This House Is Mine

by Dörte Hansen

  “What do you mean?” Anne was too tired for physics. It wasn’t even seven o’clock yet. They went back inside and made coffee.

  She asked Dirk zum Felde about it when she bumped into him on the farm track a couple of days later. “That’s called solidification heat,” he said, “never heard of it?” He started his tractor up again. “We’ve got a few things to teach you yet.”

  He tapped his cap with his finger and took off. God forbid he should say too much. It was as if he had only a small supply of words that had to last him till the end of his days.

  23

  Man Oh Man Oh Man

  CARSTEN HAD ALREADY PLACED THE window in the trunk. The frame and sash were made of oak, and it was painted white and dark green and was double-glazed. For the smallest facade window, all the way at the top, under the ridge of Vera Eckhoff’s house, single glazing would have sufficed, but master carpenter Drewe didn’t do things by halves.

  “Let’s just hope your measurements were right, journeyman,” he said, tossing his old Adidas bag onto the backseat of the Mercedes as he climbed into the passenger seat.

  He took his tobacco out of his jacket pocket and rolled a few cigarettes. They drove in silence as far as Finkenwerder, and then he said, “The Lechtal Alps puzzle, a thousand pieces. I hope they can manage without me for two evenings.”

  It had been a long time since they had bought any new jigsaw puzzles. They now did the old ones over and over again. It didn’t bother them, though. Karl-Heinz always started with the edges, since that was the easiest part, but even that took him an eternity now.

  Hertha had deteriorated even further. She blamed it on the stupid energy-saving bulbs, grumbled about bad lighting and her new reading glasses. But it was her head. She was getting senile. She sometimes tried to force two puzzle pieces together that couldn’t possibly fit. Even a blind man could see that. It cut Carsten to the quick, but it also really got on his nerves, so he’d pop outside for a smoke whenever that happened.

  Hertha was also getting the days of the week mixed up, and she’d read the paper in the morning and then read it again in the afternoon as though she hadn’t seen it yet. “Quite handy,” Anne said, “that way you get more from your subscription.”

  Carsten smiled, and they didn’t say anything more until Borstel.

  “The detox is over, eh?” asked Anne.

  He nodded, cranked down the window, and tapped the cigarette ash onto the street.

  * * *

  Willy had to move into the living room of Ida Eckhoff’s apartment for the weekend. “It’s him or me,” Carsten said, pointing at the cage. “I’m not sharing a room with a rat.”

  He put his bag next to Leon’s bed and went out into the hallway where Vera was. “I just have to hear that gnawing,” he said, “scrape, scrape, and it’s already more than I can bear.”

  Anne heard Vera let out a loud guffaw. It was such a surprise that she almost dropped the rabbit.

  They spent nearly an hour showing Carsten around the house.

  “Man oh man oh man,” said Carsten. He tapped on the timber framing and examined the carving on the wedding door, the worn-out wood of the large front door, and the window frames. He stood in front of the ornamental gate for a long time and then again in front of the facade. “Man oh man oh man.” When he asked about the inscription, Vera read it out to him. So, when Carsten Drewe asked it was okay. “And what does that mean in German?” he said, pulling a cigarette out of his pocket. Vera took it out of his hand, pointing at her thatched roof.

  “This house is mine and yet not mine, he who comes after me will call it his.”

  He nodded slowly, then looked at Vera and grinned.

  “Nothing rhymes with hers, eh?” He shook his head. “Those guys were something else back then.”

  They showed him the inside of the house. Carsten went through the rooms like a birthday boy, finding surprises in every corner. Those closets! Those chests of drawers! That ceiling panel! Man.

  “Solid hardwood galore…,” said Anne. “Master Drewe’s in heaven.”

  They sat down in the kitchen to plan things out. Carsten sat at the table in his corduroy vest and sharpened his carpenter pencil with his pocketknife.

  “So, when’s the scaffolding gonna be here?”

