by Dörte Hansen
* * *
Vera wasn’t fooled by its scarred facade and its disheveled thatched roof: the house might be under the weather, but it would still be standing long after she had departed through the wedding door, feetfirst.
In the evenings, when it got dark, Vera let her dogs into the kitchen and the three of them sat as though they were keeping vigil over a sick person.
4
Fine Woodworking
BERND ALWAYS OPENED HIS CHATS with his staff with the same question, and it was best not to respond: “Why are we sitting here?” He preferred to answer it himself. “We’re sitting here, Anne, because I’ve received a pretty strongly worded e-mail complaint.”
He had printed it out, and it was lying next to him on his desk, two and a half pages covered in exclamation marks, parentheses, and question marks.
The mother of Rice Cake Girl, of course, expressing total disbelief that her little Clara-Delphine wasn’t allowed to blow into a flute with her mouth full during the open house.
Anne looked out the window. The large poplar at the entrance had caught a thin green plastic bag in its bare branches. The wind was tugging at it as if it were torturing an animal simply for the fun of it.
Bernd took off his glasses, placed his elbows on the desk, put his hands together, and pressed the tip of his nose to them. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was a bad atmosphere at the open house. Anne didn’t look at him again until he posed another question:
“What is your problem?”
His verbal warnings were always carefully orchestrated. They started off quietly enough, but any minute now he would work himself into a lather for a bit, molto vivace, which was still bearable. The really bad part came after that.
It all really got to Bernd. No one ever realized the strength required day in, day out for this kind of work and now this crap here—the aggro, the negativity, all the bad vibes. It was making him ill, burning him out. He was going to start crying again. He looked up slightly, closed his eyes, and shook his head in slow motion. Grave.
The flood of tears was as integral to his conflict management discussion as the denim shirt was to the open house.
* * *
The problem was her temper. Foaming rogue waves, enormous breakers, great whoppers. An ocean of rage and a leak in her ship.
The children who came to her classes couldn’t help the fact that they were called Clara-Delphine or Nepomuk, or that their parents carried them like trophies through the streets of Ottensen and dragged them from one early learning program to the next.
When they were brought to Musical Mouse at the age of three, they sucked their recorders quite happily and thrashed about on the xylophone and keyboards with aimless enthusiasm. But, after eight weeks at most, their parents would come and ask to chat about their prospects.
They always turned up with nice, self-deprecating smiles, but ambition protruded from their smiles like a cold foot from a blanket that’s much too short.
Of course, the music school was supposed to be fun above all else, absolutely, but perhaps the keyboard wasn’t quite right for Clara-Delphine?
Anne never contradicted them at this point. She would immediately suggest a complicated exotic instrument—the harp or flugelhorn, so as not to underchallenge your child—and the parents would go off quite happy.
This was also sanctioned by Bernd, who valued the fact that the tutors of the unusual instruments were kept busy as well.
Musical Mouse was a dream factory. The school kids came in as normally gifted little children and left as amazing musical talents. It was all a matter of labeling. Bernd earned a ton of money with his mumbo jumbo, and any qualms he may have had were held in check. Anne sometimes asked herself how the little girls on harps or the little boys on flugelhorns would fare later.
At some point they would meet another child their own age who really could play, and the realization would be painful.
* * *
In the beginning, she had dreams that were as bad as actual crimes: an incurable cancer for Thomas, an accident, a coma, murder. In these dreams her brother would disintegrate, disappear, pass away, and then everything would be good again until she woke up and was dismayed to find he was still there and was still outshining her. And then she’d be alarmed again because she had been so happy in the dream.
When she was awake, it was impossible to hate him. Not even Anne could bring herself to that. He was a boy who never demanded anything because he already had everything: his inner life was bright and cheerful; there were no dust bunnies lurking in the corners, no spiders in his cellar. And he knew nothing of the spiritual abysses of others.
Anne could play the grand piano only when she was alone in the house, and even then she would break off in the middle of pieces. She could hear herself, after all, and could feel her fingers catching at the difficult spots, which Thomas managed with ease—indeed, seemed to dream his way through.
And even if she made it all the way to the end of a difficult Beethoven sonata without making any mistakes, when she played well and with confidence and with feeling!, as her piano teacher requested, it sounded different from when Thomas played it, no matter how much she practiced, no matter how much she loved the piece. It was as if the music didn’t love her back.
When Thomas sat at the grand piano, the notes seemed to fly to him; he attracted them as some people attract kids or cats. “You know how that feels, don’t you, Annie, when you’re not playing the music but the music’s playing you?”
He wasn’t an enemy, he was her brother, and he understood nothing.
Oh, to smash the lid of the piano down on his hands and to hear his fingers snap! Some dreams were very difficult to shake off.
The black grand piano was no longer hers. They never spoke about this, but Anne could sense it and she handed it over, just as people might hand over a foster child when the real parents turned up.
She tried not to notice Marlene’s expression as she crept up to her room while Thomas was playing, or her father’s false cheerfulness when they were sitting at the dining table in the evening—there were always flowers, always candles—and he realized at some point or other that everything had revolved around Thomas yet again, around some concert, a recital, a rehearsal.
