"I've brought you flowers, Moritz."
She's like a little girl, with her hair in braids and her dress fluttering about her knees, pink and raw like her cheeks. Her smile is one reserved only for him; a curious mixture of shy and coy, and she bites her lip, regarding him from beneath long eyelashes. They're special eyelashes, Heinrich would say, as he re-created them time and again with a meager stroke of the brush.
Ilse liked to paint, too. When Heinrich pinned her on the bed, and over his shoulder she would see them reflected in the mirrors -- how she despised those mirrors (she would dream of them, you see, dream that she saw scary haunts beyond the glass) -- and she could see the expanse of his back, map every mole and hair and puckered scar -- and simply by shutting her eyes, shutting them tight and fast, everything would fall away -- save for a brief flicker of a thought, such as when it occured to her how sex smelled of alcohol and paints.
-- Oh, how she loved to play pretend -- ! Pirates and robbers and -- and changing the color of Heinrich's eyes as he made love to her. They would no longer be sharp and gray, shards of flint hovering above her in the dark, but soft and brown and so sad, so sad. And the mouth of a gun, cold against her breast, would turn into the mouth of a boy, and she would kiss it and make it warm. Then after, panting and sweaty, his hand would brush the damp hair from her face... And she would press her cheek against his chest, where his heartbeat lay...
Thump, thump, thump.
She might have uttered the name "Moritz" beneath him, but Heinrich did not hear, caught within his own personal oblivion. Was that not every artist's way, after all?
She remembered seeing him -- an angel in the fog. Hunched over slightly, he was, as if in prayer. And she remembered her voice, calling his name, her own prayer on the wind.
"... Moritz Stiefel?"
Even memories can be made pretend. Ilse would remember him turning, smiling. A tiny smile, a tiny silly sort of little-boy smile. "Let's climb a tree, Moritz," she said. "Let's be birds and fly away from here." And they would climb, and they would fly...
"I've brought you flowers," Ilse says again. "And I've put my hair into braids, so that you might untie them, and I could feel your hands tremble." She wrinkles her nose and giggles. Giggles, sighs, kneels, puts one hand on the tombstone.
A pile of flowers lies near, a testament to days gone by. Oh, how they fly, fly like birds! "Let's be birds again, Moritz," says Ilse, and she curls up on the ground, her cheek pressed against the sun-warmed stone, where the name of a so-sad boy is etched. "Let's be songbirds."
And she shuts her eyes and begins to hum and to paint a picture in her mind, begins to untie her braids, only they are not her hands. And the soft tuft of grass is his hair, tickling the bridge of her nose. The slight weight of the flowers, set against her hip, is his hand. And the hot sunbeams, kissing the top of her head, those are his lips in her hair.
There's a dull throbbing beneath the earth, beneath the stone, the stone-soft fabric of his shirt. Ilse smiles; it's a tiny smile, a tiny silly sort-of little girl smile, as she falls asleep to the sound of the grave's heartbeat.
Thump, thump, thump.