A week later, on June 7th, in the evening’s newspapers throughout Germany,

Stormtrooper Chief Ernst Roehm made official the announcement that Ruprecht Jabloner had heard rumored:

“I have decided to follow the advice of my doctors and take a cure in order to restore my energies which have been severely strained by a painful nervous complaint. My place will be taken by the Chief of the Leadership Office, Obergruppenfuhrer von Krausser.

I expect the Stormtroops to return on 1 August completely rested and refreshed in order to serve in those honourable capacities which nation and fatherland expect of them. If the enemies of the Stormtroops live in hope that the Stormtroops will not return, or will return only in part, from their leave, we will allow them this brief pleasurable anticipation. They will receive the appropriate reply at the time and in the manner most suitable. The Stormtroops are and remain Germany’s destiny.”

Two days later, Lisel sat very still in the cabseat of the truck 200 kilometers south of Berlin. She was so upset she did not see or hear anything Horst’s uncle said; he was driving her to Weimar for the train back to Berlin. Two weeks at home had made her strong enough to leave, and she knew her mother had desperately wanted her to go.

When Lisel was upset, she did not feel the hot waves, like water, break against her from people who touched her, or brushed past her, or who put a coffee cup in her hand. Her hands were folded tightly in her lap in Horst’s truck. The 60 year old man was none too happy to be driving her, but Horst had called all the way from Berlin and said that Lisel’s wishes were to be obeyed. Uncle Karl could give orders to Horst’s mother, his sister, but he had to take them from his nephew.

As Uncle Karl drove through the fertile countryside, he told himself the good of it was a Saturday spent doing something he could tell about later over a stein in the beerhall in Buttelstadt. He would say (he rehearsed in his mind as he avoided a dog on the road), “The departure of a looney from Buttelstadt is an event; the arrival of a looney in Berlin is history!” Uncle Karl smiled to himself at his cleverness and the approval his friends would show him. They said he had wasted his talents as a farmer, he should have been a writer with his wit. But he said, “It’s better to grow food people can eat than write books they have to burn!” Everyone took it as proof of his cleverness.

“No. Stop!” Lisel said.

“What is it?” Uncle Karl asked. He kept his voice kind, for Horst’s sake. He was also somewhat afraid of the girl’s new strangeness. She had always been merely a very pretty, simple girl from a poor family, father died in the Great War, an object of pity, not fear, until now.

“Not south,” she said. “Please drive north.”

He tightened his hands on the steering wheel. Who was paying for the gasoline for all this? Horst? Ha! The look on the girl’s face, however, convinced him to turn the truck around. “Back home?” he said, trying to sound understanding.

“No,” she commanded. She would suit Horst, after all. “Just north, the road to Sommerda. I went there with Mr. Entrater.”

He obeyed, shaking his head all the way.

“There’s nothing here,” he said along the narrow country road.

A dense crowding of young beech trees shaded their route. Behind the young trees, there were bigger trees where loud insects and birds argued over territory on the fine spring day. The air was filled with sweetness, or wildflowers and wet earth. Uncle Karl breathed in, sticking his head out the truck window. In the unseen distance was the stump of an ancient oak that the poet Goethe was supposed to have often sought out.

“That’s no farm smell,” he sniffed, “it’s just the bees making honey.”

She tried to smile, but the feeling was coming on her like dark clouds. She looked out the window. The sky was high and blue, and the only clouds were the fat lambkin kind that one would watch change shapes in the wind.

She seemed to see through the blue sky, through the plump clouds, as if they were a curtain on a stage gone transparent from stage lighting. Behind the painted sky it was dark and deep, cavelike. It was cold, and Lisel shivered.

“Stop,” she whispered hoarsely. Then more loudly, “Stop!”

“Oh,” Uncle Karl swallowed a curse, “we’re in the middle of —-ing nowhere, Lisel.”

“I have to get out,” she whimpered.

He drew over to the side of the road. It was midday. He pulled the truck emergency brake and watched her open the door, jump down from the cab, and run through the young trees into the woods as if drawn on a string, jerkily, like a marionette. He tried to believe she had to take a leak or maybe had the runs, but she gave him the chills. He relaxed when she was gone. He was glad, like an anvil had been taken out of the seat that he been tilting the ride, wearing down the front left tire on her side. He took off his blackcloth cap and ran his fingers through his damp hair. It was a warm day; now she was gone, he felt the heat.

She whimpered all the way through the trees, slipping on mushrooms that had grown up overnight in the wet. She had hoped the other time, with Mr. Entrater, driving south from Sommerda where he said, he said? He said his wife’s family but she was dead, and Lisel knew there had been a child, a daughter, three or four years old, she had seen her – Lisel had hoped the other time it was the beating that had brought on the strangeness. The horrible sight.

“Weimar,” she said out loud, trying to break the spell. She could have been in Weimar by now, sitting on a wooden bench at the train station. Instead, she stood in a column of sunshine facing a silvery beech. A robin flew past her sight, a blur of orange brown.

Beyond the beech she could feel, like gusts of a breeze, the open, unbroken field, she could see what she would see if she took only a few more steps pointed wire, a windswept hill flattened by many feet, striped cloth grey and white and yellow stars. A galaxy of yellow stars. There was the smell again in the air. Of burning feathers. She felt dizzy, her tongue gagged the back of her mouth; she reached out to steady herself against the beech—it was smooth against her palm.

“What is the matter?” Uncle Karl said behind her, out of breath. She turned to stare at him but the light fell through the trees in a strange way, and she could not see the man clearly. She frowned.

“You screamed. What is wrong?”

She turned and pointed towards the low rise and rundown buildings only she could see.

“You’re nuts,” he said. He moved toward her to reach the extended hand and lead her back to the truck.

“No, look!” she said fiercly, grasping his thick hand first and pulling him with uncanny strength. She pulled him several steps till he trotted alongside her curiously. They reached an opening in the woods, and the girl’s blue eyes opened wide as saucers as she stared at a grassy flat rimmed with dark trees. She put up both her hands to hold off a wall about to fall on her. “NO!” she screamed.

She felt him catch her as she fell, but when she turned to look into his face, it had changed horribly, first into a black cloud electric with blue and white sparks, then into a hollowed skullface, the same face she had seen before.

She squeezed her eyes shut, but could still smell the stink of burning feathers rising off his charred body. Then,mercifully, nothing.

Uncle Karl lifted the unconscious girl easily, and he thought of what he had heard the three Berliners had done. If it came to it, he was now ready to ride the train with her all the way to Berlin. Everybody knew the mother didn’t want her anymore; she thought the girl was the Devil. Perhaps she was right. If so, then goddammit, he felt pity for the Devil.

There was only a small village nearby. Could he find a doctor there somewhere in Buchenwald?