Archive of Our Own ^beta

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PART I: ALLENSTEIN

During the first few days, when my world was limited only to walls, the courtyard, the training ground, and the unbearable chill rising from the lake, I came to realize a few painful things. In the automobile, rattling along the unpaved roads of the Wartheland, with my father at the head of the column and my mother sitting in the back, her hand resting on my knee, I had spent too little time looking out the window. Instead, my eyes were fixed on the melting snow clinging stubbornly to the tips of my boots — at first it melted slowly, then, as the automobile warmed from the shared work of our breaths and the heat of life pumping vigor into our bodies, the snow disappeared. The crystals dissolved into a miserable little puddle, and I was forced to sit with my feet in that small pool of water, tormented by the feeling that it was my own sweat, that I was sitting in it, naked, unbearably exposed — that somehow it was proof of how much the Napola made fear swell somewhere between my chin and collarbone.

I had looked at my mother for too short a time. Later I no longer remembered the color of her lipstick; only the scent of her perfume remained etched in my memory. I could smell it on her letters and parcels, she was sending me sometimes, but I no longer knew what she had been wearing — and yet I could have studied her familiar silhouette instead of staring mindlessly at the floor; I could have remembered what she looked like at the moment she handed over her own child to the slaughterhouse, watching how the gears of the Great Reich turned into a meat mincer. If only I had looked more closely, the image of the unnatural mother in my mind would have been more complete.

I loved her. I wanted her to be proud. I didn’t understand why she hadn’t defied my father’s will — she knew that her sensitive, fragile boy would be crushed, squeezed dry, like a pig bled out, but said nothing. If she did I would have resented her. 

Look at me, Mother — it’s me, your son. Flesh of your flesh. Blood of your blood. The fruit of your love. I’m brave, I’m not even trembling. It’s a privilege, I know. An honor, to be able to feed the war machine. I serve you humbly. Kiss my forehead when Father isn’t looking. Wipe your tear in secret, so he doesn’t call you a weepy pessimist. Tell me that I’ll always be your son, even if I come home with a black ribbon across my chest and a word of remembrance in an obituary.

I could have looked out the window, watched the world flicker and pass by — quickly, painlessly, without promises or regret. A casual landscape, foreign, meant for one night, which was to usher me into life and the long-awaited future — yet one completely different from what I had imagined. With great naivety I accepted the luxury of indifference. Afterwards, nothing was easy anymore — easy to deny, to forget, to suppress. Nothing.

I stepped out of the heated automobile, and the September chill felt almost like a blessing after all the time spent in the warmth of bodies silenced by tomb-like stillness. Winter had come early — a weather anomaly, my father claimed. Winter would be harsh, but we would endure; what ice bound, the Reich would tear apart by force, split, and melt with glowing iron. He spoke to me: “Albrecht, the colder the frost that bites your skin, the tougher it will become. Do not shy away from hardship; it will shape you. In struggle, it will carve you into a man, a magnificent man of Carrara marble. Show your worth.”

So I crossed the gate of Allenstein Napola with two suitcases. One contained personal belongings: a bone comb, a gold tie pin with the Stein family crest, handkerchiefs monogrammed AS, and other pretentious trifles. The other held my typewriter — an Olympia Robust — my portable confidant. I had no inkling of how much I would have to confess to it, to cry out through thick, heavy tears of ink, though I felt heaviness, settling over my shoulders when the headmaster's hand closed over mine in a suffocating handshake — more like a death sentence than a welcome. A heavy, oppressive stillness hung over everything, like the pause before a storm.

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A cadet, older than me, escorted me to my assigned room with an open, seething reluctance. After all, it was my fault — the fault of the governor’s son — that he was forced to play nursemaid to a brat instead of dozing off somewhere, leaning against a damp castle wall. Though he clearly considered me a loathsome duty imposed upon him, he didn’t touch me, didn’t shove me, didn’t even grab me by the arm — and I had been prepared for the iron grip of his fingers closing around my elbow like a vice. Nothing of the sort happened.

He fetched me from the director’s office after that so-called introductory speech — a kind of gospel meant to prepare me for the consumption of the almost intimate power and prestige of this institution.

“Lights out means silence, so keep your trap shut or I’ll feed you your own tongue, got it? Don’t wander the corridors — step outside your room and you'll end up in the brig. Wake the cadets or make a scene — you get a beating. Don’t make me repeat myself. Now get inside.” He flung the door open with such pointless force that I thought it might spring back and hit him square between the eyes.

He had an exaggerated brow ridge — an ugly type — and looked like one of the engravings from the Darwinist tomes my father had brought from the Reich to our new residence.

I entered without a word, and my elder companion left me the same way — wordless, with a slam of the door and a burst of furious footsteps echoing down the stone corridor.

For the last time, I could look at that room with a kind of detached curiosity, which in a way was a blessing. People don’t realize how much of a treasure indifference truly is. They don’t understand that when you see something for the first time — not yet knowing how deeply it will become part of you, how far under your skin it will crawl — that is the one and only moment you truly have control over it. Never before, and never again, did I look at that cramped interior with such clarity of mind — free from the convictions, hopes, fears, and suffocating pain that would later take root.

I often thought about it afterward — about those moments when something changes, when a new element, a new variable, appears. We don’t realize how it will come to rule the tracks of fate later on, how, for now, it means nothing to us. Absolutely nothing. Once, I asked my mother what she had thought of my father when she first met him. I was fascinated by that — how one can look at someone who will one day father your child and feel nothing, nothing at all that would betray such a future. She told me, “My son, I didn’t think about such things. You don’t think about such things — they simply happen and reshape our world as they go, they mold the future because that’s how it was meant to be. You think too much, mein Liebling.”

But I couldn’t help it. I thought constantly. I constantly felt that if things were meant to happen as they did, then time was not linear, and every moment existed parallel to the ones before and after. I knew I would have felt something — some kind of stirring — if I were to meet the person who would one day ruin or save my life. Such things, I believed, were etched in the memory of the soul — not yet overwritten, but already traced in graphite: erasable, yes, but ready to be inked, to be made permanent.

I hurriedly arranged my personal things in the only empty locker left, though I found it by trial and error. The first one I opened reeked immediately of heavily seasoned meat. Closing it, I glanced at the sleeping lads, tucked under their covers and, apparently, completely wiped out from the toil of the previous day. The next locker I inspected was almost unused; everything inside was neatly arranged — the uniform and clothes smelling of starch and the scent iron leaves after pressing. On the door, from photographs carefully pinned there, a fair-haired blond smiled at me, with a jaw that looked like it could crack walnuts if he wished.

I shut the locker and it banged against the frame; the hinges screeched. If I’d broken them, I’d have had one hell of a problem. I muttered a curse under my breath, feeling an increasing urge to punish myself for my idiotic carelessness.

The second-to-last locker, alone among them, stood empty. It waited for me, but as I slid my things in I felt neither at home nor satisfied to take up the cadet’s prestigious berth in Napola. I knew too much; I had heard too much. Though I resisted it for a long time — even then, even after crossing the room’s threshold, ironically I would not allow the thought that the officer factory, in whose bowels I found myself, might in truth be something darker. A machine for turning children into carrion.

I prided myself on a self-awareness beyond my years, yet I lied to my own face like a coward.

My beloved Olympia Robust would not fit on the shelf, so I placed it higher, on top of the locker, together with the second suitcase I had previously painstakingly lightened of personal ballast — though the sight of all my most personal possessions in this new, silent place felt unfriendly, foreign, even somewhat hostile.

The bed was uncomfortable, stiff, and the blanket thin, hardly stopping the cold that crept along the floor. Despite all these inconveniences, I lay down without a prior wash, following the headmaster’s injunction: “Bathrooms are locked after ten o’clock; anyone who hasn’t washed can go jump in the lake, and I’ll set the dogs on them.”

Discipline was not alien to me; after all, I had spent previous years in a school for the German elite — children of officers, governors, and the Reich’s crème de la crème — and what I had seen there was no less brutal than Napola, but here it was different. A dull silence shrouded the center like a shroud of muteness.

We were all forbidden to talk in bed, which struck me as absurdly pedantic and at the same time more cruel than anything else. They were human just like us, children; they knew how much one strips away inhibitions when lying down beneath the covers — as if the ritual of relaxing on a mattress was the first step toward some inevitable tragedy. No doubt they didn’t want our mouths to utter dangerous words, stirred by the safety and intimacy of our beds.

The room, smelling of men and cold, was like a confessional, and the battle-hardened soldiers clearly knew it.

I pressed my lips shut, turned my head to the right, and immediately worried. The same boy, whose locker I had nearly ruined, looked at me with eyes reddened and glassy from sleep. He must have woken when I flailed about like a complete fool looking for my locker, or perhaps later when I stubbed my foot on the leg of his bunk and, hissing curses, sat on my own. He said nothing. I did not speak either. But he smiled sleepily, as if he knew something I did not. He fell asleep before my eyes. For a long time I had trouble to do the same.

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For the first time in Napola, I became acutely aware of my own body. Not even because each morning I discovered new ligaments of muscle, new paths that had labored and tensed the day before until they finally ceased to resist. I had gained awareness, yes, but it was not the kind born of anatomical comprehension — though on my body it would be difficult to find any solid expanse carved by the iron hands of superiors, guardians, teachers, and trainers. The grueling hours spent marinating in my own sour sweat produced little effect — I was still a sort of weakling, a disgrace, an insult to the majesty of the Stein name.

That bodily awareness did not come as understanding or control over my limbs — some cadets, like Gladen, my roommate, still pissed their beds regularly, night after night. It took instead the form of a chilling, blood-curdling, almost obsessive thought:
I have a body. I am alive. I can be hurt, I can be humiliated. They will strip me, strip me naked, see who I am, what I am. And I am nothing. My own body will betray me — it will fail me, inevitably fail me. A time will come when my flesh will destroy me. Flesh is a prison.

Clad in uniforms, we trudged through stubble fields, marshes, and bogs, treading the same mud-paved paths adorned with barbed wire. Yet that was still bearable, because somewhere deep down I knew I was hidden, that nothing here was real — all of us only longed to return to school and our duties. The uniform, though heavy and restrictive, was a refuge — within it, I blended into the grey, softened surroundings. In a well-tailored uniform I even took the shape of a man, as if I had stepped into a mold and emerged more pleasing to the eye.

Perhaps that was why my father so insisted that I dress properly — he wanted my feeble body to fill the frame of expectation he had built the very moment my mother had whispered tearfully, “It’s a boy, my son.”

After an hour wallowing in muddy trenches and hollows — over which Peiner made us leap like mountain goats, for which I hated him with particular fervor — he finally let us march to Die Schweinebucht — the pigsty, the mud-room, which I privately called the first chamber of hell. I did not yet know that hell had no chambers, only an antechamber known as Earth.

“Ab in die Schweinebucht!” Peiner screamed until his thin blond tufts bounced atop his sweat-soaked skull.

So we went to that sty — a structure clinging to the castle’s western wall, connecting directly to the showers. Before we entered, it was only silent, perpetually wet, as though the walls wept when we were gone. As though they missed us.

Pressed into an irritated, soaked, and sullen mass, we assaulted the cleanliness of the sty, tracking in water and mud that dripped freely onto pale, cracked tiles.

“Move, you filth! One, two, one, two! Don’t make me look at your mess a second longer!” Peiner watched as we pulled off our boots and set them in the Stiefelgang — the boot corridor — where the servants collected them for cleaning, to be returned washed and ready for polishing.

“One more second and I’ll wipe his face with that filth he loathes so much” hissed Hefe, pulling off his sodden socks from feet so numb with cold they no longer remembered what it meant to be fully mobile.

“Shut your mouth or I’ll gag you with those socks” Schneider muttered — perhaps not the voice of reason, but at least someone intent on keeping our dormitory from drawing attention, whether during inspection or training. He had mastered the bureaucrat’s lifestyle perfectly, ever ready to preserve the honor of our room for the sake of his own comfortable hide.

Weimer squeezed himself between me and Gladen, setting down boots at least four sizes larger than mine, brushing against me in the process — and since I was pulling off my mud-soaked trousers, I nearly lost balance and went sprawling into the tiled wall, which, like the floor, was no longer white but brown, covered almost entirely in filth.
The expansion of mud was alarmingly swift and efficient.

“Sorry.”

I muttered something in reply, focusing on folding my wet, stiff clothes into a neat pile I would later stuff into a linen sack marked with my name. By morning, it always returned to me — the uniform washed and starched. Socks, underwear, and handkerchiefs we washed ourselves; afterward they hung miserably on a hastily strung line stretched between the lockers and the wall in our shared room. There was something dehumanizing about it — exposing one’s soiled undergarments and opening the window to let in the cold air so the room would not reek of frightened boys.

With trembling hands I unfastened my belt and reached for the fly. That was the worst part — in that place I felt like an animal. I didn’t dare look around; all I saw, from time to time, were someone’s feet — bare, red from the cold. I lowered my trousers. The buttons of my uniform refused to cooperate, slipping painfully from between my fingers.

“We’re running out of time,” A voice cut through the steam — his voice, familiar though rarely addressed to me. I hated that I knew it before I turned my head. Weimer — Friedrich Weimer, a person I had tried my best to ignore in my first days there. As always, he broke into my thoughts and invaded the small mental space I had set aside for self-pity over my current wretched condition — standing there in the middle of the muddy sty, trousers around my ankles, utterly convinced I would rather die than endure this humiliation.

“You think I don’t know?” I growled, wrestling with my undershirt.

Weimer only shrugged, his shoulders released from the shackles of his jacket, muscles rippling theatrically beneath the skin. I flinched in disgust, and when the wet sleeve of his coat slapped against my thigh with a sickening squelch, I bristled and told him to “complete his process of undressing without involving me in it!”

The showers were marginally better than the sty, though still unbearable. They reeked sharply of soap and some caustic detergent. Peiner did not come in with us — he waited, sometimes timing us, worried we would use too much water. The room was tiled, lit by a few flickering fluorescent tubes under the ceiling. The shower frames jutted bluntly from the walls like ribs piercing the thick skin of the bathroom. No curtains, no partitions. We washed quickly, eyes downcast, staring only at our feet, rinsing away the grime clinging to our skin.

My gaze was fixed on the brown streams racing toward the drain — the floor sloped toward a central grate. Now and then, a pale red tint appeared beneath my feet — my heels and toes were rubbed raw and bleeding. Apparently, I was too delicate to meet Peiner’s expectations for regular ballets in muddy pits — which he so enjoyed watching us perform.

Intimacy among cadets amounted to this: the accidental glimpse of a bruise, a foul scar, a bluish patch spreading across someone’s thigh after slipping and falling into a shallow stony ditch. Often I felt as though I lacked air, though I was not underwater. The stream, alternately scalding and icy, lashed at me rhythmically, bending my neck. Each of us silently endured that public flogging, yet I often felt the sting of tears beneath my eyelids. And yet I could not feel the touch of my own hands on my body. It was so condemned, so repulsive, that I drove the thought from my mind — that I was touching my aching flesh, while beside me Weimer or Hefe did the same.

The water washed away the dirt, but the shame remained. Together with what we scraped from under our nails, our childhoods went down the drain. The roar and hiss of droplets striking the tiles drowned out the thoughts splitting my skull. I shut my eyes and clenched them until I saw blotches dancing in rhythm with the streams thrashing against the stone.

“Wash faster! I don’t want to see pigs when you come out! You’d better shine, you lazy rats!”

Hefe snorted in hatred, shaking the water from his body. I opened my eyes and again I was a trembling, naked boy, trapped in a room filled with bare bodies lashed by steam. I wiped my face, the strands of hair clinging almost tenderly to my temples.

“Time’s up!”

The water fell silent. The steam shrouding our nakedness began to fade. Goosebumps rose on my shivering skin, as if tracing the outline of my body, separating it from the rest of the damp, suffocating air. Before we began to move again, completely soaked and somehow more naked than before, an echo rolled across the room, bringing back the sound of my own breath to me, amplified by the chorus of the cadets’ sighs.

Somewhere beneath my throat, I felt the urge to vomit.

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I remember few moments when I wasn’t aware of the iron grip around my throat—though perhaps it was simply that even the tamest dog knows when the collar tightens against its neck. The freedom I was granted with the key to the newspaper office was an illusion— the headmaster hadn’t let me off the leash, only loosened it a little, enough for me to pace in ever-widening, senseless circles, trampling the grass of an already barren yard, until at last I’d curl up by the kennel, with nowhere left to go.

Still, I accepted that mirage of freedom with satisfaction, even pride—something swelling in my chest as I placed the native case of my Olympia Robust upon the ebony, carved desk. Der Fackelträger—The Torchbearer. I had been appointed editor of the school newspaper, printed with clockwork precision every two weeks, never a delay. Jaucher showed me the editorial room—tucked in the east wing, with four narrow windows overlooking the inner courtyard. Had I wished, I could’ve reached the basement easily; why I would, I didn’t know—such whims were foreign to me—but the stairway rose before the door like steps to a dungeon.

After a brief inspection of my new quarters—the only true oasis of warmth, and that not from the forbidden portable heater in the corner—I concluded that it needed a few minor alterations. It was as cold as a kennel inside, yet I refrained from sharing that charming observation; Justus Von Jaucher was already boring holes into my back with those unblinking, fishlike eyes of his, as if he longed to bite off my ears, or perhaps my fingers.

The role of editor had once been his, but, as the headmaster had put it, he lacked “the lightness of touch so essential when dealing with delicate and lofty material. Von Jaucher begins his final year at Napola—better to entrust his duties to a young, vigorous mind, eager to stoke the sacred fire of our fatherland in the hearts of our pupils.” From the start I knew Justus was closer to darkness than enlightenment, so, for once, I found myself in full agreement with the headmaster.

The typewriter provided to me was the same one Justus had used before. It stood on the desk like a boulder—coarse, graceless, as though hacked from granite by a few clumsy swings of an axe. No wonder his writing was so abysmal. A Continental Standard, model 1937, it was no match for my own Olympia, which I gently set beside the desk, preparing to remove the unnecessary relic.

“May inspiration find you,” Jaucher sneered. “Four heroes have fallen at the front for the Führer. The obituaries must appear punctually. We can’t have their sons waiting an eternity for remembrance.” He cast one last look about the room—the kind of look a dog gives before marking a wall or chair to ensure his presence is never forgotten. And then he left, the air behind him heavy with resentment.

Once the door shut, I ran my fingers along the cold machine—the last relic of Justus’ reign. It was bulky, meant to stay put, unlike my Olympia, light and faithful, ever ready to follow me wherever I went. Out of curiosity I struck a few keys—the paper was loaded, but blank, untouched by words. As I suspected, the keys resisted; the ribbon was tacky with half-dried ink.

On the front, in fading gold, the letters read: CONTINENTAL WANDERER WERKE SIEGMAR-SCHONAU. The name gleamed obstinately against the ruin of its chipped black body. I could almost sense, in that defiance, the dull weight of years of soulless reports, formulaic obituaries, and witless essays it had been forced to swallow. I almost pitied it as I dragged the heavy thing off the desk and pushed it beside the old cabinet, filled with yellowed papers, jars of glue, and rusted scissors.

In the months that followed, this room would become my quiet haven—my cradle of growing defiance and courage—but also a place of hushed conversations: I on one side of the desk, Friedrich on the other. He kept me company through countless hours—sometimes in silence, sometimes not. Both states delighted me equally, for though Friedrich Weimer did not look the type to possess wit or charm, he surprised me with both. He disarmed me. Later, I would often blush with shame, remembering how quickly I had judged and boxed him in.

But before that transformation, before the room became something more, I arranged it with studied detachment—to suit myself and this sudden, undeserved privacy. What a gift it was! Rarely did anyone disturb me. My only companions were the rows of old typewriters locked atop the wardrobes, and a photo of the Führer—hideous, in a frame even uglier.

Some overzealous patriot had pinned beneath it a short verse, which I would read from time to time, praying that whatever I produced would be far better:

Dem Führer

Er führt uns stark mit heil’ger Hand,

Durch Sturm und Not, durchs Vaterland.

Sein Blick — wie Stahl, sein Herz — wie Glut,

Für ihn wir leben, geben Blut.

When I think of that room—the scent of oil and metallic ink, the ceaseless tapping of keys—I cannot imagine it without Friedrich. I fought long to keep him from entering my sanctuary, but in the end, I yielded; resisting his youthful fervor and unguarded charm proved futile. At first I brushed him off, never admitting where I went, but vanity—wanting to boast of my hidden refuge—and the longing for intellectual intimacy overcame my pointless stubbornness.

Friedrich fascinated me. I delighted in watching his reactions, even let him read my old works—the relics of earlier school years. While he read and I wrote, hammering the keys mercilessly, I’d glance up to study the way he’d thrust his jaw forward in thought, revealing unexpected intelligence. He always caught me staring, teasing that the silence was deafening when I wasn’t conjuring legions of small, black insects marching across the paper.

One warm, late September afternoon, Friedrich burst into the room where I sat, blissfully unaware of the world outside. I startled, ripped from my rhythm of typing and sliding the carriage back for a new line.

“Skittish as a rabbit in its burrow. Taken root here, have you?”

“Good manners clearly escape you, Friedrich. One doesn’t barge through locked doors without warning. You’re an uncivil brute,” I sighed, smiling despite myself.

I’d made a mistake—the sheet would have to be replaced. I pulled it from the roller and set it aside.

“Forgive me for desecrating your sacred temple,” he said with mock solemnity. “Would you prefer a formal apology? Should I borrow your typewriter and prepare one?”

In the glow of autumn sun, his hair was near blindingly fair. My mother used to lament that I’d once had the same—golden curls like a cherub’s—until they darkened, perhaps only to make my failure as a dutiful son more visible.

“If I lent you the machine, I’d never see it again,” I huffed, feeding a new sheet in. “You type at the pace of a mildly exhausted tortoise.”

“You wound me.”

“You came here just to amuse me with your jolly vulgarities dressed in friendly chatter, or do you actually have business?”

He dropped a small stack of papers before me—my old essays, which he had borrowed earlier, promising to read, even to think on them. What he sought in them, I still don’t know. Perhaps he only wanted to comfort me after I’d confessed, in a fit of self-pity, that my mother had lied about reading my work. In hindsight, it seems almost childish. But Friedrich’s gesture—it was as if someone had struck a match inside my chest: friction, spark, glow and then warmth.

“You read them all?”

“Yes.” He sat across from me, sprawling into the chair that had long since become his by habit. “Every single one. Did you doubt I could read? Did you think no one but you could appreciate fine literature?”

“Oh, shut up,” I said, smiling despite myself.

I waited, eyes fixed on his face, eager to drink in every word from his laughing mouth. He drew it out deliberately, clearly amused, his hand still resting protectively on the papers, reluctant to let them go.

“Well?” I finally pressed.

“They’re good.”

“Good?” I kicked him under the desk; he returned the favor, harder, making the table—and my Olympia—rattle. I glared, half serious.

“Quite good. Very good. They’re excellent.”

“You’re only saying that so I’ll keep helping you with physics.”

He rolled his eyes, clutching his chest.

“Slander and calumny. I mean it, truly.” He struck his breast in mock sincerity. “Albrecht Stein, you are a veritable master of the school essay.” He earned another kick. “I mean—a fine writer.”

“That’s better.”

If I had to name the precise moment Friedrich became someone I trusted, I could not. There was no single turning point, no declaration or signpost. Perhaps only one—one that carved itself into memory—the moment Friedrich chose to look at me, and truly see me and feel me, understanding completely.

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“What will you do with them?” I asked timidly, before I could stop myself.

That was before I knew him better—how could I have known I could entrust him with something so delicate? How could I have known? Such things can’t be foreseen, even though my unshakable belief in my own infallibility, in my deeply rooted enlightenment, always made me think—foolishly—that I could tell at a glance whether someone would become my blood brother, bound to me for years by friendship, or just another shallow, trivial fool.

Friedrich turned lazily, fanning himself with my essays in a way that was neither dignified nor respectful—and I, idiot that I was, demanded respect from everyone, everywhere, in every situation. That same pride would be my downfall, and Friedrich would give me my first lesson in humility—and in trust.

“What do you mean, what will I do? What kind of question is that? I’ll read them, of course.”

My eyes went wide, but only for a moment. From the look on his stern face, I quickly realized—too late—that my expression must have been especially idiotic.

“You’ll read them?”

“Yes. I might even think about them. You’ve spent hours working on these,” he said, weighing the bundle in his hand, as if estimating precisely how many minutes of effort had gone into that collective labor.

His inspection must have been satisfactory; he pressed the stack to his chest a little more gently. I leaned back in my chair, partly because I didn’t know what else to do. Later, replaying the scene again and again, half amused, half mortified, I recalled the heat that had flooded my face.

They were only school essays, after all—nothing special. Simple assignments, stitched together on command, rarely granting me the chance for mischief or lofty fantasy. And yet the thought that someone wanted to read them—Friedrich Weimer, of all people, whom I had never suspected of wanting to be anywhere near the written word—was intoxicating.

 Two fronts clashed violently somewhere inside my constricted chest. I wanted to be known. I wanted to grant permission for that small glimpse into myself—and at the same time, I didn’t want to be exposed, naked, as I was each morning under the fluorescent, soulless lights of the showers, surrounded by other young men—too tired to feel shame, or as wounded as I was.

But now we were alone. And soon, if Weimer’s assurances were to be believed, he would be alone with a voice born in my head, flowing from my heart—the fruit of joyful hours. My father had never read my essays, but writing them had always filled me with a kind of euphoria, like a bird suddenly realizing its wings were meant to fly.

“All right,” I said at last, seeing that Friedrich was growing impatient, ready to dart out of the office with my essays like some insolent thief. “You can read them. Just don’t expect too much—they’re only essays.”

“Are you afraid of my opinion?”

“No.” The word burst out of me with disarming honesty.

I wasn’t afraid—though part of me still had doubts. Could I be sure Friedrich was the right person to commune with the voice in my head, in solitude and silence? When I wrote those essays, I never imagined my classmate would be the one to read them. Had I known, I would have written them differently. I wrote first for my father, then for my teacher, and finally for some blurred figure in my imagination—a neutral listener who didn’t exist, who could not judge, who could not utter a review. My phantom reader had no power to condemn my words.

That was good. Comfortable.

Any other vision should have terrified me.

And yet, in that moment between Friedrich and me, I felt no terror. Only excitement.

Someone had looked, and stopped, and kept looking. Wanted to see. Wanted to understand. The thought itself was intoxicating. I let myself be drunk on it—watching that beautiful boy hold the work of my hands as if it were something precious.

Almost against myself—as always, since everything I did seemed to contradict my own undecided nature—I proposed a short escapade.

On the day of my arrival, as the automobile crossed the stone bridge over the dry moat, I had noticed a light below. Later I discovered it was a small window—probably from the servants’ quarters—deep in the castle’s belly, almost beneath the ground.

There were few moments in Napola that belonged to me alone. Most were collective memories—assemblies, breakfasts, drills, hygiene routines. Everything shared, everything communal. Secrets, private moments—those were a luxury. We were to learn that our bodies and minds were property of the whole, not our own, and we had no right to demand peace or privacy.

That discovery—a single light against the vast dark wall, rising from the earth like an iceberg I was meant to collide with—filled me with curiosity, and with warmth. It was mine, and no one else knew of that luminous little window on the outer wall. In a spare moment I looked down from the stone parapet. After assessing the height, I realized that with a partner, I might be able to see inside. The plan was unnecessary, even foolish—but I couldn’t resist investigating the source of that alluring glow. So I asked Friedrich to come with me. I would have preferred to explore alone, but even if I’d been two heads taller, I couldn’t have seen through the glass.

Even as we descended into the moat, I doubted whether I was doing the right thing. The light had been mine alone, and now it belonged to him as well—just like my essays, tucked behind his uniform, my editor’s desk in the school paper’s office, even the voice in my head meant for a faceless listener. I felt as though Friedrich was undressing me—but, to my own horror, I let him.

I even encouraged him.

I invited him on that nocturnal escapade beyond the walls to feed his curiosity—to bind us more closely together. What we found exceeded my expectations: a girl. Our age—one of the servants I’d seen carrying breakfast in the dining hall. Suddenly the whole adventure took on a different meaning, and I felt heat and cold rise and fall within me in turns, as if my blood had frozen from fingertips gripping the windowsill to the toes trapped in my stiff shoes.

“Do you see anything?” Friedrich grumbled, displeased that I’d claimed the right to look first. After all, I’d discovered the place—why should he be the first to see?

“Well? What is it?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing there.”

“Really? Albrecht… now, my turn!”

“I told you—there’s nothing there!”

Friedrich’s grip on my legs loosened; I swayed, and he immediately tightened his hold, pressing me so close that he knocked the breath out of my lungs—though his hands were on my legs, not my chest.

“Friedrich! Stop shaking me, for God’s sake!”

“Then get down! My hands are going numb. You don’t look it, but you’re heavy!” The warmth of his breath spread where it absolutely shouldn’t. I wanted to curse—him, myself, my idiotic night-time adventures—and though my father had forbidden me from praying, I prayed he wouldn’t notice what I was feeling, because I certainly did - a problem springing to life.

“Shut up—you’re supposed to be strong as a horse!” I panted, vision blurring.

Later, when I recalled that night, the image of the servant girl undressing for her bath was faint; I couldn’t remember her hair color, whether she wore a slip or not—and those should have been the details that mattered most.

Something in Friedrich snapped—he let go abruptly, and I nearly fell, boots sinking into the rotten, wet heap of leaves piled under the wall. I almost landed on my back in that decaying muck, which sobered me instantly. The haze of confusion and fever broke, leaving only burning irritation.

“What are you doing? Why did you let go of me?!” I cried, straightening my uniform, smoothing the wrinkles his hands had left. My undershirt had ridden up to my armpits when he dropped me, and I felt utterly disheveled after that brief contact.

Weimer’s gaze raked over me, and the tips of my ears burned crimson. Idiot.

“My turn now.”

“I told you, there’s nothing there.”

“Doesn’t matter. Help me.” He placed his hands on my shoulders, and just in time I laced my fingers into a cradle so he’d have a place to set his muddy boot.

Bad idea. A damn bad idea.

Friedrich pushed down with his whole body, and my heels sank into the soft ground—I was sure I’d collapse under his weight. He was heavy, that much was clear. If he’d lifted me with some effort, I was now utterly crushed beneath him. A mass of muscle pressing me down—my legs shaking—but I didn’t let go, leaning on the wall for support. Without it, I’d have herniated myself before lifting him an inch.

I was furious, humiliated, and absurdly, illogically overheated—and even then, I knew how indecent the whole thing was. Not even half a minute had passed since Friedrich had interrupted my observation of the girl, and I could no longer recall her silhouette at all.

“Well?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?!”

“Nothing. Same as you.”

That liar. That damn, hulking liar. He pushed himself up a little higher on his strong arms, easing the weight on my shoulders—but I still feared he’d slip, and we’d both tumble into the mud. I shifted my grip, and something hard brushed my cheek. In that instant, I began to pray again—something I never did. And for the God I called upon, my prayer must have been all the more blasphemous, because it went roughly like this: “Please, let it just be the belt buckle. Please, let it just be the belt buckle.”

For a moment, I thought I’d faint.

