“Hasn’t been since the year 1209. But this is where the foundation was. Don’t pick at the moss, Judy.”
“Why’d they take it down?”
“Because Count Otto murdered King Philip of Swabia,” he told her, and Kirsten nodded. “Then Count Otto tore it apart and used the stone for other things. Probably to build his own castle someplace else. Or to throw over the walls at people who liked King Philip better.”
She ran her fingers over the German script carved into the stone. Behind the rock sprouted a crowded assortment of trees, their trunks fanning out at angles, all vying for the light. Other than the marker, there was no sign that this place had ever been anything but woods. In a way it was a gravestone, no different from the ones she and Rudi had played among the past winter, but for a place instead of a person. A gravestone for a home.
“Well, I guess we ought to go take a look at the church,” he said. His walking stick thumped against the dirt. “Another day, another plaster Virgin Mary. Lead the way, kiddo.”
“We can skip it. I don’t care about it.”
Her father shot her a disbelieving look. “Are you kidding? You love that stuff.”
She shook her head. She would never be able to explain it in a way that made sense. Lately, during meals, her father had begun to make optimistic small talk about her mother’s condition, how much better she would likely do once she was moved to a civilian hospital back in the States, how glad she would be to know Judy was being well taken care of.
“Well,
He started toward the church, with Kirsten falling in line behind him and Judy, in turn, behind her. As they walked Judy picked red currants from the bushes along the path, and Kirsten gazed up at the trees, pointing out birds and naming them for Judy.
“You’d better pay attention to what you’re doing,” Judy warned her in rudimentary German. “If you don’t, you might have an accident.”
The girl cast a nervous glance at her and hurried ahead to where Judy’s father strode onward, walking stick pressing him steadily forward through the forest. The word for
“Come on, kiddo,” called Judy’s father. “Pick up the pace.”
Kirsten looked over her shoulder at Judy, and Judy smiled. Three at a time she popped the red currants into her mouth. She was the cavechild, eating the food the primeval garden offered her, following the tribal king. Speaking the language that winnowed words down to their simplest terms, forcing them into meanings that were foggy yet dense, like the morning.
The girl Rudi liked so much couldn’t stay there forever. The following week Judy returned to the barn, because she harbored a dogged hope that things might return to normal, but also because time was getting away from her and she wanted to cherish what remained with Rudi. At the gate that marked the edge of his yard she turned and caught a glimpse of her own home. It stood in the near distance at the rise of the hill, cheerful and half-timbered with geraniums in the window boxes, the lovely cottage which Kirsten had turned into a jack-in-the-box of primal fear. It was Judy’s mother’s tidy domain, but while she sat by the window in a sanitary room and waited for her senses to come back to her, the natives back home were throwing a party. To her father, the topography of Germany was a thin surface of charming, sportsmanlike, well-organized modern life laid over the deep crackling roots of a barbarian land. The hardy knots of the old ways still broke through, and must be negotiated: the peasant good cheer of their festivals, the pagan earthiness of their Christianity, the temptation to cradle the cheek of a subservient virgin and see whether she would dare say no.
The old green station wagon belonging to Rudi’s family was missing from their gravel driveway; they all appeared to be gone except for Kirsten, who was at the Chandlers’, but Judy checked the barn anyway. Rudi’s black rubber boots rested beside the pile of hay bales. The cow, large-eyed and full-uddered, swished her tail at Judy. The barn was dim in the late-afternoon light, smelling more strongly than usual of manure. She looked up at the crucifix on the back wall, witness to numerous sins. She thought about the puffs of crinoline on either side of Rudi’s hips, how he must have pulled the girl against him to make them flare wide open like flowers in a time-lapse filmstrip. The barn had that effect on people.
She walked through their yard to the shed, as she still occasionally did, to look in on the family of hedgehogs. The gasoline fumes gave her a mild headache, but it was worth it to play with these little animals Rudi agreed were precious. Yet now they were gone; where they had been there was only a fluff of dry grass interspersed with brittle brown leaves. She crouched on the hard-packed soil beside it and poked with the end of a trowel, but it was useless. The family had disappeared, and she could not guess where they might have gone.
She stood and set her hands on her hips, digging the toe of her saddle shoe into the ground. The shed was small and close. The tractor fit into it but left little space for anything else. Along the far wall rested a cluster of tools, hoes and spades and a rake with rusted tines; beside it sat a pile of rotting baskets and a stack of milk pans. A sack of fertilizer sat near the door, its top gaping open. She turned a basket upside-down and sat on it, then took from her skirt pocket the little stack of matches she had been hoarding from the box in the kitchen. They were so much larger than the small ones people used to light cigarettes, and the strike-anywhere feature still amazed her. When she moved too skittishly, either the match snapped in half or nothing happened at all. But when she snapped it decisively, nearly every surface became a runway for the most forbidden thrill she had yet encountered.
