THE GUY FROM HAMBURG WITH the bike helmet didn’t come back until Vera was wiping down the kitchen. Heinrich showed him the smokehouse, then left him standing in the hallway and headed off.
This visitor didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He looked around for a bit. Vera was just taking off her bloodstained work coat when she heard him groan loudly out in the hall. It was a sound of delight.
Burkhard Weisswerth had discovered the old hope chest that stood against the wall next to the kitchen door. He was now kneeling in front of its carved-oak front, running his fingers over the inlay—birds, flowering vines, the finest Baroque craftsmanship. “Holy mackerel!” he said as he inspected the forged metal fittings and the turned feet. He took a couple of photos with his iPhone before shifting his attention to the sideboard containing Ida Eckhoff’s crystal glasses. Then he looked down at the terrazzo floor, which was cracked in a couple of places, but what an expanse! Burkhard Weisswerth knew what a floor like that was worth. Eva had been dreaming of one like it for some time, but the cost today was prohibitive. They’d looked into it.
Vera watched the man in her hallway snapping away like a tourist. That was enough!
She went up to him briskly, said “Right!” stretched out her arm and shook his hand, just once, decisively and vigorously. That’s what she did in her practice with patients who sat around for ages after their treatment was over and went on and on about their children and grandchildren. It always worked.
Burkhard Weisswerth tucked his cell phone away and thanked her for the extremely thrilling morning. He lifted his bike helmet from her hope chest and left his business card on it.
Vera had wanted to ask what kind of a magazine published articles about venison sausage, but he had already rolled off on his bike. Apparently they now cycled on their backs in Hamburg.
* * *
Anne’s boy had suddenly appeared in the kitchen shortly before seven that morning, and stepped straight into the blood. “A big boy like you shouldn’t cry,” Heinrich had said, pulling a cough drop out of a tin for him. “You can sit down and watch. But no more whining!”
Leon didn’t utter a sound. He wiped the snot from his face with the sleeve of his pajamas and climbed onto the kitchen bench. Vera fetched the bag of M&M’s that had been in her drawer since New Year’s Eve. Kids had stopped coming to her door at the New Year to sing songs; not even the neighbor boys for the last few years. Maybe they were afraid of her, the old witch in her crooked house.
As she was putting the candy down in front of Leon, he tugged gently at her sleeve, glanced quickly over at Heinrich, who was turning the crank of the meat grinder, and whispered, “What are you guys doing?”
A large knife was lying in front of him on the cutting board, and beside it were bowls of raw meat and lard. He had just been standing barefoot in a puddle of deer blood and had seen Heinrich Luehrs stuff something bloody into the meat grinder. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the boy was a little upset.
“Well,” said Vera, “we’re making sausage. We use meat and lard for that, and it all has to be ground up, which is why we’re turning it through this thing, which is called a meat grinder. That’s Heinrich, he lives next door, he won’t bite. Unless you annoy him, of course.”
“That’s when I make sausages out of children!” Heinrich said as he resumed his cranking. Vera wasn’t sure how Heinrich Luehrs’s humor went down with young children. Leon didn’t laugh but he stayed seated on the bench, and later on he helped with the stirring. “Clever boy,” said Heinrich, patting him on the shoulder on his way out.
* * *
Still no sign of life from Anne. The morning after you got drunk on fruit brandy was always awful, Vera knew, so she let her sleep. She put the coffee on and made breakfast while Leon drew on her shopping pad. “It’s a tractor.” He obviously hadn’t seen a lot of farm machinery before now. His tractor was emitting clouds of smoke and looked like a steam engine.
Since Vera didn’t have any hazelnut spread, he was eating bread with honey. “Your mother will have to hose you down later,” Vera said. The kid was sticky from head to toe.
They went to the horse barn and fetched hay for his rabbit, but Willy didn’t want the stuff that Leon shoved into his cage. In Hamburg there had been carrots and Happy Bunny nuggets. Willy set his ears back anxiously and turned away. He still had to process all this change.
“Try it, Willy, it’s delicious,” Leon said, chewing a piece of hay to prove it. But that didn’t help either. The rabbit retreated into a corner of his cage and surrendered to culture shock.
Vera suddenly felt that her legs were about to give way. She was dead tired from spending the night in the kitchen, from the sudden commotion in her house, and to top it all off, the guy in the bike helmet that morning. Willy wasn’t the only one who needed to get used to all the changes.
A quick peek into Ida Eckhoff’s living room revealed that Anne was still out of it. She was lying diagonally across the sofa bed, with her legs tangled up in the duvet cover.
Vera opened the window partway. Since there was no movement on the bed, she went back to the kitchen.
