2

Salting the Meat

Nelke Windberg met Shminiak Bedrobessian in Staßburg, early summer, 1839. It was a holiday, and hot, with boys shinning up greasy poles to get at squawking cocks, couples dancing circles, drunkards bawling, fiddles screeching, men playing ninepins, dogs cleaning up the spillage and puke that fell between the tables set up in the town’s square. Nelke was one of those offending bowkers, Shminiak a courteous bystander, slipping an empty piggin bowl beneath her sad debouch. She had ­obviously drunk more than she was used to, although Shminiak was too polite to point it out; it was easy to drink too much in a place like Staßburg, everyone habitually dehydrated, the soft drift of salt from the mines covering everything, from ground to tables, cups and cutlery, hair and hands and clothes. No one buys salt in Staßburg, went the old saying, you just shake from your shirt. It was in the air you breathed, made worse that ­celebration day by the dancers kicking up the dust.

Nelke drank as others did, she ate pigs’ trotters, jellied tongue, pickled cabbage and cucumber. It was a festival, and she did no more nor less than was expected, except to meet Shminiak Bedrobessian halfway through the day, when he had seen in her what he’d never seen before in any girl, and after he’d cleaned her up he limped her off away from the Wirtshaus, down to the hay meadows by the river, and the next morning they awoke together under the same blanket, deciding there and then that there were worse things they could do than stay together, share shack and rent, with no need to trouble the church with formalities.

He carried on working in the salt mines, hack, hack, hacking away at the salt-bricks with his pickaxe, and she in the flourmills, churning out bread by the ton.

‘Oh my dear Nelke,’ Shminiak said, once she agreed to their joining bodies and bed. ‘My sweet cherry, the lips of my soul will always kiss your holy name, as will the longing of my breath.’

Shminiak was Armenian and liked to quote his patriarch, Grigor of Nareg, whose Lamentations Before God had been such a help to him throughout the shambolic ways of his life. Nelke replied in kind, at least in those early days.

‘Stille, mein Liebchen,’ she so often replied. ‘Be still, my love, for we are as one.’

So they were, and the happiness this brought Shminiak caused him to shake off his habitual depression and work all the harder and soon was promoted to Aufseher, controlling the town’s salt exports to Westphalia and beyond. At home, Nelke was proud and quiet as she grew like an orange, linea nigra creeping up from pelvis to bellybutton, stroking the child as it expanded within her skin.

‘Ach, meine kleine kind, meine säugenling, meine apfelkuchen, meine nocke, winzig meine nuß, meine eichel.’ Her words of love and blessing were whispered over and over to her unborn child, her precious apple cake. All her thoughts were of motherhood and the startling cravings that came with it: she devoured noodles boiled with pickled peppers, apples dipped in fireplace soot, eggs fried and sprinkled over with sugar and salt. She chewed her mouth black with little pieces of coal, peeled sticks right down their cores until she got to their tender centres, her greed growing with her gravidity, the child within her already adored and already named. She listened with joy for the uterine souffles and the double pulse, and laughed when Shminiak tickled her belly with his fingers, both counting down the weeks and months as they came.

And then, almost a month before she was due, all went still, and for three days Nelke held her breath and shook with every moment; couldn’t bear the thought that her little apple cake had died within her, her body become a coffin she could not escape. She cried out with relief when the pain began suddenly to rage within her as the child manoeuvred itself for early battle, drumming on her pelvis bones as if trying to snap them through, and then came the sweat and the shouts and the awful swearing as she was racked and attacked by the spasms she could not control. The neighbours all came running then, sending the shiny-eyed, petrified Shminiak down to the ale-house where he rocked back and forth in his chair, the brandy coming across to him at regular intervals as he sang his half remembered hymns of protection from Grigor’s Lamentations Before God:

‘Cover with Your Hand, O Christ, the roof of my house, mark my door with Your Blood, cover my bed with Your Right Hand. O Jesu protect my couch from ambush and defend my soul’s soul in its distress, place Your Arm around my heart and that of my beloved . . .’

For fourteen hours he sat and rocked and ranted, listening to Nelke’s screams ringing down along the cobbled alleyways, the barman keeping the brandy coming, notching up the tally on his slate, wondering if he should really charge such a man at all.

The leather birthing-strap that was placed between Nelke’s teeth was worn down to a fragment by the end of it, the bedposts creaking from grind and press as the child punched its way towards its narrow and bony gate. Right through that leather Nelke finally bit when at last came out her burden, foot-first, still kicking, followed by the rest of it, and then the final travail of the large and cumbersome head that had to be tugged out by force, coming out the colour of red carnations as it bawled as hard as Nelke when it eventually emerged, releasing her from her agony, allowing her to subside into unconscious relief. Frau Kranz from next door had taken early charge and pushed away the world, holding the newborn as if it were her own, cleaning up afterbirth and child, getting him ready for Shminiak come staggering home from the inn, poking gently at the bauble-bump that shone beneath the baby’s skin, hard as a plum pip and five times as big.

The life that came next for Nelke was not at all as she’d ­imagined it would be. She could barely look at her torturer, let alone give it a name, and cursed every drop of milk squeezed from her sore and ulcerated breasts and the way her legs had gone all wet and white, shiny like soap, rubbed over by Frau Kranz with fish-oil and glycerine, turning her beauty into the pickings of a fishmonger’s stall. She couldn’t understand where her little apple cake, already lovingly named Elsa, had gone to, nor the cruel blow she had been dealt inasmuch as a monster had been ­delivered in her place.

Back to the flourmills went Nelke, soon as she was able, the changeling left with Frau Kranz next door. She went grind, grind, grinding out her anger, knead, knead, kneading out her despair. Her assiduous work did not go unremarked, and a molinet stick was placed into her hands and up the stairs she went, ascending to the high station of the Confectionery Department, her rage and despair put to good use as she whipped and whisked the chocolate into angel folds soft as butter, light as clouds; churning her sweat and tears into the brandy lacing the truffles, the chantilly that filled the tortes, the sugar that was spun around marzipans and chocolates. She saved her best moments for the nußbeeren, going at that mocha mousse like a demon, having a special hatred for the hazelnuts she had to hide within, seeing in the whole confection an exact reflection, not of her not-to-be little Elsa, but the horrid taupe of the alien child that had usurped her, duping them both, ripping their promised happiness into ribbons as a conjuror does his flag; a conjurer who has forgotten his trick halfway through and walks off the stage, leaving the broken pieces behind instead of rolling them back together and reproducing the banner again, as whole and beautiful and unscathed as it had been before.

It was left to Shminiak to name his son and to stroke the brown into which his taupe had sulked after its initial shocking debut in purple and red, to twist the little curl of hair around his finger, kiss the beat of blood that ran through it like a second pulse. He sat for many nights in the chair by the fire with the child held close to his heart, while Nelke lay upon the bed, pale and sharp as ghost-thistle, lips opening and closing as she slept her angry sleep.

‘My little Philbert,’ he whispered at such moments. ‘My tiny son. There is love enough in me for both of us, only hush now, and do not wake your mamma,’ and then he stroked his small son, his head, his taupe, trying to stroke away the bad times he knew must come.