Starting today, I’m going to be publishing my novel, Above the River, right here on my blog feed, in serialized form. Every week or so, I’ll put up one or two chapters as a new blog post. I’m going to be continuing to put up my regular blog posts here, too. To make it easier for folks to want to keep up with the novel without having to scroll through blog posts, I’ve added a new page to this site: “Above the River”. Each time I post a new installment as a blog post, I’ll also add the new chapters to the bottom of that page. You’ll still have to scroll down to find the new chapters, but at least they’ll all be there in one place. It feels very exciting and fun to be sharing the novel with you in a serialized form. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it this way, too!
Above the River
by Sue Downing
Author’s Note: What follows is a work of fiction. All characters in this novel are fictional, with the exception of Bruno Groening (1906-1959, Germany) and his assistant, Egon Artur Schmidt. Dubbed “The Miracle Healer” by the media, Groening attracted great crowds and a large number of followers, beginning in the late 1940s. Thousands of these people were healed of a wide variety of diseases and disorders after spending time in Groening’s presence. Groening had no medical training. Nor was he licensed as a healing practitioner. He asserted that any healing people experienced through their encounters with him was brought about not by him, but by God, whom he called “the greatest physician”. The German government initiated several legal cases against Groening, on the grounds that he had violated the Healing Practitioners Act. Although he was fined for his activities, he was never jailed. No verdict was rendered in Groening’s final trial: He passed away while it was still in progress.
Groening appears in this novel, as does his assistant, Egon Artur Schmidt, but the novel’s characters, and the scenes depicting their interactions with Groening, are entirely fictional. However, I have used many of Groening’s own words in these scenes: extracts from lectures he gave, which were recorded, and subsequently transcribed, and translated into English. I have used boldface type in the text to indicate the phrases and sentences which are Groening’s. I am deeply grateful to the Bruno Groening Circle of Friends for granting me access to these transcribed, translated lectures, and for granting me permission to use excerpts from them in this novel.
* * *
Above the River
Thoughts are free. Who can guess them?
They fly by like nocturnal shadows.
No person can know them, no hunter can shoot them
with powder and lead: Thoughts are free.
I think what I want, and what delights me,
Still always reticent, and as it is suitable.
My wish and desire, no one can deny me.
And so it will always be: Thoughts are free!
And if I am thrown into the darkest dungeon,
All of these are futile acts,
Because my thoughts tear apart
All gates and walls: Thoughts are free!
– From the song “Thoughts are Free”,
Hoffmann von Fallersleben
Chapter 1
August 6, 1949
Gassmann-Bunke family homestead
Near Varel, Germany
It is time. Ethel Bunke comes into the kitchen of her family’s log home. Her hazel eyes float quickly and almost haphazardly over this small and that large object. It’s as though she wishes to slowly take in every detail of this kitchen that has formed the comforting shape of her daily life for the forty-five years she has been alive. There’s the stove, so central and friendly that her fingertips can feel its scratches and firmness without even touching them. A jar of flour, not quite two-thirds full, stands on the wooden counter. This reminds her of the crock of sourdough starter in the cellar. A sudden wish to pack it into her suitcase floods her heart. No. No need. Mama and Kristina will use it here. And anyway, Ethel reminds herself, I’ll be back in a few months! Besides, she knows that there is plenty of flour where she’s headed. Even so, she also knows that the new and, as yet, un-breathed air, different humidity levels, and unfamiliar yeasts of the air there will create an entirely new sourdough starter. A new starter. Their entire family desperately needs a new start. Really, Ethel thinks, I suppose we’ve already gotten our new start. Now we each have to choose how to make use of it.
She is moving around the kitchen, her slim body appearing to float, her arms resembling wings riding the air currents. The sunlight creates a halo around her blonde curls.
“Lina?” she calls out to her daughter, in a what is barely even a whisper. Then, realizing how softly she’s spoken, she calls out again. “Lina?” There is more volume in her words this time, and more depth. “Your brother’s pulling the car up. Did you hear? Are you ready?”
Her twenty-year-old daughter’s answer flows forth from the bedroom next to the kitchen. Her voice is light and melodious, like her mother’s, and quiet, but assured. “I heard, Mama. I’m just about ready.”
“Good, because the train won’t wait.” Looking around, Ethel’s gaze falls upon her right hand. She turns her hand this way and that, contemplating the wooden ring that adorns her third finger. The ring has been worn smoother over the past twenty-seven years, and the carved flower atop it is chipped in one spot. But it is still beautiful. Ethel runs the fingers of her left hand over the ring, recalling the joy she’d felt on the day Viktor placed it on her finger.
Now she stands up, walks over to an open wooden shelf on the plaster wall to the right of the stove. She picks up the photo that is leaning there, a close-up of a man’s face. Lacking a frame, the photo, although on thick, postcard stock, has bowed slightly in the middle under the influence of humidity, and its bottom edge and corners are roughened from frequent handling. Ethel places the photo inside a largish envelope that holds her and Lina’s travelling documents, and slips the envelope into a large, brown leather handbag that she hardly ever uses. She rarely leaves the homestead, after all, except to do this or that shopping, or to visit her great-aunt Lorena, who lives a couple of miles down the road on her own family’s farm.