Leon had dressed himself. The straps of his dungarees were twisted and he’d forgotten his socks. He came over with several of his board books and stretched his arms out toward Vera: “Lap.”
She pushed back her chair and lifted him up. He weighed no more than a fawn.
Leon inconspicuously pulled his pacifier out of his pocket and shoved it in his mouth. Then he leaned back with his head on her shoulder, and she felt his soft skin against her cheek, and his hair as well. He felt like a chick to her.
The letters swam briefly before her eyes, so she pressed her fingers to her eyelids for a moment, then started to read. “It had already been raining for days.…”
How long had it been since she had touched something that didn’t have fur?
Her hands knew horsehair and dog fur, dead hares and deer, the velvety coat of the chewed-up moles that Heinrich’s tomcat would sometimes bring her. They had known Karl’s bony shoulders under his flannel shirts, and the stubble on his cheeks that she sometimes touched when he lay sleeping on the bench. But her hands were almost afraid of this warm little boy.
Vera Eckhoff only had experience with children who were tense with fear, lying back in her dentist’s chair, their eyes large and mouths open wide, and for the most part she hurt them.
She could have touched their faces now and again, let her hand pass briefly over their cheeks, before or even after their treatments. And you’re only just realizing that now, she said to herself.
Children didn’t come to her practice anymore. Their parents now drove them to Stade, to a young dentist couple who specialized in young patients, whatever that meant.
There were probably toys in the waiting room, and the dentists most likely wore T-shirts.
Vera spent only two days a week in her practice nowadays. Her patients came simply out of habit, or because they didn’t have a car to drive to Stade. Now and then a fruit farmer would bring her a Kurdish farmhand with bad tooth decay or an infected molar. Word had gotten around that Dr. Eckhoff didn’t ask about health insurance or official documents.
Vera carried on reading to Leon. It was a story about a bear, a pelican, and a penguin. The story didn’t make any sense, but Leon was mesmerized. He had pulled his knees in to his chest, and Vera placed her hand on his bare foot, feeling his round toes beneath her thumb; it took everything she had not to press the child against her and bury her face in his soft hair.
You’re a silly old bat, Vera Eckhoff! But she placed her cheek against his and continued reading the crap about the animals that were searching for the sun.
* * *
Still, it was better than the stories she’d had to read to Karl in his final year, when he had to be with her at all times.
Karl, who had never seen the Alps, fell in love with the idyllic world of alpine romance novels after coming across a cheap paperback that a female patient had left behind on a chair in Vera’s waiting room.
After that, Vera had bought him a new one at the Edeka store every week when she did her grocery shopping.
The old lady dentist with the alpine doctor novels in her shopping cart. People had probably found that highly amusing, but who was surprised anymore where Vera Eckhoff was concerned?
At that point, Karl already couldn’t sit up very well. At night, he kept slipping off the kitchen bench, and his back couldn’t take the living room armchair or sofa for very long. So he had to go to bed. Too tired to read and too anxious to sleep, he would just lie there while Vera read him the stories about the doctor from Tyrol.
Dr. Martin Burger with his brown eyes and his steely physique from mountain climbing became Karl Eckhoff’s family physician. The doctor had to rescue him every night.
Vera mostly read from midnight until about one in the morning, when Karl finally drifted off into a dreamless sleep. But Dr. Burger’s remedy often didn’t last until morning, and Vera would hear Karl screaming again.
First like a child, then like an animal.
She’d wake him, sit down on the edge of the bed, and hold him until he calmed down. But sometimes only the medicine helped. PsychoPax, ten hours of inner peace. But he would pay for it the next morning. He’d be numb from the Valium and hungover into the afternoon, and often the next night would be bad again.
What Karl dreamed at night couldn’t be put into words. Vera no longer asked him, and she didn’t tell him that he called out for his mother in his sleep.
“Help me, Mother,” he’d cry.
But Ida couldn’t help her boy anymore, so Vera helped him instead.
* * *
She’d thought for a long time about how she should do it. Some nights she put Dr. Martin Burger aside quietly once Karl’s eyes were closed and took Ida’s hand-embroidered sofa cushion in both hands, since it was big and heavy enough for an old man. But then she would lower it because Karl, who dreamed he bled to death in his wet sheets night after night, didn’t deserve to die in the bed he detested so much.
Karl Eckhoff ought to fall like a brave soldier, taken cleanly by an unexpected bullet, between the trenches of an apple field, Vera thought, a hero’s death. He had earned medals for his bravery, held out on the battlefield day after day, and in all those nights, he hadn’t climbed into the hayloft and jumped from a stool. He hadn’t abandoned Vera.
