He hadn’t been paying attention.
By everyone’s account it was an accident. Terrible and unfathomable? Yes. But also entirely accidental. Ursula and Margrith saw the whole calamity unfold. They’d been standing in front of Hans’s tractor shed, just twenty feet away. Margrith was holding Polly Jean. Ursula had just gathered the last late vegetables from her garden and had brought them over to share with Margrith. A basket of turnips and potatoes was hooked in the crook of her arm. It happened in a startling instant. Charles ran into the street and almost immediately the car made contact. His little body hit the ground. He ran in front of the car! He just ran in front of the car! The driver was a man in his early thirties. He ran in front of me! I couldn’t stop! Jesses Gott! Jesus Christ!
Victor, too, saw the accident. For the rest of his life, he would remember, in perfect, immutable detail, the shriek of the tires as they seized to a radical stop, the incomparable panic of disbelief that glazed the driver’s eyes, and the absurdity of the single red potato that fell from his grandmother’s basket and rolled close enough to Charles’s head that it had to be kicked away.
It was an accident. The driver—his name was Peter Oesch—had not been drinking, he had been paying attention, and he was not speeding. Charles ran into the road. He just ran out in front of me! I wasn’t going fast! This was true. Peter hadn’t been. But it wasn’t the impact that killed him. As quickly as Charles ran into the road, Peter hammered the brake and swerved sharply enough that he didn’t hit him head-on. He clipped him. It broke his leg and his hip. That’s it. This alone, Charles would have survived. But when Charles fell, he cracked his skull. While improbable, the fracture was not impossible. His little head hit the ground at the exact right angle and with just enough force and velocity to split it apart. A betting man would have never taken the wager. A thousand to one chance against its occurrence. But it occurred. It was an open fracture, a lacerated artery. Paramedics couldn’t stop the blood. Charles died quickly, though not instantly.
Anna was asleep in the Hotel Allegra when he died.
19
STERBEN IS THE GERMAN VERB “TO DIE.” IT IS AN IRREGULAR verb. This makes sense; no two deaths are the same. Sterben’s participle changes vowels mid-word: a usual, expected e becomes an o’s wide-mouth surprise. Sterben forms its compound past with sein, which means “to be.” Er ist gestorben. Du bist gestorben. Ich bin gestorben. He and you and I. The present being becomes the passed.
For dead is something you are. Forever and forever. You are dead and you’ll never be anything else.
THE TAXICAB PULLED UP to the scene and Anna jumped out before the car fully stopped. She didn’t pay the fare. The driver yelled for her to come back, but when he saw the police, the women clumped in crying circles, and the tall man who stepped out from the crowd to grab hold of the woman who had leapt from his taxi, he guessed the rest. He turned the cab around and drove away. Anna craned to look past Bruno to the place in the road around which the policemen huddled. Bruno blocked her, even though at this point there was nothing left for her to see. Anna yelled out a half dozen breathless questions. Where is Victor? Where is Polly? Where is Charles?
She didn’t need to ask; she knew who’d been hurt without being told. This is a mother’s talent. Hurt, she told herself. He’s hurt. That’s all. He’s okay. I will him to be okay. But the same mother’s talent knew that he wasn’t. When Bruno explained what had happened, Anna’s yelling folded seamlessly into howling. She buckled at the knees and went limp.
Margrith stepped forward to steady her but Bruno shook his head. “Put your arms around my neck, Anna. That’s it. Try.” Bruno lifted her and carried her into the house like a new husband delivering his bride across the threshold of their first home. He brought her into the bedroom, laid her on the bed, sat down next to her, took her shaking hands inside his own, and told her everything. Each detail forced Anna’s body into a tighter ball. The driver’s name. The time of death. Which leg the impact broke. Bruno stroked her hair with his right hand and with his left, he rubbed his own tears back into their sockets. “We tried to call you.”
Anna spoke to the pillow beneath her head. “My ringer was off. I forgot to turn it on.”
Bruno didn’t respond. There was no reason to.