Lina, meanwhile, sits for another minute in her familiar chair. In a gesture she perfected in childhood, she wraps the end of her waist-length dishwater-blonde braid around her right wrist and lightly grasps it with her fingertips Unlike her mother, she is not casting any final glances around this room. She feels no need to seek to imprint anything here on her mind. In the course of the past four years, she has, without even trying to, committed every sensory detail of her bedroom to her memory. The plaster walls, stained here and there by dampness, or marred by small holes. The scent of the air during the various seasons, the spots where her featherbed is higher or lower, firmer or softer. The way the upholstered chair’s arms and cushion feel beneath her forearms and thighs. She knows it all by heart.
Her left hand is lying, palm up, on her lap. In the palm of her right hand, beneath the tuft of braid between her thumb and forefinger, there lies a small fabric pouch with a drawstring cord that is looped around Lina’s middle finger. The pouch contains something small and round and hard.
“Just about ready,” Lina repeats softly, as she closes her hand gently over the pouch. Shutting her eyes, she sits that way for a brief minute. Then an exuberant smile spreads across her face, and she opens her eyes. She turns in her seat to the small table that stands between her chair and the bed, and shifts her gaze to the photo that leans against the reading lamp on the table. A close-up of a man’s face. She looks into his eyes. He into hers. She whispers two short phrases.
Then Lina picks up the photo and slips it into what is, essentially, a fabric envelope, and folds the flap over it, as an extra layer of protection. She leans over and picks up the large hand bag that is leaning against her chair. Opening it, she carefully slips the now-cushioned frame inside. But the small pouch remains in Lina’s hand, as it generally does, both day and night, the object it holds thus protected. And also protective.
Ethel ethereal and yet fully human figure appears in the doorway. She smiles when she sees her daughter’s glowing face and shining gray eyes. “Ready?”
Lina smiles back as she rises from her chair. Her mother is struck by how tall and strong she looks. And yet flexible, like a sapling that’s been replanted in a new spot, in fresh earth.
“I am now,” Lina tells her.
Chapter 2
August 10, 1944
Gassmann-Bunke homestead
No one could quite explain what happened on that day in 1944. Not at first, anyway. Only five years later would Lina finally understand it all.
On that morning of August 10th, 1944, Lina’s older brother, Peter, was about to set off to drive over to their great-aunt Lorena’s farm with the wagon, which was over-filled with 2-foot thick slices of pine firewood. Peter – Ethel and Viktor’s middle child – was four years Lina’s senior, and a year younger than his older brother, Marcus. At this point, Peter was only five months back from the front, discharged after his right temple had been grazed by a bullet and his right thigh had been wounded by a bullet that hadn’t missed its intended target. Back in 1942, he went into the army a tall young man with sandy-colored curls. He had his mother’s wispy build, but his father’s strength. Constantly in motion, he had a vigilant gaze, continually observing what those around him were doing, and trying to predict what they would do next.
It was because he’d always been so observant, that Peter felt so mystified by what happened on August 10th. As a general rule, very little escaped him. But, as he was always quick to admit later on, when the subject of the accident came up, his attention at that moment had not been fully on what he was doing. Maybe the pain distracted me, Peter sometimes suggested to himself when he considered what had happened. Since he’d been back home, he’d noticed that when his leg was really bothering him, he would sometimes lose track of what was going on around him.
This was not surprising, really, given what he went through after being wounded. The injury to his right leg was severe: a compound fracture of the femur, and massive tissue damage. He endured more than one surgery in the military hospital to push his bones into place and stitch his shredded muscles back together. He’d been “just this close” to a severed femoral artery, the doctor told him. He was lucky to be alive. He then spent two and a half months in a cast before finally being released from the hospital. Now, at age twenty, Peter was back at home, in possession of a card that listed him officially as eighty-percent disabled. The cast had been off for some time now, but Peter was still in strong, nearly constant, pain. By way of explanation – but certainly not encouragement – the doctor had informed him that because his muscles and bones had been so badly damaged, it was unclear whether they’d ever function fully again. And due to the long period of time he’d spent immobilized in the hospital and nearly immobile in the cast, both of his legs were weak from lack of exercise. He still walked with a stick.
This, combined with the chronic pain, meant that Peter struggled to do much at all around the homestead. It was impossible for him to even think about going back to the forestry work that provided the main support for the extended Gassmann-Bunke family. It had been that way since his great-great grandfather had purchased the 11-hectare forest nearly a hundred years earlier. The one saving grace in the situation was that, although Peter could no longer work in the forest, he was able to contribute to the furniture-making side of the family business. He had begun learning these skills already before the war, by working alongside his father and grandfather. Peter’s father, Viktor, was a master furniture-maker, and Peter himself had shown promise. His grandfather, Ulrich, told him he would become a good cabinet-maker in his own right someday. So, now Peter was glad to at least have the chance to hone his skills in this area. Drawing up plans for a sideboard, or planning the wood for a tabletop – which he could manage without experiencing extreme discomfort in his leg – helped him feel a bit less guilty about not being out in the forest.
If Peter’s mother, Ethel, had had her way once he returned from the war, she would have pampered him. She wanted him to rest longer, to regain his strength, without even working on the furniture. But she knew as well as anyone how much her father, Peter’s grandfather, Ulrich, needed help to keep the furniture-making going, even if the orders at that time were few and far between. This was because Ulrich was terribly short-handed when it came to labor for the forestry: Peter’s brother, Marcus, was still deployed, as was Viktor, who had been Ulrich’s right hand man for most of the past twenty-three years. It was true that by the time Peter came home, Ulrich had more help out in the forest, from the Polish prisoners billeted in nearby Buckhorn who worked there each day. These prisoners helped haul the logs from the forest and cut and stack the wood. But they didn’t have the skill to fell trees or identify which ones could be cut now, much less do any of the small scale cutting of the wood that would be used to make furniture.
