by Dörte Hansen
“Everything’s fine, Mama. I’m good.”
“That’s nice.” Marlene was a master of the pause. “I’m also fine, incidentally.”
“I would have asked you, Mama.”
Anne had inadvertently stood up again. She picked up a cushion, dropped it on the floor, and kicked it across the living room.
“And what do you mean by everything’s good?” Marlene asked. “Does it mean you’ve finally quit that stupid job?”
Anne took the second cushion from the sofa and kicked it against the wall.
“No, Mama, that’s not what it means.”
She closed her eyes and slowly counted to three. There was a brief pause for effect on the other end of the line, then a deep intake of breath, followed by an exasperated sigh. Then, wearily, and almost in a whisper: “Isn’t that a little beneath you, Anne?”
She should’ve hung up at that point, normally she did, but yesterday obviously wasn’t her day.
“Mama, cut the crap!”
“Watch your language, Anne.…”
“It’s not my fault my life’s an embarrassment to you.”
A moment or two lapsed before Marlene was able to speak again. “You had it all, Anne.”
* * *
The other girls were always really nervous before the recitals. Pale with fear, they’d sit next to their piano teachers, awaiting their turns. Then, with their heads hanging low, they’d drag themselves up the few steps onto the stage, as if ascending the scaffold.
Anne had loved it, though. The churning in her stomach when her name was called, then mounting the stairs onto the stage with her curls bouncing, swinging herself onto the piano stool, tilting her head back briefly—and off she’d go.
“Of course you think it’s great, you always win,” her best friend Catherine had said without a trace of envy. She was simply stating a fact. Anne’s first place at Young Musicians was more or less routine. In regional, state, and national competitions, it was a pretty bad day if she got second or third place, and then she’d be so annoyed with herself that she’d torment herself even more when practicing afterward.
In the first three years, Marlene had taught Anne herself, and after that she went along to all of her competitions. There were large ice cream sundaes after her concerts, and as Anne got older, big shopping trips, arm in arm. They were so very happy.
* * *
It still hurt to think about it. And about her father as well, his smile, his hands on her shoulders when she came home with a first prize, large hands that betrayed his origins as a farmer’s son. “Potato-digger hands,” Marlene used to say, and on good days it sounded affectionate.
It seemed then that it didn’t matter to her that her husband had climbed the social ladder. He was a country boy who may have lost his farmyard smell in libraries and lecture halls, but whose r occasionally slipped to the front of his mouth, where he rolled it as they do in Low German. Marlene winced every time she heard it. Like a farmhand.
But Anne loved it because at those moments Enno Hove the physics professor was approachable as he seldom was otherwise. Papa with the stress on the first syllable.
* * *
“She gets her talent from me!”
Marlene had renounced her music career when she’d gotten pregnant at twenty-one. Or that was her version of events at least.
But it wasn’t a great sacrifice, Grandma Hildegard always added. “Let’s just say it was a small sacrifice. Marlene and a career, good Lord!”
But Anne seemed to have what it takes. Not even Hildegard von Kamcke doubted that. So, a magnet school with a focus on music, naturally, her first concerts in schools and at cultural centers, and then for her fourteenth birthday, her own grand piano.
It was almost too large for the living room, a Bechstein, secondhand, but her parents still had to take out a loan. They stood listening arm in arm as Anne played her expensive instrument for the first time, the black varnish as serious and solemn as a promise.
Thomas, her younger brother, was seven at the time. He was just about to enter second grade and had four loose teeth. Oddly enough she still remembered that.
Anne had shown him his first pieces on the piano very early on. Thomas on her lap, his fat little fingers on the keys. He learned fast. Soon they were playing duets.
By eight he had caught up with her.
At nine he overtook her.
At his audition at the conservatory, the assessor had a hard time remaining composed. Their mother was blissfully happy, their father almost timid in his reverence. A child prodigy!
The whole world was lit up by the radiance of this child.
You had it all, Anne.
First she had it all and then nothing at all. Lights out. A total eclipse of the sun at sixteen. No one noticed a talented child when a gifted one entered the room.
