The Master Butcher's Singing Club

TWELVE. Traumfeuer

THERE WAS IN the butcher’s kitchen a large crockery preserving jar into which Delphine cut up the last bits of fruit as they went in and out of season — cherries, tough peaches, raspberries, raisins, bananas, apples, and grapes. Over each addition she dumped sugar and a measure of brandy. The stuff, spooned over pound cake or ice cream if they ever had it, was a dessert reserved for weekends, when it didn’t matter if the boys went to bed slightly tipsy and woke up late. Perhaps that was the origin of its name, Traumfeuer, dreamfire, and the reason they loved to eat it just before they went to sleep. Delphine, who never stayed that late, didn’t know where the stuff went and had no idea that Fidelis let the boys get into it. On the day before they were to leave for Chicago, she was eating a large bowl of it in the middle of the afternoon. She’d poured Traumfeuer on a hard piece of sweet bread and added a bit of cream, treating herself because she’d packed the boys’ clothing into a suitcase that would be roped on the top of the car. It was more, she knew, as she spooned herself another powerful helping, a way of blotting out the next day’s plan.

Tante had finally persuaded Fidelis to let her take the boys, excepting Franz, since he was nearly finished with school, back to Germany. Tante would raise them with the help of the grandmother, who was lonely. With the sewing machine, which she had purchased instead of acquiring a husband, Tante felt confident of returning. And now she was bringing the boys along, although, she pointed out, it would not be forever! It would be a year, at most two, before Fidelis came over and brought them back himself. Without the exhaustion of taking care of them, the store would flourish. They would be more responsible by then. Old enough to help.

Maybe it was the pile of bills that had finally persuaded Fidelis, or that he could not pay Delphine for the hours she was working. Perhaps what had happened to Markus in the hill was the reason. Or the forehead of Emil, peppered with still healing dents made by a neighbor boy’s BB gun. Maybe it was Erich’s last fall off the roof, which laid him out cold for half an hour. Or the raft they had constructed of trash lumber, which had whirled them miles down last year’s spring river. Maybe it was all the clothing they needed and Fidelis could not afford. Their wristbones had grown past their sleeves. They were still in short pants, which galled Markus.

The plan for tomorrow was for everyone to drive down to Chicago in the DeSoto. Fidelis, Tante, and Delphine would ride in front. The boys in back. For three days, Franz would take care of the shop. They would leave in the middle of the night, get there in the morning and handle all of the passport proceedings and red tape with the consulate on that first and second day. On the third day, Tante and the boys and their luggage would board a train to New York City. The day after that, their ship embarked. They had reserved one cabin with an added floor pallet and a tiny window, luxurious according to the agent they had telephoned, and yet a bargain.

Delphine spooned more fruit onto the sopping bread. The brandy loosened her shoulders, but her face burned and a ringing started in her temples. She sealed the top of the crockery jar and decided that she would go home and get some rest. It felt as though she were dragging herself through an underwater atmosphere. As though she were suddenly twice as heavy. Added gravity. As she was washing her bowl and the rest of the dishes in the sink, she felt Markus enter the kitchen. She did not turn. He walked up behind her, as the boys often did when she was working at the stove. As always she pretended not to hear him, allowing him to draw very close to her.

“What’re you doing?” he asked.

“Just washing dishes.”

He stood with her, watching her hands move in and out of the water and the suds. Delphine had noticed that there was something about a woman doing kitchen chores or standing at a stove that seemed to make boys feel safe. With her back turned, they would be apt to confide in her. They would stand right next to her while she was stirring or frying food and they would tell her things they’d never reveal if they were, say, sitting at a table across from her. Markus, especially, was apt to do this after his school day was ended. Delphine stirred soups endlessly and drew out her chores just to keep him talking — over potato soup he’d told her, for instance, that he’d got a Valentine once from the Ruthie who died in the cellar. And he’d also told her what it was like to sleep inside the hill. He told her some of his dreams, and he also, with a lonely eagerness, talked about his mother. And when he talked about Eva it was good for Delphine as well. Once she’d said, ladling out a bowl of dumpling soup, “Your mother taught me this recipe, but I’ll never make it like she did.”

“Yeah,” said Markus, “but yours is good, too.”

And when he’d said that, a rough emotion grabbed her throat, and she’d put her hand on his head, actually stroked his hair.

Now she was supposed to say good-bye.

“I’m going to send that soup recipe to your grandma. That soup you like so much,” she told him.

“Oh,” said Markus. “That’s good. Do they make good dumplings in Germany?”

“That’s where the dumpling was probably invented,” said Delphine. “Noodles, too, spaetzle, and they bake bread like nobody’s business. Your mother told me. She said they have a chocolate so dark it is almost black, that tastes of oranges. And they have this light cheese they spread on toasted rolls in the morning, and jams of all kinds. Marmalade. You ever have marmalade?”

“It’s on the store shelf.”

“I don’t like it, but she just swore by it. She said the marmalade they have over there comes from oranges in Spain. Not like the pitiful oranges here, she said, all rindy and full of seeds and too sweet. These Spanish oranges taste like bitter sunshine even preserved in sugar.”

