Chapter 5
Summer, 1945
Gassmann-Bunke homestead
Somehow, Lina and her family did “learn to live with it”, as unlikely as that seemed to any of them on the night following the hope-slaying doctor’s visit. Of course, what “live with it”meant for the family varied from person to person. The morning after he’d uttered his prayer, Peter tucked the disk with the bird on it into Lina’s knitting bag, in the hope that she would come across it, and that it would be of comfort to her, and perhaps even help her make her way toward Hope. He himself gained a bit of comfort from knowing she still had the bird disk close to her. Has she even realized she lost it? If she has, once she finds it, will she wonder how it made its way back into her bag? Maybe, for just a second, she’ll wonder whether the fairies found it and placed it there for her to discover. It made Peter smile to think about that. Nurturing that thought was the main way Peter managed to “live with it”.
What about the rest of them? “The rest of them” now included the full Gassmann-Bunke extended family, plus two new residents. Within a few months of the doctor’s pronouncements, Marcus, and then Viktor, returned from their respective service. Shortly afterwards, a refugee war widow from East Prussia named Kristina was resettled to their homestead, along with her 5-year-old daughter, Ingrid. Renate and Ulrich and Ethel viewed this return of familiar faces and influx of new ones as a multi-layered blessing.
The most immediately-recognizable blessing, in terms of the familiar faces, was that they were family faces. Having Marcus and Viktor back home was a gift, and the fact that they’d both returned home uninjured meant that everyone could breathe that much easier. They’d already made so many adjustments to accommodate Peter and Lina’s various limitations, that it was a relief not to have to figure out what else they might need to change because someone else couldn’t use one leg or both. And why, it had occurred to more than one of the members of this family, is it legs? What is it with our family and legs?
Another blessing bestowed by Marcus and Viktor’s return was that now there were more people to take up the work around the homestead. Viktor’s contribution was particularly welcomed, especially by Ulrich. Despite the disagreements that had arisen in the early thirties because of Viktor’s political leanings, Viktor and his father-in-law had always worked together in great harmony. So, Viktor returned eager to get back to tending the forest and building up the family’s cabinet-making business, which had faltered so badly during the war. For now, Marcus was toiling in the forest alongside his father and grandfather, but that wouldn’t be for long: A month or so after Viktor returned home, he announced that he’d pulled strings to get Marcus a coveted Civil Service position in nearby Varel. He’d be able to start working in a few weeks. This pleased Marcus greatly, since he’d never much enjoyed working in the forest – or with his father, for that matter. The position in Varel, off the homestead, would give him some measure of independence, plus some prestige, too. Ulrich would rather have had the extra help with the forestry work, but since relations between Viktor and Marcus had been tense for years, he figured it might not be such a bad idea for his grandson to work in Varel. Besides, they had Stefan working with them now, a skilled hand from Bockhorn. Between himself, Viktor, and Stefan, they should be able to make a go of things.
Viktor, too, felt no small measure of relief when all of this fell into place. Ethel had, naturally, filled him in on every detail of what had transpired in the year since their daughter’s accident, and Viktor wanted to do what he could to make things easier for her. So, he was pleased to have been able to use his war-time connections to secure that position for Marcus. Maybe this was his attempt to make up for the disturbances their family had gone through before the war. Not that he felt himself to be at fault, but the rest of the family certainly did. And Viktor recognized how important it was to make an effort to have everything be congenial now, and also for the homestead work to run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. As good as Marcus was at the forestry tasks, having him off in Varel during the day would help keep the atmosphere at home calmer. Viktor knew that this calm was key, for everyone’s sake, but especially for Lina’s. Or maybe Viktor was thinking not so much about how Lina needed peace and quiet, as about how he needed it, after what he’d been through in the war. Most likely, he sensed both his own need andhers. But he mentioned only hers when he spoke with Ethel and his in-laws about striving for a peaceful setting. God knows, we all need it, he often thought to himself.
Just exactly why Viktor needed the calm was not something he ever discussed with Ethel. She asked him once or twice, in a roundabout fashion, about what he’d done during the war (a question along the lines of, “Were you there the whole time, the spot you sent your messages from?”) This was her way of opening the door for him to share that with her, but without shoving him through that door. Ethel’s indirectness had its roots not solely in her natural ability to treat others with consideration. She held back also out of a tightness she sensed deep in her chest whenever she wondered what her husband might tell her if he did actually respond.
But, for better or for worse, Viktor did not walk through the door Ethel opened for him. Rather, he said only that it was better if she didn’t know. He knew, as well as she did, that there were many ways to interpret that statement. And he liked it that way. It really was better for her not to know. Sometimes he wished that he didn’t know, either. All the more reason to get things into good order on the home front, he reasoned.
With the whole family back under one roof, plus Kristina and her daughter living in the workshop, the Gassmann-Bunkes were grateful for Ulrich’s father Detlef’s eccentric approach to building a house for his family. It was thanks to him that they had plenty of room to move around in, more than any of their relatives or friends.
Detlef built the Gassmanns’ original, one-room log cabin back in 1880, in the early years of his marriage to Ulrich’s mother, Iris. Inspired by reading about the American pioneers’ simple houses built of logs, and mortared with mud and moss, Detlef boldly constructed one for his own family, flouting convention, which dictated a traditional low house. That’s what Detlef’s own father had built for his family: a modest, but roomy two-post low house.
Built of timber and bricks with whitewashed walls inside, the low house was an all-purpose building: Detlef and his parents lived in it, along with all the livestock and some of the hired hands. The cattle and horses and goats lived in stalls that lined one of the house’s two, long sides nearest the large barn doors at one end. These stalls extended inward from the outer walls, ending at one of the two central rows of posts that supported the beams up above. The other side of the house, opposite the stalls, was open, and the walls were lined with workbenches and cabinets. Detlef and his father, Wolf, did their carpentry work here.
There was living space, too, at the opposite end of the house from the barn doors: one large room for the Gassmanns, and a second, smaller, room for the few hired hands who didn’t have lodging elsewhere. A large, open space between these two rooms and the part of the building that housed the animal stalls and workbenches, provided a large kitchen area. Its large brick and stone hearth both heated the whole building and served as a stove and oven. There was a small window on the lefthand side of the wall, if you were facing the hearth and the bedrooms behind it. Without the one window, the house would have been entirely dark inside. Even with it, the house was anything but bright, especially, when the barn and side doors were closed. Opposite this window was a side door that led out into the current day yard – the spot where the wood rounds had tumbled out of the wagon onto Lina.
It was clear to all around him that Detlef was a man of many plans. He knew exactly what he’d do after he completed the log home: He’d construct outdoor pens and lean-to stables for the livestock. Once he’d done that, there’d be plenty of space inside for Detlef, Wolf, and their helpers to work, and the low house would become a dedicated carpentry workshop (the one that still stands on the homestead today). Detlef even intended to pull the bricks out of eight of the spaces between the timbers on the stall side of the house, and installed windows, to let in more natural light. Once the entire Gassmann family moved into the log home, the forestry helpers would occupy the larger of the two rooms at the end of the workshop. Detlef intended to install a small, wood-burning stove in there to make it more bearable during the cold months.
