by Tessa de Loo
They discussed the books they had read – in the mornings while Aunt Martha was still in bed, in the afternoons when she was having a nap and in the evenings when she was in bed again. Although the conversations were fleeting, fitted in as they went along, they created a secret bond between two who were like-minded, the last descendants of one family, against the ominous background of the wife upstairs who was still a stranger to them both. Only much later on did Anna understand that her aunt must have felt this alliance, through the walls – perhaps in her morbid suspicion she had even seen an unspoken love in it. Her aunt bided her time until a chance arose to drive a wedge between them. Bernd Möller unintentionally became her tool.
Anna went to find him in his workshop to enquire whether the problem with the haycart’s axle had been fixed yet. He did not look up from the threshing cart he was repairing; she had to repeat her question before an intelligible reply came from his mouth. No, he had not yet got round to it. A newspaper was open on his workbench, among the nuts and bolts. Anna bent inquisitively over the columns, avid for anything that appeared in print. Quiet returned to the workshop except for the prosaic sounds of repair work. ‘Are you still here?’ said Bernd Möller, surprised. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Reading.’ ‘What are you reading?’ Anna turned back to the front page. ‘The Völkischer Beobachter.’ ‘That’s not for you, all politics.’ Anna folded open the paper and held it up to his nose. ‘Who is this?’ With a black fingernail, under which chicken and pig muck had collected, she pointed to the portrait of a man with a clenched fist and a provoked, irate look, who was screaming inaudibly, a flag with black spiders’ legs in a white circle in the background. ‘Adolf Hitler,’ said Bernd Möller, wiping his nose on his sleeve. She turned up her nose. ‘It looks as though he wants to go and fight.’ ‘That is what he wants.’ The mechanic put his spanner on the floor and slowly stood up from his crouch. ‘For me, for you, for all of us. Against unemployment and poverty.’
He forgot all about the job he had been engrossed in just before and went to sit on the workbench to explain to her what plans the man in the photograph had for the German people. Long-awaited work, a new order – even for the ordinary man who was driving himself into the ground every day for a plate of pea soup. Look, here it was in writing. Bernd Möller had an aura of optimism about him. Someone had appeared on the horizon who was preparing great changes, who was going to put an end to the poverty and chaos in the country. Stirred by his enthusiasm, Anna had the feeling that something might then improve for her too – even if it were perhaps only something small. A long-awaited father figure who would take up the cudgels for her and who would break through the chains of drudgery, fatigue and hunger. She looked intently at the photograph. What he was giving expression to and what had initially aroused her distaste was, on further inspection, precisely what she felt beneath the veneer of slavish obedience: rage and mutiny.
That evening she said to her uncle in a conspiratorial tone, ‘There’s someone who is going to put an end to poverty.’ He was sitting in the chair his father had died in; she was on the sofa beneath the soldier killed in action. ‘That’s good news,’ he said, looking ironically at her over his book, ‘how do you make that out?’ ‘It’s in the Völkischer Beobachter. Adolf Hitler has said …’ ‘What?’ he cried. The book slid out of his hands. ‘That fool? You don’t know what you’re saying. Only dumb, desperate people trail after that ridiculous figure. Who did you learn that nonsense from?’ ‘From Bernd Möller,’ she said, offended and confused. ‘Oh, I get it, that’s his way of rebelling. The Völkischer Beobachter! You don’t read that! No one here reads that paper. Every right-thinking person, every right-minded Catholic votes for the Centre Party. Pius X’s encyclical describes exactly how poverty can be overcome from the Christian point of view. Listen, girl – this Hitler with his bragging wants just one thing: war.’ He bent over to pick up his book and looked at her as though he were listening acutely for something. ‘I won’t have you associating with Bernd Möller, understand that.’