“That sounds good,” said Markus, his voice clogged as if he was about to cry.

“I know it sounds like I’m hard-hearted, talking about marmalade when you’re leaving all the way to Germany,” said Delphine, turning to him. “I’m all broken up inside. I don’t want you to see it.”

She turned away and as she did so Markus put his head against the back of her arm, and leaned there. She did not move. There was a long sigh of quiet in the kitchen. He had chosen her, once again. At that moment, Delphine decided. He was hers. That was that. She would not let him go. It was just a matter of finding the right way to keep him, but she would do it. Tante hadn’t a chance.

Eventually, Markus grew embarrassed and moved off, wishing that he could speak, but unable to choose the right words. He started eating a cheese sandwich she put into his hand. Hypnotized by despair at the familiarity that he was soon going to lose, he chewed too quickly. He wanted to tell her that he could not go. Maybe even to beg her to hide him, or bring him home with her, or do something to persuade his father that this was a mistake. But his tongue was fat in his mouth, numb and stupid. The sandwich was dry and sticky all at once, and very difficult to eat. I’m just luggage getting moved from here to there, he thought. A thing that doesn’t matter. A stuffed pants and jacket. He couldn’t find the words to tell this to Delphine.

* * *

IN THE DEEP BLACKNESS, they loaded the car and the boys crawled sleepily into the backseat, collapsing immediately back into their slumber. Fidelis would take the first shift, driving, and so he got behind the wheel. Tante made certain she slipped into the middle seat, jostling Delphine aside in her haste to set herself next to her brother. Her sewing machine was latched in the trunk, nestled in its traveling case, crated besides so it would not suffer on the voyage. A small valise of her clothing was also set in the trunk, and her large black leather purse was secure in her lap. Tante was prepared. She had freshly aired and pressed her tough and shiny suit. She’d brought five boiled eggs in a sack — it hadn’t occurred to her to bring one for Delphine. But no one would notice the eggs, anyhow. Delphine had made sugar cookies in the shapes of animals, special for the boys, and she brought fried doughnuts, sausages, bread, hard cheese, apples, and a small insulated box that contained bottles of beer.

Delphine was wearing an ordinary suit and coat, but in a round green case she had brought along two changes of underclothing and her one smart wool suit with a pinched-in waist. The suit matched a hat with a curved green feather stuck in the band, a hat she could tilt rakishly over one eye. There was a short dotted veil inside the hat that she could put down if she wanted to look more coquettish yet. But she didn’t. She just wanted to get through the whole mess. While Tante and Fidelis wrangled papers and got passports cleared, her job would be to take the boys out to see the monumental sights of Chicago. After lunch, she switched places with Fidelis. Driving, she could concentrate silently on the road. The car’s atmosphere was gloomy. There was some cheer from Tante, but Delphine thought it morbid. The boys drowsed and drifted in sleep. The closer they got, the more Delphine felt that her appointed task — walking around with them looking at parks and historical markers and art museums — seemed about the grimmest, most upsetting thing she could think of to do. Once they were settled, she decided, they’d find a circus.

WE SPENT TWO DAYS feeding peanuts to the goddamn elephants, she would remember with Markus, later on. Because while Tante and Fidelis made their complicated arrangements, that’s where they were. At the beginning of the stay, Delphine went into a bookstore, consulted a guidebook, and marked out in her mind which educational sights they should supposedly be seeing. After she made the boys memorize facts about the sights, they went straight to the circus and spent the morning at the sideshow feeding the monkeys and elephants and talking to all of the attractions, who were on duty in their carts and behind their cages or on their little podiums, their placement depending on their oddity. Because it was a raw late winter day and there weren’t many gawkers, and because the boys were so obviously smitten with wonder, but mainly because Delphine liked to talk to people, they made friends.

There was a woman called the needle, so thin that when she turned sideways she was supposed to disappear (she didn’t). There was the usual fat lady — hers spread in pools beside her where she lay on a bearskin rug, as though she’d half melted. Seal-O was a young man with flippers for hands and completely turned-out feet. He had a mean personality and made fun of the boys’ worn and shrunken clothing. Seeing they were stung with shame, Delphine said to Seal-O, “You’re a fine one to talk. You should be balancing a red rubber ball on your damn nose.” He laughed at her in a nasty way, and she grabbed the boys before he said anything worse. They talked to Mr. Tiger, whose skin was really striped. He let them try to rub the stripes off, and they couldn’t. Girl Wonder Calculator made their heads spin. “How come you’re here,” asked Delphine, “not in the university?” There were a very bored strong man and a frightful person of no determinate gender who had another frightful half-a-person growing out of its belly. There was an exotic four-breasted mermaid, whom the boys were not allowed to see, but Delphine did see. She told them later that the top was real but the bottom was definitely made of rubber. And at last there was the Delver of Minds, a little off from things, in a solemnly draped tent.

The boys, as could be expected, had no interest in having their minds delved. Delphine bought them some cotton candy swirled on a paper cone, told them not to get lost, and paid a quarter to enter.

