by Ursula Hegi
On Helene’s fourth day as a married woman, Stefan’s mother led her through her house that was crammed full of belongings she should have thrown out decades ago. Yet everything was spotless because she cleaned each morning after mass.
“Whatever you like,” she said, “you just pick it out.”
Though Helene tried to object, Stefan’s mother gathered lace doilies and tablecloths, pillowcases and scarves, a picture that Stefan had drawn as a boy of the family’s dog, Spitz, long since dead. Helene was still trying to adjust to the changed relationship with this woman who’d always been her neighbor and now was family and expected her to call her Mutter—mother. Since they had only fifteen years between them, she used to think of Stefan’s mother as belonging to her own generation, while her new father-in-law, though just nine years older than his wife, seemed an entire generation ahead.
In the attic Stefan’s mother held up a carved dollhouse with tiny blue dishes. “My grandmother played with this as a girl in Holland. She gave it to me the day of my first communion. Now you take it for Greta.”
“Don’t you want to save it for Margret?”
“Five years married and no children yet? You tell me.” Frau Blau raised a corner of her apron and dabbed at the sweat on her powdered face.
“There’s still time,” Helene said, though she knew Margret didn’t want children and was afraid to tell her mother. Easier to pretend she couldn’t have them and go to the midwife who knew how to keep you childless by fitting half an apricot pit deep inside you. If you came to her already pregnant, she’d boil shreds of birch bark with tea leaves, wrap the cooled concoction into cheesecloth, and pack that up inside you till you bled. But if you didn’t bleed, your child would be liable to carry the sign of the tea leaves somewhere on its body—out of sight, if you were lucky—a birthmark in the shape of a few dark and tiny leaves, and then all you could do was pray that your child would never find out it was marked with the sign of the unwanted.
“Margret never cared for that dollhouse,” Frau Blau was saying. “The one day I let her play with it, she broke two cups. You make sure now Greta doesn’t break anything. And don’t let the boy play with it. Do you like those lion chairs?” She pointed to the wall where two needlepoint chairs stood, their legs and armrests thick wooden spirals. “They’re over a hundred years old.”
Helene touched the upholstery, a dense pattern of greens and browns. As she bent closer, she saw vines and trees and orchids, and then, as if emerging step by step from this jungle, half-hidden animals: lions and elephants and giraffes. “They’re beautiful.”
“Sit down. Try one.”
Each armrest ended in a small crouched lion, and as Helene closed her fingers around the lions’ heads, she felt the carved strands of their manes.
“They’re yours.”
“I wish we could take them with us. But they’re way too heavy.”
“Not nearly as heavy as your desk or those tiles Stefan bought for his stove. I’ll talk to him.” Before she let Helene go, Frau Blau insisted she take some of her lentil soup along for Leo. She poured a generous amount into a large porcelain bowl, set it atop a dish-towel, and tied the four corners of the towel together so that Helene could carry it by the knot.
When Leo helped Helene with the crating of her belongings, he teased her about all the things her mother-in-law wanted her to take along. “Did you forget how to say no?”
“I can’t with her. Because of her eyes. They’re always so tragic.”
“Ever since Stefan ran off.”
“And now he’s running off again. With me.”
“After only a week,” he teased her. “Disgraceful.”
“After half a lifetime.”
He looked at her, gravely, as if he’d understood all along how she’d waited for Stefan, but had been too considerate to tell her; and since it bothered her to think of her brother knowing, she stepped away from him to glance out of the window. That narrow border all at once seemed to define her hometown—what she could see and beyond: church and marketplace and meadows and river—containing it so that she could take it with her, small and manageable, just one more thing to pack along with her mother-in-law’s tablecloths and furniture and five bundles of Stefan’s letters.
As she lowered the bundles into the crate, she said to Leo, “We’ll write to each other.”
“Often. To take the place of your letters to Stefan.”
“That’s true,” she said slowly, thinking how much she would miss those late nights of writing to Stefan and imagining his reaction.
He pointed to one of Frau Blau’s silk scarves, green with a yellow sailboat. “You really plan to wear this Kitsch?”
“No.” She folded it into the crate. “But it gives her comfort to know we have some of her things. We’ve told her that we want them to visit, but I don’t think they will.”
“You know the Blaus. If they can’t get there on their bicycles …”
Helene smiled. “I know, they won’t go.” Lots of the old people in Burgdorf were like that. They didn’t even like to take the train to Düsseldorf for the day because anything unfamiliar felt dangerous. The older they got, the more modern the world around them became, tricking them, constricting them. While she was getting ready to travel to a different continent. “But you will visit,” she said. “Real soon?”
“Gertrud and I.”
“Of course,” she said quickly, ashamed she hadn’t included Gertrud in her invitation. How could she possibly tell her brother that she sensed something half-broken beneath Gertrud’s loveliness, something that might eventually cause him more pain than joy? She laid her mother’s black leather purse into a crate that was just about full. “Do you ever wonder—” She hesitated. Filled the rest of the crate with cardigans she’d knitted over the years.
