The Master Butcher's Singing Club

FOURTEEN. The Army of the Silver Firs

DELPHINE HAD always known that her body would not be inclined to grant her children, not after what she’d seen in the cellar of her father’s house. She felt the lack less than other women might, perhaps, because she’d helped raise Eva’s boys. Markus especially bore the force of her maternal attention. Delphine had observed that after his resurrection from the earth, Markus was a very different boy from the one who had dug the tunnels and fought ecstatic boy wars and smashed himself into trees in go-carts and tumbled off sleds. Lying in the grip of earth had quieted his mind and cooled his blood. He became a reader, developed a studious quiz-bowl intelligence, bought himself a record player. Squeaking horns, the human moans of saxophones, smooth backwards scrolls of music spurted from his room. Some of his teachers sent home glowing reports and others said that he was arrogant, lipped off, and was a troublemaker in the classroom with all of his criticisms and his questions.

When he was younger, Delphine scolded Markus for losing mittens, and then knit him new pairs. Developed strategies of feeding to combat his thinness, which did not work. As he grew older, she helped him study and celebrated the awards that he won in school. Consoled him when he was forced into eyeglasses and made him wear them, hoping secretly that they would keep him from acceptance into the army. By cheating on the vision tests (she was sure) he schemed his way in anyhow.

The day he told her, she was prepared.

“Markus, sit down with me.”

He sat down eagerly at the kitchen table, confident and excited, indulging her. Delphine knew already that he wasn’t going to listen to her or believe her, but she was determined to make some impression.

“Markus, it’s not like in the movies where they shoot you in the shoulder or even if you die it is neat. Drilled through the heart. Men get ripped limb from limb. Torn up like so many pieces of paper. And half the time it’s out of some mistake and our own side kills its men by accident. Whatever you do, Markus, I am begging you, for Eva’s sake and your father’s sake and even though I’m not your blood mother, my own sake, too. Don’t get yourself put in the thick of it. Nobody says what it’s really like, Markus, to the young men. No one says boys get mangled.”

“Mangled!” Markus looked at her in patronizing surprise. “Where did you learn all this?”

“Reading, and common sense.” She could feel herself becoming desperate with irritation at his superior attitude. “What do you think bombs do? Pick out the Germans and Japanese? Make distinctions when they fall close to our lines? And then neatly and invisibly do away with you? They’re meat grinders.”

“Mom,” said Markus, “calm down.” As if he were dealing with a crazy person.

“Are we all a bunch of stupid suckers?” Delphine burst out passionately. It wasn’t even the war that made her so angry, it was the hypocrisy, the cheerful façade, the lies. She grabbed a magazine and leafed to an ad for toothpaste that exhorted the reader to send a tube to their boys in the front lines. “As if the worst you’ll suffer is a toothache! And this!” An ad for gum implying that a stick in every letter would counter loneliness and even sharpen the troops’ observational skills.

“That’s how we are in this country,” she cried. “Destruction is a way to sell gum!” She put the magazine down, nearly weeping.

“I know, Mom.” Markus put his hands on her shoulders now and patted gingerly. He spoke quietly, dropping the cocksure tone. “I’ll be careful. I won’t let anybody shoot me or mangle me. I’m not like Franz, you know. He was a trained pilot when he went in. Me… they probably won’t even ship me overseas.” He said this kindly, to comfort her, but although she was grateful she could tell he both thought and hoped otherwise.

She put her face in her hands as Markus continued to pat her, awkwardly. She knew he wished that he were somewhere else. She felt her heart splitting right in her chest. “Go, get out of here. It’s your last night home,” she finally said, wiping her face with her apron. “Go tear up the town.”

“There’s nobody here to tear it up with anymore,” he said. “I’m gonna take a walk, buy a newspaper. Then I’m reading myself to sleep.”

HIS BROTHERS’ ARMIES still ranged across the room, along the top of the dresser, on the windowsill. Markus had long outgrown the set, but he didn’t take down the display. In fact, after he’d taken his walk, unable to sleep, he spent his last evening at home perfecting the battle. Even though it was stupid, sentimental, Markus righted the tiny horses and toppled lieutenants, rearranged a charge and fortified a stand. As he fiddled around, he grew absorbed by the boy’s play. He surrounded a motley reconnaissance group with the wooden rocks and trees the twins had sawed of lumberyard scraps and painted in crude woodland colors years ago. He arranged the armored vehicles, with real rubber treads and tin flags. The soldiers had tiny helmets that could be blown right off their heads. And the horses, and the cavalry, they were obviously no match and easily reared over backward, hit, when, in a moment of fascination, Markus ranged their homemade machine-gun nests before them and made a sweep, and then sent in the tanks. Anyone could see that it was romantically insane to send mounted horsemen against armored divisions, as the Poles did when Blaskowitz’s Eighth Army drove eastward against Lodz, but Markus meticulously arranged the seated horsemen with the rearing officer at their head.

When Delphine and his father first married, Markus had hidden behind the door of the office listening to his father on the telephone. From thinly disguised talk between Fidelis and Delphine, he understood the truth that his brothers weren’t coming home. That was when he decided that he wouldn’t put the toy soldiers away. He would never put them away. He would have to keep their toys prepared. And so, as though the passionate games they’d played for hours, lost in their careful arrangements, would of their own force and incompletion draw his brothers back home, Markus had wiped the dust off the infantry and set them into a new and stricter formation. He’d kept them looking sharp ever since. Now, he took a step backward, frowned, then swept some down with a finger to lie with their rifles pointing at the ceiling. His action suddenly frightened him. Superstitious, he set the soldiers up again.

THE NEXT DAY, MARKUS left on the bus to Fort Snelling and Delphine baked until midnight. Then she sat at the table, reading mindlessly down a stack of popular novels she’d lugged home from the town library and eating half the cookies she meant to send in his first package. At two a.m. she baked another batch and when she finally fell asleep she dreamed, for the first time in many years, of those dead in her cellar, of Ruthie, who rose toward her spitting clouds of white moths.

When she woke in the streaming light, Delphine knew that she’d have to take unusual measures to ensure her sanity and contain her anxious grief. An assessment was in order. She must be strict with herself. She was thirty-five years old and the one she’d called her son was grown and gone. What had happened to the two younger boys in Germany was quite unknown. Her husband had dragged from her a sort of love. Not romance, after all. The weight of it once all their feelings had settled was enormous, like a rug to sleep beneath instead of a goose-down quilt. It was a love full of everyday business, full of selling and killing and hemming pants. They slept heavily, deeply, and probably both snored. He still ironed his own shirts. She bought a sharp French perfume and badgered him about his touchy digestion. Theirs was a tolerable and functional love, and precious to her because it did not have the power over her that she had feared.

More and more, Delphine liked the work of grocering and butchering and figuring accounts. Keeping track of the store’s inventory satisfied a streak of mania for detail. And then there were civic duties that befit her position. To her bewilderment, by simply marrying, following a daily schedule, attending to details and minding her own business, she became one of the town’s most stable and respected women. Her advice was asked. Her solutions were quoted. Her sagacity with cheap cuts of meat and her saving ways with money were admired. She knew when to spend a dime on advertising or equipment and when to save it or buy a war bond. And she read — that was something, too. People followed her appraisals or withdrew books from the library that displayed her neat and forthright signature on the cards tucked into cardboard pockets inside the back cover.