That was where Lina came in. Thank goodness for Lina! Peter found himself thinking during those months when he was just getting used to being home. His younger sister, Lina had always loved the woods. Starting from the time she was a little girl, she would tag along with her father and grandfather whenever they’d allow her to. Gradually, having grown weary of her nagging, persistent requests that they teach about the forest, they began telling her all that they themselves knew, showing her how to do this and that. At that point, it was still Peter and his twin brother Marcus who were being groomed to take a large part in the forestry work: They were several years older than Lina, and, well, they were boys…
But Lina had such a strong love for the trees and such a keen desire to learn forestry, that she made sure she was right in the thick of things whenever her mother and grandmother didn’t need her help in the house. Even when they did need her, Lina could often be found in the forest instead, learning to notch a tree, or how to decide which trees in a stand should be cut down, and when. Then the war came. First her father, and then Peter and Marcus, went off: Viktor to an undisclosed post at an undisclosed location, then Peter to the infantry, and Marcus to the Censorship Office. Back then, in 1942, Lina was only fourteen, but there was still work to be done in the forest…
Ethel wasn’t entirely in favor of Lina being involved in the forestry work. On the other hand, she had to admit, that Lina never looked happier than when she came out of the woods for supper, or at the end of the day. She’d been telling them all since she was nine years old that she planned to become a full-fledged forester and carry on her grandfather’s work. As unconventional as Lina’s wish was, for a woman in Germany in the 1940s, it gave them all a great deal of comfort, especially Lina’s grandfather, Ulrich. So, even Ethel refrained from putting forth any objections when Lina altered some of Peter’s pants to fit her slightly smaller frame and headed off into the woods with her grandfather Ulrich. Over the next two years, she became an invaluable part of the Gassmann forestry team.
This was especially true now, in 1944, since Marcus had never shown interest in the forest, and Peter could no longer perform that kind of work. Although Viktor, too, was a forester and furniture-maker of nearly unparalleled skill, his behavior in the years leading up to the war had given his family members reason to wonder how committed he would be to the family’s business once the war ended and he returned home. Assuming he made it home. Despite not knowing precisely where Viktor was, Ethel had a feeling that her husband would return home safe. This feeling was somewhat irrationally based on the fact that he would regularly send them mysterious care packages with cigarettes and liquor that they could parlay into cash on the black market. If he had access to such things, she reasoned, he must be in a position of relative importance and safety…
* * *
Such was the state of life on the Gassmann homestead. So, on the morning of August 10th, 1944, despite the strong pain in his leg, which made it challenging for him to climb up onto the wagon, Peter felt determined to be of use and deliver the firewood. It didn’t seem wise to send two of the Poles to deliver and unload it: A guard would have to go with them, and that would leave only one guard here at home. Who knew what the Poles might take into their heads to do along the four-mile stretch between here and Lorena’s, with two horses and a wagon and firewood at hand?
Up until today, Lina had been the one to drive the wagon over to Lorena’s. There was always someone there to help unload it when she arrived. Besides, sending Lina gave the two women the chance to visit a bit over coffee (ersatz though it was) and cake that was still just as buttery and leavened by farm eggs as before the war, despite shortages elsewhere.
But on this day, Lina wanted help her grandfather, Ulrich, with the felling of several pines. So, once the Poles had grudgingly rolled and shoved and, finally, hoisted the thick rounds of wood into the wagon, Lina came out of the workshop to wish her brother a good ride. She put one foot onto the step at the front of the wagon and hopped up to plant a kiss on his cheek. She noticed as she did so that, despite all he’d been through, and all he was still going through, her brother looked as dreamily handsome as he had before the war. She reminded him to ask Lorena to send back the length of fabric her mother needed to move ahead with an upholstery job she was doing for someone in town.
Then she tousled her brother’s hair and hopped lightly back onto the ground. As she headed back toward the workshop, Lina noticed that the Poles had not replaced the wagon’s back railing slats. She paused there, her left hand against the side of the wagon. That was when she caught sight of the slats lying on the ground, off to the wagon’s other side. She stepped behind the wagon, intending to pick up the slats and put them onto the wagon. At this moment, evidently perceiving something that went unnoticed by Peter or Lina, the horses suddenly lurched forward and took two big steps. Peter now seized the reins which had, until then, been lying in his lap, in a firm hold. But it was already too late. Once the horses plunged ahead, the obedient wagon also jerked forward. This set off a cascade of wood rounds which, free to escape through the rail-less opening at the rear of the wagon, tumbled and rolled out of the wagon, and onto Lina. Caught unawares, she was unprepared to defend herself from the sharp edges and unforgiving density of the wood blocks that now bombarded her.
The thunderous noise of the wood hitting the ground, mixed with Lina’s cries, brought the Poles, and Ethel, and Lina’s grandmother, Renate, racing to the area in front of the workshop. Peter sprang down from his bench atop the wagon, ignoring his own pain. The scene, it struck him, looked just as it had earlier in the morning, when the pile of wood rounds had, as yet, been only half loaded onto the wagon. There was the same pile, in nearly the same configuration. But this time, his beloved sister lay half obscured by the pile, her one, long braid flung out to the side, her gray eyes wide. Peter noticed, as he gripped his head in horror, that it was as if only half of her was left: From her hips down, there was only wood. He watched as she tried in vain to lift herself up. Peter began stumbling in this direction and that, pushing at one chunk of wood, then pulling at another. The Poles, too, were struggling to shift the log pieces off of Lina. Meanwhile, Renate, with her solid body and air of authority, was holding Lina’s shoulders firmly to the ground, to keep her from thrashing about. Ethel was gracefully and gently, but purposefully, moving her hands up and down Lina’s arms and across her forehead, in an attempt to calm her daughter, while speaking softly to her. Peter couldn’t make out what she was saying.
