Then he was inside. To the front section of pews, or to where the men sat? He decided on the front section, but the last pew. As soon as he opened the door, even while he was still reaching for the handle that had always seemed too high to him, he could hear the singing. He slipped into the last pew of the front section, knelt down, crossed himself, and then slowly settled back into the pew, listening. He had never heard anything like it. He could not have imagined this. The Ave Maria, sung by . . . not a person, but a voice. The angel occurred to him. The service was already over. It was ending with this song. Of course he recognized the voice. His father had bought the record. It was the world famous meterman from Ravensburg. A sheer miracle of a voice: Karl Erb. He didn’t have to turn around to know that up by the organ, Herr Grübel was standing or kneeling. Beside the singer. Cousin Anton. Herr Grübel, over sixty years old, could still hit the high C effortlessly. So you’re no tenor, Johann told himself. You’re no singer at all. You knew you weren’t. So just listen. Ave Maria, clear and cool as water, floating into the evening light. No difference between earthly and unearthly. The Ave Maria sung this way—not anxiously or the least bit dramatically, but with complete restraint. Just allowing it to happen. The second Ave dark, but transparent, vaporous.
This strange feeling of being rich without knowing what your riches were. You’re standing on a peak and have no idea what it’s called. You have never seen as far as you do now.
As the voice returned to earth, it was silent in the church. Then the creaking of wood signaled that someone had gotten to his feet. The sounds of steps, the church door opening. Johann joined the exodus. Mother and Anselm were standing by the grave, Anselm almost as tall as Mother. Johann went up behind them and put his hands on their shoulders. Mother made a sound and Anselm said quietly, “It’s Johann.” Then all three turned back to the gravestone, as was right and proper. Now Josef’s name was there, too: 1925–44, Niyregyhaza. Mother’s lips moved in prayer. Anselm seemed to be praying, too. Johann couldn’t. He couldn’t get out the Lord-give-him-eternal-peace-may-eternal-light-shine-upon-him-Lord-let-him-rest-in-peace-Amen. He would have had to summon it up.
Although Mother was praying, she whispered something into the middle of her prayer—“Say hello to Frau Brugger, too”—and after whispering went right back to praying. A few graves away, Frau Brugger stood praying. Her grave was the freshest one. Mother whispered, “Herr Brugger, in April, in prison.”
Anselm, just as quietly, “May have been killed by the other prisoners.”
Mother: “Shh!”
Johann nodded over to Frau Brugger, and she answered with a nod. Johann didn’t want to miss the singer’s exit. Father’s grave was located where the singer and his entourage would pass right behind Johann. He would stand and pretend to be praying until they came by. Between the church door and the cemetery gate, the singer and his escort would move and speak quite differently than all the other churchgoers. Perhaps the singer was still speaking with the priest. If only Frau Brugger would just leave. Then he heard the voice. Even the speaking voice was somewhat unearthly. Johann simply turned around. Anselm turned, too. Mother kept praying. Karl Erb, beside him Herr Lohmüller, the high school teacher who had probably accompanied him, and Kreszenz, who might have been his accompanist, too, and two ladies about whom there was absolutely nothing to suggest that a war of several years had just been lost. Genteel ladies, so to speak. One was talking to the singer insistently and in extremely loud Swabian and addressing him as Herr Professor. In the brief moments in which Johann was able to overhear them, she twice mentioned the name Richard Tauber and said she had been a friend of his. The singer walked as if not walking. It had to do with the way he lifted his chin. Perhaps he didn’t even hear what the lady was saying to him. The ancient high school teacher belonged beside the singer, since he always wore suits from the nineteenth century that nevertheless looked new. The presence of the high school teacher made the singer’s appearance into theater. The singer smiled. Looked like a noble old Indian chief. Or a noble old squaw. Johann thought of his cousin, the great-uncle. Johann made such an obvious bow that the singer noticed and responded with a glance and a gesture. With his bow, Johann had signaled: I will never forget you or your voice. Only when they had passed beyond the cemetery was he able to tear himself away from the grave.
Frau Brugger had been waiting to say hello to Johann. It was too bad that her husband had not lived to be here. But Adolf would be happy to know that Johann was back. Adolf was in Buchloe, working for the famous livestock dealer Wechsler, Eberhard Wechsler, who was able to return from Zürich now that those brutes had abdicated. As long as Wechsler had to live in Zürich, he’d used a front man to run Wechsler and Co., and through him, her husband had kept in contact with Wechsler. Wechsler had no children and now wanted to adopt Adolf and train him to be his successor. She couldn’t imagine anything better for Adolf. Thank goodness Adolf had been baptized Adolf Stefan and had already had that awful first name officially dropped. It would be nice the next time Johann saw him if he would just call him by his new name.
