Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

Franz

I shouldn’t see him, Mazarine thought. I lost him once already and I do not want to lose him all over again. But Franz must have written something about his intentions and feelings to Delphine, because as school was letting out that afternoon, Delphine drove up beside the school in the meat truck. She got out, and walked up to the playground where Mazarine was standing, her dress and hair in a whirl, laughing at some children’s games.

“Well, he’s going to be here tomorrow or the next day,” Delphine said. “We even got a phone call.”

Mazarine didn’t pretend even a moment of ignorance, although they’d never spoken of Franz since the day of Roy Watzka’s funeral, years ago.

“You look good,” said Delphine, a little critically, as though she was appraising Mazarine on her stepson’s behalf. Then she laughed and waved away her scrutiny. She was slightly embarrassed at her assessment of every girl her boys took an interest in — she hadn’t liked that Zumbrugge girl way back. It was a good thing she had no idea about the women Franz probably met on his furloughs. And of course she’d always liked Mazarine, though she still had the nagging feeling that she had to save the girl from the situation with her mother. But then, Delphine herself recognized that she hadn’t exactly found a way of handling her own father when he was alive. And Mazarine did look as though she was surviving fairly well. She hadn’t cut her hair or permanented it, as so many of the girls did now, and a thick fall still flowed around her shoulders, lighter from the sun in the schoolyard. She was one of those teachers little boys fell in love with. Her cheeks were rose red from running with the children, and her brown eyes, always lush and expressive, had lost that hungry look she’d had as a skinny girl. Though she was anxious, thought Delphine, about Roman’s difficult recovery and she was still probably drained by her mother.

How is she, the big slug? Delphine wanted to ask. Instead, she said, “I hear your mother’s back in bed.”

Mazarine gave a cool nod, neutral. She was sensitive about her mother’s reputation. She asked if Franz was going to take the train or the bus. Delphine said the train and that, if she were Mazarine, she would be looking for Fidelis’s car and Franz driving it, shortly after she heard the train whistle.

“If not before,” said Delphine, her voice deadpan amused. “He sounds ready to jump off and get a running start.”

THE SUN FELL thick along the banks of the river and heated the scored gray trunks of trees that swayed out over the driving spring current. The air was dry and the old leftover grass, packed by snow, a haylike and dusty padding on the ground. Mazarine settled herself, pulling a huge old brown woolen coat around her knees. Franz, in his father’s borrowed clothes but wearing the heavy Christmas coat he’d received from Germany so long ago, sat beside her on the tough, dead grass. He was close enough to touch her hand, but he didn’t. Anyway, she soon wrapped her fingers in the folds of her sleeves and stared away from him, at the opposite bank.

Across the boil of water the trees were loaded with last year’s brittle wild cucumber vines — the strings and suckers drooped off the limbs like hair. Here and there, within the fresh wounds in the bank where a tree was torn out by the spring breakup, or where the ice had gouged a wedge of earth clear, dirty pockets of snow still lingered. Crows, the first birds to return, wheeled raucously through the skim of branches. They hurtled past one another like black stars and crosses, and their cries seemed to hold a fever of meaning.

“I suppose we should talk,” said Franz, at last.

“All right,” said Mazarine.

“Not that I know exactly where to start,” he said with an uncomfortable laugh. He had forgotten how quiet she was, and how composed. She met him with the same gravity with which they had parted. She didn’t fidget about, finger her hair and retouch her lipstick, or make any sort of small talk, and for that he felt grateful. Yet he missed those things that other women did. Those gestures made it easier for him to maintain a simple gloss of conversation. To attend to himself was an uncomfortable task. So much had happened to him. Returning from the war, he felt tremendously strange, dislocated, even menacing, like a ghost that comes to spy on the living.

“I thought about you all the time,” he said, helplessly.

She nodded, still regarding the veiled trees and the shouting crows. “And what did you think?”

“I wronged you.” He was tentative, thinking that he must revisit his old transgression first and apologize, just in case it was required of him.

“No, don’t.” She withdrew her hand from the sleeve, waved it, and put it back. “None of that’s important, not anymore.”

He knew very well that that was true, they had certainly grown past those times, but he had expected that he would be required to pay some homage to her old misery. He had expected that she might even exact some sort of humiliation from him. Any other woman would have, he thought, probably any man. But she was not interested, he saw now, and although he admired her disregard for the past it also confused him. Where were they, then, if they could not go back in time and make repairs?

“You wrote,” she said, “but you didn’t say what really happened to you. You’ve been all over. You’ve been through things.” She turned to him, and her eyes were very clear, so that it was simple to look straight back at her. “You think I don’t want to know. But I do want to know,” she said. “I can’t know unless you tell me, and if I don’t know…”

She left off, her voice trembling slightly in the liquid spring air, her face suffused not with pity but with an intimate calm that left him slightly breathless. “… where do we go?” They were already at the heart of things and Franz was panicked. He could not answer at first.

“Anyway, I won’t be in the worst of it now,” he said to her, finally, his voice so low it blended with the mutter of the icy river. “I’ll drop paratroopers or tow gliders and release them. I’m not a fighter pilot anymore, not with a heavy bombardment group, either. I fly a C-47. That’s a transport plane. I evacuate the wounded, drop supplies — food, clothes, medicine, stuff like that.”

She nodded, letting the silence yawn between them, hoping he would continue.

“I was reassigned,” said Franz, “I was…” He searched for the word, but there really wasn’t one. “Tired out, I guess.”

Mazarine was silent, knowing that was not it. Her breath stilled, her heart squeezed painfully, her skin burned, and she couldn’t help imagining herself lunging toward him, dizzily. She had to close her eyes and turn away. She knew that she shouldn’t have agreed to see him. His presence leveled the defenses she’d put up and made her wretchedly alive with longings, thoughts, hopes.

“I want to hear what’s happened to you,” she said evenly after a while. She gestured in the direction, down river, of the butcher shop. “It’s just that there is nowhere else to start,” she said gently. “Neither of us is the same. But I’m different because of small, good, manageable things. You’re different because… things I don’t know.”

She looked at him so long, her eyes so still and warm, that Franz turned to her. She opened her arms and then shook him, lightly, with an angry tenderness. He was panting, his breath squeezed by the effort of not remembering. He was extremely cold. Ashamed of his shaking hands, he pressed his fingers between his knees. He bit his lips, gray as the tree bark, and he tried to control the absurd urge he had to tear off his clothing and dive into the slush, swollen river. She saw that he was in the grip of an unbearable need for flight, and she kissed him to change, if she could with one sudden gesture, the character of his fear.