This was the scene that played on an endless loop in Peter’s mind from that morning on: the wagon half full, with no Lina on the ground beneath the rest of the wood that was waiting to be loaded; then the wagon fully loaded; and then the wagon only half full once again, as if a film strip had simply been run backwards, except that when it was run back, somehow Lina was under the wood. Who had suddenly inserted Lina into this movie of the mundane activities of their life in such a horrifying way? And how? And now what would they all do?
* * *
In the months that followed, these were the very questions that Lina’s mother and grandparents often discussed, but always only in pairs, and always only in spots where they thought Lina or Peter wouldn’t hear them: Ethel and Renate engaged in hurried chats in the kitchen while Lina was out in the yard in her wheelchair; Renate and Ulrich reviewed the situation in their bedroom at night. This was safe, they figured: They assumed that Lina must be asleep, or that, if she was still awake, she wouldn’t be able to make out what they were saying through the wall that separated their two rooms. Peter, just like Lina, was excluded from these discussions. But he, too, knew that they were going on.
It was autumn now, and Lina knew her family members were talking behind her back. What she couldn’t understand was why. I’m healing, right? They all know that, so why do they need to talk about it, especially in secret? Certainly, she reasoned, decisions needed to be made about how to keep the household running. But can’t we make them all together? It’s as if they think my brains were fractured in the accident, too! Lina told herself. But, in the moments when she was clear-headed enough that this next thought could penetrate, she reminded herself: This is the way we Gassmanns and Bunkes do things. Grandpa and Grandma and Mama and Papa talk about what needs talking about. Then they present Marcus and Peter and me with their decisions. And that’s that! That was the way it had always been when Lina and her brothers were growing up. But we’re grown now! she thought. Shouldn’t we have a say? She never raised the topic with Peter. The situation was painful enough for him, without her bringing it up, Lina reasoned.
But, Lina sometimes wondered: What if it isn’t these new arrangements they’re all discussing in low voices, like spies? What could they be talking about, if it isn’t about that?
When Lina did occasionally reflect on what else her family members might be discussing, several possible and disturbing answers would come to mind. But the one that would most often pop into her mind was this: They’re talking about how useless I am to them now. I can’t pull my weight. They’re talking about how to get rid of me. Why else would they be so secretive?? Somebody probably went into Varel to look at one of those awful homes… If Lina had been able to think clearly, that’s how the thoughts might have been expressed.
But she wasn’t able to think clearly. Even now, after the initial tumult of the accident and the hospital and surgery seemed to have subsided, Lina found it difficult to follow a train of thought.Besides, these ideas were so upsetting to Lina that she didn’t even really want to think them. So, it ended up that, instead of complete thoughts, bits and pieces – sometimes just words and phrases, such as “a home” or “get rid of me” or “euthanasia” or “useless” – would fly relentlessly, uncontrollably, and unbidden into her consciousness, day after day. Even these snippets of ideas were enough to leave her distraught and frowning, the fingers of her right hand toying with the tuft of hair at the end of the braid she compulsively wrapped around her wrist and then unwrapped again. Why do I have to be at the mercy of these awful thoughts? She wondered, in desperation. If she’d had sufficient focus to be able to pray, she would have prayed to be freed of them. But that was beyond her. One night, she did manage a brief, wordless plea in her heart, but then she instantly forgot it, as the unwanted thoughts rushed in once more.
* * *
Lina knew as well as the rest of them what the doctors had told them after the wagon had been used to deliver her to the hospital in Varel instead of to haul wood to Lorena’s farm: multiple broken bones in both legs, a broken foot. A dislocated hip. Quite possibly some nerve damage, too, from all the crushing weight. Lina had to take her family’s word for this: She didn’t remember hearing any of it. Even though she’d been present in the room for the whole examination and discussion, she couldn’t recall a thing, no matter how hard she tried in the days and weeks that followed. She remembered being beside the wagon and then beneath the wood, but even that last part was a hazy recollection at best. There hadn’t even been any pain, not until afterwards, when she was lying in the hospital bed. That was so strange! How could it not have hurt to have all those bones broken? she would ask herself later, in the periods when she wasn’t experiencing the pain that followed having her bones set, and the surgery… Following those terrible and terrifying minutes with the doctors – which had seemed like hours or, rather, of indeterminable length – she would recall the pain-free time that followed the accident and wonder why she had to feel it now.
When the pain streamed through her now, Lina would comfort herself with the thought that it wasn’t as bad as it had been right before and after her surgery. It had been worst of all before the surgery, she reminded herself. She thought back on it in a distanced kind of way, as if she were observing someone else undergoing that procedure: At first, her mother and grandmother, and Peter, too, were with her. Then only her mother was there. The orderlies held her down by the arms and shoulders while the doctor set the bones that could be set. She remembered screaming from the pain, while her mother held her hand tightly, as tears rolled down their cheeks. She so wanted to fight them off, but she couldn’t do that, of course. Why didn’t anyone keep them from hurting me? she would wonder later. Why didn’t Mama do anything? Had they given her any pain killers before setting the bones? It certainly hadn’t felt like it.
