by Dörte Hansen
They must have felt invulnerable in this house, Chin up!, and then they were out in the snow, running for their lives.
Anne took photos of the gardens, the stables, the house, then returned to the crumbling outside staircase, where Marlene was still standing. She had said nothing since they’d arrived.
Anne watched her mother take a bag out of her backpack, then a plastic spoon. She scraped some soil into the bag along with a few bits of gravel, then went over to the wall of the house, broke off a couple of pieces of stucco, and took them all with her.
Anne turned away quickly. She didn’t want to see Marlene with her plastic spoon in front of the ruined manor house, a sixty-year-old child looking for her mother.
Hildegard von Kamcke wasn’t to be found here. She didn’t want to be found by Marlene, and the house didn’t give anything about her away. It disclosed absolutely nothing. It just stood there with the birch growing out of its roof, like a wounded soldier who’d had a flower placed mockingly in his helmet. It too would soon fall.
Anne asked Marlene if she wanted Anne to take a photo of her standing in front of the house. She shook her head and went over to the taxi without looking back. Yet another person who’d undergone surgery.
They nonetheless drove on down the streets that Hildegard had described and looked for the place on the map where she had drawn a small cross. Gregor von Kamcke (11.10.1944–19.1.1945).
They stopped somewhere on a street that led to Heilsberg, “Lidzbark Warmiński!” said the taxi driver patiently. He knew that the Germans could never remember the Polish names, but he thought they should hear them at least.
He didn’t get out of the car with them.
There were a lot of mosquitoes here, and flies. Marlene thrashed the map around, and Anne sought shade under an oak tree.
What had they done with all the dead children who had been left lying at the side of the road? Who had buried them when the earth had finally thawed? The hosts of baby carriages, the slumbering dolls, what had happened to them?
You could no longer believe in the beauty of the Mazurian avenues when you started to ask questions like these. If you thought that under every oak tree and in every green ditch there were still bones, and that there were buttons and little shoes under the poppies.
They went to Frauenburg by minibus. It was the last day of their trip. From the cathedral’s tower, they looked out over the Vistula Lagoon. The homesick tourists stood there a long time, fumbling around with their handkerchiefs. Then they got onto a ferry that was to take them to the Vistula Spit.
The captain looked grim, and who could blame him? Dealing with all these distraught old people all the time, perhaps he felt like the mythological ferryman who continually transferred the dead to Hades.
That’s it, I’ve had enough, Anne said to herself. She was going to stay on the jetty.
But Marlene had already gotten on board. She seemed to have shrunk over the course of this trip.
Anne stood next to her mother at the railing. Marlene was wearing sunglasses, and even on the ship, she was holding the guidebook in her hand, with the map open and fluttering in the wind, totally useless.
There was nothing to be found in Mazuria, no answers and no solace, no trace of Hildegard von Kamcke. A mother like a strange continent, that’s how it remained. There were no adequate maps for this part of the world.
Anne stood next to her and looked at the choppy water. She put her jacket on.
Then she told Marlene what the farmers did with the blossoms when the night frost came. “Frost protection through glaciation,” she said. “It really works. You see?”
Marlene’s sunglasses were very large, and Anne couldn’t make out what she was thinking.
The women had had to become either heroes or animals. There was no other way to get across the ice with children.
How could they have sung songs to them and laughed with them after that?
They couldn’t be mothers like that anymore. They didn’t let you speak to them, told you nothing, explained nothing, and didn’t even look for a language for the unutterable. They practiced forgetting and got good at it. Trundled on in coats of ice. You didn’t need to tell them what solidification heat was.
Marlene didn’t say a thing. In Kahlberg, they disembarked for three hours, took off their shoes, and wandered along the beach. They looked at the shops, ate ice cream, and felt each other’s pain.
It was inconceivable that they’d ever walk arm in arm or make each other happy again. But ten days together without blood and tears was almost a miracle.
