Chapter 27
June, 1922
Gassmann Homestead
The eight months between the announcement that Hans was leaving for America and Ethel and Viktor’s wedding passed quickly, since there were many preparations to be made for both events. Hans knew that securing the necessary papers on both the German and American sides would take time. Even so, part of him was annoyed that the church wedding wouldn’t take place until June 11th (with the civil marriage ceremony two days earlier.) He would be cleared to leave the country before that, certainly, and he didn’t see why Ethel and Viktor needed to wait until after Pentecost to get married!
When the date was being chosen, Renate said that the priest mentioned the spiritual significance of that day – when the Holy Spirit descended into Jesus’ disciples. He’d said that this was an auspicious time for Ethel and Viktor to enter into marriage.
“The Holy Spirit will come into them strongly then,” Renate reported to the family after she and Ethel visited Holy Mary Church in Bockhorn, where the wedding would be celebrated.
Hans grumbled inwardly, but said nothing. You can’t argue with a priest, he reminded himself. And especially not with Mama. Of course, when thinking this, Hans seemed to have forgotten that he had, in fact, argued with his mother. If he hadn’t made up his mind to do that, he would never be where he was now, with his plans for emigrating to America proceeding smoothly. Perhaps, now that he had successfully asserted his independence and was certain he would be leaving, he was able to see Renate and her controlling nature in a more charitable light. She’d no longer be able to tell him what to do! This realization enabled him to move through the winter and spring and early summer in high spirits and enjoy these final months of living and working alongside his family.
During this period, Hans was surprised to notice that he began to feel more accepting of Viktor, too. His future brother-in-law was clearly relieved when Hans’ news was revealed to the whole family, and since there was no need to keep secrets any longer, some space opened up in their interactions for something resembling an actual friendship to develop. The two discovered that they worked well together, both in the workshop, and when meeting people who were interested in commissioning furniture. They managed to develop an effective way of engaging with clients. Their approach highlighted Hans’ down-to-earth competence and business-like demeanor, while also allowing Viktor’s intuition to play a role when it came to establishing a connection with the people they met with and offering them just the design they were wishing for. By the beginning of February, there were so many furniture orders, that Hans even wondered whether they’d manage to complete them all before he left for Illinois.
“Maybe you’ll just have to stay,” Viktor joked one afternoon in March, as the two of them sat together, hunched over the workbench, discussing plans for a headboard and bed frame order they had just finalized.
Hans shook his head and laughed. “Nice try. You’ll always be able to find someone to help you with this.”
Viktor began to protest – completely sincerely, and not because he thought Hans might appreciate hearing the praise. In this moment, it surprised Viktor to note that so much had changed between the two of them since the previous summer. Something had shifted in Hans since he decided to leave Germany. He’d grown more and more confident, both in his own abilities as a cabinet-maker, and as a person. As a result, the need he felt to compete with Viktor and show his own skill had diminished. Their collaboration was easy now; they could discuss a project design without either of them feeling he had to “win”. These days, if Ulrich or Ethel or Renate came into the workshop while Viktor and Hans were at work together, they noted that the atmosphere felt light and charged with creative energy. The two men were always smiling or joking, or intently studying plans together. It was a shift they all were grateful for.
Thinking about the past year of his own life, Viktor noted how much he had changed since coming to live and work with the Gassmanns. Ulrich had shown such confidence in him that he himself had come to genuinely believe in his abilities. Then there was Ethel, of course. Falling in love with her, and feeling her love in return, had transformed him in ways he hadn’t expected. He, like Hans, had grown more open-hearted, and the old habit of manipulating those around him by giving them what he felt they wanted really had faded away. At least it seemed to him that it had gone. He’d spent the last months learning to better pay attention to what he felt inside him, in his gut and in his heart. He gave thanks every day for his “initiation”. That’s how he described the experiences he had out in the forest back in the fall, when he discovered how connecting with God through the trees could help him determine what he truly felt, and make decisions, too.
Not that it was easy for him to do this. It required constant practice, and he also needed time in the forest when he could connect to God. He made a habit of taking a few minutes each day to sit amongst the trees and just feel what was going on inside him. And if he was trying to decide on a course of action, he would ask as he leaned up against a spruce or pine or beech tree. What about this design for the sideboard? Or Should I talk with Ulrich about my idea, or just let it go? He and Ethel would do this together whenever they visited the treehouse of an evening. True, they didn’t talk much about those minutes when they sat in silence. Then again, they didn’t really need to talk about it, because it was clear to them that they were both buoyed up by this time with each other and the trees surrounding them. Viktor did say something one time, though, as he gently held Ethel’s waist while she hopped off the rope ladder onto the soft ground below.
“Feels like an antidote out here, doesn’t it?” he remarked as Ethel took his hand. They started back toward the path that led out of the woods.
“I never thought of it that way,” she replied thoughtfully. They walked in silence for a bit, and then she added, “But I think you’re right.” She made a gesture that encompassed all the trees around them. “No matter what’s going on outside this forest, it all turns right once we come in here.”
“That’s the way I see it, too,” Viktor said. “As if there’s nothing that can’t be fixed here…”
“With God and the trees,” Ethel added.
“With God and the trees,” Viktor replied. They looked at each other and squeezed each other’s hands. “And with you and me together,” Viktor told her.