Lately, she had less time to read, less time for everything. The war was changing the business in a startling rush. Suddenly, they were behind orders. Customers came out of nowhere. Jewish synagogues from Minneapolis sought out Fidelis for custom kosher work. At the same time as business boomed, shortages plagued them. Although Fidelis possessed a much coveted C sticker for the delivery truck, they were always low on gasoline. Coffee disappeared. The government requisitioned butter from the dairies, so she sold blocks of oleomargarine with little pats of yellow dye. Her distributor could supply only the lowest grade of canned goods, then none. No eggs. They were all being powdered for the soldiers, apparently, as Markus wrote to say that powdered eggs were their breakfast staple. He lived for Clark candy bars and any fresh fruit he could get, and he was desperately bored. Delphine bought a dozen Modern Library paperbacks and mailed them two by two. Dos Passos. Faulkner. Cather. She seemed busier than ever, and yet the restlessness that had assailed her as soon as Markus left continued.

Delphine wrangled with suppliers, argued about rationing, made up clever advertisements containing jokes, like the picture of the cow and its slogan, “Our Only Dissatisfied Customer.” She worked long hours in the shop, hoping to exhaust herself. But every night she woke at precisely four and could not still her brain. Sometimes she felt Fidelis awake beside her, thinking about the twins. “They’re too young,” she said to him, thousands of times. She waited until he slept again, and as soon as his breathing deepened, she tossed and turned. She tried to write, to keep a diary, but her attempts irritated and then bored her. For a while she took up sewing and then grew impatient with seams and patterns. At last, she began taking night walks before bedtime.

While Fidelis prepared himself for sleep by listening to the radio and soaking his feet in a hot Epsom salt bath that she prepared for him after he drank his first highball, Delphine walked the town streets. Passing the serenely lighted houses in the cool of dark, she wondered whether she had absorbed the insomniacal heron-stride of Step-and-a-Half. Perhaps she would be known as similarly eccentric. Perhaps at night, people in their houses would hear her pass by and say, “There goes that old Delphine.”

As she passed by the graveyard where her father lay, and Eva too, she often turned through the gate to visit. Even at night, the cemetery with its blunt square stones was a welcoming and ordinary place with nothing of death’s majesty or mess. All was neatly laid out, measured inch by inch. Hock’s grave with its severe black spike of granite (he’d already picked it out, way back then) was no more than a sad curiosity. Roy’s grave smelled to her faintly of schnapps. Eva had chosen to be buried in Argus and not shipped back to Germany. But it had pained her sometimes to think of staying forever in such a new country, far from her mother and father’s graves, parentless. Delphine had planted a small pine tree behind Eva’s gravestone, leaving room for it to grow. She found comfort in imagining that by now the roots had twined down to cradle her friend. One night, although the ground was cold, Delphine wrapped her coat around herself and sat beneath the pine. She listened to the soft wind rushing in its needles, and pretended that the sound traveled down the long roots so that Eva could hear the beauty of it, too.

“If I hadn’t met you,” she told Eva, “maybe I’d have moved on. But now, the strange thing is, you took my ambitions and left me with your life. I have your life now. I kept on running things.”

Fidelis had bought a large cemetery plot, and he would lie next to Eva. Although Delphine had claimed his other side, she thought now that she would rather if Eva lay between the two of them. Beyond her was Roy’s place. At least I’ll have Roy at my shoulder for eternity, Delphine thought, telling rough jokes in my ear. But in that cool, rushing darkness she also felt the bottomless loneliness one can only feel from a childhood loss. That mother loss had made Delphine strong, but also caused her to live as a damaged person, a searcher with a hopeless quest, a practical-minded woman with a streak of dismay. Even now that she could count herself close to middle age, she missed her mother. Stroking the icy blades of grass over Eva’s grave with her hands, she had the sudden urge to lie down and listen to the ground, as if she would hear a great heart beating beneath her ear, as if she would be tranced like a baby by the humming of her mother’s blood.

ENTERING THE WARM KITCHEN, Delphine found her husband reading the paper, sitting in a chair with his feet in the bath. She’d made the water as hot as he would tolerate, but now the foot bath was cooled. She looked at him — he’d grown a mustache and it came out entirely pale gray, although his hair was the same roan as when she first knew him, shot only here and there with strands of age. She touched her own hair, just a little duller, thinner, in spite of the rich black walnut shampoo she bought from the supplier. Yet she had kept her looks — she knew that from the exasperation of the female customers who declared themselves jealous and then, she imagined, went off uttering words of condescending pity for the inability to conceive that enabled Delphine to stay so young, and was not worth it, in their opinion, given the joys they experienced with their children.

Delphine sat down on a little stool before Fidelis and took his feet into a towel on her lap. Fidelis’s feet were white and heavy as sink porcelain. The butcher’s defenselessness lay in the tender skin, the surprising arch, the square vulnerability of his toes. Delphine poured eucalyptus liniment into her hands from a big brown bottle, and rubbed her husband’s feet to aid the circulation, then she pared the nails, salted his feet with coarse sea salt and rubbed again to smooth their calluses. At last, she poured more liniment on her hands and rubbed harder. He put the paper down and groaned with relief as her hands worked, and he thanked her in a sheepish voice. This attention always slightly embarrassed him, but he couldn’t resist it. He had never recovered from the old war-time frostbite, and lately cramping pains and a numbness of the toes had begun to plague him.

When his feet were safely stuffed in woolen socks, he poured another highball, made with rum. He was trying to get used to it as whiskey from overseas was scarce. Delphine put away the foot bath, sat next to him. I’ve missed out on God, she thought. Still, I haven’t fooled myself. I still think God’s a drunken lout who hasn’t given the world a second thought since making it. Formerly a genius, yes, I’ll give God that, but a supremely careless artist who casts His most extraordinary paintings and sculptures and exquisite live works to hell and lets the devil shit on them.

“Just read between the lines,” she slapped the Fargo newspaper headlines. Guadalcanal. Stalingrad. “No divine presence would allow such evil mayhem. What kind of God is that?” she asked Fidelis.

Fidelis didn’t answer because he was used to her noisy newspaper reading, where she made anguished replies to the lists of the North Dakota fallen. He never minded her shooting wild ideas, funny stories, sorrows, and irritated opinions at him out of nowhere. Besides, when it came to God he agreed even though he prayed every night for his sons, just as he had prayed when under fire, knowing it was useless but having no other option but to apply to God for help. He bent across the space between himself and Delphine and kissed her forehead. It was a rare tenderness. His hands drifted down her neck. He tipped his face sideways and kissed her again, slowly, then drew away. She looked straight on at him and the knifepoint dimples on either side of her smile deepened. They got up. Ceremoniously, the dog trailing after them, they made the rounds of the house and shop testing door locks and dousing lights. Somewhere in the front of the shop Fidelis took her hand. Gouged, ripped, healed, their hands fit together like pieces of old pottery. They held hands as they walked down the hallway into their bedroom and closed the door behind them.

Left outside, the white dog moved up the hall with an old dog’s lumbering aches, and stood in the gloom of the shop, half blind, nose high, making certain that all was as it should be. When she was satisfied, she turned back down the hallway, nails clicking slowly on the linoleum tiles. At the bedroom door she paused a moment, and her ears, large points delicately furred inside, cocked forward with a concerned attention, and then relaxed. She turned around twice and lay down in a cool spot she cherished, shifted onto her side, her legs stretched in a running bound.

EMIL’S WAR WAS VERY SHORT. He didn’t have to lie about his age because the army became desperate for reinforcements and took the entire class from his Adolf Hitler Schule, including the teachers and platoon leaders. Both Emil and Erich were highly praised and singled out at the selection camp as officer material. They had planned to join the Hitler Jugend division of the Waffen SS and spend the whole war shoulder to shoulder. But Emil stepped on a mine planted in a sheep pasture, early on. His new uniform was blown apart before it was ever stained or dirtied. A swirl of green passed before his eyes, and he realized with wonder that he was upside-down in the air, looking down at the grass. He was dead before he landed on it. A picture of Tante soaked up blood in his pocket and a piece of honey candy cooled in his mouth. His grandmother made him bring the honey candy. Recalling that his father had survived the great war on honey, she’d hoped it would similarly protect the son.

