Chapter 7
June, 1949
Gassmann-Bunke homestead
It had been nearly five years since Lina’s accident, and it seemed to Lina that her brothers and parents and grandparents had come to focus even more deeply on their own areas of concern within the life of the homestead. Ulrich was constantly in need of more help with the forestry work. The Poles were no longer here, having been sent back to Poland in the summer of 1945, and although Viktor took the forestry and cabinetry work back up full time once he came home from the war, they still needed more helpers. Their hired hand, Stefan, couldn’t fill all the gaps. As before, Peter devoted his time and energy to the furniture-making business, since his compromised leg still prevented him from going out into the forest. Marcus was the only member of the family who was working full time off the homestead, at the plum Civil Service position in Varel. He seemed the least connected of all of them to life at home – except where Kristina was concerned. He’d grown very fond of the refugee widow, and they had been courting for a couple of years now.
Kristian Windel and her 5-year-old daughter, Ingrid, arrived on the homestead early in the summer of 1945. They ended up with the Gassmann-Bunkes in the same way that thousands of other refugees fleeing the invading Soviets ended up with other families across the western part of Germany. They’d been sent there by order of authorities in Oldenburg that were resettling residents of area refugee camps who could not return to their pre-war homes. Despite whatever concerns they might have had about strangers coming onto their homestead, Renate and Ethel were overjoyed. Just as they strived never to show Lina how tired they were from the extra work her disability required of them, now, they were careful not to openly express their eagerness for this young woman’s arrival. God forbid Lina might interpret this as a desire to pass on irksome duties to someone else. This was how Renate and Ethel thought Lina imagined they saw caring for her. The two older women were, in fact, so used to keeping every emotion relating to Lina’s care locked inside, that they never even discussed the situation between them. What if Lina heard us? But upon receiving the official notice about Kristina, both were filled with a deep sense of relief. Someone to help!
During the first weeks, Kristina – her head still whirling from the months she and Ingrid had passed in uncertainty, danger, and fear – directed all her attention and energy toward fitting in with this family that had taken her in. She knew that the Gassmanns had been forced to do so, but she didn’t feel any resentment coming from any of them. She spent the first few months puzzling over that, every day half expecting to be thrown out, although she knew that this would have constituted a violation of law. Even so, she put her nose to whatever grindstone she was directed to, and tried her best to keep Ingrid from causing any trouble, either.
When they’d first arrived, little Ingrid had been ill – thin and worn down from all she’d endured, and suffering from some respiratory ailment as well. She didn’t have enough energy to be a pest. But the summer days out in the fresh air, and Renate and Ethel’s good, hearty food helped her grow stronger each day. Before long, she was well enough that Renate and Ethel were able channel the little girl’s newly-returned energy into helping out around the house. Ingrid was thrilled to be asked to gather the eggs in the morning and toss feed out for the chickens, to search the garden vines for beans for supper. She helped with the baking, too: Ethel showed her how to roll fat cigars of dough with her little palms, and twist and tie them into little bundles, and how to tell when they were risen enough to go into the oven. Renate put her to work stirring sugar into the raspberries that would soon become jam, and Lina, while sitting at the kitchen table doing mending, taught her how to darn a sock with the help of a wooden tool that looked to Ingrid like a bulbous rattle that, mysteriously, made no noise.
Although Kristina, busy with her own duties in the household, at first frequently asked the Gassmann women to let her know if Ingrid was being a bother, she rather quickly gave up doing so. She could see that they doted on Ingrid: The tasks they gave her would certainly have gone more quickly if they’d just done them themselves. But Kristina saw that Lina and her mother and grandmother found joy in Ingrid’s presence and delighted in seeing her happiness at each new activity, at being asked to take responsibility for shelling the peas or pouring the sugar, or threading a needle. It occurred to Kristina that they were as thrilled to have a lively child in their midst as Ingrid was to be there. There was something about having the little girl around – a happy little girl – Kristina thought, that spoke of renewal after the hard years they’d all been through. A symbol of hope. Kristina herself felt hopeful about the future as she watched Ingrid grow stronger and come out of her shell with this family. We are alive, she’d think to herself. We are safe. We are blessed. We have a future.
When September came, Ingrid began attending kindergarten in Bockhorn. By now, she was as carefree and healthy as she’d been as a toddler back on Kristina’s family’s farm in East Prussia. Kristina marveled at Ingrid’s resilience, and prayed to God to feel as at ease and light as her daughter. It did Kristina’s heart good when Ingrid, having walked the few miles home from school with the children who lived down the road, gave them a hearty wave as they parted, then met them the next morning with an eager smile. Kristina was relieved both that Ingrid had found new friends quickly, and that she was also accepted by the families, who often invited the little girl to play with their daughters. She knew that this was certainly not always the case where war refugees were concerned. We are blessed.
Renate, as the Gassmann matriarch, ran the household and, thus, it was she who issued Kristina her tasks. The older woman was truly grateful to have an extra hand around the house: In addition to the usual washing, cooking, sewing, gardening, and tending to the animals, there was Lina to care for. Both women were devoted to Lina and took great pains to always treat her with the love they truly felt for her. At the same time, there were limited hours in the day, in the summer in particular, when there was so much harvesting and preserving to be done on top of the regular household chores. Renate and Ethel found themselves exhausted by the end of each day. Their fatigue was intensified by their desire not to show how tired they were, lest Lina feel she was placing an unbearable burden on them. But Lina knew her mother and grandmother well, and she could see by their weary faces the toll that her inability to walk was taking on them both. So, Lina frequently reminded them that, although she couldn’t walk, she did still have full use of her arms. She reminded Renate of “her” decision to allow Lina to help with whatever she could. But that still meant that if she was to do something out in the yard, someone needed to roll her wheelchair outside, or fetch the cooking ingredients she couldn’t reach. And so on.
So, Kristina really was a godsend to the family. In addition to helping Renate and Ethel with whatever Renate asked her to do, she was also Lina’s caretaker during the daytime hours. She would make sure Lina had everything she needed and get her set up to carry out whatever work she was able to do: sewing, knitting, peeling vegetables, etc. But, “godsend” didn’t necessarily translate into “friend”, as Kristina quickly learned. She had entered the Gassmanns-Bunkes’ life at the point when Lina was just beginning to allow herself to feel the anger that was pushing itself up into her awareness. Following Kristina’s arrival with Ingrid, Lina’s anger expanded to include not just all her family members, but this young refugee widow with the sickly child, too.
One day during the second week, when Kristina wheeled her out into the yard, so that the two of them could sit side by side and darn socks out in the fresh air, Lina was feeling particularly angry: at her immobility, at her dependence on others, at not being able to be in the woods, and at this young woman beside her who could do all of those things and more. A young woman who, Lina had decided, was so self-centered that she couldn’t even bother to ask Lina about herself and what she’d gone through. We took her in, for heaven’s sake! Lina’s anger flowed from her tight chest down into her arms and out her fingers, which began tugging the darning yarn with a ferocity that Kristina couldn’t help but notice.
“Looks like that sock is your enemy,” Kristina said, a slight, cautious smile coming to her lips.
