with wax. They tried to curl the hair, but the iron was too hot and burned. Her nostrils, rather than dilated in grief, were drawn closely, dispassionately together, making two small smudges on the apex of her nose.

Sometimes she thought she had waved. She saw the ship’s poop inching its way farther into the distance on the flat water, a few unrecognized faces staring back, and smelled for a moment the odor of fish. The sea rolled noiselessly away, and walking back, all the paths choked with marble dust, the air smelled of linen, of dead trees. And all Stella’s forebears had finally made this journey — the ocean was filled with ships that never met. No matter how much powder they sprinkled on the mother’s face, the iron grey color would lie stiffly under the skin the following morning. At night they placed a lamp beside her chair, and in the first light took it away again, its flame brushing the stiff folds of her dress, shining weakly as the smooth disturbed crests of the waves, almost extinct. Each morning she sat just as straight, as if she did not know they had prowled all about her during the midnight hours, beyond the globe of the lamp. She would never see them sailing back, and this most distant visitor, lying in state nearby, asleep day and night, so changed by the assumption of the black role, seemed waiting to bring her to the land of desire, where her weeping would cover all the hill above the plain. Stella’s face became gradually unwashed, her arms grew thin, the fingers stiff, her mouth dry, trying to recall this person’s name. The attendants and sudden last visitors perspired. The old woman grew damp as if she fretted.

Finally they took the coffin out of the house.

On that day Ernie sat at her feet, and again it was so hot that the birds buried their heads in the shade under their wings, the fountains were covered with chalk, the room close. They heard the scuffling in the corridor and on the stairs as the coffin made its way out of the house, and the servants milled about in the lower hall, talking, weeping, holding the doors. Ernie wanted to open the curtains but did not dare.

“You don’t even have a cross,” he said. His beloved was silent. “You don’t even have any candles, no face of Christ, no tears. What can I say?”

Then she began to murmur and he was astonished.

“I’m sorry. I will believe in the eternity of souls, I am bereaved. I will see those places where death talks solemnly to the years, where the breakers roll over their sins and their regrets, where the valley of Heaven lies before the crag of immortality, and I will believe my mother has gained peace. I have lost her. Has anyone felt such terrible grief, known that for all earthly time the eyes shall never see, the heart never beat except with her shadow? What an unhappy loss, the candles are gutted, and the face wanes for this immortality. I have lost my mother.”

This was her only glimpse of Heaven, and she wept so much that he was afraid. Finally she held his hand. The two brothers fired the cannon at the burial.

That night Stella went to live in her father’s room, since he could not be left alone, and he watched her with troubled suspicion as she slept, filling only half the invalid’s ponderous space. She walked amid heaps of soiled nightdresses, rows of enameled pots for the old man, the stale smell of bones and flies, emptied the deep drawers of food he had hidden, awoke in the gloom and confusion of yesterday’s air. She sang him lullabies well after midnight, fed him with a spoon, scrubbed the pale face and neck, fought with Gerta over his mad words, and still he could not keep alive. The odor of sweet grass again became heavy, and one morning she found him, tongue rolled under, the top of his head a brilliant swollen red, clutching a feathered helmet across his breast. She had not even awakened.

Where is the railway station?

The leaves turned heavy on the branches, birds coursed away, forgotten, and the cold chill of a new season descended on the city with rain and late fever.

The great ring of chopped ice rumbled thousands of feet below them without moving. Jagged and slender like headless flowers, like bright translucent stems, the quivering clear stalks of ice shot rays of sun back and forth over the soundless field. It was as if the hotel’s foundations were buried finally so far below in this unreal brilliant bed that the sudden sensation of holiday traveled up and down the polished floors to the center of the clear colorful ice, that the wine flowed first pink and then golden in sheer chasms where little men in feathered hats filled it with song. With pick, rope, spike and red shirts they climbed in the afternoons, hung waist to waist over the most treacherous graves in Europe, and at night it snowed, or the moon rose ringed with a faint illumination in the darkness. The mornings climbed upwards from the valley in violent twists and turns, leaping from one shelf of ice to the next, turning the flat grey blades into brilliant shattering arms of light until they finally rose above the gasping mouth of the hotel in cold transparent wings of color, holding them motionless, suspended in gravity amidst an unanchored spectrum.

Stella and Ernst found themselves in the midst of healthy guests, the men giants, the women tanned with snow, even the old venerable and strong because they were not too old. A few children chased each other about the lobby and bowed when approached by adults. Their short rasping voices were small and unawares out of doors, and there was a fear that they would fall into the ice floes. “It’s a great mistake,” Stella said, “to think that the youngest children are the most lovely — they’re not.” And yet she thought these children, the sons and daughters of the straight athletes, were beautiful. She watched them romp with hostility, and yet they flowered before her, danced and played. “The younger they are the more they demand, the more helpless they are. They’re capable of more than we think, especially when they can’t talk.” They lit their cigarettes and passed out of earshot of the children. Ernst was bundled to the throat in a jacket of bright fur and smiled and nodded at all she said, the tufts of long hair rubbing against his neck. Now that he was on the heights and all below him was gone, he walked always with spikes on the soles of his feet so he would not slip. Hearts in their hands, he slung the rope on his shoulder but never went down, for they wanted to be alone, high, in this one place. The whiteness flashed up, clearing away the last traces of summer, and Stella, looking over such a profound staged landscape, clung to his arm as if he would fall. But he was nearer God.

Every afternoon the old horse stood wheezing by the porte-cochere, trembling slightly with head lowered from the terrible exertion of the long climb. The sleigh would be empty, a rug dragging on the packed snow. The horse appeared blind, so limply hung the head, so blank the closed lids, and little drops of frost grew in his nostrils and on the bit, clung embedded in the sparse mane. He was cold, black and thin and hung with red trappings that did not fit, that swung against his damp hide with each painful bellow of air. Stella always tried to feed a piece of sugar to the flabby lips and slime-covered steel, but always the dumb groping nose knocked it from her palm. “Ah, the poor beast,” Ernst would say, looking over the sucked-in tail and fragile hocks. “You could count his age on all the ribs.” Then the driver would come out, sinister eyes rolling over his muffler, followed by the departing families with their skis. The black horse stumbled down the hill, and the couple continued their honeymoon, two golden figures in the setting sun.

Behind those flat drooping lids, the horse’s eyes were colorless and strangely out of shape, but they were deep, shy, inhumanly penetrating. The knees shivered both backwards and forwards.

This was the upper world. Some of the guests whisked in the morning down to the lower and with each sharp descent in the process, the pitch of their enjoyment dropped, until it was too low to bear. And quickly as possible, they laboriously began the crawl back upwards to the clear air, waiting to laugh until they had reached the point where they could turn and let their eyes glide down in cool recreation over those falling fields. The upper world was superior. In the lower, tufts of grass poked dangerously through the snow; snarling dogs ran under foot; the snow turned to rain on the lowest fields, and the isolated huts were grey and sodden. The laughter was above, the easiness that was tense with pleasure, the newness poured itself over the winged guests in sudden, unexpected delight, for a few days or weeks. The cooking was excellent. The black horse thrived better in the lower world. He was the same horse the students rode, shivering with the cold, tied alone to suffer the night. And yet he carried them, their switches flicking in the wind.