Johann hastened to say, “I’m very glad for Stefan. Please give him my best wishes.”
Since Johann had no desire to go past Head Teacher Heller again, he said he was going to go home on the Moosweg. And he told her why.
“That poor man,” said Frau Brugger. “Has to sit there like that for eight Sundays, but it serves him right. It was a terrible time.” She glanced toward Mother, who nodded. As soon as Frau Brugger had taken her leave—she was going to go past the teacher again—Anselm told him that when the French tanks were entering the village, the Princess had been unable to stay put inside or at least on the terrace, but had run out to greet them, wanting a tank crew, all young guys, to lift her up onto the tank. But then she didn’t quite make it, got dragged under the tank, had her legs run over, and bled to death. He could show Johann the spot between the train station and the chestnut trees. You could still see the bloodstain. But now Lucile was the queen of them all. If Lucile put in a good word for you, you could even get your bicycle back. Without Lucile’s help, they would not have been allowed to stay in the house. Downstairs, it was all an officer’s mess. Lena had to play piano for them practically day and night. Johann felt himself grimace when Anselm said that.
As they entered the house through the back door, they could hear the piano in the spare room. Popular hits. Probably French ones. Fairly sentimental.
Upstairs, Anselm went right to the cabinet and took a letter out of the drawer from the Unit APO No. 40-345-E. Beneath the date January 16, 1945, Johann read:
The company hereby confirms receipt of your letter of 21 November 1944. We are of course more than happy to inform you in more detail about the death of your son. The tank in which your son was serving as a gunner was deployed in the defense of the town of Niyregyhaza. In the course of a hard-fought defensive action, his tank suffered a direct hit, which immediately detonated its munitions and burned out the tank. Your son died a quick and painless death. I send you my very best wishes for the future and greet you with Heil Hitler! Signed on behalf of Lieut. . . .
The signature was illegible. Niyregyhaza, thought Johann, that would have been a word for Father to spell. He pictured it in the word tree. It hung there awaiting an equivalent: Niyregyhaza.
Anselm said, “Edi Fürst was also killed in action. Jim, too. And Saki. And Trautwein Hermann. And Lange Josef. And Ellenrieder’s Alois. And Friedl’s Arthur. And Frommknecht’s Severin. And . . .”
“Hush now,” said Mother.
“Just one more thing about Herr Hübschle, Gottfried’s father in Hergensweiler,” said Anselm. Because the French thought the SS man in the large framed photo in the living room was him, they dragged him out of the house and beat him to death with the butts of their rifles. His wife had been in a mental hospital ever since, Gottfried Hübschle missing in action since January.
Johann must be hungry, said Mother.
“Hungry
?” said Johann. “If you say so.”
So she would make something to eat now, said Mother. But she still couldn’t believe that he was really home. Johann said he wanted to change his clothes. He washed up at the sink. Thinking of his grandfather in Kümmertsweiler, he first splashed cold water on the back of his neck. He cut off his beard, carefully shaved off what was left, smiled when Anselm, who was watching, said, “A shame to lose that.” Then he went to the wardrobe and picked out one of his jackets, although Josef’s jacket with the greenish herringbone pattern would have pleased him more. He sensed that it would be improper to come home and put on his dead brother’s jacket. He needed to dress well now. Nothing wrong with that. From downstairs came the sounds of a tenor singing a sentimental song to piano accompaniment. So Lena was playing. He could ask about Magda. But he didn’t. He listened to the schmaltzy tenor, listened to the accompaniment, and pictured the player to himself.
“She’s got some tough-looking brothers,” said Anselm. Johann looked at Anselm as if he didn’t know what he was talking about. How does he know who I’m thinking of? wondered Johann.
“You’re how old now?” asked Johann.
“Almost eleven,” said Anselm.
“Oh yeah, right,” said Johann.
Mother called them to the table. Buttered potatoes and smoked pork. “From Kümmertsweiler,” she said. Johann inhaled the fragrance of smoked meat.