The whole escapade ended pitifully soon. The dogs—Peiner’s beloved beasts—must have caught the scent of our sick excitement and stress, or heard us fumbling like fools under the castle walls, because they began barking furiously, sending us scrambling up the slope as if the ground itself were on fire.

Later, when we were in bed, I felt how dry my throat was. The stress and anger gave way to an absurd euphoria. I wanted to laugh, to giggle—the image of our mad dash with Peiner’s dogs snapping behind us was electrifying. Friedrich and I shared something now—something that bound us in more ways than one.

Had I just signed the devil’s pact? If not for those few events, one after another—would things have gone differently? I’ve often wondered. If not for Friedrich’s suggestion, his sudden closeness (which he likely didn’t even realize—the way someone who doesn’t write can’t understand how intimate writing is), if not for our mischievous brotherhood under the castle walls—would he still have broken through every barrier I built around myself?

I didn’t even have to help him—he scaled them effortlessly. I don’t know what I was thinking then. Later I understood: there’s a peculiar thrill when someone you’re fascinated by wants to strip you bare. A sick, unnatural excitement—like a small animal that crawls willingly into the predator’s claws, because the idea of being devoured feels erotically profound.

“Friedrich…” I whispered into the quiet of our room, though it was forbidden to speak.

“Yes?”

“How did you know she’d be there?” The question slipped out before I could stop it. I had to know. I had to know whether I should feel ashamed.

Our eyes met, and the fair-haired boy smiled disarmingly as he whispered,

“You stopped breathing.” —and left it at that.

I said nothing either, but our shy smiles spoke louder than the silence between us.

Chapter Text

They released us into the field like hounds chasing a rabbit, though just as well we could’ve been the rabbits—hiding in the grass, our eyes wide and darting, our limbs restless and twitching. But if we were to keep the comparison to greyhounds, to hunters and trackers, then we were cowardly dogs—tails tucked between our legs, praying that this time it would be different. In truth, we were chasing our own tails, biting at each other’s paws, and Peiner had no qualms about lashing our heads with a wet towel twisted into a hard knot at the end. For sloppiness. For insubordination.

“Achtung!” Peiner halted, swaying on his spindly legs against the ground, no longer so muddy now that the morning frost had hardened it—as if bracing for an unseen blow.

Everything around us was locked in the cold stillness of dawn, tense—the earth itself did not trust us as we stepped on it. I didn’t trust myself either, not with the weight on my shoulder feeling so alien, and the strap of the Kar98k cutting in so sharply it felt like it reached the bone. Perhaps it was because there wasn’t much distance between my skin and bones anyway—unlike Friedrich, who had stopped just ahead of me, his bulk enough to make him believe his flesh could keep out the cold and the pain.

Our march was silenced by Peiner’s command; a dozen pairs of iron-soled boots tore into the frosted, rotting grass and leaves. The scrape of rifles echoed true in the white stillness of morning.

“On my command, you’ll line up in threes at each firing station. Do not fire without order! First shot standing. Then drop—fire from prone position! Finally, kneel and finish your round with a shot from your knees! Now move, ladies! Is the cold biting your balls?! March to your stations!”

We looked at one another, a single murmur of movement passing between us. Schneider broke ranks first, Friedrich followed, and I took my place with them before our target range—a sandbag laid over a wooden pallet, half-rotted and rejoined to the earth.

“That’s why Peiner’s always running around in just his tracksuit,” I muttered, though I didn’t feel like laughing.

The weight on my shoulder might as well have been an executioner’s hand. A man changes twice—first, when he puts on a uniform, and second, when he takes a weapon in hand and realizes that whether he wants to or not, he holds power—and that his damned duty is to kill for an incorporeal fatherland. Honor. Damn honor.

“Well, look at that—Stein speaks before breakfast,” Christoph lined up first. The rest of the cadets straggled along, stretching our company thin between the various shooting stations. “Decided to grace us with your charming wit this fine morning?”

“Why does Peiner run around in a tracksuit?” Friedrich asked, glancing back at me, hoping my poor joke might lift the mood.

“Because he’s got no balls. Doesn’t matter to him anymore,” I whispered dully.

He exhaled, shoulders loosening a bit—so I took that as a small victory. Along with the cloud of vapor from his lips came a bitter, resigned statement:

“Soon it won’t matter to us either. When he makes us crawl through that frozen mud under the wire.”

“Right,” Schneider straightened up, ready to follow Peiner’s orders. The instructor was currently yanking poor Hefe to his feet for lying down too early instead of waiting for the command and first position. “Once the cold water reaches your balls—kaputt. Nothing matters anymore.”

“Nothing matters,” I repeated quietly, gripping the rifle tighter.

Its length fit my body perfectly, oddly comforting. It nestled against my side and thigh like a loyal companion, soaking up the warmth from my skin—greedy for it, hungry for it, maybe as a foretaste of the heat it was made to steal. The human warmth of life.

Yet this foreign, solid thing could never truly be an extension of my body—hard, metallic, its stock oiled and gleaming—it was made never to fail us. It was meant to be our best friend in battle. But never a part of me. Never wrong—unless the mechanism jammed. Just like us—never mistaken, unless after the shot, when we realized we could no longer be sure of anything.

We trained endlessly with that rifle—marching, drilling “stand, drop” routines, hundreds of times bringing it to our cheek, empty, to get used to its feel. Hundreds, thousands of times. Stand, drop. Rifle on the shoulder. Fire. After thousands of repetitions, the feeling of the stock against our cheek, the steadying of breath, became more familiar than a tender touch.

The rifle caressed us, and we caressed it. We lived in a lewd symbiosis with metal and wood—a burning rod that breathed death and destruction—and I knew it.

Holding a weapon, I felt small, clumsy. When I started hitting the target, I felt powerful. Friedrich would pat my shoulder, smile. I imagined that one day, a bullet I fired would tear through an enemy—and because of that, Friedrich or Schneider or one of the others would get to smile and clap a friend’s back for a day or two more. It was worth learning to shoot—for that. Perhaps only for that. Perhaps that was the only reason any of this had the faintest trace of meaning. To save, to protect, to fight. That’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? That’s what the weight on the shoulder whispered—the smell of gunpowder and sweat.

We were to be heroes.

What sense would it make, otherwise, if it was only about killing?

How good, I thought suddenly, focusing on the target fixed in the distance, that the bullet has such a long range. I won’t have to look them in the eye.

“Ready?! Move, move! On my command! Achtung!”

A scraping sound rippled through the cadets. Schneider might even have clenched his buttocks.

“Anschlag!”

Rifles slid from our shoulders, straps falling limp and lifeless. The barrels didn’t gleam—there was no sun. They simply were in the frozen morning air, as they truly were. They cut through the essence of things like black rods, bare and cold against a sky that bled into the earth.

God had left us. Not in that moment specifically—He had been gone for a long time. It would take us much longer to realize it.

“Zielen! Feuer!”

I watched dully as bullets stitched into targets, scraps rising for a few short seconds.

How does a bullet behave when it enters flesh? Does the blood spray far? Or does the body swallow the bullet with a kind of erotic hunger—brutal penetration—so religious, so carnal. How does the body look next to something so human, so often described as sacred and honorable?

Honor again. What is that word, except just a word?

Schneider’s and Friedrich’s turns passed quickly and cleanly. Their bullets hit nearly every time. From other stations, Peiner’s vile screech echoed:

“German cadets don’t miss! Hold that rifle properly—I swear you won’t shoot better when I shove it up your ass, so don’t tempt me! Go on, shoot the damn target!” Peiner could shout all he wanted—some of us trembled too hard while aiming to hit anything, or even come close.

The bullets struck the ground, tearing tufts of grass and dirt into the air, flinging them aside like confetti.

“Weimer, Schneider, good,” the trainer planted his hands on his hips, thrusting his pelvis forward like his spine had permanently bent that way—to match the shape of a bloody sadist. “Now Stein! Move! Anschlag!” He blew that damned whistle that had haunted our sleep for weeks.

Without a word, I took the first position. The stock pressed against my cheek—familiar, like a kiss. For a brief moment, I had to steady my shaking hands. The target seemed so far away it barely existed. I wouldn’t feel the bullet strike it, wouldn’t see it tear through—nothing. It didn’t concern me.

I shoot, there is only me and the rifle. Together, we converse, we bargain for my life. My friend, who saves me and my comrades. Whoever is on the other end doesn’t matter—they’re too far to exist.

“Zielen!”

Inhale to aim. Exhale to pull the trigger.

“Feuer!”

The stock didn’t kiss me then—it bit me. The wood struck my cheekbone with the crunch of crushed skin.

Recoil.

I wasn’t ready for it.

“How the hell are you holding that?! You’ve got to brace the stock against your shoulder and hold tight—tight!” Peiner bellowed, his whistle bouncing on his chest with each breath of shrill hatred. “No strength in those twigs of yours, Stein?! Want a smack in the face?! Do you?! Next position! Hold that rifle properly! You’ll never hit a target shaking like an aspen! Go! Move!”

When he slammed the stock into my face, it was still warm from my cheek. It had been colder than shame before—but now it was different. I realized that each time, it got easier, that a man learns to live with it.

With pain came humiliation; I could feel Friedrich’s and Schneider’s eyes on me as I dropped flat on my stomach, aiming at the distant target that didn’t exist in my world anymore, a world where I focused on other things: hold firm, don’t shake, grip the rifle with conviction bordering on fanaticism. Inhale, exhale, and shoot.

The target splintered, and I breathed out in relief, repeating the same pattern at the sound of Peiner’s whistle. Again and again, until it became habit—written deep beneath the skin, maybe beside the need for warmth and closeness, maybe even replacing fear. With enough repetition, even recoil could become comfort. If you held the rifle right, the recoil was only a humble strike. And a strike—just a kiss, only harder.

The body tightens as the trigger’s pulled, a stolen breath rushes back into the lungs. Muscles remember what it means to be.

For too long we hadn’t appreciated existence—and as a mass of cadets on the range, we would go on not appreciating it for a long time still.

“Last position!”

Rising to kneel, I reloaded automatically. The empty cartridge cap fell by my knees, ringing like a tiny bell, clear and bright. I pulled the bolt back—forward. Aim, fire. Then there was silence, and it was good—because Peiner patted my cheek briefly, where a red mark was already blooming, but it was over. I didn’t look at the target—it didn’t exist for me. There was only the fact that it was over, and soon I could return to the school, eat something warm, and forget.

In the washroom, while we all preened before the mirrors—especially Schneider, who used at least a ton of pomade a day—I touched the swollen spot on my cheek. The red had turned to bruised purple. It had swelled more than I expected.

“It’s nothing,” Friedrich whispered beside me. “I come back from boxing half-beaten most days.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Katarina’s bound to notice,” Schneider puffed himself up like a peacock, fixing his part for the thousandth time. “She won’t even look at a clumsy wretch like you, sorry Albrecht, but you’ve got no chance.”

“Katarina’s approval is the last thing I’ll be looking for in the mess-hall,” I muttered, glancing back into my own reflection.

“Katarina this, Katarina that,” Hefe growled, nearly poking my eye out with his comb. “Shut up already, Schneider!”

“Jealous, aren’t you?”

 Friedrich leaned closer to me. The warmth from his body was unlike the rifle’s kiss—it was real. I didn’t want him to move away.

“Vogler gave me some ointment. For bruises. You know… after practice. Want some?”

I nodded. I didn’t know how to refuse.

Chapter Text

I’ll admit openly that sometimes I failed to appreciate Friedrich. Not out of prejudice, nor out of any inner conviction that the son of a factory worker must somehow be corrupted—because he was not.

I admired him for his strength and the talents he possessed in fields where I could boast of no accomplishments. As if, before we were born, when merits were being distributed, I had been given shares in entirely different domains. His strength blinded me, and often, between the two of us, I saw only myself as the one capable of scheming, of probing into the entrails of matters, of processing entrusted information in a thousand different ways.

Friedrich was not simple—no one worth knowing ever is—yet he never came to mind when I thought of a penetrating thinker; he lacked that sly gene, the one that, like a poker player, appears with an ace up the sleeve and knows how to play it. He wasn’t simple, but he was noble, though he never saw it in himself—the fool. His whole being shone, radiating a bright, living warmth. People felt it, were drawn to him; others, consumed by jealousy—which gnawed at me too, in the first days of our acquaintance—wanted to dig hateful pits beneath his feet.

I wished for his well-built frame and the bearing of a man who, like Samson or Heracles, could tear down walls, shatter stone columns through the sheer force of his will, his masterful discipline, and his admirable control over his own body.

If our hearts were compared, his would be three times larger—of a deeper shade of red—with aortas thick as hempen cords and coronary vessels like a crown of thorns encircling that noble organ, pumping life into every limb. It would contract and swell with such vigor that anyone who tried to squeeze or wring the strength from it would sooner break his own fingers—the joints twisting painfully, slipping from their sockets.

No one could have broken him. My heart, next to his, would scarcely be noticed. At times I wondered if I had one at all—it beat softly and timidly, making itself known only in moments of deep embarrassment or pain. It was the heart of a coward, drumming in my chest only when I was forced into great physical or emotional distress.

If it were laid upon an operating table beside Friedrich’s, it would look small, pitiful, pale—as if the blood in its chambers had congealed, slowed to a crawl, giving it a languid rhythm. Had a doctor decided to exchange our hearts—give me Friedrich’s and sew mine into him—I would have died instantly. The pressure would burst every vein in my body, while Weimer would perish of grief, for nothing pains more than a timid heart trapped in such a magnificent body.

That night, I never suspected him of such perceptiveness. To me he was only a good-natured, brave colossus—stronger in body than in mind, though still talented in both disciplines, unlike myself.

Many times I thought my father foolish for not seeing the potential in the written word—my potential, the potential of his own son—until I began to repeat his sermons myself, convincing myself that his twisted, wounded image of me was, in fact, true.

I was a hypocrite. I had not appreciated Friedrich’s insight—I was blind, or if not fully blind, then short-sighted. A conceited, crooked boy, absurdly proud and yet so deeply buried in the well named Low Self-Esteem, which echoed back to me every doubt born beneath skin too delicate, too sensitive.

We stood together by the lake, tasked with ensuring no rat, dog, or hare came near the walls—the cadets never ran away from school, nor even strayed beyond its boundaries. No one dared risk public humiliation, a letter home, or even expulsion from this most coveted institution. No one ever tried to break in either—for what reason would they? Yet we were still ordered to take turns on night watch—this time as punishment for being late to evening roll call. That day, Jaucher had made us play dress-up, which ended in a tremendous mess and an hour spent restoring the room to order. We were late again, and that was how we ended up there, by the lake, freezing our backsides.

“Want to peek through the window again?” Friedrich nudged me teasingly.

“Probably won’t see anything this time either.”

“That’s exactly what I’m hoping for.”

“Oh, stop it,” I sighed, sitting on the bank among the frost-hardened, withered reeds—the remnants of golden autumn, retreating from us mercilessly, already promising frozen fingers and windburned faces. “If you want to scrub toilets after they catch us, go right ahead. I’m not in the mood for any nonsense. You shouldn’t be either.”

Weimer sat down beside me, resting his rifle across his knees, with a gesture so practiced, so natural, that even I didn’t feel it was anything unusual.

“I thought we could use a little entertainment. The night will be long, and the frost bites. A bit of warmth here and there would do us good.”

“You’re incorrigible, Friedrich. You should be ashamed. If you want warmth, go sit in the boiler room for five minutes. You’ll be roasted evenly.”

“You make it sound like I talk nonsense, but you know it’s the truth. Nothing warms a cadet’s heart like—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, shut up!” I smacked his helmet so hard it tilted askew—he never fastened the chin strap, the slob. Claimed it “chafed.” “If Peiner heard you, he’d make you run around the walls naked for a week and send his beasts after you. Erna and Gerda would tear off a piece of your left buttcheek, no doubt.”

“You’re such a pessimist. Often fantasize about my buttcheeks, do you? Who’s incorrigible here? Maybe I should report you to the warden.”

“Spare me your vanity. Just because Vogler worships you like Michelangelo himself carved you out of marble doesn’t mean anything. We’re staying put. It’s just fine here.”

I fixed my eyes on the opposite bank, half-shrouded in milky-white fog—on one side devoured by the lake’s black waters, on the other brushed by a corpse’s breath drifting from the forest and over the clearing. The frost hadn’t yet sealed the surface completely, but near the edge, brittle stalks stood locked in frozen soil—stiff, spellbound in place.

 “Fine for you, maybe, sitting here till our trousers soak through. Whatever you say, you’re the boss.”

“Don’t even start,” I muttered, irritated that he still occasionally reminded me of my early coldness and distance toward him—mistaken for disdain.

Some cadets joked that I was an ice princess—the governor’s son, thinking himself better than the rest. They soon learned I wasn’t about to challenge anyone, and Friedrich himself forgave my initial uncertainty and innate aloofness, never holding it against me as some imagined privilege.

“I like watching the water,” I admitted after a pleasant stretch of silence.

“I know.”

I raised an eyebrow, and Friedrich laughed softly.

“I’ve read all your old essays, remember?”

“Ah… right. Of course.”

“There was one… wait, I’ll remember.” He rubbed his chin in thought, and I watched him shamelessly, drawing unspeakable pleasure from the gesture.

Was his skin smooth like mine, or did invisible stubble catch faintly on his fingertips? I wanted to know, though I couldn’t say why. For a long time, I told myself it was just for comparison—as if we were competing in some private games: if his skin was the same as mine, I’d have nothing to be ashamed of.

But from the very start, it wasn’t about that sick need to measure my worth through Friedrich.

Even if his skin held an entirely different note, I still wanted to feel it, to discover it. I desired that knowledge regardless of the outcome. It wasn’t about me—and every version of Friedrich was perfect, because it was him.

“The topic was ‘Describe Your Summer Holidays.’ I wrote plenty of those back in school. Such a banal theme—but you turned it into… something.” He glanced at me with a faint smile, a remnant of some happier thought.

“Yes,” I nodded, fixing my gaze on the dark, gently rippling water. “I thought it would make for a better story than some casual nonsense.”

“Did it really happen?”

“It did.”

“And Governor Stein jumped into the water to save you?”

“No.” The laugh caught in my throat, trembling painfully. “I embellished it a little, you know, literary fiction. My father didn’t jump after me—it was the chauffeur. Funny, but for a long time I believed it was him. That he stripped off his uniform and leapt in. But later, my mother, with her usual dose of embarrassment, told me what really happened. It was the chauffeur. Our chauffeur jumped into the lake and pulled me out. He got a bonus afterward.”

The truth hurt, but it was the only one I had. Fiction and fantasy—those one could have in abundance, could choose whichever hurt less or more, depending on the depth of one’s perverse need for suffering—whether through the nonexistent beauty of a beautiful lie, or the magnified ugliness of a crueler truth.

My fiction portrayed that hot summer of 1939 differently—I chose the nonexistent beauty, the imitation of family woven into words that paid homage to no truth. There was only one truth, and I didn’t want to repeat it on pages scrawled by a trembling child’s hand.

I was thirteen, and my mother insisted we make use of the summer days, so we went to the countryside, far from crowded Berlin, thick with smoke and exhaust. She tirelessly claimed that young boys needed plenty of fresh air, as though my poor growth were due to the city’s fumes. It was easier for her to blame Berlin; otherwise, it would mean I took after her more than after Father—and that, for a German officer, was the greatest disgrace: a son resembling a frail, effeminate weakling.

She ordered the chauffeur to drive us outside Berlin, to the places where she’d grown up. The end of summer spoiled us with magnificent weather even as it punished us with heat, and Father sent me into the water to build strength, claiming that “swimming sculpts the whole body, spirit included.”

So I waded like a heron through the shallows, slipping on moss-covered stones, chasing little silver fish that darted from beneath my feet.

Father smoked, leaning against the automobile, sharing cigars thicker than my thumb with the chauffeur. Mother sat beneath the twisted apple tree—its branches gnarled like arthritic fingers—fanning herself with a hand-painted oriental fan she never parted with on hot days. Beneath her elegant hat and intricate hairstyle, she saw nothing.

“Why did you swim out to the middle of the pond?” Friedrich interrupted the cavalcade of memories unspooling in my head like a torn film reel. “You knew you weren’t a strong swimmer. And swimming in open water isn’t like a pool.”

“I know. I just felt an overwhelming need to please my father. In the center of the pond there was a little island shaped like a horseshoe. A small apple tree grew there—the same kind as on the shore. I wanted to pick a tiny apple and bring it to him, as proof that I could do something, that I was worth something.”

Friedrich was silent for a long time, digesting my words. With his right hand he fumbled in the frozen sand by the lapping water, searching for twigs or scraps to occupy his hands.

“Does Governor Stein not realize how much you’re capable of?”

“Governor Stein, first and foremost, is a governor—not a father.”

He neither nodded nor shook his head—his gesture was somewhere in between. With a quick motion, he hurled a smooth, flat stone; it skimmed the surface again and again before finally succumbing to gravity, slicing into the water and vanishing.

“You’re such a wassermuddler.” I scoffed.

“So are you.”

He was right. When I found myself in that murky lake water, thick with weeds, branches, and mosquito larvae, my muscles failed me, and the panic that made me thrash and gulp the muddy water turned my brain to pulp. I heard only my mother’s desperate cry before the pressing dome closed above me, trapping me in a kingdom of silt and glimmers of light through the stirred-up mud—the bottom too far to reach without sinking like an anchor, like a drowned man.

The first few seconds were the worst. After that—it was easier.

“What does it feel like?”

“To drown?”

“Yes.”

“At first you’re terrified, because it’s not a fate you chose. Suddenly you’re torn from all your plans, and your body becomes ballast dragging you inexorably toward death. But then… it gets easier. Like everything else.” I picked up a pebble and tossed it into the still lake. It skipped four times before vanishing. “Underwater it’s quiet—so quiet like nowhere else. I may not like bathing in wild lakes or rivers anymore, but sometimes I like to hold my head underwater, to feel that absolute silence again. It’s soothing. Drowning isn’t such a bad feeling, Friedrich. There are worse ways to die.”

He absorbed every word, every nuance. I paid too much attention to his gaze—but not in the way I should have. And he listened, memorizing greedily, and later I would curse and hate him for that needless perceptiveness. But in that moment, I only fumbled blindly in the sand, searching for another pebble to send after his—out there, toward the middle of the lake—my eyes fixed on the tight line of his jaw.

I underappreciated him. I hadn’t understood the weight of that moment. How tragic the consequences of that small negligence would be. And Friedrich—beautiful Friedrich—drank the words from my lips. I wanted to keep speaking, speaking until maybe he’d want to taste those words himself, pressing against my cracked lips. But the words didn’t come. Not anymore. Silence fell between us and lasted until morning.

Chapter Text

If I had to choose between the evenings in Napola—filled with shame and the constant replaying of the day’s memories, most of them tense and rather unpleasant—and the mornings, the act of waking up in that cold room that could never truly be warmed, then in every way, it was the mornings I despised the most.

They brought no good news, all of them nearly identical—just as grim and gray, as if upon opening one’s eyes, God had stirred a pot of murky soup with a metal spoon and from it painted the pitiful reality before our eyes. One could expect the same from each day, so upon waking, the only thing one wished to do was close their eyes again.

Sometimes the mornings reeked of smoke from the boiler room and urine, a sour, biting smell in the nose; sometimes of our sweat-soaked undershirts, hung by the window but still unwashed. We couldn’t hide them in the lockers to rid ourselves of the stench—Jaucher would barge in at dawn, as always, and during inspection would turn the room into a real cesspit, as though some natural disaster had swept through it.

He was one of the reasons why my feelings toward mornings in that cursed place were soaked through with burning hatred. Justus woke us up punctually, yelling like some unholy creature, never sparing us his “warm threats” or “kind words of encouragement,” as he liked to call his vile insults thrown at our feet without hesitation. He couldn’t boast intelligence or wit, but he never lacked a rich supply of offensive epithets, with which he so delighted in showering us. The sheer capacity of his vocabulary of invectives was truly remarkable.

He was most fixated on Friedrich and Gladen—like a vile tick lurking in the bushes, waiting to latch onto its victim and slowly suck out its lifeblood. That’s what Jaucher did, in all his disgusting temperament, fastening himself onto those two, eager to drain them. He had clung permanently to Gladen, choosing him as a target that couldn’t escape, forced to endure those endless jibes, each one crueller than the last.

Friedrich was not the right companion for such mental and emotional games, that filthy persecution; he brushed the tick Justus off and crushed him underfoot. And with every failed attempt to draw blood from Friedrich, the tick Justus only flailed harder, venting his frustrated malice upon Gladen—poor Gladen, who still wet our bunk.

If the men responsible for creating this so-called progressive, respectable institution—whose highest purpose was to temper us and twist the neck of any depraved idea that might taint the golden youth of the Reich—had any sense at all, they wouldn’t merely have forbidden talk in bed; they would have locked each of us nightly in solitary cells, soundproofed rooms, so that no one had to wake in a cold dormitory before the treacherous dawn, or before the arrival of that idiot Jaucher, to hear others or themselves disturb the stale air of that Napolian prison.

In such moments, even I sometimes succumbed to temptation. There was no other way. I was young, and youth always wants to feel more than life allows—to chase more rabbits than the hunt permits.

I hated mornings. They offered more hope than the fleeting moments stolen in the lavatory, more freedom than the evenings in the editor’s room—after all, Friedrich had the habit of barging in without knocking, and I wasn’t foolish enough to draw attention and risk worsening the tension already between us. The mornings, wrapped in the threat of dawn, were dangerous in their silence and illusion of safety. A person will take the smallest scrap of comfort and make a god of it, enthrone it, and be wholly satisfied, when there’s nothing else to cling to.

That’s what we did. Every one of us. We settled for scraps to satisfy ourselves.

Some were terrified of being overheard—including me, who preferred to refrain for weeks rather than force someone to hear my breath falter pathetically, the whole pitiful act of it. Whatever respect I had for myself dwindled each day; since arriving in Napola, I had none left. My body deserved respect only as the property of the country and the Führer—but I could not accept that. Out of stubborn defiance, I granted myself that respect by refusing any touch on my own bunk, certainly not in the lavatory or under the desk in the editorial room.

To be caught would have stripped me of dignity as if it were a flimsy garment.

And yet, I won’t deny that when I awoke before the natural disaster that was Justus Von Jaucher arrived, I often felt that reaching for relief would cost me little and give me much—a trace of comfort, normalcy, something proper for a boy my age. Or so I thought; of such “normalcy” I never spoke—with anyone, least of all my father or mother. Schneider and Tjaden sometimes talked about all sorts of lewd matters with such gusto that I’d stop listening halfway through, unable to bear them.

That looseness of speech between us, however, never led to breaking the taboo around self-pleasure, which some called by far more damning names. We didn’t talk about it openly—we kept it to ourselves, perhaps out of fear of admitting that, even though our bodies belonged first to the Fatherland and the Führer, and only afterward, if at all, to our own desires. We lived in fear of exposing even that one thing no one had ordered us to reveal.

That one thing could remain ours alone; no one exploited it against us, for that would have been cruelty in the worst taste. Though perhaps no one needed to enforce rules or punishments—we ruled ourselves through control and denial.

Each time I woke to the sound of Friedrich moving too rhythmically on his bunk, I turned the other way—toward the window—and fixed my gaze on the sill until he quieted and fell asleep. I rarely slept before he finished, perhaps because my heart pounded so loud and fast it drowned all else. Those were the only moments I truly felt alive. That’s why I couldn’t sleep, though I wanted to—Friedrich’s quiet, regular motions left me aching, afflicted with painful tightness I’d never admit to anyone, even under threat of burning with red-hot iron.

We had brought this upon ourselves, this curtain of mutual virtue-watching. I was full of fear, shame, and disgust toward myself and my body—so much so that waking with hardness between my legs made me wish, bitterly and terribly, that the discomfort would fade before the first curious light leaked through the window cracks.

But that method often failed. I woke as usual, before Justus’s marching steps thundered through the hallway. Nothing yet hinted at his arrival; the sunrise was only a pale glow beyond the trees rising over the lake. For a few moments I just blinked, reacquainting myself with the gray reality, assembling the shades of this world in my head—they looked particularly miserable on the palette of the coming day.

Friedrich slept to my right, arm bent awkwardly above his head, face marked with deep concern. Less than a meter separated us—cold air and the gap between the beds—but I felt the urge to turn toward the window, to pull away as far as possible so that the warm air escaping from under my thin, scratchy blanket wouldn’t brush against his face, wouldn’t betray me with a treacherous gust.

Only then did I focus on the discomfort tightening my pajama trousers. It happened more and more often, and it filled me with enormous anxiety. There was nothing arousing in it, nor did it come from dreams—if I dreamed at all, I never remembered. My dreams never ventured into intimacy or desire, as if my mind censored them automatically, erasing every improper trace.

I knew perfectly well what I could and could not have.

Satisfaction, fulfillment of gentler desires, was not among those things. I wasn’t even allowed to dream of them.

I loosened my trousers slightly so they wouldn’t press as much—only to the thighs, no further. Always cautious, always restrained—that was the way to survive in Napola, to keep a shred of dignity. I hated this morning ritual; even the natural gesture of taking myself in my hand filled me with humiliation and anger. My own body betrayed me constantly, forcing me into wants that had no right to exist in my life.

Morning hardness was worse than fleeting impulses sparked by a thought, a glance, a brief touch. Those were intangible, unpredictable, and left quickly when pushed away. Sometimes I gave in, but it was quick, dry, leaving me irritated and ashamed of my trembling hands—hands that at such moments were rough, cold, and devoid of warmth.

I clenched my lips and eyes shut, my whole body tensing like a single drawn muscle, a whip about to crack the air. Just not to breathe too loud, not to make a sound, not to shake the bed that scraped across the floor and shrieked like a tortured thing.

I wanted to cry. That act always summoned the worst in me. I wanted to disappear.

I wanted not to be alone in this shame.

Before I could even get started for real, the heavy thud of boots in the hallway froze me in place.

Jaucher.

“Up, you filthy brats! Now, move it! Out of bed, make your bunks, and off to morning drills!” Justus burst into the room, slamming the light switch. The wall lamps beside my face flared up, conspiring to expose my shameful state. “Don’t make me repeat myself! If you’re late, they’ll run you till you shit yourselves! I’d love to watch it, but I’ve got things to do, so MOVE! You sniveling, wretched maggots!”

Before he left, our room exploded into motion. Schneider was already on his feet, rushing to his locker. Hefe grumbled for a moment, then got up. Tjaden pulled the blanket over his head in a desperate act of defiance, but soon rose too, whining that “the floor’s cold, the air’s cold, the food’s cold” and that “he’s had enough, enough of all this.”

I drew a trembling breath, holding back tears. The tension wouldn’t leave me; it clung like a curse, and its cruelty was no joke but a death sentence. I turned slightly, glancing over my shoulder. Friedrich was slowly getting up, still on his bunk, his pale eyes fixed on my curled, pitiful form.

“Morning.”

“Morning.”

“You not getting up?”

“I… I will. In a minute.” My eyes filled with tears, so I turned again toward the window.

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

Thinking of horrors—vile, terrible things—was useless. I had to get to the lavatory, but how, with shame written on my face and proof tenting my trousers?

