“He’s tired still,” Etta said. “He’s tired from the train.”
Max stepped back from the crowd and looked up at the dome. She stepped back with him. It was fat and round as an onion and it didn’t reach for the sky like the grand spires did in the city. All its beauty was hidden inside. Masons had worked for years on the arches that ran to the altar, all those hands working the stone, and it was spun fine as sugar.
He almost forgot to dip his fingers when he came inside. She took his hand and set it over the water, and he remembered then and crossed himself. They took a pew near the center. She sat there every time she came. All the people had their regular places, women on the left and men on the right, but the rules had loosened with the war, and so she sat beside Max now and nobody minded. She sat in the middle and Ilse was up front, and some of the ladies came twice each day and they sat closest to the back so they could see who came late and who didn’t come at all. They were the scorekeepers. They shook their heads because people weren’t devout the way they should be. The boys and girls in town hardly ever came to services because the HJ and the German League took up all their time, and the adults weren’t much better. Ilse was inside already, just beneath the stained glass window of Kilian the missionary giving food to the poor, who looked more confused than grateful for his help. Etta could see her gray kerchief pulled tight around her head. They would see each other afterward. They’d walk together to the cemetery and tend to the stones.
Pfarrer Büchner and the servers stood by the altar steps. He’d gotten even fatter now, and his robe was big as a curtain around his belly. “Introibo ad altare Dei,” he said, his words clipped, hard as hail hitting a roof the way he said the t’s and the d’s, still foreign to her ear after a lifetime of Sunday services. Max had learned Latin in the gymnasium, and Greek, too, and he could understand the priest’s words, and Georg was better still the way he learned his languages. He memorized the conjugations and the constructions, all the details the others complained about were the things he loved best, and he wrote out the grammar exercises though he’d already done them all at least twice before. He took languages apart the way others dismantled an engine or a clock. And when she asked him why—why dead languages and not something living—he was serious when he answered. “Because they give me no cause to talk to anyone,” that’s what he said, and he went back to his books. If only he were home now, too, the house would be complete.
Büchner began to confess. “Confiteor Deo omnipotenti,” he said, and she understood none of it. She squeezed Max’s hand. His skin was smooth, soft as the hand of a child and not a soldier’s hand, not the hand of someone who had marched in the cold and the dark, who carried a gun and knew how to shoot. She wondered for a moment what those hands had done. What he had seen so far away and why the officers had sent him home. All the other boys were leaving, even ones who were young like Georg and hadn’t finished school yet. They were leaving and Max was coming home and the letter never said why. The priest kissed the altar and then stood straight, his back to the people. The servers knelt on the steps leading to the altar. “Kyrie, eleison,” the priest said, “Christe, eleison.”
A few people coughed or shifted on the hard wooden stands. Etta looked over at Max. He was wide awake, his eyes still focused on the stained glass window, as if he were in a movie house and not in church. She had seen that look before, the time they had gone together to the big planetarium in München and they sat close together in that dark room. He laughed when he saw the stars come into focus. Mutti, look how close they are, he’d said. The sky’s come down, it’s come into my hand. He was quiet that night on the train. He sat with his back to the window and closed his eyes, and he looked so young while he slept. Another year and he was gone. They sent him east, and when Etta saw the stars at night she wondered where he was and if he saw them, too.
“Gloria tibi, Domine,” said the priest. Someone near the front of the church sneezed violently, paused, and sneezed again. She looked to Max, suppressing a smile, but something wasn’t right. His lips were moving. He began to speak, quietly at first and then louder, so the people beside him could hear. He was speaking in Latin, in Greek, in all the dead languages they’d taught him in school. People turned to see. They turned around and looked at Max, and old Herr Gerberich’s mouth was open wide because no one had interrupted mass before, not even when Henriette Mayer the diabetic had gone into sugar shock. She fell back against the pew and her head hit the wood, but she fell quietly, with decorum. Men carried her out like an old plank. They hoisted her up and carried her, and old Büchner went on with his sermon and didn’t stop once to look.
“Maxima culpa,” Max called out. He stood up and pointed to the altar.
“Be quiet, Max. Be still and sit with me.” She reached for him. People were staring. Even Büchner had turned to look at them, tilting his head at the disruption.
Max looked up at the window and started to laugh, his mouth open wide. His eyes were clear like water. They were too pale to be human eyes. No, they were angel eyes, lit from within. “Mea maxima culpa,” he called out, reaching up with his hands. She didn’t recognize his laughter, it was not her son’s laughter, not the way her boy laughed, had ever laughed.
“Max, what are you doing?” She spoke low. This was madness, it wasn’t happening, and all the people looked at her. They’d take him if he acted this way. They’d take him away like they took Jürgen Hillen and nothing and no one could help then, not even his father and all the people he knew. She led him by the arm. He did not resist her touch. He went with her. She took him down the aisle, and when he refused to turn away from the window she pulled him backward, through the doorway and out to the steps.
4
Georg was in the middle of the line. It wasn’t even six in the morning and they were marching already. They carried shovels over their shoulders and marched like soldiers to the pit. Every day they dug trenches at the Vorfeldzone of the wall. The boys at the front held a banner, and the people stopped to watch. This new town was nothing like Heidenfeld. There were no fine houses here, no carvings above the doors and no stone bridge. Not even the doctors had cars. People walked and rode rusty bicycles and pushed buggies, and their manure piles reached to the roofs. It had been two weeks and two days since he had come to the wall. Two weeks, two days, and fourteen hours. The numbers gave him no comfort.
They came to the pit and started to dig without anyone telling them what to do. Georg shoveled dirt into his bucket. Boys stood along the trench walls, their faces pinched from the cold. Behind the trench there was barbed wire and an old concrete pillbox to protect the soldiers inside against enemy fire. The boys worked one next to the other, clinging like mountaineers to the sides of the hole. He felt the first drops across the tops of his hands. It was a relief when it started. All the heaviness was gone from the air. The drops rolled down their faces and under their collars, and their undershirts stuck to their skin. By midmorning the water was up to their calves. It flowed down the sides of the trench, bringing that smooth dirt down and foaming like a river in the channel at the bottom. The soil was heavy by the trench. It was thick as clay and black, and still they worked their shovels. They leaned in close and dug.