Hausfrau

by Jill Alexander Essbaum

  He put his hands under her arms and against her deadweight managed to turn her over and sit her up. She moaned as he leaned her against the same wall he’d thrown her into. “Does this hurt?” Bruno held her by the jaw and turned it toward better light and ran a finger along the ridge of her nose, which was still bleeding.

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t feel broken.” It was a clinical statement. “Put your arms around my neck.” Bruno took one of her arms and hooked it over his shoulder. Anna followed suit with the other one. “Stand up,” he ordered, even as he was pulling her to her feet. He put an arm around her waist and held her as she steadied herself. The room jerked and Anna dropped the washcloth. “Come on.” Anna didn’t have a choice but to follow him as he led her out of the kitchen and into the bathroom.

  Bruno flipped down the toilet seat and positioned Anna on top of it. “Can you sit up?” Anna shook her head no, so Bruno angled her sideways and, as in the kitchen, leaned her against the wall. Anna would have laughed but for the ache in her ribs. So much of me has been so frivolous, Anna thought. So very laughable. Ha, ha. Anna was light-headed and loopy. She let her weight fall into the green tiled wall. She was suspicious of the architecture of the room but had no choice other than to trust it.

  Bruno turned his back to her, put the stopper in the drain, and ran water into the tub. Anna asked again where the children were; Bruno had told her but she’d forgotten. Bruno didn’t answer. Instead he swiveled back around to face her. He reached for Anna’s left foot and removed her shoe and her sock and then set her foot back down. He repeated the process with the right foot. Then he helped her stand.

  Her legs were jelly; she put her hands on his shoulders for support. Bruno unfastened her jeans, unzipped them, and pulled them down. “Step out.” It was a tedious procedure but Anna did it without falling. Next came her panties. Anna wore a black thong with a satin bow. Under the circumstances, her underwear seemed obscene. Between the pain and her remorse, or a variable combination of the two, Anna started crying again. Her sweater was more difficult to remove. It caught on her nose as Bruno pulled it over her head. “Hush,” he said again. It was not meant to console her. Anna wasn’t wearing a bra. Bruno helped Anna into the tub with the same lack of ceremony with which he’d undressed her.

  “Is it warm enough?”

  “No.” Anna reached to adjust the faucet but Bruno pushed her hand away and did it for her.

  “Better?”

  Anna nodded.

  Bruno wet a washcloth and wrung it out and began to dab away the blood on Anna’s face. He parted her hair. She was still bleeding where her head had hit the wall. “It’ll be okay,” Bruno said. He was looking at the floor when he said it. He’s hurt me more than he meant to, Anna thought. She reached around to touch it but Bruno stopped her. “Lie down.” He leaned Anna slowly back into the now-warm water before turning it off. He pushed her farther down. “We should wash your hair,” Bruno said, reading her thoughts. The water around Anna’s head turned pink. It’s like he’s baptizing me. I’m washed in the blood. Anna didn’t know if she’d been baptized. She never asked her parents and they never said one way or the other so she assumed she hadn’t been. Bruno and Anna had baptized all three of their children, but they’d done it simply out of custom and for the benefit of Ursula, who’d urged them to. Bruno sat Anna back up and gave her a perfunctory shampoo. He rinsed her hair with the handheld sprayer. Anna winced against the pressure of the water and the sting of the soap.

  “You’re fine,” Bruno said as he took her face in his hand and, as in the kitchen, turned it back and forth to look at it in the bathroom’s strong light. “You’ll have a bruise.” Anna blinked. Bruno reached behind himself for a towel and rolled it into a neck bolster and then he helped her lie back once again. He stood and looked down on her in the bath. Anna closed her eyes and fished the washcloth out of the water and put it over her face. The light was so bright that she imagined her every guilt was visible. “You’ll be okay,” Bruno said a final time as he left her alone in the bath, flipping the light switch as he pulled the door shut.

  This was as close to an apology as Anna would get.

