This House Is Mine

by Dörte Hansen

  “Crab apple. Inedible,” he warned, pointing at a little tree behind Heinrich’s barn.

  “Turn handlebars!” he yelled when he was teaching Leon how to reverse his John Deere tractor.

  And the first time he’d stood in front of the rabbit cage in Leon’s room, with his arms folded across his chest, Theis zum Felde had said, “Individual housing. Not species appropriate.”

  Leon had looked at Willy and then at his mother, shaking his head reproachfully.

  Now Theis zum Felde was standing with the stethoscope in front of Vera’s linden like the head doctor, and Leon was at his side like his staunch assistant.

  Anne could see Heinrich Luehrs in his garden, pruning some defenseless bush that was daring to grow in the wrong direction.

  She had borrowed his longest ladder so as to reach the small window that was hanging to one side on its hinges at the very top of Vera’s gable.

  It must have been decades since anyone had looked through its cracked pane. There were so many spiderwebs on it you could hardly see through it. Anne could make out only a couple of beams of light in the attic—the sky shimmering through where the thatched roof was worn. But once her eyes got used to the dark, she could see a couple of little bones lying on the floor. A mouse, a rat, a marten, some sort of small animal must have perished there a while back. She could also see a flight of stairs, the narrow stairway that led up to the attic, and next to it a dusty bag and a large pair of boots.

  Vera hadn’t let anyone go up in this attic for a long time, because the stairs and floorboards were giving way.

  Anne could press the screwdriver into the rotten wood of the window frame without applying any pressure, and in some spots it went all the way through. The wood was untreated apart from the remains of dark green paint that was left in the corners. The putty was crumbly and yellowed.

  She took the narrow chisel out of her pocket and started to lever the little window out of its frame.

  She carried it down the ladder with care, went into the toolshed, and used the jigsaw to cut a piece of hardboard the same size as the window.

  Heinrich Luehrs had taken the burlap bags off the tops of his rosebushes, a reprieve after the long, anxious winter. Now he was raking their bed.

  He should never have lent her the ladder. If anything happened, he’d be in for it. Heinrich kept a close watch over the top of his boxwood hedge as Anne lifted her hammer, stuck a couple of nails between her lips, clamped the board under her arm, and climbed back up the wobbly thing.

  He couldn’t bear to look. She’d never stood on a ladder as tall as this one before and now she was brandishing tools thirty feet above the ground. It was sheer madness.

  He put down his rake.

  Anne watched Heinrich Luehrs walk over to the bottom of the ladder and hold it firmly with both hands. She nailed the hardboard over the gap in the window, waved down to him, and waited until he was back at his roses. Then she dropped the hammer onto the lawn, climbed down a couple of rungs, and tried to decipher the weathered inscription on the large crossbeam.

  * * *

  “Oh, something in Low German,” was all Vera had said.

  It wasn’t easy trying to discuss the house with her.

  The deal was that she’d put the house in order. But whenever Anne picked up a tool, Vera would come up behind her and want to talk through everything she planned to do.

  Whether the windows were really so shot that they had to be knocked out. Whether the roof couldn’t be patched instead of ripping off all the thatch and the old beams in one go.

  It took a while for Anne to realize that money wasn’t the problem. Vera had piles of it.

  “I’m not going to destroy anything around here,” Anne said, “you can take my word for it.”

  But that wasn’t it either.

  * * *

  Vera Eckhoff turned white when Leon hit the vase that stood on the table in the foyer with his Super Ball. There was a gorgeous, crystal-clear sound and the large vase tottered briefly, then stopped, but Vera caught the ball right away and tossed it out the front door like a hand grenade.

  Leon started to cry and scoured the entire yard with Theis zum Felde, but they couldn’t find it. “In the ditch probably,” Theis said with a shrug. “Good throw.”

  Leon cried himself hoarse. Anne pulled him onto her lap and sent Theis home. “I’ll buy you a new one, Leon.”

  Behind Vera’s kitchen door, she could hear the pots rattling and clanking.

