by Dörte Hansen
Florian had taken photos. “This is awesome!” The editorial team was thrilled with the wonderfully quirky guys and wanted more of the same. And Burkhard had been able to use Klaus and Erich again in his book People from the Elbe—Gnarled Faces of a Landscape. That’s how it was supposed to work.
The bumpy cobblestone courtyard was worth every cent anyhow. It gave their house a raw and honest quality. There was no room here for the urbane, neurotic, overwrought high-heeled life.
* * *
WELCOME TO RUBBER BOOT WORLD, Eva had put up a sign on the garden gate for their housewarming party. They had bought twenty pairs in various sizes and colors and the women could exchange their pumps for rubber boots before stepping onto the cobblestones. It was a successful icebreaker. They had all laughed so much.
Burkhard had then called his second book Welcome to Rubber Boot World. It had sold well, but Burkhard Weisswerth was capable of more. He was an editor and wanted his own magazine, wanted high circulation figures and success, and for everything to be calm and relaxed at the same time, to be free of fluster and excitement, like a farmhand, laid-back, completely unruffled. That’s what would piss them off most of all, those anxious smart-asses on the Baumwall media embankment with their nervous stomachs and slipped discs.
Those who’d tossed him out because they thought he could no longer hack it.
They couldn’t have done him a bigger favor.
He’d come up with the title for his magazine a long time ago: A Taste of Country Life, a magazine for people who’d had enough, downshifters like himself who had realized that less was more, who wanted to jettison the whole ballast.
He had sold his Audi and it didn’t bother him in the least. Now they just had the Jeep that Eva needed for driving to the home-improvement store or the garden center. He went practically everywhere by bike. It wasn’t until they were living out here in the countryside that he understood what mattered in life.
A man never forgot the first potato that he took out of the earth with his own hands. That had been an initiation. He, Burkhard Weisswerth, had been let in on the big secret of sowing and reaping, growing and blossoming, blossoming and dying off, and, yes, it had humbled him, sensitized him to the wonderful, simple folks out here who were sustained by the work of their hands. Respect! He had the deepest respect for them. He wasn’t afraid to make contact and they sensed that. That’s why he got so much closer to them than the affected, clueless hacks from the women’s and lifestyle magazines who’d recently been unleashed in droves on the poor country folk. They didn’t understand anything whatsoever.
Here he sat, Burkhard Weisswerth, fifty-two years of age, just before eight o’clock on a Saturday morning, in the saddle of a custom-made recumbent bike, riding along the Elbe at a fair speed for a man his age.
He was thinking of his former colleagues in Hamburg who would just be struggling out of their beds around this time in order to jog once around the Alster before having to go to the weekly market with their stressed-out wives. Not me, buddy.
Burkhard shifted down two gears and rode up the narrow asphalt road that led over the dike to the main street. It was all downhill from here, and he had to watch that he didn’t go too fast. He briefly held on to a streetlight to let an Elbe fruit truck pass, then crossed the main street and turned onto the village road.
He stopped in front of a large well-tended half-timbered house and examined its cobblestones. It looked like his courtyard, but this one had most definitely been here two hundred years longer, and the stonemasons back then had obviously been more talented than Klaus and Erich Jarck. His, in any case, hadn’t been laid as evenly as this. Perhaps that’s how it was with dying guilds—the last representatives were only half as good. Still, he’d gotten it at a reasonable price. “No more than ten euros an hour!” Eva had said, “they’ll just go off and spend it all on schnapps anyhow.” And she’d been right. “We normally get fifteen,” they’d replied, but they hadn’t turned it down. The two of them didn’t get many jobs anymore, and he’d given them cash in hand, which they didn’t pay taxes on for sure!
Burkhard Weisswerth couldn’t help smirking at the thought of Klaus Jarck filling out a tax form. He wouldn’t even know which end of the pen to write with.
