by Ursula Hegi
* * *
For the Sisters the youngest Girls evoke their own girlhood. Awkward with new girth, they knock over candlesticks, say, or jugs of water. In the wide corridors they jump rope. When the Sisters forbid it, the Girls jump rope in the cellar of the church.
It’s for them the Sisters pray extra rosaries. Because their bodies are not grown enough to push a child into life.
One Tuesday at vespers, it comes to Sister Hildegunde that St. Margaret deserves more than one painting. A series, she thinks. Like Christ’s fourteen stations of the Kreuzweg that manifest his torment and death on the path to crucifixion and resurrection. St. Margaret certainly won’t need fourteen stations, just a few so that those Girls—children actually—will be motivated by the saint’s courage.
She stretches another canvas, smears the first layer of oils with her palette knife, and paints through the night with loose strokes, hands and mind flying till the violet blue before dawn reveals St. Margaret—pristine and tranquil—standing next to the dead dragon, gown spotless, one translucent foot on the scaly hide, not one gash, bite, wound, cut, slash, tear, or bruise on her.
When she sets the panels side by side, she decides there must be a transition between St. Margaret inside the live dragon and St. Margaret outside the dead dragon. The following night she works on the dragon vomiting up St. Margaret. But it’s all wrong. Too meticulous. Too fussy. By showing everything, she is limiting herself. Why paint each dragon toe and toenail when it is more compelling to suggest the talon? With her palette knife, Sister flies at the dragon—strains, punches, retreats, charges—and in scraping off what confines her, uncovers passion.
* * *
Of course the Sisters notice.
How can they not?
Something has come unstuck in Sister Hildegunde, turned luminous. Some say it happened overnight, others that it changed over decades. But they agree that Sister Hildegunde’s strokes have become translucent, raw canvas showing through the colors. With broad sweeps she captures the essence of the bishop’s mansion that must have been ready to claim her from the first day she walked toward it, levitating above the meadow in all its beauty and vulgarity; and she is still walking toward it—from every angle—humbled by how it gives itself to her, afloat on layers of mist, its windows shaped like peacock feathers, iridescent blues and purples, the feather-eye.
That glowing window becomes her signature: it may fill her canvas, appear as a tiny window high in a tree, or at the horizon.
Bishops fly up and settle on the roof. Inspired by half-human cries of peacocks, Sister Hildegunde applies the heads of bishops to the bodies of peacocks.
Poppies the size of pear trees grow around the mansion, giving shade to the Sisters who stroll beneath them while a bone-white little girl carries a baby up the front steps.
Frau Bauer says the red poppy trees remind her of the Black Forest.
“Everything reminds you of the Black Forest,” Sister Hildegunde says.
“Would you trade the painting?”
“For what?”
“For some three-legged milking stools. My son Köbi makes them from a design our ancestors brought from the Black Forest when they came here for a wedding and didn’t leave and—”
“We don’t need milking stools.”
“But they can be used for other activities, like … like weaving and painting and maybe even gardening if you like to sit while pulling weeds and they don’t wobble like most stools if you sit off-balance even if you are drunk—”
“That”—Sister’s pupils drift toward the bridge of her nose— “is not a problem for us.” She closes her pale eyelids and—with an expression of utmost concentration—directs her pupils to reverse their direction.
“I’m sorry, Sister Hildegunde. I didn’t mean you get drunk and I’m sorry if I tired you out—”
“How many milking stools?” Sister opens her eyes and the pupils are in the center again.
“Three?”
“Ten.”
“Oh—”
“For our older children. Even if they fidget, the stools won’t tip over.”
* * *
The next painting to sell is that of the bishops on the roof. Several people want it, but the blacksmith is the first to arrive with money. The other buyers ask Sister Hildegunde to make more paintings like that.
“A painting of the bishops hiding behind a chimney.”
“Or of the peacocks shoving the bishops off the roof.”
