Somebody would know. Somebody would find out. The Juicy Fruit paper crackled in his fingers. When he thought he had run away enough and could not see the cloth factory any more, he sat on a pile of rubble and crammed all of the gum into his mouth. It made a wet and noisy ball as he chewed it. He swallowed, hard, and it made a lump in his throat all the way down.
His father worked in the Red Cross hospital that the French doctors had set up. Well—that wasn’t quite true. He did not work in the hospital, but in the basement of the empty bakery next door where they had the morgue. When the doctors and nurses were tired of them and had done all that they could, Anton’s father washed the bodies of the dead. So did Anton, as the hospital was small.
It was an odd occupation and he liked it. He wasn’t one of those boys who ran around and shouted; he was a boy who liked looking at things. Looking at the dead people was easy now. His father told him they were all going to Heaven, except maybe the Nazis, so you didn’t have to feel bad about them. When he passed by the hospital to go to the bakery morgue, he saw rows of whey-faced women there.
“I don’t want you going out at night,” said his father, washing toes. “All these Moroccan soldiers, those Tunisians, attacking our girls. It’s disgusting. You come here before six o’clock, Anton.”
Anton thought about it.
“Why is it only women?”
His father made that tch! noise which meant he didn’t really want to answer the question. “Your hair’s getting too long,” he said. “I will cut it.”
“They do things to them, don’t they?”
Wrong question. Anton was set to wring out sponges.
He kept thinking about the gum in his stomach rather than anything else. Swallowing all those pieces really would kill him. He would drop down dead, which was a relief, because then he wouldn’t ever have to meet his American soldier again or think about the woman. He thought about the woman’s white, bloodied legs and split lips. He thought about the unbuttoned front of the American’s trousers. Sweat prickled on his palms.
“You smell like sweets,” said his father, when he was done with the sponges. “No more! Stop annoying the soldiers for them. The Americans, they’ve liberated us. Stuttgart was proudly outside the Reich for years. Now we have our dignity back—if the Tunisians would just go and stop their disgusting business.”
“What if it wasn’t Tunisians?” asked Anton, but his father didn’t understand.
The next day he found himself by the factory again. His legs took him there, unwilling, and he watched the American soldier fold a woman over some abandoned crates. Anton thought it might have been the same woman. He did not talk to Anton this time, just rummaged in his pocket and tossed chewing gum to him like you would for a clamorous seagull. Then he went back to his work. Anton’s mouth tired of chewing by the time he got back home. He had started burying the wrappers in the rubble piles, like they were for the monster ants.
One night, his father washed the body of a woman and he realized with a start it was his woman—the American soldier’s woman, that was: it had taken him a bit to notice because her throat was torn in a long raggedy line terminating halfway across the neck. His father fancied himself a bit of a coroner. “Suicide,” he said, shaking his head. “See how the first hole here is deep, and the rest of the gash is much shallower? See how it is a hole, not a cut? Ah, Anton, what a waste. Commend her to God. “
Her hips and her thighs were all one bruise. Her wrists had bracelets of fat red marks with flecks of dried blood beneath her fingernails. Anton did not breathe.
“Poor lady,” his father said. “She is somewhere happy now.”
She did not look happy. Her jaw was clenched shut. There was a silvery fleck at the corner of her mouth, and his father reached out to try to wipe it away. It didn’t wipe. His fingers were very gentle as he pressed on her lips and opened them up, and took a thin wafer out from underneath the swollen tongue. “Those nurses are being lazy,” said Anton’s father, and held up the wafer to the light. A striped Juicy Fruit wrapper, oily with blood.
Anton had to close his eyes and count to ten, which he had not needed to do in the morgue since he was eight. His father must have seen, because he said quietly: “Go out and get some air, darling. Not too far. Stay by the door.”
The night was dark and cold. From down the street he heard raucous voices, infantrymen. Anton hugged his knees to his chest until his father came outside to take him home.
On the third day his American soldier was smoking indolently by the chimney wall. “What,” he said laughingly, “now ‘haben Sie cigarette’?” Anton shook his head. “Good boy,” said the American. “Good. No smoke! Makes you sick.”
There was only one piece of gum for him now. He clutched it in his fist and saw every policeman on the corner now as he walked, every woman, imagined their staring through his fingers to see what was inside. The giant ants settled in their holes underneath the untidy piles of brick, muttering about chewing gum and Anton, and he took the key from beneath the bakery flowerpot to open up the morgue.
Nobody had come for the woman because nobody knew who she was. There were many people in Stuttgart like that now. She would be written down as Lieschen and put at the crossroads grave come Sunday when the priest came. Anton touched her chilly fingers gently, as his father had touched them gently, and then he prized open the mouth to put the piece of chewing gum within. He could hide it there, inside her.
He wet himself when the dead woman began chewing. The soft rectangular strip mulched between her pink-stained teeth as she rolled it around in her mouth, gray eyes flicking open as she spread it on her palate and sucked out the flavour as Anton always did. He was aware of hot trickles down his legs.
When she swallowed, there was a brief flash of pink in that ugly hole at her throat. The dead woman was staring at the ceiling, and he was sure that once she turned that gaze on him he would be killed immediately.
“Tell me how much you got,” she said.
Her voice was a little bubbly, whistling through that awful hole, but otherwise sounded perfectly normal. Anton could not speak. She said, “You ate his food. How much did you eat?”
Because his brain would not work, he had to count on his trembling fingers. He had liked math when he had been at school. Five pieces to a packet, which meant—“Ten pieces,” he said, and recalled further. “And one half. Ten and a half. Since Tuesday.”
She was silent. He tried to be brave about it. “Am I going to die?” he said.
“Ten pieces,” she said without answering, “and a half. That will be enough, I think. Go and get me ten pieces and a half as payment for your staring—and change your pants.”
Ten (and a half) pieces of chewing gum was an unbelievable amount. For one, he had gotten ten-and-a-half pieces only by accident in the first place, but fear made him trek all over Stuttgart in desperation thinking about how he was going to do it. When the next day his American soldier said, “No rations!” he nearly wept like a baby of five. His soldier must have felt bad, because he ruffled Anton’s curls instead. Though he’d had a bath just that week, Anton had to go and wash his hair after.
The next day he got two pieces from the American, and two from a French doctor who knew his father—impertinence his father would have smacked him for, but this was a matter of life and death. Anton snuck down to the morgue and fed them to the dead woman piece by piece.
She spat out the two from the French doctor—“No good,” she said—but ate the two from the soldier. Her eyelids fluttered and her fingers twitched, slowly unbending, stiff toes curling inward underneath her sheet. “You’re slow.”