There was not much light in the Stube, but Marlene was a skilled seamstress. An artist, Gabriel liked to say. Marlene had never believed it, but she was flattered a man of such refinement and such undeniable talent should call her that.
She had spent the happiest hours of her marriage to Herr Wegener in the workshop of the boutique: chatting with the other seamstresses and learning the tricks of the trade from Gabriel, caressing the fabrics brought by the wholesalers and choosing the best, transforming the fruits of her imagination and the new brides’ requests into fine garments.
Wegener had never understood it, but, bent over the work benches, her brow furrowed, her eyes sometimes watering with fatigue, Marlene had felt free.
The Stube of a maso, though, was not a workshop for wealthy snobs. A Bau’r’s clothes did not have to be artistic, she reminded herself. They had to be sturdy. The seams had to hold, the cloth cut in such a way as not to impair movement, the buttons sewn on with a double thread.
Even so, the result was not without elegance.
Marlene pricked a finger and raised it to her lips.
Keller’s fabric was old, but it was of excellent quality. He had brought it up from the cellar – he had not allowed Marlene to go down with him and help him carry it up to the Stube. She wondered where he had got it. She wondered when.
Maybe it had been his Mutti’s? A Bäuerin was also a seamstress. That and a million other things.
Keller had told her how his mother had died giving birth to his sister. He had also told her about Voter Luis’ madness, how he had turned from a man of faith into a monster, how afraid he, Simon, had been of his father’s silence and his father’s rages. A monster who had killed his own daughter.
Elisabeth. Little Lissy.
He told her how he had sat up with her until dawn, rocking her dead body in his arms.
Little Lissy . . . Sweet Lissy.
He told her, with the extinguished pipe between his lips and a vacant stare in his eyes, how one day he had gone into his father’s bedroom to find his dark, severe clothes.
And do what had to be done.
“I put on his clothes. These clothes. And I cut his throat while he slept. I should have made him suffer. Should have filled him with terror, the way he’d filled little Lissy with terror. But that would have been revenge, and revenge isn’t worthy of a man of faith. Pity, though, is. I acted out of pity. He was still my father, and before he lost his mind he’d been a great man.”
Marlene looked at Keller’s gnarled hands spread open on the table: the damaged knuckles, the scars, the dark spots on the frost-bitten skin.
A killer’s hands.
“Do I scare you, Marlene?”
Marlene had not replied immediately. She had looked at those hands and thought of the torment he must have felt, having to watch over his little sister’s body. She thought of those years of fear and terror, years of such extreme solitude that it was impossible to see an end to it.
No, Keller’s hands were not a killer’s hands.
“It wasn’t murder,” she said. “It was justice.”