He is leaving without saying goodbye to me? He sent his warmest regards? I swallowed hard and tears welled up. I tasted bile. Of course, he had not known that I was to be married off, I reassured myself. I saw concern in Caroline’s eyes and she took my hand. ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘I know, it’s all such a surprise. Why not marry soon, at Epiphany? Trubach is coming for supper tomorrow evening. He is a nice man, you’ll see.’ She took up her sewing again and the pastor smiled at me as a father would, proudly and kindly. The talk was over. I turned to leave and saw a quick glance passing between the Glucks: a silent look of agreement and understanding. Were they getting rid of me? No. They had wanted only the best for me, always. Could I disobey these people to whom I owed everything? The answer was clear in both my heart and my mind: I could.
That night I waited only for the right moment. I had no time to lose. Nervously, I checked my bundle twice. I had enough money to take me to Pernau; the first carts were leaving at dawn. I’d walk if I had to. The Glucks would be hurt, insulted too. I couldn’t let myself care. Just as I rose for the third time to check my belongings, I heard a tapping against the windowpane. Someone was throwing pebbles against it. I almost stumbled in my haste to reach the window, tearing the lead catch open. A horse was tethered outside, its breath steaming. The winter night hid the rider’s face – his coat collar was turned up and his hat pulled low over his forehead – but my heart knew what my eyes couldn’t see: it was Anton. He had come to take me with him. He got off the horse and hastened over to the window of my room behind the kitchen.
‘Marta,’ he said, embracing me. ‘I have to go, but I can’t leave without saying goodbye to you.’
The clouds moved across the moon and in the sudden white light I saw him clearly: his blue eyes and his strong white teeth. ‘No need to say goodbye, Anton. I have packed already. Let me get my boots and my coat and we can go. I shall sit behind you on the horse. We can do this,’ I whispered, my voice choked with relief.
‘It’s not safe to travel with a young woman, Marta. There are two large, marauding armies out and about, just waiting for their next orders. Do you know what bored soldiers do with girls like you?’ he said. ‘And, besides, what would we live on? Give me time to build my life in Pernau and I’ll come and get you then.’
‘But time is running out . . .’ I pleaded.
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘You are best off here, with my parents. We have time aplenty.’
‘Far from it! They are marrying me off to a Swedish dragoon and your father wants to wed us at Epiphany, in only a couple of weeks. But I only love you and I will only ever love you.’ I heard the fear in my voice. I remembered something Tanya had said a lifetime ago: men can sense a woman’s despair like bloodhounds their prey. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from adding, ‘Isn’t the war almost over? After Narva there shouldn’t be any reason for more big battles again, should there? That’s what your father says, at least. The Swedes have won and are keeping their hold on the Baltic provinces.’ I sounded unsure, though.
‘My father knows nothing,’ Anton spat out. ‘What is Narva to Charles but another feather in his cap? He is crazy about war and France and England are happy to know he is keeping busy here. Charles will only stop when he reaches Moscow.’ The church bell tolled and Anton looked around. ‘I have to go, Marta.’
I clung to his neck, crying, ‘Don’t leave me.’
He loosened my grip, caressed my face and whispered, ‘Don’t cry. Let’s wait and see, shall we? Perhaps this isn’t the worst way forward? After all, I wasn’t the first with whom you – well – you know.’
‘How do you mean?’ My voice was hoarse with hurt.
He shrugged. ‘Well, this way we can always meet without anyone being suspicious. You will be an honest married woman and we can do whatever we want.’ He kissed me, sliding his warm tongue into my mouth. I pushed him away. ‘Take me with you,’ I said, through tears, grabbing his cloak once more in my fists and clinging to him.
Something stirred in the rectory’s doorway and Anton hastily shrank away from me, relief in his face. ‘I ought to go. Don’t despair, Marta. We’ll meet again.’
He mounted his horse, tipped his hat to me and galloped away through the narrow alleyways of Marienburg, his horse’s hooves thundering on the cobblestones, towards a town which was by the wide, open sea; far away from me. Why had I wasted those last moments in quarrelling with him? I should have smiled and lured him in, saying, Come, my love, let’s talk about this inside, shall we? Pain and shame tore me apart, but I held my breath when the Glucks’ cook, who was working late, stepped out on to the snowy street. ‘Who’s there?’ she asked, raising her lantern and squinting into the darkness.