Here in this beautiful forest of burnt furniture, amidst the pale coolness of the wide-flung windows, in the crackling of parlor fires, in the songs beyond the thick rustic walls and the love inside, it did not matter that Herman said he was sorry to see her go, that the Sportswelt would miss her. The remembrance of the old house and the old parents, her sister, Jutta, was a far-off thing.

The hotel, from its highest porch where Ernie hid himself to watch all those who approached, to its gradually widening foundations where the mountain flowers shriveled and curled against the stone, was the center of a small acre of snow-packed land, was the final peak of a mountain. During the long rail trip they had watched the winter arrive, the smoke from squat chimneys more grey and thick. The snow fell, first in warning flurries, settling more coldly on the weaving branches and huddled animals. Winter was near the hotel.

At the far end of the acre was a small house, the roof curling under a foot of snow, its rear window gazing outward twenty miles and downwards to the depth of a thousand feet. Stella and Ernst, holding hands, silent in wondrous amazement, turning and clapping each other in excitement, walked over this very acre every afternoon and passed the house. A few scrubby trees leaned dangerously over the cliffs. And every afternoon they passed the old man on the doorstep, brittle shavings heaped over his shoes and like yellow flakes blown on the snow. He grinned while he carved, looked up at them, seemed to laugh, and hunching his shoulder, pointed backwards, behind the hut, out into the emptiness. The crosses he carved were both small and large, rough and delicate, some of simple majesty, others speaking minutely of martyrdom. They too fell across his feet, mingled with the sticks of uncarved wood — sometimes a bit of green bark was left to make a loincloth for Christ. Those that were not sold hung inside from a knotted wire, and slowly turned black with the grease and smoke; but the hair was always blacker than the bodies, the eyes always shone whereas the flesh was dull. Tourists paid well for these figures that were usually more human than holy, more pained than miraculous. Up went the shoulder, the knife rested, and he was pointing to the nearness of the cliffs. After the first week, Ernie bought one of the crucifixes, a terrible little demon with bitter pain curling about the mouth no larger than a bead, drawing tight the small outward-turning hands. Then he began to collect them, and every afternoon a new Christ would peer from his pocket through the tufts of fur.

By now his prayers at mealtime were quite audible. The setting sun stained the imperfect windows, made whorls crimson and shot the narrow panes with streaks of yellow until an off-color amber, like cheesecloth, finally smeared them over and gave way to a dismal night. Chairs scuffed in unison as the five long tables filled, and in the first silence, before strange conversations were resumed, before they had recaptured their half-intimate words, while they were still only nodding or whispering, one of the tables would become conscious of an impersonal, pious mumbling. Busily rearranging the silver and china before him, his brow wrinkled, he talked as if to an old friend. The table would be hushed and uneasy until he looked up. The hotel manager, who took this time of the evening meal to appear before his gathered guests and walk up and down between the rows to interrupt a conversation or a draught of wine, was struck dumb with the unnatural monotone, and would cast significant glances at Stella. The lines of beautiful cloths, the habits of silk, the evening dress of others turned inwards upon her, incongruous with the thick china and bare walls and floor, modern and glittering and presumptuous. She touched his hand, but it was stiff and cold, smooth and pious. She thought at first that she could feel something of his Bishop’s creed and was part of this furtive ritual that exerted itself more and more, even when the evenings were rich with color.

The crucifixes began to fill the hotel.

Ernst had filled their two rooms with flowers and stones, small misshapen petals that were bright and petrified, delicate and warped with the mountain air, clear opal stones polished with ages of ice. At night before they slept he arranged the flowers in her hair, and with a kiss laid her away. In the morning he would climb to the porch and spend an hour noting carefully who arrived. And he did the same in the afternoon, breathing deeply, peering intently. He and his wife were very happy. An old count nodded to them in the corridor just beginning to grow light; they awoke blushing and warm holding the covers tight with a childish guilt, and below their window the children laughed, danced and clapped. He no longer thought of the Baron, or Herman, or the Sportswelt, no longer thought of Stella’s singing and particularly did not want to hear her sing. The altitude made him faint, he breathed heavily, and could not stand to think of pain. If anyone twisted an ankle, or if one of the children skinned a knee, or an old woman ached in the chest, he rushed to be by their side, he “stood over them,” as he called it. Then the old man, the Christ-carver, began to visit the hotel regularly, bringing with him each day a basket of those crucifixes that he could not sell, so that the black ugly Christs hung upon the walls of their rooms along with the bright new ones. Children were soon seen playing with wooden crosses, lining them up in the snow, leaving them all about the playroom. A small crown prince possessed one with beautifully flexed muscles and a rough beard. Stella began to have him lean on her arm as they walked and knew that the most beautiful bird holds tightest before flying straight upwards.

It was almost is if the whole family lived in the next room, asleep in the pile of trunks under the hanging window. The trunks collected dust and beneath the arched lids one of her mother’s gowns slept with Herman’s waistcoat, a militant comb lay straight and firm by a yellow brush. A pair of medical tweezers that had plucked the fine moustache grew old near one of Herman’s mugs. The trunks were sealed with wax. All together they were happy, and a flute player charmed the two rooms.

On a morning in the third week Ernst left her side and climbed to the porch. Above the snow there was light, but the thick flakes, like winter, covered all the mountaintop in darkness, beat against his eyes, swept over his knuckles hooked to the railing. He watched. It was impossible to see where the acre ended and where the deep space began, the fall. He waited, peering quickly, expecting the messenger, sure of the dark journey. “Look over the plains,” he thought, “and you will see no light. No figures, no men, no birds, and yet He waits above the vast sea. Thine enemy will come, sweeping old ties together, bright as the moon.”

Ernst had given up the sword; though his wounds were healed, the Heavens gaped, and he had lost the thread of the war’s virus. Then, at the bottom of the flurry, he heard the arrival. The horse’s bells rang as if he had been standing there, just below, all during the night and the snow and had just come to life. He heard the muffled knock of a hoof, a door slammed. A sleepy-eyed boy, his tongue still flat along his lower jaw, weaved back and forth in the wind, nearly fell beneath the bag that weighed of gold. The driver beat his gloves and pocketed the Pfennig, the snow raced. Ernie closed his mouth and saw through the white roof of the passenger’s descent. Cromwell ran up the steps and rang the sharp bell that awoke the clerk. By the time Ernst was back in the room, bending over her in the darkness, cold and afraid, it had stopped snowing. The black horse shook off his coat of white.

Still one could not see beyond the fortress of the hotel, beyond the drops of mustard gas and mountain vapors, beyond the day that was only half risen. The children became thin and tired and the adults suddenly were unable to find their own among the solemn faces. With that sharp cry of mother to child, the parents searched among the idle play groups as if through obligation. During the three meals the tables were half empty and a great many plates were broken, as the child bites and the young mother is still forced to feed. All of them smelled the fog, it curled about their hair and chilled them in the bath, and the nurse’s playing fingers could do nothing to help, while the air became more thin and the water difficult to pump.