But although Detleft managed to resettle the livestock, and install the windows and the new wood stove without interference from anyone, his grand reimagining hit a snag at the very last moment. On moving day, just a few months before Ulrich was born, as Detlef had already begun moving the family and all their belongings into the log home, Wolf announced that he was better off staying in the low house. This annoyed Detlef mightily, for he had other plans for the smaller room – plans of which Wolf was well aware. He intended to store the forestry and garden tools in that room, as well as saddles and harnesses, etc., for the horses. But early in the morning of moving day, Wolf declared his allegiance to the low house. “I was born in this house, and I see no reason why I should die in that new one,” he told them. What’s more, he insisted on sleeping in the second, smaller low house room – Detlef’s intended store room. So, while Detlef and Iris’ bed, and Erich’s, too, were carried into the new log home, along with two bureaus, the hired hands carried Wolf’s bed and the washstand from the larger room into the smaller room. Then they moved all their belongings, the utilitarian beds they slept in, and the washstand from the smaller room, into the newly-vacated larger room. Even achieving this was a struggle: Wolf initially insisted that he could just sleep in one of the hired hands’ beds and use their rickety washstand. But no one – the hired hands included – would hear of that. So, by the night of moving day, absolutely everyone on the homestead was sleeping in a new room. And each of them experienced at least one moment of confusion during the dead of night, when they awakened in an unfamiliar setting. Where am I? Am I where I belong?
Within a week or so, Detlef and Iris and Erich seemed to have fully adjusted to the new house. Erich, who was not quite four, and who had delighted, during the construction phase, in climbing up the logs that formed the house’s walls, continued to try to scale them even now, much to his mother’s consternation. He would poke at the moss between the logs, and add tiny sticks and leaves to it wherever he could. “Daddy, look!” he’d announce gleefully. “I’m building the house!”
Wolf, meanwhile, initiated several improvement projects in the old house on his own hook. Detlef began to notice, when he was out in the low house-turned-workshop, that their equipment was gradually migrating into the small room where Wolf now lived. Detlef first caught sight of harnesses hanging on hooks that had previously held the hired hands’ clothing and towels. Another day, when he wondered aloud where the saddles had gone, Wolf just pointed to his room: Three saddle benches now lined the wall beneath where the harnesses hung. Then there was the morning Detlef went into the workshop and found the long tree saws missing from the main room. “No need for them to take up all that space out here,” Wolf had said by way of explaining why he had – evidently in the middle of the night – put up more pegs high on the wall above the harnesses to hold the long, big-toothed saws.
“But Papa,” Detlef replied, bewildered, “that’s your room, not a storage room.”
Wolf shrugged. “Felt kind of lonely with just me in there.”
Detlef opened his mouth to object. But then he realized that the saddles and saws and harnesses were just as much a part of Wolf’s life and family as were he and Iris and Erich. So he just nodded and started in on the morning’s work.
Wolf evidently interpreted this conversation as permission to go whole hog. Over the next couple of weeks, Detlef noticed changes every morning when he came into the low house. Within a month, “Wolf’s” room had been transformed into a model store room. Tools, harnesses, saddles, and forester alike seemed pleased with the arrangement. This was so much the case that, when Wolf died in 1882, it was a long, long time before Detlef could bring himself to remove his father’s bed and washstand from the room. Wolf still belonged in there, somehow.
Ulrich, who never even lived in the low house, took the building’s transformed layout as a given. As a toddler, though, he was always fascinated by the storage room. He loved to sit on Wolf’s bed in the evening, listening to his grandfather’s stories, until Wolf finally hustled him back off to the log home to sleep. Sometimes, if Ulrich had been especially well-behaved during the day, Wolf would seat him atop one of the saddles that were stored on the sawhorses, and they would pretend they were out on this or that adventure in the forest, in search of dragons or wolves or monsters. Even after Wolf passed away, Ulrich would often ask to go out to “Dampa’s” room. They couldn’t leave him alone out there, not with all those sharp implements, so his step-mother Claudia (his mother was no longer with them by then…) would go with him. Little Ulrich would sit on the bed in silence, as if listening to some voice that Claudia couldn’t hear. Sometimes Ulrich would nod. Other times he’d just smile. Then he’d report to his father that “Dampa” had told him this or that.
Even when Ulrich grew older, that little storage room remained one of his favorite spots on the homestead. By the time his own children were born, “Dampa’s” bed had long since been moved into the larger room, but Ulrich carried on the tradition of telling stories to Ethel and Hans out there. And those two youngsters delighted in the evening horsey rides on the saddles in that room just as much as their father had done before them.
When they grew a bit older, Ethel and Hans asked how the storage room had come about. Why does it always feel so good in there? they wondered. Ulrich was touched that his own children clearly felt a connection to Wolf in that room, just as he always had. Nonetheless, he didn’t want to delve into the realm of sappy emotions, or controversial spiritual matters. So, he focused on a more mundane explanation, telling Hans and Ethel how their grandfather Detlef himself had justified dedicating that room to storage, instead of to living space. “Your grandfather liked order,” he told them. “He’d wave his hand around here in the workshop and say, ‘How could you work in here with all of that lying around all the time? I couldn’t!’” Ulrich went on to tell his children that Detlef’s construction and then, expansion, of the log home exemplified their grandfather’s philosophy of “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” Except that, when it came to the log home, that seemed to mean, “A place for everyone, and everyone in his place.” In lots of space.
The Gassmanns’ neighbors saw the original log home mainly as an eccentricity. “What’s wrong with the low house?” they all asked, scratching their heads. Even so, the cabin didn’t seem to offend anyone with its size: The area where Detlef slept with his wife and two sons, was larger than the room they’d shared in the low house, but not dramatically so. This “bedroom” in the front corner of the original log home’s kitchen was first separated off from the rest of the room by curtains, and, before long, by solid walls. Then, in 1886, when Ulrich was six and his older brother, Erich, ten, Detlef built the two-storey addition onto the original log cabin. Detlef and his second wife Claudia had two daughters by then, and Claudia had begun grumbling – “Six of us in this little room!” Knowing Detlef’s penchant for arranging just the right spot for everything, Claudia began mentioning casually that before they knew it, Erich would be married, and Ulrich wouldn’t be far behind, and that meant daughters-in-law, and grandchildren… Detlef, who immediately began dreaming of a large, harmonious family living under one roof, took the hint. The cabin’s newer section boasted two bedrooms on the ground floor and two on the second, with a central staircase connecting them.
It was when Detlef put on this two-storey addition that everyone’s jaws dropped. A log cabin was one thing. But a log mansion?? This went beyond eccentricity, the neighbors and friends insisted. This bordered on madness. No one outside the family could understand why on earth those Gassmanns needed all that room! Then again, none of them knew about Detlef’s dream of a large extended Gassmann family.
Ulrich’s marriage to Renate in 1900, followed by the birth of Hans in 1901, and Ethel in 1904, represented the sowing and earliest growth phases of that dream. Detlef died suddenly in 1905. But, watching from the world beyond, he saw his wish blossom beautifully when Ulrich and Renate’s daughter Ethel married Viktor Bunke in 1922, gave birth to Marcus in 1923, Peter a year later, and Lina after four more years. Even so, the blooms faded quickly on his granddaughter’s marriage, even before Lina was born. There was that period when certain events led Viktor to go back to live in Schweiburg (which we will get to in due time); when Ethel followed him there; and when they eventually returned to the Gassmann-Bunke homestead.
All of these events created fault lines in the family that weakened its emotional foundation. The log home itself, though, remained solid as ever and even underwent certain improvements associated with modernity: electrification; the installation of water pipes to the kitchen; and, finally, the so-called indoor plumbing, although the bathroom itself was added to the back of the house, on the other side of the kitchen wall.
When the opportunity arose to install this bathroom, the family had to address what turned out to be an unexpectedly thorny question: where to put it. Without really thinking it through, Ethel innocently floated the idea over supper one evening that they could use the empty first floor bedroom in the newer section of the house. Renate immediately stiffened at this suggestion, for reasons that neither Ethel nor Viktor grasped at that moment. Ulrich, who generally sat through meals with a placid and food-focused expression, stopped in mid-bite. He’d noticed Renate’s reaction. After no more than three seconds of silence, though, Renate regained her composure.