Lina, who had not taken in the lightness in Kristina’s remark, turned sharply and glared at her. The anger in her face caught Kristina by surprise, and the small smile that had accompanied her words instantly faded.
“Oh, forgive me,” Kristina said quickly, anxious to turn the situation around. Seeing that Lina was making an effort to stuff her anger back down, she added, “It just looked like you were trying to stab that poor sock to death.”
The tiniest of smiles appeared at the corners of Lina’s mouth. She nodded and put the wounded sock down in her lap. Staring straight ahead, she said, seriously, “I was.” But then she looked at Kristina once more, and her smile grew a bit bigger.
Kristina barely knew Lina at this point, but she felt the younger woman’s anger the day she arrived on the homestead. Not that she consciously noted it until about a week had passed. In fact, at the start she barely registered it, because she had experienced so much anger around her during the previous eight months. But after that first week, she began coming out of her own state of shock and started to discern more clearly who was feeling what. The anger in the household was coming from Lina.
“So,” Kristina went on, encouraged by Lina’s slight smile, “what’d it ever do to you? Besides get a hole in it.”
Until now, Lina had been sitting upright, her arms and shoulder and back held stiff. Now she shrugged and leaned back in her wheelchair. “That’s precisely it. It got a hole in it. It’s ruined.” She waved her hand again at the sock.
“You’re stitching it back up, aren’t you?” Kristina protested. “It’ll be good as new.”
Lina shook her head and held the patched hole for Kristina to see. “It’ll never be good as new. You’ll always be able to see where it had to be reknitted. It’s like a scar that’ll never go away.”
“What, it’s no good if it has a scar?” Kristina asked softly, grasping what Lina was really talking about.
“Maybe with one it’d be okay,” Lina replied, staring down at her lap. “But you can only patch a sock so many times. Too many holes, and you might as well just toss it out. It’s no good to anyone anymore.” She raised her gaze once more to the woman next to her, and Kristina could see that the anger in Lina’s eyes had been replaced with sorrow. The tears were just beginning to form.
Silently, still holding Lina’s gaze, Kristina reached over and laid her hand on Lina’s.
“You know, Lina,” she said finally, her voice full of kindness, “I have a lot of holes in my socks, too. But here’s what I’ve come to believe these past eight months: Never give up on a sock. Even if it’s full of holes. We just have to find the right yarn to mend it. Then we can go on. And the sock will be stronger for the mending.”
Lina didn’t immediately come around to this idea. That took several years. But after this conversation, she did come around to Kristina: She was touched by the unexpected kindness of the touch of Kristina’s hand on hers. In that moment, something passed between them that neither could have articulated, a sense that there was something they shared, even if they didn’t yet know what it was. The sense of it must have been enough, though, for as they began spending more and more time together, both young women grew lighter, each drawn out of her own sorrow and worries by the other, at least temporarily. After that morning, when Renate or Ethel happened to look out the kitchen window into the yard where Lina and Kristina were hanging out the laundry, or picking berries, or simply sitting at the entrance to the forest – Lina in her wheelchair and Kristina sitting on the ground beside her, her skirt and apron spread out around her – the older women began noticing that, more and more, the girls were smiling, their heads bobbing energetically as they talked. There were even smiles. More and more smiles as the years went on. Which brings us to 1949. Late June.
* * *
It had become part of Lina’s routine to sit out in the yard in the early part of each afternoon, in a sunny spot, if one was to be had, and read the newspaper. This seemed like something of an indulgence to her. But Renate and Ethel and Kristina assured her that it was not, and that, in fact, she was helping them. “You read it for us, dear one,” Renate would tell her. “Then tell us all the news.” “Yes,” Ethel would chime in. “We certainly don’t have the time, but we want to know all that’s going on.”
So, each day, Kristina wheeled Lina outside and made her cozy, with a sweater or scarf or a plaid or a sun hat, depending on the weather. Then she left her friend alone with the newspaper and some mending she could do, once she finished her reading. This was just about Lina’s favorite part of the day. For the first time since her accident, she once again was able to take delight in spending time on her own, in silence. Reading the paper and then relating its most interesting, relevant, and suitable contents – nothing controversial, though, since these are the Gassmann-Bunkes we’re talking about! – to everyone over supper helped her feel like a productive member of the family, even if it was on just a very small scale. As she read, she enjoyed making a mental checklist of which stories she would relate to the family, and in what order. Seeing herself as the family’s personal journalist, she would curate each day’s news with an eye toward creating maximum narrative and dramatic effect.
On this particular day, June 25th, Lina was sitting with just a light shawl around her shoulders, her sun hat casting a broad enough shadow before her that she was able to read the paper without squinting. The front page was occupied by the usual articles on national politics, stories that Lina did not usually relate over supper, because that kind of news spread easily and quickly by word of mouth. The second page, dominated by local news of a practical nature, was always suitable, if boring: openings of some businesses, closings of others, new ordinances, etc. Page four, with its details about prices for crops, weather reports, and overall trends in local trade, was consistently so sleep-inducing to Lina that she hardly ever even glanced at it. Besides, she knew that her father and grandfather would study this page themselves, so she left it to them to scour it for news that would affect the family’s forestry or cabinetry business. This left page three, which was where Lina generally found the stories that served as the highlights of her daily reports: articles about new films or plays that were set to be shown or performed in the near future; notes about fashion, with accompanying photos; and, always, some bit of scintillating reporting about prominent national citizens or entertainment celebrities.
This afternoon, then, as was her habit, Lina opened up immediately to page three and folded the paper so that she could comfortably read the articles above and then below the fold. Her approach was to first seek out the report that would serve as the centerpiece of the day’s summary and then peruse the rest of the paper for stories to fill in around the edges. She started, as usual, at the top of the page: Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children” was to be performed in Varel that weekend. Under other circumstances, this would be big news to share, indeed. The thought of an inspirational play appealed to her. But then she recalled hearing (or maybe reading in a different article earlier in the year) that Brecht had revised the play to show how the mother had played some unsavory role in the war. None of us needs to watch that, Lina concluded. We have enough suffering of our own to contend with. Lina struck the play from her mental list. Then there was an interview with Anna Seghers, on the occasion of her new novel, The Dead Stay Young, being published. Lina recalled hearing about Seghers’ previous book, The Seventh Cross. Didn’t Mama even read it? Lina frowned and tried to think back… Yes! All about escapees from a prison camp. Lina remembered that her mother hadn’t been able to stomach reading about the brutalities the prisoners endured. No need to mention this, either, Lina decided. Let’s see what else we’ve got…
She flipped the paper over, but before she’d even read the title of the article that filled the whole bottom of the page, her eyes were drawn to a photo in the middle of the text: A man stood on the small second-floor balcony of a house, leaning on the railing and looking down at a throng of people below. Some of them had stretched their hands up toward him. Lina brought the paper up close to her face, but she couldn’t get a good sense of the man’s face, because he was shown in profile. Judging from his clothing, he seemed an ordinary man, clad in dark pants and a dark, unassuming wool coat. But his face, at least what Lina could see of it, was both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. His long, thick, wavy, dark hair was brushed back from his forehead and reached down over the collar of his coat. Lina could see that the man was slightly balding at the temples. His mouth was set in a stern expression, and his jaw was strong, his cheeks a bit sunken. And although the photo was not a close-up, Lina saw clearly that he was looking at the crowd with great intensity. This so surprised her, that she found herself staring at him, from the side, as it were, and wishing he would turn to face her.
