THE HOUSE HAD BEEN AS tranquil as a deeply submerged whale. It had held its breath for three days and three nights until Marlene had left.
Vera had tidied up the kitchen, stripped Marlene’s bed, and returned her mother’s letters to the oak chest.
Then she sat outside on the bench drinking the wine that was left over from the night before until clouds of mosquitoes came out of the ditches. It was still bright when she sat down in the kitchen. She ate Marlene’s soup and watched the moon rise in front of her kitchen window.
She almost trusted the calm.
She didn’t want to hear the crunching sound at first. She summoned her dogs.
An old beam or a bone breaking or being broken.
A scurrying above her head.
An animal or the wind, and tired dancers scuffling their heavy feet across the floor.
And then silence that lasted until she counted to a hundred.
A flapping in front of the kitchen door, a whispering from the walls. Or a breath.
Heavy chairs being pushed across bare floors.
A choir of old voices quietly warming up.
You weren’t allowed to be alone in these houses. They weren’t built for that.
He that follows. But there was no one to succeed her, she was falling.
Under the old voices was a stillness that was even older, as old and dark as the sea or the universe. The falling no longer ceased, a falling out of the world, as though she’d been released, as if no one was holding her anymore. Impossible to find Karl in the deep darkness. He had sunk to the bottom, if there was one, if the falling wouldn’t simply carry on.
Something rolled, something small—a ball, a bobbin.
Or a silver button off an old costume.
Or she herself, who was only a toy, a little spinning top that the house twirled within its thick walls.
A child crying. Or cats yowling outside, night birds screeching. Vera could no longer leave the kitchen or go out into the hall, where there was a line of angry voices.
Where the soldiers went whom Karl had marched with for decades during the night. He had left them all there for her. And Ida was dancing in her sleep above her head, and all the others she didn’t know who had breathed and died here.
This hoose is mine ain and yet no mine ain … She couldn’t get away from here. She was a moss that clung only to these walls. That couldn’t grow here or flourish, but still remained.
She was a refugee who had almost frozen to death once and had never gotten warm again. She had found a house, any old house, and stayed there, so she wouldn’t have to go back out into the snow.
* * *
The Elbe had frozen in her second winter in the Altland, and the children went out onto the ice—Hinni Luehrs with his brothers, Hans zum Felde, and the chubby Pape sisters. “Vera, come along.”
She had gone with them as far as the dike, but not out onto the ice. And she didn’t do that later either, when Karl gave her ice skates for Christmas and all the other kids raced along the shiny trenches.
Vera never put the skates on.
The ice wasn’t to be trusted. She had seen it give way, and people sink.
Some had slipped down under the ice without a word. They hadn’t made sound, as they’d grown so accustomed to suppressing their screams along the way. The horses’ screams had been the worst.
You could forget everything if you really wanted to. Vera Eckhoff could do it as well.
She forgot the crunching of shoes in the deep snow, the droning of the airplanes, the heads of the pilots that were visible as they flew over the ice. Forgot how red and bright the villages burned, forgot the scarecrows with their necks askew that had hung in the trees, and all the contorted, quiet bodies in the roadside ditches.
Forgot the little brother in his cold baby carriage, and even the doll, her doll, lying next to him on his white pillow, that she wasn’t allowed to go back for after they abandoned the baby carriage because Hildegard just kept pulling her along. Simply pulled her away from her soft doll with real hair, which Kris Kringle had just brought her.
You could forget everything but you never forgot the horses’ screams.
* * *
Vera sat in the kitchen and tried to make herself invisible. She didn’t make a sound. That way you might not be discovered.
Then they’d move on, Karl’s soldiers and all the broken, frozen figures with their crunching steps and their baby carriages. The forgotten ones. What did they want from her after all these years?
The birds redeemed her early in the morning, the raucous awakening of a summer’s day. When the sun rose, she made coffee and let the dogs out.
She must have fallen asleep in her kitchen chair, just dreamed it all, simply been scared of the bogeyman, like a child afraid of the dark. In the cold light of day, her nightly dramas were nothing but soap operas, and the demons were no more than haunted house specters.
* * *
The following evening, she turned on the lights in all the rooms before it got dark. She switched the kitchen radio on. Then she took a stack of travel magazines from the shelf, made herself some tea, and sat down at the large table in the hallway, with the doors to all the rooms open. She heard music coming from the kitchen. The dogs wandered back and forth. They were confused at first, but then they lay down at her feet.
She read about ice fields in Patagonia, antelopes in Namibia, monasteries in Engadine. Shortly before midnight, she went to bed. She kept the lights on, and the radio, pretended she couldn’t hear it this time, the whispering, the wailing, the dancing, the footsteps of the forgotten ones in her hallway.
She simply listened to the music, tried to think of Namibia and Patagonia, dropped off for half an hour, and woke with a start thinking of Prussian villages that were burning.
She pulled the covers over her head and didn’t make a sound.
She fell asleep when she heard the blackbirds’ song, woke up with the midday sun streaming through the window, and wanted to laugh at the soap operas and the haunted house specters but wasn’t able to.
* * *
On the third night, she slept at her office, on the old couch she’d bought for Karl, allowed herself to flee this one time, and dreamed of her house going up in flames. She woke up with a start in the gray of the dawn and drove home. It wasn’t burning; she went to the Elbe with her dogs until the sun rose and thought of Hildegard von Kamcke: Chin up even if your neck is dirty.
Her mother’s Prussian lessons had sunk in. Vera had learned early that you had to become a hunter if you didn’t want to remain a hare, that you had to gallop on horseback through these village streets, looking down on the marsh farmers’ sharp hair partings, if you didn’t want to remain rank-and-file.