“Wonder about what?”
“Oh … nothing. You’re getting too thin.”
“I’ve always been too thin.” He pushed his pale curls from his bony forehead. “What is it really?”
“I shouldn’t ask. I don’t want to be the sister who holds on too long.”
“Ask.”
“If Gertrud is right for you. Do you ever wonder about that?”
“Do you?” He knelt down to nail the first crate shut. “About Stefan?”
She was startled. “No. I guess I’ve never wondered. And here I’m asking you. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not even sure what that means … being right for someone. None of us can know for sure if someone is right for us. And maybe that’s good. But what I do know is that Gertrud feels like a second sister to me.”
Helene felt queasy. “A sister?”
“Not like you. But familiar in a way because we were children together.”
Slowly, Helene wrapped the wax Madonna her students had given her last Christmas. “Of course you’ll bring Gertrud to visit us.”
“After we’re married and have saved up.” He packed her encyclopedia. “And you’ll show us America.”
“Listen to us.” She forced a lightness into her voice. “I haven’t even been there, and already I’m showing you all of America.”
He laughed.
She spread her arms. “Well then—where would you like to go first?”
“To the town where you live, of course. Then New York. Then the highest mountain you can find in America. Then the Wild West and—”
“You have thought this out.”
“I’ve had an entire week.”
She rolled her great-grandmother’s pewter cups into cloth napkins. “I haven’t given you much time.”
“Or yourself,” he said softly.
When she embraced her brother and Margret the morning of her departure, she knew she was following the myth she had created as much as she was following the man, but she was ready to begin the life she had staked out in her fantasies.
As she walked next to Stefan up the wide, curved steps in front of the Wasserburg, she recognized the building fro
m the descriptions in his letters, but she was not prepared for the opulence when he set down his leather suitcase and unlocked the double oak door. From the paneled vestibule, they entered through a set of French doors with half-moons of stained glass above them. The marble-tiled lobby was larger than any hotel lobby Helene had ever seen: stenciled beams supported the high ceiling; brocade chairs and sofas were grouped around gleaming tables; an inlaid desk stood below one of the front windows. Two long mirrors enfolded her reflection as if to compare her to Stefan’s previous wives, and she felt the urge to climb out of a window to escape that verdict, an urge she would forget until nearly forty years later when she would come across her grandchildren, Emma and Caleb, climbing on top of the desk and squirming out of the window as though compelled to give shape to their grandmother’s long-ago impulse.
She had never ridden in an elevator, had never been inside a building this tall. When Stefan took her up to the sixth floor, her hands felt cold despite the summer heat, not because of the elevator—although that made her stomach leap to meet her heart—but because she was anxious about meeting Greta and Tobias. How she wanted to love his children for whom she’d longed from far away.
But they weren’t there yet. Somehow she’d forgotten, though Stefan had told her that they were still with their grandparents. When he left to pick them up, she walked through the huge apartment, feeling unstable because the many curtainless windows let the outside in much more than she was accustomed to. The lake was speckled with islands and reflected the clouds, the mountains, and a sky so immense that Helene felt dizzy. Though no one could possibly look into these windows—after all, no other houses stood as tall as her husband’s—she felt exposed and resolved to get drapes as soon as possible, and to replace the delicate chairs with something solid that would balance this feeling of being up here in a tree house.
When Stefan brought his children to her, she crouched to embrace Greta, who had something calm and mysterious about her that drew Helene to her instantly. As the girl’s gray eyes took her in, squinting as if to see only her and no one but her, Helene kept her arms around her, their faces at the same level, until Greta smiled, relieved that this new mother would live to be an old woman. When Helene stood back up, she felt still, protected even. But the boy unsettled her: his eyes pulled at her for more affection than anyone could possibly give him; yet, when she lifted him up and kissed his cheek, he arched away from her and began to wail, resisting her tenderness, his body as unyielding as that of his father when he’d danced with her on their wedding day. She had wanted Stefan to see how natural it was for her to be a mother, and she could feel him watching, perhaps even judging, as she failed to soothe his son.
In the meantime, Greta was tugging at her skirt, and Helene ended up balancing her and Tobias in her arms. She braced her legs—not just to support the children’s weight, but also because it felt unnaturally high up here on the sixth floor.
“Look… the mail boat.” Stefan pointed to a large boat that was approaching one of the islands, leaving a triangle of light on the water.
“How beautiful.” Her eyes followed the wake, triple lines that emerged from the stern and widened the further they were away from the boat.
“I’ll take you for a tour on it,” he said. “Soon. See that?” With his free hand he motioned to a bald spot high on a hill across from them. “I wish they wouldn’t cut so many trees. Two centuries ago shipbuilders used to get their masts here … white pines that were over two hundred feet tall. They’re all gone now.”
She waited for him to take one of the children from her arms, but as soon as he offered to, she felt compelled to object, “No, it’s not necessary. They’re just getting used to me. Why don’t you get their presents instead.”