Of course, thought Delphine, the Delver of Minds was a woman. She looked up rather grumpily from where she sat next to a little charcoal burner that she stirred with a slim iron poker. Without a word, gesturing abruptly for Delphine to sit in the wooden chair across from her, the Delver busied herself with unwrapping and then sprinkling onto the charcoal some powdery substance, maybe a kind of incense, that gave off a penetrating spicy aroma. The smell was extremely pleasant, and Delphine breathed it in and looked curiously at the woman.

She had white hair but her face was young. Perhaps she was not much older than Delphine. Although she was quite delicate, and seemed a bit chilled even swathed in misty blue folds of material, she also had a broad-lipped mouth and powerful hands. Her wrists, as she laid out a pack of cards in some peculiar order, were bony and slender. But those fingers, thought Delphine, could crack walnuts.

“You’re watching me pretty close, miss,” said the Delver.

“I was just noticing your fingers — strong enough to crack walnuts open — that’s what I was thinking.” Delphine laughed.

“Crack walnuts. The man in question does that with his fingers. You can look at me all you want,” the woman said, putting away her cards, “but you paid to get your own mind read.”

“Well,” said Delphine, unnerved by the walnut reference, “go ahead then.”

“You’re in town on some desperate errand,” said the Delver.

“Pretty good,” said Delphine. “I’m here to send off the man’s boys, the man I work for.”

“They’re going to Germany.”

“What?”

“You’re in the meat business,” said the woman. “I looked at your hands, too.”

Nicked and gouged, already missing a tiny corner of a fingertip, scarred with small white nicks, roughed with lye and toughened from mixing hot spices for Italian sausages, Delphine’s hands had changed. She looked at them, lying there on the little copper table, as though they were the hands of an alien being. “I never noticed,” she murmured.

“No,” agreed the woman, “you never even tried to hide them when you walked in. Women around here wear gloves. That says something, too.”

“What does it say?”

“You’re not going to hide anything,” said the woman. “There are people who pretend to themselves they are honest, and there are people who actually tell the truth. You’re still between the two. But you’re heading toward the latter. I hear music. This man, you love him.”

“No,” said Delphine. Then she added, “He sings.”

“Oh, all right,” said the Delver. She closed her eyes and then pinched her fingers to her temples, as though she was suffering from a sudden headache. “There’s some kind of animal in your way. Oh, I can’t be right.” She began to laugh to herself. “I am seeing in your mind the picture of a large black bug… skinny at the middle like an ant.”

“Well, you are right,” said Delphine, too amused to be totally surprised. “It’s the boys’ aunt.”

“You hate her guts with good reason.”

“You could put it that way.”

“But she’s going.”

“She’s…” and now Delphine’s breath stuck, painfully. “She is taking the boys.”

“And you love them.”

“Yes,” said Delphine promptly.

“The man is too bright to look at, too dark inside to read. He is a widower. Marry him.”

“I can’t,” said Delphine, now obscurely irritated.

“You’re no coward, either,” said the Delver, “so the reason lies elsewhere.” She turned over the glowing coals and sprinkled a different powder onto them. A bitter and soothing scent rose between them. “You’re tired of holding them all up, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Delphine.

“Then let go of the ones you can do without. She won’t let you take them all, anyway. You will not prevail over her, or divide the sister from the brother, not if they’re blood.”

* * *

DELPHINE GATHERED the boys and walked away from the Delver’s tent — she’d said other things, statements Delphine needed to sort out. And her head now ached mildly from the smoke of the powder she had breathed. That afternoon, the boys were getting their passport pictures taken, anyway, and they were to meet at the hotel just before.

“Let’s get those strings of candy off you,” said Delphine, brushing Emil’s suit jacket, which she’d let out as much as it would go. She plucked away some spiderwebby bits of pink floss. Markus brushed Erich off and unstuck some pieces of straw from the elephants’ bedding from his wool socks. Erich grinned, his two front teeth looked huge and comical. His other teeth were still missing or only half grown in.

“Now you all look good,” said Delphine, but her voice stuck in her chest and came out half strangled.

As they walked back to the hotel, there entered into her mind the unwilling but compelled conviction that she had to talk to Fidelis alone. And she would do it. Never mind what blocks Tante threw, she’d make sure that she and Fidelis had the chance to talk this over before the four of them took off on that train — who knows, it could be forever, the way things were going. She’d kept track of what was happening over there ever since the purge of 1934. Details of that terror were still coming out and she collected them in her mind, would not forget the slaughter as Fidelis and Tante conveniently did when the Saarland was returned and then the Rhineland militarized. All they could talk about was the strength, the prosperity, their family’s increased holdings. The strange, compelling genius of the leader. At the bottom of a Minneapolis newspaper’s foreign section, a tiny blurb on a rampage of hate against Jews and glass breaking made Fidelis shake his head, but then say, after a few moments, that things had always been so. There was always this poison, a few who would express it. Johannes, er war Judn, he said, but didn’t translate or explain. Now, even though Delphine was convinced she could argue him down, even though she believed she’d thought more about the situation that the boys faced than Fidelis, she was afraid to talk to him. Even the thought made her heart beat uncomfortably fast, made her tough hands sweat.

