The Stargazer's Sister

by Carrie Brown

  She crawls out from under the table and approaches her mother, head down, and leans carefully against her apron. It, too, smells of smoke. Lina holds her breath as she puts her face to her mother’s belly and mouths hello to the baby. She imagines its face turning in the darkness of their mother’s womb toward her voice. She worries about the baby. She understands that there are too many Herschel children, Lina and Sophia and their three brothers, also a baby who came before Lina and died, and then another who came after her and died, and now this new baby who is almost here. Lina understands that God has put the baby in her mother’s stomach. Therefore it is also God who makes her mother retch into a basin in the morning, and walk with a hand at her back, and who swells her mother’s feet and ankles. Such suffering, she understands, is part of God’s plan for women.

  The last time there was a baby, Lina went to the stable, her hands over her ears, but she could still hear her mother’s wailing. The last baby died. That was God’s plan, too.

  Sometimes her mother does the things mothers do. She combs Lina’s hair with quiet hands, ties the strings of her apron, and buttons her dress in the back. But often if Lina tries to rest against her, as she does now, longing for her touch, her mother’s fingertips push Lina away.

  “Don’t do that,” her mother says now and steps away.

  They are burdens. All the Herschel children are burdens to their mother.

  “Say your prayers,” her mother says. “God has protected us today.”

  Lina folds her hands and bows her head. But she is not praying.

  Of course a tiny animalcule would be no match for God. God is the biggest thing there is. And God made everything, which must mean that he made the animalcules as well, and that therefore they must be under his dominion, just as she and all her brothers and her sister are under his dominion, even horrible Jacob. God sees everything, she understands, but that does not mean he is always available to hear your prayers and help you. He cannot be looking everywhere at once.

  Perhaps the animalcules are like the good angels and the bad angels. William has told her about these, reading aloud to her from the poem called Paradise Lost. Perhaps there is always a battle raging under the surface of the world, just as the Foot Guards are always marching to and fro at the parade grounds, the men and boys in their red coats, piping and drumming and preparing to die.

  —

  A FEW DAYS LATER, William comes home with this news: he has met two vagabonds watering their horses at the post house. The men carried with them reports of the earthquake, an event so great in scale that it traveled over two thousand kilometers, William says, reaching places even as distant as Hanover. Despite everyone’s fright that day, Hanover had received actually only the smallest of shocks, the quake’s farthest ripple.

  Even on the shores of North Africa, William tells their father and Jacob, who is also at home, the earthquake was felt.

  An earthquake? Lina, sitting on the stairs, does not know what this is, but she will not say so.

  William sits beside the fire to take off his boots.

  It began in Portugal, he says, in the city of Lisbon. Because it was All Saints’ Day, every candle on every altar had been lit. When the earthquake struck, flames engulfed the altar cloths in the churches and cathedrals, where the Catholic faithful were massed in number as on no other day of the year. Soon the whole city was in flames. People were buried beneath the collapsed buildings, crushed by the weight of timber and stone.

  Their father closes his eyes. “It is a picture of hell,” he says.

  “That’s not all,” William says. “The earthquake was followed by a giant wave that rushed over the city from the river Tagus.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Jacob says. “A giant wave.”

  Lina sees their father drop his head into his hands.

  William puts aside his boots and stares into the fire. He ignores Jacob.

  “Despite the flood, the city is still smoking,” William says. “Those who survived the devastation live now in tents pitched on the rubble. Flames still flare up in the ruins, the men said.”

  Lina is unable to be silent any longer.

  “It was the animalcules?” she cries finally. “The bad animalcules?”

  Her father looks between Lina and William. “What? What is she saying?”

  Jacob laughs. “Stupid idiot,” he says.

  Lina slinks down the stairs, shamefaced. She understands that she is confused about something, that she has revealed her foolishness.

  “Lina,” William says. He tries to catch her skirt as she goes past him, but she shrugs away his hand and runs to the stable.

