by Clio Gray
But the first of these was Nelke, the mother who had never wanted the boy-burr, and who grieved for the non-existent flower of the imagined Elsa who should have been born in his place, and who grieved for this lost child all her life. And it was Nelke who took the decision that one of them had to go and, seeing as Philbert at that time could hardly walk his way past the chicken shed without falling over, she took the burden of leaving upon herself.
For Nelke, it went like this: she woke up with a smile for the first time in years, listening to the chickens scratching in the dry mud outside her shack without rancour, knowing it would be the last time she would ever hear them. Shminiak was in Lippstadt doing business, Philbert in his cot underneath the table with his wretched pig, who snottered like an old man, christened with a name that was just as she sounded, which was Kroonk. Nelke didn’t know the boy was awake nor that he too was listening and watching, seeing his mother moving quietly about the kitchen, taking a few extra minutes to brush her hair, braid it into a silken snake down her back. She put on her best cotton dress, fingered through the others in the ratty box before closing the lid knowing she would never have to wear another, or sew them when they split, or patch them when they tore. Nelke wanted to sing with the larks she could already hear fluting above the hay meadows and to laugh with the river tugging playfully at its banks beyond. Instead, she crept around her home and picked up a small basket, placing within it the comb and mirror her beau had brought her on his last visit – at last a man who knew the things a woman wanted, as only a fine Frenchman could. She tip-toed past the table and lifted the latch, seeing the sun shine down on her new life and the dusty path that beckoned her on. She sniffed the air, smelt the flour and salt for the very last time, threw her shawl around her shoulders and for a moment, just one moment, she turned to look at the boy beneath the table, wondering if at the very last her heart would waver. But there was nothing but contempt for the shack in which she had been cooped these past few years, and nothing for the child she had never considered her own. Strangely, in that last long look, the only thing she regretted leaving was the one thing never there at all: her little flower bud Elsa who had never bloomed. And it was for Elsa, not Philbert, that Nelke shed a few tears as she took her quick way along the path to the bridge and the man offering escape.
Philbert stayed below the table with only little Kroonk for company, hungry and bewildered, waiting for his Mamma to return. Eventually Frau Kranz came in, as she often did, and fetched him up, took him back home with her. But the next day found him back beneath his table, expectant, too young to comprehend that Nelke was never coming back. This went on for several weeks until Frau Kranz began to take the place of Nelke in his head, and he would sit every morning on a chair while she pounded at her dough, rolled out her noodles, trying to explain that sometimes people just disappeared and it wasn’t the fault of those they left behind. And eventually four-year-old Philbert forgot his mother’s face, her smell, and her anger, the constant dripping of her tears, and for a while there was only Philbert and Kroonk and Frau Kranz, lying beneath their own hedge, in their own ditch, crying out for help, hoping – as people in those places always hope – that help will one day come.
The neighbours talked, the neighbours gossiped, the neighbours regarded the disappearance of the Confectioner’s girl as something of a scandal, a trope for all the disappointed women, unwilling mothers, flirtatious courtesans they had ever known. And they soon came tap, tap, tapping at Frau Kranz’s door wanting more, wanting details, although she never gave them up. Surprisingly they also took much interest in Kroonk, examining her as they examined every newcomer to the town, unanimous in their decision that she was too small, too red and runtish, and absolutely did not like the way she sneezed and snottered. There were murmurings of swine-fever, which Frau Kranz expertly batted aside.
‘Stuff and nonsense,’ she grumbled, mysterious with her knowledge. ‘It’s just a cold, little piggy, and don’t let nobody tell you different.’
Frau Kranz scratched Kroonk’s little red ears, rubbed her down with warm wet towels, fed her, as she had once fed Philbert, with a twist of flannel soaked in milk-bran and mashed-up biscuits, until the sneezing dried out into a purr and the coughing a husk of what it had been, and the neighbours gathered one more time and declared her fit, though fit for what they did not say.
They were strange times for Philbert, settling, as mud will do, no matter how fast flows the stream. Nelke left with the summer, and autumn brought Shminiak home, although staying only long enough to bless Frau Kranz and leave her some bolts of cloth from Westphalia, stroking his child’s head, chucking Kroonk beneath her chin, admiring what they’d all turned into which seemed, to his eyes at least, a family to which he no longer belonged. He urged Frau Kranz into the bigger shack, removed himself to hers for his increasingly brief and infrequent visits when he drank too much and talked to himself, tried to persuade himself that he was happy too.
And so it went for a few years: boy and pig growing and playing together behind the chicken-shed, paddling in the shallows of the river, snuffling for pignuts in the fields, collecting berries from the woods. Frau Kranz swept and scrubbed out all the years of accumulated muck left behind by Nelke, and made pickles of vegetables and pots of rabbit and pigeon that she sold to neighbours; sewing Shminiak’s bolts of cloth into tablecloths, pinafores and curtains, selling the fabulously exotic foreign fabrics to the greyness of the town. They went from cabbage soup to proper wheat-bread and mutton chops; from fried cucumber and potato to salt-fish stew. Kroonk snuffled up the leftovers and rooted the neighbours’ middens, though no one seemed to mind, and even began to leave their peels-and-pickings for her in bowls by their back gates.