As clichéd as this last part sounded, this truly was the way Viktor felt about Ethel. Even now, just a few months after she’d accepted his marriage proposal, and a few months before they’d stand before God as man and wife, he still woke up nearly every day in wonder that his life had taken this turn, that he’d found Ethel. And the trees and God.
Now, as Viktor stood talking with Hans, he wondered how the man at his side would make his way in Illinois, where, if Ewald was to be believed, the land was much more sparsely covered with trees than it was here. Not that Hans showed any evidence of a strong connection to the trees themselves. It was building something from their wood that he enjoyed, so he’d probably do just fine in Illinois. But then there was the question of a suitable wife, someone who would be to Hans who Ethel was to him.
“Tell me,” Viktor asked, turning to Hans and tapping his pencil against the wood bench before him, “is Ewald lining up a wife for you over there, too? Or just a job?”
Hans gave a chuckle. “He’s not working along those lines. Not much of a matchmaker.”
Viktor slapped him jovially on his back. “You’ll have to take care of that yourself, then, right?”
“Maybe not,” Hans said, winking. “Ewald wrote in his last letter that Elise – that’s his wife, remember?”
Viktor nodded.
“Well, seems she has a couple candidates in mind, daughters of some of their friends.”
“Ewald didn’t send any photos along for your approval?”
Another chuckle came from Hans as he shook his head. “Doesn’t want me getting ahead of myself, probably.”
“But aren’t you curious? German girls? German-American, I mean?”
“Mmhmm. All good cooks, too, according to Elise.”
Viktor leaned back and rubbed his hands together. “Ahh, that’s perfect, then. You’ll never have to pine away after Mrs. Gassmann’s rabbit stew, or her strudel.”
“Don’t know about that,” Hans told him. “No matter how good a cook your wife is, she’ll never measure up to your mom,” he said, a bit wistfully.
“I’m not sure I agree with you there,” Viktor joked. “Ethel’s a darn good cook.”
“True, true,” Hans agreed, but his high spirits seemed a bit deflated now.
“What I mean to say,” Viktor told him, laying a hand affectionately on Hans’ shoulder, “is this: May you find the very, very best of the lot of those German-American girls, and may she make you the happiest man in all of Durand. Hell, all of Illinois!”
Hans laughed. “I appreciate that. Really, I might as well go to Illinois, because I’d never find anyone to match Ethel here. You’re a lucky dog, Mr. Bunke.” Whether his mood had shifted back in the upward direction or he was just making a good show of it for Viktor’s sake, Hans smiled now and reached out his hand to give Mr. Bunke’s a hearty shake.
* * *
As the wedding grew closer, Renate noticed how happy it made her to help get Ethel ready for this most important day of her life. Naturally, she found herself not only anticipating her daughter’s wedding day, but also recalling her own. One day in March, as she was stuffing sausages in the kitchen – a hog had recently been slaughtered over at her parents’ farm – she recalled her “flour sack” dress, and how handsome Ulrich looked in his wedding suit, back in 1900. Lorena stood up with her, and Erich with Ulrich. Ulrich’s mother was gone by then, of course, having died when he was but a babe in arms, but Detlef was in attendance, as were Renate’s own parents, Ingo and Veronika. As her hands kneaded the mixture of pork and onion and dried sage, Renate imagined how happy her mother and father would be as they watched Ethel walk down the aisle of Holy Mary Church, the same church where she and Ulrich were married, and Lorena and Stefan, too.
Renate’s grandparents hadn’t lived to see her marry Ulrich. Her grandfather passed away ten years before they wed, in a hunting accident. At least, that’s what they were all told, but it made no sense to Renate and Lorena and Ewald when their parents offered them this explanation of their grandfather’s death. The children couldn’t judge, certainly. They weren’t doctors, after all! But they did know two things: First, Grandpa Harald was an excellent hunter who knew his way around guns; second, he was utterly unpredictable, prone to flying into rages and terrors at the slightest provocation, or none at all.
By way of explanation for this behavior, Veronika (his daughter-in-law) revealed to Renate and Lorena and Ewald when they were very young, that their grandpa had been wounded during the Franco-Prussian war. When Lorena asked where he’d been wounded, Veronika pointed to her own head. This didn’t make sense to them at the time. But since that time, Renate had lived through the Great War and had heard tales of the mental suffering of soldiers who had returned. And so, as she imagined the terrors and memories that must have overwhelmed Harald after being wounded in the way he was, she formulated her own idea of what must have happened to her grandfather out there in the woods on the day
Her grandmother, Harald’ wife, Elsa, outlived her husband by eight years, before succumbing to a blood infection in 1898. Renate remembered seeing Grandma Elsa laid out on boards atop two sawhorses in the main room of the farmhouse, during the two days before Ingo finished building her coffin. What stuck in Renate’s memory was the lines of red splotches and bruises that flowed up her grandmother’s arms, even in death.
Renate and Lorena’s other grandparents, Veronika’s mother and father, Peter and Sophie Schulter, had gone to live with their son and his wife in Oldenburg once Veronika and Ingo got married. Veronika’s brother, Theodor, who, like his father, was a tailor, found a place in that city that offered a shop on the first floor and living quarters on the second. Business turned out to be good, since both men were excellent at their trade. But everything came to an abrupt end in 1895: Fire swept through their neighborhood, destroying both the shop and the living quarters, along with the entire Schulter family sleeping up above.