As she sat there and gazed at him, she felt an unfamiliar sensation: a tingling in her fingers. A few moments later, a wave of emotion rose up in her chest, a feeling of such calm and love that she didn’t know what to make of it. She had felt something akin to it one time years earlier, before her accident. She’d been alone in the forest and had sensed whatever it was that flowed through the trees – from God, as she had always believed. But why am I feeling this now? she wondered. Confused, she shifted her gaze to the caption below the photo: “Bruno Groening on the balcony at No. 7 Wilhelmsplatz, Herford, June 17”.
Holding the newspaper tight in hands that were, for some reason, trembling, Lina turned her attention to the article itself: “The Miracle of Herford”. She read both swiftly and with care, wanting to take in all the information there as quickly as possible, but without missing anything. The article said that thousands of people had been streaming to the small town of Herford, in Westphalia, for several months now, to see this Bruno Groening, who had been dubbed “the miracle doctor”. Was he a doctor, then? No, it seemed he wasn’t. They’d just started calling him that, Lina read, because dozens upon dozens of sick people who had come to see him had inexplicably gone away healed. This man didn’t examine or diagnose anyone. He would just stand on the balcony and talk to them.
Lina let the newspaper fall to her lap. None of this makes sense. She frowned. How can people be healed just by listening to this man? What can he possibly say to them? She thought back to her own visits to the doctors, to her surgery, and to the doctor’s final pronouncement four years earlier. “You just have to get used to living like this.” Lina picked up the newspaper again. Who are these people he supposedly healed? Probably no one with injuries like mine. She read on, and learned that the original boy whose healing had attracted the attention of the press in the first place had suffered from muscular dystrophy. It had been so advanced that the boy could no longer even get out of bed. But the illness had disappeared after a visit from this Groening. Entirely gone. Just like that. Lina read the author’s description of the scene in front of the house where Groening was speaking, the house of the healed boy:
“It was an indescribable picture of misery. There were innumerable lame people in wheel chairs, others who were carried by their relatives, blind people, deaf mutes, mothers with retarded and lame children, little old women and young men, all of them groaning and pressing together in front of the house. Almost a hundred cars, trucks and buses were parked in the square, and they all came from far away.”
But what about these people? Lina thought. Did they get healed, like the little boy? Lina was beginning to feel dizzy now, but she kept reading. The next section of the article reported some of what Groening said to the thousands of people who’d gathered beneath the balcony on the evening of June 17th:
“My dear seekers of healing! Your pleas and prayers to the Lord God were not in vain. For today the town authorities have granted me an exception and given me permission to heal. I make you aware that healing only benefits those who carry in themselves faith in our Lord God, or are prepared to take faith in. I hereby declare you all healthy in the name of God!”
The journalist who wrote the article – he’d been present present in Herford that evening – went on to detail the healings that people there experienced: “A young boy paralyzed in both legs climbs out of a wheelchair and walks. A girl with chronic headaches is suddenly free. A blind man shouts to Groening on the balcony that now he can see.” How is this possible? He declares people healthy and suddenly they are? Lina knitted her brows and scrutinized the photo once more. Then she continued reading and came to the words Groening spoke at the end of the evening, as shouts of healed people rose up from the crowd:
“I ask you not to direct your thanks for this healing to me. Thanks are due to our Lord God alone. I don’t ask anyone for a reward. But I do expect you to pray to God all your life. Life without God is no life.”
Lina noticed that her hands were trembling so much that the newspaper was waving as if blown this way and that by a breeze. She folded it back up neatly and sat for a long time, staring as far into the woods as she could see, noticing the odd sensations in her body, and the calm in her heart. Then she took out the small scissors from the sewing bag on her lap, opened up the newspaper once more, and carefully cut out the article about the “Miracle Doctor of Herford”. Then she slowly folded this cut-out section into ever smaller rectangles, until it was small enough to fit inside the pocket of her apron. She stowed it there, patting it with her palm and noticing that the tingling in that hand increased asshe did so. What is this all about?
Later that afternoon, the whole household was sitting around the supper table. Ethel had prepared a rich rabbit stew, and Renate had baked a batch of the small, buttery rolls that were Ulrich’s particular favorite, but which the others gratefully devoured, too, dunking them in their bowls to soak up the stew broth. Lina, taking up her expected role, opened the suppertime conversation with her summary of the day’s news. She began by telling about a new butcher shop that was opening in Varel to replace the one destroyed by fire a month earlier, and about a dispute among two neighboring businesses regarding the common porch their buildings shared, and which one of the business owners wanted to divide with a railing in the middle. This elicited smiles all around the table. “What’s their address?” Viktor joked, laughing. “I’ll go ask them if we can bid on the job.” Next came the story Lina had chosen as the centerpiece of her daily report: A new film, “Girls Behind Bars”, was set to be screened in Varel, but one of the local priests had taken exception to its “scandalous” subject matter and was doing his best to whip up a frenzy that would be sufficient to prevent the screening . The whole family received this story, too, with great amusement. The Gassmanns weren’t prudes, and although they attended church regularly, they were not so religiously-minded that they would immediately side with a priest on questions of morality. So, a light-hearted discussion ensued, with the family members hazarding guesses as to what the film could possibly contain that would be so offensive. Even Kristina, a staunch Catholic, joined in, laughing at the others’ guesses.
But while others happily explored this topic, Lina noticed that she didn’t feel her usual satisfaction at the success of her reports. Rather, she sat quietly at the end of the table, lost in thought, her hand resting against her apron pocket. When Ulrich asked her about page four, since he hadn’t seen the paper in its usual spot on the table near the kitchen door, she answered without even looking at him. “I’m sorry, Grandpa. The paper slipped off my lap into the mud, and so I salvaged the first page and put the rest straight into the fire box.” Hearing this, Kristina cast a curious glance at Lina. She hadn’t noticed any mud outside near where Lina had been sitting, much less the newspaper in it. She had, however, seen Lina place the first page in the pile of old newspapers they used when lighting the fireplace.
Kristina didn’t have much time to wonder what accounted for this discrepancy in what she’d witnessed and what Lina had said, though, for Renate had been waiting to share some news of her own.
“You’ll never guess who called today!” she said, and everyone at the table could see that it had been only thanks to a monumental effort that she had managed to keep whatever she was about to say to herself all day.
“Who?” Ulrich and Ethel asked at the same time.
“Hans!” Renate announced, her eyes gleaming.
Ulrich raised his eyebrows, and Ethel and Viktor exchanged glances.
“And?” Ethel asked. “I hope it’s not bad news.”
“It’s not, is it?” Viktor asked, concern registering on his face.
Renate allayed their worry with a wave of her hand. “No, no! It’s good news!” She paused so long, to prolong the suspense, that Ethel spread her arms out.
“Mama! Tell us!”
