CARSTEN HAD ALREADY PLACED THE window in the trunk. The frame and sash were made of oak, and it was painted white and dark green and was double-glazed. For the smallest facade window, all the way at the top, under the ridge of Vera Eckhoff’s house, single glazing would have sufficed, but master carpenter Drewe didn’t do things by halves.
“Let’s just hope your measurements were right, journeyman,” he said, tossing his old Adidas bag onto the backseat of the Mercedes as he climbed into the passenger seat.
He took his tobacco out of his jacket pocket and rolled a few cigarettes. They drove in silence as far as Finkenwerder, and then he said, “The Lechtal Alps puzzle, a thousand pieces. I hope they can manage without me for two evenings.”
It had been a long time since they had bought any new jigsaw puzzles. They now did the old ones over and over again. It didn’t bother them, though. Karl-Heinz always started with the edges, since that was the easiest part, but even that took him an eternity now.
Hertha had deteriorated even further. She blamed it on the stupid energy-saving bulbs, grumbled about bad lighting and her new reading glasses. But it was her head. She was getting senile. She sometimes tried to force two puzzle pieces together that couldn’t possibly fit. Even a blind man could see that. It cut Carsten to the quick, but it also really got on his nerves, so he’d pop outside for a smoke whenever that happened.
Hertha was also getting the days of the week mixed up, and she’d read the paper in the morning and then read it again in the afternoon as though she hadn’t seen it yet. “Quite handy,” Anne said, “that way you get more from your subscription.”
Carsten smiled, and they didn’t say anything more until Borstel.
“The detox is over, eh?” asked Anne.
He nodded, cranked down the window, and tapped the cigarette ash onto the street.
* * *
Willy had to move into the living room of Ida Eckhoff’s apartment for the weekend. “It’s him or me,” Carsten said, pointing at the cage. “I’m not sharing a room with a rat.”
He put his bag next to Leon’s bed and went out into the hallway where Vera was. “I just have to hear that gnawing,” he said, “scrape, scrape, and it’s already more than I can bear.”
Anne heard Vera let out a loud guffaw. It was such a surprise that she almost dropped the rabbit.
They spent nearly an hour showing Carsten around the house.
“Man oh man oh man,” said Carsten. He tapped on the timber framing and examined the carving on the wedding door, the worn-out wood of the large front door, and the window frames. He stood in front of the ornamental gate for a long time and then again in front of the facade. “Man oh man oh man.” When he asked about the inscription, Vera read it out to him. So, when Carsten Drewe asked it was okay. “And what does that mean in German?” he said, pulling a cigarette out of his pocket. Vera took it out of his hand, pointing at her thatched roof.
“This house is mine and yet not mine, he who comes after me will call it his.”
He nodded slowly, then looked at Vera and grinned.
“Nothing rhymes with hers, eh?” He shook his head. “Those guys were something else back then.”
They showed him the inside of the house. Carsten went through the rooms like a birthday boy, finding surprises in every corner. Those closets! Those chests of drawers! That ceiling panel! Man.
“Solid hardwood galore…,” said Anne. “Master Drewe’s in heaven.”
They sat down in the kitchen to plan things out. Carsten sat at the table in his corduroy vest and sharpened his carpenter pencil with his pocketknife.
“So, when’s the scaffolding gonna be here?”
They managed to talk turkey with Vera. They spoke about money and time, and the heritage conservation regulations, about masons, cabinetmakers, carpenters, thatch, stone, and wood, and Vera didn’t jump up once the entire time. She just ran her hands over her table now and again as though reassuring an animal or a child.
They made lists and did sums. Vera remained seated, didn’t make any faces, and even served sandwiches and pear brandy later on.
They drank to the house. Then Carsten lay down on Leon’s bed, and Anne sat a while longer on the carpet in Ida Eckhoff’s room, stroking the lonely rabbit.
Vera stroked the kitchen table.
* * *
At the beginning of May, they brought the scaffolding. Men in undershirts, who already had sunburns, tossed heavy pieces of steel around all day and roared orders at one another. Then they all disappeared, leaving Vera’s house standing like an old man on crutches.
Anne drove to Hamburg and returned with young men in journeyman outfits. They wore earrings and black hats. “Respectable journeymen,” Anne said, but Heinrich Luehrs wasn’t so sure. They looked like gypsies—traveling folk—to him and he wouldn’t have let them into his house, but Vera had to know what she was doing. It was none of his business.
They rolled out their sleeping bags in the farmhands’ rooms, and when it got warm they hung hammocks in the trees. They came and went as they pleased.
Some stayed for only two days, others for a few weeks, and then they moved on and others took their place. Anne stood on the scaffolding with them, kept track of their hours, and paid them.
Vera kept an eye on the house, day and night. Sometimes she couldn’t stand the hammering on the walls, the creaking and cracking of the old window frames, the grating in the joints on the weather-beaten windward side.
It felt as though her head were being beaten, her bones were breaking, her teeth were being scratched away, ever deeper, down to the nerve.
