It seemed to Willi, almost, that she had prompted him to follow Earl away from that party and off that hill to that white, steaming spring. He imagined her pale hand, ghostly even when she was alive, hovering over that pasture, her finger pointing. "See them. Cages are everywhere."
Everywhere. Everywhere. Willi tried to shut his ears against the chant of it. He had to sing nursery rhymes sometimes, children's songs, songs his mother used to sing before he went to bed, to keep his grandmother's refrain of cages from his mind. Everywhere.
And the irony of that hot, artesian spring—letting the horses live just so they could die.
HE'D STOOD BEFORE HER HOUSE
. A triangle of vineyard was visible in the distance between buildings—the vines marching up the Mosel valley slopes against the dark soil. Willi had thought of people out there, walking the vineyards in the sun, the Mosel flowing wide and swift below them. It would be good to be one of them. He played with the possibility—avoiding this encounter, letting his life be what it had been, what his parents had made it for him. He raised his finger to the bell and let it fall, raised it again. He imagined the freedom of the Mosel valley, its space.
But he pushed the bell. And heard the sound of steps beyond the door, then the sound of bolts sliding backwards through their journals. The door swung open. A musty smell of interior space washed over Willi, and an old woman looked out at him. Fine white hair. Skin age-spotted. Nothing in her eyes spoke recognition.
Then her expression changed: the slightest opening of her eye-lid, sliding like dry, almost translucent paper over her pupil, the smallest forward movement of her jaw. She settled back into a standing repose. Her index finger at her side twitched. From within the house something shrieked.
"So," she said, her voice a sparrow's. "You came."
She turned and walked into her house. She didn't invite him in, but she left the door open. From within came the smell of carpet cleaner, room freshener, bleach, bird droppings, an old woman's sweat and age. Willi hesitated, then stepped into that smell. Standing on the carpet, he held the door for a moment, looked back at the bright afternoon street. Then he pushed it shut, heard the latch precisely click.
She was already sitting in a stuffed chair too large for her. Her elbows seemed to rise up to meet the chair arms. Frail bird wings. She stared at Willi, unblinking. He felt she might spring from the chair and flap toward him, crying a hoarse bird cry. Then one of her fingers moved. Only that. He saw the half-moon cuticle, the soft, wrinkled flesh around the knuckle.
"You may sit," she said.
The finger indicated a high-back chair, maroon leather, brass tacks. Willi looked at it. She'd allowed him into her house, but did she really know who he was? She showed no wonder, no welcome—just this dusty expectation, this failure of surprise. But she waited for him to sit, so he sat, looked around the room.
"You may look at me. It's why you came."
He looked: a small woman, in pale green slacks and a gray cardigan. Thin, a frail neck. Her hair straggled in loose white whorls around her head, a dark mole visible through it just above her forehead. But other than the hair, she had a preened look. Willi was aware of her joints: the sharp elbows on the arms of the chair, the knees bent inside the slacks, the brittle wrists—a body of breakable angles.
"I'm Willi," he said. "Hermann's son. Your son, Hermann. I'm..."
He let his voice drop off. She stared at him without expression. Was he in the wrong house? What if this woman was not his grandmother but someone deluded, who mistook him for someone she'd been waiting for?
"Do you think I don't recognize my own blood?"
Her voice was faded, weary, with a tinge of cynical humor—not unfriendly but not inviting, either. For a moment Willi didn't understand what she meant. That strange term: blood.
"I came," he said. "I've never met you. I came because ..."
Her finger on the chair arm lifted. Just that. "I suspect you don't know why you came or what you want," she said. "No more than your father."
So: just like that, the heart of things.
A shriek. Willi started. Behind him a white bird clawed its cage. She ignored it. Two of her fingers moved on the chair arm, coming together. Shears.
"How could he know?" she asked. "Cut off from his blood."
Again that jarring, dissonant term: not mother, not family, not even relationship—but blood. Willi had imagined some moments of awkwardness, the protocols of greeting, exclamations of delight, perhaps even tears, all perhaps embarrassing, but nevertheless welcome. Wanted. But she had not even said his name.
