by Ursula Hegi
The making of toys was the second largest industry on the peninsula; but since there were too many toymakers—as if to make up for too many babies—the apprentices would donate their experiments to the St. Margaret Home, where the children who’d been left behind got to play with toys that were unlike others and would never reach the market.
Some toymakers felt sorry for these children when Lotte Jansen ordered her plain blocks, and they couldn’t stop themselves from carving pictures into the surfaces of these blocks and painting them with their brightest colors, feeling generous as they imagined the joy of the children.
Of course, Lotte would thank them and hand the blocks to the children who did, indeed, enjoy them. Then she’d order another dozen—smooth and unpainted with rounded edges—from a different toy shop until, finally, she found one that did not improve her order.
*
There were always St. Margaret Girls who felt guilty about releasing their children for adoption. They knew the midwife would not judge them because what she’d done to her youngest was a thousand times worse than giving your child away to a decent family. That’s why they trusted her, came to her with their guilt. Some did sign the papers, then; but others wanted to wait with deciding, leave their infants in limbo at St. Margaret’s, where a new crop of pregnant Girls would feed them and bathe them and murmur endearments their own children would never hear from them.
Here, in spacious rooms lined with cribs and tall windows, these children learned to walk and pray and sing. A few of their mothers would visit with gifts and with tears. Most would not return. Still, you’d come to recognize them in towns afar or near because they’d glance away from children as if stung, or they’d stare at them with such hunger that children would want to hide from them.
Once or twice a year, a new mother would insist on taking her child with her, raise it alone. Foolish, the nuns would say. Yet, they’d bundle diapers and clothes and tiny blankets for her to take along, advise her to tell people she was a new widow. It would bring her compassion. Respect.
*
For twenty-one years, Lotte Jansen had known there was no God.
She had still believed in God that August day she’d taken her four children to the traveling Zirkus. On the way home, they’d run onto the tidal flats as they often did, laughing and chasing after the tide that would retreat for kilometers, Lotte with the baby, Wilhelm, in one arm, her other children linked to her by holding hands: Bärbel with her tiny fingers clenched around Lotte’s thumb; Martin in the middle; her oldest, Hannelore, on the outside.
Clouds of seagulls rose from the damp flats, an entire sky in each vale between the sand ridges that would fill once again in a few hours when the incoming tide would meld a thousand skies into one. But for now it was only sand that squeezed itself up between their toes, golden and wet, sand and shallow puddles that sloshed around their feet.
Running and laughing with her children, Lotte, because tomorrow she would take them to the Zirkus again, for free again, because their father, like other toymakers on Nordstrand, worked there as a roustabout for a week every summer. Running and singing with her children, Lotte, wunschlos glücklich—happy without a wish, until another sound muffled the screeching of the seagulls and the laughter of her children, a roaring, a rushing, as a freak wave galloped at them—
No—
Too soon for the tide to—
She had never seen a wave that colossal. “Hold on to each other!” Lotte shouted and tightened her grip on Bärbel. “Deep breath! Duck into the wave—” Because that was how she and her husband, Kalle, had taught their three oldest to swim. That’s how all the people on Nordstrand learned to swim as small children, facing a wave and then ducking into it before it curled, before it could tumble them.
But Lotte had never been seized by a wave this crushing. Still, she believed in God when it toppled and spun and choked her, when she burst into light, dizzy and coughing, with her youngest in her arm—
Both arms—
“Bärbel—” she screamed. “Martin—Hannelore—”
They were bobbing just two church-lengths away from her as the wave took them toward the horizon, then four church-lengths, leaving behind nothing but soaked ground. Clutching Wilhelm, Lotte ran after them to where she’d spotted them last—Bärbel Martin Hannelore—pushing at God with her prayers, her rage.
She still believed in God while the townspeople and the Zirkus people fanned across the tidal flats, clowns and acrobats still in their costumes, side by side with farmers and nuns and toymakers. Most hunted the wave on foot, but some rode out on horses and Zirkus ponies.
Even when Kalle reminded her what good little swimmers their children were, Lotte still believed in God. Even when the tide came back in and divers searched for the children, Lotte believed God was keeping them afloat nearby until the sea would spit them out.
And it was the immensity of her belief in this all-powerful and all-merciful God that led to her bargain with God. She drew the sign of the cross on her baby’s heart, kissed his lips, his forehead. “Take Wilhelm in return for the other three,” she wailed and flung him into the sea.
But God did not keep Wilhelm. And that’s how she knew there was no God. Kalle scrambled into the sea, horrified by what his wife had done, and raised his youngest into his arms. At home, he laid the boy against Lotte’s breast, and she cupped Wilhelm’s head in her palm the way she had with all her children. But her breasts had gone bone-dry, and Wilhelm twisted his face aside.
When Kalle sent to the priest for help, he arrived with Sister Franziska and a St. Margaret Girl who’d recently given birth. From her, Wilhelm accepted the breast, so hungry that he was sobbing with each swallow.