Ernst had become more and more used to the lover’s mystery, had learned timidly what strange contortions the honeymoon demands, and she, not he, was the soldier, luring him on against the fence, under the thicket, forcing him down the back road through the evening. He watched her sleep. But now it was painful, it was cold, the snow was already too thin to hide him. He walked up and down the room, could see nothing from the window because he was too near the light, and the early morning, without the hands of the clock or the morning paper, his own time, was about to break. He was already one of the cold bodies down on the ice, he felt the terrible rush of air. After pausing a moment he ran quickly down the stairs, seeing all of them dragged into the university, kicking, clawing, hunched up like camels in the dust, caught and beaten. Someone put both hands on his knees.

No one stirred, the clerk and boy were curled up to sleep again until the real morning came. The lobby was filled with cold shadows, uncollected cups, a discarded shirt, a bucket with a thin edge of ice over the top. For the first time Ernst felt that the windows were closed, the wires cut, and felt the strange sensation that the mountain was moving, tearing all the pipes from the frozen ground, sliding over unmapped places. A magazine was several months old, an electric fan turned from side to side though the blades were still.

He forced himself to speak. “How was your trip?” The man stood up, still in evening dress, smiling with the old natural grace, and he felt the fingers take his own. “Well, Heavens, to think we’d meet again. And, congratulations, you’ve got my admiration, she’s a delightful girl.” They sat together, vaguely conscious of the damp air. “I thought I was coming to a place quite different, no familiar faces, a place of rest, but it’s more as if I were home. Well, you must tell me all about yourself.” No one stirred. They drank the thick black coffee which Cromwell had heated himself, careful not to soil his white cuffs, while he watched the briefcase. The windows were folded in white, the hat and gloves and cane lay by the coffee pot, the heavy cane close at hand.

Gradually Ernst’s head began to lean forward, closer to the table. He had told their story, they were happy, he thought someone moved overhead, but then he knew he heard nothing. Cromwell was telling him everything he did not want to know, and he waited for the footsteps of the cook or the old man or a nurse come to heat the bottles. Cromwell lectured, smiled, and spoke confidentially, with ease, about the lower world. Behind the column of figures, the sweeping statements, the old friendship, there was the clicking needle, the voice coming from inside the briefcase — with facts and sieges memorized, hopes turned to demands, speaking to convince them all, from the general to the dandy. Ernst’s head touched the table. Cromwell was not tired from the long ride up the mountain but spoke quickly, as if he had been everywhere and carried near his breast the delicate maps and computations, the very secrets they lived on.

“… Antwerp fell. The Krupp gun, 42 centimeter, took them through and luckily enough, I was able to see the whole thing. It was like Hohenlohe’s progress in Africa, more, you see, than just a concentration of men for their own good, more than anything like a unity of states, like the Zolleverein, rather complete success, a mass move greater than a nation, a more pure success than Prussia’s in the Schleswig-Holstein affair. We fought, gained in the area of Soissons and they couldn’t drive us from Saint Mihiel — glory be to the German army! The line is now from the English Channel to Switzerland, and we wait only spring. We extend across Europe in four hundred integrated miles.”

It was now dark, morning turned backwards in exasperating treachery. Cold porridge was left on the table. He thought he should perhaps shake Cromwell’s hand again, go fetch more coffee. He had lost the thread, the long chain of virus that keeps a man anchored to his nation, instrumental in its politics, radiant in its victory, and dead in its defeat; had lost the meaning of sacrifice, siege, espionage, death, social democracy or militant monarchism. He was lost, the newspapers scattered over the vertical cliffs, the wires coiled, cut in the snow. And he prayed at meals, knowing nothing about the collective struggle of the hated Prussian and genius Hun, knowing nothing of the encircling world, the handcuff, the blockade. That air seeping visibly below the window, through orchard and burrowed haystack, crawled by the red and yellow wires, kissed the worried Oberleutnant, and the dumb sapper smoking his pipe in the hole. Eyes burned; it left patches in the lungs amid the blowing of whistles, this yellow fog. It came in the window, the mountain slid lower, railway tracks giving way to on-sloughing feet.

“They are well trained,” said Cromwell, “in spring, the valleys will fall under — extension — we must have technological extension. No nation has the history of ours.” There was a list of seven hundred plants in his briefcase, where locomotives swung on turntables and the smell of cordite hovered over low brick buildings. The world is measured by the rise and fall of this empire.

The hotel manager was shaving and soon would come downstairs. A nurse, ruddy and young, behaved like a mother, smiling at the child in the darkness. In the neighborhood of Cambrai where an Allied flanking movement had failed to turn the German extreme right, a farmhouse at a fork in the clay roads, demolished by artillery fire, lay half-covered in leaves and snow. There the Merchant, without thoughts of trade, dressed only in grey, still fat, had died on his first day at the front and was wedged, standing upright, between two beams, his face knocked backwards, angry, disturbed. In his open mouth there rested a large cocoon, protruding and white, which moved sometimes as if it were alive. The trousers, dropped about his ankles, were filled with rust and tufts of hair.

When Stella awoke, she was still possessed of the dream; it lingered on in the dim light. When she looked into Ernst’s bed, she saw only a small black-haired Christ on the pillow, eyes wide and still, who trembled, and with one thin arm, motioned her away.

“Maman,” a child’s voice cried below the window, “the old horse is dead!”

LUST

All night long, despite the rattle of the train wheels and the wind banging against the loose window-panes, Ernst could hear the howling of the dogs out in the passing fields and by the rails. The robe hung over his shoulders and was clutched about his throat, the heavy folds coarse and dark, stamped with the company’s seal as railroad property. Robes were piled in all the empty compartments, the dim light swayed overhead, and the cold grew so severe that the conductor, who continually wished to see their papers, was irritable, officious. The compartment, or salon, a public beige color, unkempt, with its green shades and narrow seats, heaved to and fro, tossing the unshaded bulb in circles, rattling their baggage piled near the thin door. Those were certainly dogs that howled. His face pressed against the glass, Ernst heard the cantering of their feet, the yelps and panting that came between the howls. For unlike the monumental dogs found in the land of the tumbleweed, glorified for their private melancholy and lazy high song, always seen resting on their haunches, resting and baying, these dogs ran with the train, nipped at the tie rods, snapped at the lantern from the caboose, and carrying on conversation with the running wheels, begged to be let into the common parlor. They would lap a platter of milk or a bone that appeared dry and scraped to the human eye without soiling the well-worn corridors of rug, and under the green light they would not chew the periodicals or claw the conductor’s heels. As paying passengers, they would eat and doze and leap finally back from the unguarded open platforms between cars into the night and the pack.

A small steam pipe, its gilt long flaked with soot, bent like an elbow, began to rattle and gasp, but after a few more knocks, a few more whistles from the engine straining at the head of the train, it died. The official ticketed odor of dust and stuffing, the chill around the dark ceiling of cobwebs increased, and Stella tried to rest while Ernst watched the night pass by, annoyingly slow and too dark to see. The firebox in the engine was small, wrapped up, steady and dispassionate for the night, the fireman nodded over his shovel, an old soldier moved abjectly about the empty baggage car, and Ernie, holding the shawl, wondered what terrible illness was falling on his shoulders. And all he had to show was the castoff crucifixion of a half-wit, wrapped in brown paper in the bottom of the carpetbag. They stopped at many small stations and crossings during the night, but no passengers boarded or left the train.

