Chapter 31
The peace and high spirits that had prevailed at the family picnic carried over into the next four days, despite the fact that these days were filled with drenching rain that prevented the hanging out of laundry on the line and drove the men into the workshop. But this sequestering of the family members created a sense of coziness and ease. It also opened the door to conversations that might not have taken place, had everyone been spread out through the house, yard, workshop, and forest, as they usually were.
On one of these afternoons, Ethel, Renate, Kristina, and Lina were cooking and sewing in the house, or, to be more precise, in the main room of the house. They had positioned themselves in various spots in this giant room, which, since it had originally comprised the entirety of the log cabin Detlef built, was home to both kitchen and sitting area, as well as Lina’s bedroom. The latter had been first curtained-off and then walled-off in one corner, long before Lina was born.
Renate was once again engaged in preserving food for the winter, although today it was raspberry jam she was putting up, not pickles. Since Kristina had learned a different method of jam-making from her mother, the two women were comparing recipes at the counter. Ethel was sitting across the room in an upholstered chair near the window, embroidering a floral design on the edge of one of the pillowcases she intended to give Hans’ daughter, Katharina, as part of her trousseau. Although they had had electricity in the house for decades now, Ethel still preferred working in the natural light. This was certainly more economical than switching on a lamp, but Ethel’s preference was not based on finances: She felt that her handiwork gained a connection to the natural world as the sunlight flowed over the flowers and leaves that Ethel was embroidering.
Lina sat a couple of yards away from her mother, working on a small pouch she’d begun sewing the day before. Similar in design to the cloth bag Peter had sewn to hold her fairy rune, this one was being constructed from fabric with a light-hearted floral design in muted yellow tones. She and Kristina had found it in a cupboard where her mother kept fabric remnants that evidently dated “at least from antediluvian times,” Lina joked to her friend when they saw the stacks and stacks of carefully-folded pieces of cloth. Lina was making the pouch for the tin foil ball Bruno Groening had given her. The ball was so slippery that Lina feared it would roll out of her hand overnight as she slept, and besides, holding it all the time left her palm feeling sweaty. She had already stitched the sides of the little bag together and was now sewing down the fold she’d made at the top to form a casing for the cord she’d thread through it to serve as a drawstring.
“It feels so frivolous to be sitting here doing embroidery in the broad daylight,” Ethel said, holding the pillowcase up to the good light by the window.
“Why’s that, Mama?” Lina inquired. “I’m knitting. Or, at least, I will be, once I finish this little pouch. That’s just as frivolous.”
“I wouldn’t say so,” Ethel replied. “Socks are a basic necessity. Embroidery on a pillowcase is a frivolity.”
“But’s it’s for cousin Katharina’s wedding!” Lina exclaimed. “I doubt she’d think it frivolous!”
Ethel smiled. “Even so, it seems I should be doing something more consequential during the daytime.”
Renate looked over her shoulder at her daughter.
“Who do I hear talking?” she asked with a smile. “This from the woman who spent the first twenty-five years of her life making designs everywhere she went – with scraps of fabric, in the dirt, in the garden…”
“And your quilts, Mama!” Lina added. She waved the pouch aloft. “I’m amazed at how much fabric you still have left from all of them, from back in the ‘thirties!”
“From before then, too,” Renate put in. She turned and pointed to Lina’s pouch. “Take that fabric you’ve got there. That fabric’s from a quilt you made back in the ‘twenties, isn’t it, Ethel?”
Ethel glanced over at Lina’s pouch and nodded. “Yes,” she said, “for the Hockners.”
“I bet it was very pretty,” Lina told her. “I’ve always loved your quilts, Mama.”
“You aren’t the only one,” Renate told her, while Kristina measured out some sugar and poured it into a pan on top of a pile of raspberries. “People from town would order them from her. Started when she was just a girl, twelve or thirteen.”
Ethel nodded. “That’s right.”
“She had quite a business going there,” Renate went on. “Her designs were so unique, not the usual squares and triangles. Folks loved them. There was a special beauty about them.”