Erich walked on though he was half gone, blown away from himself with his twin. He had vowed to fight to the death, and his expression never faltered, but he found that when the shelling was constant his bowels disobeyed him. His arms froze around a sandbag. His fingers numbed and locked into fists. The sacred oath he had sworn and the Kameradschaft he lived by were useless shelter from the rain of blood, guts, brains, and undifferentiated bits of meat or even, once, the marvel of a boy turned into a burst of red vapor. He hadn’t slept for four days and nights when he was captured, but he still, by some instinct, kept himself from croaking an answer in English when the GI who disarmed him said, “This one’s just a kid, probably doesn’t have fuzz on his balls yet.” What would he have said, anyway, he wondered, as the soldier was more or less right?

Later, he’d made a vague grab for the GI’s rifle and crumpled instantly when he was bashed over with a curse. “I hate these baby storm troopers. Bunch of little rattlesnakes.”

“They’re goddamn poison,” said another soldier. “We should kill ’em. Save the trouble. Where the hell, anyway, are we going to march them to?”

The first one stepped back, raised his M-1 and just as he might have fired Erich was horrified to hear himself scream, “Jesus Christ, sir, please don’t shoot me.”

“What the fuck?”

“I was born in North Dakota,” Erich choked out. “My dad still lives there.”

“I’ll be fucked. What are you doing here, you little pissant?”

“I got sent here before the war.”

“What the fuck are you then, a fucking Nazi or a fucking American?”

Erich was further shocked at his sudden yell. “I don’t know what the hell I am, sir, but I’ve got no hair on my balls!”

The Americans went crazy with laughing and his fellow Hitler Schule classmates, the two who were left, looked at Erich in mystified and sober wonder, deciding that he either possessed a hitherto unknown brilliance or had, under the pressure of battle, entirely lost his mind.

* * *

PERHAPS IT WORKED. Maybe the lead armies that Markus carefully arranged before he left drew Erich back. Of course, Erich couldn’t have known it. He did think of his toys, as he thought of every aspect of his childhood, when the stripped-down American train car within which he and two hundred other prisoners rode, went north, as well as he could make out, because it was nighttime, toward somewhere around the Great Lakes, maybe Wisconsin or Michigan. He couldn’t remember anything about the map — he’d forgotten all he could about the States. After the shocking ignominy of his surrender, Erich had hidden that he knew and understood English perfectly. There were fervent Nazis in his group who’d vowed to punish any of the prisoners who collaborated. So he continued to affect a suspicious, withdrawn silence. All the way across the country he’d been nearly struck dumb anyway just looking out the train windows. So were the others. They were all waiting to gloat over the miles and miles of bombed-out cities, the devastated countryside, blackened crops, dead farms they were promised by the radio reports back in Germany. And yet, they had penetrated farther and farther into a curious, cheerful, teeming, spectacularly untouched country. The prisoners were tragically awed, bewildered. Later, some would feel betrayed. Others would choose excuses of their own invention. Erich did neither, for his brain was too busy, too desperate, too crammed with excited memories and despair.

They kept traveling north, and north, into the pine forests. Here, those from the southwest of Germany felt at home and pointed and nodded at the great, dark, revolving stands of fir that shifted and bristled in the blue light of dawn. The train veered deeper into the trees and the forest seemed to close behind them. At a small station, their hands were linked to a chain and they filed out of the train cars and then walked a muddy road for miles. It was early summer and the blackflies were out. When one man reached for a stinging fly with his chain arm, the whole chain clanked and the others’ hands jerked, but the flies were so bad that the men couldn’t help swatting.

“Where the hell are they gonna go?” said an American soldier guarding them. There were six guards altogether. “Let them off the chain.”

“Nah,” said the officer, but not with much conviction. German prisoners of war did not escape in this country, they found cousins. Former village neighbors. They worked on farms and were paid good money for it. Nobody was supposed to talk with them, take their pictures, give them food, or even notice they were there, but plenty of people did.

The line of prisoners kept moving, clanking and jerking, but the men were speechless until they reached an enclosure deep in the woods. Pine logs were stuck all around the camp, anchored deeply into the earth, and several different thicknesses of wire were nailed onto the logs. Barbed-wire rolls were set on the ground to either side. Yet because of the surrounding trees and the blue light of the sky, the place was not all that forbidding. They’d live in simple barracks cabins. In spite of his confusion and the burden of his memories, Erich entered with a lightness of feeling that nearly choked him. They lined up for blue work outfits emblazoned with PW. They were given overcoats, shoes, four pairs of socks, undershirts, drawers, even a wool shirt and a raincoat. They were given two blankets, toothbrushes, soap, one tiny towel each. Erich accepted each item and frowned at the involuntary satisfaction that he felt. Maybe it was the fresh air, he thought, working on his brain. Or the fact they were going to do forestry work — good hard mindless work, a thing his body craved. And then the food, served at once and ladled hot into their tin pans from great cauldrons in the central log house, was sweetly familiar. There were baked beans — he hadn’t tasted the tang of molasses, the heat of the powdered mustard, the smoked fat of pork, in this particular combination since he was a child. He suddenly thought of Delphine. Although famished, he ate slowly, with a combination of reverence and shame, wiping the plate with white bread sliced into a soft, square page.

There was no meat but the fatback, but there was for each man a mound of creamed corn and a huge baked potato. Onto each plate, a slug of lard was tapped. There was a two-inch square of white cornbread with Karo syrup poured over it. Each man received the food, staring at it as though it would vanish. Some pocketed their potatoes, inhaled the sweet cornbread, or cleaned their whole plates before they even got to the tables. Inside the great hall there was utter silence from the men. Only the scrape of tin spoons. The animal wetness of their chewing. They were silent not only because they were famished but because, from the quality of the food, the amount, and that it was somehow carried to this remarkably remote place and actually fed to them — dregs, prisoners — they knew that Germany had lost the war.

THEY USED crosscut saws for the big trees, Swedish saws to trim the branches on the trails. They used chain drags, a couple of heavy trucks, and for the remote trees they had two mules they named Max and Moritz. One of the supervising soldiers spoke passable German and had the job of censoring the little newspaper that the men put together on a handset printing press. Although years before it was thought that none of the Waldvogel boys had inherited their father’s voice, Erich’s had developed once he hit adolescence. He’d opened his mouth one day to hum tunelessly, then snapped his jaws shut in surprise when a rich sound boomed forth. To kill time now, in that beautiful place, he began to sing and soon others sang with him, swapped the words to songs, made of the singing a nightly event to cut the tedium.

The songs acted on their emotions, entered their dreams. At night in the bunkhouses, men cried out in their sleep, coughed, farted, snored, snuffled, and sometimes moaned tunelessly into the darkness. Erich heard them every night, since he was wakeful, as he listened to the sounds from the outside. The smooth mutter of pines, the owls calling back and forth, curious and hollow. He longed to go back to Ludwigsruhe, wondered if he’d ever see his grandfather, whom he adored, or eat the sausages he’d stolen at night to share with Emil in their bed. He thought of his brother, but with dispassion. He’d made his heart numb. He avoided and then shut out all thoughts of his family here. It might have cost him his life to make the specifics of his identity known, or take advantage of his American upbringing. There were rumors of German POWs sawed to bits and burned and scattered through the woods by the Heiligen Geist. They disappeared if they got too friendly with the Americans, it was said. No one had actually known, or seen, or spoken with anyone who knew this for certain. But some of the older prisoners put dread into the hearts of those who weren’t loyal enough to Germany. As for Erich, in a fierce crush of training and in the years of his formation, he had become in his deepest person thoroughly German. Or what he thought of as German. That is, he’d replaced his childhood with a new wash of purity. Belief, death loyalty, hatred of the weak. He lived simply, by one great consuming oath.

