The Master Butcher's Singing Club (20 page)

The first time he’d noticed the light down the hall and heard the low murmur, he’d been frightened to investigate. The next time, he realized that Schatzie was sound asleep, not even twitching, and he’d reasoned that if there were burglars or murderers about the dog would be at their throats. And anyway, she would protect him if he got up to see what the light was, and the sound. He felt compelled to find out now. Schatzie did exactly as he thought she would, rising as he passed and silently following him, her nails clicking softly on the green linoleum tiles. He shivered a little in his washed-thin striped pajamas and proceeded with infinite slowness. He didn’t want to be discovered, didn’t want to anger his father, whose voice he now recognized, and who fell silent just as Markus reached the door of the little pantry, where his mother slept.

Markus hardly breathed. Motioned for Schatzie to sit down behind
him. Staying in the shadows, just out of the doorway’s shaft of quiet radiance, he peered into the room and was stilled by what he saw. There was his father, and he was kneeling at the side of his mother’s bed, holding on to her foot. Her foot was slim, waxen white, and almost glowed in the cool lamplight. Fidelis rested his forehead on the place where the foot curved into the ankle. His father’s back shook, and after a stunned moment Markus realized that his father was weeping in a soundless and terrible way, a way all the more frightening because it was sobless and tearless. He had never, ever, seen his father cry before. The most upsetting thing was that the movement of his father’s shoulders was so close to the movements of convulsive laughter. Then Markus thought that maybe it was laughter. Maybe his mother, who could be very funny, had just told his father a joke. But her face was quiet. He could hear her breathing, for her breaths were deep, rattling sighs. He watched a little longer, but then Fidelis put his head up and seemed to stare straight at him. A scared thrill ran through Markus. He froze. But his father was staring blindly at the shadowy wall and did not see him.

Slowly, his father straightened his back, still kneeling, and then he tenderly tucked the blanket around Eva’s feet. When he had done that, Markus wanted to go, frightened he’d be found out, but he still couldn’t move. His mother’s eyes had opened and she stared deeply at Fidelis, and then she smiled at him. It was a glorious smile, serene and full of joy, a softening thrill of her face that Markus would never forget. Fidelis sat in the chair wedged next to the narrow bed, took her hand. Without her asking, he began to sing to her the song she loved most, a song that Markus knew, the one about the water maidens on the river in Germany. His voice was warm and pure. Markus closed his eyes. His father’s voice brought the taste of smooth, brown caramel into his mind. With his father’s singing for cover, Markus made his way quickly to his own room. He crept into his bed, thrust his fingers through the rip in the pillow where the pin did not quite shut the gap. Then he fell asleep quickly, safe in the rise and fall of his father’s voice, with his fingers touching the paper heart.

* * *

DELPHINE BLEACHED
the bloody aprons. She scrubbed the grimy socks. Their stained drawers and their one-strap overalls. She took their good suits out of mothballs and aired them and pressed them. She sprinkled Fidelis’s thick white cotton shirts with starch, and rolled them up and laid them in the cooler. Every morning, she ironed one for him, just as Eva had done. She took on the sheets, the hopeless sweat, the shit and blood, always blood. The towels and the tablecloths. The laundry itself was a full-time job, and Delphine had no idea how Eva had ever done it, plus so much else. But this laundry was a kind of good-bye gift. For once Eva left, Delphine was leaving, too. She’d already decided that to stay there in her old job, with no Eva, was impossible. It wasn’t just that people would talk, for they talked about her already. There was more, things she couldn’t say even to her private self. No, she couldn’t do it. Besides, there was another person chafing and eager to finally take over. Stepping in to care for the boys and her brother would be a perfect showcase for Tante’s pieties.

On the last birthday Eva would ever celebrate, Tante did come around, just in time for the cake. After the blur of useless presents and too cheerful toasts, while the celebrators craned over the large scrolled cake, Tante materialized in her usual black, and said to Delphine in her freezing nasal voice, “This is good cake. How much does my brother pay you extra for taking care of Eva?”

Unknown to Tante, Fidelis stepped behind his sister, so he heard Delphine’s reply.

“Not one flat dime, you hypocrite sow.”

