The blind side of the heart

NO FINER MOMENT

In the winter after the death of the girls’ father the Spree froze over from its banks, until in January the ice floes were so close together that the boys of Bautzen tested their daring by crossing the river on them. To Helene, the spectacle was evidence of biblical truth. Couldn’t water freeze even in the desert, and wasn’t Jesus walking on water historical evidence of that fact? Smoke rose from chimneys early in the morning, clouds of it enveloping the town where it stood on its granite rock. Only the tip of the Lauenturm, the Cathedral of St Peter and the leaning Reichenturm, visible from afar, emerged from the mists of Bautzen in the morning hours. Even the high walls of the Ortenburg and the Alte Wasserkunst, the Old Water Tower, were lost in the vapours. Most households ran out of firewood at the end of January, and where money was short and coal deliveries slow people chopped up small items of furniture, stools and benches, garden furniture that seemed useless to them in midwinter. Martha and Helene saw their cash running out. If they managed to sell a calendar or a picture postcard, the money was spent right away. Bread had never been as expensive as it would be tomorrow. They tried to find someone to lease the printing works, but nothing came of all their advertising and enquiries. The factories down by the river were laying off workers, and anyone who could leave went to Breslau, Dresden or Leipzig. Any big city offered better chances of finding food and heated accommodation.
Helene cleared the stockrooms and the office shelves. Thick dust lay on the upper shelves, along with a number of small composition patterns for type that no one would be needing now. Helene had kept paper in the lower compartments in past years, but much of it had found its way into the stove these last few weeks. The brief warmth as it burned was better than no warmth at all. The long planks forming the top shelves would be sure to give a good heat and there’d be no need to take all the shelving apart. Helene planned to use only the wood from those two planks at the top, which were firmly anchored in their supports. The shelving covered the whole long wall of the room from floor to ceiling, then ran from the far corner to the door and beyond. There would still be plenty of space without the top shelves. Helene climbed the ladder with a hammer in her hand. A piece of cardboard had slipped behind one shelf and was stuck there between the plank, the wall and the support. Helene leaned forward, held on to a shelf with one hand and tried to pull the cardboard out. Then she intended to knock the top shelf right out of its anchoring. The cardboard was still stuck. Helene groped her way along the wall and was trying to free one corner of it from the supporting post when she was aware of something metallic moving. She felt behind the outer support for the object, pulled it out and found that she was holding a key. It was a little rusty, but Helene knew at once what it was. She was familiar with its shape and the unusual ornamentation of its head, even with its weight, yet she had never held it in her hand before. It looked a little smaller, as if it had shrunk. Helene well remembered how, before the war, her father used to clear the till at the end of the day, take the key and go into the back room with the money in his hands. Then he opened the large cupboard. Although Helene might already be turning to the door when he opened the till, he winked at her every evening with the eye that would be missing later and said: You stand guard at the doorway, will you? And if anyone comes, just whistle. Sometimes Helene said: Girls aren’t supposed to whistle. Then he would smile and reply: Oh, are you a girl, then? And once, half hidden by the open cupboard door, he chanted the lines he had written in her album: Sweet as the violet be, /virtuous, modest and pure, /not like the rose whom we see/flaunting her full-blown allure. Then he changed his tone of voice, adjuring her almost menacingly: But all girls must know how to whistle, just you remember that.
Helene knew that the door to the safe was in the back wall of that cupboard. In all the years of her father’s absence the key had not turned up, and after his return there had been no opportunity to ask him about it. Helene loved her father and, in the old days, when he stroked her hair and drew her head towards him as if it were the head of his big dog, she wouldn’t for anything have endangered that sense of security; she would keep still until he sent her out to the kitchen or into the street with a kindly little tap on the behind. All the same, Helene didn’t care for those lines about the violet. She liked the sweet scent of violets and their delicate appearance, but she admired the upright growth of roses at least as much, the thorns they grew to protect themselves and their bright colours, pink unfolding like dawn, yellow like late October sunlight. In particular she loved the old song about the Virgin Mary walking through a wood of thorns, which all burst into flower and bear roses. Leontine had taught it to them before she went to Berlin. Weren’t those thorns showing Mary how much they respected and even worshipped her by flowering? Everything about the rose seemed to Helene admirable, even enviable. Out of respect for her father she made an attempt to like the allegory of girls seen as flowers, but it was only an attempt and went no further. Since last year Helene had been growing roses, not violets, in the garden outside the house. They were not really garden flowers but wild roses that she had found and dug up on the slopes of the Schafberg.
Now, when Helene and Martha opened the safe for the first time, they found old banknotes arranged in several wads, amounting in all to a good two thousand marks, which made them laugh. To think what they could have bought with that years ago! Now it might buy a whole loaf, or anyway half a loaf. At least half a pound of bread. Two thousand loaves back then, claimed Martha. They discovered a leather address book with the cut edges of the pages gilded, and a folder containing lithographs of various sizes and, judging by the typography, of different origins, arranged in no particular order. The lithographs were pictures of women with nothing or very little on. Curvaceous women, very unlike the sisters themselves and their mother. Women in just their stockings, women with veils and tight-fitting basques, as well as women wearing nothing whatsoever.
