At the far end of the acre was a small house, the roof curling under a foot
of snow, its rear window gazing outward twenty miles and downwards to the depth of a
thousand feet. Stella and Ernst, holding hands, silent in wondrous amazement, turning and
clapping each other in excitement, walked over this very acre every afternoon and passed the
house. A few scrubby trees leaned dangerously over the cliffs. And every afternoon they
passed the old man on the doorstep, brittle shavings heaped over his shoes and
like yellow flakes blown on the snow. He grinned while he carved, looked
up at them, seemed to laugh, and hunching his shoulder, pointed backwards, behind the hut,
out into the emptiness. The crosses he carved were both small and large, rough and delicate,
some of simple majesty, others speaking minutely of martyrdom. They too fell across his
feet, mingled with the sticks of uncarved wood—sometimes a bit of green bark was left to
make a loincloth for Christ. Those that were not sold hung inside from a knotted wire, and
slowly turned black with the grease and smoke; but the hair was always blacker than the
bodies, the eyes always shone whereas the flesh was dull. Tourists paid well for these
figures that were usually more human than holy, more pained than miraculous. Up went the
shoulder, the knife rested, and he was pointing to the nearness of the cliffs. After the
first week, Ernie bought one of the crucifixes, a terrible little demon with bitter pain
curling about the mouth no larger than a bead, drawing tight the small outward-turning
hands. Then he began to collect them, and every afternoon a new Christ would peer from his
pocket through the tufts of fur.
By now his prayers at mealtime were quite audible. The setting sun stained
the imperfect windows, made whorls crimson and shot the narrow panes with streaks of yellow
until an off-color amber, like cheesecloth, finally smeared them over and gave way to a
dismal night. Chairs scuffed in unison as the five long tables filled, and in the first
silence, before strange conversations were resumed, before they had recaptured their
half-intimate words, while they were still only nodding or whispering, one of the tables
would become conscious of an impersonal, pious
mumbling. Busily
rearranging the silver and china before him, his brow wrinkled, he talked as if to an old
friend. The table would be hushed and uneasy until he looked up. The hotel manager, who took
this time of the evening meal to appear before his gathered guests and walk up and down
between the rows to interrupt a conversation or a draught of wine, was struck dumb with the
unnatural monotone, and would cast significant glances at Stella. The lines of beautiful
cloths, the habits of silk, the evening dress of others turned inwards upon her, incongruous
with the thick china and bare walls and floor, modern and glittering and presumptuous. She
touched his hand, but it was stiff and cold, smooth and pious. She thought at first that she
could feel something of his Bishop’s creed and was part of this furtive ritual that exerted
itself more and more, even when the evenings were rich with color.
The crucifixes began to fill the hotel.
Ernst had filled their two rooms with flowers and stones, small misshapen
petals that were bright and petrified, delicate and warped with the mountain air, clear opal
stones polished with ages of ice. At night before they slept he arranged the flowers in her
hair, and with a kiss laid her away. In the morning he would climb to the porch and spend an
hour noting carefully who arrived. And he did the same in the afternoon, breathing deeply,
peering intently. He and his wife were very happy. An old count nodded to them in the
corridor just beginning to grow light; they awoke blushing and warm holding the covers tight
with a childish guilt, and below their window the children laughed, danced and clapped. He
no longer thought of the Baron, or Herman, or the
Sportswelt
, no longer thought of
Stella’s singing and particularly
did not want to hear her sing. The
altitude made him faint, he breathed heavily, and could not stand to think of pain. If
anyone twisted an ankle, or if one of the children skinned a knee, or an old woman ached in
the chest, he rushed to be by their side, he “stood over them,” as he called it. Then the
old man, the Christ-carver, began to visit the hotel regularly, bringing with him each day a
basket of those crucifixes that he could not sell, so that the black ugly Christs hung upon
the walls of their rooms along with the bright new ones. Children were soon seen playing
with wooden crosses, lining them up in the snow, leaving them all about the playroom. A
small crown prince possessed one with beautifully flexed muscles and a rough beard. Stella
began to have him lean on her arm as they walked and knew that the most beautiful bird holds
tightest before flying straight upwards.
