In Search of Anna

by Valerie Volk

  With my hair drawn back and the cluster of curls behind my new bonnet, I felt ready to be captured by the photographer as he crouched beneath the heavy black curtain over his equipment. Even Kurt, who has just this year changed from the loose robe of childhood into the required clothes for a five-year-old, now looks a little boy in his miniature leggings and coat, while Hanna thinks herself a true little lady in her hooped skirt and the matching tartan jacket with its lace ruffles at her wrists. We had never dressed like this before; it is indeed a special event that I know will not happen again. Otto will not countenance such extravagance another time.

  Even here the tension in our family is captured for all generations to see. Otto’s arm is around his beloved daughter, while I stand behind him, careful not to touch either of them. My hand rests lightly on Kurt’s shoulder, keeping him with a family group that he seems eager to separate from. Ah well, the camera doesn’t lie, they say. Perhaps they are right, and maybe Monsieur Delroix, when he posed us, had an intuitive understanding of our family life.

  Could he have heard the disputes over my teaching of the boy, or seen the way Hanna simply ignores my requests, my commands? Could he have seen the increasing coldness of our married life? There will be no more children, that is clear. Otto finds his satisfactions elsewhere and makes it clear that our marriage bed is a cold place that gives him no pleasure.

  ‘At least your Count von Bismarck has a happy marriage. And three children, though they are grown now,’ I tell him.

  ‘Two of those sons went to war last year,’ he replies. ‘They were in the cavalry and fought bravely against the French upstarts.’

  ‘I wonder how their mother felt,’ I ponder.

  ‘You will scarcely need to worry for that. Your little runt of a son would run from battle. He quakes when I come near.’

  ‘That cannot surprise you. You are too rough—you frighten him.’

  ‘I should beat the fear out of him. He needs to learn to stand up for himself.’

  This photograph may be the last time that we stand together as a family. For the divisions that were always there are likely to become deeper and more damaging as the years go on. I sense that will be the future. Perhaps it is a mercy, that we do not see too far ahead.

  CHAPTER 6

  Lewin, Silesia, 1883

  I had been right to fear the future, and the changes that would come. That before he was twenty, I would be losing the son who was the one bright spot in my life. The day he went will never leave my mind. My son.

  I sit these days at my loom, for many in Lewin have tried to keep the old industries alive, and though linen weaving is no longer central in our lives, and even the mill has closed, there is a comfort in doing things as they have always been done.

  There are not so many who will still plant and harvest the fields of flax that once surrounded us, but old techniques of treating the fibres and the spinning have not been forgotten. There is talk that embroidery will survive, and that they may even build a school in Lewin to teach this skill. Clearly times are changing, and new ways of life will come. I sit as I weave lengths of linen to take to the markets, though these tawdry little affairs are so sad compared to what we once knew. They tell us that fifty years ago there were near on 300 looms in Lewin; today the few of us who still spin know that there will be little profit made. We have watched people in the town no longer able to feed their families, and calling on the public purse for support.

  I bless the fact that we do at least have land and some livestock; it is all that sustains us in these hard times. Hard they are, since Otto’s work is gone. This is, I think, the worst that could have happened to him. All that passion that he had for the railroads, all his confidence that one day even our tiny Lewin would have its own tracks and station and engines … well, it may yet happen. I believe it will, but he will not be a part of it. What use is a man with only one arm in the world of the huge mechanical beasts he loved to tame?

  As I sit and spin I can understand the dreadful harm that has been done him. No matter that the accident was his own fault. Had he not been so many hours drinking in the alehouse in Glatz, would he have been more cautious on his way to the lodging house? Would he have been so stupid, so befuddled by liquor, as to have sought his way home along the railroad tracks?

  The irony of it, that he, who loved the iron monsters, should have suffered under one!

  ‘Would I were dead,’ he groaned in those first awful days. For a time it seemed that he might indeed not survive, but he has always been a big man, a strong man, and by some miracle he lived.

  ‘We cannot save the arm,’ the grave-faced doctor told me. I shivered, for I knew what this would do to my husband. While there was no love left in me for him, I could feel pity. He was the father of my children, and there had been moments of tenderness between us—hard to remember in the seven years we have endured since his maiming.

  For a time the company gave him some work in Glatz, but it was clear this could not last. Such work, for a man of his sort. He who had driven the huge machines, who had fed the ravening beasts with coal and watched the flames in their bellies, to now move among the pasty-faced little men in the offices and do their bidding. Perhaps he drank even more to blot out all that had happened, so I was not surprised when, outraged and resentful, he came to us in Lewin with news that he no longer had work.

  ‘Thrown away like a dog!’ he raged. ‘I have worked for them near twenty years, and this is all I get. Those bastards …’

  As his language became more immoderate, I turned away, glad that the children were at school. I wondered what would become of him, no longer able to satisfy the lust for power I had always known was the deepest part of his being.

  Well-founded fears, for these years have been unhappy ones for us all. Work in our field is of little interest to him; even with the animals he must often ask our help. A missing arm is more than just a limb gone. It is a deep change in a man’s image of himself. I found him looking at the photographs taken in those first heady years of our Iron Chancellor’s rule, and the desperation on his face as he saw the man he had been was pitiful to watch. I turned quickly from the door, because I know that my pity is unbearable to him.

