by Dörte Hansen
She would have remained a stranger in this village, a nobody to the straddle-legged farmers with the timber-framed farmhouses, who thought they were aristocrats and had never seen an East Prussian wheat field or the grand tree-lined avenues that led up to manor homes.
She wanted to become once more what she had been before. She wanted to have her old life back, all of it.
Including her little boy.
But when she had a baby with Fritz Jacobi, it was a girl, and no boy came after that.
* * *
Vera always polished her shoes and cut her fingernails before she went to the Jacobis’. She wore her best clothes but noticed that her mother still furrowed her brow when greeting her. They would shake hands; Vera didn’t curtsy. She’d decide on the ferry ahead of time that she wouldn’t bend her knees and almost always succeeded.
Marlene was like a puppy whenever Vera came. She’d jump around her excitedly with dolls and balls, pull her into the nursery, show her the miniature shop, and fetch games and picture books from the cupboard until Hildegard called them for dinner.
Every meal was a test—the white tablecloth, the stiff napkins, the overly large silver spoons. Little Marlene always passed, and Vera inevitably failed. She was almost twenty the last time and got tomato soup on the damask.
“Tell me, do you eat in the barn at home?”
Hildegard didn’t see Vera flinch. Marlene put down her spoon. They finished the meal in silence.
That was Vera’s last visit to the Jacobis’. She never went again when Hildegard summoned her, but she still read the letters that her mother had been writing to her since she had left Ida Eckhoff’s farm.
She wrote about oak woods and stork nests, cornflowers, kingfishers, and cranes, about swimming in the lakes of Mazuria, and skating on black ice.
She recorded the names of her horses and dogs, and the names of her three siblings, none of whom were alive anymore. She wrote down the words and the music to the songs of her homeland, including “The Land of the Dark Forests” and “Annie of Tharaw,” all seventeen verses, and she drew hollyhocks, globeflowers, white-tailed sea eagles, and the von Kamcke family’s manor home.
She also put recipes in the envelopes, for beetroot soup, potato dumplings, and blintzes.
My dear Vera, wrote Hildegard Jacobi to the farmer’s child she couldn’t stand to have in her Blankenese house for even half a day. And each time the child stood right in front of her, Hildegard only inspected Vera’s shoes and fingernails and kept her at arm’s length.
Hildegard wrote about baby Vera, who had sung when she could barely speak, who wanted to sleep in the kitchen in the big basket with the puppies.
She sent Vera a photo of a man with a broad smile, sitting on a horse with a child in front of him. Friedrich und Vera von Kamcke on Excelsior.
Hildegard wrote as if she were trying to keep a Prussian Atlantis from sinking.
My dear Vera. She could be affectionate as long as the Elbe lay between her and her daughter.
Vera had filed the letters in a document folder. They were stored in the oak chest and were no one else’s business, not even her half sister’s.
But she no longer even had Karl and sat by herself on the family bench. Too much solitude, even for Vera Eckhoff.
So, on the second day after the funeral, she fetched the letters from the chest, placed them on the kitchen table, and went off to bed.
The letters were still there the following morning in the closed folder, but they’d been read. Marlene’s eyes were red and puffy. They drank their coffee without a word, even had a second cup, but then Marlene took the breadbasket and threw it against the wall. The cutlery followed. “DON’T YOU DARE!” Vera shouted as Marlene reached for a cup. Marlene rushed outside, ran through the garden and into the cherry trees, and started to scream. The last few starlings that were still looking for cherries flew off in alarm.
Leaves and whole branches were broken off, tree trunks got roared at, dandelions were crushed and beheaded by feet that could no longer kick Hildegard von Kamcke, since she had died without saying a word. Like drift ice, always cold, something you couldn’t get a grip on. Marlene didn’t know a single children’s song from Prussia, she had no photos of a manor home, and she had never heard of a dead child by the roadside. She knew absolutely nothing.