It was almost is if the whole family lived in the next room, asleep in the
pile of trunks under the hanging window. The trunks collected dust and beneath the arched
lids one of her mother’s gowns slept with Herman’s waistcoat, a militant comb lay straight
and firm by a yellow brush. A pair of medical tweezers that had plucked the fine moustache
grew old near one of Herman’s mugs. The trunks were sealed with wax. All together they were
happy, and a flute player charmed the two rooms.
On a morning in the third week Ernst left her side and climbed to the porch.
Above the snow there was light, but the thick flakes, like winter, covered all the
mountaintop in darkness, beat against his eyes, swept over his knuckles hooked to the
railing. He watched. It was impossible to see where the acre ended and where the deep space
began, the fall. He
waited, peering quickly, expecting the messenger,
sure of the dark journey. “Look over the plains,” he thought, “and you will see no light. No
figures, no men, no birds, and yet He waits above the vast sea. Thine enemy will come,
sweeping old ties together, bright as the moon.”
Ernst had given up the sword; though his wounds were healed, the Heavens
gaped, and he had lost the thread of the war’s virus. Then, at the bottom of the flurry, he
heard the arrival. The horse’s bells rang as if he had been standing there, just below, all
during the night and the snow and had just come to life. He heard the muffled knock of a
hoof, a door slammed. A sleepy-eyed boy, his tongue still flat along his lower jaw, weaved
back and forth in the wind, nearly fell beneath the bag that weighed of gold. The driver
beat his gloves and pocketed the
Pfennig
, the snow raced. Ernie closed his mouth
and saw through the white roof of the passenger’s descent. Cromwell ran up the steps and
rang the sharp bell that awoke the clerk. By the time Ernst was back in the room, bending
over her in the darkness, cold and afraid, it had stopped snowing. The black horse shook off
his coat of white.
Still one could not see beyond the fortress of the hotel, beyond the drops
of mustard gas and mountain vapors, beyond the day that was only half risen. The children
became thin and tired and the adults suddenly were unable to find their own among the solemn
faces. With that sharp cry of mother to child, the parents searched among the idle play
groups as if through obligation. During the three meals the tables were half empty and a
great many plates were broken, as the child bites and the young mother is still forced to
feed. All of them smelled the fog, it
curled about their hair and chilled
them in the bath, and the nurse’s playing fingers could do nothing to help, while the air
became more thin and the water difficult to pump.
Ernst had become more and more used to the lover’s mystery, had learned
timidly what strange contortions the honeymoon demands, and she, not he, was the soldier,
luring him on against the fence, under the thicket, forcing him down the back road through
the evening. He watched her sleep. But now it was painful, it was cold, the snow was already
too thin to hide him. He walked up and down the room, could see nothing from the window
because he was too near the light, and the early morning, without the hands of the clock or
the morning paper, his own time, was about to break. He was already one of the cold bodies
down on the ice, he felt the terrible rush of air. After pausing a moment he ran quickly
down the stairs, seeing all of them dragged into the university, kicking, clawing, hunched
up like camels in the dust, caught and beaten. Someone put both hands on his knees.
No one stirred, the clerk and boy were curled up to sleep again until the
real morning came. The lobby was filled with cold shadows, uncollected cups, a discarded
shirt, a bucket with a thin edge of ice over the top. For the first time Ernst felt that the
windows were closed, the wires cut, and felt the strange sensation that the mountain was
moving, tearing all the pipes from the frozen ground, sliding over unmapped places. A
magazine was several months old, an electric fan turned from side to side though the blades
were still.
