That night in the Big Nursery, Tilli lies awake in the alcove across from the beds of the sleeping children, four rows of six. As she tries to steady her breath—louder and faster than the breaths of these children—she longs to be an Old Woman. First Sabine will become an Old Woman. Then Lotte. And then Tilli will join that circle. And never be alone again and no one ever telling me to go away or stay because I’ll be the one who gets to say.
The first time she took Wilhelm to her breast, she made a promise to Lotte to steal Sister Franziska’s rosary, a silent promise that matters more than spoken words. She leans over the side of her bed, slides her handkerchief box from the satchel Sister Franziska has let her pack. In the dark she tiptoes past the little beds and down the stairs to the infirmary where she slips the rosary from the key of the medicine cabinet. In the kitchen she melts its amber beads in a jar set within a pot of boiling water. As she waits for the amber to soften, it releases the scent of childhood, of pine and salt. She pummels it into one sticky lump, cuts that into pear-shaped halves the size of her little finger, jiggles the moon clippings of Wilhelm’s fingernails from her handkerchief box, and presses them into the amber halves before she connects them again. With her hairpin she pokes an opening for a cord. Come light of morning, she sees the bubbles that have settled around the moons like halos.
The Big Nursery is much bigger than the Little Nursery. Three rooms: The sleeping room. The learning room. And between them the playing room with a big table where the children clamor to stick their fingers into the jam because Tilli did it first, one long finger to fish for the dark speck inside the jam. Not a fly but a bread crumb that looks like a fly but isn’t a fly because Tilli gets it out, more jam on her finger than needs to be.
She licks it. Makes her eyes go big.
“Me.”
“Jam.”
“Since you’ve finished your barley soup…” Barley soup with carrots and bits of apple that she carried up from the kitchen for her children.
“Me. Me.”
They lean across the table, try to climb on it.
Tilli holds the jar upside down to make it easy for their little fingers. So what if jam gets the table sticky? She wants to cheer them up. They shriek with delight that comes from the forbidden. Jam on their cheeks. Around their lips. The Sisters are shadows that fade for Tilli when she plays with the children, when their joy restores some of the warmth beneath her heart where her own girl slept till she was born and where Wilhelm lived until she was banished from the Little Nursery. She still sees him, but not enough.
“Fizzy!” the children cry.
“Ticklish!”
They point to her amulet where it lies against the dip of her throat, the shimmer of honey. She keeps it shiny by rubbing it with spit every day.
“The hair on my arm,” the children cry.
“Make it stand up, please.”
“My arm first.”
She slips off her amulet. As the children press against her, she sways the amber against their arms, and they giggle at the sparks. She loves her work with the big children far more than she thought she would when Sister Franziska banished her from the Little Nursery a month ago.
“Slivers of moon inside.” She kneels amid the children so they can see the pale slivers inside her amulet.
“How did you get them, Fräulein Tilli?”
“From the sky. They’re magical.”
Magical. The children sigh with wonder.
As soon as Lotte believes her husband will never come home, she has a dream about waking up to the smell of gravy, rich and brown, and feels a pulling in her groin, a heat—
—and running downstairs barefoot in her nightgown wondering if you can smell anything while sleeping and in her kitchen Kalle cooks his Sunday gravy, browns a fist-size chunk of meat with onions and bacon, and he doesn’t notice her though she stands behind him with her arms around him and her palms on his chest so hot his skin hot the air stirring he’s stirring—his miracle not loaves and fishes but gravy he can expand till he has plenty—and just before his gravy is about to burn he adds water, lets it hiss and boil and thicken, and again he stirs and browns until she smells his gravy on her skin and in the mist that surrounds her house and—
—dawn, then. And her house too cold to hold any smells, other than the smell of cold itself: stone and dampness and snow. Lotte shivers, tugs the bedding around her shoulders. Not Sunday. But a watery Tuesday in February. By late morning she’s outside with Wilhelm beneath a patchy-thin cover of clouds, hanging laundry on the line. He takes one cautious step, clutches a fold of her skirt. Yesterday he took his very first step away from her. Now he studies the ground as if considering his next step. Much of the snow has melted, softening earth into mud, but some snow clings to the bottoms of dried grasses, pockmarked where rain has pelted it. Above the darker stones the snow is gone.
Wilhelm takes another step. Tips his face to his mother, astonished by what he can do, beams at her.
“Look at you!” She laughs, sets her laundry basket on a flat stone, and squats, her arms one safe circle where he can walk. Another step—
—and it’s then that her husband rides into the yard on a stiff-legged zebra. Its back is damp. So are Kalle’s shoulders and hat. And he’s already wrong because he sees her smiling and has no idea it’s at Wilhelm, not at him, because he smiles at her.
“Please,” he says.
His presence intrudes on her longing for him when longing itself has become familiar. She wants to fly at him with her fists raised.
“Lotte,” he whispers.
Wilhelm teeters on his baby legs, and she tightens her arms around him, feels the edges of shells he’s crammed inside his pockets again, makes herself think of those shells, sees herself emptying the pockets before the wash. How many times have you turned your children’s pockets and socks to get at the stones and shells and sand? Sand is the hardest because it will hide for several washings in seams and in corners. Long after the wave you still find sand in the socks of your children.
Kalle slides off the zebra, his legs as stiff as the zebra’s, as though he’s been riding it every day of the six months he’s been gone.
“I have—” He clears his throat. “I have an idea.”
She won’t speak. Won’t make this easier for him, though her body is straining for him as if they had no betrayal or death between them.
“An idea for a trade,” Kalle says. Away from his family he has felt unmoored, floaty; has sketched his children the way he used to, the easy curve of Lotte around them before and after birth; but they no longer come together for him, are merely charcoal lines on paper that prove how much he has lost. So much easier to draw animals.
“The zebra can bring you income.” Kalle pats its mangy flank.
“I can raise colonies of moths in that fur and sell them.”
“That’s the Lotte I know.”
“You don’t know me.”
Wilhelm hides against Mutti’s leg, peers at the horse-with-stripes as it smiles, snorts, curls its lips, shows him long teeth. Wilhelm curls his own lips, shows his own teeth to horse-with-stripes.
“I want to help, Lotte, with the farm and—”
“There is no work for you.”
“You can rent the barn to the Ludwig Zirkus. I can bring a few sick animals, make them stronger here.” Three weeks ago he seized a moment of disagreement over killing this ancient zebra and offered to stable her on the farm his wife brought into the marriage. It gives him cause to stay without telling Lotte he wants to come home. And he doesn’t, or at least isn’t sure enough to let her know that he doesn’t know. “And maybe,” he adds, “next winter the entire Zirkus can winter over.”
“I’ve leased the farm to the sexton.”
“Old Niessen? Who drinks the piss of sheep?”
“The piss of goats.”
“Goats, then.”
“And he doesn’t drink it. He gets it through a syringe.”
“I don’t like another man doing my work.”
“Your work?” she asks, ablaze with anger.