“He didn’t have much. It’s hard to get.”
“You got it before. You can get it again.”
There was nothing he could say to that.
One piece the next day made three, which meant the vastness of seven and a half pieces to go—now the dead woman could sit up and even hobble a little, and he got her a coat and some skirts to hide all the red splotches from where her body had lain on the table. His dread tripled when she said, “It’s cold here. Take me home with you.”
“You can’t. My father will find out.”
“This place is full of dead people. I don’t like it.”
“But you’re dead,” said Anton, nearly crying from frustration.
“Just one night.”
There was nothing for it. He went to her late that night, and she leaned on his shoulder through the streets of Stuttgart where nobody noticed them but a policeman who said, “Go home!” when he saw them both. The woman was heavy and smelled a little sickly, that familiar chilly smell of dead body. When they got to Anton’s house, she clambered through his window then lay on his bed.
Anton made to sleep on the floor, rolling up his unraveling jersey to put underneath his head. They both lay in awkward, uncomfortable silence.
“I just wanted a cigarette,” she said. “I was going to pay him, you know; I don’t beg. I had some apples that weren’t soft.”
He did not know what to say to this, but felt like he had to say something. “Were you very old?” asked Anton.
“Nineteen,” said the woman—so, yes, quite old.
The floor was hard, so he was surprised when he did somehow get to sleep. He was woken up by a noise like wet hiccups: the dead woman was crying. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.” Anton put his clammy hand up into hers. After a little while she stopped crying, but held his hand until he was nearly asleep.
“My name is Elke,” she said, startling him awake.
“What?”
“My name is Elke. When they put me away,” she said, “don’t let them call me anything else.”
In the thin morning sunlight she was gone and he was tucked up in the blankets. Truthfully, he was relieved.
Six pieces. His American had given him another three to make him go away when he found him talking to an American girl, one of the ones with stockings and shiny hair who came with the USO. The day after that, Anton couldn’t find him, and Sunday would come soon, and he didn’t want his dinner because he was too busy thinking about ways to get more chewing gum. That suited Anton, because when his father found out that he had asked the French doctor for candy he got a wallop. Anton didn’t really want to look him in the eye.
He went to the gardens of the houses that had been bombed, picking flowers. It was a sad bunch of woody roses and nosegay, but when he gave it to his soldier, who was still standing in the shadow of the factory wall, he was touched. “Oh, son,” he said. He took one of the roses and put it in his buttonhole, waving it to be admired, and Anton smiled wanly. “I have a brother.” He fumbled with the German as he said it: Mein Bruder? Mein kleinen Bruder? Now Anton felt sick. “Little brother. Just like you.”
He pinched Anton’s cheek and laughed at his grimace, then gave him a whole packet of Juicy Fruit. “Brush your tooths,” he said.
Eleven pieces—that was eleven—he stuffed the packet down his shirt and ran all the way to the bakery. His fingers fumbled with the key. As he flung himself down the stairs, his dead woman was already sitting up, gaunt and waiting, and they ripped open the packet together with impatient hands. The last piece he broke in half with his fingernail. She gobbled it up with the rest.
“All right,” she said. “That’s good.” She swung her legs over the side of the pallet and wrapped herself in the skirt and coat, pulling the collar up over her punctured neck. Anton didn’t quite know what he’d been expecting; she was still very dead, though now she walked tall and graceful and smooth. “Let’s go, shall we?”
“Where are we going?” he asked.
But he already knew.
Outside in the bustle of Stuttgart nobody looked at them. He held tightly to her hand, the skin slipping a little underneath his palm, past the anthill piles of rubble from the houses and past the camp where the Russian men fought. He led her to the abandoned factory with its thrusting smokestacks, and there was his American soldier: still with the rose tucked inside his buttonhole, grinding out the butt of his cigarette as he prepared to leave.
At first his mouth rounded in a greeting for Anton, but then he saw the dead woman. The coat had slipped open to show her dead and naked throat, the squeezed bruises of her—her chest, her waxen skin.
His American soldier screamed. She was on him even as his gun clattered bullets into her body and she forced his face into the wall—pushed her fingers into his mouth so that his screams spluttered into a wet muffle. Anton thought that she put her mouth to the place between his soldier’s neck and shoulder to kiss him, but then there were wet gristly sounds that were definitely not kissing.
He pretended himself into one of the rubble piles safely buried in the rocks. He put himself into a monster ant and walked around in the dark, his bristly body scraping up against the bodies of other monster ants. The dead woman chewed wet, noisy mouthfuls, swallowing in grunts, hand rooting around somewhere at the soldier’s belly and into his shirt. Their bodies moved together as one.
When it was over, his dead woman’s belly was grossly distended and there were only scraps of cloth left in her hands, and he couldn’t believe how she’d done it—and she couldn’t either, because she had to be a little sick next to the wall. He did not look. Her mouth was dripping red and she tried in vain to wipe it, but when that didn’t work all she did was cry and cry like a child.
“I was always going to be in the ground with him in me,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure, that’s all. I just wanted to make sure.” And then she was a little sick again.
Anton went to see her Sunday when she was buried. Before she was wrapped up in her sheet she said, “You will come and see me, won’t you? You don’t hate me?” and could only fall asleep when he held her hand. Perhaps it wasn’t sleeping. He sewed her up in a grubby shroud as he had seen his father do, and he was there when they put her at the crossroads grave for suicides. Her and the American. With a stone he expended some effort scratching letters onto a piece of wood, and when he was done had some splinters and E-L-K-E for his pains.
When he made the walk back home into Stuttgart and to the bakery next to the Red Cross hospital, he tried to imagine the monster ants again, but they didn’t come. It was as though he had thought about them too hard and they had burnt up in his brain.
There must have been something in his face when he met his father at the door of the bakery morgue. “I forgive you, darling,” said his father, and put one arm around him. “Just stop acting like one of the beggar-boys from now on. Look! I have something for you.”
From one of his capacious pockets, his father drew something thin and silvery. He presented it to Anton with the air of a magician: two sticks of Juicy Fruit in a bit of their wrapper, smelling as sweet and as sickly as they always did. “There,” he said proudly. “Since you like it so much.”
He did not understand why Anton gagged.
’Til Death Do Us Part
Shaun Jeffrey
“It’s her, Dad, I swear it is. Over there, it’s Mum.”
I exhaled slowly and looked at my fourteen-year-old son, Tim, as he excitedly pointed across the street. Before he could say any more, I took hold of his shoulder and turned him toward me. “You know it isn’t her. She’s dead. We buried her. You know that.”