by Unknown
These reflections appeared to Helene and Martha like the yearning of their own graceful souls for the heaven of Berlin, and they hoped for nothing more fervently than to touch their aunt’s heart by writing in such terms. True education enables you to set the right tone with anyone, striking a note that chimes harmoniously with your own, don’t you agree, dear Aunt Fanny? And you are a sacred example to us there.
Helene and Martha went to great pains to show their aunt, line by line, how cheerfully independent they were and at the same time how grateful to her. Their very existence was a real joy! Helene thought this assertion too fine not to be written down. Martha, however, felt that such an expression was a demeaning lie in view of the sheer exhaustion that came over her when she thought of her life in Bautzen. Adopting a tone that trod the narrow line between pride and modesty appeared to them the real challenge of the letter they were writing. Time and again sentences were crossed out and rephrased.
Sacred example, said Martha doubtfully, she might take that the wrong way.
How do you mean, the wrong way?
She might think we’re making fun of her. Maybe she sees herself as anything but sacred, so she wouldn’t want to be a sacred example.
You think not? Helene looked enquiringly at Martha. Well, in that case at least she’ll have a good laugh. We really must put that in or we’ll never meet her at all.
Martha shook her head thoughtfully.
It was hours before they could get down to the fair copy, which had to be written out by Helene, because Martha’s handwriting often looked unsteady and crooked these days. Something wrong with her eyes, Martha claimed, but Helene didn’t believe her. She put in the bit about the sacred example and finally, in the last sentence of all, she politely asked their aunt if she would like to visit them in Bautzen some day.
When days passed, then a week, then two weeks and no answer came Helene began to worry.
There was nothing at all the matter with Martha’s eyes. If they went for a walk and Helene pointed out a dog a long way off, a sandy-coloured dog like their father’s old Baldo, who had disappeared on the day when he went away to the war, or if she showed her a tiny flower by the roadside, Martha had no difficulty in making out in detail both dog and flower. Helene suspected that her untidy handwriting, like her sudden dreamy moods, was to do with the syringe she had sometimes seen these last few months lying beside the washbasin, where Martha had obviously left it. Often as Helene handled syringes herself at the hospital now, the sight of one on their washstand at home made her throat tighten. Everything in Helene protested against the sight of that syringe when she didn’t want to see it. The first few times she was so shocked and ashamed on Martha’s behalf that she wanted to hide it before Mariechen found it, or Martha herself noticed her carelessness. But if she hid it that was sure to be noticed and would make it impossible for them to go on saying nothing about it.
As time went on, Helene became used to the idea that Martha had formed the habit of using the syringe every day. She did not speak directly to her about it. Nor could she honestly have asked questions, since she knew perfectly well that since their father’s death and Leontine’s departure Martha had been injecting small quantities of drugs now and then, presumably morphine, perhaps cocaine.
In the time just after her father’s death it was Aunt Fanny’s letters more than anything else that kept Helene hoping for a life beyond the town of Bautzen, a life she did not yet know. Even the pictures of Berlin that she had seen made her wax enthusiastic about the many different aspects of the city. Wasn’t Berlin, with its elegantly dressed women and never-ending nights, the Paris of the east, the London of Continental Europe?
But no reply came from Aunt Fanny all through October in response to that letter from Martha and Helene, the best, most detailed letter they had ever written her. Early in November Helene couldn’t bear the waiting any longer and wrote again. She hoped, she said, that nothing was wrong with her aunt? Here in Bautzen, anyway, they were more than grateful to her for getting in touch with Uncle Herbert’s relations in Breslau. Had their last letter arrived? Life went on in the usual way in Bautzen. After passing her examinations successfully (Helene had first put brilliantly, but struck it out again), she had begun work in the surgical department of the hospital in September. It meant that she was earning more, but she specially liked the work for its own sake anyway. Martha took the pen from Helene’s hand and added, in her scrawl, that Helene had filled the position left vacant by Nurse Leontine, a friend of theirs, when she moved to Berlin two years ago. The professor wanted to have Helene beside him more and more often these days, when he needed someone with great powers of concentration and sure hands to help with difficult operations, because she was very talented in that way. Helene wanted to strike out what Martha had said; it seemed to her boastful and ill-judged. But Martha said Helene’s worst mistake could be to hide her talents under a bushel, it would mean she ended up a helpless little thing in some man’s arms, begging for his favours. She held out the pen to Helene.
You don’t really believe that, do you? Helene wished Martha wouldn’t keep challenging her in that way of hers. She took the pen and went on writing.
Thanks to their uncle’s legacy, she said, their mother was now provided for. Aunt Fanny was warmly invited to visit them and would be a welcome guest at any time. With best wishes and hoping to hear from her soon.
