by Ursula Hegi
“I’m sorry for being late, Fräulein Jansen.” Jochen is good with apologies.
Too good, his teacher thinks.
He raises his arm. “Heil Hitler.”
“Heil Hitler,” she responds.
She used to worry about forgetting to salute and that the students would tell on her, but with each month she’s become more immune to her distaste. They’re just words. At first she avoided raising her arm whenever possible, and she’d move her lips without saying the words aloud. But that became an effort because she’d be monitoring herself to keep from getting caught.
It has become simpler to salute whenever she enters and leaves her classroom. Or when a student, usually Jochen, arrives late.
If I were his mother—
Thekla has spoken to Frau Weskopp, who gets her sons off to school at the same time. While the youngest, Benjamin, is never late, Jochen has to look closely at everything along the way. Still, the other students benefit from his observations because he talks about them in class.
To think I could have children that age.
But Thekla’s yearning, all along, has been for students—not for children of her own. Perhaps the yearning, itself, was similar, but she has seen too many mothers sacrificing for their families. Birth children could hold her back. Her students she could bring forward and release. They weren’t hers to start out with.
“Please, sit down quietly,” she tells Jochen.
But he announces, “My father is getting a new dog for his birthday.”
“What kind of dog?” Eckart is poking inside his left ear.
“The same. A Schäferhund—sheepdog.” Jochen still has his child-face. His brother, too. Some boys keep that child-face into manhood; with others the man-face emerges before they are one year old.
Jochen’s father, Konrad, was the first boy Thekla kissed when they were both fifteen. Though she liked the kissing, she avoided Konrad Weskopp after he said that now she’d have to marry him. For him, marriage was the logical outcome of kissing. No wonder the next girl he kissed, Lioba, became his fiancée. A three-year engagement till they were old enough to marry.
Konrad Weskopp still likes to hint at their long-ago courtship. Last month he was at mass in his uniform. Afterward he offered Thekla a cigarette.
“Thank you.”
He leaned toward her as he lit it. “My son tells me he wants to marry a girl who smiles like his teacher. I realize why.”
As she raised her cigarette, he had to take a step back, and she kept the glowing point between them, distracted him by saying what a remarkable student his Jochen was. So easy to ignore a man’s interest by pretending it wasn’t there.
*
“Have you ever noticed,” Franz says, “that people get the same kind of dog again and again?”
“Yes, like poodles for the Buttgereits,” Eckart says.
And now the boys are all talking, interrupting one another.
“Poodles are nervous.”
“That’s why they yip so much.”
“I like cocker spaniels best.”
The teacher doesn’t remind her boys to wait quietly until she calls on them; she wants them to be silly like this, rambunctious. They’ve been restless, more so with each day they’ve come closer to today’s anniversary of the fire that changed Germany, the world even. Speculations about communists have been on the radio with a fresh pitch of urgency, fanning fear of this enemy ready to strike and undermine the Vaterland.
In the past few months, radios have become so cheap that they’re in most households now. Although Thekla has considered buying one—just for the music—she hasn’t because she doesn’t want those rants to invade her home: rants about cultural Bolshevism, about degenerate intellectuals responsible for the decline of family values, about the healthy instinct of the moral majority reclaiming the traditional family.
“That dog from the pay-library chases birds.”
“Not just birds. People, too. He bit Fritz Hansen by the river.”
“That dog limps.”
“The taxidermist’s dog has bad breath and pees inside the house.”
Tomorrow she’ll bring her boys a poem about courage. A new poem, as every Wednesday. She’ll find one that’ll uplift them, and if she hasn’t already memorized it, she’ll copy it into her notebook instead of bringing the thick book of poems collected by Dr. Theodor Echtermeyer generations ago.
The book used to belong to Fräulein Siderova. Until last fall Thekla kept it open on her desk at school so that her students could leaf through the pages, over seven hundred marked pages in a worn binding. Occasionally, she let one of her boys choose the poem for the week and, just like Fräulein Siderova, encouraged her students to mark up pages in the Echtermeyer so that their notes would become part of the text.
