The blind side of the heart

Just under two years after the war had ended, Ernst Ludwig Würsich finally managed to set off for home, accompanied by a male nurse from Dresden who was also on his way back. It was a difficult journey. He spent most of it sitting in a cart pulled along by the male nurse, who swore at him for various reasons depending on the time of day: in the morning because he kept apologizing for giving the man such discomfort, at noon because he wanted to go much too far in a day and in the evening because in spite of his missing leg he still weighed several kilos too much.
To his disappointment, and because he had not reported to the barracks until some weeks after the beginning of the war, he had not been accepted into the 3rd Saxon Hussars, a regiment set up four years earlier. How could he tell anyone that his wife said she was dying, and without her in his life he might well not feel any inclination to be a hero? But even worse, certainly – and perhaps it was why he couldn’t talk to anyone about his wife’s threat of her imminent death – this was by no means the first time she had felt impelled to make it. Although he had lived with her words ringing in his ears for several years, and although she gave a different reason every time, he could not accustom himself to that most extreme threat. He was also aware how little such a reason could affect a garrison, how little it could ever be a valid reason for defying orders from a state requiring unconditional obedience. The threat of his Selma’s death appeared plain ridiculous and insignificant in the face of a German Reich for which he was in duty bound to risk his life.
On his arrival at the Old Barracks on the outskirts of town, he was immediately stripped of the hussar’s uniform and curved sword he had acquired only a few months earlier, and was told that another man had ridden his horse to France, where he had already died a hero’s death. The artillery had also left, so he was to report to the new infantry barracks. On all these journeys he was accompanied by his dog, old Baldo. He had told him to go away, but Baldo was having none of that; he simply would not leave his master. God with us! Ernst Ludwig Würsich had shouted at Baldo, gesturing to him with outstretched arm to go away. Perhaps it wasn’t so hard to understand that a dog called after Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg could not part with his master on hearing him utter the Chancellor’s own slogan. Baldo lowered his head and wagged his tail hard. The dog followed him so persistently from barracks gate to barracks gate that tears came to Ernst Ludwig Würsich’s eyes and he had to threaten to strike Baldo with his bare hand to make him go home, where no one expected him. At the infantry barracks they handed Citizen Würsich, until recently a hussar, a private soldier’s uniform that had obviously seen action already, then they pondered for some weeks which way to send him. In mid-January he set off for Masuria. He could hardly move for the driving snow. While the men in front of him, behind him and beside him spoke of revenge and striking back, he longed to be at home under the warm goose feather quilt in his own bed in Tuchmacherstrasse in Bautzen. Not long afterwards the army he had been sent to join did indeed fight a battle among frosty fields and frozen lakes, but before Ernst Ludwig Würsich could even use his gun in a copse of oak trees – the saplings were still young and not very tall – he lost his left leg to his immediate neighbour’s hand grenade, which went off at the wrong time as the troop attacked. Two comrades carried him over the ice of Lake L?wentin and in February took him to a field hospital at L?tzen, where he was to lie forgotten and thus unable to return home for the rest of the war.
As soon as the pain brought him back to consciousness on his sickbed, he asked someone to look for his talisman: the stone that his wife had pressed into his hand on one of the days of their long-drawn-out farewell. At first she probably hoped that the talisman would change his mind and get him to stay, but later, when he was polishing his sword, she had told him to think of it as something to keep him safe. It was sewn into the inside pocket of his uniform and was shaped like a heart. His wife, claiming to have recognized it as a linden leaf, ascribed curative powers to it and told him to lay it on any wound to heal it. The wound below his torso seemed to him too large for that, and for the first few weeks after his injury he shrank from looking down at it at all, let alone touching the sore flesh in any way, so he placed the stone on his eye socket. It felt heavy and pleasantly cooling there.
While the stone lay on his eye socket, Ernst Ludwig Würsich murmured words of comfort to himself, words reminding him of what his wife had said, good words – oh, my dear, she had called him – encouraging words saying that it would be all right again. Later he took the stone in his hand and held it tight, and he felt as if not only his pain, that keen and now familiar companion which kept appearing, white and shining, to deprive him of sight and hearing, but also the last of his strength were being pressed out into the stone, breathing life into it. At least just a little, so little and yet so much that the stone soon felt to him hotter than his hand. Only when it had been lying on the sheet beside him for some time could he use it to cool his eye socket again. So he spent days occupied with this simplest of actions. Those days appeared to him at first anything but dull, for the pain kept him awake, kept his wound alive, nagged until he would have liked to run away from it on both legs, and he knew just where he would go. Never before had he thought so passionately of his wife, never before had his love seemed so clear and pure to him, manifest as it was without any kind of distraction, without the faintest doubt, as in these days when all he did was to pick up her stone and put it down again.