No healing took place in Mazuria, but Anne had seen Marlene with her plastic spoon in front of the manor house. A daughter who had nothing, who had to scrape sand and plaster and stucco together, as though it were possible to make a mother out of them. She wasn’t miserly but poor. What Anne wanted from Marlene, Marlene clearly didn’t have to give. Anne could tug at her, rummage around in her pockets, shake her down as though Marlene were a drug dealer, and she wouldn’t find anything on her of the stuff she still craved.
Anne could stop searching. It had to be possible to live without it. It was possible.
* * *
Vera picked them up at Hamburg’s central station in her Mercedes, and they drove to Marlene’s for coffee. There was some dust on the black Bechstein, and a stack of music too. “I’m just getting started again,” Marlene said. “There’s no one to hear me play the wrong notes.”
They were out in the hallway already and managed an embrace of sorts. Marlene then pressed something cool into Anne’s hand and closed the door behind her and Vera.
A little amber heart on a silver chain. A child’s necklace from a shop on the Vistula Spit.
Vera took it out of Anne’s hand and looked at it for a while, until Anne had finished with her Kleenex. Then she helped her put it on. “I had one like that once too,” she said, “it must still be around somewhere.”
They drove to Ottensen and picked up Leon. Vera just stayed in the car. Christoph was in the new apartment next door, which still had to be painted.
Carola handed Anne the collapsible crate containing Leon’s clothes. “My little brother’s in there,” Leon said, pointing at Carola’s stomach.
Anne nodded and took him into her arms. “Come on,” she said, “we’re going home.”
Vera had nodded off in the car. Nine nights in the house on her own; she hadn’t gotten much sleep.
Anne told her to get into the back with Leon. Shortly after the tunnel they were both asleep and Leon’s chubby hand was clasped in Vera’s blue hands.
25
Brain Drain
YOU COULDN’T WALK AROUND BAREFOOT in the garden anymore. The slugs had taken over the terrain—the fat brown ones. Burkhard had stepped on one of the critters once, and after that he kept his shoes on.
Eva’s hatred of snails was greater than her revulsion to them. She cut them in half with her snail shears. Burkhard didn’t like to watch. She didn’t even scrunch her face up when she did it.
Eva no longer carried spiders outside to set them free either. She now turned on the hot tap and aimed the showerhead like a flamethrower at the fat ones she found in the bath, rinsed them away, and then pressed the stopper into the drain so they couldn’t escape.
Thatched roofs were full of spiders, which got into the rooms through open windows, and some then crawled into the beds. You discovered them when you pulled back the covers in the evening. They were as large as children’s hands and frequently they made off very fast. Then you couldn’t sleep because you didn’t know where they were lurking.
Summer in the countryside was like war. Nature sounded the attack and took no prisoners. You couldn’t negotiate with it.
The fly and wasp bottle from Manufactum, handblown in the region of Lusatia, was still down in the cellar. They had placed it on the windowsill during their first summer here. A little sugar water to detain the insects until the strawberry cake was eaten up, and then the
y’d set them free again. Live and let live, reverence for all creatures, peaceful coexistence of man and animals. That’s what they’d believed! What naive refugees from the big city they had been! Almost touching when you looked back on it.
Mosquitoes wanted blood, and so did the horseflies and biting houseflies that came out of the ditches. In the beginning they had still treated the stings with tea tree oil, but now they acted preemptively with DEET. They weren’t taking any prisoners.
In that first summer they had laughed, found everything funny. They found so much material in rubber boot world for op-ed columns, and Burkhard had written his first book effortlessly. About the snails and insects, the pellets that the wild cats threw up in front of their door, about voles in the flower beds and molehills in the freshly seeded lawn. About the farmers who couldn’t take a joke and eradicated everything they termed vermin. About stonemasons who arrived on mopeds and ate aspic with their fingers.