*
At home she’ll open the book and check the topics in back: courage and sacrifice; happiness and fulfillment; parting and longing; memory and hope. Under “courage” she’ll find “Der Taucher”—“The Diver” by Friedrich von Schiller. Twenty-seven stanzas. She still recalls every word about the mad king who challenges his knights and pages to dive into the rough sea and retrieve the golden cup he’s tossing from the cliff. Glory, he promises. Wealth. Only one young page, sanft und keck—mild and audacious, leaps in despite the danger and vanishes down the chasm. But he emerges with the cup, with tales of the horrors below the surface, and he warns the others not to tempt the gods by longing to see what they, mercifully, cover with night and horror.
Da unten aber ist’s fürchterlich,
Und der Mensch versuche die Götter nicht
Und begehre nimmer und nimmer zu schauen,
Was sie gnädig bedecken mit Nacht und Grauen.
Tomorrow she’ll recite “Der Taucher” to her boys, the way Fräulein Siderova used to teach poems. Every Wednesday, Fräulein Siderova would recite a new poem and write it on the chalkboard. Thursdays her students would copy it from the chalkboard. Fridays she’d divide her class into four groups so that each group, en chorus, could chant one stanza. And by Saturday every one of Fräulein Siderova’s students would be able to recite the entire poem.
Thekla still remembers how terrified she felt for the diver when the king, once more, flung the cup into the roiling sea and promised him marriage to his daughter if he leapt in again and brought him more knowledge of what lay beneath. Even as a girl Thekla understood what hubris it was to ask that much of fate. But he leapt, the young page.
Of course he was flung against the cliffs.
Of course he drowned.
*
Legends and poetry were filled with stories of hubris that lured you into death, and Thekla’s students were mesmerized by those stories. That’s why they voted to change their frog’s name from Copernicus to Icarus the morning she taught them about Icarus’s flight toward the sun.
To escape from King Minos, Icarus’s father, Daedalus, built wings for his son and himself. After they practiced leaping into the air with those wings—“like frogs,” the boys pointed out—Daedalus and Icarus soared away. But Icarus became cocky, ignored his father’s warnings, and flew toward the sun. Of course, its heat melted the wax between his feathers and sent him tumbling back to earth.
When Andreas Beil concluded that Icarus died because he was disobedient to his father, the teacher was not about to reduce legend to a moral about obedience, and she asked her boys to sketch the wings of Icarus. It was well known that Andreas’s father was too strict. Children who were confined, body or mind, often strained against that confinement, and she could certainly see that in Andreas, who bullied other children. Yet, he was also gifted at sketching, and that’s what she focused on when she praised him for his intricate picture of wooden frames with feathers held together by wax.
*
Thekla has inherited this class of seventeen boys from Fräulein Siderova. There were five more when she started last May, but she’s lost them: David, Hans, Jakob, and Simon attend school
at the synagogue; and Markus is in America. She feels accountable to Fräulein Siderova, who has lodged herself within her like conscience itself.
You know what it’s like, Fräulein Siderova, studying for the work you’re meant to do. But you have no idea what it’s like to wait for ten years. You found a teaching position right away.
Sometimes Thekla wants her out of her head, just for a while, but then she’ll open her drawer in the teachers’ lounge where Fräulein Siderova used to keep her books and handbag, and she’s overcome by the familiar scent of rosewater and vanilla, by the urgency to help her teacher.
Soon, I’ll invite you to visit my class. Except, I don’t want Sister Josefine to say something that would . . . offend you. Better to invite you along on a learning excursion. In the spring. No need to tell anyone at school. I’ll let you know where I’ll be with the boys, and you’ll meet us . . . as if by chance, yes, or maybe watch us from a distance.
On Thekla’s bedroom wall with the family photos hangs one of Fräulein Siderova tending her indoor garden in her tall bay window, where stained glass will coax light even from hazy days.
