It helped that there was so much to do. Any repining or blame must wait until later.
Stefan Glatzer and the Hohlbaum family had had their fields flooded by the Drench; now both had nothing but stretches of swamp and water. The Hohlbaum brothers were the richest in the neighbourhood, and owned other fields, but Glatzer would be ruined, having lost his house as well. Ten other houses had stood in the path of the flood and might not be habitable again. The colonel’s bombardment had killed Pavel Hecht’s cow and left the church in ruins. And then there were the newcomers to the town: some seventy men and a dozen women, all of whom, the mayor ordered, must be given hospitality. Most of the men would only stay until the good weather came, and then move on to seek their fortunes elsewhere, but there were still strangers to fill every spare room or space where a bed could be laid, at least for the winter.
Meister Weichorek had set out immediately to visit all the town’s solid citizens, while Dame Weichorek went to work on their wives. A heifer was donated to Hecht and new furniture and a bushel of seed promised for Glatzer. Then the real business began: felling the forest for some acres to the south of the town, clearing a field for planting and building new houses. At least the presence of the soldiers speeded the work. Fifteen men were deputed to help Meister Stefanu put together the house frames and another five, led by Private Leintz, who had been apprenticed to a stonemason before his conscription, set to work on the church.
A few of the newcomers had asked for land to build houses of their own once the main work was finished. There were two men whose wives were with them (one of them a girl of no more than eighteen), and, astoundingly, two lone women, Libush and Alis, who proposed to set up together as seamstresses. Some of the townswomen looked at these two askance: who knew what threat women of that kind might pose to their menfolk and children? But Dame Weichorek was adamant. They had all done the town service, she maintained, and all deserved its help and its hospitality.
For their part the newcomers were grateful for their reception, having seen the fate of the comrades they had left at Pokoj. They paid for their billets in storerooms, barns and attics with hard work, and with coin if they had it. That did a great deal to extend their welcome.
Lieutenant Klaes—no longer a lieutenant, he had to remind himself—took no part in the work at first, and in fact wished fervently that he were anywhere but here. He had been offered lodging by the mayor himself, who proposed setting up a bed for him in the back parlour. The Weichoreks had received him with as much courtesy as if he had never wronged them, and even Jakusch, already back on his feet, greeted him with no sign of rancour. But the sight of the boy’s stiff walk, and his wince as he sat down, filled Klaes with shame. He protested that he could not give the burgomaster so much extra trouble, and found himself a billet at the town’s inn.
He might have stayed at the carpenter’s house instead, he knew. Bosilka—Miss Stefanu—had politely offered him lodging as they walked the three miles upriver from the Drench’s southern bridge, the night after the deluge. It was the least she could do, she added, after his service to the town. Klaes could not share her good opinion: if his obstinacy had not uncovered the body of Petos, the whole exercise might not have been necessary. Nor Drozde’s death, he thought sadly. Nor his own disgrace, nor August’s blood on the girl’s head. On the other hand, he had got her safely home and carried her trunk for near six miles. That probably earned him a bed for the night.
She had led him into a workshop and shown him a closet room almost filled by a narrow bedstead. It had been Anton’s, she said—and started to cry. She wept for a long time, hunched over the workbench, while Klaes stood by helplessly. He already knew that he could not sleep in Hanslo’s bed. When Bosilka’s sobs subsided a little he had led her into the little room and made her sit down, finding a blanket to cover her.
Klaes had waited until he was sure she was asleep before leaving the workshop. He had walked about the town till morning, thinking that he could not stay in a place where he had caused so much misery.
But he had stayed: he had nowhere else to go. And to his surprise, he found no one to blame him. Quite the contrary: Meister Weichorek had instructed that the visitors be welcomed, and as their leader, Klaes commanded a certain respect. When he presented himself at the inn he was offered a room without demur, though the innkeeper had been one of those whipped. Possibly the man took some pleasure in his new guest’s embarrassment when he was forced to ask to pay for his keep by chopping wood. But there Klaes had no choice: he had barely enough with him to pay for two weeks’ lodging; less if he wanted to eat more than bread and beer. All he owned now were his coat, his pen and a few books.
