The god of that summer, p.10
The God of that Summer, page 10
Vinzent, still holding his whip in his left hand, pressed his fists against his hips. His shoulder muscles stood out under his tight black jacket, and he jutted his chin to reveal his row of lower teeth as he addressed the boy. The boy looked up at him with wide eyes and again blood ran from his hair, a thin trickle. It dripped from his forehead onto his uniform when he nodded, and then again when he shook his head. Vinzent reached into the pocket of his riding trousers and held out a white package to him.
Luisa recognized the familiar writing. The Englishman looked quickly at his dead comrade, ran the tip of his tongue over his lips and pulled a cigarette out of the silver paper. The glass of his watch was shattered, from far off it looked like a round piece of ice, his fingers trembled, and one of the soldiers standing nearby reached out his arm and gave him a light. The mouthpiece of the Juno was red from the first drag.
Vinzent pushed his whip into the leg of his boot. With the leather-rimmed cap pushed out of his forehead, he pointed to the field hospital behind them, to the bandaged men and the nuns in the windows. He clapped him on the back, gave an inviting movement of the head and led him around the pile of earth that the bow of the bomber had thrown up. And when the boy hesitated and looked over at the road, at the curious women, children and old people lining it, he grabbed him apparently gently by the back of the neck. With his other hand he opened his holster and, quickly and eagerly, his cheeks hollow, the Englishman took another puff on the cigarette. As he did so he stared at the ground, the fresh grass, the first yellow crocuses.
Some of the forced labourers on the opposite side of the river – probably Russians, because they wore felt boots and fur caps – crossed themselves with their thumbs on forehead, chin and chest. Behind the dented fuselage, where the field sloped down towards the shore, to the faded reeds with the half-gnawed spikes, the two men could no longer be seen, and the administrator, with one foot on the pedal, leaned his torso back and energetically started the BMW. ‘What was that?’ Luisa asked and looked at him.
With his pipe between his teeth, Thamling put his foot on the accelerator and made the engine rattle. ‘A car backfiring!’ he exclaimed. ‘This bucket is almost as old as me, it belongs on the scrapheap. Now you get home, child. There’s an evening milking today.’ Then he drove off.
*
On some of the gables of the dilapidated farmhouses on the far side of the avenue it was possible to make out coats of arms or dates, and only the stable built in 1811 still had its roof intact. The thatch was thickly covered in moss, but the twenty heavy cobs that had once stood beneath it, Haflingers for the most part, had long ago been deployed as artillery horses at the front. A refugee family now lived in each of the spacious boxes, with lines full of clothes and household goods stretching over them.
Someone was playing the accordion; the air was thick and hard to breathe. The people crouched by the smoking wood stoves, stirring pots and pans and looking around at her over their shoulders. A little boy raised his hands as if he was holding a camera, pressed an invisible shutter release, and Luisa smiled. Even though they were a bit too big she was wearing her mother’s buckled shoes, and for the first time she had lined the edges of her eyelids and painted her reddish eyelashes black.
She knocked at the door of the coaching inn. The cry of the children behind it fell silent. The woman who opened to the door to her wasn’t much bigger than she was and possibly as old as Billie, nineteen or twenty. She wore a brightly coloured headscarf, a sleeveless apron over her pullover and gym trousers, which were tucked into old rubber boots. Behind her a light bulb swayed on a wire, illuminating a stove and a few mattresses on the floor. In a tub, a zinc vat, crouched two children with foam in their hair, and she said hoarsely: ‘Good evening! I would like to see Elisabeth.’
The music, the hubbub of voices and the clatter of plates and pots in the high-ceilinged stable swallowed her words. The woman she had spoken to held a hand behind her ear, and now Luisa recognized her: it was the milker with the painted fingernails. Her skin was slightly tanned, her wayward hair as black as her shaded eyes, she had a gently curving nose and beautiful slender lips which lent her features an elegant quality in spite of the apron that she wore, and when Luisa repeated herself more loudly, she replied: ‘Then you’ve come to the right place. Come in, I have to wash the kids.’