But the pain went on and on, exhausting his nerves, and fine cracks appeared in his clarity of mind of those first few days; his insight into his pure love crumbled and collapsed. One night the pain woke him and he could turn neither to left nor to right, the pain was not white and shining any more but fluid, black, lightless lava, and he heard the whimpering and whining under the other sheets on the beds close to him. He felt as if all his love, all his understanding of his existence, had been merely a courageous but vain rebellion against the pain. Nothing seemed pure and clear any more; there was only pain. He didn’t want to groan, but there was no time or space for what he wanted now. The auxiliary nurse was tending another wounded man who wouldn’t last much longer, he was sure of that, the man’s wailing at the far end of the hut must stop soon, before his own. He longed for peace. He cried out, he wanted to blame someone, he had no memory of God or faith in him. He begged. The auxiliary nurse came, gave him an injection, and the injection had no effect whatsoever. Only after dawn did he manage to sleep. At midday he asked for a sheet of paper and a pencil. His arm felt heavy, there seemed to be no strength in his hand, he could hardly hold the pencil. He wrote to Selma. He wrote to keep the bond between them from breaking, so faint now did the memory of his love seem, so arbitrary the object of his desire. He devoted the next few days to his stone out of mere loyalty. A chivalrous feeling ran through him when he touched it. He wanted to cry. Cautiously, his thoughts circled around ideas like honour and conscience. Ernst Ludwig Würsich felt ashamed of his own existence. What use was a one-legged, wounded man, after all? He hadn’t so much as set eyes on a Russian, he hadn’t looked an enemy in the face. Still less had he risked his life in some honourable action in this war. The loss of his leg was a pitiful accident and could not be considered any kind of tribute to the enemy. He knew he would go on picking up the stone and putting it down again until the next infection of his wound or his guts struck, setting his body on fire, burning it out, and he sank into fever and the twilight of pain.
Although the winter battle had been won, that success was to remain as remote from Ernst Ludwig Würsich as the question of there being any point in the war. When the field hospital closed down one day just after the end of hostilities, he and the other wounded men were to be taken home. But transport turned out difficult and tedious. Halfway through the journey some of them deteriorated; typhoid spread among them, many died and the survivors were temporarily accommodated in a small colony of huts near Warsaw. From there they went on to Greifswald in a larger convoy of the injured. Week after week now he was told that they were only waiting for his health to improve before sending him back to Bautzen. But however much it improved, there were still stumbling blocks: he needed the financial means to get back and someone to help him physically, and those he did not have. He wrote two or three letters home a month, addressing them to his wife, although he had no way of knowing whether she was even still alive. No answer came. He wrote telling Selma that the stump of his leg refused to heal, although the injuries to his face near the socket of his right eye had healed nicely and the skin around the scars was smoothing out more every day. Or at least, so his sense of touch told him; he couldn’t know for certain because he had no mirror. He hoped she’d recognize him. Of all his features, his nose was almost the same, he said. Yes, his face had healed up extremely well, he assured her, very likely it was only on close inspection, and by drawing conclusions from the rest of his physiognomy, that anyone could see where the right eye had once been. In future, when they went to the theatre, he’d be glad to borrow the gilded opera-glasses he had given her for their first wedding anniversary, and then at last he’d offer her his monocle in exchange. He knew she’d always thought the monocle suited her better than him, he added.
That, he thought, might at least make his wife smile her enchanting smile if she were still alive, if she read his letter, if she learned about his injuries from it. Merely imagining the sparkle of her eyes, their colour changing between green and brown and yellow, sent a shiver of desire and a sense of well-being down his spine. Even the pain, so far unidentified, that sprang from a sore place on his coccyx, throbbing and spreading up his back as if the upper layers of skin were being sliced into very thin strips, even that he could ignore for minutes at a time.
How was he to guess that his wife Selma handed the letters to her housekeeper Mariechen for safe keeping, unread and still sealed?
With abhorrence, Selma Würsich told Mariechen that she felt more and more disgusted to be receiving wartime letters from That Man – as she now referred to him – a man who, allegedly for love of her but against her express wish, had wanted to go off and be a hero. She thought that in these signs of life from him she detected a kind of mockery, something of which she had suspected her husband for no real reason ever since they had known each other. Inwardly, she was waiting for the day of his return and her chance to say, with a shrug of her shoulders expressing utter indifference, the following words of welcome: Oh, so you’re still with us, are you?
After the first weeks when he went missing, and the following weeks and months of fury that he had ever gone away at all, such a display of indifference promised to be her ultimate triumph. The Wendish housekeeper, that old maid, as Ernst Ludwig had once described Mariechen in their daughters’ hearing, was now the only person to whom she ever spoke, not that she spoke much at all.
Selma Würsich lay in wait season by season. She had no time to spare; an inner restlessness chased her out of doors in spring. Suddenly, there stood one of her daughters in front of her asking something, the word Ascension came into it, and Selma was turning away, for such words, she thought, were none of her business, but still they rang in her ears; a pair of eyes belonging to one of her daughters was fixed on her, but it couldn’t possibly be anything to do with her. She simply said she didn’t want to be disturbed, and demanded peace and quiet.