But Sister will not take assignments. Sister is in a hot rush to capture what comes to her in story-dreams so consuming that she can’t tell if she’s painting in her chapel alcove or in her imagination. Only when finished will she let others see her paintings, and when they tell her how magnificent they are, how transforming, it doesn’t matter to her because she’s already in a swift current toward another story-dream, and it’s the beauty of it that drives her, the not-knowing. To give rise to images that were not there before—she teaches her students—that’s what we must do. Not a serene process, it can’t be, she tells her students, and inspires each Girl to dare enter the swift current of not-knowing toward a vision of her own.
PART THREE
Fall 1878
11
Translucent Moons
At the St. Margaret Home for Pregnant Girls, Lotte Jansen sleeps while Girls play with Wilhelm in the Little Nursery, rock him atop their bellies. He’s too big already to remind them of the babies that will come out of them.
But not yet not yet not—
Or maybe not at all if it’s true that storks pull babies from the sea, pull them out dripping, and fly them to you and bite you in the leg till you scream. Leave a brown circle on your leg, a Mutterfleck. Mother’s spot.
They whisper to Wilhelm he’s lucky he has a mother who can take him home with her.
But for now Lotte sleeps. Ten hours. Eight. Punctuated by short spans of being awake when she can trust her despair to be waiting for her; can trust that despair to paralyze her when Sister Franziska brings Wilhelm to visit her; can trust it to render her silent when her cousin, Nils, rides across the tidal flats from Südfall to sit with her.
Nils slides the chair next to her bed.
“Lotte may not answer you,” Sister Ida has cautioned him. “She is in the deepest of all sorrows. Just talk to her.”
* * *
Nils tells Lotte stories from before: before the wave; before the children; before Kalle. Stories from when they were children and she’d sit on his horse behind him, arms around his waist. Flying. Forever flying. Forever ten years old. To attend school on Nordstrand, Nils rides his horse across the Watt. His parents lease the only house on Südfall; depending on tides and winds, he stays with Lotte during the week and returns home after school on Saturday.
“You got so happy,” Nils says, “when you were allowed to ride with me to Südfall and stay till Monday morning with us.”
One May when Lotte stayed on Südfall, high tide and a full moon swept away the eggs of nesting birds. Not a story for her, Nils decides. Not now. Maybe never. Even though the birds started over, enough time for them to have young ones. Another story he won’t remind her of: climbing the steps to the attic with Lotte and hiding in the rowboat his family keeps there. When Hochwasser rises around the house, they can ease the dory through the hatch. Nils wishes he had memories without the Nordsee for Lotte; but he cannot separate the Nordsee from their lives: its roar; its whisper; its changing surface; its salty taste on your skin; its force when it tumbles you.
* * *
In the Little Nursery Tilli trims Wilhelm’s fingernails and saves the translucent moons in her handkerchief box. She can see herself in his house, trimming his fingernails every week.
“Soon,” she tells him, “soon I’ll move in with you and your Mutti. Just the three of us.”
She is getting used to him being so big. His legs dangle from her arms. One morning she yanks him from her breast because he kindles such hunger for h
er own girl—how then did they get you away from me while we slept cocooned? That’s when she remembers—
—remembers the jab of a needle—
—a gentle voice here here hands peeling—
—my arms open peeling your skin from my skin—
She squeezes her eyes shut and summons her own girl at her breast and lets Wilhelm’s mouth back against her to relieve the hunger of her own girl because her body makes what her girl needs and is there for Wilhelm and therefore her girl cannot be so far away.
* * *
Nils brings his sketch of a starling to the St. Margaret Home and reminds Lotte how Sister Sieglinde taught them about starlings and their migration in third grade. As Lotte holds his sketch—black speckled feathers, straight bill—she finds her own sketch of a starling tacked to the wall of their classroom. Finds the wetlands where she and Nils and Kalle wait with their teacher just as schoolchildren over centuries have waited for the Schwarze Sonne of spring.