MAZARINE WENT OUT behind the house and emptied her mother’s night bucket, then walked slowly back and set the galvanized pail on the broken back stairway. The unpainted wood of the little house still sagged, and great clumps of thistle and burdock had thrust up around the outhouse. That didn’t matter. The weeds were full of twittering birds — tiny golden throated warblers, green finches, drab sparrows. Let it just cave in, thought Mazarine. Who cared? Certainly not her mother, who now called weakly from her bed for a cup of water. Mazarine ignored her. Growing against the side of the teetering steps a lilac bush, one she’d planted herself from a tiny sprig long ago, lifted a fat cone of fragrance. Mazarine pulled the branch against her face, breathed the sweetness that always filled her with a sweeping nostalgia. Lilac dew crawled down her neck. The sun was already warm in the grass. Mazarine wasn’t much good with a hammer and nails, but the day before she’d found both and now she turned and fit the snow-warped boards into place and attempted, as best she could, to repair the winter’s damage. She hammered over her mother’s repetitive cries, over the creak of protest as her mother rose and began to move about in the kitchen, drawing her own water from the indoor pump, perhaps even stirring up a little fire to cook herself some oatmeal.

Mazarine had gone to teacher’s training college in Moorhead, and now she had a grade school certification. She had returned when Roman was wounded in the war and got his medals. Her mother took to bed and did not rise, so Mazarine stayed. The Argus school needed her to fill a temporary position anyway, so she’d taken over a fourth-grade class. It had been six months now and Mazarine thought that her mother would probably stay in bed until the house collapsed all around her. She could see it happening — the mice chewing down the flimsy walls, the lilacs growing up to her bedside, painted swallows and woodpeckers nesting just over her mother’s head and learning instead of their own bird calls to imitate her mother’s faint cries, Mazarine? Mazarine? as the light sifted through the tattered shingles.

She steadied the lowest step with a rock lugged from against the side of the house, and then sat down again on the weathered wood. The smell of sun on the wood reminded her of the salty, dusty, summer boy smell of her brother’s hair. She pulled down a bunch of flowers and breathed deep. The lilac had benefited from her mother’s laziness — she tossed her wash water out the window instead of walking to the door. As the spring sun rose the fragrance intensified. Mazarine touched the side of her skirt and stirred the crackle of the letter in her pocket.

Delphine told me that you are back in town and didn’t get married yet out in the wide world, which is good. I didn’t either. I’m coming home pretty soon and you’re going to see me whether you like it or not because I have never forgotten one single moment and I still love you.

Franz

I shouldn’t see him, Mazarine thought. I lost him once already and I do not want to lose him all over again. But Franz must have written something about his intentions and feelings to Delphine, because as school was letting out that afternoon, Delphine drove up beside the school in the meat truck. She got out, and walked up to the playground where Mazarine was standing, her dress and hair in a whirl, laughing at some children’s games.

“Well, he’s going to be here tomorrow or the next day,” Delphine said. “We even got a phone call.”

Mazarine didn’t pretend even a moment of ignorance, although they’d never spoken of Franz since the day of Roy Watzka’s funeral, years ago.

“You look good,” said Delphine, a little critically, as though she was appraising Mazarine on her stepson’s behalf. Then she laughed and waved away her scrutiny. She was slightly embarrassed at her assessment of every girl her boys took an interest in — she hadn’t liked that Zumbrugge girl way back. It was a good thing she had no idea about the women Franz probably met on his furloughs. And of course she’d always liked Mazarine, though she still had the nagging feeling that she had to save the girl from the situation with her mother. But then, Delphine herself recognized that she hadn’t exactly found a way of handling her own father when he was alive. And Mazarine did look as though she was surviving fairly well. She hadn’t cut her hair or permanented it, as so many of the girls did now, and a thick fall still flowed around her shoulders, lighter from the sun in the schoolyard. She was one of those teachers little boys fell in love with. Her cheeks were rose red from running with the children, and her brown eyes, always lush and expressive, had lost that hungry look she’d had as a skinny girl. Though she was anxious, thought Delphine, about Roman’s difficult recovery and she was still probably drained by her mother.

How is she, the big slug? Delphine wanted to ask. Instead, she said, “I hear your mother’s back in bed.”

Mazarine gave a cool nod, neutral. She was sensitive about her mother’s reputation. She asked if Franz was going to take the train or the bus. Delphine said the train and that, if she were Mazarine, she would be looking for Fidelis’s car and Franz driving it, shortly after she heard the train whistle.

“If not before,” said Delphine, her voice deadpan amused. “He sounds ready to jump off and get a running start.”

THE SUN FELL thick along the banks of the river and heated the scored gray trunks of trees that swayed out over the driving spring current. The air was dry and the old leftover grass, packed by snow, a haylike and dusty padding on the ground. Mazarine settled herself, pulling a huge old brown woolen coat around her knees. Franz, in his father’s borrowed clothes but wearing the heavy Christmas coat he’d received from Germany so long ago, sat beside her on the tough, dead grass. He was close enough to touch her hand, but he didn’t. Anyway, she soon wrapped her fingers in the folds of her sleeves and stared away from him, at the opposite bank.

Across the boil of water the trees were loaded with last year’s brittle wild cucumber vines — the strings and suckers drooped off the limbs like hair. Here and there, within the fresh wounds in the bank where a tree was torn out by the spring breakup, or where the ice had gouged a wedge of earth clear, dirty pockets of snow still lingered. Crows, the first birds to return, wheeled raucously through the skim of branches. They hurtled past one another like black stars and crosses, and their cries seemed to hold a fever of meaning.

“I suppose we should talk,” said Franz, at last.

“All right,” said Mazarine.

“Not that I know exactly where to start,” he said with an uncomfortable laugh. He had forgotten how quiet she was, and how composed. She met him with the same gravity with which they had parted. She didn’t fidget about, finger her hair and retouch her lipstick, or make any sort of small talk, and for that he felt grateful. Yet he missed those things that other women did. Those gestures made it easier for him to maintain a simple gloss of conversation. To attend to himself was an uncomfortable task. So much had happened to him. Returning from the war, he felt tremendously strange, dislocated, even menacing, like a ghost that comes to spy on the living.

“I thought about you all the time,” he said, helplessly.

She nodded, still regarding the veiled trees and the shouting crows. “And what did you think?”

“I wronged you.” He was tentative, thinking that he must revisit his old transgression first and apologize, just in case it was required of him.

“No, don’t.” She withdrew her hand from the sleeve, waved it, and put it back. “None of that’s important, not anymore.”

He knew very well that that was true, they had certainly grown past those times, but he had expected that he would be required to pay some homage to her old misery. He had expected that she might even exact some sort of humiliation from him. Any other woman would have, he thought, probably any man. But she was not interested, he saw now, and although he admired her disregard for the past it also confused him. Where were they, then, if they could not go back in time and make repairs?

“You wrote,” she said, “but you didn’t say what really happened to you. You’ve been all over. You’ve been through things.” She turned to him, and her eyes were very clear, so that it was simple to look straight back at her. “You think I don’t want to know. But I do want to know,” she said. “I can’t know unless you tell me, and if I don’t know…”

She left off, her voice trembling slightly in the liquid spring air, her face suffused not with pity but with an intimate calm that left him slightly breathless. “… where do we go?” They were already at the heart of things and Franz was panicked. He could not answer at first.