Below me, Gladen had risen, as usual soaked, and trudged toward the bathroom like a condemned man walking to the gallows. I bit my lip till it bled, and where my fingers dug into my thigh, half-moon cuts bloomed red—marks I’d notice later under the communal showers.

Why does it have to be this way? What’s the point of all this? I don’t want this—I can’t go on. I don’t want to be human. I don’t want this body; it’s good for nothing if it won’t obey me, if I can’t control it. It betrays me too often. I don’t need it. I don’t want it. How do I tame it? How do I force it into obedience?

I climbed down from the bunk as stiffly as Gladen before me, half-covering myself with a hand and half with the blanket that slid down with me. Friedrich, one eye on his bed as he tidied it with practiced ease, kept the other fixed on me. He said nothing—but I knew that he knew. I dressed, though my own hands blurred before my eyes. I couldn’t catch my breath.

I don’t want this, I don’t want this, I don’t want this…

The rest of the cadets had already rushed out in their tracksuits. Only Friedrich, Tjaden, and I remained—Tjaden still pulling on damp socks.

“Why so slow? Can’t you move faster, you lazy bastards?” Justus stormed back in, brushing past Tjaden as he fled into the corridor. “When I say you’ve got five minutes to be with Peiner for drills, that means five minutes! I’ve got no time to stand over you and play nursemaid!” He stopped in front of me, and I thought I’d faint.

I couldn’t speak; my throat tightened as if bound by rope or clamped in iron. I still held that cursed blanket against my waist—a last shield against his accusing stare, against ridicule. Of course Justus noticed immediately. He sensed fear like a predator, always sniffing for weakness to exploit for his favorite game—psychological torment. A row of pale teeth gleamed through the thin lips he twisted into a grotesque imitation of a smile.

“Stein. Step forward.”

“We’re leaving now,” Friedrich said, stepping between us, his broad shoulders hiding my entire miserable figure. “Thirty seconds, no longer.”

I couldn’t see Jaucher’s face—Friedrich blocked him completely—but after a tense moment of silence, the floor creaked under the sharp rhythm of metal-tipped boots. He left, the door wide open.

Friedrich looked at me once—his eyes full of understanding. I mouthed a silent “thank you.” Then he left too, closing the door behind him and granting me a minute or two of mercy—just enough to rid myself of shame.

Hurting, my skin raw beneath the rough fabric of my trousers, I ran for the courtyard. Peiner was waiting, and he gave me a killer warm-up as a punishment for those two minutes of delay—two minutes during which I had wept in our room, begging my skin, burning from mindless friction, to obey me just once.

For the next twenty minutes I steeped my shame and pain in sweat, while the fire in my lungs burned away any last trace of dubious comfort that cruel morning had offered.

Chapter Text

“You were foolish to stand up for me in front of Justus. He was looking for a reason, and you handed yourself to him on a silver platter,” I said, even before Friedrich had time to greet me.

Those were the first words we exchanged after the trainer had dragged me brutally across the entire courtyard, venting his fury for those two minutes of lateness.

“He could’ve told Peiner to make you run fifty laps around the wall until you fainted somewhere in the moat.”

Friedrich rolled his eyes, setting a few textbooks on the long table. As soon as he came closer, the green glow of the lamp wrapped around him like a good friend. Instinctively, I shifted a little to the left, though there was more than enough room on the bench attached to the table for both of us.

At that hour, the library was almost empty, breathing quiet contemplation like a chapel—the chill, too, matched that of a chapel. I could even indulge in a painterly conceit and compare the library to a crypt—after all, they had much in common.

Both dead, both extracting from their visitors only timid whispers, cold and unwelcoming, reeking of something older than time itself—of mildew, of rotted age and decay, finding shelter in every corner.

In the mornings, frost bloomed in the form of vast floral carpets where the window frames weren’t well sealed with putty, giving it a fine field to display its artistry. The library was magnificent in the morning, a cathedral of knowledge with its high ceiling and dark beams, but I could only enter it early when one of the teachers opened it for his own use—otherwise, library hours lasted for a short time after dinner, and it was supervised by the prefects.

They guarded its peace like hellhounds, ensuring that none of the rascals razored engravings out of the books or blew their noses on the more important titles in the academy’s collection. The rarest and most significant works could only be viewed in the reading room, always under the watch of a prefect-spy. Since I never liked being watched, I avoided the reading room like the plague, instead invoking my father’s title to borrow certain books almost on the sly. Of course, under a volley of threats from the prefects, who weren’t eager to hand over valuable volumes to a younger cadet—thereby risking their own necks.

I felt Friedrich stretch his long legs under the table.

“Von Jaucher won’t do anything to me. He only pretends to have power; he’s just another cadet like us.” Weimer was once again living through his day in blissful conviction that the obvious rules bound everyone equally and fairly.

According to him, the forces were distributed evenly, but he missed one small, though vital fact—the equality in Napola existed, at best, only on paper and in a few slogans meant to persuade families to hand over their sons to the ranks of toy soldiers: soldiers of iron, of mother-of-pearl, and those of paper and cardboard.

Maybe we were all thrown into the same pot, but that pot had levels—the ones at the bottom were the first to burn, trampled by those above them.

“Jaucher is a prefect. He has other privileges.” I pulled the textbooks Friedrich had brought closer to my side of the table.

He handled them with remarkable care, so they bore almost no signs of use. Unfortunately, I had the nasty habit of folding corners, breaking spines, and squeezing from books all they could give me from their physical, bodily side.

The physical communion with books was something deeply familiar to me. A book regularly became my companion—more reliable and trustworthy than any human—and thanks to its materiality, it nourished not only the soul, as a lecture or a concert might, but also that deeply rooted need to have something within the grasp of hands starved for contact.

Friedrich laid his notebook and fountain pen before us, but he didn’t abandon the topic I probably shouldn’t have started or stirred up unnecessarily. We didn’t need to speak of it at all—I didn’t feel the need myself. I only wanted him to understand that, despite my gratitude for his intervention during the morning incident, I’d rather he didn’t risk his neck again for my weakness to low temptations.

“You’ve got privileges too.”

“But I’ve no intention of using them to cause you trouble. That blond swine, though—he has.”

“He somehow restrains himself.”

“Because Jaucher’s afraid of you.”

“You think so?”

“Yes.” I was almost certain of it. Jaucher might have been devoid of compassion and incapable of understanding the concept of the common good or empathy, but he had mastered the art of self-preservation to perfection. “He’s afraid you’ll smash his nose. That’s why he’s always tense and bristling. And he’s jealous—pathologically jealous.”

“Jealous of what?”

“Of everything. Of you—all of you. You’re the walking image of perfection, but you can’t keep rubbing it in everyone’s face without earning a kick. I know Vogler pampers you as if you were his beloved duchess, but remember—Vogler’s protection has its limits. Before you know it, you could be scraping leftovers from the latrines. Or Peiner could chain you to a kennel and have his dogs gnaw on your calves.”

Friedrich laughed a little too loudly, and the steps of one of the prefects guarding the library’s silence—the oasis of Napola’s enforced quiet, the last bastion of learning—sounded from behind one of the shelves to our left, dangerously close to our secret corner.

It was by far my favorite spot in the whole library, though I preferred borrowing books and reading them in the editorial room—the privilege of being the governor’s son granted me unlimited access to the library’s resources, letting me enjoy its vast collection in the quiet of my own refuge. Still, there were some things even I couldn’t bypass, despite invoking my nearly omnipotent father and his iron authority.

Press editions, or the Napola Chronicles, as well as some early issues of Der Fackelträger, were available only within the library and reading room. I couldn’t persuade them to let me take them out, though I tried persistently—so persistently that I nearly earned myself a slap in the face from Sulzer.

When the footsteps faded, Weimer leaned closer; I didn’t even need to see his face to recognize the shape of a smile carried by his warm breath on my skin.

“Gnaw on my calves, you say? Mhm. And by morning they’ll grow back again, and so on, in a loop. Prometheus.” He straightened proudly, puffing himself up.

He remembered the myth of Prometheus—I’d told him recently, during one of our leisure chat sessions in the editorial room.

In one of the cabinets, locked with a key I had found tucked behind a portrait of the Führer, there lay a leaflet—a remnant of an earlier print run promoting the school paper. Made in linocut, its blacks struck boldly at the viewer, depicting a proud man holding a torch. Prometheus. Beneath it blazed the title: Der Fackelträger – Zeitschrift der Nationalpolitischen Erziehungsanstalt.

“You compare me to a Greek hero quite often—is that intentional?” He nudged me playfully in the ribs, and the trace of that touch sent a shiver down my whole body, as if every smallest part of me sent word to the next: Friedrich is touching me. Friedrich is close. He’s here. Stay alert. Another touch may follow.

“Your looks resemble a Cyclops more. Don’t risk yourself like that. I could’ve handled that bastard. Next time, just stay out of it. I don’t want you on my conscience.”

That remark must have stung Friedrich’s pride—or his sense of duty—for he clenched his jaw and jutted it slightly, a gesture of offended defiance.

“You’d rather it was you? You’d rather run around the moat or scrape Peiner’s breakfast scraps from the latrine? Albrecht…”—as he spoke my name, his voice slipped into a whisper, as if it were a mystical secret—“Von Jaucher could’ve really made trouble for you; you know how dangerously high-strung he is.”

“His sense of duty is overly developed.”

“He’d have taken your weakness and turned it into a public spectacle for the student rabble. That’s just how he is—disgusting. Disgustingly pompous, disgustingly devoted to some idiotic doctrine meant to turn us into fools afraid of our own cocks. You think he doesn’t do it at night? I’m sure he does.”

“Friedrich…” I hissed warningly, glancing around instinctively.

For such words, Weimer would’ve been sentenced to solitary cofinement for the night if any of the prefects had heard even a fragment of that heresy-filled sentence. Besides, I had no desire to speak with him about such matters—one simply didn’t. Those things were to be silenced, endured in solitude and quiet, never breaking the surface of conjecture, forever confined within secrecy.

“It’s completely normal,” he pressed on, leaning even closer. He was angry—angry that I kept repeating the same truths he so despised. “We can’t let them convince us otherwise.”

I jerked my head a bit too sharply, so he drew back, scraping his elbow against the tabletop. What did it matter that I had locked myself in a cell within my own head and chosen to stay there? Was I supposed to openly demand the right to pleasure within the limits of my own body? Was I supposed to accept that weakness? That was no privilege worthy of pride—it was humiliation.

“I’m not going to let them make me ashamed of myself,” Friedrich said finally, laying his open palm on the polished surface with emphasis.

Friedrich had nothing to be ashamed of. Even the rhythmic dance beneath the sheets in his case seemed a dance, not the convulsions of some paralytic fool—which I’d rather spare myself. Looking at him, in the lamplight, in that pathetically cold library, I felt I hated him so much, admired him so much, longed so much to be like him. I wanted to be his mirror; I wanted him, looking into me, to say I recognize you.

Why couldn’t I be like him? So free, so sure of himself, so perfectly carved from the hardest marble—and with such mastery?

He was unyielding. I couldn’t hold back the bitter anger.

“Yes, yes, I know—you have absolutely no problem with any of it. You’re ashamed of nothing.” The venom slipped from my lips before I could stop it.

Maybe he didn’t freeze entirely, holding his breath in shame—not him—but he hesitated. The leg he had been nervously tapping under the table stopped its jittery beat against the floor.

“Do I bother you when you sleep?” he asked so gently I thought I’d shed my skin from shame.

How could I be so spitefully vile? How could I punish him with cruel words just because I so desperately wanted to be more like him?

“No,” I finally answered.

My left hand still rested on Friedrich’s notebook, so I quickly withdrew it, realizing that my fingertips were sweating.

Friedrich—embarrassed, though not deeply—sighed, settling himself more comfortably on the exceedingly uncomfortable bench.

“I bite on the blanket. It helps. You know, to stay quiet.”

“I know. Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

Filled with conflicting feelings, I opened the notebook and grabbed the fountain pen, eager to occupy my hands with something.

“Better tell me how to solve this problem: A projectile is fired horizontally with an initial velocity of v = 60 m/s toward zero height. What must be the launch angle θ relative to the horizontal for the projectile to reach a distance of R = 200 m? Ignore air resistance, g = 9.81 m/s²”

He obediently took the formula tables and bent over the exercise.

Chapter Text

In those early years of education, I did not ask myself one particular question often enough: what was the war to me? What was the war to all of us?

The definition of that word took on various shapes in my mind, transforming constantly, as if it lived a life of its own, and yet it was limited by my own dullness — its lifespan reached as far into the truth as I myself managed to approach that truth, and the opportunities to come closer to it were painfully scarce. Until the truth itself caught up with me and revealed before me — to the brain that had been fed propaganda, that spongy brain soaked through with the vilest filth — the incomprehensible, until then unimaginable enormity of its staggering, vile power.

What was the war to me?  

Before I could deliberate more deeply on that word, ponder it, dissect it and conduct a thorough vivisection into its constituent parts, I was invariably steered in quite the opposite direction. By the words of my father, my mother, or one of those, for a time and in a certain sense, respected by me educators. Together they formed a kind of parental, pedagogical, and military body, breathing together, eating together, existing together — not only inhaling the products of their own bodily functions that clouded their minds, but also poisoning the minds of the youth with vapors from the toxic marshes and bogs of human degeneration.  

It was thanks to those who valiantly bore the torch of bestial ignorance and the seed of falsehood — a seed that was to bear fruit in the form of a sea of tears and an ocean of blood — thanks to those officers and teachers, that the image of war in my mind remained a foggy, distant, though saturated vision of pathos and eternal glory, the delusion of a fool. Or perhaps merely the delusion of a child.  

That’s what we were, each of us. Children. Boys. Had we been given the chance to do one thing without shame, we would probably have wept into the fabric of our mothers’ skirts — if only we had known what deeds we would one day have to commit.  

War — bodiless, and yet a body, formed of millions of gray, voiceless existences. Conscious, yet mute. Unconscious, yet endowed with the power to act, which they in turn wielded mindlessly. War was composed of so many separate, distinct elements, each a thousandfold different in its own shades — just as sepia can have many tones, and by those tones reveal a photograph, so too did war possess many shades, and thus it was impossible ever to seize its essence and forge a definition of “the one image of war.”

  Single adjectives proved useless when the time came to describe that dark, and at the same time pseudo-sublime colossus looming on the horizon of my thoughts. War — it took place beyond borders, like an arrow slicing into a target beyond the reach of my sight or sense, so too that war, beyond the boundaries of the school, beyond the borders of the Reich, seemed almost a fairytale phenomenon.  

In my mind, it took on those diminished meanings, becoming mere slogans, incapable of reflecting its reality. Sometimes it took the shape of the military chaplain, whose steps, quiet as death itself, could silence the entire dining hall.  

The sweep of his habit, like a gust of plague air, made the children, devouring their long-awaited meal with zeal, freeze with their spoons resting on their lips and feel them tremble. And when the chaplain, a black bird of ill omen, of truly vulturine nature, settled upon the shoulders of a boy whose valiant father had fallen on the front, the knot of anticipation slackened, like a noose loosened at the last moment.  

Sometimes war became a quiet lament. When I spent hours pasting photographs of dead soldiers onto the obituaries I printed, I searched their eyes for the shape of war, for some hint, some clue. They were silent — and that very silence, sepulchral, empty, irreversible, should have shown me the true face of that evil unfolding somewhere in a place I knew only from the paper and ink with which the maps in our history classroom were printed.

 I looked at their silent faces, and they lay somewhere, in a land I did not know, in a grave their families would never visit, or simply covered by a layer of snow — half-digested by decay, eaten by vermin and wrapped in forest litter that embraced them tenderly, like a lover longing to become one with them.  

Then war would appear at the threshold of dreams, like a nymph flitting lightly and smoothly through the forest undergrowth, and she was called “The Final Victory,” leading young men astray, from where they could never return home. The forest closed above them, and they themselves became nourishment for the earth. And yet, on the threshold of sleep, I saw her — with hair flying, calling to us, vassals of the Fatherland. She led to ruin, dressed in a silken veil and muslins.  

The Final Victory dragged entire masses into the chasm of time, laughing all the while with the cackle of a madman.  

The first time the war took shape within me — a shape cut, however roughly, from the same mold as brutal truth — it was during an event at least completely removed from the topic of war. And yet, perhaps the perfect stage for the brutality of that world, so akin to war itself, was that hall full of sweaty, roused rabble.  

It was at the beginning of October, and Friedrich himself had been preparing for that first trial diligently, and it was in its name that he returned to our shared room in the evenings bruised and battered, with lips smashed and swollen like ripe cherries.  

I stood in the packed crowd, dressed in Gesellschaftsanzug, my dress uniform — black, with the school insignia struck in silver and an armband on my shoulder, plainly visible so that everyone could see and breathe in the scent of elite pomposity that billowed from our group in heavy clouds.

Schneider and Hefe were shouting like enraged gargoyles, effectively dispersing that aura of prestige, though no one was really paying attention to the level of excitement, or lack thereof, among the handful of cadets buzzing beneath the boxing ring.  

In the middle of that boiling crowd it was hard for me to catch my breath, yet I followed the notion that I should endure the discomfort and the lack of fresh air, if only so I could nod toward Friedrich, just then stepping across the ropes that marked the boxers’ space. I was there at his invitation and request, and for my own personal drive — I wanted to support him and to witness with my own eyes the triumph of my friend. To drink in the light of the glory he was about to cast not only upon himself, but upon our school community.  

With that lofty thought in my heart, filled with youthful excitement, I stood firm, staring at Friedrich, while Hefe kept stepping on my freshly polished shoes, for which I wanted to scold him soundly, if not for the atmosphere of simple, mindless joy. Tjaden was no better in his valiant effort to crush me between the jumping bodies, because he kept jabbing his elbow into my gut with such persistence that I finally shoved him slightly aside.  

“Keep kicking like that and you’ll poke someone’s eye out!”  

“Not my fault you keep walking into my arms. You’re asking for a shove. Better shut up and watch the pride of our school. See that brat over there?” he said, thoroughly amused, pointing to the boy in the opposite corner while wiping his nose. “Friedrich will crush him. I bet one mark.”  

I rolled my eyes; after all, as everyone knew, Tjaden didn’t have so much as a broken pfennig, let alone a full mark. Still, he liked to throw around money he didn’t have, and we joined in, forming cheerful bets that every loser would later pay back in his own way. I pulled out a notebook and a pencil in a metal case, saying:  

“Better bet how quickly it’ll happen, not whether it will.”  

“One mark that the fight won’t last longer than two minutes.”  

“Fifty pfennigs on Gehrig!” someone shouted from the back, then fell silent immediately as one of his smarter friends smacked him over the head.  

Betting was forbidden, so it had to be conducted in good taste, with due discretion and preferably within one’s own intimate circle — purely for the sake of entertainment and art itself, and especially so that later we could watch Tjaden polish everyone’s boots after throwing his imaginary marks into the mud.  

I hastily jotted down Tjaden’s wager. Schneider, quickly catching on to the whole farce, decided to turn me into a bookmaker, for he pushed his way forward impatiently and drawled:  

“So what’s this, some betting? What are we betting on? How badly Friedrich’s going to beat that dolly?”  

“Five marks that the fight won’t last longer than a minute and a half,” I said lightly, writing down my sentence — overly optimistic, perhaps, for Friedrich.  

Five marks was the equivalent of two months’ pocket money for cadets from wealthier families, so Tjaden gaped foolishly, and Schneider bulged his eyes so wide they nearly fell out.  

“Ho ho, I see Friedrich has his most faithful disciple,” he whistled mockingly, leaning on Hefe. “I’ll take that bet. Let’s wager how many times he gets punched in the nose.”

 “Better shut up and watch what’s happening instead of where dogs are shitting, Schneider,” Hefe snapped, shrugging him off. “The fight’s starting.”  

“One mark says he knocks him down in the third round,” another overeager amateur behind me shouted. “Come on, write it down.”  

“Two marks on Gehrig, even if it costs him his head!”  

“Bets are only for those with confirmed financial ability,” Schneider dispersed the crowd with a royal hand gesture, like a lord dismissing bothersome servants.  

“Everyone shut up, bets are closed.”  

The audience roared with applause and screams as the two tense youths clashed in fierce combat. For the first time I saw Friedrich use those swollen muscles of his for something other than work and daily duties. Always, at the sight of his strength, thoughts crossed my mind — about his effectiveness in a fight, yes, but also about his worth as a source of pride, as honor, not only for the school but for myself as well. My splendid friend, a hero, a demigod.  

Only when I heard the crunch of crushed flesh and shattered jaw did I realize that power and strength are measured by the pain they can inflict, the domination they can claim, the submission they can command.  

Friedrich pressed forward, only to be pushed back into the corner. No one was keeping time; the bets were childish in any case. That boiling sea of students surged around me from all sides, and I screamed with them, thinking I was giving Friedrich courage. Later, he confided in me that he hadn’t heard us at all — during the fight, concentration silenced everything around him, as though his entire existence had shrunk and focused into that one precise moment — fight or die.  

We clapped as each boy, in turn, took fiercer and fiercer blows, and we urged on the spectacle en masse. It was no sporting event — looking back, I can’t understand how we could watch such an open display of dominance through raw strength and call it athletic competition. It was more like baiting animals in a cage.  

I stood close enough that the sweat pouring from both fighters constantly turned into a fine spray landing on my face — I could say with full certainty that no one had a better spot than I, for I could feel the match in all its aspects. And I had the almost sweet awareness that when Friedrich, victorious or not, stepped down from the platform, it would be I who had the honor of tending to him first — right after Vogler — to wash his face, toss the wet towel into the laundry sack, and hand him my own clean, snow-white one.  

The vision of quiet care after the fight made me exist in the moment of combat only superficially. I knew it would soon be over. That Friedrich, the perfect example of a young, strong man, would end the match quickly and cleanly, and that would be that.  

“Holy fuck, what a hit. A bit harder and his teeth would’ve flown onto us,” Schneider commented, but neither Hefe nor Tjaden listened — they just roared, lost in their mindless revelry.  

“He’ll be fine,” I said, a bit too softly, without even having a clear recipient for those naive words.  

I was trying to calm myself that everything would be all right — after all, it was Friedrich Weimer. The boy of steel.  

“Come on, knock him out! Knock him out!” the cadet next to me yelled so loudly I almost went deaf in my right ear.  

“Take him, Gehrig!”  

“Don’t give in, Weimer!”  

“Weimer! Weimer! Weimer!”  

I glanced around the hall only for a moment, just long enough to see the sheer number of people gathered to watch two boys spill a bit of each other’s blood. Those few seconds were enough — the events in the ring unfolded with such furious speed that a moment’s distraction cost me the decisive blow.  

Only the roar from many throats, heated red with frenzy, and the thud of a body against the platform’s frame forced me to tear my gaze away from the officers, teachers, and their elegant friends or faded, perfumed wives, who were shrieking no less than the cadets.  

Friedrich stood frozen, his chest heaving steadily like a great bellows. Nearly entangled in the ropes, leaning against the corner post, lay Gehrig, and he looked so pitiful that I instantly felt sorry for him. His whole face was swollen, and from his nose and mouth blood poured freely, staining his white, sweat-soaked undershirt.  

A pang of shame struck me for feeling such pity for his opponent — after all, Friedrich, my friend, my confidant, my comrade, looked almost the same: red, drenched in sweat and his own blood, his lips puffed with pain as though he’d bitten into an apple with a wasp on it.  

Then an even greater uproar erupted. Vogler slammed his hands on the ring and began to bellow:  

“Hit him, Friedrich! Hit him! You fight to a KO. Finish it! Hit him! Hit him, Friedrich!”  

Hit him? But that boy, unable to rise from the boards, looked as though one foot was already in the Elysian Fields, as though he were about to give up his ghost. I looked around fearfully at my peers, who seemed to share the same message Vogler was shouting. Hefe nearly swallowed his own tongue, howling:  

“Smash him, Friedrich, for God’s sake! Smash him! Put him down!”  

“Hit the bastard! Once and for all! Go, Weimer! Hit him, he’ll be even uglier!”  

“Friedrich! Destroy him!” Tjaden was close to choking himself.  

Hefe coughed on his own saliva, bent over wheezing, and Schneider thumped him on the back absently, returning to his yelling toward Friedrich, who still stood there, staring around like an ox at a new gate.

He didn’t find my eyes in the crowd, though I stared at him desperately, hoping that in those few seconds of contact we could find some inner understanding. What was I hoping for, I don’t know. Certainly not that Friedrich would tense like a leather whip, and his fist would slice through the air and in a single, precise blow contain such force that Gehrig would collapse without a trace of consciousness or breath of awareness.  

His body crumpled to the floor, taking on the physical properties of a sack of potatoes rather than a human being. I forgot to breathe. I forgot about the bets, about shouting congratulations, about everything I had wanted to say to him after the match, examining every bruise with tenderness bordering on devotion. The sound of Friedrich’s fist meeting Gehrig’s face echoed in my skull with multiplied resonance, like some cruel song.  

The hall became one single roar. Vogler ran up to Friedrich, embracing him, pulling him close like a son. I turned my gaze aside. The headmaster, Karl Klein, was orchestrating a “standing ovation.” A farce. A grand farce.  

I pressed my lips so tightly that all the blood drained from them, as if they were meant to be the perfect opposite of Friedrich’s crushed cherries.

It was baiting.

Friedrich and Gehrig had been set on each other like dogs. In the name of what? Sport? That was no sport anymore. A perverse amusement for old goats like Klein or his powdered wife, who preened at her reflection in a tiny mirror she had drawn from her dainty purse, listlessly, as though she didn’t see that one boy might have a concussion while the other stood bloodied, barely on his feet.  

Some sudden hatred and disgust boiled in my veins. I shoved my way through the crowd, intent on storming out of the hall and sparing my presence from that vile spectacle — but I stopped at the door. Friedrich was smiling, celebrating. He felt satisfaction from his own brutality. I couldn’t help but feel glad for his happiness, and at the same time I was so angry, so disappointed, so…  

Frightened. Betrayed.  

If it had been me there — if Friedrich had been forced to choose — would he have turned my mouth into ripe cherries? Would he have rearranged my whole face in the name of some higher cause?  

I had often looked at his hands, against my own will hoping they were capable of great tenderness. Was I wrong?  

Klein was shaking Friedrich’s arms, congratulating him fervently, and his wife was clapping demurely, her eyes darting about. Years later I would understand that at that very moment I had come close to understanding the nature of war. Klein, as headmaster, would in the years to come wipe his mouth with Friedrich’s talent, greedily drinking in the glory of his skill — and none of it came to him freely; first he had to set the youth upon one another, and only then could he reap the harvest of violence in the form of flawless profit. After all, it was not he who risked himself in the ring, not he who bled.  

Slipping away to the lavatory, I passed Gehrig on the way. He had vomited in the doorway of the locker room, and his mother was convulsing with sobs, hiccupping rhythmically.

I knew I would find Friedrich there. Succumbing to the sadistic temptation of a disappointed companion, I told him exactly what I thought about the whole affair. Perhaps I acted childishly — after all, Friedrich had only done what the rules of the game demanded.

“Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.”

For a long time afterward, we didn’t speak to each other, but even that passed without much of an echo. Normalcy returned — though not for long.

Chapter Text

Victims of war, before that fateful day, had remained anonymous to me—at most, they existed for a moment in my memory as names, inseparably bound to the photographs printed on the pages of obituaries.

I bent over them diligently and always had my hands full with the dead—during my stay in Napola, there was never an issue of Der Fackelträger that lacked several pages dedicated to the fallen.

Yet, despite devoting so much time to the dead, I never lingered over their weary faces long enough to grasp more deeply the tragedy itself—this spectacle of transience—as though the mere existence of physical proof that those eyes had once laughed and wept only underscored how fleeting life itself was.

This loss scarcely reached us within the walls of the school. At least, not me—a statement so selfish and self-absorbed, for all the other cadets would tremble at the sight of the chaplain, who carried into our fragile ranks the stench of death. Despite those regular visits from the angel of death, despite our insanely jubilant little paper devoted to praising the deceased, I felt that death would never touch me.

Death, like war and all other similarly intricate constructs, remained for me a mystery not of intellect, but of spirit. The fear for anyone in my family—or the family of my closest friend—did not touch me.

Friedrich’s father was a laborer, a factory worker—a part of the human resources of the Reich—so no one had any intention of sending him to war. My father, Oberpräsident Stein, wasn’t going either. His duties involved exercising authority over the province, and those required him to keep his gubernatorial backside firmly seated in his comfortable residence in Wartenburg—the villa we moved into right after my father assumed his lofty office.

I had no older brother, and Friedrich had only a younger one, Hans, who, according to him, had been sent by their mother to the countryside, to relatives.

No one close to me seemed endangered, so I enjoyed the privilege of peace, almost with the same brazenness as my father. We were part of that privileged minority, and though I was aware of that privilege, the full gratitude to the providence of fate still escaped me.

After all, we were all safe. The Reich was safe. What did it matter that our soldiers were dying, when the enemy’s losses were tenfold greater and far more severe? The war would soon be over. The final victory glowed like a bright dawn in the East—the fulfillment of the soldiers’ wish, the promise of morning.

Besides… the Third Reich was, after all, to be invincible—unique, supreme, at the top—trampling upon all the other petty, insignificant little states. The Reich was like an ivory palace amid a spittle-stained, lice-infested sty inhabited by subhumans—or at least, that was the doctrine hammered into our heads with fists and shovels.

The world had already known such invincible colossi—powers that believed that if they inflated the machine of war enough with empty words, it would roll forward, gaining momentum from the bloody conflagration stretching across Europe.

Legions of fools pushed that wooden horse named the Third Reich forward, never suspecting that long before the walls of Moscow, the Russians would hurl a flaming spear that would pierce its frame, and the flames would scorch and boil the human mass inside.

Behind the school walls, we had our own brutal rules, dehumanizing rituals, and even worse bits of wisdom we memorized instead of prayers—but death did not reach in here with its tentacles, not here, where the castle in Allenstein rose majestically above the sleeping lake, towering over the quiet town.

Death had no entry here. Death should never have driven its wedge between our ranks—a wedge capable of splitting even the tightest bond. We were not such a bond at all—one crack was enough to cause a general infection that made our hearts swell, and the rifles grew unbearably heavy, as if pricking our weary shoulders.

For a long time, we could not speak about that day. Somewhere in our understanding, that event took the place of an inexplicable tragedy, of higher good or curse—an unexpected burden of responsibility that set in motion the gears of guilt rather than gratitude. We did not feel grateful, because somewhere deep in our minds, we knew that a man who had not been driven to the edge would never have acted as Siegfried Gladen did.

As usual, after the inhuman exercises that Peiner loved to subject us to and from which he drew unspeakable joy, he ordered a march toward the fields north of the school. That was where the shooting range was set up, right next to the obstacle course with the walls we climbed nearly every day. Then came the field lined with barbed wire, and finally the deep trenches—reinforced constructions made only for demonstration purposes, for us, the foolish cadets.

In all my life, I had never had to dig a hole—let alone be ready to dig with a shovel into the earth, to carve out trenches where I’d be expected to sit until my wretched death. Like a worm burrowing underground, hoping to survive the harshness of a few heavy months, to crawl out again ready to breed without restraint.

