by Ursula Hegi
Longing. But not grieving. Not for Kalle.
To grieve him and her children together would be disloyal to her children.
* * *
When the Ludwigs meet with Kalle about restoring the wagon panels, both want magic and passion; but where the father envisions additional Bible scenes, the son wants to replace every panel with scenes from Arabische Nächte—Arabian Nights.
“Too expensive,” Herr Ludwig says.
“We need something more exciting than virgins and apostles,” Silvio says.
Kalle listens carefully to figure out how to get along with both. “It may be dramatic to merge your story lines—”
“That’s impractical,” Silvio Ludwig says.
“Impractical,” his father echoes.
“It would keep your costs low,” Kalle says.
The Ludwigs glance at each other. Then at Kalle. Wait.
“I won’t do unnecessary work. I’ll keep what I can of the Biblical panels.”
He begins with the kitchen wagon, removes the rotting half of The Last Supper and splices in veiled belly dancers who gyrate toward the leftover apostles. As a toymaker he’s created intricate features, but with the Zirkus he’s learning to work on an expansive scale. By afternoon he’s exhausted but can’t sleep at night because he dreads waking up and remembering he’ll never hold his children again.
* * *
The memory of body—impossible to overcome. The memory of how they latched on to Lotte: Hannelore wanting to do it all for herself as soon as she could, both hands pulling Lotte’s breast toward her mouth; Martin always curious, turning his head to follow whatever was happening nearby, stretching Lotte’s nipple; Bärbel with her fervent appetite and will, clamping onto Lotte—lips, gums, tongue, teeth—
Once again he barricades his soul, takes refuge in feeding the animals and shoveling their droppings till he’s drowsy, only letting himself think of what needs doing that moment and what needs doing the moment after that moment until he’s calmed, gladdened even, by their nearness and smell, by his hope that he’s good with them. He doesn’t do his other work. Tells himself that he is the veterinarian, at least closer to being a veterinarian than anyone in the Zirkus. He cooks gravy for the sick animals, just as he used to at home. While he browns a bit of meat and simmers it, adding water, the animals sniff the air, press closer, and he calls them his little cannibals, talks to them till he calms himself and the meat is in shreds and has turned into gravy that tastes like meat; and when he pours it over feed they’ve already refused, he gets even the most reluctant animals to eat, gets life to flare in their eyes again, ignoring the advice of anyone who’s told him that grazing animals don’t eat gravy because that would be cannibalism.
* * *
At first both Ludwigs are enthusiastic about Kalle’s work; but one evening in the kitchen wagon, Herr Ludwig is agitated. For a while they eat silently.
“Yesterday you liked the belly dancers,” Silvio says.
His father shakes his head.
“We agreed, Vater.”
“Did not.”
“We agreed. On everything. You forgot.”
“Did not.”
Silvio points to his father’s uneaten food.
“Don’t want to.”
“You’re letting yourself get too thin.”
“No belly dancers on my wagon!”
“Don’t you get sick.”
“Oh…” His father picks up a wedge of boiled potato, bites into it cautiously, fingers against his lips, hands like claws.
“You hear me?”
“No belly dancers! Your mother would be outraged.”
“We can keep our wagon silver and black. Let’s wait till we see what Kalle does with other wagons.”
“He’s not doing his work.”
“Sabine says it’s sadness about his children.”
13
The Old Women Ride Their Bicycles to the Cemetery
Even when it rains, the Old Women ride their bicycles to the cemetery, one hand holding an open umbrella, the other steering. On their handlebars sway watering cans, sisal nets with gardening tools and flower pots. After they cross the bridge across the moat, they get off their bicycles. Maria is limping. Nothing, she says when they ask what happened. No, she says when they offer to carry her supplies up the steep path.
They scrape flecks of moss from gravestones, clear family plots from weeds. They know one another’s stories and the stories of the buried ones, recognize the moment before everything shifts—into sorrow or bliss or rage—and calibrate those moments even if half a century has passed. Like when Maria—the day of her wedding to the lanky fisherman she’s loved since she was sixteen—brought the new Doktor to the bed of her mother.
Better if her mother had not tried to make her wear her old-fashioned veil and climbed on a chair to reach the top of her wardrobe. Better if her mother had not broken her femur when the chair tipped. Better if the Herr Doktor had not presented himself at his best—skillful with clean hands and new shoes. Better if Maria had not jilted her fisherman who still waits for her after nearly half a century. Better if Maria had not married the Herr Doktor and moved into his fancy villa with the two verandas. Because he beats her, the Herr Doktor, beats their five daughters. You’d think a family of women could stop one bow-legged man. Poison him. Bludgeon him. Drown him. Suffocate him. The Old Women fantasize.
* * *
For now Maria walks at night. Her jilted bridegroom only had to wait one year before she sought him out. She gets her deepest sleep in the morning hours. When her children were young, they’d find her asleep when they’d climb from their beds. The older girls would get the little girls dressed and fed.