The honeymoon was over, the mountain far behind, and as they had begun walking down the road, the old horse long dead, Cromwell called, “Well, we’ll meet soon again, sorry you have to rush,” and waved awkwardly with his briefcase. “I don’t think so,” said Ernst, and dug his pike into the snow. There was no one, no one; they traveled alone except for the dogs over the snow whose edge, leagues beyond, was besieged. But when, the following morning, they drew into the city, into das Grab, hundreds of people milled about the shed, pushed near the train but paid it no attention. When she helped him down the iron steps, her face red with the frost, he knew things had changed, that the dogs had beaten them to the destination. That train would certainly never run again, he felt sure, and he knew that its journey was over. The engineer’s black face was still asleep, a mailed fist caught on the whistle cord, head propped on an arm in the small unglassed window. “Fare well,” said Ernst as he stepped off into the crowd that steamed and rattled like stacks and shovels and feet clattering in the bunkers.

Engines that had just arrived stood on sidings unattended, steaming, damp, patches of ice stretched over the cabs, waiting where the crews had left them, unaccounted for, unfueled. The crowd milled around wooden cars, valises were lost; returning soldiers, unmet, ran towards strangers, laughing, then backed away in other directions. The streets beyond the station were filled with unindentified men who had lost brass buttons and insignia to bands of children. Some soldiers that were carried on stretchers by medical men, waved empty cups or dozed in the shade of awnings, while their bearers drank inside. Some were seasick as they slid along under the towering gangs, bruised by trailing wagon chains, swept by the rough skirts of coats, tossed close to the crowded surface of the concourse. The streets were as close as the sliding dark hold of a prison ship, and since the continuous falling-off of arms and spirit, since the retreat, provided little fare for the dogs that beat the train. They couldn’t support the town dogs and certainly not these soldiers.

Stella had carried the bags ever since leaving the mountain, and used to them by now, thin leather sides stamped with the black permits, bulging with nightshirts and a few mementos, she walked along by his side, stepped over the stretchers and stayed as close as possible without any trouble. Ernst had grown stronger during the night, he felt the air sailing past the train; all of them grew stronger as they neared the city, das Grab. It looked quite different, not at all as he had expected, not dark and safe and tiring in the middle of the earth, but cold and wide, packed with the confused homecomers, knapsacks filled with the last souvenirs. There were no bugs or insects, no still drooping beaks and shapeless wings on the marble walls. But crowds in front of empty shop windows and endless white platoons formed and re-formed behind the courthouse. Names and numbers and greetings were shunted between rows of bright bleak buildings and they kissed, changed dressings, in the middle of the street.

Ernst began to look for Herman. He didn’t want to look for the old man, conscripted father, but felt, as a citizen, that the soldat should be met. He looked under the blankets, in the wagons, scrutinized the ranks, walked faster and faster but did not find Herr Snow.

“Ernst, my dear husband, wait, aren’t we going in the wrong direction?”

“Where would you expect to find him, except in this way? All soldiers come here and go in this direction.”

Every half-hour the trains slowed to a stop in the stockyards, tired brakemen swung to the ground while troops hurried from the cars; each half-hour the streets were more filled with tattered capes and swinging arms, and musette bags and boxes left forgotten on corners. All the soldiers appeared to think that someone was meeting them, and smoking their first cigarettes, hand grenades still in their belts, they appeared to enjoy searching, at least for a while. In any other place but das Grab they would not be so joyous. The musicians who had played at the Sportswelt were gathered about an upper window of an empty room and soldiers nearing from the distance heard the tune, caught it, sang it until they passed, and then forgot it. There was at that one place before the window some music. Ernst looked a long while for his father, leading Stella halfway around the city before they finally reached the house.

Beyond the outskirts of the grave, beyond the locked barns at the edge of town, beyond the open doorways and colored stock — out past those hundred miles of fields and cow sheds where old Herman had met his fill and lost his supper in the ditch — out past those last outposts and signal stations, far out to sea, the American Blockade turned first one way and then another in the fog. A few more crates and a barrel and orange or two sank away in the foam. There was no noise in this well-organized blockade field except the cold sound of the waves and the slapping of an oar, locks outward, against the blue tide.

Evidently Gerta was out and the house was empty. Stella, weary of the cold and the long march, glad to keep their voices, questions, and songs away from the day of homecoming, let the door sag-to past the sleeping sentry and, lantern in hand, helped her returning husband up the wide dark stairs. While the trench mortars out of town approached and stopped, then continued on, she felt his small burning cheek and, stooping, unbuttoned his fluttering shirt.

Gerta trudged with her thin legs cold among the boys, her wig tied on with a yellow ribbon, her skirt caught up at her black and blue hip, an old ungracious trollop, a soldier’s girl. She would have nothing to do with the blind ones, they frightened her. But she’d met a boy the day before and dried his dressing, sang to keep up her spirits while pushing another along in his red box. She was hurried along, talking in a loud voice, in the throng, now and then her hand falling on a damp shoulder or into a loose pocket. The red box rattled on its cart wheels, bandages turned grey with coal dust, whistles called from the tangled depot, and soaked oranges sank slowly through the ocean’s thick current. The pockets, she found, contained only the photographs of the deceased.

Two days after arrival, each trainload of men, smiles gone, hair long, found themselves foodless and the tin pans banged at their belts, the queues turned away. But as each group became hungry and camped on the doorsteps, a new load arrived, singing, watching, laughing, waiting to be met. The new laughers filtered through the despondent men; shops were empty but hung with new regimental flags, and as the laughers became, in turn, pale and confused, as last loaves were eaten and crusts lost, more laughers filtered in, singing, pushing, looking about das Grab for the first time. Gerta bumped from one to another, laughed, was carried up and down among the krank and lost, among the able but gaunt, among the young or bald. No one who walked these connected streets was old; the aged had been blown indoors. Suddenly the Sportswelt loomed ahead.

“Try this, try this, try this,” she cried, and rifle butts were pitted against the sealed door, a window broke like the breast of a glass doll. They entered the place, weak and shouting, while the blonde trollop found her way out back to catch her breath.

The corridor made by the rock walls down to the open latrine, was filled with wind-blown pieces of paper, and across the walls the tables were overturned, the lawns long and the valor-petals dry. Returning from the pea-green pit of stench, Gerta almost stumbled where the Merchant fell, cocoon in his mouth, beams on his chest, months before. Her wooden shoes clicked on the green stones, skirts swung from the sides of her sharp hips. Gerta took a cigarette from a tin box hidden in her blouse, the smoke trailed into the garden and over the dead leaves.

The family was all dead. The Father, the victor, with a cocked hat and pot, had long ago wished her well. The Mother lay in the cold bunker of the street, cinders falling over the rough chin. The Sons, no longer to be with Nanny, having no longer spurs to tinkle against their boots since spurs were always removed before the body was interred, had never been parted and both lay under the wet surface of the same western road. So now alone, she wore her skirts above her knees and her bright lopsided lips were red with the glistening static day of das Grab; for she had survived and hunted now with the pack.

