Impossible Things

  I take out the folded piece of paper Dr. Funkenheld gave me and lay it on the wireless. He comes nearly every night to see if I have gotten an answer to his message, and I take off the headphones and let him listen to the static. I tell him that we cannot get through, but even though that is true, it is not the real reason I have not sent the message. I am afraid of the commandant finding out. I am afraid of being sent to the front.

  I have compromised by writing a letter to the professor that I studied medicine with in Jena, but I have not gotten an answer from him yet, and so I must go on pretending to the doctor.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Muller says. He sits on the wireless, swinging his leg. He picks up the paper with the symptoms on it and holds it to the flame of the Primus stove. I grab for it, but it is already burning redly. “I have sent the message for you.”

  “I don’t believe you. Nothing has been getting out.”

  “Didn’t you notice the northern lights did not appear last night?”

  I have not noticed. The ointment the doctor gave to me makes everything look red at night, and I do not believe in Muller’s theories. “Nothing is getting out now,” I say, and hold the headphones out to him so he can hear the static. He listens, still swinging his leg. “You will get us both in trouble. Why did you do it?”

  “I was curious about it.” If we are sent up to the front, his curiosity will kill us. He will take apart a land mine to see how it works. “We cannot get in trouble for sending military messages. I said the commandant was afraid it was a poisonous gas the Russians were using.” He swings his leg and grins because now I am the curious one.

  “Well, did you get an answer?”

  “Yes,” he says maddeningly, and puts the headphones on. “It is not a poisonous gas.”

  I shrug as if I do not care whether I get an answer or not. I put on my cap and the muffler my mother knitted for me and open the door. “I am going out to see if the mail has come. Perhaps there will be a letter there from my professor.”

  “Nature of disease unknown,” Muller shouts against the sudden force of he snow. “Possibly impetigo or glandular disorder.”

  I grin back at him and say, “If there is a package from my mother, I will give you half of what is in it.”

  “Even if it is your gloves?”

  “No, not if it is my gloves,” I say, and go to find the doctor.

  At the dressing station they tell me he has gone to see Schwarzschild and give me directions to the artillery staff’s headquarters. It is not very far, but it is snowing and my hands are already cold. I go to the quartermaster’s and ask him if the mail has come in.

  There is a new recruit there, trying to fix Eisner’s motorcycle. He has parts spread out on the ground all around him in a circle. He points to a burlap sack and says, “That is all the mail there is. Look through it yourself.”

  Snow has gotten into the sack and melted. The ink on the envelopes has run, and I squint at them, trying to make out the names. My eyes begin to hurt. There is not a package from my mother or a letter from my professor, but there is a letter for Lieutenant Schwarzschild. The return address says “Doctor.” Perhaps he has written to a doctor himself.

  “I am delivering a message to the artillery headquarter,” I say, showing the letter to the recruit. “I will take this up, too.” The recruit nods and goes on working.

  It has gotten dark while I was inside, and it is snowing harder. I jam my hands in the ice-stiff pockets of my coat and start to the artillery headquarters in the rear. It is pitch-dark in the communication trenches, and the wind twists the snow and funnels it howling along them. I take off my muffler and wrap it around my hands like a girl’s muff.

  A band of red shifts uneasily all along the horizon, but I do not know if it is the front or Muller’s northern lights, and there is no shelling to guide me. We are running out of shells, so we do not usually begin shelling until nine o’clock. The Russians start even later. Sometimes I hear machine-gun fire, but it is distorted by the wind and the snow, and I cannot tell what direction it is coming from.

  The communication trench seems narrower and deeper than I remember it from when Hans and I first brought the wireless up. It takes me longer than I think it should to get to the branching that will lead north to the headquarters. The front has been contracting, the ammunition dumps and officer’s billets and clearing stations moving up closer and closer behind us. The artillery headquarters has been moved up from the village to a dugout near the artillery line, not half a mile behind us. The nightly firing is starting. I hear a low rumble, like thunder.