Then he’d clear his throat, fold his napkin, rest his elbows on the table, and smile at her. “And what about my big girl, how was your day?”
And she would just make something up—it was never true, but no one ever noticed.
No one noticed either that her house lay in ruins and that she had to climb over ashes every day.
* * *
At sixteen, too late in fact, she went up to the attic to get her flute, her first instrument, which had long been forgotten, and Marlene immediately found her a teacher, the best, Anne!, who worked with her three times a week. She practiced until she could no longer sleep due to the pain in her elbows.
Two years later she could play Bach’s Partita in A Minor for solo flute perfectly, and she passed the music school audition with flute as her main instrument and piano as her second.
Thomas picked flowers from the garden for her; her father wanted to celebrate as though he was proud of her, and he really seemed to believe it. As if it were some kind of a success. As if her little brother hadn’t just made his first big appearance at the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra’s Laeiszhalle.
Marlene smiled and embraced her, but she didn’t look her in the eye.
* * *
After five semesters, Anne returned the flute to the attic and put her sheet music in the recycling. She lay down on the shiny, herringbone-patterned parquet floor in front of the piano and listened to Thomas play Schumann.
She suffered from incurable homesickness for a home that no longer existed. She was a displaced person who didn’t know where she belonged.
She didn’t tell them about the carpentry apprenticeship until she had already signed up, a few days after her twenty-first birthday. Her fathe
r, who rarely raised his voice, gave a loud lecture off the top of his head about accidents with veneer presses and mortise chisels, about fingers severed in circular saws, eyeballs pierced by splinters, crushed toes, irreparable hearing damage, and slipped disks; one of his brothers was a carpenter and had had his share of injuries over the years.
By this point, Marlene was worn down and simply shook her head wearily.
* * *
Carsten Drewe, master carpenter in Hamburg Barmbek, preferred to take on female trainees. He didn’t fare so well with males and his general problem with men applied specifically to his father, a robust eighty-year-old who fired up the circular saw at seven on the dot every morning. When Carsten went into the workshop around seven thirty and saw the old man cutting particleboards to size for him, he’d already had it.
Carsten dreamed of solid wood, of fitted kitchens made of native sycamore, of curved oak staircases and oiled cherry chests of drawers, but he made his living from veneer and vinyl window frames. It wore him down when his customers, who didn’t have the foggiest idea, wanted to have their old pine floorboards replaced with laminate; he didn’t always manage to remain objective because this whole goddamned flat-pack business totally sickened him.
Above the workshop was a dusty room where the trainees could live rent-free. It smelled of sawdust and wood oil and had as much stuff piled up in it as a furniture warehouse because this was where Carsten stored the chairs, bedside cabinets, and bureaus that he made. Most of the space was taken up by a massive four-poster bed made of wild oak, his masterpiece—No glue! It could be dismantled! Not a single screw!—with an inlaid rosette on the headboard and heavy red velvet curtains that his mother had made for him. The bed looked as though the heir to some throne was to be born in it.
“You can make the place quite cozy,” Carsten told her, but she’d have to go out into the yard if she wanted to smoke. His parents lived right next to the workshop, and though Karl-Heinz Drewe was a kindhearted soul, the fun stopped if the fire regulations were broken.
* * *
“Look after yourself. Keep in touch.” Marlene didn’t want to hear any more about Anne’s childish plans. She wouldn’t even go look at the dive in Barmbek in which her daughter had decided to live.
She helped her with her backpack, slammed the car trunk shut, then turned around and went back into the house. There was nothing to be done. The collateral damage of a prodigy, surely. That was how she saw it anyhow, and the prodigy was standing in the hallway, crying inconsolably.
Professor Hove drove his daughter to the Drewe firm himself. He had at least taken off his tie. He shook hands with Carsten and his parents, and while Drewe Senior showed him round the workshop, he inconspicuously checked out the safety arrangements for the circular table saw. The blade guard, the crosscut fence, the push stick, everything was there, and all the Drewes seemed to be physically intact as well. That was something at least. Even the room above the workshop wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, and that was just for the time being, Hertha Drewe had said. Carsten was going to move out of his parents’ apartment soon, “and then the kid can move in there.” She’d baked bee sting cake and they broke for coffee at three as usual.
Anne’s father sat in his white shirt on the corner bench between Karl-Heinz and Carsten, and it slowly dawned on him that an apprenticeship with the Drewe firm was also an adoption of sorts. Quite absurd perhaps, but no cause for alarm.
Hertha put one piece of cake after another on his plate but he didn’t seem to notice. Nor did he see his coffee cup being filled over and over again, and he didn’t hear that at this kitchen table with the checkered wax tablecloth his r’s skept slipping to the front. The r was rolling freely and no one paid any attention to it but Anne, who was sitting perfectly still, dabbing at the crumbs on her plate with her finger, focusing her eyes on the onion pattern and trying not to cry.
Before he got into his car, Enno Hove gripped his daughter’s shoulders with his potato-picker hands and shook her a little awkwardly. “You’re not on the other side of the world, Anne.”
But of course she was. The Drewe family scattered when Anne started to cry.
