Seal Woman

by Solveig Eggerz

  The words my soldier hung suspended like a thread between them, over which traveled the memory of the other ten. Glaciers rumbled over rocks, left them intact but scarred. Soldiers could leave marks on a population. Charlotte knew that from the Russians. The French shaved girls' heads after the soldiers were gone. Not here, though. Soldiers hadn't been the enemy. One had given the old woman an orange, then turned to stone inside the earth.

  A Bird's Breath on Her Skin

  Across the rubble of a bombed-out church, she'd seen their broad shoulders in big coats. Two Russian soldiers climbed over the rocks towards her. One dangled a pair of sausages at her. He grasped her hand, placed it on the sausages—a promise. As he pressed against her, her mouth filled with water. Whatever she had, they could take, just so they fed her.

  She made it easy for him, lifted her skirt, pushed aside her underwear, leaned against the broken wall. He grunted as he rammed into her. Over his shoulder, she saw the other soldier leering at her, unbuttoning his pants. When the first one was finished with her, she pocketed one sausage and braced herself to earn the second one.

  Afterwards, as she climbed the steps in the dark stairwell, a hand between her legs, the sausages in her pocket, her shame gave way to pride. She'd been working for a living.

  Her mother sliced half of one of the sausages, fried it with potatoes, kept her eyes on her plate. Throughout the meal Charlotte and her mother barely spoke to one another.

  "They left a lot here," the old woman was saying. "Chocolates, stockings, oranges, babies, their bodies—oh yes and their cars."

  But the old woman couldn't forgive the soldiers for one thing. They'd ripped up the sphagnum moss to bandage their cuts. And they stuffed it into their sleeping bags for warmth.

  Charlotte picked up the other side of the fleece rack, and they walked to the creek. Its bank was yellow with marsh marigolds. It was the same every year. The day the marigolds shed their petals, the haymaking would begin.

  Ragnar had anchored a crate to the bed of the creek so that water flowed through its slats. Groaning, the old woman almost dropped the rack onto the ground. Rubbing her back, she helped Charlotte drop each fleece into the crate, singing to herself:

  Sing loud and dance

  For the night, it is so long.

  This vision of the darkest days of winter chilled Charlotte— days just folded into memory—days of pulling, combing, carding, and spinning the wool. Fussy about each sheepskin, the old woman scraped it clean with a knife, stretched it for drying, tight as a drum skin, on the door of the shed. Later, she rolled it up, placed it on the top shelf in the pantry.

  Sometimes Charlotte thought the old woman lived outside the passage of time. Even though the boys preferred rubber shoes from the cooperative store, the old woman unrolled the skin during the darkest part of December, cut it into parts, and stitched shoes for them. She dyed them black with bearberries, knitted woolen pads with their initials as shoe fillers, and made Tryggvi take his indoor shoes to school in his pocket.

  Take off your boots. Wear the sheepskin in the classroom.

  Of course, the old woman could have bought blue dye at the cooperative store, but she believed in self-sufficiency. So for Henrik she'd scraped the copper layer out of a discarded kettle, dissolved it in water, and soaked his shoes until they turned blue.

  "Once our cat drank the dye. We found him dead," she'd whispered. Charlotte heard the pride in her tone—only the strongest dye for her boy's shoes.

  Now the sheep cycle was beginning over again.

  They spread the fleeces over the tussocks until the ground looked alive with hump-backed sheep. The wind would fluff the wooly skins into a curly dryness, and Ragnar and the boys would load them onto a handcart and take them to the shed for storage.

  At the end of the day, the old woman was stooped. She walked back to the shed rubbing the place between her neck and shoulders. From the shelf she took a packet of nettles. Out fell the gray green flowers and leaves covered with tiny spikes. She wrapped a dishcloth around the base of the prickly stalks and handed the bouquet to Charlotte. She slipped off her blouse and undershirt, then undid her skirt and pushed it below her hips. Her papery white skin glowed in the flickering light of the oil lamp. She turned her back to Charlotte, placed her hands on the wall.

  "Don't stop until you see blood," she commanded.

  Charlotte swung the bundle of plants, tapping the pale back and shoulders gently at first, then harder. Soon, the fuzzy hairs on the leaves of the stinging nettle would break the thin, dry skin and drive the phytomedicine, a natural anti-histamine, into the muscles. Tiny dots of blood formed on the thin skin.

  Urtication the old woman called it. Developing a rhythm to the flagellation, Charlotte thought of the golden paintings of Franciscan martyrs, carrying palm leaves and smiling radiantly. The blood on the axe blade lodged in the martyr's neck contrasted with the iconic gold.

  The blood pinpricks joined into droplets on the old woman's back. Charlotte's eyes blurred at the emerging red landscape. A familiar disorientation came over her. Another younger and stronger back lay beneath her hands now. The torn flesh was a mass of red and purple wounds oozing into dirty bandages. Max had writhed when she washed his wounds.