“But just imagine how noise that will be for Papa and me,” she told Ethel and Viktor. Then, catching the puzzled looks on the grandchildren’s faces, she explained. “What with all of you traipsing to the bathroom at all hours, we’ll never get any sleep!”
“But Mama’s talking about that room,” Peter said, pointing through the door that led into the addition.
Ulrich, seeing Renate’s distress, came to her rescue. “But our bedroom here shares a wall with that room.” He leaned across the corner of the table and mimicked the noised the plumbing might make in the middle of the night. “How could a body sleep through that?”
Peter started giggling, and Marcus and Lina followed suit. This distraction provided sufficient cover for Ulrich to shoot Ethel a quick glance that conveyed, ever so clearly, “Let it be. There’s something here you don’t understand.” Ethel dropped the subject. The children, meanwhile, amused themselves by producing all the sounds they could possibly imagine emerging from the new bathroom, and the rest of suppertime passed with the children’s levity underlain by the adults’ awkward silence.
Later that night, when everyone had headed off to bed, all four grownups pondered the situation, but silently, each without consulting any of the others. By this point, Ethel understood where she had gone wrong. Viktor, too, fully grasped the underlying issues, and there was no way he was going to step onto that shaky ground by raising the topic with his wife. As for Ulrich and Renate, they had nothing to discuss, both having spent years living within the bubble of Detlef’s dream.
While their parents and grandparents slipped quietly into nightclothes and fitful sleep, the youngsters continued their own plumbing-related games, imagining tiptoeing into the bathroom and flushing the toilet – however it was that one did that, by the way… Neither Marcus nor Peter nor Lina had the slightest idea what the question of the bathroom placement had stirred up for their parents and grandparents. This wasn’t surprising. First of all, let’s remember that this was a family that never discussed emotionally-charged topics if it could be avoided, which it nearly always could be. Second, the seeds of difficulty in regard to this situation had been sown by their great-grandfather, Detlef, who had, at this point, been dead for nearly thirty years. The crux of the matter was the dream that had inspired the eccentric Gassmann patriarch to build this large home in the first place: the deep wish for his home to be filled with harmony and as many children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren (and so on) as it could hold. This wish had been expressed only in whispers from Ulrich to Renate, and then from Renate to Ethel and from Ethel Viktor. Even so, all four adults in the family knew that keeping the remaining empty bedroom free was key to protecting that dream. Its emptiness represented the future family members who would fill it. But until the question of the bathroom arose, none of them, except for Renate, had consciously realized that they, themselves, too, had fully adopted and were clinging to Detlef’s dream. Then Ethel stumbled upon this minefield of a topic – Who can blame her for forgetting to avoid it? It wasn’t as if this part of family history was on constant display… – and each of them was forced to confront it in his or her own way, in his or her own mind.
Ulrich’s position was that he wanted whatever Renate wanted. He knew full well that peace in the household came about when his wife had free rein to direct the lives of those in the family – to the extent they’d allow her to do this, of course. For her part, Renate felt sure that keeping the family under one roof was essential for everyone’s happiness. So, naturally, that bedroom just had to be left free for Marcus or Peter or Lina and a spouse. Ethel, too, despite how up and down things had been between her and Viktor during the previous five years, clung to the hope that everything could smooth out, that they could be the family they’d seemed on the brink of being before certain things had come to light in 1926. That left Viktor. Although the others might not have believed this, he, too, felt that if they could all just stay in one place, they had a chance of fighting their way back to the joy of the early days of his and Ethel’s marriage. He very much wanted that. Maybe he and Ethel could even have more children. Thus, the future happiness of the whole Gassmann-Bunke family clearly came down to the placement of the bathroom.
Although all four of the adults agreed about the absolute necessity of building the bathroom onto the back of the existing house, instead of in the free bedroom, none of them wanted to put forth this explanation to the others. There was no way they could talk openly about such concerns. It was this even greater than usual squeamishness around touchy subjects that kept the discussion going around and around for more than a week with no resolution.
Then, one evening, Marcus, who was excited to see how the plumbing in the promised bathroom would actually function, pressed for information about when and where the new equipment would be installed. Ethel cleared her throat.
“Well, Dear,” she told her older son, “we haven’t quiet decided that yet.”
Seven-year-old Lina frowned at this. She was confused, since she had been paying attention to the suppertime talks over previous days. The question she posed now was genuinely innocent.
“Mama,” she said quietly, leaning toward Ethel, “don’t you all want the same thing?”
“What’s that?” Renate asked her granddaughter. She hadn’t heard Lina’s question, but had assumed the little girl might be feeling unwell. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, yes, Grandma,” Lina said cheerfully.
“What is it then?” Renate asked.
“I was just saying to Mama that you all want the same thing.”
Ulrich, who had, as usual, ceded the floor to Renate, and had been observing rather than speaking, perked up now.
“What’s that you say, Lina? That we all want the same thing?”
Lina nodded. “Grandpa, you don’t want the bathroom in here, do you?”
“No,” he admitted.
“And neither do you, Grandma, right?”
“That’s right,” Renate told her.
“And Mama and Papa don’t, either, do you?”
Both Viktor and Ethel shook their heads. Lina looked genuinely perplexed.
“Then I don’t understand what the fuss is.”
Emboldened by their sister’s successful invasion of the conversation, Peter and Marcus spoke up, too.
“Who said it had to be in the downstairs bedroom in the first place?” Marcus said bluntly.
“Right!” Peter called out brightly. “Nobody wants it in there.”
The adults exchanged glances. At this moment, each of them grasped that the children were giving them a way out of this impasse, one that wouldn’t require them to talk about the underlying issue at all.
“But, I thought you suggested it, Viktor,” Renate replied, cagily.
Viktor, happy to play along, shook his head.
Renate looked at her husband. She knew that no one would believe the plan had originated with him.
“You, then, Ethel,” she suggested, turning to her daughter. “It must have been you who suggested it in the first place.”
“No, Mama,” Ethel objected. “It wasn’t me. I thought it was Papa.”
“Not me,” Ulrich said succinctly. He knew where this was headed and he wanted to get on with it. High time to settle this.
“Then it looks like the kids are right,” Viktor said. “We really do all agree.”
This was probably the one time any of them could remember that the youngsters’ views had been entertained at the table. The children themselves were giddy with their newly-found power, but Renate quickly coopted the victory.
“I knew all along we’d come to an agreement!” she said firmly.
It was clear to little Lina – and to all the rest of them – that the logic in Renate’s declaration did not hold. But Lina was still too young to be able to comprehend that she and her brothers had been manipulated for the grownups’ gain. Peter and Marcus, even if they did understand what was going on, knew better than to press their luck by trying to point it out. So, once Renate summed things up – “I knew all along we’d come to an agreement!” – the grownups immediately shifted their focus to discussing the layout for the new bathroom they would build onto the outside of the kitchen wall. The unexpectedly unanimous decision to keep all the waste and dirt outside the main house, thereby leaving a clear and pristine space free for the family to grow, seemed to each of them to bode well for the future.
But a little more than ten years later, in 1944, when Viktor and Ethel had had no more children, when Peter and Marcus, and Lina had yet to marry, and Germany was mired in war – that’s when Lina had her accident, mere months after Peter came home from the war, wounded. These events forced the family to once again confront the question of how best to use the space in the original log cabin and its addition.
The changes began as soon as Peter came back from the hospital, unable to climb the stairs to his childhood bedroom. Ethel moved upstairs to the room Peter and Marcus had once shared, and Peter occupied his parents’ former bedroom, one of the two bedrooms on the main floor of the addition. After her accident, Lina naturally couldn’t make it to her second floor bedroom any more, either. So, they moved her into the front, kitchen bedroom, displacing Renate and Ulrich. They, in turn, settled reluctantly into the other bedroom on the main floor of the addition: the room that had been so fiercely kept free over the past years. It really was the best alternative: Now both in their 60s, Renate and Ulrich were reluctant to have to climb the stairs to reach Lina’s old upstairs room. But there was something else about this decision that weighed heavily on them, and on Ethel, too. This musical chairs-like shifting of bedrooms’ occupants left the three of them feeling keenly disappointed. The cozy room they had guarded in their hearts as the spot for future generations conceived in love and harmony, had become, in the blink of an eye, a symbol of dashed family dreams, occupied now by the oldest, rather than the youngest, generation.