I stepped back, climbed over the window ledge and fell onto my room’s cold stone floor where I cried, heaving with sobs. Only when I shivered with cold – despite the warm clothes I had planned to wear while travelling to Pernau – did I remember to close the window. The flagstones were covered with rime as I opened my bundle and unfolded my dresses.
19
I was sick for the first time between Christmas and New Year, throwing up in a kitchen bucket. The cook had surprised us with a heavy goose-liver pie for Christmas dinner: probably that hadn’t agreed with me. When I didn’t bleed though, I remembered Olga’s despair. I was pregnant with Anton’s child.
Whenever Johann Trubach came to see me, my eyes were red and swollen from crying and I hardly even thanked him for the small gifts he brought each time, be it some coloured yarn, new needles or boiled sweets. The day before Epiphany – the day Ernst had set for our wedding – I was resolved: I had to end the engagement.
Johann fetched me for a walk through the town. As the war and what might happen next was ever on our minds, I was glad that he wore a simple, dark knee-length jacket over tight breeches and sturdy high boots instead of his uniform. His shirt was spotless, and he even wore a silk neckerchief and a warm fur-lined coat. Dressed like that, he looked like a well-to-do burgher – not that such a man would ever marry the likes of me.
‘Lift your hands up high in the air, so they are nice and white,’ Caroline had told me, and pinched my cheeks rosy before Johann came. ‘There you go. Now you look healthy again. Don’t be too long, will you? We have a lot to prepare for tomorrow.’
Marienburg was busy but joyless. The stench of sewage on the icy streets hung in the January air. I took care not to spoil the boots Caroline had lent me for the walk. Coachmen still drove their oxen and mules on with whips, even though their carts only carried light loads. Baker boys with frozen red faces sold meagre rations of bread, pies and the Epiphany cake, in which a lucky charm was hidden: I bought a cake for the rectory, as we all needed some good fortune in these days. Farmers hawked poached animals such as skinny hares and small deer; they were freshly hunted, blood still trickling from their ears. Well-dressed men tipped their hats to each other, trying to hide the axes they carried while dragging along little handcarts full of freshly chopped firewood. I counted more and more beggars in town, squabbling with the girls of easy virtue for the best places to loiter. A man sold hot chestnuts, turning them over the coals, his fingertips blistered. Johann bought me a handful and we walked on, enjoying the soft, sweet and mushy flesh in silence. Once we had eaten, his fingers sought mine in the muff that my mistress had also lent me.
I hastily withdrew my hand and he looked at me, saddened. ‘May I not hold your hand? Do I disgust you so much? What can I do to make you like me more?’ he asked. I felt ashamed: at our few meetings, he had treated me with more kindness than I could have asked for.
‘You don’t disgust me . . .’ I started to say, but Johann would not listen to me.
‘Why then do you always look so sad when I come to see you? It was of your own free will that you agreed to marry me, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. And no.’
‘No?’ He stopped walking, a look of hurt on his open features. I touched his arm.
‘Please. You are a good m
an, Johann. But I simply can’t marry you.’
He chuckled and squeezed my arm, which surprised me. ‘Oh, I see. It’s the pastor’s son, isn’t it? I have watched the two of you in church. I know it’s hard but forget about him. He will marry a Pernau girl who will further his prospects, a rich merchant’s daughter.’
I blushed. Had this been clear to everyone but me? Perhaps I was being foolish. It would be easy for me to marry Johann and raise this child as ours. What man in love notices a month here or there? But I didn’t want to be a liar, like Anton.
‘I am pregnant, Johann,’ I said, lowering my voice. ‘You won’t want to marry a girl who carries the child of another man, will you?’
He stopped and stared at me. My courage gave way to dread. What would he do? Slap me? Drag me back to the rectory and shame me before the Glucks threw me out? I’d be on the streets again, but this time pregnant. I felt breathless and light-headed from fear. I stepped back when Johann embraced me in full view of all Marienburg, kissing my forehead and laughing. A minstrel lifted his pipe from his frozen lips, just to smile at us. Johann tossed him a coin.
