by Ursula Hegi
On the fourth day of Tobias’ life, a sudden fever pushed Sara into the pillows that turned damp as she pitched her body from side to side. Dreams of birds fell at her, tiny and naked birds that drop from their nests and crash to the ground, bone-white and flat, so flat and still in their human nakedness against the brown earth, half-formed and cold so cold—“I’m not letting you die.” Stefan, it was Stefan’s voice, pulling at her, pulling her back from where Agnes waited while he sponged her body with melted snow. Cold. So. Cold and those beaks, those shallow beaks like baby-girl features, while others fall into her dream naked and cold so— And then he was carrying her. Carrying her to the window. Telling her about the journey they’d take to Germany come May. May? How can it be May? The roofs of her town were white with new snow but the birds are of all colors now, not naked but huge with feathers of all colors all colors and cries as extravagant as their feathers.
“Now they have feathers,” she said slowly, “feathers …”
But her husband was crying.
She pressed one palm against the side of his face till he stopped. “How do you say bird in German?”
“Vogel. Why?”
“And little bird?”
“Vögelchen.”
She raised her other hand toward the ice flowers that bloomed on the glass panes; and while Stefan told her about the barges that hauled cargo up and down the Rhein, she climbed into his voice, bringing with her the naked birds and also the birds with feathers, while he drew word-pictures for her of chestnut trees with candle blossoms, of an ancient town he called Kaiserswerth across the river from his hometown.
As he stroked Sara’s arms, her flushed face, Stefan suddenly could no longer recall the features of his first wife; there was only Sara now, and he wondered how he could have ever not recognized her fully. For the two hours before her death she was lucid, and he tried to explain to her that he would take Elizabeth’s name off the deeds and put hers on instead, but all Sara wanted from him was to circle back with her over Agnes’ brief life—that inquisitive way she had of raising her head; how she loved to swim; the way her hair clung to her temples when she slept; the surprised look she got when waking up as if she’d expected to find herself somewhere else. … It moved Sara how much Stefan had noticed about their daughter, and as they circled over every movement and sound of hers they could recall, their words became more hurried, while—outside their locked bedroom door—Greta was pressing herself against the painted wood, absorbing those words into her memory, shivering because she could feel the shape of the something she’d known about long before her sister’s birth, the something that already had taken Agnes and was now here for Sara. Even her father wasn’t powerful enough to stall it any longer.
In the months after Sara’s burial, Stefan would hike up to the cemetery early every morning while Greta and Tobias and their new nursemaid were still asleep. Standing in front of the grave, he would try to keep his gaze above ground, to not let himself imagine his two wives lying on their backs the way they had in their coffins, side by side with Agnes between them. Because if he let himself see them like that, Sara and Elizabeth turn to each other, murmur across the child beneath the dark earth, there, palms touching palms as if they were lovers.
Sometimes the people of Winnipesaukee would raise their faces toward the hill because they’d hear Stefan, even from that distance. They’d never heard a man howl like that—a sound not quite human, they said. Some whispered that it was his howl that made the pines in the cemetery shed their needles that winter because his was too formidable a grief to let anything living adhere to where it belonged. In their empathy for him and in their fretting that he might throw himself into the Brook-that-finishes-grieving, they grew closer to one another, closer yet than they had been in this village by the great lake; and oddly it all tied in with his tall, new house that became more theirs, now, as they talked about Stefan Blau more than ever before. About how, instead of statues, he’d placed fire extinguishers into the alcoves of the hallways as if to protect what was left of his family. About how he’d stopped giving Father Albin money. About how every dollar of profit from his restaurant went into his apartment building—the best of everything: Italian marble and Dutch tiles; stenciled beams and oriental rugs; German carvings and crystal chandeliers; balconies with flower boxes atop the ornate railings; a stone fountain with two tiers like something you might see in picture books of Venice.
He immersed himself in his restaurant, trying variations of his ratatouille and salade niçoise, testing new recipes like poires au vin rouge—pears in red wine. Sometimes his work could blunt his sorrow for a few hours, but then it would raise itself again, a savage beast that tore at his memories, a beast he could cage until late at night after he’d close the restaurant, a beast he’d take with him into the green boat and row far out on the lake to drown it. As the bow crushed flimsy layers of ice, sweat coated his chest, and he knew he would freeze to death if his boat were to tip over. Stripping off his clothes, he felt the cold, black air against his slick skin, but he kept rowing toward the faraway center of the vast lake and the dim mounds of the islands whose legends Sara used to collect. To row to the far end of the lake would take days, maybe even a week. He longed for the ache in his arms and shoulders to expand till it blotted out all else, longed to shatter and disperse into fragments no larger than those specks of stars above him, longed to get sucked into the sky and vanish—but whenever he’d look toward shore, the massive shape of the Wasserburg would summon him.