Lina pursed her lips and frowned. “But why don’t I remember you making them when I was growing up?”
Ethel was working again now, pulling her needle, with its strand of cornflower blue embroidery thread up through the cloth. “Because I stopped around that time.”
“But why?” Lina asked. “If people wanted you to make them. Did you not like it anymore?”
Renate turned back to consulting with Kristina about the jam, but part of her was listening to her daughter and granddaughter, too.
“Oh, no,” Ethel told Lina, laying her sewing onto her lap. “I always loved it. I can’t tell you how happy it made me to come up with those quilt designs and sew them.”
“Each one of them was a work of art,” Renate put in.
“Then why did you stop?” Lina persisted.
“The joy just went out of it,” Ethel said.
“Out of life, you mean,” Renate said softly. “First out of life, and then out of the quilts.”
Now Lina was frowning in earnest. She barely recognized her mother and grandmother. The other day they were giving Kristina marriage advice, and now they were talking about the joy going out of life. Why were they suddenly so talkative about private things?
“What do you mean, Mama? Grandma?” Lina looked back and forth to them, but since Renate was now facing the kitchen counter and not her, it was left to Ethel to explain.
“That was the Schweiburg period,” Ethel said after a pause. Her tone was neutral and somewhat distant, as if she was speaking about the history of Germany. But this didn’t ring a bell with Lina.
“The Schweiburg period?” she asked. “I’ve never heard of that.”
Renate laughed. “Not in the national sense. Just the family sense.”
Ethel explained. “You were born in Schweiburg, Lina. That’s where your father and I were living – with Marcus and Peter, too, of course – when you were born.”
“Well, I’ve never understood why that was, either,” Lina said, laying her knitting on her lap.
No comment was forthcoming from Renate this time. Ethel looked out the window and seemed to be choosing her words carefully before speaking.
Lina grasped her long braid in her right hand and wound it around her wrist, in anticipation. Ethel smiled, seeing this. She was suddenly transported back to when Lina was a toddler. Even then, when her curly hair barely reached her shoulders, she would always twine it around her fingers when she was excited or anxious.
“How we got to Schweiburg…” Ethel began. “To be honest, Lina, I’ve never totally understood that, either.”
“I thought Papa was working there,” Lina asked.
“Well, yes, that’s true, he was,” Ethel told her, nodding.
Now Renate entered the conversation once more, even though her eyes and hands were focusing on the pot of raspberries and sugar that she and Kristina were tending. “It’s how he came to be working there that’s the confusing part.”
Lina just looked at her mother and waited for her to continue.
“Well, I guess it started with our wedding,” Ethel said finally. Renate nodded.
“Your wedding! That was, what, in 1922?” Lina exclaimed. “But I was born in ’28, and you weren’t in Schweiburg all that time, were you?”
“Oh, no. Not until 1927.”
“Then how did it start with your wedding?” Lina persisted.
Now Renate turned around to face them, spoon in hand. “Goodness, Lina, your mother will be telling the story until midnight if you don’t let her just tell the story her way.”
Suitably chastened, Lina let out a sigh and made up her mind to not say a word until her mother finished talking.
“You see,” Ethel began, “when Papa came to work here, he told us that his father had died fighting in the war. And that his step-mother and sister – her sister was named Hannelore – were dead, too.”
“He implied they were dead,” Renate corrected, but without removing her eyes from the pot.
“Well, yes,” Ethel allowed, “I imagine you’d have to say that he implied it, but the point is, that’s what we all understood him to be saying.” She looked out the window, at the fruit trees there behind the house that were laden with pears and apples just thinking about ripening.
“And so, naturally,” Ethel went on, shifting her gaze back to the room, “when Papa and I were getting ready for our wedding, we were talking about his family, and how sad it was that none of them were alive to come to the wedding.”
Lina was holding her tongue, even though a multitude of questions had rushed into her mind. Renate, on the other hand, evidently felt that she didn’t need to honor her own request for no interruptions.
“Tell her what he said when you said you were sure you would have loved his sister.”
Ethel smiled at her mother’s words. “Maybe you should just tell the story, Mama?”
