by Ursula Hegi
He swoops Wilhelm onto the zebra. Holds him steady with one arm around him. Children and dogs run to follow the parade.
“Some earthbound Ark we have here,” Vati tells Wilhelm.
Verrückter Hund raises his leg. Wobbles topples.
Vati says it’s because the Sisters don’t teach him how to pee like a boy dog. “But you can show him, Wilhelm. Butt your shoulder against his side. Keep him from toppling.”
Pee like boy dog … Dove flies at church door. Nest above door.
“See the shadow of the steeple,” Vati says, “how it points at the St. Margaret Home?”
Wilhelm sees. Rides over shadow of steeple.
Flies teem around the eyes and nostrils of the Zirkus animals, not moving if the animals swing their heads or tails. Mud sucks at the shoes of the spectators, darkens the tips of their umbrellas. They swat at flies, lift small children who’ve slipped in the mud, but all that is part of the festivities that will include their purchase of tickets—Saturday and Sunday performances sell out quickly—and the blessing of animals once the priest and two altar boys appear in a puff of myrrh that scares off the flies.
When Kalle brings Wilhelm home on the zebra, they stop in the barn to get more ropes. He lifts Wilhelm off the horse, lifts him high, higher yet, and that’s when he hears it—laughing in his kitchen. A man’s voice. Then Lotte’s. She doesn’t laugh like that when she’s with me. An icy-hot stab behind his eyes. He sets Wilhelm down. Riffles through the shelves above his workbench, looking for chores that’ll postpone entering the house.
* * *
“Can I ask you a question about a Sister?” Köbi asks Lotte.
“Which Sister?”
“The one with the long legs.”
“You cannot see a Sister’s legs.”
“I know what hers look like. She’s younger than the others and walks fast. If you watch closely, you can picture her legs. You’ll notice it in her walk … the way only long-legged women walk.”
“You must explain something to me.”
He flinches. “Explain what?”
“How does a long-legged woman walk?”
He blushes as he used to in first grade.
“You’re blushing.”
“And you—you have no mercy.”
“Must be the new Sister. Sister Bertha.”
“Sister Bertha…” He sighs. “Those sweet legs. Almost too long. And that swivel…”
“What swivel?”
“Of her … her personality. Her hips.”
“Women adore you,” she teases Köbi. “Women melt just looking at you.”
“I know.”
She laughs aloud. When’s the last time she heard herself laugh? “Women cannot wait to get engaged to you.”
“A sad thing.”
“It is a sad thing.”
He grins. “Abundantly sad.”
“Why a Sister?”
“Love chooses for us. Love chose for my ancestors. My great-uncle took a year to walk through Germany and met this young woman on Nordstrand.”
“Don’t tell me another Sister.”
“A weaver. His entire family traveled to Nordstrand for his wedding and never returned to the Schwarzwald. Now—this Sister Bertha? Do you know her well?”
“Well enough.”
“What is she like?”
“Why?”
“I must know.”
“And then what must you do? Get engaged again?”
He winces. Four broken engagements so far.
“You love getting engaged but not being engaged because that leads to marriage. So—let’s imagine Sister Bertha leaves the convent for you.”
He looks startled.
“She moves in with you and—”
“Oh no.”
“—and her beautiful love for you replaces her beautiful love for her eternal bridegroom—”
“No.”
“—and she ends her engagement to her eternal bridegroom. Devotes herself to you.”
He groans.
* * *
“Hungry, Vati.”
“First we must clear this out.”
All around them sharp tools … a scythe a shovel an ax a pitchfork …
Wilhelm tugs at a bucket of nails.
“That’s heavier than you. You’ll get hurt if you drop it on your feet.”
“Nein,” Wilhelm cries.
“Stop it!” Kalle yells, instantly ashamed. He hands him a wooden ruler. “You can carry this.”
“I help.” Wilhelm tunnels his little hand into Kalle’s fist and—
No— Martin tunnels his hand into Kalle’s fist. That’s the hand Kalle wants in his, not the hand of his lastborn whose eyes are too mild to match Martin’s.
In back of the lowest shelf he finds a nest of shredded rags, evidence of mice. Kalle grabs the shovel, ready to kill, but when he flips the nest, a female falls from it, three tiny mice latched to her teats, sucking and still latched to her while dropping to the floor where she lies on her side. Kalle can’t raise the shovel. He’s killed mice before. And now is saving them. Because of the nursing. Because of the not letting go. Because he is still a father with one child hanging onto him.
He drapes a burlap sack around the milking stool and sets it above the mice. To shelter them? To give them privacy? He shakes his head. Privacy for mice.
“You stay away from mice,” he warns Wilhelm. “They’re filthy. They get people sick.” Then he positions Wilhelm on his shoulders—his armor, his conscience—and walks toward the house, pushes the door open.
* * *
“I’m already over her,” Köbi says to Lotte.
“I don’t believe you.”
Kalle bristles. “What are you doing here?”
“You said you’d meet me here.” Something cocky in Köbi’s voice. “To talk about wood shavings.”
“Well … last time they were too small.”
