Rudenau sits opposite him on the small sofa. He has crossed his legs and placed his interlaced fingers on one knee.
Lüders avoids Rudenau’s eyes. No man sits like that, no real man.
“Frau Behrens was my parishioner, Herr Lüders. I visited as her priest. And, as far as I know, she had nothing to leave. You got the Behrens property on a hereditary lease, didn’t you?”
The words are friendly, but Lüders hears the reproach. Whenever the Behrens farm is mentioned, he hears the reproach. He’s been living there for more than thirty years by now, and still everyone calls it the Behrens farm. It should be called the Lüders farm. “We agreed, old Frau Behrens and I, but only orally, you see? The farm, that’s in writing . . . but the meadows behind, and the woods, for them there’s only her promise.” He shuffles forward a little on the edge of his seat. “I thought she might have left it to . . . the church.”
Suddenly he realizes he has already found out what he wants to know. He leans his upper body forward, rests his weight on his stick, and stands up. “I’ve got to go now. Midday soon.” He wonders how to leave the house without shaking hands with this sissy. Rudenau stands up too.
With surprising agility, Lüders has already slipped past him. “I’ll find my own way out.”
Chapter 6
She turns right off the road into the narrow avenue of poplars. One hundred and twenty-two. There are a hundred and twenty-two trees.
It had been a sunny day, like today. They were going to take the bus into town. There was no bus stop, but if you stood by the side of the road, the bus from Kranenburg would stop for you. She had whined, and Mama had suggested they count the trees. The ones on the right for her, the ones on the left for Mama. By the end, she was running, trying to be one or two poplars ahead of Mama.
A new housing development has appeared to the east of Merklen. Pretty little single-family homes and duplexes. There they sit, moored incongruously beside this centuries-old village, which lies there round and self-contained as an oyster.
She finds her way immediately. Into the center of the village and left at the shrine with the crucifix. The lane is paved. There are three houses on each side. Once she is past them, the view is limitless. In the middle of this plain, on an exposed mound that is supposed to protect the farm from floods, lies the Behrens farm, surrounded by oak trees. The lane, which runs between two drainage ditches like a miniature dam, leads to the driveway to the house and then carries on around the farm in a great arc. She stops at the beginning of the driveway and gets out.
A farm track leads off to the left. Where the rain persistently washes away the clay soil, the ruts have been filled in with broken-up red roof tiles. Big red stripes mark the track, which ends in the little grove of oaks a good five hundred yards farther on. That is where the cottage is, and from here it can only be seen in winter.
Quickly, she takes a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of her jacket pocket. It takes her three tries with the lighter before the cigarette is lit. A dog barks at the end of the drive, behind the closed gate. She can see the base of the house, the lower part of the barn, and the gate between the oak trees. Everything else is hidden behind the trees, but she mustn’t look. The facade has been painted white, the shutters dark green; and the roof has black shingles. Then the big brown gate. She has only ever known it open, but now it seems to be closed. On the other side of the gate, the barn and, behind the house, the stables and the vegetable garden, where Grandma used to stamp out narrow paths between the peas and beans with her feet close together. All the buildings in a semicircle around the flagstoned yard.
Drive up and collect the keys. Just collect the keys. She sucks in the smoke greedily. Herr or Frau Lüders will open the door. Or maybe one of the sons. Don’t go in. No thanks, very kind of you, but I just want the keys.
She brings the cigarette to her mouth one last time, her hand trembling, throws it to the ground, crushes the stub into the clay soil at the side of the lane with her right foot, and gets back into the car.
She drives up the driveway at walking speed. As she passes the last oak, she sees that things have changed in thirty years. The yard in front of the house is a black expanse of tarmac, with four neatly marked parking spaces. The windows are not wood framed anymore, but plastic, with no vertical white beam in the middle. On the upper floor she sees half-lowered blinds. The shutters have been removed; the hinges project uselessly from the brickwork. She steers her car into a parking space. A license plate has been nailed to a wooden plant holder containing some gradually browning daffodils and some red tulips with a few sparse petals.