She left decorating the Easter eggs to Mariechen, who was better at it anyway. Indeed, Selma found being with other people more and more of a burden, she simply lacked the patience to tolerate her daughters’ chattering and questions. How gratefully, in secret, she thanked heaven for Mariechen, who kept their cheerful company at a distance from her.
In summer Selma picked the last few cherries from the large unpruned tree that had been plundered for weeks by the street urchins and her own daughters. To go cherry-picking she wore one of her broad-brimmed hats, a hat with a veil beneath which she could watch the Kornmarkt less conspicuously, and as she stood on the ladder she kept looking the way she thought she would see her husband approaching. Sitting on the steps in front of the house with her basket full of cherries, she nibbled the meagre, maggoty fruit off the stones. It tasted sour and slightly bitter. She laid out the stones to dry in the sun, where they bleached like bones. Every few days she took a handful of cherry stones and shook them in the hollow of her hands. The sound warmed her. Happiness might sound like that, thought Selma.
In autumn she once thought she saw her husband trudging through the fallen leaves on the opposite side of the street, and turned back quickly so that she would be at home when he arrived. She tried hard to feel nothing but indifference. But her efforts were wasted; the doorbell was silent and he did not appear. The man trudging through the leaves must have been someone else, probably a man who, welcomed home with a passionate embrace, was now sitting laughing with his wife over their supper of hot cabbage soup.
Early in winter Selma Würsich removed any green walnut husks and those already black and dried from the inner shells with a knife, and as she worked she looked out of the window into slowly drifting snow. Flakes tumbled up and down as if ignorant of the force of gravity. She often saw him coming down Tuchmacherstrasse. He would have aged in these last few years, he would smell of strange places. If he came back – well, he’d soon see!
But her long wait for next spring and summer, for the delightful revenge she longed for, was followed by a time of exhaustion. Business was slow; hardly anyone wanted anything printed. Paper was getting expensive. While Selma sat at the window, empty-eyed, Helene worked out new prices for letterheads and death announcements every quarter. Sales of picture postcards were so poor that she hadn’t been able to get any more printed for months, and there were hardly any orders for menus, since most landlords and café owners wrote up the names of their few dishes on blackboards. The savings of the pre-war period, when the printing works were still flourishing and Helene’s father had begun printing marriage advice manuals, collections of crossword puzzles and finally poems, suddenly lost their old value. The number of copies of the calendar they sold annually had recently dropped to less than a hundred. Designing the calendar pages for 1920 looked like costing more than prospective sales would bring in.
Acting on an idea that came to her one night, Helene’s mother had begun paying the wages of the typesetter who had worked for the firm for many years several months in advance. She obviously thought that this was a way to counter the price rises and help her to get around them, so to speak. But fewer and fewer orders came in, and the typesetter sat around without any work to do, solving crossword puzzles. Booklets of the puzzles piled up in the stockroom because no one was buying them any more. The army hadn’t accepted the typesetter as a wartime recruit because he was too small and his legs were too short. His wife and eight children went hungry with him, many of the children begged for bread and lard in the Kornmarkt, and they were always being caught stealing apples and nuts.
One evening Selma found a handful of sugar cubes in the typesetter’s overall pocket, after he had hung it up beside the door before going home from work. Because of the shape and colour of the sugar cubes, she found it easy to believe they had been stolen from her kitchen. Next morning she felt sorry for the man when she saw him sitting there with no work to do. Selma felt a great reluctance to speak to him about the sugar and how much he was costing her. She expected excuses and thought she would rather find a way to stop employing him. She would get him to teach her younger daughter how to set type, and handle the characters and the press. After all, she wouldn’t have to pay Helene for the few jobs and orders that still came in.
The girl was bored to death in her last year of school; it was time she made herself useful. Helene’s mother would not give in to her ardent wish to go on to a High School for Girls. If she had found school so tedious until now, it seemed to Selma far too expensive an indulgence to pay for her to do nothing in comfort for another two years.
Selma Würsich stood at the window and looked up Tuchmacherstrasse, holding her dressing gown closed. It was days since she had been able to find its belt. The bells were ringing; her daughters would soon come out of church. Selma was not at all happy with the idea that her younger daughter might become a teacher and had once, in her artless, childlike way, even expressed a wish to study medicine. That child is unruly and rebellious, she whispered to herself.
Martha was arm in arm with Helene as they strolled down the street from the Kornmarkt. Selma saw a violet satin gift-wrap ribbon lying on the glass display case. Mariechen must have rolled it up tidily and put it down there. Selma put it round her dressing gown instead of the missing belt. With great care, she tied a bow and smiled at her idea. Now she heard the shrill sound of the doorbell ringing.