It seemed to her that she had practiced for this shot her entire life, each time they’d stalked together through the fruit fields at first light on an autumn or winter morning. Karl, who hadn’t fired a shot in ages, still loved the hunt, the absence of human activity, the world as seen through binoculars, the hours spent up in the deer stand, Vera’s rough coffee out of the thermos. He couldn’t smoke before she fired, of course, because the animals would smell the smoke.
When she slowly and quietly raised her shotgun, aimed at a hare or a deer, squinched her left eye shut, and placed her index finger on the trigger, Karl would stick his fingers in his ears and look down at his feet.
Vera shot only when she was absolutely certain. She almost always hit her target. Then Karl would stand against a tree and smoke while she went and got the car. He still helped with the carrying, so they’d both take hold of the dead animal and place it in Vera’s trunk. But after that he’d walk back alone, on foot, a hunter without a gun.
It could be as easy as this: Old Karl Eckhoff shot while hunting, an accident. These things happened.
She watched him limp with his stiff leg through the dull light of a November morning, saw him clearly and distinctly through her scope, followed him silently through the wet grass. There were hardly any leaves left on the apple trees and Vera could hear the desolate, tuneless song of the whooper swans flying toward the Elbe. Karl stopped and looked up at the birds. He was standing completely still, unsuspecting. Vera placed her finger on the trigger.
And then she couldn’t do it and was ashamed of her cowardice.
That winter they hardly slept.
It got better in the spring.
In the summer it was no longer bearable.
When the sun shone, Karl would doze on the swing and sometimes would whistle to himself, but at any moment he might stand up with a start and salute an invisible superior.
And he now screamed during the day too. A couple of times, Heinrich Luehrs had come running over from his garden, even though he recognized the screaming. He heard it whenever they left Karl’s window open on a summer night. Heinrich also saw the duvet cover on the clothesline every day—Just don’t look—and he knew what went on over at the Eckhoffs’ during the night.
And what he couldn’t possibly know, Vera would tell him when he went to her for his six-month checkup.
When Heinrich Luehrs was lying back in her chair, with two cotton rolls stuffed in his cheek, when her assistant was gone and the waiting room was empty, when Heinrich couldn’t speak but could still hear, Vera told him all the things that she otherwise kept to herself.
With his mouth wide open, Heinrich Luehrs heard about Vera’s near hunting accident, of Karl’s hero’s death and her cowardice. He just winced slightly when she told him, but once the cotton was out and he’d rinsed his mouth, he quickly left the office. Sometimes she freaked him out.
* * *
One day in July, when the cherries were still hanging in the trees, Heinrich and Vera, with Karl in between them, were sitting on Ida’s old wedding bench, and Karl wasn’t screaming anymore because Vera had given him ten drops of PsychoPax. He was leaning against his neighbor’s shoulder, fast asleep.
Karl Eckhoff was a case for the loony bin. He had been for a long time. This was clear to Heinrich, but Vera would hear none of it. And crazy people often outlived everyone.
Karl had to be past ninety by now, and he’d looked like a corpse for a long time already.
Vera pulled him off Heinrich’s shoulder and over onto her own without waking him. She put Karl’s head in her lap, and since she never cried otherwise, Heinrich didn’t notice at first. She wasn’t making any sound.
Heinrich Luehrs didn’t dare ask straight out. He sat for a while with her in silence on this rotten bench before finally working up the courage to ask very softly, so that Karl couldn’t hear:
“Can’t you give him something for it, Vera?”
She didn’t respond and Heinrich simply got up and left. But a few days later, Dr. Vera Eckhoff drove to her old vet and asked for 100 ml of Narcoren, the amount needed to put a medium-sized Trakehner mare to sleep. “It’s not any fun,” the vet said, pressing the brown bottle into her hand. Then he packed a large syringe and a couple of needles into a plastic bag and scrutinized her face. “Give me a call if you want me to do it for you.” She shook her head.
The following Sunday—a warm day without wind—Karl was sitting under the linden, his white smoke rings wafting up to its crown. He followed them with his eyes until they disappeared and then made new ones. Vera watched him from the kitchen window, with his gray hair all matted, and his back as narrow as a child’s, only more stooped. She went outside and sat down beside him; it seemed to her that she had spent her entire life like this, sitting on this white bench with Karl smoking beside her.
“How small you were, Vera,” he mumbled suddenly. Then he began whistling softly.
She looked at his profile for a while. His cheeks were so sunken and his eyes were all red with fatigue.
“Karl,” she said, “shall I give you something so you can sleep?”
He repositioned his leg, the stiff one. Then he stared at the grass, which was teeming with ants, and reached for his cigarettes.
“You don’t mean the drops, do you?” he said.
She shook her head.