“All right, all right,” Renate replied, with a broad smile. “Katharina – that’s Hans’ daughter,” she said, leaning toward Kristina to explain, “is getting married! “
Ethel sat up straighter. “Oh, my! How wonderful! Hans didn’t mention anything in his letters about her even having a young man! Shame on him!” she said, with a laugh.
“When’s the wedding?” Ulrich asked, already feeling a slight melancholy stealing into his heart.
“October,” Renate told him. “He said they’re mailing us an invitation, but he wanted to call.”
“To tell us in person, as it were?” Ulrich inquired.
“Not only that,” Renate replied. “He knows we won’t all be able to come, but he hopes at least two or three of us will. And he said he would like to pay for the trip for two of us to attend.”
Hearing this, Ethel felt her heart leap. She hadn’t seen her brother in twenty-seven years, and the thought of visiting him for her niece’s wedding, of meeting his wife… She had to clasp her hands together in her lap so as not to pop up and beg to be one of the ones who would go. Of course, she told herself, if Mama and Papa want to go, that would only be right. He’s their only son, after all, and they’re getting on in years…
“He’s hoping,” Renate went on, “that we – whoever ends up going, that is – will be able to come late in the summer and stay for a good, long visit.” She was smiling so broadly that the apples of her cheeks were making her eyes crinkle.
Ulrich nodded and wiped his mouth thoughtfully with his napkin.
“That is fine news, indeed, Renate,” he said softly, and they could all hear the tenderness in his voice. “Would that we could all go.” He looked at his wife, at Ethel and Viktor, and their three children. “You three,” he said, pointing at Lina, Marcus, and Peter, “could finally meet your cousin Katharina, and your Uncle Hans and Aunt Laura.”
“What a joy that would be,” Lina said wistfully.
Ulrich nodded. “Indeed it would be, Lina, dear,” he said to his granddaughter. “But we can’t all be away from home that long. Renate, you and I will discuss it tonight, yes?”
Renate nodded, and they all turned to discussion of how old Katharina was – twenty-three – and who her fiancé was – a young man named Karl who was a cabinet maker, like Hans.
By and by, the rabbit stew made its way from everyone’s dishes to their stomachs, and conversation shifted from the news of the wedding to more mundane matters: the current forestry and cabinetry work, and whatever gossip Renate had gathered from her sister, Lorena, on her nearby farm. Kristina, meanwhile, was keeping a close eye on everyone’s expressions. She’d developed the habit, early in her days with the Gassmann-Bunkes, of scanning everyone’s faces during meals, especially supper, because she learned in those first weeks, that this was the time when serious family matters were raised. Not for discussion, mind you – because that took place behind closed doors – but simply as points of information, the way the Chancellor might inform his ministers of policy changes he planned to enact. So, Kristina had grown skillful at detecting when such moments were on the horizon. When she did, she would graciously excuse herself and Ingrid from the table and give the family their privacy.
This dance had become so formulaic that Renate and Ethel had long since given up the charade of encouraging them to stay. It was clear that, rather than being annoyed that Kristina was not going to stick around to help clean up after supper, they were, in fact, touched by her perceptiveness. It even seemed to Kristina that the various family members had, unconsciously perhaps, begun to telegraph their intentions in a slightly exaggerated way, with frowns or silence, to make it obvious to her: Today is one of those days we want to be alone. So, this afternoon, she took particular note of the fact that Viktor, despite the uplifting news of the cousin’s wedding, was maintaining a gloomy silence and furrowed brow. Clearly, there was something he wished to discuss with his family that he didn’t want her to be party to (even though he was quite aware that Marcus would share everything with Kristina in the end). Thus, Kristin made use of a convenient lull in the conversation to usher Ingrid outside and to their room in the workshop.
As soon as Kristina had pulled the kitchen door closed behind her, Viktor folded his napkin and placed it next to his bowl. He watched his fingers lay it down as if they were part of someone else’s hand, and continued to study those fingers, with their closely-clipped nails, as he began to speak. This was a technique he had found useful during the war when talking with a subordinate. Begin the conversation as if you’re not really paying attention, as if the topic were not all that important…
“About the furniture work,” he began, noticing a nick on one knuckle of his middle finger, and touching it briefly with the index finger of his other hand. “We need to make some changes.” He continued to attend to the nick until the other small conversations going on between his in-laws, his wife, and his children ceased. Then he looked up and gazed at each face in turn.
Marcus, sitting across the table and next to Peter, was immediately on his guard. Maybe he knew what was coming, or maybe he understood his father’s self-assuredness and calm and attempts at misdirection because he had acquired these skills himself and could recognize them in others, too.
“What kind of changes?” he asked, leaning forward, unconsciously sitting up taller than before.
Although Marcus spent his workdays in Varel, at his Civil Service position, he was still living at home. He preferred the freshness of the country air, he would say by way of explanation, to anyone who asked. But the main reason he hadn’t relocated into Varel was that the current living arrangement afforded him the chance to spend time with Kristina. At twenty-six, he for some reason considered himself the big man around the house. It wasn’t difficult to see why he had drawn the conclusion that he was superior to his brother, Peter, with his limp and limited work capability. There was also the matter of Peter’s occasional lapses into profound and unshakeable muteness. When this happened, he would sit staring into space, his eyes wide, his jaw slack, and his hands clenching and unclenching. No one knew what was going on inside him at those times, and no one asked. They would simply wait him out for the minutes or hours it took for him to re-enter their world.
Perhaps Marcus also sensed that his grandfather, Ulrich, at age sixty-nine, was on the decline and no match for Marcus’ own youthful vigor, despite the fact that Ulrich had retained his strength into his later years.
Then there was his father, Viktor. Hehad gained undisputed dominance amongst the men in the household nearly as soon as he showed up to work as Ulrich’s apprentice in 1921. Undisputed until now, in Marcus’ opinion. Perhaps he sensed that he could not compete with his father’s skill or power in the arena of physical work and had chosen to rely instead on his charisma (which nearly equaled Viktor’s) to make a name for himself by working in Varel. But there was no way Marcus would cede his position on the actual homestead by moving off it. As Marcus saw it, by living at home, he enjoyed the double benefit of being able to impress Kristina with his status, while simultaneously lording his government position over the rest of his family.
Viktor, meanwhile, was fully aware of how Marcus saw both himself and his father. For the two of them, regarding each other was basically the equivalent of looking in the mirror. But it was not a complete double reflection: Viktor could see certain aspects of himself in his son, although there were others he could not see, or chose not to. For his part, Marcus would not accept that his own strength and power might have their origin in this father, whom he had come to despise during those rough years of his and his siblings’ adolescence. It didn’t matter that this father of his had arranged for him to go first to the Censorship Office instead of the infantry, and then, after the war, into the Civil Service. Marcus didn’t give a damn about those wartime care packages Viktor had arranged, either. After all, Marcus hadn’t directly benefitted from them, anyway, except during his rare periods of leave from the citadel of the Censorship Office. During the war, rather than being grateful to his father for that assignment that kept him safe while others – including his own brother – fought on the battlefields, Marcus had done his best to distance himself from Viktor. By now, in 1949, he had somehow managed to convince himself that everything he had achieved, both during the war and now, in the Civil Service, had come as a result of his own skill and intelligence. I owe you nothing. That was Marcus’ mantra, when he thought of his father.