* * *
After the Pied Piper routine, she ran to get Leon from day care, but she still got there much too late.
Red-faced, she crept along to the room where Leon was playing on his own in the Lego corner, his coat already on, while the preschool teacher swept under the lunch table. She greeted Anne with raised eyebrows.
Anne had gotten used to simply shouting Have a nice evening! into the room instead of apologizing. She grabbed Leon and carried him out quickly, like a ticking time bomb that could go off at any moment.
She bought a roll for him and a cappuccino to go for herself, then pushed his stroller in the direction of Fischers Park, joining the trek of Ottensen’s Organic Moms, who streamed out of their town houses every day to air out their offspring. Cappuccinos in hand, they carried their shopping from the organic supermarket in the nets of their premium strollers, whose pure-wool foot muffs each contained a small child holding something soggy made from whole grain.
Like everything else in her life, this also seemed to have simply befallen her somehow: being a mom in a hip urban neighborhood.
It was a cold afternoon with a sky as gray as stone. They wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer in Fischers Park, or the Fischi as all the mothers called it. But Leon needed some fresh air after spending the morning cooped up in the day care center.
His “Beetle” group didn’t get outside often enough. The topic would be raised yet again at the parents’ evening she had no intention of attending.
Anne lifted Leon out of the stroller and gave him his Playmobil digger, sat down on a bench, and watched him march over to the sandbox, where a small boy was sitting with a turtle sand mold. He had already produced a considerable number of reptiles and intended to populate the rest of the sandbox with even more turtles, it seemed.
Leon stood at the edge of the sandbox with his digger and was clearly anxious about going in. Anne looked away. It was better not to interfere.
Two benches over, a woman was coaxing her daughter up the steps of the slide, rung by rung. The mother was wearing a parka with a number of drawstrings and zips and a pair of Campers.
Most of the mothers at the playground wore these shoes. They left long, curling oval patterns in the sandy surface of the playground whenever the women, like good-natured family dogs, retrieved the pacifiers and drinking bottles that their small children threw out of their strollers.
Leon was still standing at the edge of the sandbox. He had swung one leg over but hadn’t gotten any farther because Turtle Boy was defending his territory loudly.
“You can’t come in here! It’s only for turtles!”
Leon glanced briefly at Anne, and when she nodded, he placed his other foot in the sandbox and put down his digger. Turtle Boy started to scream and tried to push Leon away.
Anne saw a pregnant woman struggle up from one of the benches and walk over to the sandpit, smiling. She bent down to Leon and cocked her head slightly to one side: “Hey, listen, could you maybe dig someplace else? Is that okay? Look, Alexander was here first, and he’s making such lovely turtles right now.”
Anne leapt to her feet and headed over to the
sandbox.
She knew herself well enough to realize that she wouldn’t win a war of words with one of Hamburg-Ottensen’s super-moms, so, without saying a word, she joined Leon in the sandbox, flattening a few turtles in the process, sadly, and destroying a few more as she knelt down in the sand to kiss her son.
“Right, Leon, get digging. Or shall I do it?” She pretended she was going to take the digger from him. Leon laughed, yanked his toy away from her, and started to dig.
Anne sat down at the edge of the sandpit and watched him.
Turtle Boy’s mother stared at her with disgust. Her son’s bawling, meanwhile, was drowning out all other sounds in the playground, so Anne couldn’t make out what she was saying. She just saw the woman yank her screaming child out of the sandbox, console him as she put him into his stroller, then take off.
They had spoiled the day for poor little Alexander, his pregnant mommy, and—very likely—the unborn child in her tummy too.
Anne hoped they wouldn’t turn up at the next Musical Mouse open house.
3
Staying Put
TWO WOMEN AND ONLY ONE stove never bodes well.
Ida and Hildegard had known that, and in a rare show of unity, they’d insisted on a kitchen with a double hot plate for Ida Eckhoff’s mother-in-law apartment.
* * *
But things got pretty bad regardless.
