Tag: spiritual healing

Above the River Q&A #1: Tingling

~ Sue Downing ~ 2 Comments

I’m finally getting started on answering your questions about Above the River! Here’s one from Janet:

“I’m curious about the tingling sensation people feel when attending a healing. Is that related to energy work?”

This tingling in the body that a number of the characters in Above the River feel when they’re in the room with Bruno Groening is something that many people have felt when they encounter what Bruno referred to as the “Heilstrom” (“the healing stream”).

Bruno Groening, as I mention in the Author’s Note at the beginning of the book, was a real person who carried out healing work in Germany after World War II. He said that the Heilstrom came from God, whom he described as “the greatest physician”. Many, many people who spent time in Bruno’s presence reported feeling this tingling that you mention, whether in their hands or feet, or throughout their bodies. Some people said that it felt like an electric current running through their body. When asked about this sensation, Bruno just said that it was the sensation of the Heilstrom moving through the body. He said that the Heilstrom would flow to every spot in the body where there was something that was “not from God”, and would clear it all out.

Certainly, not everyone felt this. Some people felt nothing at all. Others felt a deep sense of peace and calm and love, as did some of the characters in my novel. Bruno made a point of saying that it’s not necessary to feel the Heilstrom in order for it to have a healing effect on the body and mind.

This is so similar to what we sometimes experience during energy healing work. As someone who practices Reiki, I can say that both my recipients and I often feel tingling in the body during a session.  And it’s my belief, which is shared by other practitioners, too, that what we’re feeling at those moments is the flow of the healing energy through our bodies, to the spots where healing is needed – a process similar to what Bruno said about the Heilstrom going to where there’s something that’s not from God.  However, Bruno said that the Heilstrom was different from prana or chi.  I imagine that he would also say it is different from the energy that we Reiki practitioners access when we give Reiki. And I can say, personally, that the Heilstrom feels different to me from the energy I use during a Reiki session, and also from the energy I’ve felt moving through me during, say, acupuncture or jin shin jyutsu. All of these have their own distinct feel to me.

I’m able to share this personal take on how the Heilstrom feels thanks to having been part of the Bruno Groening Circle of Friends: After Bruno passed away in 1959, a small group of what he called his Circle of Friends, managed to continue his work.  These friends began helping people connect to the Heilstrom by instructing them the way Bruno did during his lifetime (basically in the same way that Bruno and Egon Arthur Schmidt explain it in my novel when the Gassmann-Bunke family goes to see Bruno). They also shared Bruno’s teaching about the healing process and Regelungen.  One of these friends, Grete Häusler, who was a close associate of Bruno’s during his lifetime, eventually formed the Bruno Groening Circle of Friends, which is active today throughout the world. I was in that group for quite a few years, and that’s how I came to experience the Heilstrom.

Now, although the Heilstrom feels different to me than all of these others energies, I feel that they all do fall into the category of “healing energies”. Maybe they have different sources, and maybe they work in the body and mind in different ways. I don’t know.  As far as I know, Bruno didn’t talk about whether the Heilstrom differs from prana or chi in terms of source. He just said that the Heilstrom is the healing energy from God. Maybe another reader who has more info about this could comment.

The main point, though, is that I’d say you’re absolutely right: When people take in the Heilstrom, they can feel a tingling that is similar to the tingling folks sometimes feel during Reiki or acupuncture or other types of energy work; and that, in both cases, this tingling sensationresults from the flow of healing energy through the body.

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Above the River, Chapter 33

~ Sue Downing

Chapter 33

Gassmann-Bunke homestead

            Lina awakens with the sun the next morning, and it takes a moment before she realizes that she is lying on her side, instead of her back. For four years, she has slept on her back, but here she is now, on her side.  She is confused at first. Then a smile spreads over her face. I must have turned onto my side in my sleep! she realizes. So, it’s true! I’m really healed! Rolling onto her back, she slowly raises herself up to a sitting position. Then, bending her knees, she scoots backwards, so that she is resting on her pillow against the headboard. And all this she does without any pain whatsoever.  Lina smiles and feels a deep well of gratitude within her.  It’s true!

            Moving aside the sheet she’d been sleeping under, Lina straightens out her legs, then pulls her nightgown up to her knees, so that she can examine her legs. After four years of such examinations, she knows the course of each scar, the outline of each discoloration, by heart. She has always had the feeling that if these spots where her skin and bones were broken could talk, they would whisper to her the secret of how and why the accident happened. Many, many times in the previous four years, she touched the white traces on her skin, the lichen-like blotches, and asked them to help her understand.  Funny, she thinks now, I haven’t looked at my legs since before the last time we went to see Bruno Groening. And that was the night when she did finally understand how the accident occurred. She runs her index finger lightly along one of the scars.  “Was it you who sent me that image?” she asks out loud, “So that I could understand?”  She spends the next few minutes bobbing her knees up and down and watching how these movements alter the way the scars and blotched patches of skin appear to her.

            Before this morning, her motionless legs always reminded her of dead tree trunks, lying helplessly on the forest floor, vulnerable to attack from all manner of insects and sharp human implements. Now, though, they seem to have sprung back to life, somehow reconnected to their roots, to their source of sustenance.  Even the scars and discolored spots have acquired a certain vibrancy, as the muscles beneath them undulate. Lina leans forward and then swings her legs over the side of the bed.  Stand up on the earth now, little saplings! she calls to them in her mind. Summon your strength up from your roots!

            The bed is just high enough that, when Lina lowered her legs, the soles of her feet come to rest against the floorboards. For the first time in four years, she feels the wood beneath her feet, really feels it. Wood to wood, she thinks, as her newly-enlivened trunk-legs meet the pine planks beneath them.  The floor is cool to the touch of her soles, and as Lina slides her feet this way and that, she notices that the pine is smooth here, roughened there.  She stretches out her right foot and touches her big toe to the edge of the hooked rug that lies half a foot from the bed. She smiles at the sensation of the wool against her skin as she moves her toe back and forth.

            It is this smile that Ethel sees on her daughter’s face when she walks into Lina’s room, just as she has done every day for the past four years.  Seeing Lina perched on the edge of the bed, Ethel’s first impulse is to rush to take hold of her daughter’s shoulder, lest she topple right over and onto the floor. But then she remembers what Groening said the evening before: that they should treat her like the healthy person she is. So, she just stands in the doorway, overcome with emotion at the sight of her daughter gently stretching out her fully-functioning leg.

            “Mama, can you believe it?” Lina asks, rising to her feet.  Slowly, not out of fear or discomfort, but out of the desire to savor each step, Lina walks over to her mother. Tears come to Ethel’s eyes, just as they did when tiny, one-year-old Lina took her first steps, in this very room. Joy and wonder, and gratitude, too, flood her heart as she and Lina embrace.

*          *          *

            When Lina comes out into the kitchen for breakfast, the others, who are bustling around either finishing the cooking or helping to setting the table and lay out the food, all stop what they are doing at the sight of her.

            “Aunt Lina,” Ingrid asks her, “why are you wearing boys’ clothes?”

            Indeed, Lina is dressed in one of the pairs of Peter’s dark gray pants that she always used to wear to work in, before the accident.  They are a bit big on her, since she has grown thinner over the years of inactivity. The white work shirt – also Peter’s – hangs loosely, too, but this suits her somehow:  As she extends her arms out straight to the sides and slowly spins to display her new-old look, the extra fabric in the sleeves and torso billows (although there is no breeze inside the house), and, for a moment, she resembles nothing so much as a dove that is just taking flight. Or, perhaps, a swallow.

            Ingrid has come over to her now, cloth napkins still clutched in one hand, and is looking her up and down in surprise. Lina reaches out and playfully tugs the little girl’s braids.

            “These are my work clothes,” she tells her gaily. Ingrid looks to Kristina for explanation, but Kristina is just as shocked as her daughter. She, too, has never seen Lina dressed this way, and it feels a bit much to grasp: first the healing, and now the clothes. Marcus and Viktor, too, are taken aback. After all, it was only after they both went off to the war that Lina began donning her brother’s pants and shirts and working alongside Ulrich in the forest. And when they returned home in 1945, it was after her accident, and she was once again wearing skirts. For Ulrich, Renate, and Ethel, seeing Lina dressed this way is not so much a surprise, as a welcome flashback to the wartime days before the accident. Here’s the Lina we knew! Ulrich finds himself thinking. For Peter, too, Lina’s garb is not unfamiliar.  After being discharged from the army due to his leg wound, he had more than a year to observe how natural his sister looked as she moved about the homestead in his clothes. And not once did he object: Seeing her head off into the forest wearing in his pants and shirts helped him feel that in some small and symbolic way, he was still able to participate in those efforts, if only by contributing the clothing his sister inhabited with such ease.

            Ingrid reaches out and touches Lina’s pants, then looks at the men in the room to inspect what they’re wearing in a way she never thought to do before. Then she rises up on tiptoes and brings her mouth next to Lina’s ear.

            “Isn’t it harder when you have to go to the toilet?” she asks in her stage whisper, a serious expression on her face.

            Lina laughs and puts her arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Well, I would say it is not,” she replies. “Fewer layers of fabric to keep track of,” she whispers into Ingrid’s ears.  This is evidently all Ingrid needs to hear.

            “Mama,” she calls out to Kristina, “can I wear pants, too?”

            They all laugh, perhaps more loudly than the question really warrants, for everyone is grateful to have something else to discuss besides the revelations that came to light in Bremen the night before.

            “I don’t think these will fit you,” Lina tells Ingrid, as she takes a plate of fried eggs from her mother and sets it down on the table. “So, you’re out of luck, at least for now.”

            Over the coffee and rolls and jam and eggs, the family members pepper Lina with questions: How does she feel? Any pain? What did it feel like to wake up and realize that her legs really did work? And this from Viktor:

            “Are you really intending to go out into the forest with us today?”

            He looks at her with eyes red from lack of sleep, and his usual upright posture has shifted. His shoulders aren’t exactly slumping, but there is a kind of listlessness in his muscles – the exact opposite of the way Lina’s legs feel now. Did my healing somehow come at the expense of his vibrancy? Lina wonders as she looks at him.

            “Yes, I’d like to. Nothing too heavy,” she tells them all and sees that they are relieved to hear this.  “But I’ve spent so many years not being able to help, that I see no reason to sit here doing nothing.”

            “And who, exactly, will help me hang out the laundry, then?” Kristina asks, her hands on her hips, feigning insult, although, to tell the truth, she really will miss Lina’s company during the day. Will she still want to take our walk tonight? she wonders.

            “Heavens!” Lina tells says, happy to be made a fuss of in a light-hearted rather than pitying way. “We’ll hang it out after dinner, before I go back out, all right?”

            “Nonsense!” Ethel tells them both. “We don’t want to work her to death on her very first day, do we, Kristina? I know you can manage on your own.”

            Catching sight of her friend’s crestfallen face, Lina says, “And I’ll help you take it down after supper. How about that? I can reach the clothespins now!”

            Kristina, relieved, smiles. “Agreed!”