* * *
The training at the Drewe firm was an apprenticeship for life. There were family therapy sessions on a daily basis. Father and son could go three days without talking to one another if Carsten lost his cool at the sight of a laminate wall unit.
“I wouldn’t build a crap storage rack like that even if I was stoned.” That wasn’t exactly what the Drewe firm’s regular customers wanted to hear when they came to have their living room furniture refurbished.
Karl-Heinz also regularly went ballistic when he got a delivery note from Nature Depot, where Carsten ordered ecological wood glazes and furniture oils for a small fortune! There’d be a big blowup in the workshop, followed by a few days of deathly silence, then peaceful sawing, planing, and sanding until the yelling started up again. This had been the pattern for two and a half decades.
Fifteen years ago, on Carsten’s thirtieth birthday, Karl-Heinz Drewe had signed the company over to his son. He still found it difficult to take orders from Junior.
When they were screaming and shouting at one another, Carsten would toss two-by-fours and folding rulers around; then he’d turn white and start shaking at some point, and clear off to his girlfriend Urte’s, who would help him relax with aromatic oil massages and a couple of Ignatia globules. Urte was a teacher in a Waldorf school and lived with two other women in a shared apartment characterized by mutual appreciation and mindfulness, and she had a complicated on-off relationship with Carsten. It was basically a matter of whether they could tolerate their contradictions, or whether these had to be resolved.
All the contradictions in Carsten’s life were sometimes overwhelming. Solid wood and factory-made wood parquet, stuffed cabbage leaves at noon and detox in the evening, Urte’s hard futon and Hertha’s fabric-softened flannel sheets, the terror with the old man and the beautiful cold Astra beer that they drank shoulder to shoulder on the bench in front of the workshop once things were running smoothly again.
Pentatonic concerts in the assembly hall of Urte’s Rudolf Steiner School and jigsaw puzzle evenings with his parents. Five thousand pieces, the great coral reef. The three of them got them done in no time at all.
When father and son were going at it full tilt, Hertha kept out of it. “I’m not saying a word! Not one word!” It certainly riled her up when Carsten ran off to Urte in a rage, but she didn’t comment on that either. “Not a word!”
Urte had voiced her opinion on the generational conflict and the Drewe family’s problem with cutting the umbilical cord more than once, but her psychobabble always got Hertha’s hackles up because every sentence that Urte said began with “I think.…” And anyhow, it was none of her business. Those were family matters, “and over and out.”
Hertha no longer said anything on the subject of grandchildren either. Urte was past that now and that was no bad thing, as any kids would have gone bonkers with a mother like that. But Carsten wasn’t too old yet. He just needed to find the right woman and Hertha was constantly on the lookout. But where on earth was she going to find one?
* * *
Carsten Drewe was a very patient teacher. He never got annoyed when Anne made a mistake, and as a matter of principle, he never let his apprentices sweep out the workshop or tidy up the storehouse because that reactionary master-apprentice stuff got on his nerves. The whole sweeping-up nonsense in the business bordered on sadomasochism. Yes, master. Right away, master. That’s how subordinates were made, grovelers and brownnosers. But not on his watch! Carsten found that in general there was too much sweeping up but Karl-Heinz saw it a little differently—“There you go, the broom’s over there, Father!”
Anne couldn’t just stand by and watch Drewe Senior sweeping the floor at the end of the day, all stooped over; she would pick up the broom herself when Carsten was driving to the wholesaler’s or sitting in th
e office with Hertha, preparing invoices. She just had to make sure he didn’t catch her, since that would get him all hot and bothered. “And you a woman! Do you want to iron my boxers when you’re done? Should I call you ‘sweetie pie’? I can’t have this sort of thing going on around here!”
* * *
After a one-and-a-half-year apprenticeship, Anne was able to handle difficult customers without Carsten’s help. And while she showed customers laminate samples or measured up for vinyl window frames, he would sit in the company car and read his trade journals, Fine Woodworking or Working with Wood, smoke a couple of hand-rolled cigarettes, and become engrossed in long articles about turned walnut chairs or the gluing of drawers. He didn’t mind Anne teasing him about his “solid wood porn.” He was glad she volunteered anything at all. Her voice was already sounding like a rusty hinge.
“It’s always sounded like that!”
All right, he wouldn’t bring the matter up again. He was her boss, not her shrink.
Even Hertha couldn’t figure out what Anne got up to all alone in her room.
Sometimes she stayed after supper and did puzzles with them for a bit, and Hertha would put a fourth small bowl of chips on the table.
* * *
The final piece of work that Anne produced at the end of her apprenticeship was a swivel piano stool made of cherrywood, which really pleased Carsten. As long as his apprentices turned out things like this, he hadn’t yet lost the battle against all the mass-produced particleboard crap. He took photos, including one of Anne, and wrote his first workshop report for Fine Woodworking magazine, a two-page spread. It took him longer than it had taken Anne to design and build her stool, but he never did things halfway.
Karl-Heinz cut the article out when it appeared in the magazine and taped it to the glass panel of the door to the workshop. “You didn’t have to go and do that, Father.” But it stayed up and Hertha simply peeled it back briefly when she cleaned the glass.