by Dörte Hansen
There was something about Anne that Vera recognized right away. It was the way she brought both hands down fleetingly over her eyes, nose, and cheeks. She did this when she put down the crate to greet Vera.
And later, when they were sitting at the table, she did it again. When you were listening to her, when she stopped speaking and you looked at her, she made this swiping motion, as though she wanted to erase something from herself, a thought or a facial expression. Vera recognized this gesture; she had seen it at this kitchen table many years before, in Hildegard von Kamcke, who had the same slender hands.
* * *
But Anne didn’t roar her anger through the whole house and didn’t go throwing the gold-rimmed cups. She was always very quiet, and when her boy was at his father’s, she seemed to fall completely silent. She remained in Ida Eckhoff’s apartment, poring over some construction drawing or other, or reading her gory crime novels. Endless streams of deranged serial killers. The cover copy alone made Vera feel weak in the knees.
Sometimes she saw Anne walking through the rows of cherry trees, smoking and listening to music through headphones. Mostly she moved in time to the music, you could tell. And on one occasion she danced, quite clumsily. Vera had looked away quickly. It wasn’t the type of dancing that was meant to be seen. It was the way you danced when you had completely forgotten yourself.
Both of them were glad when Leon returned on Sundays.
Easter with his father, Pentecost with his mother, equity all the way down to the holidays. It was customary today to have equal custody as soon as the love was over.
Divorce—a clean cut—that no longer happened, it seemed. They were now attached to one another forever, all the couples who’d made a mistake and wanted to go their separate ways. They wanted out but that wasn’t possible. They were joined at the hip because of the children.
People had done it differently in the past. They resolved the question of guilt and got divorced. One had screwed up, the other one got the child. It was much simpler.
The thought alone of Karl and Hildegard having had to see each other every other weekend!
They had never seen each other again. If you wanted a divorce, then you took the consequences, you didn’t cry over your child. Hildegard Jacobi, divorcée Eckhoff, hadn’t done that anyway. A clean cut. Better for everyone.
It certainly wasn’t very easy living as a couple. People were rarely happy with one another. Vera hadn’t even tried it. Now and then she’d borrowed a married man for a couple of months, once even for a couple of years, a fine specimen.
But not a good enough liar. His wife almost hadn’t wanted to take him back when she found out.
A clean break, then he’d cleaned up his act and it was okay. Vera didn’t want him around.
But she could have had a child, a fatherless one, why not? No one in the village would’ve been surprised. At times she was sorry that she had thought of it too late.
How could anyone forget that she wanted a child?
21
Iceland
IT WAS IMPORTANT TO REMAIN emotionally detached. You had to stick to the facts, avoid any hint of accusation. Sigrid Pape preferred to pick the phone up herself. She had held telephone conversations like this often enough, her soft skills could be relied on.
She dialed the number, sat up straight, and smiled.
“Frau Hove, good morning.” (continuing to smile) “Sigrid Pape here, from the Elbe Frogs.” (still smiling)
What she personally thought of the revolting creatures, how hard it was for her to understand how a mother could possibly not SEE THEM CRAWLING around on her child’s head, that had nothing to do with it, nothing at all.
Head lice weren’t a sign of bad hygiene, for heaven’s sake. Lice could strike any family. They weren’t anything to be ashamed of. That was the broadly held consensus among the experts, the accepted doctrine. That was the theory at least.
In practice, however, child care workers could always identify those who were likely to get them. Naturally, they didn’t say this, but they knew it to be true.
The fact that the new kid from Hamburg-Ottensen had them all over his head didn’t surprise Sigrid Pape in any case. Perhaps his mother would finally cut his long hair; sometimes some good came of it.
Aside from the lice, he was doing well in the Bumblebees. He was still a little whiny, a typical only child, but that was also improving. And he always wanted a second helping when there was goulash. So much for him being a vegetarian.
“Exactly, you can get that at the pharmacy here. See you shortly then, Frau Hove.” Sigrid Pape hung up and gradually relaxed her smile.