They turned the house into a battlefield.
Every morning, Hildegard drank her tea out of Ida’s Hutschenreuther fine china collectible cups that were too expensive for everyday use. One by one they lost their handles, their gold rims faded due to thoughtless washing up—or they shattered on the kitchen’s terrazzo floor.
When Ida pulled up weeds from her flower bed, in front of her window, the stock plants beneath her daughter-in-law’s window also disappeared, and when Hildegard scrubbed the white wooden fence in front of the house and repainted it, the following day Ida stood on the street with a pail and brush and painted it all over again.
Hildegard invited the neighboring women over for afternoon coffee, set the big table with Ida’s silverware, and forgot to set a place for her mother-in-law. And without saying a word, she took down Ida’s rose-patterned curtains, cut them up into dust rags, and hung up new ones.
And Ida, who hadn’t yet signed the farm over to Karl, who still had the say and the money, would fire the seasonal workers Hildegard hired at harvesttime and take on new ones. And, on her double burner, she cooked proper Altland lunches so the pickers didn’t have to eat the miserable blintzes, pierogies, or potato dumplings that her Prussian daughter-in-law cobbled together.
* * *
Karl, who was caught between the fronts and constantly had to dodge bullets from both sides, seemed to be impervious. He whistled quietly to himself and remained in his own world, which was peaceful.
In the winter, he sat outside on the bench without a jacket or a cap, watching the snow fall. He’d stretch out his hand, let the snowflakes land on it, and examine them through a magnifying glass until they melted away. Vera sometimes watched him from the window. His lips would move, but she couldn’t make out whether he was talking to the snowflakes or himself.
In the summer, he hung a swing from a branch of the linden tree for Vera, but most of the time he sat on it himself, smoking and rocking gently back and forth, looking down at the grass, which was teeming with ants. When Vera arrived, he would push her high into the air until her feet touched the leaves at the top of the tree, and he’d only stop when she’d had enough.
Karl also made her a pair of stilts in the shed, and he made another pair for Hildegard, who found them childish at first and didn’t want to try them out. But then she practiced to the point where she almost always beat Vera whenever they raced.
Hildegard laughing—that rarely happened.
* * *
Vera learned to make herself invisible. She’d vanish in the barn or play with the cats in the hayloft whenever the grenades started flying around the house. Sometimes she went over to Heinrich Luehrs’s place and helped him pick dandelions for his rabbits, German Giants that earned him good money when they were ready for slaughter.
“Stalingrad over at yours again, huh?” Hinni would ask. Word had gotten around that the walls shook fairly often at the Eckhoffs’, but it wasn’t any different at the Luehrses’ place either.
Hinni’s father was on the bottle. They never knew what state he’d come home in. It was best when he was just slightly tipsy and wanted to embrace the world and kiss his wife. But two more schnapps and the Luehrses’ place was Stalingrad too.
Vera didn’t say any more than she had to at home. You could make too many mistakes when speaking. Ida spoke only Low German with Vera and Karl, and Vera knew how much Hildegard hated that. When Vera answered in Low German, her mother had to be out of earshot. And if she answered in standard German, Ida would turn away. So, for the most part, Vera tried to get by with nodding, shaking her head, or shrugging her shoulders. That was the safest bet.
When Hildegard wasn’t around, Vera often went across the hall to Ida’s apartment. They’d sit in her small kitchen playing cards and eating rock-hard cookies, which Vera dunked in her milk.
Sometimes Ida would show Vera her treasures, the traditional Altland costume with all the silver chains and filigree button balls, and Vera was allowed to try the black bonnet on carefully and admire herself in the mirror.
But you needed light-colored eyes for the traditional costume, Ida Eckhoff thought, so she’d take the bonnet off the child again quickly.
She showed Vera how to do embroidery, cross-stitch and flat stitch, and for her ninth birthday she gave her a silver bracelet that Vera wasn’t allowed to show her mother.
Vera hid it in an old can up in the hayloft, where she also kept the small amber necklace that belonged to her grandmother in Königsberg.
