The Blind Side of the Heart (16 page)

It’s all right. Martha pushed her hair back from her face, suddenly radiant.

Is it? Helene saw Martha’s glazed eyes. She didn’t want to hear any lies.

Yes, everything’s all right! Martha took a deep breath and spread her arms. Helene clasped Martha round the waist. Oh, not so stormy, little one! Martha laughed out loud. Don’t forget, we’re out of doors, everyone can see us!

Oh, Martha, you’re dreadful. Helene smiled, she was ashamed of herself, for all she had been thinking of was comfort. She wanted to comfort Martha, she wanted to know everything about Leontine and Martha, yet she had firmly resolved to ask no questions.

Shall we go upstairs? Martha gave Helene a lustful glance.

Helene couldn’t say no, but she did say: I only wanted to comfort you.

Yes, you do that, comfort me! Martha was breathing audibly and deeply again, in and out. Under her thick coat she wore her new black dress with its high collar. Mariechen had made it specially for the funeral. Its black was a pretty contrast with Martha’s white skin. Her cheeks and her large, delicate nose were reddened by the cold. Her glazed eyes looked brighter than usual. Comfort me!

Helene tried to take Martha’s hand, but Martha snatched it away. She was holding something in that hand, something that now disappeared into her coat pocket.

The sisters went upstairs and closed the door of their room. They dropped on to the bed that they shared and undressed. Helene returned Martha’s kisses, receiving every one of them as if it were meant for her, as if they were not both thinking of Leontine.

My breasts aren’t getting any bigger, Helene whispered later in the blue twilight.

Never mind, said Martha, they’re getting prettier. Isn’t that something?

Helene bit her tongue. Martha could have said that Helene had only to wait another two or three years, after all, and time allowed her to hope, but her kindly answer showed Helene how difficult it was for Martha to pay attention to her sister today. Yet Helene too was thinking mainly of Leontine and her engagement to a man in Berlin. Perhaps Leontine had written Martha a letter, and Martha had been reading it in secret in the closet and put it in her coat pocket before she could take Helene’s hand. A goodbye letter to explain where this fiancé of hers had come from all of a sudden, and why she was going away after all, in spite of her previous promises. Helene wondered what would become of Martha now. But Martha obviously didn’t want to talk about Leontine.

I’m thirsty, said Martha.

Helene got up. She took the water jug off the washstand, poured some water into a mug and handed it to Martha.

Lie down on me, little angel, come on.

Helene shook her head. She sat on the edge of the bed and stroked Martha’s arm.

Please.

Helene shook her head again.

Then I’ll go downstairs. I think I heard Mariechen just now. I’ll help her with supper. Martha stood up, fastened her woollen stockings and put on the black dress.

As soon as Martha had gone out of the door and her footsteps had died away on the stairs, Helene reached out to pick up the coat lying on the floor. She did not find a letter in the pocket, but a handkerchief wrapped round a syringe. A memento of their father? Helene’s thoughts were all in disorder. Why would Martha hide their father’s syringe? Helene found tiny drops of blood on the handkerchief. She quickly rewrapped the syringe in the handkerchief, and the handkerchief fell open once more. Helene rolled it all up together and put the little bundle back where she had found it – why was it in her sister’s coat pocket; why did she go into the closet with that syringe and not with a letter from Leontine?

NO FINER MOMENT

I
n the winter after the death of the girls’ father the Spree froze over from its banks, until in January the ice floes were so close together that the boys of Bautzen tested their daring by crossing the river on them. To Helene, the spectacle was evidence of biblical truth. Couldn’t water freeze even in the desert, and wasn’t Jesus walking on water historical evidence of that fact? Smoke rose from chimneys early in the morning, clouds of it enveloping the town where it stood on its granite rock. Only the tip of the Lauenturm, the Cathedral of St Peter and the leaning Reichenturm, visible from afar, emerged from the mists of Bautzen in the morning hours. Even the high walls of the Ortenburg and the Alte Wasserkunst, the Old Water Tower, were lost in the vapours. Most households ran out of firewood at the end of January, and where money was short and coal deliveries slow people chopped up small items of furniture, stools and benches, garden furniture that seemed useless to them in midwinter. Martha and Helene saw their cash running out. If they managed to sell a calendar or a picture postcard, the money was spent right away. Bread had never been as expensive as it would be tomorrow. They tried to find someone to lease the printing works, but nothing came of all their advertising and enquiries. The factories down by the river were laying off workers, and anyone who could leave went to Breslau, Dresden or Leipzig. Any big city offered better chances of finding food and heated accommodation.

