They wandered beneath the trees beside the road, freckles of silver-white light raining down through the leaves into their hair. Ilse gasped in shock, stopping and turning back to him, her hand dangling from their ever-intertwined fingers.
"An atheist! Melchior Gabor?" Moritz watched as her eyes seemed to deepen with wonder. He nodded at her, shivering slightly to himself at the thought of his best friend's rebellion.
"We won't even attend church anymore. His parents are always there without him..." Moritz looked off in quiet amazement, marveling at the idea of abandoning Catholicism. His parents, of course, would never allow it. He wouldn't dare even to suggest questioning the way they lived - the way every upstanding family in town lived. He could imagine his father's voice in his head at the very mention of skipping mass.
"You want to miss church?" his father's voice grumbled in his deadly calm tone, one that often precedes shouting. "And just how would your mother and I look if our own son was absent from the service? What would our neighbors say?" The calm voice began to rise slowly, and a sort of furious shaking was detectable underneath the sound. "How could we face Father Kaulbach? Our only son, abandoning his morals... living in disgrace! Do you ever think, son!"
Moritz shuddered, unable to stop the voice as it echoed in his head. Surprisingly, his parents had not denounced Melchior or his actions. Despite some subtle haughtiness towards Melchior's parents, they never mentioned his sinful acts, and always seemed to approve of Moritz spending time with him. In most ways, Melchior was all they wanted Moritz to be - smart, eloquent, handsome, charming, strong... Moritz knew it and accepted it, but the knowledge made a bitterness rise inside him, a sour hatred like none other Moritz had ever felt.
It was not Melchior that he hated. He looked on his best friend only with admiration and love, the only person Moritz could confide in and trust and feel himself with, the only person who could even begin to understand him. No, the only person Moritz hated was himself.
"Melchi Gabor..." Ilse breathed beside Moritz as she strolled with him, breaking him from his reverie. The thought of Melchior's godlessness did not seem to have quite as dizzying an effect on Ilse. Her face was softened into blissful smile, her eyes still wide; she looked quite young, a shadow of the innocence Moritz knew she had lost glowing in her features. "To think that he would disobey his parents. He was such an obedient boy!"
Moritz remembered the young, polite yet adventurous Melchior. No matter how relaxed and allowing Melchior's parents were, back then one never would have guessed he'd grow to be such a radical. Ilse suddenly laughed, a long, free laugh.
"Moritz!" she she said suddenly. "Do you remember that day in summer - we were playing with my hobby horses by my mother's favorite plum tree, and Melchi wanted to prove that he was braver than us, and-"
"He tried to climb up on those thin branches," Moritz remembered, a smile breaking over his ashen face, "and they broke! And he almost fell right onto poor Wendla!" He was laughing now, quiet laughs shaking his frame. Ilse continued to laugh with him.
"And he destroyed my favorite horse! And mother's prized tree," she said between giggles. "And went straight to my parents and begged them not to tell Frau Gabor!" Ilse, her laughter freely bounding across the woods in uncontrollable glee leaned on Moritz for support, causing them to stumble through the moonlight-dappled path, both breathless from laughing. Moritz had not felt this free in a long time. Ilse wiped some tears from her eyes.
"I miss those times..." she said quietly, breathing heavily, and renewed giggles took hold of her.
Moritz looked out down the road, and saw, alone along the empty road, where the trees had thinned to an almost treeless clearing, Ilse's house. It looked mostly like he had remembered it, only much darker. Moritz could not ever remember seeing her house with all the lights turned out, even at night. The wildflowers that used to blanket her lawn and the hills seemed to have disappeared, perhaps with the sudden cold of October. As Ilse's eyes looked up to see it, her laughing stopped and her smile subsided. She released his hand.
Instead of the security he had expected to feel, Moritz was suddenly taken with some strange feeling of uneasiness. He had tried not to face these feelings but could not keep them away for long. Ilse's house... where they would be alone, to do whatever Ilse wanted to do.
The thought had hovered in the back of his mind since meeting her, and it was a thought with a powerful hold on him. It was haunting and terrifying so that it chilled him to the bone, and yet it was one that he could not shake and could not fathom ignoring. He knew he would succumb to it - it was not his choice. This could be his last chance to give in to the battle he'd been fighting against himself, and feel at last what he knew he was meant to feel.
He looked form the house to Ilse, who watched it with as much trepidation as he watched her, her creamy skin and dark, curly hair classically beautiful and glowing in the moonlight. This was what he wanted, right?
The door clattered behind them as Moritz and Ilse stepped into the dark house. He stood uneasily as she felt along the wall for the gas lamp, lighting it with a hiss and a crackle. The light bloomed through the foyer, illuminating the dark paneled floors Ilse's ordered sitting room to the side and a white-walled hall to her kitchen straight ahead.
Ilse was not holding his hand, and strode ahead of him down the hall. Something about the way she carried herself and the way her hands swayed so close to her thighs, the way her shoulders seemed to stiffly sway, suggested that she was closing herself off. The rift between them as Moritz followed, though only a few feet, effectively separated them into their own solitude. Moritz felt a spark knot the muscles of his shoulders as the shadows of the house seemed to fold around him.
A lone candle flickered on the kitchen table, the flame swaying gently and casting a weak orange glow on the room, creating more shadow than light. Moritz's breath caught in his throatas he saw that someone else was there, sitting at the wooded table, her back to the window's billowing curtains.
Frau Neumann was an older woman, carrying herself with less grace and uprightness than Moritz's mother, but somehow with a harsher, less gentle air. Her graying black hair was pulled back showing her tired yet sharp-looking face as she hovered over a letter on the table. She looked up as Ilse and Moritz entered.
"Good evening, Frau Neumann," Moritz said in little more than a whisper, his quiet, shaking voice nevertheless cutting through the empty air. He stood stick-straight in the door frame. Ilse had not stopped but headed straight for the stairs beside the kitchen with no more than a glance towards her mother. She stopped on the first stair, her back to the room, perhaps waiting for Moritz.
Frau Neumann looked from Moritz to Ilse with an unsettled expression on her face. Her eyes widened, her mouth pulling into a hard line, and her face seemed to pale slightly in the candle's light. Ilse began to walk up the stairs without looking back, and as Frau Neumann's eyes followed her daughter, Moritz was gripped by that uneasiness, that unnatural coldness and strange sensation of fear.
Moritz stood for another second as Frau Neumann said nothing, seeming to forget he was there as her eyes traveled back to the table, and he went to follow Ilse up the stairs to where he knew her old room was. His footsteps echoed with a graceless thud with every step, a sharp contrast to Ilse's silent glide. Following Ilse to the door of her room, the uneasiness sat in his stomach, growing into a sickening weight that he could not shake.
From down stairs, the scratching of pen on paper resumed.