This House Is Mine

by Dörte Hansen

  “I don’t know what you’re spraying on your trees,” she said in her scratchy voice. “It’s none of my business, but you don’t need to go spraying it all over me, and definitely not on my son.” She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket and straightened up. “The next time you have to mark your territory, you can piss on my car instead. I’ll get it.”

  Dirk zum Felde put his glove back on. He took the shears from his belt and cut off another branch. “Very happy to oblige.”

  She turned around and went bounding along the gravel track. It took a couple of minutes for her heart to settle down. This, she thought, is what it must be like for people in those courses for social anxiety who are afraid of human contact and get sent by their therapists to the meat counter to buy a single slice of salami.

  A few lingering islands of snow lay on either side of the track like the remains of a bubble bath. She heard a tractor and, somewhere in the distance, the aggressive whine of a chain saw. She took her cell phone out of her pocket. No one had called. Had she given the day care center the right number? Maybe Leon was still screaming.

  “Frau Hove, everything’s all right,” said Sigrid Pape in the all-clear style characteristic of all the caregiving professions, which was equally effective with the hard of hearing, dementia sufferers, and mothers, and Anne understood very well what Sigrid Pape hadn’t said: as a mother you have to keep it together now and again.

  She went home, took a screwdriver out of her toolbox, and started inspecting the thirty-two rotting windows in Vera Eckhoff’s house.

  14

  Apple Diplomas

  DIRK ZUM FELDE HAD TO slam on his brakes when Burkhard Weisswerth came hurtling out of the farm track on his bike.

  Weisswerth under his tractor, that was all he needed! Him in his hat and suspenders on the tractor, posing with farm equipment, was bad enough.

  But that matter seemed to have resolved itself. They hadn’t come by with the camera since the incident. The photographer probably didn’t have the nerve to come back, the chickenshit.

  Britta thought the kick in the butt hadn’t been called for, but she couldn’t stand that type any more than he could. It just took her longer to get mad.

  He wished he had her nerves: the kids, all the livestock, his parents, who were slowly getting unsteady, and all the little kids with stutters and lisps with whom she practiced speech therapy. Britta stayed as cool as a cucumber.

  “Go drive your tractor, Dirk,” she’d say when the brats were driving him up the wall, and by the time he got back everything was fine, and the kids knew that he was never angry for long. If it had been up to Britta they’d have had their fifth a while ago already.

  GIMME FIVE! she’d recently written with her finger in the grime on the rear window of their car.

  “Wash the car first, Frau zum Felde!”

  She’d just smiled and drawn another 5 on the hood, followed by exclamation marks.

  He’d gone ahead and ordered soccer tickets online: Werder Bremen against Hannover, VIP platinum seats. The price was ridiculous, but it was their tenth wedding anniversary, and some men spent much more than that.

  Kerstin Duewer had gotten a new kitchen from Kai. A Bulthaup, with an induction stove. You might as well go whole hog, the old show-off had said. Now you weren’t allowed to spill anything over at their place anymore.

  “It’s like eating in an operating room,” Britta had said, “but really snazzy.”

  She didn’t care what her kitchen looked like. They still had his mother’s built-in oak cupboards. Indestructible, even by their children.

  He had also ordered a Werder hat with a grass-green pom-pom from the fan shop, green-white for life. Britta would wear it, he knew she would. There weren’t many women who could pull off a pom-pom hat. He didn’t know any apart from her. Zum Felde for life.

  Burkhard Weisswerth called out “Howdy!” and waved when he saw Dirk zum Felde. He was totally oblivious to the fact that Dirk had had to slam on his brakes and was now pedaling easy as can be in the direction of the dike.

  Dirk turned into Vera Eckhoff’s driveway, drove across her yard, and switched on the spreader. He would fertilize the apple trees by noon as well.

  He’d have to see Vera soon about the lease agreement, which would run out next February. Another fifteen years, hopefully.

  But with Karl Eckhoff now dead, she didn’t have to think about anyone else. And if she wanted to sell the farm, Peter Niebuhr would pounce. Then Dirk would look pretty foolish.

