by Ursula Hegi
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To my grandchildren A and S—
always and forever in my heart
PART ONE
Summer 1878
1
A Hundred-Year Wave
With each pregnancy Lotte and the toymaker introduce their unborn to the sea, Lotte with her belly taut, Kalle with his hands on her hips as he guides her in to the peak of her belly. Eyes shut with bliss, with reverie, Lotte feels her baby swim, the wall of her body separating it from the Nordsee. First Hannelore. Then Martin. Then Bärbel. During her fourth pregnancy Lotte gets playful and dives into a handstand, surprises herself and the toymaker who laughs aloud, faced with her feet wiggling above the surface of the sea; but as he reaches down to steady her, one hand on her belly, the other on her buttocks, he’s the one who needs steadying because Lotte shoots up, spews water at him, clamps her legs around his middle. Tilts herself to him.
When you grow up by the edge of the Nordsee, you respect it, know it like the rise and fall of your breath. It begins when you learn to swim before you can walk, plunge below a wave and dig your tiny fingers into the silt before a wave can scramble you. Hannelore is daring that way, exuberant in the water like her mother, Lotte, while Martin is cautious. Too early to know with Bärbel who’s two that August of 1878 when a freak wave heaves itself at Nordstrand. A hundred-year wave, the Old Women say. Not that Lotte Jansen miscalculated the tides. Vacationers may drown, foolish enough to walk out too far on the wet sand and get cut off by the surge of incoming tide; if locals die by water, it’s in a storm or when a fishing boat capsizes.
This hundred-year wave will enter legend, define Nordstrand as much as the people who tell and retell the story, who consider themselves witnesses—not only those who see Lotte and her children dance and play in the tidal shallows on their way home after the Zirkus performance—but others who’ll hear about it later and yet speak of it as if they were with Lotte just before all wind ceases and the sky fades from blue to yellow, blotting the sun. In these stories—memories, the Old Women insist—Lotte carries her fourth baby, Wilhelm, on one hip; her daughters wear smocked dresses and Martin his lederhosen as they chase the retreating tide, laughing, running back ashore and out again, until Lotte offers her free hand to link her children to each other. And to her.
“Free hand?” The Old Women will ask.
“How free can a mother’s hand be if she has children hanging from it?”
But you refuse to envision your own children ripped from you. Your grandchildren. Aloud, you wonder why God has punished Lotte and Kalle Jansen without mercy. Because they copulated before marriage? But then you’d all be going under with sin.
“Let’s put our feet in the water…” Lotte sings to her children, “… this is the sun’s water.”
Who of you hasn’t let the sun’s water lick your ankles, your calves? You know what that’s like. You also know what it’s like to go under while you play in the Nordsee as children or swim out far as adults; and you give your memories to Lotte Jansen as you describe how the wave slams into her, fills her mouth and her nose, stings her eyes. And in that one moment all you see and recall and imagine fuses, poised to grow and enter legend.
Legends, the Old Women know, are ancient gossip; yet not all gossip leads to legends. By itself gossip won’t last, but legends feed on gossip. The Old Women know if you have a hangnail. If your great-great-grandparents cheated on each other. If you burn your soup. If you carry hate in your dreams.
* * *
After the freak wave recedes, people fan across the Watt to search for the children—nuns and Zirkus people and toymakers and fishermen and shopkeepers and church people and Old Women and farmers and blacksmiths and big-bellied Girls from the St. Margaret Home for Pregnant Girls—a bizarre crowd hoping to outwit death. Some on Zirkus ponies or horses, water sloshing around the hooves. Some in carriages. Most on foot.
“We’ll find them,” Kalle vows to Lotte who clutches their youngest against her shoulder.
“We taught them to swim…”
“Before they could walk.”
Heike from the Zirkus runs toward Lotte, white-blond hair flitting around her face, satin skirt flapping high. Heike, just six years younger than Lotte. Body of a woman, mind of a child.
“Wait, Heike,” her mother Sabine calls.
But Heike outruns her, in her fist crepe poppies, gaudy and smelling of barn. When she thrusts the poppies at Lotte, Wilhelm squirms for the red that quivers before him till Heike’s mother steps into the red. Blots it.
“Oh, Lotte…” Gently, Sabine wipes mud from Lotte’s face, tucks wet tangles of hair behind her ears. She’s been part of Lotte’s summers since Lotte was five and visited Sabine’s Zirkus wagon and was allowed to hold her new baby, Heike.
“Flowers for Hannelore,” Heike cries.
Lotte draws a sharp breath.
Sabine loops her arms around Lotte. Steadies her and the baby. “I can hold him.”
Lotte shakes her head. “No.”
“I’ll do anything for you.”
“Where is Hannelore?” Heike stomps her feet.
Lotte used to think how devastating it must be for Sabine to raise such a child. But now—she shivers.
“We don’t know,” Sabine tells her daughter. “Not yet.”
“Not yet,” says Heike.