When I was seven, my father bought me a Weimaraner—a puppy still, with silvery fur and intelligent eyes. His father had also given him a dog when he was my age, and so in his mind gleamed the notion that every young German boy ought to have a dog—to learn discipline, control, and responsibility.

He quickly grew disgusted with the creature, though, since the puppy had a habit of pissing on Persian carpets and gnawing on antique furniture. I named him Falco and bonded with him with the kind of attachment only a barely loved child can form with its pet.

Mother grew to dislike him too when he turned the upholstery of her favorite chaise longue into shreds, splinters, and colorful scraps cleverly spread across the salon.

He ended up under the wheels of an automobile—Johan swore it wasn’t intentional, but I knew better.

Even then, I wasn’t the one who dug the grave for Falco—but as I dropped his favorite toy down, where he lay wrapped in my childhood blanket, I felt the same as I did stepping into the trench. In a sense, one could tell it was a grave—only more functional.

Peiner led us across the frosted meadow straight to the training station he had prepared in advance. The stage, for Josef Peiner, had to remain immaculate—ready to receive him like a star performer, eager to keep up with his pedagogical genius.

He waited a moment until we spread out into three ranks, taking our places in the honorary box, in front of an information board kindly informing us that a hand grenade had an effective range of about fifteen meters, and that individual shrapnel could travel farther, making them no less deadly.

“Now pay attention, because I won’t repeat myself twice, you rabble,” said the puffed-up Peiner, now in full military uniform, pulling from a transport crate a dummy hand grenade.

 “Well, would you look at that,” I muttered quietly—so quietly only Friedrich could hear. He did, because I felt him straighten beside me, waiting for my next word. “One would think that tracksuit had grown onto Peiner’s skin, and yet it turns out he can still take it off.”

“I bet if you threw that tracksuit against the wall, it’d stick,” Friedrich replied.

I stifled my laughter at once, but the lightness remained.

“Time for you to get acquainted with the practical aspect, now that you’ve learned the technical part. In summary: unscrew the cap. Pull the string. Now the grenade is armed and ready. Make a wide swing, throw, and take cover.”

“How wonderfully spoon-fed that was,” Schneider hissed in my ear, kicking me on the heel.

Typical provocation—pure Schneider—whenever boredom got the better of him. He played the smartass, and perhaps he alone among us wasn’t shitting himself at the thought of holding something that could blow us all to bits. He liked to boast that his uncle—God rest his soul—used to take him fishing and let him throw grenades into the lake. Then they’d collect the prettier ones floating belly-up.

“Be glad you’ve got experience,” said Hefe, tugging Christoph back into line, “because without it, even a spoon-fed explanation wouldn’t help you, you birdbrain.”

“At least I didn’t shit my pants at the sight,” Schneider shot back.

“You want me to smack you?”

“Can you two just shut up?” Friedrich threw them an accusatory glare over his shoulder.

“Someone’s touchy this morning. What happened? Get up on the wrong side of the bed, Weimer?” Christoph, as always, didn’t know when to stop—a trait not particularly helpful for surviving in Napola society.

At least not without a black eye or a broken nose. Fights among cadets were nothing new, but they were carried out in secrecy—almost with finesse. Not that any of them possessed much finesse, since they gladly listened to stories of our classmates beating each other to a pulp behind the walls, out of the teachers’ sight.

The loudest hit of that month—though it had barely begun—was Christoph himself, who had already secured the top of the brawl charts after he and Lukas Klugmann clashed like two rabid roosters behind the canteen.

The cause was purely prosaic—Klugmann, being the simple lout he was, publicly declared that he’d “have that first-class piece of skirt, Katarina, in no time till the dust flew from under her petticoat.” The remark enraged Schneider so badly he tore down Lukas’s pants and kicked his ass so hard the poor guy still avoided sitting down.

Apparently, Schneider hadn’t had his fill of glory, because he immediately picked up again, hoping to provoke Friedrich this time.

Peiner, either not hearing our little gang or choosing to ignore us, continued his lecture, pacing back and forth in his tall boots like something was burning in his trousers.

“After you pull the string, you’ve got about four and a half seconds before detonation. Any questions?”

“About four and a half seconds? Is that more or less?” Tjaden whispered, his lower lip trembling dangerously.

“For you, even ten wouldn’t be enough. I’d bet you’ll blow us all up today—but I won’t tempt fate.”

“With all due respect, you’re asking for a beating, Schneider,” I said calmly. “Would be a shame for you to lose your front teeth before lunch.”

“And you’re gonna knock them out, huh? You haven’t got enough strength to jerk off, let alone—”

“Christoph, if you don’t shut up, I’ll ram your teeth down your throat,” Friedrich cut in, his voice stripped of any humor.

Christoph believed him, because he fell silent at once, like a flustered schoolgirl.

“No questions? Excellent. Move to positions!”

We marched in a tight column toward the sandbags lining the edge of the trench and climbed down the wooden steps. Everyone found their spot; the braver ones stayed at the front, the rest burrowed toward the back—or better yet, the middle. Everyone knew Peiner loved to drag those in the rear to the front line—he relished putting the unwilling in no-win situations, where the best option was to humiliate and terrify a cadet into obedience.

“Everyone set? Good. We can begin.”

“I need to shit,” whispered Tjaden pitifully.

“Just don’t let go,” muttered Hefe, “because if you do, Peiner will smear your face with it.”

“What, fear screwed you too?”

“I’d rather it were Katarina.”

“You want a smack, Bacon?”

“Shut your traps!” roared Peiner, joining the charming conversation, his eyes bulging so wide they nearly popped out and rolled on the ground like marbles. “Christoph, you first. Move! Quickly! Hop, hop, hop! Good. Hold it. Unscrew. Swing and... throw! Take cover!”

We all ducked as one, hands clamped over our ears. The sound of the explosion sent us jerking in pitiful terror, and the force rattled the entire trench to its foundations. I could swear even the clumps of earth on the planks beneath us trembled. From a nearby swamp, a few wild ducks took flight, fleeing as far as they could from human stupidity.

Sweat broke across my forehead. Of course I was afraid. This was no “pissing on the wall” or “shitting in the bushes.” One wrong move, and twenty cadets—and one colossal bastard—could end up six feet under. One move, and the little local cemetery on the gloomy hill west of the castle would have gained new residents. I was scared—terrified. Never before had all our lives been so endangered, and each of us was responsible for twenty-one souls that could be annihilated by a single, foolish act.

One by one, Peiner called up Friedrich after Christoph, then Hefe. Bits of debris, stones, and dirt rained down on us, huddled in that hole like marmots.

“I’m gonna shit myself, really,” whimpered Tjaden, on the verge of collapse.

“What, the mole’s knocking on the stool, huh? Tough luck,” Krafft smacked his lips, sharing the misery.

“All right, Albrecht, your turn,” Josef Peiner bent down again, with the grace of a pregnant cow, and handed me the weight of a hand grenade.

It wasn’t well balanced—but it was heavy. Heavy enough that if you smashed someone’s head with it, it’d still fulfill its original purpose—killing, albeit less efficiently.

At that moment, I wasn’t thinking at all—but I tried to look as though I was. When I pulled the cord, with what I thought was a firm gesture, the seconds began to fly past so fast that before I realized what I was doing, Peiner was already shouting in my ear:

“THROW IT, FOR GOD’S SAKE!”

So I threw. My legs were jelly. The trainer drove me to the other side of our lovely trench, where Schneider, Friedrich, and Hefe waited, faces grave. Even Christoph had no wit left for taunts—and I was so on edge that if he’d said a single word, kind or unkind, or worst of all, a misplaced remark, I’d have knocked him senseless.

“Bloody kids. Martin. Come on. Move. Faster. We all want to make it to lunch. Here, take it.”

When Martin Rehder took the grenade into his hand, I was already looking elsewhere—somewhat relaxed, though not serene. I stared blankly at Tjaden’s face across from me, studying his expression tight with strain. He looked downright idiotic, and he tensed as if he might actually soil himself right there.

“Have you completely lost your mind?! You’re supposed to throw it! Throw it! Throw it now!” Peiner’s shriek froze our blood.

Then came the dull thud of a dropped grenade hitting the ground.

Armed—I thought, parting my lips in a silent plea—it’s already armed.

Martin stood frozen, trembling, sweat dripping onto the planks beneath his feet. I hadn’t yet exhaled when Peiner leapt over the trench’s edge, skipping the ladder, running headlong away from the damned pit where we were all about to be turned into pulp.

Before any of us could move—in contrast to Peiner, who was already bolting toward the school like a hurricane—Gladen, in a single motion, threw himself upon the grenade, covering it with his body.

Siegfried Gladen. The hounded, terrorized Gladen.

No shout, no hesitation — only the blunt geometry of a body folding over a thing that might have killed us.

Whether a thousand thoughts raced through my mind or none at all, I cannot say. Only later, in the washroom, as I rinsed the remains of Siegfried Gladen from my hair, did it truly dawn on me what had happened.

All the visual details returned as well, painted red against the white of the sink. The smell of cordite in the air, the feel of hotness, sprayed on my face, seeping between my parted lips with its metallic taste.

I vomited, gripping the edge.

Death was among us.

Gladen was a victim—not of one boy’s stupidity, but of the war itself.

The war was already reaping its harvest in our ranks then.

We all wore the noose around our necks— placed there with fatherly tenderness by our own men.

Chapter Text

“Apparently Peiner has started drinking again. I saw him take a swig from a flask while we were thawing our balls early in the morning. Where does he even get his whole supply from? Supposedly there’s already been quite a scandal up above because of it, before they even assigned him here, that bastard.” Tjaden muttered, trembling from the cold, but didn’t dare to stamp his feet, or even blow into his frozen hands.  

I turned toward Peiner, but had no desire to look at him. He stood there in a coat with a fur collar, looking as though he was in a hurry to get back to school, to start drinking again. Here he couldn’t allow himself that. At the cemetery, he wouldn’t dare gulp it down to the bottom, especially since Gladen’s parents stood nearby, over the gaping blackness of the freshly dug grave.  

“Come off it. Among officers, there are no fights over drinking — only fights because they don’t get enough vodka. The whole thing is bloody unfair, don’t you think, boys? He could’ve shared some, out of the goodness of his heart, given us each a sip to raise morale, but that bastard doesn’t even blink. And all the officers get their regular ration, every two weeks.” Schneider cut in, as usual, indignant. “We’re not allowed anything anymore — no girls, no vodka.”  

“If only you knew how to handle either, it might be worth understanding why you’re making such a fuss. But since you don’t know a damn thing about one or the other, do us a favor and spare us your nonsense. Shut your mouth before the maggots crawl in.” I sighed softly, deflated, as if life had leaked out of me completely, here on this godforsaken hill where the wind whipped at the frozen ribbons of the hastily ordered wreaths.  

The entire funeral ceremony lasted barely three days. Just enough for the gaping wound of emotion to scab over a little, instead of festering endlessly. We drew a curtain of silence over the whole incident — one approved by our superiors, and only occasionally tugged at by the other cadets, for of course everyone wanted to know what had happened to training group G, seventh year, during standard hand-grenade exercises.  

Those who hadn’t seen it with their own eyes remained curious — the kind of curiosity one has toward decay before ever having a rotten tooth.

One can be fascinated, even enchanted by the vision of rot. Such a person spins fantasies, dark conjectures, and draws from them a perverse pleasure. But if one day the rot began festering in his own mouth and he had to swallow his own pus daily — perhaps then he’d learn to avoid such degeneration.  

Despite this, the rest of our fellow cadets were neither wise nor restrained, and they pestered us terribly — especially Friedrich, who had always been kind and polite to them, but whose courtesy and everyday gentleness plummeted sharply over those three days, hovering dangerously close to zero. It effectively froze every spark of curiosity in the skulls of those nosy, intrusive layabouts.  

They kept Gladen’s coffin outside during that time, in the vestibule near the entrance to the boiler room — which, naturally, wasn’t heated, and where there reigned a grave, exemplary, and most useful chill. The director of the academy, the ever-shrewd and magnanimous Klein, decreed that “It simply wouldn’t do for a cadet to start stinking on us, and before the funeral, no less. Bring me the mother and father at once, and if they want him, let them take him away. But first — the farewell. Governor Stein will arrive to present an honorary decoration. Now get back to work.”  

The parents — Herr and Frau Gladen — had no wish to take their son Siegfried Jr. home, and who could blame them?

The funeral in Allenstein Napola was conducted with great pomp, and had our unit wanted to, we could easily have gone into the funeral business — gravedigging and event organization alike. The latter was handled quite smoothly; the former, a little less so. While carrying the coffin along the unpaved road leading up the bald hill — where graves jutted from the ground like old, crooked teeth — Jaucher stumbled, and Gladen nearly went tumbling into the ditch.  

He halted the entire funeral procession with his little mishap and now stood in the second row among the gravestones, his ears blazing red beneath his beret.  

Frau Gladen was a woman of such composure she might have been cast in bronze, yet hollow inside — she proved it with her attempts to drive Josef Peiner away, lashing out with: “My child should never have had to make such a sacrifice. It was your duty to protect the youth, and you ran away like a dog, a dog, I say, with its tail between its legs! Shame! Disgrace! Disgrace upon this school!”  

After conferring, once the first surge of emotion had passed, they announced that Siegfried should be laid to rest in the soil of Allenstein, near the school he had so loved. It was Herr Gladen who coined that final statement, after his wife had fallen completely silent and ceased all communication whatsoever.

“It’s the shock — shock, the whole school is in shock,” Klein assured everyone, nodding his little poppy-head atop its thin stalk of a neck.  

Resistance was futile. Pointing out the mistakes or weaknesses of the group’s guardian was equally futile, if not outright idiotic.  

During the ceremony itself they made us sing Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden, and before it, we rehearsed the hymn for at least an hour — our choir supervisor kept finding fault, either with the key or the tempo, until finally he threw up his hands and declared, “Let it be what it will.”  

When I was still a child, I often sang with my mother, who played the piano. She would sit on a little stool, stretch her fingers above the keys, and I felt an indescribable lightness that came from creating something beautiful together. I admired her deeply in those moments — when she sang so clearly, like a nightingale that had never known a golden cage.  

This time it was completely different — the words of the song swelled in my mouth and refused to pass through my throat, yet I sang loudly and beautifully, for there was nothing else I could do for Siegfried Gladen but to take part in the ceremony, and perhaps drown out Hefe’s screeching a little.  

None of the others could sing well anyway — Schneider sounded like a pig being slaughtered, Tjaden like a chorus of souls writhing energetically in the afterlife, and Friedrich, though his voice was deep and beautiful, gulped too much air and released it like the dying breath of a corpse. In short, I did not foresee any of them having much of a choral career.  

“Look how Jaucher’s in a hurry,” Hefe muttered, clearly offended at the entire world. “Stepping quick like a schoolgirl. Lately he’s been slipping into town often — every Sunday, always says he’s going to church, if anyone asks. I can’t picture him, praying on his knees diligently.”  

“To church?” Friedrich raised an eyebrow, but didn’t laugh — not at the cemetery, not when the grave still lay open and the corpse, if not fresh, wasn’t yet old. “On his knees, perhaps, but certainly not in a church.”  

“Oh, on his knees all right — but most often on Jutta Wentzel.” Schneider, as always the best informed among us, had long known where, with whom, and how often Justus snuck around. “That’s where he’s rushing — the whole barracks is buzzing about it. He hooked himself a typist from town.”  

“A typist?” Tjaden hissed with jealousy.  

“And how do you even know that?” I whispered, so as not to draw the attention of the teachers, or my father, who was speaking with Gladen’s parents by the open grave.

“Kohl,” Christoph replied, as if that alone answered my evidently idiotic question. “I sold him a picture of my sisters in the bath — for a mark and that interesting piece of information. The latter’s worth less, as you know, but gives just as much entertainment.”  

“A picture in the bath?!” Hefe raised his voice, so I jabbed him in the stomach to make him shut up, preferably for good. But he was so indignant he kept hissing spitefully. “You were supposed to show me that, you bastard! How could you sell it?! You promised.”  

“I don’t want to spoil your fun, gentlemen, but Governor Stein is present at this solemn event.” I truly wanted nothing more than for them to choke on their own tongues. “If you disturb the peace, you’ll get either solitary or a beating.”  

“Unless he sends us to the Eastern Front.”  

“Well, someone’s got to be there if not him.” Schneider piped in, amused beyond good taste.

“Daddy came by — tell me, Stein, did you wash your ears for the occasion?”  

“Shut up,” Friedrich snapped curtly — and apparently did something to Tjaden, because the latter yelped.  

“Hey! Don’t pinch me, you brute!”  

“Weimer pinching you? Weimer, missing some girlish ass to squeeze, so now you’re grabbing Hohenstein instead?” that pig Christoph picked it up immediately, always eager to stick in a pin or two. “Talk to Jaucher — maybe that Wentzel of his has a sister.”  

“I don’t want any Wentzel. You go for it, since you’re always horny.”  

“I already have one — her names is Katarina.”  

“Katarina didn’t want you then, and she doesn’t want you now.”  

“You’re getting on my nerves today, Stein.”  

“And the feeling’s mutual.”  

“Maybe Friedrich prefers male charms, eh?”  

Friedrich nearly burst out laughing but held back. The gravity of the moment demanded it. By now, none of us seemed to remember we were at a funeral. All we thought about was getting back to the warm school. The tragedy of the preceding days had faded, its edges blurring into the grayness of everyday life.  

“Spare me. Even if I did, I wouldn’t go for Tjaden.”  

The subject of their little chat got offended immediately:

“Oh? Something against me? You saying I’m not a tasty morsel?”  

“And if not Tjaden, then who?”  

“You want to be first in line for Friedrich?” I tossed over my shoulder and immediately regretted it.  

“God forbid — I wouldn’t dare lay claim to young Stein’s property.”  

I turned, full of outrage — but our mock-friendly squabble was broken off by a drawn-out wail of despair that escaped Frau Gladen’s lips like air from a punctured pig’s bladder.

She stood over her son’s grave, bending and pressing her gloved hands to her lower belly, as if she felt the loss of her child deep inside — as if he were leaving her womb again, as at birth. Herr Gladen tossed a handful of soil into the pit. The clumps struck the darkness in a salvo.  

My gaze grew so heavy I could no longer lift it, nor keep it fixed on the parents bidding farewell to their only son. The rest of the double row fell silent, turned to stone. The officers could move a little, shuffle back and forth. Peiner stuck his hands in his pockets whenever the Governor and Klein weren’t looking.

We weren’t allowed to speak, step out of line, or worse, fidget like turds in an ice hole. Each of those rules was broken, but Vogler, who was watching over us, chalked it up to the biting cold whipping our necks, and the fact that as witnesses of a traumatic event, we had to find some way to cope.  

I focused on the ribbons flapping in the wind, tied to the not-too-handsome wreaths. At the front stood the one from the school — the largest, with red ribbons and fat, clumsy letters spelling out equally heavy words:  

Die Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt Allenstein – Deinem heldenhaften Kameraden.

 Right beside it, on my right, stood the wreath from us, the cadets. Less ornate, more modest, but with the same thick inscriptions, looking as though they might slip off the delicate fabric any second:  

Deine Kameraden – In Treue fest.  

Finally, on the left, slightly crooked and a bit battered, was the wreath from Governor Stein:  

Der Tod ist schwer, doch Ruhm ist ewig.  

Death is hard, but glory is eternal. What a pompous phrase — yet it suited him perfectly. He stood by Gladen’s parents as they lowered the coffin, glancing at his watch from time to time. During the entire two-hour ceremony, he looked at me only once, with a reproachful expression, while saying: ”Each of you standing in this hall should ask himself: Why wasn’t it I who threw myself over the grenade, who covered it with my own body? Why wasn’t it I who sacrificed my wretched existence for the greater good, for the Fatherland?” 

He didn’t need to add, “Why wasn’t it you, Albrecht?” — I understood that cold message well enough. He’d have looked at me more kindly if it were I lying in that coffin, and not standing there among the other cowardly aesthetes.  

“I wish they’d hurry up with all this. My fingers are about to freeze off,” Tjaden groaned.  

No one had the strength to answer.

“We bid farewell today to a remarkable young man,” Governor Stein began, just as Frau Gladen drew a trembling breath between sobs. “The cadet who lies in this grave gave his life for the Fatherland, for the Führer, for the greater good — something that neither history nor our nation will ever forget. His memory will live on in our hearts, inspiring in them the same manliness, courage, and loyalty. Let us honor the memory of Siegfried Gladen with a solemn minute of silence.”

Peiner discreetly stepped aside, pulled out his flask, and took a swig for warmth and consolation — for apparently, the mere memory of Gladen wasn’t enough to fill him with manliness, courage, and loyalty.

We stood on that small cemetery hill, enclosed by a rusted, collapsing fence. Crows black as ink perched on a withered, gnarled oak — the same that once split gravestones with its roots — now standing only as a relic of another world. Their cawing resembled a forgotten elegy.

“It wasn’t in vain,” I said quietly, as the mourners began to drift away — some slower, some quicker. Governor Stein was the fastest of the whole gathering; before Klein had even reached the cemetery gate, my father was already striding briskly down the hill.

It was neither a question nor a statement — more a kind of reassurance — but Friedrich answered me anyway.

“That depends on us,” he said, “though I don’t think it was in vain.”

We trailed behind our group, shoulder to shoulder.

Chapter Text

At the word of command — either formally, by letter from the parents of a given individual, or at the personal request of the cadet himself: “Would there be a chance to excuse my son, or myself (if the cadet pleaded on his own behalf, because either his old folks couldn’t send a letter or had completely forgotten about him, and he wanted to worm his way out himself), from school duties on Sunday next week?” — Karl Klein, the headmaster of that respectable institution, would usually turn around, make a phhh! sound, and come dangerously close to asking the supplicant to kiss his ass.

The privilege of leaving the school on days free from classes — Sundays and holidays — had to be approved from above, sealed with Klein’s blessing and adorned with an official note; all this preferably on the basis of family notification that some member had suddenly kicked the bucket and the son must be summoned home to join them in mourning.

Only death, natural catastrophe, or some other highly significant occasion could persuade that pompous ass Klein to sign such a permit. And even then, he did so most reluctantly.

With one exception.

“Has my father’s letter arrived?” I asked, catching Klein in the hallway as I was leaving the military tactics classroom.

He didn’t look well — he must have just come back either from the department of administration and finance or from the lavatory. No matter the details, something hadn’t gone Klein’s way, and now he hardly looked in the mood for small talk. Which only made me all the more eager to start one, if only to annoy him further.

There was nothing he could do to me — he merely smiled his doughy smile when he looked my way, as though the messiah himself had appeared before him, holding the key to the heart of Governor Stein.

He was wrong, of course, to assume that I, the supposed messiah, possessed the key to my father’s heart.

“Oh yes, yes, of course it arrived.” Klein began nodding so vigorously he nearly unscrewed his head from his neck. “I have already prepared the pass. Two days in Wartenburg at the Governor’s request, in celebration of his birthday. Everything has been arranged. Should the need arise, I’ll send the state automobile, and the school will cover the cost of fuel to Wartenburg and back.”

“That won’t be necessary. Governor Stein will send his chauffeur for me.”

“Ah yes, yes, quite right, quite right,” he kept repeating those few simple phrases, staring at me as though I had some secret formula written across my forehead for extracting the Governor’s favors.

Perhaps that mantra gave him courage. Repeating “quite right, quite right” over and over might have helped fill the gaps in his impoverished vocabulary and made him sound a little wiser than his tongue usually allowed.

For several unbearably drawn-out seconds, neither of us spoke. A group of cadets passed by, jeering and somehow, collectively, making a ruckus enough to wake the dead. They dispersed strategically before the headmaster could start yelling. Apparently, his ability to wield the scourge of rigor got terribly diluted since he had to use most of his intellectual resources on chatting with the Governor’s son.

Klein, slightly bewildered, opened his mouth like a fish and promptly shut it again — I had sometimes seen the cook, Elfriede, keep live fish in a tin basin. Still alive, though already destined for the Governor’s table, they had the same stupid expression and gaped their mouths just like Klein now did — except their eyes had somewhat more sparkle and grace than the headmaster’s.

“However…” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, clasping my hands behind my back. The idea was risky, but I couldn’t deny myself this small indulgence. “...there is something you might do for me, Herr Klein.”

His ears twitched; he came instantly to life.

“With joy I shall extend my goodness and wisdom to such an exalted cadet. How may I be of service?”

“I would like a cadet from my year, Friedrich Weimer, to accompany me during my stay in Wartenburg. My father wishes to meet him. After all, Friedrich is a very promising athlete, and Governor Stein is a great admirer of boxing. Weimer will be an honored guest and my companion on the journey.”

Klein was close to letting out an ecstatic sigh.

A few days later, Friedrich and I stepped beyond the walls of the academy, dressed in formal uniforms and carrying modest luggage in our suitcases. Everything was folded neatly and packed carefully inside so it wouldn’t crease too much, though I knew full well that Mother would have Anne-Marie unpack and iron everything before Father arrived.

Unless, of course, Anne-Marie was no longer in service at the villa — which wouldn’t have surprised me.

Mother was the sort of woman who, with each passing year, tolerated young girls around the house less and less. She was not of the dowdy kind — far from it. To me, she remained the most beautiful, most elegant, and most majestic woman I had ever known. That’s exactly what she was — strong and beautiful. Yet my opinion meant little to her. More than once, by accident, I had caught her quietly weeping into the sleeve of her fashionable Parisian suit. She always grew terribly embarrassed, pretending nothing had happened, but the cold indifference of her husband was a shard of ice — not in her heart, but in her pride.

A wounded lioness will lash out at anyone who crosses her path, and Mother lashed out at whoever happened to be closest — one maid or another, it hardly mattered which. If any of them lingered too long around Herr Stein, like flies around a heap of dung, she would soon find herself thrown out onto the street — and certainly without references.

“You lucky bastards,” Schneider yelled in our ears as Friedrich and I emptied our lockers, grinning stupidly at each other. “Leaving us in this godforsaken hole while you two go off to drink and carouse who knows where!”

“Oh, I can picture it already — there’ll be vodka flowing, maybe even some skirts,” Tjaden sighed dreamily, then scowled again, as though the thought of skirts only reminded him how far out of reach they were. “Tell me, Albrecht, got any nice maids at the Stein residence?”

“They do. Two of them,” Friedrich chimed in, folding his Dienstanzug into the suitcase with exceptional care. “One for each of us.”

“Utter nonsense,” I scolded him fondly, tucking my toiletry pouch beside my nightshirt. “But you know what, Tjaden, I’ll tell you this: we’ve got a chauffeur, Johan — he’ll be here to pick us up. I honestly don’t care if we leave twenty minutes late or not. What do you think, Friedrich?”

“Doesn’t make a difference to me.”

“So what do you say, Tjaden — should I recommend you to Johan? The car’s upholstery is very comfortable. It’d be quite the royal adventure.”

“Go to hell.”

“You really don’t know how to argue with Stein, it’s almost pitiful. I’m ashamed of you. Don’t you remember how I trained you?” Schneider twirled theatrically, one hand on his hip, lips pursed. Then he snapped his head toward me, birdlike and predatory. “You should’ve said — if not the maids, then there’s always Frau Stein for you, eh?”

“Keep my mother’s name out of your mouth, or the Governor will see to it you’re sent to the Eastern Front.”

“Oh no, my dear, oh no.” Christoph danced like a maiden on the forest’s edge and poked me in the chest. “Of all of us, you’re the first in line to be sent east by Daddy Stein himself.”

Schneider. Vile, sharp-tongued Schneider — through and through. If only he’d known how close he’d come to the truth with that careless, yet all-too-accurate remark, the words might have stuck in his throat. Christoph might have been a swine and behaved accordingly, but he wasn’t cruel.

I brushed him off with a roll of my eyes. My hands, folding the trousers of my uniform, should have trembled — but they didn’t. Defense mechanism of denial was working splendidly, though a seed of unease had begun to sprout somewhere deep in my gut, threatening later inflammation.

“They’re off to party with the Governor,” groaned Hefe, lying belly-up on his bunk. “Did Daddy hit a nice, round number?”

“Yes — a jubilee,” I laughed, suddenly filled with a lightness I hadn’t felt since our wild escape from Peiner’s dogs that night in the moat.

Later, I understood that sudden surge of emotion — a force so strong it might’ve knocked me off my feet had I not been sitting in the back seat of the automobile, bouncing over every bump in the road. It wasn’t caused merely by returning home; homecoming had never stirred euphoria in me. And yet it was there, coursing beneath my skin with the same insistence Schneider felt whenever he needed to pick a fight.

“Look, cows. You don’t see those in Berlin,” Friedrich observed with an air of expertise, pointing at a lazy herd grazing peacefully across the broad field that stretched along the road.

With that single, banal remark, he completely disarmed me — all resistance vanished. I was so happy that Friedrich was there with me, that day, that hour, on the road from Allenstein to Wartenburg, pointing out cows with boyish delight.

I only nodded and turned to my own window, my face burning like a torch.

For the first time, I wasn’t choking on my mother’s perfume in the automobile, nor sitting there like a condemned man being taken to yet another dreary year of study at some ever more unbearable institution.

Get up, make your bed, don’t piss your trousers, thank us for your meal, if not for the Führer you’d have nothing to eat, study, study, pray to the Fatherland, pray but never for salvation, invoke the name of the divine judge, and bend beneath the boot of our education.

Not this time. There was only me and Friedrich.

Friedrich — and the road unfolding before us like a roll of parchment, so willingly, so smoothly, that one might almost believe our destination was some faraway place where people were truly happy. Napola faded in the distance, lingering on the horizon for a long while, perched on its hill so its shadow could cast fear over more lives — but even it eventually surrendered to fog and distance, and disappeared, as though it had never existed at all.

“Herr Stein, everyone’s been eagerly awaiting your return. Elfriede made a birthday cake, but there’ll also be Apfelstrudel — your favorite.” Johan, as ever restrained yet with a touch of fatherly care, clearly felt it proper to add his two pfennigs after Friedrich’s inspired remark about cows.

“That’s very kind of her.”

“There’ll be Apfelstrudel?” Weimer looked at me with such a disarming smile that if he’d asked, I might have fed it to him myself and wiped his mouth with my pedantic handkerchief. “The kind with vanilla sauce and powdered sugar?”

“Yes, there will be. The sauce, I’m not sure — but with powdered sugar, yes.”

“Sweet.”

The rest of the journey passed much the same way — I burned quietly on my side of the seat, clenching my hands on the burgundy upholstery, while Friedrich spoke from time to time in ways that only made me melt further at the sound of every careless syllable he let fall. I tuned myself to the sound of his voice as one might tune to a melody — completely, thoughtlessly, with no attention left for anything else.

The golden autumn landscape beyond the window — fields and fallow ground, rows of reddening leaves dying slowly in the sunlight of those last, almost stolen days before winter — played like a silent film, to which Friedrich so generously lent his voice. My cheeks reddened as well as the leaves; my heart trembled like them too — except I had the luck to sit there beside him in that cramped automobile, rather than remain out there, part of a world he would never touch.

Chapter Text

The beatific bliss and fascination with which Friedrich embraced this newly discovered world—one that deftly revealed before him its most intimate corners—bordered almost on a fierce fervor. Quite an achievement for Friedrich, since he usually showed such emotion only after a training session with Vogler or after one of our more or less civilized conversations, of which I was rather proud.