For five days, Kalle tried to look into his Lotte’s face, to match his sorrow to hers. But he couldn’t. When he left with the Zirkus, the people of Nordstrand said he could have forgiven his wife for losing three of his children to the sea—a wave like that happened once in a lifetime, no, once in a hundred years—but that he would never forgive her for what she’d done to Wilhelm.
*
The nuns understood Lotte Jansen’s sorrow. Scripture and life had taught them about sacrifice, about a mother offering up her child to God. They brought Lotte and Wilhelm to the St. Margaret Home. While she slept or cried in the small room next to the dormitory, Wilhelm lived in the nursery where Sister Franziska, the midwife, would rock him, play with him, and tell him stories of the Virgin Maria who had relinquished her son to God when he was thirty-three.
During the weeks and months his mother was lost to Wilhelm, he was breast-fed by St. Margaret Girls who’d given up their infants soon after birth and pitied this boy who brought them relief from the fullness in their breasts. But some were so shocked by an unforeseen longing for their own babies that they wouldn’t go near Wilhelm again.
When Lotte was able to sit up in her bed, she could see across the dike and the edges of land that had been reclaimed so often from the Nordsee that the people were accustomed to shifting ground beneath their feet and beneath their houses, even in their connections to others because those, too, could be washed away. In a landscape like this, you could not presume.
*
Twice a day, Sister Franziska would carry Wilhelm up the marble steps to the third floor, lay him on the pillow next to his mother’s face, and quietly sing to them both. Once Lotte was ready to get up, Sister Franziska offered her paying work, trained her in the nursery, then in the delivery room, though Lotte was terrified that her touch might cause death.
Sister Franziska would listen, nod, then fill the young woman’s arms with newborns. For each of her own, lost, Lotte helped another child into the world. Then ten. Thirty. And more until she, too, had become a midwife.
Every dawn, Lotte Jansen would walk by herself along the edge of the sea. Some people said it was odd; others speculated she was still waiting for her drowned children. But there were enough people, including the priest, who believed the legend of R
ungholt, a wealthy city swallowed by the Nordsee over five centuries ago; they found it comforting to think of Lotte imagining her children safe in Rungholt, surrounded by treasures and toys made of gold.
Wilhelm grew accustomed to nights at home with his mother and days with other children in the nursery of the St. Margaret Home, where his mother was the one who fed him, rocked him, and came back to play with him whenever she could between patients. His mother and Sister Franziska fussed over him because he had trouble filling his skin and drew unsettling pictures of a boy with dark waves inside his head.
He would not forget the briny taste of the sea, and he’d become a slight man with pale eyes and pale hair, a boy of a man who’d never quite reclaim his flesh from the water-grave of his siblings. He’d become a toymaker like his father, who continued to work for the Zirkus, where he used his skills to repair broken equipment, wheels and poles and yokes, and carve toy animals, tigers and elephants and monkeys and giraffes, that he sold outside the tent whenever the Zirkus arrived in a new place.
Chapter 6
IT WAS AT Sunday mass where Wilhelm Jansen first saw Almut Bechtel, enfolded in the honey-colored light from the stained-glass windows, where she knelt in the St. Margaret Home pews with other Girls in gray capes. Her freckles and her hair were the color of honey, too, so that she seemed to be made of light and of joy, and the toymaker believed that she was the opposite of him and that he could love her.
That’s what he heard himself say aloud when he waited for her after mass—“I believe I could love you”—when what he’d intended to say was that he’d like to invite her on a walk.
Of course she shook her head.
Of course he was mortified.
Of course he was certain, in the week that followed, that he could never again enter this church where he’d been christened and had received first communion. If necessary, he would become a Protestant to avoid her.
*
Yet, the following Sunday the young toymaker was back—to apologize to her, he believed—and knelt in the last pew on the men’s side of the church. Quite a few of the men were watching the St. Margaret Girls, speculating that it was easier to sweet-talk women into opening their legs once they’d done it, because doing it made them need it from then on. Even the toymaker, still a virgin, found himself thinking that, and he felt so ashamed that he fled while the priest gave the final blessing.
He made it to the bottom of the church steps before a voice called out to him. “Wait . . .”
Feeling caught and prickly, he turned.
The St. Margaret Girl with the freckles stood on the top step, her boots at the same level as his eyes—sturdy and laced to above her ankles, old leather made smooth with much polish and brushing—and he thought how odd her boots looked with her church dress, which hung in pleats from her shoulders beneath her open cape.
He hoped she didn’t think he was pretty. He’d heard people say that about his father, that he was too pretty.
Almut was thinking how beautiful he was, this man with the fine-boned features. Pointing her toes inward, she motioned to them and grimaced. “I wore my hiking boots to mass. . . . In case you’d still like to take a walk?”
He laughed with relief, no longer certain what he had said to her. His words and thoughts must have become jumbled so that, indeed, he had invited her for a walk.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
*
He walked with her along the top of a dike where sheep grazed on both slopes, one curving down toward the ocean, the other toward the windmills and the brick or stucco houses. Some of the older sheep were so huge that, when they lay down, their backs spread as wide as a child’s mattress. But the lambs were running and hopping, kicking their hind legs.
