As they shuffled along the corridor Herbert told Christine that he had folded and sealed his imaginary letter of protest about the train and was mailing it in his head to papers in Frankfurt, Hamburg, West Berlin, Munich, and Bonn; to three picture magazines, a trade journal, an engineering review, a powerful newsweekly, and a famous TV commentator — but not to any part of the opposition press. He wanted to throw rocks at official bungling, but the same rocks must not strike the elected government. His letter mentioned high-handedness, lives disrupted without thought or care, blind obedience to obsolete orders, pigheaded officials, buck-passing, locked toilets, shortage of drinking water, absence of someone responsible, danger to health, indifference to others. Among the victims he mentioned a small child, an old woman, a visiting foreigner who would be left with a poor impression, a pregnant American, and a tall girl who wore nothing but size-eleven sandals and a short linen frock, who was traveling almost naked, in fact.
Hand in hand, perhaps wanting to avoid further instructions, Christine and little Bert made for the barbed wire they had been told to avoid. They walked along a sandy road that was strewn with candy wrappers, cigarette butts, bottle caps, and bent straws, like any sightseers’ road anywhere. Little Bert’s hand felt as soft as the sand underfoot and as grubby as the rubbish on it. His natural surroundings were rust, wires, rain-washed warnings, sweet melting foods.
“Your father is getting you something to drink,” she said, though he had not complained of thirst or of anything, and seemed content with promises. She showed him frontier posts looped with rusted wire like birthday ribbons. “You can die of tetanus if you catch your hand on it,” she said. They stood on a height of land from which she could see two little villages flanking a smoking factory and a few scattered farmhouses with their windows boarded up on one side. No one in those houses could lean on the sill and observe little Bert, or Christine, or the barefooted old woman cutting grass for rabbits right to the first strands of rust, or a couple moving along at a crouch because they were hunting for mushrooms. Stern cautions against doing this had been nailed here and there, but people were used to these by now.
Little Bert began to play at hopping off the path. “You may step off one side, but not the other,” she warned him. He no more questioned this than he had the meaning of tetanus. He appeared to have an inborn knowledge of what the frontier was about.
He was bored, however. “What are you looking at?” he said, with a return of his Paris whine. Being small he could not see farther than the first barrier. She counted off for him a fence, a tract of low scrub, fence again, scrub, more fence, deep-ditch trap, fence, trap again probably, fences clean and bright in the sun as they moved farther east. Shading her eyes, she found herself looking at a man in uniform who was looking at her through field glasses. He looked at her and at little Bert, who was tugging her hand and wailing, “Let’s walk.”
The child’s bratty voice made another man turn; he was a civilian with a scarred hairline, strolling along the sandy road too with his hands behind his back. He seemed to measure everything he gazed on — seemed to estimate, memorize, and add to a sum of previous knowledge. He knew about the smoking factory on the other side and about its parasite villages; he remembered when there had been the rumor, years ago, that the factory, with its technicians and engineers, was to be dismantled and moved. No one had told him so: He was too little then to be trusted. He knew something had frightened the adults; he could read their mute predictions. All bicycles had been confiscated, even the children’s. He had walked up the main street to the top of his village, which was shabby and countrylike. You could still find milk and an egg sometimes if you were not an informer. There he saw Marie sitting on a wheelbarrow, with her hair cut like a boy’s (lice were rampant), blond and ragged; she was eating bread — or rather, sucking on a wide crust spread with boiled rhubarb. Bare dirty feet, eyes in the distance, dreamy: He thought later that he had seen clouds on her eyes, like clouds on a clean sky. But perhaps all that her eyes had reflected was stupidity. She swung her feet, which did not reach the ground because of the tilt of the barrow. The geese Marie was there to watch watched Sigi approaching with pure blue eyes outlined in orange that could have been drawn with a wax crayon, so thick was the tracing and the color so true. The geese looked at him with one eye at a time, the way the Ancient Egyptians looked at people. His mother caught up with him before he could say anything final to Marie, either “I love you” or “Good-bye.” He had been told not to play with Marie and to keep away from that part of the village — he had been told again only this morning. His mother was looking for milk. She hid the canister in a basket, under a napkin camouflaged with the wild sorrel and plantain they ate as vegetables now.
Sigi left Marie still pensive, still occupied with her bread crust. He walked with his hand in his mother’s. His mother said, “Did the Marie ask you any questions?” But Marie hardly ever spoke. His mother said that minding geese was too big a job for a little child; a long prison sentence was the punishment now for misappropriation of domestic fowl.
He was prepared for the end, perhaps the end of everything living, and he knew that endings were in blood. He decided to take to his execution Peoples of the World, a school prize of his father’s, which was in perfect condition; his father never smudged or creased anything he owned and washed his hands before taking down a book. In this book were the Ancient Egyptians looking with one eye at a time precisely like Marie’s geese. He closed his eyes so that his last memory would be of Marie.
“Why are you walking with your eyes shut?” asked his mother.
“I’m pretending to be blind.”
“God will strike you blind if you play such wicked games.” Normally she would have gone on to say exactly why God would want to do a thing like that. Her abrupt silence was part of the end of everything.
When she woke him up that night and dressed him (he could dress himself) she was still tongue-tied, and when he asked something she put her hand on his mouth.
“Tape it?” said his father, of Sigi’s mouth. She shook her head. “God help us if you don’t keep it shut, Sigi,” said his father, bringing Him into it again. After he was dressed they gave him a glass of milk and told him to drink all of it. But they could not wait for him to finish drinking and when he was only halfway through his father removed the glass. His parents wore heavy coats and carried knapsacks. Sigi took Peoples of the World from under his pillow.
“No, you will need both hands,” his father said. He pinched Sigi’s arm, like the witch testing Hansel, and asked, “Will he be warm enough?”
The signs of the end of the world were being dressed in the night, the milky glass left on the table, and his mother’s silence. She did not even ask why he had taken Peoples of the World to bed. Much later he fell asleep again. His father was carrying him, and woke him suddenly by setting him on his feet in a plowed field. Unable to move, paralyzed, he heard a strange man cursing him, and suddenly his mother cried from another corner of darkness, “Run!” So he plunged at a crouch between ropes of barbed wire as if he had been trained for this all his life. The man cursing him for his slowness grabbed Sigi and dragged him facedown. He looked up to see who it was and left a piece of his scalp on a wire. No matter how he combed his hair ever after the scar reappeared.
They went to live in Essen. He hated the food, school, traffic, accents, streets. No grass, no air to breathe. He would say to himself, “When I turn this corner, Marie will be here.” Years later somebody sent a long letter with news of the village. Part of it was, “As for the Marie, she is so fat and stupid she falls off her bicycle.”