Even when it rains, the Old Women ride their bicycles to the cemetery, one hand holding an open umbrella, the other steering. On their handlebars sway watering cans, sisal nets with gardening tools and flower pots. After they cross the bridge across the moat, they get off their bicycles. Maria is limping. Nothing, she says when they ask what happened. No, she says when they offer to carry her supplies up the steep path.
They scrape flecks of moss from gravestones, clear family plots from weeds. They know one another’s stories and the stories of the buried ones, recognize the moment before everything shifts—into sorrow or bliss or rage—and calibrate those moments even if half a century has passed. Like when Maria—the day of her wedding to the lanky fisherman she’s loved since she was sixteen—brought the new Doktor to the bed of her mother.
Better if her mother had not tried to make her wear her old-fashioned veil and climbed on a chair to reach the top of her wardrobe. Better if her mother had not broken her femur when the chair tipped. Better if the Herr Doktor had not presented himself at his best—skillful with clean hands and new shoes. Better if Maria had not jilted her fisherman who still waits for her after nearly half a century. Better if Maria had not married the Herr Doktor and moved into his fancy villa with the two verandas. Because he beats her, the Herr Doktor, beats their five daughters. You’d think a family of women could stop one bow-legged man. Poison him. Bludgeon him. Drown him. Suffocate him. The Old Women fantasize.
For now Maria walks at night. Her jilted bridegroom only had to wait one year before she sought him out. She gets her deepest sleep in the morning hours. When her children were young, they’d find her asleep when they’d climb from their beds. The older girls would get the little girls dressed and fed.
Whenever Maria’s husband prescribes another sleeping tincture, Maria pretends to swallow. “My grandmother had the same sleep pattern,” she’ll lie. “Awake in the dark and sleeping into the morning hours.”
Most nights Maria and her jilted bridegroom are on his fishing boat between midnight and predawn, find one another in passion and in tenderness.
He has offered to kill her husband. “Why do you stay with him?” he’ll cry.
“I promised in marriage.”
“You did not promise to let him beat you and our daughters.”
Our daughters.
Three of Maria’s five daughters are his, their appearance no giveaway because both men are blond and bow-legged. Her daughters only know him as the generous fisherman who sells them his freshest fish for the lowest price. All five believe the Herr Doktor is their father, a man they fear and despise.
“I wish they were all mine,” the fisherman will say.
“You’d be a good father.”
“Once I kill him, we can tell our daughters they’re mine.”
“When they visit you in prison? When you get out, we’ll be ancient, and people will whisper at our wedding how bizarre it must be to caress each other when we’re so very old.”
He laughs. “… And that we probably don’t want this anymore.”
“This…” Maria reaches for him.
Although the cemetery is on a hill with a moat around it to drain away groundwater, the earth is spongy, and if you set a plant into the ground, water seeps in from below and the sides. Worse, of course, if you take shovels to a new grave. A coffin will displace that water with a gurgling sigh you don’t want to think about at night. The most merciless burials are for drowned children whose parents have to give them back to water.
“At least the Jansens were spared that.”
The Old Women fret about the Jansen children as they have every day since the drowning, face-down in the Nordsee, though no one saw them like that. No bodies. No graves.
“Lotte still has Wilhelm to live for.”
“That child worries me, so gloomy—”
“He bangs his head.”
“I’ve been bringing her cream.”
“Sister Elinor says Lotte craves red cabbage.”
“I fixed the latch on her door.”
“My sons will repair the roof of her barn.”
“I’m baking bread for her.”
“Cheese and buttermilk.”
The second most merciless burials are for mothers who die in childbirth and are buried with their infants—born dead, or alive for just a few hours.