It was a good book, even by his own exacting standards—ironic and witty and still selling in its fourth printing. He’d like to see his ex-colleagues do that.
He watched Eva yanking out nettles outside. In the winter she struggled with depression, and in the summer it was weeds.
The seagulls that perched in the trees in front of the house screeched constantly, and his neighbors’ frogs reached peaks of eighty decibels. He had measured them himself. Tractors, lawn mowers, and electric saws were constantly droning. The entire Altland appeared to be getting deforested. It was a wonder there were any trees left.
Sudden deafness plus tinnitus. “Cut back, my dear man,” his family doctor had said, “no stress, no noise.” He was now using earplugs when he needed to concentrate, but it did nothing to reduce the cheeping, especially on the right side.
“That’s what all your downshifting nonsense has brought you!”
Eva’s reaction wasn’t quite what he’d expected from his wife when he returned home with high-frequency tinnitus.
Her jelly factory was finished, and they weren’t going to refurbish it again. Eva had thrown fruit spreads, chutneys, and jellies worth a thousand euros at the wall. In fact, nothing much remained intact after her spring festival. It had started out bad. Thick clouds, much too cool for Pentecost, and rain showers—not weather for an outing—and no one from the village ever came anyhow.
The point was that the limit had already been reached before that, not just for Eva but for him as well.
He had buried his project.
A Taste of Country Life had died, beginning with the feature story “From Quarry to Sausage.” Vera Eckhoff had failed to tell him that deer season didn’t start until September. He found out only in April, when he called to make an appointment with her. She had a good laugh about it, and oh, yes, she had now given up hunting, by the way. By the way.
Florian wanted a cancellation fee from him for his photos right away. He claimed to have definitively scheduled the job already. Well, he could just go ahead and sue him! His best bet would be a class action suit. He could join forces with the Jarck brothers.
Burkhard had almost fallen off his chair when the letter had arrived from the Jarcks’ lawyer in Stade. His clients felt unfavorably portrayed in Burkhard Weisswerth’s coffee-table book People from the Elbe—Gnarled Faces of a Landscape. The photos had at no point been authorized.
Violation of privacy: ten thousand euros compensation and a motion for a preliminary injunction. Dumb as stumps, the two of them. They couldn’t even spell injunction!
Yet they went off and hired a lawyer. Unbelievable! Peasant cunning, that’s probably what it was. And their odds of succeeding with the lawsuit were pretty good.
The whole thing really got to Weisswerth. He’d been open toward the people around here and that was all the thanks he got.
But he had also romanticized a few things. He’d realized that in the past few weeks. However much sympathy he had for the bizarre characters he had met out here, the brain drain was undeniable.
Anyone with half a brain, anyone capable or who wanted something, didn’t stay in this hick town, staring at the Elbe until he croaked. Those who stayed behind were the bottom feeders, remaindered goods. Minnows, poor suckers, odd birds. Extremely stupid stonemasons, social phobics like that Vera Eckhoff, and simpleminded farmers like Dirk zum Felde.
Dirk had apologized to him for the Glenfiddich stunt a couple of days later, with a grin on his face. The nice cocktail of scotch, ice, and Sprite was just a joke. “No offense meant, Burk-hard.” It was still a mystery to him what exactly was funny about it. But okay, let it go.
He didn’t want to think about these people anymore, or to write articles or books about them. He’d said all he had to say. He was sorry, but he couldn’t do any more, he just had to move on, he had outgrown rubber boot world.
And he was finished with journalism too.
Burkhard Weisswerth was ready for a change. He would steer his life in a new direction, back to the source. A villa in Hamburg-Othmarschen, an excellent address with a view of Jenischpark.
For the first time in her long, fulfilled life, his aged mother had had good timing. The housekeeper had found her at the beginning of June, in her bed as though asleep, the kind of death you’d wish for from a fairy godmother.