The blonde, the old nursemaid, pinched her cigarette and went back to the hall. The vandals, with tunics itching on bare chests, with packs paining and eyes red, with rifles still riding strapped to packs, searched, pawed over the dust, sat leaning against the rafters and waited. They seemed to think the orchestra would pick up, the lights flare on; they waited for the singer. The chairs were not made to sit on, the tables were against the walls, and the dust, lately stirred and tossed in the cold light, settled on the darkening planks. A cat called from one of the upstairs empty bedrooms and disappeared. Several white shoes, chair legs, hands, scraped against grey puttees. These were not looters who carried swag on their shoulders and trinkets in their arms, they did not scrounge and run. They searched as if for something in particular, walked softly about the bare room. The girls were gone with the Schnapps. The soldiers crowded together, tossed a few periodicals and lists of the dead, to the middle of the stage, and walked up and down the green carpet while the wheels rolled against the snow. They were now taught methodically to meet the train with blistering paws, and iodine stained their green cuffs.

Gerta laughed as she leaned close to an old hatless soldier who dozed far back in the chair, head to one side, shoulders caught against the rungs. His red beard was clipped unevenly, his wedding ring, tight about a dirty finger, was green. His nails were chewed like those of a young girl. His discharge papers rose out of his upper pocket blue and torn, and the paper disks hanging near his throat turned from red to black in the changing light. She touched his knee.

“Captain, have you a match?”

The eyes opened, the lips were moistened, they shut.

“No.” The answer came in low bar-owner’s German. He folded his thick hands together and slept.

“Have you come home to be rude to a lady?”

A shawl was miraculously unearthed from a bare corner, the black beads hung over a soldier’s back. Cold air swept about the walls.

Slowly, eyes still shut, the big man’s hand moved towards a pocket, the weight shifted slightly, the hand went deeper, the face was unshaven, dark, still passive. With another movement, he emptied his pocket on the table, the hand dropped back to his side and did not swing, but hung straight and unmoving. Among the dull coins, the knife, the tube of ointment, the cerulean clipping, the bits of wire, Gerta found a match and flicking it beneath the table, cursed and broke its head for being damp.

Children were looking in at the windows, watched with glee the Madame, matron and the uniformed Herr Snow.

“Was it a long journey, Captain?”

“Across the road, over there.” She leaned closer to see.

When Gerta was kissed, she clung to his shoulders and looking over towards the light, saw the child’s face. It pointed, laughed and jumped out of view. And old Herman, fully awake, touched the soft fur with his mouth and felt the wings through the cotton dress, while in the far end of town a brigade of men passed shallow buckets of water to quench a small fire. Herr Snow did not recognize the Sportswelt and did not know that he was kissing Stella’s nurse. A rough golden forelock brushed his cheek.

Then old Snow stopped kissing, and for a moment his lips worked uneasily with no desire to speak, and he leaned back, his rough chin raised higher than the blunt nose. He smelled the breath of unsweetened soap, the odor of the comb issued by the government, and all about him were the grey backs, the crackling shoes, the children whose dead brothers were from his own regiment. Old Snow, sitting with a friend he’d never met in the Sportswelt he no longer knew, with small bright bugs still pestering his legs, had no right to be tired, no more right to look torn and drab than all the rest. For though he could not remember, bare shell of a man, his eyes and face wore the look on one who knows where he is going — size without substance, his expression was yet determined. It was the determination on those ugly features, the fact that he took a stand in the consideration of his own fate, that made him contemptible, that marked him as second rate, only a novice at the business of being a civil servant.

When he laughed it was the last laugh, and his whole mouth quivered as if the paper lips had been touched with feathers. Gerta laughed, but quickly, and looked through his belongings on the table once more. His once black shining boots, once steel padded and reinforced, once scorching in the sun, were now down on one side, scraped and shredded with long bare patches between the seams; tufts of mud and grass stuck to and raised the heels so that the squat man rolled as he walked on the city streets but sank and plodded in the valiant fields. A civil employee must not sink and plod.

“It’s a good thing we met …,” her mouth torn between desires, “it certainly is.” She pulled back, stole a glance at the darkening windows, looked down at her thin hands. Somehow the woman, a little more sallow, a little more old, felt herself more than lightly touched. All the preceding boys she couldn’t count, all the brilliant days with the city filling every hour with friends, friends, their sudden departure from the dark cold working hours, all this gaiety, the train arrivals sprinkled with glittering medals and redcross flags. All of it was brilliant and time consuming. But meeting the red-bearded man was a little different. She thought he was different and he was, with his sunken chest; he was, with his palsied fingers; he was, with his short hair shaved for medical reasons. But most of all because he had a sense that the stiff-marching, girl-getting fight was out of him. Now it was time for the father to have the son take over, time for the new horse, the milk-fed horse, to take the reins and buck, to trot up the mountain that was now too steep, the going too difficult with the snow. But Herman didn’t know he had a son named Ernst, and there was no new horse, only time to try once again. Old Snow would try and try, sinking downwards in a landslide of age that would never end, until in the night, near the death of his son, he would try once more and fail.

“Come now,” she said, “aren’t you going to bring me close?” While the laughter faded from her voice and it wheezed, the old man seized her in the darkness and was neither surprised nor disappointed to find that there was almost nothing there.

There were no lights in the Sportswelt. For a long while, the old patriots were silent, the vandals and depressed soldiers about them were silent, telling stories in hushed voices, readying themselves for sleep on the great hall floor. The children were gone. And then a lone policeman on patrol, his spiked helmet dull and gleaming in the pale moonlight, himself short and thin, defenseless but warmed with beer, stood on a box and flashed his torch into the Sportswelt depths.

“My Lord,” Old Snow realized by the light of the torch, “she has black stockings on her legs,” and they were stretched, thin and taut, across his broad useless lap.

The tremendous scroll letters, so thick and difficult to read, blurring and merging and falling off in the darkness, profuse and graceless on the ornate pine walls, advertising inns that were dark, posts no longer to be filled, tours that no longer existed, plays that were done, loomed outmoded and intricate overhead as they passed in the street. Gerta pulled him along, curls slightly askew, pushing, holding back, intent upon guiding the soft cumbersome elbow. The street, partially emptied of his comrades, twisted fluidly and darkly ahead, an inopportune channel, street of thieves. Tenaciously she drew him on between the banks, led him down into the gathering arches, and for a moment old Herman saw his brother’s barge, and on the pillows in the stern a gross unrecognizable female who kept him in tow on the warm musky evenings. He smelled the oil on the water and the powder sprinkled lightly on her pink curls.

“Wait, Liebling, please, not here on the corner, just wait a moment, only a moment.” Nevertheless Gerta was flattered and this momentary flicker of life raised, deep within her, very false hopes.

He forgot the barge, but the smell of the sea lingered on until they stood before the sharkskin house, larger, darker, more out of date, more boarded up, than ever.

Within the whitewashed walls of the Saint Glauze nunnery, a figure, held mesmerized by the four uneven corners, gazed ruefully about her cell’s inner haven. Jutta sat upon the cot’s unbleached single sheet, hearing from below the tinkle of bells and creak of leather where the sisters walked around and around in precise timeless honor of the evening prayer. The veils were heavy over the young girl’s face, they smelled of linen and were not scented with the fresh new rose, did not smell of the garden or heavenly pine or oil-softened hands. They had been laid on quickly and protectively, after the face was washed. The birds and squirrels were thin near the nunnery, theirs was only the fare of rain and prey of lower insects; the high walls were old and bare. She heard the women rustling unevenly in line, heard the soft devout invocation of Superior who was the only one to speak. From down below in Superior’s room she heard the occasional stamping of the Oberleutnant’s boots. She knew that he was standing straight and tall by the narrow window, smiling, patient, watching the revolution of the humble ring. Now and again she heard his voice.

