This House Is Mine

by Dörte Hansen

  Weisswerth loved these totally authentic guys. And he’d long since joined their ranks! When being photographed, he liked to stand right next to them, shoulder to shoulder, his hands buried deep in his pants pockets, engrossed in a conversation about night frosts or crop rotation. As if there weren’t a camera in sight. He’d sprinkle a few local phrases into his speech, such as “Ain’t that somethin’?” or “You said it,” and when leaving, he’d call out resolutely, “All righty, see ya!”

  Weisswerth knew how these wonderfully simple folks ticked, all the earthy, reticent, pigheaded farmers he wrote about so wittily, and with a wink, in his books. They really existed! And he also knew country life so much better than all the editors in Hamburg’s Baumwall media district, who, at the very most, might drive their SUVs to the nearest Demeter farm on a weekend, so their kids could pet a calf that was being raised in a near-natural environment.

  But Dirk zum Felde had no time to pose with farm machinery. He’d already prepared his spray unit, but Burkhard Weisswerth was still sitting on his tractor, staring off into the distance. The photographer must have taken hundreds of shots by this point. The camera lens had been clicking so continuously, you’d have thought they were standing on the red carpet at Cannes rather than on the property of an Altland farmer who just wanted to get back to work.

  “All right, Burkhard, off the tractor. I’ve gotta spray.”

  Click-click-click. Click-click-click. Click-click-click.

  “Hey, we haven’t finished up here yet,” the photographer had said without taking the camera away from his eyes. “Burkhard, I was thinking, maybe he should join you up there?”

  He, Dirk zum Felde, had gotten a bit tense at that point. He had given the photographer from the slow-food magazine he’d never heard of a kick in the backside to get him out of the way, and had thrown the tripod after him. Burkhard Weisswerth had then clambered down from the tractor of his own accord, pretty fast in fact, and the guy with the black-rimmed glasses, who’d stood freezing on the sidelines the whole time, had had to run back to fetch Burkhard’s hat.

  Dirk zum Felde had had his fill of idiots in expensive rubber boots who just had to move to the country.

  It was only ever those who hadn’t made it in the city. B-list professionals and creative types, no longer equipped for city life. Left on the shelf, they wanted one more go-around at the farmer’s market.

  At first, with the early arrivals, before he knew that a whole invasion would follow, he’d made it clear every now and then that he himself had been a student and had lived in shared apartments. That he wasn’t a boor with a diploma from the tree nursery, which was what they obviously thought he and all the other established residents around here were.

  It had taken him a while to figure out why they didn’t want to hear about that. Because he was spoiling their fantasy. An agricultural scientist with a college degree who worked an Altland orchard using modern technology, sprayed his apple trees with pesticides, and simply chopped them down when they stopped bearing fruit—that was like a four-lane highway in a sentimental film set in the countryside. He didn’t fit the mold. He unsettled them.

  And they bothered him! These dopey creative types streaming from the towns into the villages, to ground themselves, and then bumming around the fruit fields with their golden retrievers and loitering in front of run-down farms and farmhands’ small houses. And when it was springtime and somewhere in an overgrown garden an apple tree weakened by age braced itself for its final blossoming, there was no stopping them. They’d tasted blood and burrowed in like ticks, like Burkhard Weisswerth and that wife of his.

  These uptight city chicks with their identity crises nagged for ramshackle thatched roof homes just as their daughters did for ponies. It was so sweet! They just had to have it! They’d look after it, always! And then they spent megabucks doing up the old brick ruins, laying out their farm gardens, and setting up pottery studios in the old stables.

  And if they still weren’t over it, they bought sheep and started making their own cheese, and every last one of these newly countrified folks made jelly from heirloom apples, as if under some hidden compulsion.

  Then he, Dirk zum Felde, would come along with his tractor and a spray tank full of Funguran fungicide, to spray his overbred apple trees against infestation and would crash right through their open-air museum.

  It would be a while before Burkhard Weisswerth in his stupid corduroy pants would sit on his tractor again. Dirk had no intention of participating in this peasant theater as an extra or a stagehand.