*          *          *

            After breakfast, Ingrid is off to school, Marcus to work in Varel.  Lina heads out into the forest with her father, grandfather, and Peter.  They are all carrying various saws and other implements – except for Lina, who has reluctantly agreed to take it a little easy this first morning.  They are still seeing me as weak! she thinks in consternation.  But they are her family, and she loves them, so she carries nothing.  As they reach the beginning of the path into the woods, Lina pauses.  The others, who are walking ahead of her, turn.

            “Are you all right?” Peter asks, a look of concern coming to his face.

            “Yes, yes, I’m fine!” she tells him with a bit of irritation.  “I’m just greeting the trees. You go on. I’ll catch up with you.”

            It is the first time she has entered the forest under her own power in more than four years. There is so much happiness in her heart, that tears come to her eyes.  She looks up at the crowns of the aspens and pines, sees them waving ever so slightly in the summer breeze. Hello, friends! she says to them in her mind, and takes the increased waving as their response.  May I come in here with you today? she asks.  A moment later, a burst of energy comes into her feet from the earth beneath her.  It rises up through her legs, through her entire body, into the very tips of her fingers, and the top of her head.  That is a ‘’Yes”! she knows. She notices that her body is tingling and vibrating in just the same way as it was the evening before, in the Birkners’ parlor. Ahhh, she thinks. The Heilstrom?  She gazes again at the tops of the trees, then runs her eyes downward along their trunks, to the point where their roots meet the ground, where myriad small and middling plants are also growing, where mushrooms have poked their caps up after the rain that fell a few days before. Nature is God, Lina thinks. Groening said that. She closes her eyes and opens her palms. The tingling in her body increases, and joy floods her heart.

            “Good morning, nature,” she says aloud, taking in the rich scents of the pines and the fungi. “Good morning, God.”

            Moving along the path, Lina feels a lightness in her body, as if she could just float up off the ground. But she wants to be on the earth, to notice how it feels and sounds different beneath her feet as she walks on bare dirt, a cushion of pine needles, or a layer of several years’ worth of dried and decaying leaves. Each of these has its own give and bounce as she moves across it, and its own scent, too. This really is the heavenly, just the way Grandpa always says.

            Before long, by listening for her relatives’ voices, she finds the spot where she needs to leave the path and head into the woods in a different direction, to where the men are preparing several large oaks for cutting.  Selected for their straightness and size, they will eventually be transformed into tables and sideboards for clients by Viktor and Peter.

            “How beautiful they are!” Lina exclaims, as she joins her relatives. She walks over to one of the trees and lays a hand on its bark.  “Do you ever think,” she says, without directing her question to one or the other of them, “what the oak must think at this moment? Here it’s been growing, growing, growing for all of these years, straight and strong and handsome, only to be cut down one day without warning. Taken away from its family, isolated, alone. And without knowing the reason for it.”

            Ulrich smiles wistfully and nods, and they all recognize that his words pertain not just to the trees, but to Lina, too, and to Viktor. Perhaps even to all of them. “I have thought about that many times, Lina,” he tells her. “Especially when I was young.  Sometimes it felt like a monstrous thing, to cut a tree off at the roots, to fell it in such a violent way, with such sharp tools, to tear it away from its loved ones. As if it is being punished for some grave mistake. Except that it has no idea what it’s done wrong, or why no one gave it the chance to do things differently.”

            “Yes, Grandpa, I was thinking that now,” Lina tells him. Tears come to her eyes.

            “But then,” Ulrich says, “I came to a different view of it.  Like Mr. Groening said last evening, nature is God.  And God has created this beauty in the forest.”

            “The heavenly,” Lina adds, and Ulrich nods.

            “And so, when we cut down a tree like this beauty here, and create a table or chairs or a wardrobe out of it, then we are taking God’s beauty and moving it into someone’s house.”

            “But not everyone approaches the trees and the table-making the way you do, Ulrich,” Viktor interjects. “Plenty of woodworkers – I’ve worked with them! – see the wood just as a product to be shaped according to their idea. They don’t see their task as working with what’s divine in the wood to create something that’s in a different shape, but still divine.”

            “And some trees are just cut down for firewood,” Peter adds, thoughtfully. “Because they’re deformed, or damaged in some way, and nothing divine seems to come from them.”

            “No, that’s true,” Ulrich agrees, reaching out to touch the tree, too. “What both of you said. But the damaged tree… it still can give warmth.”

            Lina jumps in. “And if it can do that – provide warmth – then there still must be some bit of the divine in it, don’t you think? To keep people from freezing to death, to allow them to cook their food. That’s an act of kindness, too, isn’t it?”

            They all nod. And Viktor looks intently at his daughter’s face. He feels that she’s speaking to him, and about him, even if it is in a very indirect way. He wants to believe that this is the case.

            “I think it is an act of kindness,” Ulrich offers, nodding.

            “So, however we use the trees, then,” Peter adds slowly, “they’re all ways of allowing the trees to be of service in one way or another.”

            Here Lina thinks of the picnic they had out here in the woods the week before. She recalls the insight she gained then: that her accident had to happen, so that the whole family could come together in love. So, she thinks to herself, even those bone-breaking rounds of firewood were able to serve us all in a good way, and help us.

            “I reckon you’re right,” Ulrich told his grandson. “Even so, there’s something about transforming the tree’s wood into an object of beauty, a piece that preserves the divine … It takes a rare ability to be able to do that. And you,” he says, waving a hand in Viktor’s direction, “are able to do that. I see that especially in your carving.”

            Viktor, who is standing, axe in hand, glances at his father-in-law with gratitude. There is so much history between the two of them, both easy and trying… After the previous night, Viktor is thankful that Ulrich still has a good word for him.

            “But if I am able to do that, then I learned it from you,” Viktor replies.  “Before I met your grandfather,” he tells Peter and Lina, “I was one of those ‘other woodworkers’ myself. I couldn’t sense the heavenly in the wood. Probably because I never spent time in the forest before I came here.”

            Ulrich shrugs. “You can’t be faulted for that,” he tells Viktor. “Generations of our family have worked in this forest and lived alongside it. We came to feel its power as a matter of course.”

            “But you never took it for granted, Grandpa,” Lina says.

            “That’s true.  My father, and my grandfather, Wolf, they brought me into this forest from the time I was born – just the way your father did with you.” He gestures to Peter and Lina. “I felt God here before I could speak and put a name to what I felt. But I knew that here is where I would find it. And that I didn’t feel this same divinity when I was in town. Or on other folks’ homesteads.  That’s how I came to understand how special this forest is. How powerful.”

            Lina sighs and runs her fingers over the oak’s bumpy trunk.  “I never realized what the forest gives us until I couldn’t be out here in it every day.  In those early days, I thought I’d die from not being in with the trees.”

            Peter steps over and hugs her. “And now you’re back with them. With us and them.”

            Lina nods.

            Viktor looks from one to the other of them, and feels a mixture of love for them and shame in regard to himself. On the one hand, if Bruno Groening is to believed, he has made things right – with God. But then there is his family. Although no one has said anything yet, he is certain that they are all looking at him differently now. Even Ethel didn’t raise the question last night when they went to bed. She looked to him like she was in a daze, and she went to bed without a word. How to make things right with all of them? The answer to this question still eludes him.

            “This forest saved my life,” he says, his voice catching. He clears his throat and looks down at the axe.

            “It did?” Peter asks quietly.  “How?”

            “As I told your mother many, many years ago – in fact it was at supper that day with your Uncle Hans and Uncle Ewald, Grandma’s brother, the day when we all talked about God.”

            “And it was after that that Uncle Hans left?” Peter asks.

            Viktor nods. “Anyway, that day, I told everyone that I didn’t believe in God before I came into this forest, before I worked with your grandfather here, amongst the trees.”

            “But how did it save your life, Papa?” Lina asks.

            Viktor gazes at her gray eyes that matches Ulrich’s, then over at Peter, whose sandy hair came from him, and his mother’s hazel eyes.  Can they forgive me? God, please help me!

            “You are very lucky,” he says to the two of them, “to have grown up here, with this family – here I’m leaving myself out – and in these woods, where you could be with God.  I didn’t have that when I was growing up. I didn’t know God. Saw no evidence whatsoever that He exists. But here –” Viktor raises his right arm and makes a large arc with it, indicating everything around them. “Here I came to know that God does exist. And that saved me. Gave me hope – for myself, for our family.”

            Feeling he might have said too much, he looks down.

            All of them realize that he is speaking now about much more than his early years on their homestead. They each, like Viktor himself, feel a mix of emotions.  Here is this man they have loved – Peter and Lina, for all their lives, and Ulrich, for more than two and a half decades – and who has also committed acts that turn their stomachs.  His two children want to run to him and cry in his arms, beg him to explain it all to them, so that they can forgive him as God apparently has done. At the same time, they want to run from him.  This new side of him that’s been revealed terrifies and repulses them. They don’t know how to incorporate it into their vision of their father. 

            Certainly, they have seen him angry and, especially with Marcus, they have seen him act harshly. But somehow they have been able to ignore that aspect of his personality – perhaps because neither of them ever had to experience his harshness themselves. And in fact, they saw him as their protector: He was the one who kept them safe from Marcus. Or, at least, Lina thinks, He kept mesafe from Marcus. She remembers now what Peter told her about Marcus’ bullying, about how he knew he couldn’t go to their parents, that Marcus would only grow more brutal if he did.  So, did he nottake care of us after all? Lina wonders. 

            Peter, looking now at Viktor, realizes how torn up his father is feeling. The thought that perhaps their father did not care for them as he should have done – this is not a new thought for Peter. But he, like Lina, has long ago found a way in his own mind and heart to focus more on the love and care their father has shown them in the course of their lives, than on what he did not do for them. At this moment, too, Peter wants very badly to continue to love his father, to see the good in him.  But how? Peter asks himself. Can there be an explanation for what he did? An explanation that will make it all right? Or that will at least allow them to return to seeing him without the shadow of what Groening revealed.

            Then a memory comes into his mind. He sees a field on the Eastern Front, an operation that took place just a few days before the one in which he was wounded. His group of ten soldiers is moving through a forest that stands alongside what was once a field where crops of some sort were growing. Wheat, maybe? There have been reports of an enemy partisan force here, and Peter and his fellow soldiers are searching for them. They move more deeply into the woods, and then, suddenly, the partisans are upon them. Peter’s friend, Rolf, is shot at close range. Peter sees the partisan who made the shot, but this partisan has not seen him. The rest Peter remembers in clear detail, but also as if through a haze: pulling his knife from its sheath, coming up behind the partisan, grabbing him around the neck, and plunging the knife deep into the man’s back at the level of his heart.  To this day, Peter cannot make sense of how he could bring himself to kill another human being.  Of course, he tells himself, there may have been other times when he killed enemy soldiers at longer range, when shooting into a line.  Until that moment – when it is your knife drawing blood from another man’s back – it is easy to tell yourself you haven’t caused anyone’s death.

            As this memory fades, Peter looks once more at his father. What brought Papa to give that order? Viktor’s face provides no answer, and Peter is left – as are they all – to make his own choice: to find space in his heart to continue loving this man, despite the truths they now know, or to allow the horror he feels to take the upper hand.