Come up here, I want to speak to you two! Their mother was standing on the landing, beckoning to Helene and Martha to join her. She didn’t wait until the girls were sitting down.
You’ve been doing the accounts for years, Helene, it wouldn’t hurt you to learn the practical side of the business too. Their mother cast a cautious glance at her elder daughter, whose criticism she feared. But Martha’s mind seemed to be somewhere else. Even now I couldn’t manage the deliveries without your bookkeeping, and you see to buying paper and the maintenance of the press. The typesetter will eat us out of house and home one of these days. It would be a good idea to get him to show you what you need to know, and then we could fire him.
Helene’s eyes were shining. Wonderful, she whispered. She flung her arms round Martha’s neck, kissed her and cried: First of all I’ll print us some money and then I’ll print a book of family records for you.
Martha shook Helene off. She went red and said nothing. Their mother took Helene by the arm and forced her down on her knees.
What nonsense! I don’t like to hear you sound so delighted, child. The work won’t be easy, you know. Then she let go and Helene was able to stand up again.
Untroubled, Helene looked at her mother. She wasn’t surprised to find that Selma thought the work difficult; after all, her mother very seldom entered the rooms housing the printing works – she had probably never seen type being set, and from a distance the business must seem to her mysterious. Helene thought of the clicking and quiet chuffing of the press, the crunch of the rollers. How differently people could see something! What appeared all right to the typesetter made Helene uneasy. She had a clear picture of herself spacing the letters and words properly at long last, with the gaps between them ensuring harmony and clarity. The idea of operating the big press on her own was exciting. She had often wanted to improve on the typesetter’s work.
Selma was watching Helene. Those shining eyes seemed uncanny to her. The child’s joy made her seem even taller and more radiant than usual.
What you lack, said her mother sternly, is a certain sense of proportion. Her voice was cutting, every word finely judged. You don’t understand the natural order of things. That is why you find it hard to recognize order among us all. Subordination, my child, is important and you’ll be able to learn it from our typesetter. Subordination and humility.
Helene felt the blood rise to her face. She lowered her eyes. Darkness and light broke apart, colours blurred. She had no idea yet what to say in reply. The kaleidoscope went round and round, several times a rusty nail moved near some walnut shells, you never knew when that nail or those shells might come in useful. It was some seconds before she had a clear picture inside her again. Her mother, who as Helene now saw was wearing the violet satin ribbon, looked all done up like a present. The violet bow shook as Mother spoke. It wants to be undone, Helene thought, it really does. Helene scrutinized the maternal landscape, consisting as it did of remnants of clothes, feather dusters encrusted with black blood at the ends of the quills, pillowcases with cherry stones coming out of the holes in their corners and mountains of old newspapers. She could not make out the summit from which her mother was trying to tell her something about understanding the established order of things. Helene could not raise her eyes to meet her mother’s. She looked for help to Martha, but this time Martha did not come to her aid.
Within a few weeks Helene lost her veneration for the pièce de résistance in her father’s printing works. The platen press, which bore the brand name Monopol, no longer inspired awe in her but demanded physical effort. While the typesetter, who was too small for his legs to reach the pedal from her father’s stool, skilfully raised one of those short legs and kept the pedal in motion by kicking it vigorously, at Helene’s first attempts she couldn’t move it a millimetre. Although she could work the sewing machine and had no difficulty in keeping it going by stepping on the treadle, the Monopol press obviously called for a man’s strength. Helene put both feet on the pedal and pushed down. The wheel simply jerked forward once. The typesetter laughed. Perhaps he’d like to show her how to clean the rollers, said Helene sharply, looking pointedly at the thick layer of dust lying on them.
She wasn’t going to accept that she wasn’t physically strong enough to learn to use the press. As soon as the typesetter had left in the evening, she went over to the Monopol and practised with her right leg. She leaned on the paper holder and trod down and down again, until the big wheel was turning faster and faster and the friction of the rollers made a wonderfully deep sound. She was sweating, but she couldn’t stop.
By day the typesetter showed her how to use the stitching machine, the pressing machine and the stapling machine. He taught her assiduously, as he had been told to do, but he kept saying, with a twinkle in his eye, that the Monopol would obey only its master. And since her father had gone away, he obviously felt that he was its master now. The certainty that, as he thought, he was indispensable cheered the typesetter.
No one knew that over the past few years a friendly working relationship had developed between the typesetter and Helene. He was the first adult to take her seriously. Ever since she began helping with her father’s accounts at the age of seven, and now, because he was away in the war, had taken over the purchase of supplies as well as the bookkeeping, the typesetter had treated her with great respect. He called her Fr?ulein Würsich. Helene liked that. And he accepted all her calculations without demur.