  And the last thing, the very last thing he needed today was this slowpoke hogging up Vera Eckhoff’s yard with her white van, blocking the entrance to the orchard. A Hamburg license plate, of course. A hooded sweater and chunky shoes, what else. He knew the type. Yet another addition to the big peasant theater ensemble.

  He gave her three weeks. Then she’d offer him some sort of fair-trade concoction in a shoddy ceramic cup with no handle and ask innocently: “So, what is it you’re spraying then?” And of course it wouldn’t be a question so much as a way to launch into her little eco-sermon. And after ten minutes tops she’d start singing the praises of heirloom fruits and vegetables.

  Then he—the country hick, who couldn’t count to three and was mindlessly spraying evil poison onto his poor, poor trees—he was supposed to slap himself on the forehead and say: “Man! I’ve never thought about it like that before! You’re absolutely right! I’m such an idiot! I’ll apply for organic certification right away!”

  These eco-missionaries couldn’t tell the difference between Russet and Jonagold apples and had certainly never eaten a grubby, scabby Finkenwerder Herbstprinz, or they’d know that these crummy old varieties were dying out for a reason. As far as he was concerned, they could feed their brats parsnips, chard, and spelt, and all the other old junk, as long as he didn’t have to harvest the crap and could just get on with his job.

  Dirk zum Felde passed the white van and turned on his sprayer. In his rearview mirror he watched the woman with the hood disappear in a misty haze.

  9

  Refugees

  VERA ECKHOFF DIDN’T KNOW MUCH about her niece, but she knew a refugee when she saw one. The woman with the pinched face, fetching her few belongings from the van, was obviously looking for more than just a new experience and a bit of fresh air for her son.

  Out there in the driveway were two homeless people. And an animal in a plastic cage, which the little boy was now dragging over to the front door.

  Anne had wrapped her son up like a grub. The little one could hardly move in his thick snowsuit; his arms were sticking out at the sides of his body, and his legs rubbed together when he walked.

  Vera suddenly recalled how it felt to stand in five layers of clothing in front of this house that didn’t care for strangers. Whether one was driven away or on the run, with a handcart or in a minivan, it didn’t make a whole lot of difference.

  As she walked through the hallway to open the door, she could see Ida Eckhoff standing before her. Her furious face on the day the Polacks arrived.

  Vera went over to Anne, who was standing next to the van’s open door, and they managed an awkward embrace. But how should you greet a young boy? Lift him up and press him against you? Bend down and shake his small, thickly padded hand? Find a bare piece of cheek and kiss it?

  “This is Willy!” Leon said, pointing at the crate. Vera knelt down in front of it, looking at the rabbit and then at the child. Blond curls fell over his forehead to just above his nose, which was red and shiny with snot. As far as Vera could see, it looked like all children’s noses. No one in her family had had blond hair, but she believed she recognized the brown eyes with their thick lashes. A wink from the East. “Willy. I see. And who are you?” “I’m the owner,” Leon replied, scraping the crate across the flagstones toward the front door. “Tell Vera your name, Leon!” Anne called after him. He turned around and laughed. “You’ve just said it already, Anne!
So I don’t have to anymore.”

  Vera could hear her dogs whining in the kitchen; they hated being confined. But two hunting dogs and a rabbit wasn’t an auspicious combination, from the rabbit’s perspective at least. She would have to impress upon the child the importance of not letting his pet hop about the place and keeping the door to his room shut at all times. Her dogs would never get so old and exhausted that an overfed city rabbit could escape their clutches.

  Vera put the refugees in Ida Eckhoff’s apartment.

  When Leon finally nodded off around nine in the evening with his rabbit cage on the floor beside him, Anne went across the hall with a bottle of red wine and knocked on Vera’s kitchen door.

