TWO WOMEN AND ONLY ONE stove never bodes well.
Ida and Hildegard had known that, and in a rare show of unity, they’d insisted on a kitchen with a double hot plate for Ida Eckhoff’s mother-in-law apartment.
* * *
But things got pretty bad regardless.
They turned the house into a battlefield.
Every morning, Hildegard drank her tea out of Ida’s Hutschenreuther fine china collectible cups that were too expensive for everyday use. One by one they lost their handles, their gold rims faded due to thoughtless washing up—or they shattered on the kitchen’s terrazzo floor.
When Ida pulled up weeds from her flower bed, in front of her window, the stock plants beneath her daughter-in-law’s window also disappeared, and when Hildegard scrubbed the white wooden fence in front of the house and repainted it, the following day Ida stood on the street with a pail and brush and painted it all over again.
Hildegard invited the neighboring women over for afternoon coffee, set the big table with Ida’s silverware, and forgot to set a place for her mother-in-law. And without saying a word, she took down Ida’s rose-patterned curtains, cut them up into dust rags, and hung up new ones.
And Ida, who hadn’t yet signed the farm over to Karl, who still had the say and the money, would fire the seasonal workers Hildegard hired at harvesttime and take on new ones. And, on her double burner, she cooked proper Altland lunches so the pickers didn’t have to eat the miserable blintzes, pierogies, or potato dumplings that her Prussian daughter-in-law cobbled together.
* * *
Karl, who was caught between the fronts and constantly had to dodge bullets from both sides, seemed to be impervious. He whistled quietly to himself and remained in his own world, which was peaceful.
In the winter, he sat outside on the bench without a jacket or a cap, watching the snow fall. He’d stretch out his hand, let the snowflakes land on it, and examine them through a magnifying glass until they melted away. Vera sometimes watched him from the window. His lips would move, but she couldn’t make out whether he was talking to the snowflakes or himself.
In the summer, he hung a swing from a branch of the linden tree for Vera, but most of the time he sat on it himself, smoking and rocking gently back and forth, looking down at the grass, which was teeming with ants. When Vera arrived, he would push her high into the air until her feet touched the leaves at the top of the tree, and he’d only stop when she’d had enough.
Karl also made her a pair of stilts in the shed, and he made another pair for Hildegard, who found them childish at first and didn’t want to try them out. But then she practiced to the point where she almost always beat Vera whenever they raced.
Hildegard laughing—that rarely happened.
* * *
Vera learned to make herself invisible. She’d vanish in the barn or play with the cats in the hayloft whenever the grenades started flying around the house. Sometimes she went over to Heinrich Luehrs’s place and helped him pick dandelions for his rabbits, German Giants that earned him good money when they were ready for slaughter.
“Stalingrad over at yours again, huh?” Hinni would ask. Word had gotten around that the walls shook fairly often at the Eckhoffs’, but it wasn’t any different at the Luehrses’ place either.
Hinni’s father was on the bottle. They never knew what state he’d come home in. It was best when he was just slightly tipsy and wanted to embrace the world and kiss his wife. But two more schnapps and the Luehrses’ place was Stalingrad too.
Vera didn’t say any more than she had to at home. You could make too many mistakes when speaking. Ida spoke only Low German with Vera and Karl, and Vera knew how much Hildegard hated that. When Vera answered in Low German, her mother had to be out of earshot. And if she answered in standard German, Ida would turn away. So, for the most part, Vera tried to get by with nodding, shaking her head, or shrugging her shoulders. That was the safest bet.
When Hildegard wasn’t around, Vera often went across the hall to Ida’s apartment. They’d sit in her small kitchen playing cards and eating rock-hard cookies, which Vera dunked in her milk.
Sometimes Ida would show Vera her treasures, the traditional Altland costume with all the silver chains and filigree button balls, and Vera was allowed to try the black bonnet on carefully and admire herself in the mirror.
But you needed light-colored eyes for the traditional costume, Ida Eckhoff thought, so she’d take the bonnet off the child again quickly.