            Ulrich, in a moment of outspokenness that surprises them all, listens to what Viktor has said and then asks, “And was it when you left the forest that you forgot that God exists?”

            A slight frown comes to Viktor’s face. “What do you mean, exactly?”

            Ulrich takes in a deep breath, and then lets it out. “When you went to Schweiburg,” he begins, “when you were away from this forest, away from the divine – was that how all those awful ideas were able to get in?”

            It is such a blunt question, and they are all taken aback that Ulrich has spoken without mincing any words whatsoever. And yet, they also notice, there is no anger in his eyes. He, too, seems to be wanting to find a way to hold onto the good that has existed between himself and Viktor, while explaining away the horrific.  Ulrich studies his son-in-law, who has, over these decades, felt like more of a son to him than his blood son, Hans. He has almost always seen Viktor as the human equivalent of the great oaks they are preparing to cut today: strong, straight, even in grain, with a bark impenetrable to parasites or nature’s calamities, its shade sheltering the small plants on the forest floor, so that they might flourish.

            But, what if they were to cut one of these oaks and, upon studying its core, find there a dark rot spreading throughout its center, from crown to roots?  Could part of the wood be salvaged? Could something beautiful still be created from the divine wood? Or does the rot at the center negate the divinity of the entire trunk and force it to be relegated for use as mere firewood – to burn down to ashes, leaving no trace of the grand beauty and power the forester mistakenly felt the tree possessed?  Even if, in the process, it provides crucial warmth to a human family inside, say, a long home? This is what Ulrich is wondering as he asks his question of Viktor.

            “Yes, Ulrich,” Viktor says finally, while looking also at Peter and Lina. “Yes, I believe that is what happened.  Here I was protected, safe, for the first time in my life.  And when I left this heavenly haven – then I lost the protection. I didn’t know how to carry it with me when I went out there.” He searches their eyes for clues to what they are thinking and feeling, and his sharp intuition picks up the absolute truth: They just do not know, yet, what they think. But Ulrich does speak again.

            “And you never regained that protection, not even after you and Ethel came back from Schweiburg. I don’t think you did, anyway. Your carving has not been the same since then.”

            This makes Viktor so sad he could cry, because he knows it is true. It is only in the past few weeks that he has once again fully felt the connection to the divinity of the forest, to God.  Did I get it all back too late? He nods, accepting Ulrich’s assessment.

            “And then I went to the war,” he says quietly.  “Without that protection. Without God.”

            “In that state,” Ulrich says softly, “anything can happen. And it does.”

*          *          *

            Two hours pass, and the four of them stop their work to have a snack of bread and cheese.

            “Lina,” Peter says, “let’s go to the treehouse and eat this there.”

            Lina is on her feet in a moment, for she has been having the same thoughts. Off the two of them go, heading deeper into the woods, hand in hand.

            “Reminds you of when they were tots, doesn’t it?”  Ulrich asks.

            Viktor nods, his heart aching with both love and regret as he watches them.

            Ulrich and Viktor are sitting, side by side, on the earth, atop the dry and decaying leaves, and amongst the small plants that have pushed their way up through them to expose their green shoots to the filtered sun and air. For the first few bites of Ethel’s sourdough bread and cheese, neither man speaks. Ulrich, on Viktor’s right, is sitting cross-legged, his long, branch-like arms resting awkwardly atop his knees, one hand holding a hunk of cheese, the other, bread. Viktor’s legs are straight out, the cloth that holds the food spread out atop his thighs, a flask of water leaning against his hip. He doesn’t have much of a stomach for the food. Then he hears Ulrich clear his throat.

            “Son,” he begins, “we none of us were prepared for what Mr. Groening said last night.”

            Viktor, who continues to look ahead of him, nods.  “I know I wasn’t.”

            “And you already knew all of what he said.” Ulrich lifts his left hand and takes a bite of the sourdough, chews it.  “Imagine,” he says, and Viktor can hear that he still has a small piece of the bread in his mouth, “what a shock it was for all of us to hear that, when we had no idea.”

            Viktor is looking at the piece of cheese he is holding, remembering his first days with the Gassmanns, and how he’d complimented Ethel’s cheesemaking. He chokes down a piece of cheese now, then turns to Ulrich and forces himself to look into the older man’s gray eyes. Ulrich’s sandy-colored hair, which has grown gray to match his eyes, was once so much the color of Viktor’s, although curlier, that the two of them really did resemble father and son. Viktor recalls how happy he was, the first time Ulrich called him “Son”. That was all he had wanted then – along with marrying Ethel: to be like a son to this man who taught him so much about the forest, forestry, God, and living. He never looked up to his own father – dead for thirty-two years now – the way he does to Ulrich. But now, he fears he has destroyed this relationship, too. Why did I tell Groening I wanted to make things right? Why didn’t I just stay silent? He tries to call back the memory of the lightness and relief he experienced the night before in the Birkners’ living room, the joy of those moments when he sensed God looking at him through Groening’s eyes and knew for certain that God had forgiven him. He can no longer feel what he sensed then. Even if I could still feel it, he asks himself, what good would it do me? Receiving God’s forgiveness is one thing. But gaining his family’s, which is what he is most wishing for now, is, he sees clearly, an entirely different matter.

            “But you had some idea, didn’t you?” he asks Ulrich.

            The older man shrugs. “Well, not in the particulars,” he replies. “But I felt it in your voice, saw it in the way you moved after you came back from Schweiburg.”

            “And in the way my carving changed.”

            Ulrich nods, chewing a bite of cheese.

            “You didn’t need to know the details to know something was wrong?” Viktor asks.

            Ulrich nods again. “You came here unsettled in ’21, Viktor. You got settled, through the grace of God –“

            “And through this family,” Viktor tells him, the emotion audible in his voice.

            Ulrich waves the hand that holds the bread. “It’s all the same, Viktor – the heavenly. Whether it flows through the trees, or these young plants here, or Renate and Ethel and me, or you. I’m not sure you ever realized that. Back then, anyway. Keep yourself in the flow of that heavenly, and you’ve got a fighting chance of coming out alive. Of coming out a human being.”

            Now Viktor folds the edges of the cloth over the remaining food and offers it to Ulrich, who shakes his head. So he lays it gently on the ground beside him.

            “You’re right, Ulrich,” he says. “About all of it. I can see it now. You’re right – I didn’t realize it then.”

            “And I didn’t care to learn any details,” Ulrich tells him. “I chose not ignore the signs. I regret that now. Perhaps I could have helped you somehow if I’d had the courage to talk to you about it.”

            Viktor doesn’t respond to this confession. But then, sensing that Ulrich wants to help him now, he goes on. “Last night, at the Birkners’, after it all came out, I looked into Groening’s eyes.  I felt God then, Ulrich.”

            “In Groening?”

            “I wouldn’t put it that way, exactly.  I’d say more that it was … as if, in his eyes, a door opened up, so that I could see God.”

            “And what did you see?” Ulrich asks, taking the last bite of cheese into his mouth.

            “I can’t say I saw anything,” Viktor tells him. “But I felt God there, and such joy and gratitude. And I knew that what Groening had told me was true – about God forgiving me.”

            “I felt it, too,” Ulrich tells him simply.

            “Felt what?” Viktor turns so that he is sitting cross-legged, facing his father-in-law.

            “That God has forgiven you,” Ulrich replies.  “And that God was looking out at each of us – through that door in Groening’s eyes, if you want to put it that way.”

            “And what did you see there?” Viktor asks, feeling now, for the first time since the evening before, the strong flow of the heavenly – the Heilstrom – in his body.

            “Nothing like what you did,” Ulrich tells him, a bit of a smile coming to his lips. “But I had a knowing, too, through a kind of inner hearing. Sort of the way I hear the trees telling me what they tell me.”

            Viktor nods. “What did you hear?”

            “That God gave Groening the message that you were forgiven as a challenge to the rest of us.”

            “What do you mean? What kind of challenge?”

            “What I heard was, ‘And you? Can you also forgive him?’”

            Looking into his father-in-law’s eyes, Viktor wonders what is behind them, in his mind, and in his heart. “And what did you answer?” he asks, his throat tight.

            Ulrich shakes his head. “I didn’t have an answer then,” he replies, reaching out and laying a hand on Viktor’s shoulder. “Still don’t.” Seeing Viktor close his eyes, he goes on. “I’m not a saint, Son. No one in this family is.  We all love you, but something like this… it’s not easy to forgive.  Or even to make sense of.  You went to the Birkners’ one person and came back somebody different. So did we. That’s how it seems to me. To all of us, I’d wager.”

            Viktor nods.

            “Like our Lina, there,” Ulrich went on, gesturing in the direction of the treehouse. “Sure, she looks different today, in Peter’s clothes again. But it’s not just the clothes. The second she got out of that chair, she was a different person than the second before. That’ll take us some getting used to, too. We all need some time.”

            “But can you all forgive me?” Viktor asks, although, even as he is posing it, he realizes how ridiculous his question is.

            “That depends on you – and on us,” Ulrich tells him. “If we can see you as the you we’ve always loved, then, yes, I think we can.”

            Viktor knows that Ulrich and Renate and Ethel all had the chance to see him when he was this man Ulrich is referring to.  But what about Lina? And Marcus and Peter, for that matter? Did they even know me before I changed?

            “But how do I make you see me that way?” Viktor asks, looking deeply into Ulrich’s eyes, seeking an answer there, seeking the older man’s guidance.

            “You can’t make us,” Ulrich says. “What we all need here is the heavenly, to not be away from it for a moment, if we can manage that. You’ve got that thingy Groening gave you, right?”

            Viktor nods and digs the tin foil ball out of his pocket. He passes it over to Ulrich, who wraps his fingers around it, closes his eyes, and sits silently with it for nearly a minute. Finally, he holds it out for Viktor to take back.

            “I don’t know how he got the power of God into it,” he says then, “but it’s there.  Keep it with you, like Groening said. I think it’s your lifeline to the heavenly, to the Heilstrom, if you want to call it that. So that you can be that man we remember. The one I know you want to be again.”

            “But what about the rest of you?” Viktor asks.

            “We’ve got our own connection to the heavenly, here on the homestead. We need to come to terms with ourselves, too”

            “But Ulrich,” Viktor persists, “will that connection be enough?

            “I can’t say. Marcus was right, you know. We do all have our free will. But unlike Marcus, I believe God can help us while we’re deciding how to use our free will.”

            “How? How does He help?”

            Ulrich is folding up his own square of fabric now. “I can’t say that for sure, either, Son.” He slides the cloth bundle into his shirt pocket. “But I suspect it’s through the heavenly Heilstrom. Viktor, if you and I were able to feel God last night when we were awash in it, and I know we feel it out here, too, and Lina got healed from being in it… Then I think anything can turn around to the good if we’re in it.”

            Viktor ponders this for a bit, then shares his thoughts. “It’s just as you said about the protection earlier.  The heavenly protects us. And when I left the homestead, I left the protection, and then I fell in with people I shouldn’t have.”

            Ulrich nods.

            “But the heavenly – or the Heilstrom, to use Groening’s word – it doesn’t just protect us. Is that what you’re saying? That it helps us? Heals us?”