Helene wondered whether she ought to apologize for the extensive account of their household arrangements in her last letter. Such matters, after all, might well bore and repel her aunt. Helene refused to entertain the idea that she might have thought the bit about being a sacred example insulting. But perhaps it seemed presumptuous of her two Protestant nieces from a small town in Lusatia to have chosen her as their example?
More weeks passed and the much desired letter did not arrive until just before Christmas. It was longer and seemed to have been written in more haste than Fanny’s earlier missives; it was hard to decipher the closely written characters. She had so much to do, she said, preparing for the coming festivities; her cousin’s children were looking forward to Chanukah and she was going to buy them little presents, even her lover was counting on Christmas, taking some notice of it. He’d see what came of that, she said. She was expecting the cousins from Vienna and Antwerp to visit at Chanukah, oh, the whole clan of them. She had her hands really full today, she had to discuss the menus for the festive season with her new cook, who was still wet behind the ears, an inexperienced young girl, so she, Fanny, had to keep helping in the kitchen. She liked that – after all, she was fond of cooking herself and she hadn’t cared for the way her old cook, before she finally retired, used to add so much flour to every sauce that it came out stodgy. The older the cook grew, the thicker were her sauces, with more and more floury lumps in them; perhaps her clouded eyes hadn’t been able to see them any more, or perhaps she had let the sauces go lumpy on purpose. Was it overwork? Or maybe she’d been cross with her husband who was making her stay at work until the day he died, using his empty sleeve as the excuse for exploiting her industry. She had suspected the old cook of using the wrong pans for milk or cream, although she’d been forbidden to do any such thing several times. Not that she, Fanny, was going to come over all hypocritical and claim to live strictly by the old dietary rules. No, she couldn’t be doing with all that milky messing about. But in the end it was the woman’s constant complaints about her lazy husband at home that bothered her more than the lumpy sauces. And that was saying quite something, for the sauces hardly deserved to be called sauces at all! In the end her fricassees were pieces of meat wedged solid in a floury paste, not a trace left of the flavours of bay leaf and lemon. Just a meat pudding, simply disgusting!
Helene and Martha couldn’t help laughing when the letter they had been waiting for so long was in their hands. A whole world unfolded before their eyes. Every sentence had to be read several times.
The girls wondered whether these cousins f
rom Vienna and Antwerp were their own relations too. The description, and the fact that Aunt Fanny hadn’t mentioned a husband in any of her letters, made it seem likely. Imperceptibly, Martha and Helene sat up rather straighter. They were sitting on the bench by the stove, warming their backs. It seemed to them as if the letter cast a net all around the world, and Aunt Fanny was close friends with that world, an expert on it, if not its very essence. In a postscript she wrote that while her travels certainly didn’t look like taking her to Lusatia in the near future, she thought maybe the girls might like to visit her in Berlin some time? She’d be happy if they could come for a long stay. The girls would find two first-class railway tickets from Dresden to Berlin enclosed. She thought Dresden must be their nearest real railway station, wasn’t it? Her apartment was large enough, for she had no children herself, and she was sure the two girls could find work in Berlin. She would be only too happy to help them make their way and succeed.
Helene and Martha looked at each other. They shook their heads, laughing. Two years ago, when their father died, they had thought that from now on their lives would consist of working at the hospital and growing old here in Bautzen, at the side of their increasingly confused mother – but here was this letter, the prelude to their future, and only now could they really dream of it. Helene took Martha’s hand and wiped a tear from her eye. She looked at her big sister, her older sister, whom she had always admired for her modest conduct, whose wide-eyed gaze derived its attraction from her perfect appearance of purity, yet also owed something to those kisses that Helene had seen Martha and Leontine exchange. Helene understood the appearance of female virtue very well, the look of a modest, well-behaved, pure girl – it was exactly what a girl should be, it was the making of her. But this letter struck another note, and it aroused Helene’s longings. Helene kissed the lobe of her elder sister’s ear, she sucked it hard and the more the hot tears flowed down her sister’s cheeks, unrestrained, the more mindlessly did Helene suck, as if this sucking of an earlobe and her sister’s salty trickle of tears were the only way of ignoring those tears, of not having to say or think anything. Helene and Martha sat side by side for a while, face to face. It was some time before they were able to think properly again. Martha’s weeping, the relief that had set it off and was the sign of it, made Helene guess how much Martha must have been suffering. Martha had been exchanging romantic letters for the last two years with her friend far away in Berlin, hadn’t she? And although Leontine was unhappy in her marriage, she enjoyed the nightclubs and theatres of the city. Only a few days ago, when Helene had still been waiting in hope and uncertainty for a letter from Aunt Fanny, she had been unable to resist secretly