But Viktor saw things differently. He made this quite clear as the suppertime conversation continued.
“Marcus, we need you back here,” he said simply.
Everyone remained silent, including Marcus, who could not yet gauge the best response to this threat. He glanced at Ulrich, on whose face he could read no clue as to the old man’s position. He didn’t bother to consult anyone else’s faces. They didn’t matter. They had no say.
Viktor waited, glancing at his knuckle again, but not in a way that betrayed any lack of confidence, because there certainly was none of that. It was simply the act of a man who knew how things would end up, a man who was happy to give Marcus the chance to come to the point of acquiescing on his own. He knew life would move ahead far more smoothly if that could be achieved.
“We’ve been over this already,” Marcus said finally, making his first move in this crucial game of chess. He was frustrated. He certainly didn’t want to accept that the result had already been determined, but he wanted to try logic first. He’d keep a more dramatic response in reserve, until it was needed. It might not be. “And we decided it made more sense for me to keep my position.” We decided, he said, even though he had had no part in it. My position. That’s what’s important.
“That was before Frank left to go work in town,” Viktor replied. “That leaves Stefan, who, you know yourself, has no more than a schoolboy’s skill with the tools. He can’t be trusted to work independently.” Viktor laid this out in a patient tone, but not one that gave any impression that he felt a need to convince Marcus. He was just stating the facts.
Marcus could already sense that things were not going his way. He sensed the futility of his position and heard it in his father’s words and tone, although the latter’s face betrayed no annoyance, only conviction in the outcome. Marcus’ frustration turned swiftly to anger, and he jerkily waved his right hand toward both Peter and Lina with an accusatory sharpness.
“You, two! Damned cripples! You – “, he burst out, actually striking Peter’s chest with the back of his hand. “Nearly useless. And you –”, he continued contemptuously, one arm striking out in Lina’s direction. “Completely useless!”
Not a single one of them was surprised by this outburst. Marcus had expressed these same sentiments many times since the end of the war. Even Renate did not jump in to try to contain her grandson. She’d given up trying to prevent or dampen his explosions years earlier, when he was a youngster. Back then, she had ceded the task of disciplining him to Viktor, who had not achieved complete success at this, either, not even when he employed corporal punishment.
This meant that Marcus became, early on, the monkey wrench in what Renate thought of as the well-oiled machinery of her family’s mealtime conversations. Even as a five-year-old, he had felt free to throw a tantrum whenever he felt something was not going his way, jumping in and protesting every perceived injustice. And from the time he’d been five, his protests had sounded the way they sounded on this day, when he was twenty-six: angry shouting and insults. Sometimes he even physically attacked one of those around him.
Every time this happened, Renate sat helplessly by, waiting for someone else to step in. As skilled as she was at guiding mealtime discussions, and at steering people away from potentially disastrous topics, she knew full well that she had little control over the conversation when Marcus was present. He just would not follow the unspoken rules for “public” family discussions! Renate knew very well that once Marcus opened up his throttle, there was always a risk that one of the other family members would jump in, too. Luckily – from Renate’s point of view – Peter and Lina as children developed the habit of staying silent when Marcus flew off the handle. They did their best to remain invisible and let their father handle Marcus.
Viktor always started with a stern glance, then followed up with a stern word or two if the glance didn’t do the trick. If the words had no effect, Viktor told Marcus to leave the table and go sit outside for the rest of the meal. If Marcus didn’t go… Well, then Viktor physically took the boy’s arm and led him outside. Sometimes Marcus went quietly. Sometimes he didn’t, and then Viktor had to drag him. Sometimes they had to bolt the door to keep him from coming back indoors. Sometimes they heard him yelling and throwing things outside. One time he threw a pail through the kitchen window, and shards of glass went everywhere. Sometimes Marcus was a monkey wrench in the machinery. Sometimes he was a bomb. You never knew which you’d get.
Luckily for them all, when Marcus reached the age of twelve or thirteen, he decided it wasn’t worth it to keep resisting his father physically. When Marcus was a boy, Viktor used a minimum of force to gain his submission. He never hit Marcus in anger, and the whipping with belts was only strong enough to get the boy’s attention, but never brutal, Viktor explained to Ethel. But as Marcus got older, he could see his father’s frustration when they had altercations. The older man visibly restrained himself, refusing to get into an all-out physical fight with his son over anything. But Marcus was astute enough to sense that if he wasn’t careful, he might someday push his father too far. He also knew he would be on the losing end of that kind of situation: He couldn’t match his father’s strength. Thus, Marcus learned, during those teenage years, to make do with being as verbally confrontational as possible when he was upset about something, but without goading his father into physical violence. This gave him some small measure of satisfaction. But it was very small.
And so, on this day, Marcus was at it again, attacking his siblings. “You both disgust me,” he told them. Then he looked at Viktor, challenging his father to contradict him.
But Marcus had miscalculated in thinking that he could emerge victorious by aligning himself with what he perceived his father’s position to be. Marcus had sensed his father’s frustration with two of his children’s disabilities and mistakenly assumed that Viktor despised Peter and Lina as much as he did. There was another weak point in Marcus’ thinking: He knew, as well as Viktor and everyone in the family did, that Peter was certainly pulling his weight in supporting the family in the furniture-making side of the business. But by Marcus’ logic, if Peter were able to work with Ulrich in the forest, then he – Marcus – wouldn’t have to do that. Never mind that Peter’s skill as a woodworker had rendered him valuable both to the people in town and to the running of the family household. Viktor himself had reminded Marcus that it hadn’t been weakness that led Peter to apply himself to developing his woodworking talents, but his devotion to the needs of the family. That remark alone caused Marcus to chafe – the old sibling rivalry thrusting its head up once more. Marcus saw Peter’s choice not as a decision, but as the inevitable result of a failure of his – Peter’s – physical strength, and Marcus didn’t see why his own work and position should suffer because of what he perceived as his brother’s insufficiency. The injustice of it all enraged him.
While Viktor waited silently, glancing slowly from face to face, Peter, as he always did when the conversation took this turn, pursed his lips, his face reddening. He summoned all his strength to resist throwing his brother to the floor and initiating a physical fight he knew he’d be bound to lose. This despite the fury that now, after the war, would sometimes burst from him in a way that surprised all who had known him before wartime.
Renate, seeing Peter’s restraint, and wondering whether this would finally be the time when he couldn’t rein himself in, exchanged glances with Ulrich, but neither said anything. A quick glance at Lina reassured her that her granddaughter was in no danger of breaking her pattern of quiet acquiescence. She looked like she was off in her own world. Turning back to the conversations at hand, Renate decided not to tell Viktor what she had long wanted to say to him: that Lina was not his sister Hannelore, and that he had no right to treat her as if she were. (She, like Marcus, had felt Viktor’s disdain for Lina’s crippled state.) But she held her tongue, because it was Marcus speaking now, not Viktor.
