by Dörte Hansen
Leon, who was happy that Carola had come to visit again, wanted to look at a storybook with her. Occasionally they did that, but not today, so he marched off to his room, wound himself out of his snowsuit, turned on the CD player, and danced a bit to “I’m a Little Teapot,” his favorite song.
Anne sat down at the kitchen table. She still had her coat on and was digging around with a large spoon in a jar of hazelnut cream from the organic supermarket. And she didn’t stop when Christoph sat down next to her, she just kept shoveling the expensive full-cane-sugar goo into her mouth until he took the spoon out of her hand and screwed the lid back on the jar. Then she lay her head on the table and closed her eyes, as though she were listening to the scarred wood and no longer needed to pay attention to him when he took her hand because she’d seen the toes with the red nails and the black hip-length hair.
Snow White in her white car, and here she sat: Anne, the little teapot.
7
Winter Moth
BY THE TIME SHE’D GOTTEN the boxes of clothes and books, her own bike, Leon’s balance bike, the big crate full of toys, and their African linden into the rented van, it was already early afternoon.
A horn sounded from the street, twice briefly, and Christoph took off. He jumped up from the kitchen chair and almost sprinted along the hallway. Then he pulled the door shut gently so as not to wake Leon.
Anne had no idea what a Fiat horn sounded like, but she didn’t go over to the window because she didn’t want to see him getting into the car, and she definitely didn’t want to be seen. The deserted wife at the window, what a pitiful sight.
Their last long days together had felt like rehearsals for a new play. The couple that had fallen out of love in their old apartment. The roles were cast, but they hadn’t yet mastered the script. They performed the old classic of loving and leaving quite ineptly. The cheat, the betrayed woman, packing boxes, taking down pictures, screaming, whispering, crying, with red eyes and pale faces.
A drama of prefabricated parts, Anne thought, we’re nothing more than that.
Christoph had followed her around all morning, even while she was packing, with his shoulders hunched over and his hands in his pockets. He had acted sheepish and guilty. “Anne, if you need anything…” His performance was awful, that of an amateur actor who had bitten off more than he could chew.
He had watched Leon sleep for a while and cried silently while doing so, shook his head, put his hands on her shoulders, and pressed his forehead against hers. “Jeez, Anne.”
And she had searched a long time for the one powerful sentence that would torpedo and sink him and open his eyes. But Christoph was wide awake, and Anne knew it. He was in love. What could he do about it?
There was thus no reason to swear at him, throw his laptop out the window, rip the CD rack off the wall, overturn the kitchen table, or, at the very least, pull the tablecloth off with the breakfast still on it, to hear the crashing and shattering, the noise of things breaking to pieces. There was no chance of riding the wave of a powerful rage through their final days together.
She was glad that it was over. Glad to be getting out of this apartment, out of the city, away from the filthy pigeon tunnel, and glad she’d never have to sit at the playground with the edgy mothers again, and wouldn’t be seeing the man in the white shirt any longer. She would walk through fields, live in the country.
Leon woke up, and Anne lifted him out of his crib, feeling his warm sleeping face against her cheek. At the back of his neck, there were a couple of little curls that had become frizzy with sweat.
She stood like that for a while, with the soft, tired child in her arms. He smelled so good, like a perfect world.
Outside in front of the window, the buckeye tree extended its branches into a colorless sky. They thrashed about in the wind that blew through the courtyard like marauding gangs. Leon’s pinwheel rattled in the hard soil.
* * *
Anne carried Leon into the kitchen to prepare a bottle for him. He was actually too old for bottles, but still loved having one in the afternoon. She tried to do it as casually as she usually did, without giving it a second thought, but it didn’t work. She was watching herself doing things for the last time: switching on the blue electric kettle, taking the milk out of Christoph’s impractical retro fridge, fetching the bottle with the fish pattern out of the dishwasher and the lid with the nipple from the tin next to the sink. Then she saw herself sitting with Leon on her lap sucking on his bottle, at the kitchen table, which was pitted and stained with red wine and oil—a veteran on wooden legs, who’d survived two apartment shares and now a nuclear family as well.