Chapter 6
Summer, 1945
Gassmann-Bunke homestead
And this is how Viktor and Marcus found the household arranged when they returned home in the summer of 1945, a few months after Lina had received the doctor’s dire pronouncement., after the new fairy disk had been found and lost – and hope along with it. Marcus took up residence in the second upstairs bedroom – Lina’s former room – adjacent to where his parents now slept. He was pleased not to have to share a room with Peter any longer. He didn’t think he could have stood that. We’re in our twenties now! We’re adults!
It’s not surprising that this shuffling of sleeping spots, which had been enacted in three separate stages, introduced its own level of instability and chaos into the life of the household. Someone would refer to “Lina’s room”, or “Grandpa and Grandma’s room”, leaving the others to wonder whether they were talking about the old or new room assignments. They all occasionally found themselves struggling to remember who was where now. Which was, actually, the overarching question each of them faced on nearly a daily basis: Where am I? What is my place here? For, although most of them had lived all or most of their lives on this homestead, the emotional landscape had shifted gradually and profoundly over the years, with the result that each of them was now feeling out of place. There seemed to be little solid ground to cling to – despite the fact that the log home, the workshop, and their beloved forest now, in 1945, looked little different than they had a half century earlier.
It seemed natural to everyone that the refugees, Kristina and Ingrid, would feel out of place, since they were hundreds of miles from the place where they’d been born, and which they’d fled with no more than small packs on their backs. But what’s our excuse? Renate silently asked herself one morning, as she felt in her own heart and mind the confusion and subtle despair that emanated from each of her family members. Then, since she was, after all, a Gassmann (by marriage, of course, but also emotionally), she filed this question away and returned to her attention to the pillowcase she was ironing.
As for Lina, she felt that she must be the one who reflected on this question more than any of the rest of them. I’m the one who’s paralyzed, after all, she reasoned. It never occurred to her that paralysis can take more forms than just being unable to move your legs. Certainly, other members of the family – and Kristina and Ingrid, too! – were coming up against their own, individual types of paralysis. The frequency with which the homestead inhabitants reflected on their states varied, from “not at all” to “nearly constantly”, and in the case of those who fell into the former category, the reasons for that varied, too. Some of them tended to actively avoid such contemplation (again, for various reasons). They might notice this or that troubling thought, but then force it down or out through work or chatter. Others, though, were so paralyzed in some emotional or psychological way that they would never have taken it into their heads to reflect on their state of mind. They just lived their lives and figured everything inside them was okay. But what everyone who lived here had in common was this: They did not talk to each other about their inner experiences. Nor did they risk asking each other the basic question, “How are you doing?” To do that would be to open up a door that none of them wanted to open, because what lay on the other side might be too terrifying to hear.
Lina was content to observe this unspoken code, as long as it meant that she didn’t have to ask others how they were feeling. But when this meant that no one was asking her how she was feeling… Well, that was not acceptable. She found herself thinking, They are all fine. But I’m not. And they can all see that. Why don’t they talk to me about it? She expected that once they got back home, Marcus and Viktor, at least, would ask her about all she’d gone through. But neither of them ever broached this topic with her. Nor did Kristina and Ingrid. These refugees simply took in her condition without posing a single question.
It wasn’t that Lina found silence in general disquieting. No. She’d experienced many enjoyable periods of quiet in her life: when working alongside Ulrich in the forest, where she found the lack of words soothing and at the same time energizing, since not talking enabled her to connect to the trees and the stories their energies seemed to be relating to her; or in the kitchen or garden with Renate and Ethel, each of them focused on sewing or cooking or laundry or weeding or sowing. There was a sweet sense of calm in those moments, too, as they worked separately, but were still connected to each other by a free flow of love.
Now, though, the silence felt entirely different to Lina. She couldn’t get out among the trees to feel their powerful energy the way she wanted to do – needed to, even – and when she was doing this or that task along with her mother and grandmother, the silence in the kitchen or garden now had a tense quality to it. Their love for each other was still there, but subtly obscured by a layer of concerns and thoughts consciously left unsaid – by all of them. Lina, too, kept quiet about her condition, sensing that no one else wanted to talk with her about it. What was there to say, after all? They just had to do what the doctor said, and get used to living like this.
What made this all particularly upsetting to Lina was that she knew the others were talking about her when she wasn’t around. Although she was excluded from participating in any of the conversations that centered around her, Lina sometimes caught a word or phrase. Whispers in her grandparents’ room occasionally rose above a whisper, sending words that Lina only half heard and half comprehended, through the curtained doorways and into her bedroom off the kitchen. The tones of voice varied: Sometimes the words seemed to bear grief, sometimes despair or regret or, perhaps, desire for the situation to be different. But if we take this last feeling – desire – well, Lina never actually heard words that confirmed her impression that her family members wanted things to be different. It made sense – rational sense – to her that they would just hunker down and find a way to cope. This was who the Gassmann-Bunkes were. She’d grasped in the course of her life, that they were all experts at coping. No complaining. No useless expenditure of emotion. Just do what needed to be done. So, Lina wondered, why were they talking about it at all? Here are some of the explanations that occurred to her:
Maybe they’re just so sad that I’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.
Maybe they’re just so sad that they’ll have to take care of me for the rest of my life.
Maybe they wish they could pack me off to an institution.
Maybe they wish I’d just die in the night.
Is this about about me or about them?
All these questions ran through Lina’s mind on a repeating loop – no paralysis there! They went on and on, until she finally came to the conclusion that if it were the first explanation – that their focus was her and her suffering – then they would most likely be saying something to her about it: “Lina, we’re so sorry.” “Lina, I wish things were different.” “Lina, let’s talk about what we can do to make life better for you.” But since no one was saying anything of the sort to her, all of this must certainly be about them: how their lives were horrible now because they had to take care of her; how the rest of their lives would would be ruined because of the burden she was for them; how much trouble it would be for Marcus or Peter to take care of her once their grandparents and parents were gone; and whether there was any way around or out of the situation. That kind of thing. Lina convinced herself that it was precisely these woes – their own, personal sadnesses – that they were all talking about when they thought she couldn’t hear them. Once she understood this (as she saw it) obvious explanation, Lina lost all curiosity about the actual content of these secret discussions, because they didn’t concern her – in both meanings of the phrase. It’s abundantly clear that they’re only concerned with themselves! And this led to another thought: Which means I’m on my own from now on.
Lina didn’t mean this in the physical sense, because her mother and grandmother continued to help her with washing and dressing and so on, never uttering a word of reproach, never showing how tired they must really have been. On the contrary: They showed such kindness and patience around her! Unnatural kindness and patience, it seemed to Lina. As she explained it to herself, they had to go overboard in their displays of caring, so as not to betray the resentment they actually felt toward her, and the despair at their own ruined lives.
No, Lina did feel that her physical needs were taken care of. And she did have a home, in the sense of a physical space to live in. But emotionally, she felt alone, lacking a firm foundation to rest against for support. The problem was, that ever since the accident, Lina had felt like she no longer had the right to be here on the homestead. Why do I even deserve a spot here, if I can’t be a contributing member of the household? she thought. Then the doctor gave her that devastating prognosis, condemning her to existence as an invalid, and none of her loved ones thought she might like to talk with them about what this really meant for her. For me! They spend countless hours talking about what this means for them. They have each other to talk to. With each other they talk. With me they’re mute. But who am I supposed to talk to? Who of them ever thinks to comfort me? Their silence (and hers, for she never posed these questions to anyone) left her feeling emotionally unsupported. As she sat, day after day, and observed the way everyone around her went about their business oblivious to her emotional state, Lina began to feel angry, but without recognizing what she was feeling as anger.
