Cyprian was still watching the ground, the delicate tracery of the beer finding its way into the crust of earth. He frowned as though something in what he saw gripped his thoughts. He knew when he looked up that it would begin, and he was, now, in no hurry. He was lazy. He was filled with a glad black sense of this moment’s inevitability, so much so that he mumbled, in satisfaction, “It had to happen.”
“So you want this, you get it,” said Fidelis, his voice flat.
And at those words Cyprian walked sideways, away from the vehicle, and then slowly raised his head to stare again into the white-blue eyes. He removed his hat in the lock of their gaze, shrugged off his jacket, rolled his own sleeves up, too. And there the men stood now, arms loose and ready by their sides, the one dark and tense, his body lean with eager strength, the other solid with power. Their strengths were very different, and they planned accordingly, each thinking how to maneuver the other in order to use his own talents to the best effect, but that all came to nothing. Fidelis, for the second time that day, broke his pact with discipline. An unexpected blind fury took him at the thought of the wasted beer, and he lunged forward in a low crouch intending to simply grab Cyprian and smash him against the side of the car. But Cyprian had already decided that he wouldn’t let the butcher get that close. He crouched too, and with a sudden hook cracked Fidelis from under the jaw, giving the punch a spin to torque his neck, and then Cyprian danced backward to assess the damage.
Not much. But the punch snapped Fidelis from his loose rage, restored his grip on his temper, and caused him to step back and gauge his next move with narrowed eyes. The two men circled with a fixed intensity now, not fury so much as a cold meditative watchfulness — for everything, for all the nothing, for something they would not admit to until it was over, for the shame of it, the foolishness of fighting over a woman neither of them had any claim on, or would admit to fighting over in the first place. And then right there, between that one punch and the next move that Fidelis made, between the intention and their half-realized urge, the boys’ thin yells of panic came to the men clear as birds’ cries across the dead grass of the fields. Seeing the men in the yard, the boys’ cries grew more desperate and shrill.
Fidelis put his fists down with a sideways look of warning at Cyprian, and the two, their attention now completely riveted to the obvious sounds of some catastrophe, strode toward the children. Roman was hoarse and gasping, Emil bawled out something about the hill. Erich, white and stiff as a cutout of a boy, plunged along behind on his short, little sausage-fat legs. When the men neared, Fidelis suddenly experienced a wave of sick intuition and broke into a run. So he was kneeling with Emil as the boys tried to tell him everything — the fort, the hill, how the hill sagged, the room inside of it, Markus — and he didn’t at first understand. It was Cyprian who grasped it all and said, “Shovels — we’ve got to bring shovels.” And it was Cyprian who instructed Delphine, who came running after, to gather up as many men as could be found. It was Cyprian, also, who said to her, out of Fidelis’s hearing, to be quick about it, and bring the doctor, too, that he thought Markus was buried alive.
ONLY IT DIDN’T feel like that from inside the earth. When the thunder of the hill’s collapse did not kill him, but wedged him in a fragment of space beneath two buckled boards, Markus felt very sleepy. The dirt had closed him in its fist. He wasn’t hurt, though he couldn’t move, and he wasn’t dying. Air seeped into his lungs but it was a sleeping gas, he thought, wearily passing into a dreamless fuzz of childish exhaustion. It was like when he was very small, the time his fever broke, and his mother curled around him in the cool blankets. She held her hand on his forehead and rocked him. He thought her hand was there now. And behind him the comfort of her great dark body. He was falling asleep. They were in the hull of a boat of silence, and blackness, and they were rocking to the end of the world.
* * *
THERE WAS JUST ENOUGH light for the men to see the shape of the hill, and to make out the doorway in the earth and see that it was shut. Fidelis threw himself forward at once and began to shovel with a maddened strength, but then Cyprian put his hands on his arms and stopped him. It took all of his strength to stop the butcher, to hold his arms. The men looked at each other in the shadow, Fidelis’s eye rolled white, and Cyprian said, clearly, urgently, “Don’t — you’ll bring down the rest of the hill. We must go very carefully.”
He showed him the tools that the boys used, and put the broken hoe into Fidelis’s hands. Then he and Fidelis knelt and began to enlarge the tunnel by scratching at the earth with light, furious movements. As fast as Fidelis bit the earth away, Cyprian gathered and pulled it onto the canvas and hauled it out. And the boys in their silent terror dumped it somewhere and brought back the canvas. The dirt that had fallen in was easy to remove, but the men had to enlarge the opening to accommodate their larger selves and so, by the time Delphine and the lanterns and the rescue party got there, the two men had barely disappeared into the opening of the hill, and they were drenched in the sweat of effort. As Fidelis inched into the hill, working from his stomach, his great arms straining forward at the shut seams of ground, he called to Markus.
Fidelis’s cries bounced off the dirt and struck Cyprian, but the other man did not take them in. He’d heard the sounds of the dying on the battlefield, the huge collective hell shrieks the mud gave after bloody encounters, and he did not react. From the past, he knew it was best not to let despair near, so he did not. Those outside the hill were not so disciplined. The whole singing club had gathered, and it was a terrible and useless meeting. The men could do nothing but mutter logistics and touch the hill on all sides and wonder whether there was another, better way to rescue the boy. They were unnerved and then worn down by the butcher’s constant hoarse cries to the point where some openly wept or turned away and put their foreheads against the trunks of the trees and waited — for that was all there was to do: just wait, and keep the lanterns going, and despair and speculate. The men inside the hill now would not quit or accept any relief.
The boards that the boys had used were guides, and as they made their tortuous way along, Cyprian righted the boards and set them up to bear, he hoped, the weight of the ground again. The top of the tunnel scraped along their backs, and if it should go they would not die instantly, he knew, but slowly feel the life and air crushed out of them. Still, he continued on behind the butcher into the center of the earth, until they entered a small passageway that had survived the collapse. They forced their bodies through it, now thoroughly inside the center of the hill, and Fidelis said, Gott Verdienst, and stretched his arm, strained his entire being forward, and touched the sole of Markus’s shoe.
Cyprian felt the shock ripple through the butcher’s body, and he grabbed the man’s ankle. Wait, he said, wait, for the earth was coming down in tiny clumps around them, threatening to give, and if the butcher pulled hard the boy, who was probably dead after all, and whose body might be entirely buried, could dislodge the entire frail board system. Or say the boy was alive. Then they’d all be buried together. Wait, said Cyprian. Just feel for his position. And so the butcher edged forward, pushed more dirt aside, made a narrow slot for him to straighten his shaking arm. He stretched to feel along the boy’s side, groped gingerly until he ascertained, with a wild gasp, that Markus had breath. But also that the boy was halfway buried and that the margin of space in which he survived was held up by only the flimsiest means, board on board, an accident of the collapse. And when the butcher understood how perilously close the boards were to giving, Cyprian felt the shock and fear communicate itself through Fidelis’s body.