She showed Vera how to do embroidery, cross-stitch and flat stitch, and for her ninth birthday she gave her a silver bracelet that Vera wasn’t allowed to show her mother.
Vera hid it in an old can up in the hayloft, where she also kept the small amber necklace that belonged to her grandmother in Königsberg.
And she made certain that her mother never heard her say Grandma Ida.
* * *
On a cold morning shortly after Vera’s ninth birthday, Hildegard got six farmhands to drag out the massive carved-oak armoire that had stood in one place for two hundred years, to make space for a piano.
That morning, Ida Eckhoff lost what remained of her self-control and gave her daughter-in-law two hard slaps across the face.
Hildegard struck back immediately, then packed suitcases for her child and herself, put on her coat, and went and got Karl. “It’s your mother or me.”
And stiff-legged Karl limped into the kitchen to Ida, sat down at the table next to his mother, took her hand, and looked out through the window at the orchard. He stroked the back of her hand with his thumb over and over, as though trying to smooth out her wrinkled skin, and didn’t look at her, just stared out the window, and when he finally spoke, he was hoarse.
Then he started to cry.
Ida Eckhoff sat next to her son and didn’t know what to do. He had placed his arms on the table and was wailing like a child. She didn’t recognize him, now that he’d started talking to snowflakes and trying to escape from the Russians in the night. He was just a cardboard cutout of himself. He hadn’t gotten a leg or an arm shot off, but pretty much everything else.
This hoose is mine ain, but what did she want in this house any longer?
* * *
That evening, Hildegard played piano. Mozart’s “Turkish March,” over and over. She pounded the keys, floored the pedals, hammered her instrument as though she wanted to demolish it.
Hildegard played her new piano like a Katyusha rocket launcher, so no one heard Ida go out into the hallway and pick up the stool, fetch the clothesline from the closet, then climb up the stairs to the attic. Nor did they hear her throw the line over a beam and secure it tightly, then climb up onto the stool, check the knot, and jump.
Karl heard the stool fall over and thought the marten had gotten back into the house.
Vera heard the clatter and hoped it wasn’t the two cats she’d hidden in the hayloft.
Hildegard was playing the piano, so she didn’t hear Vera creep out of bed, walk barefoot through the hallway, and tiptoe up the stairs.
Grandma Ida was wearing her traditional costume and seemed to be dancing in the air.
* * *
Hildegard didn’t calm down any after Ida Eckhoff was in the ground. Her anger simply changed direction, hurtling unchecked at Karl and Vera, both of whom became increasingly stooped in the gales of her perpetual storm.
Vera eventually walked tall again when she was fourteen and her mother got pregnant and ran off with the father of her little girl, who was called Marlene.
But Karl never stood tall again. For the rest of his days, he walked around like someone who’d been beaten. His shoulders were constantly hunched over as though he expected to be struck again at any moment.
The little that had remained of Karl after the war eventually snapped completely in Hildegard’s hurricane.
* * *
After Hildegard had cleared off to the Hamburg suburb of Blankenese with her new child and her architect, Ida Eckhoff’s sister saw to it that the livestock was sold and the land was leased.
She put the money into a savings account and allocated her nephew and his refugee child what they needed to live on each month. She almost felt sorry for the girl, with her mother gone and a father who was like a child.
But Karl blew beautiful round smoke rings into the crown of the old linden, he got on well with snowflakes and with birds even when they devoured the cherries, and when Vera got out of school in the summer, she’d sit next to him on the bench and they’d peel potatoes together.
* * *
Karl gave Vera his old shotgun, his binoculars, and the backpack he’d used for hunting, and she very quickly learned how to shoot.
At school, the others had long since stopped teasing her. Not because she learned better than most, that didn’t matter, but because they knew what would happen if they called Vera Eckhoff a Polack brat. Alfred Giese was the first to find out, and the last to try it. With his broken nose, he looked even more stupid than before.