Helene cleared the stockrooms and the office shelves. Thick dust lay on the upper shelves, along with a number of small composition patterns for type that no one would be needing now. Helene had kept paper in the lower compartments in past years, but much of it had found its way into the stove these last few weeks. The brief warmth as it burned was better than no warmth at all. The long planks forming the top shelves would be sure to give a good heat and there’d be no need to take all the shelving apart. Helene planned to use only the wood from those two planks at the top, which were firmly anchored in their supports. The shelving covered the whole long wall of the room from floor to ceiling, then ran from the far corner to the door and beyond. There would still be plenty of space without the top shelves. Helene climbed the ladder with a hammer in her hand. A piece of cardboard had slipped behind one shelf and was stuck there between the plank, the wall and the support. Helene leaned forward, held on to a shelf with one hand and tried to pull the cardboard out. Then she intended to knock the top shelf right out of its anchoring. The cardboard was still stuck. Helene groped her way along the wall and was trying to free one corner of it from the supporting post when she was aware of something metallic moving. She felt behind the outer support for the object, pulled it out and found that she was holding a key. It was a little rusty, but Helene knew at once what it was. She was familiar with its shape and the unusual ornamentation of its head, even with its weight, yet she had never held it in her hand before. It looked a little smaller, as if it had shrunk. Helene well remembered how, before the war, her father used to clear the till at the end of the day, take the key and go into the back room with the money in his hands. Then he opened the large cupboard. Although Helene might already be turning to the door when he opened the till, he winked at her every evening with the eye that would be missing later and said: You stand guard at the doorway, will you? And if anyone comes, just whistle. Sometimes Helene said: Girls aren’t supposed to whistle. Then he would smile and reply: Oh, are you a girl, then? And once, half hidden by the open cupboard door, he chanted the lines he had written in her album:
Sweet as the violet be, /virtuous, modest and pure, /not like the rose whom we see/flaunting her full-blown allure.
Then he changed his tone of voice, adjuring her almost menacingly: But all girls must know how to whistle, just you remember that.

Helene knew that the door to the safe was in the back wall of that cupboard. In all the years of her father’s absence the key had not turned up, and after his return there had been no opportunity to ask him about it. Helene loved her father and, in the old days, when he stroked her hair and drew her head towards him as if it were the head of his big dog, she wouldn’t for anything have endangered that sense of security; she would keep still until he sent her out to the kitchen or into the street with a kindly little tap on the behind. All the same, Helene didn’t care for those lines about the violet. She liked the sweet scent of violets and their delicate appearance, but she admired the upright growth of roses at least as much, the thorns they grew to protect themselves and their bright colours, pink unfolding like dawn, yellow like late October sunlight. In particular she loved the old song about the Virgin Mary walking through a wood of thorns, which all burst into flower and bear roses. Leontine had taught it to them before she went to Berlin. Weren’t those thorns showing Mary how much they respected and even worshipped her by flowering? Everything about the rose seemed to Helene admirable, even enviable. Out of respect for her father she made an attempt to like the allegory of girls seen as flowers, but it was only an attempt and went no further. Since last year Helene had been growing roses, not violets, in the garden outside the house. They were not really garden flowers but wild roses that she had found and dug up on the slopes of the Schafberg.

Now, when Helene and Martha opened the safe for the first time, they found old banknotes arranged in several wads, amounting in all to a good two thousand marks, which made them laugh. To think what they could have bought with that years ago! Now it might buy a whole loaf, or anyway half a loaf. At least half a pound of bread. Two thousand loaves back then, claimed Martha. They discovered a leather address book with the cut edges of the pages gilded, and a folder containing lithographs of various sizes and, judging by the typography, of different origins, arranged in no particular order. The lithographs were pictures of women with nothing or very little on. Curvaceous women, very unlike the sisters themselves and their mother. Women in just their stockings, women with veils and tight-fitting basques, as well as women wearing nothing whatsoever.