She loves to play with local children wherever the Ludwig Zirkus sets up for a week, especially on Nordstrand where Hannelore is her best friend. Hannelore adores her. Hannelore can sit so still that she’s allowed to watch Heike rehearse her cello with the Zirkus orchestra.
“But where is Hannelore?”
Hannelore. And everyone searching for her and Bärbel and Martin, rushing and returning and setting out again, while Lotte stands rooted in prayer and drenched clothes, Wilhelm locked into her arms. Sun drenches the clouds with crimson that leaks through crevices, fighting the gray. When the incoming tide forces the searchers from the Watt, they run for their boats. A few stay in the deep, diving. Kalle leaps into the dory of the beekeeper who lunges for the oars, arms silver with pale hairs, like a god who will go beneath the sea to bring back your children.
2
Tilli. Eleven Years Old
Tilli. Eleven years old. Cradling her belly with linked palms, she’s out on the tidal flats, among church people who usually shun St. Margaret Girls and how they flaunt their bodies. Church people know to postpone rapture because only then will rapture be theirs in heaven, a rapture far superior to what mortals can feel, and it infuriates them that these Girls have indulged in the act that is sacred after the sacrament of matrimony, but a sin before. A few even manage to snag local men. Yet, the search for the Jansen children makes them allies; they have the sun in their eyes and the sun is hot and slants almost like sun in the morning, that angle, except from the opposite direction; and they shout the names of the children.<
br />
They shout: “Bärbel!”
They shout: “Martin!”
They shout: “Hannelore!”
All Tilli wants is to lie down. When she awoke with slow cramps at dawn, she didn’t tell Sister Franziska. Later, Tilli thinks, I’ll tell Sister later. She was determined to go to the Zirkus, gratis, as promised by the Twenty-Four-Hour Man who appeared three days before. True to his title, the Sisters said, he always appeared twenty-four hours ahead of the Ludwig Zirkus to hire roustabouts and negotiate the fee for setting up in the meadow behind the St. Margaret Home. For weeks the Sisters have prayed for this meadow to dry so the wheels of the Zirkus wagons won’t sink.
The Twenty-Four-Hour Man prides himself on knowing how to talk with nuns, but they dicker so craftily—not proper for nuns, not proper at all—that he’s embarrassed for them. He has no idea they’re embarrassed for him because he is ugly and kneads his lumpy chin. They get him to raise his offer, but once he agrees, they demand gratis tickets. As usual he feigns indignation, waits them out by silently counting—to ten to fifty to two hundred—but these nuns are virtuosos of silence who’ll outlast him if he were to count to a million.
He sighs, dramatically. “Tickets for all Sisters.”
“And for all Girls.”
“The Ludwig Zirkus cannot afford that.”
“It doesn’t have to be the Sunday performance.”
“Monday then.” He stomps off but halts by the door. Winks.
To announce the Ludwig Zirkus, he ties his painted banners around trees and hires a dozen local men, farmers and merchants and toymakers, who’ve waited at their regular jobs for months, counting on the wages and free tickets for their families, but even more so on the thrill of being roustabouts for one glorious week. Every August Kalle and his childhood friend Köbi whisper about running off with the Zirkus, even this morning while mucking cages and spreading fresh wood shavings.
* * *
For new Girls who haven’t been to the Ludwig Zirkus, the Sisters rhapsodize how fabulous the parade will be, eclipsing one another. This is when they are most alike—Sisters and Girls—in their Vorfreude, joy of anticipating joy.
“—ornate wagons and horses—”
“—with head plumes and acrobats—”
“—dancing dogs with tutus and hats—”
“—ponies prancing in tight circles—”
“—poppies braided into their manes—”
“—a sad and beautiful clown woman—”
“—red shoes and she paints hearts—”
“—on the foreheads of children—”
And it’s all true, the Girls say as they follow the parade through the streets with hundreds of spectators, exhilarated to be part of village life that transpires outside the St. Margaret Home and usually excludes them, except for church where they’re confined to narrow pews below the pulpit.
Behind the St. Margaret Home the earth is still so soggy that its scent has become one with the air, thickening your breath. The Ludwigs welcome the roustabouts and remind them that working for their Zirkus means dedication. Perfection.
“Some traveling shows rush to put everything together, causing accidents. None of that with us. We expect you to ensure the safety of our audiences.”
Enthusiastically, the roustabouts pull ropes and tarps from the supply wagons; wedge lumber scraps under the wheels; unload animal props and provisions; secure a wide plank that slopes from the first wagon to the ground; bridge additional planks between all wagons. Then Silvio Ludwig unlocks the cages. Spectators in their Sunday clothes cheer and applaud as animals emerge from the first wagon, one after the other down that plank where the priest blesses this extravaganza of creatures living harmoniously, he says, without bars. They smell almost like livestock, Tilli thinks, only more exotic. Livestock makes her think of the barn back home and of her brother who won’t be able to find her.