Now, her family was not an angry lot in general. Almost without exception, they were cordial to each other, warm, actually, because theirs was, for the most part, genuinely a very loving family. Explosions of anger did occur, but they were rare, even in the case of Marcus, who was the most vocal of them all. Instead of openly expressing any anger they did feel, the members of this family tended to keep it out of sight, holding it back and pushing it down into some inner space where they could contemplate it in quiet, personal moments. Or, conversely, they’d simply leave it unacknowledged and uncontemplated, papered over with the hope that whatever was wrong would turn out fine if only no one discussed it, out in the open, as a family.
Lina had never been aware of experiencing any anger herself before now, aside from the short-lived anger of childhood that arose out of everyday frustrations with her siblings and parents. But even those frustrations had been few and far between for Lina. As the younger sister, she had been spared the taunting and beatings that Peter had suffered at Marcus’ hands, and so had grown up mostly in a bubble of lightness. She’d found her way to the forest in early childhood, really found her way there, both physically and as a human and spiritual being. Immediately sensing the divinity and spiritual power of the trees, she had, unconsciously at first, sought to spend every free moment with them. She spent hours sitting beneath them, or perched on their boughs, or leaning against the trunk of the big beech tree in the tree house her grandfather had built for and with Ethel and Hans. At these times, Lina entered a world beyond the physical reality of the homestead, a realm where she felt so connected with the trees and with God who had created them, that it felt to her that her blood and their sap were one. In this, Lina was truly her parents’ child and her grandfather’s granddaughter.
This link to the divine, through the forest, gave her a strong, stabilizing spiritual foundation for her life. Whatever might happen – whatever slight disappointment or upset – she could always find comfort and solace in the forest. Standing or sitting amongst the trees, she would feel, Ah! I’m home. All is well. Precisely because Lina learned early on to seek refuge amongst the trees when she felt anxious, or when others in the family were ill at ease, anger never became a familiar part of her emotional landscape. She knew how to settle herself down and take comfort from the forest’s heavenliness.Lina took her sustaining spiritual connection to the trees so much for granted that she might even have referred to it as her birthright. But she’d have said so only if she’d stopped to reflect on this. This, though, was something she never did that, not until August of 1944, when it seemed to her that her birthright had suddenly and viciously been snatched from her.
Since her accident, Lina had been deprived of the opportunity to commune with the trees and soak up the solace they so eagerly offered. Certainly, the spruces and birches and larches at the edge of the forest where the path began did their best to comfort and soothe Lina as she sat in her wheelchair. But the effect was just not the same, not strong enough to quell the disquiet and feeling of homelessness that grew within her as the months dragged on. Lacking both communion with her beloved trees, and (as she saw it) a way to earn her position on the homestead, Lina felt untethered from both the land and her family. Like an interloper. Is this the way Kristina and Ingrid feel? Lina mused one day as she watched the refugee mother and child walk from the house to the workshop, their steps tentative, their shoulders a bit hunched. No, Lina decided. They are lucky. This isn’t their land, but they’re earning themselves a spot here. And a cry rose up in her throat. She noted the strong emotion, without attempting to label it, then forced it back down, into the depths of her heart.
It wasn’t until sometime in the early fall– after Marcus and Viktor had returned and Kristina and Ingrid were getting settled into life on the homestead – that Lina attempted to name the unfamiliar emotion she noticed arising in her more frequently. The first feeling she recognized was what she easily labelled as frustration – her familiar discomfort at being relegated to the forest’s edge. Then she observed how her frustration gradually intensified and deepened, until it tipped over into… Anger. Yes, that’s what it is. Once she identified it, Lina was shocked. She’d never thought of herself as an angry person. She observed with horror as this anger rushed through her, gripping her more and more tightly as it went, as it supplanted God’s energy, that had previously flowed into every part of her from the trees.
It was October of 1945 now, and some days, as she sat at the beginning of the path she couldn’t follow, Lina fell into a state of mute rage. She lost awareness of everything around her and felt only the intense pressure of her own stiff breathing and the constricted movement of her chest as it rose and fell, and her clenched jaw. Then she suddenly came to and looked down to see her hands wrapped tightly around the wheelchair’s armrests, her arms tense and straining, while her sewing lay abandoned on her useless legs.
These incidents occurred while the rest of her family members and Kristina were going about their business. No one noticed Lina’s distress, or if they did notice it, they didn’t mention it. That Gassmann reticence again. Or perhaps just lack of awareness? After all, there was so much to adjust to, for all of them. But whereas pre-accident Lina, soaked in all the heavenliness of the forest and softened by it, would have realized that each person on the homestead was going through his or her own process of coming to terms with his or her wartime experiences, post-accident Lina could see only her own suffering. Despite the chores and tasks she had taken on, she still had precious little in the way of distraction to lift her out of her earth-bound state of anger at her own helplessness and hopelessness.
What, precisely, was she so angry about? Lina asked herself this very question the first time she found herself gripping the wheelchair’s armrests as if she were attempting to strangle them, and realized that it was anger she was feeling. Several initial answers flowed freely into her mind: They don’t care about me. They’ve forgotten about me. They can’t be bothered to ask me how I’m feeling. No one’s even trying to think of a solution. Because these answers were similar to the reasons she’d already come up with to explain everyone’s silence, Lina found them satisfying. There was also something else that made them appealing to her: They all implicated her family members and their heartlessness.
For some reason, she felt a strong need to be able to pin the blame for her situation on someone. She could have blamed God, of course. But she wasn’t particularly inclined to do so, since until a year earlier, before her accident, she had felt embraced by God’s presence every single day, had felt loved and supported by Him. Lina didn’t like to follow this train of thought, the idea that God might be to blame. The answers to the question What am I so angry about? that ran along that track – and which were actually more questions, instead of answers – disturbed her: Why did God allow this to happen to me? How did I disappoint God so that He did this to me? Why did God abandon me? She certainly did feel abandoned now, and not just by God, but by her family, too. This feeling led her to wonder why everyone had abandoned her. Am I myself somehow to blame?
At this point in her ruminations, Lina suddenly recalled something her mother had said to her a few years earlier. It was right after Peter went into the army, Lina recalled. So I’d just turned fourteen. She and her mother and grandmother were in the kitchen. Renate was busy with dinner preparations. Lina was standing up on a chair, wearing the new skirt Ethel had sewn for her, while Ethel was kneeling behind her, pinning up the skirt’s hem. They were having the kind of light conversation that always dominated when they were working together on a project. Feeling relaxed and happy, Lina came out with a question she’d been thinking about off and on for a week or so.
“Mama, why are Marcus and Peter only a year apart, but there’s four years between Peter and me?”
Ethel made no reply at first. But Lina could feel her mother’s hands stop their rhythmical motion of folding the fabric and pinning it up. Renate, too, paused at the counter, where she was chopping carrots.
“Mama?” Lina asked again, and then turned to look back at her mother.
“Don’t fidget!” Ethel replied, the words emerging from around the straight pins she was holding in her mouth.
Lina, who had no idea about how and why children were conceived, couldn’t understand why she hadn’t been born a year after Peter. And so, she’d innocently asked her mother for an explanation. She couldn’t see Ethel’s lips tighten around the pins. But she did notice that Renate put down her knife and wiped her hands on her apron.
“Mama?” Lina asked once again, more quietly this time. Again, she felt Ethel’s hands stop moving. After removing the pins slowly from her mouth, Ethel finally spoke, still kneeling behind her daughter.