Somehow, all these details of her family history came pouring into Renate’s head as she put together the sausage mixture. Certainly, she told herself, death can take any of us at any time. Where her family tree was concerned, there was no lack of tragic ends. But there were also the losses that came through distance, rather than death, she realized: Ewald. And Hans, who would soon be following him to Illinois. Thoughts of these two men she loved so much came into her awareness, and her heart constricted, as grief unexpectedly flooded in. She pushed it aside the way she’d push a dark, wavy curl out of her face. She told herself that somehow it was worse to lose someone to war, or to a sudden and terrible death of any sort. The memory of a particularly disastrous death from her own childhood rushed into her memory, but she fought it back down. She would not think of it! Frowning, she turned her thoughts back to Viktor and Ethel.
She felt sad that Ethel and Viktor would be marrying with the memory of the Great War and its victims still fresh in all their minds. As they sat at supper that day, Renate studied Viktor’s face. He lost his father to the fighting when he was just fourteen, she remembered. And his mother died giving birth to his little sister, Hannelore, when Viktor was just three. True, he’d had his step-mother and sister, but Ulrich had had a step-mother, too, and his experience with her and his two half-sisters had been far from harmonious.
But as far as Renate understood, Viktor had lost even these members of his family, too. When they began planning the wedding, Ethel inquired who they might invite from his family. She wanted to tread lightly in asking, because Viktor never spoke about his family. There was that time when he first came to work on the homestead, when Hans asked Viktor about his family, and he replied that they were “all gone.” Ethel never asked him for details, not wanting to open old wounds, but this also meant that she didn’t really know his family history at all. She finally broached the question in January, as they were taking a brisk evening walk.
“Isn’t there anyone we can invite from your people?” Ethel asked him gently.
“No one,” he replied, somewhat gruffly. Ethel interpreted his tone as a sign that the past was too painful to revisit.
But on this March day, at dinner, Renate decided to ask him to do precisely that. Not in a direct way, of course: She didn’t intend to pry. It was just that she’d been thinking about her own family and how her relatives had slipped into the afterlife, pulled there in a multitude of different ways.
“Viktor,” she said when they were well into their second helping of potatoes and ham, “I was thinking this morning how sorry I am that your parents can’t be here to see you and Ethel get married.”
He looked over at her and nodded silently before turning back to his plate.
“Or even your step-mother,” Renate continued. “I’m sure she would have wanted to be here.”
Another nod from Viktor.
Now Ethel joined in. “And your sister,” she said quietly. “I wish I had met her. I’m sure I would have loved her.”
Viktor looked at her and answered, a dry smile on his lips. “Oh, I don’t know about that.”
Not knowing what to say to that, Ethel exchanged confused glances with Renate. Viktor noticed their expressions.
He picked up the cloth napkin from the table and looked at the tiny bluebell Ethel had embroidered on it. He wiped his mouth and then spoke.
“My sister… She wasn’t like you Ethel. And my step-mother was not like you, Mrs. Gassmann.”
“Oh, but Viktor, I’m sure we would have gotten to be best friends,” Ethel began.
In an uncharacteristic public display of affection, Viktor reached across the table and took Ethel’s hand.
“You wouldn’t have,” he said simply. “There was something very wrong about Hannelore. It made her very mean.” He saw the looks of surprise and dismay on his soon-to-be-relatives’ faces. “I’m sorry to have to say that, but it’s true.”
“But surely, your step-mother wasn’t that way,” Renate put in, quietly, hopefully.
“There I am going to have to take exception to your statement,” Viktor said, forcing a smile to his lips. “Please forgive me.” And he bowed to her in a way that appeared both sincere and comical.
“Well, Viktor,” said Ulrich, placing his own napkin next to his plate with an air of finality. “This very house has been no stranger to evil step-mothers. And Ethel and Hans here, spent many an afternoon playing Hansel and Gretel out by the treehouse, didn’t you?”
Ethel and her brother both smiled, as much at the memories as in gratitude to Ulrich for lightening the tone.
“Now, my evil step-mother, Claudia…” Ulrich continued, to the surprise of the rest of them around the table. “She asked me, on her deathbed, to forgive her for everything.” He paused and shook his head. “Never thought I would, or could, for that matter. But I did.”
“Mine never asked me to forgive her,” Viktor told them flatly. “I doubt I could have, even if she had asked.”
Ethel wondered what could have gone on in Viktor’s family to make him so unlikely to forgive his step-mother. She didn’t understand it. “Don’t you think we all need to be willing to forgive those around us?”
Viktor tipped his head to the side and looked across the room. “I’m not sure. I think some acts are beyond forgiveness.”
Ethel pursed her lips. “Do you mean, by us, humans, or by God?”
Now he looked down at his hands briefly before shifting his cornflower blue eyes to his fiancée. “I don’t know, really. As humans, maybe we’re just not up to true forgiveness.”
Ulrich nodded, but said nothing. These past few years, ever since he forgave Claudia, he’d felt that his act of forgiveness had not been complete.