  The smell coming from within took her breath away. Vera was standing at the sink in a white rubber apron and was cutting up a large animal. “Come in, the glasses are over there.” Anne, breathing through her mouth, took two crystal wineglasses out of the kitchen cupboard and climbed carefully over the two dogs that were lying on the floor gnawing on bluish bones. “I’m almost finished here.” Anne tried not to look over at the pail that Vera was tossing bits of hide, entrails, and tendons into. “The corkscrew’s in the drawer,” she said, pointing a bloody hand at the old sideboard. Then she sawed a bone off with her ripsaw, threw it over to the dogs, and put a large chunk of meat into a plastic tub. The animal was too big to be a hare, so it had to be a deer.

  Anne, who felt as though the contents of her stomach were slowly rising toward her throat, concentrated on the wine bottle and fiddled silently with the cork for such a long time that Vera turned around to see what she was up to.

  When she saw Anne’s face, she yanked the window open, shoved the bowl of meat and the waste pail into the pantry, and washed the blood off her hands. Then she fetched a bottle of fruit brandy from the cupboard, took the wine bottle and the corkscrew out of her niece’s hand, poured a large shot of kirschwasser into her glass, and said, “Down the hatch!” Anne knocked the schnapps back and received another.

  Vera pulled her over to the open window and had her breathe in and out deeply ten times. She knew that game always smelled a bit strong, although she no longer noticed it herself.

  They left the bottle of wine corked and stuck to the fruit schnapps. Anne thought the pear tasted better than the cherry, even if not quite as good as the yellow plum.

  They toasted each other with the crystal wineglasses. “Down with the ex!” Anne said after the dogs had been snoring under the kitchen table for some time, and because she found it so funny, she emptied another couple of glasses to down with the ex, until Vera took her by the arm and dragged her across the hallway to Ida’s parlor. The grandfather clock in the corner struck two.

  Anne sat giggling in a chair while Vera pulled out the sofa bed, but she fell asleep before the bed was ready.

  Vera removed Anne’s weird shoes and put her feet up on a footstool. The right sock had been darned—by the boy, by the looks of it. The black fabric had a blue piece of yarn zigzagging every which way across Anne’s big toe. Vera threw the duvet over her, then went back to the kitchen to fetch a bottle of water, two Alka-Seltzers, and an empty pail, hoping that it wouldn’t all end up on Ida’s beautiful old rug.

  She left the door to the apartment ajar, then made some coffee, put the rubber apron on again, and went back to the deer.

  * * *

  When Anne came to in the armchair about four hours later, she immediately remembered the dissected animal with the bluish bones—and then its smell as well.

  She more or less managed to get everything into the pail on her lap and gagged until her eyes welled up. Vera had left the floor lamp on, but it still took Anne some time to figure out where she was. With a groan, she set the pail aside and tried to get out of the chair, but the pounding in her head forced her back onto the cushion.

  She felt around on the table for the tablets and the bottle of water, pressed the two Alka-Seltzers out of their foil, put them into the bottle, and shook it up. She tried to drink the stuff without throwing up again. The first few gulps landed straight back in the bucket, but then it was okay. Anne sat motionless until the sharp pains in her head became a little duller.

  When she felt no more than a gentle thumping, she lifted herself out of the armchair, picked up the pail, and went to look for the bathroom.

  Where was Leon? She put the pail in the bathtub, tripped over her shoes in the living room, and located the door to the bedroom, which was slightly open. The rabbit was sitting very quietly and pricked up his ears as Anne clattered through the room and bent over the bed. She knelt down next to the sleeping Leon and listened to him breathe.

  The house groaned. Anne could feel it sucking in the cold wind through its rotten windows.

  I’m completely shot, she thought as she staggered back into the living room. She somehow managed to stuff the duvet into its cover, left the buttons undone, undressed partway, and went into the bathroom to rinse the bad taste out of her mouth.

  Then she lay down on the twisted duvet and tried in vain to ward off the thoughts that were buzzing through her drunken skull like a swarm of hornets:

  I’m lying completely wasted in a dilapidated farmhouse. I’m living with my four-year-old son in the house of a madwoman, who guns down animals and hacks them up in her kitchen. I haven’t held a plane in my hand for five years, and I haven’t the foggiest idea how I am going to fix Vera’s decrepit windows and beams. Christoph loves Carola.

