The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls

by Ursula Hegi

  When he finally gives in, he looks exhausted. And that’s when I feel compelled to be honorable. To give him a chance to walk away from Heike.

  “Heike can’t have children. An abortion before she turned fifteen. Another the following year. She nearly bled to death.”

  He winces.

  “I didn’t go searching for the operation, but when the nurse offered it, I said yes. And whenever I question my decision I come to the same answer—that I had to keep her alive.”

  “I understand.”

  “But do you understand that you’ll never be a father?”

  “You’ll be there too. In my house.”

  “With Heike.”

  He wraps his arms around his sides; his lips are pressed together, his chin is puckered. He looks smaller, this tall man, thinner, as though I’ve whittled him down.

  And I’m afraid he’ll walk away. And I already miss him.

  “The three of us together … best for Heike.” He looks exhausted.

  “For her counting to ten is like a song she’s memorized…” I talk as fast as I can. Lay out her flaws. Rattle them off to hold him. “She doesn’t understand what numbers are and how to manage them … has no idea she is different. A cello in her arms gives her more pleasure than a child would. At least a cello won’t starve if you forget where you left it. She goes from happy to sad—you’ve seen that.” I hesitate. “Ever since the operation—”

  “Tell me, Sabine.”

  “—she’s no longer interested in … being affectionate with a man.”

  “Then I’m relieved.”

  29

  The Old Women Set the Stage by Trusting Gossip

  “Maria pounded on my door last night with her granddaughter, both of them bleeding—”

  “That beast—”

  “The granddaughter bit his leg when he beat at Maria again. Then he whipped his belt across her face, laid bare the edge of one eyebrow. So much blood across her eye and side of her face…”

  “Face wounds can be like that.”

  “I’ve offered her my revolver.”

  “I’ve offered her my nephews to break his legs.”

  “Not your sons?”

  “Nephews are enough.”

  “She didn’t want our help.”

  “And now?”

  “Now Maria says we must talk.”

  “Finally!”

  The Old Women have been young with Maria and grown old with Maria. They set the stage by trusting gossip to make known that Herr Doktor Ullrich is sinking into melancholy. Twice already—so it travels on the stream of gossip—he has walked into the Nordsee.

  “His shoes were lined up in the sand,” the Old Women gossip.

  “His daughters saved his life.”

  “Side by side, his shoes.”

  When the priest arrives to counsel him, Herr Doktor Ullrich chases him off.

  “He denies his melancholy,” the people of Nordstrand say.

  Sister Konstanze arrives with Sister Ida to offer the Herr Doktor a good rest in the infirmary.

  “Lies,” he yells at them.

  But the Sisters don’t budge.

  “My wife wants to kill me!” He advances, one arm raised.

  “Don’t you dare,” Sister Ida rasps and steps in front of Sister Konstanze.

  During their first years at the St. Margaret Home they had cells at opposite ends of a marble corridor; nights they visited one another, terrified to encounter Sister Hildegunde, ready for lies they were willing to confess.

  And one dawn it happened. Sister Hildegunde stepped in the way of Sister Ida.

  “I was praying,” Sister Ida said. “Walking and praying—”

  “This is not right.” Sister Hildegunde squinted at her, the pale hue of rose petals. “You wake everyone up traipsing back and forth. We must do something about this.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “After Mass I want you to move into the cell next to Sister Konstanze.”

  * * *

  In the cemetery, the people of Nordstrand comfort the Widow Maria Ullrich and her daughters. Nearly everyone is here to see the Herr Doktor buried. Farmers and Sisters and Old Women and Girls and fishermen and toymakers.

  “Herr Doktor Ullrich was hallucinating when we visited him,” Sister Konstanze tells them.

  “Raving mad,” Sister Ida adds.

  “No surprise he succeeded in killing himself,” people say.

  “Not by water but by rope.”

  “He certainly tried before.”

  “Such a troubled man,” says the priest.

  “You have done all you can to keep him alive,” the people tell the Widow Ullrich.

