He set his left hand over the coins and his right hand flat on the desk. He shut his eyes and exhaled. When he lifted both his hands, a coin had moved to the right side. He held his hands over the coins again, like a healer or a holy man, and when he lifted them, another had jumped across. The trick grew harder for him here. The third coin always fell from his palm no matter how hard he squeezed his muscles together.
Someone rattled the door and pounded hard against the frame. Georg jumped up from the desk. They were coming back early today. He dropped the coins into his pouch and pushed it down his shirt, but the drawstrings trailed behind and caught on his collar buttons. He opened the door and stepped aside.
“Why’d you lock it?” Müller looked all around the room and at the desk especially. They were bright and impenetrable as church windows, those strange gray eyes he had, and he fixed them on Georg.
Georg stepped back. He moved toward the desk and thought hard of what he should say. He set his hands inside his pockets, and just then he felt the ladies start to move, down his shirt and under his loosened belt and straight down his right pant leg. He reached for his knee. He tried to stop their fall, but it was no use, and they landed on the shiny linoleum floor with a musical sound, four of them, four of his ladies, faceup in the light from the window.
This was not a good development, no, not at all, he knew this already, but all he could think of as he stood there was how strange it was that they had landed faceup like that. What were the odds of that? Surely less than one in four, no, it would have to be one-half multiplied by one-half four times over, or one in sixteen, but that didn’t sound right either. He had paid no attention when they learned probabilities in school. He doodled in his notebook instead and looked out to the treetops. They were a strange thing anyway, probabilities, with their permutations and combinations, as if things could be figured in that way when everyone knew that there was no pattern to things, none at all, and that things happened all the time for no reason. No, the probability that the ladies would fall faceup was one hundred percent. It was as inevitable as Müller coming back early from dinner and finding him there in the room.
Müller knelt down and picked one up, holding it between his thumb and his index finger. “An Ami coin,” he said, “you’ve got an Ami coin.” He stood up straight.
Boys were in the hallway, opening doors and closing them, and somewhere someone laughed and said “Idiot, you’re an idiot.” The others would be back soon from dinner. They’d be coming to the room, arguing still and pushing their way through the door. Georg wanted to reach for his ladies and put them back in their pouch. He wanted to leave Müller and the rest of them and walk down by the trees. He knew where the barn owls were, all their secret places, and he wanted to go see them. They perched by the fence posts behind the track and sometimes by the well. He pushed his hands deep in his pockets and stayed just where he was.
Müller was looking at the coin in his hand and Georg was looking at Müller, and the fifth lady slipped from the pouch and fell between his feet.
“Are there more?”
Georg shook his head. “That’s the last of them.”
Müller picked the fifth coin up. He was solemn as a choirboy, the way he set them on the desk. The silence from Müller was a terrible thing. The news traveled through it, Georg could feel it rippling outward through the school. The administrators would come running and the Bannführer with his badges. There’d be consequences. They’d send him home. They’d send him east, because that’s where the punishment posts were, and he’d have only himself to blame. He should have brought his aluminum coins. He should have brought his pfennig pieces, but he had left them home on his desk and taken the ladies instead because they were beautiful. “I need them,” he said at last. Müller was still looking at him, and he had to say something. “I need them for my vanishing tricks.”
Müller considered this. Georg looked for surprise in his face but found none. “Show me something,” Müller said, folding his arms.
“I’m out of practice.”
“Show me something easy then.”
The sun set in the window. Its rays came across the desk and lit up the ladies as if they were on a stage and all the lights shone down on them. Georg took one in his hand and pressed her tight against a fold in his pant leg. He yanked the fabric over her. He lifted his hands, and she was gone. The trick was a simple one and meant for small children, but Müller smiled.
Georg took the ladies and set them back in their pouch. People usually wanted to know how the illusion worked. They wanted to see the mechanics of it, the inner workings, and they pestered him when he said no. Do it again, they’d say, right now, not later, do it slow this time, and sometimes they were angry because it was an insult to see something and not to understand. He held the pouch by the strings and waited, but Müller was looking at where the coins had been.
“You’re funny,” he said. He reached for Georg’s wrist and squeezed it hard. He was the best boxer in the class, and he could grapple, too, wrapping those legs tight around his opponents. He knew how to choke them out, knew it from instinct and not from the lessons they took together, and the poor kids who fought him went down on the mat and twisted round themselves like carnival pretzels. Their eyes bulged, and their faces went red, and all the others leaned in to watch. He came so close that Georg could see the blond whiskers that grew along his jaw. “No wonder they give you trouble.” He let go of Georg’s wrist all at once.
Georg put them to bed when Müller left. He slid the pouch back under the mattress. He went through all Müller’s words and his inflections and found hidden meanings in them, and though he should have been scared that Müller knew about the coins, he felt relief instead. He was unburdened.
It took days for the bruise to fade to green, those five circles that Müller’s fingertips had left when he’d grabbed Georg by his wrist. The next time he took the ladies out, Müller sat with him and watched, and though Georg knew the tricks and had done them all a hundred times before, his hands shook anyway.
Mutti had given him the book when he was ten, going on eleven, and sick with a lung infection that kept him in bed all summer and into fall. She kept the curtains drawn to keep out the heat and the bugs, but the flies still came inside and she ran after them with her swatter. She brought him tea and apples and thin butter cookies. She sat with him and her fingers were cool against his wrist, but he didn’t move under his blankets. He didn’t answer when she spoke. The breeze from his window was heavy with the smells of summer, of soap and sweat and the linden trees in bloom. Outside boys shouted. They played ball in the street and climbed the apple trees that grew between the houses, and he slept through all their noise, the laughter and the shouts, the feuds and the reconciliations that followed. He slept, and the sounds fell away. He was hungry for sleep that summer. It was better than food to him, and the more he slept, the more he wanted to sleep, resisting Mutti when she leaned in to check on him. “Wake up, Georg,” she’d say, “have some tea and talk to me,” and he’d close his eyes all the tighter and try to get back to that dream place where the flies didn’t buzz and the air was cool.
She didn’t give up so easily, his mutti. She brought him books and left them open on his table. He fought her at first, but then she began to read to him, and he was caught. Who knew where she had found them; she must have taken the train to Wertheim to buy the stories he loved, or maybe she asked Max to bring them when he took the train back from Lohr. Distant Worlds, The Tunnel, The Hands of Orlac, The Amazon Queen, she read them each in her steady voice that never rose or fell, with all the solemnity of a priest giving a sermon. She sat so straight in the oak chair by his bed and read to him of spaceships and water tunnels, of platforms floating in the sea. Her voice wound like ivy through his dreams. He was with Professor Schulze and Captain Münchhausen, who was fatter even than Georg, and Lord Flitmore and all the rest of the crew aboard the spaceship Sannah. He was with them on Mars, and they walked along its craters. They saw legless beetles there and flying snails. They saw the glowworms that lived under its snows. She read to him, and there was no resisting her or the stories she told. He opened his eyes. He sat up against his feather pillows and listened, roped in by her voice, which pulled him through those dark days of summer.