Ulrich had, of course, discussed with Viktor the question of calling Marcus home before this suppertime announcement, and although he had his own misgivings about bringing Marcus back to work alongside them, he agreed that it would be for the best. Ethel, like Peter, felt the blood rush to her face, and words were beginning to make their way to her tongue. But as she was taking in the breath to utter them, the conversation took a surprising turn.
Lina saw Marcus’ outburst coming from the moment her father laid down his napkin. So, as the drama played out, she felt free to reflect on something other than the future of Marcus’ position. She spent a minute or two considering how long it would take before Kristina finally saw through her brother. But then she began to consider her own position – here in her wheelchair.
For Lina, who had, over the past nearly five years, had more time than any of the rest of them to consider the situation, the question had always been, Why hadn’t it been worse? Or, Why did I even survive? Like Peter, she was familiar with the idea that God has a plan for each of His children, and, up until the day of her accident, she had fully accepted this premise without considering what it might mean in practical terms in any one individual’s life. Because, when life is going along well, more or less, despite the fact that your country is at war and your father and brothers are off defending your right to live where and how you’ve lived up to this point, why would you put your energy into ruminating about what God’s plan for you personally might be? Both the necessity and the luxury for that kind of reflection had been lacking in Lina’s life.
But she was quite convinced that God existed, that He was present. What Ulrich labelled the wishes of trees, what her grandmother had felt when communing with the forest spirits, and what guided her mother as she created her quilts – these things Lina considered an expression of God’s presence. These and other things, too: the love she sensed flowing toward her equally from the trees and the beetles and the animals small and large, from the grasses and the fairies and the birds up above the river, and from the river itself, too, from its sometimes mountainous waves down to its muddy sand bottom, and from all that moved its gills or legs or leaves between surface and bed. She could feel God’s presence there, in every piece of the natural world, even if she couldn’t discern what His plan was for each of those pieces. Because why would God have plans only for His human children?
Indeed, let’s note once again, that Lina felt no need to try to ferret out the details of God’s plan for the mushroom or the tern or the bean vine. Wasn’t it enough to feel God’s love present in them all and, when she encountered them, flowing into her, too, back and forth between them, embracing them both as one?
Sitting at the table now, Lina recalled what Bruno Groening had said in Herford: “Life without God is no life.” And she suddenly realized that although her faith in God’s existence hadn’t wavered, not even since her accident, her life had, in a way, become a life without God. Not without a belief in God. But without the strong, steady connection she had felt before the day the wood fell from the wagon and doomed her to life in a wheelchair. Only now, after reading that article this morning, could she see how being separated from the divine force of the forest had affected her: Without the opportunity to spend her days bathing in the love and calm of God’s energy, she had come to feel gradually more and more weighed down – in her spirit, as well as in her body. Stagnant, depressed, lacking in the hope that things could be different. True, she and Kristina had grown close, and their friendship brought them both a lot of joy. But that relationship could not give Lina what she was truly missing: the feeling she got when she was amongst the trees and felt God’s love and essence flowing from them into her. She remembered now, as she sat at supper, blocking the argument between Viktor and Marcus out of her mind, that she had gotten this very same feeling when reading the article about Bruno Groening. It still didn’t make any sense to her, logically. But a different, spiritual meaning was beginning to come to the surface of her awareness, like a water bubble released after having been long trapped beneath a layer of mud.
True, this bubble – which we can call her exploration of the question of what might be meant by God having a plan – had begun pressing upward through the mud of Lina’s consciousness after her accident. When she first began considering this question, she’d have expressed her understanding roughly this way: All the details of each creature’s or plant’s or human’s life are the way they are because that is what God has planned for it. God laid it out in a certain way, and that is the way life is. We have no input. We just live out what God puts before us. So maybe we just have to learn to endure, to be patient? That could be a plan for us, too, couldn’t it? That’s what the doctor told me, right? To learn to live with the hand God dealt me? That’s as far as she’d gotten these past five years, and she had let her initial questions – Why did I survive? and Why hadn’t it been worse? – fall back into the mud of her consciousness, her curiosity dulled by the overlay of pain and boredom and isolation from her beloved trees.
But today, after she read the newspaper article, a new bubble of curiosity formed deep within her and was making itself felt by exerting some slight pressure on her consciousness. She sensed now that there must be more to this idea of God’s plan. It occurred to her to ask why it was God’s plan for her body to be broken, for her to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. Even after Lina came in from the yard, the article tucked away stealthily in her pocket, and began peeling the potatoes for supper, part of her consciousness continued to work on this question. At one point, as she reached for the next potato, she paused, knife in hand, and an offshoot of the Why was this God’s plan? question took shape in her mind: What if God’s plan didn’t end with the accident?
Lina was under the impression that everyone around her assumed God’s plan had ended with the accident. It seemed to her that they all thought of it as some life’s event that existed on its own, plunked down in the middle of the dirt yard before the barn, separate from everything else in the farm or the forest or the family life and history. LINA’S ACCIDENT. Cast in stone, immovable and immutable. Only Ethel seemed to have a different perspective. Although she never expressed this to Lina in words, it seemed to Lina that her mother saw LINA’S ACCIDENT as something more malleable, something that might change its shape and qualities over time. Lina sensed that her mother did desire and hope for this change, desperately, even. Now, reminding herself of her mother’s quiet, unspoken hope, a thought came slowly and gently into Lina’s mind: What if God’s plan includes not just my accident, but what happens after it? And not even precisely what happens afterwards, but what she and others chose and choose to do afterwards? (Here the granddaughter shows her connection to her grandmother, ever focused on choice and decision and assigning intention, even if Renate saw it as intention in the sense that would allow one to blame something on someone else.)
Oblivious to the duel between Marcus and Viktor, which was progressing closer and closer to its inevitable conclusion, Lina began moving eagerly toward this newly-arisen thought question. It came to her then, penetrating the dense, nearly solid, mud of her consciousness: Of course! Of course there is more to God’s plan than just the accident. What if God’s plan is not a simple, inexorable playing out of fate, but a life in which each player can craft his or her own role, together with God’s guidance? Lina glanced at her family members around her, but still without hearing them. She noticed the same tingling she’d felt out in the yard, and placed her hand once more against her apron pocket. She sensed the presence of the newspaper inside it, and the new, but now familiar, calm and joy begin to fill her heart. Her whole body began to feel lighter, even her legs. Is there some sensation in my legs? Maybe I’m imagining it…
Lina suddenly felt, quite clearly, that God did not mean for her to just acquiesce and sit, inert, making no effort to turn the tide of her life. In that moment, she recalled how she once encountered a swallow on the bank of the river, one wing flapping against the dirt, the other motionless, injured somehow. As Lina watched, the swallow stopped flapping its good wing for a few seconds, maybe even ten or more, panting from its previous exertion with open beak. But then, all of a sudden, it pushed off on its thin little legs and, inexplicably to Lina, managed to lift off. A moment later, it was once again climbing, above the river.
As Lina considered that recollected scene for a bit, no one in her family noticed any outward evidence of the shift that had just occurred inside her. No one sensed the energy that was flowing through her now and giving her the strength to sit up straight in her chair and regard each member of her squabbling family in turn. What if… Lina thought. What if the swallow on the riverbank and God were working together to put God’s plan into action?