Even when Helene could not comply fully with his request for higher wages after the war, nothing about his friendly attitude changed. He discussed the work on hand with her. And if one of the machines needed servicing, he referred back to Helene, particularly now that her mother was disappearing into the upper part of the house for months on end, closing the net curtains and turning her back on the windows. Helene liked the typesetter. It was she who would go up to the kitchen, search the pantry, look round several times to make quite sure no one could see her and fold newspaper to make a paper bag, fill it with pearl barley, put semolina into another bag and finally place a cucumber, a kohlrabi and a handful of nuts in a third. When she found the huge cardboard box of sugar cubes on the top shelf of the pantry one day, she unhesitatingly tore a page off the Bautzen Household Calendar, wrapped a heap of cubes in it and gave that to the typesetter too.
As soon as he had left in the evening Helene went back to practising on the Monopol press in secret. After a few days she practised with her left leg as well as her right. She practised until she couldn’t go on. And when she couldn’t practise any more she practised overcoming not being able to practise any more, and got on with it. In the evening she could feel how strong her legs were growing, and next morning she felt an unaccustomed tugging in them. She knew what it was, but before now she had only ever heard boys say they had cramp in their legs.
One evening she sat high up on her father’s stool, which was fixed to the floor. To her surprise she didn’t even have to stretch her legs; the stool could have been made specially for her. She put both feet on the pedal and trod away. She had to pull in her stomach firmly, which caused a pleasant, tickling sensation; she felt a fluttering inside, as if she were on a swing. She was reminded of Martha’s hands and Martha’s soft breasts.
Only when Selma Würsich asked, a few weeks later, whether her daughter had learned all about the printing press now, did the typesetter demonstrate the cutting machine to her. So far he had avoided even taking her anywhere near it. A dark presentiment now took shape in his mind. He looked at her fair hair, which she wore plaited into a thick braid, and found that he could bring out the words only reluctantly. His comments were brief. First open it. Then adjust it. The typesetter placed the rulers one above the other like battens. Place the paper here.
Without a word of apology, the typesetter pushed Helene slightly aside and showed her, in silence, how she must first knock the stack of paper together and then straighten it to fit it into the machine. As he saw it, the cutting machine was dangerous, not because Helene was a tender young girl of only just thirteen, but because now she could operate all the machinery, everything but the Monopol press.
Mother told Mariechen to roast a joint of beef with a thyme-flavoured crust for Martha’s twenty-second birthday. As always when there was meat, she ate none of it herself. No one discussed her reasons, but her daughters agreed in thinking they were to do with certain dietary regulations. There was no kosher butcher in Bautzen. It was said that the Kristallerer family asked the butcher to slaughter meat specially for their needs, and there was a rumour that they even took him their own knives for the purpose. But Mother obviously didn’t feel comfortable about getting such things done if everyone in town would know about it. And perhaps she meant it when she said she simply didn’t like meat.
Martha had been allowed to ask her friend Leontine to her birthday party. Mother wore a long dress of coffee-coloured velvet. She had lengthened the hem herself with lace that looked to Helene unsuitable and a little ridiculous. Helene had put Martha’s hair in curlers the evening before and let it dry overnight. Now she spent the afternoon pinning up her sister’s hair and weaving silk mallow flowers into the little braids, so that in the end Martha looked like a princess, and a little like a bride too. Then Helene helped Mariechen to lay the table. The valuable Chinese porcelain came out of the sideboard, napkins were placed in silver rose-petal rings that had come with Mother’s trousseau and were otherwise used only at Christmas.
When the bell rang, Martha and Helene hurried to the door at the same time. Leontine was standing outside, her face hidden behind a big bunch of flowers and grasses that she had obviously picked in the meadows: cornflowers, rue, barley. She laughed merrily and turned once in a circle. She had cut her hair short. Where there used to be a chignon severely pinned back behind her head, you could now see her ear and her white neck as her short hair swirled in the air. Helene couldn’t take her eyes off the sight.
Later, at dinner, Helene’s eyes were fixed on Leontine. She tried to look away, but she couldn’t. She admired Leontine’s long neck. Leontine was both slender and strong. Helene could see every vein and sinew in her forearms. She worked with Martha at the Municipal Hospital, not as a ward sister yet, she was much too young for that, but at the age of twenty-three she had been head nurse in the operating theatre for several months. Leontine was the surgeon’s favourite nurse. She could lift any patient by herself, and during operations her hands were so steady and sure that the surgeon, who had only recently been appointed professor, was always asking her to stitch up difficult wounds.
When Leontine laughed, her laughter was long and deep.
Helene spent her time with Martha and Leontine whenever she had a chance. The way Leontine laughed went far down inside you. When she sat down, you could clearly see her bony knees parted under her skirt. She sat there with her legs spread, not at all embarrassed, as if that position were perfectly natural. Now and then she put her hand on her knee and bent her arm slightly, so that the elbow stood out at an angle. These were short, sharp movements that told a tale of unhappiness, but then her deep laugh would follow. Leontine usually laughed on her own. Martha and Helene listened open-mouthed to her laughter; perhaps that would help it to seep down inside them too and reach the pit of the stomach. It took Martha and Helene some time even to guess what Leontine had been laughing at. They must look silly, sitting there. They didn’t shake their heads out of any idea that Leontine’s laughter was misplaced, but because it amazed them. Helene specially liked Leontine’s voice, which was firm and clear.
