THERE WAS NO BEFORE and no after. Days had melted together. Eva’s long dying was the ground and the air. For a week now, she’d taken only sips of lukewarm water. Her hair stood up in a peaked cap despite Delphine’s attempts to comb it down. Her elbows and knees were knobs and her bones jutted from her flesh. She’d absorbed morphine like water. It made no difference. Her body would not die and would not live. Her eyes were unearthly. She stared through everything, saw nothing. She had taught Delphine to look into her eyes straight on, and when she did the world dropped away. There flowed between them an odd and surprising electricity. Their gaze was a power — comforting, frightening. Delphine was pulled somewhere fast, yanked right out of her skin. With their eyes locked they rushed through the air, ecstatic, hearts lurching.
The night Eva finally died, Delphine woke to the knocking, and knew. She cast off the quilt she’d wrapped herself in at the foot of Eva’s bed. Eva’s arms were flailing like a backstroker’s and her fists rapped the headboard. Delphine grappled with the bedposts and got to her knees, then stumbled blearily to the side of the bed. She hadn’t slept more than two hours at a time for days, and now she hardly knew whether she was sleeping or awake as she tried to catch Eva’s arms. But Eva was running in place now, her bone-thin legs kicking, her arms pumping up and down at her sides. She was running in her high heels. Again, she was running against Franz and her breath came urgently, gravelly and harsh, as though she was nearing the end of a race. She gritted her teeth and seemed to strain for the invisible finish line. The cords in her neck pulled taut, her face twisted, and then she breathed deeply and a sound like sticks rattling came from inside of her chest. Her arms fell to her sides. Her breath went out and she did not retrieve it.
“Can you hear me?” Delphine said. “Are you there?”
Eva’s eyes opened and she took a little air. She said nothing, but looked steadily at Delphine. Her face had become beautiful once again, austere, the flesh pulled across stark bones, the graceful lines of her eye sockets and her skull. After a while, she whispered, for Delphine to light the lamps.
Delphine lighted the lamp and then caught Eva’s fist and held it. Delphine’s head fell forward and her eyes closed in a swimming heaviness. She jerked awake, took a round, amber bottle of almond oil from a little shelf beside the bed. She poured a small amount into her left palm. Sleepily, she rubbed the oil into Eva’s skin until the fist slowly began to relax.
“Franz, he knows nothing about it,” gasped Eva suddenly. “His father was not Fidelis. His father’s name was Johannes Grunberg, a Jew. Quite a student, and so handsome, so tall and fair. In the war, dead.” Her lips worked. At last, she gathered another breath and went on. “Fidelis knows, but he never spoke of it.”
Delphine poured out another bit of oil and worked it into the slack, dry skin of Eva’s forearm. This was the fourth time Eva had labored to tell her this. Usually, from this revelation she went on to give Delphine directions on when to marry Fidelis and how to care for the boys. But this time, she said something different, something she’d never said before. She said it with a clear simplicity.
“I want you, only you, to handle my body. And please write to my Mutti. Tell her that you took care of me. Tell her this: I loved you.”
Delphine looked into Eva’s eyes expecting to become hypnotized, but this time something gave way, she could feel it. Their thoughts had pushed through an invisible barrier, a magnetic field, and there was suddenly a lightness that lifted them giddily into a storm of calm. Later, Delphine was to think that she should have called Fidelis or the boys. But at the time it did not occur to her. Delphine didn’t look away from Eva’s face, even for a moment, because she knew that Eva was afraid. She did not let go of Eva’s hand, because she knew that Eva wanted her to hold her hand, just as a child would when it must enter a new and foreign place. Delphine did not move to adjust her friend when the sticks in her chest rattled again, even louder, three times. She did not pound Eva’s chest when the breathing stopped. Eva was still looking into Delphine’s eyes, and so, during the time when she might have taken another breath, Delphine saw the light go out behind that silver streak, like a crack behind the door.
“STRUB’S FUNERARY, how may I be of service?”
Benta’s voice was sleepy, but Delphine knew that they had kept track of the progress of Eva’s disease and had been waiting for a call.
“I should have got hold of Clarisse, but I know if I did I’d break down,” said Delphine.
“You think it’s hard, at first, that she’s your friend,” said Benta. Her voice now stronger, down-to-earth. “You’ll find Clarisse can be a great comfort to you. Can we come over together?”
“Yes,” said Delphine, and then she sat in Eva’s kitchen listening to the boys and Fidelis, together in the other room, the murmur of their sorrow. One comforted the other, gained control, and another broke down. Delphine needed to hear them, for she felt very much alone. She couldn’t be with them, it wouldn’t be proper for her to enter that room now. She had washed Eva with her lilac soap, pinned a towel between her legs, smoothed her face into a calmer expression and closed her eyes before she called Fidelis. She thought that perhaps she should accompany the body back to Strub’s, too, as Eva had made that final request. But now everything seemed too much for her, out of her control, and somehow strange, as though with Eva gone it was no longer right for her to be there. It seemed a long time before the Strubs arrived, pulling up to the back door in their long, pearl gray hearse. Delphine answered at their knock and Clarisse entered, took hold of her with an embrace that radiated a practical kindness. The Strubs brought her effortlessly into the room where Fidelis and his sons sat with Eva. When the others entered, Fidelis bent down and picked up Eva in his arms. He looked so bewildered, then, holding his wife in the air with no place to take her, that no one could move until Aurelius put his hand on his shoulder.
“Put her down, Fidelis, we’ll take good care of her.”
Gently, Fidelis lowered Eva to the mattress. With a wild, rough cry, Markus broke away and stumbled to his mother’s side. He bent over and with a passionate gesture he kissed his mother’s ankle, just as his father had. He cradled her foot, closed his eyes, and touched his forehead to the place he had kissed. Franz stepped behind him, embarrassed, and was about to pull Markus away when Delphine stopped him. Just as she touched Franz, a sound emerged. It was a roar of grief, a loud, keening bellow, and it filled the room. It seemed to come from all of them, or no single one of them, or from the walls of the room itself. Delphine never was to know. The sound released everyone, as though from a spell, and they stepped away from Eva and left her.
NOW ROY WATZKA passed into an unprecedented period of sobriety. Dry days passed into weeks. He was able to accomplish this because of the starkness of Eva’s death. And then, too, what had happened in the cellar came back to haunt him. At last something had unnerved him. In his periodic bouts of delirium, the dead had appeared. The Chavers came for him, snapping with beetles and sprouting grave moss. Their hands reached with insane stroking motions, dragging him to their cozy wormhole in the earth. This vision had plagued him since the discovery of the Chavers, and finally, when Eva died, the experience became unbearable. He found within his thoughts, for the first time, a horror to which even the terrors of withdrawal were preferable.