"Willi, I need to ask you," his father said haltingly. "You went to see her, yes. And I assumed. But maybe not. Did she tell you?"
"Tell me what?"
Willi knew. But he did not feel forgiving. He wanted to force his father to say it.
"
Lebensborn.
Did she speak of it?"
"I've just come from her funeral. Is this...?"
But his father held up his hands. "Please. I've been waiting for two hours. It has taken all my courage to ask."
This shook Willi. That his father would speak of courage.
"Yes," he replied. "She did."
Something frozen in his father thawed. His breathing became visible. Willi realized his fear had been that Willi would not know. And he would have to tell him.
"She told you, then, that I was...?"
"She told me," Willi said. He was not used to his father stumbling over sentences. To have difficulty naming, giving voice.
His father nodded. Willi moved across the living room. They took up familiar spots, looking out the window. Only this time they were speaking. Or trying to. Each of them half-speaking, making a whole of it.
"One must go a long way to leave such a thing," his father said.
Willi remembered standing outside his grandmother's house in the darkness beneath the invisible stars. He spoke what he had thought then, though the words seemed strange, aloud.
"They sacrificed you, didn't they?"
A muffled sound came from within his father's chest. He cleared his throat.
"Yes," he said. "Yes. That's it."
He gazed upon the darkening city. "It is the other side of it all," he said. "An evil coin. Two sides, but the same false metal. Death and birth both made wrong. Death to those we chose as scapegoats and foreigners. And life to ourselves."
"But not life."
"Not life. Just more death. Pretending to be life."
The first lights in the city came on, out of their nowhereness. Willi and his father had always before watched the morning city, the lights blinking off in the sun. Willi wondered if the last one to turn off was the first to turn on. And if it was always the same one. Or if the smallest variations of shadow, of cloud, changed things, so that the pattern never repeated.
"I've tried to understand what they did," his father said. "My parents. I've tried to understand how they could. I look for models. I can't help it. Perhaps it's why I became a historian. The stories of history image each other like photographs and their negatives. But I have to go almost beyond history for a model for what they did."
He paused, gathering strength and thought, and Willi waited.
"I think of Abraham," his father said. "With Isaac bound before him. Abraham did not know his god was merciful. He thought his god was hard and unforgiving. Those who see Abraham as an example of faith forget the god he knew as he raised the knife. That god desired blood. People imagine only the god who stopped the knife. But Abraham raised the knife for a god greedy for the blood of his son. Think of it. His god was more than he knew. But he didn't know the more when he raised the knife."
Lights were popping on in the near and distant dimming now. They ran in parallel lines above the walking path along the Rhine and smeared their reflections in the river. They ran in other parallel lines outlining the streets. They lost their order in the distance, became a jumble, anything the eye wanted them to be.
"So much is never known," Willi's father said softly. "What did Sara say when Abraham came to her, full of wonder at what had been revealed to him? How far did he get in his story before Sara grabbed the child from him? The story we have exists because it is incomplete. It could not survive"—he paused, his voice became a thin, weak reed—"a real mother's words."
Willi's last resistance dropped away: to hear his father want his mother. To realize how much effort it still took him to resist her. Below them an S-bahn train, coming up from Frankfurt, rumbled along the Rhine, its windows flickering with interior lights. There were people on that train, looking out the windows, seeing the world like a movie, the castles along the Rhine like fairy tales, things imagined, unreal. Did those people look up and see this window, its light, the figures standing in it? A glimpse. Did they wonder why the figures stood so still?
Willi's father spoke again, things long on his mind. "Inspiration is as much deletion as it is revelation. Our knowledge of anything comes not in the fullness of the word but in its careful canceling. The words by which we know are defined by words unsaid. And those unsaid words might be the ruination of faith. The ruination of God Himself."
He paused and then said, "
Lebensborn.
"
That single word. He breathed it out and let it stand and let it disappear and let the silence cover it. Then he went on. "Well of Life. Indeed. Isaac's story is never told. Only the story of the god. Or the demon. Isaac asked his father where the sacrifice would come from. Abraham answered that God would provide it. What did Isaac think of his father's faith when it dawned on him what that answer meant? We never hear. The story of God might not survive our hearing it.