“Things like that aren’t always so simple,” she began, then paused.
“I’ll go see whether those sheets on the line are dry,” Renate remarked, before turning and walking out the door, into the yard.
Lina found that odd. Why’d Grandma go out right in the middle of cutting up the carrots?
Ethel, meanwhile, was thinking about that period of her life and marriage, about the reasons for the gap Lina had asked about. Then she thought about Viktor and Marcus, who’d already been away for two years, and about Peter, who was, at that moment, heading toward who knows what battlefield. She felt her stomach tighten, and blinked away the tears that rushed to her eyes. She bowed her head for a moment, feeling grateful that Lina’s back was to her. Later, Ethel would both marvel at and regret the honesty she displayed in the next moment.
“The truth is, Lina,” she went on, finally, “that your father and I weren’t getting along very well for a few years. I wasn’t sure whether I even wanted to live with him any more, much less have another child with him.”
Then, with no further explanation, Ethel placed the pins back into her mouth, one by one, and went back to pinning up the hem on Lina’s skirt. Lina, for her part, stood stock still, meek and mute, moving only when her mother said, “Turn”. By the time she’d revolved enough that she was facing her mother, Lina couldn’t bring herself to look down. Had she done so, she would have seen the tears in her mother’s eyes. As it was, it was all she could do to keep her own tears from rushing down her cheeks. A few minutes later, once Lina was once again facing forward, Ethel spoke again.
“But I’m so, so glad you came to us,” she said softly. “All done,” she added, tugging on the hem of the skirt.
Lina hopped off the chair, silently and hurriedly changed back into her work pants and, without a word, fled into the forest, to the tree house. There she wrapped her arms as far around the trunk as she could reach, and just sobbed. It took more than an hour, but the old beech gradually soothed Lina’s sorrow, as her tears soaked into its bark.
* * *
Although Lina managed to convince herself that none of her family members was the least bit concerned with all she was going through, the actual story was not quite that simple. Each of them had his or her own questions about what Lina had gone through, and what she was still going through.
The Why? of it. That’s what kept nagging at Peter, tormenting him. He was, perhaps, the most religious of all the family members, and he recalled hearing that God has a plan for each of us. How?, he was continually asking himself, could it have been in God’s plan for me to cripple Lina? To be the instrument of breaking her bones and consigning her to a wheelchair for the rest of her life? What kind of heinous instrument is that to be in life? He would pray and ask God to explain how this could possibly be a plan for him – and for Lina. Some days he would stand in the yard and stare at the spot where the accident had occurred and look at the dirt, which he could swear was still dented in spots, still darkened by Lina’s blood. Well, actually, there had been less blood than he would have expected, given the gravity of her injuries. Why weren’t there entire pools of blood? Or maybe, he considered, it was just his war experience that had conditioned him to expect that wounds always released whole rivers of blood? Sometimes Peter looked at the spot with the same blank stare that came over his face whenever someone mentioned the fact that he’d been wounded in the war, an event he was incapable of remembering, despite the very real evidence that it had occurred. Other times, he stared intently, frowning, practically willing God to answer his request for an explanation of the events of August 10, 1944. No answer had come by the time summer of 1945. But he continued to pray.
* * *
Ulrich, as a forester, was an observant man with a love of precision. Tall, and with a grounded heaviness about him, Ulrich was also strong, like the pine trees he resembled. Even his curly, sandy-colored hair was reminiscent of the pine pollen that settled on him in the spring as he worked amongst the trees. In the world of trees and forestry, his insight and decision-making were flawless. Ulrich was skilled at quickly and accurately assessing a situation, whether that meant gauging where a tree needed to be notched so that it could fall cleanly without toppling others, or how much to charge a carpentry client, depending on the client’s current mood, his wife’s disposition, or the amount of rain his hay field had received in the past month. So, it wasn’t the Why? of the accident which hounded Ulrich, but the How? He just couldn’t make the calculations come out right, no matter how hard he tried. Perhaps something else is at work here? he mused.
Ulrich knew, without a doubt, that various powerful and natural forces operated in the world. This he came to believe during his earliest days in the eleven hectares his family had owned for generations. His belief in these forces took root bit by bit, when he heard sounds that no one could quite explain to him coming from trees, or saw a falling tree inexplicably shift its direction and avoid crushing a hedgehog. There were a few times when he asked his father about these incidents. He asked why the trees were talking, or why that beech tree chose to veer away from the hedgehog. “Was it afraid of being pricked by the spines?” His father, Detlef, a less fanciful thinker than Ulrich (although he, as we’ve seen, defied convention in his own ways) refused to grant that trees possessed any voice or agency. For Detlef, there was no Why? to be discussed, because he saw Ulrich’s starting premise as faulty: Trees were trees, not actors in and of themselves. They merely took (but without any conscious choice) the direction the foresters nudged them in.
It was Detlef who used the word “fanciful” to describe his son. But Ulrich never understood his father’s choice of that word. What was fanciful about these forest events that Ulrich knew to be true? How? could his father reject something so real? However, when faced with Detlef’s resistance – despite the fact that he couldn’t understand it – Ulrich changed his tack. Clever, but also stubbornly curious, and at the same time respectful, he took to reframing his question. “How?” he then asked his father, “did it happen that the tree fell and didn’t crush the hedgehog?”, despite the fact that the hedgehog was padding across the very spot where Detlef intended for the tree to fall. Even at an early age, Ulrich sensed that these types of questions placed Detlef in an untenable and undesirable position: He had to admit either that he had erred in his own calculations when felling the tree, or that some other force was at work. But no answers were forthcoming when Ulrich posed questions of this sort. Whenever Ulrich persisted, Detlef eventually just pretended not to hear what his son was saying.
But his father’s lack of response did not deter Ulrich from posing such questions, or from drawing his own conclusions. Over the course of the sixty-four years of his life, nearly all of them spent in the family’s forest, Ulrich came to believe that trees, along with all living beings, were permeated by the divine life force that he himself felt out amongst the trees. In other words, God’s power flowed through them all. Ulrich came to this conclusion based on his own experience of feeling peace and joy and love out in the forest. He was firmly convinced that the trees around him – and the other beings and plants who lived there – must experience this, too. He also believed that this divine power somehow had the ability to guide them, to encourage them to act kindly towards others around them.
But does that mean that God sent the divine power through a beech tree and thereby encouraged it to avoid crushing a hedgehog? Or did the tree make this decision on its own because it was full of the divine? Ulrich had been mulling that question over for decades now, along with this one: Can God do more than simply fill us with His power, or do we individuals make our decisions completely on our own? Or is there some collaborative process at work?
Because this longstanding inquiry was often present in his mind, Ulrich also had the habit of wondering what part God played in global and local events alike. He reflected on God’s role in the two wars they’d lived through, in the quantity of rabbits that took up residence in the forest each year, and in the number of trees that toppled in a strong storm. He wasn’t so naïve as to assert that a human’s actions or motivations played no part in how life played out around him – that God could control every detail of one’s life. But at the same time, neither was he comfortable relying solely on rational, measurable explanations.
So, when it came to discussing Lina’s accident, Ulrich was desperately engaged in pinning down the How? of it: How did Lina end up beneath the mound of wood rounds, with two broken legs, a broken foot and a dislocated hip? For him, determining the How? meant studying both earthly and divine factors. When he thought about the earthly side of the situation, numerous technical questions rushed to his mind. The first involved angles, because he was always thinking about angles, and degrees of incline, and trajectories, and straight paths. Thus, when he stood in the yard, staring at the spot where the accident occurred, Ulrich was trying to pinpoint the angle and speed at which the rounds of wood had tumbled off the wagon’s back end. If the wagon had been going a little faster, would Lina’s legs still have been crushed, or would the wood have fallen further from her? Had the wagon’s front wheels lifted off the ground even a bit as the wagon lurched forward, thereby increasing the force they exerted upon Lina’s bones, and upon the hard-packed earth? (Ulrich, too, saw the indentations in the ground.) How?, precisely, in terms of angles and speed and force, had the wood fallen?