Renate shook her head. “Not mine to tell, Ethel. You go on.”
“Yes, well, as Grandma mentioned, I told Papa that I wished I could have met Hannelore, because I was sure I would have loved her. And he said something like, Oh, I doubt that.”
“’Oh, I don’t know about that,’” Renate chimed in. “That’s what he said.”
Ethel waved in her mother’s direction. “Yes, basically. And when I protested, he went on to say that there was something very wrong with his sister that turned her very mean.”
Lina raised her eyebrows, but said nothing.
Intuiting at least one of the questions Lina wanted to ask, Ethel told her, “Of course, I wanted to know what he meant, but we weren’t even married yet, and I didn’t want to pry into his family business. So I didn’t ever ask him what had happened to her – or to his step-mother.”
Lina couldn’t keep from asking one question. “But what about his mother? What happened to her?”
“She died giving birth to Hannelore, it seems.”
“If we can even believe that!” Renate said, not entirely under her breath.
“Mama, please!” Ethel told her. “Let me go on. You said it yourself, otherwise we’ll be here all night!”
Seeing Renate nod, Ethel continued. “Well, so we got married, and Marcus was born, and then Peter a year later. And then, one day in 1926, a letter came for Papa. From his step-mother, Gisele.”
“She was alive after all?” Lina cried. Even Kristina, who had been focusing on the jam so as not to seem overly interested in these private family matters, turned around, her mouth open in surprise.
Ethel nodded. “And Hannelore, too. They were still living in Schweiburg – that’s where Papa grew up.”
“What did they want? With writing the letter, I mean?” Lina asked, and both Ethel and Renate realized it would be both pointless and perhaps even unkind to make a fuss about the interruptions.
“Oh, I don’t even remember all the details,” Ethel told her. “The main point was that Gisele accused Papa of abandoning them after the war, when they were all alone.”
“It took them five or six years to track him down,” Renate added.
“Yes,” Ethel said. “You see, he worked for a number of carpenters before he came here. And in a factory in Oldenburg for a while, too. So it was hard for them to find him.”
“But what did they want?” Lina asked in a whisper, as a feeling of dread filled her.
“They wanted him to help them, take care of them.”
“And why did he lie about them, say they were dead?” Lina asked, her voice anguished.
“I’ve never fully understood that,” Ethel said. “You see, Lina, when that letter showed up, it was like my whole life turned upside down. It wasn’t just that Gisele and Hannelore were alive. It was that Papa had lied about it.”
“And also that he’d abandoned them,” Renate added sternly.
Ethel frowned at her mother. “Well, as I came to find out, the story was a bit more complicated than that. But yes, he had these relatives we didn’t know about. And he had, at the very least, hidden himself from them.”
Looking at her mother’s solemn face, Lina realized that this must have been one of the occasions Ethel had been referring to the other day, one of the moments that require more of you than you expect when you got married.
“So what happened then?” she asked.
By now, Kristina had turned the gas beneath the jam down a bit, to allow it to thicken, and she and Renate had turned around and were leaning back against the counter, listening.
“As you can imagine, it was a terrible blow to all of us,” Ethel said, her own voice going very soft for a moment. Then she took a deep breath and let it out. “Papa felt he’d let us all down, and so he left. Went to Schweiburg. Said he wanted to ‘make things right’ with Gisele and Hannelore.”
“Yes,” Renate said, “that’s exactly what he told us: ‘I just want to make things right.’”
“But it didn’t feel like that was all that was going on,” Ethel said. “I don’t quite know what was going through his mind, but it seemed like, one day he was here, and the next he was gone.”
They could all see that tears were welling up in her eyes. Lina began to roll her chair over, hoping to comfort her. Ethel waved her away, but not unkindly.
“I’m okay, Sweetheart,” she said. “And so there was my husband, in Schweiburg, with two ghosts – that’s the way I thought of them – and here I was, with two little boys. And now I felt like the abandoned one.”
“You were the abandoned one!” Renate said tenderly.