Though his rents were far more expensive than others in town, Stefan already had a waiting list of prospective tenants that spring of 1911 when he moved with Greta and Tobias into their seven rooms on the top floor of the Wasserburg, where high ceilings met the walls in graceful curves and the windows framed the lake and mountains. It all looked the way he and Elizabeth had planned it—only now it no longer meant anything to him. Since she had taken such delight in describing each detail to him when she’d been pregnant with Greta, he still thought of the apartment as hers and furnished it with the tufted sofas and painted fern baskets she’d wanted, left the windows without drapes. The birch furniture in the bedroom he kept, and he ordered a leather chair like the one he’d seen in the office of Elizabeth’s father.
Greta, who had been listless since Sara’s death, started humming and smiling in the new apartment. Fascinated by the haze of unfamiliar smells, she’d bring her nose against the cool tiles, dry plaster, and gleaming woodwork, inhaling deeply as those odors revealed the house to her. Often her face would be smudged, and it wouldn’t be until she was five and Dr. Miles would prescribe glasses for her, that she would discover colors beyond those that now made up her surroundings; but by then the habit of sniffing would be so ingrained that she’d continue to form many of her first impressions by scent.
Like the scent of her brother.
Who smelled like Agnes.
Powder and diapers and tears.
And who lived with knowing about Agnes long before anyone would tell him about her. Because Greta had taken the white-and-yellow blanket that used to belong to Agnes. Had plopped it into her brother’s crib. And as Tobias slept within its folds, sleeps and dreams, dreams and turns, he is living for himself and for Agnes. Someone like me; almost like me. Dreams and turns within the folds of the blanket. Dreams and cries. And remembers what he cannot possibly remember from his own experience but what, nevertheless, is imprinting itself on his soul. Deeper with each day. More permanent with each day: someone like me; almost like me. So much like Agnes that even his father, when bending over his crib, would feel momentarily confused, thinking he was seeing Agnes—those tufts of hair, that minus sign of freckles, that urgent grasp, too urgent—and then realize it was Tobias. Me. Someone like me.
The first tenant to move in was Miss Garland, just retired from the shoe factory that had calloused her hands and curved her spindly back slightly to the left. It was where work had been available the year she’d graduate
d from school, and she’d started there, certain she’d find something more interesting in six months. A year at most. But she hadn’t left. Not for half a century.
From the kitchen window of her old apartment, she had witnessed every step of the construction as the Wasserburg had grown to obstruct her view and the view of everyone else who lived in the clapboard houses behind it. While others had grumbled, she’d been mesmerized. Five years it had taken the house from start to finish, five years for her to imagine what it would be like to make her first withdrawal ever from her bank account that had grown astonishingly over decades of living frugally while making scant, weekly deposits from her pay. She hadn’t known what she was saving for until the Wasserburg had begun to rise outside her window like the manifestation of desires too glorious to admit to anyone. But then she had understood. And had gone to see Stefan Blau, shy around him—because how could you have known so precisely what I want?—as he wrote her name on the first line of a list that would grow during the years of construction.
When it was time, he came to her door and did what he had promised her, though she had not believed him, offer her the choice of any apartment—any, except his own—in his Wasserburg, though it must have been obvious to him that she could only afford the least expensive one. Still, he led her through every single room in his vast building, adjusting his pace to hers—I notice that, things like that—his widower’s face almost pleased when she told him how splendid it all was. Imagine, a button inside each apartment to let people in from the outside. And another button recessed in the parquet floor where her table would stand so that with the touch of one foot, one toe even, she could summon a maid. Imagine. Her own flush toilet instead of a privy behind the house. Ceiling lamps that could be turned on with one switch.
On the day she moved into her small apartment on the main floor across from the brass mailboxes and the elevator, Stefan Blau told her, “Willkommen,” and explained it was a German word to greet esteemed guests. What Miss Garland had always liked was to watch others, and her apartment was ideal for that because her windows opened to the courtyard and street. And to think that the street view was less expensive than the water view, that she was saving money by choosing what she preferred.
Inside her linen closet, she stashed her canning jars with cloudy contents, sacks of flour, and bottles of maple syrup she’d been hoarding for years in anticipation of emergencies. For her living room she ordered the most luxurious furniture you could buy in Winnipesaukee; but in the bedroom she kept her sagging bed and scuffed dresser, concealed behind the door along with her shame at having earned her money by working. All her life, Miss Garland had yearned to be married, supported by a husband who worshiped her, and after moving into Stefan Blau’s Wasserburg, she began to invent her past as though she had settled in a different country where no one knew her history. She would hint at an inheritance, at a young fiancé who had died tragically four decades ago. And because she cherished the idea of herself living in a building this magnificent, she rarely left it, except to watch it from outside while she sat on the bench that the German carpenter had bolted to the end of the dock, her back to the lake and the tourist cottages on the islands and the lower slopes of the mountains.