And she made certain that her mother never heard her say Grandma Ida.
* * *
On a cold morning shortly after Vera’s ninth birthday, Hildegard got six farmhands to drag out the massive carved-oak armoire that had stood in one place for two hundred years, to make space for a piano.
That morning, Ida Eckhoff lost what remained of her self-control and gave her daughter-in-law two hard slaps across the face.
Hildegard struck back immediately, then packed suitcases for her child and herself, put on her coat, and went and got Karl. “It’s your mother or me.”
And stiff-legged Karl limped into the kitchen to Ida, sat down at the table next to his mother, took her hand, and looked out through the window at the orchard. He stroked the back of her hand with his thumb over and over, as though trying to smooth out her wrinkled skin, and didn’t look at her, just stared out the window, and when he finally spoke, he was hoarse.
Then he started to cry.
Ida Eckhoff sat next to her son and didn’t know what to do. He had placed his arms on the table and was wailing like a child. She didn’t recognize him, now that he’d started talking to snowflakes and trying to escape from the Russians in the night. He was just a cardboard cutout of himself. He hadn’t gotten a leg or an arm shot off, but pretty much everything else.
This hoose is mine ain, but what did she want in this house any longer?
* * *
That evening, Hildegard played piano. Mozart’s “Turkish March,” over and over. She pounded the keys, floored the pedals, hammered her instrument as though she wanted to demolish it.
Hildegard played her new piano like a Katyusha rocket launcher, so no one heard Ida go out into the hallway and pick up the stool, fetch the clothesline from the closet, then climb up the stairs to the attic. Nor did they hear her throw the line over a beam and secure it tightly, then climb up onto the stool, check the knot, and jump.
Karl heard the stool fall over and thought the marten had gotten back into the house.
Vera heard the clatter and hoped it wasn’t the two cats she’d hidden in the hayloft.<
br />
Hildegard was playing the piano, so she didn’t hear Vera creep out of bed, walk barefoot through the hallway, and tiptoe up the stairs.
Grandma Ida was wearing her traditional costume and seemed to be dancing in the air.
* * *
Hildegard didn’t calm down any after Ida Eckhoff was in the ground. Her anger simply changed direction, hurtling unchecked at Karl and Vera, both of whom became increasingly stooped in the gales of her perpetual storm.
Vera eventually walked tall again when she was fourteen and her mother got pregnant and ran off with the father of her little girl, who was called Marlene.
But Karl never stood tall again. For the rest of his days, he walked around like someone who’d been beaten. His shoulders were constantly hunched over as though he expected to be struck again at any moment.
The little that had remained of Karl after the war eventually snapped completely in Hildegard’s hurricane.
* * *
After Hildegard had cleared off to the Hamburg suburb of Blankenese with her new child and her architect, Ida Eckhoff’s sister saw to it that the livestock was sold and the land was leased.
She put the money into a savings account and allocated her nephew and his refugee child what they needed to live on each month. She almost felt sorry for the girl, with her mother gone and a father who was like a child.
But Karl blew beautiful round smoke rings into the crown of the old linden, he got on well with snowflakes and with birds even when they devoured the cherries, and when Vera got out of school in the summer, she’d sit next to him on the bench and they’d peel potatoes together.
* * *
Karl gave Vera his old shotgun, his binoculars, and the backpack he’d used for hunting, and she very quickly learned how to shoot.
At school, the others had long since stopped teasing her. Not because she learned better than most, that didn’t matter, but because they knew what would happen if they called Vera Eckhoff a Polack brat. Alfred Giese was the first to find out, and the last to try it. With his broken nose, he looked even more stupid than before.
For him school ended after the eighth grade, but Vera, the Polack brat, was a straight-A student at the girls’ high school and Karl went to her graduation in the assembly hall when she got her high school diploma and he almost sat up straight in his suit that was much too baggy. She wore her silver bracelet and her amber necklace, and in the evening she celebrated with a few girlfriends from her class in Ida Eckhoff’s hallway.