  The roar seems to be ahead of me, and I stop and look around, wondering if I can have gotten somehow turned around, though I have not left the trenches. I start again, and almost immediately I see the branching and the headquarters.

  It has no door, only a blanket across the opening, and I pull my hands free of the muffler and duck through it into a tiny space like a rabbit hole, the timber balks of the earthen ceiling so low I have to stoop. Now that I am out of the roar of the snow, the sound of the front separates itself into the individual crack of a four-pounder, the whine of a star shell, and under it the almost continuous rattle of machine guns. The trenches must not be as deep here. Muller and I can hardly hear the front at all in our wireless hut.

  A man is sitting at an uneven table spread with papers and books. There is a candle on the table with a red glass chimney, or perhaps it only looks that way to me. Everything in the dugout, even the man, looks faintly red. He is wearing a uniform but no coat, and gloves with the finger ends cut off, even though there is no stove here. My hands are already cold.

  A trench mortar roars, and clods of frozen dirt clatter from the roof onto the table. The man brushes the dirt from the papers and looks up.

  “I am looking for Dr. Funkenheld,” I say.

  “He is not here.” He stands up and comes around the table, moving stiffly, like an old man, though he does not look older than forty. He has a mustache, and his face looks dirty in the red light.

  “I have a message for him.”

  An eight-pounder roars, and more dirt falls on us. The man raises his arm to brush the dirt off his shoulder. The sleeve of his uniform has been slit into ribbons. All along the back of his raised hand and the side of his arm are red sores running with pus. I look back at his face. The sores in his mustache and around his nose and mouth have dried and are covered with a crust. Excoriated lesions. Suppurating bullae. The gun roars again, and dirt rains down on his raw hands.

  “I have a message for him,” I say, backing away from him. I reach in the pocket of my coat to show him the message, but I pull out the letter instead. “There was a letter for you, Lieutenant Schwarzschild.” I hold it out to him by one corner so he will not touch me when he takes it.

  He comes toward me to take the letter, the muscles in his jaw tightening, and I think in horror that the sores must be on his legs as well, “Who is it from?” he says. “Ah, Herr Professor Einstein. Good,” and turns it over. He puts his fingers on the flap to open the letter and cries out in pain. He drops the letter.

  “Would you read it to me?” he says, and sinks down into the chair, cradling his hand against his chest. I can see there are sores in his fingernails.

  I do not have any feeling in my hands. I pick the envelope up by its corners and turn it over. The skin of his finger is still on the flap. I back away from the table. “I must find the doctor. It is an emergency.”

  “You would not be able to find him,” he says. Blood oozes out of the tip of his finger and down over the blister in his fingernail. “He has gone up to the front.”

  “What?” I say, backing and backing until I run into the blanket. “I cannot understand you.”

  “He has gone up to the front,” he says, more slowly, and this time I can puzzle out the words, but they make no sense. How can the doctor be at the front? This is the front.

  He pushes the candle toward me. “I order you to read
me the letter.”

  I do not have any feeling in my fingers. I open it from the top, tearing the letter almost in two. It is a long letter, full of equations and numbers, but the words are warped and blurred. “ ‘My Esteemed Colleague! I have read your paper with the greatest interest. I had not expected that one could formulate the exact solution of the problem so simply. The analytical treatment of the problem appears to me splendid. Next Thursday I will present the work with several explanatory words, to the Academy!’ ”

  “Formulated so simply,” Schwarzschild says, as if he is in pain. “That is enough. Put the letter down. I will read the rest of it.”

  I lay the letter on the table in front of him, and then I am running down the trench in the dark with the sound of the front all around me, roaring and shaking the ground. At the first turning, Muller grabs my arm and stops me. “What are you doing here?” I shout. “Go back! Go back!”

  “Go back?” he says. “The front’s that way.” He points in the direction he came from. But the front is not that way. It is behind me, in the artillery headquarters. “I told you there would be a bombardment tonight. Did you see the doctor? Did you give him the message? What did he say?”