  They managed to talk turkey with Vera. They spoke about money and time, and the heritage conservation regulations, about masons, cabinetmakers, carpenters, thatch, stone, and wood, and Vera didn’t jump up once the entire time. She just ran her hands over her table now and again as though reassuring an animal or a child.

  They made lists and did sums. Vera remained seated, didn’t make any faces, and even served sandwiches and pear brandy later on.

  They drank to the house. Then Carsten lay down on Leon’s bed, and Anne sat a while longer on the carpet in Ida Eckhoff’s room, stroking the lonely rabbit.

  Vera stroked the kitchen table.

  * * *

  At the beginning of May, they brought the scaffolding. Men in undershirts, who already had sunburns, tossed heavy pieces of steel around all day and roared orders at one another. Then they all disappeared, leaving Vera’s house standing like an old man on crutches.

  Anne drove to Hamburg and returned with young men in journeyman outfits. They wore earrings and black hats. “Respectable journeymen,” Anne said, but Heinrich Luehrs wasn’t so sure. They looked like gypsies—traveling folk—to him and he wouldn’t have let them into his house, but Vera had to know what she was doing. It was none of his business.

  They rolled out their sleeping bags in the farmhands’ rooms, and when it got warm they hung hammocks in the trees. They came and went as they pleased.

  Some stayed for only two days, others for a few weeks, and then they moved on and others took their place. Anne stood on the scaffolding with them, kept track of their hours, and paid them.

  Vera kept an eye on the house, day and night. Sometimes she couldn’t stand the hammering on the walls, the creaking and cracking of the old window frames, the grating in the joints on the weather-beaten windward side.

  It felt as though her head were being beaten, her bones were breaking, her teeth were being scratched away, ever deeper, down to the nerve.

  Then she started beating her pots again and slamming drawers in the kitchen. She turned white and treated Leon unfairly, scolding him when he made a mess with his bread and honey in the morning, then buying him little animals by way of apology, and grumbling again the next morning.

  Anne knew the reason for Vera’s kitchen battles. They would have to take their hands off the walls for a couple of days, leave the house alone. She let the journeymen go.

  It needed to be quiet for a while. Vera seemed to listen to her house’s chest with a stethoscope, as though it were a patient with a heart condition. She took its pulse and paid attention to its breathing.

  And she needed to get some sleep but wasn’t able to. It was much too loud with the journeymen around, and too quiet without them.

  It was best when Carsten was there. Every other Friday, when Anne drove Leon to his father’s, she brought Carsten back with her from Hamburg. He arrived with new windows, which he’d built in peace, one by one, in his workshop. Karl-Heinz Drewe had lost it when he saw this.

  Carsten did his rounds every other Friday. He walked around the outside of the house with Vera, and through all the rooms, taking note of what had changed and then taking out his tools, “Because I can’t stand shoddy workmanship.” He always found things that he had to finish off because no journeyman was as finicky as Master Drewe.

  He was the only one who didn’t see any problem with Vera’s house. It wasn’t a ruin or a disaster in his eyes. All he saw was an old hero who needed to get himself together. “A tad damaged, but nothing that can’t be fixed.”

  They sat in the kitchen in the evening and tried to play cards, but it didn’t work with Anne, as she lacked talent and inclination. “Journeyman,” groaned Carsten, throwing the cards onto
the table, “I don’t like to say it, but my dog can play better than that.”

  They fetched Heinrich Luehrs and he forgot to go to bed at ten. They played until one in the morning.

  Heinrich’s favorite tune on the piano was “Für Elise.” If it had been up to him, Anne would have played it in an endless loop every evening.

  * * *

  The piano in Vera’s hallway was hard to miss. But Anne had managed to give it a wide berth for almost three months.

  Then, on a rainy day in June, when Vera was out with the dogs, she removed the old books that were lying on top of the walnut lid and the dusty pile of travel magazines that were twenty or thirty years old.

  The house was quiet, because the journeymen weren’t around. The keys looked like bad teeth. Yellowed ivory, a little loose, but they felt really good beneath Anne’s fingers.