* * *
Anne’s head began to itch. She ran into the bathroom, held her head over the sink, ran her fingers through her hair, and rubbed her scalp, but nothing suspicious fell into the washbasin.
The pharmacist had very long hair, braided into a thick ponytail. Anne couldn’t understand her very well, since she was speaking very quietly. “I’ll put that into a bag for you.” There were always a lot of customers in the pharmacy at this time of day. She pushed the bag over the counter quickly and seemed to take the money from Anne’s hand with her fingertips.
Leon was already standing in his jacket and rubber boots outside the Bumblebees’ classroom. He was carrying his hat, scarf, and stuffed animal in a plastic bag, which had been tied up tightly. He was scratching his head and could hardly wait to tell Vera what had happened.
“You might have them as well,” Anne said, but she didn’t find any on Vera. You didn’t have to look for long in Leon’s hair. That wasn’t sand or dandruff on his head. It was crawling. Anne took the lice comb and the pump dispenser out of their bag and began reading the instructions.
“Give me that,” Vera said. “I know how to deal with lice.”
Then she sprayed the oily stuff all over Leon’s head and massaged it into his blond curls.
“I also had lice when I was your age.”
* * *
Anne stripped Leon’s bed and then her own. You never knew. She gathered up their pajamas, hats, and scarves, and stuffed everything into the washing machine. She poured hot water into the basin and tossed in their brushes and comb. Stuck all the stuffed animals into a big plastic bag, tied it up, and put it in Vera’s storeroom. Three days, Sigrid Pape had said, and then she’d have to get a doctor’s note stating that Leon was free of lice.
“And would you please be so kind as to let the zum Feldes know? Theis wasn’t at day care today. If Leon has lice, Theis might very well have them too.”
Vera sat Leon on the kitchen table, placed a towel around his shoulders, and combed the lice out of his hair, strand by strand.
* * *
“Refugee pack! Lice on your back!”
Their heads were crawling with them. They had been on the road for weeks, lain on teeming mattresses, on old pillows in abandoned homes, and pulled blankets belonging to others over their heads, other people’s coats, and at times it was so cold they had taken hats off the dead. The itching never ceased. They scratched until they bled.
The hair came off later, really short. They looked like criminals, felt like it too, like a pack, like a refugee pack, like stinking Polaks, even later when their hair grew back.
What should they have said, the Polak children, when the others had teased them?
That they hadn’t committed any crime?
That they were children who’d had to walk over the dead? And that this was better than climbing over the dying, because dead people no longer made a sound?
That they’d seen villages burn down?
That they threw up when chickens were singed because the scorched feathers smelled like burned hair?
That you shouldn’t bother giving kids like them ice skates?
That it wasn’t good to find Ida Eckhoff in the hayloft, because then you started dreaming again about those you had forgotten, who had hung in the trees with crooked necks like birds that were much too large?
&nbs
p; But what could people who’d never had to leave their timber-frame villages know about the lice-ridden foreigners who were driven into their barns and houses, in increasing numbers, endless herds like mangy cattle.
“Refugee pack, lice on your back.”
You couldn’t blame the kids with their rosy apple cheeks.
“Tell me a story,” Leon said.
They had had little puppies back then. They were born just before Christmas and Vera hid them in her coat pockets, so she could bring them along. But Hildegard found them right away. They were whining quietly, and she pulled them out of Vera’s pockets and took them away from her.
Hildegard had shot the old bitch before they’d set off. Vera had known that. But the puppies too? What did you do with young dogs that were so small they fit into children’s hands?
“How small?” Leon asked. “Show me.”
* * *
Anne knew where the zum Feldes lived. She passed their farm on her way to the day care. Sometimes she saw Britta in the parking lot next to the Elbe Frogs center and wondered how they were possibly compatible, the bad-tempered Dirk zum Felde and this woman in the grimy VW bus, who was constantly laughing and had her bus packed with children. Theis and the twins, and a sister as well, Pauline. Leon had told Anne about her with wonder. She allegedly knew even more about pygmy rabbits than Theis.