“Surprises from Germany,” he announced. “And when the rest of our things arrive, there’ll be more.” He unwrapped Tobias’ gifts, a cast-iron milk cart with a horse, and a play-circus with painted wooden animals. “You’re next, Fröschken” he said to Greta.
“My dolls are careful. They don’t break dishes.”
“Have you already told her what’s in there?” Helene asked.
He shook his head. “Sometimes she worries me when she gets like this.”
For the town of Winnipesaukee, Helene’s presence was a reminder that Stefan Blau did not trust the endurance of the women in his adopted country. The first time she went to mass at St. Paul’s, the people looked solemn as if they saw the sign of death on her face.
“… too soon, that marriage,” they whispered.
“… just a mother for his children.”
“… someone close to him at night.”
They lit candles for her at the side altar where Stefan had once bartered with God. Some wondered if he still carried a spell on him that destroyed the women who bore his children, and most agreed that a man who grieved with such passion would need a woman far more exciting than Helene to make him forget his dead wives. After mass, when he stood waiting for her outside the church he had promised himself to never enter again, Helene linked her arm through his, only too aware that people were speculating why a handsome man like that would take such pleasure in walking home with her—a plain, large-boned woman who was older than he but still blushed like a schoolgirl. And yet it was obvious that he liked being with her. He was content. Took her to the fair. To a town meeting. Came home for early dinners with her and the children before he returned to his restaurant to work till late most nights.
By now, the crates they’d shipped from Burgdorf had been delivered, except for the one with Helene’s cardigans and her mother’s purse and the letters from Stefan she’d saved all those years. The cardigans she could replace. And she had other things that had come to her from her mother. But those letters … What made their loss even harder for her was finding out that Stefan hadn’t kept any of hers. It was as if that part of their history had suddenly dissolved.
He tried to console her. “That crate may still arrive.”
But she didn’t believe it would. Because somehow it felt as though she’d traded his letters for the reality of being here. With him. As his wife.
Sometimes the townspeople would come upon the new Mrs. Blau by the lake where she’d be playing on the beach with the children or reading to them from a picture book in her own language. Greta, a dreamy expression on her face, would kneel in the sand and, with a twig, draw pictures into the dirt. She had an ability to see and appreciate details that others didn’t stop to notice: the shadow of a leaf, the shape of a stone, the contrast of branches against a blue sky. Tobias would be propped up in his wicker carriage, chattering to himself in wordless sounds. If he banged his head against the backrest, steady and fast as he often did, his stepmother would cup the back of his head in one palm and whisper her soft and foreign phrases to him.
While Helene craved words that fit her thoughts, words that didn’t feel so unfamiliar, the people of Winnipesaukee mistook her silence for snobbery; they saw her as a proud woman who kept herself apart from them; they didn’t understand that she’d always seen herself as smart, capable, and now felt frustrated in her new language where she could barely make herself known; they had no idea how confused she was by their lack of formality. Americans told her, “I’ll see you,” and she wanted to ask, “When?” But then they didn’t visit. Was it because she didn’t respond properly?
Though she’d studied English in school, it was much harder speaking the language than reading or hearing it. Often she’d feel so slow that she’d stay silent rather than risk not being understood. “Huh?” people would ask, and if she’d repeat what she’d just said, they’d ask again, forcing her to repeat herself three or four times until she was whispering with embarrassment.
It made her feel different, made her think how—although everyone carried some difference just by the separation of skin from others—that became magnified when you were an immigrant, when there were more details to set you apart. Language, for one. And then of
course the experience of having grown up a certain way. Here in America she felt more German than she had back home. Because here she stood out. She envied her husband who blended in because he’d come to this country as a boy.
At home, they only spoke German.
One afternoon when she took the children for their daily Spaziergang—walk—Tobias in his carriage with Greta holding on to the side as usual, she saw a group of small boys—all of them hunchbacked—chasing a ball around the playground of the granite school building. Their legs were knobby around the knees. Choked with pity, Helene stopped by the rose hedge. How could there be so many of them in one small town when all of Burgdorf had only one hunchbacked man? But at least the parents of these unfortunate boys had brought them together in a game where they were all alike and would not be teased by healthy children. It made her appreciate America, that magnitude of concern. Grateful that her stepchildren’s bodies were not deformed, she bent to kiss the tops of their heads.
At the dinner table, she added a prayer for the hunchbacked boys and their parents.
“Hunchbacked boys?” Stefan spooned mashed potatoes onto Greta’s plate.
“You must have seen them before. There were nine of them. Their legs were all swollen around the knees.”
“Here in town? I haven’t seen a single one.”
“Their heads were covered with little helmets. To protect them, I guess. They were playing with a ball, kicking it and—” Stefan started to laugh.
She stared at him. It was the first time she’d seen him laugh. She’d seen him smile through his grief—always through his grief—and she’d respected that; but now he was laughing. And about this? Someone else’s misfortune? “I don’t know you at all,” she said.
“Lenchen. …” He wiped his eyes. “It’s padding they put on. To play football. So they won’t get hurt. It’s a rough game.”