But Anna could not allow herself to give up this ray of hope so easily. The following day she scurried over to the workshop. Bernd Möller shook his head at her uncle’s reaction. ‘I’ll explain to you exactly why he said that – so that you don’t look shocked at me any longer with your lovely blue eyes. I can’t stand that.’ He smiled. ‘You simply have to let them talk, those brave farmers, those obedient Catholics. They don’t know any better. They are just animals who have lived in a cage for too long: if you throw the door open they simply stay in there. If we had to wait until the Centre Party settled our problems we’d all starve.’ His self-confidence aroused trust. She needed to believe in a chance of change, there was no alternative. And Bernd Möller kept this belief alive with cheerful hymns. She did her work at a faster pace purely to be able to steal over to his workshop in between times and talk with him, or to watch him while he fiddled inside the motor of a farm machine. They did not only talk politics. The pitfalls of everyday life, the attitude that you should take towards it, the books Anna had been reading, her cough – no subject was taboo in the intimacy of the old, draughty shed, as she sat with one buttock on the open newspaper and the other on the scored wood of the workbench.
‘Although you’re only sixteen, you’re an exceptional girl,’ said Bernd. He heaped praise on her; in his eyes she was a little, philosophical Virgin with a big heart that was beating for all the outcasts and unfortunates in the world. The new Germany would get off the ground more easily if there were more such young women, She had a great future before her, he assured her, squeezing her hands with their split and broken nails in his fists smeared with engine oil. Over time that future increasingly took on the form of a house he was going to build for her. A rustic, old-fashioned house with a gabled roof, shutters, a Bavarian veranda along the full width of the façade and a massive oak door, which he would push open to carry her across the threshold when she was eighteen. Anna allowed these fantasies to glance off her indifferently. Marriage she had never thought about; merely the idea of it was ridiculous to her. Whenever he conjured up these dream pictures to her she looked intently at the floor strewn with tools and machine parts – apparently this was a sacrifice that had to be made now and then for friendship.
When the rye was being harvested she had no time for these interludes. A little boy from the village pushed a letter into her hand: ‘This evening at half-past eight behind the Lady Chapel by the bridge.’ It was already twilight by that time and it smelled intoxicatingly of damp hay. She did not recognize him at first. He crossed the bridge in a brown uniform that was rather a tight fit and he had a parting in his hair. There was an officious expression on his face that did not become him. He grasped her by her wrists. ‘Your house is going to be built, Anna! An architect in Paderborn has done a design. It’s waiting for you, you must approve the drawing!’ She gazed at him impassively. All of a sudden she no longer knew what she had been seeking at the Lady Chapel with a wild stranger who was badgering her about a house that ought to remain a fantasy instead of turning up on paper and, even worse, being built stone by stone on this sandy ground with which she had no affinity. Aroused by his own excitement, he threw his muscular mechanic’s arms around her, demanding the impossible of his sleeves. She heard the threads snap and over his shoulder saw the neighbour passing by with a young goat on a rope. Ashamed, she hid her face in his chest; he took it for affection and increased the pressure of his arms. When he eventually let her go she dashed across the bridge towards the farm, stumbling over her own feet as though she had narrowly escaped from a great danger.
The neighbour did not neglect her citizen’s duty and the next day reported Anna’s wooing to Aunt Martha, who understood instantly that this was what she had been waiting for all that time. Concealing her triumph behind an exemplary display of moral indignation, she disclosed the report of the rendezvous to her husband, embellishing it with shocking details that unerringly hit him below the belt. Anna, still
suspecting nothing, was fetching water for the pigs. When she turned round, Uncle Heinrich was standing on the threshold. Although he was not heavily built, he looked as though he filled the whole doorway. Why was something so threatening emanating from him? The figure, cramped by suppressed tension, approached her and came within a metre of her. She felt suddenly that an unknown misunderstanding was festering between them, which had to be resolved as quickly as possible.