“She’s got a whole lot,” Leon said. “Not just one.”
The zum Feldes’ house was big and old. It must have been handsome before, but it now looked as though it were scared. The picture windows gaped in the walls like open mouths. Dirk zum Felde’s father had gotten tired of transom windows, thatch, and half timbers—out with the old crap—sometime in the seventies, when the historic preservation people didn’t yet have a say, and it was only the old and those behind the times that still wanted to live in poky, dark rooms.
He had whipped the house into shape, installed a wide door with glass bricks, had the roof tiled, and extended it out with big dormers. There were a lot of houses like that in the villages along the Elbe.
“Renovated to bits,” the Realtors moaned when they were commissioned to find buyers for these abominations. Progress looked very ugly in retrospect; most of the old farmers regretted their renovations already.
They would have preferred to get rid of the clinker facades they’d applied to the framework, and the concrete they’d poured over the cobbles. They mourned the old tiled stoves and carved doors that they had thrown into the ditches as if they were garbage, thirty, forty years ago. And they missed their old language, which they hadn’t spoken with their children because it sounded too much like the barn and the countryside, and like stupidity.
Some were now trying to compensate for that. They were teaching their grandchildren a smattering of Low German, as though with a few words, a few phrases, a few songs they could save the language that they had wanted to let die out, as if it weren’t long since too late.
Sometimes their children restored the houses, at great expense. They almost looked old again.
And if they didn’t have the money, they came to terms with their houses, with their bland bad face-lifts. After a while you didn’t notice it anymore.
* * *
A large dog almost wrenched Anne from her bike. It barked, jumped up at her, and ran in front of her tires, making her swerve and topple over.
Britta zum Felde came running out of the barn in green overalls, with a stopwatch in her hand. She pulled the dog away by the collar. “Did he hurt you?”
“It’s okay,” Anne said, as Britta helped her up. The light on the handlebar was now a bit off-center, but everything else seemed to be in order. “You really are a stupid dog,” Britta said, giving him a slap. “I’ll be right back.” She disappeared into the barn again with the dog in tow. Anne leaned her bike against the wall and went after her.
A brown pygmy rabbit was sitting in a pen. It was tethered with a leash as though it were on duty, as if it had to rescue avalanche victims or help blind people cross the street.
Or as though it had to jump over hurdles like a show jumper. In fact, in the sand of the pen, there was a show jumping course, little hurdles with red-and-white bars. “Rabbit show jumping,” Britta said, “a pretty new sport. This is our champion.” She took the leash. “Come on, Rocky, one last lap.” She put the rabbit down in the sand in front of the first hurdle and started the timer on the stopwatch. With its ears flowing, it cleared the first hurdle but remained seated in front of the second one, pressing its paws into the sand. Then it started to dig as though it had buried something very important.
“Shame,” Britta said, “he can actually do it.” She shoved the stopwatch into her pocket and let the rabbit off the leash. “He jumps better for Pauline.”
She gathered up the hurdles, packed them away in an old plastic shopping bag, then took her champion out to a large open-air pen. Anne realized what Leon had meant by a whole lot of rabbits. “I know.” Britta laughed. “I always have to have the place filled to the brim with everything, children and rabbits, it doesn’t matter what. I’ve also got chickens and I’ve stopped counting the cats around here.”
She also laughed when she heard about Leon’s lice. “If Theis has them, my in-laws will be thrilled. They’ve taken him to Hagenbeck Zoo.”
They went into the house, took their shoes off in the hall, and placed them on an old towel that already had a large pile of shoes on it. The dog picked up a blue children’s boot and dragged it over to its basket beneath the stairs.
A hissing sound came from the kitchen, an iron gasping out the last of its steam. “Oh, shit,” Britta said as she pulled out the plug.