Whenever Maria’s husband prescribes another sleeping tincture, Maria pretends to swallow. “My grandmother had the same sleep pattern,” she’ll lie. “Awake in the dark and sleeping into the morning hours.”
Most nights Maria and her jilted bridegroom are on his fishing boat between midnight and predawn, find one another in passion and in tenderness.
He has offered to kill her husband. “Why do you stay with him?” he’ll cry.
“I promised in marriage.”
“You did not promise to let him beat you and our daughters.”
Our daughters.
Three of Maria’s five daughters are his, their appearance no giveaway because both men are blond and bow-legged. Her daughters only know him as the generous fisherman who sells them his freshest fish for the lowest price. All five believe the Herr Doktor is their father, a man they fear and despise.
“I wish they were all mine,” the fisherman will say.
“You’d be a good father.”
“Once I kill him, we can tell our daughters they’re mine.”
“When they visit you in prison? When you get out, we’ll be ancient, and people will whisper at our wedding how bizarre it must be to caress each other when we’re so very old.”
He laughs. “… And that we probably don’t want this anymore.”
“This…” Maria reaches for him.
* * *
Although the cemetery is on a hill with a moat around it to drain away groundwater, the earth is spongy, and if you set a plant into the ground, water seeps in from below and the sides. Worse, of course, if you take shovels to a new grave. A coffin will displace that water with a gurgling sigh you don’t want to think about at night. The most merciless burials are for drowned children whose parents have to give them back to water.
“At least the Jansens were spared that.”
The Old Women fret about the Jansen children as they have every day since the drowning, face-down in the Nordsee, though no one saw them like that. No bodies. No graves.
“Lotte still has Wilhelm to live for.”
“That child worries me, so gloomy—”
“He bangs his head.”
“I’ve been bringing her cream.”
“Sister Elinor says Lotte craves red cabbage.”<
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“I fixed the latch on her door.”
“My sons will repair the roof of her barn.”
“I’m baking bread for her.”
“Cheese and buttermilk.”
The second most merciless burials are for mothers who die in childbirth and are buried with their infants—born dead, or alive for just a few hours.
14
Silvio Climbs into His Father’s Bed
Long before dawn, crying from Herr Ludwig’s wagon and Silvio runs to him, rubs his shoulders, dries tears and snot from his face; but his father is inconsolable, rolls his head. Mottled skull beneath sparse hair. Silvio is taken by a crazed pity. When did you get so old?
“Why are you crying?” he asks.
His father smiles through tears. “It always gets better.”
“That’s what you like to tell all of us.”
“That’s what your mother always told me.” And he is crying again, harder.
“Do you remember why you are crying?” Silvio asks and—since he doesn’t know how to comfort his father—climbs into his father’s bed. First then, that awkwardness of touch. The dry skin. But the crying lessens, and his father settles himself with his bony head on Silvio’s shoulder. Drops one flaccid arm across Silvio’s chest, arms that used to lift Silvio when he was a boy, lift him to reach for things high up. Wir zwei. The two of us. Or to hide a flask where his mother cannot find it. Wir zwei. Silvio’s mother doesn’t allow his father to drink, says it’s indecent, and the not allowing spills into shrieking, spills into lies.
Some nights Silvio finds his father roaming, searching for his wife, and leads him back to his silver and red wagon.
“How can I stop him?” he asks Hans-Jürgen.
“We cannot tie him down.”
Cannot gives way to can. Not tying him down, though, they agree. But anchoring him, a kitchen towel loose around each ankle, fastened to the end of the bed. Still, the old man gets his hands on the floor, squirms on his elbows till his sweaty feet slip from the dish towels.
“He is agile,” Hans-Jürgen says with admiration.
“That he is,” says Silvio who fears he is not doing enough for his father. But when he offers to move back in, his father won’t accept.
“Why not?” Silvio asks.
“Because—” His father opens his palms as if talking to someone particularly dense. “—Hans-Jürgen is your family now.”
“You are my family.”
“My dear boy … You don’t need to make up stories for me.”
* * *
Kalle—
—thinking he is awake—
—thinking he feels children nearby—
—or is he just dreaming about children? He doesn’t recognize them. Misplaces them again.
But he knows he is their father. A negligent father. Rootless. Despair fills his soul. Over days and weeks, that despair swells, presses Kalle’s organs aside until it becomes too cumbersome to walk, to leave his bed. He worries about his farm. What needs to be done. Repaired. Come winter, the roof of the barn may buckle beneath too much snow.
* * *
I storm into Kalle’s wagon, yank the covers off him. “You and I are taking a walk.”
He snatches at the covers to hide himself.
“You’re not working. You’re not coming to meals.”
“Tomorrow…”
Again, I yank the covers away.
“I need to wash up.”
“First the walk.”
“I stink.”
“You do.”
He closes his eyes.
“You can walk while you stink.” I tug at his arm till he has to sit up.
But he lets his body go limp and slumps back.
