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Chapter One

The Last Link

Fidelis walked home from the great war in twelve days and slept
thirty-eight hours once he crawled into his childhood bed. When he
woke in Germany in late November of the year 1918, he was only a
few centimeters away from becoming French on Clemenceau and
Wilson's redrawn map, a fact that mattered nothing compared to what
there might be to eat. He pushed aside the white eiderdown that his
mother had aired and restuffed every spring since he was six years
old. Although she had tried with repeated scrubbings to remove from
its cover the stains of a bloody nose he'd suffered at thirteen,
the faint spot was still there, faded to a pale tea-brown and
shaped like a jagged nest. He smelled food cooking -- just a paltry
steam but enough to inspire optimism. Potatoes maybe. A bit of soft
cheese. An egg? He hoped for an egg. The bed was commodious, soft,
and after his many strange and miserable beds of the past three
years, it was of such perfect comfort that he'd shuddered when
first lying down. Fidelis had fallen asleep to the sound of his
mother's quiet, full, joyous weeping. He thought he still heard her
now, but it was the sunlight. The light pouring through the
curtains made a liquid sound, he thought, an emotional and female
sound as it moved across the ivory wall.

After a while he decided that he heard the light because he was
clean. Disorientingly clean. Two nights ago, before he'd entered
the house, he begged to bathe in a washtub out in the tiny roofed
courtyard, beneath the grape arbor. They built a fire to warm the
water. His sister, Maria Theresa, picked the lice from his hair and
his father brought fresh clothing. In order to endure all that the
war necessitated, including his own filth, Fidelis had shut down
his senses. As he opened to the world again, everything around him
was distressingly intense and all things were possessed of feeling,
alive, as in a powerful dream.

Quietness reverberated in his head. Ordinary sounds, people outside
in the streets, seemed marvelous as the chatter of rare monkeys. A
thrill of delight crashed through him. Even to put on his clean and
vermin-free clothing was a task so full of meaning that the
fastening of his grandfather's gold boar's-head cuff-links nearly
made him weep. Breathing low, he collected himself, and stilled his
tears with the power of his quietness. Ever since he was a child,
when sorrow had come down upon him, he'd breathed lightly and gone
motionless. As a young soldier, he'd known from the first that in
his talent for stillness lay the key to his survival. It had
carried him through the war as a pitifully green recruit of whom it
was soon discovered that, from a sniping post, he could drill a
man's eye at 100 meters and make three of five shots. Now that he
was home, he understood, he must still be vigilant. Memories would
creep up on him, emotions sabotage his thinking brain. To come
alive after dying to himself was dangerous. There was far too much
to feel, so he must seek, he thought, only shallow sensations. Now
he tried to adjust. He must slowly awaken even to this childhood
room he knew so well.

He sat down at the edge of the bed. On a thick shelf set into the
wall, his books stood in lines, or stacked as he'd left them,
marked with thin strips of paper. For a time, though his occupation
was assured, he'd cherished the vision of himself as a poet.
Therefore his shelves were stacked with volumes of his heroes,
Goethe, Heine, Rilke, and even Trakl, hidden behind the others. He
looked at them now with dull curiosity. How could he ever have
cared what such men said? What did their words matter? His
childhood history was also in this room, his toy soldiers still
arranged on the sill. And his young man's pride: his diplomas and
his guild papers framed on the wall. These things did matter. These
papers represented his future. His survival. In the closet, his
bleached, starched, and pressed white shirts hung ready to embrace
him. His polished shoes waited on the shelf beneath for the old
Fidelis to put his feet into them. Gingerly, Fidelis tried to slide
his feet into the open maws of the stiff shoes, but they wouldn't
go. His feet were swollen, tender from frostbite, peeling, painful.
Only his hobnailed boots fit, and they were green inside and stank
of rot.

Slowly, he turned to contemplate the day. His bedroom window was a
long, golden rectangle. He rose and opened the window, using the
ram's-horn curl of its handle, and looked out, over Ludwigsruhe's
slow, brown river, over the roofs and dead late-fall gardens on its
opposite bank, across a patchwork of tender, gray fields, and then
a tiny complex of roofs and chimneys beyond. Somewhere in that next
town's maze lived the woman he had never met before, but had
promised to visit. He found himself thinking about her with a
complex intensity. His thoughts formed questions. What was she
doing now? Had she a garden? Was she gathering the final few dusty
potatoes from a small, raised, straw-covered berm? Was she hanging
out her laundry fresh and white on a piece of icy rope? Was she
talking, over tea, to her sister, her mother? Was she singing to
herself? And his own presence, what he had promised to tell her.
How could he go through with it, and also, how could he not?

Eva Kalb, 17 Eulenstrasse. Fidelis stood before the blond-brick
walkway, frowning at the frail cast-iron arbor that marked the
entrance. The ironwork was threaded with the tough overgrowth of
climbing rose stalks …

Excerpted from THE MASTER BUTCHERS SINGING CLUB ©
Copyright 2004 by Louise Erdrich. Reprinted with permission by
Perennial, an imprint ofHarperCollins. All rights reserved.