For the first week he ate at the inn and stayed in his room when not carrying out the owner’s chores, but one night at supper he was surprised to find himself surrounded by a group of local men. He knew them by sight: they drank most nights in the room next door and had nodded at him once or twice. But now they came up as soon as they saw him, and two or three wanted to shake his hand. It seemed that some of the men working on the new houses had been telling the story of the bursting of the dam to entertain their coworkers who had not been at the scene. Privates Toltz and Schneider, who had seen the fuse being lit, had cast Klaes as the hero of the day; had painted him, in fact, as some kind of reckless daredevil.
“Meister Klaes! Pleasure to meet you, sir,” an old man said. “Diverted a river with a stalk of dill, hey?” Someone laughed and slapped him on the back. Two others contended to buy him a drink. The innkeeper himself came over to hear the story retold, and looked at his guest with a proprietorial pride.
People had short memories, Klaes thought.
His newfound popularity did not alter his predicament: he was no longer a soldier, and there was no life waiting for him outside the army. He could not stay indefinitely in Puppendorf as a hanger-on, living on charity or taking what work he could to pay his way. He would have to find a profession of some sort, and quickly. But running through the list of his accomplishments, he could not believe that the town required a sapper or a figures clerk, nor a magistrate for that matter.
He had no skill with his hands, and no great strength: he could not train as a wheelwright or a shoemaker, and would be little use to them in the building. Maybe, he thought, he could find work on a farm. When he was a boy everyone in his village had helped with the harvest. And he could care for animals: he had groomed and fed the horses he rode, though he had never owned his own. There would be ploughing and sowing in the spring, and calving; maybe there would be enough for him to do.
He walked to the north edge of the town where the cows were pastured. A group of children were playing at the side of a field, balancing on the stone wall and taking it in turns to swing from a pair of ropes tied to a tree branch. Klaes stopped to ask them the way to the nearest farm.
“That’s my dad’s,” said one of the boys. “But he won’t stop to see you today, sir; he’s out fixing fences in the back field.”
That fitted well with Klaes’s agenda. He asked the boy if his father might have use for a man to help him with such work. The boy, looking at Klaes a little doubtfully, allowed that he might. “But you can’t ask him now,” he repeated. “He don’t like to be disturbed when he’s working.”
“Maybe I could leave him a note,” Klaes said, unwilling to have come out for nothing. The boy laughed.
“Can if you like, sir, but it’ll do you no good. There’s no one here can read.”
“No one?” This was an out-of-the way place, Klaes thought, but still. “What do you children do for schooling, then?”
The boy gave him a blank look. “What’s that?”
Meister Weichorek was in favour of the idea, to Klaes’s considerable relief. He even suggested a place for Klaes to set up: while the church was being rebuilt, its surviving furniture had been moved to Laslow’s empty barn. The services were held there on Sundays, but for the rest of the week the pews and lectern might just as well be used for an impromptu schoolroom. Klaes would charge two groschen per pupil for a week’s teaching, and would move on to figuring once they knew their letters. The mayor would send away for slates and pencils at his own expense. He could not order the townspeople to send their children, of course, but many of the mothers would jump at the chance. And Dame Weichorek could be very persuasive.
Klaes prepared for his first lessons two weeks before Christmas. Eight families were sending their children: eleven boys and three girls in all. He laid out the pews in a hollow square around the lectern and propped a large slate in front of it, feeling as nervous as when he’d taken his first command.
He heard a step behind him and turned to see Bosilka Stefanu. He had not spoken to her since the night of his arrival, and could not imagine why she was here now, though from her stern expression it was not a friendly visit. He bowed to hide his discomfiture, and waited for her to state her purpose.
“I want to join your class,” she said without preamble.
Klaes was completely taken aback. But she clearly required an answer. “You—you mean, to study with the children?” he managed.
“I mean to learn reading; to read better. Drozde left books in her trunk. I want to find out what they say.”
“But . . .” he stuttered, and was silent.