The sisters set to work to write the names and addresses from the leather book on envelopes. They put a death announcement for their father in each envelope. Under ‘S’ they found the name of an aunt or maybe cousin they had never heard of before. It said: Fanny Steinitz. Under the name their father had written, in the fine script of a meticulous bookkeeper, a note in brackets: (Selma’s cousin, the daughter of Hugo Steinitz’s late brother). The address for Fanny Steinitz was number 21 Achenbachstrasse, W 50, Wilmersdorf, Berlin.
Even before Helene managed to catch her mother at a moment of mental clarity during the next week and took the opportunity of asking about her cousin who lived in Berlin, she wrote a short letter on her own initiative. Dear Aunt, she began, unfortunately we are sending you sad news today. Our father, your cousin Selma Würsich’s husband, died on 11 November last year from the consequences of his war wounds. You will find our death announcement enclosed. Helene wondered whether, and in what words, to mention and explain her mother’s condition. After all, the cousin would be surprised to get a letter from her nieces, not her cousin in person. She added: I am sure our mother would send you her best wishes, but sad to say she has been in very poor heath for the last few years. With our very best wishes, your nieces Martha and Helene Würsich.
Helene could not be sure whether their aunt still lived at the same address. Wouldn’t she have married some time over the past years, in which case her surname would not be the same today? Their aunt might well be surprised to find them getting in touch after such a long time – moreover, there must be some reason for the absence of any mention of this maternal cousin of theirs in the family stories they had been told. But Helene wanted to write this letter. Her curiosity and her hope of receiving an answer from Berlin outweighed her doubts, and she quickly dismissed them all.
It was Easter before the postman brought a strangely narrow, folded envelope addressed to Fr?ulein Helene Würsich. Their aunt wrote in a bold hand, the letters leaning far to the right, the upper loops of the ‘H’ in Helene’s name just touching the finely traced letter ‘e’. This, wrote Aunt Fanny, was a wonderful surprise! After that exclamatory opening she left two lines blank. It was a long time since she’d heard anything of that crazy cousin of hers. She was delighted to hear that two children had obviously arrived over the years, for they had not been in touch since the birth of the first child, Martha. She had always wondered whether her cousin had broken off contact with her because of their old quarrels, or might even have died in childbirth. In a postscript Aunt Fanny asked her nieces whether their mother was seriously ill.
A correspondence began. There was little to say about their mother, Helene replied, she hadn’t been well for years and it was unlikely that any doctor could help her. She consulted Martha about the best way to describe their mother’s condition. To say she was in poor health did not mean much, particularly as there was nothing organically wrong with her. They remembered Lady Midday, the Noonday Witch whom Mariechen mentioned now and then, saying with a curious smile that her lady, as she called the girls’ mother, just wouldn’t speak to the spirit who appears in the harvest fields at noon and can confuse your mind or even kill you, unless you hold her attention for an hour by talking about flax. There was nothing to be done about it, said Mariechen, shrugging her shoulders, although all her lady had to do was talk to the Noonday Witch for an hour about the working of flax, that was all. Mariechen’s eyes twinkled. Just passing on a little wisdom, she told the girls. Martha and Helene had known the tale of the Noonday Witch as long as they could remember; there was something comforting about it, because it suggested that their mother’s confused state of mind was merely a curse that could easily be lifted. Nothing to be done about it, however, Mariechen repeated, shrugging again, and her smile showed she was sure of the spirit’s powers and felt only a tiny scrap of sympathy for her disbelieving mistress. On the other hand, as things were Mariechen had her lady to herself, along with her beliefs. Her lady couldn’t run away. But Martha and Helene did not write to their aunt in Berlin about the Noonday Witch; they did not want Fanny Steinitz thinking of them in connection with rustic superstition and supposing that they must be simple-minded. So they merely gave a factual account of some malady that no one could explain: it was hard to pin down any cause for their mother’s mental anguish and it seemed impossible to treat it.
Ah, well, that wouldn’t surprise her, Aunt Fanny wrote back. Such disorders ran in the family; and in that case, she asked, who was looking after the girls now?
They looked after themselves, Martha said proudly and she asked Helene to put that in her next letter. Both of them did. And she told Helene to tell their aunt that after just two years of training, and although she was the youngest of the student nurses, she, Helene, was going to take her examination in September. She should say that she was already helping in the hospital laundry and earning a little money there, so the two of them had enough to live on in a modest way. So far what remained of the family fortune had just been able to provide for their mother, the household and their faithful maid Mariechen.
Helene hesitated. Wouldn’t it be better to say what little remained of the family fortune?
Why? A fortune can’t be little, my angel.
But it’s all gone now.
Does she have to know that? We’re not beggars.
Helene didn’t want to contradict Martha. She liked the invincibility of her sister’s pride. She went on writing: So far we haven’t found anyone to lease the printing works, but we can probably sell some of the machinery. We’ll have to sell the Monopol press too, since our money is running out as the currency loses value and we have had no news of our legacy from Breslau. Did Aunt Fanny know anything about her late uncle the hat maker Herbert Steinitz, and the big salon he was said to have opened on the Ring in Breslau?
