IN THE WINTER, HE IRONED only the collars and the cuffs. He wore sweaters over his shirts, so no one could see whether the rest was done or not.
He put the ironing board up in the kitchen, close enough to the window that he could look outside, but not so close that he could be seen from out there. Heinrich Luehrs preferred not to be observed when he was ironing.
It was now getting warmer out. Soon he wouldn’t need a sweater. He would just wear his work jacket over his shirt. So then he’d have to iron the entire front, for he might well open his jacket a bit when outside in springtime. But he wouldn’t bother with the back. He’d do that again only in the summer.
Here he was, standing in the kitchen, smoothing out his wrinkled shirts as though he had nothing better to do.
Leni Cohrs could do the ironing, she had offered to. She dropped by once a week, cleaned the windows, vacuumed, and mopped the floors. But he wouldn’t let her anywhere near his laundry. Just the thought of a strange woman fiddling around with his shirts and pants! Not to mention his bedclothes and his underwear. That’ll be the day!
There were now shirts that didn’t need to be ironed at all; the sales associate at Holst had shown him one last summer when she’d noticed that he was on his own. A man buying shirts for himself at Holst had to be a widower or a bachelor.
He had taken one, to please the sales associate more than anything else. It looked completely different from his gray-and-blue-checked shirts. It was striped.
And Vera had noticed it right away, of course, had wolf whistled at him with her fingers. At first he’d thought she was whistling for her dogs, until he saw her grinning and giving him two thumbs-up.
Vera had always been like that. She got up to stuff.
Like the time she dove off the Lühe bridge—simply took off her clothes and dove headfirst into the river in her underwear. She was twelve at most at the time. And then, without drying herself off, she’d gotten back into her clothes and ridden home on the old bike Karl Eckhoff used for the milking.
Nobody jumped headfirst from the Lühe bridge. They jumped feetfirst or cannonballed at the very most, and girls didn’t even do that. Only daredevils dove headfirst. And Vera Eckhoff.
Then, later, she had shown him how she had learned to do it: from practicing in Eckhoff’s hayloft. Jumping down from the hayloft onto the little ledge and then headlong into the big haystack. The ledge was pretty high, but that wasn’t so bad.
Heinrich just couldn’t stop thinking of Ida Eckhoff the entire time.
He wondered what it looked like when someone hanged themselves. He had never seen anything like that.
“Like someone who’s fallen asleep while dancing,” Vera had said, then gave him a demonstration. Let her head slump to one side, and turned back and forth with her arms dangling at her sides. Then she climbed back up onto the beam and jumped into the hay.
Heinrich jumped then too. He sometimes wondered if Vera Eckhoff was all there.
* * *
The flat bits didn’t take long to iron. He used the water sprayer to dampen pillows and sheets a little. You had less fuss and bother with the large items than with the shirts.
From his window, he could see Vera riding home from the Elbe. Yessiree, always straight over his raked sand! He ran to the window, rapped on it, and wagged his finger at her. She lifted her riding crop briefly. She seemed to be coming back around at last. It had taken a while.
You’d think she had lost a child, not a man past ninety who was tired of life.
They’d dragged Karl Eckhoff’s stiff body back to his bed that July morning. Vera was still quite normal then, a bit pale of course, understandably.
But when the sister left after the funeral, she had crawled around the house, and the practice was temporarily closed. Then, as winter approached, she got to looking like a ghost.
Even so, she still fed her horses.
Heinrich had gone to check at some point, and she came shuffling along. In her bathrobe, at five in the afternoon.
“Well, Hinni, come to see if I’ve hung myself?”
She could be mean. And how!
He had just left her standing in the horse barn in her bathrobe and rubber boots. He didn’t have to take everything Vera Eckhoff dished out.
“Just go and die then, you nasty old hag.”
Later he noticed that the light was on over at her place all night long again.
* * *
You had to grow into an empty house at first. In the beginning, you were much too small.
After Elisabeth’s funeral, the neighboring women had come by with goulash casseroles and plates of cake every day. They took turns. They meant well.
They gave him their leftovers and almost finished him off.
Widower’s meals warmed up and eaten in silence. It was so quiet he could hear himself chewing and swallowing.
Some things tasted quite different than Elisabeth’s, which wasn’t so bad.
If a dish tasted just like hers, he’d get upset while eating it. It was like the dream he’d had repeatedly in the early days. That she was still alive.
And then waking up.
In his first winter as a widower, the land behind the house also lay there as though it were dead. Silent, dark, and odorless.
In December, he thought the trees were going to stay as they were, skeletons, their branches bones that had been stripped, forever this time.
But they stirred themselves in March. They really did bud again.
Then some hard frosts came in April, but most of the buds still managed to hang on.
And by July, there were black cherries on the branches.
Many split open in the heavy rain and hail.
Then the apple trees produced a good crop in August, although many were broken by the September storms.
But, all in all, his harvest hadn’t been bad in the first year without Elisabeth.
He wondered how others did it, townsfolk, people without land, office workers who weren’t pushed through the first year by nature. Or thrashed. Who had to march through it without a taskmaster.