“Anyway, I won’t be in the worst of it now,” he said to her, finally, his voice so low it blended with the mutter of the icy river. “I’ll drop paratroopers or tow gliders and release them. I’m not a fighter pilot anymore, not with a heavy bombardment group, either. I fly a C-47. That’s a transport plane. I evacuate the wounded, drop supplies — food, clothes, medicine, stuff like that.”

She nodded, letting the silence yawn between them, hoping he would continue.

“I was reassigned,” said Franz, “I was…” He searched for the word, but there really wasn’t one. “Tired out, I guess.”

Mazarine was silent, knowing that was not it. Her breath stilled, her heart squeezed painfully, her skin burned, and she couldn’t help imagining herself lunging toward him, dizzily. She had to close her eyes and turn away. She knew that she shouldn’t have agreed to see him. His presence leveled the defenses she’d put up and made her wretchedly alive with longings, thoughts, hopes.

“I want to hear what’s happened to you,” she said evenly after a while. She gestured in the direction, down river, of the butcher shop. “It’s just that there is nowhere else to start,” she said gently. “Neither of us is the same. But I’m different because of small, good, manageable things. You’re different because… things I don’t know.”

She looked at him so long, her eyes so still and warm, that Franz turned to her. She opened her arms and then shook him, lightly, with an angry tenderness. He was panting, his breath squeezed by the effort of not remembering. He was extremely cold. Ashamed of his shaking hands, he pressed his fingers between his knees. He bit his lips, gray as the tree bark, and he tried to control the absurd urge he had to tear off his clothing and dive into the slush, swollen river. She saw that he was in the grip of an unbearable need for flight, and she kissed him to change, if she could with one sudden gesture, the character of his fear.

“I was shot down,” said Franz suddenly, as if the kiss unstopped his tongue. “That was the first time. The next time, my engine quit on me. The worst of it was seeing my friends die — I saw Schumacher dragged onto a black reef off Corsica. He’d parachuted out. Another time, I saw Tom Simms go… his parachute was ripped apart by flak but he didn’t know it until the chute opened and then disintegrated above him. He gave two little kicks, as if to try and jump himself into the air, and then he just surrendered. It must have felt like a dream, I don’t know.”

Mazarine pulled his hand into the sleeve of her coat to warm it. He reached his other hand along her arm, up her other sleeve, then knelt before her holding her by the elbows and staring into her face. “I hope it felt like a dream,” she said.

A huge baffle of sorrow penned him. He hated that he nearly wept, a sob of hoarse anger that he choked back. He made his mouth move and talked quickly, his voice neutral.

“I could see spouts of light just below, the second time, but there was no sound to the fire so I knew I was deaf. My legs gave out on me, and I probably wouldn’t have had the strength to get out of my harness if I hadn’t…” But here Franz had to struggle for words, and stopped.

“Hadn’t what?”

Franz’s breath came harsh and he tried to slow his heart. He didn’t dare tell even Mazarine. He’d heard a woman’s voice that filled him with a powerful assurance. Eva’s voice. He’d put his arms out and was not surprised to feel her in front of him. He tucked his arms tight, closed his embrace around the waist of his mother. As he stepped into the air his eyes filled with blood. Blind, he held her. Falling, he heard her counting, low and musical, in German as she had when he was little, first on his fingers and then on her fingers, until his parachute opened and the earth swerved up to meet them.

“Part of the design,” he said, weary now, slumping.

Mazarine kissed him again and folded him down carefully next to her, wrapped him in the huge folds of coat that swathed her like a blanket. They lay back against a great root that had pulled itself from the ground like a damaged foot.

Holding on to Mazarine, Franz breathed the old crush of pine needles, the innocence of breakfast cooking. I’ll never get enough of her scent, he thought, I’ll never. He smelled her teacherliness, the waxen crayons and stiff, new paper, the same blue powdered soap that had always poured in a tiny stream from the metal dispensers above the Argus school sinks. She smelled of milk cartons, chalk dust, and tulips. She made him think of safety rules and clean hands and politeness to your neighbor. Franz felt himself floating off into a mesmerized half-sleep. He relaxed against her and she continued to hold him, stroking his hair, looking upward, listening to his heavily drawn breathing, to the greedy wash of the river and the hectoring and bitter arguments of crows as they wheeled among the whips and flails of spring branches.

FROM THE WAY Franz and Mazarine moved around each other, it was obvious to Delphine that they were lovers. Nothing most people would have caught — they were still too shy to even hold hands in front of their parents. It was more an awareness, as if they were two dancers carving lines in ordinary rooms. They leaned toward each other no matter what they were doing. Dazzled, electric, they laughed too quickly, ran out of breath, made gestures unexpectedly clumsy. The day after Franz left, Mazarine came to visit Delphine. The two women worked side by side, hands moving, desperate. They hardly spoke. They couldn’t sleep. It took days for them to even say his name.

It had been a dizzying relief to Delphine when Markus wrote to say he’d flunked the vision test and that he was probably going to be doing some sort of desk job at the OCS for the duration. Delphine was elated — it felt to her as though some reparation had been granted to them in the design of things — and she began at last to sleep. Markus wrote about ten or twenty times as many letters as Franz did, and later on he was able to talk about his job, which included writing other letters. Ghost letters by ghosts, written for ghosts, about ghosts. Those were the kinds of letters he composed. Delphine didn’t understand a word of it until he came home.

Markus had become a spare, thoughtful, professorial young man. Still, he had a quick laugh and a wicked talent for mimicry. Of course, she had expected that he would be very different. He was neat. A square package of cigarettes jutted from his breast pocket, and he was extraordinarily well groomed. The starch hadn’t wilted from the press of his pants and shirt. His face was meager and tired but his eyes were still Eva’s, filled with a penetrating sadness and rich good humor. He walked toward his father and without embracing the two sat to drink beer. From time to time they exchanged short and half-meaningless blurts of sound. They were so awkward at talking to each other that they were lost without Delphine. So she joined them, with her own beer, asked Markus what the letters he wrote were all about.

“Dead boys, Mom,” he told her. “I’m good at condolence and the commanding officers give me lists of names to write the letters to their parents. Of course, I never knew these guys. I never know how they lived or who they were or how they died. I’m becoming quite adept at the art of creative fiction, I guess you could say, but I hate it.”

He took a long drink of cold beer and the three let a quietness collect at the table. Then Markus abruptly set his bottle down, and said, “I’m here for something else… I wasn’t sure that I would tell you because it might just be a wild hair. But here’s the thing…” Markus squared his shoulders, folded his hands. Then he unfolded his hands, drummed his fingers on his knees, and addressed the tabletop, frowning as though he wasn’t sure he should say what he had to say.

“There’s this guy,” he finally told them. “I ran across him and we were having a smoke because he’s from the Midwest anyway, Illinois, right, and he’s been transferred. Anyway, we swap our names and when he hears mine, my last name, he makes me repeat it twice and he gets this look on his face, like he’s remembering something. All of a sudden he snaps his fingers and he says, ‘I know why you look familiar… and that name. There is this guy looks kinda like you and he’s got the same name Waldsomething in the camp where I was a guard way up north.’ His first name? He didn’t know. He’s a POW.”