  The piano was so out of tune that it invoked a harbor bar. It was a honky-tonk piano that turned every piece of music into a children’s song, harmless and off-key, perfect for someone who had run away from the resonant tones of a Bechstein grand piano.

  Chopin’s preludes sounded like popular tunes on the piano in Vera Eckhoff’s hallway. They didn’t scare Anne because no matter how often she played a wrong note, it couldn’t get any worse.

  Vera stood in the doorway in her rain-soaked jacket, and one of the dogs howled briefly when it heard the strange tones. Anne took her fingers off the keyboard. “It’s been a long time since anyone played this thing,” she said.

  Vera looked at her and mulled it over. “Your mother was the last.”

  * * *

  Marlene had had to practice for three hours every day, even when she was vacationing at Vera’s. Hildegard Jacobi made no concessions. She would call in the evenings and inquire. But she obviously didn’t know her daughter very well. You didn’t need to prod Marlene. She played until her fingers seized up. On one occasion, Vera had asked her, “Is that fun, Marlene?” and realized right away how stupid her question was.

  Vera had taught Marlene how to ride, first on the longe, until she sat firmly in the saddle and was no longer afraid, then along the Elbe. Finally she had galloped along the beach. Vera could hardly keep pace with her at times.

  “Doesn’t sound like her,” Anne said. Vera took off her rain jacket and wet rubber boots. “You don’t know Marlene at all,” she said. “You only know your mother.”

  What did daughters ever know about their mothers? They knew zip.

  * * *

  Hildegard von Kamcke had never mentioned a man with a wide smile, and she had never told anyone what she had felt for a man with a stiff leg. Or what she’d felt at the sight of her mother-in-law, whom she had tormented with music until she’d hung herself from an oak beam.

  Nor had she said whether, when she lay awake at night, she sometimes thought of her children, the little one left cold in the roadside ditch, or the big one that lay under a thatched roof.

  Or if she was one of those homesick wretches who, in their beds at night, dreamed of tree-lined avenues and wheat fields.

  Vera had no idea whether Hildegard von Kamcke had always worn a coat of ice, just as other women sported fox fur or mink, which they’d inherited from their mothers, and whether this coat had also been an heirloom, or if she had worn it only from the moment when she was driven through the snow with her children.

  All daughters knew that their mothers were also daughters, but they all forgot this. Vera could have asked questions. You could ask mothers anything.

  You just had to live with the answers.

  They had never told Hildegard Jacobi that her youngest daughter could ride as wild as a hussar. “She won’t believe it anyhow,” Marlene had said.

  Then she fell off her horse on the last day of her vacation and broke her wrist.

  In a cast for six weeks, no piano for eight, no more vacations in the Altland. And no more letters for My dear Vera.

  24

  Miracles of Light

  MARLENE MUST’VE SPENT WEEKS preparing. She had maps and travel guides that she had read from cover to cover, as was clear from the yellow Post-it notes that were sticking out between the pages. And she also had a folder in her bag stuffed with papers. She had borrowed her mother’s letters from Vera and made copies of them. Anne saw her flipping through them in the lobby of their Danzig hotel and already thought of taking off, and their trip hadn’t even started.

  “My greatest wish, my only one.” It was Marlene’s sixtieth birthday. Thomas had a good reason for not being there. He was traveling to Melbourne for a concert, and nothing could be done. But Anne didn’t have an excuse, so she cursed and went along.

  Single rooms at least. Ten days of sharing a room and they’d kill each other.

  She’d almost forgotten what it was like to travel with her mother. Marlene’s mode of walking was a working canter. She didn’t travel as other people did. She slogged, plowed through landscapes and cities until she’d seen and knew everything there was to know.

  So now they were going to East Prussia, Mazuria, by minibus, and even Marlene was too young for this journey. Born after the war, she couldn’t be homesick for the land of the dark forests. Anne had no idea what Marlene was looking for.