He forced himself to speak. “How was your trip?” The man stood up, still in
evening dress, smiling with
the old natural grace, and he felt the
fingers take his own. “Well, Heavens, to think we’d meet again. And, congratulations, you’ve
got my admiration, she’s a delightful girl.” They sat together, vaguely conscious of the
damp air. “I thought I was coming to a place quite different, no familiar faces, a place of
rest, but it’s more as if I were home. Well, you must tell me all about yourself.” No one
stirred. They drank the thick black coffee which Cromwell had heated himself, careful not to
soil his white cuffs, while he watched the briefcase. The windows were folded in white, the
hat and gloves and cane lay by the coffee pot, the heavy cane close at hand.
Gradually Ernst’s head began to lean forward, closer to the table. He had
told their story, they were happy, he thought someone moved overhead, but then he knew he
heard nothing. Cromwell was telling him everything he did not want to know, and he waited
for the footsteps of the cook or the old man or a nurse come to heat the bottles. Cromwell
lectured, smiled, and spoke confidentially, with ease, about the lower world. Behind the
column of figures, the sweeping statements, the old friendship, there was the clicking
needle, the voice coming from inside the briefcase—with facts and sieges memorized, hopes
turned to demands, speaking to convince them all, from the general to the dandy. Ernst’s
head touched the table. Cromwell was not tired from the long ride up the mountain but spoke
quickly, as if he had been everywhere and carried near his breast the delicate maps and
computations, the very secrets they lived on.
“… Antwerp fell. The Krupp gun, 42 centimeter, took them through and luckily
enough, I was able to see the whole thing. It was like Hohenlohe’s progress
in Africa, more, you see, than just a concentration of men for their own good, more
than anything like a unity of states, like the Zolleverein, rather complete success, a mass
move greater than a nation, a more pure success than Prussia’s in the Schleswig-Holstein
affair. We fought, gained in the area of Soissons and they couldn’t drive us from Saint
Mihiel—glory be to the German army! The line is now from the English Channel to Switzerland,
and we wait only spring. We extend across Europe in four hundred integrated miles.”
It was now dark, morning turned backwards in exasperating treachery. Cold
porridge was left on the table. He thought he should perhaps shake Cromwell’s hand again, go
fetch more coffee. He had lost the thread, the long chain of virus that keeps a man anchored
to his nation, instrumental in its politics, radiant in its victory, and dead in its defeat;
had lost the meaning of sacrifice, siege, espionage, death, social democracy or militant
monarchism. He was lost, the newspapers scattered over the vertical cliffs, the wires
coiled, cut in the snow. And he prayed at meals, knowing nothing about the collective
struggle of the hated Prussian and genius Hun, knowing nothing of the encircling world, the
handcuff, the blockade. That air seeping visibly below the window, through orchard and
burrowed haystack, crawled by the red and yellow wires, kissed the worried
Oberleutnant
, and the dumb sapper smoking his pipe in the hole. Eyes burned; it
left patches in the lungs amid the blowing of whistles, this yellow fog. It came in the
window, the mountain slid lower, railway tracks giving way to on-sloughing feet.
“They are well trained,” said Cromwell, “in spring, the valleys will fall
under—extension—we must have
technological extension. No nation has the
history of ours.” There was a list of seven hundred plants in his briefcase, where
locomotives swung on turntables and the smell of cordite hovered over low brick buildings.
The world is measured by the rise and fall of this empire.
The hotel manager was shaving and soon would come downstairs. A nurse, ruddy
and young, behaved like a mother, smiling at the child in the darkness. In the neighborhood
of Cambrai where an Allied flanking movement had failed to turn the German extreme right, a
farmhouse at a fork in the clay roads, demolished by artillery fire, lay half-covered in
leaves and snow. There the Merchant, without thoughts of trade, dressed only in grey, still
fat, had died on his first day at the front and was wedged, standing upright, between two
beams, his face knocked backwards, angry, disturbed. In his open mouth there rested a large
cocoon, protruding and white, which moved sometimes as if it were alive. The trousers,
dropped about his ankles, were filled with rust and tufts of hair.
When Stella awoke, she was still possessed of the dream; it lingered on in
the dim light. When she looked into Ernst’s bed, she saw only a small black-haired Christ on
the pillow, eyes wide and still, who trembled, and with one thin arm, motioned her away.