Stirring joy in Friedrich had wickedly climbed the winding staircase of my priorities, until it seated its vile backside somewhere near the very top. When that happened, I didn’t know, and I didn’t particularly feel the need to know—for the damage had already been done. Damage to my psyche, previously untouched by such foolishness.

Now, in my system of values, there appeared a new unit of measure, almost like a currency whose worth kept rising—the smile of that blockhead, dearer to me than my own mother’s. For of those two smiles, only one was sincere and, in a way, constant—it never really changed, perhaps only in breadth, or in the number of teeth it revealed. Sometimes it was only a shadow of itself, sometimes it grew into a loud, hearty laugh, usually preceded by a friendly slap on the shoulder, ending with a large, warm hand resting on my arm two heartbeats too long.

Friedrich’s smile was never in danger of suddenly turning sour—as I could almost always expect from my mother. She had absorbed sourness into herself and ruled over it completely; she had mastered the art of sourness to virtuosity. I often held a seat in the front row for that bizarre concert of nerves. That acidic imitation of a smile was precisely what I expected, and it nearly always followed that brief, warm lifting of the corners of her lips.

For this simple reason, it was the steady, dependable smile of my friend that was closer to me. It was like a promise, like the regular repayment of a loan by someone with impeccable credit. I lent him my trust, and he repaid it with interest, rarely disappointing me. Occasionally there were clashes between us, but they were like shards of glass smoothed by the current of the raging river that was Napola—gradually becoming rounded, no longer cutting anyone, even pleasant to the touch. Rounded, smooth, safe.

The Stein residence, formerly Haus Falkenruh, I called simply The Lair, for it often didn’t feel like a home at all, but rather a den of officer rabble spilling out of their automobiles and swaggering about the estate—and even inside the house itself—under the pretense of my father’s hospitality.

He cared little for these blatant displays of self-will or even vandalism, as Frau Stein called them, usually dismissing her complaints with, “Trampled or not the roses were already dead, Wernz should rip them all out by the roots. No sense in letting them make my driveway look shabby.”

I never quite felt at home there, if only for the trivial reason that the grand estate gave no impression of being truly inhabited—of being ruled by my father, governed by his will and presence.

The pipes were constantly breaking, the floors rotting, and rats lived in the shadows of the vast cellar as if the ghosts of former residents, having too much time in the afterlife, were training them to perform unholy mischief right under my father’s nose. Ghosts were one of the more timid, romantic explanations I invented on summer evenings, when rats romped in the hollows of the walls, mating as rats do, depriving Herr Stein of sleep with their inappropriate ecstasies beneath the floorboards.

The truth was entirely different—the family who had once lived in this villa hadn’t died or passed away leaving behind a tended rose garden and rooms full of pompous excess and irritating vanity. They had been expelled—driven out and dismissed—because Herr Stein needed a fitting residence, preferably one grand enough to accommodate his swollen ego.

Confiscation of property!

“A natural process—indeed, a necessary one,” Father declared, sprawled across someone else’s chaise longue, sipping port from someone else’s glass—and only his underpants were his own.

If there had been ghosts, they likely left after the scandal when Vincent Hohmann, a drunkard of some renown and a decorated officer, was caught with the very young and somewhat dim daughter of a nearby baker. Honest Hohmann was a guest of my father, but even Governor Stein—known for his boundless hospitality—could not tolerate his friend trampling the flowerbeds while fornicating with some harlot under the window of his study.

My father treated his friends well, but this time the cup of bitterness overflowed. There was no salvation for poor Hohmann. The Eastern Front!

The brass plaque engraved with Haus Falkenruh was, by Father’s order, thoroughly scraped and polished away. Now it stood by the front gate, long before the house itself came into view, and served as an ugly reminder of one generation erasing another—layer upon layer—piling up lives and histories until their abundance suffocated everything, leaving behind only indifference. It was no longer Haus Falkenruh, and no one was ever to remember it by that name again. What remained was only the scraped plaque, a heap of keepsakes, furniture, and nameless portraits—confiscated as well—which Mother ordered to be kept for their “artistic value,” as she put it, though the real reason was to mark the territory and her total dominion over it.

She phrased it differently, of course: “So that the walls don’t gape with such depressing emptiness.”

All this, tinged with a subtle bitterness and a kind of mourning for the confiscated lives, made a tremendous impression on Friedrich. Though perhaps the prospect of real food—not the thin potato broth and dog cutlets of his daily fare, served with salad that looked as if plucked from a fresh grave—filled him with such wonder that he admired everything and everyone equally.

The automobile rolled up the long drive, allowing us to take in the entire residence—a textbook example of neoclassicism, funded by some unknown industrialist’s wallet and built by hands we would never know. Their stories, loves, sorrows, and joys had all passed away, and only this monument to wealth endured—stone facing eternity.

The façade facing the garden was lost in the shadow of cypresses and old lindens encircling it like a cocoon—whether meant to protect or to crush and bury this cradle of the new order, no one could say. The changes my father introduced—perhaps not drastic, but seasonal—still stood out like a stain on the honor of the place.

It had become politically charged—the spacious Western Room often served as the adjutant’s office, and the entire side wing was sometimes used as officers’ quarters whenever they fancied holding a gathering at the Stein villa.

Only the orangery, at my mother’s insistence, remained untouched. “These gentlemen officers, golden men, true pride of the Reich,” she would say, “sometimes, but persistently, ignore all conventions—so, darling, I insist that they be strictly forbidden entry to the orangery. Were it a menagerie, I might understand the need to behave like animals, but it is not. Please, take the necessary steps. You ought to enforce some discipline, Heinrich—after all, this is your home, not some brothel.”

The expression she wore while proclaiming this decree filled me with unspeakable pride, and Father nearly swallowed his cigar.

To our right, a columned gallery greeted us, rising from the ground like a row of whitening soldiers. Soon the automobile stopped at the front entrance, where another colonnade awaited—a welcoming one this time—composed of old Wernz the gardener and two maids, neither of whom I recognized. Mother must have made considerable changes to the staff. They waited patiently, as if their feet had grown roots where they stood.

When the gravel finally quieted under the tires, Wernz, driven by his deeply ingrained sense of duty, hurried to unload our luggage. Friedrich accepted this without a word, though with more trust than he ever showed toward the overzealous Johan in such matters.

I glanced at the maids—none of them knew me, nor I them—and felt no particular curiosity. By my next visit, I’d likely see entirely different faces under those white caps; there was no point learning their names.

My friend, however, seemed to hold a different opinion of them, and as the only female presence in his recent visual repertoire, he let his gaze linger long enough for a vile bitterness to flare briefly in my mouth. I pulled him deeper into the house’s bowels as the maids giggled maliciously. One even blurted out, rather inappropriately, “Our young master is quite the little spitfire!”

Friedrich’s rapture came gradually, taking him over piece by piece. Polished furniture, Italian mirrors, even the almost obscene rococo painting above the French commode in the main hall—straight out of a scandalous boudoir—put him in the sort of mood one might feel in Florence, bombarded at every step by masterpieces. Whether something was tasteful or not didn’t affect his appreciation; his response bordered on reverence—idolatrous reverence, even if the décor was far from refined.

Only when he asked whether the mandarin tree in the parlor ever bore fruit did I answer no (Mother insisted it stay there, believing the orangery—one or the other—was insufficient). His smile faded slightly at that.

We found Mother on the stairs.

“Albrecht! At last!” she squealed and pressed her powdered cheeks to mine, leaving traces of her velvety face powder behind.

Friedrich, amused and properly respectful, stood behind me, hands clasped in front of him as if for protection. A first impression on Frau Stein was sacred, and though I hadn’t given him any advice on how to approach her, I knew he’d perform admirably—if not flawlessly, then at least interestingly.

Once she had drunk her fill of my face, her gaze turned to my friend.

“Friedrich, is it not? I’ve heard so much about you. How wonderful to have you as our guest.” She extended her hand toward him at such an angle that it clearly expected a kiss on that smooth, well-creamed skin, shining like wax.

“I’m very grateful for the invitation,” he said, shaking her hand firmly—soldier-style—which made her penciled brows arch upward.

“There’s no need for thanks! My husband and I are absolutely delighted to have such a promising example of German manhood at our table.”

“Mother, I wanted to—”

“Tell me later, darling.” She brushed her perfumed, ringed hand across my face in a farewell gesture and slipped off to the salon, heels clicking.

Of course. What else could I have expected? Somewhere deep inside, I had a powerful urge to fall at her feet, hide in the folds of her cocktail dress, shrink to the size of a seven-year-old, and sob like a child. To cry until the source of my misery and tears ran dry, and to lament half-coherently through a nose full of snot: “Mom, you don’t even know how hard it’s been, you don’t know from what place I’ve come back to you. Mom, I want to stay here, please let me return to your warmth—I miss it so much, I want to be your son again, not just another ‘promising German man’.”

I only pressed my lips together, lifted my chin, as if to say, this hasn’t broken me. But Friedrich’s presence drew out hidden reservoirs of tenderness in me. Tears welled miserably in my eyes. He probably didn’t even notice, too busy admiring the decorated walls, but it didn’t stop the machinery of wounded pride from starting up.

“Show me your room,” he asked.

I turned toward him, surprised that he still noticed me amidst all this visual splendor, and silently began climbing the carpeted stairs. I wiped my tears in secret, turned away from him.

“Nice place,” he stated.

“It was all already here.”

“All of it?”

“Yes.”

“Who would leave so much behind?”

He matched my step as we walked down the corridor where Mother had hung all the paintings she’d so often bought at auctions.

“No one left it. It was confiscated as ‘misused property’ and turned over to the Reich.”

I didn’t really know who had lived here before my family—only that the villa had been called Haus Falkenruh, and that the previous owners had rather mediocre taste. Still, I was ready for Friedrich’s inevitable next question:

“Who lived here?”

“German Jews.” 

And that was where the subject ended.

Chapter Text

There are certain moments when a man decides to lay himself bare before another person—willingly or not—but he does not resist that incessant, alluring fact: in a moment, I shall be known.

One thinks more or less about it; at times, it means little, and at times it means everything. A terrifying, and at once ecstatic sensation. I found myself upon its threshold at the very instant I opened the door to my room and let Friedrich go in before me.

The brass handle sank slowly, and upon it suddenly rested the weight of the entire world—my world—the reality of a feeling I had refused to admit even to myself. The air escaped me along with the push of the door and filled the room, bathed in a golden, autumnal glow. A draught began to toy with the delicate fabric of the curtains, puffing them out impishly, so I hastened Friedrich inside and closed the door tight, sealing the decision to lay myself bare.

He was now within the most hidden chamber of my reality. There could hardly be anything more intimate between us that did not involve touch. Of course, that assertion was false—as were most of my hasty declarations and borrowed wisdoms—but at the time my awareness was brimming with a small yet decisive certainty: there is no turning back.

I found my room in the same state of order—or rather disorder—in which I had left it. I had asked Mother to forbid the maids from cleaning here more than was absolutely necessary—not from slovenliness, nor from any perverse desire to cultivate an air of negligence, but because my bedroom was an ecosystem, only I could navigate without destroying.

“Mother has put you in the guest room; your belongings will be there as well. Wernz has surely already sent the valet to carry your suitcase up. If you wish, you may go and change, and freshen yourself,” I said casually, setting the suitcase down beside the old ebony canopy bed, whose four posts were carved with cherubs and wildly entwined vines.

Besides the cherubs, there were also satyrs—egged on by the cherubs and nymphs—but I shall not dwell on the obscenities that had once made Mother wish to rid herself of the piece, though she never did. Therefore, I had something to sleep on, though the décor was hardly conducive to pleasant dreams.

Friedrich paused at one of the two large windows and drew aside the airy curtain, embroidered with the traditional pattern of the edelweiss. I knew precisely what his eyes beheld: the small pond overgrown entirely with reeds, and the line of birches that guarded the road leading down southwards toward the town. During the holidays I had often stood in that very spot, watching Father depart—or arrive—sometimes alone, sometimes with the rest of his officer brethren.

“It’ll feel strange, sleeping alone in such a large room,” he remarked, seemingly less than delighted at the prospect of a night spent in solitary confinement within four walls. “I’ve grown used to an entire troop of snoring, fidgeting, and farting cadets beside me.”

“You’ll have some freedom. And at least you’ll be able to breathe,” I replied.

“At home, Hans often lay beside me—especially of late.” He gazed out the window again, farther still, beyond the birch tops. “I do wonder how he sleeps in the country. Apparently some Bachner fellow pesters him—a little rascal, that one.” He glanced at me. “He reminds me of you.” He moved toward my desk and ran his fingers over the dark, gleaming mahogany.

The desk was in no state of order—far from it. One might even have thought some unskilled sapper had detonated a charge inside one of its drawers. Pile of books number one leaned dangerously to the left edge; pile number two threatened to slide off the right, and had it done so, it would have struck pile number three squarely, sending Goethe, Rilke, and Nietzsche into a great paper cataclysm—not the most desirable outcome.

“Who? The rascal?” I asked, watching as he cautiously surveyed, by touch and sight alike, the landscape of that most intimate piece of furniture in my entire room.

Even the bed, nor the drawer of my undergarments, was more private than the place where I poured out my petty joys and bitter complaints.

“No. Hans. My brother.” He touched the old inkwell of black stone and glass, then brushed his fingers across the marble bust of Adonis. The pitiable god had a broken nose and a chipped cheekbone—an heirloom from former owners, hidden away in a drawer and long since written off. “He too is…” Friedrich began.

“Helpless?” I interjected, my voice squeaking as he examined the mutilated face with a kind of tender concern.

“Sensitive. Beautiful on the inside.”

Without a word I opened the large double wardrobe and began to rummage for clothing other than the school uniform. For that one privilege of normality I could allow myself—even if brief.

Friedrich continued his exploration with shameless enthusiasm. His eyes wandered freely over the photographs in silver frames, the scraps of theatre programmes pinned to the silk wallpaper, and the small trinkets I kept on a little porcelain dish. He studied for a while the postcards sent regularly by my aunt Luzie from Berlin who was dying of longing.

The last, tucked between compartments of the writing cabinet, showed the Dom and Friedrichsbrücke—the cathedral and bridge where Luzie obsessively went to confession. I missed her too. She made good dumplings and always carried sweets. Many a time she’d press into my hand her favourite Stollwerck chocolates, insisting: “You’re too thin! At that school, the boys are like oaks—they’ll trample you, or, God forbid, drag you off and do as they please! Eat, eat, my dear, you must put some flesh on those bones!” I had no desire to “put on flesh”—lest I resemble Aunt Luzie herself, plump as if kneaded from dough—so I shared the chocolate with Johan, who ate it without a word.

My comrade soon discovered a new amusement: he had seized the trinkets from my porcelain dish, lifted a golden signet ring, and read the engraving, grinning like a fool.

“A.S.—does that stand for Arroganter Schnösel?”

I snorted, pulling from the wardrobe a pair of woolen trousers and a jacket in a handsome shade of brown. Since I was home, I could indulge myself by changing into something civilized, if only for a moment. Stolen normality smelled of starch and mothballs.

“Another minute and I’ll lock you in the wardrobe and tell Mother you’ve taken ill from the country air and are stuck in the privy.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” he retorted, setting the ring down and trudging toward me, his eyes gleaming with unbounded curiosity at the wardrobe’s contents. “Besides, Frau Stein would never forgive you. It’s one thing to be five minutes late because of a privy, quite another to miss the Governor’s birthday reception to which one’s been officially invited. Why, it’d be a scandal! I should never show my face in public again. The loss of Frau Stein’s blessing is social suicide.” He placed the back of his hand to his brow, with a gesture more fitting to a maiden in distress.

“You are my guest, and thus I may do with you as I please.”

“Ah, so that’s how it is,” he said, spinning on his heel and flopping heavily onto the bed, making the springs groan. “You simply want me all to yourself. You need only ask, you know; there’s no need to lock me in a wardrobe. Such behavior ill befits a young gentleman.”

“I need no lessons in propriety from you. Move over,” I said, laying the jacket, trousers, and waistcoat upon the navy bedspread. “You’re breaking all records in earning Stelzner’s wrath during etiquette lessons.”

“Firstly, those lessons are idiotic; secondly, my answers are always beyond reproach. Stelzner simply enjoys being an arse for no reason.”

“When asked what you should do if, while dancing with an officer’s wife, your monocle slipped into her bosom, you replied that one should merely ‘give her a good shake and a wiggle, and it’d pop out of its own accord.’”

“And I still maintain that’s true,” he said cheerfully, scratching one of the carved cherubs on the bedpost while peering at the other figures with great interest. “If it fell in, it’ll fall out. Grab the officer’s wife by the legs, give her a little swing over the floor, and the monocle will turn up by itself. Besides, it wouldn’t happen to me—I don’t even know what a monocle is.” As if to lend his words greater gravity, he patted one of the ebony satyrs upon its impressive attribute.

“You’re playing the fool, that’s all,” I said with disapproval. “And stop fidgeting, you’re crumpling everything. I can’t go down to Mother looking like a tramp.”

“You’ll have to change again soon anyway. For the Governor, you’ll need to strap yourself once more into that green school rag,” he said, kindly rising so as not to crease anything further. “And for the record, I’d never dance with an officer’s wife.”

“I don’t see any lining up to dance with you.”

“Are you doubting my dancing skills?”

“I needn’t doubt what I know does not exist.”

“You’re uncommonly touchy today, my good fellow.”

“You keep pestering me—in my own house, no less—and have the nerve to call me Arroganter Schnösel!”

He had the gall, the rascal. Were it not for that, I might never have grown so fond of him. Yet he could drive me to a white heat, as now, when he rummaged through my wardrobe, laughing at the old tailcoat with jabot I’d inherited from Grandfather—the so-called ball rag. Grandfather maintained that “any well-bred young lady begins to shuffle her feet the moment she sees a gentleman in a well-cut tailcoat.”

Apparently Friedrich counted himself among such well-bred young ladies, for he held the coat against himself and made a few playful turns.

“Fine rags you’ve got there—spotless,” he said, putting the coat away and taking up a riding crop that hung on the inner side of the door. He brandished it coquettishly, well amused. “And this—who’s it for?”

“You, if you don’t settle down.”

“I know you think me a thoroughbred stallion, but that may be overdoing it a bit. Still, who knows—I might rise to the occasion, since you’ve such high hopes for me.” He laughed, then caught himself and asked, “Do you ride?”

“Yes. My uncle does business at the horse races in Hamburg,” I replied, slipping off my jacket and shirt until I was in my undershirt alone. “Sometimes I visited him with my parents, but he never saw a jockey in me. Nor do I care for horses—they’ve a tendency to sneeze half-chewed hay all over one’s face.” With no trace of embarrassment, I put on a fresh shirt and began fastening the cufflinks—engraved too with Arroganter Schnösel.

To bare oneself at home came far easier than at school. We had changed clothes together often enough, we boys, though I had no intention of stripping to my drawers before Friedrich, shirts however, were another matter. It did not trouble me. We had both seen one another stripped of innocence—in comparison, bodily nakedness was nothing.

When I raised my head, I caught Friedrich’s gaze, which quickly retreated into the wardrobe—half in embarrassment, half compelled by what little good manners he possessed. Not that he was particularly accomplished in that regard, but I was inclined to forgive him.

“Hans always wanted to learn to ride,” he murmured, hanging the crop back in its place. For a moment it swayed rhythmically, tapping the wardrobe door.

“If he likes half-chewed hay, I’d be glad for you both to accompany me next time in Hamburg,” I replied.

He emerged from behind the door, grinning ear to ear.

“What an honour! But what’s this?” he said, stopping halfway as something on the inside of the wardrobe caught his eye—a torn poster I had once taken from behind the opera house. On it, a red-haired woman was clearly in rapturous ecstasy, all thanks to the soap she so fervently praised. “And who’s this, then—your sweetheart? Planning to go into the soap trade?”

“In a moment I’ll go into the gravedigging trade and bury your idiotic remarks for good,” I said, fastening the last button of my jacket—just in time, for the door creaked open after two discreet knocks.

First came the long nose of a maid whose name I did not know, and only then the rest of her person. She quickly set a suitcase beside the bed.

“Thank you. Have my friend’s things been placed in the guest room?”

“Yes, young master.”

“Would you show Friedrich to his room? I shall freshen up in the meantime.”

“Yes, young master,” she said more cheerfully now, casting a hungry glance at Weimer like a famished beast.

The object of her unhealthy desire seemed unaware of the danger awaiting him, for he was already meekly trotting toward the door. Before disappearing, he gave me one last radiant smile.

I dressed the rest of the way rather hastily, hoping the maid was not so practiced in the art of seduction as to reach poor Friedrich too soon—or unbutton his trousers before I had put on my own. Ready to defend my friend’s honour, I marched to the guest room briskly.

Friedrich was alone, to my immense relief. There were still two hours until Father’s arrival, so I took the liberty of showing him about the estate—the mausoleum, the pond, and the park, where marble statues were strewn about as though someone had defecated them by the dozen. In short—it was the most delightful afternoon of my life.

Chapter Text

The growl of the Mercedes was that day listened for in the Steins’ residence like the rumble of an enraged hydra — with dread. The maids, Wernz, Johan, Mother, and together with her Friedrich and I — as tasteful trinkets, small accessories that Governor Stein wished to don for this one evening — we were ready to stand at attention, in the very front line, awaiting the sinister murmur of the Mercedes — the metal dragon, the black beast rolling hastily along the muddy roads, driven by the command of Heinrich Stein. Even the machine itself trembled beneath the lash of so mighty a moving force as was my esteemed father.

Frau Stein had checked everything ten times, and then five more, remarking to the maids every moment that “your cap is crooked — fix it,” or at once accusing, “that collar is not ironed as it ought to be, were you pressing with your eyes shut?” All bore it patiently, silently, as though they had swallowed their tongues; they had clearly already learned to hold them behind their teeth, otherwise they would at that very moment be trudging down the birch-lined road toward the marketplace of little Wartenburg.

My mother’s mood quickly infected me, so every so often I glanced at Friedrich — over whom I was in a sense keeping watch just then — and under my breath gave him instructions, or simply smoothed the creases on his uniform, hastily ironed by the new maid.

She was unskilled, and Mother had scolded her sharply when she nearly burned a hole through the left breast pocket. Yet Frau Stein could not vent the full splendor of her fury, for time was pressing, and the banqueting hall below — her beloved salon — was not yet ready. A scandal!

Now she was pacing back and forth like an officer among cadets, attuned to catch every oversight — for this was not merely about her husband; the entire crème de la crème, the golden husbands of the Reich, were to appear. That obliged one. She would not have been the finest hostess in East Prussia had she not known how to drive her household to work.

“Fix your hair,” I threw over my shoulder — Friedrich, as usual, had applied too little pomade, and now it stood up rebelliously.

“Another bit of slicking down that damned part and I’ll lose every hair. I’ll end up bald like my father. I’ll have temples showing. My head already shines as if I’d spat on it.”

“Don’t exaggerate,” I said, instinctively adjusting my own impeccable coiffure. “For now baldness hardly threatens you. Keep your trap shut and fix it. Father will be here any minute, and with him the rest of the gang — I don’t want to lose face because of my own guest.”

Mother ran once more to the bedroom to put on the diamond earrings — a refined gift from Father for their twentieth anniversary — which she had earlier forgotten. She did not wear them daily; she kept them in a small safe in her desk and decided to parade them only on exceptional occasions, those that demanded splendor of the highest order, combined with the theatrical opulence of a slowly dying illusion. When she put them on, each facet of the diamonds reflected gleaming fragments of a world that could do nothing but burn itself out, be forgotten, and buried amid the encroaching leaves of history known as bygone past and present.

At that time I did not yet grasp this so clearly — after all, like the first-class passengers of the Titanic, I felt a delicate tremor, not alarming, only faintly disquieting — the murmur of the colossus going down. It was the year 1942, when we stood in that quivering row, one by one: Friedrich, myself, the lazily smiling Wernz, the maids staring at Friedrich as cows at a flowery meadow, my eternally irate Mother shouting orders toward the kitchen where Anne-Marie was finishing her caresses of the great cake — while we stood so, on the front thousands of soldiers were dying, torn to shreds by hand grenades, blown to dust by mines, and pierced through with the careful stitch of bursts from the MG-08. They died, and we were suffocating in the broth of our own folly.

We waited, excited despite ourselves, and this whole fit of nervous looseness was accompanied by the mad horns of the officers’ cavalcade now approaching from the main gate. From the very racket they made at the outset one could already infer that at least a whole convoy of twelve cars was arriving. Like a wild procession of frenzied huntsmen, their cry set the entire house on its feet.

Anne-Marie must have dropped the wedding porcelain, for from the kitchen came the dry crack of a plate or cup shattering to bits. That sound awoke in Frau Stein the killer’s instinct, but there was no time now to punish poor Anne-Marie — she merely fastened her earrings, murmuring imperiously:

“Faster, faster! Everyone to your places! Bring the cake!”

The three Mercedes cars that halted before the wide-flung front doors presented themselves rather poorly compared with the legend of an entire battalion of armored vehicles which their noisy approach had conjured. I received this with a measure of silent gratitude. From several to perhaps a dozen officers could be managed, but if they had brought with them well-born young ladies for company — sometimes stenographers, sometimes daughters of influential soap-powder merchants or hoteliers — then the situation began to slip from control. Even the most seasoned military tactician could not devise a perfect strategy for how such gatherings ought to be conducted.

My Mother had come quite close to achieving that feat, yet there was always some Vincent Hohmann trampling the flowerbeds. A demanding company indeed.

A maid rolled into the hall, and the radiance she emitted led me to suppose that it was not Anne-Marie with the cake, but a living torch. A bloody glow took possession of her frightened face, and all the power of the candles — stuck like field crosses into the dark icing — burned like a little village aflame. Mother pounced upon her, sizing her up, ready to bark new orders for the improvement of the enterprise, yet finding no flaw in her appearance, she merely stroked the girl’s cheek and turned toward the door: immaculate, unbending, and merciless.

The dark mass of officers spilled from the open doors of the three black, metal steeds and spread about as though someone had foolishly thrust a stick into the midst of an anthill. Together they might have given the impression of an organized group, yet, upon closer focus on each individual unit, they lost much of their coordination — in other words, each one was drunk as a fiddler’s dog.

The merry officers, led by Governor Stein, poured into the residence, stamping their metal-soled boots almost crudely. Not even my Mother’s eyelid quivered; instead of her eyelid, her hand twitched, rising into the air to lead the chorus in a hymn to dear Father.

I joined the choir with Friedrich, and with us the maids and Wernz, bowing their necks and opening their mouths in fear of Frau Stein’s wrath. Together we merged into a harmonious cacophony, while Anne-Marie sang so zealously, inhaling such gulps of air, that with each mighty exhalation she nearly blew the tiny torches from the frosted surface of the cake.

Frosted, and not without design — upon it an eagle swelled proudly within a laurel wreath, clutching in its talons a most dignified emblem. Some might argue whether the placing of national symbols upon a piece of pastry and icing — soon to be devoured by the cavernous maws of the officers’ fraternity and later by them excreted — was entirely proper or fitting. Mother would surely have declared it a kind of communion: the golden men of state were to nourish themselves on the spirit and the idea, on the body of the nation, in the form of a chocolate cake — after which each would suffer inevitable constipation.

The simultaneous widening and bulging of Governor Stein’s eyes foretold that he had not been prepared for such a circus-like reception — least of all his head, which now must have been bursting at the seams, pounding and throbbing as though someone were digging trenches in his frontal lobe. Yet he had to endure these family formalities; there was no escape. A lazy, pseudo-moved smile crept upon his lips, and the rest of his companions joined in at the very end, strongly accentuating the finale of my Mother’s artistic escapade.

He was drunk as three lords; one could smell it from afar. The smile did not leave my face, though it grew slightly numb when Father bent forward and began earnestly blowing his heavily alcoholic breath upon the small conflagration borne by the anxious Anne-Marie.

She was anxious chiefly because the candles were melting fast and, as a testament to their brief yet effectual existence, left white puddles upon the cake’s surface. At last, with no small effort, he extinguished the cake, and Mother hastened to him to plant by his ear a nonexistent kiss. I sprang from the line as if shot from a sling — I wished to greet Father.

“Good evening, and all the best, Father,” I said, grasping his hand.

He returned the clasp with equal strength, and it lightened my heart. I wanted him to look at me, to grip my hand as one grips a man’s, and to take me for such. I wanted that clasp to last a little longer, but he broke it, asking:

“You’ve lost some weight. Do you practise enough sports?” In the furrow of his brow I saw complaint. He glanced at Mother over my shoulder, as though my sudden shrinkage were her fault. “You should exercise more. I shall write to the school, requesting that they increase the intensity of your programme.”

“But of course, I do exercise, and quite a lot. Our trainer takes excellent care of our form.” Again those brows, rising slowly beneath the brim of my father’s officer’s cap. I felt I was losing him as a listener, so in desperation I drew Friedrich toward me — like a farmer bringing his finest cow to the fair. My friend was my pride. He was mine. He was my friend, and it was I who had invited him; thanks to me he stood now in this house, and thanks to me this whole rabble could feast their eyes upon him. “This is Friedrich Weimer — you remember him, don’t you?”

“Of course. I have heard much of your boxing abilities.” Governor Stein brightened at once.

Evidently, upon returning home, he had expected to find on the threshold a youth of iron — with a splendid body full of manly grace. That one wish was fulfilled in the person of Friedrich, who this time found the proper recipient for his firm handshake. They clasped hands as in a circle of mutual, silent admiration, and I fought only against the stubborn burning beneath my eyelids.

Anne-Marie withdrew strategically with the cake, Wernz did likewise. The kitchen suddenly gained importance, and the disposition of forces presented itself roughly like this: the banqueting hall was the battlefield, the kitchen the strategic point of comestible supply, and the hall the place of regrouping.

A two-maid detachment pounced upon the officer rabble and began helping them remove their coats. Stripped of outer garments, the officers advanced in a colourful procession, their Iron Crosses gleaming, at whose head marched Frau Stein. She led them into the salons like a goddess of victory.

The cake rolled into the banqueting hall upon an elegant little trolley, accompanied by the long-nosed maid. The frosting, worthy of a Governor, with its national emblems, had been in the kitchen scrupulously portioned out among all the guests, and thus it appeared before them — as a feeble substitute for what it had once been — illegible and stripped of all pathos. Each of them, attempting to tear from national glory a morsel for himself, only further undermined the already much-abused honour of our country.

Friedrich and I were seated together. Father at the head of the table, beside him Mother. Opposite them sat the chief guest, my father’s best friend — Colonel Wilhelm Kruger, commander of the Wehrmacht garrison in Allenstein. Such an arrangement was clearly most convenient for Father, since it spared him the sight of Wilhelm bespattering himself with bits of boiled potatoes each time he chose to regale us with his glorious exploits, contained in accounts short on substance yet intolerably long in delivery. Each of these ended with: “But it’s not the same anymore, gentlemen, the rot is spreading, there are no good officers left,” — and this conclusion was punctuated by a lump of potato landing on the table.

To Friedrich’s right, Frau Stein had chosen to seat one of the less important guests. His name was Paul Rienecke, the Governor’s secretary — not much of a companion in conversation, though the poor fellow tried so earnestly that one might have awarded him a medal for it, in addition to the one already pinned to his uniform jacket.