“Up until then, for those nearly five years, I was the happiest woman alive. I loved my husband, and he loved me, and we had the two boys we loved, too. It was a perfect picture.” She paused, then looked down at her lap. “And then, suddenly, one day, I no longer knew him. And suddenly, in a flash, he was gone.”
“But then how did we all end up in Schweiburg?” Lina asked.
Ethel waved her hand again. “That is a story for another day, Lina. But to put it into one sentence: I went after him.”
“And then I was born.”
Ethel nodded, but clearly she was thinking back to that time.
“But what about Gisele and Hannelore?” Lina asked softly, not wanting to upset her mother, but also not wanting to leave this bit of family history unexplored.
“Oh,” Ethel said, turning to look at her, “what Papa had said about Hannelore was one hundred percent true.” She sighed and shook her head sadly. “So was what he said about Gisele, even though they weren’t blood relations.”
Lina wanted to ask for details, but it was clear this topic was closed.
Kristina turned back to the pot on the stove and scooped a dollop of the jam mixture onto a saucer to cool, to test whether it had thickened enough.
“Things were just never the same after that, though,” Ethel said, wiping the tears that had fallen onto her cheeks. “Papa was never the same.”
“What happened to him?” Lina asked, her braid now tightly wrapped around her wrist.
Renate saw that Ethel was struggling to come up with an answer, so she offered one herself.
“He fell in with some despicable people there, Lina. Got involved in some bad doings.” Then she turned to inspect the raspberry blob on the saucer.
“This looks jelled, don’t you think, Kristina?”
Lina knew this was the end of the conversation. A pall had fallen over the room, and she felt it was all her fault.
“Mama,” she said quietly, rolling over and placing her hand on Ethel’s, “I’m sorry I asked. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Don’t apologize, Lina,” Ethel replied, taking her daughter’s hand in both of hers. “I was the one who started talking about it. And besides, your papa and I… We… well, I guess I’d say we’ve gotten back to the way things were at the beginning. Or at least, most of the way there.” She stopped talking and looked over at Renate. “I don’t know what came over me!” she announced brightly. “What’s going on with us these days? All this talking about matters of the heart. This is not at all like us, is it, Mama?” She smiled. “But you know,” she added, holding up the pillowcase she was embroidering, “I guess I started talking about this because yesterday I had the thought, Ethel, don’t you feel like making a quilt?”
“And do you, Mama?” Lina asked her.
“Yes, I do! I don’t know why. Your grandma’s right – after we came back from Schweiburg, I never made another quilt. The creative energy just wasn’t in me anymore, I guess.”
“But now it is?” Kristina asked, feeling that this was safe enough territory for her to venture into.
“I think it is,” Ethel said, and she smiled again, sincerely now. “I felt it the day after we went to see Mr. Groening. I was looking for something in the cupboard where I have all the leftover fabric stored, and all of a sudden, an idea for a pattern came into my head. And it made me feel happy.”
“Mrs. Bunke,” Kristina said, “why that’s wonderful!”
Renate gave a wry smile and quoted Kristina. “’Mrs. Bunke.”
“Yes, you’ll have to stop that, Kristina,” Ethel told her. “I’ve been trying to get you to call me Ethel ever since you’ve been here, but now you’re really going to have to let go of that. Please start calling me Ethel.”
“Or Mama,” Lina put in. “Some women call their mother-in-law that.”
At first, Kristina smiled, but then she took them all aback by suddenly bursting into tears.
“What is it, Dear?” Renate asked, slipping an arm around Kristina’s shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” Kristina said through her tears. My God, she thought to herself, first I fall apart the other night, and now this!
“No, no,” Ethel said, in an attempt to comfort her. “What is it? Did we say something to upset you?”
Kristina shook her head so forcefully that her one, dark braid, danced back and forth behind her back. “Not at all. I was just thinking about my own parents, back home. And my brother. I don’t have any idea whether they’re even still alive.”
Renate and Ethel exchanged glances. They knew that, as soon as Kristina arrived at the Gassmanns’ homestead, she began trying to contact her family back in East Prussia, but her letters remained unanswered. All her inquiries to the organizations that sought to reunite family members separated during and after the war had yielded no information.