For him school ended after the eighth grade, but Vera, the Polack brat, was a straight-A student at the girls’ high school and Karl went to her graduation in the assembly hall when she got her high school diploma and he almost sat up straight in his suit that was much too baggy. She wore her silver bracelet and her amber necklace, and in the evening she celebrated with a few girlfriends from her class in Ida Eckhoff’s hallway.
They drank strawberry punch and Karl played the accordion, which he could still do, and Hinni Luehrs and his brothers came over when they heard the music.
Old man Luehrs also stopped by later, much later, on his way back from the bar. He stumbled through the new side door, which Ida’s sister had just had installed, staggered through the hallway, danced a couple of faltering steps in time to the music, then drank the rest of the strawberry punch straight from the large glass bowl.
When it was empty, he looked Karl angrily and drunkenly in the eye and dropped the bowl on the floor. “What you up to now, you wimp?”
Karl didn’t react. He just stared at the keys of his instrument and gradually began to play again.
Heinrich tried to push his father toward the side door and out of the house, but the old man shoved him to the ground without much effort. Heinrich screamed as the shards of glass from the bowl pierced his hands and knees, and Vera ran off quickly to the hunting cabinet, fetched her shotgun, and aimed it at Heinrich Luehrs Senior.
Hinni was still screaming. His father staggered out the door, cursing.
Karl stiffened when he saw all the blood. He got up quickly with his accordion strapped across his stomach, went into the kitchen, and closed the door.
Vera grabbed Hinni by the shoulders and pulled him out of the heap of broken glass. He was still screaming and was covered in blood. She guided him carefully to a chair and pulled the glass out of his hand, one splinter at a time, and then out of his knees. Her friends fetched some bandages and a bowl of water from the kitchen, where Karl was sitting at the table, smoking calmly, because none of this concerned him anymore.
Blood and screaming now had nothing to do with him.
Heinrich and his brothers didn’t dare go home that night. They were allowed to stay in the old farmhands’ rooms, but they didn’t sleep well in the dusty beds because they didn’t know whether their mother had locked the bedroom door in time.
The girls whispered long into the night in Hildegard’s wide marital bed, which had been Vera’s since Karl had moved into his mother’s apartment.
And Vera sat with Karl at the kitchen table and smoked her first cigarettes until the blackbirds and seagulls woke up outside and Karl finally summoned the courage to go to bed.
Then she went out into the hallway and waited for Heinrich Luehrs the Younger, the best. And she swept up the glass when he didn’t come.
That’s what happened when you dared to lay a hand on this house. You tore an old, rotten side door out of it and then paid for it with blood and glass in the hallway.
She’d come within a hairsbreadth of shooting Luehrs the Elder.
And they’d gotten off lightly. Vera knew it could’ve been a whole lot worse.
You moved a heavy oak armoire that had stood at its post for two hundred years, and that evening someone hung dead from a beam in the attic.
* * *
Karl and Vera didn’t lay a hand on the house after Hinni Luehrs sat with bleeding hands among the shards of glass. They left everything just as it was. They didn’t move the furniture around, didn’t rip out the transom windows, and didn’t knock the old tiles off the walls.
They didn’t lay tiles over the terrazzo floors, installed no more new doors, and didn’t remove old thatch from the roof.
And they never went up to drive off the marten in the hayloft.
They weren’t crazy, after all.
* * *
Vera went off to Hamburg to study. The fine lady, Ida’s sister said, but that was what Karl wanted. He was still able to make his own decisions, and even if he wasn’t, what difference would it have made?
The adopted refugee child would still inherit the farm. Perhaps a farmer’s son would turn up yet and marry into the Eckhoffs.
But what local man who wasn’t out of his mind would want to marry Vera Eckhoff? Early in the mornings, she would stalk through the orchards in Karl’s heavy old hunting jacket, picking off hares and deer. She only said hi when it suited her, let her mentally ill stepfather clean the windows while she pored over her books, and, if Dora Voelkers was to be believed, had bathed buck naked in the Elbe the previous year, near Bassenfleth.
A girl of eighteen!
And afterward she’d sat in the sand and smoked. Smoking like a steamboat. Naked.