Anne traced its scars with her finger: burn marks from hot pots, nicks from slipped knives, the small hole from the corkscrew that Christoph—lost in thought at the time—had twisted into the tabletop just after they’d discovered that she was pregnant. The stabbings from Leon’s toddler fork, the marks left by modeling clay and crayons.
A table like a family album, a notion of home. But she was so bad at staying put. She’d fled once and never arrived at a new destination.
A prodigy now ruled her home. He sat at her black grand piano like a sun king; she couldn’t go back. She had turned into something adrift, a creature bobbing in the current, a floating animal, a piece of plankton in the sea.
Three years on the road, traveling for the most part on her own. It had been so easy, like an endless tour: every few days a new stage, turning in a couple of performances and moving on.
Arrive, sparkle, take off, as she had done before at Young Musicians. Child’s play, even being with men—just a game, dead easy. The trick was to take off before things got complicated, before the varnish showed its first scratches.
She had gotten very good at that, become a champion at breaking up and moving on.
But it was a whole lot harder with a little boy in her arms.
* * *
Anne put Leon’s snowsuit on him. Then they both carried the crate containing his pygmy rabbit out of the apartment. “Last one out turns off the light, Willy,” she said before locking up and tossing the key through the mail slot. But the rabbit was in no mood for joking. He sat in his crate like a bad-tempered prince in his sedan chair.
When they were finally all settled in the white transit van, the traffic was so heavy it felt as if the city were being evacuated. It was late afternoon and the mass exodus from the offices was under way. The commuter cars were piling up on both sides of the Elbe tunnel, and Anne, who’d driven only rarely since getting her driver’s license twenty years earlier, could feel her palms getting sweaty on the steering wheel.
* * *
Leon thought it was great to be riding in a truck. He sat contentedly in his car seat, swinging his rubber boots against the front seat and singing a song he had learned at day care to the anxious pygmy rabbit, whose crate was buckled in next to him. Willy’s mood wasn’t much improved by this. He was squatting in his crate with his ears turned down and would drum his hind quarters nervously every now and then.
Leon pushed a piece of carrot through the bars to him, and when Willy turned away, he ate it himself. After that, he tried the Vitakraft rabbit treats that they had bought during their farewell visit to the pet store. Anne wondered fleetingly whether she should stop Leon from eating the rabbit food. The supermoms wouldn’t have allowed their kids to chew on pet snacks. They’d have cited many good reasons against it, but Anne couldn’t think of any, so she let Leon eat the grain feed while she steered the van through the Elbe tunnel at a snail’s pace. She tried to ignore the guy in the car next to her, who was cutting his fingernails and steering his Opel Astra with his knees. At the end of the tunnel, he threw the nail clippers onto the passenger seat and hit the gas.
When Leon saw the cranes at the port, he pressed his face against the window and forgot all about the rabbit food. The cranes stood on the wharf like enormous dinosaurs, their steel necks extending up into the gray sky, and they appeared to
be waiting on prey. They were driving in the direction of Finkenwerder, and Anne was thinking of the trips she had taken with her parents, all those Sundays in the Altland during cherry season. They had never stopped off at any of the farm shops or little road stands.
“I’m certainly not buying cherries,” Marlene would say, “we’ve got plenty of those ourselves.” During cherry season, Anne’s mother refused to concede that the Eckhoff trees weren’t hers, that it was Vera who had inherited the farm, and that she was nothing more than a guest in the old farmhouse.
On Sundays in July they’d go rushing to the farm with empty buckets in the trunk of their car, “pretending to be farmhands for a bit,” Vera would say with a sneer. But she’d still place ladders against the trees and lay out the old blue work jackets for them.
When her parents disappeared into the branches of the cherry trees and Thomas was over visiting the neighbor, who had enormous rabbits, Anne would propel herself up into the linden tree on Vera’s old swing or gently stroke the two Trakehners that grazed in the paddock, sweeping the summer flies away from their bodies with their tails. They were beautiful, high-strung horses that no one besides her aunt dared to ride.