In the night, the alpine doctor had to be fetched again, and they needed the medicine later on as well. Karl lay in his bed, small and fluttering like a bird, and his voice was so weak that Vera didn’t hear him at first.
When she realized what he was saying, she helped him get dressed, took him by the arm, and they walked as slowly as a bride and groom through the hallway and out into the garden.
Once Karl was seated on the bench, she draped a blanket around his shoulders and gave him his cigarettes. Then she went back into the house and returned with a glass of apple juice from Heinrich Luehrs in one hand and a smaller glass in the other. Karl Eckhoff was a slip of a man. He wouldn’t need all that much.
It was very dark with just a sliver of moon overhead. On Elbe island, young seagulls were cheeping, sleepless, restless, hungry all the time. The leaves of the white poplars rushed in the night’s wind as if asking for peace and quiet. “Shhhh.”
Karl took the glass out of her hand. Vera cupped her hand under his elbows, held his arm very gently, because he was shaking so much, and then he chugged the stuff like he would schnapps, shuddered, and said, “Like a club over the head.” Vera quickly slipped him the apple juice.
She couldn’t help thinking of Ida in her black costume hanging from the ceiling beam. She took Karl’s hand and held it tight. He didn’t let go of her until he slumped over to the side. Vera remained seated next to him on Ida’s wedding bench until she heard the blackbirds’ morning song.
The last Eckhoff, a refugee. She didn’t make a sound.
* * *
Heinrich then had to help her carry Karl back to his bed and he didn’t ask any questions. Old Eckhoff had passed away peacefully, the rest was nobody’s business. They sat in the kitchen until Dr. Schuett had completed the death certificate, and Heinrich stayed until Otto Suhr arrived with the hearse.
Vera did the right thing for once. Karl Eckhoff got a grave, as was fitting. Otto Suhr knew the routine. An obituary and cards, a condolence book, and a coffee table laden with butter cake. The neighbors all came, as did a couple of Vera’s old patients, and two classmates of Karl’s, the only ones still living, came from the village as well.
Pastor Herwig kept it short. They sang O take my hand, dear Father, and placed Karl Eckhoff next to his parents.
Their buddies from the hunting club stood at the graveside in their green jackets, sweating in the July heat, and sounded the last death-halloo, out of tune as always, but Vera was grateful nonetheless.
In the church, for funerals, Otto Suhr always reserved the front three pews for family members, but the first row sufficed for Karl Eckhoff.
Heinrich Luehrs, who was sitting farther back, got up after the organ started playing and sat in the front row next to Vera, even though he didn’t belong there. He imagined that there was now some whispering going on behind him.
But a person alone in the family pew wasn’t a pretty sight to behold.
He didn’t know that Vera’s sister was in the church.
Vera herself discovered Marlene only at the graveside. Then she saw Marlene’s daughter too, and started to cry. Up until then she’d held up well. Heinrich Luehrs had never been a hero at funerals. The receptions afterward were the worst. All that jabbering. Now that Vera’s sister had linked arms with her and she was no longer alone, he didn’t feel like he had to go.
* * *
After the funeral, Marlene and Anne stayed with Vera, who looked like a ghost. They sent her to bed, then opened all the windows, cleaned the filthy windowpanes, and scrubbed down all the floors and wall tiles. They dusted the furniture, took Karl Eckhoff’s clothes to the dump, and threw out all the old food in the fridge.
Anne drove back to Hamburg the following day, but Marlene stayed and made soups, poured them into plastic containers, and put them in the freezer. She woke Vera up only to eat, kept the bedroom door ajar, watched over her like a sister for three days and nights until Vera was back on her feet and as snappy as a guard dog.
Marlene’s soups came with a price, Vera knew, and she didn’t want to pay it.
She didn’t want to talk about Us with her half sister, didn’t want to see her walk through Ida Eckhoff’s hallway or let her drink from the old gold-rimmed cups.
She didn’t want to show her the small black album that contained the photographs that Marlene lacked: Hildegard von Kamcke in her bright dresses and with her beautiful horses. Hildegard Eckhoff on stilts beneath the fruit trees.
Vera didn’t want to share these pictures with Marlene.
She’d shaken her hand and continued to give her cherries on those July Sundays when Marlene would turn up with empty buckets, wanting to pick some fruit. Vera had also set up ladders and put coffee and apple juice out on the table in the yard.
She hadn’t asked her into the house, but Marlene had gone in regardless, as though it were also her home, as though she and Vera had more in common than their thin, straight noses and their brown eyes.
* * *
Vera had buried Karl and then sat by herself on the family bench just eight months ago.
Now she was sitting here with Marlene’s grandchild on her lap and Marlene’s daughter was sleeping in Ida Eckhoff’s parlor.
She didn’t know who was calling the shots in her life at the moment.