Dora Voelkers’s sons hadn’t been able to contain themselves, but no girl was so pretty she could afford to take such liberties, Dora Voelkers said.
And a refugee to boot.
She won’t get anyone to take her, that was certain.
But Vera couldn’t leave Karl on his own at the farm for very long. One hot summer’s day, as she was nearing the end of her third semester, Karl dropped one of his many cigarette butts and torched the old shed, which contained Vera’s stilts and her doll carriage.
The fire department got there fast, so the flames didn’t get a chance to leap up to the thatched roof. Karl Eckhoff had been lucky. He had more luck than sense.
* * *
When Vera finished studying and finally returned home to Karl and her farm as a Doctor of Dental Surgery, there was a stroller in the Luehrses’ front yard, out in the sun. Heinrich Junior, the best, was an exemplary son for his boozer of a father; he’d also called his eldest Heinrich.
Hinni did the right thing. He married land and money and a woman who was like a tame bird: Elisabeth Buhrfeindt, of old marsh farming gentry, slim, quiet, and blond. What were you thinking, Vera Eckhoff? That someone would wait for you?
Elisabeth also did what was expected. She planted flowers, picked cherries, raked the yellow sand in front of their house day in, day out. She painted the white fence, and when the time came for a child, she gave birth to a son. Three times over, like Heinrich’s mother before her.
Hinni seemed to be living his parents’ life all over again, but properly this time, without schnapps or blows, as though he could paint over the stain that Heinrich Luehrs the drunkard had left behind.
Luehrs Sr. didn’t grow old—at least he did his kids that favor—and Minna Luehrs had her best years after she buried her husband.
Vera watched her walk through the garden on her daughter-in-law’s arm, examining bed upon bed, shrub after shrub, rose upon rose. She saw them stop in front of each plant, nodding and talking quietly to one another. It reminded her of hospital visits, Sisters of Mercy, and Vera sometimes wished that she could join them, be a sister too—perhaps a daughter even.
For just as long as it took to do one round of the garden, she longed not to be the other, the foreigner. To join arms with Minna and Elisabeth, as though she were one of them.
* * *
Karl hadn’t managed without Vera. He now rarely washed and forgot to eat. And at night, the Russians still came, so he was afraid of his dreams and no longer went to bed.
At night, Vera would find him in a kitchen chair, half asleep, exhausted, but still awake with a fat book about farm machinery or dike construction in front of him, his head almost touching the pages, and the cigarette in his right hand turned to ash.
* * *
When she opened her practice in the center of the village, she took Karl in to work with her. He sat in the waiting room, flipping through old magazines and doing crossword puzzles. He nodded at the patients, who all knew him and were aware that Karl Eckhoff had gotten weird and left him in peace.
At ten o’clock Vera’s dental assistant would make him a sandwich and a cup of tea, and then he’d lie down on the sofa that Vera had pushed into the little room at the back for him.
They kept the door slightly open so Karl could hear her talking to her patients. He could hear the drill whining and sometimes a child as well. He could hear the assistant’s quick steps on the linoleum floor, and also the doorbell and was able to sleep on this bed of peaceful noises.
At noon he’d limp back to the farm, boil potatoes, make fried eggs or fish for Vera and himself, and after lunch Vera would lie down before driving back to the practice.
For Karl wasn’t the only one who slept badly in this house at night. Vera left the radio on in the evenings when she went to bed. She tried to get to sleep before the end of the broadcast day, but she didn’t manage it most of the time. She was still lying awake when there was nothing but white noise.
Then she’d get up again, join Karl in the kitchen, and smoke with him until she was so tired that she could no longer hear the whispering coming from the old walls.
She still didn’t trust this house, but she wasn’t going to let it throw or spit her out. She wouldn’t let herself be rejected like a foreign organ. She refused to be like the majority of refugees, who’d gotten out of the large farmhouses as fast as they possibly could and moved into small houses in developments, grateful and scrupulously intent on avoiding becoming a burden to anyone else for the rest of their lives.
If Hildegard von Kamcke had bequeathed anything to her daughter, it was her lack of humility.