It wasn’t the argument about the politics — it was the other, the unexpressed. All that she feared about the lay of her heart and did not examine. Nothing is by accident, nothing is by chance, she told herself. I went in to see that delver of minds for a very good reason: whether or not she could see the whole thing, I wanted to get my own mind clear. I had to hear myself say those things, had to hear out loud what I don’t even know I am thinking inside. I had to sit there with that white-haired lady and put it all out where I can see the shape of it.

THEY ALL WALKED together into the great stone building set inside with tiny corridors of offices where papers were processed. The office ran in balconies around a central shaft open to the ground floor. Dusty light poured down from a vaulted skylight ornamented with obscure struggling figures. The boys craned upward, and Delphine held their hands, walking them up the broad stone stairway. Outside the room where passport photographs were taken, people waited in a line along the corridor, some on the floor, some slumped against the wall. It was a very long line. Tante was tired, but she didn’t slump. Her stiff suit seemed to hold her up. She made a face of severe annoyance, and said that the boys needed to eat.

Delphine seized her chance. “Let’s go and get them some sandwiches,” she said to Fidelis.

Tante said immediately, “Don’t bother. No. We’re not that hungry.”

“The boys ate nothing,” Delphine said, with a composed firmness.

“They’ll live,” said Tante, curt and loud. She produced, with an air of triumph, a clutch of lemon drops from her purse. Their sugary coating had gathered the usual purse dust, and they were stuck together in one lump. Tante cracked it lightly against the wall and gave a piece of the candy to each of the twins, a tiny sliver to Markus.

“There,” she concluded, “that will hold them.”

“That stuff’ll rot their teeth,” said Delphine. “Let’s get them some nourishment,” she said to Fidelis. Then she looked straight into his face, opened her eyes, let the dull radiance from the great central skylight cascade down upon her, and she smiled.

“You could use the air, too,” she said. “Come along.” And he followed.

Outside, in the street, walking toward a delicatessen they’d both spotted, Delphine began to speak with a simple urgency. “I’ve got nothing to lose,” she said to Fidelis, “so I’m going to talk. Listen. You can’t let Maria Theresa take them back to Germany, Fidelis, it is all wrong. Impossible. You can see that she doesn’t know crap about taking care of boys.”

“My mother will care for them once they are settled,” said Fidelis.

They reached the doors to the shop, and almost entered, but Delphine’s mind spun furiously. She didn’t want to divert Fidelis from the problem with the mundane selection of cheap sandwiches. “Let’s keep walking around this block. I’ve got more to say.”

“It is done,” said Fidelis.

“No, it’s not, and you owe me to listen.”

That got him — he never liked to owe anyone. And he knew she was right, knew that she’d cared for his sons to the full extent of her powers and beyond the limits of her job ever since Eva died. So they didn’t go into the deli but kept walking.

“In Germany,” explained Fidelis, “they learn the proper way to do things.”

“Maybe so.” Delphine breathed deep, tried to stay calm so she could argue reasonably. “But then what? Do you think they’ll want to come back here and help you in the shop? Do you think Tante will even let them come back?”

Fidelis looked down at her, his face distinctly tightening. It was clear that he’d thought of this deep down, but stuffed away his apprehensions, or argued himself out of them. He paused, but then he spoke in a light, determined voice.

“Then I go over there and get them myself!”

“I read in the newspaper that new government is keeping any Germans who visit,” said Delphine. It was purely a rumor at the time, though it would indeed prove true, but Delphine decided to use it. “And the boys… what if the borders shut? You know what the war was like.”

But that was going too far. Fidelis became serious and spoke with an earnest fervor. “I have seen war — there could never be another war! Es ist unmöglich! I believe this Hitler is strengthening the country for peace. That is why the family does good — and they buy things for the boys. They have money.”

“Money!” said Delphine, fighting a surge of anger. “All well enough, but these are the sons you had with Eva!”

Her name dropped between them like an anvil.

Now Delphine used the fact that she had been saving for a moment like this, when the stakes were huge.

“Tante stole the morphine — you must know that. How can you send your sons with the woman who made Eva suffer? At least leave Markus here! I’ll take care of him!”

They both stopped walking at the same time. There, in that windy street, they looked at each other. Fidelis’s face was grim and ashen. Her face turned up toward his, a challenge, her eyes narrowed and watchful. When she stared at him, her eyes a magnetic ore, Fidelis felt himself moving toward her, nodding, allowing her to take control. As though the wind had pushed him, just a little, off his feet, he took a step to right his balance. He couldn’t think of anything else to say, because of course she was right. Tante wasn’t good with Markus. And yet, he looked away from her. Tante was right about some things. The younger boys would be better off back in Ludwigsruhe, surrounded by family, not digging their way into hills and floating down the river and nearly drowning themselves.

“I can’t watch them enough,” he said to Delphine, and he put his hands in his pockets and looked down at the mottled concrete sidewalk between them. He had something more to say, and he didn’t want to say it. “I don’t have the money to pay you anymore.”