After silently looking at each of her family members in turn, she lifted her right hand and brought the flat of her palm down onto the table with a strength that silenced all voices and brought all eyes to her. Even Viktor’s face registered surprise.
“Enough,” she said loudly. And sharply. “I’ve had enough.”
Chapter 8
May, 1921
Gassmann family homestead
“That young man’s coming today,” Ulrich announced at breakfast, although Renate and Ethel and Hans already knew this. Ulrich stopped speaking, his two hands pausing in the act of gently pulling apart his roll so that he could spread it with butter and a bit of Renate’s strawberry jam. They were on the last jar of the previous summer’s stockpile, and Ulrich didn’t want to eat it absentmindedly, while talking about work. So he paused.
“Viktor?” Hans asked his father.
“Yes. Viktor Bunke.” Ulrich returned his attention to the roll.
“What do we know about him?” asked Hans, making an effort not to narrow his eyes, but aware of the edge in his voice.
Ulrich set the roll down on his plate. “Well,” he began, “he’s from Schweiburg. Apparently trained with his father in a carpentry shop they had there before the war, then…”
Hans interrupted. “How old is he?”
“Eighteen, I guess,” Ulrich told him. “Said he was born in ’03. ‘Three years younger than the year.’ That’s how he put it.”
“So why not go back and work in his father’s shop?” Hans persisted.
Renate jumped in. “So many questions, and the young man’s not even here,” she said, tucking a strand of her dark hair behind her ear as she pointedly placed a fresh roll on Hans’ plate. Distract the family with food. That was her strategy for keeping the peace. Not that there was generally any need. Theirs was an unusually harmonious family. They were blessed by peace and by an abiding affection for each other, an affection supported by a foundation of deep love.
This was spring of 1921, many months before the events of 1921 that we’ve mentioned before, the events which caused Renate to adopt a much more hands-on approach to mealtime conversations. But already many years before, Renate had become an excellent spotter of even a light gray fog of conflict on a distant horizon, and she’d adopted her own mother’s tendency to soothe and smooth over with food. As a result, Renate was skilled at shoring up the ramparts of familial peace with subtle, yet powerful culinary sandbags. It was her habit to keep the rolls and cheese coming, even when no conflicts loomed. Today she saw no need for new sandbags, not yet, but a little adjustment of existing levees did seem in order. Hence the second roll for Hans.
“Yes,” Ethel chimed in, her voice light and airy. “You can tie him to the saw horse and force him to tell you everything,” she told her older brother, her eyes dancing, and her lips forming an affectionate smile. Ethel was not the only one in her family to recognize in Hans’ words his tendency to anticipate threats where none might be present. But she was the only one who could get away with teasing him about it.
He was nearly 20 years old now, and she not quite 17. They had grown close in the course of their childhood, so devoted to each other that neither could ever detect the minutest ill will in any remark by the other, even when they experienced a difference of opinion. Besides, despite being the younger sister, Ethel felt herself Hans’ equal in strength. Not physically – Hans was tall and strong, in a wiry way – but in her spirit. Under Hans’ constant tutelage and protection, she had grown into a young woman who knew her own mind and was not shy about asserting it. But her self-confidence was tempered with such lightness and joy, and so completely lacking in arrogance, that no one ever got cross with her for her assertiveness. Ulrich had called her “our little angel” from the time she was tiny, because her light, curly hair looked to him like a halo. Even now, although she braided her long hair and wore it coiled into a bun, the halo was not in the least subdued.
Hans smiled at her wryly. “You bet I will. Who knows who he is? There are so many men roaming around the countryside now. Men without a past, or wanting to be, making themselves out to be.”
Ulrich nodded slowly. Of course, he’d considered that himself. Despite the fact that Ulrich handled business-related decisions and Renate was in charge of domestic concerns, this was a question that would affect them all. So, the husband and wife had discussed it. They’d decided it would be good to take Viktor on, and had informed Hans and Ethel. This was all according to the Gassmann family manual: Ulrich and Renate announced the decision, and then the topic turned to implementation. Renate knew that it was to be expected that Hans would have questions. That was acceptable. He’d have to work with this Viktor, after all. All the same, she hoped Hans would just move smoothly into the implementation phase.
Renate felt that life on the homestead had been so much easier before Hans and Ethel came to consider themselves grown-ups. Back then (a few short years ago!) Renate hadn’t had to contend with anyone else’s opinions about how she did things around the house. Nor had Ulrich had to answer for his decisions about how he ran the business. Now, though, the children seemed to have decided they could assert their own views! These days, Renate often found herself saying, at mealtimes, “Talk to me about it later, Lina.” Or “Hans, you can discuss that with your father later in the afternoon.” It was a challenge for her to develop a strategy for maintaining control over both the way things were done and the way they were discussed, while still giving the children the impression they had a say in things…
Ulrich, too, was feeling his way through this new stage of working with his son. His own father, Detlef, had been dead for more than fifteen years already, so Ulrich was used to making all the decisions about the forestry and cabinetry-making business entirely on his own. Or, rather, with Renate as a sounding board, just the way she used him as a sounding board for her domestic decisions. In the current case, this was not the first time Hans had raised this particular concern about the new man, Viktor Bunke. To his credit, Ulrich was happy to be patient with his son. He probably realized that Hans had inherited the family propensity for repeatedly mulling over questions. Let Hans bring this up again, if that’ll help him gain comfort with the decision. This was the way it usually went with Hans: He needed to come at a situation several times before he could see his way clear to accepting a decision.
“I see your point, Son,” Ulrich replied, his voice kind. “We’re none of us going into this blind. He’s coming on a trial basis. He doesn’t work out, we send him along his way.”
“We need the help,” Renate reminded him. “You have orders to fill, thank God.”
“Be that as it may,” Ulrich said, “we’ll send him off if need be. There are others looking for work. But give him a chance to prove himself to us.”
“Okay. I can do that,” Hans said.
“I’ll say it again: no one’s giving him the keys to the barn l just yet.” This Ulrich said with a smile.
Hans laughed and scratched the back of his head, as if admitting that he could wait to meet Viktor before declaring him a thief or murderer. “No one except Ethel, maybe,” he replied, smiling now. “She’d give the whole house away to anyone who needed it if they looked at her the right way.”
Ethel smiled, too, topped half of her roll with a slice of cheese, and shrugged. “But it’d have to be just the right way. And that’s not happened yet.”
* * *
In fact, it was not just Hans’ tendency to see threats where none might exist that prompted concerns about Viktor. Born in late 1901, Hans was called up to the army in 1917, but he never served: He suffered a bad break in his right leg during basic training, and was sent home for good. Hans was – as were Renate, Ethel, and Ulrich, who had himself had avoided military service due to nearly complete deafness in one ear – keenly aware of their family’s good fortune in emerging from those years intact. So, he felt that the least he could do was to be on guard now, when life in their country as a whole, and their small part of it, was still unpredictable and unstable.
Hans was particularly protective of Ethel. His natural seriousness and vigilance served as an ever-present, but not oppressive, counterweight to her lightheartedness and the joyful way she moved through life, swirling this way and that like her blond curls. Although it wasn’t an accurate perception, Hans believed that if he weren’t there to tether her to the earth, Ethel might well float off into the clouds. He’d seen her that way from the time she began to walk.