  DOKTOR MESSERLI TRIED, ONCE, to explain Jung’s concept of the shadow to Anna. “In the physical world a shadow is the dark shape that forms behind anything that light shines upon. A place where light—at present—isn’t. In analysis we equate consciousness with light. Therefore, unconsciousness finds its parallel with darkness. Simply, the shadow is formed of what a person doesn’t consciously know about herself. The self’s unattended aspects. Places where consciousness—at present—isn’t.”

  “The dark parts. The sinister parts.” Anna bowed her head.

  Doktor Messerli hemmed. “The unknown parts. The shadow isn’t inherently negative. But yes, a negative shadow is very destructive. It will rarely be experienced as an intentional response or a rational force. It is an unconscious reflex. You don’t control it. What stays in shadow controls you.”

  Doktor Messerli spoke with slow, dire counsel. “The result of not working toward consciousness is isolation. Instead of real relationships you’ll have imagined ones. The less embodied you are in your conscious life, the blacker and denser your shadow will be. You have no wish to succumb to a negative shadow. And yet”—Doktor Messerli weighed the outcome of every statement that might possibly follow—“the effect of a compulsion is rarely positive. What conscious person would jump into a shark-infested sea? Who would eat glass? Who would shiver when she could so easily be warm? No conscious person would.”

  “So it’s bad.”

  Doktor Messerli pulled back. “Not exactly. The shadow’s potential to destroy is undeniable. Lightning might strike a house and set it ablaze. But harness the electricity and the same house can be illuminated with the turn of a switch. Consider a vaccine. Included in the serum is a small amount of the disease. Light needs the dark. It is the order of the universe. What would thaw in the spring if we didn’t have a winter to endure? Consciousness is conditioned against its absence, Jung wrote. Amputate the serpent’s tail and the power to heal lies within.” Anna nodded. She tried to understand.

  “All self-knowledge begins in the shadow’s black rooms. Enter those rooms, Anna. Address the shadow face-to-face. Ask your questions. Listen to the answers. Respect the answers. The shadow will tell you everything. Why it is you hate. Who it is you love. How to heal. How to sit with sadness. How to grieve. How to live. How to die.”

  WHEN ANNA FIRST BEGAN to journal, her writing was intentionally rough. Doktor Messerli had challenged her to write like that, automatically and without judgment and self-editing. Anna was to let her thoughts flow unimpeded. In a rare instance of concession, Anna took the Doktor’s advice and did as she counseled her. The resulting entries were hurried and overblown and her handwriting was illegible. But this was how it was done, she was told, and this is how she would try to do it. And it was good to have a place to let it all loose. The page was her sole confidant. My soul confidant, she thought. After Charles’s death, Anna’s prose slowed and her already abstract logic grew more nebulous.

  And what is a Swiss flag but a white cross swimming in a sea of red? I’ve no place to go but insane. Like trying to find your glasses without your glasses: impossible. Like a cell phone’s incorrect predictive text: wrong, wrong, wrong. Like massaging a broken bone: it’s done because it must be done. A blessing, a curse upon me. I merit every ache.

  I want nothing more to do with my life.

  AN HOUR AFTER LEAVING her alone in the bathroom, Bruno returned to help her out of the tub. The water had cooled. Anna had unrolled the towel underneath her head and used it to cover herself, out of shame and shivering alike. She had worked the whole dark hour on willing her mind to empty. She hadn’t succeeded, but the attempt filled the time and distracted her from the pain.

  She couldn’t figure it out. I know everything about you. Anna doubted that was true but wasn’t going to ask for specifics.
As if he would have given them to her. That’s how he always handled the boys. You know what you did. Now go to your room. The wondering was part of the punishment. How much did Bruno actually know? Anna was going to have to live without that answer.

  Bruno was the only father Polly Jean had ever known. And she’s the only daughter he’s ever had. People parented children who were not their genetic offspring all the time. He loved her. Adored her. Was that so unusual? He would do anything for her. Would maintain every appearance for her. Would swallow his pain for her. For Victor and Charles.

  For Anna.

  Whom he loved. Truly, deeply loved.

  Bruno helped her stand and then wrapped her in a towel and dried her off. She felt like a child. Bruno was neither tender nor rough. He toweled her down noncommittally. He’d brought a nightgown—Anna’s favorite, she noted—into the bathroom with him and instructed her to lift her arms as he dressed her. He pointed past the bathroom’s open door into the bedroom. “Can you walk by yourself? Lie down. I’ll be in soon.” Anna did as Bruno instructed her. She was the queen of compliance.