  * * *

  Two women, one stove. That never works. Vera had made that clear shortly after Anne moved in. They didn’t cook together, seldom ate with one another, but Leon had gotten used to shuttling between them.

  He no longer woke Anne up in the mornings. He dressed himself and ran in his slipper socks through the cold hallway and into the kitchen to Vera.

  Vera never sent you back to bed just because it was still dark. She didn’t want to sleep in for once or for crying out loud have some peace.

  Vera was always up already.

  Early in the morning, she fixed his twisted trouser straps and the sleeves of his sweater, spread honey on bread for him, and eventually bought him a plastic cup. It drove her nuts when he waved the thin old cups with the gold rims around the place.

  Vera found a child’s cup with a mole on it at Edeka, and they teased Heinrich Luehrs with it when he came over for coffee.

  “Hey, look, Hinni, your buddy,” said Leon, pointing at the mole, and Heinrich looked as though he wanted to toss the cup with the stupid-ass mole out the window.

  When Anne heard Leon laughing in Vera’s kitchen in the morning, she knew they were telling the hilarious mole joke again.

  * * *

  The morning after the incident with the Super Ball, Vera had gotten into her old Benz and driven off at high speed to buy saddle soap and oats. At the cash register there were small toy animals, impulse-buy items for the farmers’ children, and Vera had bought two of them, a Trakehner mare and a foal. Theis zum Felde had dozens of these animals, which he drove around in his trailer, but these would be Leon’s first ones.

  “No more rubber balls in my house,” Vera said. Leon nodded, took the horses, and shuffled through to the kitchen with her. Then she made breakfast.

  Ida Eckhoff’s old cupboards were still hanging in Vera’s kitchen; SAGO, PEARL BARLEY, and MALT COFFEE were inscribed on the ceramic drawers; and Vera cut her bread with a cast-iron hand crank.

  Everything in her house was old and heavy. Vera didn’t appear to ever have purchased a chair or a tablecloth or a cupboard.

  She’d inherited everything, but she lived with the things as though they didn’t belong to her.

  She was house-sitting, nothing more than that. It seemed that she didn’t even dare disturb the old flowerpots that her mother had placed on the windowsills decades earlier.

  When Anne removed the curtain rods in the front room so she could get at the window frames, Vera ran around aimlessly, clearly on edge, before finally starting to clear the sills.

  She lifted the flowerpots one at a time and carried them with both hands as though they were her relatives’ urns, took them into her bedroom and locked the door, because children with or without rubber balls had taken to parading through all the rooms lately. Then she disappeared into the kitchen and started banging cupboard doors and slamming drawers.

  Anne heard her crashing about and was reminded of her mother, who would do exactly the same: set her face, not say a word, and let objects cry out in pain instead.

  Marlene could be preparing vegetable soup and make it sound like a massacre, hacking off cabbage heads, snapping beans, scraping the skin off carrots while making horrendous noises.

  As she had done the evening that her daughter had taken her flute back up to the attic and put the sheet music in the recycling.

  Anne imagined there were other ways of reacting. That instead of abusing a cabbage with a knife in the kitchen, you could have gone to the living r
oom and lain down next to your child on the parquet floor.

  You could also perhaps have pulled her toward you, taken her in your arms, and held her for a while. You could have shaken her or cried. You could have said, “I’m sorry.”

  Sorry because you couldn’t have a broken child around you, because you could only cope with a bright, perfect child.

  You had to leave this one lying on the floor, unfortunately.

  Marlene didn’t cry, she wreaked havoc, and Vera did the same. They started wars when they didn’t know what else to do.

  Hildegard von Kamcke’s daughters in their armor of rage.

  * * *

  Vera never seemed to sleep.

  If Anne woke up at one in the morning because Leon was looking for his pacifier or his stuffed toy, Vera would be sitting in the kitchen with her dogs.

  And at three or four, if Anne awoke with a start from a dream or was shaken awake by a storm, Vera would still be sitting on the kitchen bench.

  Anne could see light under the door. She could hear Vera’s radio. String quartets and piano concertos until about six in the morning, Classics for Night Enthusiasts. But Vera didn’t enthuse through her nights, she sat in the kitchen as though riveted to the spot, and waited for another night to be over.