  But if this chick from Hamburg was now fixing up Vera’s house, as Heinrich Luehrs had said, then it didn’t seem that Vera was about to pack up and go.

  Maybe it was merely a form of therapy, supervised work, a little fiddling about with Vera’s ruins in order to downshift or get herself sorted out. The tree huggers and people searching for spiritual power places along the Elbe were the ones he liked most—to kick in the butt.

  But if Vera was now planning to set up a sanctuary for female carpenters, then she wasn’t intending to pack it in just yet.

  His lease agreement with Heinrich Luehrs ran for another five years. After that, anything could happen. Heinrich was almost surely still hoping that Georg would return, but he could forget about that. Dirk met up with Georg, who was only a year younger than him, from time to time. “As long as the old man’s alive, I’m not gonna touch a single apple around there.” The question was how long Heinrich would carry on. He was already in his mid-seventies.

  Grow or give way—he couldn’t stand hearing that anymore, but it was true, and he needed the acreage. If he could no longer lease anything from Luehrs and Eckhoff, he’d have to find land elsewhere. His thirty acres wouldn’t get you very far anymore, even if his father still didn’t want to accept it.

  Perhaps he should have done what Georg did. Marrying Frauke Matthes had been worth it. Beauty fades, acres remain.

  Nothing against Frauke, but she’d obviously had a humor bypass and she couldn’t pull off a pom-pom hat, that was for sure.

  * * *

  A deer shot out of the ditch and jumped right in front of his tractor. It was heading toward the Elbe. Somehow the animals seemed to know when hunting season was over. In any case, they always got pretty bold in the spring.

  Please, no game damage to the tractor now. That recent mess with the VW Passat was enough, and the animal had still been alive and screaming.

  He hadn’t known that deer could scream. “They only do it when it’s really bad,” Vera had said. She’d come immediately and shot it. “Should I skin it for you?” But after all the commotion, he really hadn’t felt up to roast venison. It didn’t bother Vera in the least, though. She’d taken the thing with her and almost surely chopped it into pieces as soon as she got home.

  He turned to fertilize the next row and saw Peter Niebuhr waving at him from his cherry orchard with his pruning shears. Niebuhr had gone organic a short while ago. He now drove to Ottensen twice a week and set up a stall at the organic market at Spritzenplatz with his apples and cherries, and he did the same again on Friday at the Isemarkt. They were apparently tearing the stuff out of his hands in Hamburg.

  Dirk had discussed it with Britta as a possible way forward for them: less acreage, but organic and marketed directly. But they’d imagined what that would be like: Dirk zum Felde at the weekly organic market with customers like Burkhard Weisswerth and his pesky wife embroiling him in endless discussions about GMO technology and heirloom apples. “Sooner or later you’ll kill one of them,” Britta had said. “Forget it, Dirk, you’re just a simple farmer.”

  And that was precisely the problem. He saw what his colleagues did when it got too hard just to be a fruit farmer and it sickened him.

  Hajo Duehrkopp had turned his farm into a Parappledise and pulled tourists behind him in his old harvest crates with his tractor, pensioners in windbreakers, families from the campground, school classes. He explained to them how apples grow, and afterward they could earn an
apple diploma and eat butter cake in his farm café. Then, before climbing back into their buses and camper vans, they passed through the farm shop and bought cherry brandy, cherry jam, and elderflower jelly, all homemade by his wife.

  Yeah, right! You can bet Susi Duehrkopp stood at the juice extractor and boiled elderberries by the ton!

  No way. There was jelly at the local Rewe store. Label off, piece of checkered fabric over the lid, handwritten label onto the front, and presto, two euros profit per jar.

  And the Low German labels probably got you twenty cents more. DUEHRKOPP’S ELDERBERRIES.

  But why did it bother Dirk so much? The tourists happily spread Duehrkopp’s Elderberries on their rolls at home. It tasted like their grandmothers’ recipe, 100 percent. And Hajo Duehrkopp and his wife now took a vacation twice a year. Hadn’t needed to slog away for ages. Still had five acres directly behind the house where Hajo continued to play apple farmer with his customers.

