afraid to breathe, afraid of missing some vibration in the atmosphere. Her heart is too loud, her damned heart, getting in the way of everything. Why doesn’t it just stop. Elfriede shuts her eyes. In the space between heartbeats, she strains, she reaches.
Sob.
To the right, to the right. Elfriede remembers in a flash, the summerhouse.
It’s possible that Johann was conceived in the summerhouse. There are other candidates, of course, but that’s the interesting one. A hot, dreamlike afternoon at the end of August. Elfriede, by now accustomed to her husband, watches him hoist himself ashore after making his daily swim across the lake. Briefly, he looks like a god. The sun shines on his hair, his thick muscles run with water. (Of course he swims naked, he’s a Romantic.) He catches her gaze. Drops his towel, clasps her, carries her into the summerhouse, and makes love to her twice in the suffocating heat. Twice. The perspiring Elfriede, fastened to some cushions by a hundred and twenty kilos of heroic bone and muscle, gazes through the blurred, sultry windowpanes toward the sky. A dream world, long ago.
A month or so later, she realized her courses were late. So throughout the rest of her pregnancy, whenever she and Gerhard walked past the summerhouse, arm in arm, he smiled and said, Look, that’s where we made our son, my dearest love, my Liebling, don’t you remember? Elfriede merely ducked her head and neither agreed nor disagreed. After all, she and Gerhard had frequent intercourse throughout the end of August, and only once—well, twice—on the chaise longue in the summerhouse. Also, what if the baby was a girl?
On the other hand, Gerhard was right about the baby being a boy. So maybe he was right about its place of conception, as well. Anyway, it’s a good story.
This is not August. It’s October, and Gerhard lies dying in his bed upstairs, and nothing is a dream anymore, it is all reality. This son she scarcely knows, this child conceived in sunshine, now weeps in the nearby darkness, and Elfriede’s arms and face and feet are numb with cold. She makes for the summerhouse. She can’t hear the sounds of weeping anymore, but maybe she never did. Maybe the sounds originated in her own mind, because her mind needed to hear them. Maybe she doesn’t expect to find anything in the summerhouse except some old cushions, some old dreams.
Still, when she finds the entrance with her hands, when she sweeps inside and sees a white head bobbing, hears a small voice crying, she feels no surprise.
She kneels on the stone floor and asks him what’s wrong.
“My private,” he says.
Elfriede experiences a moment of bemusement. “Your private?”
“My soldier. I left him here and he’s gone!”
“Oh, dear. Oh, dear. This is terrible. Has he run off, do you think? Deserted his post?”
“No, no. He’s a brave soldier. He wouldn’t do that.”
“Then we shall just keep looking, won’t we?”
“I looked everywhere.”
“Then we look everywhere twice. Come on.”
On their hands and knees, Elfriede and Johann dredge every inch of stone, every seam of floor and wall, until Elfriede’s fingers discover a small metal object wedged between the cushions on the chaise longue. Still too dark to see it properly, but Johann, clutching the figure, joyfully declares his missing private found.
“Now let’s return to your room, before Nurse finds out you’ve stolen away,” Elfriede says.
Already Johann’s rubbing his eyes. “I sleepy,” he tells her, losing his grammar to fatigue.
So Elfriede places her hands around his warm ribs and lifts him to her hip. “I’ll carry you.”
They emerge from the summerhouse to discover a fine pink light on the horizon, a smokiness in the air. Dawn steals over them. Elfriede turns her face so she breathes nothing but the scent of her son’s hair. Ahead, the schloss rises from the earth in shades of gray. A lamp illuminates the master’s bedroom, and Elfriede experiences a shudder of fear for the abandoned Gerhard, though not regret. If her husband’s died of fever during this past hour, she will never regret leaving him to die alone. Not when she’s saved a son, their son.
Because servants wake before dawn, the lights also burn on the third floor. Which is the nursery? Elfriede isn’t sure. She carries Johann up the steps to the terrace—he’s now asleep, his body slack against hers—and makes for the French door, still ajar, just as a woman flies outside in a blur of white nightgown.