“Maman,”
a child’s voice cried below the window, “the old horse is
dead!”
All night long, despite the rattle of the train wheels and the wind
banging against the loose window-panes, Ernst could hear the howling of the dogs out in the
passing fields and by the rails. The robe hung over his shoulders and was clutched about his
throat, the heavy folds coarse and dark, stamped with the company’s seal as railroad
property. Robes were piled in all the empty compartments, the dim light swayed overhead, and
the cold grew so severe that the conductor, who continually wished to see their papers, was
irritable, officious. The compartment, or salon, a public beige color, unkempt, with its
green shades and narrow seats, heaved to and fro, tossing the unshaded bulb in circles,
rattling their baggage piled near the thin door. Those were certainly dogs that howled. His
face pressed against the glass, Ernst heard the cantering of their feet, the yelps and
panting that came between the howls. For unlike the monumental dogs found in the land of the
tumbleweed, glorified for their private melancholy and lazy high song, always seen resting
on their haunches, resting and baying, these dogs ran with the train, nipped at the tie
rods, snapped at the lantern from the caboose, and carrying on conversation with the running
wheels, begged to be let into the common parlor. They would lap a platter of milk or a bone
that appeared dry and scraped to the human eye without soiling the well-worn corridors of
rug, and
under the green light they would not chew the periodicals or
claw the conductor’s heels. As paying passengers, they would eat and doze and leap finally
back from the unguarded open platforms between cars into the night and the pack.
A small steam pipe, its gilt long flaked with soot, bent like an elbow,
began to rattle and gasp, but after a few more knocks, a few more whistles from the engine
straining at the head of the train, it died. The official ticketed odor of dust and
stuffing, the chill around the dark ceiling of cobwebs increased, and Stella tried to rest
while Ernst watched the night pass by, annoyingly slow and too dark to see. The firebox in
the engine was small, wrapped up, steady and dispassionate for the night, the fireman nodded
over his shovel, an old soldier moved abjectly about the empty baggage car, and Ernie,
holding the shawl, wondered what terrible illness was falling on his shoulders. And all he
had to show was the castoff crucifixion of a half-wit, wrapped in brown paper in the bottom
of the carpetbag. They stopped at many small stations and crossings during the night, but no
passengers boarded or left the train.
The honeymoon was over, the mountain far behind, and as they had begun
walking down the road, the old horse long dead, Cromwell called, “Well, we’ll meet soon
again, sorry you have to rush,” and waved awkwardly with his briefcase. “I don’t think so,”
said Ernst, and dug his pike into the snow. There was no one, no one; they traveled alone
except for the dogs over the snow whose edge, leagues beyond, was besieged. But when, the
following morning, they drew into the city, into
das Grab
, hundreds of people
milled about the shed, pushed near the train but paid it no attention. When she helped him
down the iron
steps, her face red with the frost, he knew things had
changed, that the dogs had beaten them to the destination. That train would certainly never
run again, he felt sure, and he knew that its journey was over. The engineer’s black face
was still asleep, a mailed fist caught on the whistle cord, head propped on an arm in the
small unglassed window. “Fare well,” said Ernst as he stepped off into the crowd that
steamed and rattled like stacks and shovels and feet clattering in the bunkers.
Engines that had just arrived stood on sidings unattended, steaming, damp,
patches of ice stretched over the cabs, waiting where the crews had left them, unaccounted
for, unfueled. The crowd milled around wooden cars, valises were lost; returning soldiers,
unmet, ran towards strangers, laughing, then backed away in other directions. The streets
beyond the station were filled with unindentified men who had lost brass buttons and
insignia to bands of children. Some soldiers that were carried on stretchers by medical men,
waved empty cups or dozed in the shade of awnings, while their bearers drank inside. Some
were seasick as they slid along under the towering gangs, bruised by trailing wagon chains,
swept by the rough skirts of coats, tossed close to the crowded surface of the concourse.