Ulrich’s next questions touched on the divine or, precisely, on the role of the divine. How? did it come about that the horses started off in the first place? And How? was it that Peter didn’t have them fully under his control? In these questions, Ulrich saw a connection to his decades-old query about the beech tree that managed to avoid the hedgehog. One day, as he stood in the yard, studying the dented ground, he suddenly had the feeling that the divine power was somehow tied up with the accident. But he didn’t find this thought appealing. Crossing his arms in front of his chest, he shook his head. Why would God want Lina to have this accident? That doesn’t make any sense. God’s supposed to help, not harm, isn’t He?
So, as regards this particular situation, Ulrich chose to focus on the earthly explanations. He generally found it calming and comforting to work out technical questions. Such a process enabled him to bring things into order by working out all the measurable details. At least, this is what he experienced when dealing with wood. But this was a very human situation, and such situations were not his strength. Nonetheless, Ulrich persisted in his attempts to calculate everything he could that related to Lina’s accident, while actively not considering what role God might have played. But since he consistently pushed aside this, the divine, side of the question, he failed to achieve the order he sought. He began to experience anguish at the lack of a satisfying explanation, and this anguish gradually settled into his spirit as a persistent sadness.
* * *
Renate also favored the question, How did it happen?, but it was not exactly the same How? as her husband’s. It was neither angles and trajectories that filled her mind, nor the question of divine influence. Her How? could be more precisely rendered as, Who?, as in, Who? caused her only granddaughter to be lying broken beneath wooden rubble? Thus, a single question – “How? did Lina end up trapped under the pile of wood?” – acquired several distinct meanings, depending on whether it came from Ulrich’s lips or Renate’s.
Now, Renate was not a forester, and thus, could tell you nothing about the angle at which a tree would fall, or how a notch should be cut. All the same, she was no less exacting than her husband: The consistency of her pastries’ flakiness or the evenness of her quilting stitches hinted at the deep love of precision that she and her husband shared. You only needed to see her short, solid figure at work on a meat pie, to understand that here was a woman who knew how things should be done. Even her braids, which she wove tight each morning, before pinning them up, one on each side of her head, so that they came together in a little bun at the top, reflected her fondness for order. She also shared Ulrich’s tendency to engage in what others might deem “fanciful” thinking. You could see this trait in the ornamental dough curlicues that adorned her pie crust tops, and in the whimsy of the fairy houses she used to make when she was a little girl. As a child, she, like Ulrich, became convinced of the existence of unseen forces in nature, of unseen forest beings, and of trees possessed of voices.
We can see here the lineage of Lina’s love of the forest and its divine nature. There can be no doubt that Lina’s strong attachment to the forest, her feeling of, “Here I’m home!” had made its way resolutely down through the family line from her grandparents and settled into her more deeply than in any of the other children or grandchildren. But while Ulrich maintained his strong connection to the forest and its divinity even after he married and had children, Renate’s focus shifted as she began raising her own family. With a husband and two children to raise (Hans and Ethel), Renate’s focus shifted to the visible, tangible human world. She felt the need to expend her mental and emotional energy on nurturing the relationships between all the family members. Facing this monumental task, Renate decided that she no longer had time for sitting in the woods, communing with fairies and spirits, no endless hours for allowing divine creativity to guide her hands as she constructed just the right dwelling out of bark, twigs, pine cones and moss. As Renate saw it, people were not fairies, beings you could deal with in some relaxed state of ease, with faith that all would turn out right as long as you came to the endeavor with joy and openness. No, Renate decided early on. Running a family is serious business.
Thus, Renate approached the realm of her household’s human inhabitants with just as much precision as Ulrich approached his work in the forest, but with an ever-lessening connection to the divine. Renate used carefully-calibrated words and actions to nudge Ulrich and her children in various directions, into the shape she felt it was best for each of them to inhabit. She did this much in the way she formed the dough for her breads, rolls, doughs, and pastries: Each had its own desired (by Renate!) form and characteristics, and none of them shaped themselves, thank you very much! Skill, exertion, and constant vigilance were required.
Renate’s insight into people and skill at handling them, both amazed and puzzled her husband, because he, himself, lacked these qualities. During all the years he’d lived before getting to know Renate, Ulrich always tried to understand what made the people around him tick, but without success. He didn’t become fully aware of this weakness until he was nearly forty – when it became abundantly clear to him that he had, decades early, entirely misunderstood a certain situation. This misunderstanding had nearly destroyed his closest friendship, and he’d never understood why, because he figured he was just as insightful as anyone else… But early on in his acquaintance with his future wife, it became clear to him that Renate absolutely shone when it came to reading people. This he could see. At this point, he also saw that his skill at intuiting the right placement for a wedge or the precise spot for a tree to fall had no corollary that would have enabled him to clearly discern what lay at the heart of a human matter. Ulrich knew full well that trees had their own, complex motivations and inner lives, and he could gain access to them in a way Renate never understood. But humans mostly perplexed Ulrich. Humans, he felt,were constantly-shifting targets.
But Renate! Renate spoke to him with such confidence about the best way to handle this person or that situation so that good relations could always be maintained. And her assessments of those around them always impressed him as self-evident once she presented them, even though he could never have come up with them himself. As for Renate, she came to her own realization early in their acquaintance with Ulrich: she saw that he possessed an incredible gift when it came to dealing with the forest and the family business. So, once they were married, without even discussing it, the newlyweds divided their duties according to their natural strengths: Ulrich managed the trees, and Renate managed the people.
This didn’t mean that Ulrich and Renate never discussed domestic or forestry matters with each other. Quite the contrary! They spoke about anything and everything each evening, before they fell asleep. Renate remarked upon this or that business development Ulrich had mentioned, and he, in turn, asked her how this or that matter was going with one of the children. But in each case, the goal was not to have a serious back and forth that would influence or yield a decision. Rather, this was the way each of them showed the other support and love, as well as respect and the complete confidence each had in the other’s ability to handle or resolve any situation that arose.
But in 1944, when Lina was so badly injured, Ulrich and Renate’s separate areas of responsibility suddenly overlapped, leaving both husband and wife wondering where they’d made their mistake. Was it on the forestry side or the personal side? For Ulrich’s part, his anguish over his granddaughter’s accident combined with anguish over his own inability to discern the How? of it: How? had he allowed this to happen? Should he not have encouraged her to pursue her dream of becoming a forester? Maybe he had supported her desire for selfish reasons. Perhaps it was because he feared that his life’s work would be all for naught if none of his grandchildren was passionate enough to carry on the forestry work in the way he desperately wanted it to be carried on?
Although Renate seemed supremely logical to those around her, she did actually experience feelings about people and situations. It was just that she had a long-standing habit of pushing them aside as irrelevant to decision-making about corralling her family members. However, these feelings remained close to the surface of her awareness, as a thin overlay that colored her intuition. (She would have denied this.)
So, when it came to Lina’s accident, it was, in fact, Renate’s tamped-down fear and anger and sadness and frustration and regret that served as the engine behind her persistent thought inquiries into the How? of the accident. She just had to figure out the mechanism of the occurrence, so that she could prevent something like this from happening again. This new situation, she was convinced, was another 1921: The events of that year had spurred her to initiate new protocols for family conversations. And, since disasters of the 1921 type had not recurred, she assumed they were effective.