“I know,” said Delphine, impatient. “That doesn’t matter. I want…” Then she was staring at the sidewalk, too. They stood there so long, both with the next words on their lips, that it seemed as though they might sink right through the stonework. The words had too much weight. Fidelis put his hand to his chin, looked down at her standing there, the smart taupe hat cocked over one side of her face, the little veil, the green feather. Without any warning, surprising him, his hand reached out. He touched the tip of the green feather. Her lips were naturally dark, not pink at all, but a deeper brownish crimson. He took a ragged breath.

“Cyprian,” he said.

She looked at him and then her smile flashed, and her comma-shaped dimples, her strong white teeth. He was dazzled by the freshness of her expression even before she spoke, shaking her head.

“Cyprian and I were never married.”

He took that in. That was something, and it was nothing. The two started walking again, side by side. They had nearly circled the block again before Fidelis found the words he wanted to say. It was difficult finding them at all, because he was ashamed of what he’d thought right after Cyprian had rescued Markus. Along with the relief and gratitude, Fidelis had suddenly been struck by an understanding: he could never, ever, in any way, make a claim upon Delphine. He owed the man she was with, the man he’d fought. He owed Cyprian. Even as he wished it were otherwise now, too, the marriage vow or lack of it did not figure into the picture. Delphine and Cyprian’s union was perhaps a shocking thing, but in fact it often happened that two people pretended to be married to thwart small-town gossip. He had noticed for some time she wasn’t wearing her wedding band. They had come full circle, around the block, and returned to their starting point.

“You have slept with him?” he bluntly asked.

“No,” said Delphine. “Yes and no. He couldn’t…”

Fidelis stopped and looked at her with a rising sense of comprehension. All of a sudden he thought he understood. When he grasped it, he shook his head to clear it of all thoughts of Delphine. So that was the nature of Cyprian’s wound. As well, the reason for his touchy and protective rage regarding Delphine. Fidelis shielded his eyes with his hand, to blot her away from his sight. The only thing left to ask, Fidelis decided, was whether Cyprian was coming back.

“Is he ever—” he began.

Just then, Tante, furious, her jacket gleaming off her chest like a scratched glass mirror, emerged from the great doors of the stone building and yelled across to them. She charged toward Fidelis, the boys tailing her as she crossed the street. Fidelis saw her, turned back to Delphine, gave her a strangled, almost desperately pleading look, as though he wanted her to finish the sentence for him.

“Is he ever what?” said Delphine. But without waiting for an answer, she lunged toward the boys, afraid of the traffic. Fidelis grabbed his sister’s arm at the curb, propelling her alongside him.

“Come, Tante, we found a good place.” He waved at the delicatessen that stood open and gleaming just down the street. “Let’s go in. Let’s sit down.”

Tante began to berate him for leaving them all and where, she wanted to know, were the sandwiches anyway, and she was missing her lunch, and that always made her light-headed. Fidelis calmly marched her into the delicatessen, which had small tables placed before a slide of great modern plate-glass windows, and he sat her down. Delphine took charge of the boys, settled them at their own table just behind Tante and Fidelis, and told them what they could have, what they could choose from the things that were cheapest on the menu. At one point, after their order was taken, as she sat with them, she looked up at the table where Fidelis was facing into the little storm of complaints his sister was making. He was nodding at all Tante said, but he was watching Delphine with thoughtful gravity.

THEIR HOTEL WAS what they could afford, one bathroom down the hall and a dreary gray feeling to the whole edifice. At least it was clean, the other people weren’t threatening, and there didn’t seem to be any bugs. The boys slept with Fidelis, and Tante and Delphine were together in a room. Delphine had dreaded this, and she hadn’t even thought about sharing the bed.

The first night, the two had been so exhausted that they merely rolled in side by side, turned their backs to each other, and managed sleep even though Delphine was awakened several times by Tante’s tossing out one hand, the fingers flicking dreamily just under her nose. She nudged the hand away and slept on. This evening, after they had eaten the remnants of the food they’d brought, they were going to bed early, as the train was scheduled to leave the next morning.

Tante sniffed as she entered the dim room.

“Someone has been here.”

She went immediately to her bags and began methodically to check through them, ticking off her possessions beneath her breath. Delphine sat on the bed, and watched her. Tante knelt before the brown cowhide valise and removed each piece of clothing as though it would explode. Then examined it suspiciously. What is she thinking, Delphine wondered, that someone entered our room, tried on her clothing, and folded it back into her suitcase? There was really nothing, besides the sewing machine, of any value in Tante’s luggage anyway, and she had left the sewing machine with the manager, safely under lock and key. She’d checked to see that it was still there before she’d retired.

“I think I’ll wash up,” Delphine said.