She gets out. The dog barks as if its life depended on it. It leaps at the inside of the gate. Anna climbs the four steps up to the front door and rings the bell. The dog calms down. She shoves her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket, takes a step back, and rocks back and forth on the tips of her toes. Perhaps she should have called first. She steps forward again, takes her hands out of her pockets, and rings again.
Now she hears steps inside the house, and soon the heavy door opens smoothly.
The old woman is stooped; she has to crane her neck up in order to see. Anna remembers her tall and strong. “It’s Anna, isn’t it?”
Chapter 7
Klara Lüders sees the dark-blue Golf from the kitchen window. It crawls up the drive and parks besides Jörg’s Opel. That’s Ludwig’s space. Ludwig’s BMW belongs there. That’s what the special sign is for. She throws the dishtowel over her left shoulder and leans across the sink toward the window. Cologne. A Cologne number plate. She is surprised at the size of the woman getting out of the car, and notices her thick, dark hair. The hair! She doesn’t know this woman, and yet she knows that hair. She doesn’t know this thin face, and yet she knows those high cheekbones.
The soft ding-dong of the doorbell makes her start. She slides the cloth off her shoulder and tosses it onto the edge of the sink. She picks it up again, carefully folds the corners over each other. Open the door! She has to go to the door and open it. The doorbell rings again.
She has folded the dishtowel neatly in two, then four, then eight. Holding the little bundle of fabric, she goes out into the covered yard and pushes down the curved iron door handle. As she pulls open the left half of the heavy oak door, she suddenly knows who is standing outside.
The women face each other in silence. For several seconds, the world appears to be without movement, without sound. The farm dog, the birds, the sound of engines wafting over from the road. Everything seems to pause.
“It’s Anna, isn’t it?” Klara Lüders wrings the cloth in her hands. Anna. Isn’t it . . . isn’t it . . . isn’t it?
You’ve grown tall, she could add. You have your mother’s hair, she could say. We’ve completely forgotten about you, she could . . .
Anna nods. “Herr Kley said I could pick up the cottage keys from you, Frau Lüders.”
“Yes . . . yes, of course.” Of course. The child wants a few things to remember her family by. What a fool she is. What was she thinking? Relieved, she takes a step back and darts over to the key cabinet behind the right half of the door.
“We haven’t changed anything yet. It’s still just the way it was. You’ll want to keep a couple of mementos, of course.” She comes back with a small bunch of keys in her hand. She holds it out to Anna. “Take anything you want.” She smiles graciously.
Anna accepts the bunch of keys. “Frau Lüders, there’s been a misunderstanding.” She puts the keys in the pocket of her leather jacket. “I’ve inherited the cottage.”
The bundled dishtowel falls to the ground. Klara’s mouth goes on smiling. “But . . . but that can’t . . .” She swallows back the tight smile at the corners of her mouth.
“Yes it can, Frau Lüders. The cottage, the meadows, and the woods belong to me.” Anna stoops and hands her the dishtowel. She turns, runs down the five steps from the farmhouse, and strides over to her car.
Klara watches her go. The mead
ows. That can’t be. Ludwig said . . . He took on all those mortgages. The meadows! The building land! She had told Ludwig over and over: The Behrens farm, that’s an unlucky farm. You don’t find good fortune where others have found misfortune.
Chapter 8
The trellised fence is dilapidated. The only thing left standing in the beds is a lilac trying not to reveal that no one has touched the place since last summer. Borders covered with brown foliage are sprouting with renewed vigor, doggedly bringing young green shoots into the light. Groundsel, chickweed, and stinging nettles have propagated themselves and taken over the land.
The gate is held shut with a strip of perished rubber, a makeshift lock. That was not like her. When she did that, her pride must have suffered.
Anna grasps the pale red ring, and it comes apart at the merest touch. But the gate remains closed. She uses her foot to push it against the thin layer of foliage. The movement exposes the damp underlying layers, and a spicy, moldy scent rises to her nose.
The front-door key is sticky in her sweaty hand. She had never come here much. You look like your mother, Grandma used to say. You’ll never be a Behrens.