“I’ll tell them at the toy factory. Again.”
“Our animals sneeze when they breathe them in. You should know that.”
“I know that.” Köbi organizes the collection of wood scraps and leases barn space from farmers to store mounds of shavings and sawdust that settle and dry from brown to silver. If the sawdust doesn’t get replaced often enough, it gets nasty from dung and piss.
Wilhelm’s heels thump against Kalle’s chest and he catches them in one hand. Holds them still. “You must explain to the toymakers the difference between sawdust for the arena and wood shavings for bedding that must be large enough so they cannot get into the animal’s lungs.”
Lotte raises her arms to Wilhelm. “Come here, Kindchen.” She won’t look at Kalle. Won’t step in front of him. Just reaches for her son from the side and lets him glide into her arms without touching her husband.
32
Lure of the Island
That night she barely talks to him.
Long hours of work with the Zirkus the following day, and he gets back to Lotte late.
Morning, then. In the kitchen. And she lets out a shuddering breath. “I cannot do this by myself…”
“I understand,” he says, though he doesn’t.
“Some days when I’m alone … I cannot see them anymore.”
“Here. Here now.” He pulls a chair away from the kitchen table, settles Lotte on his knees. “We see them better when we’re together.”
“When we talk about them.”
“They’re playing in the sun.” He spins the story for her, embellishes, to lift her from her despair. And be with her.
“Hannelore … she’s in second grade. Her teacher says she’s eager to learn.”
“She’s always been curious. And Martin has been wanting to go to school ever since Hannelore started.”
“Sometimes he gets envious of her.”
“I hope the other family knows how to reassure him. Not punish—”
“They’re kind people,” Lotte says.
“Bärbel loves to play wit
h the family’s animals.”
He restores Lotte to being with their children. He can give her that. Can give her Bärbel as she tags behind the teacher and the shipbuilder and tries to help with chores, not one bit afraid of the horses and cows. Can give her Martin trailing Hannelore, imitating how she arranges her bedding around herself, the two of them plumping and shifting and hiding like starlings in their pockets of leaves. Can give her Hannelore on her third birthday, songs and Kuchen and the wooden doll with the yellow dress that Wilhelm likes to drag around.
Lotte sighs. “But now the other family gets to celebrate her birthday with her.”
He runs one palm up and down her spine.
“I wish…” She lays her head on his shoulder.
“Have I told you about the playground at their school? Just like here. Sundays they take our children there and show Bärbel how to pump her legs on the swing—”
“—but not too high.”
“They always look out for Bärbel.”
Wilhelm tugs at his sleeve. “Vati? Vati?”
“Not now,” Kalle snaps, wishing he’d said it softly because Lotte raises her head from his shoulder.
Wilhelm keeps tugging, and what feels clear to Kalle is this: the boy does not fit into the world he and Lotte inhabit with their older children. He, who has never slapped a child, wants to demolish the boy and—in the waning of his flesh and spirit—get back his other three.
Where did that come from? Demolish? Certainly against my will.
“I’m not capable of that,” he blurts, mortified.
“Capable of what?” Lotte asks.
He shakes his head.
“So good with animals, aren’t you? But you don’t want to love your son.”
“That’s not so.” But the sweet trusting gaze of the boy makes Kalle uneasy, a glance that will suck all life from you if you let him. He must shield the boy from knowing. Wilhelm was already thrown away once—nothing can undo that.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Also about how I was with Köbi.”
“You only want what you can’t have.”
Lotte stands up, but he pulls her back, pulls the boy up onto her lap, enfolds her between the boy and himself. She brings her arms around the boy’s back, settles in. When Kalle’s legs go numb, he doesn’t lift the boy back down; she’ll take it as a sign that he’s trying not to love Wilhelm.
* * *
Words that make pictures of their children. To be with her, he must remember the words she has told him, remember the sequence to establish their children for her. He must not miss one detail because he’ll need it to build the next detail. And the one after that. If he holds on to the power of reason he can let her slide into her make-believe but remain separate, ready to comfort her when she emerges, to caress her till she opens herself to him.
“Tell me what they are doing. This moment?”
He feels burned by her intensity. Is she testing him? The strength of his belief?
“Tell me they are on Rungholt now.”
“They are on Rungholt now. Probably still asleep.”
“Not probably.”
“They are still asleep.”
“It’s our secret.”
“Has the secret taken the place of our love, Lotte?”
“You’re not the only one who gets jealous.”
“Who?”
“As if you didn’t know.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s still early on the island,” she says and waits.
“Hannelore will wake the little ones … tickle them awake. You know how she is.” Hannelore, their firstborn, raising her chin when she asks yet another question. Hannelore who wears down the surfaces of her doll with her love, drags it around by the braids, sleeps with it facedown across her belly. No one else knows the children the way he and Lotte do. “Soon they’ll have breakfast.”
“Slices of boiled ham?” Her voice is raspy.
“Ja. And Dutch cheese.”
“Exotic fruits…”
“They’ll eat pastries,” he prompts her.