"I came for a reason," he said. If she would not be surprised at his presence, he would stick to business. "I need to ask you something."
But she shook her head. Only once, a jerk more than a shake. Almost a spasm. But it stopped his words. "You came to find yourself," she said. "Whatever else you think."
Behind Willi, the white bird fluttered. Its wings battered the silver wires. Willi turned from his grandmother to watch it. It was a medium-sized bird with a powerful, curved beak. A cockatoo, he thought. Perfectly round eyes. It fluttered for a while, then stopped, seemed exhausted, its wings drooping, one eye staring at him. Something about the bird's dark eye reminded Willi of how his own father stared out the window every morning, and he realized that his father was staring in the direction of this house. Staring at a place he'd canceled from his life.
"I think I've made a mistake," he said.
"Of course you have."
He'd begun to rise, but her words confused him, and he sank down again. She sighed. "All right," she said. "Hello. I'm your grandmother. And you're Willi. It's so good to finally meet you. I've been waiting years and years. Is that better?"
She smiled, her lips velvety, stretched across her teeth, erasing for a moment the wrinkles around her mouth. She lifted her chin, raised her hands, linked her fingers, regarded him. The bird fluttered again, and Willi cast his eyes to it.
"Do you like the bird?" she asked.
Willi didn't know. He shrugged. He didn't know what to look at here.
"It lives in that cage," she said. "Sometimes I let it out. It flies around the room, then returns to its cage and flaps around like that, trying to get out. What do you think of that?"
He couldn't think at all. The conversation was an escalator he'd stepped on, changing speed and direction, tripping him every time he matched its momentum.
"Is it foolish to return to its cage?" she prodded. She lifted her chin. The thin, loose skin under her neck stretched tight, then sagged again.
Willi sensed it was somehow an important question. That, in spite of her tone, there was gravity here. That she'd been waiting years to ask this question. Imagining it. Playing out the possible answers in her mind.
"I suppose so," he said. The bird's wings drooped at its sides, its body so limp he thought it might fall off its perch. "If it lets itself be caged when it could be free."
"I see. So your father would say, too."
A shiver of alarm ran through Willi—that she was speaking not with him but with his father, whose name she would not speak. Arguing with him. And Willi was only a substitute in an argument she had to have. An argument she needed to win more than she needed anything—but which, all these years, she'd been prevented from having.
"Its food is in that cage," she said. "Its perch and water. Is it foolish to return to those?"
Willi was somewhat calmed. He felt a responsibility to speak well in his father's place. "It would learn to find food and water on its own," he said.
"I suppose it might. If it lived long enough. But suppose it angered me by not returning to its cage, and I locked the cage with the food and water inside and shut the windows and put all other food into cupboards and left the house so as not to hear its chattering—and when I returned, suppose I found it clinging to the outside of the cage, dead, trying to get the food and water there. Would you say then it was a wise and happy bird?"
Willi was astonished that she would even imagine such a scene—this bird, this pet of hers that he supposed assuaged her loneliness. "That would be cruel," he cried.
She was unmoved. "Of course it would be cruel. We are not discussing cruelty. We're discussing the wisdom of birds. The nature of cages."
"But if you're determined to kill it, it doesn't matter if it's foolish or wise. It has no choice."
"Choices," she said. She gazed at him, her eyes unblinking. "Of course. Your father again. You chose to come to my door, I suppose?"
"Yes, I did."
"No doubt." She looked around the room. "Cages," she said. "They're everywhere. There." She unknotted her hands and her finger flicked, indicating the bird cage. "There." It flicked again, and Willi felt the walls around him, the door with its bolts. "Out there." She lifted her forearm off the chair and swept the air with an abrupt, backhand movement that shrank the world and condensed the sky.
"The cages just get bigger," she said. "Until people forget they exist. Our cages make us happy. That's why we return to them. We want only to be allowed to think they don't exist."
"That isn't true."
She laughed, a dry twitter. "And so he makes my point for me," she said to the bird.
