by Ursula Hegi
“Right. Bird shit.”
“And you walk up to him and you tell him he’s finally found his place, but he cannot answer you because he’s all stone now and you can say whatever you had to hold back.”
“I don’t hold back much, Lotte.”
43
You Don’t Have a Brother
Usually Lotte and I can talk about everything. It sustains me. Is part of our days, our thoughts, our laughter. That’s why it’s so troublesome when she and Kalle isolate themselves. Of course we see them—they’re our neighbors—but every sentence they speak to us already aims toward its ending while they press on past us; every word has that rush forward, even when they walk slowly along the crest of the dike.
They whisper, those two, as if afraid wind will scatter their words through our neighborhood. Is it because I’ve told her too much about the beekeeper and me?
As Tilli weaves back and forth between our families, the balance changes. Heike starts running away again. To Lotte’s house. And Tilli brings her back. Part of the time Tilli lives at our house, but more often next door.
When Heike wants to go with her, Tilli says no one else is invited.
As if Lotte and I ever needed an invitation.
Heike asks, “Who says so?”
Tilli hesitates. “Lotte.”
Heike bawls. Like a child, only louder.
I put my arms around her.
“I’m sorry,” Tilli says. “I’ll help here, too … with anything you need.”
“You know we need you to be around Heike. What is happening with Lotte?”
She blushes—that is, the white around her freckles turns pink so that her freckles are lighter now. “I don’t know what is happening.”
But I don’t believe her.
* * *
With each absence Wilhelm has claimed more space in Kalle’s soul. His wordless attachment competes with the space his siblings occupy, a struggle when Kalle still tried to keep Wilhelm separate from the other three, when he didn’t understand his quiet and unyielding persistence that he has come to admire.
In November Kalle returns with an early Christmas gift for Wilhelm, two brushes and a metal box with watercolors. He also brings a pony, rendered worthless by the impatience of its previous owner, and promises Wilhelm to teach him how to nurture the pony to strength, earn its trust.
Heike takes Wilhelm and Pia to the barn to visit the pony. Smell of dry hay. Wilhelm has to sneeze.
Heike lifts him up. “You can pet the pony’s head.”
Above the pony is a spider’s web where a wasp whirs and spins like a carousel. The spider scrambles down the thin-thin that comes from its body but stops when it’s close to the wasp that thrashes like the whale in the picture at church harpooned by a little boat.
Tilli comes up next to them. “I was looking for you, Heike.”
“I got away.”
“You’re good at that.”
Heike laughs. “I know.”
“And you know that you’re not supposed to get away with the little ones by yourself.”
“Not little,” Pia complains.
The web bulges, but no wind. Up and down the spider works, wraps the wasp. A bee Tilli would free with a twig, poke it from the net. But not a wasp.
“Bees have round rear ends,” Tilli says. “Wasps have pointed rear ends. That’s what my brother says.”
Heike says, “You don’t have a brother.”
“My cousin. I have … two cousins and they are brothers.”
“But not your brothers.”
“Not brothers to me.”
“Down. Now.” Wilhelm squirms in Heike’s arms.
“But then you can’t see the wasp.”
“Wasps mean.”
“Bees make honey,” Heike says. “The beekeeper is my husband because I gave him my bees.”
“How many bees?” Pia asks.
“Two million.”
Tilli asks, “Remember when the wasp stung you in the foot, Heike? You were running in the tall grasses.”
“Grass waves like water.”
“You cannot drown in grass,” says Tilli.
“I was running and then I cried because of the wasp.”
Wilhelm sneezes.
Pia tilts her head back to watch the spider climb all over the wasp, all around the wasp. “Up,” she demands. “Now.”
Tilli props her against one hip, careful to keep the short legs together. She can’t carry Pia like Wilhelm who’ll clamp his legs around her waist.
The spider up and down fast. Stock-still, the wasp.
“You picked me up from the grasses,” Heike says. “You put your spit on my bite.”
“To stop the itching. Spit does that.”
“You got a big knife—”
“—a little paring knife—”
“—and stuck it into my foot.”
“No. I scraped it across the stinger.”
“Until it came out.”
“Out,” Pia repeats.
The spider spins with the wasp. Both spin till the wasp is stock-still again. Then the spider crawls all around it. Swaddles the wasp.
“It’s nature,” Tilli says to the little ones. “Spiders numb their victims.”
Pia grimaces.
Wilhelm grimaces.
Come morning wasp is gone. Net is gone. Above hangs a tiny dark bundle.
“Our wasp,” says Pia.
“Our spider hoisted it up,” says Heike.
* * *
I wait until Kalle is away for a few days. Then I rush to Lotte’s house.
“I’ve missed you,” she cries when she opens the door.
My face is wet. “I’ve missed you, too.”
“If—” Her fingers sweep the wet from my face. “If anything happens to me—to me and to Kalle—will you raise Wilhelm as your own?”
I take her by the elbows. “Are you ill?”
“No. No, I just need to know what if—”
“For me to raise Wilhelm. As my own. I will.”
“Just if.
“I will.”
“So we both understand.”
