Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

“You should see him first,” Delphine said, taking the baby from Mazarine’s arms. Her chest hurt with the tension. She could hardly breathe. “I’ll come in later.”

She prodded Mazarine forward, and the younger woman entered the doors behind the wide, swishing businesslike white rear of the nurse. She walked toward Franz. Halfway down the row of men, some surrounded by curtains, some incurious, others whose glances clung to her, Mazarine realized that she was holding her breath. She gasped dizzily and took in too much air. The odor was worse here because it included everything that the disinfectants and germ-killing alcohol was meant to eradicate: the gamey-sweet smell of slowly healing flesh, the sharp scent of old piss, the sweat of desperation, the vinegar bleakness of resignation. And yet, she knew — for this was the reason she was here — these were the rescued. These were the men who would probably live. And then the nurse examined a chart and stopped before a bed. She drew open a curtain on a hoop around the bed to allow Mazarine to enter the makeshift room.

As she passed between the folds of the curtain around Franz’s bed, Mazarine knew that she was leaving the before — where Franz existed in her memory and imagination — and entering the after. Until she looked directly at him, until her eyes took in the damage, he would still be perfect, a boy, a young man, and they would not have entered the world of grown-up love, with all of its terrible compromises. I can’t do this, she thought. But she knew what she could or could not do didn’t matter. The man who inhabited the bed was lost in a drugged sleep. Her eyes began at the bottom of the tucked-in sheet and traveled slowly up the blanketed form, noting every detail, until she could no longer avoid his face.

The man in the bed was still Franz while he was asleep, and so she sat with him tasting the illusion until it became unbearable. Still, she could not wake him. Franz breathed so slowly and slightly that she could not see his chest move. The hurt side of his head was swathed, and dark bruises flowed down his neck. There was no telling what would happen, how much would return, the doctor had said. Mazarine held Franz’s wrist, tightening and loosening her grip as if she could pump her own strength into him. She sat there, and she sat there. Around them the blank curtains were a closed screen upon which, more wrenching and more complex than death, their future spilled.

T HE MONUMENT to the victims of the bombing of Ludwigsruhe was to be unveiled that afternoon, and all of the master butchers were gathering from the outlying villages and even more distant towns to sing. It was 1954, and all flesh of the war dead was earth. During the month of their visit to his hometown, Fidelis had been practicing with the ones who were left, those few men who had survived. While he was practicing, Delphine went walking through the town cemeteries, famous for their beauty, or she strolled along the charmless streets of blocky Marshall Plan stores and apartment houses, in and out of jewelry shops where imitation gold lockets could be had so cheaply, but were so finely made, and at last to the garden where her husband had played as a child and where the statue now stood wrapped in canvas and roped carefully so that the town officials could drop the veil in one tug.

She sat in the audience, alongside Tante, who craned stiffly toward the speakers and ignored her. All that Delphine could see of her was her foot, still elegant, cased now in a finely made blond leather pump. On the other side of Tante sat Fidelis’s brother and sister-in-law and their two grown children, and on the other side of them Erich with his new bride. When she and Fidelis had planned this visit, it was to be something of a much delayed honeymoon, but the trip had turned out very differently. Fidelis had suffered mysterious pains on the way across, and an X ray told them of an enlarged liver and a threatened heart. Chronic constipation had plagued them both, though they ate buckets of fresh strawberries to try to obtain relief. Delphine could understand nothing of the fast floods of language. Her mouth hurt from smiling, and she was tired of her own amiable nodding. Her isolation had become tedious. Yet some of the relatives would, it seemed, do anything for them — people from her husband’s past planned picnics and camping trips, hikes all through the forests, lavish dinners of wild game and local mushrooms, gave them handmade gifts, and kissed and hugged Fidelis with frantic joy.

And yet Delphine felt bewildered, darkly helpless. What kind of people were these? Delphine looked around at the crowd seated expectantly, and watched them as the speeches rolled over, waves of language, sounds on sounds. Women wore small hats and drab gray or tan suits of outdated style, thick heels, rubbery stockings, no gloves. They wore dresses made of somber flowery material — purples and browns. Handbags were in their laps, the leather softly tanned, the colors muted and glowing. She put her own hand above her eyes, to view the scene. The sun moved in and out of puffy clouds. Everyone cast sharp, distinct shadows. The shadows cut across the women’s faces and lay hard beneath their hands and pooled under their feet. There were shadows around their purses and shadows glancing down the legs of the chairs. Cast by the backdrop of paper streamers, shadows striped the town officials. Germany was all darkness and light, bright flowers and drab summer gabardine. Delphine breathed the sweetness of a hothouse gardenia on some woman’s bosom, the sizzling fat fragrance of a portable wurst stand just behind the gathering. Below the thick German language sweeping over the crowd, she caught undertones and strained to hear what seemed a murmuring hum, the curious singing of some other crowd.

That low sound became almost overpowering and then the butchers filed from their front seats to the podium, stepped into their formation, and began their songs. Most were large men, but not all. Some were thin and wiry. Their voices surged out, over the crowd. Sound sprang from their great chests and bellies. The music unsheaved out from the tight-muscled small men in a pour of energy. Those instruments, their voices, built a solid wall of melody. Delphine watched them, thoughts drifting. She began to listen past the singing. She didn’t hear singing, soon, at all, but only saw the mouths of the men opening and shutting in unison, in a roar, like some collection of animals in a zoo. For some reason, she saw her mother’s indistinct photograph, large and flickering, imposed on the cheerful scene. She thought of all that had happened here, the burning and the marching, an enormity beyond her, a terrible strangeness in which things unbelievable were done. And yet, now, here were these butchers singing. And the songs were lovely to the ear. Her own husband’s voice soared in German air.

Delphine’s vision receded, she blinked dizzily. A sense of unreality was stealing over her, a ringing in which all sound was one. Then her eyelids were knocked upright. She saw what was really happening. As the veil was torn away, as the statue of the burned stood washed in pleasant sunlight, as the master butchers parted their lips in song, smoke and ash poured out of their mouth holes like chimneys. Their hearts were smoldering, she thought, disoriented. Their guts were on fire. Their lungs were hot bellows. Yet they kept on singing as though nothing was wrong at all. Nobody pointed, no children cried. Darkness continued to spiral up out of the men’s oven-box chests. Smoke swirled, ash drifted. Finally the singing ended. All the cloudy dark the men had belched disintegrated and was gone, except for the tarry residues of the shadows. People surrounding her smiled and nodded. Clapped their hands with a solid racking clatter that went on and on. So, thought Delphine, very tired, throwing her hands together along with everyone else, it was normal for black plumes to rise from the mouths of the singing butchers into the brilliant air of the garden. It was an ordinary thing to witness here.