YOU COULDN’T WALK AROUND BAREFOOT in the garden anymore. The slugs had taken over the terrain—the fat brown ones. Burkhard had stepped on one of the critters once, and after that he kept his shoes on.
Eva’s hatred of snails was greater than her revulsion to them. She cut them in half with her snail shears. Burkhard didn’t like to watch. She didn’t even scrunch her face up when she did it.
Eva no longer carried spiders outside to set them free either. She now turned on the hot tap and aimed the showerhead like a flamethrower at the fat ones she found in the bath, rinsed them away, and then pressed the stopper into the drain so they couldn’t escape.
Thatched roofs were full of spiders, which got into the rooms through open windows, and some then crawled into the beds. You discovered them when you pulled back the covers in the evening. They were as large as children’s hands and frequently they made off very fast. Then you couldn’t sleep because you didn’t know where they were lurking.
Summer in the countryside was like war. Nature sounded the attack and took no prisoners. You couldn’t negotiate with it.
The fly and wasp bottle from Manufactum, handblown in the region of Lusatia, was still down in the cellar. They had placed it on the windowsill during their first summer here. A little sugar water to detain the insects until the strawberry cake was eaten up, and then they’d set them free again. Live and let live, reverence for all creatures, peaceful coexistence of man and animals. That’s what they’d believed! What naive refugees from the big city they had been! Almost touching when you looked back on it.
Mosquitoes wanted blood, and so did the horseflies and biting houseflies that came out of the ditches. In the beginning they had still treated the stings with tea tree oil, but now they acted preemptively with DEET. They weren’t taking any prisoners.
In that first summer they had laughed, found everything funny. They found so much material in rubber boot world for op-ed columns, and Burkhard had written his first book effortlessly. About the snails and insects, the pellets that the wild cats threw up in front of their door, about voles in the flower beds and molehills in the freshly seeded lawn. About the farmers who couldn’t take a joke and eradicated everything they termed vermin. About stonemasons who arrived on mopeds and ate aspic with their fingers.
It was a good book, even by his own exacting standards—ironic and witty and still selling in its fourth printing. He’d like to see his ex-colleagues do that.
He watched Eva yanking out nettles outside. In the winter she struggled with depression, and in the summer it was weeds.
The seagulls that perched in the trees in front of the house screeched constantly, and his neighbors’ frogs reached peaks of eighty decibels. He had measured them himself. Tractors, lawn mowers, and electric saws were constantly droning. The entire Altland appeared to be getting deforested. It was a wonder there were any trees left.
Sudden deafness plus tinnitus. “Cut back, my dear man,” his family doctor had said, “no stress, no noise.” He was now using earplugs when he needed to concentrate, but it did nothing to reduce the cheeping, especially on the right side.
“That’s what all your downshifting nonsense has brought you!”
Eva’s reaction wasn’t quite what he’d expected from his wife when he returned home with high-frequency tinnitus.
Her jelly factory was finished, and they weren’t going to refurbish it again. Eva had thrown fruit spreads, chutneys, and jellies worth a thousand euros at the wall. In fact, nothing much remained intact after her spring festival. It had started out bad. Thick clouds, much too cool for Pentecost, and rain showers—not weather for an outing—and no one from the village ever came anyhow.
The point was that the limit had already been reached before that, not just for Eva but for him as well.
He had buried his project.
A Taste of Country Life had died, beginning with the feature story “From Quarry to Sausage.” Vera Eckhoff had failed to tell him that deer season didn’t start until September. He found out only in April, when he called to make an appointment with her. She had a good laugh about it, and oh, yes, she had now given up hunting, by the way. By the way.
Florian wanted a cancellation fee from him for his photos right away. He claimed to have definitively scheduled the job already. Well, he could just go ahead and sue him! His best bet would be a class action suit. He could join forces with the Jarck brothers.
Burkhard had almost fallen off his chair when the letter had arrived from the Jarcks’ lawyer in Stade. His clients felt unfavorably portrayed in Burkhard Weisswerth’s coffee-table book People from the Elbe—Gnarled Faces of a Landscape. The photos had at no point been authorized.
Violation of privacy: ten thousand euros compensation and a motion for a preliminary injunction. Dumb as stumps, the two of them. They couldn’t even spell injunction!
Yet they went off and hired a lawyer. Unbelievable! Peasant cunning, that’s probably what it was. And their odds of succeeding with the lawsuit were pretty good.
The whole thing really got to Weisswerth. He’d been open toward the people around here and that was all the thanks he got.
But he had also romanticized a few things. He’d realized that in the past few weeks. However much sympathy he had for the bizarre characters he had met out here, the brain drain was undeniable.
Anyone with half a brain, anyone capable or who wanted something, didn’t stay in this hick town, staring at the Elbe until he croaked. Those who stayed behind were the bottom feeders, remaindered goods. Minnows, poor suckers, odd birds. Extremely stupid stonemasons, social phobics like that Vera Eckhoff, and simpleminded farmers like Dirk zum Felde.
Dirk had apologized to him for the Glenfiddich stunt a couple of days later, with a grin on his face. The nice cocktail of scotch, ice, and Sprite was just a joke. “No offense meant, Burk-hard.” It was still a mystery to him what exactly was funny about it. But okay, let it go.
He didn’t want to think about these people anymore, or to write articles or books about them. He’d said all he had to say. He was sorry, but he couldn’t do any more, he just had to move on, he had outgrown rubber boot world.
And he was finished with journalism too.
Burkhard Weisswerth was ready for a change. He would steer his life in a new direction, back to the source. A villa in Hamburg-Othmarschen, an excellent address with a view of Jenischpark.
For the first time in her long, fulfilled life, his aged mother had had good timing. The housekeeper had found her at the beginning of June, in her bed as though asleep, the kind of death you’d wish for from a fairy godmother.
He could now call himself wealthy. The house alone was worth four million euros, and the rest was priceless. A Hanseatic upper-class life, the Overseas Club and Patriotic Society, a berth for his boat at Muhlenberg. He would sail again and maybe play polo again too. He was going back to his roots after all these years. He had been a rebel all his life, an angry young man, never let himself be bought, never conformed, never used his old man’s influence. Now he had nothing left to prove.
It would make their friends in Eppendorf sick. Sure, they lived quite comfortably in their apartments at the Isemarkt; the location on the Alster wasn’t bad. But the real, old money was to be found in the Elbe suburbs, and they all knew it. A villa in Hamburg-Othmarschen was simply in a different league.
He was looking forward to their tight-lipped smiles.
Eva was still straining at the weeds out there. He wondered why she was so angry now that everything was looking up.
There had been something with that pomologist. Burkhard wasn’t blind. No drama in and of itself. They granted each other freedom in that respect, allowed themselves little side trips. You shouldn’t be begrudging. It had never done their marriage any harm. Quite the opposite, in fact.
But they had clear rules: adventures yes, but romance was a no-no. He’d adhered to that up till now. Little biochemical affairs, carried out with discretion—a nice evening or two and then adieu.
He just wasn’t so sure about Eva.