‘What would your father say?’ he began, with a gruesomely controlled voice, ‘if he caught you with that womanizer, that agitator? Eh? Would you have dared if he had still been alive?’ Anna stiffened, she could see the whole chain of cause and effect in one second. ‘Would you have dared?’ he repeated, lending force to his question with a slap on her face. ‘Well?’ As she brought a hand up to her cheek in disbelief he hit her on the other cheek. She turned away and ducked to escape his hands; this evasive reflex only provoked his frenzy further. His fists landed wherever he could reach her. When she fell over on the slippery ground he pulled her up by her hair and punched her in the stomach. The rage he dealt out to her was greater than himself and greater than the cause. It was concentrated from all his resentment against a world in which he was powerless, but also from all the like-mindedness between Anna and him, and their solidarity – perhaps even his defencelessness against the young woman she herself was without having any inkling of it. All that impenetrable, murky motivation: Anna had not the slightest suspicion of it – for her all that existed were the blows and punches, and the cries he uttered, as though he was suffering more than she in the thrashing. At one moment one side of the cowshed flashed by, next the other again, and the pigs’ snouts moving on either side like amazed witnesses. She lost all sense of time until, beneath the raised arm with which she was protecting her head, she saw Aunt Martha positioned on the threshhold in order to enjoy the full measure of the punishment. Her appearance brought Uncle Heinrich out of his fury. He stopped abruptly, looking down at Anna with surprise, glassily. Without deigning to look at his wife, he pushed her aside and disappeared outside.
Anna got up laboriously – a searing pain dragged through her whole body. Aunt Martha was a pompous black blob outlined against the daylight behind her. ‘What must the neighbours think?’ she growled. ‘You’ve made a hell of a noise.’ ‘What noise?’ moaned Anna. Who had yelled with each blow? Not her, she had clamped her lips tight. The record had to be set straight, even in the midst of chaos. Collecting the last of her strength, she crawled towards her aunt, her broken nails reaching for the skin of the weak, naked arms. The woman who was so large and looked so strong, crossed her arms anxiously across her breasts; the deep-set eyes above the wide cheekbones sunk even further into their sockets. She fled backwards out of the cowshed; Anna stumbled after her and fell over on the grass splaying out her arms.
No more clatter of weapons, but absolute silence. Guiltily Uncle Heinrich put food and drink on the floor by her bed; like a wild animal she only touched the plates when he had gone. For the first days she lay on her stomach because the pain in her back was so bad, then she exchanged the monotonous panorama of wood-grain and knots in the floor for that of the wall, and turned half on her side, because the contractions and stabbing pains in her belly were now drowning out all other forms of pain. It was becoming worse instead of diminishing. An unbearable paradox; she could not endure it any more and yet she was enduring it. With each wave of pain she lapsed into a soft wail that penetrated to the kitchen down the chimney hung with hams and sausages. Eventually Uncle Heinrich stumbled upstairs to ask her what could be done to put an end to the moaning. In a rasping voice Anna complained of stabbing in her belly. That frightened him, the reproductive organs were sacred: Go forth and multiply. What had never been considered necessary for her cough was to happen now: an appointment was made with a doctor. She had to promise her aunt dutifully to keep quiet about the injuries and bruises. New tortures were announced. The law required an adult woman to be present as a chaperon at an internal examination. Lying on her black and blue back, beneath Aunt Martha’s vulture glare, Anna felt his cool rubber finger penetrate a region she had not suspected of existing until then. A piercing pain split her down the middle. ‘It’s a bit uncomfortable,’ said the voice of her benefactor. Uncomfortable! Had he ever been cleaved in half? Dull tears slid down her cheeks without her permission, a triumph she did not concede to her aunt. ‘Come, come,’ said the doctor, ‘we’re not making a drama of it. Your womb is twisted, I’m trying to get it back in position.’
The pain subsided. Aunt Martha’s lust for power was stronger than ever before, as though she had been present at an initiation ritual that henceforth gave her new power over Anna. During mass, behind the stocky straight back of her aunt, she crumpled a letter for Jacobsmeyer into the hand of an old school friend, containing a simple but urgent message: ‘Help! Anna.’ During the Gregorian hymns her eyes strayed involuntarily to the bas-relief where Jesus was being flogged. Her breath caught. She quickly directed her gaze up to the vaulted roof decorated with tendrils, where the singing voices joined the echo of the prayers. The note reached the pastor wonderfully fast; he called her as she was leaving the church. She rolled up the sleeves of her Sunday dress and said, ‘My back also looks like my arms.’ Although Jacobsmeyer was, from his profession, on familiar terms with violence in the Bible and with the Christian idea that suffering was the shortest route to God, he was put off his stride when confronted by it in reality. He lifted his glasses from his nose, put them back and raised them again before he laid a trembling hand on her head.