  What he sold in his farm shop, he got from colleagues, from Dirk zum Felde, for instance, so Dirk really ought to simmer down.

  But it got his goat when he saw Hajo Duehrkopp decanting his apples and cherries, transferring them from the zum Felde crates into Duehrkopp ones before putting them into the shop. Hajo the magician in his big rustic circus. He did the magic and Dirk zum Felde, his stupid assistant, had to get the rabbit into the hat without anyone noticing.

  The good thing was that no one lost out.

  The tourists drove back to their rented apartments and row houses with their image of country life intact. The life that was reflected in calendar pictures, everything so healthy. And they came back again and again.

  Next year Hajo also wanted to launch an adopt-an-apple-tree scheme. Werner Harms had already been doing it for some time. Forty euros per sponsor per year, and all he had to do was stick a name tag on their tree and they could visit it from time to time and pick twenty kilos of apples in September.

  “I’ll bet you anything the little baby apples all get names too,” Britta said. She’d thought Dirk was kidding when he told her about it.

  Hajo fared best as a fruit entertainer; when he was in really good form, he would walk through the farm café and play folk songs on his accordion.

  And he, Dirk zum Felde, had a reliable customer in Hajo Duehrkopp.

  So, what was the problem?

  * * *

  He turned the tractor and saw Heinrich Luehrs coming out of the barn with his ladder. The recent storm had nearly blown Heinrich out of a tree. Dirk had seen his ladder swaying. But the tree would’ve had to fall over before Heinrich Luehrs came down.

  Heinrich was totally old-school. He still shook his head at the farmers who set up roadside fruit stands to sell apples, pears, or plums to folks driving past. Even though pretty much everyone was doing it now, Heinrich would never dream of it, as he considered it beneath his dignity.

  I’ll have to ask him whether his apple trees also have godmothers now, Dirk said to himself, and he looked forward to seeing Hinni Luehrs’s face.

  Doubts about artificial fertilizers and pesticides hadn’t yet entered Heinrich’s world. His faith in high-performance trees and premium fruit was still intact. He had sprayed mercury and arsenic in the past. They were of a completely different caliber than today’s pesticides and had also killed off moles and all other burrowing and scuttling critters, and as far as he was concerned, it could have carried on that way. What good were the vermin to anyone anyhow? Now they were protected species, but in Heinrich’s garden that didn’t do them any good. And he wasn’t stupid enough to get caught when he trapped a mole.

  His trees stood in rank and file, his fruit was flawless. He was horrified when he saw a meadow with scattered fruit trees, and he thought organic farmers were screwballs.

  Heinrich’s worldview was just as well ordered as his lawn.

  The fact that some bushy-bearded pomologists had recently been celebrated as saviors of the world for resuscitating the Finkenwerder Herbstprinz and the old Pfannkuchenapfel had passed him by, and he should be envied in that respect. He simply hadn’t realized that everything had changed a while back, and Dirk zum Felde wasn’t going to tell him that farmers like them were now profit-hungry idiots who simply continued mass-producing goods in their pesticide-polluted monocultures for the indifferent folks who still shopped in supermarkets, while organic farmers like Niebuhr and his pomologist cronies were improving the world with the fruit they were producing for professionals.

  Or that, as ordinary farmers, it was best to drive through the orchards only at night, so they didn’t get caught doing their dirty work by tourists and critical consumers.

  “We can rent out,” Britta had said when he’d had it up to here yet again.

  Kai and Kerstin Duewer had done it. They had converted their cold-storage house into vacation apartments, leased the land, and Kai now had a great job at the Raiffeisen hardware and feed store. A five-day workweek, vacation and sick pay, and they still had enough to buy a Bulthaup kitchen.

  “We could do that,” Britta said, “no big deal.”

  But they couldn’t really, and she knew that, of course. Precisely because he was a farmer. That was the problem.

  But he wasn’t the only one. He still had colleagues who understood how it felt to see the trailer drive into the farmyard in the fall with crates full of fruit, and to see his name on the crates, DIRK ZUM FELDE. And the old crates still bore the name of his father, who still helped with the harvest too.