More than any social inclination, however, he displayed a thirst of a decidedly alcoholic nature — from the very beginning of the evening he had been eyeing the bottle of cognac which the Governor had brought home with him, presumably reserved for later toasts. For now, poor Paul, who was parched, dreadfully parched, had to content himself with the sparkling wine carried by the maids orbiting round the table. He did not stint himself, and all the while nudged Friedrich, urging him to drink along. Friedrich, of course, declined with perfect courtesy.

The seating arrangement, conceived by my mother, was as deliberate as could be; there was no place here for oversight or social discord. To her right, her husband; to her left, Major SS Karl-Heinz Möller — a repulsive fellow who courted her relentlessly. She, for her part, repaid him in kind, and her pearly laughter, which rang out each time Karl delivered some miserable jest, seemed by a miracle not to set the silverware trembling. Yet the official version of events was that she “despised Karl-Heinz Möller, for he was a scoundrel and a swindler, and he did not address her as ‘gracious lady’.” That alone placed him remarkably low in the hierarchy of good manners among the gallant officers.

Nearest my father sat Captain Ernst von Falkenhayn and SS Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Stoll — perhaps not his closest confidants, yet decidedly his favourite drinking companions.

Wilhelm had in his life so thoroughly abused the bottle and all earthly pleasures that now, when he had been posted away from the front line, he had fallen quite ill and could take little alcohol. Frau Stein knew this well, and therefore gladly seated him honourably on the opposite side, next to the army physician, Doctor Otto Weiss, who also drank little and seldom pressed others to excess. Unfortunately, on Kruger’s left lurked Rienecke, who, having failed to find a kindred spirit in Friedrich, sought to strike up some carousal with Kruger instead.

Farthest from the Governor sat Franz Dietrich, Kreisleiter of the NSDAP, who competed with Father for influence — an offence so grave that he found himself placed between one companion who took no notice of him and another who had turned entirely toward Otto Weiss. I sat opposite him, and so, willy-nilly, our gazes met across the vast floral arrangement set in the centre of the table. In silence I shared his aversion to our company, but there my sympathy ended.

Franz Dietrich was notorious for his weakness for the casino, for women, and for strong drink — in short, for human frailty — and he gave himself up to it as men of the lowest sort do: completely and without restraint. A trait which, it must be said, could have been attributed to a surprising number of guests at Governor Stein’s receptions.

“Charming company,” Friedrich remarked softly, brushing from his shoulder a piece of potato that had landed there after another of Kruger’s impassioned orations — this time delivered standing, so that his range of fire might be greater. “Fifty pfennigs says the fellow beside me topples under the table before the night is out.”

“This is no reception but a masquerade,” I whispered, peering at him over the rim of my crystal glass. “And the fellow beside you is Paul Rienecke.”

“He’s already drained at least one bottle of Sekt and is reaching for the cordial.”

“You can help him if you’re so concerned for his welfare; I assure you he’ll be profoundly grateful.”

Friedrich shook his head and served himself a portion of Gemüsesalat.

“I’ve seen my father drink himself senseless, then lie pissed against the house wall. It rather kills the urge for me.”

“What’s this, abstinence?” Paul broke in, reaching for the untouched bottle of Bordeaux that had stood, virginal and untroubled, before Friedrich, apparently failing to tempt him. “Commendable, gentlemen. At such a young age, not to drink — oh no! But to refuse a drop to the celebrant, on his day of honour? That’s an insult! An insult! Come now, lad, pass me that glass, I’ll pour you enough for two, you’re big enough for it.”

“Thank you, I’ve no desire.”

“Why not?”

“Alcohol has a dreadful diuretic effect on me, sir, and I’ve no notion where the lavatory is,” Friedrich delivered smoothly, his face nearly stone-like.

I smiled maliciously, for Paul flushed slightly — he had, clearly, the same problem.

“Not good, not good,” Rienecke muttered, dabbing at his sweating brow with a snow-white handkerchief, then his lips. “I’ll tell you this — right round the corner there’s the orangery, lots of flowerpots in there. My favourite place, when nature calls. I’m telling you, you won’t find better, and the relief’s the same. So, how about it? Care to take a leak?”

I set my glass down on the table with a firm clink. The orangery? He had turned my mother’s orangery into a privy? So that was why her orchids had fared so poorly, until she’d ordered the place sealed for good.

“Then leak, man,” Friedrich sighed wearily, giving in, and pushed his glass closer to Paul, who, with a beatific expression, began to pour.

“Leak in your breeches, not in my orangery,” I muttered under my breath, deeply affronted.

“A delightful evening, gracious lady!” Ernst’s booming voice drowned out the laughter that escaped from Friedrich, rather too freely and uncontrollably. “Truly delightful! You are indeed a marvellous person, the jewel in this house’s crown, the ornament of our provincial town. Perhaps through your good offices a humble place like Wartenburg may regain its good name and class.”

“Think nothing of it,” Mother blurted out at once, as if she had been waiting for that compliment ever since the guests were seated.

Indeed, there was little to think of — for besides giving orders to the servants and approving the extensive menu for the evening, including the import of fine Bordeaux vintages confiscated in France, her hand had not touched any truly significant aspect of this solemn night. Though I must admit, the choice of flowers for the table was truly masterly — the central arrangement dripped with the splendour of burgundy and golden chrysanthemums interlaced with oak leaves, and amid this thicket were set white carnations.

Father raised the first toast of the evening just as the roast duck with apples and red cabbage was brought in. At the mere sight of Kruger piling his plate high with cabbage, Friedrich nearly crossed himself — we both knew that half of that plate’s contents would end up, in the best case, on the table, in the worst, on us. Sometime during the meal, Governor Stein rose again to speak, but was thrown off course by Ernst’s inquiry after cigars. He opened his silver case and began offering cigars thicker than two of my fingers.

To my mother’s absolute horror, Alfred bit the tip off his cigar instead of trimming it properly, and spat it somewhere onto the floor.

“The dog will find it later,” he said cheerfully.

“We have no dog,” Mother gasped, smoothing her neck to calm herself.

“Every host should have a dog. I’ve one myself, though my wife can’t stand the beast. He humps her leg — getting him off, ha! That’s a challenge! He goes at her calf till the dust flies! Fine energy, that boy!”

“Something to envy, eh, Wilhelm?” Karl-Heinz crowed with glee, driving the barb in.

“My friend,” Kruger said gravely, “I shall let that remark pass my ears.”

“Why, that was no insult, merely a question after your health. How is your health, my dear fellow?”

Kruger plunged his knife into the duck’s breast a shade too forcefully; his cheeks, stuffed with red cabbage, quivered ominously. He swallowed — thank heaven — and then spoke.

“They pulled me off the front, and at once the ailments began. My back, my stomach, my liver — all going to hell. I’ll tell you, it’s all damned rot. Idleness doesn’t suit me. The sooner I’m back where I belong, the better.”

“Yes — where there’s the thickest mess and the greatest stew.”

“And I think—” Paul Rienecke hiccuped loudly, splashing wine across the table. “It’s for want of certain things.”

“What things?” Wilhelm reached for Tilsit cheese, pickled plums, and Königsberg herring. “Enlighten me, my good man.”

“Too little fucking and too few Gypsy fiddles, that’s what.”

Mother, luckily, did not hear, for she was fending off Möller’s advances on the hem of her cocktail gown. Kruger froze, mouth agape, with the herring poised to flee. Friedrich only smiled foolishly, jabbing at me insistently with his knee.

“I’m enjoying myself far more than I’d thought. Expected a funeral, and I’ve found myself in the midst of an exceedingly merry pandemonium,” he whispered, holding out his plate for me to pass him toast spread with wild-boar pâté.

“Wait till Stoll begins to recite. Once he’s tanked up sufficiently, his inner orator awakens and he declaims all the best-known works of our nation’s finest poets.” I gave him some pike in aspic. “Never remembers more than two stanzas, and mixes them so thoroughly our poets must be turning in their graves.”

“Good thing he doesn’t sing.”

“My Mother sings, when she’s drunk too much liqueur with Aunt Luzie.”

“And what do you do when you’re drunk?”

“I fuck and listen to Gypsy fiddles” I blurted, stifling a laugh.

Friedrich nearly choked on his pike, quickly hiding behind his napkin to finish his ostentatious laughter. He rested his left hand upon my thigh, and a flickering warmth climbed my spine, confusing my thoughts. When he withdrew his hand, the warmth still burned for some time, as though he had branded me with red-hot iron. He had marked me with some invisible sign, unseen by the naked eye. It lodged in my head like a shard of shrapnel embedded in the skull of some unlucky soldier — I felt it burrow deeper and deeper, soon sheathed in soft tissue, impossible to extract or be rid of. It terrified me, for I knew that if I tried to tear it out, it would leave a hideous scar.

From my pocket I drew the poem I had prepared for Father. I had been crumpling it for some time, and the ink had begun to blur, the paper greedily drinking the sweat from my palm.

“What’ve you got there?” my ever-observant friend noticed at once.

“A poem, for Father. For his birthday,” I whispered. “But I doubt he’s in the proper spiritual state to absorb anything other than alcohol. I’ll read it to him later.”

Our lively chatter had caught the attention of Alfred Stoll, who turned slightly toward us, caressing the tip of his cigar with his narrow lips. On his clean-shaven chin a crimson streak of cranberry sauce had dried. His expression suggested that he was about to pose some intrusive question — one he hadn’t thought through, but felt compelled to voice.

“How goes your military training, Albrecht?”

“Well,” I nodded briefly, inwardly laughing bitterly.

Well. Exceedingly well. It goes well for us all — until we’re dead as dogs. Then it no longer goes well.

“Albrecht, after training, will be an officer of the Waffen-SS,” my father deemed it proper to interject.

“Ah,” Stoll sighed indulgently, amused. “There are still physical requirements and—” He broke off mid-sentence, flattened by my father’s gaze, which seemed intent on burning a fashionable hole in his forehead. The strategic Stoll — renowned for his strategy both in conversation and on the battlefield — turned back to Friedrich and me, deftly shifting attention from my less-than-impressive attributes. “You’re the boxer,” he said, wagging a thick finger vaguely in Friedrich’s direction.

“In splendid form, I’ve heard,” my father added, lighting another cigar and tossing the spent match into his empty coffee cup.

Something in me flared at once. Even a farmer whose cow had won first prize at the fair could not have felt such blissful joy. Friedrich was someone far greater — greater than those cows, greater than the diamond earrings, greater than the Iron Crosses. He was magnificent, and I was his friend, and he wished to be mine. We were bound by friendship, we had chosen one another — I wanted everyone to know, to see what a marvellous man I had brought with me. The finest among that whole rabble. The one and only, gifted and dazzlingly bright.

Kruger the spitter, Rienecke the drunk, Möller the swine, Stoll the boor — none of them were worthy of my guest, none could match him. The jealousy that had so often entwined my heart left me for good. His triumph was my triumph. Friedrich was the worthiest of the worthy, deserving every laurel and every hymn in his honour. All those gathered, in my eyes, were obliged to recognise him as I did — and so they did.

“A talented boxer?” Von Falkenhayn joined the conversation.

I swelled with each of their words. The more warmth they poured upon Friedrich, the more light kindled in my chest.

“Then we’d gladly see how you move, boy! We all appreciate talented young men here!”

“An excellent idea!”

“Gentlemen,” Governor Stein straightened, full of some undefined intent, “after dinner, I invite you all to the cellar. Our youthful elite shall show us something very special!”

Chapter Text

I sat there petrified, all the blood drained from my face, fleeing somewhere in search of a more dignified place to dwell. Evidently, my mortified terror, mingled with disbelief, did little to encourage the circulation of Germanic blood beneath the skin of a coward, under the mask of failure — the son subjected to trial and ridicule by his own father.

Friedrich, wanting to make sure I hadn’t choked on a morsel of goose, gently touched my back, between the shoulder blades, precisely where the shivers were marching in rank, like a garrison of infantry.

“Are you all right?”

I tried to answer, but only managed a voiceless yes, then grasped the cup and sipped a little of the bitter liquid, hoping that for a moment I might hide behind it from the officers’ cheerful glances. They whispered among themselves, one over the other, greatly amused, and the boyish excitement on their faces made them look so young again that they might as well have been a pack of brats plotting to watch a cockfight.

Mother’s large, worried, and slightly disgusted eyes met mine above the rim of the cup, and from that one glance I could tell that she was suffering. I never knew how to defend myself before that gaze — nor could I lie to it — and so, in a truly maternal gesture, she recognized my torment almost at once. She brushed aside Möller’s hand with a loud slap. That hand, which had apparently been seeking snags in her stockings and had hitherto gone unpunished for its persistent fawning, now, mercilessly rebuked, began to atone by offering my Mother a cigarette.

“Albrecht, darling, perhaps you’ll play something for us?” she asked, flashing a row of teeth in a forced, painful smile. “The gentlemen would surely enjoy a little music of refinement.”

“With pleasure, with pleasure,” Krüger said, crushing a pickled plum pit between his thick fingers — it shot from that iron grip straight into a crystal vase with a resounding ding! “Rarely does one get to hear first-rate music these days, that’s the truth — all loafers and rascals playing in corners, and what’s worse! Some savage gyrations — people twisting about like victims of Saint Vitus’s dance, jerking and leaping like animals. It’s, I tell you, sheer diarrhea.”

Franz Dietrich finally deemed it proper to speak, for he roused himself, donned upon his face the sneer of an eternal malcontent, and hissed through his teeth, drawing the attention of nearly all present — largely because each of them wished to assess to what extent Franz was already incapable of proper functioning, so cruelly wronged by the lack of conversation partners and an excess of access to alcohol. Yet his speech was still quite articulate, for he declared bitterly:

“Every one of those filthy musicians who succumb to this pernicious American fashion ought to be shot on the spot. They only corrupt the youth, which turns away from truly Germanic values in favor of unworthy, degenerate perversions of culture.”

Stoll began nodding as though wound up, and at last, taking pity on his neck, rested his eyes on me.

“Well then, my boy. Up with you — play us something. We’ll all be glad to listen. Come now, don’t dawdle. We’d like to go down with our esteemed host to the cellar before the night grows old.”

I rose stiffly, accompanied by my mother’s smile — that smile of a woman who knows when her own child is to go to his inevitable execution, to a spectacle of mockery, and so decides to arrange the performance as a kind of antechamber to the coming humiliation. I was to play my own farewell elegy, to provide my own accompaniment to the moment when I would descend beneath the floorboards like a fiddler who keeps drawing sound from his instrument until the ship of his pride sinks softly to the bottom.

Only that I was not to sink softly. I was to be driven down with a crash — and the louder that crash, the more delighted the worthy officers would be.

The piano waited for me at the side, half concealed by an oriental screen of rice paper. Anne-Marie, who happened to be on duty near the table, rushed to the screen and, with a smooth motion, slid it aside, revealing the instrument in all its glory. Its rounded body was covered with a snow-white cloth, and upon that cloth stood a small crystal vase with white carnations.

I sat down, equally stiff, and began to stretch my fingers. I might as well have exchanged hands with a corpse; they possessed as much grace as the cold, stiff flesh of something from which the soul had fled.

Rienecke belched loudly. He tried to muffle the sound with his sleeve, but failed miserably, and only added a touch of piquancy to the entire performance. I could safely say he had already stolen the whole show — I couldn’t have entertained that officerly rabble more if I’d played them a tune upon my eyelashes.

Otto Weiss, somewhat bored, took a break from discoursing about stab, cut, and tear wounds, and began picking his teeth. My father, too, showed little interest in the performance my mother had solicited, whispering quietly with Stoll and von Falkenhayn about something that brought a red flush to his slightly sagging cheeks.

Only Krüger and Friedrich seemed to await my performance with any measure of curiosity. My friend smiled at me faintly, encouragingly, and I felt the dreadful chill leave my hands and climb higher, locking my whole face in icy chains. From jaw to neck a frozen collar closed around me, and there remained nothing to do but to use those hands which, by some miracle, had thawed just enough.

I struck the keys, caressing them softly, while tears welled into a glassy film that blurred the rows of black and white fingers. I did not need to see them; I knew this Chopin Sonata by heart. The Nocturne in C minor — the very one my mother used to play sometimes back in Berlin, before my father decided she should focus on Beethoven or Schubert, far more suitable to the salons of a man of his stature. I chose it for the raw beauty with which it now invaded the thick air of the banquet hall.

Turned sideways to the table, I could no longer follow the guests’ movements, but out of the corner of my eye I focused on my friend’s silhouette. He leaned back comfortably, completely ignoring Paul, who was tugging at his sleeve, demanding he have another drink. His fingers rested along his jawline, moving slightly, as though searching for some imperfection in the work of a divine chisel. In vain.

I wanted to stand up, take his hand, and lead him away. And say:

Let me look, let me see whether God’s hand slipped when He carved you and gave you life. Let me be the one. I swear I’ll do it as I’ve never done anything else. The verdict is already known to me. But grant me that favor. Please.

Before my eyes rose Gehrig, with his deformed face, misted eyes, sweating and snot-streaked, retching, bent double in the doorway of the locker room. My fingers struck a few notes too fast, too loud. Mother flinched in her chair; no one noticed but the two of us. Yet I was no longer thinking of Chopin. I was thinking of him. Of myself. Of what would come once that spoiled brotherhood decided to amuse itself at our expense.

How could I hurt you? How could I cause you pain? Friedrich… are you ready for us to hurt each other? Is it so easy to change us? I saw your eyes when you hurt Gehrig. Can that be justified? Will we bow before this audience as well?

Frost crept inside my chest. I tried to shake it off, to resist, to warm my fingers enough against the keys that the warmth might spread through my whole body. I broke into sweat; dew formed on my temples. The uniform clung to my sides, but it was all in vain. Cold — so cold.

The world was one great tournament, one endless banquet. There was always someone watching, imposing his doctrine upon the puppets who danced to his will upon the stage of this rotting brothel. And he and I — we were the jesters of that masquerade, raising fists, hoisting rifle butts, marching toward our undoing — and I could not save us. I could not. I only wanted to give a performance worthy of my father’s son. How was I to choose between the two people whose approval I craved the most?

Shackled in the stocks of duty. Harnessed to make mayhem. A betrayed generation of tin boys.

Silence fell. I was breathing harder than after the marathon Peiner once made me run. I pressed my hands to my chest, fearing that if I didn’t, it would leap straight onto the keys and desecrate my mother’s piano.

The delay with which I turned back to the table betrayed all that was already written on my damp face — though to read those signs required at least a modicum of attention, which could hardly be expected from that rabble, except perhaps from my mother, now properly sour again.

Friedrich was torn. Unsure whether it would be appropriate to start clapping, or whether such eagerness would be considered bad form. He glanced around, but no one seemed to care about the end of the performance. It was a miracle they even remembered that anyone had been playing. He only nodded, looking at me with such intensity it was as though he meant to burn a hole in me. The art might well have succeeded; I could almost feel the searing heat of that gaze.

I returned to my seat. Mother no longer looked at me. She was absorbed in a hushed conversation with Möller about the barbarity and cultural decay of the Slavic races. The long-nosed maid began bringing coffee in my mother’s beloved Meissen porcelain, and just behind her Anne-Marie tirelessly handed out the much-awaited Apfelstrudel to Friedrich’s delight.

He smeared his chin with vanilla sauce, and without a word I passed him my handkerchief. He took it with another brief nod; when it had done its duty, it vanished into the breast pocket of his jacket.

I remained frozen in place, awaiting the final hour — but it delayed unbearably. The distinguished gentlemen had no intention of raising their officerly backsides, comfortably steamed in plush-upholstered chairs.

The idyll was broken by Rienecke’s antics. He acted on my father like a pistol shot fired over a racehorse — as soon as Anne-Marie squealed and jumped, and Rienecke puffed his chest proudly, laughing like a donkey given fresh oats, Father rose sharply and pushed back his chair. Pinching the servants was out of place — that needed emphasizing.

The officerly fraternity hastily began to rise from their seats, wiping their mouths, draining their glasses. Stoll gathered up several bottles of wine, deciding that the entire battery of vodka already waiting for them in the cellar would by no means suffice to slake the thirst of such distinguished German commanders. Governor Stein spread his arms and proclaimed:

“Gentlemen, to the cellar! Our Elite will entertain us.”

“Albrecht…” — Friedrich tugged at my uniform, but I ignored him.

The drunken fools seized us, as though fearing their entertainment, their prey, might slip away. They dragged us downward, to the cellar, stumbling over their own feet. My father was even more jovial than before — he was finishing off a glass of cognac on the way down. His drinking speed amounted to roughly a glass per flight of stairs. With his other hand he manhandled Friedrich — the main attraction of the evening, the executioner, the master of ceremonies, the favored gladiator. I saw him being tossed and jostled by those intrusive hands, and somewhere deep inside I wanted to let them tear him apart, for I knew that in this one ceremony he would deny me the last shred of honor I still possessed.

Friedrich — will you let me remain a man in my father’s eyes? Or shall I allow myself that right? How is a man’s worth measured? By his capacity to cause pain?

The cellar swam in shades of carmine and bloody red, cast by the tinted lampshades so cleverly fitted over the few bulbs. The smoke from lit cigars quickly filled the air with a hazy, almost dreamlike atmosphere, as though the evening mist rolling over stubble fields had found a crack and slipped underground, lured by the human stench and the acrid scent of fear. I reeked of it. I knew. Krüger knew too — he held me high enough to feel how drenched my solemn garments were in sweat.

“Undress,” my father ordered, gripping Friedrich with one hand and, in the same fatherly way, pulling a carafe toward himself with the other.

“Undress?” I repeated blankly, though my hands were already reaching for the buttons of my uniform.

Krüger was only too glad to help. His fleshy fingers, with officerly dexterity, tore at the fabric, undoing four buttons at once. A moment later his paw yanked off my jacket. The rest of the officers abandoned their ballast of bottles and crystal glasses, stacking them almost one atop the other, balancing them on an elegant black table.

“But, Albrecht… he—”

“Every young German ought to box. Now, come on — off with those rags and into the ring! We’ve waited long enough for your performance.”

“Aye, else we’ll finish the stock before you’re done and have nothing left to toast the victor with. Move, boys, lively now! Off with that uniform!”

I averted my eyes; I couldn’t bear it anymore, holding Friedrich’s gaze unanswered. He was still looking at me, unwavering, loosening his tie. We were divesting ourselves — and being divested — of our outer layers in the half-light that in itself was undressing; it too much resembled the dimness of our shared room. Too strongly did it remind me that I knew the outline of his body, cloaked in shadow, that so many times I had longed to trace it with my hands if not my eyes. Not eyes — never again just eyes. I wanted to rid myself of sight, to savor the world beyond it.

Now I was to clench my fists, when all I wished was to open my hand — to make as much skin as possible touch his. I wanted to move it slowly, gently, with a reverence bordering on worship. But I had to clench it — to clench and meet his body with the crunch of bone on bone, the wet slap of skin on skin, lined with hatred.

Was there a way to strike with love?

They stripped us as boys are stripped — boys on their way to damnation.

I let the suspenders fall, standing only in my undershirt. My sweaty body was exposed to the warm, acrid, smoky breath from officerly throats. Friedrich stepped into the ring first, parting the ropes. A damp V marked his undershirt. We donned the gloves. Von Falkenhayn joined us in the ring as referee and final instigator. The rest hung upon the ropes that marked the ring’s boundaries, like vultures eager for the bloody scraps promised them by the Governor.

They all wanted blood.

What do you want, Friedrich?

I want you.

So do I. But not like this. Never like this.

There are no choices here.

We had no choice.

“And now — box!”

He hesitated. Of course he did. A despair so sharp seized me that I nearly felt my knees give way, folding meekly under the weight of a world in which men may dispose of us as they please. “They’ll buckle soon,” I thought miserably, “I’ll fall before either of us throws a blow.”

To my own cowardly horror I stood firm, unwilling to fall to my knees before him — something I would have done readily enough in another, more or less proper, circumstance. I stood, and my heart pounded like a war drum — thundering within, perversely pumping blood into a body unaccustomed to fighting, yet ready for it in fear and wronged friendship.

We circled each other in an almost peaceful dance for four beats of the drum. Then the bloodthirsty mob roared at us with a single fiery breath:

“What’s this supposed to be?”

“Fight!”

“You needn’t hesitate!” my father bellowed, offended. “Not here! Here I’ve no one to pity!”

There’s no one to pity in this house, least of all my son. This is the house of the Steins. Show that you’re ready to hurt him. Show that he bleeds like a man, show that he breaks like a man. Let him prove himself, let him show me I haven’t sired a pitiful imitation! Fight! Fight until there’s no blood left to spill! Blood unspilled rots in the veins! It rots! Rot with honor, not without! Strike! Fight! Pain purifies!

“Fight in earnest,” I whispered hoarsely.

“No.”

“You have to fight. Hit me already! Hit me!”

“I won’t do it, Albrecht!”

I lunged at him, fists flying, not knowing what I was doing.

Do you want me to beg you? Is that it? Do you want me to beg you to let me be a man? Is that what you want? Who do you think I am? Who do you see in me? Am I so pitiful I don’t deserve your strength, your talent? Am I unworthy to face you? Hit me!

He dodged, easily, like a child eluding a goat’s playful butt. The reproach written upon that noble, proud, and yet so earthly face was enough to make me choke on the burning red rising from my gut.

The air turned red-hot. The pain in my chest intensified, as though someone had poured glowing coals down my throat straight from the furnace. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted him to feel pain, to be drenched in his own blood, and to look straight at me while I proved that I too could wield the whip of terror, that I too could strike.

His jaw — long enough for five kisses, or so I once believed — seemed to beg for a caress. And I desired it, so much, so desperately.

“Hit me, you coward!” I screamed, choking on my own saliva. “Hit me!”

My sudden lunge, the full weight of my body thrown against his, caught him so off guard that I drove him closer to the corner, showering him mercilessly with blows that hurt me more than him — but I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t, not while Father bellowed like a bull, clutching at the ropes, craving with sick delight to see his favorite pupil lay his own son on the boards, and yet he would have been just as pleased to witness my pitiful attempts to hurt my dearest friend.

And I let them. I let them egg me on, and my whole body was sweating tears. Another moment, and I would have wept blood.

He struck me in the chest — not hard at all. Merely a rebuke, the way a lion swats a cub with its great paw. He could have hit harder, could have sent me face-first into the little table beyond the ring. I’d have deserved it. But he didn’t. There was more honor in him than in me. With every second, our friendship lost value — sinking fast into something that deserved only disgust. And condemnation.

Father began to laugh.

Five kisses proved to be worth one fist. Four knuckles wrapped in leather, four fingers clenched tight. I branded him with the mark of my own feeble strength, knocking his face sideways. He twisted from the force with which I kissed him by way of my fist — as passionately as a lover driven to the edge of despair.

The horde of ungrateful spectators burst into shrill squeals. The officers boiled over, whistling, spilling liquor from their glasses, which didn’t stop them from waving their arms like lunatics. The scalding lust of the moment spurred me on, and under the pressure of that omnipresent, vulgar fervor, I wanted to strike again, and again, and again — until his beautiful face was no longer recognizable, until that betrayed, pitying, frightened look was forever erased from his tear-swollen eyes.

I surrendered to them — so easily — to them all. I bent so easily under the propaganda of violence.

The gleam that lit up in Friedrich’s eyes as soon as his head snapped back into place nearly leveled me to the ground. He was furious. A shiver ran through me, from knees to nape, electric, pulsing under the skin with a sickly excitement like liquid mercury — because I knew it would all be over in a moment.

He tensed, turned, twisting his whole torso to give momentum. He loosed his arm — and it shot forward like an arrow released from a bowstring. The sweaty glove smashed straight into my face, dropping me to the boards with childlike ease. I could no longer hear the roar of delight that single, taut, lightning-fast movement unleashed. I heard only a ringing in my ears, and the sound of Chopin — the same Chopin I had played earlier — as if someone were performing it now in the drawing room. Perhaps my mother, whose son had failed the test of friendship, of manhood, of loyalty to his own self.

I hit the ground with such force that it nearly knocked the last breath from my lungs. Von Falkenhayn crouched beside me, holding my head that swayed from side to side. He was saying something — I couldn’t hear. Governor Stein and Krüger had already seized Friedrich, who, however, was not smiling. He just looked at me — and I was amazed that he still could, that he didn’t feel only contempt and disgust.

They started forcing vodka on him.

“Let them have their fun, let them tear him apart with their sticky hands — what do I care anymore” I thought, to punish myself.

Shame. I was so deeply ashamed.

I got to my feet on unsteady legs and climbed out of the ring, tearing off the gloves as I went, as if they were burning me. I threw on my jacket while running, scrambling up the stairs as fast as I could — just to escape that hell, the hell built in the cellar of my father’s house.

Chapter Text

Friedrich appeared beneath my door precisely at half past twelve in the night. He knocked twice — firmly — as though to make clear that, had he wished, he could have forced the door open and dragged me out by the collar into the corridor, where he might have thought it proper to give me a sound thrashing. He did none of these things — nothing that my idle reflections were then imagining.

The door was locked, yet he did not even deign to test it, out of mere courtesy if nothing else. He was a guest here, and ill-mannered brats did not bear the title of “guest” in the house of the Steins. He departed, and his footsteps were so measured that I could, with a degree of relief, conclude he had not taken after Paul Rienecke and drunk himself past the point of motor control.

When the fleeting spectre of his presence had dissolved, I rose, turned the key, and left the door open.

Simply. Open. Neither an invitation nor a tempting of fate — merely the pitiful desire of one incapable of declaring aloud what he wished for, let alone taking the first step towards his most secret longing. And I longed to draw him close, to beg his forgiveness. I feared his hatred.

I sat upon the bed the whole evening, listening to the cheerful cries from the ground floor. For Governor Stein, the revelry was only just beginning. Proofs of it climbed melodiously along the walls and spread over the floor in the form of stifled laughter, the ringing of glasses, and the occasional feminine giggle. I could surmise that the feminine entourage had arrived with a tactful delay — to burst into the residence with theatrical grace, amid clouds of more or less refined perfumes, and descend upon the brotherhood of officers like angels of mercy.

For what would officers be without women? Nothing. A bundle of lust, with burning sawdust spilling from their ears. A drunken troupe of harlequins rebelling against the loneliness of human cruelty, demanding companions to their own corruption. And companions they found readily enough — drawn by the gleam of decorations, weaving their various matrimonial fantasies. After all, to become an officer’s wife was to become a lady, donning that title as one might a silken garment. As Kruger would have said: “A whore won’t tear off another whore’s head, and a lady’s not equal to every lady.”

I wanted to weep, yet had I mourned myself, I would have been a miserable poseur. Had I mourned Friedrich, I would have been an even viler one — a contemptible hypocrite, a child who weeps over the worm he has torn apart, for it was he himself who ripped off its head. Because he wanted to. He wanted, and did it, and then sobs idiotically, afraid of his own desire to inflict pain.

Where was that idea of pleasure in domination hatched? Where did that craving to prevail through power swarm and breed? Why had I so ardently wished to harm him then? How far had the rot of friendship’s ideals already reached? For I had fought so valiantly against the popular currents, defended so carefully my well-polished ideals of man, faithful to what mattered most. And violence had never been what mattered most. It was not even important. It ought not to exist in this world. But for it not to exist, there would have to be no suffering, no cruelty, no envy.