After the bone-setting and the surgery, the doctor told them – Lina did recall this – that what Lina needed to do now was be patient and wait for her bones and tissues to heal enough that all the swelling would go down. No casts could be put on while the swelling was so great, he said. Besides, he needed to be able to inspect the stitches on her left foot and lower leg, where he’d had to perform surgery: Her broken left fibula had ended up piercing the front of her calf, and that had had to be repaired. She’d been lucky, the doctor assured her: The left femur and right tibia had suffered only simple breaks – one transverse, the other linear. “Only simple break”s? Lina thought indignantly whenever the pain started up. Simple for whom?
As the doctor examined her during the several weeks she spent recuperating in the hospital, he regularly expressed his opinion, that the swelling was going down. Lina herself could see this, and she was anxious for the casts to go on, so that she could go home. The forced immobility in the hospital bed was like torture: She wanted to get up, but wasn’t allowed to do so, and there was also the pain to contend with. They gave her morphine in small doses when she most needed it, but often she just had to endure the pain, lying in her bed with nothing to distract her from her torment. True, Ethel spent a large portion of each day sitting by her bed, tenderly rubbing her arm or brushing her hair out before rebraiding it. Ulrich and Renate and Peter came every evening and chatted with her, or brought her a piece of cake (which she rarely felt much like eating). But even in their company, Lina felt alone: The constant series of inner battles to not give in to the pain kept her isolated from her loved ones. And although they tried to cheer her up in every way they could imagine, they could see from her strained expressions and the far-off look in her eyes, that she wasn’t fully with them.
After a few weeks of daily examinations, the doctor announced that the surgery sites were healing well. He was happy about that. The swelling had lessened considerably. This pleased him, too. The casts could go on soon. What did not please him was the fact that Lina couldn’t feel anything in her feet and legs, except pain. This seemed particularly unfair to her – and to all her family members, too. But the doctor explained it to them, in a calm and matter-of-fact voice: “Lina can feel pain because those signals come from higher up in her nervous system, not in her legs themselves.”
Each day now, the doctor came in and pricked the bottoms of her feet with a pin and asked her to wiggle her toes. Both Lina and the doctor looked expectantly at her toes, but they never observed even the slightest movement. Immediately following the operation, the doctor had said that the most likely explanation for all of this was that the swollen tissues were pressing on the nerves of her legs. He kept repeating this conclusion each day for all the weeks Lina lay in the hospital bed. “We’ll see how you do when the swelling is down.” Finally, four weeks in, Lina noticed his tight-lipped expression following one of the daily examinations. She decided to speak up.
“The swelling is down, isn’t it, Doctor?”
He nodded, but didn’t meet her gaze. “Yes. That means we’ll be able to put the casts on in the next few days. Then you can go home. That will be a relief, won’t it?” Now he looked up at her, straining his mouth into a tight smile.
“But you told me that once the swelling was down, I’d be able to feel my legs again, and move them,” Lina said, knitting her brows. “But I can’t.”
The doctor patted her foot, where the stitches made the skin look like a quilt made of jagged fabric scraps. “Not to worry, Lina. All in good time.” Then he walked out of the room.
* * *
Autumn had come, and Lina was back home, with a small wheelchair to move around in. She had her casts on now, but still felt nothing in her legs or feet, aside from pain. Lina could propel her wheelchair through the house on her own, and make her way around the yard, but she still needed someone else to get her chair out of the house into the yard. Naturally, she also depended on others to move her from bed to wheelchair to toilet. Also naturally, all of these limitations on her freedom of movement frustrated her.
She discovered early on, that when she was outside in the yard, as near to the forest as possible, her spirit would feel a bit lighter. One of her family members would push her wheelchair outdoors, and then she’d roll herself over to where the main path into the forest began. This was her boundary. She could go no further. Well, that wasn’t strictly true: She could have rolled a ways down the path, which was wide enough for a wagon and a horse. But instead of being smooth, it was scored with several sets of deep ruts made by wagons, and the spaces between the ruts were overgrown with grass and littered with rocks and twigs and even small branches. These features, which she’d barely noticed when she’d had the use of her legs, seemed to be taunting her as they blocked her movement into her beloved forest.
Knowing how much Lina missed being amongst the trees, Ethel tried one day to push the wheelchair along the path into the forest. But it immediately became obvious that the chair was no match for this terrain. But, perhaps more importantly, each jolt of the chair as it passed over a twig, each slight dip into a rut, sent pain surging through Lina’s legs. She begged her mother to go back to the yard.
But her grandfather, Ulrich, didn’t want to give up so easily. His first idea was to lift Lina up onto the buckboard of the wagon and drive her into the forest that way. But, as much as Lina detested her wheelchair, she had, by this time, come to see it as a kind of protective armor. She feared that without the arms to grip and the footrests to keep her feet in place, she might just topple off the front of the wagon. Peter, Ethel, and Renate all offered to sit alongside her, to make sure she couldn’t fall, but Lina shook her head adamantly in refusal.
Ulrich’s next plan was this: They would construct a ramp out of planks, push her up into the back of the wagon in her wheelchair, and then drive her deep into the woods. Once there, they’d roll her back down again, and she could sit amongst the trees. “We can make it a picnic!” Renate even suggested. But Lina, terrified that riding in the wagon at all would bring on pain, rejected this plan, too. She couldn’t bring herself to take the chance.