            “That seems right to me,” Ulrich says. “I never thought of it in those terms, but that must be right.  I say that because I experienced it myself last night.”

            “Experienced what?”

            “Healing.” Now Ulrich looks straight ahead, out into the forest.

            “But you weren’t hurt, were you?” Viktor asks, scanning the other mans’ body for signs of an ailment.

            “Not physically, no,” Ulrich tells him.  “But inside, yes. In my heart.” He lets out a long sigh before continuing. “My mother left us when I was a tiny baby,” he says.  “I never knew her. But I missed her. Cried for months, my father told me once, when I was grown. And later on, I came to hate her for leaving us.”

            “Why did she leave?” Viktor asks, but Ulrich waves him off.

            “Not important,” he says. “What is important, is that the first time we went to Groening, we were sitting there, and all of a sudden, my mother’s face came into my mind.  I never saw her, mind you – or not so as I remember the way she looked – but I recognized her.  And I felt very warmly toward her.  For the first time in my life.” Ulrich reaches down and gently moves some dead leaves away from some new green plant leaves that are trying to make their way to the light. “Then last night,” Ulrich tells Viktor, “while Groening was talking to Kristina, I saw Mama’s face again. And in that moment, something shifted inside me, in my heart, like a clasp opening up and two cupboard doors spreading apart and letting love out.” He shows this motion with his hands. “I saw my mother – her whole body now – and she stretched out her arms to me. She embraced me, and I embraced her. I told her I forgave her for leaving us.  And I knew in my heart that it was true.”

            “Is such a thing possible?” Viktor asks. “To see someone that way, someone who’s dead?” He was thinking of Wolf again. He felt sure now that Ulrich must have seen him sometimes, too.

            “I don’t know,” Ulrich tells him. Then he smiles. “But whether it’s possible or not, I did! I saw her.  Maybe it’s not so different from your intuition, the way you pick things up, Viktor.”

            “You could be right,” Viktor says, “and it’s just a different kind of knowing.”

            “One that comes about when we’re in the heavenly. That’s what I think.”

            Viktor nods, and before him appears Wolf’s spirit. He’s also sitting amongst the leaves, nodding.  

            Ulrich points a finger in Viktor’s direction. “That’s why I said what I did about things turning around when we’re in the Heilstrom. Because of last night. That’s how I know it can happen. Because I experienced it myself.”

            “If we want to forgive, God will help us. Is that what you think goes on?” Viktor asks.

            Ulrich nods. Then he gets to his feet and stretches his arms up overhead and then straight out to the sides.

            “I do,” he tells his son-in-law.

            “But did you want to forgive your mother?”

            This gives Ulrich pause.  “You know, I never consciously asked God to help me forgive her.  But in my heart, I wanted to. I can see that now. Maybe that’s all it takes – to want it in the deepest part of your heart.”

            Viktor brightens at this. “And doesn’t the deepest part of everyone’s heart want to forgive?”

            Ulrich can tell where Viktor’s going with this thought.    

            “I can’t say, Son.  All I know is, as far as this family and forgiveness is concerned, it’s between each of us and God now.”

*          *          *

            “To think that less than a week ago, I never could have gotten up here!” Lina exclaims. She and Peter are sitting in the treehouse, their bread and cheese bundles open on their laps, looking out through the woven walls.

            “I wouldn’t have been able to do that two weeks ago, either,” Peter replies, speaking around the chunk of bread in his mouth. 

            Lina nods. “It didn’t hurt at all, climbing up here,” she tells her brother.  “After four years in that awful chair, how is it possible that my muscles work so well? That I don’t feel weak?”

            “I don’t know. Doesn’t make sense to me, either.  I feel lighter in my steps than I ever have, even before the war.”

            Lina reaches over and takes his hand. Her face is beaming. “It really is a miracle, isn’t it? For both of us!”

             “Oh, yes, a genuine miracle.” Peter says, with a nod.  “Isn’t there something odd about it – that the two of us were healed within a week of each other?”

            “Odd, why?” Lina is now breaking off little bits of her mother’s farmhouse cheddar and savoring the flavor. “You know,” she says, before Peter can answer, “I think Mama’s cheese tastes better to me now than it has for the past four years. Now, that’s strange!”

            Peter laughs.  “Yes. The whole forest looks brighter to me today, Lina. The greens look more vibrant. That’s strange, too!”

            “It is! But what about our healings?” Lina prompts him.

            “Right. Remember last week, when we were here – or, rather, down there – talking, and you said you felt responsible for me being wounded in the war? And you told me that vision you had at the Birkners’ place?”

            “Yes.” Lina is testing the bread now, to see whether it, too, tastes better than usual. It does.

            “Well, I’ve been wondering why in the world you would have done that. Caused the accident, I mean.”

            “And have you figured anything out?”

            Peter shrugs. “Not figured out, exactly.  But the whole past week, after my leg got healed, I was feeling that it wasn’t fair for my leg to be healed while you were still in the wheelchair.”

            “Peter,” Lina begins, but he holds up his hand.

            “Listen.  What I mean is, that it became so clear to me that you and I are more like twins than just brother and sister.”

            “Yes, I feel that, too. That’s nothing new, though, Peter. We’ve talked about it before.”

            “I know, I know. But because we are so close – and who knows why that is, but it’s true – maybe because of that, we can’t bear to be unlike each other.”

            Lina frowns and puts down the piece of bread.  “I don’t quite get it.”

            He sits up straighter and looks at her with shining eyes. He reaches out and touches her shirt.

            “I go off to war, and you start wearing my clothes and working in the forest with Grandpa.”

            “Well, I couldn’t very well wear my dirndl, could I?” Lina asks him with a laugh.

            “Hear me out, Sis,” Peter tells her. “You put on my clothes and learn my job.  I come back from the war and can’t do the forestry work anymore, so you keep it up for me. But, as you told me yourself, you’re feeling guilty that I got wounded and can’t use my leg properly.  And then…” He pauses and looks her straight in the eye. “Then, you’re feeling it’s your fault, and so, you cause an accident that makes it so that you can’t work in the forest or use your legs, either.”

            Lina’s jaw drops. “Wait, Peter! What are you saying?”

            “And next,” he goes on, “within a week of my leg being healed, you are miraculously healed, too.”

            “Peter, I don’t understand what you’re saying,” she tells him, shaking her head.

            “I’m not sure I do, either. But what if you and I are so connected – in our souls, if that makes any sense, or if it’s even possible – that we are constantly striving to reflect each other? We’ve known all our lives that we were so alike in our personalities.  Couldn’t that happen in our souls, too?”

            Lina frowns, but simply in confusion, not annoyance.  “Peter, for the life of me, I have no idea!”

            “But doesn’t it make an odd kind of sense?”

            Lina applies herself to the bread and cheese again, as she mulls this over.  Then, finally, she says, “As if we’re playing a constant game of copycat.”

            “Trying to keep up with each other, to be always in the same spot.”

            “In our bodies and in our souls,” Lina adds, and Peter nods.

            As they both ponder this, they finish their snacks and fold up their cloths. Lina looks at her own clothes and her brother’s.

            “Whyever this is all happening,” she tells him with a smile, “it’s convenient that I can wear your clothes. As for the rest of it, I don’t know what to think.”

            “Me, neither,” Peter admits. “But can we just tell our own souls and each other’s, that they can stop this game now?” A smile comes to his face.

            “Agreed!” Lina says. “Hear that, souls?” she calls out, lifting her head to look up high above her.  “Everything’s in order now. Can we leave it at that?”

            Peter laughs and reaches over to hug his sister. 

            “Lina, I’m so glad you’re well now.  You have no idea.”

            “I think I do. It has to be the same joy I feel that you’re well, too.”

            “And we had both better get back to Papa and Grandpa before they fine us a day’s wages!”

            Indeed, as they are lowering themselves down the ladder, they catch sight of Viktor, who is making his way through the woods toward him. Today he does not look as carefree as the last time, when the three of them shared the heartfelt chat beneath this old beech. Looking at him now, Peter understands why their father was reluctant to tell them about how the family came to live in Schweiburg for several years. “A story for another day. A sad story.” That’s what he said, Peter recalls.

            Viktor reaches the bottom of the old beech and, as he gazes up at his son and daughter, he is overcome with joy at the miracle of their healings.

            “Just look at the two of you!” he calls out tenderly. “Did you both really climb up there?”

            “We did!” Lina tells him, with a broad smile, and he sees the brightness in her eyes. He also notices another, more somber, emotion fleet across her face. He sees it in Peter’s expression, too, along with a joy in his eyes that matches that in his sister’s. Please, dear God, Viktor begs inwardly. Please help them forgive me!

            Once Lina and Peter have fully descended and are back on the ground once more, Viktor stands facing them. Then he walks up and wraps his arms around the two of them together. There is an awkwardness in this embrace that they all feel, as Viktor tightens his grip and pulls them to him, but then each of them finds a way to let go of this and lean toward each other. Viktor says nothing in words, but Lina and Peter sense all that his heart is expressing. After a moment, brother and sister both reach one arm around their father’s back. As he fights the tears that rush to his eyes as he feels their hearts’ complex messages, Peter’s hand meets Lina’s, and they lace their fingers together, and rest their intertwined hands against Viktor’s back.

*          *          *

            While at work in Varel that day, Marcus manages to keep at bay all the thoughts about his father that keep trying to invade his mind.  He is busy enough with his work that, in fact, he doesn’t have much time for reflection.  But by the time his coworker drops him off at the Gassmann-Bunke homestead, he notices that the thoughts are swirling in his brain.  He turns his focus to the brief exchange he had with Groening the evening before.

            “Mr. Groening, about the Heilstrom…”

            “Yes, Mr. Bunke?” Groening gazes at Marcus, giving him his full attention.

            “You said that it comes from God.”

            “That’s right,” Groening replies. He is looking intently into Marcus’ eyes.

            “But, my whole life,” Marcus tells him, slowly, cautiously, “I’ve felt a strong power deep inside me, here.” He lays a hand on his abdomen. “I’ve always felt it. But I don’t think it’s from God.” He watches Groening’s face for signs of disapproval, but sees none. “I think it’s my power. And when I’m trying to decide something, I go to that spot with my mind. And then I know what to do.”

            “Even though you don’t always do what the voice there tells you, do you?”

            Marcus holds Groening’s gaze and shakes his head. “That’s true. But what I’m wondering is this: Is it right to trust that power, to let it guide my decisions? Even though I don’t think of it as coming from God? I mean… maybe I’m wrong, but it feels like it’s my power.” He pauses. “And God did give us free will, didn’t He?” He looks intently at Groening now, happy to have given voice to all of these questions.

            Groening tips his head thoughtfully to one side, then nods, a small smile coming to his face. He places a hand on Marcus’ shoulder. “We do all have this power you speak of, Mr. Bunke, inside us. And you do have the free will to choose what to do.”

            Marcus, overjoyed, feels like he’s grown taller.

            “If we use this power carefully, and with love, then all is possible,” Groening continues. But then he wags a finger at Marcus, and his smile grows less broad.