“Now, Superior,” he would say in his unnatural tones, “it is time again to invoke the Heavenly Father’s love for our men in the field. Battery C is in a difficult position, you know.” And the Mother’s voice would intone once more. The Oberleutnant had recently been relieved of active duty and given the political position of director at the nunnery where he improved the routine and spirit a good deal. He walked fretfully himself in the garden when the nuns were asleep, at their frugal meals, or at their indoor prayers. Jutta, the young girl, imagined him directing the almost perfect prayers of Superior, could see the old woman glancing out of the tight crowded ring at the man’s face hidden deep in the recess. A supply officer, he was secretly included in the older sisters’ prayers, and when he walked, bent with rank and tension, he gave the impression of deep concern and all knew he was worried about the welfare of Battery C.

With the old man dead, her mother dead, her two young brothers lost to the Fatherland and her sister Stella gone to marry in the mountains, Jutta was left alone while the city was gradually corrupted into war. It was Gerta, in the last days before her flaming debauch, who took her in long arms and presented her, with reverence, to the nuns. And after the family was no more, swept into the great abyss by the ancestral tide, and Gerta had no more chores, nothing but red paint and the empty house, her friend with the buns sent a note of sympathy trimmed in black. But by the time it arrived, Gerta was on the street and it remained in the leaking mailbox with all the other dead unopened letters. After that the postman stopped calling and the old house shrank tighter, where once the Grand Duke came to call. The street fell into ruin.

One by one she heard the feet shuffling through the gravel to the sanctum door, and as each stooped woman entered into the darkness of a century of peace, the sounds in the garden stilled. The circle unwound until the sisters of charity were no more and she could hear only the Oberleutnant humming as he paced rapidly back and forth, replacing the characteristic tone with heresy and haste. Not a bird sang anywhere, but a small bell jangled the sisters to board and thanksgiving. Their prayers for the evening meal echoed through the damp plaster corridors and up to her unmolested cell.

Jutta remembered the ladies in plumed hats and velvet gowns with distaste, remembered Stella’s sailing around the ballroom with malice, and the thought of her dead parents, so many years too old, left her unfeeling. The old memories came but briefly, as brief as the desire to own anything or to own the black trousers, and when they did come, she summoned down her pride to fight the witchery.

She heard the soup spoons in the bowls, the soldier’s quick steps.

The black skirts were held down about her ankles by long thin arms, frail from the disease that calmly ate at the calcium in her bones and drank the humbleness out of her system. As yet she did not know that her brothers had died howling in retreat, and for herself, all of them could go that way. The half-hours went by and the sky grew cerulean, the ointment was under the pillow but she couldn’t reach it. She leaned forward, head over the knees, and it took all this effort at balance to keep from toppling over in a black heap. With ankles now as thin as wrists, the disease was cutting deeper, and there was no one to sit her up again if she fell. So she sat as still as she could, her thin fingers clamped firmly with effort.

Her father, the old general, in the days when he could talk and she could sit on his knee, wanted her in the civil offices. But from the first, she was determinedly an architect, she built towers with blocks and barns of paper, built them where they could hardly stand on the thick rugs, built them with childlike persistence; and the smile of completion was always one of achievement rather than pleasure. As she grew older she did not smile at all and hid her queer angles and structures in her little whitewashed room, grew more and more serious, objected rationally to the public documents and taxpayer’s history fostered on her by the old general. Carefully she designed herself inwards, away from the laughing women, closeshaven men, away from tedious public obligation, until she was finally accepted, one steaming afternoon, into the Academy of Architecture.

It was almost time for Superior to start her rounds, to observe, to praise and to condemn the girls who were bad physically or bad spiritually. Superior would stand in the doorway with her face that was neither a man’s nor a woman’s, blocking out the last bit of light with her stiff fan-like hood and robes. With her steel spectacles, pink face and sharp black eyes, Jutta thought of her as the doctor who walked so slowly and stayed, while probing, such a long while. Down below she heard the Oberleutnant sit heavily on one of the benches and from down the hall came the sound of an old woman putting Superior’s desk in order. While no one in the city even knew the date or what was taking place, knew neither of the blockade at sea nor of the battles in the empty forests, Superior did. Every morning, after her consultations, she sat at her desk composing, in tiny script, a long laborious letter of protestation to the President of the United States. She objected to the starvation and spreading illness. It grew dark, and Jutta could not move to light the candle.

In the Academy Jutta often saw the young men lined up with their brown torsos and tight grey gymnasium trousers. At first they often smiled at her in the cold corridors and looked over her shoulder at the drawing board. But all of them now, as far as she knew, had swords and spurs like her brothers. Winning the favor of her professors, she did not have to force herself to look at them. They passed out of reach and a long line of nurseries and fortresses took their place. Besides devising a new triumphal arch and scraping hard pencils on her sanding block, she studied history. Volume after volume passed under her close disciplined study. She knew all of the Hapsburgs, knew that the Austrians and Germans were all one blood, knew that the light and life was in the East. Her fits of temper were gone, the sabers were no longer within range, but were only of use, like her brothers, in the fields far away.

Superior was coming up the worn stairs, the Oberleutnant, back in his room, stepped out of his trousers. Jutta felt weaker, more weak than ever before, and down in the city the policeman put away his torch and left his beat to go to sleep.

Her remaining isolation had been debased. The General couldn’t talk, the mother was absurd in his unmade bed, Stella flew off again and again until she finally met the one with the puckered face and flew for good. There was no one to give clear-headed praise, no one to admire or respect her diagrams of mechanical exultation, no one to recognize, even at thirteen, her great skill. But it was not the language of the dumb, the old, that made the declining days a treachery and not a triumph, not the dead in the streets and silence in the house that drove her to the nuns.

The final blot against absolution, depriving her of sacrifice and intelligent suffering, was Gerta’s unpleasant love. When the sores first came and she fell with dizzy spells, the old fool of a nurse put her to bed, and far too old for such exertion, climbed the immense bare stairway with trays for the invalid. Gerta told her stories, sat by the bedside, excited with the drama, with something to do, and with Nordic bravery, plunged majestically into the soiled linen. And worst of all, the nurse told hundreds of stories of ladies and their lovers, treating Jutta all the time as if she were a girl, and worse, as if she were a child. On the final rainy day, when the child could hardly walk, Gerta insisted upon dressing her meticulously and heavily, and tied, grunting, one of the mother’s huge old bonnets on her head to shield her, unhappily, from the storm. It was Gerta’s care, the coughing attachment and unforgiveable pity, that made the nation’s born leader forlorn in the nunnery. How the old fool petted and fawned even before the sisters, who, though not so outwardly comforting, were more, finally, difficult and grasping, feeding on their wards.

The stately steps grew closer; confessions mumbled nearer at hand.