As they sat around the table on Martha’s birthday, with the roast beef in front of them, Leontine said: My father’s going to let me study.
Study? Mother was surprised.
Yes, he thinks it would be a good idea. I could earn more money then.
Mother shook her head. But studying costs money. She handed Leontine the dish of potato dumplings.
I don’t want to study, though. Leontine pushed the dark hair back from her forehead. It now fell sideways, like a man’s.
Mother nodded in agreement. Very understandable. Who wants to learn useless things? Nurses are in constant demand. A nurse can always find a job anywhere, at any time.
What sort of useless things? Helene looked enquiringly at Leontine, who was just putting a large piece of roast beef in her mouth.
Well, perhaps not so very useless, replied Leontine, but I don’t want to go away. Away from what, Helene wondered. As if Leontine could hear her thoughts, she said: Away from Bautzen. Helene accepted that, although she doubted it.
Mother nodded again. Helene wondered whether she really understood what Leontine was saying; after all, she had never taken root in Bautzen herself in all these years, far from it. Mother was always restless in Bautzen. As Helene saw it, there couldn’t be many reasons why Leontine would want to stay here. Her father was a well-respected lawyer; he was also a widower and a drinker, both in moderation, as he saw it. He preferred his younger daughters to Leontine and if he went away on work he always took one of the younger girls with him, bringing her back in a new dress or carrying a fashionable parasol. Leontine’s father was a prosperous man; you couldn’t call his eldest daughter a Cinderella forced to do menial work, nor was she ill-used, but she seemed to be in her father’s way. It troubled him that Leontine didn’t get married. From time to time he made suggestions to her, and then they quarrelled. Since the death of his wife over ten years earlier, he had lived alone with his three daughters and his mother-in-law, whose mind had been confused for years. On Sundays he went to St Peter’s Cathedral, walking past the Town Hall arm in arm with his younger daughters, one to right and one to left of him. His mother-in-law followed a few steps behind with the cook, and it looked as if Leontine had no established place in this family. It was left to Leontine herself to choose her company. She usually helped her grandmother along, but as soon as they reached the church and she saw Martha among the cluster of people in the porch, she seized her chance to go to a pew hand in hand with her friend. Here she sat between Martha and Helene, in the place that, in their thoughts, they left free for their father. Even though the war was over, he wasn’t home yet. She liked it when, during the service, Martha placed her hand with its long and beautiful fingers beside her own and they linked fingers. Then she sometimes felt a warm weight on her other side: it was Helene leaning her face against Leontine’s arm as if she had found a mother in her.
Hardly a day passed when Martha didn’t bring Leontine home from the hospital with her to Tuchmacherstrasse. They did the housework together and, depending on their shifts at work, they helped out on the big bleaching ground in the meadows by the Spree. They were inseparable.
Wild horses wouldn’t drag me away from here, Leontine assured them as she took a rather small potato dumpling, and it did not escape Helene’s notice that Martha’s elbow was touching Leontine’s, although the two of them avoided exchanging any glance that might give them away.
Eat up your meat, girls. Helene, how are you getting on in the printing works? Mother smiled with a certain derision. You usually learn so fast. Can you do it all? Is there anything you don’t yet know?
How am I to know what I don’t yet know? Helene helped herself to a slice of beef.
Mother rolled her eyes. She sighed. Perhaps, miss, you would be kind enough just to answer my question.
How am I supposed to answer the question when I don’t know the answer?
Then I’ll answer it for you, dear.
Mother had never before called her dear. It sounded like a foreign word, sharply spoken as if Mother wanted to show Martha’s friend how kind she was to her children, although it didn’t come easily to her. It’s been ten weeks now, she said, plenty of time for you to have learned all that matters. What you don’t know yet, you’ll have to learn as you go along. I’m dismissing the typesetter tomorrow. Without notice.
What? Martha dropped her fork. Mother, he has eight children.
So? I have two children myself, don’t I? We have no man around the house. We can’t pay the typesetter any longer. We aren’t making any profit these days. You know that better than anyone, Helene. What did last year look like in the accounts?
Helene put down her knife and fork. She picked up her napkin and dabbed her mouth with it. Better than this year.
And worse than any year before, am I right?
Helene did not nod. She hated the idea of presenting Mother with the words and gestures she expected.
There we are, then. The typesetter is dismissed.
