Master Butchers Singing Club Page 40

  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.