A mother like an uncharted continent, the daughter sent out without a compass, without a map, in a country with deep ravines, in which the earth shook and wild animals lurked. You didn’t come through that in one piece. Marlene had fallen into every gorge, come crashing down again and again from smooth, cold walls. It hadn’t been nice being Hildegard Jacobi’s child.
To Marlene she’d bequeathed her musical talent, her voice, her ear. There were singing and piano lessons, and Marlene played very well.
But not well enough for Hildegard Jacobi, who’d raise her eyebrows as high as they could go, give a thin-lipped smile, and exhale briefly whenever Marlene played a wrong note in an impromptu, as though she’d known in advance that it would happen.
And if Marlene didn’t make a mistake, if she had mastered a difficult piece, played it perfectly, then let her hands fall, was content for a brief moment, Hildegard liked to cite the German humorist Wilhelm Busch.
If a frog, who on hands and knees barely made it up a tree, were to think he’s now a bird, he’s erred.
Her chronically cheerful father, seldom found without a brandy snifter, would then sit next to his daughter on the piano stool, laugh, and pull her toward him.
“Oh, don’t let that bother you, little Marlene. Come on, play another nice tune.…”
She was a frog in a tree to Hildegard Jacobi.
The older, faraway daughter who had gotten straight A’s in school, gone off to college, then opened a dental practice and owned the Trakehners, My dear Vera, was the bird.
And Vera had never said anything about these letters, not in all the summers that Marlene—with her pigtails and her backpack—had spent in the Altland, vacationing at her big sister’s. She’d begged for it every year, just for a week. She had loved Vera so much, even her scary house, even the old man with the limp who quietly whistled songs on his white bench.
Not one word about the letters, not even later, on any of the July Sundays when she’d visited the farm with her husband and children to pick cherries. Vera had kept her at arm’s length, starving.
Snails died, molehills were trampled under Marlene’s feet, field hares fled.
Vera stood at the kitchen window with her binoculars and watched Marlene wreak havoc, creating a scene for the trees, like a woman who had been deceived.
Vera regretted it already. Wished she’d left the letters in the chest and burned them at some point.
That’s what happened when you offered Us just because you were tired and relented out of loneliness.
Marlene was now out of sight. She had to be getting close to the big ditch. Vera called the dogs and went after her.
She found her on one of the little wooden bridges, slumped over, and no wonder, after that terrible frenzy. “Move over,” Vera said. The dogs lay down on the grass, and she sat down next to Marlene on the bridge, at arm’s length. But it wasn’t about the letters anymore.
Marlene sat howling in the blazing sun because the ice just wouldn’t thaw.
Because Hildegard Jacobi’s daughter, herself frozen to the core, was now letting her own daughter freeze.
“I’m treating Anne the same way! Everything just carries on unchanged.”
She didn’t have a Kleenex, so she used her sleeves. Her face grew blurred from crying like a child, with her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth wide open. “I didn’t want that.”
She was bawling like a girl who’d accidentally broken her doll’s arm or ripped off its head.
Vera didn’t understand such things, but she could see Marlene’s sweat-drenched hair, her face that was like a fuzzy photograph, and her blouse hanging on her like a wet rag, stained with
dirt, grass, and tears.
She pulled her up and they stumbled back to the house, two soldiers exhausted by battle.
Marlene lay down on the bench under the linden, and Vera went inside to get her some water, but Marlene had fallen asleep by the time she got back.
Vera drank it herself. She looked at Marlene on the bench and didn’t know where to sit.
That evening, they drank too much. The wine and apple brandy gave Marlene Dutch courage, and she asked questions that she would never ask Vera Eckhoff if she was sober.
“Why did she leave you here on your own?”
“Why don’t you have any children, no husband?”
“Why do you have no one?”
Vera got up and cleared away the bottles and glasses. “I had Karl,” she said. Then they went to bed. The next morning she took Marlene to the train.
* * *
On the way back she dropped in at the graveyard. It was still hot outside and the gerbera flower arrangement from the hunting club was already flagging.