            “Although it can be your guiding compass, you must take great care to seek its guidance properly,” Groening says. “Find calm within you, and only then listen to the voice that speaks with the power. This is very important. The other side – the evil – will try to masquerade as the good, Mr. Bunke, and trick you into hurting others. When angry thoughts come to you, listen carefully. Ask yourself, ‘Who am I hearing? The good power? Or the evil?’ That is your task now. Be on guard!”

            Then Groening reaches out and places a small, tin foil ball into Marcus’ hand.

            “Keep this with you. It will help you hear the voice of the good power inside you. It will help you recognize the evil and avoid its trap. Don’t engage with the evil!”

            Marcus nods solemnly.

            “And remember, Mr. Bunke. Let us not despise anybody. Let us absorb brotherly love, and be good to one another.”

            “Yes, Mr. Groening. Yes,” Marcus replies, nodding again.

            Running through this conversation in his mind now, as he nears the house, Marcus resolves to heed Groening’s advice – and his warnings. He knows that the evening meal with his family will be a great test for him.

*          *          *

            As the family sits down to supper, Ulrich jokingly laments the fact that Lina has been too busy out in the forest to read the newspaper and give them her usual report. 

            “On the other hand,” he says, “she has become reacquainted with some of her favorite trees.”

            “And the treehouse,” Peter adds.

            “She climbed the ladder herself,” Viktor tells them, smiling at Lina.  “So did Peter,” he says. He turns to look at his younger son. In his eyes is an expression of both pride and gratitude, as well as an indication of some greater closeness between the two of them. 

            Marcus sees this in Viktor’s gaze and cannot understand it – especially now, given what Groening revealed about their father the evening before. As he notices what passes between Viktor and Peter, Marcus also detects a bitter taste in his mouth, and an upwelling of anger in his chest.  Don’t they see right through him? This thought comes to him, and he wonders whether it is from his own inner power, or from the evil that Groening warned him against. He also has a fleeting thought: Let it go! He recognizes this as the voice of his inner power, and resolves to do what Groening told him: to heed it. So, he composes himself, wraps his hand around the tinfoil ball in his pocket, and decides to broach the subject that is on his mind.

            “So,” he begins. “About my job.” 

            Viktor shifts his gaze from Peter to Marcus, and Marcus immediately senses that his father is now on his guard. Strangely, though, Marcus does not detect any of the aggression he has felt coming from his father his whole life.  It is an entirely different complex of emotions emanating from the man now, although Marcus can’t yet decipher it. But what he does understand, without rationally examining it, is that things have shifted, and that he suddenly has the upper hand in the relationship. This comes as a shock to him, and the voice inside him says, “Go easy”.

            “Now that Lina is healed,” Marcus continues calmly, gesturing with his right hand at his sister, who is sitting next to him, “I will be staying at my job in Varel. I’ll tell Mr. Weiss tomorrow.”

            Ethel opens her mouth and looks from Marcus to Viktor, who makes no response. But this is not the Viktor of old, who consciously bided his time by feigning indifference and leaving his interlocutor to anxiously await his response. This time, he is simply not engaging with Marcus.

            “Did you hear me?” Marcus asks, raising his voice slightly. The tiny voice inside urges him to stay calm, but Marcus is once again feeling angry. It’s as if all the anger that he’s pushed down over the years is now pressing back up, demanding to be expressed.

            “I heard,” Viktor says, but without meeting Marcus’ gaze.

            “And?” Marcus asks, grasping his napkin with his free hand.

            “That was our agreement,” Viktor tells his son flatly, finally looking across the table at him. 

            No one else at the table is even eating. They have all laid down their utensils. Renate and Ulrich catch each other’s gaze.

            “You don’t have anything else to say?” Marcus asks him, his tone suddenly simultaneously incredulous and biting.

            Viktor shakes his head.

            Marcus notices the contrast between his inner power’s voice and a voice that seems to be connected to the anger. “The bastard!”it is saying to him.

            Now the anger gains the upper hand within him, shouting down Marcus’ own inner voice that is urging calm, but unheard.

            Marcus rises from his chair so swiftly that it falls back onto the floor, making Ingrid jump. He throws his napkin onto the table, then leans forward and places both hands on the table – the tin foil ball abandoned in his pocket – until his face is a foot from his father’s.

            “I bet you don’t have anything to say about last night, either, do you?” he asks Viktor, his voice full of sarcasm.

            Now Ulrich stands up and reaches an arm out to his grandson.

            “Marcus, Son,” he begins, but Marcus cuts him off.

            He straightens up and points his left hand at his father.

            “This man,” Marcus says, struggling not to shout, “whom I do not even want to claim as my father… This man ordered two hundred prisoners put to death.” He pauses and takes in all of his family members in a glance around the table.  “Two hundred!” he repeats.  “Are you all content to sit here in the same room with him, as if nothing has happened? Content to talk about the forest and the treehouse and about how Lina’s wearing pants again?”  His mouth is open in disbelief.

            “Marcus!” Ethel cries, rising to her feet, too.

            Marcus turns to face her. “What, Mama?” he asks, his expression a mixture of sadness and anger and disgust. “Are you going to defend him? The way you did after Schweiburg?” He shakes his head and grimaces. “I told you back then that he was a monster –“

            “That’s enough!” Ulrich says, raising his voice with a tone more ominous than any of them has ever heard from him. But even this does not cut short Marcus’ outburst. There is no way he can hear the voice of his own inner power now, urging him not to speak words he might come to regret.

            “No, Grandpa, forgive me,” Marcus says, making a small, tight bow in Ulrich’s direction, “but it is not enough!” His voice rises to a shout.  “A man sits here who has done unspeakable things, and you all say nothing! How can that be?”

            Once again, he looks around the table.

            Peter spreads his hands open before him. “But what do you want us to do?”

            Marcus looks at him, wide-eyed. His breathing has calmed a bit now, and he is no longer shouting, but his tone is still one of contempt and amazement. “How about at least talking about what Groening said last night?”

            “I don’t see what good that would do,” Renate offers, after clearing her throat.

            Marcus shakes his head.  “What? Are you all planning to sit here at this table, day after day, and pretend nothing has happened? Ignore what he did? Can you really do that? I can’t.” He turns around, walks behind his overturned chair, picks it up, and sets it carefully back in its place. Then he waves a hand at no one and everyone at the same time.

            “Groening says God has forgiven him, and what? We have to forgive him, too? Do we?”  He waits, but, once more, no one answers him. “Is that God’s will?” he cries. “For us to forgive Viktor Bunke, the way He has?”

            Again, Marcus hears a faint voice inside him. Enough. Ignoring the admonition, he closes his fist and brings it against his own chest.

            “Well, not me, my dear family. I am about to prove to you what I said at this table back in – whenever that was…  God can wish all He wants, but He cannot make a plan for me and force me to follow it. No. I have my own free will, my own power, that comes from inside me, and I am choosing to use that free will of mine to not forgive that man.” He points at his father. Then he leans over, facing Viktor, and brings the palm of his hand slowly down onto the table.  “I will never forgive you,” he says quietly, but in a chilling voice. “Not for what you did to this family. Not for what you did to all those others.”

            At this point, Viktor silently rises from the table. Without saying anything, without meeting anyone’s gaze, he walks slowly to the door and steps out into the yard, carefully shutting the door behind him.

            “Yes, leave!” Marcus calls after him. Then, facing his mother and grandparents, he adds, “So? Will you let him come back this time, too?”

            Again, still, silence reigns.

*          *          *

            Viktor does not leave, at least not in the way Marcus is expecting him to do.  Once outside the family home, he picks up a wicker chair from the sitting area near the door and carries it to the far side of the yard, beyond the goat pen.  He spends the rest of the evening sitting there, observing everyone else’s activities.  Kristina and Lina come out and take the laundry down from the line. Then he watches as the two of them begin to walk down the drive for an evening walk. He sees Ingrid come running up behind them, pushing the empty wheelchair. She hops up and down and tugs at Lina’s sleeve, while Kristina looks a bit put out. Then, Viktor can see that Lina is laughing. In the next moment, Ingrid has taken a seat in the wheelchair, and Lina is beginning to run, pushing the chair ahead of her, while Kristina walks heavily along, making no effort to catch up, until they turn around and wave to her.

            Ulrich and Peter leave the house and go into the workshop. A light goes on. A few minutes later, Ulrich comes out again, but Peter remains inside. Most likely working on those plans again, Viktor concludes, as Ulrich goes back into the house without even a glance in his direction.  Do they even know I’m here?

            Kristina, Lina, and Ingrid return, looking more buoyant, with Ingrid pushing Kristina in the chair this time.  Ingrid and Kristina kiss Lina on the cheek and go into the workshop. The light in their room goes on. It’s Ingrid’s bedtime. Lina pauses as she turns toward the house, and gazes over at her father. Ah, so they do know I’m here. She looks as if she is considering coming over to him. But then she hesitates, choosing to wave to him instead, before reentering their home.

            After that, there is a lull in the yard. Viktor notes the voices of the goats as they communicate whatever they need to communicate to each other before settling down onto the hay in their shelter. He hears the evening bugs buzzing and calling to each other, too. Errant fireflies float in the open space of the yard, hoping to catch a mate’s eye.  The sun is down now, and the dusk is growing deeper when the light in Kristina’s room goes out and she and Marcus come together to sit on the bench just outside the workshop door. Of course, Viktor is too far from them to hear anything, but he can see from their gestures that his son is still agitated, and Kristina concerned.  Then he watches as they tenderly kiss goodnight. Kristina follows Marcus with her eyes as he crosses the yard, opens the kitchen screen door, and steps inside. A lamp is burning in there, too.  Kristina heads back into the workshop.  Peter must still be working…

            The yard is illuminated only by the moon and the stars now, and by the faint light from inside the workshop. Viktor looks toward the forest, studying the way the dark shapes of the trees rise against the sky like a mountain range. An unconquerable range, it seems to him now.  How to get over it? He is pondering this, and recalling Ulrich’s words from earlier in the day, when he hears the sound of the screen door slapping shut.  Someone is moving toward him through the near-total darkness.  It is Ethel, he realizes, with both joy and dread in his heart. She walks to the edge of the goat pen, and he sees that she is dumping a bowl of scraps in for them, for their breakfast.  Then she walks over to her husband. Standing in front of him, she pauses, then speaks to him. In her tone, he senses his own mix of emotions.

            “Are you going to come in?”

            He wishes he could see her eyes, but then, in the next moment, is glad he cannot. And that she cannot see his. “Should I?”

            Ethel extends her free hand to him.  “Come on, then,” she says quietly, her voice tinged with exhaustion, sadness, disappointment, and yet, a bit of tenderness, too. “Nothing’ll be helped by you sitting out here alone all night.”

            He takes her hand and holds it tightly as they walk across the yard and into the house.

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Above the River, Chapter 32

~ Sue Downing

Chapter 32

Bremen

            Thursday evening found the entire household once more headed to Bremen – as before, in their pickup truck and the Opel Kapitän, which Marcus had borrowed once more from Mr. Weiss. And this time, even Ingrid was with them. Having heard so much about Bruno Groening during the previous week, she’d begged so much to come along, that Marcus had finally said that she could come and see what all the fuss was about.