  “You have done all you can,” the Old Women tell her.

  “You know I have!” the Widow Ullrich says fiercely.

  “Ssshhhh…” The Old Women pull her inside their circle, arms locked around each others’ shoulders and once again and forever help her drag the Herr Doktor into the barn. Heavy, he was heavy on the ladder to the hayloft, knocked insensible with a shovel after the feather pillow against his face failed to keep him down. In the loft they knotted a rope around his neck, tied the end around a rafter, and shoved him from that rafter.

  One death seen through.

  They could have killed him a dozen times.

  “Ssshhhh…”

  * * *

  The priest blesses the coffin and approaches the Widow Ullrich to offer Herzliches Beileid—heartfelt condolences; but the Old Women are a fortress, a black fortress, solid with their black coats and black hats and black shoes. As the coffin is lowered into the open earth, groundwater fizzes around it, bubbles and swells, and the Widow Ullrich emerges from her black fortress. Even if for some implausible reason her dead husband is not totally dead, water will swallow him in his coffin and rise even after his grave gets filled in with dirt, causing a puddle on the grave, a rectangular indentation. Proof.

  “Herzliches Beileid, Frau Ullrich.” The priest shakes her hand, eager to return to his bed with a cup of tea and Lebkuchen. Gluttony—

  No, not gluttony. It’s just that he adores eating in bed and drifting into a little nap. The second floor of the carriage house is his apartment now, assigned by Sister Hildegunde, and on the highest shelf in his kitchen he stashes whatever sweet indulgences a parishioner may leave for him in the confessional. To retrieve them, one must get the ladder. A ladder is a fine substitute for willpower.

  30

  Driftwood Jesus

  The following Sunday the priest feels compelled to deliver his gluttony sermon. His gluttony and Rungholt sermon.

  “Five hundred years ago, the island Rungholt had gold and treasures from around the world that arrived on ships from tropical countries. On the docks, people could buy whatever they wanted. There was such excess on Rungholt that, soon, the people had no wishes left. Nothing to wait for.”

  The St. Margaret Girls, who’ve grown up waiting for nearly everything, are mesmerized.

  “Excess led to gluttony … led to malicious pranks … led to godlessness. I’ve been researching Rungholt for decades,” he says, but leaves out that he’s been searching the wetlands for treasures from Rungholt. “You see, in January of 1362, some drunk farmers forced Schnapps down a pig’s gullet till it fainted. Then they tied a white bonnet to its head and put the pig into a bed.”

  A few scoffers and whisperers giggle.

  “They covered the pig with a blanket.” The priest gathers an imaginary blanket to his neck. Feels the urgency in his voice, likes how the momentum of this urgency makes him feel taller. He’s on Rungholt this very moment, trying to stop those drunks from mocking God. “They sent for the chaplain to give last rites to a dying woman, but when he folded back the ruffles of the bonnet, he screamed and refused to give last rites to a drunken pig. He crossed himself and ran away. But these farmers were so irreverent and demented that they chased him and poured beer into the silver vessel where he carried the consecrated communion wafer. Th
ey laughed at him. ‘Now your God is drunk too.’

  “Again the chaplain got away and hid in a church where he begged God for revenge. And God said, ‘Enough! Enough!’ And did what He had done before to punish humans. Sent the flood. Die Sintflut. Except there was no Ark. Now those of you—” The priest peers at the St. Margaret Girls in the tight rows below the pulpit. “Those of you who are newcomers to Nordstrand would like to know if anyone survived.”

  The new Girl from Berlin slumps forward. Heavy odors make her queasy. Incense. Liver. Camphor. For her the fainting is not staged; but it is lucky for those Girls who get to support her by her arms and—genuflecting and crossing themselves—usher her from the church into the moist spring air.

  The priest waits until the church door slams. His eyes come to rest on the raised faces of the St. Margaret Girls. “Only the priest and two girls survived. The flood took everyone else.”