Tante’s cheeks mottled red and white, as though she had been slapped. As for Fidelis, she could have sworn that a surprised smile flickered across his face. Delphine hadn’t yet told him that Tante had stolen Eva’s morphine. Part of her training in dealing with drunks was to hoard information, never to let go of a valuable nugget until it could be made to pay double its worth. There would come a time, thought Delphine, there would definitely come a time. Tante would pay, somehow, for Eva’s pain.

* * *

A TINY STREAM
that mainly carried spring runoff down behind the house, through the field, had dried into a tough little path the boys used to travel into the woods. They spent most of their time there after their chores were done, looking for arrowheads, for pitted, gray fragments of pots, and little white seashells left from when a great ocean had covered all they saw. Markus sometimes thought about this ocean, which he’d learned about in school. The fact that he was walking on what was once an ocean’s bottom intrigued him. Sometimes he imagined the water going straight up, over him, just as the air did now. And all around him water creatures floating and diving. Markus and his two little brothers stopped, pulled from their pockets some of the fuzzed-over horehound drops that Tante always gave them, and spat as they sucked away the lint. They concentrated until they got to the actual candy, a somber, medicinal taste, but sweet. Their faces cleared.

“This used to be an ocean bottom,” Markus said, showing Emil a tiny brittle white scallop he’d picked up from the field. The shell was about the size of his little fingernail. His brother looked at the shell without much interest.

“Gimme that,” said Erich, and he inspected the little shell, then gave it back to Markus. “Is she dying now?” he asked.

Markus said, “I think so.”

All that week, whenever they woke up, Delphine fed them carelessly, old bread or stiff oatmeal, and then forgot to check whether their chores were finished. She allowed them to play wherever they wanted. She was in the other world of the two that existed side by side. One world was of those who would go on living. The other was centered on the one who would die. Usually, the boys stayed outside all day. After dinner, they went in to see their mother before bed, to kiss her good-night. Her face was gray and sunken, almost like a headhunter’s shriveled trophy. Suddenly, her face was full of lines and folds. Wrinkles had appeared around her mouth. Her breathing was so slow it seemed forever between breaths. Her eyes were large and staring, but the boys were not afraid of her. They’d gotten used to her. Markus found that when he kissed her, he felt absolutely nothing except that her taste was
a strange taste, earthen and moldy, not human anymore. As soon as he left his mother, crawled between the covers of his bed, and laid his head on his pillow, a numb buzzing noise started in his ears and he fell immediately asleep. He never even woke when Emil crawled into bed beside him on some nights. In the morning, he was groggy and fuzzy, and he had trouble nudging his brother out of his bed.

“My foot’s asleep again,” said Emil, yawning.

It was happening to them, too, Markus had noticed. Whenever they sat still too long, his little brothers complained, their limbs went odd and prickly. He could see how their eyes drooped. Even now, though it was full daylight and they had precious time to play, they were drowsy. Markus pointed to the riffle of woods just ahead.

“Let’s go there,” he said. He pictured the soft mat of fallen leaves underneath the scrub birch and maples, how nice it would be to rest there for a while. They each took another horehound drop and spat lint while they walked to the woods. They sat down in a deep pile of crackling, dust-smelling leaves. Then they lay back and looked at the green leaves on the branches turning and flickering. Their eyes grew heavy and Erich began to snore, a light whining sound. The air was dreamy and hot. Ants crawled over Markus’s hand and he flicked them off. It was like being underwater just then with the green and changeable light falling through the woods onto them. What if they were lying at the bottom of the ocean? Markus thought of great storms and waves passing over, high above. On the tranquil bed, way down here with nothing to bother them, they lay undisturbed.

Emil was stretched out next to him, half asleep. Markus felt his brother inch a little closer. He pushed him away, once, then he let him draw near again. Soon, with an adult sigh of irritated indulgence, he let Emil hold onto the bottom of his shirt, put his thumb in his mouth, and sleep. Markus stayed awake a little longer and even, once, rubbed his brother’s hair in the distracted way he rubbed the dog’s head. He missed the dog. But these days she did not come with them on their daily rounds, or out into the fields and woods. Schatzie preferred to stay near his mother, just outside her door. She was guarding Eva and she was
waiting patiently to haul her across the deep spaces of the night, the black spaces, to the other side.