* * *
The next house had to be it. Burkhard ducked as he rode under the rotting ornamental gate, then got off and leaned his bike against the wall of the old house. The enormous, mossy thatched roof was shimmering greenish in the sun, and dark chunks of it were lying around the yard. It was obviously coming down in clumps. Oh boy! He knew what his small roof had cost, and this pile was easily three times the size. A rustic cathedral! A northern German hall-house from the eighteenth century at the latest. Burkhard took a few steps into the front yard to get a better look at the facade. Nine windows, decorative plaster infill, and the carved crescent suns up top! You could no longer make out the long inscription on the large crossbeams. Was it Latin?
He turned around and surveyed the overgrown front yard. It must have at one time been a classic boxwood garden. You could still see the remains of the old hedges under the brush.
In lousy shape, but it could be rectified.
He couldn’t let Eva see anything like this or she’d hire an architect right away and run to the bank. But this one was a tad too big. Anyone with a house like this on their hands would have to win the lottery jackpot. Or run a magazine-publishing house that was doing extremely well. You never could tell!
So this was where Dr. Vera Eckhoff, dentist and honorary chairwoman of the county hunting club, lived. Up till now, Burkhard had only ever seen her galloping along the bank of the Elbe. “I wouldn’t get into an argument with her,” Dirk zum Felde had warned him, “she’s a heckuva good shot.” Burkhard had just given her a call recently.
Vera Eckhoff seemed to be a true original. He had chewed the fat with her for a bit and was now being allowed to watch her make her venison sausage.
Venison sausage! No one will believe me when I tell them! The first time around, it would be just him without the camera—that’s what he always did. He couldn’t come right out with it. You had to let country folks thaw a little, it took a bit of time. But if you had a knack for it, they’d come to trust you sooner or later and eat out of your hand. It always worked for him anyhow. He was on good terms with these people.
Initial contact without the camera, that was rule number one.
And anyhow, Florian was still ticked off about the incident with the tractor the previous week. Burkhard had had to work hard to talk him out of reporting Dirk zum Felde for bodily harm. It had cost him two crates of Bordeaux, which ought to be plenty of compensation for a bruised butt.
“Howdy!” Burkhard walked through the large front door with a spring in his step and made his way toward the noise. He could hear voices and a grinding, crunching sound clearly coming from the kitchen. Knocking on the open door, he saw Vera Eckhoff standing at the table in a white dentist’s coat. It looked like someone had just blown themselves up next to her; her coat was splattered with dark blood everywhere, all over her stomach, sleeves, and collar—even her face was speckled red.
“Hey, good morning, I’d forgotten all about you! But you haven’t missed anything yet, we’re just getting started.” Vera Eckhoff pointed to a large older man in a rubber apron who had his shirtsleeves rolled up. He was standing next to her, turning a crank. “My neighbor, Heinrich Luehrs.” There was a grating and a creaking sound.
“That’s the guy from Hamburg who bought Mimi’s little house.”
“I see,” said Heinrich Luehrs, nodding once and continuing with his cranking.
Beside him sat a small boy whose mouth was covered in chocolate. He was chewing M&M’s and watching in fascination as one piece of meat after another disappeared into the grinder and emerged from the other end as red worms, which curled up into a large washtub.
Heinrich Luehrs couldn’t kill animals. He didn’t even slaughter his own rabbits—w
hen he was a boy, his father had had to do it—but he was an ace with the meat grinder.
Burkhard Weisswerth leaned against the wall, with his hands in the pockets of his corduroys. He tried not to look straight at the grinder, to stare off slightly to the side, but it was all still too much for him. The horrendous crunching, the smell of raw meat and fat.
It reminded him of that awful scene in Fargo where the crazy kidnapper with the dyed blond hair stuffed his victim into the wood chipper. But this was awesome. Burkhard thought of the photos that Florian would take of this massacre. He couldn’t recall having ever seen anything like it in a magazine photo spread. It was amazing! He wanted the photos raw and totally naturalistic. Definitely not black and white! This wasn’t art, it was nature! This is country life, folks, it’s completely different from buying a few slices of venison salami at the weekly market!
Vera Eckhoff was using an old kitchen scale to weigh out salt and spices. Burkhard typed the ingredients into his iPhone. Pepper, juniper berries, marjoram.