She heard the gate creak, and saw Heinrich Luehrs coming down the sandy path toward her. When the weather was like this, he drove to the graveyard every day to water the flowers on Elisabeth’s grave. He noticed Vera, turned off the path, and came over to her. He put down his watering can and pail. “Hi, Vera.”
They stood for a while in the sun.
“It’s all behind him now,” said Heinrich as he watered the gerbera on Karl’s grave. “No need for tears.”
He watered the cornflower wreath from Vera and the flower arrangement with yellow roses from the neighbors. The remainder, just a few drops, he poured over Vera’s head. Then he widened his eyes in mock horror, slapped her on the shoulder, and left.
She wiped the water from her hair and watched Hinni Luehrs march the watering can back to the faucet, then over to his wife’s grave.
He crouched down stiff-kneed and started to feel around for dead heads on the two daisy bushes that stood to the right and left of the headstone. He snapped them off, tossed them into his pail, then did the same with the six rosebushes that stood in two rows parallel to the perfectly straight flagstone path. The flowers were cut to the exact height of the headstone, glowing soldiers at roll call.
Heinrich wasn’t prone to compromise when it came to looking after graves either.
WHY SO SOON? In the case of sudden deaths, the Suhr firm always recommended this inscription, and mostly an angel on the headstone too.
But Heinrich Luehrs was through with angels, and the question on the headstone wasn’t meant as pious whispering. It was best roared out loud: WHY SO SOON!
Vera watched him kneeling in the graveyard, plucking the flowers with a punishing hand.
He’d carried her himself with his three sons. They had heaved the coffin onto their shoulders, Heinrich and his eldest in front, Jochen and Georg at the back, in their new black suits. The four of them had schlepped the heavy oak coffin through the entire graveyard, soaked to the skin, their black ties and sharply creased trousers waving like flags of mourning in the wind. It had rained and stormed, but at least that weather suited Heinrich’s furious face at the side of the grave, when there was nothing else to carry, nothing more to do than stand empty-handed next to his sons, none of them daring to cry.
None of the mourners were crazy enough to go up to Heinrich Luehrs at the graveside and press his hand. They all took off.
Karl then hobbled across to Heinrich and held the umbrella over his head while Vera took his drenched sons home.
When she got back to the graveyard, they were still standing under the broken umbrella. Both of them were dripping wet and shivering, and Heinrich was still too stubborn to accept a ride.
It passed, even for a man like Heinrich Luehrs, who was very precise about everything, who would never say an Our Father in his life again because he’d discovered what it might mean: Thy will be done.
Who didn’t like to be pushed around and was finished with angels.
Vera watched him water the roses and daisies carefully with his watering can. At least the flowers and bushes complied. They grew as he wished them to. On this grave, the will of Heinrich Luehrs alone was done, even though it was God’s Acre.
17
Rural Plagues
THE FEATURE STORY WAS ALREADY in place. “From Quarry to Sausage,” an opulent photo spread, but nothing quaint. He wanted it raw, honest, bloody, hard. He just had to ask Vera Eckhoff when he could go out hunting with her. He wouldn’t mention a photographer at this point. He still wasn’t sure that Florian was right for the job. After he had been thrown out of Dirk zum Felde’s place, he’d called in sick for two weeks and said that he would definitely be psychologically scarred by the incident. The man was in his mid-thirties and was acting like a little girl.
But his magazine, A Taste of Country Life, would never be one of these country kitsch rags, not another of those magazines with cute songbirds and lambs and little wildflowers on the cover, and with recipes for parsnip soup and instructions for absurd woodworking projects, tea warmers, nest boxes, or crap like that, and above all NOTHING with felt, God forbid. Felt was so last year, for heaven’s sake.
Burkhard Weisswerth shifted down a gear and turned onto the small farm track. He took the curve a little too tightly, his back tire swerved a bit, and it almost went very wrong. It could’ve been quite ugly, with a bottle of single malt in one saddlebag and a jar of Eva’s zucchini-apple-chutney in the other. He slowed down a little. The streetlights ended, so it was pitch-dark, and the farm track was muddy and slippery.