  And this: fertilizing the cherry trees on a March day, not a single leaf in sight, the buzzard already circling, and the horny brown hares tearing after each other, nature on the hop, everything new, each year again in the springtime.

  How could they bear to stand in the Raiffeisen store selling rubber boots when outside the ground was thawing and everything smelled of new beginnings?

  Out on the street in front of Heinrich’s house, a tour bus pulled in. It was almost Easter, so the tourist coaches were slowly starting to arrive. They always stopped in front of Luehrs’s farm, but fortunately no one ever got out. That’s all Heinrich needed, a bunch of strangers tramping over his raked sand. They stayed seated while their guides described through the microphone the impressive decorative plaster infill of the house’s facade, the witches’ broom, the windmill, and the swan gable. Some of them took photos through the tinted windows before the bus drove on to the apple cider tasting.

  At Eckhoff’s the bus picked up speed. It could only be hoped for Vera’s sake that her niece wasn’t as dopey as she looked. The house really needed some help.

  But it didn’t really make a huge difference.

  Heinrich was just as lonesome behind his glorious facade as Vera was behind her drafty windows.

  Two old people in enormous empty houses.

  To be the last farmer on the farm, like Heinrich, that was a bitch. After that it would become a former farm. The phrase alone was enough to make you want to throw in the towel. Former farm, put out to pasture, as in retired. And then people from Hamburg would sweep in and finish the poor farm off.

  Most of them didn’t even have a handle on their children or their dogs, let alone their lives, and then they believed in all honesty that they could take on an old thatched-roof house and make it cozy.

  The results were clear to see. The entire village was killing itself laughing at Weisswerth’s wet cellar (wine cellar!), and even more so at his bumpy cobblestone paving. The Jarck brothers had done quite a job laying that. Weisswerth had gotten the workmanship that ten euros an hour bought you, and on top of that, the Jarcks had drawn the work out, just take it easy, man, and taken twice as long as they should have.

  * * *

  Right, the last row. Dirk zum Felde turned around and saw the twins and the dog coming toward him. Erik out in front as usual, Hannes in tow, bending down for something or other—a beetle, a worm, a snail. He could use them all for his creepy-crawly zoo in the machine shed.

  He stopped
and let them both climb onto the tractor. Two laughing, gap-toothed faces. Another six months and they’d be in school.

  Pauline was going on ten already. Theis was now five.

  Maybe one more.

  Full house.

  15

  Nesting Instinct

  NATURE WAS SLOWLY COMING ROUND. Like a patient coming out of a deep coma, it still looked pale. The grass was lifeless, straggly, and the fields looked swollen, as if from crying. The trees were dripping and shivering, but the buds on their bare branches were already starting to swell.

  You could now hear the water rushing when you pressed your ear against their trunks. “The sap flow,” Theis zum Felde said. Anne tried it but couldn’t hear a thing. She believed only half of what the little exterminator said anyway, but Leon hung on his every word.

  The boys were out and about exploring Vera’s garden. They had fetched the yellow plastic stethoscope from Leon’s doctor bag and were listening to the trees with it. Anne could see them standing next to the linden in their rubber boots, listening and nodding.

  Theis zum Felde had been pedaling his green tractor over to the farm almost daily since he and Leon had first played pileup together in the Bumblebee group.

  He had suddenly appeared in Vera’s hallway in his green overalls. His muddy rubber boots were lying outside the door. He had stood with his hands akimbo, in his Bob-the-Builder socks, not saying a word. When Anne said hi, he just nodded. Leon had arrived and stayed silent as well until Theis uttered an almost complete sentence: “I’m allowed till five.”

  That evening, after Leon had brushed his teeth, and after the bedtime reading and songs, when he’d rolled into his bed to sleep, his eyes already closed, Anne heard him mumble through his pacifier: “Theis is my best friend ever.”

  Now, in all kinds of weather, they trekked through the fruit farms and over the farm tracks, Leon and his best friend ever, who explained the world to him in shorthand.