  A few minutes later Anna heard the thin, airy siffle of the teakettle. I was making tea and then … She let the thought wander off. Another minute passed and Bruno was at Anna’s bedside delivering the cup of tea she might have prepared two hours earlier. Bruno set it on the nightstand. Anna sat up weakly. “Here.” Bruno offered an open palm. In it were three small pills.

  “Three?” They were the pills Doktor Messerli had most recently prescribed. Anna had only taken a few, and no more than one at a time. But she took the pills from Bruno’s hand, put them in her mouth, and washed them back with a sip of tea. “Bruno,” Anna started.

  He shook his head. “We’re not going to talk about this tonight.” And then he left the room and shut the door. Anna set the cup on the nightstand and let her body become the bed. Help me, help me, help me, she cried into her pillow. Her eyelids were swollen and sore. She repeated her plea until the pills began to soften her resolve to remain vigilant and her consciousness retreated into a lonely place inside that didn’t have a name.

  Then she fell asleep.

  23

  THE COLOR OF A FLAME WILL TELL YOU ITS TEMPERATURE. Yellow flames are coolest. The hottest flames are white. They are called dazzling flames. Red fire is not as hot as blue. The record for the hottest on-earth temperature is 3.6 billion degrees. It was reached in a lab. How is that possible? That’s hotter than the center of the sun. Each year, two and a half million Americans report burn injuries. Suttee is the religious suicide of a Hindu widow. Self-immolation is a frequent form of protest. Every ancient culture had a fire god: Pele, Hephaestus, Vulcan, Hestia, Lucifer, Brigid, the Mesopotamian god Gibil, the Aboriginal goddess Bila, Prometheus. Domestic control of fire began 125,000 years ago. No modern country allows execution by burning. Smoldering is the slow, low, flameless form of combustion. God appeared to Moses in a bramble of fire. An intumescent substance swells when it’s exposed to heat. Gretel pushed the witch into the oven where she died. Ash is the solid remains of fire. Incineration is the act of making the ash, and fire, if you’d care to be poetic about it, is ash’s mother. Under rare conditions, fire will make a tornado of itself, a whirling vortex of flame. When struck against steel, a flint edge will produce sparks. The flame that tortures also purifies. Not all fires can be fought.

  24

  ANNA SNAPPED OUT OF SLEEP. THE TRIO OF PILLS SHE’D TAKEN the night before had all three worn off at once, and in the manner of slices of bread when a toaster’s timer has run down, both eyes blinked open at the same time and Anna was awake.

  The house was in a still and somber mood. The floorboards did not speak. The walls didn’t breathe. The house on Rosenweg was made of quiet. This was unusual. Even with the windows closed, mornings were typically noisy with birdsong and cars and people walking up and down the street. But Anna heard nothing that day. The silence was sobering. She figured it for an aftereffect of the pills.

  Her eyes found first their focus, and then the clock. It was just before seven. The bells would ring soon. I will lie here until the bells ring. Anna’s head thumped. She would wait for the bells, then rise. What day is it? It was Friday. She would allow herself the indulgence of waiting on the bells.

  When they came, Anna rose. She moved at an invalid’s pace; each step made her wince. It took a full minute to shuffle into the bathroom. The absoluteness of the morning had been her imagination. Dietlikon was as busy as Dietlikon ever was. A man walking three sheepdogs passed by the house on his way up the hill. The postman was awake and at work. He zipped down Dorfstrasse on his yellow motorbike. He was a light-complexioned man in his upper twenties with a shaved head and a wide, silly mouth. For the first few months he’d worked this route, he’d been under the impression that Bruno and Anna were siblings, not spouses. In lumbering English he would flirt with her, ask where would she be that weekend, what she would be doing. Then, he would detail his own plans and end their interaction by mentioning how nice it would be if they happened to run into each other some evening out. Bruno eventually corrected him. Why didn’t you tell him I was your husband? Bruno asked. Why did you let him flirt with you? Anna told him she hadn’t realized he’d been flirting. Since then he’d kept a proper Swiss distance: ruthlessly polite but tediously reserved. He’d been their postman for five years. Anna learned his name once but she’d subsequently forgotten it and was too embarrassed to ask for it again.