Helene found the next few weeks a difficult time. She wasn’t used to being alone all day. The typesetter hadn’t been seen since the day he was dismissed. He was said to have left the town with his family. Helene sat in the printing works day after day, waiting for customers who never came. She was supposed to be studying from Martha’s book for the admission examination she must take for nursing, but she just leafed through it and found hardly anything she didn’t already know. The exact sequence of compresses and bandaging to be used for various illnesses was part of the final nursing exam rather than this one. Most of the book was concerned with what you would have to learn during your training, and after she had leafed through it the few details she hadn’t known before were fixed in her memory. So Helene began reading other books, the books that she found on her father’s shelves. His daughters were forbidden to take any volumes out of that mighty bookcase, but even in the old days when Father was still here, his daughters had felt that it was a particularly exciting adventure and a test of their courage to borrow those precious books. They would push Stifter’s The Condor further to the left so as not to leave a gap where Kleist’s The Marquise of O, had been standing. The books stood in no particular order on their father’s shelves, which upset Helene a little, but she wasn’t sure whether her mother kept an eye on this disorder, or what might happen if she took it upon herself to rearrange the books in alphabetical order. As she read, Helene kept her ears pricked, and as soon as she heard a sound she hid the book under her apron. She often looked out of the door when she thought she heard Leontine’s deep voice. Once, quite unexpectedly, the door opened and Martha and Leontine came in, laughing, with a big basket.
Goodness, how red your cheeks are! said Leontine, passing her hand briefly over Helene’s hair. I hope you aren’t running a temperature?
Helene shook her head. She had a treasure tucked under her apron. She had found it on the very top shelf of the bookcase, wrapped in newspaper and lying behind the other books as if hidden away. It was more than a hundred years old. The cardboard binding was covered with coloured paper and there was an embossed title: Penthesilea. A Tragedy. Helene apologized briefly to Martha and Leontine, bent down behind the big wooden counter and hid her treasure in the lowest drawer there. She put some of the old Bautzen Household Almanacs over the book to conceal it.
A farmer from the Lusatian Hills had given Leontine the basket of peas as a thank-you present. Months ago, she had splinted a difficult break of his wrist. Now Leontine put the big basket on the counter in front of Helene. It was full of plump green pea pods. Helene immediately plunged both hands into the basket and ploughed them through the pods. They had a young, grassy smell. Helene loved popping pods open with her thumb and the sensation of pushing out the smooth, gleaming, green peas from top to bottom in order of size, to roll down her thumb and into the bowl. She would put the tiny peas that weren’t fully mature yet straight into her mouth. Martha and Leontine were talking about something that Helene wasn’t supposed to understand, giggling and gurgling. They spoke only in mysterious half-sentences.
He was asking all the nurses and the patients about you. Oh, and to see his face when he finally found you! Martha was amused.
Dear child. Leontine rolled her eyes as she spoke, obviously imitating the farmer.
Oh, I come over all peculiar when I see you, nurse! Martha put in. She was spluttering with laughter. Nurse, I’m yours heart and soul!
He didn’t say that? Leontine was laughing too.
He did. You should have seen the way his hand kept going to his trousers. I thought he was going to fall on you there and then.
But our dear professor didn’t think it was funny at all: oh, take your peas and go away, you seem to have finished work at noon today. Leontine sighed. And usually I can never stay too long for him.
Are you surprised? Didn’t you hear what he said to the ward sister about you the other day: she may look like a flapper, but she’s something of a bluestocking!
He thinks highly of you, but his fears are growing.
Fears? Leontine waved the idea away. Our professor doesn’t know the meaning of fear. Why, anyway? I’m a nurse, that’s all.
The girls were shelling the peas now.
A long silence followed. But suppose you do go away after all? Martha was bracing herself for anything.
Helene didn’t want to see her sister’s grave face now. She tried to imagine she was invisible.
Leontine did not react.
Go away to Dresden, I mean. To study. That’s what everyone is saying you’ll do.
Never. Leontine hesitated. Not unless you come with me.
That’s stupid, Leontine, just plain stupid. Martha sounded both sad and stern. You know I can’t.
There you are, then, said Leontine. In that case nor can I.
Martha put her hand on the nape of her friend’s neck, drew her face close and kissed her on the lips.
Helene’s breath faltered; she quickly turned away. There must be something she ought to do, look for something on the top shelf of the bookcase, or maybe take a stack of paper out of its pigeonhole and put it on the desk. The picture seemed to be burned on her retina: Martha drawing Leontine towards her, Leontine pursing her lips ready for the kiss. Perhaps Helene had mistaken what she saw? She risked a cautious glance over her shoulder. Leontine and Martha were bending over the basket full of pea pods, and it was as if there had never been a kiss at all.
But suppose you took her with you? She could train as a nurse in Dresden. Leontine was speaking quietly, now, and her glance went to Helene. Helene acted as if she had heard nothing and hadn’t realized that they were talking about her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Martha shaking her head. There was another long silence. Helene felt that her presence was inhibiting their conversation. At first she thought of leaving the two of them alone and going out, but next moment she felt rooted to the spot. She couldn’t move her feet; she severed the umbilical cords of the peas and felt a sense of shame. She didn’t want Leontine to leave them, she didn’t want Martha and Leontine to stop talking because of her, and she didn’t want Martha and Leontine to kiss each other either.