“You would tell me if you were ill?”
“I would tell you.”
“Then what is it you’re not telling me?”
PART NINE
Spring 1880
44
Maria Ullrich Is Hungry for Colors
Maria Ullrich is hungry for colors.
She wants a red dress, hussy-red.
But it’s too soon for red, especially a red wedding dress. I promise Maria to sew a red blouse for her. For now I store her secrets and the clothes I’ve sewn for her.
One more month of mourning.
One more month of black clothes, Maria tells me. Then she’ll let herself be seen with her fisherman. First in church—nest of most gossip. Her church clothes I have ready. Pale blue. For walks along the dike with the fisherman she’ll wear pale green. Sundays after Mass she’ll invite him to her house for Mittagessen. He’ll bring the fish, she tells me, prepare it as he has countless times for her and himself—delicate with butter and with herbs. Her daughters will like him—he’s modest and kind, curious about them. Afterward they’ll be surprised he’s spoken so little but listened to everything, his expressions playing back to them what has pleased him, say, or moved him. Too soon to tell her daughters what she and the fisherman have decided decades ago—that he’ll claim them all as his daughters—and it is true, could become true, moving them toward an outcome both simple and merciful, unassailable by even the most rigid conscience. A wedding planned for summer.
* * *
In the weeks before the black sun, Lotte and Kalle cocoon. Let everything fall away from what matters as they prepare for their children’s return. They air out the little featherbeds. Arrange with the sexton’s hired man to tend to their livestock for one night and one day. As the Old Women observe that the Jansens are painting their shutters and repairing the back steps, they ease the
ir concerns. After all, Lotte and Kalle look happier than they have in many months.
Together Tilli and Lotte wash bedding and make up the beds in the Kinderzimmer.
“Who’ll sleep here?” Tilli asks.
Lotte smiles.
“Are you expecting guests?”
“Better than guests.”
“Can you tell me?”
“Soon. But not a word to Sabine.”
They pull fresh covers over the featherbeds. Shake them till they plump up.
“Not a word.”
“Just that … it’s still a surprise.”
“What kind of a surprise?”
“The best of all surprises.” Lotte is feverish in her excitement. “Oh, Tilli, you’ll be so happy—”
“About what?”
“You’ll know in a few days.”
“Can you give me a clue?”
Lotte purses her lips.
Tilli waits.
“Our family will be bigger.”
Tilli’s heart skips. Soars. It’s going to happen. It’s finally going to happen. I’ll move in with Wilhelm and Lotte.
Lotte widens her arms, and Tilli is about to step into her embrace when Lotte hugs her arms around herself. “We’re bringing them home, our children…”
Tilli stares at her. “But they drowned.”
“They’re alive.” And what Lotte first revealed to Kalle with such hope and trepidation now pours from her, faster and louder, words tumbling and spiraling.
Tilli stands frozen, arms hanging. Has Lotte gone mad? Those children are dead.
“You’ll like our children.”
“I saw them,” Tilli says.
Lotte waits. Rocks back and forth on her feet and waits.
“At the Zirkus. With you. That day…”
As Lotte tells her how she and Kalle will row to Rungholt and return with their children, she feels closer to Tilli who believes her, mirrors her own magic. Still, Lotte has to ask her, “Do you believe me?”
Tilli nods and already she’s veering into what she’s best at: being useful to claim a place for herself. “You’ll need help with your children. They’ve been away for so long.”
Tilli will calm Sabine if she gets suspicious. Will keep Wilhelm safe until they’re all back.
Lotte lets Wilhelm help her while she bakes and cooks. “For your sisters and your brother.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
Wilhelm is afraid that Hannelore will take the yellow doll and that Martin will break his toys. Wilhelm must hide the doll in Heike’s room, make her promise not to tell.
* * *
Done with the heavy lifting of life, the Old Women help with the cooking. Help with their grandchildren. Teach them good manners and how to scrape the soles of their shoes and brush off sand so they won’t drag it through the house. Still, sand makes it indoors, and the Old Women sweep it away. Sweeping. Always sweeping. Sometimes four generations live in a row house or next door to you. The youngest and the oldest are most revered: the youngest adored; the oldest valued for the wisdom you can read in their faces. As you age, you grow into your true nature: more loving if you are born loving; more envious if you are born envious; more patient if you are born patient; more greedy if you are born greedy. The imprint of your life maps your features.
45
Schwarze Sonne
“Oh, there—”
“Listen.”
“The noise of all those wings.”
Dusk, and they’ve spread their blankets in the field: Heike leans against Tilli, makes finger wings; Wilhelm sits on Tilli’s knees; Kalle and Lotte whisper, their heads close; while Sabine and the beekeeper make sure to sit at a proper distance from each other.
Tilli is the one to draw us all together, Kalle thinks.
“The starlings.”
“Like a storm.”
Heike pinches her nostrils. “They stink.”
Tilli pinches her nostrils. “They stink worse than sheep.”
“Because there are so many,” the beekeeper says. “They gather in one huge cloud before they go down to their sleeping grounds. Because of the predators.”