“Dame Weichorek has approved it,” the girl said defiantly. “I can come in the mornings and work longer in the afternoons. I already know my alphabet, and some words, and if it’s more trouble I’ll pay extra.” She rummaged in her apron pocket as she spoke, and held out coins. Four cruitzers—that would be at least a week’s wages for her. When he still hesitated she added tartly, “Or don’t you teach girls?”
“I do! Assuredly I do,” he broke in at last. “But Miss Stefanu . . . these are children—the oldest is fourteen. Will you not feel out of place?”
“I’m nineteen,” she said. “If we’d had a teacher when I was younger I’d have gone to him, but there was none. And my father couldn’t read; nor could Anton. I’ve had to teach myself. Do you think I’m too old to learn more?”
She met his gaze levelly, challenging him to disapprove. Klaes felt his face grow hot. “I’m sorry for doubting you, Miss Stefanu,” he said. “I’ll teach you gladly.” Her grey eyes were almost black in the room’s shadows. He pressed on without giving himself time to consider. “But I won’t take your money. Perhaps . . . Do you think you might come here as a helper, rather than a pupil? Assist me in running the class, I mean. As—as a friend. I think you could still learn all you’d need.”
She hesitated. And Klaes had the sensation that he’d stepped over a cliff.
“I could,” she said. “That would work very well. And Lieutenant, my name is Bosilka.”
By the new year they had twenty children. All of them could chant the alphabet and write their names, and Klaes had started the more advanced on reading passages from Drozde’s chapbooks and his own Old Testament, written painstakingly large on the big slate. At the end of each session Bosilka would teach them a song, or retell an old story with the children joining in at the exciting parts. And in February, when snow would otherwise have kept everyone indoors, they staged a puppet show.
It was Bosilka’s idea. She had pestered Klaes for every detail he could remember of Drozde’s shows, and then she’d gone to find Private Taglitz, now doing odd jobs in the forge, to question him as well. They had agreed on a short performance for the first experiment: the stories of “Clever Gretel” and “The Cobbler’s Son,” both favourites of the children, and to finish, a dramatization of “The Moving of the Mala Panev.”
Klaes had raised some objections to this. They couldn’t tell the full story, he pointed out: they would have to leave out important facts, even falsify. But Bosilka overruled them all.
“We won’t lie,” she promised him. “But this story is important to them, perhaps the most important of all. It tells them how their town has become what it is. It tells them who they are.”
She worked night and day to make scenery: a series of cutouts for the town, model barrels of gunpowder, a long skein of blue and green cloth for the river. She removed the fluttering eyelashes from Drozde’s model of the great gun and replaced them with menacing, reptilian eyes copied from the dragon. And she practised endlessly with the puppets: the overbearing colonel, Drozde, the soldiers and townspeople on their crosspieces, and the gangly officer who would stand in yet again for Klaes.
This was Klaes’s greatest objection of all, though he’d been too embarrassed to voice it. His men’s lurid accounts of his exploits had gained some currency among the town’s drinkers, but the children had not yet connected the hero of their fathers’ stories with their well-mannered schoolteacher, and he had no wish for them to do so. But Bosilka had foreseen this problem too. “We’ll use your given name,” she said.
He did not like his Christian name. He had been teased about it too many times in the past: schoolmates and fellow soldiers informing him, as if he had never heard it before, that his parents had named him after the wrong animal. But the townspeople, and most of his men, had never heard it. So for the sake of the story the hero of Puppendorf, who blew up the dam and saved the town with a reed, would be Lieutenant Wolfgang.
On the day of the show the barn was packed. Nearly a hundred children sat on the pews and on benches hurriedly made by Stefanu the week before, while their parents stood at the back. The press of bodies generated such heat that many had already opened their heavy coats before the performance started. Klaes stood to one side of the theatre booth, welcoming the arrivals and privately wondering what he had got himself into. He was no showman! But Bosilka raised the Drozde puppet and made her wave to him. Taglitz blew a fanfare on his trumpet, as raucous as it had ever been in the old days. And the crowd fell silent.