"And then history shuffles the negatives, and the story reappears, reversed. My parents, and thousands like them, reenacted it—thousands of Isaacs just like me, sacrificed to a demon who knew no mercy. The angels of a different god had to appear to stop the knives. If you can call bombers angels. Swarms of them over our cities."
He reached out and placed his arm around Willi's shoulder. The gesture was awkward, stiff. They didn't move toward each other or away, the arm like a bridge between them. Not close, not even comfortable. But connected. The city below them was nothing but light, and their own faint reflection floating, imposed, above it.
"I've never been able to say these things," his father said. "How can Isaac not be ashamed? He's seen his life reduced to nothing but his death. The whole meaning of his life nothing but his death. Life, but not life. Every thought and dream he might have had swept away. Made meaningless. And then he is untied. What life is he to live now? How can he not be ashamed? How can he not be silent? The story we have never considers God's cruelty to the boy—to wait until Isaac has seen the knife raised. Where can Isaac go from there? Perhaps he chooses to forget. But when the story is its negative, and Isaac is sacrificed to a demon who intends no mercy..."
He stopped, unable to finish. Then he gathered his emotions and went on, his voice husky, "When you were very young, you gave me back the life my parents stole from me. I didn't think anything could do that. I didn't know such mercy was possible. Didn't know it could still come."
Willi's throat swelled up.
"But I didn't know what I was doing," he said. "I don't remember thinking. Don't remember..."
"It doesn't matter. Mercy is a mystery."
For a moment Willi couldn't see anything but a great, round blur of light.
"I only wish I'd told you these things long ago," his father said.
Willi blinked, lifted a hand to his eyes. The individual lights returned.
"Do you know what the Nazis called the Jews?" his father asked, his voice dryer now, as if he had to divert them both to something more abstract. "Do you know what name they forced every Jewish man and woman to take? Along with the yellow stars, the names? The men they called Israel, the women Sara. Israel is another name for Jacob, Isaac's son. They spoke of so many Israels, so many Saras, put on trains, taken to camps."
He let the image sink in.
"And then," he said, "they reversed the story. Perverted it and created it anew."
WILLI WATCHED TED'S HAND
in Surety's mane, and he thought of all these things. He listened to the slide of cartilage and tendon as Orlando lifted a hoof, and he looked at Earl, who had asked him if he meant it, that they should kill Magnus, and he thought,
Here it is again. The same story. Sacrifice and gods. Or demons. But if this is the same story, who are we in it?
Was the story so much a part of him that he carried it with him? It seemed he had chanced upon things here, stumbled up from that fire and followed Earl. Almost foolish. Almost bumbling. But what if all along he had pushed events before him? An envelope of influence he carried. It frightened him to think of it. Could it be? He couldn't make the thought diminish, couldn't make it dwindle and go.
He felt his grandmother close. Hovering. Waiting, like Earl and Carson and Ted, for his answer. Why had he spoken of killing Magnus Yarborough? Did he mean it? Or was it just a thing he'd said? Found it in his mind and spoken it?
No: He'd meant it. It was a real possibility. And if he'd been surprised to find it in his mind, he had spoken it deliberately.
"Yes," he said to Earl. "I did."
"You agree with Ted? You think we should actually do it?"
This was a different question—the difference between possibility and actuality, between choice and decision. A fifth person here awaited his answer—not just these friends of his, and not just his grandmother, but his father, too, somehow and somewhere—maybe only in Willi's mind, but still present, listening and waiting.
Cages are everywhere,
his grandmother would say. And his father would say,
Maybe. Or not. But even then you can make decisions. Cages do not determine what you do.
He'd said it, Willi realized, to have the choice. To define, if that's what it was, the cage. To see its limits, its size and scope. And then to say,
I will not be my cage. My blood. My history. My story. I do not have to be these things. Do not have to be driven to the one thing, the only. There are reasons beyond the cage.
"No," he said. "I do not think that we should do it."
Ted glared at him. "Why'd you say it, then?"