Ah, yes, the hat maker, Aunt Fanny wrote back. Her well-heeled uncle had liked only one person in the world, and that was her strange cousin Selma. She was sure he had left everything to Cousin Selma. Herself, she had never really cultivated the acquaintance of her Uncle Herbert. Perhaps she ought to make up for that now, after the event? The fact was that her uncle’s reputation depended solely on his fortune. She could ask her brothers about him; one of them still lived in Gleiwitz, the other in Breslau.
It was to be autumn before Martha and Helene received the legacy left to their mother. It consisted of the regular income from the rents of an apartment block with business premises on the ground floor that Fanny’s uncle had had built in Breslau, some securities that were worth hardly anything now and finally a large, brand-new wardrobe trunk that came by cart on one of the first cool days of late September.
The carrier said the trunk weighed so little that he’d be willing to carry it upstairs by himself.
It was lucky that Mother was in her bedroom and didn’t see the trunk. Martha and Helene waited until Mariechen had gone to her own little room that evening, then broke open the lead seals with a knife and a hammer. A scent of thyme and southern softwoods rose to their nostrils. The trunk contained a large number of unusual hats packed in tissue paper, lavishly trimmed with feathers and coloured stones, and inside them square wooden hat blocks that gave off a resinous aroma. The blocks were planed smooth but were sticky at the sides. Each hat had a flat little bag of yellow hemp on it, filled with dried herbs, probably to keep moths away. Among the hats were two curious small round ones that looked like pots and fitted closely on Martha’s and Helene’s heads. At the bottom of the trunk, wrapped in heavy moss-green velvet, lay a menorah and a peculiar fish. The fish was made of horn in two different colours, adorned with carving, and the two sections fitted ingeniously together. Its eye sockets, pale horn set in horn of a darker hue, might once have held jewels, or at least so Martha thought. Inside the hollow horn body Helene found a rolled-up paper. The will. I bequeath all my property to my dear niece Selma Steinitz, married name Würsich, now resident in Bautzen. Uncle Herbert had signed his will. Further inside the belly of the fish was a thin gold necklace with tiny deep-red translucent stones. Rubies, Martha surmised. Helene wondered how Martha came to know anything about precious stones. Instinctively she let the stones slip through her hand and counted them. Twenty-two.
We’ll keep the fish here in the glass-topped display cabinet, said Martha, taking the fish from Helene’s hands and opening the cabinet. She put the fish in one of the lower compartments where it couldn’t be seen from outside. It was tacitly agreed that Helene and Martha would not ask their mother what to do with the fish. If she said they should keep it, that might mean for as long as she lived. They told her nothing about the fish and they hid the two modern cloche-shaped hats in their wardrobes.
When Martha finally, with Helene’s assistance, pushed the wardrobe trunk containing the other hats, the will and the menorah into their mother’s darkened bedroom one morning, then carried it, stepping cautiously, from clearing to clearing, because there was no space for the big trunk on the floor, she looked up in alarm. Like a frightened animal, she watched her daughters’ movements. They lifted the trunk over a pile of fabrics and clothes, over two little tables full of vases and twigs, caskets and stones, and countless other items unidentifiable at first glance, raised it in the air and finally put it down at the foot of Mother’s bed. Martha opened the trunk.
From your uncle the hat maker in Breslau, she said, holding up two large hats heavily trimmed with paste gems, stones and beads.
Uncle Herbert in Breslau, Helene confirmed.
Their mother nodded so eagerly, then glanced at the door, the window and back to Helene again with such a hunted look, that the girls didn’t know if she had understood them.
Don’t open the curtains, Mother snapped at Helene. She snorted with derision as Helene put the menorah on the windowsill beside her smaller candleholder. Candles had last burned in Mother’s menorah on the day of her husband’s death. She had lit only six of them, and when Helene asked why her mother had left out the middle candle she had whispered in a toneless voice that there was no Here any more, hadn’t her child noticed that? Helene opened the window as she suddenly heard a chuckle behind her. Her mother was struggling to catch her breath; something evidently seemed to her incredibly funny.
Mother? Helene tried just speaking to her at first; after all, there were days when a question could be asked to no purpose whatsoever. Her mother chuckled again. Mother?
Suddenly her mother fell silent. Well, who else? she asked, and broke out laughing once more.
Martha, on her way downstairs, called out to Helene. But when Helene reached the doorway her mother spoke again.
Do you think I don’t know why you were opening the window? Whenever you come into my room you open it, unasked.
I just wanted to . . .
You don’t think, child. I suppose your idea is that my room stinks? Is that what you want to show me? I stink, do I? Shall I tell you something, stupid girl? Old age comes, it will come to you too and it rots you away. Mother raised herself in her bed, rocking on her knees, looking as if she might tip forward and off the bedhead first. And she was laughing, the laughter was burbling out of her throat, physically hurting Helene. I’ll tell you a secret. If you don’t come into the room it doesn’t stink. Simple, eh? Mother’s laughter was not malicious now, just carefree, relieved. Helene stood there undecided. She was trying to make sense of the words. What’s the matter? Off you go, or do you want to leave me stinking, you pitiless girl?