Harsh work had catapulted her from being a girl of fifteen to being a woman of sixty-five—nothing in between for her—but now that she had leisure for the first time in half a century, she could feel herself growing younger as if her life had opted to reverse itself. Without checking in mirrors, she could tell her body was getting nimbler. She read articles in Ladies’ Home Journal on how to decorate elegantly on a small budget, scanned the advertisements in The Saturday Evening Post, already knowing she wouldn’t buy any of those wares. Some days she took three baths. After a lifetime of carrying a pitcher of water to her bedroom and washing herself from a basin or, occasionally, crouched in a metal tub, she loved turning on the faucet and watching an entire white bathtub fill up, a bathtub so long that even when she lay stretched in it, her toes could not touch its other end. And when she was clean, she could let it all run down the sink instead of pouring out slop water. Already, her hands were softer, and the yellow cracks beneath her feet had healed. To make sure her feet would stay like that, she sewed three pairs of soft black felt slippers and embroidered them with hummingbirds.
Inventing a fiancé wasn’t all that different from what she had done since childhood—make up what she longed for—and as her history as a woman who had almost married grew into a lavish tapestry, it covered the worn cloth of her past, except for moments when strands of light dropped through the gaps between the stitches and illuminated fragments of her barren years. She’d been raised in a small, remote house where her mother bred and sold cocker spaniels, and her father left every morning on his bicycle to work at the shoe factory. Sometimes he talked about looking for other work, but since the tools he worked with at the factory didn’t belong to him, he didn’t think he could afford to leave there. Besides, he hadn’t been trained for any other work. “Make sure you get skills and tools of your own,” he’d tell his small daughter, who would not play with other children until she’d started school. The few visitors who came to the house were customers who fussed over her mother’s puppies. How she wished they’d buy every single one of those dogs that followed her all day. If she ran from them, they’d chase her, brown-and-white ears flopping, tiny needle teeth nipping at her ankles. “Scram,” she would holler, “scram scram scram,” flailing at them with her pinafore. One day behind the house she kicked one of them away, and when it didn’t move, she nudged it behind the lilac bush by the back steps and ran inside. For several days she didn’t use the back steps, and when she finally looked behind the lilacs, the puppy was still lying there. “Here, puppy, puppy. …” She bent to pick it up. “Wake up, puppy. Wake up.” In her hands it felt light, curiously light, and when she turned it around, it had a hole in its white-and-brown belly that was filled with white rice. Rice? And then the rice moved.
Feet smooth in her felt slippers, Miss Garland would sit by her window, her good suit jacket over a housedress, not ashamed to be noticed by people who passed by the Wasserburg, and if she kept her door half open, she could also see everyone who came to the mailboxes. She was intrigued and appalled by Nate Bloom, the most dazzling of the tenants, who had a telephone and was divorced. His mustache was so thin it looked painted on. As president of the local factory that built railroad cars, he had his own railroad car that he could hook to the Boston and Maine Railroad. Though Miss Garland had only seen it from outside, she’d heard it had red velvet seats and mahogany tables bolted down to the floor, mahogany trim around the windows, and a separate compartment with a large bed. The railroad car was stocked with the best liquors, and Mr. Bloom gave extravagant parties while the train traveled from one place to another. Sometimes he’d order as many as fifty dinners from Stefan Blau’s restaurant, and Miss Garland would see waiters in tuxedos leave the Cadeau du Lac to deliver their covered trays to the railroad station. From one of the waiters she knew that Nate Bloom particularly liked Stefan’s rognons, prepared in a wine-and-mustard sauce, and the filet de sole served with wine-soaked prunes.
Though Nate Bloom invited Stefan Blau on several of his journeys, Stefan declined, just as he declined all invitations, except those from his dead wives’ parents. He was grateful to them for all they did for Greta and Tobias, but even with the help of a nursemaid, he knew that wasn’t enough. Eventually, he would need to find a mother for them. But he postponed thinking about that by working late every evening. Besides, the people of Winnipesaukee—though they praised his devotion to his children—kept their daughters of marriageable age away from him. Often he’d roam the hallways of his apartment house after the restaurant closed, and he’d touch the brass crowns of the fire extinguishers in the alcoves, the wroughtiron sconces—much in the way his granddaughter, Emma, would touch them many years later.
Nate Bloom was persistent—not just with his invitations
, but even more so in wanting to rent the largest apartment in the building, the one where Stefan lived with his children. Though Stefan was clear in his refusal, Nate Bloom would approach him about it every time he saw him in the elevator until Stefan offered to rent him two apartments on the fifth floor and combine them by breaking through the connecting wall with an arch.
He hired Homer and Irene Wilson, a married couple who used to manage a building in Florida and came with the best of references. Though Homer Wilson was easygoing and only in his thirties, his tanned skin was already creased across his neck and forehead. His wife had the flat build of a boy, and her mouth was set in an eager but dissatisfied expression as if she worried that whatever she did was not enough. Her first day on the job, she caught Stefan by the front door and confided that she and her husband had moved to Winnipesaukee to live close to the child they were about to inherit.
“You see, my Homer’s sister, she’s been ill with lung problems ever since she left Orlando with some fellow and took Danny along, that’s her son, and we’re first in line to adopt him since he’s got no father, never had, at least not one who’d stay long enough to give him his name on a certificate, so Danny’s last name is already Wilson which means he won’t even have to change his name once he’s ours, once his mother dies, that is just so you know he’ll be living with us.”