When he was strong enough to come down to the kitchen for his meals, she brought out a package and set it by his plate. He could tell it was another book. He undid the twine and tore away the paper and let it fall to the kitchen floor. Conjuring Made Easy, the cover promised, A Magic Book for Everyone, by Ernst Firnholzer. There were photos inside, dozens of them, and detailed explanations of every sort of trick, not just the regular ones but strange ones, too, that required silk string and doves, apples and sugar cubes. He pushed his plate aside and thumbed through the pages. “It’ll take forever to learn all these,” he said.
“The good things take work.” She wiped her hands dry on her apron. “They’re a sharpening stone.” She made no sense sometimes, the way she said things, but he was used to it. They all were. They ate and let her talk, and they nodded sometimes to show that they were listening. Yes, they’d say, yes, and they’d reach for the ladle or the bread basket.
Mutti left him and went out to the garden, and he sat with his book. It must have taken old Firnholzer years to pull the tricks together. He went through the pages and imagined the author and just how he was. He was old, Georg could tell from the way he wrote, and he probably lived high on a hill. Moonvine grew in his garden and primrose and angel’s trumpet, and all the flowers opened up at night because that’s when he worked, that’s when the coins and the cards moved best beneath his hands. What a sweet life he had, old Firnholzer. What a sweet life to make things vanish.
He kept the book in his room. He tried the tricks, but he was lazy about it and undisciplined. He left his coins where he had dropped them. “Something’s wrong with them,” he’d say, “they’re too big and these ones here are too thin and they slip between my fingers.” He went peevish at the coins and cursed them, and he set the book aside and went back to his stories.
When the carnival came in October, Mutti took him because he loved the games there and the hawkers with their fresh pretzels and their bouncing balls. She gave him a few coins and left him by the gate. He walked tall through the crowd. His legs were shaky from all that time in bed, but still it was good to feel the sun shining on his head. An old man was there that day, stooped low over his accordion, and though Georg wanted to play darts and buy a goldfish in a bowl, there was something in the old man’s face that stopped him. His eyes were shut tight, as if he were sleeping in his chair. He played a mournful song, a song that didn’t belong at any carnival, and the accordion wailed and quavered and beat like a heart between his palms. The old man was communing with the angels, Georg could see it in his face. A strange power was working its way through him and pulling all the people toward the sound. Georg wondered how it would be to stop people like that, to stop them where they were and make them listen.
He left the carnival with the coins still in his pocket. He didn’t want goldfish anymore or caramels. He picked up old Firnholzer’s magic book when he came home and read it from the first page to the last, and when he was done, he read it again. He set aside part of his room as his studio, and Mutti found him a little folding table and a piece of black velvet. She brought him whatever Firnholzer called for, sugar cubes and extra-soft pencils and silk thread spun fine as a spiderweb. She found it all. She let out a sigh when he asked her for a bird, but then she gave in and brought him a yellow parakeet. She’d gone three towns over to find the bird, and all the people had looked at her when she carried it back on the train. He’d wanted a fat gray dove and not a parakeet, but he was happy all the same, and when he practiced there in his room, with Kaspar whistling and pecking in his cage, time stopped for him, and he was content.
He took his coins everywhere he went, even to school, and as he walked he held them tight in the fold of muscle between his thumb and his palm, so tight that he could swing his arms from side to side and wave at old Frau Fader as she swept her stoop and the coins would not come loose. He checked the tricks off as he learned them, and each time he’d call Mutti to his room. “Come see,” he’d say, “come quick,” and she sat in his chair. He’d clear off his table and smooth out the coverlet and rub his hands together to warm them up. He watched Mutti as he worked, to see whether she was looking in the right places. He could tell from her eyes just how the trick had gone. He worked early in the morning before he left for school and after dinner and on weekends, too, and all the pages came loose and fell across his floor.
The day he left for the academy, when his trunk had been packed and she’d walked with him to the station, Mutti set the book in his hands. She’d repaired it with binding tape, page by page, a job that must have taken hours. She’d cupped his face in her hands and gave him a kiss on each cheek, and she was waving still as his train pulled out and rounded the corner.
Graf was wet from the lake. He shivered in his chair at the mess table, and Georg handed him a napkin to dry his face. They staged their boat fights even when it rained. They fought for fun when their classwork was done. They wrestled for a spot on the boats. What’s the cold to us, they said, what’s the cold to soldiers, and they puffed their chests. They rowed together toward the center, shivering until the work raised their blood. Their hair was damp and stuck to their foreheads, and their breath rose gray as smoke. Georg watched from the shore usually, unless he was feeling brave. He stood by the reeds and the grasses, and the only sounds he heard were the eagle owls high in the trees and the oars slicing through. When the boats came together, the leaders in the front touched oar blades. They were gladiators then. They fought like old Romans. Boys reached across and grabbed arms and oars and sometimes hair. They nudged the other boat and tried to turn it over. They were mostly quiet while they worked, but sometimes one shouted as he went in, and the sound rose from the water and was gone.
The others came to the table. They looked at Graf, who sat dripping in his chair, and they teased him and jabbed him with their fingers, but it was a gentle teasing and left no marks. “We’ve got a mermaid at our table,” they said. “A pretty little fish.” Graf rolled his eyes and laughed with them, and he raised his soup bowl and drank from it.
They set their elbows on the table. They leaned in close to talk, and a few went back to refill their plates. When the table went quiet, Schneider pulled out the book. The World’s Great Beauties, it was called, and he kept it in his bag. “Not that old chestnut,” someone said. “It’s older than Methuselah, that book, and the ladies are, too.” But they turned the pages anyway and looked at all the photographs because they were beautiful, all those ladies from Finland and Austria and France. There were exotic ones, too, from India and China, from Argentina and islands in the Pacific, and they had smoky eyes and waves in their hair, and their lips were shiny as lacquer. The boys knew them all. They gave them names like Liliana and Isabella and Fatima, and they argued the merits of each. She’s horsey, that one, and her eyes are too small, and this one is moon-faced, and on they went, and Müller laughed the whole while. He laughed at them and leaned back in his chair, and Georg looked at Müller and not the book.
They were leaning in to see when Bahnführer Frisch came in. They were all the way to Pomerania and Portugal when he called them to attention. He stood by the front table. He was a tall man and his face was angular, and there were shadows under his cheeks and in the hollow of his throat. He spoke a high German because he was from up north, and his words had none of the softness of the southern dialects. All the boys in the hall sat straighter when he came into the room. Schneider moved quickly. He was deft as a magician, the way he pulled the book under the table and set it back inside his bag.