*
Every Sunday afternoon when Thekla visits Fräulein Siderova, she’s dazzled by the light coming through the stained glass, diffusing and reassembling itself around her so that she feels part of the light, light herself, in a shape that is only hers.
For decades, the people of Burgdorf have thought of Fräulein Siderova as a midwife to the dying, and they’ve sent for her to read poetry to their dying in her lovely voice, guiding them right up to that threshold of death, but letting them cross it alone while she stayed behind. She knew how to. Knew enough about everyone to choose poems that were meaningful for that person alone—poems about courtship or nature or victory—that led the dying back to those people who had once inhabited, or still inhabited, their sorrow: an unforgiving parent, say, or a false love, or, worst of all, an already dead child; and as the dying encountered them on this final passage, they felt ready to let them be. As they were and would be.
Fräulein Siderova wouldn’t accept money for this, but since it was known that she adored stained glass, the townspeople would give her the most precious of what they’d inherited or what they could buy for her: a translucent blue vase, say, or a Venetian goblet, or a bowl so yellow it held the sun in its center.
*
Every Sunday afternoon when Thekla visits, Fräulein Siderova gets out her Russian porcelain cups and brews red tea from rosehips that she gathers every August and dries—
—except that’s no longer true—
*
Every Sunday afternoon when Thekla visits—
—except I haven’t visited you, Fräulein Siderova, though I’ve thought every day about coming to you—
Her heartbeat against her clavicle, Thekla longs for her teacher’s praise, the joy of it.
I haven’t dared visit you in nine months—
1899
Chapter 5
LOVE COULD BE TRICKY, the nuns at the St. Margaret Home knew. It could make you crazy for one night, or forever. Make you lie to yourself and deceive others. Make you long for secret touches you ought to forget but tried to remember. And because the nuns understood this, they tried to protect the St. Margaret Girls, made them wear gray capes to hide their shame. Yet, those capes only identified them.
Named after the patron saint of childbirth, the St. Margaret Home was the largest industry on the Nordstrand peninsula, the industry of illegitimacy, that provided income for the convent and gave the nuns purposeful work: tending to the souls and bodies of pregnant young women, the youngest barely fifteen years old, the oldest past thirty, who arrived here frightened but relieved to be far enough from home so people wouldn’t talk.
The Nordstrand peninsula was shielded by islands that buffered the coast from the moods and the direct onrush of the Nordsee—North Sea. Over the centuries, children had played on the tidal flats; couples had strolled at sunset; and horses had pulled the people of Nordstrand in carriages and sleds. Here, by the edge of the Nordsee, earth and water had barely separated and were still as they must have been on the third day of creation. That’s what the children of Nordstrand learned in school and in church, how God had separated land from water, scooped his hands into the masses of water, sifted the muck by holding it raised till all water had drained away, and named the residue: land.
But the midwife, Lotte Jansen, knew there was no God. Of course, she kept this secret from the nuns who employed her to bring life into the world. At the St. Margaret Home, she was known for her kindness and skillful hands, but most of all because not one single death happened on her watch. It was said that her great tragedy protected anyone she touched because death would be embarrassed to come near her again.
*
In the dining room of the Home hung a diptych of St. Margaret. In the first panel, the patron saint of pregnant women was swallowed by a dragon. Actually, it was the devil disguised as a dragon. But—by divine preordination, so it was said—St. Margaret clutched her book-size cross as she was being sucked down the tunnel of the dragon’s throat. The edges of her cross scraped and pierced the lining of the dragon’s throat, causing his engorged body to contract, a brutal reminder—the midwife thought—to the pregnant Girls of what they had yet to endure. That’s why she advised them to sit with their backs to the picture while they ate.
When the train with Almut Bechtel arrived on Nordstrand in the spring of 1899, it slowed before it reached the station, crossing vast meadows with sheep and cattle and horses. One mare stood in the backyard of a small farm, nuzzling a foal that lay on its side, all four legs stretched in one direction, as if felled from the effort of being born. I don’t have to think of that yet, Almut told herself. I don’t have to think about that till the day it wants to be born, and then I can be as afraid as I need to be. I know I can get through what needs to be gotten through.
