THE SEAGULLS WERE BACK. NOT that he cared for them particularly. In the summer, flocks of them would attack Vera’s cherry tree again and then they’d fly over his farm, back toward the Elbe, and their crap would land in his garden.
The tree would have to go anyhow, that old piece of junk in her front yard. The trunk was overgrown with ivy, and the branches were growing every which way without rhyme or reason. Because Vera never thought of cutting them back. It was so tall now that you could no longer throw a net over it in summer.
She hadn’t gotten a single cherry from it last summer. She simply let the birds do as they pleased. “Just don’t look, Hinni.” And that was the best that you could do if you were unfortunate enough to be Vera Eckhoff’s next-door neighbor: just not look.
Heinrich Luehrs tried very hard not to see her mossy, unkempt lawn that was littered with molehills, the weed-infested, lopsided flower beds, and the tattered hedge. He couldn’t comprehend how anyone could simply leave everything in a state like that.
Just don’t look was much easier said than done.
Whenever Vera drove off in her car, Heinrich would rush over to her garden and prune a couple of rosebushes, or stake up the gooseberry bush, which was drooping. In the mornings, he would sometimes wait until she’d trotted off on her wayward horse in the direction of the Elbe before popping over to plant a few traps in her molehills and go once around the bottom of her hedge with his Roundup spray. Vera never noticed and that was how it had to be. Her goutweed would otherwise get out of control and spread over to his place again—and the mole didn’t respect property boundaries either. If Vera wanted to live in her wilderness she could, but he wanted none of it.
* * *
The seagulls were back. The first ones had just perched on the little island in the Elbe where they spent the summer nesting and teaching their ugly fledglings how to fly. Heinrich Luehrs could hear them at half past six in the morning, when he fetched the paper from his mailbox.
When the seagulls arrived, the winter was over. Yet another one.
He always prepared his two slices of bread with liverwurst and honey, then covered the plate with plastic wrap and placed it in the fridge before going to bed. He put water and three spoonfuls of coffee into the machine and placed a cup and saucer and the sugar on the table, so that he only had to turn the machine on in the morning on his way to the bathroom.
Elisabeth had always done it that way because everything had to go chop-chop in the mornings.
But since Heinrich Luehrs had leased the fruit trees to Dirk zum Felde, he now had time to read the paper in the morning, and he turned the radio on as well so that it wasn’t so quiet in the kitchen.
There was no need to go chop-chop anymore, and the winters were getting longer and longer.
But now there were snowdrops under the kitchen window, and he’d picked the first five and put them on the table in the small crystal vase that was no bigger than an egg cup. Elisabeth had used it for the daisies and the pansies and the dandelions with short stems that the kids used to pluck out of the dike for her when they were little. They weren’t allowed to take any flowers from her garden, she was quite strict about that, but the first five snowdrops were always placed in the small vase, one for each member of the family.
It was so quiet.
Not that they would have spoken much to each other. But Elisabeth had always sung and hummed from the moment she got up—in the kitchen, in the garden, among the fruit trees—all day long. She didn’t seem to be aware of it, but he could always tell where she was because of it.
And if she wasn’t humming he knew that she was angry with him for coming down too hard on the boys or tramping through the house in his muddy boots. Once, she didn’t hum for two days because he had danced with Beke Matthes a few times too many at the Blossom Festival. And yet there had been nothing in it. He liked Beke Matthes, all right, but not like that.
* * *
But Elisabeth no longer hummed because a painter and decorator from the nearby town of Stade, who was doing twenty-five miles an hour over the speed limit, had swept her off the bike path at the big curve in the road, so now Heinrich Luehrs lived without a soundtrack. There’d been twenty years of silent movies since she died.
For He shall give his angels charge over you to keep you in all your ways, her friends in the women’s church choir had sung at the funeral service. It had been her confirmation motto, and Heinrich knew then that he would never enter the church again. The graveyard, yes, he went there every Saturday. He kept the grave tidy, planted begonias in the spring, alternating red and white ones, as Elisabeth had done in her garden.
But his wife hadn’t deserved to die at the age of fifty-three, run down like an animal at the side of the road.
And he hadn’t deserved it either. Heinrich Luehrs had spent many a day and night turning over stone after stone of his life, looking for some mistake, the big crime he must have committed. And he wasn’t able to find any. He had been good to his wife and his children. Strict, yes, even quick-tempered now and then, but never nasty. He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink any more than anyone else, and there hadn’t been any womanizing either. Beke Matthes certainly didn’t count. He hadn’t disgraced his parents, had always kept his yard shipshape, 100 percent in order. He was hardworking and efficient, a helpful neighbor, and he never cheated on his taxes. In fact he didn’t even cheat at cards.
* * *
The angels of God could buzz off. They had a strange idea of what it meant to watch over you in all your ways and carry you on their hands. “We can’t always understand the ways of God,” the lady pastor had said, but Heinrich Luehrs had understood very well what was meant: show a bit of brawn now and again, bend a straight back, force a man to his knees so he’d run to church and learn how to pray. That’s what it was all about.
Not with him. This whole thing wasn’t right and he wasn’t of a mind to accept it. If he had paid as little attention to his farm as these angels had paid to his wife, then it would look like Vera Eckhoff’s yard right now.
* * *
“Me neither, Father,” Georg had said a couple of days before Elisabeth rode off on her bike. And he’d have been the best of the three. Heinrich Luehrs had three sons and no successor.
He didn’t know if Elisabeth had hummed on her final morning.