  If not pity, what else can I give? Not love, for there never has been love. Now we are locked together more than ever before. His time in Glatz made our lives possible; that relief is gone. I see the rage building in him, and I know what will come when it reaches—like one of his great boilers—an explosion point. He goes to the alehouse with the coins we so desperately need, and I wait, anxious only to shield the children.

  The old days of softness for Hanna are gone, and even she has felt the swift blows from his strong right arm. It is as if he must use double force to compensate for the missing limb. It was good for her when she found work in the town, for this too brought us money for what we needed.

  At thirteen she was ready for her confirmation, the main moment of transition from childhood to adulthood. I would have wished her to wait another year or so but she was yearning to be free of this house. So we allowed her to join the class that Pastor Schirmer was holding each Sunday after the first service for the day. She had been through the earlier years of instruction, so there was no problem facing the examination given to her class.

  Otto and I sat, he according to custom in the left-hand pews in our local church, though his church attendance, never frequent, is rare indeed since the accident. Whatever God there is has treated him unjustly, he is sure. Ten-year-old Kurt was with me on the women’s side, but he understood the importance of this public testing, and fidgeted nervously; soon, I sighed, he would be old enough to join the men.

  Hanna does not become nervous; her thoughts were, I was sure, on her first long-skirted gown for the confirmation ceremony on Easter Sunday. From this time she would be officially a woman, allowed to go to dances, allowed also to think about a future spouse.

  It was as she wished. From that time she went each day to the hou
se of our Bürgermeister, to do the cleaning and the washing that his wife, a sickly lady, found more than she could manage with her eight children. There has been talk each time she is again with child, and the boldest in our town have much to say as we sit together over the looms. Frau Schmidt, who knows about these matters, casts her eyes heavenwards and makes crude gestures when she talks of him.

  I feared for Hanna when she found a place in that household, but she was eager to leave us and make a new life for herself. Otto was no longer the father she had known. At first she was perplexed, confused by the changes. The dark brooding silences that could explode into sudden rage—both children learned to watch for these.

  For Kurt it was easier; he was accustomed to his father’s rages. He had always known the need to keep clear of the man who would lash out at the slightest cause for anger—or even without cause. Back then Otto had seen it as his duty as a father.

  ‘He needs to learn to fight back.’ It was his justification in all those early years for the roughness in his handling of the little boy.

  ‘See the way he cowers! No son of mine is going to act like a frightened girl. He has to be taught to fight.’

  Kurt would flinch from the upraised hand and run from the expected blow. Until he realised that escape was impossible, and to try it made the final beating more brutal. Better to endure than to run.

  For Hanna, his pet, the change was bewildering. At twelve years one cannot comprehend the misery that can so corrode a person that even a beloved child becomes an outlet for rage. The first time he struck her was when she came late from the school so that her evening milking of the cow was delayed and the animals not in their pens. I had watched fearfully, knowing how long he had spent in the alehouse and his dangerous temper when he came. I had thought to do her work instead, but before I could reach the animal he was there.

  ‘Get inside!’ His voice was raised in anger and his words slurred. ‘Let the little slut do her own work.’

  He pushed me roughly into the house, and I watched apprehensively as she came, unawares, towards him. The sight of his face should have warned her, but her laughter as he stumbled and fell against the cow was all that was needed. There was no more laughter after he struck her across the face, his one good arm flailing wildly.

  I could understand her readiness to take on any sort of work that would take her away from us, and the man who had so changed towards her. Even life at the Bürgermeister’s house, with a fretful ailing woman and a house full of squalling brats, must have seemed preferable to this new father.

  She was only sixteen when she came to tell us the news that she would marry. I could only hope and pray that she had found someone who would treat her well and feel relief that she had found a different life for herself. Franz is a good man, though much older, and the fact that his first wife died in childbirth made him, I think, especially tender towards Hanna when her time came. But that was later.

  Those years in the Bürgermeister’s house had taught her many things about life, and the ways of men. I gave thanks daily for her quick wit and, yes, the strength she had inherited from Otto. I am sure she needed both in that household where caring for one and escaping the other must have been a daily challenge.

  We rarely talked. There had been the bond of birth between us, and that, I have now discovered, is by no means as strong a tie as is generally believed. I did not like the woman she was becoming, strong and ruthless. But love? Did I love her? Child of my body—there were ties there that did not break. The cord between mother and child is never completely severed, even when the midwife’s scissors have cut it and clamped the little stub that remains. Invisible it may be, but still alive and strong. It was there, even though I found it so hard to show her love. And God knows she had seen little enough of it between Otto and me. Why would she have expected love to be a part of marriage?

  I listened with concern as she told us of the marriage that would take place and wondered whether her new husband’s age had led him to believe that he would be master in their home.

  ‘He is fifty,’ she declared. ‘A good age for a husband. Why, he is older than you are, Vati, but seems younger than you.’