After picking cherries, they’d sit on Vera’s bench next to the house and eat the cake that Anne’s mother had brought from home—each piece meant as a silent reproach of the elder sister, but Vera had always been stone-deaf in that respect. The only things she ever offered her guests were apple juice from Heinrich Luehrs, which stood in a canister on the table, and coffee, which tasted as though it had come out of a cement mixer. It stood like tar in the cups, its surface shimmering like pools of gasoline. Anne’s parents often tried to drink the stuff. They’d dilute it with water, dump milk into it, heap in sugar, and try to knock it back as hot as they could stand, because it tasted a heck of a lot worse when it cooled off. Vera was the only one who liked it—and the weird grandpa Karl, who always sat slumped over on the bench. After a while, Anne’s mother had given in and, on those Sundays in July, in addition to the cake, she’d started bringing a thermos full of coffee too, but that reproach was lost on Vera as well.
* * *
On their journeys back to Hamburg, with the cherries in the trunk of the car and her father at the steering wheel, looking unusually laid-back in his sunglasses, her mother would smoke in the passenger seat and talk herself into a frenzy about the sister who was letting the house go to rack and ruin, about the weeds, the unpainted fence, the cherry trees that were running to seed, the rotten window frames, the burn marks and coffee stains on Ida Eckhoff’s hand-embroidered tablecloths, and the scruffy old man who belonged in an insane asylum. Her mother’s hands would wave about as though she were directing an atonal piece of music. Vera’s eccentricity! Vera’s arrogance! Vera’s horrid mutts! Sometimes the ash from her cigarette would fly off toward the children in the backseat.
In Anne’s memory, every visit to the Altland had ended like this: cherries in the trunk and tirades from the passenger seat. And her father, who found his idiosyncratic sister-in-law highly amusing and was used to his wife’s temper tantrums, would light two new cigarettes with the electric lighter, roll down the window a little, and say with a smile: “Let it be, Marlene.”
* * *
As Anne was driving with Leon toward Stade, she realized that she had only ever seen this landscape in the summer.
For the first time she was seeing the Altland in its cold starkness, the fruit trees standing like soldiers in the heavy earth, bald regiments in endless rows and between them the marsh soil hard with frost. In the deep ruts left behind by the tractors, rainwater had turned to ice. Large birds of prey, whose names she didn’t know, perched on the branches as though they were too heavy to fly. On the dikes and at the edges of the ditch, the grass lay ragged and pale—a landscape devoid of color except for the neon yellow of the safety vests worn by an orderly group of day care children who were sauntering in pairs along the sidewalk with their teachers. Two little boys at the far end of the line were stamping through the ice on a puddle with their rubber boots, and Anne tried to imagine Leon on this day care excursion, holding another child’s hand and carrying an apple from the farm they had just visited in his other hand.
She needed to find out where you could get one of those yellow vests.
* * *
Shortly before Lühe, Leon woke up and was hungry, but Willy had already eaten the carrots and rabbit treats. Anne turned off at the pier in Lühe and pulled in next to a food truck, which must at some point have been white. BE HAPPY, YOU’RE IN STADE COUNTY! was written above a jetty on the Elbe, which led to a deserted ferry dock, and on either side of that, frozen flags scratched at their masts.
Anne bought french fries with ketchup and put the carton on the seat between Leon and her. An enormous container ship was coming up the Elbe, nosing its way toward Hamburg. Leon watched it as he chewed and dribbled. Anne wiped ketchup off the seat and went and got some more fries, and after that she got a lollipop for Leon and a plastic cup of coffee for herself that tasted of frying fat. But she would also have drunk Vera’s cement sludge as long as she could sit here with Leon, who loved ships, in a car that smelled like a french fry stand.
* * *
The sky had turned red and the sun was sinking into the Elbe by the time they reached the “teensy-weensy little baby town” that Leon had told the kids at his day care about during his farewell breakfast with the Beetle group.