‘How wonderful, Marta!’
I was dumbfounded.
‘I, too, have something to tell you before we get married.’
I looked at him. What could it be?
‘I will not be able to satisfy you as a husband should. It’s all over for me, perhaps due to an old wound or maybe the cold in the field and the fortress of Riga. I’ll only be half a husband to you, but a full father to your child, I swear.’
What was there left for me to say? The following day Ernst married us in his church. I wore a high-necked dress of pale grey cotton and held a small bunch of snowdrops so tightly that my knuckles turned white. For our wedding breakfast we ate chicken stuffed with offal and drank wine and beer: it was the best the Glucks’ kitchen had to offer. When we shared the Epiphany cake for pudding, I found the lucky charm inside my piece.
Johann kept his promise and was a good husband, who never raised his voice or hand against me, liked the food I cooked and only came home drunk on a Friday, when I gave him part of his pay to go to a kabak with his friends. We laughed together – not a lot, but enough – and for that period of my life, his good nature gave me what I had longed for: peace at heart. If this was to be my life, then so be it: his room in the garrison was sparsely furnished with a table, two chairs and a narrow bed; our few clothes hung off two hooks on the wall. I tried to make the place pretty by placing flowers in a bowl on our windowsill. But a month after our wedding Johann left for the field. I felt very lonely after the warmth of the Gluck household, but visited Caroline as rarely as was possible without being impolite.
The only friend I had in the garrison was my neighbour Lisa, whose sons and husband were also away in battle. One evening in May we sat together in her room, turning collars and darning socks for the still-wealthy customers who liked her needlework. We sipped kvass and Lisa chewed tobacco – her only joy in life, she said – but I found the spitting of red saliva as off-putting as the tinted gums and rotten teeth the habit gave you. In a break from sewing she spat, neatly for once, in her bucket and then took my palm between her hands.
‘Let me read your hand, my sunshine, and see what life has to offer a dove like you. Haggard old Johann can’t be all there is, can it?’ she giggled tipsily and looked at my palm, where lines criss-crossed, starting low down at the wrist and leading all the way up to my fingers. She shook her head. ‘Who are you trying to fool, or have you borrowed your hand from another woman?’
‘Why? What is it you see?’ I asked eagerly. ‘Will I be happy? What about my baby, what will it be?’
She glanced at my palm again. ‘I see a big, enduring love and many, many travels. I see a long life – you are as strong as a horse, aren’t you, Marta?’
‘Travels?’ I said, laughing. ‘For me? And what about that big, enduring love? Will it be fulfilled?’ I honoured Johann; love was not the word for it.
She bent my hand and counted the small folds that formed beneath my little finger. ‘Indeed. I see thirteen pregnancies.’
‘Thirteen? Good Lord!’ I said, but then fell silent. Johann had to content himself with caressing my body whilst I lay on my back, my eyes closed. I felt so lonely and miserable in those moments: where was Anton now and was he ever thinking of me? I was even ready to forget his ugly last words and his betrayal, if he only came back for me.
I rested my hand on my still flat belly. ‘What about this baby then? Is it a boy or a girl?’
She dropped my hand. ‘I can’t see that. Stop asking nonsense and get on with your work,’ she said, picking up her needle again.
Two days later I met Caroline in the market. By now, farmers only sold what they didn’t need themselves to survive and there were no more foreign merchants and travelling salesmen to be seen. Over a year at the mercy of foraging armies had sent the province into famine: the people of Marienburg paid with strings of pearls for a pound of butter and with emeralds for a side of bacon; most burghers had swapped their flower beds for vegetable patches. With Caroline was a pretty young woman, who carried her basket for her as I had once done.
The pastor’s wife embraced me. ‘Where have you been hiding, Marta? Finally, we meet again.’ Her joy at seeing me warmed my heart.
‘Well, you know how busy marriage keeps you,’ I said, and glanced at the stranger. She carried herself proudly in her well-cut blue cloak; the colour flattered her light eyes and blonde hair that was wrapped in a heavy bun at the nape of her neck. Small pink pearls shimmered in her earlobes.