“Like fawns,” Almut said with delight.
Fields of rapeseed stretched beyond the neighborhoods, yellow and swaying.
“Raps,” Wilhelm said. “People make oil from it. Honey, too.”
“Your clouds are different from where I come from,” she said.
“In what way?”
She pointed toward one of the islands where wind bunched the clouds into tight formations. “The way they move. With a river, they move in streaks, like the current, almost.” She spoke in a dialect that enchanted him because it was like singsong running alongside words.
He told her about his fear of the sea, about the gray waves inside his head that claimed him time and again; and as she listened, closely, he could see she wasn’t afraid of him.
“Maybe,” she said, “it’s because you have the fanciful mind that goes with making toys . . . with dreaming.”
“This is not like dreaming.” He told her about his sisters and brother drowning, about his mother pulling him from the sea and then flinging him back in, about a pale sky suddenly tilted and replaced by muddy water.
Almut reached for his hand. “I’ve heard.”
“I think I know why. Because—how could she not?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Wouldn’t you trade one child for three?”
“I won’t even keep this one.”
“Don’t you wish you could keep it?”
“It wouldn’t be . . . practical.”
He took that in. Waited.
“I already promised to let it be adopted.”
Damp air shimmered around them, silver-gray air the color of sky, of water, shimmering and holding them separate from the rest of Nordstrand, and he realized he was afraid of losing her. And her child. How could that be? He barely knew her.
He moved his shoulder so she could lean against it, and when she did, he asked her, “What if you could raise the child . . . you and a husband?”
*
When he asked his mother if he could invite Almut Bechtel to their house for coffee and cake, she said yes and of course.
The following Sunday, after he left to pick Almut up at the St. Margaret Home, his mother set the table in the living room with her best china and tablecloth. She cooked coffee and whipped cream to serve with the Erdbeertorte—strawberry tart she’d baked that morning. Behind the lace curtain, she waited for them, heart beating—for what?—for what she didn’t let herself hope.
When her son led Almut into the house, the midwife stepped forward and took both her hands. “I am so glad,” she said. And then said it again. “I am so glad.”
Wilhelm seemed boylike next to Almut, though he was older—just by a month; still, older—and for an instant the midwife was afraid he might not be enough for Almut. And yet, there was something different about Wilhelm, passion, and it felt odd to notice that about her quiet son, unfamiliar and surprising. Suddenly, the midwife felt taller without the familiar weight of her worry for him.
Chapter 7
EVERY SATURDAY AFTERNOON the toymaker went to confession, knelt on the outside of the wooden latticework, and received absolution and penance: twelve Hail Marys plus six Our Fathers for lusting after a pregnant woman.
That August, when Almut had been on Nordstrand five months, the old priest informed her during her confession that the toymaker was eager to save her from shame.
Her face burned. “Is that what he told you?”
“Your initial sin has been confessed properly and—”
Your initial sin, succumbing to being needed that morning in the kitchen when Michel Abramowitz touches your elbow, courteous and kind and something unfamiliar, too, his urgency that makes you feel chosen, and you know he’ll stop if you say so, that’s why you don’t need to stop him, still, as he raises you, there’s an instant of doubt, yet to push him away now would make you a . . . a bad hostess, no, not hostess, there has to be a better word, and whatever it is, you’re not like that word, but just then you’re stunned by your own moaning need that cleaves you in half and—
Your initial sin. Your one-time-only sin. Both of you horrified. Afterward. Even before afterward begins.
“—and absolved properly,” the priest continued,
“but you must know—”
“To save me from shame? Is that what Wilhelm Jansen said.” Her words bounced off the priest’s body. They had nowhere to go because his bulk and smell filled the cubicle of the dim confessional. Back home, with skinny Pastor Schüler, there’d always been enough air between him and Almut.
She shifted to ease the pressure of wood against her knees. Again, she asked him, “Is that what Wilhelm Jansen said?”
“Not like that, no, Fräulein Bechtel.”
He called me by my name? She had believed you could tell a priest everything because you were anonymous in the confessional. Bound by his vows, a priest would rather endure torture or death than reveal your name and sins to others. How about all those stories of murderers confessing, unburdening themselves, knowing the priests could never turn them over to the police?
“You called me by my name,” Almut told the priest. “That’s wrong.”
“You must know that to continue sinning like this will mean losing your soul and residing in hell forever. It is God’s will that you marry the toymaker.”
“Not like this.”
“The toymaker is a shy man. He doesn’t think you’d want to be his wife. But it’s God’s will.”
There was not enough air between her and this priest’s wall of flesh.
“Think of your soul,” he pressed.
Priests, Almut thought, were the same no matter where. That pious and lust-denying façade of theirs squeezed women into chastity and corsets. And yet, she still needed the solace of church. Still. Already, she had confessed far too much to this priest.