He didn’t.
Unfortunately for the young German, I did not take him that afternoon. I stepped over him with the other poor souls in my arms and made my way back to the Russians.
Back and forth, I traveled.
Disassembled men.
It was no ski trip, I can tell you.
As Michael told his mother, it was three very long days later that I finally came for the soldier who left his feet behind in Stalingrad. I showed up very much invited at the temporary hospital and flinched at the smell.
A man with a bandaged hand was telling the mute, shock-faced soldier that he would survive. “You’ll soon be going home,” he assured him.
Yes, home, I thought. For good.
“I’ll wait for you,” he continued. “I was going back at the end of the week, but I’ll wait.”
In the middle of his brother’s next sentence, I gathered up the soul of Robert Holtzapfel.
Usually I need to exert myself, to look through the ceiling when I’m inside, but I was lucky in that particular building. A small section of the roof had been destroyed and I could see straight up. A meter away, Michael Holtzapfel was still talking. I tried to ignore him by watching the hole above me. The sky was white but deteriorating fast. As always, it was becoming an enormous drop sheet. Blood was bleeding through, and in patches, the clouds were dirty, like footprints in melting snow.
Footprints? you ask.
Well, I wonder whose those could be.
In Frau Holtzapfel’s kitchen, Liesel read. The pages waded by unheard, and for me, when the Russian scenery fades in my eyes, the snow refuses to stop falling from the
ceiling. The kettle is covered, as is the table. The humans, too, are wearing patches of snow on their heads and shoulders.
The brother shivers.
The woman weeps.
And the girl goes on reading, for that’s why she’s there, and it feels good to be good for something in the aftermath of the snows of Stalingrad.
THE AGELESS BROTHER
Liesel Meminger was a few weeks short of fourteen.
Her papa was still away.
She’d completed three more reading sessions with a devastated woman. On many nights, she’d watched Rosa sit with the accordion and pray with her chin on top of the bellows.
Now, she thought, it’s time. Usually it was stealing that cheered her up, but on this day, it was giving something back.
She reached under her bed and removed the plate. As quickly as she could, she cleaned it in the kitchen and made her way out. It felt nice to be walking up through Molching. The air was sharp and flat, like the Watschen of a sadistic teacher or nun. Her shoes were the only sound on Munich Street.
As she crossed the river, a rumor of sunshine stood behind the clouds.
At 8 Grande Strasse, she walked up the steps, left the plate by the front door, and knocked, and by the time the door was opened, the girl was around the corner. Liesel did not look back, but she knew that if she did, she’d have found her brother at the bottom of the steps again, his knee completely healed. She could even hear his voice.
“That’s better, Liesel.”
It was with great sadness that she realized that her brother would be six forever, but when she held that thought, she also made an effort to smile.
She remained at the Amper River, at the bridge, where Papa used to stand and lean.
She smiled and smiled, and when it all came out, she walked home and her brother never climbed into her sleep again. In many ways, she would miss him, but she could never miss his deadly eyes on the floor of the train or the sound of a cough that killed.