Late August, time to bring in the harvest. All over Germany, crops are being lifted and prepared for storage. Everyone knows it will be a hard winter, the fourth of this war. People work until their backs ache, their thighs throb and their heads thump. They barely talk to each other, but instead busy themselves with the endless tasks.
The Schefflers are finding it more difficult than most. It is now three years since their daughter died, killed in a road accident while cycling home from school. She’d been keen to get back to the farm to help. That was the kind of girl she was – thoughtful, eager, their little princess. Though they rarely speak of her, she’s in their minds all the time; they can’t stop thinking about her. She would have been fifteen in December.
As Frau Scheffler prepares the evening meal, she wipes a tear from her eye. These are strong onions, or so she tells herself. After three years, and with all that is going on, she feels guilty that she still weeps for her daughter. It is an indulgence, and she knows it, but still the tears come.
Her husband, Friedrich, comes into the kitchen. His tread is soft, and she doesn’t hear him until he is standing right behind her.
“There’s a letter from Wilhelm, over there, on top of the range.” She speaks to divert him – she doesn’t want him to see her tears. Her voice is thick, though, and he notices at once and comes to her side.
“Are you all right?” His voice wavers. “You’re not thinking about Helga, are you?”
She shakes her head, not trusting herself to speak. He puts his finger under her chin, raising it up so that she is forced to look at him.
“Why do you do this to yourself? It does no good. What’s done is done.” He pats her cheek and goes back to the table where he cuts a slice of bread and spreads a thick layer of butter on it. They are lucky in the countryside, food is not so scarce here, and they can still eat well. He takes a bite and carries on talking, but Gisela doesn’t listen. She’s back in the past, where her two children are safe in bed, rather than fighting a war or buried deep in the ground in the Catholic cemetery in the nearby town.
“Well then, what do you think?”
Gisela stops chopping and stares at her husband. “What do I think about what?”
“My plan.”
She has no idea what he is talking about. These days she blocks out most of what is said to her. It’s easier that way. When Helga died and so many people talked nonsense to her with their pious platitudes of much better places and time being a great healer, she argued with them, but they didn’t like it. She could see it made them uncomfortable when she said things like: “Is she in a better place? How do you know it’s better? Are you saying she wasn’t happy here with her parents?” The priest especially was embarrassed, and after a while he stopped asking her how she was, and offering to say masses for her. Instead, he’d look away when they passed each other in the street. Once, he crossed the road to avoid her, almost falling in his speed to get away from her. Stupid old fool. At least he hadn’t badgered her when she stopped going to church.
Friedrich is shaking her. He often does this to get her out of her reverie. Poor Friedrich, he misses their children too, though he will never talk about it. But she can tell from the eagerness with which he grabs Wilhelm’s letters and the way his eyes fill when he says Helga’s name.
“Please listen to me,” he says, “I read about it in the paper, about how you can adopt children.”
She’s listening now. What madness is this, to suggest adopting other people’s children when they have their own? Her heart beats in her head, thumping a painful rhythm inside her skull.
“There are so many children who are orphans now. The government is looking for families like us to give them a home. Just think, Gisela, we could make a child happy.” His eyes are bright. She hasn’t seen him look like this since long before the war began. It was never in her nature to disappoint people, she had grown from a compliant child to an obliging adult, but she’d changed when Helga fell off her bike into the path of an oncoming car, and today she hardens her heart against him.
“I don’t think so,” she says, and goes back to her mechanical slicing of onions. Behind her, Friedrich sighs. “I thought it might help,” he whispers.
For several days she won’t let herself think about what Friedrich said, but gradually the idea takes hold. She reflects on what it might entail: the difficulties of raising another woman’s child, perhaps it would be cheeky, or sullen, or perhaps it might be unhappy. Yes, almost certainly the child would be unhappy. Could she make someone happy again? She doesn’t know. At this moment, when she can barely remember what it is to be contented and not to have a gnawing emptiness in her stomach, when smiling is an effort and laughing an impossibility, she thinks it would be easier to count the grains in a field of corn. And yet – she has to be truthful; the idea is appealing. The thought of a child running around the house, someone to look after, to love, to teach, fills her with a barely remembered emotion: hope. Perhaps it would do no harm to find out more.