* * *
Vera hadn’t brought him soups or cakes, and she didn’t make any jellies either. Vera didn’t put her hand on his arm.
She looked away when he kneeled in the flower beds, his eyes all red, and she didn’t listen when he spoke to himself in the cherry tree.
Vera banged on his windowpane with her fist at six in the morning if he wasn’t able to get out of bed, when he didn’t want to enter the deathly quiet morning, when he lay in bed like a stone because he was so horrified by the single cup that stood on the kitchen table like someone bereaved.
Hinni, get up! Every morning for nearly half a year, Vera Eckhoff had banged on his bedroom window and waited until the light came on.
She wrote him a note to stick on the washing machine:
Shirts, pants, sweaters, socks 104˚ F
Bedclothes, underwear, towels 140˚ F
Wool by hand, lukewarm (don’t wring out)!
She drove with him to the Edeka store, showed him what got weighed and what didn’t, where to put his empty deposit bottles and cans, and where to find the oatmeal and the jars of little sausages.
But she noticed quickly that it wasn’t working. He was ashamed of his shopping cart, of the few paltry items he pushed before him, an old man who no longer had a wife. Everyone who looked in his cart could see that he was on his own. He was a man with something missing. He felt like a man with only one leg, like someone with scars all over his face.
Heinrich Luehrs didn’t want young mothers with massive amounts of family shopping to let him go ahead of them at the checkout. It was none of their business which toothpaste he used, or what he washed his hair with, what he had for lunch, or that he liked chocolates filled with brandy.
“Write me a list,” Vera said finally, and since then she’d picked his stuff up for him twice a week.
He never complained when she bought the wrong thing, which rarely happened anyway. And occasionally he’d find something in the bags that he hadn’t written down, white marshmallow mice, port wine, or cheese sticks perhaps, and he’d put them on the table when Vera came over to play rummy.
* * *
He pulled the iron’s plug out of the socket and folded his bedclothes. He had overlooked a crease in the center, but he didn’t give a shit.
At first he had kept changing both beds, and had also washed and ironed Elisabeth’s bedclothes. But he didn’t do that anymore. It was nonsense. Her pillow and her duvet now lay in the cupboard, had done so for several years now. What was the point?
But going to bed in the evening, turning on the light and seeing her side empty, you didn’t get used to that. It remained something that had to be confronted every night. And a bitter awakening every morning.
The little zum Felde kid came pedaling around the corner on his tractor. He steered clear of the raked strip of sand. Farmer boy, Heinrich Luehrs said to himself.
Dirk zum Felde had three sons, and all of them wanted to be farmers. What else? He often saw them driving to the orchard with their father. But he’d also had three like that himself at one point.
Me neither, Father, and then you were left here on your own.
You raked the sand, pruned the trees, fertilized, sprayed, harvested, put everything in order in the winter, and it started all over again in the spring. You painted the windows and fetched the roofer because the thatch had to be mended in one corner, and you painted your fence for no reason at all, because there was no one to succeed you.
But the house wasn’t built to have one solitary last person living in it.
Fathers built houses like these for their sons, and the sons took care of them and preserved them for their sons, and a son didn’t ask himself whether he wanted it. When had the wanting begun? When had the fault crept in? When had the misunderstanding arisen that farmers’ sons were allowed to choose a life for themselves? Simply select one that was nice and colorful and comfortable? Go to Japan and cook fish, move to Hannover to sit in an office. And Georg, who was a farmer, the best of the three, had simply left it all behind and looked for a farm someplace else, just because his old man didn’t suit him. As if at any time in the past a father had ever suited his son!
This was no longer the world that Heinrich Luehrs knew. He’d raised three sons, lived as he was told, what you inherit from your fathers, and yet he was all alone in the end regardless.
No better off than Vera next door, who had never done the right thing, had only ever been ornery. Indeed, two people couldn’t be more different than he and she were.
And now they were suddenly almost identical. Two old people in two old houses.
He could simply quit, sell it lock, stock, and barrel, and get a mobile home, like others did. But what were you if you didn’t have a house? The houses remained standing even if the people left—or didn’t take care of them, like Vera Eckhoff. A half-timbered house didn’t fall down. It stayed standing.
Heinrich Luehrs wouldn’t be standing for long without his half-timbered house. He knew that for certain.
Nothing much had been done to Vera’s house yet, as far as he could tell. Still the same old dump.
Apart from the fact that the niece had fidgeted around hazardously with the facade atop his forty-foot ladder.
Just don’t look!
The saying must run in the family.
If living next to Vera Eckhoff for six decades had taught him anything, it was just that: Don’t look.
* * *
Heinrich Luehrs hadn’t looked when the Stade police had driven onto the Eckhoff farm because Ida was hanging in the hayloft in her traditional costume. And later, when the hearse had arrived, he hadn’t looked then either.
Neither had Vera. They had played Sorry!, his mother stoking up the stove especially for her so late in the evening. “Play with her,” she’d whispered to him in the kitchen, “go off and play, Heinrich.” His brothers had played as well.