  "Harder," the old woman commanded.

  Again, she slapped the bony shoulders with the prickly plant, hating the red streaks that formed on the skin. She began to talk to herself, saying things she could not herself hear, anything to stop the pain of her thoughts. If only he'd stayed in the kitchen painting flowers.

  "Enough," the old woman said suddenly.

  Breathing hard, Charlotte dried the old woman's back and rubbed it with salve.

  Dressed now, the old woman waggled her finger at Charlotte.

  "I heard you. I know you're hiding something."

  Charlotte stepped back. "Me? What?" Then guilt washed over her. She'd promised Max not to tell. They'll arrest me again. She'd never told until now—maybe. Still he'd been arrested.

  Over the old woman's head, through the window, Charlotte glimpsed the ridge of the hill. She lived between that hill and the dirt beneath her feet. She drew a circle in the dirt floor with her toe, felt the rough ground through her thin shoes. It came down to two things. She was here. The rest of the world was there.

  Her back to the old woman, Charlotte undressed. Like a bird's breath on her skin, the old woman came close, whispered in her ear. "You know those pictures of goblins jumping out of a person's mouth?"

  Yes, she knew about goblins from medieval woodcuts, how evil people harbored them, how the priest helped sinners spit them out.

  "You have a goblin that sits in your throat. You need to get it out."

  "How?" Charlotte asked, wincing with pain under the slap of the nettles.

  "Tell it—the whole thing," the voice whispered at her shoulder.

  Gradually the stinging feeling transformed itself into relief. First her skin, then her whole body relaxed. Finally the old woman stopped, and Charlotte sensed the blood cooling on her back and with it the fading of the memory of Max's ordeal.

  Small hands traveled her back, and the smell of yarrow salve rose in her nostrils. Feeling faint, Charlotte grasped the timber beam in the wall to keep from sliding to the floor.

  The voice at her shoulder again. "Just say 'I have something to tell you.'"

  "Yes," Charlotte promised.

  The old cowardly blood was gone. Her new blood would give her courage. The timber beam was her witness.

  An Odd Desire

  After a long day of raking and binding hay, Charlotte usually slept well, but in the middle of haying season, she began to awake to nightmares.

  The dreams often started with a garish review of Max's paintings, the ones he did after he was banished from the art academy—the prostitutes with orange nipples, one legged beggars, erect penises poking from among rags. Pot-bellied gentlemen dandled rouged boys. The dancer, elbows on her knees, opened her legs, revealing a red-lipped ca
ve.

  She'd waited all night for him to return from a cell meeting. When he walked in the door, his face a bloody pulp, his eye hanging down to his cheek, she screamed at him.

  We've got to get out of here.

  His words made her blood boil.

  I'm a German just like everyone else. Why should I go?

  She picked him up and threw him down the stairs, ran after him, boiling with anger. At the bottom of the stairs, she kicked him again and again. A stormtrooper came. Together, they kicked Max's head until it resembled an overripe tomato.

  Her own sobbing woke her. She lay back on her pillow, ashamed.

  I loved Max. Why am I doing these things to him?

  He'd taught her the difference in brushes, rabbit's hair, buffalo tail, pig's bristle. He'd taught her to paint what wasn't really there—the empty spaces, the made-up things. And now he kept coming back. How many times did she have to kill him?

  Her toes stood out from under the sheet. She addressed them directly.

  Go away. I have a new life now.

  But she knew he'd be back. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and put on her work pants. In the kitchen, the old woman and Ragnar were talking. She could tell by the relaxed lines in their faces that they'd finished the milking and had fed all the animals. She'd overslept that badly. It was raining hard.

  Ragnar reached for his sweater.

  "Time to cut that grass along the barbed wire."

  She nodded without looking up, didn't expect more talk from him that day.

  Tryggvi came out of the bedroom, pulling on his clothes.

  "I want to go too," he said.

  "The weather—" she protested.

  But Tryggvi took his overalls from the hook, stood on the steps and climbed into them. He buckled her old dress belt around his waist and looked expectantly at Ragnar. Stirring the bubbling rhubarb pudding, she ignored the gritty sound of men putting on rubber boots in the hall. Weather was everything here, but it also meant nothing. In Berlin, if it rained, they canceled the picnic. Here you rode it out, waited for the rain to pull back before you unwrapped the sandwiches, ate fast, huddled against a rock cavity.

  Through the window, she saw them, the crescent moon of the scythe blades curved over their backs, the points aimed at their buttocks, until the fog enveloped them.

  Again, the front door closed. Henrik was outside, running after them. She rapped on the windowpane, but he didn't turn around. She flew out the door, chased him over the tussocks. Quick as an elf, he disappeared into the mist. Panting, she stopped and turned around.

  The old woman met her at the door with a dry pair of socks.

  "Don't chase your boys like that. They'll see your fear."

  Charlotte glared. She didn't want to hear the story again, but the old woman was already gesturing with her hands.