She wouldn’t let herself be driven out of this house, not by the haunted house specters, not by the cold walls. This hoose is mine ain.
Finally she did what Karl had done—she sought relief in PsychoPax and Dr. Martin Burger. Her nights got quieter, the days were dull. She saw her patients only in the afternoons; she didn’t have many left anyhow. She barely managed to tend to the horses and dogs. This would be the time to give up the animals, but who would want two ancient Trakehner mares and her worn-out, slobbery hunting dogs? The young Vera Eckhoff would have shot them. That’s what she had done with her first two dogs when she’d seen that the end was near. The one had lived to twelve, the other to sixteen. She had found it hard but had done it nonetheless.
The old Vera Eckhoff, who had buried Karl, didn’t want to kill any more animals. She still went out hunting but no longer fired any shots. She did what Karl had done.
The dogs slept next to her bed every night.
On good days, the horses still went through their paces with her. They were almost thirty years old. East Prussian warmbloods, they were tough and remained stubborn.
* * *
In her first winter without Karl, she thought about the small bottle of Narcoren. There was still enough of it left, and it wasn’t all that difficult, as she’d seen on the bench in July.
It was certainly good to have a hand to hold after you had drunk the stuff, but it was also doable without that. Whom could she have asked anyhow? Not Hinni Luehrs—he would never have held her hand and watched her die. She couldn’t ask that of him.
She hadn’t asked him to bring her his paper every morning either, after he was done with it himself. He just started doing it all of a sudden. At ten on the dot, he’d appear in her kitchen. His day was half over by then. “Any chance of a cup of coffee?”
And in the evenings, there was always rummy. If she didn’t go over to his house, he would come by.
Until ten, then he had to go to bed. His alarm went off at five thirty. Heinrich Luehrs, regular as clockwork, dictated her rhythm that first winter.
He probably thought she hadn’t noticed. They played rummy until January.
Then her refugees arrived.
“It’s Anne.” It took Vera a moment to realize who was calling that evening in the middle of February. At Karl’s funeral, she had recognized Anne only because she was standing next to Marlene. They would have passed each other in the street and been oblivious.
Now they were sharing a house, and Anne Hove was working her way through Vera’s rooms, taking stock of cracks in the beams, damp spots in the masonry, unsound steps, rotten window frames, and cracked panes of glass in the old cowshed.
Vera watched her inspecting the house for damage, tapping and measuring it, recording its dilapidation. Mine as well, Vera thought. Her life was a list of deficiencies, and she found it hard to bear that Anne realized this. Anne knew nothing about this house, she had no idea what could happen to a person in it.
There were so many other houses—solid and well heated—that you could flee to, but this one in particular seemed to attract mothers who compressed their mouths into straight lines, with thickly wrapped-up children on their hands. Anne must have sensed that Vera wouldn’t leave two homeless people standing in front of her green front door.
You didn’t choose refugees, and you didn’t invite them in either. They simply came, covered in snow, with empty hands and muddled plans.
They brought chaos.
It remained to be seen whether they could also sort things out. A couple of windows or beams, or a person who was lonely to the bone. Who had no idea how she might get through the second winter, all the long nights, without a fellow human being.
There was something about Anne that Vera recognized right away. It was the way she brought both hands down fleetingly over her eyes, nose, and cheeks. She did this when she put down the crate to greet Vera.
And later, when they were sitting at the table, she did it again. When you were listening to her, when she stopped speaking and you looked at her, she made this swiping motion, as though she wanted to erase something from herself, a thought or a facial expression. Vera recognized this gesture; she had seen it at this kitchen table many years before, in Hildegard von Kamcke, who had the same slender hands.
* * *
But Anne didn’t roar her anger through the whole house and didn’t go throwing the gold-rimmed cups. She was always very quiet, and when her boy was at his father’s, she seemed to fall completely silent. She remained in Ida Eckhoff’s apartment, poring over some construction drawing or other, or reading her gory crime novels. Endless streams of deranged serial killers. The cover copy alone made Vera feel weak in the knees.
Sometimes she saw Anne walking through the rows of cherry trees, smoking and listening to music through headphones. Mostly she moved in time to the music, you could tell. And on one occasion she danced, quite clumsily. Vera had looked away quickly. It wasn’t the type of dancing that was meant to be seen. It was the way you danced when you had completely forgotten yourself.
Both of them were glad when Leon returned on Sundays.
Easter with his father, Pentecost with his mother, equity all the way down to the holidays. It was customary today to have equal custody as soon as the love was over.
Divorce—a clean cut—that no longer happened, it seemed. They were now attached to one another forever, all the couples who’d made a mistake and wanted to go their separate ways. They wanted out but that wasn’t possible. They were joined at the hip because of the children.
People had done it differently in the past. They resolved the question of guilt and got divorced. One had screwed up, the other one got the child. It was much simpler.
The thought alone of Karl and Hildegard having had to see each other every other weekend!
They had never seen each other again. If you wanted a divorce, then you took the consequences, you didn’t cry over your child. Hildegard Jacobi, divorcée Eckhoff, hadn’t done that anyway. A clean cut. Better for everyone.
It certainly wasn’t very easy living as a couple. People were rarely happy with one another. Vera hadn’t even tried it. Now and then she’d borrowed a married man for a couple of months, once even for a couple of years, a fine specimen.
But not a good enough liar. His wife almost hadn’t wanted to take him back when she found out.
A clean break, then he’d cleaned up his act and it was okay. Vera didn’t want him around.
But she could have had a child, a fatherless one, why not? No one in the village would’ve been surprised. At times she was sorry that she had thought of it too late.
How could anyone forget that she wanted a child?