He could now call himself wealthy. The house alone was worth four million euros, and the rest was priceless. A Hanseatic upper-class life, the Overseas Club and Patriotic Society, a berth for his boat at Muhlenberg. He would sail again and maybe play polo again too. He was going back to his roots after all these years. He had been a rebel all his life, an angry young man, never let himself be bought, never conformed, never used his old man’s influence. Now he had nothing left to prove.
It would make their friends in Eppendorf sick. Sure, they lived quite comfortably in their apartments at the Isemarkt; the location on the Alster wasn’t bad. But the real, old money was to be found in the Elbe suburbs, and they all knew it. A villa in Hamburg-Othmarschen was simply in a different league.
He was looking forward to their tight-lipped smiles.
Eva was still straining at the weeds out there. He wondered why she was so angry now that everything was looking up.
There had been something with that pomologist. Burkhard wasn’t blind. No drama in and of itself. They granted each other freedom in that respect, allowed themselves little side trips. You shouldn’t be begrudging. It had never done their marriage any harm. Quite the opposite, in fact.
But they had clear rules: adventures yes, but romance was a no-no. He’d adhered to that up till now. Little biochemical affairs, carried out with discretion—a nice evening or two and then adieu.
He just wasn’t so sure about Eva.
26
Shut-eye
THE SUMMER STORMS ARRIVED IN August. The wind gusts dug their claws into the roof and tore at the walls, which whined like old men, like Karl on his worst nights.
Vera stood at the window and watched the trees in her garden hunch over like people who’d been beaten. They appeared to be waving frantically at her, as if they wanted her to let them in.
You couldn’t stay seated on nights like this, never mind lie down. You had to stand with your legs apart like a helmsman, waiting for the breakers and the flashes of lightning, and hope that the ship wouldn’t go down this time either.
* * *
They were making good progress. You could hardly recognize the facade with its new windows and sound timber frame. Nothing had been plastered yet. They were finishing the side walls first, and by the spring they wanted to be up on the roof.
Vera had grown accustomed to the journeymen with their black hats, their long hair, and the rings in their ears, noses, and eyebrows. A couple of them had tattoos on their arms like sailors, and that’s what they moved like too. Always calmly, as though they had all the time in the world.
When their pace slacked too much, Anne revved them up again. They stood head and shoulders above her, but woe betide any of the
tattooed guys who got lippy with her.
The house held its ground beneath the hammer blows.
At first Vera had expected an accident every day, reckoned there would be blood and severed fingers, men falling down from the scaffolding, young children running into saws or stepping on large nails with their bare feet. She had feared the worst right from the day that Anne had knocked the first little window out of the wall.
But summer came and the house stood like an old horse that was letting itself be shoed, lifting its hooves dutifully instead of defending itself, and for the first time in many years, the thought struck Vera that this house might just be nothing more than a house. Not an avenging angel that sent old women up to the attic with a clothesline if an old cupboard was moved or thrust young men down on their hands and knees into the shards of a punch bowl just because an old side door was replaced.
It was a ridiculous childish belief. She knew that and was ashamed of it by day.
But she firmly believed in it again at night. As soon as it got quiet and dark, and the forgotten ones shuffled through the hallway, and the old voices whispered to her from the walls, she believed the house capable of anything.
The following summer, when the thatched roof was finished, they would start on the inside—the walls, the floors, and the ceilings—and perhaps after that there would finally be peace, even in the night.
* * *
It seemed to Vera that in addition to the house, they had also refurbished Heinrich.
He played skat with them long into the night and didn’t set his alarm for the morning. He was suddenly breaking his own rules. Maybe Heinrich Luehrs sensed that he had been a slave to rather than the master of his life, and that his strict rules weren’t much use.
Vera had never done the right thing and yet everything seemed to be turning out well for her. She had a little boy who sat in the kitchen in the mornings drawing, and a niece who resembled her and dared to ride her horses. And her house was now being put in order for her, even though she had never done anything to it.