Helene went away.
And close the door behind you! she heard her mother calling after her.
Helene closed the door. She put her hand on the banisters as she went downstairs. How familiar they seemed to her; she felt almost happy to think of these banisters leading her so safely down to the ground floor.
Downstairs, Helene found Martha sitting in their father’s armchair. She was helping Mariechen to mend sheets.
Helene and Martha thanked Aunt Fanny for her help over the legacy in a long letter full of detailed accounts of the weather and descriptions of their everyday life in the town of Bautzen. They told her that they had made a second sowing of winter salad greens in the garden behind the house and next day it would be time to sow overwintering cabbage varieties. No one would expect a flower garden to be kept going in times like these, but they did it for love. Although the water rates were rising in an alarming way, they had managed to keep the flower bed in front of the house from drying up all summer. Late summer meant a lot of outdoor work. Now Helene had cut off all the rose leaves and burned them. They had made a copper brew to spray the roses against rust, and a lime and sulphur brew to ward off mildew. The Michaelmas daisies were in full flower. They just weren’t sure when to put in flowering bulbs: Mariechen said now was the time to plant scilla and daffodils, tulips and hyacinths, but last year they had planted those bulbs early and they had frozen during the winter. They liked spinach and lamb’s lettuce very much, and had sown plenty for the winter, for no one could say when the general situation would improve. Last year, after all, they had printed small calendars for the coming year on a little press that had been standing idle in the workshop, fully operational but covered up, and now they were colouring them in by hand in the evenings. They hoped very much that the calendars would sell at the autumn fairs, or at the latest at the Christmas fair in winter. Thank goodness, they wrote, the Christmas market was reserved for local traders, or the hill farmers would force down prices. People had to look out for themselves these days. Only yesterday they had designed a little calendar with texts quoting rustic lore and maxims giving good advice. The provincials here liked to be exhorted to be virtuous in the sight of God, and it increasingly seemed to Helene, she added, that agreement on such matters was what created a sense of community here in Lusatia, bringing consolation and giving courage. And what could be more important these days than confidence and hope? What, for instance, did her aunt think of such precepts as: moderation and hard work are the best doctors; work sharpens the appetite and moderation prevents its wrongful satisfaction? People so often confuse education and good conduct with etiquette and will forgive a boy’s prank more easily than anything offending against the usual forms of social intercourse. The surest way to spoil a young man is to lead him to value those who think as he does more highly than those who think otherwise. A resolution cannot be more certainly thwarted than by being frequently uttered.
These reflections appeared to Helene and Martha like the yearning of their own graceful souls for the heaven of Berlin, and they hoped for nothing more fervently than to touch their aunt’s heart by writing in such terms. True education enables you to set the right tone with anyone, striking a note that chimes harmoniously with your own, don’t you agree, dear Aunt Fanny? And you are a sacred example to us there.
Helene and Martha went to great pains to show their aunt, line by line, how cheerfully independent they were and at the same time how grateful to her. Their very existence was a real joy! Helene thought this assertion too fine not to be written down. Martha, however, felt that such an expression was a demeaning lie in view of the sheer exhaustion that came over her when she thought of her life in Bautzen. Adopting a tone that trod the narrow line between pride and modesty appeared to them the real challenge of the letter they were writing. Time and again sentences were crossed out and rephrased.
Sacred example, said Martha doubtfully, she might take that the wrong way.
How do you mean, the wrong way?
She might think we’re making fun of her. Maybe she sees herself as anything but sacred, so she wouldn’t want to be a sacred example.
You think not? Helene looked enquiringly at Martha. Well, in that case at least she’ll have a good laugh. We really must put that in or we’ll never meet her at all.
Martha shook her head thoughtfully.
It was hours before they could get down to the fair copy, which had to be written out by Helene, because Martha’s handwriting often looked unsteady and crooked these days. Something wrong with her eyes, Martha claimed, but Helene didn’t believe her. She put in the bit about the sacred example and finally, in the last sentence of all, she politely asked their aunt if she would like to visit them in Bautzen some day.
When days passed, then a week, then two weeks and no answer came Helene began to worry.
There was nothing at all the matter with Martha’s eyes. If they went for a walk and Helene pointed out a dog a long way off, a sandy-coloured dog like their father’s old Baldo, who had disappeared on the day when he went away to the war, or if she showed her a tiny flower by the roadside, Martha had no difficulty in making out in detail both dog and flower. Helene suspected that her untidy handwriting, like her sudden dreamy moods, was to do with the syringe she had sometimes seen these last few months lying beside the washbasin, where Martha had obviously left it. Often as Helene handled syringes herself at the hospital now, the sight of one on their washstand at home made her throat tighten. Everything in Helene protested against the sight of that syringe when she didn’t want to see it. The first few times she was so shocked and ashamed on Martha’s behalf that she wanted to hide it before Mariechen found it, or Martha herself noticed her carelessness. But if she hid it that was sure to be noticed and would make it impossible for them to go on saying nothing about it.