  “So you actually held the letter from Einstein?” Travers said. “How exciting that must have been! Only two months after Einstein had published his theory of general relativity. And years before they realized black holes really existed. When was this exactly?” He took out a notebook and began to scribble notes. “My esteemed colleague …,” he muttered to himself. “Formulated so simply. This is great stuff. I mean, I’ve been trying to find out stuff on Schwarzschild for my paper for months, but there’s hardly any information on him. I guess because of the war.”

  “No information can get out of a black hole once the Schwarzschild radius has been passed,” I said.

  “Hey, that’s great!” he said, scribbling. “Can I use that in my paper?”

  Now I am the one who sits endlessly in front of the wireless sending out messages to the Red Cross, to my professor in Jena, to Dr. Einstein. I have frostbitten the forefinger and thumb of my right hand and have to tap out the letters with my left. But nothing is getting out, and I must get a message out. I must find someone to tell me the name of Schwarzschild’s disease.

  “I have a theory,” Muller says. “The Jews have seized power and have signed a treaty with the Russians. We are completely cut off.”

  “I am going to see if the mail has come,” I say, so that I do not have to listen to any more of his theories, but the doctor stops me on my way out of the hut.

  I tell him what the message said. “Impetigo!” the doctor shouts. “You saw him! Did that look like impetigo to you?”

  I shake my head, unable to tell him what I think it looks like.

  “What are his symptoms?” Muller asks, burning with curiosity. I have not told him about Schwarzschild. I am afraid that if I tell him, he will only become more curious and will insist on going up to the front to see Schwarzschild himself.

  “Let me see your eyes,” the doctor says in his beautiful calm voice. I wish he would ask Muller to go for a hand lamp again so that I could ask him how Schwarzschild is, but he has brought a candle with him. He holds it so close to my face that I cannot see anything but the red flame.

  “Is Lieutenant Schwarzschild worse? What are his symptoms?” Muller says, leaning forward.

  His symptoms are craters and shell holes, I think. I am sorry I have not told Muller, for it has only made him more curious. Until now I have told him everything, even how Hans died when the wireless hut was hit, how he laid the liquid barretter carefully down on top of the wireless before he tried to cough up what was left of his chest and catch it in his hands. But I cannot tell him this.

  “What symptoms does he have?” Muller says again, his nose almost in the candle’s flame, but the doctor turns from him as if he cannot hear him and blows the candle out. The doctor unwraps the dressing and looks at my fingers. They are swollen and red. Muller leans over the doctor’s shoulder. “I have a theory about Lieutenant Schwarzschild’s disease,” he says.

  “Shut up,” I say. “I don’t want to hear any more of your stupid theories,” and do not even care about the wounded look on Muller’s face or the way he goes and sits by the wireless. For now I have a theory, and it is more horrible than anything Muller could have dreamed of.

  We are all of us—Muller, and the recruit who is trying to put together Eisner’s motorcycle, and perhaps even the doctor with his steady bedside voice—afraid of the front. But our fear is not complete, because unspoken in it is our belief that the front is something separate from us, something we can keep away from by keeping the wireless or the motorcycle fixed, something we can survive by flattening our faces into the frozen earth, something we can escape altogether by being invalided out.

  But the front is not separate. It is inside Schwarzschild, and the symptoms I have been sending out, suppurative bullae and excoriated lesions, are not what is wrong with him at all. The lesions on his skin are only the barbed wire and shell holes and connecting trenches of a front that is somewhere farther in.

  The doctor puts a new dressing of crepe paper on my hand. “I have tried to invalid Schwarzschild out,” the doctor says, and Muller looks at him, astounded. “The supply lines are blocked with snow.”

  “Schwarzschild cannot be invalided out,” I say. “The front is inside him.”

  The doctor puts the roll of crepe paper back in his kit and closes it. “When the roads open again, I will invalid you out for frostbite. And Muller, too.”

  Muller is so surprised, he blurts, “I do not have frostbite.”

  But the doctor is no longer listening. “You must both escape,” he says—and I am not sure he is even listening to himself—“while you can.”

