Tilli. Breasts swollen, hot with milk her own girl will never drink because the new parents have left with her. To ease the swelling Sister Franziska packs cold, dry cabbage leaves around Tilli’s breasts where her chest, just last Christmas, was as flat as her twin brother’s when she wrestled him in the hayloft. They’ve wrestled since before they could walk, in their cradle, their bed, poking and pinching each other, more freckles than white skin all over their bodies, the comfort and familiar shape soothing.
Older by forty-one minutes, Tilli is the stronger twin.
That’s what their father says. He likes to tap-tap their noses with his own. “Listen to your sister, Alfred.”
Their mother says, “You are the oldest, Tilli. You must look out for him.”
Sister Franziska leads Tilli to the house of the toymaker. The instant they enter, the cries of a baby make Tilli’s breasts leak. Like wetting myself, only in the wrong place.
In the kitchen the priest and toymaker wait. Upstairs the toymaker’s wife sits on the bed, clutching a big, furious baby who’s straining away from her. Sister catches the baby, swirls him around and toward Tilli who hides the front of her blouse with both hands. Sister asks Tilli to open her arms for the baby. But when she tries to reach across him to unbutton the blouse, Tilli holds the baby like a shield. Wet and hot on the insides of her thighs dripping from the hollow wet and hot and open and the baby shrieks and Tilli squeezes her thighs together to keep from spilling herself on the floorboards and the amber beads of Sister’s rosary suck the light from the window as she peels back the cabbage leaves. Slippery—
As a child, Tilli played with chunks of amber she and her twin gathered along the Baltic Sea. You can tell amber from other stones: it makes sparks when you rub it against your clothes, and it makes the hairs on your arms stand up. At home, they line up their treasures on the windowsills with amber their mother collected as a child, the biggest a quarter-pound. Together, they study each find, fascinated by tiny animals trapped in golden resin from pine trees—a beetle or a worm or a spider still in its web—so lifelike that any moment they may crawl again.
“Relics,” Alfred says.
Their mother wears her favorite amber on a ribbon around her neck. To keep it shiny, her mother polishes it with her spit. One edge chipped after it was smoothed by the sea, but inside the green moth levitates, unharmed.
“Insects,” she teaches her twins, “are lured by the smell of resin that will trap them, preserve them for millions of years. Since amber is heavier than water, it drifts along the floor of the seas with the currents until a high tide throws it ashore.”
In the Stone Age, Tilli and Alfred learn, humans used amber for trade and for ornaments. And for healing. Worn in a pouch near your pain, amber cures toothaches and bellyaches. If you rub Bernstein across a snakebite, it nullifies the poison; and if you lay amber on the collarbone of a pregnant woman, she’ll confess her secret the moment she wakes up.
“Here now here…” Sister tugs at Tilli’s nipple.
Tilli flinches.
“For the baby.” Sister tugs Tilli’s nipple into the baby’s mouth.
Thin and sharp and fast like an arrow shot from inside tracking the trajectory of need.
Then a tingling, a stinging as her milk trickles to him, sticky and yellow.
“Vormilch,” Sister Franziska says. “He won’t get much from you this first time. Just a few drops.”
Vormilch. Milk that comes before milk. Other Girls had Vormilch before Sister Franziska bound their breasts and brewed sage tea. Tilli stifles a sob of release when the baby sucks right away and his shrieks dwindle to sniffles at her nipple that fits him and unfurls his belly. He fills her arms, four times as heavy as her own girl.
She sees her mother lifting the ribbon with her amber moth amulet to Tilli’s neck. Saying, “Let me see how this looks on you.” But her mother’s hands tremble, and Tilli instinctively steps from the circle of ribbon—why? why then?—before the amulet can graze her skin. When it slips from the ribbon to the floor, Tilli’s mother laughs uneasily, such dread in her eyes, recognizing what Tilli can’t begin to understand though she lives on a farm.
From then on wrestling becomes a secret. Still, twice they get caught. Thrashed with the carpet beater. Locked into separate places: cellar and stable.
The morning their father saddles two horses and rides off with Alfred to board him with a farmer two hours away—Work him hard, he demands—their mother takes Tilli to the midwife’s house.
In the kitchen she makes Tilli lie on the table and presses one ear against her belly. “Pull her legs apart.”
“She can’t be pregnant,” cries Tilli’s mother.
“Wider.”
“She’s only eleven.”
“I had another eleven-year-old,” the midwife whispers. “Barely survived. The baby didn’t.”
Her mother’s hand on Tilli’s belly. A fish leaping oh—
Sister Franziska straightens the mother’s legs on the bed. Lowers her head to the pillow. But the mother spins her face toward Tilli. Streaks of silt on her neck and arms. Eyes like cracked glass. “You are a child—”
“She’s the only one with milk.” Sister Franziska kneels and brings her arms around the mother’s shoulders. “Lie down now.”
“Don’t you have someone older?”
“Veronika. But her milk has almost dried up. I won’t make her start over again.”
“How old?”
“Sixteen.”
“No, no—this child.”
“Eleven.”
“This is so very wrong.”