The streets were as close as the sliding dark hold of a prison ship, and since the
continuous falling-off of arms and spirit, since the retreat, provided little fare for the
dogs that beat the train. They couldn’t support the town dogs and certainly not these
soldiers.
Stella had carried the bags ever since leaving the mountain, and used to
them by now, thin leather sides stamped with the black permits, bulging with nightshirts and
a few mementos, she walked along by
his side, stepped over the stretchers
and stayed as close as possible without any trouble. Ernst had grown stronger during the
night, he felt the air sailing past the train; all of them grew stronger as they neared the
city,
das Grab
. It looked quite different, not at all as he had expected, not dark
and safe and tiring in the middle of the earth, but cold and wide, packed with the confused
homecomers, knapsacks filled with the last souvenirs. There were no bugs or insects, no
still drooping beaks and shapeless wings on the marble walls. But crowds in front of empty
shop windows and endless white platoons formed and re-formed behind the courthouse. Names
and numbers and greetings were shunted between rows of bright bleak buildings and they
kissed, changed dressings, in the middle of the street.
Ernst began to look for Herman. He didn’t want to look for the old man,
conscripted father, but felt, as a citizen, that the
soldat
should be met. He
looked under the blankets, in the wagons, scrutinized the ranks, walked faster and faster
but did not find Herr Snow.
“Ernst, my dear husband, wait, aren’t we going in the wrong direction?”
“Where would you expect to find him, except in this way? All soldiers come
here and go in this direction.”
Every half-hour the trains slowed to a stop in the stockyards, tired
brakemen swung to the ground while troops hurried from the cars; each half-hour the streets
were more filled with tattered capes and swinging arms, and musette bags and boxes left
forgotten on corners. All the soldiers appeared to think that someone was meeting them, and
smoking their first cigarettes, hand grenades still in their belts, they
appeared to enjoy searching, at least for a while. In any other place but
das
Grab
they would not be so joyous. The musicians who had played at the
Sportswelt
were gathered about an upper window of an empty room and soldiers
nearing from the distance heard the tune, caught it, sang it until they passed, and then
forgot it. There was at that one place before the window some music. Ernst looked a long
while for his father, leading Stella halfway around the city before they finally reached the
house.
Beyond the outskirts of the grave, beyond the locked barns at the edge of
town, beyond the open doorways and colored stock—out past those hundred miles of fields and
cow sheds where old Herman had met his fill and lost his supper in the ditch—out past those
last outposts and signal stations, far out to sea, the American Blockade turned first one
way and then another in the fog. A few more crates and a barrel and orange or two sank away
in the foam. There was no noise in this well-organized blockade field except the cold sound
of the waves and the slapping of an oar, locks outward, against the blue tide.
Evidently Gerta was out and the house was empty. Stella, weary of the cold
and the long march, glad to keep their voices, questions, and songs away from the day of
homecoming, let the door sag-to past the sleeping sentry and, lantern in hand, helped her
returning husband up the wide dark stairs. While the trench mortars out of town approached
and stopped, then continued on, she felt his small burning cheek and, stooping, unbuttoned
his fluttering shirt.
Gerta trudged with her thin legs cold among the boys, her wig tied on with a
yellow ribbon, her skirt caught up at her black and blue hip, an old ungracious trollop, a
soldier’s girl. She would have nothing
to do with the blind ones, they
frightened her. But she’d met a boy the day before and dried his dressing, sang to keep up
her spirits while pushing another along in his red box. She was hurried along, talking in a
loud voice, in the throng, now and then her hand falling on a damp shoulder or into a loose
pocket. The red box rattled on its cart wheels, bandages turned grey with coal dust,
whistles called from the tangled depot, and soaked oranges sank slowly through the ocean’s
thick current. The pockets, she found, contained only the photographs of the deceased.