The front door opens surprisingly easily, and swings wide. The small hallway is bare. A brown winter coat hangs in the closet on her left. A hat sits on the rack above it. An umbrella and a stick stand ready in an old milk canister.
Coat and hat on, brolly and stick,
Off we go now, quick quick quick.
On the wall in front of her, Jesus hangs on the cross. Perfectly modeled drops of blood trickle from the wounds in his emaciated body. She looks down at the wooden floor and is momentarily surprised to see no red stains. A palm frond hangs overhead. It is the same color as the cross. The Lord has taken two of my three sons, Grandma used to say. Anna knows there is a similar crucifix hanging in every room. Grandma wanted to see the son of God suffering, whichever room she was in. He should be breathing his last, beneath that crown of thorns, everywhere.
She walks through the remaining rooms. They have all been carefully cleared out and aired, the potted plants cared for. The Lüderses have taken care of it all, in the expectation that they will soon be the owners. They have walked through the woods, through the vegetable garden, through the back door. The way she used to walk herself.
The furniture is from the sixties. Veneer, worn thin by years of polishing, and Formica. The big heavy oak pieces stayed in the Behrens farmhouse.
She starts in the kitchen, searching through the drawers and cabinets. Plates, cups, shopping bags, cutlery, preserving jars, receipts, medicines, candle ends, and a shoebox stuffed with tape and rubber bands. She searches through the closet and sideboard in the bedroom. The good porcelain, vases, cake slices, kitchen forks, insurance papers, a prayer book, and two cookie tins. In the silver one, marked Aachen Prints, she finds photos. In the brightly colored one decorated with little winter scenes, she finds letters.
The name of the addressee is written on yellowed paper in a fine, flowing script: Margarete Lech.
The pieces of furniture slide toward each other, leaving her no room to breathe. Margarete, Mama’s sister. Aunt Margret, who always claimed to have no contact with the Behrenses. Margret, in whose home Anna grew up.
She realizes she is jumping to conclusions. The letters are here; they are neatly stamped, unopened, never sent.
She carries the tin to the dining table, holding it in both hands as if its contents could turn to dust at the slightest vibration, and sits down on one of the brown upholstered chairs. She takes out the uppermost envelope, and her fingers leave damp, greasy prints on the paper. She turns the letter over and sees what she suspected but did not want to think, what seemed too incredible. It is written there: Magdalena Behrens.
The letters are thirty-five years old.
“Anna, here comes Uncle Claus. Can you give him this letter for Aunt Margret?” Mama hands her the snow-white rectangle. She skips down the steps from the front door into the yard, into the humming light of the day. The heat grabs hold of her bare arms and legs. She runs between the huge oak trees, along the always-cool driveway to the mailbox.
“Hello, my dear. Well now, have you got some mail for Cologne again?” Uncle Claus rides a yellow bicycle and wears a uniform. Uncle Claus is Papa’s cousin.
Chapter 9
Klara is standing on the steps. He shuts the door of his BMW, presses the button on his key, and hears the soft whir of the lock. Klara only waited on the steps once before. That time, Jörg had fallen out of the tractor and had been taken away in an ambulance.
“Anna’s been here.” She clasps her forehead.
“Anna? Which Anna?” He hears her agitated words as if through a tunnel. He doesn’t need her explanation. The outlines of the house blur. He sways—gasps for air. He feels Klara’s hands, on his chest, gripping his arms, turning him.
“Sit down, Ludwig. For God’s sake, sit down.”
Slowly, he sinks down onto the last step but one, clinging tightly to the railing with both hands. The old woman hated him, all those years she hated him. Because he was alive. Because her sons were dead. And now she’s had her revenge, turned her death into the final reckoning. He rests his elbows on his thighs. His hands hang limply between his knees. His gaze wanders over the stables, past the two silos, and on toward the fields. None of it belongs to him now. The banks and Gietmann will come and demand their money.