Caroline linked elbows with her: ‘Meet Louise. She is Anton’s fiancée and has moved in with us. As soon as Anton met her – he works for her father – they were head over heels in love. I hope to be a grandmother soon as well.’
She patted my belly and Louise met my gaze calmly, her grey eyes gauging me, before she gave a hint of a smile. I was sure that Anton hadn’t so much as touched her fingertips in his wooing of her. He’d be the first man to have her, not like the maid in his parents’ house. I nodded curtly and wasn’t able to wish her well, as politeness demanded. The sight of her stabbed me right to the heart.
20
After meeting Louise and Caroline in the market I felt a mad longing for a hot bath, wanting to scour the memory of Anton from myself. I dragged bucket upon bucket of water up to the room and lit a fire, counting neither the kindling wood nor the coals. When I poured the last of the steaming water into my wooden tub, a searing pain shot through my lower belly. I bent over double and my knees buckled, and I felt a warm gush between my legs before my skirt turned red with blood. I wanted to get up but pain floored me: it felt as if a giant was squashing me in his fist, breaking my back there and then. I crawled out of my room on all fours and was just able to knock on Lisa’s door before I passed out on the galleried landing that connected the billets.
She lifted my feet, told me to breathe and to push. I’d have bled to death without her. Anton’s son was stillborn at five months and with him died my love for his father. For days afterwards Lisa was still spooning hot broth and kvass into my mouth, to help me gain strength. During these lightest months of summer, my days were as dark as midwinter.
King Charles of Sweden loved war for war’s sake. Yet after the first successes, such as holding Swedish Livonia and taking the neighbouring Courland, the war turned sour for him. The Tsar of All the Russias seemed to have learnt from his first defeats. Rumour was rife all over Marienburg: ‘Have you heard? General Boris Petrovich Sheremetev is approaching with ten thousand men. He’s the son of one of Russia’s oldest families and has war in his veins. So far, he has not lost a battle, they say. The Swedes don’t stand a chance.’
‘Huddle up in the garrison. By July we will be under Russian siege!’
‘No, hide in the rectory, it’s solid and built of stone. The garrison will burn like tinder.’
The rectory? I would not live under one roof with
Anton’s fiancée. Instead, I holed up in the garrison, together with the other women and children.
On 25 August 1702, Sheremetev attacked Marienburg and, to me, it seemed as if the day of reckoning Ernst Gluck had threatened us with had truly come. Seen from the garrison’s tower, his armies resembled a dark flood coming to swallow us whole; they poured towards us, shouting, screaming and shooting. Hell opened its gates. Cannon maws roared and spat death and destruction; cannonballs howled in the air like wolves – the sound scared me witless the first time I heard it and I hid underneath the table, pressing my hands to my ears. They tore open the town walls, roads and the market square. People were rushing around, crazed with fear, bundling up their possessions and dragging children and animals along. The wooden houses were ablaze; thick grey smoke made people choke and hindered them from saving what they could; there was no quenching the flames. The town lay in ashes, the air reeked of sulphur, and still the siege’s steady thunder deafened us.
By noon the Russians were storming the town: when I watched the dirty, ragged Swedish banner being torn from the main gate, my stomach clenched. To a serf, one master was like another but what would it be like to live with the Russians once more now that I had known kinder masters? I heard the whooping and shouting of their army: they fired round upon round into the air and I knew that Marienburg had capitulated. What had happened to Johann? Was he still alive and, if not, what was to become of me? Lisa’s sons and husband had not returned from battle. Her wailing haunted the empty garrison. I dared to leave my room to plead with her, but she would not open the door. The next morning, all was silent next door. I hoped she’d made it away in the dead of the night, as in the following days no one in their right mind would go outside any longer. The Russians locked captured Swedes inside stables and set them alight. They plundered and looted, marvelling at the riches they found in the prosperous town, practising their knife-throwing skills on the Holy Trinity above the altar of Ernst Gluck’s church, before melting down the silver, guzzling the Eucharist wine and lighting bonfires with the pews.
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