A moment later, Jo saw a shadow flit past her along the floor. It was Frieda’s cat, meowing hungrily and arching her back against the old stove. “Well come on, then,” her expression seemed to command.
Josephine finally stepped inside the house and began searching for something she could feed the cat. She found a half-full bottle of milk on the floor beside the sink, undoubtedly Clara’s doing as well. Jo dribbled a little into the food bowl, then went over to the sofa, with its long-faded wine-red velvet cover. Frieda had tossed a crocheted blanket over it. The blanket consisted of gray, brown, and beige squares, and Jo had watched the blanket grow as Frieda had added new squares whenever she had wool left over from her knitting.
With a melancholy sigh, Josephine pressed her cheek to the blanket. It smelled dusty and old. And a little bit of Frieda . . .
Apart from the sound of the cat greedily lapping up milk, all was quiet. Josephine could not remember ever having experienced such a silence. No droning machines, no gossipy, garrulous women sharing her living space, no beating of hammer on iron. Would she ever grow accustomed to such quiet? Would she ever! She smiled. Then she took out the letter the lawyer had given her. Please read this only once you are settled in my—or rather your—house. Josephine nodded. All right, she was here. She carefully opened the envelope. But before she could begin to read, the cat jumped up onto her lap as if it were the most obvious thing in the world to do and began cleaning itself.
Dear Josephine,
I would so love to be with you right now. I would make you a cup of tea and something good to eat. But the dear Lord had other plans for me. Who am I to question that? And nor should you. Rather, you should look ahead. There is a great deal to do! The house, the garden, Robert’s old workshop—all of it is waiting to be brought back to life. Feel free to do what you like with them! Throw away whatever you don’t like. Or better yet, give it to the needy. Berlin has more than enough of them, after all. Don’t worry, you have enough money to buy whatever you need new—and lovelier and better things at that. From now on, you will not want for anything. You are a well-to-do young woman, Josephine! There is money that no one knows anything about—not Langbein, the notary, not my nephew, Joachim. I wanted it that way. You will find your starting capital in the fat vase on the mantelpiece. You know it, the one with the broken handle. When you were a child, it was the one you loved the most, because it is so colorful.
Josephine gently lifted the cat from her lap and stood up.
The vase left behind a dust-free circle on the mantelpiece when Josephine took it down. She hesitated for a moment, then reached into the dark interior of the vase and pulled out a rolled-up bundle of bills. And another. And another. Hundreds of marks. Jo stared numbly at the money. She looked frantically toward the door, then to the window. What if someone was watching her and tried to rob her? She hurriedly stuffed it all back in the vase and set it back exactly where it had been.
Then she crept back to the sofa and sat down beside the cat, which had curled up into a small ball. For a while, she simply sat, as if paralyzed. Finally, she stood up.
Like a marionette dangling on stiff strings, she went to the heavy wooden door that separated the house from the workshop. She paused, her hand on the door handle. In all these years, she had never once entered the workshop. But why not? Perhaps because she had not particularly liked Frieda’s husband, Robert?
Josephine had to try out several of the keys on the key ring Clara had given her before she found the one to the workshop. The door creaked loudly when Jo opened it.
The room was pitch black and cold, much colder than the house. Josephine felt her way over to a window, opened it, then pushed the shutters open. A square of bright-yellow sunlight fell across the room, flooding the old tools, which hung in perfect rows along the walls, in a golden glow. Josephine looked around, mesmerized.
Hammers, wrenches, pliers, files, a few pairs of shears. Boxes of nails, rolls of wire, sandpaper and sanding blocks in different sizes. Several folding rulers. A pair of diagonal pliers. A fretsaw and a fine handsaw. An enormous chisel. Boxes of iron clamps and clips and other bits and pieces. A crate full of rags and bandages and a bottle opener.
In one corner at the back, she even found a black, sooty forge, where one could heat metal for smaller welding work.