So, instead of risking going into the forest, she made it a habit to sit and stare into the trees, straining to catch sight of the old treehouse deep amongst the beeches, even though she knew it was far too distant for her to be able to glimpse.
Nearly all the time Lina was sitting outdoors – or anywhere, in fact – she experienced either physical pain or emotional and mental distress. Over the past couple of months, Lina had come to the conclusion that these two had made a pact: One of them had to keep her company at almost all times, with only brief breaks between shifts. So, first her legs would be wracked by pain for an hour, or more, and then the pain would fade. But before Lina could even catch her breath, deep sadness and fear would flood her mind. And they’d drag the horrid words and phrases – “a home” or “euthanasia” –along with them.
On one of these typical days, Lina was sitting, as usual, at the edge of the forest, looking at the trees, and enduring yet another series of physical an emotional attacks – and then those words! In despair at having to go through this torture day after day, she heard herself cry out, “Dear God! Please take these thoughts! And the pain! Please take all the pain, too! I can’t bear this any longer!”
Then, at some point – Lina couldn’t have said precisely when this happened – she realized that things had shifted a bit. It seemed to her that maybe a couple of weeks had passed since she had wished in her heart for respite from the awful thoughts and the pain.
What, exactly, was different now? It wasn’t that she never heard the upsetting words any more. No. But she noticed that a new thought had appeared, or, rather, a new word. Her mind was now racing from dawn to dusk, fueled by an agitation that manifested consistently as this one, new word. It was a command: Move! Of course, this command from within contrasted sharply with what she was physically capable of doing. She could still not move around under her own power. Even so, it was a new word in her head, and something about it felt positive.
Move! she heard throughout the day, no matter where she was. Sitting pushed up to the kitchen table, she’d hear it. Move! Or as she mended clothes by lamplight in the evening. Move! And very often, after her wheelchair had been pushed to the edge of the forest and she was sitting gazing into the woods, it would come. Move! Since Lina couldn’t walk, she’d move in whatever way she could when she heard the word. During the day, she’d push herself back from the table and wheel her chair slowly across the kitchen, through the door to the other part of the house, behind and around under the staircase, and back again into the kitchen.
Moving herself around out in the yard was easier, which was a blessing, because it was out here, in close proximity to the forest she was unable to enter, that her two pain companions were always most active. But when she felt despair beginning to set in, or a pain deep in one of the spots where her bones had broken, then she’d heard Move! sound loudly inside her head. Move! Move! Move! The repeated word sounded like the movement of a soft breeze. And then she’d begin her “strolls”, as she called them. There were just as many obstacles out here as indoors: the chicken coop, the goat pen, the clotheslines’ poles, the garden. But there were also paths of sorts that wended around and between them, and which were basically worn flat, in contrast to the forest path. So Lina followed these paths, weaving in and out, all around the features of the yard that she’d never thought too much about, back when she’d been able to walk. She rolled and rolled and rolled, until whichever pain companion was on duty went on break. Then she had a brief respite until its replacement’s shift began.
During these brief periods, Lina allowed her arms to rest after spinning, spinning, spinning the wheels of her wheelchair, propelling herself around her chosen obstacle course. Lina felt calm and even light in these minutes, her whole upper body energized by the exertion. Then she could think clearly – she’d finally gained the ability to do this, after weeks of mental chaos following her return from the hospital. And the thoughts that came in these moments were positive, optimistic. Every once in a while, when she saw Peter still hobbling, unable to work in the woods, instead of thinking, I’m the same as him! she quietly but forcefully repeated to herself, over and over again, I’m not Peter. I’ll be in the woods again.Lina noticed that sometimes this focused repetition would even drive the pain and the unwanted thoughts away for a time. During these minutes, parked by the path that led into the woods, she felt in her heart that it was just a matter of time before she was out of the chair, back to helping her grandfather with the work in the forest. She closed her eyes and imagined herself out there with him, clothed in her familiar pants. The traditional dresses and aprons she’d begun wearing again after the accident – to make it easier for her mother and grandmother to care for and dress and undress her – seemed foreign, a symbol to her of her confinement. That was why she always closed her eyes when imagining herself in the forest: so that she wouldn’t see the full skirt covering her legs. These were happy minutes, sometimes whole half hours, when Lina was able to hold onto the good. Once this respite even lasted an hour, by Lina’s reckoning. She thought of the strolls when this happened as her “lucky” strolls.
Then there were the “unlucky” strolls. On those days, each landmark she rolled past served as a cruel reminder of what she was no longer able to do: the narrow dirt lanes inside the garden, where she used to sow seeds or weed; the clotheslines she could no longer reach; the henhouse where the eggs would lie, waiting for her to collect them. At these times, when her focus shifted to what was unattainable, she was flooded with despair. She still heard Move! in her head, but the old words and phrases reasserted themselves, too. You’ll never walk. Useless cripple. They might as well just kill you. This shift signaled to Lina that her pain companions’ break had ended, and she’d struggle to hold onto the vision of herself as healthy again: Don’t go! she’d whisper frantically as she felt her calm beginning to slip away, and the optimistic thoughts along with it. When a “stroll” turned unlucky in this way, Lina would race ahead as fast as she could, as if trying to outwit the thoughts by racing past the offending spots before her brain would notice them. It usually did not work, and when that happened, she seemed to be hearing not Move! but Move! Or else…
Lina had to devise different strategies for moving around in the evening, as she sat with the rest of the family in the main room. With everyone there, occupying chairs and space around the table, she had no room to maneuver. But Move! still sounded in her head. So, she got into the habit of reaching down and slowly wrapping her hands around the metal guides that framed her chair’s wheels. Laying one finger at a time on the guides, she took in the sensation of the cool metal against her warm fingers and palms, allowing herself to feel that fully, alternately tightening and loosening her grip. Then she began moving the wheels forward and backwards, ever so slightly. Sometimes she did this for an hour at a time. At times, she thought the rubber tires must be wearing soft grooves in the wooden floor beneath her.