With her free hand Heike pinches Wilhelm’s nostrils shut, but he swivels his head, shakes her off.
“Don’t do that.” Heike catches his face between her palms.
“Let me help.” Sabine lifts Wilhelm from her.
“Wilhelm,” Heike cries, “hold your nose shut.”
Starlings tumble from the sky in fabulous and iridescent formations that scatter as birds of prey—falcons on tapered wings, hawks on broad wings—give chase to this feast of starlings that veers and dips and soars as it enfolds its loss; and if you have not encountered such loss, you may assume the flock has always been like this, whole, the sum of all transformations, as it flings its devastating grace and splendor at the heavens. But what if you don’t understand what you’re about to lose? With her own girl Tilli should have known. Worst thing is you cannot know until after. Like the morning before the drowning when the Jansen family reveled in their happiness and Venetian candy.
* * *
Wilhelm lifts his face to the black swirls. Tastes his amazement like sugar on lettuce.
Kalle drinks in his son’s wonderment. “The starlings,” he tells him, “are so tired that the urge to sleep is greater than caution. They know they must get down to the marshes swiftly, together, to be safe.” He describes how Raubvögel wait for the starlings to descend. “Falcons attack from the sky, hawks from below. Most—”
“Hawks need to eat too,” Tilli says.
“Falcons, too,” Heike says.
“True. Most starlings pass through the attack of the hawks and reach ground.”
“Yes,” Lotte says. “They clutch reeds, one claw here, the other claw there, and press down the tops to stabilize them, make a pouch of leaves where they hide and rest through the night.”
Heike swats at mosquitoes.
“They must sleep one meter above water because of the ground predators,” says the beekeeper. “Foxes and weasels swim out during the night to eat the starlings, but they can’t climb up the reeds.”
Lotte raises her arms, forms a cloud as Sister Sieglinde did in this very field when Lotte was a child. Sabine’s fingers fly up, graze Lotte’s, and their hands plummet together. Fly up again.
And in the plunge Lotte links her fingers through Sabine’s. Asks, “Can Wilhelm stay at your house tonight?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you. And part of tomorrow?”
“What should I be asking you?”
“Whatever you want to ask.”
“Where will you be?”
“Südfall.”
Sabine waits.
“My cousin Nils needs help with…”
“You promised to tell me if—”
“I am telling you.”
Sabine shakes her head.
“We need to help my cousin on Südfall.”
Tilli and Heike make their own clouds, pull Wilhelm into their radiance, and the three laugh and bump into grown-ups and one another. Tilli’s cloud separates into fingers that shiver and fly and she’s a starling now who must hide in the night. As Wilhelm wiggles his fingers, it comes to Kalle how—in this twilight flicker of wings and hands—the birds and humans belong to one migration.
* * *
It was like that when he and Lotte took their first baby to watch the sun turn black with birds. As they carried Hannelore through the fields, sun slanted from the right. Ahead of them, marshes. They spread some hay across the muddy ground. There they wait. He twirls a hollow stem between his fingers, blows into it to make the wispy hairs on Lotte’s temples rise with his breath. She smiles. Clasps Hannelore to her breast till her eyes close. Together they bundle their sleeping baby and back away from her on their knees, soundlessly, into the deeper grass behind a stand of reeds, from where they can still watch her. There, they love one another, loosen each other’s clo
thing just enough to stroke, to merge, half-covered if Hannelore were to wake up.
They can finish in two minutes.
Can take two hours.
All day and again as in their first year of loving. Hiding from parents and nuns and teachers and neighbors; only now it’s their baby daughter they’re hiding from. Sun, deeper and glowing, dips behind the reeds, hones their silhouettes, miniature trees in Japanese drawings, each leaf suggested. While Hannelore sleeps, a fine ribbon of milk on her throat; while her parents love one another in the deepest grass, screened by a stand of reeds.
* * *
Hannelore. She’s here, Lotte thinks. Hannelore is here. We are ready. Soon.
The beekeeper says, “Starlings sleep squeezed next to one another.”
“Feather to feather…” Heike says.
“All the starlings. That’s why it gets so hot.”
“How hot?” Wilhelm asks.
“Over one hundred degrees,” Heike says.
“No, no,” Tilli says. “You know what happens at one hundred degrees.”
“Water boils?” Heike asks.
“Good. And at zero degrees?”
Heike nudges Tilli.
Tilli whispers to her.
Heike says, “Water freezes.”
Wilhelm hums.
“Forty degrees Celsius,” the beekeeper says, “that’s how hot it gets in the center of the flock when the starlings sleep.”
“Forty degrees is still very hot,” Heike says.
“Like the hottest day of summer,” says Tilli.
“The starlings come here because it’s easy to catch insects with all that water around,” says the beekeeper.
“Rain, too,” Heike says. “Do they eat sleeping bugs?”
“Sleeping bugs and awake bugs,” Tilli says.
“Where do they go from here?”
“As far north as Sweden and Norway,” Tilli says.
“Finland, too?”
“Finland, too.”
* * *
When we walk from the darkness into our house, my daughter shouts, “Wilhelm is here.”