CHAPTER FOUR
Prose
THE WHOLE LONG, HOT SUMMER was spent reading, the intrusive heat kept at bay by elegant Venetian blinds. Venetian blinds struck him as elegant since he had read about them in novels. Reading, but always ready to hear steps on the creaking floorboards of the corridor, jump up and fling open the door, and intercept Lena, simply not let her past because three steps farther on she would disappear into Room 10 on the other side of the hall, and through that door he could not follow her. So intercept her and somehow maneuver her against the wall of the corridor and just keep her there. To bring her into Room 9 was also impossible, as impossible as following her into Room 10. So no matter what he was reading at the moment, there was nothing to do but intercept her as soon as she turned into the corridor from the stairs and keep her there and then look into her eyes so she knew she would soon have to deal with his mouth. It was still August when it happened: doing nothing but looking at each other turned into doing nothing but kissing each other. And how he hated that word! Kissing! Baloney, he said to himself when he heard the word. He never said it out loud. Never, not in his whole life, would the word kissing pass his lips. Give me a kiss. Not that word either, although since its form led much more quickly to a decisive conclusion, he had more sympathy with the noun than with the gerund. He performed the act in a way that was calculated to hurt her. She should feel that there was nothing he could do about it. He wanted to behave as if not responsible for his actions, and he did. In August. Starting in August. Always out in the hall. Every time he heard her steps, her heels, her high heels drumming along the corridor so the floorboards forgot their creaking. She was the only person who walked in a way that basically never gave the floorboards a chance to creak. That’s how she walked. He jumped up, threw down Stifter, Heine, Faulkner. Out into the hall to capture her. He chopped at her mouth with his, as if her mouth was something that needed to be knocked down quickly. At the very least, her mouth should be bleeding when he was done knocking it down. He couldn’t let her get the idea that she was being kissed. Johann is kissing Lena—horrifying.
Once he had captured and belabored her with his mouth until she bled, made her familiar with both his lack of responsibility for his actions and his rage at the act of kissing, he gained enough confidence in himself so that the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh—up to thousandth time he captured, held, and assailed her with his mouth he could proceed more mildly, slowly, contemplatively, gently, and reasonably and almost allow her to guess that he might know what he was doing.
And what could he say or not say about what was going on inside of him? Say everything? Impossible. Although he did write down the poems that again rose insistently to the surface, they contained almost nothing of him. And nothing at all of Lena. They contained only themselves. He was furious at these imperious poems. But he could not suppress them. Not yet. He wrote down what he dreamed. What was later to be found on the paper was not what he had dreamed but still contained more of him than his poems did. The poems had a polished clarity he lacked. A lucidity foreign to him. An orderliness he found laughable. He was also annoyed by the stilted mood that writing poems inevitably generated. What annoyed him most was that he began to hand over his poems to Lena, too. Each time he did, she said, “Thank you, Johann.” She accepted his poems as if they were flowers. You could actually see that she would have liked to sniff them. But she controlled herself. He would rather have handed over the dreams he wrote down. But he didn’t dare to. He wrote down his dreams in an old purchase ledger with many blank pages. Once he dreamed that he had read in a book—half murder mystery, half science fiction (he had just read Hans Dominik’s Atomic Weight 500)—that a woman had children who were born wearing ties. They were born with ties, congenital ties so to speak, flesh-colored and made of flesh. A stick pin, and they would have bled. He said to Josef, who was looking over his shoulder and whom he knew right away he could trust unconditionally: Why can’t I think of things like that? And at the same time, still in the dream, he was very happy because he sensed that he was just dreaming about the congenital ties, and so the idea didn’t belong to another writer, but was his own and he could use it. But then when he woke up for real, he had no idea what congenital ties would be useful for. Just write it down, your dream. And he did.
Beginning in the early evening, sentimental songs with piano accompaniment started drifting up from downstairs.Bésame, bésame mucho. The noncom who was called upon to sing every evening—yowl was more like it—would hit Lena on the fingers if she made a mistake in the accompaniment, and sometimes even if she didn’t. When Johann heard that, he was unable to read or write anything once the music started up.
