by Ursula Hegi
And whenever he talks of leaving because he is afraid of hurting me worse I smile and pull him toward me and sometimes I forget my daughter is in the room because there’s no air for anyone but me and him but then his hands are on me and I feel her shrinking away a silent shadow in my raincoat. Some nights she walks in her sleep and I find her on the sidewalk with her hamsters and I hold her and tilt her face to the night and show her how to watch for a shooting star so she can make her secret wish for a miracle of her own.
A Woman’s Perfume
The summer after my parents’ divorce, my father took me to the yellow hotel near Trieste where we used to stay every July with my mother. The balcony of our suite overlooked the Riviera di Barcola, and from my bedroom, I could see the Adriatic Sea and the cliff with the white castello where Maximilian of Haps-burg and Charlotte of Belgium had lived a hundred years ago.
The hotel was a favorite of other German tourists, and whenever my father and I sat in the dining room, we’d hear more German than Italian. Even here, people were gossiping about the Shah of Iran and his third wife, Farah Diba. German newspapers and magazines had been speculating ever since the wedding last December that the Shah would divorce the young architecture student—as he had his previous wives—unless she produced a son. Already Farah Diba was pregnant. But what if she gave birth to a daughter?
My leather dictionary was small enough to carry in my palm, and I would rehearse those vibrant Italian words when my father and I shopped in the open market. I loved the rapid voices rising above the bins of bright fruits and vegetables, the metal trays filled with fish, the stands with jewelry and combs and lace. Italy was far more exciting than my own country with its somber, guttural sounds that often were like the beginning of a cough. I liked the laugh of the dark-eyed men who sold us tiny golden-crisp fish that crackled when I ate them whole; the plum-shaped tomatoes that still hung on wilting vines; the taut peaches and grapes whose juice would run down my neck when I’d bite into them. Some vendors said I carried the sun in my hair and tried to tease me into bartering a touch of my blond hair in return for so many lire off whatever I wanted to buy. Though my father would shake his head, I’d usually laugh back at the men and let the quick warmth of brown fingers into my long hair.
Every morning, my father and I played a game of tennis behind the hotel and ate the breakfast he fixed for us on our balcony; then I’d run into the blue-green water of the Adriatic Sea, swim out far into the waves, and let them carry me back to shore. The day I got my period—my fourth one ever—I swam as usual, waving to my father, who was setting out for one of his solitary hikes along the beach, carrying his anger and grief in the stiff angle of his arms. He never talked about my mother, and if I mentioned her at all, he’d get very quiet. Sometimes I was afraid he’d just keep walking on that beach, past the city of Trieste, past the border, and into Yugoslavia.
About an hour after my swim, my insides began to cramp with pains that pulsed into my legs, my chest. I tried lying on my bed, sitting up, walking. Nothing helped. One hand against the wall, I made it to our balcony and scanned the long ribbon of sand for my father. But another cramp took hold, and I dropped to my knees. Crying, I curled up by the railing, knees pulled against the front of my swimsuit, wishing my mother were here. But she was far away, in India on a medical project. That’s what my mother had dreamed of doing when, at age nineteen, she became a nun: travel to exotic regions to help the poor who really needed her. I’d grown up knowing that—had it not been for falling in love with my father, the convent accountant, and being surprised by motherhood—my mother would have left Germany long ago to work in those exotic regions with other nuns. Instead, she ended up assisting doctors who took out the tonsils and set the broken bones of ordinary Germans.
Sometimes I thought she had divorced me as much as my father, leaving both of us behind when she met a group of American Mormon missionaries in Berlin, who sent people like my mother to foreign countries where she could heal far more interesting ailments than any she might find in Germany.