That evening in bed, Helene turned her back to Martha. Martha could scratch her own back, she thought. Helene didn’t want to cry. She breathed deeply and her eyes swelled, her nose felt smaller and stuffed up. Breathing was difficult.
Helene didn’t want to count freckles either, or feel for Martha’s stomach under the blanket. She thought of the kiss. And while she imagined kissing Leontine, knowing that only Martha would kiss her, tears escaped from her eyes.
Mother expected Helene to run the printing works so that no red figures had to be written in the accounts books. She found that easier every day. A profit recently entered could easily compensate for the losses of the early part of the year, which appeared numerically slight by comparison. What that meant wasn’t clear to Mother. She was just surprised to see how seldom Helene ran any of the machines.
Not wishing to waste stocks of paper, Helene designed simple calculation tables. She suspected that people could make good use of her ready reckoners in these times of rising prices.
The mere sight of one of her ready reckoners cheered Helene up. How nice and straight her figures were! It had been worth giving the figure 8 more space than the others, and the margin was so neat.
When news of the typesetter’s dismissal got around town, it wasn’t long before Frau Hantusch the baker’s wife put an unusually small and over-baked loaf down on her counter when Helene went to buy bread.
Helene asked if she could please have one of the two larger, lighter-coloured loaves still on the shelf instead. But the baker’s wife, who used to press little pieces of butter-cake into her hand only a few years ago, shook her head as well as anyone with almost no neck could. The deep line marking the short distance between her breasts and her head didn’t move at all as she shook it. Helene ought to be glad she could still buy a loaf at all, she said. Helene took it.
You poor thing. The baker’s wife was short of breath, her heavy lids covered her eyes, her words expressed sympathy but her tone was both indignant and injured. Operating heavy machinery these days. A girl, working machinery! The baker’s wife shook her head again in her laborious way.
Helene stopped in the doorway. It’s not hard to learn, she said, and felt as if she were lying. I’ve printed some very nice ready reckoners. I can bring you one on Monday if you like, we could do a deal – you get a ready reckoner, I get four loaves of bread.
Nothing doing, said the baker’s wife.
Three?
To think of girls at a man’s work these days, we can’t have that kind of thing. Your mother’s well off. Why didn’t she let the typesetter keep his job?
Don’t worry, I’ll be starting to train as a nurse in September. We don’t have anything left. Most of what we did have was money, and money’s worth nothing now.
The baker’s wife raised her eyebrows sceptically. These days everyone suspected their neighbours of owning more than they did. Helene remembered how, early this year when she had wanted to do something to please her mother, she had gone into her room and stripped the sheets off the bed to do a big wash. Only when she lifted the mattress to put a clean sheet on it did she see the banknotes. Huge quantities of them tucked into its stuffing. Notes of many different currencies, bundles of them tucked among the feathers and held together with paperclips. The numbers printed on the notes were of small denominations, ridiculously small. As Helene, alarmed by her unintentional discovery, hastily threw the old sheet over the mattress again, she heard her mother’s voice behind her.
You little devil. How much have you stolen from me already? Come on, how much?
Helene turned and saw her mother leaning on the door frame, so angry that she could hardly stay upright leaning against it. She was drawing on her thin cigar as if extracting information from it.
I’ve been asking myself for years: Selma, I’ve been asking myself, who in this house is stealing from you? Her voice sounded low and threatening. And all these years I’ve been telling myself, well, it won’t have been your daughter, Selma, never, not your own child.
I was only going to change the sheets, Mother.
What an excuse, what a mean, shabby excuse. And with these words her mother went for Helene, clutching her throat so tightly that she could breathe only by raising her hand against her mother to push her away with all her might. She pinched her mother’s arms, but they would not loosen their grip. Helene tried to scream and couldn’t. Not until footsteps came up the stairs, and Mariechen audibly cleared her throat, did her mother let go.
Helene had not set foot in her mother’s room since then. She remembered how scared she had been at the sight of those banknotes and wondered how, with her own faultless bookkeeping, her mother could have contrived to put them all aside. Money that, as Helene was sure, was worth hardly anything now. Money that, if it had been spent at the right time, would have kept the whole household going and might have allowed her to study.
Helene looked at Frau Hantusch the baker’s wife. She couldn’t help thinking that the woman’s doubts arose from discontent with her own situation.
Last week we had some particularly good stout paper in. Paper with a high proportion of wax in it. Helene smiled as nicely as she could. It stands up to moisture well, it would be just the thing in your shop.
Thanks, Lenchen, thank you very much, but I can tell my customers the daily price of bread myself. The baker’s wife pointed to her mouth with one fat forefinger. It’s all in here, that’s what counts. Having it on paper would just be a waste of money.