  She presses her forehead to the horse’s flank.

  It was not the moon falling from the sky, for she has watched for it every night and seen it rise as usual. And it was not the animalcules, she sees now.

  It was God who moved the earth, who buried everyone under the fallen churches. She thinks of the people in tents, their dead below them. In her heart is the Überangst, her sad state of affairs. Eine traurige Sache.

  A cart rumbles past the courtyard; she can tell by the sound that its load is heavy, wood or coffins or manure. The stench of the pigs in their neighbor’s courtyard is vile, strong in the cold air. The familiar knot of worry forms in her stomach.

  When her mother calls her from the house, Lina kisses the horse again and again on its nose, but she leaves the stable. She does not want a whipping.

  When she goes inside, she is glad to see that Jacob has gone away. Only William and her father remain in the big room before the fire. Her father says her name and she goes to him, head hanging.

  He takes her onto his lap. “Perhaps do not always tell her so much,” he says to William over her head.

  William gets up and crouches before her. She curls away from him, pressing her face against their father.

  “We do not understand what causes an earthquake,” William says. “Some great instability within the earth, of course, but it is not the animalcules.”

  She is silent, listening.

  “They are…like creatures,” William says, “but they are forever trapped inside the things that contain them…because they are the things. Things do not exist without them. Do you understand?”

  She does not.

  “Can we see them?” she says, speaking into her father’s chest.

  “One day you will,” William says. “One day we will have a microscope and a telescope and then everything will be revealed to us.”

  She keeps her face turned away from his.

  “Why would God kill all the people?” she asks.

  She feels her father’s hand, which has been stroking her hair, stop. She knows that William and her father are looking at each other.

  “God is not responsible in that way,” William says. “It is difficult to understand, I know.”

  No one speaks. Lina listens to the sounds of the fire.

  Then William says: “A great philosopher tells us that we live in the best of all possible worlds,” he says. “Beste aller möglichen Welten. There is suffering, yes, but it does not mean God intends us to suffer.”

  He is silent for a moment. Then he says: “God intends for us to triumph over suffering, to come to know his great creation as fully as we can.”

  “But why should there be suffering?” she asks. “Why not only happiness?”

  Again William hesitates.

  “To teach us to be kind,” he says at last. “To teach us to be better than our human instincts might prompt us to be. To bring us into closer knowledge of God.”

  Her father pats her back, but he says nothing.

  She thinks of Jacob. She does not think the earthquake will make Jacob kinder.

  “You’ll see,” William says. “The people of Lisbon will rebuild their city. One day it will be more beautiful than ever.”

  She closes her eyes and leans against her father. His heartbeat is faint in her ear. She concentrates on it. She does not want to
listen to any more of William’s explanations.

  But he understands her, anyway.

  “Think of everything you love, Lina,” he says. “God made all of that, too. Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not,” she says, but she keeps her eyes closed, her ear against her father’s heartbeat.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, William takes her to the esplanade in Hanover to see Winged Victory, who toppled from her perch on her high pedestal during the earthquake.

  Wouldn’t she like to see Victory’s face up close?

  In the esplanade, fallen Victory’s face is beautiful, Lina thinks, but her eyes are disturbingly empty, like the eyes of the blind knife sharpener, his thumb made of leather, who walks the streets with his cart to collect the knives and hatchets.

  Victory’s head has been cracked open on one side, her nose chipped. One green wing has broken off and lies severed in the grass. On the ground the wing is so much larger than Lina could have imagined, an angel’s massive wing fallen from heaven.

  She kneels and puts her hand to it, strokes the cold feathers. She looks up to the top of the empty pedestal. She knows that Victory has only fallen from her high perch. But where are the angels? Where is God?

  She has understood from William that the stars do not go away during the day; they are still up there, burning and burning into eternity, only they cannot be seen when the sun is shining and the sky is bright. It has to do with the rotations of the earth and the sun and moon, William says, everything rolling in the sea of the sky in separate orbits.