“But God,” Ulrich said, “God must forgive. Mustn’t He? Even if we can’t?”
Renate had had enough of this conversation, which was quickly heading in a direction she didn’t like.
“Forgive me for breaking in on your philosophizing,” she said, pushing her chair back from the table, “but if I don’t get these dishes cleared soon, then the cake will never get baked for tonight. And that,” she said, punctuating her words with a rap of her hand against the table, “no one will forgive!” She was about to add something, but then felt her words would not be appropriate. But Hans had no such compunctions.
“Not even God!” he called out.
They all laughed, and the tension that hung in the air dispersed, even as the question at hand lingered in their thoughts.
* * *
The last two weeks before the wedding were full of activity – for the female members of the family, at least, although the men did have several important tasks to fulfill, too. Ulrich made the arrangements for the carriage that would deliver Viktor and Ethel to the civil ceremony on Friday and to the church wedding on Sunday. The young couple had insisted that they could ride to the Town Hall on Friday in the Gassmanns’ everyday wagon, but Renate wouldn’t hear of it, and even Ulrich insisted on the carriage.
“Don’t take after your mother, here,” Ulrich chided Ethel. “No sack cloth wedding dresses or farm wagons for you and your groom!”
Ethel had to admit that she enjoyed going into Bockhorn to the dry goods store, where she always purchased her quilt fabric, to pick out the ribbons Hans would use to adorn the horses that pulled the carriage. And she was surprised how warm her heart felt when she asked the shopkeeper for several yards of white satin ribbon, too. This she would cut into small lengths and tie them onto her bridal bouquet (which she decided would be made up of her favorite flowers, gathered both from the forest and their garden). After the church wedding, she would pull out one ribbon to hand to each wedding guest. She was the first among her various girlfriends to get married, and she was already anticipating how much she’d enjoy giving each of them this keepsake.
Of course, picking out the ribbons was the least of what Ethel had to do in the months before the wedding. There was her dress and the trousseau, which she’d finally agreed was important after all. After all the sheets and other linens were finally ready and placed in the chest in her room, Ethel reckoned that she had done more embroidery during those two months than in the whole rest of her life up to that point. Renate joked that this was certainly not the case, but the blisters and needle pricks on Ethel’s fingers told a very different story.
Although it seemed to Ethel that the menfolk had it far too easy when it came to wedding preparations, they were, in fact, also in charge of setting everything up for the all-important baumstamm sägen – the log sawing. What with Ethel being a forester’s daughter, this tradition seemed particularly symbolic to everyone. Thus, the men discussed it in secret, so that neither Renate nor Ethel (nor Lorena or Ethel’s cousin Brigitte, for that matter) would know what kind of log the newlyweds would have to saw until they came out of the church following the wedding mass.
* * *
On Friday evening, after the civil wedding service and the simple meal at the Walters’ farm to celebrate – the proper reception would follow Sunday’s church wedding – the Gassmanns set about moving Viktor’s possessions out of his room in the workshop and upstairs into the room he and Ethel would now share. There were two bedrooms in the upstairs portion of the log house, one Ethel’s, the other Hans’. It had been decided that for the first week following the wedding, Hans would move out into the workshop room, so that Viktor and Ethel would have some privacy. It was Ulrich who raised this topic with Hans, at Renate’s request. Although relations between mother and son had improved since the sharp exchange in the fall over his emigration, Renate felt Hans might take it “the wrong way” if she was the one to ask him to move out to the workshop.
“What ‘wrong way’ do you mean?” Ulrich asked her, perplexed. But, for once, Renate couldn’t put her feelings into words. Or perhaps she just chose not to.
“I can’t say, exactly,” she told her husband. “But my gut tells me this is the right way to go about it.”
Ulrich stood before her as he always did, tree-like and solid, his gray eyes like a cloudy fall day as he looked at her. Of course, he agreed.
Renate was both surprised and grateful when Hans readily agreed to this temporary shift in quarters. She was also caught off guard by the tears that began to sting her eyes when Ulrich told her this news.
On that Friday evening, then, Hans and Viktor moved Viktor’s belongings into the main house, and upstairs. There wasn’t much to bring in, really. His clothing, a few books, and the notebooks he used to make notes and designs for furniture projects. All the tools, naturally, stayed in the workshop. On his second trip from the workshop, Viktor had his pillow in hand, too, but Ethel stopped him at the kitchen door and took it from him.
“No sir, Mr. Bunke,” she told him with a laugh. “Did you think I wouldn’t have a pillow for you upstairs?”
“But this one’s special,” he leaned over and whispered to her. “I’ve been sleeping on it for a year now, and that embroidery – your embroidery – well, I’ve gone to sleep with my head resting on it for all these months, dreaming of you.”
Ethel blushed, then told him quietly, “The dream – mine, too – has come true now, and I’ve embroidered new pillowcases, specially for our wedding. You don’t need this one anymore.”
Viktor straightened up, ready to relinquish the pillow, but not sure what to do with it. Finally, Ethel took it from him and passed it to Renate, who stood hugging it gently.