“Cappuccino?”
Anne didn’t notice that it was instant until it was too late. She had said yes, and Britta was already reaching for the kettle. She stirred the cappuccino around until it was frothy, then licked the spoon, threw it in the sink, and sat down on the bench next to Anne.
* * *
Two women and two cups of coffee. That’s how it always began.
Revealing and confiding at kitchen tables, talking about everything, about nothing whatsoever, about kids, jobs, and husbands, my life and yours. Anne hadn’t been able to do it at the Fischi in Hamburg-Ottensen with all the other mothers on the playground benches. These conversations functioned like barter deals. You tell me a secret, and I’ll give you a confession; you comfort me, and I’ll praise you.
The mothers would sit on the bench, passing the time with this spiritual Ping-Pong, playing at being therapists while their kids were digging around in the sandbox or pushing each other off the swings, the strong-willed little rascals.
Mothers with coffee cups wanted to warm up to each other, they thawed, let themselves go—but Anne clammed shut. She was shy with strangers in the way that some people stammered.
She had no talent for this talking, would lose the thread, stall and stutter, and then get stuck in the middle of her sentences, like an insect caught in a spiderweb. She hadn’t had any practice after all.
Since she was a little girl, she had only ever practiced scales, piano sonatas, pieces for the flute. You didn’t need to speak if you could play, you just had to know the notes and let your fingers do the work. You also didn’t need to listen to anyone. You just paid attention to the music. You didn’t have to come out of your shell, you were plenty warm inside it.
“You don’t like that one bit.” Britta smiled, pointing at Anne’s cup. “I’ll go get us some beer.” They clinked their bottles. Then Britta went and got some potato chips, ripped the bag open, and tipped the contents onto the kitchen table.
She definitely wasn’t the type who played spiritual Ping-Pong.
She asked questions that didn’t sound like questions. She said, “I’d like to hear your flute sometime. Leon says it’s made of silver.”
Britta said, “You must be really brave to move in with Vera Eckhoff. Or mad.” Then she grinned and left the choice to you. To laugh, remai
n serious, talk, keep quiet, take a drink.
Anything was permitted in Britta’s kitchen, which was as large as an arrivals hall.
They drank their second beer in her workshop, where she was making clay dinosaurs. “The brachiosaurus’s killin’ me,” she said. “The long neck keeps breaking off.”
A white delivery truck pulled up outside. Britta caught sight of it through the window, went to the door, and came back with a large box from Iceland Frozen Foods. She opened the freezer, plunged large bags of chicken drumsticks and french fries, pizza boxes and packets of lasagna into it, then kicked the empty box out into the hallway.
Someone kicked it back.
Suddenly a wiry woman appeared in the kitchen. She had white hair, was wearing a dark-blue quilted jacket, and had Theis by the hand. “Here’s your son. He doesn’t need to go to the zoo, he’s already got creatures on his head!” Theis had taken some candy out of his backpack and started eating it. He was holding a chocolate bar in one hand and scratching his head with the other.
“Father’s had it, I’m telling you.”
Helga zum Felde was standing in the kitchen like a witness at a crime scene. Beer bottles and chips at eleven in the morning, unironed laundry, dirty windows, dust bunnies lurking in the corners, and an Iceland Frozen Foods delivery in the freezer.
A child with head lice and a strange woman at the table, who obviously had nothing better to do than get drunk on a bright, sunny morning.
Nothing like this had happened here before, not in this house, in this kitchen, which was kept shipshape for thirty years, when it was hers.
“Come and sit down for a bit, Helga,” Britta said. “I’ll make you a coffee.”
“Never mind. Enjoy your meal.” She vanished as quickly as she’d appeared.
Anne almost fell off the bench laughing.
“My poor mother-in-law,” Britta said, “she really doesn’t have it easy with me.” She knocked back the last swig of her beer, then laughed as well. “I’ll tell you!” she said, turning to her son, who had been scratching his head the entire time they’d been talking.