As a boy, Hans was often charged with keeping Ethel company – and safe – while their mother was occupied with household tasks. On these occasions, he was the keeper of the scissors and needles that little Ethel needed to have at hand to make her little quilts from scraps of their mother’s fabrics. In the earliest days, when he was six years old and Ethel only three, her manual dexterity was not on a par with her creative skills, and the two of them became a team. Here’s how that came to be:
When she was about two years old, Ethel displayed a fondness for arranging small objects into patterns, often colorful objects, but not always: A dried bean or a metal button appealed to her just as much as a fallen flower blossom or the scraps from her mother’s sewing projects. While Renate sat sewing a dress or embroidering a towel, little Ethel would search the sitting area of the main room for small items, which she would then bring back to where her mother was working. Ethel would sit contentedly on the floor for hours on end, fully engaged in putting her items next to each other on the wooden floor, shifting one and then another, exploring various combinations: sometimes squares or diamond shapes, but most often more fluid lines, spirals. At some point she would declare the arrangement complete and call to her mother to admire her creation: she called them her “pictures”.
Renate sewed nearly everything the family wore, except for Hans and Ulrich’s work pants, and, frugal German housewife that she was, no scrap of fabric was ever discarded. All unused pieces went into a basket in the house’s main room. During the winter, she would spend the evenings making small round disks from these scraps, one side flat, one side gathered in the center. Then she’d sew them together at the edges to create coverlets to go atop their bed quilts. Ethel always watched this process intently. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t long before the beans and buttons fell by the wayside (partly because Renate would scoop them up when Ethel wasn’t paying attention, for her own uses – it seemed frivolous to allow everything to be turned into a toy!) and Ethel began asking her mother for some of the pieces of fabric. Renate gave Ethel her pick of the scraps, a tiny bit grudgingly, at first, since they were useful, after all… Still, let the girl have her fun. For the first few weeks, Ethel was content with simply laying out and arranging the scraps on the floor. But the desire to push needle through thread soon arose. Whether this wish was transmitted to Ethel by heredity, or whether she absorbed it during all the hours at her mother’s feet, we can’t say. Whatever its origin, the desire was strong, and Ethel was insistent: “Mama, I want to sew them together,” she’d say, indicating the fabric pieces before her. This is where Hans came in.
Renate was not about to allow Ethel to handle a needle on her own, and besides, her own time was precious: She was so busy running the household that she couldn’t spare hours to tutor Ethel in this skill, not before she was really ready. But Hans was old enough. And he adored his sister. Curiously enough, he enjoyed watching her create her “pictures”. He sometimes brought in treasures he’d found in the woods or the yard – this in the years when Ethel was too young to be out in the yard alone with him. Hans allowed her to use these seed pods or pebbles or feathers or acorns in her pictures, but just for that morning or afternoon: he had his own plans for them after that.
Seeing Hans’ devotion to Ethel and his interest in the arrangements, Renate decided to teach the six-year-old boy to sew. That way, he could then be the one to stitch the fabric pieces together, under Ethel’s direction. This would keep both children occupied, which was a very good thing. Ulrich, despite his love for Hans, often complained that the boy was underfoot, constantly asking to help with the forestry and carpentry work. Ulrich did want the boy to learn this work, but not now. He was too young, as of yet, to help with the main work, although Ulrich was already teaching him to saw and nail during a spare moment here and there. Neither parent was quite sure how Hans would react to Renate’s new plan, and, indeed, Renate had quite a time convincing Ulrich that Hans would not turn out any less a man for knowing how to sew. But, in the end, Ulrich assented, and so did Hans. Thus began a close collaboration between brother and sister that continued, in ever-shifting ways, up until about 1922.
This early picture-making was also the point when Hans took on the role of Ethel’s protector. Hans’ mother officially charged him only with keeping Ethel safe from being pricked by a needle. But he took to his new role so thoroughly and seriously that it naturally blossomed into a desire to protect his little sister from scissors, rose or hawthorn thorns, the edges of pieces of firewood, certain stones, and saw blades and awls… In short, from everything sharp and pointy and potentially deadly.
By 1921, Ethel seemed to Hans to have come into her full beauty. He anticipated that he’d now have a much harder time protecting her. It didn’t even cross his mind – as it had Ethel’s – that she didn’t need protecting any longer.
But let’s go back, now, to 1907. Hans, even at 6, was a quick study. Renate knew this, and she correctly calculated that it would take him only a matter of minutes to learn to thread the needle, knot the thread, and tie it off at the end of a seam. She had a pair of small scissors, just right for his hands, which she gave him to use for these projects.
Three-year old Ethel was thoroughly delighted at being able to transform her pictures into a form she could carry around and display, instead of having to drag her father or Hans or visitors to a spot on the floor to view them. The pictures became quilts for her doll, curtains for a chink in the wall of the workshop, and napkins for the dinner table. Hans, proud to be able to contribute to the process, was quick to point out to all viewers that he had sewn the seams. And Renate was pleased with the speed with which his stitches, which had, of course, started out crooked and of every which length, quickly grew even and precise. Ulrich noted this, too, and he understood that this keen eye and attention to evenness and detail would serve his son well as he moved into helping with the woodworking.
Now, Ethel’s creative process was such that, once she finished laying a picture on the floor and handed the sewing of the precious design over to Hans, she never went off to do something else while he stitched. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him to do it correctly. On the contrary, she was utterly convinced that her big brother was capable of doing whatever he set out to do. Such was the trust and confidence she had in him. What was it, then, that drew her to sit before him, watching him sew, until he completed the very last stitch cut off the end of the thread with a triumphant snip of the scissors? Sometimes, mesmerized by the way the needle moved through the cloth, Ethel stared at its sinuous motion, watching the tip and shaft vanish and reappear with hypnotic regularity. Other times, it was the path of the thread that captivated her: the way it obediently trailed along behind the needle, as if needle and thread were playing “follow the leader”. Something about watching the loose thread grow steadily shorter also filled her with joy. Why did watching Hans sew affect her this way? She could never explain it. But her soul inside her knew: It was that the needle and thread moved both in a straight line, toward the completion of a goal, and also in a to-and-fro pattern that wove in and out, up and down. Ethel was a girl with goals, but she also appreciated the freedom to move a little bit outside the chosen path, while still heading toward the chosen end point. It was the to-and-fros of Ethel’s movement through life that would bring her the most difficult moments of her life, as well as the most profoundly happy.
But for now, Hans and Ethel were concerned only with stitching together the scraps of cloth for Ethel’s portable pictures. It must be noted, though, that once Ethel saw that Hans knew how to use not just a needle, but scissors, too, she began asking him to cut the fabric scraps along this or that line that she would indicate with her fingers. She’d line up her fingers next to each other to show him the pathway to follow with the scissors. And he would cut, using her fingertips as his guide. He was good enough with the scissors that he knew he’d be able to do this without nicking Ethel’s fingers. And she knew it, too. She was safe with him.
Sue Downing 