She’d been on trains all day, leaving Burgdorf before dawn. At the St. Margaret Home, a kind nun with wide hands gave her a gray woolen cape and words of caution about the steep marble stairs between the second floor and the third-floor dormitories, where one might take a shallow step and fall and lose one’s baby.
*
When Almut entered the dining room, she came to a halt in front of the diptych, studied the first panel without flinching, and laughed aloud at the second panel, where St. Margaret stood above the felled dragon, one bare foot on his green lizard skin, her raised cross dripping with dragon gore, her dress immaculate.
“Why would you be laughing?” the midwife asked.
“I can get out the worst stains . . . coal and blood and gravy and red wine. But that dress?”
“No?”
“How can it be that white after her ordeal?”
“Proof of her virginity?”
“Please!”
The midwife’s face opened into one of the rare smiles that let others forget her sorrow, and she motioned the new St. Margaret Girl to sit with her. Here’s one who won’t be broken either.
While Almut ate her lentil soup, she considered the panel. “That picture is a lie,” she concluded. “Because I could not get that dress clean again.”
“Are you practical? Or irreverent?”
“Both,” Almut said without hesitation.
It started there for the two women, the recognition of something kindred; and from that day forward, a friendship grew as they sat next to each other at meals, facing the diptych to mock it and to spare others the sight.
*
Between the St. Margaret Home and the St. Margaret Church, an alley of birches and more substantial chestnut trees arched above the brick path, concealing the St. Margaret Girls on their walk to mass. To keep the Girls from distracting the parishioners, the Girls had to use the side door. They were the first to enter, the last to leave, causing the younger children of the parish to assume the St. Margaret Girls lived and slept in these pews.
As Almut Bechte
l followed the pregnant Girls into the pews to the left, beneath the pulpit, the smell of the ancient stone floor and painted stone walls reminded her of her cellar in Burgdorf. One of the altar boys latched the low gate at the end of each pew before the parishioners began to arrive through the large main doorway, pouring down the center aisle, where they genuflected and separated, filing into long pews on the women’s or the men’s side of the church.
When the old priest lumbered up the steps to the black and gold pulpit, his sermon fell on the St. Margaret Girls as though it were the voice of God.
They all worked in the nursery of the Home, longing for the day when their bellies would be flat again, their infants adopted by kind families, and they could return to their hometowns with stories to be believed, stories they revised during pregnancy as they inspired one another, a story of visiting an ailing godmother in Bremen, say, or sitting by the deathbed of a grandfather who’d made death wait for seven months.
*
While the nuns counseled the St. Margaret Girls on abstinence, the midwife counseled them on pregnancy and birth. Some were so naïve that she had to explain how they’d come to be with child. They’d been seduced, or forced, or had yielded to the confusing insistence of their own bodies. What the midwife’s patients had in common was that they felt trapped and wanted to be separate, once again, from what was crowding them inside. Some had tried old-fashioned methods of prevention: jumping backward seven times after intercourse to dislodge the seeds, or rotating their hips during intercourse to keep the seeds from attaching, or catching a frog and spitting into the frog’s mouth three times, or tying a pouch with a cat’s liver around one ankle.
The midwife shuddered to imagine what had happened to the rest of the cat. She was impatient with myths that lured women into trusting they wouldn’t get pregnant. That’s why, secretly, she helped those St. Margaret Girls who asked her how to avoid pregnancies. Since nearly all would leave without their babies, they didn’t have the choice that married women had: to breast-feed for a year or more, as the midwife had with her own babies, thereby tricking their bodies into presuming they were already pregnant. But what the midwife could do was insert a little wooden block in front of the cervix before her patient reentered the outside world. These blocks the midwife ordered from local toymakers by the dozen—smooth and unpainted with rounded edges—allowing the men who sanded them to assume they were for the children at the St. Margaret Home. To let them find out that these blocks served to prevent children would have meant banishment.