purloining a letter addressed to Martha. It was from Leontine in Berlin. Helene had taken her chance to open the letter skilfully over the steaming kettle while Martha was on late shift at the hospital. Dear sweet friend, Leontine began. I can’t tell you how badly I miss you. It’s not so very often that my course means I must go on studying until late into the night, and I’m already giving the younger students lectures on pathology, but the weekends are mine. Yesterday we went dancing. Antonie brought her friend Hedwig with her, I showed them my new outfit – stolen from Lorenz’s wardrobe. My friends loved it, but I don’t wear his trousers outside the house. I’ve made myself a new dress for when I go out. Antonie was wearing a lovely dress too, a cream-coloured tea gown. We admired her in it so much. Knee-length and unwaisted! She danced beautifully in that tea gown – she sent us out of our minds, and enjoyed it. What can be more exciting than the hint of a waist and a hip when the whole cut of the dress pretends there’s no such thing underneath? She was wearing a silk peony at her neckline. We competed to dance with her. Oh, my beautiful tall friend, I keep thinking of you all the time. Do you remember how we danced half the night away in our attic? You sweet, dear girl, I’m with you so often in my thoughts. It goes to my heart to think I won’t be able to come and see you this Christmas! Lorenz won’t hear of it. He thinks it would be an unnecessary expense; after all, he says, my father is comfortable with my sister Mimi’s family and no one at home misses me. Lorenz always has to be in the right, of course. Nothing he says ever admits the faintest doubt. I tell you, he ought to have been a lawyer. He’d have been really at home in the law courts. Our domestic life together isn’t comfortable, not with the righteous glances he gives the world, narrowing his eyes like a lizard’s. You can imagine how the things he says annoy me. I could always contradict him, but then I suddenly find I couldn’t care less about his remarks, and I usually leave the room and even the house without answering him. He loves to have the last word – well, he’s left alone with it more and more often. Does that satisfy him? Luckily we don’t see much of each other. He sleeps in the library and every morning I tell him his snoring can be heard all over the house. I wish that were so, but to tell you the truth he snores as little as you and I. However, I’d rather have him sleeping at the other end of the apartment so that we meet as little as possible. I’m going to the theatre with Antonie this evening. The Terra Cinema in Hardenbergstrasse has closed and a theatre’s going to be opened there in October instead. The production of Miss Sara Sampson is famous all over the city. I’m sure Lucie Höflich must be simply wonderful as Marwood. But why do I tell you these things, my dearest, when you’ve never seen her on the stage? What wouldn’t I give to be going to the theatre with you this evening. Don’t be jealous, my sweet honey-tongued love. Antonie’s getting married in April, she says she’s very much in love. I saw her fiancé at a distance once, he didn’t look exactly elegant – a burly, broad-shouldered fellow! Just the opposite of delicate, pretty Antonie. How did Helene’s exams go? Give my love to the little one. Love and kisses to you, from Leo.
She signed it just Leo, like a man’s name, with a long inky curve hinting at the rest of the name, but it was certainly Leontine’s handwriting. Helene did not show that she had read Leontine’s letter to Martha, but now, days later, when the girls sat face to face over Aunt Fanny’s invitation, with Martha crying over it and laughing for joy the next moment, Helene was sure there was nothing Martha would rather do than pack a suitcase at once and leave for Berlin, to stay there for ever. In fact, Bautzen had a large railway station of its own, but what did that matter? Helene often went to meet her professor’s colleagues there on his behalf, other doctors and professors from all over Germany, and Bautzen station couldn’t properly be called provincial. Railway carriages built in the carriage factory here were sent halfway round the world, and some of them must certainly go to Berlin. However, Aunt Fanny couldn’t be blamed for thinking of Bautzen as a village and she showed extraordinary generosity with those first-class tickets. To think that neither Martha nor Helene had even been on a train at all!
One afternoon in January, when darkness had already fallen, the professor of surgery asked young Nurse Helene to come to his consulting room. He told her he intended to go to Dresden for a week in March. He was meeting colleagues at the university there, he said, they were planning a jointly written book on the latest developments in medicine. He asked Helene if she would go with him. It would be to her advantage, he said. He didn’t want to hold out too many hopes, he added to the fifteen-year-old, but he could imagine her as his assistant some day. Her nimble fingers on the typewriter and her knowledge of shorthand impressed him. She was clever and gifted, he would feel it an honour to take her to his meeting with his academic colleagues. He expected she’d never been in a motor car, had she? His grave gaze made Helene shy; she felt her throat tighten. There was nothing to be afraid of, said the professor, smiling now, she would only have to take the minutes of a meeting now and then, his old secretary couldn’t travel any more because of water on her legs and he couldn’t ask too much of her. Helene felt herself blushing. Only a little while ago this offer would have seemed a wonderful opportunity. But today she had other plans, not, of course, that the professor could have known anything about them.