But maybe this pain that felt as though my body were turning itself inside out would interest my mother. And maybe the lush setting would contribute to making me a worthwhile patient. Another cramp ran through me, and I moaned, certain I was about to die. My mother, all dressed in black, stands by my open grave, sobbing as my coffin is lowered into the wormy earth. “I’m sorry, Christa. I’m so sorry. How can I go on living without my only child?” As she tries to throw herself across my coffin, three men—no, four—have to hold her back….
Hot gusts of wind blew in from the sea, carrying specks of sand and the smell of fish. My lips felt dry, but my mother’s cool hand elevates my head as she guides a glass of lemonade to my lips. “Here, drink this, Christa.” Her thin face looks tired from traveling so far to be with me. But at least she is here. Worried that she has not arrived in time to prevent my terrible illness, she whispers, “You need help, dont you?” And I moan, louder, just for her, just to keep her here. Here—
“You need help, don’t you?” The voice, I could hear the voice clearly—but it no longer belonged to my mother. And the woman’s hair, a lighter shade of blond than my mother’s, was not short but braided back into a chignon. She had red-red lips, and she was studying me across the partition from the next balcony. “I’ll be right there.”
After her face vanished, I heard the scraping of a chair being dragged onto the balcony. As she climbed across the wall, her back to the sea that lay three floors beneath us, she talked herself through it: “Careful now, Anneliese … don’t look down there. You know how you are with heights. Easy, now.” The hem of her white dress flared above her high-heel sandals, and the butterfly clasp of her belt glittered in the sun.
“There, now.” She leapt down on our side of the balcony. “There, now.” Kneeling by my side, she put her arms around me and helped me to sit up.
I could smell her perfume—not flowery like most perfumes, but like the kind of breath you want to hold in your lungs for a long time.
She led me inside and settled me on the sofa, two pillows beneath my feet. “Where does it hurt, Liebchen?”
I motioned to my belly, my chest, my legs. Another cramp made me draw up my knees. “But it never hurts like this when I have my period.”
She touched the strap of my swimsuit. “You didn’t go swimming, did you?” She sounded alarmed.
“For a while.”
“But it’s the worst thing you can do, going into salt water when you have your period. It draws your blood right out of you. Some women try to bring on their bleeding by soaking their feet in salt water. Don’t you know that?”
“No.”
“Putting your whole body into salt water …” She clicked her tongue. “Poor girl. Didn’t your mother tell you this?”
“She—she went to India. Before I started periods.”
“Is she joining you and your father here?”
“She used to come here … but they’re divorced now.”
“Just when you need her most,” she said softly.
Sudden tears crowded the inside of my head. I turned my face aside.
“Men don’t know about things like that. At least not how to explain them to a young girl.”
Her name was Frau Hilger, Anneliese Hilger, and she took hold of my life from that moment on. She brought me oval pills from her apartment, made peppermint tea, buttered crisp Zwieback, and made me rest on our living-room sofa with two of her German fashion magazines. When my father opened the door, she was frying paper-thin veal cutlets, Wiener Schnitzel, in our kitchen.
“Your daughter is doing better,” I heard her whisper before he could say anything.
“What happened? Christa didn’t drown or—”
“I have her lying down.” Taking his hand into hers, she steered him toward the sofa where I was lounging, quite comfortable by now, surrounded by cups and plates and magazines.
“My God,” my father said.
&nbs
p; I sighed. Draped one hand across my forehead.
“What happened to you, Kind?”
Frau Hilger winked at me, then smiled at my father as if she had separate secrets with each of us. “Women’s problems.”
He took off his glasses. Busied himself cleaning them with his handkerchief.
“Your daughter should have never gone into salt water. It pulls all the blood out of you at once.”
“Do you need anything?” As he tucked my hair behind my ears, he looked as if he were about to ask me something else, but Frau Hilger laid one slender hand on his arm and drew him toward the kitchen.
“Let me pour you some Chianti,” I heard her say. “Sit down. We’ll eat soon.”
“I couldn’t impose.”
But she shook her head, firmly. “It’s at times like these that a girl needs the friendship of a woman.”