Thus, looking back at her past success in this area, Renate felt she should be able to: 1) discern what actions lay at the heart of Lina’s accident, and then 2) root them out. This would ensure that no one else in her family would go through anything similar. This focus on determining the precipitating actions originated in Renate’s belief that Lina’s accident not just an accident. Because if it were just accident, then there would be no way for her to prevent such things from happening in the future. No. Not that Renate rejected the “accident” explanation consciously, though. This was just her innate approach to the world: Unlike Ulrich’s father, Detlef, who disavowed the agency of trees, Renate knew perfectly well that behind every action (whether by a sentient or non-sentient being) lay a conscious decision. Not just an idea or a motivation, but a decision to act on that idea. So, Renate put her mind to work to determine who had decided to hurt her Lina.
In the early months, as Lina lay physically bruised and broken, and psychologically damaged, on a day bed they’d set up for her in the kitchen, Renate spent much of her time going over and over this question in her mind. During this period, the family noticed that the curlicues atop Renate’s pie crusts grew even more sinuous, reflecting, perhaps, the twists and turns of her thinking as she followed every possible explanation through to its conclusion. At the same time, her stitching became ever more even. She seemed fixated on forcing the needle and thread to her do her bidding: to produce a perfectly linear and straightforward narrative of thread and fabric, one that would, she hoped, lead to an equally straightforward narrative of the accident.
Among the possible answers to the Who? was Peter, of course. But Renate couldn’t bring herself to accept that story. (That was the emotional overlay in her mind talking.) All logical considerations aside (the damning fact that he had been the one in charge of the wagon), he had already been through enough, hadn’t he? (The overlay once again.) Marcus was nearly the death of him when those two were growing up, and then the Russians had tried to finish the job with those two bullets. Peter feels responsible enough for Lina’s accident, without me heaping blame upon him, too. Renate felt that such accusations would be as crushing and sharp as the load of wood he had failed to control. I can’t do that to him. Her grandmother side was at work once again.
That left the Poles. They were a convenient Who? They had loaded the wagon. They had neglected to put up the railings across the back. Neglected! Yes, there’s where the fault lies, Renate suddenly realized. In the Poles’ decision to neglect their duties. I’ve found it! Renate was taught, as a young girl, that neglect was not a benign act. Her father had been of the belief that one did not just “forget” or neglect to do anything. He’d had the bewildering habit of attributing every genuinely-forgotten childhood chore to a willful act of domestic rebellion and disrespect. And although Renate herself had been on the losing end of countless such conflicts growing up, she had also unconsciously absorbed this view. As we’ve seen, she did not hesitate to make use of it, at least when it suited her. And now was one of those times, she decided. She found it quite convenient to blame the Poles. They claim to have “forgotten” to put up the rails. That counts as a decision, doesn’t it?
* * *
Now, Ethel was aware of her parents’ ruminations on the cause of the accident, and of Peter’s, too. They all came to her with their theories – always when Lina was not in earshot, naturally. She listened and nodded and offered a noncommittal response to family members who were so caught in their own thought processes that they would not have entertained any objections. She knew better than to bother to putting forth alternative explanations, especially to her mother. Over the course of the first year following the accident, Ethel grew immensely frustrated that these theories’ trajectory always pointed backwards in time, seeking explanations into the past. That approach felt irrelevant to her. What was relevant, she thought, was the Now what? of it.
Ethel had always been the creative one in her family, or, rather, the one who did not allow her creative spark to be crushed and stalled beneath the weight of the mundane necessities of everyday life. Whereas her mother gave her inner light the space to peek out only in the vines and leaves of dough atop her piecrusts, Ethel, from early childhood, had embraced a world of free-flowing, swirling color and form and movement. Guided by an inner voice, she fashioned fabric scraps into small quilts with wildly irregular designs. There was the time she infuriated her mother by sowing the bean seeds in a spiral, so that she’d have a labyrinth to walk in when the vines grew tall. Unlike Renate, who carefully constructed a vision of the future and then strived to produce it by controlling those around her, Ethel delighted in stepping into the forward-moving flow of creativity and seeing where it led her.
Really, the scope of Ethel’s creative spark had already been greater than her mother’s right from the start. It’s true that the past twenty years – fully half of her life – had challenged her ability to hold onto her lightness of vision and forward motion. She had struggled to avoid being dragged down to earth and so tightly tied down by earthly concerns, that she couldn’t lift off again. At some points, she had felt as if unseen evil spirits had thrown ropes around her ankles, so faintly connected was she to the divine creative force that had once flowed through her so freely. But she never lost touch with it completely, and she fought to maintain this connection, although at times she even fought to maintain her belief in the divine itself.
But Ethel and Renate were more alike than it might have appeared on the surface: They both enjoyed following threads. It was just that Renate preferred tracing and retracing the threads she herself had already laid out clearly. Ethel, on the other hand, was enamored of the process of seeing a spool set to rolling before her and discovering where the thread before her would lead. For her, the joy had always lain in following the threads laid out by the divine force, and trusting that they would lead to the good. Now, faced with the unexpected spool of thread that was her disabled daughter, Ethel focused her creative vision on discerning how she was being guided to follow this spool of thread that the divine had presented to her as it rolled into the future.
The thing about being guided is that, before you can let yourself be guided, you have to be able to perceive the guide. Ethel worked out that her answer to that as a child, at least as far as creative projects, such as sewing and gardening were concerned. The guide was God. But as she moved through life, as she married and given birth to children, she began having trouble hearing what God was saying to her in the midst all her responsibilities within the family. Much like her father, she found it difficult to apply the gifts that she used effortlessly in one area of her life in others. Even so, all these years, she consciously persevered in seeking out divine guidance, in asking to be guided. She asked to glimpse the spool God was setting in motion for her and wanting her to follow. At this point, then, in the late summer of 1944, she fixed her gaze firmly on discerning what direction the path of the future might lead them along. There was an openness to her thought and vision, even if both, at this point, lacked clarity. Ethel felt that there must be something that could be done to help Lina, and she was set on following this divine spool as it rolled out the thread along a path she was convinced could help them find an answer.
* * *
So? This was Marcus’ response to the news. He was still away, in Berlin, when his mother’s letter reached him. An officer with the Censorship Office, he was intently focused on supervising his team of censors, so that no details which might undermine troop morale could sneak through in the letters that loved ones sent to troops at the front. When one of the young censors was in doubt about whether to strike the mention of a father’s illness or the joy of coming upon a cache of food in the woods, the final decision rested with Marcus. Therefore, when his sharp and hardened eye read his own mother’s words about his own sister’s accident, this detail from one life among so many others elicited from him not a response, but a decision. Such was his training, and his job: Let it through or strike it out? He crumpled the letter and tossed it into the waste bin, thereby striking it from his consciousness. So what?
* * *
Lina’s father, Viktor, too, was still away when Ethel wrote to inform him. Precisely where Viktor was, Ethel did not know in 1944. The actual facts of where he’d been and what he had done did come out, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, but not until a few years later. During the war, Ethel had a mailing address for him – which contained an acronym that meant nothing to her – but on the two occasions when Viktor came home on leave, he told her that it was best not to send letters to him through the mail. Clearly, the love of censorship that had blossomed in the son was present also in the father. He insisted that Ethel give any notes for him to the young officer whom he sent to them every few months with provisions: cigarettes, liquor, chocolate. These items of mysterious origin were quickly transformed into flour and cloth and meat on the black market, and Ethel knew better than to inquire of the young officer or Viktor about their source.
Ethel fully complied with her husband’s wishes. She never passed letters of casual or frivolous content (as if any letter during the war could possibly fall into that category!) along for her husband with the young officer on the return journey. She preferred instead to send simply a verbal message of her love. So, when, in the fall of 1944, this young officer handed Viktor an actual letter, in an actual envelope, Viktor muttered, brows knit in consternation, Now what?
Sue Downing 