Josephine felt her knees grow weak, and she began to tremble all over. She was soon shaking so much that she could no longer stay on her feet. With no consideration given to her clean skirt, she dropped onto the grimy linoleum floor.
She had landed in paradise. It was a dusty, old-fashioned paradise, to be sure. But that didn’t matter. What was it Frieda had written? The house, the garden, Robert’s old workshop—all of it is waiting to be brought back to life.
Josephine took a deep breath. Her lungs expanded, and her heart pounded with delight as it never had before.
Until this moment, her plans had always been vague. She knew what it was she wanted to do, just not how to do it. But here on this cold, wax-yellow linoleum, all the big questions were gone.
Jo saw her future ahead of her, unclouded.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The next day, Josephine resigned from the shoe factory and collected the last of her wages. Later that evening, she moved into her new house.
She had plenty of dry wood, and she soon had a fire going in the fireplace so she could heat some water. In the pantry, she found various cleaning materials, rags, brooms, brushes, and sponges, and within an hour, had wiped down all the countertops, scrubbed the floor, and cleaned the food cupboard’s shelves. She threw Clara’s bouquet of lilacs on the compost heap in the garden; after that, the house smelled only of cleanliness and well-being.
Then came the huge task of tidying up. Frieda had been a great collector. The cupboards were crammed full of remnants of fabric, wool, stones, newspapers and magazines, and jars and tins of all sizes. I can’t see myself doing much knitting for a while, she thought with a smile. She was about to toss the basket of half-used balls of wool into the fire, but she stopped herself—perhaps she could use it for something after all. Besides, burning wool smelled horrible.
She decided to use the fabric remnants as cleaning rags in the workshop. And the newspapers . . . Perhaps she should read a few to find out what she had missed in the last few years? As she heaved a pile of them onto the small table in front of the sofa, one of them slid to the floor. The pages were as full of holes as Swiss cheese. Some pages had a large square cut out of the middle, while others were missing the entire upper third, and yet others all the advertising down the side. Josephine laughed. How could she have forgotten Frieda’s habit of reading the newspaper with a pair of scissors in her hand? There really wasn’t much left of the papers to read. But they would still make a good fire starter.
After all her work, Josephine took a break and looked around critically. There was no need to change the furnishings, she decided. Frieda’s old sofa and her solid bed were good enough. But why then did she feel that something was missing?
Following her instincts, Jo pulled the kitchen table out from the wall. Frieda had stacked her own hand-painted oils against the wall behind the table, almost as if she were ashamed of them. Only the backs of the canvases were visible. One at a time, Josephine freed the paintings from their relegated existence. A vase filled with blue larkspur appeared. Then a single flower painted in colors that ranged from pale pink to deep violet, surrounded by tendrils of dark-green leaves. Jo didn’t know the name of the flower but knew they grew in the middle of summer, in a far corner of Frieda’s garden. Then came a tendril of a wild grapevine, a silver, shining snail creeping along it. A few landscapes—was that the Spree? And here was the Brandenburg Gate, the sun setting behind it.
Jo pored over the beautiful paintings, wondering why Frieda hadn’t hung them up. Then she marched into the workshop, found a hammer and nails, and set to work.
That’s what was missing, she thought with delight when she stepped
back half an hour later and inspected her handiwork. Everything looked so colorful, fresh, and lovely! She had given the house a character all its own, without expelling Frieda’s ghost in the process. On the contrary, her spirit filled the rooms more than ever.
Josephine’s first night in the house was short and restless, spent battling the cat for rights to the bed, and she was up and about well before dawn.
“Josephine? Josephine Schmied?” The baker’s wife’s eyes were as round as the raisin buns steaming in a basket on the counter. “Is it really you? I thought you . . .”
Josephine smiled, her mouth askew. “Thank God I wasn’t put away for life back then . . . Now, I’d like four rolls and a loaf of black bread.”