  He has drawn pictures for her, shown her how the earth revolves around the sun, how each planet itself spins on a fixed path. He’s shown her the positions of the moon and the sun, the orbit of the earth, drawing pictures with dotted lines.

  He has explained—drawing arrows from the moon to the earth, earth to the sun—that when it is daylight on their side of the world, everyone on the other side of the earth is in darkness.

  “Their night is our day,” he says.

  “Upside down?” Lina says. “Hanging on by their feet?”

  “No, it is not like that,” he says. “It is difficult to explain. But think. At night, you are just as you are now. You are not upside down.”

  She shakes her head. It is too confusing.

  “How far does the sky go?” she asks him as they gaze down at Victory.

  “The universe,” William says. He looks up at Victory’s empty pedestal. “We don’t know,” he says. “Far.”

  Lina takes his hand and makes him stroke Victory’s wing with her.

  “Where do the angels live?” she asks. “And God? Heaven is above the planets?”

  About God and the angels William has no immediate reply.

  “God is in another…realm,” he says finally.

  Lina looks at Victory’s ruined face. Perhaps the angels look like Victory.

  “We will see God when we die,” she says.

  “Yes,” William agrees.

  Together they look down on Victory’s shattered wing.

  Lina is not sure she wants to see God. She does not like the priest, and why would God have a servant who is so unpleasant and ugly? All God’s angels except Satan are supposed to be very beautiful, like Raphael and Michael in Paradise Lost.

  But God also made the horse and the orchard and—suddenly she looks up at him, marveling—he made William.

  And he made her.

  “Truly,” William says, looking at Victory. “The mystery deepens, the more I know.”

  —

  MANY YEARS LATER, when she is an old woman and has returned to Hanover after a long absence, she will see Victory again.

  She will stop on the esplanade late on a winter afternoon, leaning on her stick and gazing up at Victory restored to her pedestal, her blind eyes gazing into the distance.

  So much about the world will have changed by then—everything, in a way. It will seem strange to Lina that Victory still stands, her great wings flexed as if she is prepared to leap into the sky.

  Ageless, heroic Victory will wear a foolish little cap of snow.

  Lina will remember her childhood, remember the earthquake, remember when she and William stood at the side of the fallen statue and touched her cold wings.

  She will remember her sense that day that mystery had been all around them.

  As she stands there, an old woman looking up at old Victory, a pigeon will alight on Victory’s shoulder, ruffle its feathers, and settle down as if to sleep.

  Though it is cold, Lina will stand with Victory for a long time, until the square has emptied, waiting for darkness and the sight of the night’s first stars.

  They had dwelt always in that mystery, she and William. He had led her there. That, at least, had never changed.

  TWO

  Moon

  On a cold morning in early spring, the Herschel family gathers in the courtyard with the wooden bucket and the broom and the bantams and the evil Hamburg rooster, who eyes Lina from his perch atop the bench by the door and rushes to peck her feet, if given the chance. The thaw has begun, but the air is bitterly damp. In the courtyard, a shelf of wet brown smoke hovers. That morning, a fat black cinder dropped onto the stones at Lina’s feet. When she touched it with the toe of her boot, it fell apart to expose its glowing heart, bright against the gray stones.

  It is three years since the earthquake; Lina is eight years old. Sometimes this winter she has been allowed to go by herself to stand bundled up on the wall of the Stadtgraben in the early evening dusk, watching the other children dart over the frozen ditches on their skates. The air smells of snow and of the tangle of frozen rushes hanging on at the edge of the Leinestrom, of the icy fields beyond, of the cloud breath from the horses pulling sleighs. When she puts her hands over her cheeks to keep them warm, the smell of the courtyard smoke clings to the damp wool of her mittens.

  She is often ill, and she is not allowed to skate, as the boys are. She is considered too weak for sport or gaiety, though not for work about the house.