They drove slowly down the smooth street past Heinrich Luehrs’s perfectly kept lot. His front yard with its tidy flower beds, paved paths, and square lawns was arranged as neatly as a parade ground. Behind the wooden fence, his rosebushes stood in rank and file, covered in burlap sacks to protect them from the frost. They looked like prisoners about to be shot.
Vera’s yard was barely visible behind its high tattered hedge, and that was just as well since the sight wouldn’t please the locals. For Heinrich Luehrs and every other farmer in the village, symmetry and order were the pillars of their self-respect. Anyone who let their yard degenerate was a degenerate himself—or a very weird person, like Vera Eckhoff.
Anne drove through the high ornamental gate, which hadn’t lived up to its name for decades. Since Vera’s dogs had mellowed with age, it was left open most of the time. It hung rotting and crooked on its hinges. In fact it was a miracle that it was still standing.
Anne had just lifted Leon and Willy out of the car when she heard scrunching on the gravel behind her.
A green John Deere children’s tractor with a front loader was reversing into the driveway. The driver was around Leon’s age and was wearing professional-looking overalls and a cap. Slowly he dismounted, approached her with an outstretched arm, and opened his fist to reveal a large dead moth. He snuffled, wiped a string of snot away with his sleeve, and said: “Varmint. A winter moth.” He dropped it and stepped on it forcefully once more for good measure, grinding it down with his heel until the moth was completely squashed. Then he tapped his finger on the visor of his cap and pedaled off.
Leon, who had watched the performance in silence, went over to the flattened moth and mumbled “winter moth,” as if learning his first word of a foreign language.
The exterminator had just disappeared behind the hedge again when a red tractor and trailer swung into the driveway, full scale this time. It braked and pulled up behind the white van. The stocky man behind the wheel was wearing a peaked cap with ear flaps. Without turning off the engine, he placed his arms on his steering wheel and looked down at Anne and Leon.
“Right. Those are my trees back there. I need to be able to drive through here at any time. Get that stupid jalopy out of the way.”
Leon decided to move his rabbit to safety by dragging the crate across the pavement. Willy wasn’t thrilled and Anne, caught unawares, simply stood by and watched.
She’d have liked to have given the driver a parting shot about his stupid cap, or have made some comment about his manners—some sta
tement that would put him in his place.
It would come to her too late, as usual.
She turned around without a word, got into the van, and pulled it off to the side. Then, hoping that the tractor had a rearview mirror, she gave him the finger.
8
Peasant Theater
DIRK ZUM FELDE HAD HAD his fill. Totally. There seemed to be new arrivals every day. City slickers running around the place aimlessly and getting in his way.
Just last week Burkhard Weisswerth had shuffled into his yard with some newspaper guys in tow, there to take a couple of photos. He’d called out “Howdy!,” slapped Dirk on the shoulder as though they were pals, and blathered on meaninglessly about the weather. This is what people did in the countryside, this is why they liked the folk out here.
“Dirk, my man, mind if I climb back up on your tractor for a bit?”
Burkhard Weisswerth couldn’t drive farm machinery, but he looked real good sitting on it, with his corduroy pants from Manufactum stuffed into his natural rubber boots—effortlessly, it seemed—his shirtsleeves rolled up, and his eyes narrowed ever so slightly beneath the wide brim of his soft hat, as he looked off into the distance. The very picture of a rural man. This is what people with vision looked like.
Two and a half years ago, Weisswerth had been laid off from his job as chief copy editor, been given a reasonable severance package, and had moved from the Isestrasse in Hamburg to a former farm on the banks of the Elbe. He was now writing books about country life and columns for a slow-food magazine. He was frequently being interviewed by former colleagues and having his picture taken for the photo spreads, usually with a lamb, a piglet, or a chicken on his arm. A pitchfork or a bunch of carrots were good too—but he much preferred to use one of his neighbors, such as Dirk zum Felde, this awkward farmer with his red tractor.