That midday meal, it was just the three of us, but when we entered the dining room in the evening, she waved us over to the table where she was sitting with a man. My father hesitated. But then she waved again, and he patted his brown mustache to make sure it was in place as he started toward her. Frau Hilger’s lipstick made her white teeth look even whiter, and she was wearing white again, this time a silk suit with a scarf and that elegant butterfly belt. To me, she seemed like the kind of woman who always wears belts, even with coats.
She invited us to sit and eat with her and her husband, a quiet man with thick eyelids and thick earlobes that gave his face a sleepy look. After greeting us politely, he said little while she recommended the spezzatino di maiale — a stew made with pork and olives —and asked my father about his work as an accountant for a boarding school.
Over dessert she told my father, “I admire a man who takes on the responsibility of being a parent.” Looking straight at her husband, she said, “I’ve never been fortunate enough to—”
“Don’t,” he said.
Her lips trembled.
“Don’t, Anneliese.” He tapped his fingers against the starched tablecloth.
“I’ve never been fortunate enough to birth children.” Her eyes shimmered with tears when she looked at me as if I were the kind of daughter she would have wanted for herself, the daughter she would have never left behind; but soon she was laughing again with her red-red lips.
While Herr Hilger was getting even more silent, my father was talking more than he did when we were alone, and his shoulders were no longer stiff. A few times her ringed hand slid along the back of my father’s chair—not touching his neck, though her fingers flexed as if already rehearsing. When we stood up to leave, her husband picked up her purse from the table and handed it to her without grazing her skin.
In the lobby she pressed a few of her oval pills into my hand—“Just in case, Liebchen”— and gave my father two tickets. “There’s a cruise in Grignano Bay tomorrow afternoon. Herr Hilger and I would be so delighted if you joined us.”
My father stared at the tickets as if weighing their value. Perhaps she already guessed that he was not a man who could let anything fall to waste. I’d seen him finish burned pancakes my mother wanted to throw out, follow her from room to room to switch off the lights she left on—sometimes on purpose to tease him.
Frau Hilger smiled and curved one arm around me. “The statue of San Giusto lies at the bottom of Grignano Bay. But there’s no need to decide now. After all—this is a vacation. A time to be spontaneous. If you’re not there, Herr Hilger and I’ll amuse ourselves. But just in case, I’ll bring a picnic for all of us.”
All of us. From that day on, all our encounters felt choreographed by Frau Hilger. Mornings, she’d call a greeting to us across the wall between our balconies. She’d insist on cooking the midday meal for us—usually German recipes—in her suite, which was the same size as ours, with two bedrooms and a living room and kitchen. In the evenings, we’d eat rigatoni or cannelloni with fish or chicken in Trieste or in the dining room of our hotel. When we’d sun ourselves on the beach, it would be next to the Hilgers. While he’d read biographies of composers and I’d swim in the sea, Frau Hilger and my father would stroll along the sand toward Maximilian’s white Miramare Castle; but she’d never go into the water above her knees, and even when the wind was strong enough to flip the pages of her husband’s book, only a few single hairs would slip from her braided chignon.
“They live on old money, the Hilgers,” my father told me. “Inherited money from his grandfather. It’s all invested in music stores.”
Those first few days around them, I barely noticed Herr Hilger except when he did something for his wife, like open a door or drape her white jacket around her tanned shoulders, careful not to touch her bare skin. “Lovely manners” my grandmother would have said about him. “So attentive” But one afternoon, when he closed his book, a biography of Chopin, and kept it in his hands as if still thinking about it, I noticed his eyes —sea-green and melancholy—and I studied his face, wondering about the source of his sadness.
Frau Hilger took my hands into hers and extended them to her husband. “Look, Elmar—doesn’t our Christa have the hands of a musician? Those long wrists and fingers?”
He set down his book. Crossed his arms. Nodded.
“You ought to let her read some of your biographies,” she said. “You would like that, Christa, wouldn’t you?”