Fidelis put his beer down with slow precision. He adjusted the glass on the table, then raised his head. He stared quizzically at Markus, and when his son looked back at him, biting his lip, nodding slightly, Fidelis hid his face in his hands. For a long time no one said a thing. There was a fuzzy quiet in the kitchen, and the cranking whine and then roar of the cooler generators across the yard underneath the wild grape vines. Schatzie appeared at the door and Delphine rose and let her in. Everyone watched the dog walk calmly through the room, straight to her post in the hall. Markus took a sip of his beer again, and then he spoke. “The guy said one other thing… I should tell you. He said this prisoner… he never talks, but sings. The guy can sing, this Waldvogel.”

Fidelis gripped his fingers together now, and his head began to nod up and down as he glared before him.

“I got us a clearance. It took some doing, but I’ve got the papers right here.” Markus patted his breast pocket. “So I’m heading up there tomorrow,” he said, very softly.

“I am going with you,” said Fidelis. “Can we get him released from this place? Er ist ein Junge.”

“I know,” said Markus, “but I doubt they’ll let him go. To tell the truth, I know they won’t, Dad, but we can visit him. That’s something. It’s a big thing, Dad — you don’t know how hard I worked, how many strings I pulled.”

Together, unspeaking, the two went out front to close the shop. They worked side by side, washing down equipment, checking the coolers, counting and securing the cash from the drawer.

Delphine let them go and stayed in the kitchen, began to clatter dishes, wash pots. As she always did when things were troubled, she started to bake. Cookies, she thought distractedly, pouring out ingredients, sifting flour. Gingersnaps. Measuring and stirring helped her make sense of things. Going up there — she didn’t want to do it, just an instinct. She didn’t want to see the men shattered if the boy wasn’t Erich or Emil and also she didn’t even want to see if the boy was one of them. There was too much that would be answered, in too short a time. How he’d changed and how he had survived. How he got into the war in the first place, so young. And would he have news about his twin? Perhaps she was just protecting herself, she thought, putting the cookies in the oven. And she thought that again, the next morning, as she watched Markus and Fidelis drive out of the yard and down the road. Protecting herself. Perhaps her place was really to be sitting next to her husband, to hold his hand in the car as they drove along. But she couldn’t. For all those reasons. And then, too, there was a voice in her that asked a small and terrible question, a quiet question, one she would not ever speak aloud. For the news was all over the place, rumors and horrors coming out, and she had to wonder knowing what she read in magazines and papers if they had killed any… in her mind she said innocent people, or civilians, but in her heart she thought Jews.

AS THEY CLEARED the flat North Dakota prairie and entered sandy pinelands and rolling prairie of central Minnesota, which they would drive all day, Markus had the childish urge to ask his father to sing to him in the car. His father had the side vent open and was smoking but letting the smoke out into the rush of air. Markus would have begun to sing himself, as a way of starting without directly asking his father, but he was embarrassed about the quality of his voice, the scratchy thin tunelessness of it, no melody, a talent he wished he’d inherited. Instead, he got his mother’s curious mind, he guessed, her drive to learn things and her oversensitive nature. He would have had a hard time of it in training if he hadn’t also learned from Delphine to talk back smart and keep his eye out for bullshit. If he hadn’t learned from his father’s friends how to play a good game of poker. Thank God he played cards, kept himself in a man’s game, otherwise they would have stepped all over him.

The roadway was narrow, with potholes and near washouts, and the two traveled slowly north and then due east into the deepening forest. The former prison guard had drawn a map of the location, which he maybe thought he shouldn’t have done. Markus knew just about what he was looking for anyway. It wouldn’t be some big secret. The camp was set on the edge of state forest lands, which were marked. And there was just one fairly obvious train track that the highway followed for a long time.

They reached the place in the late afternoon, drove down the simple rut of a logging road, and parked at the barbed-wire-and-log entrance. There was just one man on duty, too casual in a rumpled uniform. He stopped them, took the papers from Markus, and shot a few questions at them. Nodded in surprised intrigue when he found out one of the prisoners might actually be American born.

“You gotta wait, they’re out burning slash,” he told them.

So Markus and Fidelis sat in the car, the doors open, breathing the green air of pines and eating some chocolate bars Markus had bought back at his PX. They weren’t the kind that could be bought almost anywhere else. They saved one. Then they tried not to smoke too many cigarettes or to say too many times, “I wonder if it’s one of them,” or “it’s probably not.” They tried to keep a lucid conversation going, but without Delphine their meanings tangled and finally it was best to simply sit there, silently, letting their thoughts drift, lighting and stubbing out cigarettes.

They tried not to jump up when the men came back, but couldn’t help it, and stood on one side of the car scanning the men intently as the work crew neared from down the road. At once, they recognized Erich. He was still strong, bull-chested, ruddy, and had the same gold lights in brown hair. He was wearing an old rumpled uniform jacket, the blue POW clothing, and a pair of washed-out dungarees. He saw them too, right away, startled by their shouts. They could tell he knew them from the involuntary wildness in his eyes, a shock he covered as he looked away from them both. Erich gazed straight ahead at the entrance, kept a rigid profile as they rushed toward him, didn’t turn when they were held away from the men by the American guards. As Erich passed, they talked to him, called out to him, names and anxious questions. But he locked his features, narrowed his stony eyes, jammed his hands in his pockets when they started to shake.

Something in Erich’s boy stubbornness, so like his own, sent Fidelis over the slippery edge of worry and relief into a blood bent rage. So immediate was his anger that he opened his mouth and roared, at the back of his retreating son, an old threat he’d used when Erich was a child. Then he swore his full swear, which always stopped everyone around him and made the boys shrink away and go still. HeilundKreuzmillionenDonnerwetternocheinmal!

Some of the other prisoners did stop, and one or two of them smiled in startled recognition, as though at their own fathers’ oath, but Erich did not turn to look. He kept on walking. His hands hardened and his mouth twitched slightly with derision. He gathered himself, his thoughts. He wasn’t about to put himself in danger for reasons of mere sentiment. Besides, he was not who they thought he was, not at all. His father was an old man now and ruined, lost, foolish to have come here looking for someone whom he thought was Erich. This man who had sold his sausage all the way to North Dakota — now he looked bony and defeated. Not heroic or even strong. What he’d come to here was nothing, and the man was nothing, thought Erich. What absurd threats, too, as though he could hurt a trained soldier far more powerful in body and cunning in mind than Erich believed Fidelis Waldvogel ever had been in his life. As though anything that Fidelis roared could possibly affect Erich. He almost laughed, thinking of the bull’s pizzle hung on a nail behind the door — that used to frighten him. Now it seemed stupid, almost benign. His father’s arm had once been hot iron. His father’s blue glare had ruled him. And the gentleness, occasionally, that his father showed had made his sons slaves to its possibility. No more. Erich strode on, did not even turn when they cried out Emil’s name again. So they didn’t know yet! Ist gestorben, he thought angrily. Killed by one of your land mines. Leck’ mich am Arsch, he wanted to scream. They’d killed his brother, the other half of him. What did they want now? But after all he had been trained not to show his reaction and reminded himself that this was still war. Unlike most of the other men around him, Erich hadn’t swallowed Germany’s defeat with either the abundance of food or the friendliness of the people in the nearby town or even the American guards, with whom they spoke German. Erich’s fanaticism was that of the culturally insecure. He’d struggled to be a German, and not even captivity was going to destroy what he’d gone through when shipped off to Ludwigsruhe. Erich’s new father was a boundary on a map, a feeling for a certain song, a scrap of forest, a street. It was a romance as enduring as the spilled blood of his brother or the longing of Fidelis or the pains of this war. It was an idea that kept him walking through the prison gates.