“They don’t even know I’m here,” Kristina went on, snuffling. “How will they find me? If they’re even still alive…”
Renate gave Kristina’s shoulders a squeeze. “If they are, then I know they’re looking for you, just the way you haven’t given up looking for them, these past four years.”
“And maybe you’ll get a letter one of these days,” Lina said. “With good news.”
“Wouldn’t that be the very best letter you could get, Kristina?” Ethel asked. “A letter telling you your long lost family is still on this earth?” She knew they were all thinking about the story she’d just told.
Now the three women felt like they’d made a terrible mistake in talking about Viktor’s supposedly dead relatives without a thought about how that might make Kristina feel. Ethel in particular was overcome by a feeling of her own insensitivity toward her future daughter-in-law.
“I wish very much for you to receive such a letter, Kristina,” she said lovingly. “And preferably before your wedding!” This attempt to shift everyone’s mood, as convoluted as it was, did lighten the atmosphere a tiny bit. At the very least, the four women felt more closely connected to each other now, thanks to Ethel’s open-hearted sharing about the “Schweiburg period”. It wasn’t quite the type of pre-wedding chatter Kristina might have anticipated from her new family. Even so, she was quite sure that this information would prove far more valuable to her than any discussion of embroidery patterns for her trousseau ever could.
Meanwhile, oblivious to that fact that family history was being divulged a mere thirty yards away, the Gassmann and Bunke men were tending to the quite tangible details involved in the crafting of furniture. Even so, their tending did not preclude conversation – conversation that was just as emotionally-tinged as their female relatives’. They, however, being men who’d been raised to be tight-lipped, kept those emotions much more tightly under wraps. They concealed them beneath the tracings of pencils upon wood and paper, or within the movement of an arm as it planed what would become the back of a chair.
Peter was perched on one of the tall stools at the workbench that lined the room’s far wall. He noticed with pleasure how comfortable it was for him to sit there, without having to bend his right leg to keep discomfort at bay. He was enjoying being able to focus on his plans without being distracted by the tearing aches that had plagued him ever since he’d returned from the war.
Ulrich noticed his grandson flexing his leg as he sat on the stool. “Does your leg hurt, Peter?” he asked, concerned.
“Not at all, Grandpa,” Peter replied, pausing and flipping his pencil back and forth with his thumb and middle finger. “I was just testing it out, to see how it felt.”
Viktor was at an adjacent seat, engaged in the beginning stages of carving a strip of wood that would form the apron for the oak table that a client in Bockhorn had ordered. For the first time in a long while, he found himself fully enjoying the delicate process of moving away layers of wood to create the shape he wanted. He felt a deep peace spread through him as he moved the tool gently along the wood.
“And how does it feel?” he asked Peter.
“Amazing,” Peter replied. “After so much pain for so long, I almost can’t believe it’s really gone now.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t notice you were better until after we got back home,” said Marcus, who was stationed at a saw horse, planing a plank that would form part of the top of the table.
“Doesn’t make any sense to me, either,” Peter told him. He shrugged and leaned back over his drawing, but Marcus went on.
“Now that you’re back on both feet,” he began, “I don’t see any reason I need to come back to work here full time.”
Ulrich, who had been expecting this topic to come up from the moment Peter hopped across the kitchen floor, noticed a slight stiffening in Viktor’s back. Figuring he’d he’d give Viktor a chance to choose his own response, Ulrich spoke. “How’d you figure that?” he asked in a neutral tone, without the slightest pause in the sanding he was engaged in.
Marcus straightened up and blew on the plank before him to scatter the wood shavings, then tested the surface with his fingertips.
“Well, seems clear to me.” He paused, and Ulrich, to his surprise, sensed in Marcus’ tone a slight willingness to discuss, rather than simply push his point. “Peter’s been concentrating on the cabinetry because he couldn’t work out in the forest, right?”
“Not entirely,” Viktor said, also in a calm voice. But Ulrich noticed his tensed muscles.