The woman invited her in with a gesture – and Luisa’s courage failed her. ‘Thank you, many thanks, I don’t want to bother you,’ she said and smiled thinly. ‘I just wanted to ask if you’d perhaps heard anything from your fiancé. We’re friends, or rather acquaintances, he works for my father-in-law who owns the farm, and he gave me tips for my horse. It’s getting much better already. So, I . . . we’re getting worried, because he hasn’t written yet, ever since he was called up. Not even to Herr Thamling, our administrator. Nobody knows how he is, whether he needs anything or what else is going on, and perhaps you have news of some kind? Is he wounded? Or well? Will he be coming back soon?’
The children giggled and splashed in the tub. The soapy water sloshed onto the floor, and she was already ashamed of herself for stammering – all the more so in that she thought she saw a hint of amusement, maybe even mockery, in the woman’s expression. In spite of her youth she already had very fine spidery veins on her cheeks.
She took Luisa’s wrist and pulled her over the threshold into the room. As she did so she looked at the little ones. ‘What did I just say? Enough of this nonsense! Rinse your hair, wash your faces and then out of the tub! You’ll be in bed in five minutes or you can forget about pudding!’ She pulled a face and rolled her eyes to the beamed ceiling. ‘My brothers,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve got another three like that, but thank God they can already wash themselves. If they wash at all.’
The room smelled of the hoof tar that had once been boiled up here, and she pointed to one of the stools by the table, took a box of Special Blend from her pocket and sat down opposite Luisa. There were sandy potatoes between them. ‘So you know Walter? I bet he never mentioned me, the sly dog. Or maybe he did? Hang on a second . . . Are you the one from the big house, from the attic? The one with all the books?’
Luisa smiled, and the women tapped a half-smoked cigarette out of the pack. ‘Oh, now I remember. You’ve got a big sister who’s red-haired as well, isn’t that right? A beautiful girl, she wears those elegant coats with the narrow waist and the Persian collar. And always stockings with seams and pointed shoes. She once came towards me arm in arm with an officer, and I stood there like a yokel in front of the Queen.’
She struck a match and dragged on the stump of her cigarette. ‘I used to read too. I’d hide myself away with a big fat book for days on end. But now that my mother is ill all the time and I have to look after these little baggages, I never have the time.’ Tilting her chin, she blew her smoke at the lamp. ‘Walter’s doing all right, I think. At least he writes like mad, you could paper walls with it. I would probably write back, but what is there to write about here? And also I have terrible handwriting, he wouldn’t be able to decipher it . . . He’s a driver down on Lake Balaton, in a supply unit, so some way from the firing. Do you want a glass of water? It’s boiled.’
Luisa said no and studied the room. It had only one narrow window, a skylight; below it were three crooked metal cupboards, each with a padlock. The stone oven with the open chimney was black with tar, and the sink was chipped. There were no sheets on the straw sacks and mattresses along the wall, only horse blankets or plaids made of colourful patches, and in one corner there was a painting on the wall that she had often seen in every possible size in the Dreyer department store: a guardian angel behind two children on a rickety bridge.
‘What’s your favourite book?’ the woman asked.
Luisa inflated her cheeks and thought. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s constantly changing. I think Winnetou I is good, or The Rider of the White Horse, even though it was difficult. And I’ve read Gone with the Wind three times.’
The woman smiled broadly. Her teeth were straight but strangely grey, as if they were all filled with amalgam. ‘Me too!’ she said and threw a piece of wood in the stove. ‘At least three times! When I was your age, twelve or so, I couldn’t stop. In the library in Danzig they had two copies, one in German, one in English, and I kept extending my loan. And when that became impossible, I just borrowed the other one and had that loan extended too. After that both books were full of my notes.’
She sucked the air through the gaps in her teeth, rolled up one sleeve and scratched a series of flea bites until they turned red. ‘But I never quite got to the end, I admit. It stopped being interesting when they had each other. And then Bonnie Blue is born, and gets a little horse, and then Bonnie Blue dies, and everyone becomes so . . .’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘No! I need crashes and bangs. When they were going at each other like knives, each of them cleverer than the other, and you didn’t know if they were going to come together or not, I thought that was exciting. What about you?’