6
‘Non … je ne regrette rien …’
‘Ha!’ Anna cried. Startled roughly out of his reverie, the old man at the bar blinked his watery eyes; there was a puddle of melted snow under his bar stool. ‘Ha! Je ne regrette rien … the queen of love never has regrets. When she had one foot in the grave she took a young lover – her musical heir, her nightingale who sang like a crow …’ She laughed mockingly. ‘Little Sparrow, picked out of the gutter … I was also a little sparrow in the gutter – now I’m an old woman teased by memories. An old woman who’ll have another.’ She snapped her fingers towards the bar.
‘Ach ja,’ Lotte said quietly, in an attempt to neutralize Anna’s emotionality, ‘the older you become the more you live in the past. You forget things that happened yesterday.’
Anna raised her eyebrows at this clichéd remark. But to Lotte it was the practical and ever successful opening for a lament about old age, a conversational ploy for keeping the discussion in safe waters. Full glasses were set before them, with a smile from the proprietress. Perhaps she had been on the wrong side in the war, as had many Belgians? It was difficult for her to imagine Anna, that well-fed, quick-witted woman sitting opposite her, as an ill-treated, sickly girl of sixteen in her Sunday dress, gagged by her step-aunt, who had been allocated so many bad attributes that it was a caricature. Wasn’t Anna exaggerating? Had time distorted her memories? She was instantly ashamed of her persistent scepticism. Barbarians, her mother had said. She could really see why now. It was all so extreme. Lotte regarded malicious, violent behaviour as a sickness, to be cordoned off safely and kept at a distance. In that light she diagnosed Aunt Martha as dangerously mentally deranged – no wonder Uncle Heinrich slowly went mad under her influence.
‘That aunt of yours was a pathological case.’ She took a reckless sip.
Anna laughed drily. ‘Not necessarily. She was merely a woman who was good for nothing. There are people like that. According to Christian morality they are evil, according to psychiatry they are sick. What difference does it make when you’re the victim of it? But let’s have something more cheerful. About you.’
Lotte did not miss the insinuation: compared with Anna’s youth, hers was, in Anna’s eyes, a model of freedom from trouble. Of the two of them, Anna was the one entitled to sympathy. Although ostensibly she spoke with distance and irony about the past, in ways she was making a subtle c
all for compassion. The compassion that had always been withheld from her and was now expected from her sister – no, demanded. But that role did not appeal to her.
‘About your singing,’ Anna coaxed, ‘your lovely voice.’
‘God, I’m hot,’ said Lotte. She stood up lopsidedly to take her jacket off. Fumbling with sleeves – cracks had appeared in the coordination of her movements as a result of the apple liqueur. There were two possibilities: to give Anna what she requested or to remain silent. The latter felt hard to her; she enjoyed talking about it. Who was still interested in it? Not her children. And if she kept quiet about it it would all be lost, as though it had never happened.
Singing gradually elbowed out the stuttering: the pleasure of singing was greater than the anxiety preceding the first letter. Her body grew and her voice grew with it – actually her voice was always rather older than herself. When she was accepted into a famous teenage choir, only her voice properly belonged there. The choir was directed by Catharina Metz, a dark, melancholy woman with a fluffy moustache that she sometimes shaved off but more often left, from indifference – the delicate hairs trembled with her vibrato. There were still yellowed newspaper cuttings about her singing career, which had come to an abrupt end with her father’s illness. They never got to see the mysterious invalid; he lived his abstract existence in a wing of the house overgrown with virginia creeper and wisteria, and it only manifested itself in the dark rings under his daughter’s eyes. Sometimes she suddenly stopped the rehearsal with a raised finger to listen with concentration to something that was inaudible to the pupils. She guided them with a gentle hand via unfamiliar French and Italian composers into the territory of the great classics.