  * * *

  But Sister Ida is not about to let him frighten her Girls with a sermon that assigns all blame to humans and all power to God. After Mass, she takes her Girls for a walk along the Nordsee. They skip ahead of her, chase mosquitoes as if they were butterflies, collect pieces of driftwood. She purses her lips and blows upward, a childhood gesture to cool her face or drive off insects. Once again it startles her that her hair does not lift with her breath. That stiff wimple— Will I ever get used to that wimple? Or to the shape of my soul?

  “Pure,” she was taught as a child, “will happen at your first confession. And the day after you’ll wear the white dress of communion to celebrate the shape of your soul. It will be the happiest day of your life.” But the happiest day did not come: not when she received first communion; not when she took vows. Not until she met Sister Konstanze with her willful chin and her soft curls, though she didn’t see the curls beneath the wimple, of course, not until they peeled off each other’s wimples while sitting on the edge of Sister Konstanze’s bed.

  “Girls.” Sister Ida tugs at her starched wimple. “Today we’ll build a driftwood Jesus, except—” Her voice gives out, and she taps her throat with two fingers. “Except none of the anguish, none of the agony.”

  The Girls skip away to find bits of wood shaped like body parts that have been washed ashore: arms; thigh bones; the curve of a belly. One Girl says she can hear the bells of Rungholt, but then she’s always the first to hear or see something—even the first Girl to refuse signing the adoption agreement.

  “I hear the bells too,” another Girl shouts.

  “Bells made of gold.”

  “I can hear them now.”

  The Girls are exhilarated by the gold and jewels beneath the surface of the Nordsee. With riches like that, you can take your baby and a story of a dead husband and move to a town where no one knows you, start your life anew.

  “—hire a nursemaid—”

  “—and a cook—”

  “—a coachman, too—”

  “—a seamstress—”

  “—a housekeeper, of course…”

  They yank a frayed fishing net from the mud. Help Sister Ida drag two bleached logs from the sea across the dike. “They’re for the cross,” Sister says.

  They lash the bleached logs together, the short log across the long log near the top. When they set out for more driftwood, they find a cold fire and pull chunks of blackened wood from the sand: three shaped like feet, one like a shoulder blade, several kneecaps, a ribcage, six ears.

  For the sake of authenticity, Sister Ida invites Sister Konstanze to lecture on human biology while she and others arrange driftwood pieces into a spine, a neck, two ears, a collarbone …

  Assembling the Jesus takes six days.

  “A genuine act of creation,” Sister Konstanze declares.

  Sister Ida nods. “Now we rest.”

  “As it must be.”

  * * *

  Sister Hildegunde paints rain and after the rain, her colors more intense in that first light upon wet—sand luminous, roofs shimmering. She’ll cover a large canvas with broad strokes that capture vastness rather than precision. Horizontal strokes, deliberate strokes that have a passion and no borders. That cross her eyes, causing her to concentrate on turning her eyes to the side. As she finds new depths in her technique, it’s exhilarating to demonstrate to her students what she is learning for herself.

  “Not every detail needs to be shown.”

  “Be the blank canvas.”

  * * *

  In the lobby of the St. Margaret Home hangs a new painting of a tiny St. Margaret Home beneath a downpour thick as a waterfall; and yet already light presses through. Sister is mesmerized by horizontal lines—between rough waves and flat waters; between vast sky and vast land—lines that are defined by the uncertainty of shifting where one ends and the other begins, widening, narrowing, and on that line Sister Hildegunde depicts evidence of humans: boats smaller than pebbles; buildings lower than dice; windmills delicate as legs of fleas.

  * * *

  Parishioners like to show Sister Hildegunde their Hochwasser treasures.

  “We have a painting of Hochwasser with tiger teeth and tiger claws.”

  “… a bowl with a picture of Hochwasser and a sunset.”

  “… Hochwasser and roses.”

  “My Opa has two carvings of shipwrecks on the backs of whales.”

  “Kitsch,” Sister Hildegunde tells her students.