  It was Vera who ought to have made the journey. Marlene had almost begged her to accompany her, but Vera didn’t travel, since it would mean leaving her house, which was out of the question. “And I’m certainly not going there!” Vera was happy when she could forget. The last thing she wanted was to be reminded.

  Marlene made a list of villages and towns that her mother had described in her letters to My dear Vera. She wanted to look for the manor house of the von Kamckes and drive in the minibus through the tree-lined avenues that Hildegard had trudged through with her children in the deep snow and at minus four degrees in January. And then go to the lagoon, of course. They all wanted that when they traveled through Mazuria in German buses. They wanted to stand at the edge of the water in their sand-colored windbreakers, refugees with white hair who had stood there once before, chilled to the bone and driven away along with their mothers.

  The tour guide knew his clientele, the old folks with their broken souls, hoping for a little healing. He drove them to the lakes and the storks and the amber-stone beaches, to Nikolaiken, Heiligelinde, and Steinort. He knew that at some point during the ten days, at some lake or other, in front of an old house or in a church, a trembling voice would sing “The Land of the Dark Forests.” Someone started it off on every trip, and then he’d hand out the words, five verses, and he always joined in himself, miracles of light across wide fields. Then the whole bus would sing along and everyone would cry.

  He drove them to the houses they were born in. Some were too shaken up to get out of the minibus; others worked up the courage and knocked on the door, and the interpreter accompanied them. The Polish families were friendly for the most part, asked them in, showed them around, posed in the doorway for a photo with a smile, shook their hands, and waved at the strangers as they climbed back into their buses.

  The old people then sank into their seats and didn’t look as though they’d been healed. They looked to Anne like people who’d undergone surgery again, been cut open and sent home too early, at their own risk.

  Marlene sat in the window seat, commented on every poppy and every street sign, and made notes in her travel journal like a model student. She sighed at every pothole and let out a moan every time they passed another vehicle. She was constantly taking her water bottle out of her backpack, and every few minutes she would dab her forehead with her handkerchief and fan herself with a sheet of paper, creating so much of a breeze, you’d think she was the only one who was sweating and being jostled during this journey. Anne closed her eyes and turned up the volume on her iPod.

  And Marlene watched her daughter travel through this landscape in total silence. Anne seemed completely cut off from her, boarded up, bolted and barred, intent on showing no emotion, on sharing nothin
g with her. It was driving her crazy.

  It was hard for both of them to bear.

  Everything they did, they did to one another.

  Then Marlene’s day came. It was a hot day in July, and the tour guide had ordered a taxi to pick them up from the hotel. Anne climbed in the back and Marlene got in up front with her map in hand.

  They had to search for a long time, took wrong turns onto rough tracks through little villages between Rastenburg and Loetzen, which now had different names than those on Marlene’s old Prussian map. She’d added the Polish names in red but soon had trouble deciphering them.

  The small places lay in the sun as though in a daze. Only the storks seemed to be awake, and a sluggish breeze leafed dreamily through the old trees. When you traveled through the tree-lined avenues, it felt as though you were in another time, another world. At some point they came across a gate made of stone and wrought iron. It looked like the one that Hildegard von Kamcke had sketched, and 1898 was engraved on the gable.

  The gate didn’t seem to lead anywhere. All they could see was green undergrowth. They pushed past the rusty iron.

  The taxi driver stayed beside his car, smoking in the sun.

  Anne struggled through the undergrowth with Marlene. They climbed over fallen trees. Nothing remained of the tree-lined approach that Hildegard had described. They now had a direct view of the ruin.

  A birch was growing out of the roof of the large manor house. The house’s walls looked as though someone had ripped the skin off them. There was hardly any light-toned stucco left, and the rough stonework was exposed. The high windows were boarded up.

  Marlene stood in front of the curved gable. She’d wanted to take photos but forgot. Anne took the camera, left Marlene standing, and went to look at the back of the house. There were still large, long stables there. It was very quiet. A forest, a river, the sky, a lake. You couldn’t imagine anything bad happening here, no shooting, no bleeding. It couldn’t possibly have taken place here in this landscape that cradled you like a child.