“I can’t do this.” I raise both palms. “I’m already raising one grown-up child and it’s unfair—no, selfish—to expect me to do that for you.”
“I’m not expecting—”
“I cannot watch your endless needing—”
“I am not a child.”
“You ricochet from one extreme to the other.”
“I don’t understand—”
“Of course you don’t because that’s all part of it too … assuming I’ll do it for you, understand it for you, and lay it out for you to understand, but I can’t do one more thing for one more person because I’m already raising a child who is twenty years old—” Soaring within me: fury and injustice and love and fear that’ll choke me if I don’t let them out. “—and I’ll keep doing that for another twenty years, for Heike yes, but not for you.”
Ranting, I know I’m ranting but can’t stop, though it has little to do with Kalle Jansen other than that he is a man who has left his wife and child. “All you men counting on women to stay while you keep leaving so you won’t turn into statues—”
He shrinks back as if I’d doubled in size.
“—while we don’t even think of leaving and when Heike shakes her head it’s like she’s shaking water from her hair and that may be endearing for a decade until it becomes disgusting and all the pretending that she’s brilliant and endearing—”
“What right do you have—” He is trembling.
“—and you know what else is disgusting? You sitting in your own filth feeling wounded while your wife—”
“What right—” He starts again. “What right to make your loss greater than mine?”
I stiffen, arms by my sides, and he steps into my storm, tries to calm me; but I flip my arms to my shoulders scissor-like, hurl him off.
“It’s about Heike?” he whispers.
“No,” I say. “Not entirely.”
“Of course not entirely,” he says and meets me there. Lets me burst through his listlessness, his torment. That day.
And in the days to follow. Lets me yank him from his bed until he can on his own. Lets me make him wash himself and make him walk and make him work on the wagon panels.
On my wagon, he preserves the Jungfrau Maria but whittles down the archangel Gabriel and replaces him with Ali Baba’s cave, so that the Jungfrau stands forever waiting—not for that archangel, I believe, but for Ali Baba to creep from his cave, tempt her with jewels and gold stolen by his forty thieves.
15
Foundling
On Allerheiligentag—All Saints Day—the first day of November 1878, a dwarf baby is abandoned inside a church in Emmerich, the last German town before the Dutch border. Allerheiligentag gathers all martyrs—the nameless and the famous—into one feast day to ensure none is ignored. In ancient times each martyred saint was honored on the anniversary of martyrdom; but the Romans killed so many more that it became impossible to document all martyrs’ fates and names.
When the Ludwig Zirkus arrives in Emmerich that afternoon for winter training, a priest carries the foundling to the Rhein meadow where our crew is setting up.
“The girl will fit in with you,” the priest tells us.
Silvio tilts his head. “Why is that?”
“She’ll be more … accepted if she lives with her own.”
“Her own…” Silvio nods. “But I’m not a dwarf.”
The giant Nowack pushes past him and claims the tiny baby with the big head from the priest—eighteen years of marriage and five miscarriages—and in an instant his wife, Luzia, is by his side, one palm on the baby’s belly.
“She’s half-starved,” Kalle says.
“We cannot take a baby on the road,” says Silvio, known for his attention to safety for everyone, animals and humans, especially his father. And this baby is even more vulnerable than his father.
“We’ve taken a baby on the road before.” Luzia motions to my daughter who caresses the baby’s hands.
“That was twenty years ago,” Silvio says, “and we’re all much older.”
“Does she have a name?” I ask the priest.
“I don’t know.”
“With foundlings there’s often a note pinned to the blanket.”
“Not with this one.”
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“But did you check inside the blanket?” I insist.
He glares at me. “I said there is no note.” And starts an endless story about an endless journey across a bridge that’s sometimes flooded and he’s not sure if he has to stay overnight to hold the wedding Mass for his brother’s ninth daughter and that he could not take a baby with him. “Will you keep her for just one day?”
* * *
Luzia and the giant Nowack huddle around the baby as if that could hide her from Silvio who’s grumbling. “One day. She can stay one day.”
“She’s half-starved,” Kalle says again.
Luzia carries her when we crowd into The Last Supper and the smell of yesterday’s lentil soup. Her husband dips his little finger into a pot of mashed potatoes, then into the mouth of the baby who gulps so quickly that her throat inflates and shrinks.
“Like a boa constrictor,” says my daughter.
“Not so fast,” the giant Nowack murmurs to the baby. “We have plenty for you. Always.”
But the mouth is already open, searching.
“A boa constrictor with teeth,” my daughter says.
“I thought I felt something sharp.” Luzia sticks a finger into the mashed potatoes and feeds the baby. “Isn’t she too young for teeth?”
“She’s almost a year,” Kalle says.
“But she’s so tiny.”
For someone so new in the world, the foundling has an abundance of blue-black curls, uncommon for the coast with its fair-haired people.
“Her mother must be a local girl,” the cook says, “her father some foreigner from down south.”