“Pastries so delicate they’ll pass their lips like—like breath,” Lotte murmurs, yielding to the lure of the island where it’s always balmy, where she can dress her children like royalty, feed them with delicacies they’ve never tasted but only heard of.
“What kind of exotic food?” he asks.
“Oranges…” Her throat swells with sudden wild joy for her children who can eat oranges every day. “Once I tasted an orange.”
No—almost tasted an orange. One slice of one orange. In third grade, when her teacher, Sister Sieglinde, brought an orange to class, blessed by the Pope in Rome. If Lotte had been at school and not home with the measles, she would have seen Sister Sieglinde pull the orange apart, golden half moons that she slid on the tongues of her students like communion wafers. Juicy and sweet, her classmates told Lotte, till she came to remember that taste on her own tongue.
“All the riches of all the world,” Lotte says.
33
You Must Be Kind to Your Husband
“You must be kind to your husband,” I remind Heike the morning of her wedding.
“My husband is boring.”
“Your husband is kind and generous.”
“He is old.”
“Younger than me.”
“He talks old.”
“He’s only thirty-two. Halfway between you and me in age.”
“Then you marry him.”
“Heike!”
“He likes you. I have eyes in my head.”
My neck burns red.
“But he’ll die soon.” She picks up the dotted feather of a seagull, sticks it into her wedding bouquet.
“Why do you say that?”
“Jesus died when he was thirty-three.”
“Not everyone dies at thirty-three.”
* * *
If you turn your attention on Heike, the light comes back threefold. It’s been like that ever since she was a girl; now, as a bride she is radiant, lovely; and you can almost forget that she’s not always like that. She adores the ceremony, the gifts, especially the inlaid cello the beekeeper has commissioned for her. She wants to play it right away but the priest makes her wait till after the vows. But then the people of Nordstrand urge her on, and they dance.
Not all of them, though. Some fret how painful it must be for Lotte and Kalle to celebrate on the anniversary of their children’s drowning, and this awareness makes them so anxious that they feel compelled to console the Jansens.
But their reaction is bizarre. Crazy, even. Lotte and Kalle smile before they speak. Smile at each other and then at the people and say, “We have reason to celebrate.” And: “Soon there will be good news.” And then Kalle, going on about winter training, how he’ll arrive early winter and set up everything. Already he has brought three more Zirkus animals the Ludwigs have entrusted to him, ailing or too weak to be on the road. They’ll stay on Nordstrand until they recover or die, sharing his barn with a cow, a horse, two pigs, and sixteen sheep.
He encourages the people to stable animals. “Get your choices known. The Sisters have signed up for the monkeys,” he says. “I’m keeping a list.”
* * *
The beekeeper has given Heike his bedroom on the second floor, next to my bedroom. For himself he sets up a bed in his workroom downstairs where the walls are covered with shelves for books and honey jars, and scales and countless tiny drawers with herbs.
On his walls hang two of Sister Hildegunde’s paintings. Heike’s favorite is called Blue Train: Girls carry their babies from the bishop’s mansion and board a blue train on the dike. One third of the canvas depicts, in miniature, the Rhein where families wait by picnic tables laden with cakes and flowers.
“Was it expensive?” she asks the beekeeper.
“I traded honey.”
“I— I gave you my bees.”
“A quarter of a million bees.”
“My bees. My hone
y. My picture!”
He laughs. “I agree. Would you like me to hang Blue Train in your bedroom?”
She claps her hands. “Ja.”
In the other painting umbrella-shaped clouds carry peafowl and babies while big-bellied Girls tug at the handles of the umbrella clouds to bring them closer.
Babies … all those babies in the paintings. How will he be with not having babies of his own?
34
A Frantic Summoning
Together, Lotte and Kalle chart their children’s day, a sort of heaven far beyond—except the island is closer than heaven, its world shimmering at the edges, expanding. Until now, Lotte was the one who started, but today the toymaker takes her to the island: she is there, with him, where their children play and breathe and run ahead of them when they go for walks and Lotte laughs her deep and loud laugh, mouth open, head thrown back.
“I’ve missed your laugh,” he says.
“Have you missed their voices?”
“Of course.”
“The voices of our children. Do you want to hear them?”
“Yes,” he says. “Yes.”
She gets Wilhelm from his crib, props him on her hip, and Kalle follows her outside and up the dike and across to the Watt.
“Listen,” she murmurs.
“I don’t hear—”
“Not yet. Listen.”
But he’s restless.
“They don’t come every day I wait for them, but if they’re near, it begins with a murmur so delicate—”
He sighs. “I still don’t hear anything.”
“Ssshhhh … soon…”
He raises his face. Hears nothing until all around them now rises the quicksilver murmur of children and the border wavers and glistens and what’s on the other side is tempting, the chance to find your children alive on Rungholt. A promise if you can believe. Which you long for, this moment. Quicksilver murmur … and the voices of Wilhelm’s children far away in the future? And yet already here. Three grandchildren who will come to you from Wilhelm. Solace in that. Rejoicing. Three for the three taken away. The tallest a girl with black hair. Daughter of Wilhelm but not of Wilhelm. Two little boys, fair like Wilhelm with his delicate features.