The sisters set to work to write the names and addresses from the leather book on envelopes. They put a death announcement for their father in each envelope. Under ‘S’ they found the name of an aunt or maybe cousin they had never heard of before. It said: Fanny Steinitz. Under the name their father had written, in the fine script of a meticulous bookkeeper, a note in brackets: (Selma’s cousin, the daughter of Hugo Steinitz’s late brother). The address for Fanny Steinitz was number 21 Achenbachstrasse, W 50, Wilmersdorf, Berlin.

Even before Helene managed to catch her mother at a moment of mental clarity during the next week and took the opportunity of asking about her cousin who lived in Berlin, she wrote a short letter on her own initiative. Dear Aunt, she began, unfortunately we are sending you sad news today. Our father, your cousin Selma Würsich’s husband, died on 11 November last year from the consequences of his war wounds. You will find our death announcement enclosed. Helene wondered whether, and in what words, to mention and explain her mother’s condition. After all, the cousin would be surprised to get a letter from her nieces, not her cousin in person. She added: I am sure our mother would send you her best wishes, but sad to say she has been in very poor heath for the last few years. With our very best wishes, your nieces Martha and Helene Würsich.

Helene could not be sure whether their aunt still lived at the same address. Wouldn’t she have married some time over the past years, in which case her surname would not be the same today? Their aunt might well be surprised to find them getting in touch after such a long time – moreover, there must be some reason for the absence of any mention of this maternal cousin of theirs in the family stories they had been told. But Helene wanted to write this letter. Her curiosity and her hope of receiving an answer from Berlin outweighed her doubts, and she quickly dismissed them all.

It was Easter before the postman brought a strangely narrow, folded envelope addressed to Fräulein Helene Würsich. Their aunt wrote in a bold hand, the letters leaning far to the right, the upper loops of the ‘H’ in Helene’s name just touching the finely traced letter ‘e’. This, wrote Aunt Fanny, was a wonderful surprise! After that exclamatory opening she left two lines blank. It was a long time since she’d heard anything of that crazy cousin of hers. She was delighted to hear that two children had obviously arrived over the years, for they had not been in touch since the birth of the first child, Martha. She had always wondered whether her cousin had broken off contact with her because of their old quarrels, or might even have died in childbirth. In a postscript Aunt Fanny asked her nieces whether their mother was seriously ill.

A correspondence began. There was little to say about their mother, Helene replied, she hadn’t been well for years and it was unlikely that any doctor could help her. She consulted Martha about the best way to describe their mother’s condition. To say she was in poor health did not mean much, particularly as there was nothing organically wrong with her. They remembered Lady Midday, the Noonday Witch whom Mariechen mentioned now and then, saying with a curious smile that her lady, as she called the girls’ mother, just wouldn’t speak to the spirit who appears in the harvest fields at noon and can confuse your mind or even kill you, unless you hold her attention for an hour by talking about flax. There was nothing to be done about it, said Mariechen, shrugging her shoulders, although all her lady had to do was talk to the Noonday Witch for an hour about the working of flax, that was all. Mariechen’s eyes twinkled. Just passing on a little wisdom, she told the girls. Martha and Helene had known the tale of the Noonday Witch as long as they could remember; there was something comforting about it, because it suggested that their mother’s confused state of mind was merely a curse that could easily be lifted. Nothing to be done about it, however, Mariechen repeated, shrugging again, and her smile showed she was sure of the spirit’s powers and felt only a tiny scrap of sympathy for her disbelieving mistress. On the other hand, as things were Mariechen had her lady to herself, along with her beliefs. Her lady couldn’t run away. But Martha and Helene did not write to their aunt in Berlin about the Noonday Witch; they did not want Fanny Steinitz thinking of them in connection with rustic superstition and supposing that they must be simple-minded. So they merely gave a factual account of some malady that no one could explain: it was hard to pin down any cause for their mother’s mental anguish and it seemed impossible to treat it.