Once Viktor’s belongings were in the newlyweds’ room, Hans packed the clothes he’d need for the next week into a rucksack and came back downstairs. The whole family was in the kitchen, and everyone seemed at a loss. The day’s events and the new room assignments had disrupted their evening routine, and they weren’t sure what to do now. They were all tired from the excitement of the trip to the Town Hall in Bockhorn, but no one wanted to be the first to suggest they all turn in, Viktor and Ethel least of all, since that might be thought unseemly. It was Hans who finally made a move.
“All right, everybody,” he said with smile, “I might as well go settle into my new digs.” He was about to walk out into the yard, but Renate reached out and touched his arm.
“Wait, Hans,” she said, trying to force a gaiety into her voice to overcome the sadness she’d suddenly felt when watching him head toward the door. She held Viktor’s pillow out to him. “Take this.”
He took the pillow without realizing his mother’s act might have any deeper significance, and tucked it beneath his arm as he opened the door and walked out into the dimming light of that early summer night. Renate felt her heart constrict, and tears sprang to her eyes. The rest of the family noticed the tears, but only Ulrich realized they were connected to Hans. Ethel and Viktor, caught up in their own thoughts about the day, and about their wedding night, concluded that Renate was crying from joy.
As the two of them prepared to go up the stairs to what had, until now, been Ethel’s bedroom, Renate dried her eyes and bade them a good night.
“Sleep well, my dears,” she told them, giving Ethel one last kiss.
“Thank you, Mrs. Gassmann,” Viktor replied, then laughed as he saw the way Ulrich and Renate shook their heads at him in amusement.
“It’s Ulrich and Renate now,” Ulrich told him, patting him on the shoulder. “Now that we’re related.”
Renate reached out and took his hand. “Or even, ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’, if you like,” Renate added, in a voice full of kindness, but with a tinge of her sadness making its presence known, too.
Surprised, Viktor exchanged glances with Ethel, whose bright, hazel eyes suddenly grew wet, then replied, “It would be an honor to.” He nodded at Ulrich. “You may have to remind me now and again.”
His father-in-law beamed. “It’ll be an honor.”
* * *
On the day of the church wedding, the hired carriage was gleaming, and everyone admired the way Hans had tied the ribbons to the the horses. Flowers adorned the back of the carriage, where the top had been folded down, since there was no threat of rain that day. The bride and groom, although dressed modestly – what need was there to show off? they both said – radiated so much love and happiness that they might as well have been dressed in gold and sunbeams.
Smiles abounded at the end of the ceremony, when Viktor followed protocol and stepped lightly on the hem of Ethel’s simple, lace-trimmed gown – to show her who would rule the roost! – and Ethel responded as she’d been coached, by placing the toe of her soft wedding shoe firmly, yet playfully on the tip of Viktor’s boot, thereby indicating that she would be no pushover!
Outside, Hans and Ulrich had set up two sawhorses, painted white for the occasion. Atop them rested the log Viktor had selected the week before. Ulrich stood alongside this setup. He held a small saw, which the newlyweds were to use, one holding each end, to cut through the log as a team. The ease or difficulty with which they completed their task was said to indicate how well they would work together as a married couple.
Viktor took his position on one side of the log, and Ethel stood across from him. The log lay between them.
Neither on that wedding day, nor at any later time did Viktor share with Ethel what he experienced at this moment: As soon as the newlyweds grasped their respective ends of the saw, Viktor glimpsed Ethel’s great-grandfather, Wolf. Or, rather, he heard him first: the same, jolly laugh Viktor had heard float through the air the summer before in the workshop. Viktor looked to the left, to where Ulrich was standing, near Ethel. Then he watched as Wolf’s form gradually came into view, in the same, gauzy way he’d appeared to Viktor before.
Wolf was standing to Ulrich’s left, his gray hair and beard unchanged since the last time Viktor had seen him. He wore the same gray, wool vest over a billowy, white shirt, except that now, Viktor glimpsed a tiny wildflower in the vest’s buttonhole. In honor of the occasion? Viktor wondered. Then he noticed that one of Wolf’s hands was resting on one end of the log, as if steadying it for the young couple. Viktor asked the old man silently, with a smile. Thanks, Viktor told the old man silently. I can use all the help I can get. Wolf’s laugh rang out once again.
Ulrich, meanwhile, noticed that Viktor was looking in his direction. He concluded that his son-in-law was seeking some encouragement before the sawing commenced. He smiled broadly at Viktor and nodded. Does he realize that Wolf’s here? Viktor wondered. How could he not? After all those evening horsey rides Wolf gave him on this sawhorse? But Ulrich nodded again, and Viktor brought his mind back to the joyful task at hand, to his wife. My wife! Viktor smiled looked her in the eye.
“Do you recognize the wood?” he asked Ethel impishly, although he already knew how she’d answer.
“Of course, Mr. Bunke,” his wife told him, with a look of mock offense. “You’ve just married a forester’s daughter. It’s clearly a beech log.”
“Indeed I have, Mrs. Bunke,” he replied. “And indeed, it is a beech log. But from which beech tree in the forest? Do you know?”
Seeing the twinkle in his eye, Ethel pretended to be stumped, leaning down to inspect the log lying on the sawhorses, even sniffing the cut edge and running her finger over the bark. Then, she straightened up and, extending her right hand, pointed with her left index finger to the beechwood ring Viktor had carved and given her on the day he asked her to marry him.