He’d seen Dirk zum Felde only a couple of times since the kicking incident, just in passing. They had waved at each other from a distance. Dirk could have stopped and said something, since he had clearly overreacted, although Florian’s tone wasn’t optimal either, admittedly. Best just to let it go!
Burkhard Weisswerth wasn’t a cheapskate. He had just gone out and spent fifty euros on an eighteen-year-old Glenfiddich that Dirk zum Felde would appreciate. He was a farmer but no idiot. Eva had given him the chutney for Britta, along with an invitation to the spring festival at her jelly factory. This was the third year in a row that she’d organized it, and always on Pentecost Monday. When the weather cooperated, and the day trippers came from Hamburg, she sold quite a lot.
Her single-variety apple jellies did best of all. Eva had the heirloom varieties delivered by a pomologist, a brilliant guy who had previously studied Asian cultures. You could see immediately that a man like that had a different outlook from your run-of-the-mill Altland farmer. It would take a lot more persuasion before someone like Dirk zum Felde would finally realize that modern fruit production with its overbreeding and overfertilization as well as its monocultures and all that GMO technology was completely insane. Total lunacy!
As a journalist he also had a role to play, of course. He was planning a portrait of pomologists for the autumn edition of A Taste of Country Life. And last year already, Eva had planted a few of the heirloom varieties in her garden, Ananas Reinette, Horneburger Pfannkuchen, and Marten’s Gravensteiner apples. Just three of each sort to begin with, but a start at least.
* * *
When he rode into the yard, Burkhard Weisswerth had to slalom around a scooter, a children’s tractor, a go-cart, and a tricycle. All the vehicles looked as though kids had dismounted them in a terrible hurry. The scooter was lying on its side, the go-cart and tricycle appeared to have gotten wedged together in a collision, and the tractor was standing crossways in front of the entrance to the house.
A rope ladder was dangling from a large buckeye tree. Someone had started building a tree house in its crown. A couple of laths had been nailed together every which way, and a John Deere flag had already been hoisted.
In a small wheelbarrow, a stack of farm animals—cows, pigs, and sheep—were piled atop each other as if they’d been culled following a pandemic. A wooden sword was sticking out of a flowerpot. How many kids did Dirk zum Felde have?
<
br /> Burkhard Weisswerth looked for a free space to park his bike, took off his helmet, fetched the bottle of single malt and the jar of chutney from his saddlebags, and walked up to the door.
He’d drink a pretty good scotch with Dirk zum Felde, no hard feelings, chew the fat man to man, and they’d gradually open up to each other a little. Establishing contact with neighbors wasn’t unimportant if you wanted to make it out here. He was very pleased that he had a knack for it, that he didn’t fear contact with others.
And you always got a lot back as well.
The nameplate above the doorbell was handmade, a large ceramic egg with a cracked shell. ZUM FELDE was written on the egg, and brightly colored lizards curled around it. Or dragons? Or maybe dinosaurs? And their little tummies had names on them: DIRK, BRITTA, PAULINE, HANNES, ERIK, THEIS.
Burkhard put the bottle down, pulled his iPhone out of his jacket pocket, and took a quick photo of it. Eva just had to see it! She had a great weakness for the monstrosities made of ceramic, salt dough, and terra-cotta that the folks here in the village used to decorate their houses and front yards.
Gesine Holst’s concrete lighthouse with the flashing light would be hard to beat, but this might be a worthy runner-up. He couldn’t wait to see Eva’s face. He put his iPhone away and rang the doorbell.
There was an edgy barking behind the front door, followed by the patter of bare feet on stone. A little boy in pajamas opened up, looked briefly at Burkhard’s expensive work boots made of fine leather, and said, “Shoes off!” before disappearing back inside.
“Who’s at the door, Theis?”
“Dunno!”
Burkhard tried to get rid of the big dog that was weaving around him, wagging its long tail, slobbering all over his trousers, and sniffing the jar of chutney. He couldn’t stand it and called out, “Howdy!”