            When they arrived at the Birkners’ house, Silvia Birkner ushered them all the house.  She even leaned down and gave Ingrid a special welcome.

            “Hello, Ingrid!  So, you’ve come to see Mr. Groening, too? How wonderful!”  She looked up at Kristina and Marcus, then back to Ingrid. “You can sit right with your mama and papa. Mr. Groening is always happy to have children come along, too.” 

            Kristina blushed at Mrs. Birkner’s assumption that Marcus was Ingrid’s father, but said nothing.  Indeed, Ingrid did share both her mother’s and Marcus’ wavy hair, although hers was a few shades lighter than Marcus’ and much lighter than Kristina’s dark, dark tresses. And her blue eyes matched her future step-father’s almost exactly. Marcus, feeling pleased by their hostess’ assumptions, thanked her, and they all filed into the parlor.

            Ulrich rolled Lina’s wheelchair into the spot at the end of the front row which Mrs. Birkner had already cleared for her, then sat down next to her with Renate. In the second row, Marcus took a seat on the end this time. Then came Kristina and Ingrid, who was sandwiched between her mother and Ethel. Viktor was next in the row, and finally Peter.  As Peter walked easily down the row of chairs to his seat, he saw that Mr. Handler was already there, in the chair in front of him, just where he’d sat the week before.  After getting settled, Peter leaned forward and tapped Mr. Handler lightly on the shoulder. When the latter turned, Peter told him that he, too, had been healed of a lame and injured leg.  Handler jumped up and held out his hand warmly to Peter.

            “Why, that’s just wonderful!” he cried, pumping Peter’s hand up and down in excitement. “I hear that this happens often with Mr. Groening – kind of a chain reaction of healing.  One person gets their hearing back, say, and then suddenly someone else in the room can hear, too, after twenty years of deafness.”

            Peter went on to tell Handler all about how he’d realized his leg was healed, about revealing it to the family at breakfast, about how he’d hopped around the kitchen, and how Ingrid – he pointed her out to Handler, had asked if the two of them could hop together.  Handler and Peter ended up dissolved in quiet laughter. No one in the room seemed to mind, or find the laughter inappropriate, especially since most of them had been present the week before and remembered Handler’s healing and Peter limping.  People began turning to each other with whispers of “the healing that young man there had after he left last time”.

            Ingrid was taking in the people in the room and also inspecting the décor. She peppered Kristina with questions: “Who painted those pictures of the forest and the lake?” “Who are the people in those photos on the mantel?” “Can I go up and look at them?” “When will Mr. Groening get here?” “When will Lina get out of her chair?”

            As Kristina fended off these inquiries as quietly as she could, she noticed that she was already feeling the same tingling that had flowed throughout her body the last time. To her dismay, she also began to notice a vague unease in the pit of her stomach.  A bit of fear. But why? she asked herself.   She turned to her right, to take Marcus’ hand, although whether out of anxiety or affection, she wasn’t sure. But as she did, she caught sight of the woman who had sat behind her the week before, the one who had come in doubled over in pain, and left fully upright and happy.  The woman recognized Kristina, too.

            “Hello, dear,” she said, stretching out her hand.  She looked at least ten years younger, now that pain was no long contorting her face. 

            “You look well,” Kristina told her.

            She nodded. “I am well. As you see, I don’t have to lean on my grandson at all anymore!”

             “Was it true what Mr. Groening said to you?” Kirstina asked. “That you might have those pains again?”

            “Yes, yes, that did happen. The night we were here, after we got back home, my stomach hurt so much that I was so afraid! But in the morning, I felt fine again.”

            “And did you go to the doctor?”

            “I did!” the woman told her, beaming. Then she leaned over across Marcus, so that she could grab Kristina’s arm. “He did the tests, and the cancer is gone!  It really is!”

            At this, everyone who was sitting within earshot stared at the woman, and the whispering began again. Marcus and Kristina exchanged glances, and both smiled, each for different reasons: For Kristina, it was because the woman’s experience had strengthened her faith that God could heal anything, while for Marcus, it was his belief in Groening’s personal power that had just received a boost.

            Nearly all the seats were full by now, mostly with people who had been there the week before, but there were some new attendees, as well.

            Lina also heard what the woman told Kristina, since they were talking right behind her.  This news, plus the knowledge of Peter’s healing, and the sight of Mr. Handler, who was clearly still walking with ease, without his cane, gave her hope.  She wrapped her hand a little more tightly around the fabric pouch in her hand.  She’d finished sewing the little bag that day when all of the women were talking in the kitchen.  The tin foil ball was now securely stowed in the pouch, its drawstring pulled tight, and the cord looped around Lina’s middle finger.  The warmth from the ball was flowing into her palm and on up her arm, and this comforted her. And when the woman who’d been talking with Kristina came up to her and said, “I know you’ll get your healing, too, Dear. I’m rooting for you!”, she felt even more encouraged.  At the same time, though, she told herself not to get her hopes up. Can I really be healed tonight?  Doubts started to flood in. She closed her eyes and frowned, and grasped the tin foil ball in her right hand even more tightly. Trust and believe. The divine power helps and heals.

            Meanwhile, Ulrich was saying hello to Helmut Birkner, who, once again, was seated three chairs down from him. The same scarf rested on the chair next to him – Mrs. Birkner’s, Ulrich assumed – and there was the other empty seat. Ulrich supposed that Egon-Arthur Schmidt would sit there, if he was present again tonight.  Indeed, after Ulrich and Helmut had shared their pleasantries, Mrs. Birkner strode energetically into the room, followed by the tall, light-haired Schmidt.

            Now Lina opened her eyes and looked toward the two of them.  This time she didn’t feel the need to observe everything in the room in detail, although she did note that the setup was the same as before: a little, round table to the right of the fireplace, with a small lamp and a glass of water.  Another lamp on the bookcase against the wall by the arched entranceway to the parlor was also lit.  The room seemed lighter to Lina than it had the last time, the wallpaper a bit less dingy.

            Mr. Schmidt was talking to them now, following Silvia Birkner’s introduction. Lina saw Silvia settle into the chair next to her husband, leaving the seat next to Ulrich vacant for now. Mr. Schmidt’s instructions were, presumably, for the new guests, but he did say some things that she didn’t recall hearingbefore, so maybe he wasn’t just saying the same things. She began paying closer attention.

            “You have come seeking healing,”Schmidt was saying. “Mr. Groening will only accept one gift from you – that is your illness.  Give it to him! In return, he will give you what you have been longing for for so long – your health.”

            Upon hearing these words, Marcus nodded and smiled. Yes, he will give that to us!     “What Mr. Groening expects from you in return,” Schmidt went on, “to help the effect of his healing power, is twofold: one is that you must be inwardly prepared to take up the Heilstrom that radiated from him, and, secondly, that you must have a deep, unprejudiced belief in the divine healing power and, therefore, in the Creator.”

            Can we really not have the healing power without believing in God? Marcus mused. Then he remembered the way Groening had admonished them before not to think but, rather, to feel. So, he turned his attention away from his own thoughts, and back to Schmidt’s instructions.

            Schmidt was showing how they were to sit: backs straight, with their hands open atop their laps, without crossing their arms or legs, so that they wouldn’t short-circuit the flow of the energy.  As Lina opened her hands, she heard Ingrid whispering to Kristina behind her.

            “Mama! I feel all fizzy inside!” A small laugh escaped her lips. Ethel looked at her and smiled.

            Kristina gently shushed her.  “Yes, Sweetheart. That’s the Heilstrom Mr. Schmidt is talking about. I feel it, too.”

            Lina looks around, too, to smile at Ingrid, and when she turns to face the front of the room once more, Bruno Groening is standing before them. He scans the room, nodding to those whom he has seen before, pausing a bit longer when his eyes meet the new visitors.  Then he speaks. He motions to a dark-haired man who looks to be in his late twenties, and motions for him to come to the front of the room. Viktor recognizes him as the man he saw the previous week, who walked in hugging his left arm, which was bent at the elbow, to his chest.  But now the man’s arm swings freely at his side.

            “Sir,” Groening says to him, “can you tell us what you experienced after our last gathering here?”

            “Yes, indeed,” the man says, although he looks at the gathered people rather shyly. Groening gestures with his hand, inviting the man to continue.

            “Well, those of you who saw me last week, perhaps you saw that I couldn’t move this arm.” He raised his left arm. “It was broken during the war. I was trapped underneath a jeep during a battle, with my elbow pinned under the wheel.  The elbow joint was broken – shattered, the doctors said. And by the time I was taken for medical care, well, they said the elbow couldn’t be made right again. They put it in a cast, but it never healed properly.  It was as if it was frozen.  I was given a disability card. These past five years, none of the therapies they’ve tried have helped at all. I just had to go around like this.” He moves his arm back into the bent position.

            “And what happened when you came here?” Groening prompts.

             “Yes, well, I was in attendance here, but when Mr. Groening asked what I felt, I said – and it was the truth! – that I didn’t feel a thing. I even thought, Oh, here you’ve come, and now you’ve wasted your time.  That’s what I was thinking when I walked home. I live not far from here, and when I got there, I thought, You’re going to go in, and everyone’s going to want to know what happened, and you don’t have a thing to tell them.  So, I walked into the back, where our garden is, and there’s a shed back there.  And I walked over to the shed and opened the door and went inside. Just to collect my thoughts about what I’d say. And for some reason – I can’t explain why – I thought, Try to stretch your arm out now.” He looks at Ulrich, who’s sitting right in front of where he’s standing, and smiles. “So, I did.  And I could extend it all the way out!” He demonstrates how his arm had moved, and smiles broadly, extending the arm and then bending it, then repeating the action a few times.  “Well, once that happened, I knew my elbow was healed!  So I ran right into the house, and everyone was confused about why I’d come in the back door!” He laughs.  “I was so excited I couldn’t even speak. I just walked into our living room and kept stretching my arm out and bending it again, to show them!”  The man is beaming now. “You should have seen their faces!”

            The man’s good humor is contagious, and everyone in the room is soon smiling.

            Next Groening calls up the woman whose cancer was healed, and she tells the story of the terrible pains, followed by the wonderful results of the doctor’s tests. “He just couldn’t believe it!” she tells them. “But I said to him, God is the greatest physician! That’s what you told us, isn’t it, Mr. Groening?”

            Groening nods.

            Peter is summoned to the front of the room next. 

            “Tell us,” Groening says to him, “how you noticed the healing.” And Peter obliges, happy to be telling tale again, since his earlier conversation with Mr. Handler had gone so well.

            “And do you know how it happened that you were healed?” Groening asks, in a friendly voice.

            Peter thinks for a moment and then shakes his head.  “I’m sorry, Mr. Groening. I don’t.  I remember you telling us not to think of anyone else, and to pay attention to our own bodies. But I wasn’t doing that!”

            “No?” Groening asks. “What were you doing at that moment?”

            Peter gestures at Lina. “I was looking at my sister, Lina, and wishing with all my heart for her to be healed.” Lina presses her lips together, and tears come to her eyes. She mouths the words “Thank you” to him.