Then she started beating her pots again and slamming drawers in the kitchen. She turned white and treated Leon unfairly, scolding him when he made a mess with his bread and honey in the morning, then buying him little animals by way of apology, and grumbling again the next morning.
Anne knew the reason for Vera’s kitchen battles. They would have to take their hands off the walls for a couple of days, leave the house alone. She let the journeymen go.
It needed to be quiet for a while. Vera seemed to listen to her house’s chest with a stethoscope, as though it were a patient with a heart condition. She took its pulse and paid attention to its breathing.
And she needed to get some sleep but wasn’t able to. It was much too loud with the journeymen around, and too quiet without them.
It was best when Carsten was there. Every other Friday, when Anne drove Leon to his father’s, she brought Carsten back with her from Hamburg. He arrived with new windows, which he’d built in peace, one by one, in his workshop. Karl-Heinz Drewe had lost it when he saw this.
Carsten did his rounds every other Friday. He walked around the outside of the house with Vera, and through all the rooms, taking note of what had changed and then taking out his tools, “Because I can’t stand shoddy workmanship.” He always found things that he had to finish off because no journeyman was as finicky as Master Drewe.
He was the only one who didn’t see any problem with Vera’s house. It wasn’t a ruin or a disaster in his eyes. All he saw was an old hero who needed to get himself together. “A tad damaged, but nothing that can’t be fixed.”
They sat in the kitchen in the evening and tried to play cards, but it didn’t work with Anne, as she lacked talent and inclination. “Journeyman,” groaned Carsten, throwing the cards onto the table, “I don’t like to say it, but my dog can play better than that.”
They fetched Heinrich Luehrs and he forgot to go to bed at ten. They played until one in the morning.
Heinrich’s favorite tune on the piano was “Für Elise.” If it had been up to him, Anne would have played it in an endless loop every evening.
* * *
The piano in Vera’s hallway was hard to miss. But Anne had managed to give it a wide berth for almost three months.
Then, on a rainy day in June, when Vera was out with the dogs, she removed the old books that were lying on top of the walnut lid and the dusty pile of travel magazines that were twenty or thirty years old.
The house was quiet, because the journeymen weren’t around. The keys looked like bad teeth. Yellowed ivory, a little loose, but they felt really good beneath Anne’s fingers.
The piano was so out of tune that it invoked a harbor bar. It was a honky-tonk piano that turned every piece of music into a children’s song, harmless and off-key, perfect for someone who had run away from the resonant tones of a Bechstein grand piano.
Chopin’s preludes sounded like popular tunes on the piano in Vera Eckhoff’s hallway. They didn’t scare Anne because no matter how often she played a wrong note, it couldn’t get any worse.
Vera stood in the doorway in her rain-soaked jacket, and one of the dogs howled briefly when it heard the strange tones. Anne took her fingers off the keyboard. “It’s been a long time since anyone played this thing,” she said.
Vera looked at her and mulled it over. “Your mother was the last.”
* * *
Marlene had had to practice for three hours every day, even when she was vacationing at Vera’s. Hildegard Jacobi made no concessions. She would call in the evenings and inquire. But she obviously didn’t know her daughter very well. You didn’t need to prod Marlene. She played until her fingers seized up. On one occasion, Vera had asked her, “Is that fun, Marlene?” and realized right away how stupid her question was.
Vera had taught Marlene how to ride, first on the longe, until she sat firmly in the saddle and was no longer afraid, then along the Elbe. Finally she had galloped along the beach. Vera could hardly keep pace with her at times.
“Doesn’t sound like her,” Anne said. Vera took off her rain jacket and wet rubber boots. “You don’t know Marlene at all,” she said. “You only know your mother.”
What did daughters ever know about their mothers? They knew zip.
* * *
Hildegard von Kamcke had never mentioned a man with a wide smile, and she had never told anyone what she had felt for a man with a stiff leg. Or what she’d felt at the sight of her mother-in-law, whom she had tormented with music until she’d hung herself from an oak beam.
Nor had she said whether, when she lay awake at night, she sometimes thought of her children, the little one left cold in the roadside ditch, or the big one that lay under a thatched roof.
Or if she was one of those homesick wretches who, in their beds at night, dreamed of tree-lined avenues and wheat fields.
Vera had no idea whether Hildegard von Kamcke had always worn a coat of ice, just as other women sported fox fur or mink, which they’d inherited from their mothers, and whether this coat had also been an heirloom, or if she had worn it only from the moment when she was driven through the snow with her children.
All daughters knew that their mothers were also daughters, but they all forgot this. Vera could have asked questions. You could ask mothers anything.
You just had to live with the answers.
They had never told Hildegard Jacobi that her youngest daughter could ride as wild as a hussar. “She won’t believe it anyhow,” Marlene had said.
Then she fell off her horse on the last day of her vacation and broke her wrist.
In a cast for six weeks, no piano for eight, no more vacations in the Altland. And no more letters for My dear Vera.