‘How kind,’ thought Philbert. ‘How generous. How they must love my Kroonk.’
He knew nothing of the tradition his neighbours remembered from better times of Epiphany Pigs, nor heard their whisperings of baked bacon pie, crackling crisping on the spit, fat sputtering into the fire. Nor did he understand the vague memories evoked by the occasional scents of chocolate and cloves as he passed by the mill-house to fetch the bread, nor the even vaguer face conjured up every time he heard the rain drip, drip, dripping from the gutter, Nelke no longer a firm memory; nor did he notice that his father, Shminiak, came home less and less often, nor that his sad brown eyes were now awash with brandy, his beard a tangled mess of sauerkraut and stale crumbs. He didn’t comprehend the significance of that last visit when Shminiak hugged Frau Kranz and kissed her hands and cheeks, making her go as red as new-sliced beef, demanding crossly what was what. Shminiak pointed to the pile of cloth he’d left by the door, carefully wrapped in hessian so they would not spoil in the coming winter’s winds and rain. He scuffed his boot-heels against the floor and then against each other. He held his son’s misshapen head against his waist and went down upon his knees to kiss it fondly, twisting the little curl of hair one more time about his finger, stroking the rounded cheeks that reminded him so much of his beloved Nelke, murmuring sweet nothings to his Little Maus, which was what everyone called him on account of his taupe. Shminiak said his last goodbyes to his boy, handing to him a little wooden donkey with legs jointed at the knees and a silken saddle. He showed Philbert how to work a hand-cranked serinette the ladies in Paris used to teach canaries how to sing, his Little Maus squeaking with delight at the fluting sound of larks when he turned the handle. Shminiak kissed Frau Kranz one last time, kissed his son, and even kissed Kroonk, and then he was gone, just like Nelke before him, neither coming back.
‘Your father’s taken a very important job in Westphalia,’ Frau Kranz told Philbert, dabbing at her eyes with the corner of her dress, fussing about, clattering pans and pots. ‘So go outside now, my dear, and play with Kroonk,’ and off Philbert went, pleased with his double-jointed donkey and the little serinette.
He was six years old when he stood for a while in the chicken-pecked yard an
d watched his Papa’s horse kicking up dust and salt from the track leading to the bridge. He found some familiar resonance of what had gone before, understanding that something important in his world was changing. He thought he heard a faint, ‘Aieee, aieee, Yehovah . . .’ drifting down the path towards him.
Last sight for Philbert of his father, and last sound.
Last that anyone in Staßburg ever heard of Shminiak and his Lamentations.
Philbert long remembered the horse and the dust, the track and the bridge, but of those words and of his father, as of his mother, there was soon nothing left.
4
Christmas Present
Winter that year was a cold season when it came, and Weihnachtsfest – Christmas time – as drear as it could be. A pall of freezing mist hung low over Staßburg, three men killed by falls of salt-stone cracked from the mine-cliffs by the ice. Worse was to come, hardly a hint of wassailing or carolling that year; very little to celebrate on Christmas Eve, few visitors doing the rounds on Silvesterabend to welcome the New Year in. The taverns were quiet because by then over seventy people had died from Die Grösse Grippe, an influenza that had stamped over them with the ice, sweeping in from the North like an enemy horde.
Philbert hid from it all beneath his familiar table, Kroonk as always by his side, Frau Kranz making huge pots of gruel to distribute to the sick. Women came in their shawls and their clogs, dipping their tins into her cauldrons before dissipating back into the mud and mist and the evermore demanding and unceasing months of winter. Then Frau Kranz got sick. Not all at once: slower than a cat creeps into a cradle. She hunched a little longer by the fire than was usual, began to sneeze over her sewing, and then to spatter her pretty fabrics by coughing up fine laces of blood. The same neighbour women came in with their shawls and their clogs, clutching their tins, began to stop and rock a little in the chair beside Frau Kranz’s bed, cluck-clucking their tongues, trying to feed the same gruel to Frau Kranz that she’d been making for others only weeks before. She lapped at the liquid from their ladles trying to take in all she could, but failed, staining her clothes with the dribbled medallions of the sick. Philbert and Kroonk crawled up beside her on her bed and laid their bodies against her own to keep her warm, wondering what would happen if ever she left, as everyone else had done.
It was a miserable winter for the whole town, a time to be wept over and mourned, and yet somehow endured.