* * *
During the performance Tilli’s cramps escalate—all worth it, the glory of the performers, the magic—but now her body is turning itself inside out and she cannot allow herself to collapse because it would be selfish to lie on the ground when everyone’s shouting and searching for the toymaker’s children. Who are drowning or have already drowned. Tilli screams. Pains slam her to her knees and people surge forward; two church women—faces like Lent—are right on her; then Heike from the Zirkus and her mother who checks Tilli’s pulse. Lotte runs toward the screaming, certain her children have been found—any moment now Hannelore will stand up, head above the curved backs of the people who bend over Martin and Bärbel to help them—but Lotte cannot see who’s on the ground until she shoves through the crowd to the center where Sabine and two church women help a screaming high-pregnant Girl who should not be on the Watt. Should not—
Heike rubs Tilli’s belly. “Do you have a baby in there?”
Tilli says her cramps just started, but the women don’t believe her. They get her up, carry her to the St. Margaret Home. My cramps just started, Tilli tells Sister Franziska who slips off her amber rosary and hangs it from the key of the medicine cabinet before she examines Tilli in the infirmary, encircled by murals of gold-plated peacocks big as cattle.
“Kitsch,” Sister Franziska says to Tilli. “This used to be a mansion, commissioned by a bishop half a century ago. With funds he stole from the church. From the diaspora fund. From the collection basket.”
* * *
Right out in the open the bishop built his mansion, the Old Women wrote to the archdiocese. Taller than the steeple of the church. Such decadence. Marble stairs that curve to the second and third floors. A conservatory with an aviary where peafowl shriek like wounded children. The Old Women celebrate with Kaffee und Kuchen when the bishop is banned to a destitute parish near the Polish border—potato fields and ravens. His peacocks stay on Nordstrand, procreate and survive hunters, except for five killed for food. But the haunting echo of their cries makes it impossible to eat them in a stew or a soup, though some people try: after all, they’re used to slaughtering chickens and sheep; still, they feel like cannibals and spit out the stringy meat.
* * *
For half a century the bishop’s mansion stands empty until a hazy day in 1842, the Old Women recall, when leaves drift toward the ground in yellow currents, and a flock of young Sisters arrives from a faraway village by the Rhein. One carries a cage with orange-beaked finches. In the clearing between church and dike floats an apparition, a dwelling more splendid than the Sisters have seen or contemplated: its edges shimmer in the mist, quiver as if it had metamorphosed untold times. A rush of huge wings. For an instant the Sisters believe the mansion is rising. Cries, then, half-human, half-beast. And three shapes heave themselves into the air.
Sister Franziska and Sister Ida cross themselves.
Sister Konstanze tightens her arms around her birdcage.
But Sister Elinor laughs. “Peacocks!”
The peacocks plop on the roof, talons scraping slate, and ogle the Sisters who ascend the front steps, led by the youngest, Sister Hildegunde, thin hands tucked into opposite sleeves. That day the sisters won’t unpack porcelain and cutlery and practical items. No, they only open boxes that hold what matters to them: paints and sheet music and books; a flute and a violin; a weaving loom. Soon, big-bellied Girls arrive, most so young that they giggle and run from the Sisters, play hide-and-seek in the chapel.
The Old Women bring gifts: loaves of bread; canned beans and peaches; applesauce. They have been on Nordstrand for centuries, its chroniclers, its conscience, its judges. They witnessed the flood of 1634 tear the island Strand into four islands, one of them Nordstrand. They fled when the most devastating flood of all obliterated Rungholt in 1362. The Old Women remember Rungholt through their own memories and through what was bestowed upon them over centuries; and they know the urge, the beauty to bestow all this upon the next generations. And with that the urge to pass it on.
Rungholt, so near that when the wind breaks off, y
ou may hear the bells in its church towers beneath the surface of the Nordsee where the sunken island lies intact—people and animals and houses and cisterns and windmills—awaiting the next time it will rise in its entirety. Most claim you cannot reach Rungholt, that it’s lost forever, and that you, too, will be lost if you set out for Rungholt. Yet, some believe it rises once every spring just long enough to let you enter.
3
Before the Age of Knowledge
Out on the tidal flats Lotte Jansen kisses the top of Wilhelm’s head and beseeches God to tell her what she’s done wrong. “Because if there’s a reason you took them, my children, took them, there must be something I can do to get them back from you.”
But God, he is silent—as silent as the darkening shapes of the boats on the sea; and when the boats return without her children and her husband steps ashore, it’s up to her to barter with God.
She draws the cross where she knows Wilhelm’s heart to be, kisses his lips and his belly. Whispers, “Forgive me forgive me” against his damp skin.
He coos. Pats her cheeks—
—oh—
—and she—
—howling—
—howling and praying and howling and praying, casts him into the sea. “Take him, God, in return for my other three—”
The crowd pitches forward as if one body, but gives way to Kalle who hauls his lastborn from the sea, reclaims his son who smells of salt and of water, of salt and of earth. When he refuses to hand Wilhelm to his wife, people speculate he’ll never forgive her. But the Old Women understand the measure of Lotte’s sacrifice, understand the courage it takes to offer your child to God, understand they’ve witnessed the collapse of her faith. They know what that’s like. Not everyone finds the path back to God.