  She didn’t seem to possess her house. It was more the other way around. Vera belonged to this house.

  * * *

  This hoose is mine ain …

  You had to feel the letters on the gray, exhausted beams. She needed a scaffold. It wasn’t possible with the wobbly ladder. And Heinrich Luehrs looked as though he wanted to pull her down with his rake right that minute. He was shaking his head and edging closer again.

  She could see the Elbe from up here. One sailor—the first—had ventured out. Small as a paper boat, his vessel bobbed up and down in the wake of a massive container ship. The first ewes were standing on the dike, bleating after their lambs. The shepherd came daily, counted the new arrivals, and collected the dead. He moved the electric fence and drove the herd on as soon as the grass on the dike had been eaten down far enough.

  Shaggy clouds, gray and thick as a fleece, moved across the sky as though someone had inflated the sheep and let them rise.

  The clouds were moving eastward as though they had appointments to get to.

  Seagulls were circling above the Elbe island, surveying breeding sites, looking for partners, heading off rivals, building nests, all as though on command. Everything according to plan.

  Dirk zum Felde was driving his forklift over the farm track. It was carrying two plastic sacks, each one reaching about head height, because he knew that it was time to spread the potash fertilizer under his apple trees, and how much, and why.

  Even Vera’s stunted cherry tree still understood that it ought to produce blossoms now.

  Everything was rehearsed down to the supporting roles. No one missed a cue, no one forgot their words. They had all mastered their parts.

  Except for Anne Hove, who was standing on a tall ladder, ignorant of the script.

  In fact, she didn’t even know the play, knew even less than Willy, who, in the third spring of his pygmy rabbit existence, suddenly began plucking his belly fur and piling up straw in the corner of his cage in the hope of offspring.

  Heinrich Luehrs had taken a look at the agitated rabbit and shaken his head.

  “If that’s a buck, then I’m a girl.”

  Theis zum Felde then removed any remaining doubts. He took out a pair of work gloves from the pockets of his overalls, pulled the struggling, scratching rabbit out of his cage, examined it, and nodded. “Girl.”

  Leon looked at Willy, baffled. He needed time to digest the news.

  “Nesting instinct,” said Theis, and Leon nodded now too, as if he had long suspected this to be the case.

  Anne climbed down and took the ladder back to Heinrich Luehrs. He gave her a look that would make you cower.

  “The ladder topples, then what? All hands on deck and general panic!”

  Another one who almost toppled over when he spoke.

  Another one with a tendency to knock people down a peg or two.

  Get down from the ladder, get out of the driveway, varmint!

  She wondered how someone got to be like that. If it was the landscape that did that to them, the trees, the river Elbe. If it might be because their fathers’ fathers had tamed a river, cut it down to size, directed it with dikes, driven their ditches and canals into its soft foreland. That they hadn’t simply discovered the land on which they lived, they had made it.

  And then built their enormous houses, hall-houses like cathedrals, and in so doing extolled themselves as creators of the marshlands, not gods, not farmers, but something in between.

  Perhaps that’s why men like Heinrich Luehrs and Dirk zum Felde stood like that in front of you, half-gods with rakes and pruning shears. And why five-year-old boys from the Altland, who wore size 12 rubber boots, trampled varmints into the ground.

  Perhaps it was handed down. If you were born into one of these marshland families, if you were part of a timber frame from the start, you knew your place and your position in this landscape, and it always went according to age: first came the river, then the land, then bricks and oak beams, and then the people with the old names who owned the land and the old houses.

  Everything that came after that, people who’d been bombed out, driven away, those weary of the city, those without land and looking for a homeland were nothing but wind-borne sand and washed-up scum. Travelers who should stay on the road.

  Down from the ladder, don’t block the access, varmint.

  Anne wondered how long you had to stay here so as not to be considered a stranger. A lifetime clearly wasn’t enough.

  “Thanks for the ladder,” she said, “just don’t look next time!”