“Where are the starlings?”
“Ja, where?”
They scan the sky, shield their eyes against the last glow of day. At first just swarms of mosquitoes and the stink of soggy earth, ancient and moldering layers of death and decay; and yet growth feeding off that rot.
“Now tell me, what do you think of when you see starlings?” Sister Sieglinde asks.
“Starling soup.”
“My Mutti bakes starling pies.”
“My Opa taught a starling to sing,” says Köbi.
“My uncle shoots them.”
“Where do they go in the winter?” Kalle asks.
“South,” says Sister Sieglinde. “France and Belgium. Who remembers the Latin name for the European starling?”
Raised hands.
“Sturnus vulgaris.”
“Good. Now who can tell me its two goals?”
“Sleep.”
“And they don’t want to get eaten.”
“Good. Now what happens when their need to sleep gets bigger than their fear of being eaten?” Sister Sieglinde has thought about choices like that, prayed over choices like that.
“They wait for the best moment to fly down into the grasses.”
“Before it gets dark.”
“In the last twenty minutes of light.”
“Real fast—”
“—like stones falling from the sky.”
“At sixty kilometers, that’s how fast.”
A few children elbow one another.
“Faster,” Lotte cries.
“Twenty times.”
Elbows flying. Jabbing. Children laughing.
Sister Sieglinde tells them to stop, but one of her eyebrows lifts, enough to slow down their elbows, to reduce jabbing to bumping to rubbing. “The starlings,” she continues, “have three different means of communicating. They constantly look around. They listen. And they make signs with their wings. What is my neighbor doing? I’ll do the same. We want to go down into that marsh in this formation, now. There has to be water … But as soon as they go down, Raubvögel—birds of prey—snatch up starlings, and the flock closes around the gap, shifts direction to escape. That’s how you can tell what type of attack is going on.”
She doesn’t have to tell her students that the magnificent dance of the starlings is a massacre. They know. And yet they can relish the beauty of the dance and not be shocked by the massacre because they’re used to eating chickens and sheep and pigs whose slaughter they’ve watched or assisted. Perhaps to them killing has its own beauty, while Sister Sieglinde still feels like the squeamish child who hides under Oma’s bed whenever Mutti pins down a chicken on the tree stump and swings her hatchet. Streaks of dried blood on the rings of the stump—
* * *
“Why didn’t you warn us?” Lotte asks when her cousin visits again.
“No one knew.”
“If you’d been here you could have warned us, pulled my children from the wave.”
Nils understands the Watt better than most. Like his father, he boosts his fishing income with Wattführungen, guides tourists on hikes, fourteen kilometers across the Watt between Nordstrand and Südfall, then his mother’s Kaffee und Kuchen and a little profit from that, before the return to Nordstrand. From Nils the tourists learn about nature and history, about the difference between an island like Nordstrand and a Hallig like Südfall that floods nearly thirty times each year. A Hallig exists in balance with the tides, Nils tells them. It does not have dikes, but Warften, meter-high hills erected by people where they build their houses and barns. During floods, they herd all livestock to the Warft. Nils will caution tourists against the danger of hiking on the Watt without a guide. Easy to miscalculate where you are and how soon the tide will come in. You may get trapped by water rising around you, cutting off your way to the shore. Soon—but Nils is not about to tell this to Lotte—he will include a warning about a freak wave that killed three children in his family.
* * *
The Sisters negotiate a lease of the Jansens’ farmland with the sexton who’s known to be reputable when it comes to work and church, but deceitful about his age. He sends a Knecht—hired man—to work the land and supply Lotte with eggs, milk, and fair payment.
Although the sexton is nearing seventy, his face is pink and unlined, his hair full, and he claims to be two decades younger than the old men who know they sat on the school bench with him. They suspect he’s getting himself injected with the piss of goats.