THERE WAS NO BEFORE
and no after. Days had melted together. Eva’s long dying was the ground and the air. For a week now, she’d taken only sips of lukewarm water. Her hair stood up in a peaked cap despite Delphine’s attempts to comb it down. Her elbows and knees were knobs and her bones jutted from her flesh. She’d absorbed morphine like water. It made no difference. Her body would not die and would not live. Her eyes were unearthly. She stared through everything, saw nothing. She had taught Delphine to look into her eyes straight on, and when she did the world dropped away. There flowed between them an odd and surprising electricity. Their gaze was a power—comforting, frightening. Delphine was pulled somewhere fast, yanked right out of her skin. With their eyes locked they rushed through the air, ecstatic, hearts lurching.

The night Eva finally died, Delphine woke to the knocking, and knew. She cast off the quilt she’d wrapped herself in at the foot of Eva’s bed. Eva’s arms were flailing like a backstroker’s and her fists rapped the headboard. Delphine grappled with the bedposts and got to her knees, then stumbled blearily to the side of the bed. She hadn’t slept more than two hours at a time for days, and now she hardly knew whether she was sleeping or awake as she tried to catch Eva’s arms. But Eva was running in place now, her bone-thin legs kicking, her arms pumping up and down at her sides. She was running in her high heels. Again, she was running against Franz and her breath came urgently, gravelly and harsh, as though she was nearing the end of a race. She gritted her teeth and seemed to strain for the invisible finish line. The cords in her neck pulled taut, her face twisted, and then she breathed deeply and a sound like sticks rattling came from inside of her chest. Her arms fell to her sides. Her breath went out and she did not retrieve it.

“Can you hear me?” Delphine said. “Are you there?”

Eva’s eyes opened and she took a little air. She said nothing, but looked steadily at Delphine. Her face had become beautiful once again,
austere, the flesh pulled across stark bones, the graceful lines of her eye sockets and her skull. After a while, she whispered, for Delphine to light the lamps.

Delphine lighted the lamp and then caught Eva’s fist and held it. Delphine’s head fell forward and her eyes closed in a swimming heaviness. She jerked awake, took a round, amber bottle of almond oil from a little shelf beside the bed. She poured a small amount into her left palm. Sleepily, she rubbed the oil into Eva’s skin until the fist slowly began to relax.

“Franz, he knows nothing about it,” gasped Eva suddenly. “His father was not Fidelis. His father’s name was Johannes Grunberg, a Jew. Quite a student, and so handsome, so tall and fair. In the war, dead.” Her lips worked. At last, she gathered another breath and went on. “Fidelis knows, but he never spoke of it.”

Delphine poured out another bit of oil and worked it into the slack, dry skin of Eva’s forearm. This was the fourth time Eva had labored to tell her this. Usually, from this revelation she went on to give Delphine directions on when to marry Fidelis and how to care for the boys. But this time, she said something different, something she’d never said before. She said it with a clear simplicity.

“I want you, only you, to handle my body. And please write to my
Mutti.
Tell her that you took care of me. Tell her this: I loved you.”

Delphine looked into Eva’s eyes expecting to become hypnotized, but this time something gave way, she could feel it. Their thoughts had pushed through an invisible barrier, a magnetic field, and there was suddenly a lightness that lifted them giddily into a storm of calm. Later, Delphine was to think that she should have called Fidelis or the boys. But at the time it did not occur to her. Delphine didn’t look away from Eva’s face, even for a moment, because she knew that Eva was afraid. She did not let go of Eva’s hand, because she knew that Eva wanted her to hold her hand, just as a child would when it must enter a new and foreign place. Delphine did not move to adjust her friend when the sticks in her chest rattled again, even louder, three times. She did not pound Eva’s chest when the breathing stopped. Eva was still looking into Delphine’s eyes,
and so, during the time when she might have taken another breath, Delphine saw the light go out behind that silver streak, like a crack behind the door.

“STRUB’S FUNERARY
, how may I be of service?”

Benta’s voice was sleepy, but Delphine knew that they had kept track of the progress of Eva’s disease and had been waiting for a call.