Why doesn’t anyone ever ask me why I do this? Lina often thought. They can’t not notice. Do they not care?
Although Ethel, Renate, Ulrich, and Peter did, indeed, all notice Lina’s wanderings, they acted as if they didn’t, or as if there was nothing the slightest bit unusual in her movements. As you might imagine, this was something they did discuss amongst themselves, but only in private. In secret. Why call attention to it? they all reasoned. They didn’t want to upset Lina by questioning her about it. If it helped her, then it was a good thing. Let it be, they decided.
* * *
Although Lina’s agitated mind consistently jumped to the most upsetting possible explanations for her family’s silence, the fact that they weren’t including her in their conversations didn’t necessarily mean there was anything for her to worry about. At sixteen, Lina was too young to know that the Gassmanns had learned “the hard way”, as Grandma Renate put it, tonot betray strong emotion about anything, and not to discuss delicate topics in public. (To them, “in public” meant during meals or where anyone who might be the subject of a third–party conversation was present.) At least that’s how Renate described the upshot of what had happened more than twenty years earlier: Renate still remembered every detail of that terrible conversation– about God and faith and healing – that had thrown her family into upheaval in 1921. She concluded that if no one had been allowed to have that discussion, what had come to a head then would never have come to a head. Nor would the subsequent events have occurred. And she wasn’t about to let that happen again, ever. The cost might be too great. So, Renate thought about it, and she decided that the way to avoid such calamities in the future was to make certain that the family’s conversations never strayed onto that topic again. Or, for that matter, onto any other topics Renate herself deemed likely to cause dissent, discord, excessive displays of emotion, or rifts between family members.
As the Gassmann-Bunke family’s self-appointed guardian of peace and harmony, Renate exercised constant vigilance during mealtimes. She was always prepared to deftly guide the conversation in a different direction if she sensed trouble looming. She was so skilled at this, that her grandchildren never even noticed when she steered them away from what they’d been intending to talk about. The adults, meanwhile, were thoroughly trained by the time Viktor and Ethel’s first child, Marcus, was born in 1923. Thus, they needed only a bit of nudging to keep conversations safe and on track. Although Renate never explicitly told Lina or her brothers not to talk about the question of God and faith and healing – or other topics Renate preferred to skirt – they quickly gained an intuitive grasp of what could be talked about, and what couldn’t. So, mealtimes among the Gassmann-Bunkes generally played out the same way day in and day out, with the identical, approved topics repeatedly coming under discussion. Only the details varied: Which stand of trees were they were considering cutting, or who had ordered a piece of furniture, or who was Ethel making a quilt for now, or how was the cheese making coming along, etc., etc.
For this reason, no one in the household was surprised when Renate took each of them – even her own husband! – aside in August of 1944 and told them that they were to discuss Lina’s accident and her current state and what might be done about it only behind closed doors or in the depths of the forest, where Lina wouldn’t overhear them. For Ulrich, Ethel, and Peter, who was surprised that his grandmother had approached him, too, this directive simply reinforced the message they had all long since internalized: No talking about things that might upset anyone. But the fact that Renate had actually spoken to each of them about it, instead of relying on her usual hints or redirection, made it quite clear that this was a matter of particular seriousness for her. She would brook no dissent and no slip-ups. In her letters to Marcus and the messages she sent to Lina’s father Viktor, she went so far as to warn them, too, not to say anything about it in Lina’s presence – even though at that point they were still away at war and far from home! Thus, once these two remaining family members returned after the war, they reintegrated into the household without ever talking at the table about what any of them – and not just Lina, but Peter, Marcus, or Viktor, too – had gone through during the war years.
True, they each shared certain details with one or the other family member, in private. But there was a great amount of work to be done on the homestead once the war ended. This provided all of them with a convenient excuse for focusing on day-to-day tasks instead of baring their souls to each other. Maybe this was just as well. Every single one of them lacked the necessary words to either ask or try to answer the most burning questions they held persistently and tightly in their hearts. And so, grandparents, parents, and children alike threw themselves headlong into those day-to-day responsibilities. It was only Renate and Ulrich who would find themselves lying in bed at night, searching for the words to express to each other what they were feeling, and discussing how they could shift things back to normal. But what does “normal” even mean? Renate and Ulrich both asked themselves. They both knew full well that even the years between 1921 and the start of the second war had been rocky for their family. When Renate thought about it, she had to travel in her mind all the way back to before the fall of 1921 to find a period she could point to and hold on tight to as her ideal of family harmony. She so wanted to get things back to how they’d been then. She dreamed of somehow transporting all of them back to that happy time before everything started going haywire.
Of course, Lina, like her brothers, knew what had happened in 1921: Her Uncle Hans and the rest of the family had had a falling out of sorts, and Hans now lived abroad. But she and Marcus and Peter didn’t know exactly what had transpired to bring it about. This was another thing the Gassmanns and Bunkes didn’t talk about. Although Lina did once ask both Ethel and Renate – separately, of course – to explain it to her, both said only that Uncle Hans had gone his own way. What is that supposed to mean?? Lina wondered.