“Why, then?” Marcus asked, also a bit surprised at how relaxed he was feeling about raising this topic. Maybe, he thought, it’s because I know I’ll be able to stay at my job. No need to even worry about it.
“It was also because I always enjoyed this part of the business anyway,” Peter told him. His tone lacked the defensiveness that would normally have crept into his voice in such cases.
“Which I never have,” Marcus said, matter-of-factly. “We all know that.”
“And we also know,” Ulrich said, raising the hand that held the sandpaper and extending his forefinger, “that we have always made adjustments in this family when adjustments needed to be made.”
“We don’t always get to do what we want to do,” Viktor added, but without turning around.
“Except for you,” Marcus said, but without any evident rancor, as he, leaned forward into the next planing movement. It was as if he was stating a simple fact.
At this, Peter shook his head, but kept his eyes on the paper before him. Here we go, he thought to himself. Ulrich put down the sandpaper and wiped his hands against each other, brushing off the sawdust. Viktor slowly turned around on his stool, until he was facing Marcus, who was working about ten feet away from him.
This situation felt familiar to all of them. They’d experienced it many times in the past: Marcus would be dissatisfied with this or that decision, provoke a confrontation with his father, and the two of them would nearly come to blows, before Marcus finally acquiesced. At this moment, though, Marcus seemed less agitated than past experience led the others to expect. Viktor, too, although he had taken a stance that could swiftly shift into aggressive action, seemed to Ulrich to be considering whether he might get out of this conflict without using any force at all.
In fact, Viktor, like his son, was surprised by what he was feeling inside. Maybe it was that Marcus’ tone sounded less abrasive than usual. Or maybe he himself was simply calmer for some reason, maybe because the carving was feeling so good to him. But whatever it was – although he had noticed the tense muscles in his own back that Ulrich had also seen – Viktor found himself able to sit in relative peace and hear his son out, rather than tensing his entire body like a notched arrow waiting to vault forward in attack.
“What, exactly, do you mean by that?” he asked Marcus. He didn’t even have to make an effort to keep his voice calm.
Marcus planed another swath of the wood, then straightened up. For a moment, he felt a quick burst of anger, and the words of a stinging reply flashed through his mind. But only for a second. Then they were gone. He couldn’t call them back. He paused, his mouth opened to speak, but then a different thought came to him. Leave it be. It’ll sort itself out. So shocked was Marcus by this entirely novel way of viewing things, which would never have occurred to him two days earlier, that he ended up by shrugging.
“I don’t know, really,” he said, and the three others were as confused by his response as he himself.
Ulrich and Viktor exchanged glances, each of them wondering what was going on. Is this just a clever ploy? Viktor wondered. Ulrich knitted his brows and went back to his sanding. Peter shook his head again. Marcus, he thought. At least it looks like we’ll get away without a fist fight today. And with that thought, he found his body relaxing, but not entirely. He still wasn’t able to believe that Marcus had changed, that the Marcus of “my dear Kristina” was there to stay. Best to remain on guard.
But what Viktor said next caused Peter to put down his pencil for good and spin around on his stool, too.
“Well, now, Marcus,” Viktor was saying, “we did have an agreement, you and I. That if Lina got healed, you wouldn’t have to come back to work in the business full time.”
Marcus nodded. “Yes. I remember.” He narrowed his eyes a bit at his father, but again, none of them detected any hostility in his voice.
Nor had they detected any in Viktor’s.
“Right,” Viktor went on, with a nod. “So, we go back to see Groening day after tomorrow. How about we just wait and see what happens then? I’m still happy to abide by our agreement if Lina gets better.” He extended his right arm in Ulrich’s direction. “You, too, Grandpa?” he asked.
“Yes, indeed!” Ulrich confirmed, pursing his lips and sticking them out, while nodding firmly.