  Why hadn’t she brought her Camper boots down on those red-painted toenails? Pressed down hard and crushed Carola’s foot by grinding her heel back and forth, as the boy had done earlier with the dead moth?

  Varmint!

  A woman with bloodred toenails had climbed into her life, lain with her man in her bed, drunk wine from her glasses, and put her hand on her arm in her hallway as though she had a right to do so, as if they were sisters.

  And she, Anne, the poor little wretch, had trotted off, speechless and defenseless, into the kitchen. She hadn’t been able to say a thing and had hung up with her hands shaking when Carola had had the nerve to call her a few days later to talk things out.

  Women who shot their rivals in a wild rage, men who finished their rivals off with knives or ran them over with their cars, things like that happened—but not in the civilized, even-tempered relationships of Hamburg-Ottensen. These were wrapped up without any displays of emotion when a feeling called love intervened. Because people were powerless in the face of love. Hey, it just happened! And someone in love could do anything, could develop himself further with an editor who resembled Snow White.

  Carola with her white car could run over Anne’s life, take her man away, laugh, look great—and even make herself a little more lovable on account of the fact that this thing with Anne was really getting her down, because she would never have wanted that and hoped that she and Anne could at some point be cool with each another because Anne was a really great woman.

  Christoph was allowed to simply stop loving Anne. He could look through her when she spoke to him, and just walk out of her life. That sort of thing happened. He and Carola weren’t breaking any laws.

  But Anne, who had lost her man and wasn’t allowed to grieve for him—since Christoph was alive and well, after all, and because he would always be there for her and Leon—Anne, who was now supposed to fall out of love, who felt widowed, wounded, and messed with, could be prosecuted if she were to knock out one of Carola’s teeth or vandalize the white Fiat. And even worse than that: she’d make a fool of herself.

  People didn’t get violent when one of the civilized, even-tempered relationships in Hamburg-Ottensen ended. They got a little hysterical, sought out a girlfriend, a sister, or their mother to take long, tearful walks with, and to moan to on the phone at night. They enrolled in a writing course in Liguria, or booked a spa weekend on the island of Sylt, drummed for a while on La Gomera, learned yoga in Andalucia, spent a couple of tense nights with an interim lover, got a haircu
t, bought a short dress. And if none of that helped, they sat down in a creaking basket chair in a therapist’s office and attempted to mend their broken souls for eighty euros an hour.

  Or they simply took off—fled to the countryside where the world was still safe and good—and lay sloshed against a damp brick wall, feeling sorry for themselves.

  10

  Venison Sausage

  AT FIRST HE’D WOBBLED ABOUT quite a bit, but now he had the hang of it.

  It was just as well that he’d bought a helmet and elbow pads! At these speeds, crashes and collisions couldn’t be ruled out, and he really couldn’t afford a serious injury, not as a freelancer! Six weeks without any commissions and Eva could kiss her summer house good-bye.

  His severance pay had disappeared faster than the excavator who had dug the drainpipe trenches around the house. The two young families who had bought the plots on either side of them had built their houses without cellars, and now he knew why.

  But at least the Weisswerths had a dry cellar for their wine—and for the potatoes that he and Eva had dug out of the heavy marsh soil with their own hands. Their farmhouse had a new thatched roof and new wooden windows, and was paved with original Altland cobblestones that Burkhard had found through an online building material supplier for pickup. What a steal!

  Klaus and Erich Jarck had laid the dump truck full of cobblestones at a snail’s pace after the previous owner’s concrete paving was finally out of the way. For four weeks they’d rattled in at seven o’clock on their moped. Neither of them had a driver’s license and only Erich could drive the thing. Klaus had even less going on upstairs than his brother. But what the heck! That had been Burkhard Weisswerth’s first big story for Going Back to Country Life: the twins Klaus and Erich Jarck, stonemasons, the last representatives of a dying guild. The photos alone! Klaus with his thick glasses, his mouth permanently half-open (and his pants too, for the most part), and red-haired Erich with a cigarette behind each ear and another in the corner of his mouth. And the two of them on their morning break, with Fanta and thick-sliced aspic without any bread, which they ate with their filthy fingers!