“Right you are!” Viktor said, with a laugh. “But don’t you worry. This is just from a branch that fell during the winter. Our tree is solid and strong as ever.”
Ulrich held the saw out in front of him, and Viktor and Ethel grasped it at the same time. Although there were a few false starts before the saw teeth caught in the wood, the newlyweds quickly fell into an easy and steady rhythm. The end of the log fell to the ground with a thump, and the crowd applauded and cheered their approval. The success of the log sawing boded well for the young couple’s future together.
The wedding reception was held in the barn at Lorena and Stefan’s farm. The table that greeted the wedding party and the guests was a testament to the skill and stamina of the Gassmann and Walter women, who had been slaving over the offerings for the wedding feast for the past several weeks. Even though Ulrich, Hans, and Viktor had been living in the same household where the majority of these sweet and savory delights had been prepared (the remainder having been cooked up by Lorena and Brigitte at the Walters’ house), they had no idea of what had been going on practically under their very noses. True, there were numerous occasions when one or the other of them would come in for dinner, take in the aromas that reigned there, and set his tongue for a certain favorite sausage or cake, only to be served something far simpler. Renate and Ethel always had a ready explanation, which they delivered with such confidence – along with a still genuinely tasty meal – that the menfolk readily admitted that, yes, their noses must have deceived them.
Given Renate’s reputation in the area for being a stellar cook, no one was surprised that her traditional hochzeitssuppe was the best anyone had ever tasted: the broth was rich enough to stand on its own, if need be, but the tender, succulent beef melted in their mouths, along with the fluffy dumplings that adorned the soup. But the true star of the wedding feast was the baumkuchen. Certainly, Renate could have chosen a different cake for Ethel’s wedding, but here the forestry theme came into play once more. Could any cake be more suitable for Ulrich’s daughter and her forester husband than a tree cake? Of course not! And so, Renate and her sister had used Lorena’s largest flat baking pan to bake the thin cake layers, which they then wrapped one atop the other, around a thin, wooden dowel. The resulting cake, looked like a tree trunk and, when cut, the edges of each rolled layer resembled the growth rings you see on a cut tree. Renate and Lorena’s creation was a triumph.
Although Viktor and Ethel took as much delight as everyone else in the flavor of the baumkuchen, it held greater significance for them than simply being the cake served at their wedding. It, like Ethel’s beechwood ring and the beech log they’d had to saw earlier in the day, reminded them of the forest where they first declared their love for each other and the trees amongst which they felt so strongly connected to God, and to each other. They recognized the forest as the source of the divinity which flowed through them both, and which bound them closely together. God’s love and energy flowing through trees and into them, nurtured and strengthened them and their shared love, just as the sap ran through each beech and pine and aspen, keeping them alive and vibrantly joining to each other as a forest. As Ethel and Viktor cut the baumkuchen together and joyfully fed each other forkfuls of it, they both wished in their hearts to always be so strongly connected to each other and to the forest that had brought them together.
* * *
Hans never did move back into his room in the log house. Each day, he carried another armful of his books, pencils, or other belongings downstairs and out into the workshop. This suited him just fine. I won’t be here much longer anyway, he said to himself. Give the newlyweds more privacy upstairs. He told himself that, too. But there was something he didn’t tell himself during the next month, before the day came for him to take the train north to where he could board a ship and set sail for America: the words and feelings that were coming up deep inside him. Had Hans paid attention to that quiet voice, he would have understood another reason he wanted to spent that last month living separately from everyone else: to begin easing out of the house, out of the family, in the hope that this would make the final separation, on his departure day, easier. But even though Hans didn’t listen to this inner voice, it still guided his actions. And this is how it came to pass that this so young man of just twenty years old, who had for months and months felt that his family was pushing him out of their tight circle, now willingly removed himself from the family nest, in quite a literal way.
What was perhaps most surprising about Hans’ first move in preparation for his big move, was that although his feeling of being rejected had been one of his most powerful reasons for emigrating, he now felt no rancor whatsoever for any of his family members! Just as he and Viktor fell into an easy camaraderie and friendship, his relations with his parents were now as good as they had ever been, and probably even better. Hans laughed more in the first six months of 1922 than he had in the years since he’d come home wounded from basic training. Renate even felt that he was “his old self” again, and although she didn’t explain what she meant by that, she didn’t need to, because they all felt it in their own way. Whatever in each of their relations might have been tense or problematic in those years seemed to have righted itself now.
Hans himself didn’t delve into reflections on this. As we’ve noted, he wasn’t the reflecting type. So, he wasn’t likely to feel a kindly thought about his parents or Viktor and notice that it contradicted the thoughts that had grown so powerful in him during the previous five years or more. If Hans had picked up on this discrepancy, he might have asked himself whether he really needed to emigrate after all. But that wasn’t the way Hans’ mind worked. All he knew was that he’d made his plans and that he was happy, for the first time in years. He couldn’t wait to get on the road, get to Illinois, and start living the kind of life he was certain he’d be living there. Why shouldn’t he be in high spirits?
This was not how Renate saw things.
“Do you see how different he’s become?” she asked Ulrich one evening when June was about to cross over into July – which meant that they’d have Hans with them only for two more weeks. They were sitting on chairs outside the kitchen door, enjoying the breeze as the sun got lower in the sky.