The baker’s wife made a dismissive gesture. “It was just one of those stupid boyish pranks! And to think they gave you such a long sentence. Everyone on the street thought it was completely unwarranted. That Herrenhus even went to the police about something like that . . . He should have been keeping a better watch over his things! And such a punishment . . . As if all of us weren’t young and foolish once.” Her face took on a dreamy aspect. Then she said in a more businesslike tone, “A piece of crumb cake, perhaps? It’s still warm . . .”
“Yes, please,” said Josephine and added, “I live in Frieda’s house now, by the way. She left it to me.” Better for people to know about it from the start. Then maybe the gossip could be kept within reasonable bounds.
“Frieda . . . what?” The woman stiffened like a pillar of salt, the bag of bread frozen in her hand. “When the neighbors hear that,” she murmured to herself, and it was clear that she could hardly wait to pass it on.
Josephine smiled and laid a few pennies on the counter, then took the bread bag from the woman. At the door, she turned back. “Incidentally, it wasn’t a stupid boyish prank.”
The baker’s wife frowned. “It wasn’t?”
“If anything, it was a stupid girlish prank!” With a cheerful farewell, she went on to Ammann the butcher, two doors down. “Josephine? Is that really you?” A mixture of astonishment and joy shone on the face of the aging butcher’s wife. “How lovely to see you again.”
Josephine smiled and placed her order.
“You want to open your own workshop?” said Mrs. Ammann, when Josephine had told her all her news. “Fixing things . . . Can you do that?”
“I believe so. Do you have anything that needs repairing?” asked Jo excitedly. She would never have guessed that she would get so much sympathy.
The old woman disappeared through the door that led into the back of the butcher shop and returned with a large, heavy machine.
“Our mincer. Something’s not working right. We can’t affix it to the table anymore. If you can get that sorted out . . .”
“With pleasure!” Josephine said with delight, as she leaned across the counter to take the machine from the woman.
With her shopping and her first commission under her arm, Josephine walked home. She wondered if she should she look in on her parents now or later. Shutters were flung open on one house after another all along the street. A few curious heads appeared at the windows.
Josephine greeted all of them pleasantly, and nearly all of them had a few friendly words for her in return. She garnered an occasional envious look when people learned of her inheritance, but most believed that Frieda’s house was in the right hands with Josephine.
“We were afraid some rich stranger would come along and tear down the house to build a factory,” said Mr. Kleinmann, the cobbler.
As far as her prison term was concerned, the general opinion was that Moritz Herrenhus should have done a better job of looking after his beloved bicycle.
“Opportunity makes the thief. Isn’t that what they say?” said Mr. Kleinmann’s neighbor, old Mrs. Otto, the widow who ran the hardware store. “Herrenhus and your father could have sorted that out among themselves, as neighbors. God knows the police didn’t need to get involved!” She accompanied her remark with a look of disgust toward the smithy.
Mr. Kleinmann shook his head and added—though not in an unfriendly tone—“Riding bicycles . . . You young women today are mad!” When he had disappeared back into his workshop, Mrs. Otto waved Josephine closer.
“Riding a bicycle—how does it feel?” she asked in a whisper.
Josephine smiled broadly. “Just marvelous!”
By the time she arrived back at Frieda’s house, she no longer feared that the residents of Luisenstadt would despise her because of her past. Several of them had announced that they would stop by in the next day or two with things in need of repair—a cooking pot whose handle had broken, a butter churn that no longer turned, an iron with a broken latch that kept falling open.
The crumb cake and the rolls smelled wonderful, as did the smoked sausage. Josephine’s stomach murmured in anticipation. A hearty breakfast was just what she needed for the day ahead. Now that her first assignments were coming in, she really had to make some headway on the workshop. As for her parents . . . let them find out from the neighbors that she was back in Luisenstadt. It would serve them right!
Jo tackled the workshop until late in the afternoon. The workbench, she decided, was in the wrong place. She wanted to have it directly under the window, where she could take advantage of the light for more detailed work. It took her half a day and moving all kinds of levers just to shunt the heavy piece into place. The tools needed to be resorted and some of them cleaned. A few were simply too old to be of any use to her. At the end of that first day, Jo looked around and felt that she had accomplished absolutely nothing.
