His eyes burned and stung. He rubbed them but it did no good. He wanted to be done with the digging. He wanted to pull away all the things and throw them to the street, and still he was scared to see what lay beneath. Max had told him once that people woke up inside their coffins. It was a scientific fact. A poor woman in Köln was buried alive, he said, she was buried in her coffin, and no one knew. His eyes shone in the telling. Her name was Bischof and she was young, and a pair of grave robbers saw the marks she’d left. All the papers talked about it and the radio, too, how she’d scratched at the sides of the box and her fingers were raw with splinters. Imagine how many more there might be—Max had laughed then—imagine how many more and no one will ever know. He could tell that Georg was scared at the thought, he could always tell, and so he laughed again and told him not to worry, there were special coffins with telephones and alarm bells just in case. That’s what you’ll have, he said, only the best for you. He had a way of saying things, his brother. He made his own trouble.
Georg knelt by the pile like a parishioner. He filled his bucket, and Graf grunted below him, and their faces went shiny from the heat. The girls were setting up the lunch truck on the street. They were bringing out the soup pots and slicing loaves of bread.
He pulled a plank from the pile and slid it down the side. When he turned back, he saw a hand curled like a crab where the plank had been. He looked at it for a good while. It was real as his own hands and would not be denied. He turned around and waved. “I’ve got someone,” he shouted down the pile, “I’ve got someone here,” and all the nearest boys climbed to his spot. They pulled out wood and piping and broken bricks and threw them down the side, forgetting the buckets and the people below. They followed the hand to the wrist and then to the elbow.
One of the young boys didn’t want to wait. He took hold of the wrist and tugged. No one paid any attention. He tugged again and fell backward. He let out a shriek, holding it up like some terrible trophy, that arm that ended in nothing and was connected to nothing, and he ran down the side of the pile. He held tight to the hand, resisting when two older boys tried to take it from him. “Don’t touch it,” he said, “let me go,” and he was shouting still when they led him away. After that Georg didn’t look at what he found. He set things in buckets and didn’t look. They worked until dark, and when they left, the ladies were still sweeping the streets with their long twig brooms.
They didn’t talk about the piles that night. They didn’t pull out their decks or magazines, and when the lights went out, they turned to the wall and slept. Graf was crying again. Every few days he cried, but he didn’t remember when he woke, and if somebody mentioned it he walked away angry and didn’t listen. Georg waited. He set his hands behind his head, and his fingers were sore from working the piles. He knew the sounds the other boys made. He knew Müller and how he breathed and how Schneider cracked his knuckles, and farther along the wall, the Heller brothers rolled and twisted in their blankets. He knew all their nighttime sounds and feared that they knew his.
He went to his rucksack once the last of them were asleep. He rolled to his side and reached for it like a friend. He had three sausages tonight, a slice of buttered rye bread, and a single spotty pear. He ate the bread first and then the pear. Schneider talked in his sleep two beds over. He laughed and spoke low in his dream language, and Georg understood none of it. He ate the sausages one after the next. His cheeks bulged big as a trumpeter’s, and he was ashamed and contented both. He thought of home when he ate. He thought of home and how the kitchen smelled. The pork fat was soft against his tongue, and though he was thirsty from the salt he lay back down when he was finished and belched under the sheets. He kicked his blanket and rolled around to find his spot. His sleep was uneasy. It always was when his belly was full. His dreams were strange and fleeting, and he sweated from the heat of all that food, and when he awoke he was hungry again. He was first in line for breakfast, and at breakfast, he thought of lunch, and so it went. It was a beast, his belly, and it had to be fed.
They liked to sit around the table after dinner. “Who’s prettier,” someone would say, “Brigitte Horney or Zarah Leander?” and they’d lean in close to bicker. She’s too dark, or she’s too pale, she’s klotzig, that one, and her bones are big. They wagged their spoons and elbowed each other to make their points. Actresses and boxers and planes and battle tactics and Churchill who was fat like a turnip. Spartans against the Romans, who would win if they fought? And what about the Vikings? The Vikings would beat them both. They argued about all these things, and they shouted sometimes and laughed. They were alien to Georg as moon men. They were fifteen years old, just like him. He’d left them in the dining hall and gone back to their room.
He knelt by his headboard and reached between the mattress and the metal frame. The pouch was where he’d left it. Its leather was soft and had gone dark around the edges from wear. He unwound the string, and the ladies tumbled into his hand. Five perfect Lady Liberty half dollars, gifts from his uncle Fritz, who had left Germany years before and settled in Milwaukee. He’d written and told them about his travels, about the Indians he saw and enormous red rocks and San Francisco where the sun shone even in December and all the pavement sparkled. “It’s the quartz,” he told them, “there’s quartz in the streets and everything shines in the city.” Georg and Max fought over his letters, reading them and rereading them until the paper went soft.
Of all the gifts his uncle had sent, Georg loved the coins best. He loved the smell of them and their feel against his skin, and the look of the ladies, all vertical lines and fabric draped across lithe bodies that walked toward the setting sun, their arms held high as if making an offering. Max had taken them first, of course. “Respect your elders,” he said when he took them. He kept them in his pouch, and he turned down all the things Georg offered him in trade. I don’t want your stamps, he’d say, and I’m too old for marbles, and what would you do with them anyway, these shiny new coins, but just before he left he gave them all to Georg. “Take them,” he said, “take them for luck,” and he tossed the pouch and laughed when Georg missed the catch.
Georg took the honey he’d filched in a napkin from the dining hall and worked a little into his palms. The school had real honey and not the kunsthonig the soldiers had to eat. Mutti would shake her head if she knew. What a waste of good honey, what a shame it was. He rubbed his hands together until they were warm. He had good hands for magic, fingers plump as sausages and straight, with no windows between them that might betray the workings of his trick. He palmed the coins to warm up, and when he was ready, he took a deep breath. He looked straight ahead.
“This is an old trick,” he said. “Kalanag did it years ago.” He raised one eyebrow for emphasis. It had taken months before a mirror to get the eyebrow right. He’d never met the great Kalanag, of course, and besides Kalanag was a big-tricks magician. Entire cars vanished from his stage, and ladies dressed in satin, and once he’d even levitated a locomotive and all the audience gasped. It was just patter. It was what he said to give the trick its rhythm. Only the coins mattered and the crowd he imagined there in the room with him. They were watching him with eyes wide because that’s how good he was, and all the men and all the boys were jealous of the way he worked his ladies.