As time went on, Helene became used to the idea that Martha had formed the habit of using the syringe every day. She did not speak directly to her about it. Nor could she honestly have asked questions, since she knew perfectly well that since their father’s death and Leontine’s departure Martha had been injecting small quantities of drugs now and then, presumably morphine, perhaps cocaine.
In the time just after her father’s death it was Aunt Fanny’s letters more than anything else that kept Helene hoping for a life beyond the town of Bautzen, a life she did not yet know. Even the pictures of Berlin that she had seen made her wax enthusiastic about the many different aspects of the city. Wasn’t Berlin, with its elegantly dressed women and never-ending nights, the Paris of the east, the London of Continental Europe?
But no reply came from Aunt Fanny all through October in response to that letter from Martha and Helene, the best, most detailed letter they had ever written her. Early in November Helene couldn’t bear the waiting any longer and wrote again. She hoped, she said, that nothing was wrong with her aunt? Here in Bautzen, anyway, they were more than grateful to her for getting in touch with Uncle Herbert’s relations in Breslau. Had their last letter arrived? Life went on in the usual way in Bautzen. After passing her examinations successfully (Helene had first put brilliantly, but struck it out again), she had begun work in the surgical department of the hospital in September. It meant that she was earning more, but she specially liked the work for its own sake anyway. Martha took the pen from Helene’s hand and added, in her scrawl, that Helene had filled the position left vacant by Nurse Leontine, a friend of theirs, when she moved to Berlin two years ago. The professor wanted to have Helene beside him more and more often these days, when he needed someone with great powers of concentration and sure hands to help with difficult operations, because she was very talented in that way. Helene wanted to strike out what Martha had said; it seemed to her boastful and ill-judged. But Martha said Helene’s worst mistake could be to hide her talents under a bushel, it would mean she ended up a helpless little thing in some man’s arms, begging for his favours. She held out the pen to Helene.
You don’t really believe that, do you? Helene wished Martha wouldn’t keep challenging her in that way of hers. She took the pen and went on writing.
Thanks to their uncle’s legacy, she said, their mother was now provided for. Aunt Fanny was warmly invited to visit them and would be a welcome guest at any time. With best wishes and hoping to hear from her soon.
Helene wondered whether she ought to apologize for the extensive account of their household arrangements in her last letter. Such matters, after all, might well bore and repel her aunt. Helene refused to entertain the idea that she might have thought the bit about being a sacred example insulting. But perhaps it seemed presumptuous of her two Protestant nieces from a small town in Lusatia to have chosen her as their example?
More weeks passed and the much desired letter did not arrive until just before Christmas. It was longer and seemed to have been written in more haste than Fanny’s earlier missives; it was hard to decipher the closely written characters. She had so much to do, she said, preparing for the coming festivities; her cousin’s children were looking forward to Chanukah and she was going to buy them little presents, even her lover was counting on Christmas, taking some notice of it. He’d see what came of that, she said. She was expecting the cousins from Vienna and Antwerp to visit at Chanukah, oh, the whole clan of them. She had her hands really full today, she had to discuss the menus for the festive season with her new cook, who was still wet behind the ears, an inexperienced young girl, so she, Fanny, had to keep helping in the kitchen. She liked that – after all, she was fond of cooking herself and she hadn’t cared for the way her old cook, before she finally retired, used to add so much flour to every sauce that it came out stodgy. The older the cook grew, the thicker were her sauces, with more and more floury lumps in them; perhaps her clouded eyes hadn’t been able to see them any more, or perhaps she had let the sauces go lumpy on purpose. Was it overwork? Or maybe she’d been cross with her husband who was making her stay at work until the day he died, using his empty sleeve as the excuse for exploiting her industry. She had suspected the old cook of using the wrong pans for milk or cream, although she’d been forbidden to do any such thing several times. Not that she, Fanny, was going to come over all hypocritical and claim to live strictly by the old dietary rules. No, she couldn’t be doing with all that milky messing about. But in the end it was the woman’s constant complaints about her lazy husband at home that bothered her more than the lumpy sauces. And that was saying quite something, for the sauces hardly deserved to be called sauces at all! In the end her fricassees were pieces of meat wedged solid in a floury paste, not a trace left of the flavours of bay leaf and lemon. Just a meat pudding, simply disgusting!
Helene and Martha couldn’t help laughing when the letter they had been waiting for so long was in their hands. A whole world unfolded before their eyes. Every sentence had to be read several times.
The girls wondered whether these cousins from Vienna and Antwerp were their own relations too. The description, and the fact that Aunt Fanny hadn’t mentioned a husband in any of her letters, made it seem likely. Imperceptibly, Martha and Helene sat up rather straighter. They were sitting on the bench by the stove, warming their backs. It seemed to them as if the letter cast a net all around the world, and Aunt Fanny was close friends with that world, an expert on it, if not its very essence. In a postscript she wrote that while her travels certainly didn’t look like taking her to Lusatia in the near future, she thought maybe the girls might like to visit her in Berlin some time? She’d be happy if they could come for a long stay. The girls would find two first-class railway tickets from Dresden to Berlin enclosed. She thought Dresden must be their nearest real railway station, wasn’t it? Her apartment was large enough, for she had no children herself, and she was sure the two girls could find work in Berlin. She would be only too happy to help them make their way and succeed.