I hesitated. The books I liked were Enid Blyton mysteries and sequels about two girls, Gisel and Ursel, who were good at sports. And the only music I listened to was Schlager— hits on the radio, many of them from America. Sometimes, when my best friend, Elsie, and I sang Schlager, we’d switch the words around but keep the melodies.
“Our Christa doesn’t want to impose,” Frau Hilger said. “You know how considerate she is.”
“Of course,” he said. “Any book you’d like to look at, Christa.”
“He’ll bring you one at dinner,” she promised, but that evening it was she who handed me a biography of Verdi.
“I saw Aïda before Christa was born,” my father told her. “I remember reading in the program that Verdi asked for the equivalent of a hundred thousand Mark before he wrote a single note for his opera. He received it too. And that was in the nineteenth century.”
“How much would that be worth today?” she asked.
“Easily seven … eight hundred thousand Mark.”
Herr Hilger pressed his lips together, as if offended that anyone could discuss music in terms of money.
“What is Verdi’s music like?” I asked him.
He regarded me gravely. “You’ll need to hear it to understand. But you can begin by reading about him.”
I started the biography in bed and read on the beach during the following days, feeling quite grown-up. One night I dreamed that Herr Hilger was walking a white dog on the sidewalk outside my school and that I ran out to meet him; but when I woke up, I couldn’t remember the rest.
In the meantime, Frau Hilger was dedicating herself to improving me. “Men don’t need to be bothered with things like that,” she told my father when she took me to the beauty parlor and decided on a hairstyle for me that “will lift out your features, Liebchen” I’d been wearing it Farah Diba-style—parted in the middle and pulled back low across my ears—but she persuaded me that feathered bangs and a layered cut would bring out my maturity. As I watched myself change in the mirror of the beauty parlor, I felt as though I’d finally left childhood behind.
She bought me pearl earrings, a white suit with a short jacket, white shorts, white sandals. “White is the best color for both of us,” she whispered to me in the dressing room as she buttoned my blouse, and I felt startled by the sudden revulsion that flushed through my body and vanished before I could think about it. “Actually off-white,” she was saying as she closed the last button, “a shade of cream that’s whiter than cream. Pearl-colored, really.” She insisted I needed underwear to go with my new clothes, and what she chose were not the pastel cotton panties my mother used to get me, but soft
lace the hue of my skin. I liked the feel of nylons on my legs. Promised myself I’d never again wear knee stocking or socks.
Whenever my father offered to pay for the things she bought me, Frau Hilger would remind him how much this meant to her. “I never have the chance to mother a girl. Just for these few weeks… please, don’t deny me that pleasure.”
Both Hilgers spoke to me as if I were their age, and soon I noticed that my father treated me differently too—with a certain politeness, almost. He’d ask my opinion instead of just making plans for us. And he stopped calling me Kind— child. I was sure it had to do with the way I now dressed. We still played tennis most mornings, but he didn’t rush at the ball the way he used to, and I began to win against him. At times he seemed bewildered, and I’d catch him watching me as if not understanding what was happening to us; but the expression would pass so quickly that I couldn’t be certain it had even been there.
Frau Hilger liked to put one arm around me, squeeze me gently, and I’d smell her light perfume. One morning, when I told her I liked the scent, she said it was from Paris and took me to her bedroom. From the bureau next to the narrow bed, she picked up an amber bottle. With the glass stopper, she dabbed a few drops on my left wrist.
“Wear it for three hours before deciding if you like it.”
“But I love it already,” I told her.
And I did. I still do. Over the past thirty years—while Farah Diba gave the Shah his long-awaited son and three more children; while she stood tall with her tiara during his long-awaited coronation; while I studied music in Berlin; while I married and divorced and married and divorced once again—I’ve tried different perfumes, of course, but I’ve never found another scent that suits me. Still, I don’t think of it as mine.