            “Ah, yes,” Groening says, placing a hand lightly on Peter’s shoulder. “And in this case, dear friends, this was the right thing for Mr. Bunke to do.  Yes, I told you that night to think only of your own bodies. But I also said, Do not think of your illness! Do you recall that?”

            Some of them nod. Others cock their heads to the side, trying to decide whether this sentence is familiar to them or not.

            “But often this is too hard for you – to not think of your own burden.  And then, the Heilstrom – God’s divine power – cannot work.  But Mr. Bunke –“ he pats Peter’s shoulder once more. “Mr. Bunke, here, all his thoughts were going to his sister. He wasn’t sitting on his burden, as I like to say. No! And in the moments when he wasn’t thinking of his own injured leg, but instead was wishing for his sister to be completely healed – then the Heilstrom could work!  It did work! His leg was healed!” He looks over at Peter. “And now he can hop!” he adds, a smile spreading across his own face.

            As if on cue, Peter begins hopping, to show that Groening has not exaggerated. The crowd laughs, and Ingrid claps her hands and bounces up and down in her chair.

            “Yes, my dear friends,” Groening says as Peter moves back to his seat, “this is what can happen, when we tune in to the divine transmission, instead of the evil.  When we say No! to the evil and take in the good instead.

            Groening now begins walking slowly back and forth, from one side of the room to the other.“How did it actually come about that the human being became ill?The original human being was not ill. People have become bad, worse from generation to generation. The badness had escalated so much that it is almost impossible to live. Quarrels and strife in families, more war than peace between nations! Worries have brought emotional suffering to humanity and have taken such deep root that people are bound to get sick. People are miseducated; they have distanced themselves from what is natural; many have lost their belief in God. And whoever loses the divine path, also loses his health.”

            Marcus frowns. Did I ever have that belief at all? But I’m still healthy…

            Groening walks over to the window and points to the trees that stand just on the other side of it.

            “Do you see these beautiful trees? The flowering bushes, with the bees buzzing around them?” People crane their necks, straining to see what is beyond the windowpane.

            “Centuries ago,”Groening goes on, “man went on the path away from nature, gave up belief in our Lord God. Everyone believed that he could maintain things alone: ‘We are on this earth now. We’ll manage now as we see fit,’ they say. And everybody thinks, ‘We know how to help ourselves.” Here Groening stops his pacing and points at them with his finger. “But I let you know that nobody can be helped without our Lord God. And whosoever believes that he can withdraw from the nature that the Lord God has created so beautifully for us, let him go where he wants to. People have withdrawn from nature, going over to culture. But we cannot manage without nature. Man doesn’t have the right to withdraw from it. Nature is God.”

            Here the Gassmanns and Bunkes nod and exchange happy glances. Groening has confirmed what they have felt for many years: God is in the forest.Except for Marcus, that is. He sees his entire family nodding. And, for a moment, negative thoughts begin flooding his brain, telling him that he must not be one of them, that he doesn’t belong, since he certainly doesn’t believe that God is nature. Or perhaps even that God is. But then Groening’s eyes meet his, and he feels the same powerful stream of love coming from this small man that he experienced the week before.  And the disturbing thoughts fade away.

            “You can also be displaced,” Groening tells them. “You have truly been moved from the place where God put you. Why? Just because you listen to other people rather than to God. As you have now become obedient to God – you tune into the divine transmission now –you will slowly get back to the place from which you were displaced.”

            At this moment, Kristina begins to cry.  Yes, she is thinking, Yes! I was displaced. Ingrid and I! The fear that has been lurking just below the surface of her awareness flares up now. She is suddenly back in the forest again, terrified that someone will kidnap Ingrid. Unable to control herself, she cries out and, wrapping her arms tightly around Ingrid, she pulls the girl to her.

            Lina turns around and sees a look of sheer terror in her friend’s eyes. Marcus has laid his arm around Kristina’s shoulder, but she seems not to notice.

            “Nature is God,” Groening says to Kristina kindly. “You and your daughter are safe now.”

            “But why is she still so afraid?” Lina asks him, recalling Kristina’s reaction when she fell from her chair in the woods.

            “This is not the original fear,” Groening says.  “Nor was it the other night in the woods, Mrs. Windel,” he tells her. “This is a Regelung.  The evil is mighty, but God is almighty. The evil is now coming out of your body, out of your mind.  You need not be afraid of this Regelung pain.  On the contrary: be happy about it, because when new life moves in, everything is straightened out again, and that sometimes hurts.”

            Now Kristina’s eyes grow a bit calmer, and she loosens her grip on Ingrid, who was frightened by her mother’s outburst.

            “I did feel so free after we were here last week,” Kristina tells Groening.  “For the first time since Ingrid and I left home, I felt calm. All the worries were gone. I felt peaceful. I knew everything would be all right.”

            “It is all right,” Groening replies.  “What you felt in the woods the other night, and what you felt just here, just now – it is all the Regelung. And now you are truly free.” Then he looks at Ingrid and leans toward her over Renate and Ulrich’s shoulders, so that he is closer to eye level with her.

            “And you, little Ingrid,” he asks. “What do you feel now?”

            “I was scared when Mama screamed and grabbed me,” she tells him.

            “And how about now?” he asks her, his voice soft and tender. It even seems to the little girl that his eyes are sparkling.

            “Fizzy!” she replies brightly.  “Fizzy. Like I could hop all day, with Uncle Peter!”

            The people in the room laugh, relieved to be able to release the tension that built up in them when Kristina cried out.

            “Do you feel happy?” Groening asks her.

            “Oh, yes!  Happier than ever!” Ingrid tells him.

            Groening nods. “And you don’t have to worry about that nightmare any more. You know which one I mean. We don’t need to say it here.”

            Ingrid gives him a surprised look. She is about to ask him whether he means the nightmare about the dogs – which she has never shared, not even with her mother – but Groening puts a finger to his lips. 

            “It’s gone now!” he tells her.

            Groening turns his attention back to Kristina. “What do you feel now?”

            “Calm again. Peaceful. Happy.” Now her tears are tears of relief.

            “No worries?”

            Kristina shakes her head.

            “Good. You have taken in the good. Now keep it!” Groening tells her, moving to the center of the room now, in front of the fireplace. “Do you see, friends? You must not reconnect with evil any longer. Firstly, dissociate yourself from it. At the moment you disconnect, the disturbance in your body will be removed. Then, tune in to the divine stream. If once isn’t enough, do it twice. To be precise, you must always do so, daily.”He pauses and looks at one or the other of them.  “Do not tune in simply when you are here in kind Mr. and Mrs. Birkners’ parlor! No! You must do this not just every day, but every morning and every evening.” He leans this way and that, so that he can see how they are all sitting.  Here and there, he corrects a person whose legs are crossed, or whose fingers are interlaced.

            “And now,” he tells them, “Free yourself from all the bad things and take in the good which is the healing wave here, which is not from humans, but from God. Give me your illness! Give me your worries! You can’t deal with them. I’ll bear them for you. I have broad shoulders.”

            He directs his gaze to Renate, in the front row.    

            “You, Madam. What do you want?”

            She clasps her hands together, but then, remembering Groening’s admonition, unclasps them and lays them back on her lap, facing up. She gives Ulrich a quick look, then replies.

            “Forgiveness, Mr. Groening,” she tells him quietly, and her face flushes.

            Behind her, Ethel knits her brows. What does Mama need to be forgiven for? She exchanges glances with Viktor, who shakes his head. I don’t know, either, his gaze tells her.

            Groening, meanwhile, is looking deep into Renate’s eyes. He stands silently for about ten seconds, looking a bit above Renate’s head, then tells her, “Mrs. Gassmann, do not worry. Your sister says she never blamed you for what happened.”

            As Renate takes in Groening’s words, all of the family members are wondering what Lorena might have blamed Renate for – all except for Ulrich, that is, who knows that Groening is referring to a sister the others never even knew Renate had had.

            “She’s forgiven me?” Renate asks.

            “What happened to her was not your fault. It’s very important to her that you know that.”

            Renate begins crying, softly at first, and then in wracking sobs that cause her shoulders to shake. Ulrich takes his wife’s hand and squeezes it.

            “How do you know?” Renate asks, wanting to believe Groening, but also wanting proof of some sort.

            “Because she is right here with you,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Spiritually, of course.  In the form of a girl of about ten.”

            “Oh! I saw a vision of her the night we were here, and she was just that age!” Renate announces, turning to Ulrich and then to Lina. 

            “But in case you don’t trust that vision,” Groening goes on, “she asks me to tell you that she was wrapped in a light yellow blanket the day she died, and that you had embroidered daisies along the edges of it for her.”

            “Yes! That’s true, that’s true! Oh, dear Anna-Liese!” Renate whispers through her tears, looking all around her, seeking to see Anna-Liese again.

            “She has been your guardian angel ever since that day,” Groening tells her.  “So you see, there is no need for her – or God – to forgive you. Just you must forgive yourself.”

            Renate, still overcome by what Groening has told her, simply nods and presses the handkerchief she’s dug out of her pocketbook to her eyes.

            “And you, Miss Bunke,” Groening says, turning slightly to face Lina. “What do you want?”

            “To walk,” Lina tells him fervently, encouraged by the stories the others have told, and by what her grandmother has just experienced, even if she doesn’t understand what it is all about.  “The same as last week. The same as always. To get up and walk and never need this chair again.”

            Groening nods.

            “Each one of you has come tonight with a wish in your heart, have you not? So, I tell you once again, do not give any attention to your burdens.  To do that is to deal with the evil, and we do not do that here! No! Pay attention to your body. Don’t feel just anything, but what really is in your body.  This is truth. It is also the truth, that today you are here, and you have been given the opportunity to reflect on your body.

            Everyone in the room closes their eyes to concentrate, striving not to think about their own illness, trying their best to notice what they are feeling in their body.  But at the same time, all of Lina’s family members, having just heard her express her deepest wish, are all inwardly asking Bruno Groening to please take her burden, to please make her legs work again.  Groening can see this, just as he has been able to see all of the details he has already mentioned.  Now he steps over to the edge of the second row, where Marcus is sitting.

            “What do you feel?” he asks.

            Marcus takes an inventory of his body and replies, almost apologetically, but also with a bit of a challenge in his voice, “Nothing.”

            Groening lays his hand briefly on Marcus’ shoulder, and suddenly the young man sees two images in succession, in his mind’s eye. First, he is standing with his father in the workshop, Viktor’s arm gripping his shoulder like a vice as he whispers in his ear that there is no use fighting him about the Civil Service job. The second image is from just a few days earlier: Once again, he and his father are in the workshop, that afternoon when they were with Ulrich and Peter, talking about his wedding and the log sawing.  Again, Viktor’s arm is around Marcus’ shoulder, but now, he is smiling. The two of them look happy. Stunned that these memories have popped up at the moment Groening laid a hand on his shoulder, Marcus just looks up at the small man beside him with a questioning expression. He notices that Groening’s touch is both firm and warm. Loving. And Marcus now feels like a hot stream of something is flowing into him at his shoulder, and from there spreading out throughout the rest of his body. But before he can say what he is experiencing, Groening removes his hand (although the sensation stays in Marcus’ body for the rest of the evening).