Standing together like obedient black birds at the bottom of the stairway, their heads bent in silent unmeditating respect, the sisters waited until Superior disappeared upwards and out of sight, painfully slow and belligerently in communion. Never, never could she whip these girls into shape, she deplored the ragamuffins, the misplaced childish females. She did not like girls. Superior caught her breath, drew herself up, and made headway through the common lot of problems and despairs, passing unscathed from cell to cell.

The world was growing dimmer for Jutta, the crisis was at hand, her hold on her knees was precarious and sharp. Whether or not she was responsible, she had her weakness, physical and perhaps beyond control, and it made her guilty of disease while the calcium continued to dribble away from the cold, well-bred bones. And despite her praiseworthy nature, her determination, she did fear Superior. Behind all her plotted good intentions, behind her adoration of the East and worship of people in the abstract, the fear always remained, fear of mother, fear of being nursed, fear of Superior. The light was flowing out of the bunker, there was nothing more to do except wait for the final unadmitted illusion to disappear, nothing to think of, no one to dislike, no one she needed to love. The little stone-like bumps were hard and rough under her fingers, the hair was straight into her eyes.

“I didn’t really want to do it, Superior,” the voices were drawing closer with short unpleasant sobs, “I never really wanted to, it was all a mistake, I’m sorry, truly sorry, sorry,” and Jutta heard them falling in terror into the slovenly captivity of forgiveness, heard the voices folding into submission. Superior would cross each name, that night, off from the human list. What was it? Yes, she scorned the heroes on die Heldenstrasse, they were forgiven, blessed and posed. She would not put on her Sunday shoes to walk that street. But she could not see Superior, she could not, and surely the grey waters of hell would drown her for that treachery, that fear.

The shadows were cold, her hands were unfeeling with numbness. The Oberleutnant, warm and restless, tossed off the covers, thought of silken hair and fiery eyes.

Suddenly the light vanished, faster than the moon could be covered with clouds, and the dark angel stood in the doorway cutting off the candlelight from the outside world. The waters opened at the feet of the girl, Superior opened her warm heart, ready to receive the remnants of another mortal. The throat tightened, pulled, and at that moment she heard the General calling, calling from the great room of feasting, “Where is the railroad station, the railroad station?” and he was laughing.

“Child,” the woman stayed in the doorway, half in the hall, half inside, “are you ready to open your heart to the Heavenly Father? Are you ready to be insured of safe flight from the pit of everlasting day and weariness? Now is the time to atone.” Superior’s voice was loud, was always the same whether she was talking to the well or ill, was always clear and harsh. “Now is the time to abandon the wicked man of your soul, now you may come to my arms.” She remained rigidly blocking the light. “Child, have you prepared your confession?”

Surely if she lived she would end up a civil official after all, entrusted and forced to take down, patiently, Superior’s documents of condemnation. She felt a small, cold throbbing under her arm.

“No.” She did not think, but answered dumbly, out of the deathbed. “No. I have nothing to confess, absolutely nothing, nothing.” She was talking back to Gerta, telling her brothers to leave her alone, for she was cold and tired. “Nothing to say to you, Superior,” and relaxing her grasp, she slipped from the cot, a rude, black, invalidated heap.

The Oberleutnant, disturbed by the voices, threw on his trousers and trudged angrily upstairs. This sort of thing had to stop.

Ernie was so small now, propped helplessly in bed, fever and chill making his face now comical, now cruel and saintlike. He was a puppet with two masks and it was up to Stella, weary, to change them as he bid. He had become as bothersome and old as all unhealthy people, but he loved, in the agonizing undramatic last moments of his life, to swallow the thick medicine and make bitter faces. Stella heard from the sentry, who was still posted at the door of the General’s empty estate, that the illness was spreading all through the city. He told her rumors of deaths, widespread prostitution, and of imminent victory. “At least,” she thought to herself, “dear Ernst is not the only one.” The valises were still unpacked and lay crookedly, uncertainly, at the foot of his bed. “He looks,” thought Stella, “as if he had a toothache,” and indeed the patient’s cheeks were swollen and inflamed at the sides of his thin white face. His coat collar was turned up about his throat, it was better to put him straight to bed, even fully dressed. Everywhere Stella moved, he still called, and though his face was turned away, the voice in the depths of his chest, she felt him holding on to her with his last breath of grace. She hadn’t even time to wash, the windows were still boarded up, the furniture, except the pile he lay upon, was still in the basement. For the first time since her love on the mountain, she began to realize that he was a fencer in the clouds, stuck through, finally, with a microscopic flu. The room was dark and close as sickrooms are, but the evening chill and ageless year round dampness made it more like an underground aid station. Holding her breath she leaned over the averted face, pulled it to position, pushed the sugar-grimed spoon between the lips, and straightened with a long sigh.

Stella didn’t know what she would do with him when he died. All at once the problem was overwhelming, his remains would hang around for weeks. The idea of disposal seemed so remote and impossible. Surely the man who took care of such things would be long out of business, where could she turn? If only the body would fly away with the soul, but, no, it would linger on, linger on here in this very room. “He doesn’t look at all,” she thought, “like the man I married in the garden.” Where is the railroad station? She helped him through each physical minute, becoming more impatient as he coughed and turned. Suddenly it struck her that this was not old Herman’s son, and now she was nursing a stranger, not even a ward of the State. “Dear Ernst,” she thought, “you look just like Father.”

Every time he opened his eyes, he saw her there, warm, beautiful, efficient. The very breath of the flowers on her shoulder brought new life. When she sat on the bed, one soft dark knee upon the other, one thin elbow pushing gently against her bosom, holding the lovely head, all lofty desire was his, he was in the presence of the white lady of the other world. Ah, to die no longer with the fire but with the dove. The first stages of death took energy, the last mere confidence. The closer she bent with the spoon in her hand, the warmer he felt, the farther he flew.

“Stella?”

“Yes, Ernst?”

“Isn’t it time for the black pills?”

Immediately she brought the bottle.

“Herman, stay away,” he thought. “The old man must not come back, the wonderful peace of being waited on must not be broken. The corrupter’s prime agent should not be allowed out of the war, but should stay forever and ever in some black hole away from the gracious light of Heaven. The maiden voyage of the star, all hands accounted for, safely arrived into the sky. At last to be able to do something alone, without old Snow there to beat the other fellow’s back.” The dreams arose more vividly, he forgot the star. “Those were fearful times with the old man filled with wrath. Oh, no, that demon could not possibly come back to plague my end, to expect to be welcomed home at such a precarious, serious time.” Ernst channeled himself once more into the soft light, the medicine smelled as sweet as the valorpetals, without the demon’s horned masterful voice intruding.

“He flicked his eyes open and shut once,” Stella later told the guard.

“Stella.” He called again, “Stella, in the carpetbag, he’s there, somewhere near the bottom, get him, please.”

She rummaged through the flabby thing, like a peddler’s sack, and there, beneath the newspapers and photographs, sure enough, under the soiled shirt, near the bottom on a pair of black shoes, it lay, wrapped in old Christmas tissue.

“Here.” He patted the pillow near his cheek, “Here,” he said in bliss.

She put the carving of Christ, almost as large as his head, on the pillow. She waited as if for something to happen. How peculiar, the wooden man and fleshless God, they kept good company. Then she remembered: on the mountain she too lay by Christ, and it was a mistake!

