It wasn’t easy to sit around the table anymore. They didn’t joke anymore or tell funny stories now that the orders were coming. They talked about who might leave next and what had happened to the ones who’d gone already, the ones who went up north. He tried not to listen but he heard the news anyway. Schiemann had gone to the forest, and he was there still, and Reidel was shot, and a truck had run over both Baumgartner’s feet and he was home now and all his toes and his ankles and the arches of his feet were ruined. They knew who had died. They said their names in low voices, with reverence, and they talked about towns as if they were people, as if they, too, fell dead on the field. They talked about Nimwegen and Arnhem and Oosterbeek, and what about Aachen, what would become of it. The Amis were coming and the English, too, and they were pushing toward the wall.
They sat around the tables and talked like generals. Surrendering was worse than dying, they said. Better to bleed out. Curse the Jews because this was their doing. Curse the Ivans, too, and Georg was lonely when he sat with them. He was lonely even with Müller two chairs down. They listened to the radio and jabbed each other, and sometimes when there was no news from the field they reminisced instead. They remembered the biggest rallies they’d seen and all the high officers they’d met and they called Müller out then, they called him dais boy and a pretty blond thing. Müller blushed at that. His ears went red, and he waved the talk aside, and when they didn’t stop, he left the table.
Georg must have seen him there at the rally. He must have looked straight at him and never known. He’d taken the train that year. He was one of a dozen boys from Heidenfeld who went all the way to Nürnberg when they were only nine. They weren’t old enough for the HJ yet, but they wore their Deutsches Jungvolk uniforms with their special belt buckles and that was almost as good. He went because his father was head teacher and not because of any gifts of his own, but he was proud anyway. He set his fingertips to the glass and watched the fields and trees. Mutti had been worried when he left. She packed plenty of chocolate in his bags. “You’ll be sharing a tent with older boys,” she told him, “who knows what food they’ll have there and what hours you’ll keep.” She would have been happier if Max had come, too, but Max was on crutches that September with a sprained foot and so Georg went without him.
The boys jostled each other on the train and talked without stopping, not even to eat. “There’ll be lights,” one of them said, “and rockets, too, and we’ll have to shade our eyes.” Yes, they said, yes, there’ll be rockets for certain. They spoke of banners and marching bands and regiments called to order, of tanks and horses and officers in boots. At each stop more boys came aboard, until all the seats were taken and boys stood in the aisles. They wore short pants and pressed shirts, with ribbons and patches and shoulder braids showing their order and their rank. There were banner boys and band members and cavalry boys without their horses, glider trainees in blue and a solitary HJ sailor with his square collar and his navy cap. They were rolling toward the city, those boys, rolling in from every direction, and Georg was certain the city could not contain them all. It would flood and its buildings crack, and more still would come.
They changed trains in Würzburg, and hundreds more joined them there, city boys who stood taller somehow because they lived on busy streets and could go to the movie house whenever they wanted and their fathers drove cars. They passed through Kitzingen and Erlangen and Fürth, and they were getting close now. They pressed their faces against the glass to see.
When the train doors opened and they stepped out, even the oldest boys went quiet. It was a city built of canvas and not of stone. There were thousands of white tents, entire fields set in rows that extended outward like star rays. There were bands, too, on every corner. The city was filled with the sound of trumpets and drums. The group from Heidenfeld marched between the tents. They blinked in wonder. Boys from other towns and other provinces walked with them. The groups flowed together as they went, and all the streets were like rivers. They wore the same uniforms, those northern boys with their blond hair and the dark-eyed ones from Bavaria and the ones from Berlin and still farther east, who were sharp-faced and had a funny way of talking. All Georg could see was boys, boys in every direction, and still there was order in the city.
They slept on cots and ate at long tables. It was September, but it felt like June, and it was warm even at night. They marched to the plaza, and women in sundresses waved at them and threw flowers. A few ran to the older boys and gave them kisses, leaving coral and scarlet gashes across their cheeks. The sun shone the whole day long. The city was golden in its light and smelled of roses. This is how he remembered it still. Gentle light and smiling women and roses underfoot. Boys sat on the platform during the introductions, under the banners and the flags. That’s where Müller was. That’s where they put him. He was one of those golden heads. The others stood in rows. They listened to one speaker after the next. Tall men in uniforms who talked about work and the joy it brings, who talked about destiny and keeping Germany pure. The Führer whose voice rose and fell like a teacher’s, who promised them that the works of the Reich would endure forever. We make art for ourselves, he told them, for Germans and no one else because we are all blood relatives. Every one of them was united by German blood and they would work together to create something beautiful, something for the ages. Georg listened for hours, he stood all day with the other boys in the arena but they weren’t tired, and when the sun set at last and the sky went to purple and then to black, the lights came on. They came on together and shot pillars into the sky.
“God,” Georg said then. He’d forgotten all his languages. God was the only word he knew, and he said it again and again. They were in a cathedral. It was made of silver and light, and he wept at the sight of it and shouted with the others until his voice cracked and broke. He expected angels to come down and join them there inside those pillars. Not angels with ringlets and lyres; no, they’d be angry angels with sky-colored eyes, who carried swords and daggers, and they knew no tenderness and no mercy. He didn’t sleep that night or the next. None of them slept. They were restless and dreamy, and their thoughts went round in circles.
The effects lingered for weeks. He was absentminded when he sat with Mutti at the table, and when she asked him about his time in the city, he looked over her shoulder and toward the window. “It was something,” he’d say. “It was all right.” She asked him again, but it was no use, and so she cleared his plate and left him. He paid no attention in school either, drawing pictures instead of pillars and lightning bolts and angels with slanted eyes. His father called him up and whipped his hands with green reeds, and he woke for just a moment, he woke to feel the sting, but he went dreamy again before he’d reached his desk. When they teased him now for being the fattest in the group or running knock-kneed as a girl, he could muster no anger. They’d been there, too. They’d seen those lights in the sky, and Müller had sat high above them.
Schneider came running to the trench with the news. His boots were both untied, and it took him a while to catch his breath. “They got them,” is what he said. He coughed and fanned his face. “They brought them back already.”