"So that we know," Willi said.
"Know what? What the hell's that mean?"
Willi shrugged. He couldn't explain. Even in his native language he couldn't explain. Even if they were going to do the same as they would have done if he hadn't spoken and hadn't considered the choice, still, it was different. Maybe someday he would tell his father. His father would understand. Willi felt his grandmother, like a dried-out wisp of thistle seed, leave his mind, leave the land here, the horses, the story they all lived, and slip away, unseen.
T
HEY WAITED FOR A NEW MOON
. Carson drove to the church of abandoned cars and sat in his pickup behind it. The dark, humped shapes of the cars, like raised burrows of large animals, rose out of the ground all around him. Starlight glittered off bumpers and windshield wipers and windows, off the backs of mirrors, off hubcaps and grills—dozens of softly shining blurs scattered on the hillside. Carson's grandfather, even in the dark, could probably identify each car. He might have been the last person in Twisted Tree who could narrate the story of the county by naming the cars abandoned here. Carson wondered how long it would be before the land itself lost its stories, the names of places and families disappearing, until deserted buildings were scattered more widely than these vehicles but in similar disarray throughout the county. And how long after that before all the people who might recall those buildings and the people who lived in them were also gone—moved away or dead?
He couldn't afford to think the thought. He stepped out of the pickup, stood in the cold, his breath white, listening. A car with a bad muffler pulled off the highway and labored up the hill, then unsteady headlights splashed the grass near him and shut off entirely, and Ted's car rolled out of the dark like one of the abandoned hulks come to life. Carson walked toward it, opened the door before it had even stopped moving, and stepped into the back seat. Ted had already picked up Earl and Willi. "The fewer cars the better," Ted had said. "I'll drive."
"Smells like tacos," Carson said, settling into his seat beside Earl.
"Supper." Ted unwrapped another Taco John's burrito, crumpled the greasy paper, threw it on the floorboards at his feet, and pulled around the pale white rectangle of the church. He turned his face sideways to eat, peering out the windshield over the limp burrito in his hand. He waited until he was on the highway to turn on his headlights, and when he did, they immediately dimmed, then brightened again. The loose wire under the dash sizzled, and the faint smell of ozone mingled with the smell of taco sauce and fried hamburger.
"How many of those things are you eating?" Earl asked.
"Five."
"Five?"
"I'm hungry." Ted took another bite, looked at what remained, then stuffed it all in his mouth.
"I haven't had a drink since we took those horses to my place," he said, still chewing. "But now I'm addicted to burritos."
"You haven't had a single drink?"
"Not one. It just didn't seem right. Those horses and all. Didn't seem right."
They honored this with a moment of silence, thinking what they were gathered to do. Then Carson broke the serious mood. "You eat that many burritos, I hope we're out a this car before they take effect."
"Small price to pay for being alcohol-free."
"Small price for you, maybe."
They came to the Lostman's Lake turnoff and drove past the lake, gray in the moonless night, ice creeping out from its shores toward the center where, barely visible, a few waves moved in a patch of open water. The cold weather had come hard and unrelenting, and stock ponds were frozen over, the entire land, within the space of a few days, turned to a sheet of iron.
Ted's flickering headlights discovered the old section line road, untracked, two snowy trails leading away into the darkness, ragged grass growing between them. The car plowed forward.
"We're going to leave tracks," Earl noted.
"Supposed to snow," Carson replied. "Should cover 'em up."
They silently watched the road unspool in the wan light and the occasional bush march by, skeletons of snow and ice against the darkness, whitely reflecting the headlights, redly the taillights, and then fading into the distant dark behind them. The snow crunched, the car's suspension creaked, the muffler pounded. Once a bird of immense proportions loomed in the windshield, appearing first as a faint vapor in the sky growing quickly to a cloud and then, before Ted could stop or any of them could even clutch a door handle, becoming suddenly a bird with white undersides of wings flung hugely out of the light and into the brief darkness between hood and windshield, filling the glass, obscuring all vision with out flung feathers and great eyes peering in at them before swooping upward, soundless and gone, and the road still reeling out of its long distance.