Helene and Martha looked at each other. They shook their heads, laughing. Two years ago, when their father died, they had thought that from now on their lives would consist of working at the hospital and growing old here in Bautzen, at the side of their increasingly confused mother – but here was this letter, the prelude to their future, and only now could they really dream of it. Helene took Martha’s hand and wiped a tear from her eye. She looked at her big sister, her older sister, whom she had always admired for her modest conduct, whose wide-eyed gaze derived its attraction from her perfect appearance of purity, yet also owed something to those kisses that Helene had seen Martha and Leontine exchange. Helene understood the appearance of female virtue very well, the look of a modest, well-behaved, pure girl – it was exactly what a girl should be, it was the making of her. But this letter struck another note, and it aroused Helene’s longings. Helene kissed the lobe of her elder sister’s ear, she sucked it hard and the more the hot tears flowed down her sister’s cheeks, unrestrained, the more mindlessly did Helene suck, as if this sucking of an earlobe and her sister’s salty trickle of tears were the only way of ignoring those tears, of not having to say or think anything. Helene and Martha sat side by side for a while, face to face. It was some time before they were able to think properly again. Martha’s weeping, the relief that had set it off and was the sign of it, made Helene guess how much Martha must have been suffering. Martha had been exchanging romantic letters for the last two years with her friend far away in Berlin, hadn’t she? And although Leontine was unhappy in her marriage, she enjoyed the nightclubs and theatres of the city. Only a few days ago, when Helene had still been waiting in hope and uncertainty for a letter from Aunt Fanny, she had been unable to resist secretly purloining a letter addressed to Martha. It was from Leontine in Berlin. Helene had taken her chance to open the letter skilfully over the steaming kettle while Martha was on late shift at the hospital. Dear sweet friend, Leontine began. I can’t tell you how badly I miss you. It’s not so very often that my course means I must go on studying until late into the night, and I’m already giving the younger students lectures on pathology, but the weekends are mine. Yesterday we went dancing. Antonie brought her friend Hedwig with her, I showed them my new outfit – stolen from Lorenz’s wardrobe. My friends loved it, but I don’t wear his trousers outside the house. I’ve made myself a new dress for when I go out. Antonie was wearing a lovely dress too, a cream-coloured tea gown. We admired her in it so much. Knee-length and unwaisted! She danced beautifully in that tea gown – she sent us out of our minds, and enjoyed it. What can be more exciting than the hint of a waist and a hip when the whole cut of the dress pretends there’s no such thing underneath? She was wearing a silk peony at her neckline. We competed to dance with her. Oh, my beautiful tall friend, I keep thinking of you all the time. Do you remember how we danced half the night away in our attic? You sweet, dear girl, I’m with you so often in my thoughts. It goes to my heart to think I won’t be able to come and see you this Christmas! Lorenz won’t hear of it. He thinks it would be an unnecessary expense; after all, he says, my father is comfortable with my sister Mimi’s family and no one at home misses me. Lorenz always has to be in the right, of course. Nothing he says ever admits the faintest doubt. I tell you, he ought to have been a lawyer. He’d have been really at home in the law courts. Our domestic life together isn’t comfortable, not with the righteous glances he gives the world, narrowing his eyes like a lizard’s. You can imagine how the things he says annoy me. I could always contradict him, but then I suddenly find I couldn’t care less about his remarks, and I usually leave the room and even the house without answering him. He loves to have the last word – well, he’s left alone with it more and more often. Does that satisfy him? Luckily we don’t see much of each other. He sleeps in the library and every morning I tell him his snoring can be heard all over the house. I wish that were so, but to tell you the truth he snores as little as you and I. However, I’d rather have him sleeping at the other end of the apartment so that we meet as little as possible. I’m going to the theatre with Antonie this evening. The Terra Cinema in Hardenbergstrasse has closed and a theatre’s going to be opened there in October instead. The production of Miss Sara Sampson is famous all over the city. I’m sure Lucie H?flich must be simply wonderful as Marwood. But why do I tell you these things, my dearest, when you’ve never seen her on the stage? What wouldn’t I give to be going to the theatre with you this evening. Don’t be jealous, my sweet honey-tongued love. Antonie’s getting married in April, she says she’s very much in love. I saw her fiancé at a distance once, he didn’t look exactly elegant – a burly, broad-shouldered fellow! Just the opposite of delicate, pretty Antonie. How did Helene’s exams go? Give my love to the little one. Love and kisses to you, from Leo.