Ulrich nodded. “He doesn’t take exception to any of the suggestions I make to his plans, or grumble about helping out with the trees at all.”
“He seems very happy. Just happy,” Renate continued. Her husband could tell by her voice that something was bothering her.
“What’s on your mind?” Ulrich asked.
Renate looked over at the door to the workshop and the curtained window next to it that looked out of the room where Hans slept these days. She smoothed her apron skirt as she gazed at the window. She remembered sewing the curtains that hung there.
“Those curtains were for a hired hand’s room,” she said, “not for my son’s room.”
Ulrich said nothing, since he knew there were more words to come. He just crossed his legs, rested one forearm on his knee, and waited for her to continue.
“It’s like he’s not part of the family anymore!” she said indignantly.
Still Ulrich said nothing.
“And he’s so happy, Ulrich, it’s like he doesn’t want to be part of the family anymore!” Renate added, her voice betraying both anger and sadness. “Why can’t he just live in the house with the rest of us? It’s only two more weeks.” Now she turned to her husband, and he saw tears welling up in her eyes.
“Don’t make more of it than there is there,” Ulrich said, putting an arm around her shoulders. “Of where he sleeps or where he doesn’t.”
Renate nodded and wiped her eyes with her apron. “How can I not make something of it? Two weeks, and he’ll be gone, and who knows when we’ll ever see him again?”
“Now, now,” Ulrich told her tenderly, “Of course we’ll see him. Don’t think like that.”
“We have so little time with him, and he’s not even wanting to spend it with us.”
Ulrich nodded. He didn’t want to let on to Renate, but these very same thoughts had been occurring to him. Here they were, about to lose Hans – because it felt to him, too, like they were losing their son – and he was walking around, happy as a lark, as if it meant nothing at all to leave the people he’d spent his whole life with. Ulrich couldn’t help but think back to Ewald and when he’d left. Ulrich had thought that it would be easier with Hans, somehow. I’m older now, he told himself, more mature. Ewald and I sorted everything out between us. When Hans and Ewald came to him, back in the fall, and talked with him about their plan, Ulrich felt magnanimous, and guilty: guilty for the distance he’d kept between himself and his best friend for no other reason than childishness, and magnanimous because he and Ewald had patched things up. Why shouldn’t he help Hans make a way for himself? It won’t be so hard this time. That’s what Ulrich told himself, back in the fall.
But somehow, that assertion hadn’t managed to sink down from his head into his heart in the course of these past eight months. What had seemed – logically – like the right thing to do, now seemed like as much of a disaster as Ewald’s emigration, and perhaps even worse, because he himself had facilitated it. But Ulrich didn’t share any of these reflections with Renate. He didn’t feel like becoming the target of her anger tonight. The situation was hard enough as it was without talking about it openly. He knew without her even hinting at it that Hans leaving had opened the door to all that she felt when Ewald left. First a brother, and now, a son. And so, Ulrich tried to comfort Renate without betraying his own complex of feelings or unwittingly providing her an opening to lash out at him.
To be clear, Renate was not one to “lash out” at anyone. She preferred to use more subtle means to resolve tensions. But what went on with Ewald – first, his departure, and then the letters he sent to Ulrich instead of to her – was the most difficult family situation she ever encountered, and Ulrich knew full well that she had been on the brink of letting her hurricane winds loose on him back then. He didn’t know quite what had held her back, but he didn’t want to push her past her breaking point now. It was important to tread carefully.
“Renate,” he said finally, “this is just his way of getting ready to go.”
She laid her hands flat out on her skirt. “This is exactly my point, Ulrich. I don’t see why he needs to go at all!”
Ulrich took a breath, preparing to say what he’d said to his wife many times since Hans’ plans came to light back in the fall: that the plans were set, and what they all needed to do was to get used to the idea. But Renate surprised him.
“Ulrich, he just seems so happy now. That’s what I mean. If he’s happy, why go? He’s proved to himself he can be happy here. So, why does he insist on going?” She looked at her husband with an almost pleading expression. “Maybe you could talk to him about it?”
Ulrich put his other arm around her and drew her close to him. “My dearest, I… I think he’s so happy because he’s looking ahead, to what awaits…”
Renate heard what he said and nodded vacantly. “But maybe,” she said, in a soft and tired voice, “maybe you could ask him, just to be sure…”
Without answering, Ulrich leaned his head over to rest it against his wife’s, and then sat there, silently holding her as her shoulders heaved and the tears flowed out.
* * *
And suddenly, the day was upon them. All Renate could later remember of that morning was the hustle and bustle of loading Hans’ suitcases into the wagon, and the way he hugged her and Ethel goodbye and then hopped lightly onto the wagon seat with Ulrich and Viktor, who would drive him to the train station in Varel. But she didn’t remember any of this with clarity. It all seemed to have happened in some kind of daze, as if she hadn’t really heard the words he said in parting, or her own words, for that matter – had she actually even said anything?? – or felt his young, strong arms embrace her, or even really seen the wagon pull out of the yard. She certainly didn’t recall that Ethel had to physically pull her arm to get her to come out of the yard and back into the kitchen. Ethel told her that she’d been standing there staring at the space where the wagon had been, long after it vanished from sight, long after the dust settled back to earth in the yard and the lane. Renate didn’t remember that. Nor did she remember how she got through the rest of the day, although when Ulrich and Viktor got back and came in for supper, there was food to put on the table, and it turned out that she had made it.