“Good, then?” Viktor asked Marcus. And when his son nodded in assent, Viktor hopped lightly off this stool and walked over to the saw horse and extended his right hand across it to his son. Marcus grasped it, and the two men shook hands, just as they’d done across the supper table a couple of weeks earlier. Then, still holding Marcus’ hand, Viktor stepped around the side of the sawhorse and placed his free arm around his son’s shoulders. Smiling warmly, he clapped Marcus’ shoulder with such open affection that Ulrich, Peter, and Marcus alike, were stunned. Viktor, himself, felt his heart fill with tenderness, and Marcus, muttering something about sawdust, reached up to wipe away some dampness from his eyes.
Feeling uncomfortable with this display of emotion, Ulrich shifted the topic to Marcus’ upcoming marriage, evidently having decided that at least here there could be some sharing of manly advice that wouldn’t bring tears to anyone’s eyes.
“Viktor,” Ulrich said, “now that our Marcus here is going to be sawing the log outside the church after the new year – what’s the date again?” he paused to ask, although he knew as well as any of them that the wedding had been set for Saturday, January 14th.
Viktor, Peter, and Marcus recited the date in unison, which convinced Ulrich that he now had distracted them from the awkward scene of moments earlier.
“As I was saying,” he went on, smiling mischievously, “as we all know… Well, at least your father and I know, since we’re the married men here, the most important part of the wedding festivities is the log sawing.”
Viktor nodded, playing along with Ulrich. But at the same time, he was fondly recalling how he and Ethel had joined forces to cut through the birch log that Ulrich had set out on the very sawhorses Marcus was now using. He also recalled the way Ulrich’s grandfather, Wolf, had appeared and laid a steadying hand on the log. He glanced at the sawhorse now, and although he saw no visible trace of Wolf’s spirit, he heard the old man’s laugh, and the words, “Nice to have all us menfolk here together.” No one else seemed to hear this remark.
“So,” Ulrich went on, motioning to Viktor, “what advice do you have for our Marcus? What’s the best strategy for the sawing?”
Viktor turned and gave his father-in-law a sly smile. “Why don’t you share your advice first? You and Renate have been married much longer than Ethel and I.”
“True,” Ulrich admitted, “but my strategy… well, I really had no strategy. I just handed her the log and the saw, and that was it!” He laughed at his own joke, and the three others followed suit.
Viktor, realizing he couldn’t get away without answering, struck a thoughtful pose.
“My advice?” he began. “Here’s what I think. Now, your mother was – and still is – a very strong woman. And so is your Kristina, by the way, Marcus. Been through a lot, and that’s made her strong. Don’t forget that about her, when you come to the log. Of course, you have more physical strength, but that doesn’t mean you can just grab the saw and do what you want with it. Remember, it’s a two-handed saw. And that’s for a reason.” He paused and looked at both his sons, who were listening with interest, Marcus more attentively than Peter.
Now Viktor positioned himself on the far side of the saw horse where Marcus was standing. He put one leg in front of him and leaned forward on it. Then, putting his hands out in front of him, he made a gesture of sawing.
“Since you do have more physical strength, use it to make the first cut. But even then, be careful. You don’t want to push or pull so hard that first time, that you knock your bride off her feet.” He chuckled, and the others also laughed. Marcus and Peter glanced at each other to try to determine whether their father was making an off-color joke or not.
“But once you’ve got that groove started,” Viktor went on, a broad smile on his face now, “pay close attention to how she moves, and adjust the strength of your own sawing to hers. Allow her to feel she is guiding the sawing.”
“But it sounds like she is guiding it,” Marcus remarked.
“In a way, she is,” Viktor told him. “But not entirely. You’re still lending your strength to the effort, and without that, she’d never saw the log in half, not all on her own.”
“You see, Marcus,” Ulrich said, picking up his sandpaper again, “we both gave you the same advice.”
“That’s not at all true, Grandpa,” Peter said, breaking into laughter.
“So it seems to you now,” Ulrich replied cryptically. “Come to me in twenty years and tell me there’s any difference.”
Peter and Marcus turned to Viktor, hoping for explanation, but he gave none. Pleased that he’d contributed to creating an air of mystery around the tradition of the log sawing, Viktor jovially clapped Marcus on the shoulder. Then he leaned forward. “Good luck to you, Son!” he whispered.
Sue Downing 