She signed it just Leo, like a man’s name, with a long inky curve hinting at the rest of the name, but it was certainly Leontine’s handwriting. Helene did not show that she had read Leontine’s letter to Martha, but now, days later, when the girls sat face to face over Aunt Fanny’s invitation, with Martha crying over it and laughing for joy the next moment, Helene was sure there was nothing Martha would rather do than pack a suitcase at once and leave for Berlin, to stay there for ever. In fact, Bautzen had a large railway station of its own, but what did that matter? Helene often went to meet her professor’s colleagues there on his behalf, other doctors and professors from all over Germany, and Bautzen station couldn’t properly be called provincial. Railway carriages built in the carriage factory here were sent halfway round the world, and some of them must certainly go to Berlin. However, Aunt Fanny couldn’t be blamed for thinking of Bautzen as a village and she showed extraordinary generosity with those first-class tickets. To think that neither Martha nor Helene had even been on a train at all!
One afternoon in January, when darkness had already fallen, the professor of surgery asked young Nurse Helene to come to his consulting room. He told her he intended to go to Dresden for a week in March. He was meeting colleagues at the university there, he said, they were planning a jointly written book on the latest developments in medicine. He asked Helene if she would go with him. It would be to her advantage, he said. He didn’t want to hold out too many hopes, he added to the fifteen-year-old, but he could imagine her as his assistant some day. Her nimble fingers on the typewriter and her knowledge of shorthand impressed him. She was clever and gifted, he would feel it an honour to take her to his meeting with his academic colleagues. He expected she’d never been in a motor car, had she? His grave gaze made Helene shy; she felt her throat tighten. There was nothing to be afraid of, said the professor, smiling now, she would only have to take the minutes of a meeting now and then, his old secretary couldn’t travel any more because of water on her legs and he couldn’t ask too much of her. Helene felt herself blushing. Only a little while ago this offer would have seemed a wonderful opportunity. But today she had other plans, not, of course, that the professor could have known anything about them.
We’re going to leave Bautzen in March. It burst out of Helene. Both of us, Martha and me. And when the professor looked at her in silence, as if he didn’t understand what she had said, she sought for more words. We’re going to Berlin; we have an aunt there who’s asked us to stay.
Now the professor stood up, and with his monocle in his eye turned to the large Pharus map on the wall. Berlin? He sounded as if he didn’t know the city and had to look for it on the map.
Helene nodded. Their aunt had sent tickets for the train from Dresden to Berlin, she said, they just had to find the money for the railway journey to Dresden. If the professor would be so very kind as to, well, to take them to Dresden in his car, she would happily take minutes for him during his meetings with his colleagues and wait until those meetings were over before travelling on by train to Berlin. Could I ask when your meetings there are to take place?
The professor of surgery could not share Helene’s pleasure. He did not answer her question about the date, but instead warned her against acting thoughtlessly. And when Helene assured him that they weren’t acting thoughtlessly, on the contrary, she and Martha had thought of nothing else for a long time, he became brusque.
Young ladies ought not to overestimate themselves, he warned her. She and her sister were the daughters of a Protestant family of good standing, after all, and their father had been a well-regarded citizen of Bautzen. Their poor mother, so far as he knew, was on her own and in need of care. What could induce them to turn their backs so irresponsibly on the mother who had borne them?
Helene swayed back and forth on her heels. She reminded the professor that Nurse Leontine was living in Berlin too and studying medicine there, largely thanks to his recommendation. That was probably the wrong thing to say, for now the professor lost his temper. Thanks to my recommendation? he cried. You’re an ungrateful rabble; you don’t know how to behave. Let alone show gratitude. It was more than obvious, he said, that Leontine had not married for love. He had heard every word when she told another nurse that it was a clever idea. Not a good idea, no, a clever idea, she had said! Just imagine that! Was she trying to make him, her professor, look ridiculous, even make him jealous? Perhaps her veneration of him had gone slightly to little Leontine’s head! A clever idea? It would have been a cleverer idea for Leontine to stay at his side. What useless trouble we go to when we let women study! Women, he said, have no business to set their sights on a career calling for stamina, strength and concentration, indeed for putting mental and physical pressure on other human beings. Women would always rank second, simply because in his profession only the best could do research and practise medicine. The professor was getting out of breath. A keen mind, it all depends on that, he gasped out rather than stating it. So why would a woman study? Leontine had been an outstanding nurse, really excellent. It was a shame; who could have guessed what she’d do? It seemed as if she had actually betrayed him, he said, putting his recommendation in her pocket, just like that, and going off to get married in Berlin!
Helene buried her face in her hands. She would never have expected the professor to harbour such a grudge against Leontine. Whenever he referred to her in front of the other nurses and the doctors he spoke with great respect, paying tribute to Nurse Leontine’s abilities. Helene had thought she heard pride in his voice when he said that his little nurse, as he affectionately called her, was now studying in Berlin.
Take your hands away, Helene, he cried, reaching out his own hands to remove hers from her face so that she must look him in the eye. As he did so, the backs of his hands brushed against her breasts so roughly that Helene found it hard to assume he didn’t notice. Now he pulled her up from her chair, his hands either side of her head, pressing so firmly against her ears that it hurt. What are you thinking of, Nurse? Do you suppose you could ever be better off than here at my side, in my ward? You’re allowed to hold my instruments when I make incisions in my patients; I even let you stitch up the wound when my own wife had her operation. What more do you want?
Helene would have liked to answer his question, but she felt numb and still inside.