FIDELIS WAS SILENT as Markus backed the car into the road, then turned around and steered down the way they had come. They drove south through the pine and then the mixed birch, maple, and popple groves of second- and third-growth trees. They passed through the small towns, each with its orderly main street layout of church, post office, grocery, hardware store, and café. Once or twice, Markus opened his mouth to say something to his father, but then lost the impulse and continued on and on in a meditative state of sadness, until they were low on gas.

He pulled into a rowdy-looking little station attached to a tavern. The attendant came out to pump the gas, and Markus and his father looked at the doorway of the bar. It was a battered red door surrounded by a bristling trim of deer antlers. There were no windows in the place.

“Let’s get ourselves a drink,” said Fidelis.

Markus parked the car and then the two walked through the odd, fanged door, into a dark little bar of wooden booths. Amber light glowed in the early evening calm from small candle-shaped wall lamps. Each ordered an expensive whiskey. Fidelis tossed his back and put out his shot glass for another. Markus asked for a ham sandwich and gestured for the bartender to bring one to his father, who was frowning at the tabletop and taking his second whiskey and then his third drink, a cheaper beer, more slowly. They still hadn’t said a word about the visit. Maybe they wouldn’t, thought Markus. The comforting darkness of the bar enveloped them. There were no other customers, and no sounds except for the soothing, muted clink of dishes and glasses being washed out in back. Markus looked steadily at his father, then looked away. Fidelis’s hands, cupping the glass between them, were startlingly pale in the barlight, and Markus had noticed that under all the nicks and roped scars and red callus those hands were rebelling from Fidelis’s control. He was careful not to show any sign of clumsiness, and firmly steadied his fingers on the table. Still, at one point he nearly knocked the glass over. Another time, he absently grasped at his drink and missed — the sight filled Markus with a stricken awe and he was glad when the sandwiches came to occupy their hands and mouths.

It was a beautiful, prewar sandwich. The bread was fresh and heavy, just baked. Country bread thickly spread with real sweet butter. The ham was perfectly smoked, cured, and cut fresh in a generous slab. There was a plate of crisp dill pickles alongside, sliced into thin green spears. They ate with slow gratitude. Fidelis said, “He must have thought he lost his mind when he saw the two of us.”

“I bet,” said Markus.

“We should write him, get him used to the idea,” Fidelis went on, growing optimistic as the beer and whiskey smoothed his thoughts. “Let him know we’re coming back.”

“We’re coming back?”

“He’s stubborn, but we’ll break his stubborn.”

Now that Markus knew how to play it, he laughed a little. “He thinks he can play stubborn. Well, fine. We’ll play stubborn, too.”

Fidelis asked for another beer now and drank it with a pleasantly congenial air now, addressing his son like a conspirator.

“We’ll kidnap the little son of a bitch.”

“Damn right,” said Markus.

His father drank the rest of the beer in a long, smooth gulp, and then he rose to find the men’s room and take a piss. He had to steady himself on the booth’s table as he cleared the space. Markus noticed that his father’s hand groped for the backs of the chairs as he passed among the tables, and that, as he reached the end of the bar, he staggered and righted himself, then proceeded with a slow formality that nearly hid the fact that he was drunk.

“FRANZ WROTE MORE than a page — that proves he’s crazy for you,” said Delphine to Mazarine, who came by to sit with her in the store. “In fact, six whole pages.”

“Well, actually, it’s seven,” said Mazarine, only a bit self-conscious. Her baby curved seven months over her thighs now, underneath a flowered and foolish maternity dress top with a spanking white bow. She had taught school up until the previous week, and there were some who said that she should not be seen in that condition, not be influencing children. At least they couldn’t say all they would have liked to include in the gossip. Early on, when Mazarine had told her about the baby, Delphine had taken care of things. She’d gone to a jeweler up in Fargo, bought a wedding ring in Mazarine’s size, and gave it to her, saying, “This will shut them up.” And then Franz had an engagement diamond delivered to her, so she had one for either hand. She wore them both and let people speculate, though who cared, thought Mazarine, when there was the war. Wasn’t it enough that there be one new life?

Delphine raised her eyebrows. “And you kept the last page in your pocket.”

Mazarine had brought the long letter from Franz — all except the last page, in which he concentrated all that was private between them. He knew that Mazarine and his parents shared all of the letters they received from Franz because he couldn’t write often. They existed in a state of suspense that wore into months and showed mostly in Mazarine’s eyes.

“It’s going to be over soon,” said Mazarine. “I can feel it. Just read between the lines.”

As Delphine sat with her now, poring over the latest letter, the younger woman rested her hand on the swell of her baby. The capacity of her thin body to expand so shockingly was alternately thrilling and tedious. Women told her horror stories of their pregnancies and she was grateful that she suffered only the normal discomforts — a boring nausea, stinging nipples, sleeplessness, backache. Harder for her than the physical changes were the unexpected sweeps of emotion. When she was caught up in those great nets of feeling, tears poured from her eyes. Ashamed of her uncontrollable weeping, she rushed to be alone and found relief in walking to the edge of town, where she stood in the presence of a raw sweep of sky. She checked on its changing incarnations. Great thunderclouds had piled darkly over the horizon that very morning, but although she could see the sheets of rain sweeping in a smokelike blur to the west, not a drop had yet fallen upon the town.

Mazarine touched the page in her pocket. Franz existed around the corner of each thought or occurrence. She tried to discipline herself to give in to her extremes of feeling only twice a day. At morning and in the evening, she gave herself leave to exist in the sharp reality of memory. Then, she would put away her wild imaginings about his safety. She would make imaginary love with him or reexchange their first words of truth or reargue the foolish arguments or resay their anguished, sexual, good-bye. At all other times, when he entered her mind, she tried to concentrate on anything else — on the housework or her mother or the classroom before her, or now, on sitting here in the sunlight with Delphine. Slowly, as Delphine read, Mazarine smoothed both hands over the flowers of her wide blouse. The baby rippled and rolled underneath her fingers and knocked its fist against her heart.

At last, Delphine folded the letter back into its envelope, and then rose and went to the refrigerated case, withdrew a half quart of milk and came back to sit with Mazarine. She put the bottle of milk on the table between them and pointed at it. Mazarine removed the cap and grinned at Delphine before she raised the bottle in a mocking toast.

“Where’s yours?” she asked, meaning of course the milk, but then she saw a thread of shadow pass behind the honey gold of Delphine’s eyes, and with a shock understood that Delphine was hurt, recovered, went on, all in an instant. Mazarine might easily have missed this, were she not acutely tuned to that moment and to Delphine’s emotions. She saw a tiny flash of darkness, an intimate admission.

“I always hated milk,” said Mazarine.

Delphine just nodded, watching her drink it, stirred by satisfaction at providing nourishment, and desolation that she herself had never needed to take such pains.

FRANZ WAS ASSIGNED to the 439th Troop Carrier Group. The fighters wore insignia patches embroidered with eagles, wolves, lions, lightning bolts and broken chains. Franz’s carrier group rallied behind the sign of an angry beaver. He wrote:

You have to wonder who the hell makes up the insignia — maybe someone like Markus. I like my beaver, though, he’s mean looking and has transport wings growing out of his shoulder blades. We fly under the sign of the Beaver Volant Proper, Incensed (holding a missile in his right paw). Mazarine, I go over that long ago time in my mind you know which time. I do not understand myself. She meant nothing to me, but you knew that. It was my weakness you could not endure. I suppose you could say of this man that he’s toughened up some but the beauty of it is that he looks upon the world from far above and it is a calm world, not a tortured one. He acknowledges a surrender in his heart. It is like the innocent love of a small boy. He was a youth when first he knew you. Flying is forever mixed with those mysterious hours.

Now we’ll have a boy or girl to tell that we loved each other ever since school days.