And that was the essence of my downfall.

I had not matured to my own pain. I did not bear it with grace.

Somewhere around two in the morning I fell into a feverish sleep, but it did not last long. I awoke to the sensation of another body finding rest beside my own — under the same coverlet. The mattress yielded pleasantly, welcoming with eagerness the weight so unexpectedly bestowed upon it, and the springs sighed with relief. So it was meant to be. So it should be.

I opened my eyes; my eyelids felt light, as though freed from the weight of a prophecy fulfilled.

“I couldn’t sleep,” whispered Friedrich, pressing his face into my pillow with a gesture so natural it was as though he had done so all his life. It suited him far better than the thin pillow in our shared quarters, though that one had smelled of him — which made it infinitely dearer.

As much as I wished to draw the cover over us both and hold that moment still in time, I could not muster more than a narrowing of the eyes, lest he read in them how much they longed to betray. Nor had I strength for any tender greeting, nor inner force to behave as I ought. Had I possessed it, I might have taken him in my arms, begged forgiveness, or cast him from the room. Yet I was incapable of any of these, and so I merely lay there, passive, like a wooden beam on its way to the sawmill.

“I could,” I muttered sourly, in perfect imitation of a mother’s tone.

“I see.” His voice cooled by several degrees. “Shall I go, then?”

“No. Don’t go. Stay.”

He relaxed slightly beside me, his gaze never leaving mine. He knew that if he stared long enough with those damnably blue eyes of his, I would yield — as always, as I must, as I had no choice. Feeling him enforce that quiet subjugation, I clenched my lips, suppressing some uncontrollable surge of emotion that came in burning waves.

“Are you angry with me?”

“No.” It came out pathetically plaintive, and I felt ashamed, for another wave rose, stronger and stronger, until my very bones seemed to soften under it.

Was I angry? He should have asked so many other things — should have ignored my childish sulking, which now shamed me, for it had grown into something darker, something with which one could no longer calmly say, “I am your friend”. From all the effort I poured into holding my tongue, restraining the venom, and keeping myself together, I began to tremble — with emotion.

“You’re shaking.”

“I’m afraid,” I forced out, compelling sound through my throat.

“Of what?”

“Of myself. Of what is to come.”

“And what is to come?”

From below came a shrill female laugh, followed by a volley of merriment from both male and female throats. The tableware played a merry staccato, accompanying the lustful rabble of fools.

I drew a long breath and shook my head. Words refused to leave my lips — they would not, would not let me be their master that night. They eluded me, and he waited, looking at me with such patience, though wounded. I remained silent, if only to preserve a moment longer that voiceless instant — the two of us, beneath a cover warmed by my body, with the world that had so tossed us both now lying sweetly remote.

“Change,” I said at last. “Friedrich, everything is changing. I… We can shove all our ideals up our arses — don’t you see? That’s all they’re worth, when the doctrine of our own gain rises on the horizon, stoked by the values drilled into us in terrifying abundance. I wanted to hurt you, do you realise that? Because my father was there — Kruger, and Stoll, and even Von Falkenhayn. They watched, and I… I felt them wanting to turn me inside out, and it amused them. They turned me soft-side out to stick pins into me.” I gasped for air, for Friedrich had moved closer, our legs entangling for a second in a wondrous, ancient design. “You were the pike upon which they impaled us both, and I thrust you onto it myself — because I did not wish to hang there alone.”

“You didn’t want them to mock you. To sneer. In those few occasions when I was permitted to observe the Governor at close quarters, he never struck me as a man of tender disposition. He is a being of granite — roughly hewn — and he takes pleasure in instincts you do not share.”

And yet he still cherished of me that romantically distorted notion. The sting of resentment returned with sudden violence, so fierce I longed to push him from the bed and order him from the room.

“I do share them. Did you not see? I was like an animal — sweating, enraged, savage. I wanted you to suffer. That cannot be forgiven.”

“You were in pain. Pain and cruelty are not the same,” he persisted, obstinate as ever — obstinate and beautiful fool that he was — and I only wished to nod, to believe him, to press my whole body into that hollow between his strong shoulder and pale neck, and there remain.

And vanish.

“Do you remember how you finished off Gehrig? I followed you into the lavatory afterwards, for I felt betrayed. I felt that, placed in such a situation, you would not hesitate to sacrifice the trust between us to the god of pain. But I was mistaken. It was I who became the aggressor.”

A goose-feather protruded from my pillow; I busied my dangerously wandering fingers with it, coaxing the feather back into its downy prison.

“He does not see a son in me,” I said carelessly, and in so doing betrayed where I hurt the most — and that confession drew forth another, as delicate:

“And you do not see a man in me.”

Friedrich caught my hand, pressing it so tightly I almost cried out, startled by his sudden vehemence.

“I do see! God damn it, I see! Were it possible, I would lend you my eyes for a few moments, and you would understand what I see in you. You are blind, Albrecht Stein. Blind — and at times so damnably foolish, though I have never known a quicker mind than yours.” He ran his thumb across the back of my hand, and I wanted to laugh, and weep, and dissolve into the air itself. “If I were to measure your worth as a man by the grace with which you take my blows — by how well my fist fits your jaw, and how prettily I might paint the landscape of the field of suffering with the blood I draw from your split lip — then I would not care to know such an idea of manhood. Why do you do this to yourself? Tell me, that I may know where to begin mending it.”

“You cannot mend it. It is not something anyone can mend.”

“Want to wager? A hundred marks that you are wrong. I have not so much, but I know I shall not lose. You would run into debt repaying me the grants earned on your blind ignorance.”

“I cannot bear my manhood with dignity. I cannot. My father—”

“With all respect, your father is a vulgar brute and a cruel one. I myself have heard him mock his own son — heard him urge me to knock out your teeth. Would you have done the same?”

“No.”

“No. Because it is swinish, and sheer bastardy on his part. Albrecht, listen to me. Only listen — and cease turning his words and deeds about inside yourself, for they are knives you twist within your own flesh. That head of yours, so marvellous and splendid, can be a terrible place, for he makes you paper its walls with his foul wallpaper. I am no fool, though I know you sometimes take me for one.”

“That’s not true!” I tore my damp hand from his grasp, stung to the quick. “Friedrich, I—I admire you so deeply! You are my friend, my dearest friend. Do you believe me? For I no longer believe myself. I wanted you to suffer — out of envy, out of fear. I am pathetic, and you are the only one among this rock of rottenness who still possesses a shred of honour.”

We lay thus for a while in silence. I trembled all over, sheathed in a clammy film of dread, for we trod on treacherous ground — bogs that lay between the shore of sincerity and the shore of utter nakedness — and toward that nakedness we pressed on, both of us, though it cost us dearly.

Moonlight streamed through the windows, limning with unearthly glow the halo of Friedrich’s fair hair. I wanted to kiss that radiance from his locks. Within me arose a conviction sincere and profound that its sweetness would surpass ambrosia.

“I have hurt you, too,” he confessed disarmingly, his fingers straying somewhere along the border of the pillow. My eyes fled to the branching of those fingers, knowing how perfectly they would fit with mine — interlocking as though they were one, divided only for a brief moment, for these seventeen years of separation between one life and the next.

“You wished to chastise me, to put an end to this farce — I know.”

“I did not wish it. I am sorry. Had I harmed you…”

With a delicate motion he touched my face, drawing aside the fringe from the temple that had swollen and darkened where I had struck the floor in my fall.

I did not move. I did not breathe. I held my breath for several exquisitely painful seconds — and he knew. He knew, and smiled sadly, dreadfully sadly, bending to kiss my brow. He left the imprint of that sad smile upon my moist skin, nor did he withdraw even when a shudder ran through me from head to foot.

“Do not apologise. You have nothing to apologise for,” I began whispering feverishly, my hands clutching at his night-shirt with a desperation bordering on madness. They fastened upon the cloth, for they lacked courage enough to clutch possessively at the skin beneath. “It is I who beg your pardon, Friedrich. I invited you into my own house and then vented upon you all my defects of character. It was unworthy of me. I made a fool of myself, flinging about like a spoiled child, because you were the wedge between my father and his vision of me as a strong, worthy son. Forgive me.” I enclosed his strong jaw between both my hands, each brimming with reverence. “Forgive me, I beg you.”

“I already have. I shall always forgive you, Albrecht. Even were you to commit some terrible folly, even should you wound me grievously — but please, do not commit terrible follies and do not wound me grievously, for then you would suffer as well, if there is in you what I see.”

“And what do you see?”

“Something beautiful.”

“I see it in you, too. I’m sorry. So very sorry.”

My fingers wandered over the place where I had struck him, seeking the bruise, frantically, as though possessed. The boundaries blurred for a moment; the vision consumed me wholly, mastered me, intoxicated me utterly.

I was a lost man.

I was damned.

And it felt so good.

I turned his face sharply, so that the left side lay bare before me in all its grace. I pushed him just enough that the pillow would not compete with me for the right to touch his skin, and pressed my lips to the very spot I had once so unworthily and brutally profaned.

And he let me. There was no resistance in him.

My body received that permission as a word of absolution. I longed to see whether indeed five kisses could fit there, whether I had been right in all my carefully guarded fantasies.

“What are you doing?” he asked gently, lest he startle me. He was smiling.

“I must find something out.”

“You must?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I simply must — it is sometimes that way.”

“I know. I understand. Then find it out.”

I leaned to him again, beginning with his chin, delighting in the scent of his skin. He ought already to be shaving. I moved upward, my lips gliding along the edge of his jaw. I meant to conduct my study with all diligence, yet as I gathered momentum I forgot entirely what it was I had meant to test, until I reached his ear, where I laid the final seal of emotion and drew back just enough to see what expression he wore.

“Well?” he asked, with a foolish grin — yet I knew his true feelings.

He was flushed, lying thus upon my pillow, beneath the weight of my devotion. Beautiful. My Friedrich. My friend. My deepest, most hidden desire.

“Nothing,” I whispered. Never before had that word concealed so much.

“You are holding your breath again.”

“Perhaps I no longer know how to breathe.”

“Don’t be absurd — must I give you mouth to mouth?”

“That won’t be necessary. You must have a dreadful breath after that Königsberg herring.”

I collapsed back upon the bed, shaking with blissful laughter at the sight of his mortally offended face. We lay side by side, our hearts pounding together in the same rhythm. I had to summon all my strength not to let my hand slip across that small strip of mattress dividing us, not to rest it upon his heart. I wanted those steady beats forever inscribed in my understanding of the rhythm itself.

We remained thus like brothers, in some distant past when incest was not yet a sin — suspended between the loneliness of life and of death, in a bubble of new discovery foretelling another farewell. Tears filled my eyes. They were neither joyous nor despairing; if one could feel both at once, I did — so fully that no part of me remained unshaken.

“You’re a cruel one,” he concluded, folding his hands beneath his head.

I let my gaze rest upon the line of his jaw. Since I had learned what it was to feel it beneath my lips, nothing could ever be the same. The world had been rewritten, and each page of this new scripture rejoiced in such wondrous knowledge. The greatest mystery of the world unfolded before me in the subtle curve of his neck.

“You’re always too far ahead.”

“Rubbish.”

“Are you sure?” I rose enough to sit up in bed. The coverlet slid from us both, and the warm air of our communion was replaced by the bracing chill of the room.

“Yes.”

“In that case, prove to me you can dance. Look under the bed. I’ve something worth your while to show you.”

Chapter Text

“Look under the bed, yes?” Friedrich threw back the quilt, leaning past the edge of the mattress, his head hanging down. “Am I meant to be looking for something in particular?”

“We shall see what you find.” I crossed my legs, watching patiently as Friedrich slid off the bed to the floor and lay flat on his stomach, thrusting his arm deep beneath the bed in search of that artifact, shrouded in so much mystery.

Under different circumstances I would never have allowed him to leave from beneath my covers. Never again. I would have kept him with me, and Father might have beaten upon the door, Mother might have wept and wailed, and even Karl Klein himself might have rattled up in his wretched school-heap and cursed me to the devil — and I would not have cared a whit. Not now, when the very idea of Friedrich’s presence was so richly underlined by the knowledge he had imparted the moment he silently consented to my affections.

He wished to be near me, and he wished me to be gentle with him, and the stores of tenderness I had hoarded for him — set aside for later — swelled sweetly within me. In my arrogant appraisal of my own love, I was ready to declare that the tower of my feeling had far surpassed the Tower of Babel in height and now reached into the heavens themselves, up whose steps I could climb the instant Friedrich whispered, “come to me.”

I propped myself on my elbow, watching him as some indolent young master might gaze from his chamber window over fertile fields stretching to the horizon — a perverse possessiveness overtook me utterly, though I recognized it, and even that recognition filled me with a particular satisfaction. Never before had I wanted anything — anyone — so fiercely. New expanses of desire unfurled like carpets, lining the fields of my soul with small white blossoms of longing.

I drank in the bliss of knowing that nothing would ever be the same, even if we never spoke a word about what had transpired here. There was no need — not yet. As two trembling, youthful male hearts, we would not have known how to cradle such feeling properly. We would only have flailed like foolish blind men, leading one another toward some inevitable tragedy.

And yet we prolonged this prelude, as the overture to something unavoidable. Something awaited.

I myself was not certain what had happened between us, nor how it might be classified or named in any unequivocal manner — I could not do it, and every attempt ended in a conclusion too terrifying, too vast to fit within the confines of our world. But my bedroom was spacious enough. And my bed. And my heart, where I could hide every truth about myself, knowing they would be at least a little safer there, not destroyed merely for existing but rather tended and cultivated. As the gardener of my own heart, I was inclined to plant only such flowers as reminded me of him.

“Is that Falco’s collar?” He rose, holding in his hand the old, worn leather band with its little silver tag on which my dog’s name had been engraved. “You wrote of him often, in your essays.”

My gaze fastened upon the memento, which appeared so fragile, so protected, resting in his hands. He was as gentle as I had always supposed him to be.

“It’s unfair how much you know about me,” I murmured.

“In what sense?”

“You’ve had a cheat-sheet. You’ve read so many of my literary ramblings that now you know so much I scarcely know from which side you’ll approach me, already knowing the shape of the meanders of my existence. It’s a little like inviting someone to a concert, hoping they’ll be surprised, only to find he has already pried into the score, read every note, and now sits with his feet up, knowing exactly what sound will come next.”

“Yes, precisely — here I sit with my feet up, approaching you as one approaches a sleeping bull, and all of it in the finest crafty style.” He rolled his eyes playfully, in no way offended.

In his eyes I saw instead a flicker of pride, as though my slight, nervous bristling was a confession that he had touched some part of me he ought to deem a trophy — the golden fleece of this friendship. His vanity was pleasantly stroked. Seeing my expression, he added:

“You do realize there’s no cheat-sheet for you? Have you ever tried catching newts?”

“Of course not.”

“Because that’s a pastime for stable-boys and beggars.” He slapped my calf playfully, and I answered by smacking his forehead with my open palm — he leaned so close it would have been a crime not to touch him, especially as he goaded me so tirelessly into responding to his verbal-musical provocations. “They dart quickly, and they’re devilish hard to catch. They wriggle like savages — might even bite your finger if you press them wrong.”

“Then why did you catch them at all?”

“Because they were beautiful, because I wanted to see them up close.” He shrugged, glanced down at his own hands, then up at me. And at my mouth. He caught himself doing it without shame. He merely raised his eyes again, and the blood rushed to my head and I flushed miserably. “Trying to catch you is like trying to catch one of those damned quick newts.”

What an exasperating man he was — this dear simpleton of mine. He wound me around his finger and played with me without mercy.

“And that is meant to be a compliment? You compare me to a cold-blooded, slimy amphibian.”

“I could spend my whole life learning you, and every morning you would be someone new,” he said lightly, as though it were the simplest truth in the world, as though the idea of discovering who I was every morning came as naturally to him as breathing. “You change. Like a forest that, having endured winter, is never quite the same come spring. And you are not an amphibian, though at times you are slippery.”

“You’re becoming a poet, my dear friend. Your comparisons grow ever more elaborate under that fair blond mop.” I muttered with mock resentment, jabbing him in the shoulder with my foot — he was perfectly within reach, and had assumed an ideal position for kicking.

“One becomes like those with whom one keeps company. I only hope I won’t grow pompous and demanding.”

“Hush and keep searching.” I threaded my fingers through his hair and nudged him downward, trying to push him farther beneath the bed, but he only braced himself, that thick neck of his resisting, and butted me with his forehead like an unruly little goat.

“I once had a pet at home. A rabbit. Small thing, black and white,” he said, his voice muffled as he disappeared once more beneath the bed. “My uncle brought it to Mother so she could make pâté. He lives in the countryside. Sometimes he brings eggs, sausages — luxuries. Well, he brought the rabbit. My brother and I had such fun with it. Hans was still quite small. He wanted to carry it everywhere. And Mother only waited for Father to return. She couldn’t bring herself to do what had to be done. She took the rabbit to the bathroom, and Hans stood by the door begging her to give it back. She came out with it, in tears. When Father returned, he took it and that was that.” He fell silent for a moment, and I laid my hand upon his head — the unruly hair, freed by sleep, tempted me irresistibly. “Then we had pâté. Neither Hans nor I ate any. Father was furious. Before that we had no trouble with it. Pâté was only pâté.”

“And it became the rabbit,” I sighed, absentmindedly curling a lock of his hair around my finger. “A second metamorphosis. I know what you mean.” I fell back on the bed, my hand sliding limply down until it brushed his back as he continued rummaging beneath for his surprise.

He knew perfectly well what he sought; he was merely playing, as always. For as soon as he spotted the angular shape, he declared triumphantly:

“Got it.” He dragged out the brown suitcase, medium-sized, and brushed the dust from it.

It was worn and battered, but what lay within worked perfectly. He unlatched the clasps, revealing the interior of a portable gramophone.

“I don’t know if we ought to dance,” I whispered, seized by a fear I could not name.

Only moments before I had been ready to tear the room apart, the walls bursting from the pressure of my swelling happiness. I thought of little Hans and his rabbit. Of Falco beneath the car wheels. Of the small grave I had not dug myself. Of Friedrich. Of me. I thought of us. Always of us. Somewhere along the way I had lost my blissful independence, replacing it with trembling at the thought of our separation, at the thought of any situation in which I could not keep him by me until the storm passed.

He, however, harbored none of my stricken vision of the future. He stared at me, rummaging blindly with one hand for the tin of spare gramophone needles.

“Why not?”

“Our men are dying at the front,” I whispered — apparently with disarming sincerity, for something shifted in his face. “We do not see them, but it is happening. All the time.” The scared words escaped me through a tightened throat, in answer to the blast and the red and the metallic taste in my mouth. In answer to the memory. “The same thing that happened to Gladen happens to them.”

Blast and red. And the hot fragments upon the face. And the cold pit. And the silent — though not voiceless — wreaths frozen stiff.

Friedrich found the tin, opened it, checking how many needles remained, then leaned his arms upon the bed, his face close to mine. He did not look at me — only turned the tin over and over — a metal aspirin box, lined by me with felt — now rattling with the evidence of my insubordination.

“If I were at the front, I’d prefer that people who can still rejoice should do so,” he said at last, thoughtful. “And if I died, I’d rather they drank vodka and danced on my grave than wept.”

“Don’t even say such things.”

“Would you cry for me?” The smile on his young face melted me where I lay.

What a foolish question. What a cruel one.

How could he speak so lightly, not knowing each word opened another latch in the machinery of terror in my mind? Did he not know how delicate we were? How frail? Even he, with a body of marble and a spirit of steel — though to me more precious than gold — would not withstand the force with which a grenade rends flesh.

One bullet would suffice.

One good aim. Or ill luck. A hole no bigger than a fingertip.

“I would cry,” I forced out, nausea rising in my throat. “I would cry, Friedrich, so I beg you, don’t say such things.”

“I would for you as well, even though German boys do not cry.”

“You’re a fool, you know that?” I asked softly, waging a losing battle with the bitterness welling in my throat.

Friedrich, I am so frightened. Our bodies belong to someone else, and our hearts — which may be muscles — interest no one. They care only for our legs and arms, which may serve their purposes, greater and more important than us. But to me nothing is more important than learning what it means to live. With you. Beside you. Always beside you. I am naïve. I am a fool. How am I to keep you safe? How am I to keep you with me?

German boys do not cry.

German boys do not love.

German boys have the privilege of dying.

“Where are your records?”

“Hidden behind the wardrobe.”

“Clever lad.”

I rose and went to the wardrobe where I had so carefully hidden my illicit musical perversions. “Degenerate” music, as my esteemed father claimed. I had acquired several shellac discs myself during summer stays in Hamburg. My Uncle’s acquaintances often brought him intriguing finds, and he, as a zealous connoisseur and melomaniac — despite my aunt’s stern rebukes — could never resist expanding his degenerate musical passion. To dissuade him was nearly impossible, and in return for my enthusiasm I was gifted several discs and a portable gramophone, which Uncle bestowed upon me “in case I wished to take some young lady upon a picnic and educate her not only in the arts of social refinement.”

I doubted he expected the “young lady” of his imagining to have such broad shoulders, a strong jaw, and to answer to the melodious name of Friedrich Weimer.

A few older, damaged discs I had bought for next to nothing from an old fellow selling oddities near the U-Bahn tracks on Invalidenstraße. Johan had been with me — he fetched me from my piano lessons but breathed not a word of it to Father. Most of the records weren’t labeled at all, and nearly every one was scratched as though someone had sledded down the street upon them. But they were dear to me — each of them. My private trophies of youthful rebellion.

“What have you there? Let me see.” Friedrich appeared at once to help me, relieving me of the shellac discs. “Where on earth did you get so many?”

“Mostly from my Uncle — the one in Hamburg.”

“The Governor knows?”

“No — and he will not.”

“He won’t hear us?”

“He’s drunk beyond wits. And downstairs the revelry goes on. He’ll know nothing of it. I often play records when I’m home and that rabble comes over. Your choice — we’ll listen to whatever you want.”

Friedrich’s face brightened disarmingly, and I stood over him with folded arms, watching him draw the discs from their paper sleeves with such care it was touching.

“This one.” He waved a disc still in its sleeve. “May I?”

“Of course. Just change the needle — I didn’t last time.”

I wound the crank, he changed the needle, and set the shellac disc upon the turntable, lowering the arm gently. The first seconds were all scratches and crackles; only after that muted overture did the tinny music begin to seep out from the unassuming box between us.

“In the Mood, the Glenn Miller Orchestra,” he read, mangling the English letters a little. “What a piece of degeneracy.”

“Delicious degeneracy.”

“Pity your dear father cannot hear you — he’d be overjoyed.”

I seized his hands, pulling him up from the floor. To my absolute astonishment, Friedrich drew me closer and began to lead us both in a sort of grotesque imitation of a dance — though to call it a dance was generous.

“What are you doing?” I laughed, a little shyly. “Surely you don’t imagine the Americans do it like this?”

“No. I do it like this.”

“I’m terribly sorry, but this can hardly be called dancing.”

“What do you mean? We’re dancing.” Again two steps, then a sway to the left and then to the right. “Something displeases you.”

“Not everything is marvelous — I simply happen to be right. If you danced like this with a girl, she’d sock you straight in the jaw.” I burst into laughter, which he muffled with his shoulder, pushing me inward with possessive, tender annoyance. “She’d sock you good, thinking you were mocking her.”

“But you aren’t some girl — and you like when I mock you.”

“But I can always sock you just the same.”

“That we already know. I ought to impose some penalties upon you and demand compensation for the damages sustained.” He quickened his steps, gaining confidence.

Our movements were no longer so stiff. We moved together, fitting our bodies into a closed circuit through which energy flowed, divided only between the two of us and none for the rest of the world. A carefree joy manifested itself in even more vigorous, absurd sways and steps across the creaking floorboards.

How wondrous it was to move about a shared axis, in a dance that had nothing to do with hurting one another.

This is good, I thought fleetingly. Let it be always so. I need nothing else.

“You’ve already had your compensation,” I muttered, squeezing his hand.

The disc crackled over some scratch, but it did not break our rhythm. “Rhythm” was a charitable word for our cavorting, but with every step, joined together, we gained something like gradual improvement.

“A single payment does not count.”

“Then in what form do you want repayment?”

“In installments.”

“Filth-monger.”

“Now see here—” He spun me mischievously, causing me to lose my balance, but caught me at once, setting me upright again. “You started it. I never told you to think filthy thoughts.”

“And now you’ll claim I molested you, you insufferable ass.”

“Don’t be cross. Want a kiss to make peace?” He raised his brows in a meaning far too obvious, exceedingly pleased with himself at the sight of the treacherous blush climbing my neck.

“No. Go stuff yourself. You can put your kiss— wherever you like. And stop stepping on my toes.”

“My apologies.”

The music slowed, then faded entirely, dissolving in the air like stretched rubber. The spring had unwound.

“We must wind it again,” I said, catching my breath.

“Let us choose something else.”

“My turn to choose.”

“By all means, sir, choose whatever you desire.”

I chose It Don’t Mean a Thing by Duke Ellington, succeeding in both setting the record and glaring at that beloved fool of mine. Friedrich rolled up his sleeves, gazing down at me with such intensity that I grew genuinely uneasy as to what he was plotting. But he banished my uncertainty at once — he yanked me upright and adopted an entirely new tactic — this time following the rhythm and melody rather than some fantasy dancing-logic of his own invention.

A rare opportunity arose to once again delight in his warmth. I cherished it more now than ever, for so little separated us from perpetual cold. How easily human bodies stiffened and died. How suddenly. How swiftly. And rather than succumb to such despairing thoughts, I moved even closer to his heat, holding him so that the full length of our forearms met in a tingling line.

We were both perspiring, covered by a thin layer of moisture pressed naturally between our bodies, and the essence of this naturalness would never have passed my lips. As a boy on the edge of life, I brushed against something beyond my courage’s boundary. I was not so bold as to seek the thrill that pulsed perfectly through the heat and damp between us. I did not seek it — but it was there, unavoidable. Waiting. Like a promise.

Like a whisper preserved for a better tomorrow. For some more forgiving time.

The door flew open with a fury I attributed to only one person in the entire house. The music continued, the needle leaping cheerfully over the scratches careening across the grooves, heedless of the intruder who burst into our intimate world and now hovered at the threshold.

“What is going on here?”

Friedrich froze. We froze both. I with my back to the door. He facing it, holding me fast without flinching. It was I who recoiled as though burned, pressing my elbow to my lips, bowing my head, defeated, shamed, terrified. He did not attempt to keep me near — he knew it would be improper. He had no right to hold me, and I had no right to remain. What we shared could not endure exposure to mockery and condemnation, now inevitable.

The verdict could no longer be postponed.

He crouched quickly to lift the needle.

Forgive me, Friedrich. I am so terribly sorry.

Dead silence followed. Dead and absolute.

“Out.” My father’s voice was like a vise tightening upon us both.

I gathered enough courage to lift my frantic, helpless eyes to his fatherly face — to see what expression he wore. What cut of fury he had chosen for this occasion. What shape of rage suited him tonight.

The Governor stood in the doorway, his hand clenched upon the handle as though he meant to wrench it free or at least bend it. A vein swelled dangerously on his brow, another throbbed upon his neck. His glassy, drunken eyes were fixed not upon that Pandora’s box — that devilish instrument of anti-cultural rot corrupting German youth — but upon me. He looked at me. He spoke to my friend, but he looked at me.

In addition to the clear fury, there was something else — wild eyes, flared nostrils, the furrows etched in his face as though molded from wax — all marked by a terrified disgust.

“Out,” he repeated, just as hard.

But Friedrich did not move. He only shot quick glances toward me, but I could not return them. One look — one — would have betrayed everything. My refusal to look at him wrung from me a pitiful shiver of frozen terror.

“Father, it was my fault, I—”

“I said out — you are to leave this room. Do not abuse my hospitality!” He roared, crossing the threshold. He still wore his uniform and metal-soled boots. “Get out.”

Again that look. And I knew what would come next — I felt it in Father’s voice.

“Friedrich, go, please… go… Please, leave… Return to your room.”

He hurried from the room, but did not close the door. I heard no steps, nothing fading down the corridor. Nothing sounding. He stood outside, just beyond the wall of this miserable scene unfolding in my bedroom — my small, violated, defiled world. He stood there, listening helplessly.

Why could he not obey me just once? Always the same stubbornness.

Father crossed the room in two strides and struck me across the face — backhanded — his signet ring carving a burning welt into my cheek. It did not hurt as much as the shame that blazed in my gut. It did not hurt so much. It hardly hurt at all.

Only then did the furious footsteps sound in the corridor, retreating rapidly, as though fleeing a reality too unbearable in its suffocating silence.

“All of this — every bit of it —” The Governor swept a hand over my entire collection with the same hand that moments ago had disciplined me. “—is to be in my study tomorrow. I shall personally verify that you have obeyed my order. Then we shall have a talk.” He left, without closing the door.

I slumped against the bed, shedding tears of shame.

Chapter Text

“Stand a little closer together. Albrecht, the fringe, Friedrich a bit more to the side, chin up. That’s better. For heaven’s sake, don’t slouch, I beg you. Good. That will do. What do you think, Elfrieda?”

Elfrieda, who never thought very much about anything, shaken to the core by my Mother’s sudden question, nearly let her beloved Kodak Retina slip from her restless little hands. Her eyes were restless as well — though whenever they did happen to focus on something, it was on Friedrich, standing straight as if he had swallowed the handle of a hoe, right beside me on the steps before the residence.

“It’s excellent, Frau Stein. Excellent. Should I take the picture now?”

Mother grimaced a little, weighed all pros and cons for a moment, calculated the risk, until she shuddered and then, with determination, crossed the entire gravel drive and marched briskly onto the lawn.

“I’ll go fetch Wernz, don’t you boys move!” — like an Amazon she plunged into the wilderness of tangled rose bushes and disappeared behind the sloppily trimmed hedge, behind which, as Wernz reported, a pleasant young couple had enjoyed an after-supper siesta last night.

The report had been submitted in the neat form of “I hereby report, though it disgusts me…”, and the investigation launched by my Mother had lasted since the morning hours — for Wernz, who was a little blind, had noticed only the girl’s crooked little cap, and not her blissful face. Blissful, because she had been lying in the hedge with none other than Paul Rienecke, whose alcohol intake had evidently set him in a sociable mood, with particular emphasis on the opposite sex. Though, judging by his lust — of which legends already circulated in the Stein residence — he would not have scorned even a straw mannequin.

One could say that the nature of his misdeeds now equalled those of the infamous Hohmann, who at present was supposedly behaving himself somewhere on the Eastern Front. Yet no one had received a postcard from Moscow from him, which boded ill both for Hohmann and for the entire Eastern Front operation.

“That old, stupid horse will never set foot in my house again!” — ranted Frau Stein during breakfast, tormenting the ear of her husband, already half-deaf to her complaints — “I will not tolerate my servants being led down the road to debasement! If he wishes, let him go all the way to that damned house! Yes! But he is not to roll around in a hedge with my servants, that is outrageous, Heinrich! Do something! Knock some sense into him! And you young ladies… If I find out which one of you was fornicating with that hypocrite, she will be thrown out on her ear! I will not feed brats under my roof!”