Now the professor let go of her and started pacing rapidly up and down. Helene could feel how her ears hurt, how they were burning. She had admired him ever since she had first been present at an operation and had seen his hands moving calmly, surely, almost gently, as if he were playing a musical instrument rather than handling bones and sinews, growths and arteries, ever since that first sight of his hands when she observed the fine, precise movements of the individual fingers. At first she had been afraid of him, because of her admiration and his abilities; later she learned to value him, because he never misused those abilities to humiliate a colleague, because he was always at the service of his patients and the art of medicine. Helene had never heard an angry word from him, let alone seen him make a rough gesture. Even when they had been working for ten hours without a break – once it was fifteen hours, through half the night, after the accident at the railway carriage factory – even then the professor had seemed to preserve a godlike calm that made her think of his kindness as well as his self-confidence. Now the professor turned the light on his desk so that it shone into Helene’s eyes, dazzling her.
Sheer high spirits? asked the professor, as if assessing a case. No, probably not, he answered himself. He moved towards her, cupping her chin in his hand. Thoughtlessness? To be sure. So saying, the professor put his head on one side and his voice softened. Perhaps stupidity? As if he were wondering whether this diagnosis might help Helene.
Helene lowered her eyes. Please forgive me.
Forgive you? Stupidity is the last thing I could ever forgive. Tell me honestly, what do you expect to find in Berlin, child?
Helene looked at the floor, which was polished and shiny. We . . . we, she stammered, searching for words to say more than she could clearly formulate in her mind, well, the way things are now, rising prices, Professor. People want to protest to the town council, they want work and bread. There’ve been rumours that people here at the hospital will lose their jobs too. Surely you’ve heard that, Professor? Well, Martha and I will have opportunities open to us in Berlin, please understand, we’ll have opportunities. We want to work there . . . and study – well, perhaps.
Study – perhaps? You have no idea what that means, child. Do you know what commitment study calls for, what self-control, how demanding studies are? You’re not up to it. I’m sorry to have to say it so frankly, child, but I really would like to warn you. Indeed, I must warn you. And the expense, you have no notion of the expense. Who is going to keep you while you study? You’re not the sort of girl who’d plan to make your way by going on the streets.
No, certainly not, Professor. Helene could think of nothing more to say. She felt ashamed.
Certainly not, murmured the professor. His eyes went to her wide, smooth face, which could surely hide nothing; his look seemed heavy, pressing down on her, she wanted to say something in reply, to ward off his glance, but then she saw a desire in it that made her look away quickly, and she allowed her tears to flow. She took her handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed her eyes.
Helene. The professor’s gentle voice caressed her ear. Don’t cry, child. You have no one, I know that. No one to care for you and protect you as only a father could.
These words made Helene cry harder than ever. She didn’t want to, but now she was sobbing, and she allowed the professor to place his hand on her shoulder. He immediately put his arm round her.
Stop that, he begged. Helene, forgive me for being so stern with you. Helene. The professor now cautiously pressed her to him. Helene felt his beard touching her hair as he bent slightly and laid his mouth and nose on her head, as if they were man and wife and belonged together. As man and wife. It was the first time a man had been so close to her. He smelled of tobacco and vermouth, and perhaps of masculinity. Helene noticed the trembling sensation in her breast, her heart was racing. She felt hot and cold, then sick. She must have forgotten to breathe. Finally she thought of nothing except that he must let go of her now, because otherwise she would have to push him away with all her might, which was the right and proper thing for a young girl to do.
And he let go. Quite suddenly, just like that. He took a step back and turned away. Without looking at her, he said in a dry tone of voice: I will take you to Dresden, Helene, you and your sister. You say you have the tickets for the rest of your journey?
Helene nodded.
The professor went behind his desk and adjusted the stack of books on it.
Of course I’ll take the minutes for you in Dresden, Helene made haste to say. Her voice was low.
What? The professor looked enquiringly at her. Minutes? Oh, that’s what you mean. No, Nurse Helene, you will not take any minutes for me, not now.
Over the next few weeks the professor seldom asked to have Nurse Helene with him at the operating table. And he dictated no reports and letters to her. Everything outside the operating theatre was done under the matron’s strict supervision. Helene cleaned the instruments, washed and fed the patients in their beds, emptied bedpans. She scraped the furry coating off old people’s tongues and dressed their wounds. As she had not yet been asked to return the key to the poison cupboard, she managed to abstract tiny quantities of morphine for Martha. Through the swing door, she heard the screaming and whimpering of women in the delivery room, and on Sundays she watched them showing the snow in the garden to their newborn babies. The midwives were firmly in charge of the maternity ward. If Helene had wanted to stay here, she would probably have gone over there to offer her services. But then if she had wanted to stay here she would still be standing by the operating table, handing the professor his instruments, taking the needles and stitching up stomachs. Helene scrubbed the floors. The advantage was that she was working with Martha more often now, and as they mopped the corridors they could talk about their future and Berlin. Despite the fact that Helene took almost no further part in operations, and the professor had brought in a new nurse to help him, he did not leave them in any doubt that he would keep his promise. They just had to wait for March to come, and then it would soon be the end of the month.