Tilli kisses the little boy. Too late, the Sisters said. Except now Tilli suspects why they haven’t let her nurse her own girl—because of this … this odd and sweet fusion of a baby’s mouth with your nipple that sets your body alight, stuns you with foreknowledge—more potent than memory—that he’ll be the last child to ever drink from you.
Think how much stronger this would be with my own.
Too late—
Think of all the children who are never chosen.
“We can tell people the child is mine,” her mother whispered. “Raise it as ours—”
“You don’t want that,” her father whispered.
“Some women raise—”
“If it came from anyone other than Alfred.”
“It’s family.”
“Too much so. What if it has a clubfoot? A harelip? Water on the brain—”
Tilli’s mother covers her eyes.
And Tilli becomes invisible. So invisible her parents no longer bother to whisper.
“And what if we raised it—what then? She’ll have more bastards … maybe one without a face.”
Without a face? Tilli can’t breathe.
“We never saw that one,” says her mother.
“Others saw. And those parents are just cousins. Brother and sister is worse.”
“A sin.”
Once they name it, sin takes root. Spreads. Blends their voices.
“The worst of all sins.”
“They must have known.”
“They’ve seen dogs hump. Horses.”
“Held a heifer ready to be mounted.”
“Those two cannot stay away from each other.”
“It’s rather that she won’t stay away.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“If we send her away he’ll take his seed elsewhere.”
Sister shifts the baby to Tilli’s other breast.
“How old?” Tilli whispers.
“Eight months.”
Eight months.
Two hundred forty days.
Two hundred forty times as old as my own girl.
Tilli misses her brother. Misses the habit of knowing he’s close by. He doesn’t have that either, knowing she’s close by. Itching in her palms circles her fingers, circles her palms to the backs of her hands as it does after she eats chicken, even just a few shreds in the soup last night. The baby’s pudgy hands pat her breasts.
“I’ll pray with you, Frau Jansen.” Sister Franziska nudges her rosary at the toymaker’s wife who twists her fingers into a knot that won’t let the rosary in. Tilli wants to snatch it, hide it, especially when Sister drapes it around the mother’s wrists.
I’ll steal the rosary, Tilli promises the mother silently. I will.
Downstairs the voices of the priest and the toymaker. The toymaker’s voice listless, not exuberant like yesterday at the Zirkus when Tilli saw him with his arm around his wife. A pretty man. Dangerous to marry a man prettier than you. Every girl knows that. But the toymaker’s wife felt pretty. Tilli could tell by the way she stood so close to her husband with this baby they made together balanced on her hip. For everyone to see. Two girls and a boy tug at them; the girls dark-haired like their father, the boy fair like his mother and baby brother. When the parents smile at each other, Tilli wishes they were hers. Parents like that follow their children to the concession stand, where the father buys little sticks with honeyed nuts for the three oldest, tickling beneath their chins to make them giggle. Parents like that keep their children close by.
“A birthing clinic,” Tilli’s mother said. “For girls like you.”
Her father said, “You leave tomorrow. On the train.”
“When can I come home?”
Tilli’s mother won’t look at her. Her face is gray.
“Two trains and a ferry,” says her father.
“He’ll travel with you,” says her mother.
Dawn. And her mother with her arms down her sides. Stiff arms. Arms too heavy to lift when Tilli embraces her.
“Mutti—” she screams. “Mutti—”
Her mother motions to the food she’s packed.
Hanover to Hamburg: Her father sits across from Tilli, one leg stretched across the aisle so she can’t run away.
Hamburg to Husum: His eyes are half-closed, and it comes to her that he’s ashamed of her.
Husum to Nordstrand: He won’t speak to her until he walks her onto the ferry. “I want to be clear about this. You cannot come home.”
“Never?”
“You must never contact us.”
“But I’ll give it away, the baby. I’ll—”
“We cannot trust you with your brother.”
“No one needs to know—”
“Nuns will pick you up on the other side.” He strides off the ferry, holds up both palms to stop her.
On the dock he waits till the ferry is out too far for her to swim back without drowning.
Nothing out there. Nothing outside my body that is mine. And with that Tilli’s insides clench around the baby. It’s all I have.
Her first night in the long dormitory of the St. Margaret Home the moon keeps her awake; she cries without sound, pretends to sleep while other Girls practice dance steps in their long nightgowns. But they won’t let her pretend. Tug her from her bed and into their circle, warn that dancing can get you big. Dancing with men, that is. Two have taken lessons at a Tanzschule—dance school—and show Tilli how to waltz and polka. They don’t know that the Sisters can hear them dance and are glad for that brief joy. None of the Girls are from Nordstrand. To take a pregnant daughter to a home nearby invites gossip, shame for generations to come. Instead, a daughter is sent away—as far as a family can afford—to shed all evidence of her sin and return home if her parents let her as if nothing happened during this long interruption of her life.
In class the Girls throw blackboard erasers at each other till puffs of chalk swirl and settle on Sisters’ habits; but their disobedience stirs Tilli, inspires her. She helps Veronika stitch the ends of sleeves shut and giggles when other Girls’ arms get stuck. Lies are not lies, Veronika says, if they have to do with pranks. Then they don’t need to be confessed.