I marvel at my daughter’s strong little body.
Marvel at her first step.
Her first word: Mutti.
When she laughs her belly quivers; and when she gets upset she bawls like a lost calf. I brace myself. Try to hold the middle. While I stitch, she sits on the floor by my sewing box, plays with the shiniest buttons, pushes them toward stripes of sun that lie on the floor. Heike moves with the sun.
From Herr Ludwig she learns to count by lining up her buttons and clapping her chubby hands: Eins zwei drei vier eins zwei drei vier … She is learning so quickly. Faster and faster she gets to twelve. Where she stops. And starts with one again.
A fidgety sleeper, she’ll shrug off her covers. Always warm where I’m chilly. Just before dawn she’ll burrow into bottomless sleep and fight awakening. Every morning a new battle with the light; eventually, I let her sleep. No matter what time she climbs out of bed, she’s groggy.
Over the next years I learn how time and facts can be manipulated; whenever Heike asks about her father, I concoct tales to shield her from the truth that he abandoned us. Her favorite tale is of him flying.
“Tell me the story of how my Vati could fly.”
“When your father flew through the air, every woman in the audience believed he was looking at her alone.”
“But then he fell.”
“True.”
“And then he died.”
“Now he’s in a beautiful cemetery.”
“On a hill.”
“True.”
“With statues.”
“Big statues, ja.”
“Apple trees.”
“True.” I beam at her.
“I saw how he fell.”
“You weren’t born yet, Heike.”
“I saw him.”
It unnerves me how she absorbs my lies as memories of her own—his fall, his death, yellow sawdust on his face.
Along the way I befriend women. If you want friends, Luzia has told me, you cannot wait because soon you’ll be on the road again. “You have to charm them with your frankness, your humor, your praise of whatever you can genuinely praise about them.”
“I already have you.”
“You do. But you need more friends.”
“Sometimes I shock people,” I tell Luzia, hoping she’ll say I don’t shock her.
But she nods.
“I was shy as a girl until I found I’m not afraid to say what I think. You think I shock people?”
“Ja.”
“Do I have to be more careful?”
“You like to shock people.”
I have to laugh. “Yes.”
“Why give that up? We’re never anywhere long enough for you to offend anyone.”
“I don’t want to push you away.”
“No chance.”
For the third time in a week, Heike wants the story about the frozen-together dogs.
“One cold day my Vati saved two dogs.”
“True.”
“It was very, very cold.”
“Ja. He ran from our wagon into the deep…” I wait for her to finish my sentence.
“… snow and he chased the boys away because they … because—”
“Snowballs,” I prompt.
“Because the boys threw snowballs at the dogs.”
“Your father helped the dogs get apart.”
“Was I born yet, Mutti?”
“You were still waiting to born.”
She pats my belly.
“Inside our wagon I kept us warm…”
“With me in your belly.”
No stories of storks and babies for my daughter.
I kiss the top of her head. “Then I heaped all our scarves and all our blankets on the bed.”
Of course I don’t tell her how I heated her father’s chilled body with mine, fingers roving over him, pulling the most frozen part of him into myself, and how I was overcome by an odd and ancient power that reached for me through centuries. And after all I don’t tell Heike, I take her to play in Luzia’s wagon while I rush back and lock the door so that I can lie with my hands on myself until they become his.
You braid your daughter’s hair.
Remind her to wash her hands.
Demonstrate for the hundredth time how to tie her shoes.
How to boil two eggs.
To count beyond twelve.
The again and again.
And no forward.
When she doesn’t want to hear or see you, she shakes her head and makes her hair fly till she’s dizzy, then opens her arms to steady herself.
Or fly away?
The winter she’s seven, I send her to school in Emmerich; but she runs away from school, new scratches on her knees and elbows.
“It pains me,” her teacher tells me, “to tell you that your daughter is quite … slow. That’s why other children push and tease—”
“You must not let them do that to her.”
“That’s what I try.” She nods, a small-boned woman with a friendly mouth. It’s clearly hard for her to say this: “Heike’s mind cannot—”
I must not allow her to finish. “I read to my daughter every evening.”
She folds her hands as if in prayer, tips her fingers against her jaw.
“My Heike has always been a good learner. She remembers the stories I tell her, and she tells them back to me.”