Her mother had refused to act the part of a have-not. She’d been driven out of her homeland, lost everything, and that was already bad enough! For that reason, a farmwoman like Ida Eckhoff just had to share what she had—her farm, her house—and if that didn’t suit her, she simply had to give way.
Chin up! is what Vera had learned.
But it wasn’t only Hildegard von Kamcke’s lessons in composure that had kept Vera here in this village, in this old timber-frame house.
She’d been washed up on Ida Eckhoff’s farm like a drowning man on an island. The sea still surrounded her and Vera was afraid of that water. She had to remain on her island, on this farm, where she couldn’t put down roots, to be sure, but could grow firmly on the stones, like lichen or moss.
Not flourishing or blooming, just staying put.
And she left no one in any doubt that she intended to stay. Karl had sold some land and given her money for the practice. Dr. Vera Eckhoff treated her patients in the center of the village, and like all dentists, she was feared, not loved.
And there was no reason either not to laugh to herself when leaning over the septic molar of an Altland farmer, who was sitting in her chair with sweating hands and had long since forgotten that he’d always walked past refugees without saying hi, that he’d thrown a rotten apple from his garden at a refugee child—“Ya wan’ an apple?”—and then laughed.
She treated her former classmates’ offspring, filled the holes in their milk teeth, and rewarded them with a marble or a balloon from her drawer if they didn’t cry.
She pulled black stumps from the mouths of the elderly she had known when they were still strong back in their mid-forties, and fitted them for dentures, which made them look strange and serious and rendered their speech more hissing and sharp.
After every shooting club festival, one or two young men who had knocked each other’s teeth crooked and loose would sit in her waiting room, and when their turn came, they’d stare at the ceiling while sitting in the dentist’s chair because they were embarrassed to be lying with their mouths wide open so close to a young woman with beautiful brown eyes, vulnerable and at her mercy—that’s how Vera Eckhoff liked them.
But she was much fonder of another man who didn’t come to her practice, who wasn’t looking for a dentist but for a woman with black curls.
When her friend came from Hamburg in his dark-blue car, Karl would leave the kitchen, whistling very softly. He knew that he needn’t worry. She wouldn’t leave him for anyone.
There was no Mr. Right for Vera. She wasn’t looking for one and she didn’t want to be found by a man who would drag her away from this big cold house that she clung to like moss.
Every now and then she had nice days and nights with someone who had a wife and kids and wanted nothing more from her than she wanted from him.
When she headed off toward the Elbe with this stranger of hers, Hinni Luehrs craned his neck from his longest ladder and Elisabeth sank down into her flower beds.
Vera and her stranger walked hand in hand, strolled along the river, sat shoulder to shoulder in the sand wearing sunglasses, smoking, and laughing. Vera knew you were never alone along the Elbe, but it didn’t bother her if anyone saw Dr. Vera Eckhoff kissing some stranger. She was a free person and paid a high enough price for it.
She left the man to suffer the guilt pangs. She herself had no compunction. She wasn’t taking anything away from the other woman. She wouldn’t want her husband even if he became available. She was simply borrowing him and would return him hale and hearty.
He wasn’t the only one either. Other strangers turned up and then disappeared again. Vera Eckhoff had done more in Hamburg than just study.
But she took care not to invite a man with serious intentions. Her life was already serious enough with Karl, who relied on her like a child, and the house, which held her in its thick walls.
* * *
In the evening, after work, Vera did her rounds along the Elbe, through the orchards, and across the farm tracks. She took large steps, as though surveying the land, as if she were measuring the yards and miles of her world. She marched over the fields, along the riverbank like a guard, Frau Doktor on patrol. She made an even greater impression with her large dogs at her side, which she’d bought when she started hunting again.
Later still, she rode her horses, whose shoes rang out like hammer blows on the village street. If you couldn’t see that Vera Eckhoff was still here, you would hear it in all the houses. On her daily long march in the evening or early in the morning, she sized up the world around her like an animal trainer who lets his eyes roam around the circus ring and can’t turn his back on any animal in his troop for long.