Luisa’s elbow suddenly itched too. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s dramatic all the way through and the ending’s very sad as well. So, I cried quite a lot and eventually thought, that’s enough, now they can live peacefully with their love. But then Rhett Butler is so bitter and cold, and Scarlett goes flying down the stairs . . .’
Naked and wet, one of the brothers pressed himself against Elisabeth, and she took a towel off the line that was stretched diagonally across the room. ‘Oh you know, I was never as romantic as that. I always had too much scrubbing to do,’ she murmured. ‘And when you’re tired you wouldn’t care if the moon fell in your lap.’
With a cigarette in the corner of her mouth she dried the little boy and rubbed his hair, staring into the distance for a moment. ‘Love, love, what is it after all?’ The sound of bursting woodlice came from the stove, and then she blew the smoke out through her nostrils and said, ‘We have to wait for love to come to us, don’t we?’
The boy, with a thumb in his mouth, nodded dreamily, and Luisa asked, ‘Why, though, what’s up with Walter?’
Elisabeth shook her head. ‘Hm, who knows what’ll come of all that. We hadn’t known each other very long. But it’s true, he’s quite the vision. Those eyes, those muscles, and when he laughs the sun comes out . . . Right after the first kiss I wanted to have children with him, a whole stable full of them. I mean, it’s idiotic, isn’t it? I’m breaking my back here sorting out my brothers, not to mention Mum with her thyroid, and on top of that I want to have brats with a complete stranger? It was a fever or something like it.’
She got to her feet and hung the towel over the line again. As she did so she noticed Luisa’s eyes on her boots, which were old and fragile where they kinked; the linen fabric could be seen behind the rubber. ‘Nifty bit of footwear, don’t you think? I’ve worn better,’ she said. ‘But we were in the field when the Russians came. They shot Grandpa straight away, right in front of our eyes. Just because he was a man. He fell in the ditch like a plank of wood, and we weren’t even allowed to go back to the farmhouse. We were chased to the four winds, in rubber boots. We didn’t meet up again until we got to Konitz.’
She flicked the butt of her cigarette at the hole in the oven, but missed it. It fell on the floor, and the bigger of the boys, in pyjamas now, picked it up and sucked on it greedily, holding his naked brother away from him with an outstretched arm. Their sister turned around, gave both of them a slap and pointed to the beds, and it was only now that Luisa noticed how big this delicate woman’s hands were, and how callused. She edged closer to the table and asked under her breath: ‘Were you raped?’
Elisabeth didn’t visibly give a start; she just closed her eyes briefly, and something grey darted across her face, the shadow of a far-off insult. ‘Heavens, child, the questions you ask,’ she murmured and took a knife from the drawer, whetted it on the sink and took a big potato from the pile. Her eyelids, also full of delicate veins, twitched constantly as if something had got inside them. And yet she wielded the blade so carefully – it was visible through the peel.
‘Yes,’ she said at last and took a deep breath, ‘one of them got me in some godforsaken . . . I had been walking for hours, I was thirsty and I thought the farmhouse was empty. Two dogs lay dead in the garden. And then I go into the kitchen and he’s sitting right behind the door and he bangs it closed quicker than I can get out. So I was in a trap. Since then the smell of schnapps has always made me throw up.’ She raised her head and blew a few stray hairs out of her forehead. ‘So? Anything else you want to know?’
It sounded sharp and sarcastic, and was at any rate meant to be conclusive. She went on slowly peeling. But Luisa, after glancing at the children, who were playing with cork cars, hooked her fingers under the table and asked quietly, almost in a whisper: ‘Did it hurt a lot?’
The peel, the long spiral, broke, and one corner of Elisabeth’s mouth turned down. There was a dark gravity in her eyes, and although she was swallowing her voice was thick. ‘Goodness, what a darling you are,’ she said. ‘What do you think? That he sang me poems by Pushkin? Not everyone’s as lucky as Scarlett O’Hara!’ With her painted thumbnail she scratched an eye out of the potato and threw it in the sink. ‘But, well, forget it. Presumably the poor bastard’s already dead too. The main thing is, I didn’t get knocked up.’