  16

  Drift Ice

  VERA HAD SLEPT LIKE A child for three nights. No dreams, no Dr. Martin Burger, no old man crying. Inner peace without PsychoPax. She hoped that Karl had found it too. She missed him.

  Karl Eckhoff had gone home, Pastor Herwig said, he now lay next to the little half-timbered church. When there wasn’t any wind and her windows were open, Vera could hear the clock in the church tower chiming. Not celebratory strikes, it was more a kind of clanging, as though someone were hitting a pot with a wooden spoon. She thought of Karl, who had gone home with his stiff leg.

  She had had his name engraved on the Eckhoffs’ headstone and asked whether there was enough space for a fourth name. “Plenty,” Otto Suhr said. “Let’s take care of it at the same time.” And so under Karl Eckhoff they’d also written Vera Eckhoff. *1940–

  “That’s sorted then.” Otto Suhr thought practically. You didn’t get far as a mortician otherwise.

  There wasn’t a word for what Karl had been. Not a father, nor a brother, nor a child. Her comrade perhaps. Her fellow man.

  * * *

  Vera had driven Marlene to the station in silence. They had rubbed each other the wrong way in the three days and nights that they were sisters. Or pretended they were.

  Hildegard von Kamcke’s daughters, her war child and her postwar child, fourteen years between them—and the Elbe. Vera had pushed little Marlene in her swing in the large garden in Blankenese and played Trap the Cap with her at the round table in Hildegard’s living room, three or four times a year on a Sunday when the head of the household wasn’t around, because Hildegard kept her life in order.

  Vera was her guest, invited to lunch, and there was tea in the afternoon as well. Hildegard’s last name was now Jacobi.

  She would send her driver to collect Vera from the ferry, and he would take her back to the pier in the late afternoon.

  The man that Vera never saw had gotten rich from the apartment complexes and row houses that he’d built in Hamburg. Thin walls and small windows for people who never got anywhere after the war.

  Personally, he loved art nouveau, stucco facades, arched windows, an
d oak floors. His own home had all these features in spades, and Hildegard knew how to live in these big houses. The villa wasn’t a mansion, Jacobi was no aristocrat, everything wasn’t quite comme il faut, but it was close enough.

  Hildegard never set foot in Karl Eckhoff’s house again, nor in the village on the dike, nor in the Altland. She left it all behind as though this ground had also been ravaged and scorched.

  She also left her war child there as if she had lost it along the way.

  Just like the other one, the little one that had frozen in his swaddling clothes. That she’d left at the side of the road in his baby carriage.

  She had covered him one more time, smoothed out his blanket. Most of the mothers did this before they left their dead children behind and then carried on past all the other silent baby carriages standing in the snowdrifts.

  It had been too cold that January. The little ones perished first.

  Some of the women had sat down in the snow long before they reached the lagoon, leaned against their baby carriages, and trusted in the cold.

  Some had jumped from bridges, holding their children by the hand.

  Some had gone into the woods, hanged their children in the trees, and then hanged themselves.

  Some, only sometime later, had employed straight razors, a rope, or poison, because they could no longer find themselves in the miserable wretches they’d become.

  The majority, though, hadn’t allowed themselves to die and remained homesick wanderers for the rest of their lives.

  They had marched off as Prussians and arrived as riffraff. You could get used to that. You could live in an apartment or a little house in a development and be thankful that you no longer had to live in a damp barrack or a Quonset hut.

  They had cultivated wax beans, planted potatoes, and not thought back, not looked east except in their dreams and on holidays, when they cried and didn’t tell their children why. And their sons and daughters got used to the fact that their parents were drift ice.

  Hildegard von Kamcke had brought her elder child to safety. Her child had become a farmer’s daughter, but Hildegard hadn’t become a farmer’s wife.

  She’d had no intention of acclimating. Of settling for a few acres of cherry and apple trees and a wounded man on a bench in a house where she’d slept on straw and had to steal milk. Where she’d stood in front of the ornamental gate in her stockinged feet, with a child who was freezing and had snot all over her sleeve. Refugee pack, lice on your back.