“From a veterinarian in Hamburg.”
“Pregnant goats, I heard at the barbershop.”
“To keep himself young.”
“I think the goats are in Bremerhaven.”
“Maybe from Bremerhaven and from Hamburg.”
“He’s away on the train often enough.”
“How expensive do you think?”
“We could ask him…”
“Ja, also how it’s done.”
But the sexton, galled by their audacity to ask, claims he doesn’t know anything about pregnant goats.
12
Belly Dancers and Apostles
“Remember when we found treasures on the Watt?” Nils asks.
Lotte stares toward the window.
He shifts his body into the path of her gaze. “When we were in third grade … that spring the Nordsee carried off muck and sediments above Rungholt. Remember?”
Outlines of cisterns and of cellars.
“Tell me what you remember,” Nils whispers.
Posts and plow tracks. You can hide in those memories. Vanish.
“There was talk of treasures,” he says. “You and Kalle and I were eight. We hiked out at low tide with hooks and pails and shovels. Entire families were out there, digging. You and I found the handle of a plow.”
Three shards of clay.
“Two shards of clay,” Nils says.
Three.
“You were good at finding treasures for the school museum.”
He reminds her how proud they were when they brought a treasure to their teacher. And though Lotte doesn’t answer, it feels like a conversation because he senses that she, too, sees the shards of clay, the handle of the plow, images that he’s seen and that move them both forward into other images: the shelves and glass cases that displayed maps and diaries; fragments from ceramic bowls and whetting stones; stiff garments and kitchen utensils from ancestors; jewelry that people willed to the museum.
Every find is worthy of investigation. An ancient inkwell. Half a spinning wheel. A copper teapot. Brilliant shards of ceramic that date back to foreign sailors who traded on Rungholt. Generations of students have practiced their handwriting on cards that document each artifact by name, century, location, and finder.
Tintenfaß | 14. Jahrhundert | Bennersiel | Dietrich Maier | Kupfer Teekanne | 17. Jahrhundert | Herrendeich | Rosemarie Link |
Over centuries, the museum has grown, curated by the current teacher, who has a desk in the museum. After hours, the teacher is allowed to use the museum a
s a parlor, sit in the embroidered armchair or lie on the sofa, eat at the fourteenth-century marble table, surrounded by seascapes and framed documents. Unless the teacher is a Sister and must be back at the St. Margaret Home before dark.
* * *
From the stillness of her bed in the St. Margaret Home, Lotte maps the route of the Ludwig Zirkus through her longing, into towns and villages along the Nordsee, up the coast through Germany, into Denmark, and then back through Germany into Holland.
Next August he’ll have to come back because the Ludwig Zirkus will set up on Nordstrand once again. You cannot be sure of the exact week. Something unforeseen may happen along the way—sick animals or broken wheels—that’ll push all performances back or ahead. But once you hear that the Zirkus is performing in Husum, you know Nordstrand is next. Will he come to the house? Or will he avoid her? Hide out in one of the wagons? Keep his door locked if she were to come to him?
Maybe she’ll be the one to hide with Wilhelm in the house. Let Kalle be the one to come to her. But what if he doesn’t? She understands why he left, but she can’t understand why he doesn’t write to her. And why he stays away. She thinks of Sabine Florian with her strong, willowy body. Sabine, free and fearless, who should use her body to anchor her daughter to earth—not tempt another woman’s husband young enough to be her son.
If Lotte could, she’d stop her longing—kill it throttle it burn it. It sucks you in, seduces you into hope unless you withdraw instantly. Because there are two sides to longing, hope and the danger of letting hope devour you. Longing trips you. Tricks you. And yet gives you brief respite from your despair while beyond your window the seasons stage their extravagant transformation: winds sweep across yellow rapeseed fields where countless blossoms sway as if one surface, and clouds ripple like wetlands after the tide retreats, dappled valleys and ridges as if the earth had turned itself upside down.