Then she lifted her hand slowly off the chair arm, and one finger grazed a withered breast. "And some cages are in here," she said. "The important ones. That's why you're here. In spite of your father, you've returned to your blood."
Somewhere in the house a clock ticked and tocked and ticked and tocked.
The old woman's white hair moved in separate strands above her head, as if caught in small, individual currents of air. She placed one fragile, loosely wired knee over the other, rearranging her bones, and she looked at Willi with eyes no more reflective of light than raisins.
"Whatever your father told you," she said. "It was not the truth."
"He didn't tell me anything. I didn't even know you were alive until ... Until the funeral. And then my mother told me about you."
"As bad. She knows only what he told her."
"There were things she didn't know," Willi admitted.
"So you've come to me. As I said—to know yourself. You've returned. Choice?" She smiled, lifted weightless shoulders. "Cages. Blood. Fulfillment. There is no difference."
Willi felt he'd come to a place where time whirled slowly around itself, forcing conversation into circles, spiraling constantly toward a single idea. He could think of nothing to say.
"You pity me, don't you?" she said. "An old woman, alone. No husband. No son. You thought perhaps you'd give me a gift. That you'd reunite the family. That I'd be grateful."
Willi flushed, embarrassed. Exposed. It was true. He'd imagined her gratitude. He felt childish, naive.
"I have only one regret in my life," she said. "And that is that he did not win the war."
"He?" The word came out even as he tried to clamp his mouth shut on it, already knowing.
"A great man with a great vision," she said. "Brought down by betrayal. And then made small by lies. Diminished by them."
She stopped. Her finger on the arm of the chair jerked involuntarily. She stilled it by lacing her hands together again in front of her. She looked as if she were praying, or performing a magic act—bringing from those hands some enormous and wonderful thing. Then she dropped them, empty, into her lap. Willi felt again that she was having an old argument, that she'd said all these things before. It was almost as if he'd walked into the house and happened upon it.
"An old woman's dream," she said. "Is there anything more pathetic?"
THE HOUSE SWALLOWED AND MIXED
all order. He would be unable to remember when she rose from the chair, but she must have, for he drank tea from a cup she handed him and ate pastry that must have been shaped by her blue-veined hands. He lifted his cup from the saucer and set it down, lifted his pastry from a plate of the same pattern that he held under his chin to catch crumbs, and he wondered what he was doing there. He had thought it might be a quick visit: He would ask her what he couldn't ask his father, and she would answer or refuse to answer—but he had thought those could be the only possible responses. He hadn't envisioned the sun moving slowly across the sky outside while he remained in the house, hadn't imagined the endless echo of the endless clock. He drank tea, ate pastry, caught his crumbs, let his cup be refilled, accepted a second pastry so as not to offend.
"I was in the cathedral of light," she told him. "At Nuremberg. I heard him speak. He showed us, those who were there. He built with light. An architect of light. A genius. Other architects had built to shield us from rain and wind, but he girded light against darkness itself. Welded light together. Riveted light to itself. We knew the world would never be the same."
But Willi had learned of this in school, and he had asked his father about it, and he spoke for his father now, confident. "Spotlights," he said. "That's all it was."
"What can you know? You think because you've been a boy and played with flashlights in the dark, you know."
But Willi did know. He'd read about it, and his father had spoken of it: Speer's cathedral, made of spotlights pointing into the sky, beams meeting like rafters ten thousand feet up, and a hundred thousand people gathered under those insubstantial filaments, imagining a structure that was all illusion, a structure that wasn't there.
"Yes," he said. "It was nothing but big flashlights. And brutal boys."
Her finger jerked. She tried to disguise the movement by lifting her hand, waving it as if shooing a fly. "You weren't there," she said. "You don't know lie from truth. It was a cathedral, the greatest ever built. Those of us there were baptized that night inside it. We were baptized in light. And reborn into our own, true blood."
She picked up her teacup, sipped, set it down, following with her eyes the meticulous movement of her hand, the cup placed precisely and almost soundlessly in the center of the saucer. The bird fluttered, scraped its claws upon the wire cage with a sound like fingernails against a chalkboard.