  "I used to spend a lot of time on the shore, like you. February mornings, we were on the sand. My boys too. We'd watch for the lull between the waves.

  "'NOW, Papa,' Ragnar would yell, but he was usually wrong.

  "Beyond the waves, the ocean was mild as a puppy. But it crashed on the shore."

  An odd desire rippled through Charlotte's body. She'd like to go down to the shore now, but she mustn't, not with both boys swinging metal in the field. The old woman took her elbow and led her to the bench.

  "In the split second before the next wave crashed, my man and six others pushed the skiff into the sea, rowed like crazy men. They got out of the soapy part of the surf before the next wave crashed. I held my breath until I could see them out beyond the waves. Then the boys and I walked back up the hillside. I fed the animals, cleaned the shed, dug up potatoes until the sweat poured off me.

  "Most days he came back. I'd be sitting at the spinning wheel—after the boys were asleep. He'd peel off his clothes in the hall, then he'd climb into bed smelling of cod and ocean."

  She closed her eyes, and Charlotte knew she was recalling the exact moment when the tide changed, the moment of greatest pleasure. And the old woman had known it in the bed that Charlotte and Ragnar now shared.

  "He loved me hard, helped me forget the work," the old woman said.

  She walked to the opposite wall and peered into the small mirror on the shelf as if she'd lost something in the crack that ran down its middle. She rubbed her fingers through her scalp.

  "Thinning," she said. "My man liked thick hair."

  She undid her plaits, stripped down to her woolen undershirt, reached for the salve of Rhodiola Rosea, and rubbed it into her scalp. A rose-like fragrance filled the room. While the rhodiola dried, the old woman washed her face in a fusion from the sundew flower. Its red basal leaves, sticky insect traps, made freckles fade. Charlotte had used it on the boys' bottoms against ringworms.

  Rubbing the sundew over her shoulders, the old woman turned to her.

  "Have you tried telling them stories from Egilssaga? I mean for courage."

  "They don't need more courage," Charlotte said sourly, picking a carding brush out of the basket, cleaning out the wisps of wool and feeding them to the fire in the stove.

  The burning wool crackled and gave off an oily muttony smell. Years ago, the aroma had repelled her, but now it made her think of her children. They smelled of sheep. The old woman dried her hair.

  "If we don't have courage, we just memorize something and do it over and over again, always working on making it easier and safer, drawing a smaller and smaller circle around ourselves."

  Charlotte knew about circles, smaller even than the one she'd fended off when her parents had hoped she'd learn to type and file. Their lives on the farm were tied off at each end by the sigh and the smile of a sheep. The only break in the pattern was violent weather, the equivalent of dropping your typewriter if you were a secretary. The weather cleared up, and you raked the last patch of hay. In the office, you got a new typewriter.

  She cleaned the noses of her new children while her mother searched Europe for her old child. Her last letter troubled Charlotte.

  I went to the Red Cross today to give them a new picture of Lena. The old one was yellowed and curled up.

  But Lena would be twenty-two now. How could her mother provide a new picture? Another picture of a five-year old? The old woman was eyeing her.

  "I wanted to make Lena safe," Charlotte said.

  "It took courage to give her away."

  "I didn't give her away."

  Yet she liked hearing "courage." It soothed her pain, like moss covering lava rock. But the hardness would remain underneath.

  Behind the statue of St. Francis in the convent garden had been a cluster of pink and purple fairy foxglove. Lena had run to the flowers, touched them with the tips of her fingers. Pretty. Then they had both sat down on the stone bench. Charlotte had buried her nose in the child's hair, enjoyed the softness, breathed in its pine fragrance.

  A nun—"the nice nun"—approached the child, her hand outstretched.

  I am Sister Marie Luise.

  Charlotte stood to make it easier, but the child clutched her thigh.

  It's only for a little while. Mamma will come and get you soon.

  It would have been easy to pick Lena up and walk out. But instead she'd nudged Lena toward the nun.

  Mamma will come back and get you.

  Her eye on the door, she'd walked backwards out of the garden. Now her broken promise formed a noose around her happiness.

  The old woman was watching her.

  "I wasn't brave. I was just a fool. I should have kept Lena with me."

  "Are you sure she hasn't survived?"

  "My mother checks with the Red Cross."

  The old woman's voice went deep now, the way it did when she imitated ducks or geese. Her favorite poet was Egil, the Viking warrior. She sang of his mother's dreams for him.

  I'll scour for plunder, the stout steersman of this shining vessel:

  Then home to harbor, after hewing down a man or two.

  "Egil's mother
was a bitch—she'd have gotten the job done at Auschwitz," Charlotte said, putting up potatoes for lunch.

  The old woman raised her eyebrows.

  She shouldn't have brought it up. She'd hated the Nazis more than Max ever could. On the hillside, she apologized for the Third Reich, as the hillside residents read about how the Germans had wanted the island during the war. Dog-eared newspaper articles got passed from farm to farm.