Suddenly he coughed and the little statue rolled over, its arms and legs thrown wide in fear.

“Here,” she said, “now drink this, drink it.” For a moment it looked as if he would recover. Then, no, no, he smiled again and all was lost. Stella crossed her soft dark knees.

The guard did not bother to open the door for Gerta and Herr Snow, but whistled and wondered at the old woman’s return, while the soldier and his girl pushed alone into the darkness of the wide downstairs hall. For a moment, Gerta stood uncertainly in the middle of the vacant foyer, listening for the sounds of the dead, with Herman leaning, drugged, on her arm. She could hear the guard, the last guard, behind her shuffling about on the other side of the door. Herman breathed heavily in the darkness, his weight sagged, she could see nothing. Then she heard them, those dead two, master and mistress, and far overhead she saw a line of light and heard the tinkle of glass, ghosts in their cups.

She wanted to shut the soldier, shirt off, shoes off, into her room with all night, every night for no telling how long, before her. But she began to lead him toward the light. Mistake, mistake to bring such a tender man, so close to popping, within the realm of unwanted, unexpected guests — to let the steam off the wrong end, the end of white, flat apprehension. And she too, by walking up the stairs, was holding off. As they neared the top, he tripped once, twice, and Gerta began to cross the line from love to nurse, from grand-sharer to assistant.

It was Fraulein Stella’s room. They waited before the door.

The trains were still arriving. Under cover of darkness, small and squat, they emptied themselves of soldiers home on leave. In the dark the girls milling on the platform could not tell whether the trains were full of passengers, perhaps men, or empty. Signals crossed, whistles argued out of the stops of tangled rail, “Train from 31, train from 9, let me pass, I’m carrying wounded.” “Wait, you’ll have to wait, 31, there are dogs in front.”

Gerta could hear the whistles far out in the night. They were long and old-fashioned and far away.

“Do you hear the dogs?” Ernst spoke, hands picking at the covers.

“Of course, dear husband.”

He could hear them barking among the boat whistles in the middle of the night.

Stella mixed the potions and wondered about the hour, what could she do when the hour stopped? All about her the phials, the wads of cotton, the handbook of medical instruction, were out of reach, too slow. There was nothing she could do against it, she lost her place in the handbook. All the soft embrace of the mountain was gone, all the humor of his saber wounds was healed; he was stitched and shrouded in that impertinent, unthinking smile. He grew thinner, and staring her full in the face with his three fingers twitching helplessly on the cover, he gagged.

They heard the scratching at the door and at first they thought it was the wind, only the comforting night air.

“Now, what’s she doing here,” thought Gerta as she stepped into the patient’s room with her lover behind.

The red-bearded devil leaned across the bed, staring at the man with a toothache. Herman looked from his son to Stella, the lovely girl, from the colored bottles to the boarded window, and back to the majestic bed.

“He’s not sick!” and the devil roared with laughter, his desire for Gerta flickering out in spasms of recognition of his foe, the bedded influenza.

He had horns. Terrible, agonizing, deformed short stubs protruding from the wrinkled crown, and the pipes he held in his fiery hands were the pipes of sin. All of the calm of Heaven evaporated and at the last moment, not knowing what it was all about, Ernst recognized Old Snow. And in that moment of defense, of hating the devilish return of boisterous heroic Herman, Ernst died without even realizing the long-awaited event; in that last view of smallness, that last appearance of the intruder, Ernst, with his mouth twisted into dislike, died, and was reprieved from saintliness. The old man still laughed, “Feigning, he’s only feigning!” Stella was irritated with his ignorance, at least this father could rise to the dignity of the occasion by admitting the fact of death. But no, he chuckled and looked stupid.

Herman paid for his mirth, for it had stolen his son and his stamina. He slept uncomfortably with Gerta in the room which she felt was much too small for the rest of the night.

The guard, Stella found, managed in the morning to fulfill her final obligation to the dead. The disbelief and anger were still on the fencer’s face as he was carried from the house, saved by the grace of his own ill-luck and ill-will.

Jutta awoke with the vision of spectacles and hood still in the abbey room and out of the weak unending dream, she heard the tinkle of the goodnight bell, while the pain in her arms and legs was numbed by her victory; for Superior was gone.

“Jutta, Jutta, go to bed,” but she discounted that voice. The last authority was gone. Superior, rebuffed, sat at her desk down the hall, unable to write, so angry, the cowl that covered her fierce shaved head tossed aside on a chair. The waiting woman stared in concern at the nun turned monk.

Jutta tried to move, but could not, and stayed for a moment, her face turned to the floor, rising from the squeamish pit of the too-easy psalm and too-easy dying bone. She opened her eyes. “There are enemies even within our own State,” she remembered and wondered why the Oberleutnant didn’t stop Superior, and she was glad to know, being allowed to wake once more, that life was not miraculous but clear, not right but undeniable. How narrow and small was the suffocating Superior with part of each day spent bartering with the miraculous medal salesman. Jutta felt, being once more back in the cell where Gerta put her, uncomfortably sick and very tired. She would try to reach the cot.

The nunnery, high and safe within the meek heart, far from the blockade at sea, rested confident and chaste in the middle of the night, spreading its asylum walls outwards over a few bare feet of uninhabited dry earth. Safe, within the Allied querulous dragnet, because a taste of faith was all the inmates knew, because over the years, the hearts grew large and the stomachs naturally small, safe, with the cyclical event of mother, girl, and vanity thrown out. The old white barn rocked gently in the cloudy night. The moss had grown thin, turned brown, and died on the mud walls, water no longer trickled and grew thick in the well, the sand could hardly lift itself through the halls at night on the wind’s back, but still in the morning and evening, bells faithfully chimed out the remote and tedious day. “Father, save me,” thinking of the girls, “from these merciless infidels,” said Superior, and leaning forward, she shrouded herself in darkness and sat for a long while with her pains and troubles by the window.

An oyster shell on the beach far away was shrouded in oil, coming in off the treacherous tide. The dogs barked.

“Perhaps I should call a doctor,” thought the Oberleutnant bending over the sick girl, but at that moment she stirred, and besides, he remembered, the old horse that used to be in the stables and could have made the journey to the surgeon’s house, was dead.

Jutta could not reach the cot, but slowly her anger and childish pain brought her back from the fleece-lined pit, and at that moment, she heard the bell in the tower ring three, heard Superior, who had rung it, padding back, feelings still hurt, to sit by the window. With a sudden lucky gesture, Jutta turned her head upwards, and in the dim light stared at the uncovered masculine chest of the Oberleutnant as he bent down, watching her on the floor.

Then, that night, she passed the crisis, and breath by breath, though scrutinized and unloved, she assumed more of life, still alone, more silent, colder than ever.

A few months after the death of Ernst, Stella gave birth to her fragile son, and while she was still on the bearing bed, Gerta and Herman took the child from her, carried it and kept it, down in the first-floor dark pleasure room where they had failed together that first night. Food became more scarce, and Stella never forgave the old woman for the stolen son. Hearing the dogs howling around the station at the port of entry to the grave, she thought, once more, of singing. The Christ carving had disappeared.