Two days after arrival, each trainload of men, smiles gone, hair long, found
themselves foodless and the tin pans banged at their belts, the queues turned away. But as
each group became hungry and camped on the doorsteps, a new load arrived, singing, watching,
laughing, waiting to be met. The new laughers filtered through the despondent men; shops
were empty but hung with new regimental flags, and as the laughers became, in turn, pale and
confused, as last loaves were eaten and crusts lost, more laughers filtered in, singing,
pushing, looking about
das Grab
for the first time. Gerta bumped from one to
another, laughed, was carried up and down among the
krank
and lost, among the able
but gaunt, among the young or bald. No one who walked these connected streets was old; the
aged had been blown indoors. Suddenly the
Sportswelt
loomed ahead.
“Try this, try this, try this,” she cried, and rifle butts were pitted
against the sealed door, a window broke like the breast of a glass doll. They entered the
place, weak and shouting, while the blonde trollop found her way out back to catch her
breath.
The corridor made by the rock walls down to the
open
latrine, was filled with wind-blown pieces of paper, and across the walls the tables were
overturned, the lawns long and the valor-petals dry. Returning from the pea-green pit of
stench, Gerta almost stumbled where the Merchant fell, cocoon in his mouth, beams on his
chest, months before. Her wooden shoes clicked on the green stones, skirts swung from the
sides of her sharp hips. Gerta took a cigarette from a tin box hidden in her blouse, the
smoke trailed into the garden and over the dead leaves.
The family was all dead. The Father, the victor, with a cocked hat and pot,
had long ago wished her well. The Mother lay in the cold bunker of the street, cinders
falling over the rough chin. The Sons, no longer to be with Nanny, having no longer spurs to
tinkle against their boots since spurs were always removed before the body was interred, had
never been parted and both lay under the wet surface of the same western road. So now alone,
she wore her skirts above her knees and her bright lopsided lips were red with the
glistening static day of
das Grab;
for she had survived and hunted now with the
pack.
The blonde, the old nursemaid, pinched her cigarette and went back to the
hall. The vandals, with tunics itching on bare chests, with packs paining and eyes red, with
rifles still riding strapped to packs, searched, pawed over the dust, sat leaning against
the rafters and waited. They seemed to think the orchestra would pick up, the lights flare
on; they waited for the singer. The chairs were not made to sit on, the tables were against
the walls, and the dust, lately stirred and tossed in the cold light, settled on the
darkening planks. A cat called from one of the upstairs empty bedrooms and disappeared.
Several
white shoes, chair legs, hands, scraped against grey puttees.
These were not looters who carried swag on their shoulders and trinkets in their arms, they
did not scrounge and run. They searched as if for something in particular, walked softly
about the bare room. The girls were gone with the
Schnapps
. The soldiers crowded
together, tossed a few periodicals and lists of the dead, to the middle of the stage, and
walked up and down the green carpet while the wheels rolled against the snow. They were now
taught methodically to meet the train with blistering paws, and iodine stained their green
cuffs.
Gerta laughed as she leaned close to an old hatless soldier who dozed far
back in the chair, head to one side, shoulders caught against the rungs. His red beard was
clipped unevenly, his wedding ring, tight about a dirty finger, was green. His nails were
chewed like those of a young girl. His discharge papers rose out of his upper pocket blue
and torn, and the paper disks hanging near his throat turned from red to black in the
changing light. She touched his knee.
“Captain, have you a match?”
The eyes opened, the lips were moistened, they shut.
“No.” The answer came in low bar-owner’s German. He folded his thick hands
together and slept.
“Have you come home to be rude to a lady?”
A shawl was miraculously unearthed from a bare corner, the black beads hung
over a soldier’s back. Cold air swept about the walls.
Slowly, eyes still shut, the big man’s hand moved towards a pocket, the
weight shifted slightly, the hand went deeper, the face was unshaven, dark, still passive.
With another movement, he emptied his pocket on the table, the hand dropped back to his
side and did not swing, but hung straight and unmoving. Among the dull
coins, the knife, the tube of ointment, the cerulean clipping, the bits of wire, Gerta found
a match and flicking it beneath the table, cursed and broke its head for being damp.
Children were looking in at the windows, watched with glee the Madame,
matron and the uniformed Herr Snow.
“Was it a long journey, Captain?”