He has always worked hard; he has slaved away a lifetime. First the little farm where Gerhard now lives with his family. Then what was supposed to be his great stroke of luck, when the old woman signed over the Behrens farm on a hereditary lease. Johann, her sole remaining son, had been lazy and a snob. The farm was run down, and he had had to invest. He went in for dairy farming in a big way. He bought more dairy cattle, milking machines, a refrigerated building for the tanks. For a few years it all went well, and then, in the seventies, the price of milk collapsed. The European Community’s grandly promised subsidies flowed meagerly, and in the end he was producing milk for free. The debts remained.
Then it was pig farming; with pigs a man can still make money. Gerhard, his eldest, had become a branch manager at the bank. The meadows are buildable land, he said at the time, and in principle they belong to us anyway.
Gerhard had arranged for some of the necessary money. Without proper collateral, trusting his word. The rest had come from Gietmann, who had set up a construction company to develop his own plots of land. He hadn’t needed anything in writing either. All Gietmann asked for was construction contracts, guaranteed, once the meadows were finally Lüders property. He was able to build two pig houses. They had plowed the fields from five in the morning till ten at night—he, his wife, and his son Jörg.
And then came the floods of 1995, and there had been a question mark over fifty acres of his land ever since. A retention basin, they called it. When the next high water came, the Dutch planned to flood the polder—an area of low-lying land—by the border, and that meant the polders on the German side would automatically be flooded too. Fifty acres of his land lying fallow. Pastureland, of course. But what was the use of pastureland if dairy farming didn’t bring in a red cent?
His hands suddenly come to life. He grabs the railing and pulls himself up.
“Stop bawling.” His voice hisses. “Maybe you were right that the Behrens farm is an unlucky farm. But this has been the Lüders farm for years now. Get that in your head.”
Chapter 10
Saturday, March 10, 2001
Outside, Böhm is greeted by a misty March morning. The cold air fills his lungs. The damp settles on his bald head, forms droplets in the ring of gray hair, and chills his face. He goes faster and faster, feels his body heating up from the inside and the warmth penetrating his muscles. He climbs the narrow staircase set into the dike. The fog blows over the Rhine in dense clouds. Up on the dike, a light wind whispers in the silence. After only a few hundred yards, the chill damp on his face is no longer unpleasant
but rather a welcome cooling. Every step takes him deeper into the fog, farther from human busyness. He loves the early-morning peace on this ridge between sleeping villages on one side and the smooth-flowing river on the other.
When he had asked for the transfer here from Cologne, four years ago, it was precisely this openness that attracted him. He had stood on the dike and called out his own and Brigitte’s names several times. For no reason. Just to hear his voice recede without an echo.
Brigitte had found it weird. She had said, One feels so lost here, Peter. He hadn’t understood what she meant. Since then, he has learned. Only he doesn’t call it lost. He feels free here. And whenever he is away for a few days, he longs for this endless sky.
Brigitte had resisted, but she had not wanted to stay in Cologne either, and certainly not in the house where everything reminded her of Andreas. So I’ll just rot in the Lower Rhine, she had said.
Things turned out differently. She taught German to foreigners at the community college, to begin with, and now she is a social education specialist in the workers’ welfare union. Sometimes they don’t see each other for two or three days, and just sleep side by side.
They had had some serious arguments, and Brigitte had accused him of avoiding her. She had taken care of their mentally handicapped son, while he earned the money. He admitted to her that he had sought out the job. That he could not bear his son’s disability, or rather, his own helplessness. She was no longer prepared to lead a life titled Waiting for Peter.
He has been less sure of her since they moved here, and this makes him afraid. He loves Brigitte and wants to grow old with her. Perhaps it is lack of imagination, but a life without her seems unthinkable.
He notices that he is walking more quickly. Run away! From the thought of losing her, run away. He turns into the narrow path beside the field and walks the last five hundred yards slowly. Suddenly he hears them. Large flocks have been coming in for days. Hundreds of wild geese stream by overhead. He stands rooted to the spot. Their honking breaks through the fog, awakens the fields and the river. Two hundred thousand, they estimated last year. He jogs in place to keep moving. “Good morning!” he calls out to them, and for the time it takes his heart to beat a few times, he feels happiness. In spring, when they arrive, and in late autumn, when they leave again. Each time he is a witness to their journey, he feels the same joy.
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