Heinrich Luehrs began stuffing large chunks of lard into the grinder, and pale worms oozed out of the holes into the plastic tub. When he was finished with the lard, Vera dumped the spices in, picked up a mixer, and began stirring everything into a shiny pink fatty mass.
Burkhard cleared his throat, but the sound was drowned out by the noise from the appliance. A couple of small beads of sweat appeared on his forehead.
Vera turned off the mixer and placed it next to the tub. The pale mass of sausage filling dropped off the dough hooks.
She released the hooks from the mixer, gave one to Heinrich Luehrs, and held on to the other one herself. With their index fingers, they then wiped the mixture from the stirrers and tasted it. “A bit more salt,” said Heinrich, tipping a tablespoon of salt into the tub. “Do you want to stir it around?” he asked, pressing a wooden spoon into the boy’s hand.
The child stirred with a serious look on his face as his hand sank into the smacking mass of sausage meat. They were exactly the same color. Vera Eckhoff disappeared into the pantry to fetch a bunch of transparent tubes that looked like overly long condoms. Heinrich Luehrs meanwhile had stuffed the sausage filling into some sort of silicone syringe and was now pumping it slowly into the intestines.
Burkhard Weisswerth left the kitchen without saying a word.
“What’s with him?” asked Heinrich Luehrs as he lay the sausage stuffer aside for a bit.
“Bad circulation or a vegetarian,” muttered Vera with a shrug.
11
Order
HEINRICH LUEHRS HAD LONG AGO stopped wondering about Vera Eckhoff, so he wasn’t particularly surprised to see that she now had her niece—with child and rabbit—living with her. “A day laborer of sorts” was how Vera explained the arrangement to him. Free food and accommodation, four hundred euros per month, and free travel in her old Benz. And in return she’s putting my house in order.
That had floored him. The word order out of Vera’s mouth without a hint of irony. Order was precisely what Vera’s farm had lacked since Ida Eckhoff had hanged herself and her East Prussian daughter-in-law had walked out on Karl and the child. And order was the word Vera had used to tease him ever since they’d been grown-ups. “Hey, Hinni, have you got everything in order?”
When he’d pruned his bushes and trees, trimmed the hedge, pulled the weeds, mowed the lawn, painted the fence, swept the yard, and raked out the molehills, when his flower beds were perfectly straight, the young cherry trees were cut back, and the old ones felled, chopped up, and piled up as firewood, whenever Heinrich Luehrs did the things that anyone who wanted to remain master of his house and farm had to do to stop the place from getting run-down or overgrown, then Vera Eckhoff would sit on her rickety bench with a cigarette, or stand under the barren cherry tree that spoiled her front yard with a mug of coffee in her hand, knee-high in a tangle of weeds, wave over to him and laugh: “Hey, Hinni, have you got everything in order?”
And Heinrich Luehrs had never understood what was so funny about someone’s keeping his world in order.
Beyond his fence, the world did whatever it wanted to. Vera’s garden was the end of all order, the opposite of order, chaos and dilapidation. Vera’s place was an example of what happened when you let nature take its course.
And at the end of his cherry orchard, on the other side of the ditch, there was no longer much order either, because Peter Niebuhr had gone organic and was letting his trees go to seed. He was selling his measly cherries to an organic wholesaler in Hamburg before they’d completely ripened. Heinrich Luehrs would’ve been ashamed even to hawk those things to tourists at the side of the road. But the organic mob in Hamburg was snapping up Peter Niebuhr’s cherries, and he was pocketing a third more than before.
The portion of the world that was still in order seemed to be shrinking by the day.
* * *
Three sons but no successor. Heinrich had one daughter-in-law from Japan and one from the city, both nice women as far as he could tell, but they were so alien to him that they might as well have been from Mars.
He had visited Heini and Sakura in their restaurant in Berlin once. Heini, his eldest, had stood at a bare table in a tall white chef’s hat, making rice rolls with raw fish, which he then placed on some kind of conveyor belt from which his customers took what they wanted.