  It was a cruel thrust, but accurate. Otto did look older; the years of drinking were taking their toll and the strong body of his working years was flabby and weak. The great stomach that hung over his low belt owed little to my Sunday rouladen and dumplings; more to the strong potato beer that he drank daily in the town.

  I looked at Franz in his wedding suit, the new waistcoat bright and fashionable, and I saw the spindly legs that could not be concealed by tailor’s art. I wondered what my daughter had done. It was her doing—that she had made clear. A man her father’s age to replace the father she had lost, perhaps. It made sense. His house and land were substantial; that too must have been a great inducement, to get away from the drudgery of the Bürgermeister’s household. But to sleep close to that scrawny aged body. To feel it press against her, to enter her, the very thought was repellent. Would there be children, I wondered.

  It seems that Hanna had taken this into account, and assured herself of his abilities … I did not question how.

  ‘Where did you meet?’ I ventured the question when she came with her news.

  ‘He was often a visitor at the house,’ she explained. ‘I knew his eyes followed me when I served at table, and his hand lingered on mine when I served the afternoon coffee. He came often—it was very proper. My mistress is his sister, after all, and she is so ill.’

  ‘Even so. You were a servant. And so much younger!’

  ‘Many chances to brush against him in the passageways as I brought him in and out of the house. Many chances to be surprised when he ventured a touch … and to make it clear that I was virtuous. Still, not too easy to bring him to the point.’

  ‘How then was it managed?’

  ‘For a time I did not know, but then I took a risk.’

  ‘So?’ By the time she told me I was even more impressed. My daughter indeed, in some ways. I doubt that Otto, smart as he had been, would have given her such initiative.

  ‘One day I wept and said I would have to leave the house. That my honour was at risk, but I could not tell my mistress because the knowledge would have killed her.’

  ‘Surely he would have spoken to the man?’

  ‘That was indeed the hard part, to prevent that happening. I said I did not want to stay there but wanted no scandal. What was I to do? Where to go? Tears are so powerful. Soon he had thought of the solution—it fitted his wishes well, and once he saw that he knew I would be willing.’

  ‘But marriage! Surely there will be talk?’

  ‘Mutti, talk does not count when you have the marriage cap and ring, and the money to support the life you want. Nor does the husband.’

  She smiled when I shook my head, but it was not a pleasant smile.

  Although Otto gave his permission readily enough when Franz came to ask for Hanna’s hand, we could not give them the wedding that the new husband would have wanted, so Hanna was forced to ask him to provide. He was happy to give funds for the feasting after the simple service in the Lewin church. The civil ceremony was, after all, a formality. But the wedding proper was to make clear his standing in the community.

  I was pleased that they did not want to follow the new English fashion of the bride in a white gown. I recalled the Countess telling me of this, saying that the English queen had made this fashionable, and that so many brides were following this—a symbol of their purity perhaps? Or their hypocrisy!

  We chose instead a dress of dark green, cut in a style that all admired, for in the town Hanna had learned to study the pictures of the new clothes great ladies wore. I had watched Lydia’s interest in dress during the years we had been together, and when she heard that my daughter was to be wed, she had offered to make her a gift of the bridal gown.

  We see each other but rarely. Lydia does not often come to the Chateau, though her father still
brings hunting parties, but when we are together the years that have passed seem to fall away. For a brief time, we are young again. We talk of past times, of that summer of Gustav and Kurt, and how little we knew of life in those days. We do not talk often of our present lives. Festering sores are better left untouched. If they cannot be healed, at least they should not be poked into life.

  But our times together are, I think, a comfort to us both.

  ‘How I once envied you,’ she confessed to me one day. ‘You and Mama—all that you shared. Not that I wanted it. All that reading! But I knew how she loved you.’

  ‘And I you,’ I replied. ‘I would have so wished to have had her as my mother.’ But even as I spoke, I felt the familiar twinge of guilt. My mother had known this, and it had hurt.

  It does not surprise me that Lydia has had no child. Her way of life offers no place for children, and her aged husband gives her freedom to live life as she wishes. And the money to do what she wants. But she takes an interest in both Hanna and Kurt and would, I think, try to find a way to help me if she could. She has offered money, but that I cannot accept. A payment for my supervision at the Chateau, yes. Her father’s payment does not degrade me, but I will not accept Lydia’s charity.

  Yet the wedding gown for Hanna—that was a gift we could both enjoy. She had brought it for the girl from Berlin, and its high neckline suited the girl’s long neck—swan-like, said Lydia approvingly.

  ‘You have your mother’s neck! She too has the same long and graceful neckline. See how her collar sits.’

  I confess I felt pride at her words. It is rare these days for anyone to compliment me, and I valued Lydia’s words. Hanna looked at me in surprise, not expecting her mother to be praised for her appearance. As I approach forty years, I do not expect it either.

  The dress was indeed beautiful, with only a hint of a bustle. The green silk taffeta of the skirt with its long line of bows trailed down the girl’s back from the frill-trimmed jacket. I was glad she had chosen not to have a long train, just a simple addition to the skirt. How little chance would she have had to wear a formal gown. Lydia’s other gift in her dark hair, a wedding wreath with its wax buds and orange blossom—no veil.