Vera loved knocking you out of the game, especially when you had three pieces already home and only had to throw a final six in order to bring your last one in. Wham! She’d won almost every game that night. “My lucky day!”
Back then he hadn’t yet started wondering about Vera. That had only started once she showed him what people looked like after they had hanged themselves. As though they had fallen asleep while dancing, like Grandma Ida.
But there were others too, she explained, who looked like big black scarecrows. They hung in the trees by the roadside.
But just where she had come from, not here in the Altland. They didn’t hang the dead outside here.
“Just don’t look, Heinrich!” Two or three summers after Vera dove headfirst from the Lühe bridge, his mother had pulled him away from the kitchen window when a dark-blue Opel Captain had driven onto the Eckhoff farm, brand-new, six cylinders, 60 HP, if not more. And Vera’s mother had come out of the house in high heels with only a small suitcase in her hand. “Stop looking over there!”
But Heinrich had run after the car as it was leaving the farm, to get a quick look at its rear end. You could only dream of a car like that.
And Vera was standing next to Karl’s shed, slightly bent over, with her fist in her mouth. Don’t look.
Word soon got around that Hildegard von Kamcke was over the hills and far away with her knight in the Opel Captain. That she had left her daughter to Karl like a consolation prize.
But if you didn’t look very closely, life at the Eckhoffs’ seemed totally normal. Vera got straight A’s at school and cycled along the main street on Karl Eckhoff’s old bike without holding on to the handlebars. And when Heinrich rode alongside her without holding on too, she’d clasp her hands behind her head or stuff them deep down into her jacket pockets. She would have closed her eyes when riding as well, if he’d agreed to compete.
“What on earth’s the girl going to do?” asked Minna Luehrs when February came and Hildegard still hadn’t come back for her child. Confirmation was in March; the youngest Luehrs and Vera Eckhoff were the same age. Where did a girl get a dress from if her mother wasn’t around?
“I’ve got everything,” Vera said when Minna Luehrs went over to the Eckhoffs’ and inquired.
Four weeks later, everyone in the church could see that no one had made a dress for Vera Eckhoff, or bought one either. She was wearing a dress that was much too large for her. The sleeves hung loose and were fastened at the ends somehow so they didn’t slip down over her wrists.
When Vera lifted her hymnbook later on, you could see that she had secured them to her arms with rubber bands from canning jars.
“Oh my Lord,” whispered Minna Luehrs.
Heinrich noticed too that Vera had used shoe polish to turn her brown ankle boots black, and he quickly looked away.
But his father, Heinrich Luehrs Senior, didn’t look away when they were streaming home after the service. He turned to Karl and Vera, who were walking along behind them, since they were all heading in the same direction.
“Here comes gammy leg with his gypsy!” He’d had a drink before church already, so he said it very loudly.
Heinrich’s brothers chuckled, but their mother suddenly started walking faster. She almost ran home in fact, and Heinrich stayed at her side.
When the guests were seated in the parlor at the white-covered table, she sent Heinrich over to the Eckhoffs’ with soup royale and a large plate of cake. She had baked and cooked for days.
Standing before Karl and Vera with his humble offerings, he wanted to sink into the ground or die. He should have known.
They were sitting in the kitchen with a cream cake from Gerde’s bakery in front of them. The paper was lying on the table and they were eating the cake with big spoons and drinking red soda pop.
Karl, who was drowning in an enormous suit, and Vera, who must have found her dress in Ida’s or Hildegard’s wardrobe, were sitting like two children playing dress-up. Two orphans playing house.
“From Mother,” Heinrich had said. Vera had stood up, looking horrified, and not looked at him. She’d simply eyed the big dessert plate quizzically as Heinrich placed it on the table. Then he’d put the pot of soup beside it and made a quick exit.
“Tell your mother thanks very much,” said Karl.
Heinrich Luehrs had learned a lesson that day.
You could be without a mother, without guests, without a white tablecloth, you could sit alone in the kitchen with a crooked little man and eat cake with soup spoons. All that wasn’t bad.
It was bad only if you were seen doing it. Then it was very bad.
Don’t look.
* * *
Heinrich had abided by this dictum when the Eckhoffs’ house and farm became run-down, when they let the garden go to seed and didn’t paint the fence or windows.
He had only looked occasionally later on, when Vera was long grown-up, and he had a family of his own. When she walked along the Elbe with strange men, he sometimes wondered what might have been.
If he hadn’t lain in the heap of broken glass at Vera Eckhoff’s, bleeding and howling like a little kid because his father had hit him. And if Vera hadn’t chased his old man out of her house with her shotgun.
She’d swept away all the shards that night. He had heard her when his brothers were already asleep, and the girls from Stade were sleeping as well. He could have gone out into the hallway to help her.
But that’s what she’d been waiting for, Hinni Luehrs, the crybaby.
“That’s none of our business, Heinrich,” Elisabeth had said when Vera Eckhoff strolled by yet again, hand in hand with some guy from Hamburg. “Stop looking over there.”