  In the courtyard now, as she waits with her father and brothers and Sophia, her feet ache. The cold air stings her nose, and the smoke makes her throat burn and her eyes stream. Inside the stable attached to the courtyard, the horse strikes the wall of his stall with his hoof, making his lonely, prisoner sound, which is what he does when he is bored. He stops for a moment and then begins again, rhythmically knocking. When Lina cleans his stall, she crouches under the roof of his belly with the long hair and puts her ear to the shining pile of his thick coat, listening to the rumbling business inside him. He stands planted as if his feet are made of stone, and she strokes his silky legs. William has taught her the secret way to run her fingers down the horse’s fetlock, so that he will lift his heavy hoof for her as if it were magically light as air.

  It is rare that all the Herschel siblings are together, but William has organized them for this important occasion. He has dragged a wooden tub into the center of the courtyard and filled it from the well. Sophia, her hair in a long plait wound around her head in a new, adult way, is very pretty. She has been away for several months, helping their uncle at his farm and vineyard, caring for their little cousins since their mother’s death. When Sophia has undressed in their old bedroom on the last two nights, Lina has stolen glances at the pear-shaped weights of Sophia’s breasts, the speckled vee of wiry hair between her legs, the cello shape of her hips and her waist. It seems impossible to Lina that she will ever grow up to look as Sophia does.

  William stands next to their father. Beside their father’s aspect of ill health—his sunken cheeks and dull skin and damp hairline—William, at nineteen, seems like a different creature altogether. When he picks her up and lifts her to his shoulders, she feels the strength in his arms. William’s heart, she thinks, is big like the horse’s heart.

  Alexander is beside William, holding little Dietrich by the hand. Alexander, who is twelve, admires William, as Lina and their father do. She feels
jealous of Alexander that he can go anywhere with William, while she must stay at home. But Alexander is good to her, at least. He shows her fingerings on his violin. He helps her in the kitchen when their mother does not see.

  Bad, dark-faced Jacob prowls the perimeter, scowling and dragging his feet. The day before he had wrenched her arm because of his knife being unclean at dinner, though she could see nothing on it. Her father had intervened, going to his chair by the fire afterward, his hand over his eyes.

  “They should’ve drowned you in a bucket,” Jacob had told her.

  “That’s enough,” their father had said from his chair. “For pity’s sake.”

  Later that evening, when William went outside, Lina had followed him.

  She’d stood before him where he sat on the bench, looking up at the stars. He’d had a book with him.

  “Jacob wishes I were dead,” she had said.

  William had put aside his book. He’d held out his hand and pulled her down beside him on the bench.

  “Look up,” he’d said. “Aren’t the stars beautiful?”

  She hadn’t said anything.

  “Jacob has an ugly thing crouching inside him,” William had said. “I told you not to look at him.”

  “I can’t not look at him,” she’d said, and even as she said it, she’d felt the way Jacob’s presence in a room made her heart race. He seems to compel her to look at him.

  “My eyes go there,” she’d said.

  William had said nothing further, his gaze on the stars.

  “He is the oldest,” she’d said. “He should know better.”

  “You will not change him,” William had said. “Make your mind think of other things.”

  Lina had leaned against him.

  “Look,” William had said again, nudging her with his shoulder. “Did you ever see anything as beautiful as the stars?”

  —

  TODAY WILLIAM HAS BEEN PREPARING for what he calls the surprise. They have been told by William that they cannot look at the tub yet, that to look directly at the sun’s reflection in the water is impossible. It is too bright for their eyes. He will tell them when it is safe to look. There is a feeling of strangeness, even dread in the air. The horse knocks and knocks in his cell. Birds fly back and forth in restless flocks, settling for a moment and then lifting off again in inky swarms that swerve across the sky. Lina cannot help herself and glances at the tub, but she sees only wavering shapes on the water’s swaying surface, a bright flash.