She’s in the kitchen when her husband comes home from the fields. He sits down heavily on the wooden chair near the range and pulls off his boots.
“Is that soup you’ve been making? It smells good.”
She nods. “I’ve been thinking,” she says, “about what you said.” She ladles some soup into a bowl and places it on the table in front of him.
Friedrich doesn’t reply. He cuts himself some bread and eats a slice before starting on the soup. He is halfway through it before he lays down his spoon. “That’s better,” he says. “Now, what were you saying?”
“About adopting a child, maybe we could find out more.” She refills his bowl.
He shrugs. “If that’s what you want.”
Gisela has tested the dough for the bread. It is well risen and ready to knead. She flours the table and puts the dough down, pressing her fists into it. With slow steady movements, she flattens it, turns it over, pushing at it with all her strength. This will be the best bread she has ever made. She’s not fooled by his terse response. After twenty-two years together, she knows this is as enthusiastic as he gets.
“Yes,” she says, “it’s what I want. Tell me about it.”
Friedrich gets up from his chair and goes over to the stairs. “Are you sure about this?”
“Can’t do any harm to find out, can it?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead he goes upstairs. Gisela hears him walking through the rooms above. She tenses as a board creaks. He’s in their daughter’s room. Friedrich never goes there. It is exactly how it was when Helga left for school that day. Her books are still in the little bookcase that Friedrich made for her tenth birthday. She loved to read, lying on the rug in front of the range. The patchwork quilt that was made from scraps of material from Helga’s baby clothes lies over her bed, undisturbed for three years. The footsteps cease. What is he doing? Gisela cannot stand the tension. She goes to the foot of the stairs. “Shall I make some coffee?” she calls. Friedrich grunts in reply.
She puts the old iron kettle on the range and starts to grind some coffee beans. She savours the comforting aroma. They don’t have fresh coffee often enough. Usually she saves the grains and uses them three, even four times. She measures them out into the pot, careful not to spill any. There’s very little left; it’s hard to get hold of these days. When the water boils, she pours some over the grounds.
“Come and get this before it gets cold,” she shouts upstairs.
Friedrich comes down, goes straight to his chair. His eyes are bloodshot, his eyelids puffy. Gisela hands him a cup and takes a sip from her own. For several minutes they sit in silence.
Friedrich bangs his cup down on the table, making Gisela jump. “There was never a child like our Helga.”
Gisela nods. “I know.”
“No one can replace her, no one.”
“We wouldn’t want to replace her.”
“Just as long as it’s understood.” He makes as if to rise, but Gisela catches hold of his hand and pulls him down once more.
“This was your idea, not mine,” she reminds him. “We don’t need to do it.” She waits for him to say something. “You said it might help.”
“Help, yes. Yes I think we could do with some help round the farm. We’re not getting any younger.”
Gisela takes his face in her hands and gazes into his eyes. He looks away from her stare, but she persists. “I don’t think that’s what you meant, is it?”
He shakes his head. “No, but now that you’ve said yes, it’s like a betrayal—”
“No,” Gisela interrupts. “It’s no such thing. Neither of us wants to replace Helga. But it would be good to try to help a little one, an orphan child. You must write today and say we will do this.”
Friedrich rises from his chair and goes to the sink. He splashes his face with water and stands for a moment at the window gazing at the fields beyond. “I have no preference,” he says, “girl or boy, it doesn’t matter.”
“Of course not,” says Gisela, crossing her fingers behind her back in the old superstitious way that he hates so much. But she daren’t tempt fate, and she is lying. More than anything, she would love a girl to teach baking and sewing and all the arts of keeping a fine house. She would not replace Helga, that was true, but in her heart, Gisela thinks she might ease the pain of the loss, just a little.