“She has some … basic knowledge.”
“Good, then.”
“But it pains me to tell you—”
Keep your pain to yourself, I want to shout.
“—that Heike’s mind cannot hold on to more advanced learning.”
There it is—what I’ve been trying to figure out for many months—why Heike is no longer making progress with numbers and the alphabet and linking letters into words.
“Heike gets in her own way if she doesn’t want to do something,” says the teacher. “She’ll put the side of her face on the desk, slide it back and forth, avoids eye contact.”
“I’ve never seen her do that,” I lie.
“Heike puts a lot of effort—”
I lean toward the teacher.
“—into not learning.”
“I promise to work harder. I’ll practice letters with her, words … and I’ll read her stories till she falls asleep and—”
“Sehr gut.” Heike’s teacher sounds pleased. Very good.
“—and someone else in our family … her grandfather will teach her more about numbers.”
“That’s exactly what we recommend for children like Heike.”
Children like Heike?
But maybe I should be encouraged. I imagine all of us helping Heike to move forward, including this teacher who smiles although her friendly mouth quivers.
“We recommend that the family teaches the child.”
“I already have some plans how we—”
“At home.”
It’s only then that I understand in my bones: my instinct to keep Heike safe can never be enough, no matter how many people teach her about words and numbers and stars, about nature and legends, and I love her fiercely—a thousand times more than I already do.
Herr Ludwig counts and writes down numbers with Heike; Luzia shows her how to weave long grasses across a forked branch; I teach her how to form the easiest letters, beginning with: o … c … v … This is better for her, we reason, than school, where she’ll learn to compare herself to other children, get hurt by words and fists.
She loves the learning, loves our attention, takes into her mind as much as a seven-year-old will. And forgets the rest. People can’t tell, not yet—she’s still like other seven-year-olds. Fast and agile. Running, skipping, somersaults. Fascinated by the trapeze. Too dangerous. The Ludwigs and I conspire to distract her. Herr Ludwig hires her to help with his act, to follow him into the arena with the Zirkus Bible, watchful about the order of Bible stories he directs. I nudge her into the orchestra conducted by Herr Ludwig, who procures a wooden box with a child-size cello. Heike whispers to her cello. Listens to it. With music there’s nothing she has to learn or remember; it already lives inside her, ready for the hum and vibration of her cello. Music threads itself through her body, through her arms and fingers and chin and thighs.
In the audiences I notice other women’s daughters dressed up for the occasion, daughters who will grow into women. Eventually, I come to pity their mothers. My daughter will always be my girl.
People click their tongues. “That one…”
Let her be! Let her be a child, then. Mine—
I teach her as much as she can take in, choose tasks we can do together. I make new costumes, and she loves the silken and diaphanous fabrics, wraps herself into the brilliant colors that contrast this barren landscape. When I mend rips and holes, she does the basting, long uneven stitches, while I do the fine hemming and seaming; and all along I praise her—I have to, praise every tiny effort, every tiny fragment of every tiny damn effort, every—
She cups my cheek.
I flinch from her hand.
“Mutti?”
I smile. Make my lips go wide. Turn them up at the ends.
“Are you angry with me, Mutti?”
“No. No no no. No—”
“You’re making your scary smile.”
Have I mentioned my delight in my daughter? She likes flying insects. Strawberries. Pretty buttons. Whenever she sees one she likes, I buy it for us—one at a time—and design costumes to go with those buttons, reinforcing seams to withstand vigorous acts. Old costumes I restore—apostles and angels—concealing worn fabric and puckered seams with trim and embroidery. I know the difference between expensive fabric and cheap, and the Ludwigs let me buy the best they can afford. I teach Heike what I’ve known since childhood watching my mother sew: even cheap fabric will look expensive if you add quality buttons.
She is the most enchanting girl I know. When she plays the cello, she is resilient, intuitive, this girl who cannot count past twelve, accomplished with the cello in a way no one can understand. As she grows, the cellos grow too. She laughs and weeps easily, says whatever she thinks.
“Music is your magic,” Herr Ludwig tells her, “your very own magic. We’re all magicians in a way, divining what lies beneath the surface of the ordinary and the extraordinary. And the amazing.”