Of course, for the first fifty times that Lena came up the stairs and walked down the hall to Room 10 in her high heels, he made it look like their encounters were pure accident. He would just wait at the door, open it as soon as he heard the high heels, and walk toward her as if he were going downstairs and leaving the house. So then that’s what he had to do. Out the back door and then up the entrance drive, for example, to where Herr Seehahn sat scribbling at a table that had been brought from the terrace and placed between the chestnut trees. Herr Seehahn spoke French. If you wanted to get back your bicycle, your radio, or anything else that had been confiscated, you had to apply to Herr Seehahn. Now every day Herr Seehahn wore the medal he had been awarded by the Holy See on the green lapel of his yellowish Tyrolean jacket. On the table before him, the lists of all confiscated items. The first time Johann walked up to him, Herr Seehahn said, “Back in town, Johann?” and then resumed his muttering and his list-keeping. Johann had heard at once that his text was still about the false serpent, miserable prick, stupid cows. But what struck Johann now was how vehemently Herr Seehahn spat out his tirade. It sounded like Herr Seehahn was responding to a particularly nasty experience he’d just had. It was just the way you’d curse if something particularly nasty happened to you. It was the way Herr Seehahn had been cursing for decades. Johann was tempted to say, like his father: You’re amazing, Herr Seehahn. It was Niklaus’s job to stand guard over all the bicycles, radios, and binoculars of the parish and Herr Seehahn’s to administer them.
If Johann didn’t feel like leaving the house after contriving one of these chance encounters with Lena, he still had to continue down the stairs but would then go down to the corner of the cellar where the highboy had ended up. He took everything out of the drawers and secret compartments and carried it all upstairs. In the process he might run into Lena a second time. He kept it up until he began to think that
Lena, too, was coming upstairs and along the corridor more often than necessary to fetch something and bring it back down.
For two weeks beginning on the first of July, he even received his board from the house kitchen, now under French administration. With six other men, Johann had been ordered to paint the picket fences along the Dorfstrasse. Red, white, and blue. And why? Hermine knew, because she kept house for Lapointe, the local commandant. On July 14th, a boat with General Lattre de Tassigny was going to land in Wasserburg, and the general would then drive from the landing up into the village as far as the linden tree, and from there turn left onto the road to Reutenen to pay a visit to General Koenig in the Villa Hasselbach. On Bastille Day, all the pickets on the Dorfstrasse would be smiling a welcome to General Lattre de Tassigny in the French national colors. For as long as it took Johann and Schulze Max and Dulle and Hanse Luis and Semper’s Fritz and Helmer’s Franz and Herr Minn to paint pickets, they would get their meals from Lucile’s fully stocked kitchen. The painters were served at Herr Seehahn’s table between the chestnuts trees. It was Luise who brought them their food.
“You can get along OK with the French.” That was the first sentence Johann heard from Schulze Max. Semper’s Fritz, who had walked from Schleswig-Holstein to Wasserburg with a shovel on his shoulder, said he’d take French asses over their predecessors’ faces any day. While they painted pickets, Semper’s Fritz and Helmer’s Franz debated whether a shouldered shovel or a shouldered pitchfork was the better way to get home from far away after a lost war without being taken prisoner. They couldn’t reach agreement. Helmer’s Franz insisted a pitchfork was better than a shovel because it was a clearer signal you were only a farmer, which was the whole point. Semper’s Fritz said a shovel was better because it was plausible regardless of the season. And anyway, getting home after the first war was child’s play. You came home, changed your clothes, and voilà. This time around, it only really got dangerous once you had made it home. The French had arrested him the day after he registered at the town office because he needed food stamps. He knew who had ratted on him, and he would get his someday. So they whisked him off to Lindau and stuck him in the overcrowded Singers’ Hall. From there, transports were leaving every day for France, to the mines, road building, or any other such-like jobs that held no appeal for a tinsmith with his excellent qualifications. So he traded two cigarettes for four smelly foot rags from a fellow prisoner, who was ecstatic, the dope. Fritz, however, had gone to the latrine, wrapped his hands in the rags, climbed over the barbed wire, swum across the Kleiner See silent as a swan, landed on the shore at Aeschach quieter than a duck, knocked on the door of an ex-girlfriend in Aeschach, put a hand over her mouth before she could exclaim, and—his big lucky break—learned from her that a guy from Alsace was paying her a visit every other night—with marriage at some later date a distinct possibility. Fritz got a chance to tell this guy about how he’d pulled the wool over the eyes of the military district officers at his physical, and the Alsatian was amused. So that’s how he came by his release papers, without which any frog who wants can collar you. Now he was going to tip off the Alsatian that Harpf didn’t deserve to be locked up on the Kamelbuckel with all those died-in-the-wool Nazis. During the war, somebody had ratted on Fritz when he told that joke about the chamber pots at the regulars’ table. He knew who it was, and he would pay him back some day and wouldn’t need the French to help him. But back then, Harpf had come to him at night and asked through his window how long his leave still had to go. Two days, Fritz had answered, and Harpf replied: I’ll come to pick you up on day three, then.
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