Thank God the quarrel took place in a spot entirely separate from where Friedrich and I ate breakfast. Mother insisted we eat together, but neither I had any wish to see Father, nor he to see me, so I secretly asked Anne-Marie to set the table in the orangery. She finished very quickly, and my friend and I ate, seated in old, plush-covered wicker armchairs, and our breakfast was served on a likewise wicker, low tea-table with a glass top, covered with a white napkin. Dear Anne-Marie even managed to add a few colourful sprigs of wild rose, the last remnants saved upon a bush growing near the gate.

The morning itself was very quiet for both of us. Friedrich silently cracked open his soft-boiled eggs, served in porcelain stands, and I did not raise my eyes to him, as though spreading butter and plum jam onto freshly baked, golden Brötchen absorbed me entirely. Friedrich did not question the great importance I attached to forming a perfectly even layer upon my piece of bread, and I, for my part, refrained from rebuking his dreadful habit of taking cheese with his fingers, a manner he had acquired God knows where, but which irritated me deeply. Silence suited us both after such a noisy night.

“The panes are leaking,” he said only toward the end of the meal, touching the spot where the putty had crumbled between the glass panels and water seeped through, leaving streaks and moss-like patterns encouraged by the omnipresent damp.

“The orangery is falling apart,” I concluded quietly, as a draft stirred the dry leaves and swept them to our feet. “We are witnessing its slow dying.” At the sound of my words, he stopped picking at the crevice with his fingernail, as if he had decided against hastening that slow dying, unwilling to add his own brick to some work of destruction. At least not that one.

We now stood in an awkward but stiff, two-man formation on the steps, while Elfrieda fidgeted beneath them, equally awkward, full of boredom. Awkward we all were, for Mother had not returned with Wernz for quite some time, possibly having been lost in the garden’s thicket, which so often rebelled against its owners and grew “sturdily ungovernable” as my esteemed father phrased it.

Sweet Elfrieda had already seen everything worth seeing in Friedrich, and since he had not grown a second pair of eyes on his forehead, nor an additional ear, nor God knows what else, her fleeting attention quickly turned to digging a hole in the drive with her black little shoe. Motionless, inaccessible, and utterly indifferent to her, Friedrich lost the competition for her attention to pebbles and clods of soil softened by the night’s rain.

Mother had conceived, in a flash of splendid maternal fancy, the idea of commemorating this whole magnificent two-day circus with a group photograph. It comprised only myself and Friedrich — together we formed that little community, united by the same black uniform in which we were to return to school. Father had long since left. He drove off right after breakfast in his official car, unusually swift and unusually tight-lipped.

“The Governor… he…” Friedrich began quietly, turning toward me. He seemed not to care at all about Mother’s stern order not to dare even to twitch. He twitched, and even dared to shift. “What did he say to you?”

It sounded innocent. A small question, perfectly appropriate after what had happened last night and perfectly expected after the heavy silence of the morning. But I knew what he was thinking, what was hatching in his head. What monstrous, exaggerated visions of the horrors my Father inflicted on me under his own roof. He asked “What did he say to you?”, but he thought, “How much poison did he manage to inject into your blood this time?”

“He didn’t say much. I gave him all the records, the gramophone too. He wasn’t very talkative, though he had so neatly promised me some sort of disciplinary lecture. He even signed under that declaration.” My lips twitched in a profanation of a smile.

He signed it. With his hand on my face.

“Did he say anything at all?”

“Nothing worth repeating.”

“I understand. So you keep silent as the grave.”

“As the grave.”

“As you wish.” He dropped the subject, focusing on examining the buckle of his belt, though nonetheless he did not deny himself one last jab, that tone suggesting he was beginning to have quite enough of me.

His irritation worked on me like a spark applied to a fuse. At once I turned a little further toward him, then looked straight ahead again, wavering whether to start a shitstorm or to restrain myself like a gentleman — but I could not bear it and let spill the bile that had been gathering under my Adam’s apple since the previous day:

“I don’t suppose I must confess my own absolution to you? Does it interest you so very much?”

“Albrecht, I beg you. You know perfectly well I am not prying out of petty, nasty curiosity. If you think I take pleasure in reopening your scabs or rejoice greatly at the thought of fresh dramas directed by your father, then you’re mistaken.” He ran his fingers through his hair, ruining the intricate arrangement created by Frau Stein herself, armed with her tortoiseshell comb and little pot of pomade. “Besides — your father stages rather plays from a burned-down theatre, and those are not to my taste.”

I laughed silently, glancing about to see if Mother was returning with Wernz, trampling the lawn, but we were still alone. Alone except for Elfrieda, pretending that she had cut off her ears or that she did not hear anything at all. She stood politely, turned sideways to us, rocking on her small heels, while her ears twitched so much dust almost flew off them.

“And since when are you so worldly and cultivated?” I snapped.

“I simply want to know.”

“What for? You’ll cry and everything will be fine? Or perhaps you’ll kiss me so it heals faster? Stop playing the good Samaritan, I’m honestly sick of it.”

“Then stop making yourself such a victim,” he hissed, grimacing foully. “My father struck me plenty of times as well, but I never sulked at the whole world because of it.”

“Shall I strike you too?”

“Try it. Maybe when I hit you back the planks in your head will realign.”

I fell silent, another venomous remark on my tongue; I swallowed it, restraining myself, prepared to digest this indigestible morsel until perhaps something wiser and more pacifistic would finally leave my mouth. Again I attempted to jab at Friedrich, out of pure terror at the imbalance between us — I stood in an entirely losing position. Pitiful, humiliated, chastised before my best friend by my own stupidity, drowning in my own sensitivity, into which I had leapt so eagerly the previous night — the mattress springs groaning, for I had been ready to ravish Friedrich there, on my own bed.

The only reasonable thing now was to bite. To defend myself somehow. To push away all inquiries concerning my person, my wounded pride, the stains on my honour, in the manner of a genuine fool and idiot — but only buffoonery and bristling came out perfectly for me, and so that was what I engaged in so often, fleeing cowardly from the battlefield of sincere friendship.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s happening to me,” I sighed, wiping my sweaty brow.

“And I know,” he declared arrogantly, which infuriated me all over again.

“You know everything, you’re so damned all-knowing it makes me sick.”

“I’m learning from you.”

There was a moment of silence during which he changed his stance twice, as though the uniform were chafing him. Only when his internal pressure had evened out did he say:

“I’m sorry too. It’s just… I heard what happened last night and…”

“You have no obligation to talk about it with me.”

“I know I have no obligation, for God’s sake!” — he grabbed my arm, turning me toward him so that he could see my right cheek. “Show me. Oh, Albrecht… Whatever he told you, don’t listen to him. Listen to me.”

“On what grounds?” I freed myself at once, ashamed of the way he positioned me as he pleased.

That was simply unacceptable.

“On the grounds that I’m your friend and you are very dear to me.”

“Very funny,” I muttered, somewhat appeased already, straightening the uniform he had so brutally disturbed. I hopped down a few steps and said:

“Elfrieda, come here, give me that camera.”

She sprang at once, politely handing me the device. I checked if everything was in perfect order and lifted the camera to my eye, aiming so that Friedrich was in view. I smiled and pressed the shutter.

“What are you doing?” he puffed up immediately, straightened, and smiled too.

“I’m immortalizing you. Later, when the pictures are developed, I’ll say, ‘oh look, that’s when we quarreled.’” I advanced the film with the little winding knob, adjusted the frame slightly and — click!

“We’re not quarreling. It’s just affectionate banter.”

“Well, shut up for a moment, otherwise you’ll show up in the photo with your tongue wagging.”

He laughed. Wonderful. Beautiful.

My finger dropped to the shutter of its own accord, sealing his likeness somewhere in its innards forever, protecting him from the unforeseen end of the world as we knew it.

My Friedrich.

“Now let me immortalize you, you fool.”

“And do you even know how to handle a camera? Look, here you press when you want to take a picture. Then you must wind the film so you don’t expose the same bit twice. Hey, gently, don’t break it, or Father will tear my head off.”

“I am the embodiment of gentleness. Now go on. Smile. Lovely. Like a little doll at a parade. Once more.”

“We’ll run out of film.”

“Be quiet, one more. And now stand straight and fix your hair, because Frau Stein is coming with the chief photographer.”

Indeed, from the direction of the garden my Mother approached, and behind her trailed Wernz, his trousers smeared with mud, with a pruning shear stuck into his breast pocket. Friedrich handed the camera back to a giggling Elfrieda as though it had burst into flames and returned to formation in less than a second. As though Peiner himself were marching toward us ready to give us murderous drills, and not my dear Mother with a broad smile stuck to her face.

“My boys. Just as we practiced. Wernz, you’ll take the picture. Stand together. Wonderful. And another. Just like that!” She clapped her hands, laughing, and the wind puffed up her silk scarf, making a charming circus balloon beside her face.

Friedrich snorted with laughter, so I nudged him with my shoe, scoldingly, though I too was grinning like an idiot.

“Perfect.” She smoothed her hair with a commanding gesture of a hand clad in a white suede glove. “Johan will drop the film at the photo atelier in Allenstein today, it’ll be on the way.”

After the session we returned indoors, and Wernz went back to the garden, muttering something about “spoiled young ladies”. Thorny bushes were dearer to him than his own superior, which did not surprise me in the least.

The spoiled young lady, alias my esteemed Mother, invited me and Friedrich for a farewell coffee before our return to school, claiming she “must feast her eyes on us while she still can, before we go, for she will miss us, miss us so very much.” Mainly, however, she feasted her eyes on her new acquisition, fresh from the auction — Johan brought it in the afternoon while we were busy with our photographic foolery.

The painting looked lovely, propped upon the French sofa in the southern sitting room. The brown paper in which it had been so scrupulously wrapped for transport lay on the couch and on the floor. Frau Stein, in the fever of a buyer and connoisseur of art, did not even think of tidying the mess she had made in her ecstatic frenzy. She wound the little string it had been tied with around her graceful hands, and her cheeks were flushed with excitement.

“Is it not beautiful?” she asked, turning to Friedrich, who was just then eating a butter cookie as a chaser to the half-finished Marmorkuchen waiting on his little plate.

Friedrich became flustered, swallowed quickly what he had been chewing, and nodded, wiping crumbs from his lips with the back of his hand.

Zwei Reiter am Strand by Max Liebermann. Two silhouettes of horsemen, proud and upright, stood out against a sky that heralded a coming storm. They lingered side by side, not particularly troubled by the looming tumult and unease. Perhaps they were speaking of the near future, unaware of how their plans might suddenly change; perhaps one was telling the other some frivolous nonsense, and the second was struggling not to push him from his mount and ravish him there on the beach.

Be that as it may, Mother was delighted.

We sipped our coffee, listening to her joyful chatter about ordering an appropriate gilded frame and then hanging the painting in the corridor by the library. Friedrich had already eaten all the butter cookies, so the good-hearted Anne-Marie brought him some raisin challah with jam, should he desire any. Bending down unfortunately, Mother had the chance to peer into her neckline, and apparently what she saw there filled her with utter disgust and burning fury, for she seized Anne-Marie by the wrist and jerked her violently upward, pulling both herself and the maid to their feet.

“So it was you! You allowed yourself to be debased by that filthy scoundrel!” she screamed, yanking the maid by the front of her uniform. “I never want to see you here again! How could you?! In the house of your employers, how dare you?! Aren’t you ashamed? I am disgusted by you, disgusted!”

I froze, just like my friend, who did not move, the challah suspended halfway to his eager mouth. Witnessing a woman’s fury — all the more in someone as composed and refined as Frau Stein — bordered on witnessing some terrible, unexpected profanation. I had never encountered such a phenomenon before, so its terrifying exoticism, its silent dread of the unknown, nearly choked me.

The girl clutched at the damaged front of her uniform, not defending herself even in the face of that bloodthirsty rage. Words of explanation would have been useless against Mother’s pride, who, as superior and lady of the house, felt personally responsible for the vile misconduct of her servants, treating it as stains upon her honour. She was repulsed almost as if Anne-Marie, giving her body to Paul in the hedge, had given her own body — which surely belonged to only one man, and that man was certainly not Rienecke.

That base betrayal of Frau Stein’s body was unforgivable.

The white banner she held had been tainted by a single blood-red blot.

Scandal!

Had there been an Eastern Front for women, Anne-Marie would surely have been sent there for her nocturnal excesses.

“If you want to whore around left and right, then not here, not in this house! Out with you! At once, go!” she panted, finally shoving Anne-Marie away, who ran to the servants’ quarters, most likely to pack. “You cheap slut!” she shouted after her for good measure. “There are proper establishments for women of your sort! I might even recommend you there personally, were I not revolted by the thought of associating myself with you in any way.”

The fury subsided like a wave receding with the tide. When Mother turned back to us, her face was smooth, like a perfect glass surface. She adjusted herself, including her hair and her elegant yet not overly ostentatious attire, and then stated firmly:

“I think it’s time for you boys to be going.”

Chapter Text

The dream of home had passed, leaving behind only eyelids glued with mucus, festering, and eyes glazed over, burning unbearably. The building swallowed us eagerly as we entered, greeting us with its piercing cold, dampness, and the stench of socks that had never dried. The stink of piss had already aired out of our room, yet none of us proved brave enough to remark upon this fact, though each one of us noticed it and, in part, felt a certain satisfaction because of it.

We were eating again, sleeping again, shitting again, and suffering—each in his own way, yet all together. Just as a face has many separate features, so the individuality of its lines diminishes gradually with every blow; and we were like a face receiving blow after blow. The nose of our face could no longer be distinguished from the mouth, everything swollen in the same way, crushed in the same way, bloodied alike, mashed into one terrified pulp capable only of receiving food. By some miracle, we still had our teeth. And he who has teeth can laugh and bite—and in our world that was enough to survive.

We rose in the morning, lay down in the evening, according to that same eternal fashion. Peiner had armed himself with a little coat trimmed in rabbit fur, but the training tracksuit, permanently grafted to his stiffened neck, remained as a symbol of his union with his dear favourites. He whipped us with the flail of his tenderness, and the frost creeping over the fields proved a most useful instrument for its display.

“Soon enough we shall have a trial of body and spirit,” he would cry, gulping down the frosty air greedily, so greedily one might think his sinuses would burst. “We shall hack out ice-holes in the lake, oh yes. You shall swim, boys! Swim! And if you don’t, we’ll find you only in the spring! Ha!”

“I can hack out an ice-hole, why ever not,” Schneider snorted, running just beside me. “But only to drown that stinking goat in it.”

Winter approached mercilessly. Each one of us felt it in his very marrow. Schneider and Tjaden scarcely removed their socks at all—only when they were soaked through did they begrudgingly peel them off their red, numb feet. Each one of us slept in two sweaters; Hefe even donned a scarf, but once Vogler caught him with it, he nearly strangled him with the thing. After that, Hefe dared not lay a finger upon that woollen bastion of warmth, fearing that, compelled by Vogler’s will, it would finish him off in his sleep in some murderous chokehold.

Everything that transpired in slowly dying Haus Falkenruh had remained within it to rot. Every warm feeling had retreated to the crumbling orangery to listen to the rain beating against the glass panes, and at last to watch as snow slipped through the leaky roof and fell upon the tiles in silence. Every cold emotion, steeped in bewilderment, had fled to wander the park like a ghost. I assumed those memories too had found some refuge, most likely in the mausoleum, seeking solace in the scent of decaying flowers left in the wall-mounted vases.

The only spark of life amidst the deadness of the days gone by was the parcel, which performed a sort of resuscitation upon every trembling conversation, every lost glance, every poorly conceived, incautious kiss. The crimes I had committed were imprisoned in the Allenstein photo atelier, so as to haunt me with bittersweet recollections from the moment my Mother’s perfumed parcel crossed our threshold, borne in Schneider’s arms.

There were ten photographs in all, counting the prints. Two showed Friedrich and me, rising out of the staircase like yet another pair of stone pillars guarding the entrance. The remaining ones were photographic fantasies, his as much as mine, each gently blurred, except for those taken by Wernz. Perhaps because while producing them so ineptly, we laughed—not carelessly, but sincerely.

After receiving his share, Friedrich pinned the photographs to the little door of his locker, and I did the same with mine. My likeness rested in a place of honour beside the likeness of his mother and brother, cut into stillness by the film in a moment separated from our world by more than mere months. I saw how he slipped our mutual picture into his breast pocket and wondered whether he still had the handkerchief I had given him for the sake of his table manners—manners worthy of some pigsty cobbled from a few rough boards. I did not ask for it back. What use would it be to me, when it could remain by my friend, pressing my own initials to his heart, as though no other place could be nearer to them?

My own print I slipped likewise into the pocket on the left side, so that the beating of my heart might urge the two of us to endure, pumping through that picture the dream of a better tomorrow—one in which we would wake with courage and hasten to one another’s hearts knowingly.

The world quickened—but without us. Suddenly and without warning, duty tore a hole in our ranks, yet the hole was not unwelcome. We felt relief, like that after the extraction of a rotten tooth, from beneath which pus now spurted freely, no longer pressing upon nerves already weary from pain. The headmaster declared loudly that “owing to intensified combat in the air, the Wehrmacht has appealed to our institution for reinforcement. Answering this call with courage and honour, the entire eighth year shall soon present itself upon enemy territory, contributing manfully to the Final Victory in the name of the Reich and the Führer!”

“Intensified air combat?” Tjaden muttered—for he knew more about air than most, especially about making it foul. “I hope that swine fanatic Von Jaucher is what flies into the air.”

We watched—neither sad nor pleased—as the eighth year marched in step across the courtyard and then began cutting through the snow, presumably toward enemy lands. A small troop, numbering barely twenty-two souls, including one officer, yet they moved full of spirit, as though they led a grand procession, as though they marched at the head of a mighty army.

An army of frightened whelps, pissing their trousers and chasing after kitchen girls. An army of children who could not tell a rifle from a potato spoon and vice versa—or who blew their noses into the bedding because they wanted to go home, not lie there listening to their friend panting in the night and then weeping, for he understood nothing except that for any mischief he would receive a cure in the form of standing in the courtyard in nothing but his underpants.

I was nearly certain no one would retreat before us, nor surrender their borders. From afar, perhaps our rifles spoke better to that effect than our young faces.

The editorial room of the school newspaper had become unbearably cold, yet I lingered there regardless, refusing to relinquish that haven and surrender it to the claws of frost. The heater tempted me; I had even prepared the firewood, defying every rule. And yet I had not dared light it—the spirit of Jaucher drifted among the pale faces of the cadets, though even they forgot him now, his presence had seemed such an inseparable part of the miserable plain of oppressed boys.

Gladen’s name had long since faded.

Justus’s name would fade.

The editorial room heater would be lit.

And this place, this whole stone Dwelling, would someday be rid of all of us, purging from its entrails the bitter aftertaste of harbouring such a repulsive band. For a little while longer, however, it remained under our dominion—the children of the Empire, keepers of a scrap of frozen land, of stone and steel. Five hundred bawling throats, five hundred sacks of flesh fit only for producing that which each of us was obliged to scrub from time to time in the communal lavatory, together, united in a purpose none of us could accomplish alone, but together managed only the collective transformation of matter.

How long had others like us languished beyond the borders, how long had they gathered in the labour of victory postponed again and again? Was Justus Von Jaucher, trotting across the snowy fields with his twenty-one little lads—were they to be that fragment of unity that, joined to the colossus, would at last tip the scales of long-awaited triumph?

I had no answer to that question, nor to many others—nor to the ones Friedrich occasionally favoured me with.

“Have you heard the joyful news?” he asked, standing in the doorway of the editorial room as though he belonged to it as much as I did, and as though it was to be expected that at any unexpected moment his pale-blond mop of hair would peek around the frame.

“No. Enlighten me.”

“I’m astonished Schneider hasn’t boasted of it to you yet. Since dinner he’s been climbing the walls as though someone had rubbed pepper on his backside.”

“I haven’t seen him since dinner. What’s happened?”

Friedrich politely shut the door behind him and settled himself opposite me, immediately seizing from the table the first object his hand encountered—a paperweight on a marble base, topped with a little brass bird lying on its back, dead and drained of life. A charming little trinket for an office.

“He’s finally sweet-talked Katarina into it,” he managed at last, after a minute of silence clearly meant to inflame my impatience as Schneider himself had been inflamed.

I raised my brows and returned ostentatiously to gluing photographs onto the fresh obituaries I had printed.

“I’m beginning to think the girl must be blind,” I said, sensing that my friend expected some response to such wild tidings and that he would not cease fidgeting in his chair until I obliged—or until the chair splintered beneath him into kindling. “He may not be an eyesore exactly, but he is no specimen of wisdom. One might say his gaze is untouched by thought. A miracle that of all of us she chose him. And a miracle she chose anyone at all, in light of recent events.”

“You cannot mean the deployment of the older year to the front.”

“That is precisely what I mean.”

He snorted as though I had greatly amused him and intended to continue mocking my petty, romantic sensitivity, so contrary to the facts; but he must have seen in my eyes that if he persisted I would glue that impertinent jaw of his shut with the very paste I was using, and so he quieted somewhat. Opening his mouth to a lesser degree, he said:

“Von Jaucher looked as though Klein himself had buttered his little bun for him—with that deployment, I mean. They were all aflame to run off straight into the middle of the cauldron, and their sweethearts kissed them goodbye and stuck some kind of sprig into their coat flaps.” He grew dreamy, tapping the brass bird on the marble base against the edge of the desk, preparing, it seemed, to cleave some furniture for firewood. “Katarina surely can’t resist the sight of a uniform—Schneider is proof enough of that.”

“It is winter; sprigs don’t grow now. So if they stuck anything in their lapels, it was bare, thorny twigs.”

“Don’t tell me you’re jealous.”

“By no means. I am merely surprised.”

I returned to my monotonous, tranquil gluing, for the moment not quite unbalanced. “Let him think what he wished—what use was there in forcing my fears into his head? If his heart still had room for the soldierly, warped sentiments of a patriotic half-wit, let it be. May it do him good”, I thought—half angry, half frustrated by a twist of fate I could not yet grasp.

Friedrich shifted about for a bit, watching me affix those unmoving faces in the obituaries as though fastening likenesses to gravestones. At last he could bear it no longer and burst out:

“One wouldn’t mind having some sweetheart here as well, eh?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You know. A Katarina.”

My mouth tightened on its own. My hands too—especially the right one, which clenched the little brush dipped in glue, as though preparing for the disgraceful duty of wielding a stabbing weapon. I would gladly have skewered him with insults, for suddenly he repulsed me horribly, though what I wanted most in the world was for him to say, “To hell with them all—I want only you.” Instead he brought up Katarina. Katarina. I began to suspect he and that dolt Schneider had exchanged heads. Yet it was still my Friedrich.

Friedrich.

No longer mine.

Never mine.

“I had no idea you dreamed of Katarina,” I finally managed, flatly, without emotion, hoping that if I proceeded carefully—dividing my emotions sensibly between what mattered and what did not—I would not squander them rashly and uncontrollably on the wretch sitting before me, playing with the paperweight. “I never suspected you were like them.”

“Like whom?”

“Schneider, Hefe, Tjaden… Don’t tell me you all hold little circles of mutual admiration, chattering on about your imaginary sweethearts and darlings.”

He bulged his eyes at me in frog-like fashion, then bristled and pouted, setting the paperweight down firmly between us.

“Do you take me for a eunuch? A castrate?”

“Ah, so the simple possession of a functioning member justifies behaving like an animal?” I snorted, also setting down my own weapon—the brush—if we were to clash in words rather than deeds across that strip of no-man’s-land which the school-owned desk now became.

“What, is yours not functioning, that you throw mine in my face as though you had divested yourself of the business and risen above it? Of course I talk to them—why shouldn’t I?”

“There would be nothing wrong with it if I didn’t know all too well how such conversations sound. You lot discuss every vileness you’d like to inflict on whatever poor creature would permit it.”

I had listened more than once to the overlong, overexcited debates in which the most renowned admirers of the female sex—Schneider and Tjaden—outdid each other in stupidity and obscenity. Usually Tjaden won, with all his gutter fantasies, and into that very gutter from which he drew those erotic concoctions he sought to drag Friedrich and the rest.

I never took Friedrich for a saint—none of us was, nor would ever be, given our peculiar reverence for things that appeared to us as the Holy Grail while being everyday bread for any ordinary man. I felt disgust for myself when I kept myself company—awake or in thought—summoning ever more scandalous scenes, yet those scenes had not sprung from the same obscene painter’s brush that coloured the filth swirling in Schneider’s head, who no doubt laughed like a madman at them.

Friedrich shook his head, on the verge of some great offence. Ever since that slap in the face delivered to me by God Himself—though enacted by my father’s hand—quarrelling and harassing one another had come to us easily, as though that one strike had tilted the world’s axis and everything upon it had gone mad.

“Is that not how it works?” he drummed his fingers on the desk, eyeing me with a shining look in his handsome, puzzled face. “Girls surely chatter among themselves and want to do vile things to us too—not that I’d mind. You never think about all that?”

“No.”

“Now you’re lying,” he said with a certainty that displeased me profoundly.

Very profoundly.

“I have never wished to do anything vile to anyone.”

“You’re a brazen liar. And again you bristle like a rabid dog someone tried to pat on the backside.”

“And you cling,” I hissed, “like a mongrel whose sole purpose in life is to latch onto the hindquarters of some bitch.”

“Hold your tongue. You truly never thought of it? Of… all that?”

Another moment and Friedrich might have choked on the wonderment worthy of the most ardent champion of male-female relations. I grimaced as foully as my stiffened facial muscles allowed.

“Have I ever spoken to you on such subjects?”

“No. But—"

“But what?”

“Never mind. Only that everyone must want it. At least afterwards, you know. After everything.”

After everything. What was that to mean for us? And for how long? Once already everything had been over—and then again everything began anew—the same thing: men slaughtered, mothers left alone, children fatherless. Husbands torn from wives to be wedded to rifles and grenades, though not to bullets unless fate was unkind.

“And you truly believe that someday everything will be over?” I asked slowly and quietly—not to enrage him, but to probe him.

“Yes. Soon. And then one finds some special girl and starts a family.” He sighed blissfully, stroking the shiny button of his uniform, gazing off somewhere, likely at that future special girl who now existed only as a spiritual presence tormenting me cruelly. “A house, children. I should like to have children. Four.”

“The kitchen is open until ten. Go—you might yet manage to father two,” I muttered.

He barked a laugh, wholly unoffended by my coarse remark.

I allowed myself to slip into dissolution—as Kruger put it, “a nasty diarrhea”—and I felt precisely that: as one afflicted with absolute diarrhea of character and will. A vision tormented me, in which my path and Friedrich’s remained forever pressed together like threads in a tapestry—forming a real image on the front, knotted and tangled behind by what was hidden. But reality was this: Friedrich sat there ripping apart the tapestry I had painstakingly embroidered, while some Katarina or Elfrieda wound his threads upon their spool, tucked between their breasts, laughing and mocking me.

I felt lonelier than ever before, though there had been moments when loneliness tightened around me slowly, forcing all joy from me. Only Friedrich had been a wedge between two tombstones—the granite slab of my own stupidity and the marble slab of truth about the world. Truth which wiped a man’s face with loneliness.

Albrecht, I am here with you now. I am. We are together.

No, Friedrich. You are here in this hour, on this day that is already fading. Already fading. We are passing away, and with us this twisted brotherhood—and then you will be gone. I shall be alone. You will be elsewhere, for in your fantasy there is no place I can fill with dignity.

He had the audacity to enter here, disturb the peace of the day, and prattle about some Katarina, who was to appear upon a cloud of “the proper time” like a Valkyrie and carry him to the eternal feast at the table of her womanhood.

We had eaten together, endured together every trial that lay bare our most delicate feelings—until she was to appear and usher him into a golden maturity upon the wings of amorous exaltation.

I regretted ever touching him, regretted letting him take root in the darkest recess of my mind, where he had sprouted like a seed sheltered by moist, earthen darkness.

“A son to be ashamed of is worse living than dead,” my Father had told me then—then, when I had gone to surrender to him the treasures of rebellion I had hoarded. And he had been right. Nothing I felt could inspire pride in me any longer. I was ashamed of myself; even I no longer defended that fortress of feeling—too weak to guard it, too heartsick to abandon it. No soldier stood upon the flanks.

My general too would soon depart, not looking back.

“You hold me in high esteem,” he said with a fading smile, tucking it away at last into his pocket and assuming a more serious expression. “I’m speaking in earnest, Albrecht. I should not wish to end like Gladen, with no offspring. A man must leave something behind, even if he dies defending his Fatherland.”

“Leave behind a wife in poverty and hungry children,” I rubbed my temple, praying he would go so I need not look at him. “Friedrich, I do not consider myself particularly qualified to speak on such matters, for we are both fools and know not half of what we ought, and half of what we know is worth no more than a heap of steaming dung. Thus I do not wish to preach, but the general atmosphere of this place does not fill me with thoughts of bringing new cadets into this world—only for them to be blasted into bits by a grenade.”

He opened his mouth, then shut it again. Then he glanced at me from beneath pale lashes, as though through a milky morning mist, and I had to restrain myself mightily from scolding him for refusing to play house with me in this fragile paper dwelling of my feelings, glued together with flour.

“You’ve changed. Since that night,” he said quietly.

“You said you didn’t wish to pick at scabs, so don’t…”

“I am not speaking of that.”

So he meant us.

Had he not had enough of gutting me? Enough of hauling out my entrails and stirring them with his great paw until I no longer knew where the end was, where the beginning was, where he entered and where he exited—until every distinction lost meaning and death seemed preferable to enduring that sadistic, emotional vendetta?

“I do not wish to speak of that either,” I cut him off, feeling the shameful, humiliating flush on my face.

“Albrecht…”

“No.” I leaned back sharply, fixing him with a look, pleading that he understand from where this desperate fear arose. “I feel this place is not what it was when we left it, and even then it did not please us.”

“We were gone only two days,” he shook his head, disbelieving—perhaps thinking me mentally strained. A smile and a joke attempted to ease the tension. “Do you mean to tell me you’ve turned into some Prophetess Sybil? Foretelling our end?”

“Friedrich!” I gasped, now overcome with grief.

It seemed he wished to say something, but the thought passed quickly across his brow, and so I added—somewhat exaggeratedly, as though superstition had begun to matter to me, as though I read the world through the omen of my own body:

“I cannot warm my fingers. They are so cold. My feet as well… Whatever I do, they are cold as ice. I can blow on them, rub them—they remain dreadfully icy. For some time now, I feel there is no hope left for us for any warmth at all.”

He reached out and took my hand into his warm one, and I nearly wept.

“Good God, they are indeed cold. You’ll catch your death.” He rubbed life into those cold, damp hands attached to my person—something I could scarcely believe until he touched those fish-like limbs. “The windows must be drafty. Wait, we shall light the heater.”

“We mustn’t. The headmaster forbade it, so as not to set anything aflame. Jaucher… Yes, of course—Jaucher is no longer here.”

“To hell with that and to hell with the headmaster,” he declared, bending for the firewood. “And Jaucher shall know nothing of it.”

Jaucher could know nothing of it, for as we spoke, he had already breathed his last, and dry, picturesque snow was falling upon his motionless body.

I was gluing his photograph only a few days later.