  The students laugh.

  “Hochwasser has inspired people over centuries. Pictures and carvings and painted porcelain. Some of it is art. But most of it is Kitsch.”

  “How can you tell Kitsch?” her students want to know.

  “You learn to recognize it.”

  PART SEVEN

  Summer 1879

  31

  August. And the Dresses of the St. Margaret Girls Billow

  August. And the dresses of the St. Margaret Girls billow, graceful and weightless. Wind cradles their bellies so they can run again, laughing with their friends on this sandy path bordered by beach roses. Two things to look forward to: today they’ll make jam from the hips of these roses; tomorrow the Zirkus will cross on the ferry from the mainland and the parade is already a presence for the Girls, dazzling in its music and smells and colors.

  From the midwife they learn the Latin name for these roses, Rosa rugosa. “If you pick them too soon,” she says, “they’re hard and sour.”

  “But if you wait too long, they’re pulpy,” says Tilli, who has lived at the St. Margaret Home for an entire year, longer than any other Girl.

  Pails swing from their hands as they fill them with the ripest fruits of wild roses. They want to keep their new friendships forever because they feel closer to St. Margaret Girls than to any friends before—except for your first best friend who was you and you her with no fences between—but some of the Girls will get away as soon as they can, flee from the shame of getting big, rip these new friendships from their souls so that nothing can tilt them into memories of the St. Margaret Home.

  Hagebutten Marmalade—rosehip marmalade from the recipe of Old Women. In the kitchen of the St. Margaret Home, Tilli warns the Girls that the tiny, sharp hairs on the hips can lodge in your fingers.

  “Like splinters.”

  “To get them out,” the midwife says, “you must scrape your front teeth across the tips of your thumb and forefinger. Like this.” She sticks the tip of her thumb into her mouth, presses it against her upper front teeth as she pulls it out.

  “Just don’t swallow the splinters,” warns Tilli.

  For the rest of the day, she works with the Girls: they trim tops and bottoms from the rosehips, cut them into halves, and scoop out the white seeds. Next, they chop the halves and boil them in water. Once the rosehips bubble in the big pots and turn the water brickred, the midwife demonstrates how to strain the mixture through sieves to get rid of the last splintery hairs. Tilli gets to add honey before they ladle the Marmalade into jars and seal them in a simmering water bath. For days the Girls�
� fingertips are scarlet.

  “When you leave us, I’ll send a jar with you,” the midwife promises.

  * * *

  While roustabouts unfold the unwieldy canvas for the tent, three St. Margaret Girls drag a ladder from the carriage house to the huge driftwood Jesus who raises his left arm as if giving orders to them; they stick wildflowers—Butterblümchen und Kornblümchen und Kleeblümchen—into his thorny crown to welcome the Ludwig Zirkus. The Sisters are delighted by their Übermut—exuberance.

  As the roustabouts pound stakes into the ground, one stake dislodges a dirty clump of gauze.

  “Look at this!” The blacksmith holds it up, flings it away in an arc.

  “Must be from the war with the Danes,” says a farmer.

  “Would a bandage keep a dozen years?” asks the baker.

  “You think there’re still bodies down there?”

  A toymaker kicks at the ground. “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “My uncle had to fight on the Danish side,” a fisherman says.

  “My father had a leg amputated,” says the blacksmith. “Green after a bullet.”

  * * *

  The first time Lotte sees Kalle again is when he comes to the house to get the zebra for the parade. But it’s agitated, staggers in a circle, whinnying, ears standing up.

  “What’s wrong with you?” He pats the zebra’s throat and jaw.

  “I haven’t seen her like this.” Lotte strokes the silken length between the animal’s nose and eyes.

  “Something is upsetting her,” Kalle says.

  “Maybe the smell of the Zirkus animals. She must know they’re back.”

  “She’ll see them in the parade.”

  The zebra butts her head against him, nearly knocks him over.

  He laughs. “Getting stronger, are you?”