Given this family approach to dealing with disturbing or potentially disturbing topics and events, perhaps it shouldn’t seem surprising that Lina’s family wasn’t talking with her about anything in the early period of her convalescence. After all, those first months that followed the accident were a period of adjustments for every one of them. It was all they could do to figure out how to both keep Lina as comfortable as possible and do what needed to be done around the homestead. They also had to make decisions about who would carry out absolutely every task in the house and in the forest. Renate and Ethel set up a schedule between them for Lina’s personal care, and they ran themselves ragged doing both that and everything else. It didn’t even cross their minds to ask Lina to pitch in around the house. She has her healing to do! they both thought. On top of all this, there were always more visits from the doctor, and consultations with him, too. (This was the one time Renate and Ethel did talk about Lina’s condition in her presence.) There was physical reorganization in the house, too: Lina switched bedrooms with her grandparents, so she’d be adjacent to the kitchen and closer to the bathroom. All of these changes left everyone in the family exhausted and disoriented, as if they were continually being blown hither and thither by new tornados that seemed to materialize each and every day.
It was in the midst of this chaos that Lina was supposed to be making her way through “her healing process”. That’s what the doctor called it the first time he visited her at home following her hospital stay. “Just make her as comfortable as possible,” he told the family. “She needs to be comfortable and calm during her healing process.” Then he went away, leaving them with no idea whatsoever about how they were supposed to run a household and a forestry operation and take care of Lina, too, all while she was still in pain. Comfortable? No, that didn’t seem possible, not to Lina or her family.
So, each time the doctor came, repeated these same sentences, then left once again, abandoning them to their whirlwind of a household, Lina slipped back into the knitting or sock darning she’d picked up over her mother’s and grandmother’s objections. “Just relax, Lina!” they constantly told her. “Get your strength back!” They could see from her eyes that she was present in body, but in some world of her own in her mind, her brows knitted, her upper body tense, while her lower body remained slack. She’s tired, Renate or Ethel would decide from looking at her.Or, She’s sad today. Or, She’s in pain. Not that they ever asked Lina directly. They preferred to intuit what her state was and to tend to and console her in actions rather than words.
That silence again, Lina often thought (about her mother and grandmother’s reticence, not her own). And this pattern of theirs upset her, even though she somehow had the presence of mind to realize it was nothing new: Why bother asking me what I’m feeling, when you can just figure it out on your own? she observed, annoyed. These Gassmann women think they’re mind-readers!
* * *
When Lina’s casts came off at the end of October, it seemed to her that the silence grew even deeper. How can what’s already silent become more so? she asked herself. But that was certainly the way it was. Maybe what intensified the silence was that everyone, Lina included, had to work even harder to maintain it in the face of one fact: Even though the casts were off, Lina still found herself unable to walk, or even to feel any sensations in her legs. Any sensation at all. Not even pain. Lina wasn’t able to tell the doctor when, precisely, the pain had stopped. It was after I started hearing ‘Move!’ Lina decided. I know that much, at least. (Not that she told the doctor or anyone else about “Move!”)All Lina knew was that the pain wasn’t there anymore.
Certainly, she was grateful that her unpleasant companions seemed to have decided to leave her in peace. But her initial elation at being free of pain faded quickly when she saw the look on the doctor’s face as he examined her. His knitted brows conveyed what his words (“I cannot explain this”) did not. His face told them, “This cannot in any way be construed as a positive development.” They were left with the strong and disquieting thought that, at this point, Lina might be even further from ever walking again than she had been before the casts were put on.
The lack of serious conversation with her family members about the only thing that really mattered to her right now left Lina to converse on her own, with herself. And with her legs. It was nearly three months since she’d seem them. They’d been shrouded in plaster for that long. Once the legs reappeared, Lina spent quite a bit of time contemplating those two parts of her as her mother dressed or undressed her. Lina even pulled her nightgown up in bed so she could study them. She was both fascinated and repelled by the sight of her legs. She’d been so eager to see them again, but when she did, it looked to her as if she had somehow acquired dead tree trunks where her legs should have been: fallen tree trunks overgrown by thick pink lichen that was darker in some spots, and punctuated in others by white lines. These lines gave the impression that the trunks had been hit by lightning that had zigzagged from here to there before springing up and then diving down once again, into her foot, and then onward into the earth.
Lina felt compelled to make a habit of studying her tree trunk legs, although she didn’t know why. Part of her wanted never to have to see them again: They reminded her of the accident. That’s no excuse, though, she chided herself. Just being in this chair reminds me of it every second. Even so, there was something about the spots where her skin had been broken and then stitched back together that kept attracting her attention. She seemed to think that, if only her legs could speak to her, they might reveal things to her: how the accident happened, what the meaning of it all was.
The white traces drew her hands to them, too. Lina often felt the urge to trace the course of those lightning track scars with her fingers, especially the ones on her left lower leg and foot. When she lifted her nightgown in the privacy of her room, though, she could only reach the ones on her thigh and calf. But if the light was right, she could see the tracks on her foot, and so she got into the habit of tracing the pattern in the air before her. After a few days of this, she didn’t have to look at her foot any more to know the design of her lightning-touched foot-trunk. She had it memorized. From that point on, she found herself absentmindedly drawing it with her fingertip, on her coverlet, her lap, the kitchen table… She found it soothing, somehow, this way of staying in touch with a part of her she couldn’t reach and which remained mute, whether out of desire or inability to communicate with her. My mind has so much to say to me. Why are my legs so still?
Sue Downing 