“Well, all appears in order,” said Tante, with a grim look. With infinite care, she began repacking her shabby slips and tissue-thin bloomers, her newly sewn skirts and crisp blouses, all put together on her machine. Delphine walked down the hall to the bathroom. It wasn’t a dreadful place, but the plumbing stank, and the water that came into the little tin sink was only a cold gray trickle. Still, she took her time, soaping herself, combing, rubbing almond-smelling cream into her face and hands. She wanted to give Tante a chance to put everything away and then get into her sleeping gown — the night before had been a big production, but she’d been too tired to care then. She found that her frustrations were brimming. She didn’t want to blow up. She wanted to think of a way to get one more chance to talk to Fidelis. She combed her hair back, smoothed her eyebrows, rubbed sweet oil into her lips, until at last there was no other choice than to walk back to the room.

Tante was a frightening picture with her hair down. She had released it from the complex of interlocked braids and whorls, and was brushing it. The hair lay in see-through scraggles and bumps, spread across her shoulders, a gray-brown horsy color. She had changed into her sleeping costume — a thick column of scratchy wool nearly as stiff as a blanket. And she was rubbing, into her skin, a concoction of lard and petroleum jelly. The stuff was scented with camphor and orange water, but that did not hide the rancid undertone. The air in the tiny room was penetrating, thick, intense. The first thing Delphine had to do was open the window. When she did open it, asking at the same time if Tante minded, there came from the older woman a horrified shriek muffled by a woolen scarf.

“If cold air should drop upon my skin,” said Tante, panicked, “I could be sick by morning!”

The stuff she laid upon her skin was apparently a kind of salve or preventative. She feared, in the city, an infection coming upon her, and she was making preparations to sleep that involved a soldierly defense of her health. There was the muffler, wrapped around her head, a towel covering her throat. Upon her feet, felt slippers laced like baby booties. Her chest bore the weight of most of the stinking grease, and a square of flannel besides, laid upon it, would contain the heat that her body would generate. She tottered to bed with a Frankensteinish stiffness, lay on her back with her hands crossed on her belly. She closed her eyes and uttered a long prayer underneath her breath, in German, and dropped off as Delphine lay down next to her in the dim space of clogged air.

AN HOUR, perhaps two, after falling asleep, Delphine snapped awake. Her brain was flooded with thoughts. The small room, a rectangle of dark city noises, seemed to rise up and up in the nothingness above the earth. She had the sense of how alone they were, meaningless as individuals, stacked in the hotel like herrings in a crate, one over the other, side to side. All of the confusions of the day swept over her, and she remembered first of all the white-haired woman in the layered blue gown, fold upon fold of material, obviously meant to make her seem mysterious. Yet, she truly was. Men are strange, flawed artifacts, she’d said to Delphine, and whether we struggle to love them, or not to love them, it is all the same. And then Delphine thought of Fidelis walking around and around the windy streets, his face heavy in the stony light with all that he could not speak. She thought she knew what he wanted to say, and what he tried to ask just as Tante emerged hysterical from the office building. She thought she knew, but then again how could she?

Delphine knew that she was no delver of minds, and the deep look that Fidelis had given her as they ate their food might have been a look of warning: Don’t come any closer. Or perhaps a look informing her that he was still in grief and could not even think of such a thing as she thought, sometimes. Yet, her father’s drinking had made her immune to the love of grown men, she decided, because the reason she gave any consideration to Fidelis was the feelings she had for his sons — she was helpless before those.

Delphine ached with the one sleeping position she had to hold so that she would not bump against Tante. Carefully, she shifted. Tried to rearrange her limbs slightly. Tante’s hand flopped over and Delphine carefully folded it back onto Tante’s stomach.

“Nein,” said Tante, “gib’ mir deinen Finger.”

She was talking in her sleep and her voice came out of the muffler, but what Tante said was what the witch in the fairy tale said to Hansel, which seemed an alarming omen to Delphine. She made herself breathe deeply, let her limbs go soft, shut down her mind, and waited for sleep.

THE BOY HIMSELF took care of the whole problem of telling Tante, by becoming extraordinarily ill in the night. It was to Markus himself a great and secret triumph, one he’d not even willed, not that he knew, although in the years that followed he wondered if his hidden self had predicted what would have happened to him if he had boarded that train to New York, then the ship to Germany. On waking that morning they were to leave, his cheeks were brilliant, his eyes glazed. He tossed in a fever so high that Fidelis tapped on the door before sunrise, and asked Delphine to stay in the room with the boy while he went out looking for a pharmacy. She entered, sat down next to Markus on the tiny cot. The twins were sleepily dressing, pulling on socks between yawns, and she could feel their gathering excitement. But Markus was dry with the heat of his fever, and his lips were a vivid bruised plum. His temples were white and his breath was short. She felt for the pulse in his wrist — it raced unsteadily. His face contorted.

Delphine swiped the wash basin smoothly from the boys and held his head over it. After he felt better, she took the wash basin down the hall. She cleaned it out scrupulously, and put a little cold water in the bottom, wet her handkerchief in the water when she brought it back and began to wipe his forehead, his thin high delicately freckled cheekbones, his throat, his ears, his slender wrists, his forearms. And all the while she looked carefully and pityingly down at him, she inwardly marveled and also feared that his illness would pass as suddenly as it had begun. But it did not.