She saw the gentle river in its bed, the houses on the dike, the trees in the fields. She could identify the birds, all of them, knew where they nested, when they migrated and returned. She often saw hares and deer in the orchards, and she recognized them before she shot them. In the spring, she counted the lambs that had been born overnight on the dike. She passed the brick pump houses on the banks of the drainage ditches and knew how high the water was and how many colonies of bees Heinrich Luehrs had in his rows of cherry trees.
It couldn’t ever slip away from Vera, this landscape in which she wasn’t rooted but to which she clung fast.
And people had better watch out that they didn’t get in the way when Vera Eckhoff galloped along the Elbe on one of her unpredictable mares.
“Watch out, the cavalry!” Heinrich Luehrs would yell, and placing his left hand on the seam of his corduroy slacks, he’d stand at attention and salute when she rode past his farm early in the morning.
“Shove it, Hinni Luehrs!” Vera woud say, trotting toward the dike. And on her way back she’d ride across his finely raked yellow sand.
Still, it was never certain who would win the daily riding contest—Vera or her Prussian Trakehners. Sometimes they managed to catapult her out of the saddle somewhere in the reeds along the Elbe. They would then make their own way home without their rider, and Vera would have to stamp across the raked bed at Heinrich Luehrs’s in her riding boots, and Hinni would still be smirking days later about the battle-axe on foot.
* * *
But that’s what Vera wanted. She also wanted her big gray hunting dogs that frightened mailmen and paperboys to death. At some point the mailman had had enough of being run down like a wild boar every morning in her yard by two superbly trained Weimaraners. Vera had had to put her mailbox out on the street in front of her fence. And she stuck a sign on it that she’d found in Heinrich Luehrs’s shed: a black skull set against a yellow background. DANGER! But men who ran away from dogs like little girls obviously couldn’t take a joke. Paul Heinsohn, in any event, now barely acknowledged her when he passed by on his bike.
When Vera was nearby, her dogs were the epitome of calmness. They obeyed her every word, accepted her as pack leader, lay beneath her table, and let her stroke their fur. But she didn’t make that widely known. Her dogs’ bad reputation was worth a whole lot more to Vera than any alarm system. Those who weren’t in the know stayed away from her farm, and that was good.
* * *
Vera Eckhoff also wanted this house, even though it only suffered her reluctantly within its walls. It was a patron of stone and oak, domineering and complacent.
She had no idea how many people had lived in these cold walls before her. It must have been nine or ten generations who’d celebrated weddings, raised children, or given birth to them, then lost them again, who’d laid out their dead in this drafty hallway. Young women had entered the house in their wedding gowns, through the wedding door, and had left it again in their coffins—through the same narrow door, which didn’t have a handle on the outside and was opened only for weddings and funerals.
You had to have been raised in these houses not to be afraid in them at night when the walls started to whisper.
Some nights a rope rasped against the ceiling beams of the old hayloft as though it were bearing a heavy load. The old voices murmured their orders, which Vera couldn’t understand. They bad-mouthed her and seemed to be laughing at her as well.
* * *
Vera had always been freezing cold in this house, and not just in the beginning when she lived with her mother in the servants’ room next to the large front door, which was the coldest of all its cold rooms, the farthest away from Ida Eckhoff’s warm stove.
But even after they had slowly fought their way up, room by room, Vera continued to freeze after they had taken over the kitchen and the warm rooms next to the stove. She had long since grown to like coldness. The cold kept her awake.
This house wasn’t built for people who wanted warmth and comfort. It was the same as with horses and dogs: you couldn’t show any weakness, couldn’t let yourself be intimidated by this colossus, which had stood with its legs apart on the marshy soil for nearly three hundred years.
* * *
Vera wasn’t fooled by its scarred facade and its disheveled thatched roof: the house might be under the weather, but it would still be standing long after she had departed through the wedding door, feetfirst.
In the evenings, when it got dark, Vera let her dogs into the kitchen and the three of them sat as though they were keeping vigil over a sick person.