The sudden shame at awakening these memories made Luisa turn red; she could see it in the little mirror above the tap. There was a crack in the glass, duplicating her features, which struck her as strangely unfamiliar with their black rims and painted lashes, as if someone else were looking at her, and she got to her feet and buttoned up her coat. Elisabeth was startled. ‘Oh, what? You’re not going already? Really? That’s a shame! When we were making friends so nicely . . .’
The girl mentioned the evening milking, and the woman wiped her eyes dry with the balls of her hands. ‘Well all right then,’ she said, ‘I’m sure we’ll see each other again. They don’t know what to do with us. We’re as welcome here as the plague. “The refugees grow fat each day and take our feather beds away!” it said in a pub in Tarp yesterday, written up in chalk. If I write back to Walter I’ll send him your regards, regards from the little redhead with the reading habit, OK?’
Then she got up, walked to the stove and hung the potato peel over the line to dry; ground up, it could be used as starch. ‘By the way: in your farmhouse over there, is there actually a bathtub? A proper big one, not just a children’s bowl?’
Luisa said yes, and Elisabeth opened the door to her. Something shy flickered in her eyes, which made her look more delicate, girlish, and in a low voice she added: ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance, but do you think I could come to yours to wash? Just for an hour? I haven’t lain in a proper tub with hot water for ages. Of course I’ll bring firewood.’
A sad tune was being played on the accordion, a woman sang in a high voice; Luisa pulled on her gloves. Once again she looked at the other woman’s rotten boots, and her desire to help ran up against the idea of her mother, who hadn’t liked refugees even in Kiel, not even as cleaners in the flat, because they supposedly brought in illnesses and stole. And she shrugged and said, ‘I think so. I’ll ask.’
The times grew harder, and they who thought they had nothing left to lose, while famine persisted and pestilence laid people in the earth, lost even more. The author of these lines had barely the strength to continue with his chronicle of woe, as ailing physics stirred his medicine. But the misty phantom of his vision floated always before him, the little flame above the water: it was his ideal. The chapel, God help every last one of us, belonged in the village, and as wise Euripides has it: many obstacles – many ways. Because anyone who believes that a dream can be buried, let him slip into the bower of night and steal the shoes of sleep!
Since the effort to win the carpenter Johann Bubenleb for the plan had foundered on his reluctance, it would have been apt to seek enthusiasm elsewhere, a sturdy young man who knew how to swing an axe in return for a strong drink. Meanwhile a sacred task had to be performed by someone with not only strength but also skill, which is not to be disdained. In fact it needs a clear mind, in which the work is determined before the first blow, indeed before the existence of the nail, still glowing as ore in the seam. Whereby it is relatively unimportant whether the man is too old or too weak to brace a beam. God forgives the pious bricklayer a crooked wall.
In the weary eyes of the goatherd Johann Bubenleb, now, wrapped in his cloud of pipe smoke, the writer had seen this spirit. Slumbering within it was a promise; he knocked on the goatherd’s door to reawaken it, and the man let him in, offered him a chair and said, not without a chuckle: Bredelin, old Merxheim! Your stubbornness is strange at a time when the earth is full to the brim with armies raging furiously with one another and appealing to God and dedicating their burning banners to the Devil. It is hard to imagine anyone today doing anything without a desire for bread or self-advancement, particularly bringing things into order. What good, he asked frankly, was a prayer-house in the village, when all had ceased to pray?
The pipe crackled, the goats tugged gently on the sackcloth which poverty had declared should be his garb, and the chidden fellow sighed with care: you are probably right, Master Bubenleb, forgive a dreamer his dream, but the idea had come to me that a man should do something that gives his earthly span a value for ever. Something that might be nothing to other human beings, but everything to God. To put it another way: what use are books in times when no one reads? They are dead paper, nothing more. And yet they keep the mystery alive.