On the second day, she got out of bed even earlier. She didn’t bother with fresh bread and went straight to work. Around midday, she lost focus working on an empty stomach and clumsily tore her hand open on a saw. It began to bleed badly, so she wrapped the wound in a few old cloths and carried on with her work.
By the end of the second day, she was more or less satisfied with her work. Late that evening, she repaired the butcher’s mincer. Between Frieda’s husband’s tools and what she had learned from Gerd Melchior, it was child’s play.
When, on the third day, there was a knock at the door and Gerd Melchior himself was standing there, Josephine thought for a moment that she was seeing a ghost.
“What’re you gawkin’ at all startled like? You’re the one who sent for me,” said Melchior, confused.
Jo laughed. She had been so busy that she had completely forgotten about the letter she had written asking him for help.
With her mentor’s help, the rest of her work was quickly finished. He suggested a better way of storing her tools, and between them they put together a list of equipment and materials that Josephine would have to buy. At one point, he turned and saw Frieda’s handicrafts basket sitting on the workbench, and he was taken aback.
“An old memento, eh? Pity, I’d have liked to have got to know the old lady. Get in touch whenever you need something! I’ll be glad to help you out,” he said. In parting, he pummeled Jo in a comradely way on the shoulder.
Saturday was warm, the breeze already carrying the sweet mildness of the coming summer. Jo sat on the garden seat that was against the back wall of the house, a glass of raspberry juice in her hand. The cat jumped up and settled beside her. The wooden boards of the back of the seat had soaked up the warmth of the May sun. Josephine leaned back with a sigh of pleasure, easing her muscles, which were sore from the strain of moving things around. Looking at the weeds growing ever wilder all around her, she realized that she shouldn’t be sitting around. But tending the garden would have to wait. She couldn’t do everything at once.
She could be pleased with her first week’s work, for she had accomplished a good deal. A great deal, in fact. She had even been to visit her parents and paid off her debt in full. The stunned look on her father’s face was one she would not soon forget!
Now she was as exhausted—but also as satisfied—as she had ever been in her life.
; Jo sipped her drink, savoring it. Tomorrow, Clara and Isabelle were coming to visit. Jo could hardly wait to show her friends all the work she had done. But she wanted even more for Monday to come. Then she could really get to work!
“So? What do you think?” Josephine stood with her arms folded, an expectant look on her face.
“It’s turned out beautifully,” Clara breathed, her head tilted back.
Isabelle, too, looked up at the large enamel sign that Josephine had mounted over her workshop, big enough to be read from far away.
REPAIRS OF EVERY SORT—BICYCLES WELCOME
The words were emblazoned in blue letters on a white background. Around the inscription were stylized images of hammers, tongs, and chisels. It was a sign—what was she supposed to say about it?
“That you have the confidence . . .” said Clara softly.
Josephine shrugged. “I’ve learned my trade. It will work.”
Isabelle furrowed her brow, struck by Josephine’s faith in herself and the proud note of self-reliance in her voice. “What if the customers don’t come? Perhaps they don’t think you can do it. You’re just a woman, after all. What will you do then?” she asked.
But Jo just laughed. “Then I’ll go peddling for customers! Besides, I’m hoping to soon be able to count the men and women from the cycling club among my clientele. You could really use a decent mechanic.”
“Ah, so we’re supposed to be your customers. I see. Don’t you think you should grace us with your presence just once first? The others find it rather strange that you haven’t paid us so much as a single visit since you were accepted into the club. Some of them are asking themselves if they made a mistake by agreeing to let you join,” said Isabelle, sounding somewhat put out. The truth, however, was that no one except Irene was asking that. The rest were far too preoccupied with other matters to care. But Josephine didn’t need to know that. A little guilt wouldn’t do her any harm!
While the World Is Still Asleep (The Century Trilogy Book 1) Page 25