When the aspirin only made Markus rave, Delphine said firmly that he could not leave, and no one challenged her. There was no use for it but Tante thought it terrible to waste a ticket and determined to find a way to sell it. She barely concealed her own relief that Markus wouldn’t be joining them. She held her hand before her face and said good-bye to him from the doorway. Delphine leaned into the embrace of the twins, held their scratchy coats for a moment, breathed their dusty boy hair. She held their rough hands as they kissed her, smoothed their foreheads. They tugged away from her, their eyes bright with excitement at their adventure. Then they were gone, the two of them, out of her life.

EARLY IN THE AFTERNOON, Fidelis drove the car to the hotel entrance and then carried Markus, limp and burning, down to the lobby. Delphine followed with the luggage, such as it was, and they packed the bags into the trunk. Put the boy into the backseat, and laid the car blankets over him. He threw them off restlessly, and anxiously asked, as he had over and over, where they were going.

“We’re going back to Argus. Going home,” said Delphine, as she tucked the light wool robes around Markus again. He looked up into her face with such a luminous joy that she was startled, then worried about delirium, that perhaps his fever had taken a dangerous turn. While Fidelis paid a tip to the manager for letting them stay longer in the room, she checked Markus carefully and thought that the worst might have passed. Maybe he just felt the way she did, light with hunger and the surprise of reprieve.

Fidelis drove and Delphine directed him out of the city. Soon they were on the highway north. They said nothing for several hours, except to murmur about the way the fields reminded them of the Dakotas, then farther on how it looked more like Minnesota. How big the barns were, how well-kept. Like they were through with the Depression down this way. Some threatening clouds came up over the horizon and they mentioned those, speculated about a possible storm. When it didn’t come to pass they switched their attention to Markus, stopped several times to check his fever and to make certain that he drank a little ginger beer from a bottle Fidelis bought. He slept as though drugged. All that day, while the sun was out, they managed to stay on safe and neutral topics of conversation. Or they fell silent, took turns driving, slept in the passenger’s seat. Once the afternoon light waned and the shadows grew long and then smudged into the general darkness, their efforts failed. Silence collected, became uncomfortable. Their quiet became waiting, then suspense.

During the day, an interior restlessness had plagued Delphine, an itch to say what must be said. It wasn’t like her not to blurt out the truth as she saw it, and she had realized that the avoidance and the careful maneuvering was wearing on her. She didn’t like the thin invisible path she had to tread around Fidelis. She drew a deep, stubborn breath and then held it so long she almost burst. When she let it out, her heart beat slower and she was calm. She had decided to provide an explanation whether or not Fidelis wanted one.

“Listen here,” she burst out. “Cyprian is like a brother to me. We’re not married and we don’t do anything together. He doesn’t want to.”

“Want to?” Fidelis swerved a bit. His brain had fixed on a war wound that robbed Cyprian of manhood. It was hard to turn his thinking from that. He didn’t want to? Cyprian didn’t want to? She could think what she liked, but he was sure that Cyprian did want to. What else could Cyprian say, and keep his dignity? Fidelis shook his head, but to enter into an argument or obtain more details was beyond both his English and his emotional reach. He stared straight forward. There was no other car on the road. They were going fifty. He tried to think of some way to advance the conversation, but nothing occurred.

Delphine crossed her legs, then folded her arms, sank her head down so that she lounged in her seat like a sulky boy. She was embarrassed at having volunteered so much, and maintained a stubborn silence. After a time, Fidelis spoke.

“What does it matter?” he said, low. “Cyprian saved Markus. He risked his life, dragged him out of the earth.”

Delphine considered that for a while, and tried to see the structure of Fidelis’s thoughts. For if he’d held himself back because of Cyprian, it must mean that he had feelings for her by the very definition of his resolve. And yet, too, the possibility of Cyprian could be the excuse Fidelis had for not acting toward her as in fact he did not want to. He may have sensed that she was possibly open — even she did not know if she truly was — and neatly banished the issue by conceiving of this species of honor that would divide them from each other and keep them excused from facing what shivered between them.

“I doubt he’s coming back,” she said. “If he does, it won’t be to live with me.”

He took that in for several miles, the headlamps cutting through falling darkness now. Her answer left him without assurance, left the whole weight of the situation upon him. Did that mean she was open to him, or that she was simply through with Cyprian? Would loving her, if Cyprian chose not to, betray the man who had saved his son? His thoughts turned this way and that. When he’d come to Eva just after the war, things had been so clear. Carnage and sorrow had made all questions of the heart too simple, maybe, but the way was strictly laid out. No ambiguities, no doubts. He had delivered his death message, she had fallen into his arms. He had visited her to help her get over her shock, comforted her, and in that storm of open emotion, it had been easy to move forward, straight into each other. Here, however, the situation was a maze. It seemed to Fidelis that there were too many people involved, but then it struck him, suddenly, that it was only repetition. Here was Delphine — the best friend of Eva as he’d been the best friend of Johannes, both dead — and now the whole entire set of events was repeating itself because Delphine could rescue him, his boys, the same way he had rescued Eva and Franz.

This, at any rate, he could tell Delphine by way of a story. He could say it to her now. Maybe if he told it all, there would be a way out, an answer in the telling.