Sakura had shown Heinrich how to use chopsticks and what to do with the black sauce. He’d found the green stuff too hot, but the rest didn’t taste bad at all.
Heini behind the counter with his long knife, with Elisabeth’s blond hair, his joyful, good-natured boyish face. Now he spoke fluent Japanese. “It ain’t all that different from Low German, Father,” he’d said, and they had laughed.
He was Elisabeth’s favorite, even though she’d never have admitted it, and when he’d stood in his kitchen cutting fish into small pieces, he hummed to himself. Now Heini was in Japan. They had a little girl and sent photos, but Heinrich Luehrs forgot time and again the name of the town they lived in.
* * *
Jochen dropped by every couple of weeks on a Saturday or Sunday, mostly with Steffi and the twins, but sometimes he came by himself, in old clothes, and they would work together in the barn and get the tractor and trailer ready for spring, or prepare the large nets for drawing over the cherry trees in the summer, just before the starlings arrived. Jochen always took a couple of days off for the apple harvest and drove the forklift when the large crates needed to be taken to cold storage. He would spend the night in his old room and drink a couple of beers in the kitchen with Heinrich. Then they’d make fried egg and ham sandwiches, share the paper, and watch the news together in the evening. Sometimes Jochen would nod off on the sofa before the weather forecast. He wasn’t used to working in the fresh air anymore. In Hannover, he sat in his engineering office all day long and never saw the sun.
Steffi didn’t like Jochen staying over at his father’s place because she then had to deal with everything at home by herself, and she already had enough to do. Steffi was a pharmaceutical rep and earned a ton of money. Heinrich didn’t dare ask, but he imagined that Jochen’s salary wasn’t keeping pace with hers.
He sometimes felt sorry for the boy. Jochen always seemed a bit worn-out, but nowhere near as bad as his wife. When the four of them came from Hannover to visit, Steffi didn’t seem able to tolerate the cold. She seldom went out along the Elbe or into the orchards, although that wouldn’t have been possible in her shoes anyhow.
Heinrich always took the boys for a ride on his tractor. He assumed they liked it, or Ben did at least, since he always wanted to sit on his lap and steer. Noah usually had a little electronic gadget with him, which beeped when he pushed it, but he’d join them outside so Steffi could take a photo of the three of them with her cell phone. Granddad would then get the picture in a metal frame for his birthday.
* * *
Georg was his youngest, his open wound. Me neither, Father.
H
e had just gotten his degree in agricultural science, and Elisabeth had seen it coming. But she wasn’t the type of wife who shared her thoughts with her husband, and he wasn’t the kind of husband who listened much to his wife.
The old man decreed, the boy cowered, and at some point—when the boy gathered enough strength and anger—the tables would turn. That’s how it worked. There was no other way.
Heinrich’s father had often hit him, but he hardly lifted a hand to his own sons.
Georg had gotten a slap once for climbing a ladder half-drunk after partying all night and hacking away at one of his best cherry trees. Otherwise a couple of nudges at most, occasionally a little shove, if he was getting in his way, which rarely happened, since Georg worked really hard. Heinrich knew he had the makings of a good fruit farmer.
But father versus son wasn’t a friendly sparring match, it was a battle. The old man obstinate, the boy full of rage, attacking and defending, round after round, fighting for new kinds of cherries and apples, fewer pesticides, larger cold storage houses, expensive machines, more seasonal workers. Heinrich heard himself yelling sentences that he remembered his father saying, and it sometimes made him cringe.
What you inherit from your father must first be earned before it’s yours! His great-grandfather had had this quote from Goethe inscribed in the crossbeams of the gable. He hadn’t inherited songs of praise from his father, so Heinrich didn’t know how to sing them. But Georg seemed to expect one.
* * *
“Just one good word for once, Heinrich, is that so hard?” Elisabeth had shouted at him in a voice he didn’t recognize when Georg had thrown the pruning shears at his feet without saying a word. But Heinrich had seen that he was crying, sobbing like a child.