  Anna forced herself to look at her face. The area between her cheek and her nose had begun to purple; the socket of her eye—the entire eye, from beneath the lower lashes to above the brow—was a pale yellow green, awful as bile. Her finger was raw where Bruno had wrenched off the ring. Her arms and legs were sore but otherwise unharmed. Her face, though. She’d wear these bruises for a month.

  This is my face, she thought. It was undeniable. That was she. She was that. It was the truest reflection she’d ever seen. Her perfect twin. Her doppelgänger.

  Hello, Anna. Nice to meet you.

  Bruno called her name from his office. When she didn’t answer he came into the bathroom. He made a generous amount of noise as he approached in an effort not to spook her as he had the night before (but really, what more could be dropped, cracked, broken?). When he saw Anna’s face in the mirror his own face fell. Anna had no reaction to this. Bruno patted her shoulder. “Get dressed. Come into the living room.” His mouth was dry and his words scratched his lips as he spoke them.

  “Okay,” Anna said. Bruno returned to his office as Anna hobbled the several steps from bathroom to bedroom.

  The day was gray. Pants would have been most practical, but Anna felt prettiest in skirts and rare was the occasion that dressing well didn’t make her feel at least a little better. Such frippery. The question was not irrelevant. Is it wise to dose oneself with the medicine of foolish vanities? Yes, she thought. Then, No, when she rethought it. A dress, a man, whatever. They cover you, you hide in them. Then Anna shook all philosophies from her head and began to rifle through the Kleiderschrank. I will take what comfort I can get.

  The blurry details of the night before began to sharpen at their edges and a picture came into focus. Bruno beat me, she thought plainly as if this were a fact she’d only just then realized. He beat me badly. Anna looked at herself in the bedroom mirror to see if anything in the last minute had changed. Oh, Anna. You had this coming, she thought. Anna knew there was something broken in her line of reasoning. No one ever has it coming, of course. But … she wasn’t the textbook example of a battered wife. She hadn’t been victimized into believing she deserved what she got. She decided it all on her own. In a violent, complicated world, Anna thought, it was a quick, lucid solution to a problem of have and lack. I had this coming and I got what I deserved. He’d never hit her before and he would never hit her again. Bruno wasn’t a violent man. There was no pattern of abuse. I brought this to myself. Myself, I provoked this. Her face throbbed. She held on to
these thoughts until she chose her clothes, setting the former to the side and picking up the latter. There’s only so much I can carry. She dressed in a dark skirt, navy turtleneck, and gray tights. As she slipped on a pair of stylish flats she looked to the mirror yet again. Excepting the bruises, Anna looked pretty.

  She was fastening her hair in an updo as she walked into the living room. She’d considered leaving it shaggy that she might better hide behind it. What good would that do? she decided in the end. I’ve nothing left to conceal. Bruno stared through the window at Hans and Margrith, who stood in front of their barn talking to the man with the sheepdogs, who had by then returned from his walk up the hill. Bruno turned around when Anna entered the room. He cleared his throat. “You look nice.”

  “Thank you.” The mood was marked with politesse and grace. Both were nervous. Like blind dates at a prom. He had complimented her appearance and she thanked him. Will he offer me a wrist corsage? Will we ride to the dance in a limousine? But Bruno was not her date; he was her husband and she was his wife, and what Anna wanted most in that moment was to apologize, to explain, then to apologize again. For everything. And she did mean everything: every snide or damaged thought she’d had since the moment she stepped from the airplane into terminal E nine years ago. Every grudge she’d nursed while traipsing the hill behind their house in the middle of the night. Every lonesomeness, every terror. Every petty wound. Every social fear. Every desire. Everything, everything, everything. Every inevitability. Every mistake. The trouble with mistakes is that they rarely seem like mistakes when they are made. Sleep had set her right. She was prepared to name names. What use were secrets now? All had been knocked down. She stood in the rubble, ready to rebuild.