The war here is over and we are doing cleanup so don’t worry, the major peril we face is sunburn.

DELPHINE HEARD IT first from a customer who got it from the radio that morning. By that night they had the evening edition out of Fargo with the headline ATOM BOMB HITS NIPS. They spread the paper out on the kitchen table and pored over all the front-page stories. Terror Missile Has 2,000 Times More Blast Than Blockbuster. Sun Power Holds Key to Explosive. Churchill Says Germans Had Some Secrets. Kitchen Dream a Reality — Combined Clothes, Dishwasher, Potato Peeler Due in 1946. Quadruple Amputee PFC James Wilson Uses Artificial Limbs. Husband Shoots Wife, Kills Self While They Are Dancing. Delphine read: “’Truman revealed this great scientific achievement today and warned the Japanese that they now face “a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”’”

Fidelis leaned forward in his chair. “Read everything,” he said. “Everything on the page.” So Delphine continued: “’Mr. Truman said that despite the vast multiplied potency of the bomb, “the physical size of the explosive charge is exceedingly small. It is an atomic bomb,” he said. “It is harnessing the basic power of the universe.”’

“And over here,” said Delphine, “right beside that story, listen to this. ‘Realization of a housewife’s dream — a combination clothes washer, potato peeler and dishwasher, with the addition of a butter churn and ice cream freezer — was near today.’”

“Just near?” said Mazarine. Dazed, she was dancing her baby back and forth in the bouncing sway new mothers automatically acquire. “You mean we’ve harnessed the power of the universe and not perfected the potato peeler?”

“Apparently,” Delphine said. “And listen to this. ‘Friends told police the tragedy occurred in the dimly lit basement of Mr. and Mrs. Michael Wojcik, who were giving a homecoming party for their son, Edwin, an army sergeant back from England. Other guests said three couples were dancing when two shots echoed through the apartment. “Are you shot, honey,” Rzeazutko was heard to ask. “Yes,” his wife replied. “Then, I might as well finish the job,” he said, and fired a third bullet into his head.’”

“Oh Christ, read back to that stuff about the bomb,” said Fidelis.

“One bomb equals 1,228 pounds of TNT for every man, woman, and child living in Fargo,” Delphine reported.

“Stop reading,” said Mazarine.

“The war’s over,” said Fidelis, very softly and with a surge of emotion in his voice that was startling to the others.

Delphine put down the paper and the three sat absorbed in their own thoughts and listening intensely. The refrigerator hummed on, and a fly threw itself against the outside door screen. The water ticked, dripping into the sink strainer. Sparrows argued in the grape arbor, twittering, busy. These ordinary sounds provoked great feeling in Delphine. It was as though they held a meaning, representing a cipher of daily pursuits. A script emblematic of a greater whole. If she could only read the pattern, if she could discover more, if she could force her mind to thread the connections. But her thoughts swung disturbingly between horror and relief. She thought she should weep. She wanted to shout. She left the others, walked outside, and worked for a long while in the hot and ordered chaos of the garden, pulling and piling great handfuls of rag- and pigweed until her brain was filled with the fresh acid fragrance of broken stems and crushed leaves. Screwing her fingers deep to tug the taproot of a vigorous dandelion, she touched the knob end of what she knew was a bone. They were all down there, still, the ones the dog hid, the bones that Eva buried, the mice, snails, birds that died there on their own, the tiny deaths and the huge deaths, all the swirl and complexity of life, one feeding on the other. Forever and ever amen, she thought, dragging out the root with the bone. Both were thick, stained, vigorous, brown. She tossed them into her weed pile and continued until her hands hurt and her thoughts were no more than a weary hum. They will be safe now. Coming home.

AS A BOY, Franz always pictured himself dying heroically, if he had to die at all, in a Spitfire, after a thrilling battle to the death, shot down by a German Focke-Wulf 190, his favorite enemy craft — dark blue as a lightning storm and pale as sunrise, with virgin yellow cowling, deadly and sunny and fair. He would, of course, shoot the Focke-Wulf down, too, as he chose to face vengeful immolation in a final burst of fire. They’d salute each other as they spiraled straight down, together. In some corner of his mind he’d held on to some childish vision of triumph through the boredom, terror, the tedium of daily survival in the real war. He would have been surprised that it came down to a stupid mistake of timing. A hungover mechanic. A snapped cable.

Franz was walking into a supply locker, a kind of big metal closet, when the plane took off behind him. One of the ground crew had forgotten to unhook a heavy steel cable and it played out behind the plane as it lifted. The other men ducked and scattered. If Franz had walked just a little faster, or even slower, he would have been out of reach when the cable flicked out like a bullwhip. With its last touch before it was dragged into the air, it caught Franz neatly across the side of the head. It tapped like a finger, neatly brushing his temple. His hand kept opening the door, but the rest of him couldn’t step through it. He had no thought. No moment of surprise. He hadn’t the faintest notion. He was still looking at the scarred steel frame of the door.

MAZARINE HAD ALWAYS hated the smell of hospitals. They were no different in New York state. When she walked into the lobby, there was the staleness of cigarette smoke, and then the grim, overpowering scent of rubbing alcohol. The nurse came, and she stood up too quickly, juggling her baby’s diaper bag as he shifted in her embrace. Her purse spilled, but there was only a tube of lipstick, the train ticket, a neat little wallet, and a booklet of ration coupons stuck in the teeth of a comb. Mazarine wished there were more to pick up. She was trying to hold herself together, but parts of her took turns shaking, her hands, her knees, her heart. Delphine had accompanied her across the country on the train to help her with the baby but when they stood before the double doors of Franz’s ward, she had stepped to one side and remained in the hall.

“You should see him first,” Delphine said, taking the baby from Mazarine’s arms. Her chest hurt with the tension. She could hardly breathe. “I’ll come in later.”

She prodded Mazarine forward, and the younger woman entered the doors behind the wide, swishing businesslike white rear of the nurse. She walked toward Franz. Halfway down the row of men, some surrounded by curtains, some incurious, others whose glances clung to her, Mazarine realized that she was holding her breath. She gasped dizzily and took in too much air. The odor was worse here because it included everything that the disinfectants and germ-killing alcohol was meant to eradicate: the gamey-sweet smell of slowly healing flesh, the sharp scent of old piss, the sweat of desperation, the vinegar bleakness of resignation. And yet, she knew — for this was the reason she was here — these were the rescued. These were the men who would probably live. And then the nurse examined a chart and stopped before a bed. She drew open a curtain on a hoop around the bed to allow Mazarine to enter the makeshift room.

As she passed between the folds of the curtain around Franz’s bed, Mazarine knew that she was leaving the before — where Franz existed in her memory and imagination — and entering the after. Until she looked directly at him, until her eyes took in the damage, he would still be perfect, a boy, a young man, and they would not have entered the world of grown-up love, with all of its terrible compromises. I can’t do this, she thought. But she knew what she could or could not do didn’t matter. The man who inhabited the bed was lost in a drugged sleep. Her eyes began at the bottom of the tucked-in sheet and traveled slowly up the blanketed form, noting every detail, until she could no longer avoid his face.

The man in the bed was still Franz while he was asleep, and so she sat with him tasting the illusion until it became unbearable. Still, she could not wake him. Franz breathed so slowly and slightly that she could not see his chest move. The hurt side of his head was swathed, and dark bruises flowed down his neck. There was no telling what would happen, how much would return, the doctor had said. Mazarine held Franz’s wrist, tightening and loosening her grip as if she could pump her own strength into him. She sat there, and she sat there. Around them the blank curtains were a closed screen upon which, more wrenching and more complex than death, their future spilled.