In the course of the next few days, it seemed to the family members that Renate gradually emerged from the haze that fell over her the day Hans left. She was back in the swing of the household routine, busy as ever – perhaps busier, even – in the kitchen, making bread and soups and stews, and preserving the vegetables and fruits it was time to put by. The laundry got washed and hung as it always did, and the goats got milked, and the beans got picked. Clothing got mended, and knitting projects progressed. Even the dead flower blossoms got plucked off, making the little flower beds outside the kitchen door look bright and gay. Ulrich and Ethel and Viktor, who preferred not to delve deeply into Renate’s state of mind, were happy to accept the signs of outward order as an indication that everything was also in order inwardly. But this was a mistake on their part.
Renate understood intuitively that the key to making it through losing Hans to America was to keep busy. Routine had always been soothing to her. There was something very comforting about bringing order to the household, she felt. A job well done! It had always been very important to her to be able to look back on her day in the evening and say this to herself. Now, though, each activity that made up her daily routine seemed somehow fake to her, window-dressing slapped on top of a decrepit frame to disguise its faults. As Renate dead-headed the marigolds, she felt like she was ripping off atrophied pieces of her own heart, leaving behind a form that looked healthy and beautiful on the surface, a picture that denied the withering that had occurred, and continued to occur. In a similar way, she put on a clean, ironed and proper way of behaving, and kept the table spread with family favorites. And she never breathed a word to anyone about what she was going through.
Renate somehow hoped that by not speaking of the pain inside her, she might cease to notice it herself. But this was not the case. She could usually manage – through extreme busyness – to keep from becoming overwhelmed by the waves of sadness inside her. But one morning, about a week after Hans’ departure, she was feeling such a dull pounding inside her chest that wouldn’t quiet down, no matter what she did. She was alone in the house, which may have been part of the problem. Ethel had gone to Bockhorn to pick up some fabric for a sewing job, and Renate was left on her own. She was in the middle of chopping carrots to go into that day’s stew, when the pounding began.
It seemed at first as if a stone was sitting in the middle of her chest, cold and hard. Then what she felt there was both a constriction and a breaking open: Her insides felt like they were being crushed, at the same time as her ribs were being bent outward at an angle there weren’t meant to go in. But then, an awful, wrenching sadness began seeping out of this broken and compressed part of her and into the rest of her chest, and upwards into her throat. She felt her whole upper body tense in pain that wasn’t physical, but which nonetheless was rising up out of the very depths of her bones and heart. It hurt so much that she couldn’t catch her breath. She fell, rather than sat down, onto a chair and leaned forward, muscles frozen as the sadness nonetheless flowed to every cell of her chest and shoulders and throat. It finally began to exit her body, flying out of her as great cries, propelled by muscles that suddenly sprang to life, contracting in some unnatural way.
Renate didn’t know she could feel such terrible longing and and anguish. It had been bad enough when Ewald left. That had felt nearly unbearable. But then, she and Ulrich were in the early years of their marriage, and that softened the blow. But Hans… This was something entirely different, she realized now, to her dismay. She could tell herself until she was blue in the face that of course she would see Hans again. Ewald came back, didn’t he?? But her heart told her that even if Hans did come back, it would not be for good. It would be to visit, for, what? Two weeks? A month? And Renate knew that it would not be enough. She felt within her, in her deepest inner heart and soul, that no matter how long Hans might come back to stay and visit, it would never be enough to free her mother’s heart of the longing for him, of the missing him. My God, she actually cried out, Isn’t it enough that I had to miss Ewald’s life unfolding? Do I now have to miss all of Hans’ life, too?
This possibility – no, this reality – was just inconceivable to her. He’d been gone only a few days, and she already feared she would never recover from the pain of being apart from him. How could she live with this suffering for the rest of her life? Live without her beloved son? Renate couldn’t answer that, but she did know that she didn’t want to live that way. Dear God, she prayed in between her sobs, hands clenched together before her on the table, please free me from this pain.
Now, no one in the family witnessed this scene in the kitchen, and Renate was under the impression that she was hiding her sorrow so effectively that her family didn’t notice how much she was suffering. But she was fooling no one. They all felt what was going on inside her, but, true to family tradition, no one mentioned it. Just let her work it out for herself, Ulrich told Ethel when she asked him if she should say something to her mother.
As for Viktor, he sensed his mother-in-law’s sadness very keenly. But what let him know that his intuition was correct, and that she was grieving far more than she let on, was her cooking. Once Hans left, the food Renate cooked just didn’t taste the same as it had before. Before, she had crafted each dish with love and care, and her own vibrancy and kindness came through in each potato and sausage and piece of cake. But now, everything she made tasted flat, even lifeless, if one can say that about food. At least it tasted that way to Viktor. Maybe Ulrich and Ethel didn’t notice it, but he certainly did: it was just the way his step-mother, Gisele’s food had tasted after word came that his father had been killed in battle. Gisele and her cooking never recovered from her loss.
Sue Downing 