1
It was worry that made her fat. It made her fat even as it made other mothers thin. Etta shifted her weight, lifting first one foot and then the other. They had never bothered her before, but now they ached whenever she stood too long. Nothing to eat but cabbage and potatoes and soggy bread. No butter most weeks and no meat and the milk ran thin like water, and still she managed to gain weight. Josef hadn’t said anything to her, not even when her finger outgrew her wedding ring and she began to wear the cherished gold band on a cord around her neck, but she caught him yesterday watching her during breakfast as she unfastened the top button of her skirt. She had turned away from him then, angry at herself for giving in to discomfort and at him, too, for noticing.
She turned the spigot. It was warm in the kitchen, and the windows ran rivulets from the steam. She washed the potatoes and peeled them, stopping every now and again to wipe her forehead. It had been two years since they’d all been together at the table. Two years since Max had left for the front, and now Georg was at the Hitler School, and there was no noise in the house and no laughter. Housework was her tonic. It was her company those afternoons when Josef went to drink his beer. She cleaned more now than she had when both her boys were home and making messes in their rooms. She washed their sheets every week and scrubbed their floors and took their feather comforters outside to pound them in the air. If work were prayer, then she was the most devout woman in Heidenfeld. Her house was cleaner than all the others, and she raked the leaves from her garden twice each day.
She brought the cabbage pot from its place in the cellar, down by the plums and the apples and the jelly jars. She’d braised the cabbage with peppercorns and apple slices and a dash of wine. The juniper berries had gone soft, and all the juices ran sweet. Just three more hours now, and Max would be back home. He’d sit down with them at the table, and she wouldn’t press him to talk. She wouldn’t ask him anything because boys needed rest when they came back. They needed time to get their bearings. Josef had grumbled when she brought him the letter. He’d lifted it high to the light and set it back down. “It makes no sense,” he said, “it doesn’t sound right,” but she shushed him. “Don’t ask why. Be glad,” she told him, “be thankful he’s coming home.” She had washed Max’s shirts already and ironed his pants with vinegar, and just this morning she’d scrubbed his window again so he could see the river from his chair. The house was almost ready. She hummed while she worked. She rattled the pot lids and took out the plates.
“Du, Etta,” Josef called over the sound of the radio. “Stop your singing.”
He was prickly today, but she paid him no mind. Mornings were hardest for him. He missed his classroom and his chalkboards and the students sitting at their desks. They had been nice enough about it, though everyone knew that he had started to forget things, basic things a teacher needed to know, and had taken to rapping the chalkboard with his walking stick. They had a party for him when he left and gave him a hammered silver crucifix, and the mayor came and spoke. The students were polite. They stood for him and clapped, and a few stayed late to help him pack. He didn’t talk to her when he came home that day. He carried the boxes to his workshop and stacked them by the wall, and he labeled each one in his fine script. She stood by the door, and when he was done they walked together to the kitchen. The new teacher was less strict than Josef, Etta had heard, and even laughed in class, and the students loved her already. They didn’t know about his forgetfulness and the fear it brought. They didn’t understand, she thought, how could they?
He came without her calling. More than twenty-five years away from the army, and still he kept to his schedule. Lunch at twelve and dinner at six and to bed by half past nine. He looked at the stewpot when he sat down. The meat was from their friend Ilse, whose daughter had a farm up in the hills. “You take too much from her,” he’d told her once when she came back with a package from Ilse. “We eat just fine with the tickets you get. Rationing hasn’t hurt you any,” and she sucked in her belly then. She tried to make herself small.
“It’s for later,” Etta told him, bringing him his plate with cabbage and blutwurst. The stew meat was for Max, who needed a good meal when he came home and not just blutwurst. Awful stuff, blutwurst, all blood and no sausage. She clasped her hands together. “Thank you, God,” she said. “Thank you for our food and drink,” and he began before she had finished. He emptied his plate and filled it again.
“It’s almost time,” Etta said. He’d spent the morning in Würzburg with the cousins. They lived in a flat on Semmelstrasse with a refrigerator and a telephone. They’d called the school secretary, who came running to let Etta know when he’d be coming. “God bless your boy,” she’d told Etta, “I’m coming with good news,” and now he was on the afternoon train and he was almost home.
“No need for us both to go.” He dipped his bread in the sausage juices, working in circles around the plate.
“We’ll walk together,” she said. “It won’t take but an hour.” It was no good staying mad. It raised the bile. It was bad for his liver, but he wouldn’t listen.
Josef stood up from the table. He hooked his thumbs beneath his waistband and hoisted up his pants. A moment later the radio came on in the living room, as high as it would go. It crackled and cleared, and the song began. They played the same songs one day after the next. Funny tunes that mocked the Amis and the British, and songs for the wives at home and marches, too, to speed things up. “When the night mists churn,” Josef sang, “to that lantern I’ll return, to you, my Lili Marlene.” He hit the low notes, and his voice quavered like a violin. He had a fine singing voice, and all those years smoking his pipe and breathing in chalk dust from his boards had only made it richer. They played “Lili Marlene” twice each morning and again in the evening. She knew that song and every mournful note, and when it began all the shadows lengthened in the house and her movements slowed.
Josef coughed when the song was done. He cleared his throat. The announcers came back on. She recognized their voices and the fine German they spoke, and she didn’t want to listen. Soldiers were dying in the East and it was the younger boys who were being called now. They were leaving for towns and islands that she’d never heard of before. Novgorod and Viipuri and Szeged, Izyum and Tilsit and Vilna and others that were stranger still, and who knew what kind of names these were and what kind of places. The announcers stammered sometimes with the words. They struggled mightily. One of the generals came on next. He talked about East Prussia, how the Soviets had made it inside but not for long. No, the Germans were waiting for the right moment to push them back, and it was always a general who spoke or a government minister and never the Führer.
Josef was taking out his notebook now. He was reaching for his pen. She brought him apple juice and emptied his ashtray, and he didn’t look up. He sat straight as a soldier in his favorite chair and wrote down what the general said. “What idiots. They’re doing it all wrong.” He wagged his finger at the radio as if it were one of his students.
For years he’d written in his journal, and even now he used a few sheets every day. He’d written about his brothers when they died, each of them in turn, with details of their memorial services and the condolence letters from their comrades and their friends, and when the war was done and he was the only child left to his parents, he wrote about the prices as they rose. In March of 1920, a bread roll weighed eighty grams and cost fifteen pfennig. He’d set the roll on Etta’s kitchen scale just to be sure the baker was right. In August 1922, the same roll cost twenty marks, and by October the following year, the roll, a single roll, weighed only fifty grams and cost half a million marks. People carried their money in barrows and buckets and in burlap bags, hauling all those pounds of paper over the cobblestones and to the store. Might as well have burned the money and used it to warm the house, Etta thought then, might as well have tossed it into the river and watched it float away, but her Josef wrote the numbers down, and when she asked him why, he just shook his head. “Otherwise we’ll forget,” he told her. “Someone has to keep the prices.” He wrote now while he listened to the radio. All those places where the fighting was, those faraway rivers and towns, and Josef sat there with his pen as if it were a tether and without it he’d be lost.