Lennart leaned back on his heels. His legs stretched uncomfortably. “Not at all.” Perhaps she was joking and the punch line was going to be his incorrect reaction. Marie did this to him all the time. She’d tell him a story about work or about Tove and if he wasn’t listening closely enough and responded the wrong way, she’d tease him for his inattention, for a faulty moral judgment that would allow him to excuse some terrible thing someone at work had done, or a story on the news. He looked at Matthias again. Any second he expected Anneke to cry out with laughter.
“Do you know,” Anneke said in a tone that was unexpectedly quiet. She held the decoy out in front of her. “I used to dislike it. But not anymore. It’s like living a make-believe life.”
Matthias was squatting beside the net and moved quickly, crab-like, farther down the array to the corner closest to Anneke and Lennart.
“After every trip,” she said, “Matthias goes back to his wife and their two sons. The boys are almost grown now.”
When Matthias had finished with the net, he walked slowly over to where Anneke and Lennart were kneeling. Each of his steps sent a spray of sand up around his feet. He leaned forward and kissed Anneke on the top of her head. She closed her eyes and bowed into his kiss.
Lennart helped place the decoys at even distances across the space where the net would fall. They settled the birds into the soft sand. Matthias checked the hinged joints, lifting and releasing the array several times. The wind filled the blind. Later, Matthias served coffee from a thermos. “Now we wait,” he said as he handed Lennart a cup.
They sat in the shade of the blind for a long time. He watched the shadow change shape. He didn’t want to seem rude to the Germans so he insisted, whenever either of them offered, that he was more comfortable on the sand. His back hurt. He wished he had something to drink. The sand was warm and the sun was hot when the wind wasn’t blowing. He took two short walks up the dunes but never got so far that he couldn’t see the Germans. There weren’t many other people out. Given the time of year, this didn’t surprise him.
It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon when Lennart returned from one of his walks. Anneke and Matthias were speaking in German to each other. Lennart tried to guess what they might be talking about, but he could never seem to string together enough words to be sure. When they’d stopped talking for a little while, Lennart turned to Matthias and said, “Anneke was telling me about your sons.” The wind was blowing hard against the blind.
“Our boys,” she said and smiled at Matthias. Lennart looked at her, curious if he’d catch a playful smile, some evidence of a lie. “We have two boys. Matthias, after his father, and the younger one is named Karl. We’ve been so lucky.” She stroked Matthias’s arm. “Matthias, the older boy, is at Konstanz, where we teach. He’s just started and he wants to be an engineer.”
“And Karl?” Lennart said. “What about him?” The sun was warm on his face. He closed his eyes. The father of a boy he’d known in school had had a secret family, a wife and three children in Finland. Something small, a postcard or a bill, maybe a birthday card, had caused the lie to collapse. People in the neighborhood where Lennart grew up still gossiped about it.
“Karl lives in Munich,” Anneke said. “He works at a bank. We’re very proud of him.”
Another hour passed and the birds still hadn’t come. Anneke spent the time solving math puzzles in a torn and creased paperback, chewing on the tip of the pen and nodding her head slowly. Her feet were in Matthias’s lap. He was leaning back in his chair, his hat pulled down low over his eyes, one of his hands resting across Anneke’s crossed legs. Lennart read the newspaper he’d taken that morning from the hotel. There was a car crash in Frederikshavn. Two Volkswagens, identical in every way except that one was from Denmark and the other from Sweden, had had an accident in a traffic circle near the ferry terminal. No one spoke.
Lennart saw the birds first. A low-slung black cloud shook and pulsed on the horizon. He placed the newspaper in the sand. At first he couldn’t tell what he was looking at. The cloud moved as if it were a single body. When one side expanded outward, the opposite side followed, closing any open space. He watched for a moment before it occurred to him that he was looking at a flock of birds. “There,” he said, pointing. When he spoke he heard that his voice sounded higher-pitched and unfamiliar.
“Come closer to the blind so that you don’t frighten them,” Anneke said. Lennart crawled through the sand toward Anneke and knelt beside her. The birds approached and a group split from the flock and landed in the sand all around them. They were taller than the decoys and much more dramatically colored. Some had yellow mixed in with black and gray feathers along their backs, and a long S-shaped line of white along the sides of their heads. The birds shook and stepped in short, rapid movements while Matthias and Anneke whispered to each other, also moving quickly, and before Lennart knew it had happened, Matthias pulled the line and the net rose straight up into the wind. The net paused at the apex of its arc and everything seemed to fall silent and then the wind caught the net and it clapped down violently. The birds not in the net exploded into the air from the sand. He listened to the caught birds trying to flap their wings beneath the net. Soon they stopped struggling and there was no noise, only the net rising and falling with the birds’ heavy breathing.
Matthias reached under the net and pulled out the first bird. He spoke softly to it as he lifted it up, held it close to his chest. He turned the bird slowly in his hand and lifted each of its wings. Then he placed a blue plastic tag around the bird’s leg and crimped it shut with a pair of pliers. He and Anneke took turns removing a single bird at a time, made note of its tag if it had one, fastened their own tag on the bird’s leg, performed what Lennart guessed was a brief medical exam, and then released it. This they did by setting the bird down in the sand and waiting for it to fly away.
It took a long time to make it through all but one of the birds. “Twenty-seven,” Anneke said to Matthias, who was approaching the final bird. The bird wasn’t moving, and as Matthias got closer, he said something to Anneke that Lennart didn’t understand. Lennart watched them both to see how he should react. The bird was pinned beneath the pole, the net twisted and knotted around its neck. “It’s dead,” Anneke said without touching the bird to confirm that she was right.
Matthias lifted the net and untangled the bird. He held it in both hands, looking down at it for a moment, and walked to a stand of grass and placed the bird behind this. Lennart was surprised at how easy this all seemed, but he didn’t know what else he would have expected to happen. “That’s all?” he said.
“If this was another species of bird,” said Anneke, “or if we knew it was diseased, we would freeze the body to study it later. But plovers are common and this one appears healthy. What this bird will tell us about the plover population of Northern Europe is only that accidents sometimes happen.”
“Anyway” said Matthias, “we don’t have the proper equipment to freeze the bird.”
“Shouldn’t we bury it?” asked Lennart.
“No,” Anneke said. “An animal will find the bird and eat it. The rest will decompose. If you bury it in the sand, the bird will rot.”
“Shall we say a funeral prayer too?” Matthias said, laughing. “Light a candle?”