The judge’s secretary was typing one day, details about a couple out walking who had been robbed at gunpoint, a fairly unusual crime for these quiet streets, when she received a call. “I hear you want information on Hoefler,” a man’s voice said.
She held her fingers above the keyboard, as if typing would scare off the voice. “Yes,” she said. “Please.”
“Meet me at the cemetery,” he told her. “Twenty minutes.”
“Which cemetery?” she asked, but she knew as soon as she said it, and the man had hung up. It was only a five-minute walk, and Hans was buried there.
She finished up the tail end of the report, swallowed herself inside her coat, and walked the ten blocks east, past the pawn shop and the bakery that specialized in crusty rolls soaked in chicken fat and sesame seeds. When she arrived at Hans’s grave, apprehensive, holding out her sharpest key just in case, she saw from a distance a man in a wheelchair with no hair on his head, wheeling past the headstones over the small green hills. She lowered the key. The air was chilly but clear, a good day to be outside. As the man drew closer, she saw he had no eyebrows, no eyelashes, and that he looked over seventy. She watched him navigate the bumps of grass. He did not look like the kind of man who would appreciate an offer of help.
Nearby stood other mourners, and even through the cold, she could smell the hints of the first dandelion tufts pushing their way to the surface. The man wheeled right up to Hans’s headstone and nodded at her. His face was geometrically compelling, with its triangular cheekbones and rectangular forehead. She waited for him to speak.
The man thanked her for meeting him. He said he was Hoefler’s brother. His older brother. He inquired after her interest and she explained that it was not professional. “I just think about him,” she said. “I’m not sure why.”
The man in the wheelchair sniffed in assent. “Good,” he said. “Then I would like you to know a few things.” He dusted his hands on the wheels of his chair, a gesture she could tell he did often. He kept his gaze on the headstone.
“When I was thirteen and Hans nine,” he began, in a voice louder than was necessary, “I told him my mind was stronger than his. We had been fighting often, or I had been fighting and he had been silent, and I was tired of it, so I sat him down and told him to try to hurt me with his thoughts. He was not a violent young man, and I could see he was uncomfortable, but he tended to do anything I asked, and he stared at me willingly. Even then, he had eyes very big and dark and more like a dog’s than a man’s. You recall?” He glanced up and the secretary nodded. She recalled very well, she said.
“You were his lover?” the man asked, lips harsh.
For the second time that month, the woman shook her head. “I was really only a distant acquaintance,” she said.
“To be stared at by Hans,” the man continued, “made you want to feed him soup, not harm him. Hans thought for a long period of time, and finally took a breath and said he wished I would not always have the first glass of juice. I told him that was an idiotic curse. Almost embarrassing. Just who was this brother of mine, so shiftless in his negativity? I’d been the clear favorite of both our parents and I’d gotten all the extra gifts and sweets. I’d never caught Hans looking at me with any kind of hatred or envy, something I found disconcerting. He tried again, and said that perhaps one day I might lose all the hot water while I was inside the shower, covered with soap. I believe then I reached out and hit him. ‘Come on, brother!’ I said. ‘Curse me! Curse me flat out!’ ”
The man shifted in his chair. His eyes flicked over to the woman, but not long enough to register an expression.
“Well,” he said, “something inside the combination of my contempt and that slap did alter Hans a bit, did snap him into a new place. He had always been obedient, and he continued to stare with that wet Hans gaze, but when he finally spoke, he said, in a quieter voice, that he might wish I had no legs. I was by then already a very fine and fast runner in school. He said Mother would not like me so well without legs, which, I must add as a side note, turned out, unfortunately, to be true. ‘Good one, Hans!’ I told him, encouragingly. ‘More!’ He leaned closer and in a whisper said that he wished that all my hair would fall out, as we’d just seen a horror film in which the vampire’s eldest child, the preferred child, loses all its hair and becomes a human snake and eats its father. Also, I had the better hair, the hair all the relatives commented upon. Such lustrous hair, too good for a boy, they all said, about my eyelashes too.”
The man in the wheelchair blinked, reptilian.
“I was—to be frank—delighted,” he said, leaning in. “Now, this was the sort of conversation I felt rivalrous brothers should have, and I suppose I felt guilty for all the preferential treatment I’d received, so it seemed better to get it all out in the open. I couldn’t tell if Hans had cursed me because he really felt it or just to please me, but I didn’t care. Of course, I was not to be outdone, and told him that he would turn scaly and dry up like a desert, that he would lose his hearing on the day of his piano recital, and forget how to speak at a crucial moment in his life, whenever that was. I said to him, ‘One day you will open your mouth when it is imperative that you use it, and nothing will come out.’ We were sitting in the room off of the kitchen; it was a small, dark hallway that was always warm from the heating vent, and smelled of nuts, though no one ate nuts in our home. We always loved sitting there. I was fidgety with pleasure. Hans nodded, digesting my curses. I asked for one more. His eyes began to glaze over, and he told me, as if in a trance, that Germany would collapse with me inside it, and I would be legless, dragging my body through the burning streets of a formerly beautiful city, and I would call and call and no one would come, and how I would find my darling wife dead in the flames.
“He and I sat silent then, until he shook himself alert.
“ ‘Will that do?’ Hans asked, smiling a little shyly at me.”
The man raised his forehead where his eyebrows would be.
“Well, he was quite a bit happier for a while after that,” the man said. “It was probably the longest I’d spoken with him in a number of months. It’s good for brothers to do a little cursing every now and then. Good to have some room to vent. All was well until, of course, the curses started to come true. The final ones didn’t. I was married for ten years, later, yes, but she left me because she fell in love with a younger man. I had no darling wife, dead. I was not present at any bombing.
“But the rest did,” he said. “We said so many curses that day, and the world was in such tumult that the odds were high that something would stick. None stuck to him; most did to me. Now, I knew an incident with a train took my legs, not Hans. I tended to put myself in dangerous situations. A fire took the hair off my head and eyebrows, a fire I could have avoided. But either way, though it was years later, Hans thought he had ordered it all, straight off a menu from the devil himself, and although I told him it was not his fault, he surely thought otherwise. That there was both greatness and a terrible danger in his mind.”
A light wind blew through the cemetery. The secretary kept her weight on both feet. She felt a bit too tall, taller than she liked to feel, but she did not want to sit on the grass, as it was wet.
“Never once did I think it was the power of his mind,” Hans’s brother said. “He had a fine human mind, sure, but he was no soothsayer. Please. I told him that, too—‘You’re just a regular kid, Hans!’—but I’m sure he thought I was trying to placate him. He read the news daily, every single word. It was a terrible time, a terrifying time. We could hardly understand any of it. And I felt terrible that I had encouraged him so. I was older; I should’ve known better. He hadn’t wanted to say anything, and I had made him, and then things came true, and imagination met reality. We all knew someone who had done something. News kept pouring in. Poor Hans. He listened to it all with terror. He stopped seeing his friends. It wasn’t just him; many young men I knew who had frightening thoughts or dreams were extremely vigilant in those days. One neighbor went on serious drugs to sleep so he’d stop having some kind of dream; he never said what it was. We did not know what we were capable of. The lid was off.