When at last March stamped her foot and kicked the cold weather out on its arse, Staßburg was only half the town it had once been. A quarter of its population cut down by the Grippe like thatching reeds and buried; the more well-to-do heading off swiftly into exile, picking up their fine hats and coats as they fled. These last returned with the spring, as the sunshine trickled into the streets and warmed the soil of the fields. The Mine Controllers tied up their ‘important business’ in Berlin and came back to crank awake the big machines, call those still strong enough back to work at mine and mill. Staßburg survived, and so did Frau Kranz, though she was thin as an egg-shell and had a cough like a rusty chain bending her double with every step. It was cabbage soup and turnip stew all over again for everyone, their deepest pockets scoured clean by winter and sickness. No one complained, just glad to hear once more the shift-bells ringing and the striking of pickaxes from the mines, tasting the tang of salt once more in the air – all signs that Staßburg had arisen.
As if in recognition of this new beginning, the flowers of spring at last began to unfurl within the fields that ran by the river, and the cold, grey skin of the town was browned by the sun. And soon after came something else entirely, further bolstering their optimism as rumours crept into every shack, house and street, starting in some dusty inn on the edge of town where a pedlar had stopped to sharpen the cook’s knives. He’d come from Potsdam, he said, and from Potsdam to Magdeburg and from Magdeburg to here, and every step of the way, so the man said, the Fair had been hot on his tail. They’re only a rattle away, says he, and sure to be here soon. The Mine Controllers sent out an emissary as the whispers passed from mouth to mouth and ear to ear, from inn to inn, from tavern to shop until – like a river in spate – it burst through the town, set it abuzz with anticipation. And then, at the very back end of May a cloud of dust was seen on the horizon and they knew at last for sure that pedlar had been right, the rumours true: the Carnival was coming to Staßburg, and not a moment too soon.
Staßburg shook itself awake, like a bear after long months of unwanted slumber. The jasmine and late jonquil raised their heads, threading the air with their delicate scent. People stopped worrying about disrespecting the dead and began unfolding their coloured clothes. A yellow neckerchief appeared, a red shawl here, a green shirt there, boasting out beneath dark waistcoats as one blue dress nodded to another on the other side of the street. The Mine Controllers declared a three-day holiday to take effect the moment the promised Carnival appeared. Tidbits began to appear once more outside Frau Kranz’s gate; she was uneasy at their implication but unwilling to let go a source of food, picking through them for what she could use, as fed up with the watery soup and dull grey days as everyone else. She tried her best to rally, spent more time up and about, ignoring the blood-spattered blankets and bean-shaped blotches that had appeared on her hands and feet through the thinness of her skin. She’d been ill before, but understood this was not the same; she knew by the slow, erratic beating of her heart that her time might be short and had one last duty to discharge, though not as yet the least idea how to do it.
And then in came the Carnival, flying and barking over the bridge into the fields beyond the river, flattening the celandine and corn-grasses, outshining them with its painted carts, colourful stalls and tents, the weird-looking people who peppered and swung here and there amongst its makeshift ginnels. Philbert and Kroonk sat on the opposite riverbank dangling their toes in the cool water, fascinated by the sights, awed by the strange sounds, the smells of donkey dung and people and sawdust drifting through the air, the roars of unknown animals; the people of Staßburg bustling and jostling over the bridge, children laughing and flinging themselves into the river, swimming to the other side, hauling themselves out dripping, ready to go at it once again. The holler and hubbub rose in volume as people thronged the tents and stalls, their voices made louder by wonderment and drink. The smell of frying potatoes and meat blistering on braziers filled the evening air, drawing in every last citizen who had a single coin to spare.
Frau Kranz didn’t have even that, so Philbert could only wander outside but never got in to see the shows; he read the signs that shouted with their large lettering of the Extraordinary Feats and Freaks of Nature hidden inside the tents: the Fishman, the Fattest Woman in All the World, the Smallest-Ever Girl. It didn’t matter to Philbert; enough just to be a part of something so exotic, threading his way amongst the stalls, seeing all the things the pedlars had brought to sell – all colours of silks and wools and linens, tooled leather boots, gloves and leggings, laces, fancy buttons and buckles, bowls and cups of strange shapes and bright colours, painted clogs, an artisan selling silhouettes of anyone who paid their money over; a man selling potions and phials of strange coloured liquids, jars of leeches which sucked their flat bellies against the glass. There was everything to see, smell and hear, as if every good thing in life had come to Staßburg, shouting out to all who could to come and get it.
Philbert and Kroonk sat and watched from their side of the river, gladdened by the animation across the water, warmed by it, happy to dip their toes and trotters into the water, satisfied to have the privilege to witness something so marvellous.
And then that girl came by, pin thin, legs like a cricket, same height as Philbert but with a face that was pinched and beaked and looked much older than her body, her features bright and without care.
‘Do you mind?’ said she, setting herself down beside Philbert, her voice sharp as shards of glass. She kicked off
her small shoes, once red, now slightly tattered and flaked over with mud, and wriggled her minuscule toes like hatching minnows in the water. Philbert couldn’t speak, went red as Kroonk, and apparently had something stuck in his throat, though the girl didn’t seem to notice.
‘Mmmm!’ she breathed and leant back her head, stretched out her arms to the ground behind her. ‘This is wonderful!’