  “I have a theory about why you have not told me what is wrong with Schwarzschild,” Muller says as soon as the doctor is gone.

  “I am going for the mail.”

  “There will not be any mail,” Muller shouts after me. “The supply lines are blocked.” But the mail is there, scattered among the motorcycle parts. There are only a few parts left. As soon as the roads are cleared, the recruit will be able to climb on the motorcycle and ride away.

  I gather up the letters and take them over to the lantern to try to read them, but my eyes are so bad, I cannot see anything but a red blur. “I am taking them back to the wireless hut,” I say, and the recruit nods without looking up.

  It is starting to snow. Muller meets me at the door, but I brush past him and turn the flame of the Primus stove up as high as it will go and hold the letters up behind it.

  “I will read them for you,” Muller says eagerly, looking through the envelopes I have discarded. “Look, here is a letter from your mother. Perhaps she has sent your gloves.”

  I squint at the letters one by one while he tears open my mother’s letter to me. Even though I hold them so close to the flame that the paper scorches, I cannot make out the names.

  “ ‘Dear son,’ ” Muller reads, “ ‘I have not heard from you in three months. Are you hurt? Are you ill? Do you need anything?’ ”

  The last letter is from Professor Zuschauer in Jena. I can see his name quite clearly in the corner of the envelope, though mine is blurred beyond recognition. I tear it open. There is nothing written on the red paper.

  I thrust it at Muller. “Read this,” I say.

  “I have not finished with your mother’s letter yet,” Muller says, but he takes the letter and reads: “ ‘Dear Herr Rottschieben, I received your letter yesterday. I could hardly decipher your writing. Do you not have decent pens at the front? The disease you describe is called Neumann’s disease or pemphigus—’ ”

  I snatch the letter out of Muller’s hands and run out the door. “Let me come with you!” Muller shouts.

  “You must stay and watch the wireless!” I say joyously, running along the communication trench. Schwarzschild does not have the f
ront inside him. He has pemphigus, he has Neumann’s disease, and now he can be invalided home to hospital.

  I go down and think I have tripped over a discarded helmet or a tin of beef, but there is a crash, and dirt and revetting fall all around me. I hear the low buzz of a daisy cutter and flatten myself into the trench, but the buzz does not become a whine. It stops, and there is another crash and the trench caves in.

  I scramble out of the trench before it can suffocate me and crawl along the edge toward Schwarzschild’s dugout, but the trench has caved in all along its length, and when I crawl up and over the loose dirt, I lose it in the swirling snow.

  I cannot tell which way the front lies, but I know it is very close. The sound comes at me from all directions, a deafening roar in which no individual sounds can be distinguished. The snow is so thick, I cannot see the burst of flame from the muzzles as the guns fire, and no part of the horizon looks redder than any other. It is all red, even the snow.

  I crawl in what I think is the direction of the trench, but as soon as I do, I am in barbed wire. I stop, breathing hard, my face and hands pressed into the snow. I have come the wrong way. I am at the front. I hear a sound out of the barrage of sound, the sound of tires on the snow, and I think it is a tank and cannot breathe at all. The sound comes closer, and in spite of myself I look up and it is the recruit who was at the quartermaster’s.

  He is a long way away, behind a coiled line of barbed wire, but I can see him quite clearly in spite of the snow. He has the motorcycle fixed, and as I watch, he flings his leg over it and presses his foot down. “Go!” I shout. “Get out!” The motorcycle jumps forward. “Go!”

  The motorcycle comes toward me, picking up speed. It rears up, and I think it is going to jump the barbed wire, but it falls instead, the motorcycle first and then the recruit, spiraling slowly down into the iron spikes. The ground heaves, and I fall, too.

  I have fallen into Schwarzchild’s dugout. Half of it has caved in, the timber balks sticking out at angles from the heap of dirt and snow, but the blanket is still over the door, and Schwarzschild is propped in a chair. The doctor is bending over him. Schwarzschild has his shirt off. His chest looks like Hans’s did.