Legend's Pet

Chapter one: the sound of a plane

Germany, Spring 1929

I hear a door creaking open and lift my head up.

But Manfred isn't there.

Instead, I see Alfred. He isn't wearing a uniform, just pajamas. His lips are tight, and his jaw is set in a scowl that makes my wagging tail grow still again. Whenever anything's wrong, I see anger in his eyes, that always runs back to one source, no matter its real cause. The great war had always been useless. It wasn't won -- it was ended. Germany knew it was best to surrender. It was strange, that day, when the distant guns went silent and the smoke was blown away in the cold November breeze.

But that was many years ago.

Now I take a rattling breath and feel my frail body shake. I cough and yelp in pain. "It's okay." I look up at my master, Alfred kneeling down beside me. His dark hair is tousled. Stumbling toward me is my old friend, Greta, a white spitz dog, with cloudy, blind eyes. "Moritz," she says. "How are you now?"
"Not very good," I say. It isn't just that I'm drowsy, with all my bones aching, I'm scared too. This is something I would have never admitted as a young dog, when fear was something I was desperate to hide. I often think of how foolish I had been in the past. I know now that I'm not the only one who can feel upset.

I watch as Alfred stokes the fire and blows on it to get the flames going again. Fire always brings bad memories in my mind. I remember how one day, I had recognized some of the firewood being fed into it, as the propellers of airplanes that had been lucky enough to survive the war, only to be destroyed after it. The smell of burning planes had followed me out of the war like too many other things had.

Greta sits down beside where I lie sprawled out, panting, on a wool blanket. "Moritz you have to eat something," Greta says. "Are you hungry now?"

Alfred brings me a dish of food scraps and holds it up to my nose, but I won't take it. I haven't had an appetite for days. He strokes my fur with trembling hands. I know he hadn't even expected me to survive the night.

Despite the fire, I shiver. Alfred dashes off again, and comes back once more with an armful of grey blankets. As he covers me with them a tattered red scarf slips out of the pile and falls to the ground. I don't want to look at it.

"I haven't seen this for a while," Greta says. Alfred ties it around my neck, despite my reluctance. I smell familiar things clinging to its fabric, behind the scent of mothballs -- like castor oil, cigarette smoke, mud.

I turn my head when I hear a sound that is also not new to me, a bee-like humming that gradually turns into a roar. I prick up my ears and listen, the fur on my back standing on end. I have tried as hard as I could, so many times, but I can't forget that sound.

"Greta," I say. "Is that a plane?"
"I don't hear anything," she says.

But I do, and I stumble to my feet and walk through the farmhouse. With all my remaining strength I paw the door knob, nudge the door open, and walk out into the barnyard. I look up at the cloudy, early morning sky and see no plane.

But I still hear it. And I haven't heard one once since the end of the war.

"Moritz," Alfred says, sticking his head out the door. "What are you doing? Come back here! It's too early to go outside."

He doesn't even notice the sound of the plane.

I am not coming back to the farmhouse; I am coming back to another time, another life that only exists now in my memories. The barnyard around me is no longer Alfred's but that of a shabby little farm in Belgium. It has been preserved in my mind for so many years. The air remains crisp and cool, but I am smaller and the sky is lighter. I don't even feel fragile and tired and know I'm a puppy again.