A light fog had risen and the smoke of it swirled in the high beams. As the car cut through the evening, Fidelis told all that had happened beginning, as he thought he must, with Johannes.

THE FIRST TIME Johannes saved his life, he had dragged Fidelis out of a pile of dead when the bullet that had slammed through his jaw knocked him senseless. The next time, he had shot an onrushing French soldier when his friend’s rifle jammed. Johannes had saved Fidelis twice only to die himself in the trembling of continual music. This happened in the war’s final days. Through two days and nights in the elegant ruin of an aristocratic house, Fidelis had stayed with Johannes. The place was a stop on the mad retreat, the place where all the wounded and the dying were dumped. All day and all night the walls trembled with the continual shelling, not far off. In the small eternities between each impact, the glass in the windows, smashed all over the sills, shook with a gentle brilliance like chimes in the wind.

They stayed upstairs because below in the cellars the wounded were being smothered when the fit sought shelter, and the reek was even worse, and the screaming and the cursing, the groans, the insane shouts. Fidelis thought it better for his friend to die in the rain and wind, in the random music. His guts blown, his throat filling, it was hard to say what killed him. Dysentery or the shallow, filthy wound or the murderous exhaustion of all of the retreating and despairing men. Johannes whispered, “Sing to me, old friend.” In a freezing room, in one corner of his shattered country, accompanied by the fractured ringing of glass, Fidelis sang. Afterward he’d laid Johannes out and wrapped a silk scarf his mother had given him for luck around Johannes’s face, but he hadn’t had the courage to stay behind and bury him. Fidelis walked on. And where he walked there was more chaos and dying, and he’d walked past that in hobnailed boots and past all he possibly could until he got back to his childhood bed, his mother, his eiderdown cover, his books, his father and sister and Eva. He told her about the death of her baby’s father, and then… He said to Delphine, “Es war einfach. Wir haben verheiraten.”

“You married,” said Delphine, her voice hushed, “so that the baby, Franz, would have a father.”

“Yes,” said Fidelis, because that was the simple answer. And because he thought it was the answer that Delphine had to hear, but it was not the only answer. His body and Eva’s had told them the answer before they’d known it, in that first meeting, when he saw her more naked than he ever would again. In the darkness now, his face became very hard. When he remembered these things, the sad weight of them closed upon him and he had to breathe in and out deliberately to loosen it, like tight bands around his chest. He certainly couldn’t explain this to the woman sitting next to him. Delphine did not seem to notice, anyway. She had removed her pumps and drawn her feet up on the seat, curved there in thought. She sat there neatly, the way an animal might crouch. He could feel Delphine’s awareness drift deep along some current he couldn’t fathom, and it was a long time before she came to her conclusion and spoke.

“So if we married it would be the same thing all over again.”

“Yes!” He was surprised she put it all together. But she hadn’t, not the way he thought, not the way it was a box of four people that strangely dovetailed. Delphine had reasoned that, since he’d married Eva not out of love but rather out of duty to the unborn child, this was not a thing that Fidelis wanted to repeat. And that was understandable, she thought, in a calm relief. Because who knew, after the child was grown, if the two would ever get along? And she herself did not know. Couldn’t read her own heart. Whether it was the sons or the combination of the father and the sons she loved. But at least, in that hour as they cut through the blackness, she admitted the possibility that he was included. And then, from behind them, Markus woke and the blankets rustled down around him as he leaned toward the front seat.

“Papa,” he asked, his voice thick with sleep, still miserable, “sing to me?”

Delphine didn’t know that there were times when Fidelis showed a certain tenderness to his sons, times he sang to them. When they had trouble sleeping, when they were very small, when Eva asked him to, and when they were ill, he sang the old German lieder to them in a restrained voice that filled the room with a comforting resonance in which they felt protected. He sang the one he knew was a favorite of Markus’s, and he sang it over and over just as Markus always asked. “Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so traurig bin. Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten, das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.”

It was the song about the Lorelei, full of pictures. The women sat on the great rocks, combing their golden hair with combs of gold. Hearing their song, men sailed closer, their hearts were pierced and fascinated by the beauty of the Lorelei, and then they were drawn onto the killing reefs. It wasn’t a song that Delphine knew and only gradually did she piece the meaning together, and when she did she wondered at him, this Fidelis, who casually stuck chickens and stunned sheep, who brought down a dozen mutts in one noise and burned them up like trash, who mourned his wife with a gravity that added to the stillness he possessed already, but said nothing, who made of the complications already between them an indecipherable maze, and who sang to calm his sons. Gradually, she fell under the spell of his singing, too, with Markus, and at last she was lulled into the blackness.

Fidelis let the song drift, heard their honest drawn breaths, nodded slowly at the road, and hummed a new and simpler song, to keep himself awake. It was a song he’d sung with Johannes, drunk, in forgetfulness which he could not now forget, as the wheels turned them forward and forward, far from Germany, onto the wideness of the plains of America where the wars were not between the same old enemies he was used to, but were over before he’d got there, the great dying finished, and the blood already soaked into the ground.