            “I have said,” he tells them all, walking back to the front of the room and taking a small sip from the glass of water that stands on the small table there,“that it depends upon the person whether I can help them, irrespective of what ailment they have. It does not depend upon me. It depends upon the person! Each person has a choice. To accept the divine power, or not.It is out of the question that I will be able to help everybody, because it is about good and bad people here.  For example, my friends can bring just about anyone to me. When I know that the person will not change, nothing can be done.  Some people are still carrying their weaker self inside. There are people who say, ‘I will give him a good dressing down!’ Friends, don’t ask me to carry on now. Otherwise, I might get personal. I might even name individuals. This type of person is still serving evil today.”

            Marcus has a fleeting thought: Is Groening talking about me? But before he can even begin to consider this, before the frown that is wanting to come to his face can even take shape, the thought flies out of his head. He recalls that this is just what happened the other day in the workshop, when he’d been unable to actually say the words that would provoke his father. Instead, now, as then, he feels the calm that has arisen as the current flows through his body.

            Groening goes on. “Each and every person has the duty and the obligation to do good here for as long as he is allowed to be here on this divine Earth, so that nothing evil happens to him. Woe to the person, though, who does evil here and who burdens his own conscience. And, if a person would, to sum it up, walk over dead bodies here – without a concern for a human life, if he has fallen for this greed, this selfishness, and works on how he can get a lot of money, and if he then believes that he can do a better job of forging his own destiny… No, dear friends, those who fall for the evil, who serve the evil, they really won’t fare well.“

            Here Groening slowly scans the assembled group. His gaze comes to rest on Viktor, who is suddenly feeling extremely hot. His stomach is burning inside.

            Groening asks him, “What do you want?”

            Viktor pauses, looks into Groening’s eyes, and replies, “I just want to make everything right.”

            “What, precisely, do you want to make right?” Groening asks, holding Viktor’s gaze.

Viktor looks at his lap and says nothing.  Ethel has turned to him and is staring at him intently.  Everyone else in the room is doing the same.

            Groening clasps his hands behind his back and begins pacing slowly to and fro across the front of the room.

            “Does God forgive, Mr. Bunke?” Groening asks, his voice stern. Viktor snaps his head up, hoping that Groening will give him the answer he so wants to hear.

            “Mrs. Gassmann’s dead sister has forgiven her.” He indicates Renate with a nod of his head.  “But then again, there was nothing really to forgive in that case. Mrs. Gassmann mistakenly took the blame upon herself.  But what about when there is blame? Then what happens? Does God forgive the kind of ‘everything’ you ‘just want to make right’?”

            “I don’t know,” Viktor replies, his voice so soft that most of the people in the room can’t make out what he’s said. They each turn to their neighbors and whisper, “What did he say?”

            “Let’s start with what those things are, Mr. Bunke,” Groening goes on, still pacing.

            When Viktor continues to sit silently, Ethel calls softly to him. “Viktor?” But he can’t bring himself to look at her. He is feeling tremendous pain in his chest and stomach now.

            “All right, then,” Groening says. He has stopped walking and is standing at the front of the room again now, facing them all. It just so happens that Viktor is right in the middle of the second row, directly opposite Groening. 

            “Let’s start with Schweiburg,” Groening suggests.

            At this, Renate, Ethel, and Ulrich all begin to feel uneasy.  How does he know we lived there? Ethel wonders. Viktor is sitting stock still.

            “We’ll take just one example from Schweiburg. The Jewish family’s bakery where you and your ‘friends’ broke the windows and set the fire.”

            A collective gasp rises in the room.  Renate and Ethel and Ulrich, who never knew any actual details of what Viktor was up to in Schweiburg, and later, in Varel, feel their stomachs start to turn.  Ethel takes hold of Viktor’s arm with her right hand.

            “Viktor,” she whispers, tugging on his sleeve. “Tell him to stop! Don’t let him lie about you!” But Viktor remains mute and motionless.

            Groening continues. “Plus other additional incidents. There and in Varel.  Is that correct?”

            Viktor nods, almost imperceptibly.  He is sitting ramrod straight, and in his posture, he still resembles, as he always has done, the strong oaks of their family’s woods. But just as trees that have suffered an attack by insects, or a limb broken in a high wind, decay and die from within long before they ever topple to the forest floor, Viktor’s cornflower blue eyes betray his inner struggle: He has almost stopped breathing and is wondering how he will manage to keep from bursting from the pounding in his chest.

            Ethel has pulled her hand back in shock, and uses it to cover her mouth instead. Her pale skin has grown even more pale.

            “And then there is the war to consider,” Groening says. His voice does not seem angry to any of them, but neither do they sense there the kindness and love that has reigned in it until this point.  “Shall I go on, or would you like to tell about the ‘things’?”

            Without looking up, Viktor lifts a hand and gestures to Groening, indicating that he should continue.

            “As a member of the Death’s Head Unit, you were second in command of the Concentration Camp Administration.” Groening pauses. “Please stop me if I make any mistakes, Mr. Bunke.” When no reply is forthcoming, he goes on, his arms now crossed in front of his chest.

            “Throughout your tenure in this position, which you held from 1940 to 1945, while prisoners in German concentration and death camps were starving, as were many Germans living throughout this country, you and your colleagues routinely received bonuses in the form of special foodstuffs – such as cigarettes, chocolate, and coffee, for example.  These goods you regularly sent along to your own family, outside of Bockhorn.”

            Every single person in the room is quiet now, not shifting the slightest bit in their seats, so as not to miss anything.  Ethel is slowly shaking her head, and her body begins to sway forward and back, and then side to side, like a bird trying to free itself from a trap that’s tethering it to the ground. We accepted those packages, she recalls, and a chill comes over her. Renate is looking straight ahead, at the fireplace, tears rolling down her cheeks. Her hazel eyes, both guarded and challenging, look up at Groening. She wants to protest, We didn’t know! Ulrich’s shoulders have slumped, and his arms, instead of resembling the upward-striving branches of the aspens he loves, droop to his sides, as if suddenly deprived of the life force.

            “In April of 1944, as part of your duties, you were dispatched to the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. There you personally gave the direct order to the Camp Commandant to inject 200 prisoners with phenol, thereby causing the deaths of these human beings.”

            People in their seats let loose cries and gasps. Audible crying can be heard. 

            “Mr. Bunke,” Groening says softly, leaning forward, “are these the things you just want to make right?”

            Viktor has now propped his bent elbows on his knees and leaned forward to rest his head in his hands, which are compulsively clutching and releasing his thick, sandy hair. All he can manage at this moment is a nod.

            There is complete silence for perhaps fifteen or twenty seconds.  Then Marcus, who now notices intense rage rising up within him, beings to lean forward. He fully intends to attack his monster of a father, throw him to the ground, do whatever is warranted in such a case… But then, for some reason, he glances in Groening’s direction. The small man, while still holding his gaze on Viktor, has extended his left arm toward Marcus, who understands what Groening is communicating to him: Now is not the time. Sit back. So, Marcus runs a hand over his hair, then settles back into his chair. He wants to try to sort out the thoughts that were coming into his mind a moment earlier, but he finds they are gone now.  So he tries his best to do what Groening asked them all to do earlier, and observe what he is feeling. Aside from the anger, which is more muted now, there is a disorienting feeling of dizziness, as if the floor beneath him has turned to sand, or water.  

            “I ask again,” Groening says, lifting his eyes to look at each of them in turn now, “Does God forgive?” Here some of those present nod tentatively, while others have crossed their arms angrily in response to the litany of Viktor’s sins that they have just heard recited. Groening reminds them with a movement to open their posture once more.  “I tell you,” he offers, finally, “that God does forgive. If,” and here he raises one finger in the air, “If we regret the evil acts we have done. If we hold onto the evil, we cannot be free, cannot be healed.” Now he watches the reactions of the people before him. “But if we say, ‘Dear God, I know I have done evil, I know it was wrong, and I regret it, and I will never do evil again…’ Then, dear friends, yes, then God does forgive. But those who cling to their actions, saying, ‘I was right to do it!’ ‘I would do it again tomorrow!’ – They will not receive God’s forgiveness.”

            Now Groening pauses and stares for a moment at the space above Viktor’s bowed head.  Then, he says, firmly, “Mr. Bunke?” Viktor can tell by Groening’s tone that he must look at the man before him.  Reluctantly, he raises his eyes and meets Groening’s gaze.

            “It is forgiven,” Groening tells him. Now the kindness reigns in his voice once more.

            Viktor keeps his eyes focused on Groening for half a minute or so. Just as Renate wanted some proof that what Groening had told her about Anna-Liese was true, now Viktor is not sure whether he can accept what Groening has told him.  Does he really know this? But as Viktor continues to look into the small man’s gleaming, blue eyes, everyone in the room around him seems to fade away into clouds, into silence, and in Groening’s gaze, he glimpses something he cannot name in words, something he cannot even fully grasp. It is a knowing, more than something tangible that he can see. But in his body, which is shaking uncontrollably now, he feels a lightness that grows, until it expands to fill every cell. It feels as if some spiritual being’s gossamer arms are embracing him, and as he looks into Groening’s eyes, a deep peace comes into him and takes him over, along with a feeling of the greatest gratitude: for this moment of connection with God (for he knows for sure that this is what this is), for the forgiveness he now knows God has granted him, and even for the horrible moments he somehow feels he had to endure in order to gain this connection with God.  In the months to come, there will be times when he wonders whether he really did experience God when he looked into Groening’s eyes, because he will not be able to call these feelings back into his body and mind and heart.  But then, each time, he will tell himself, No. It did happen. And that knowledge will carry him through what he has to go through next.

            But as Viktor is staring into Bruno Groening’s eyes and feeling God’s boundless love, many around him in the room have begun to feel anything but loving.  The whispering has started up once more.

            “Is there any person here who does not need God’s forgiveness for some act?” Groening asks, sounding genuinely curious.  “Raise your hands.” Some of the guests look at the floor, others to their companions. Shrugs and pursed lips can be observed.

            “I thought not,” Groening tells them, his voice again soft and loving.  “Dear friends, what you have done in the past – what others have done… Hand that over to me now, too.  All of it!  For those memories – of your own evil deeds, and of others’ – they only burden you. One should not do this – think back about the evil, about the war, about how others have wronged you.  Or how you have wronged others – once you have repented of your evil actions, it goes without saying.” He scans the crowd and knows that some of those present are not yet feeling able to release incriminating thoughts, whether about themselves or those close to them.

            “Haven’t you learned from it yet?” he asks them. “When you thought back, looked back, even one time, to the evil of the previous years – or even just to two days ago –  weren’t you sad? Please look back now on an evil hour, an evil moment! On a moment of fear, when you – when your whole body – was seized, when it was petrified.  Such as Mrs. Windel, here. Think about it now! And keep thinking about it! Then evil will soon have a grip on you. And so I ask you: Do you want to always bring up the past, throw it down in front of your own feet – or your loved ones’ – again and again, and always walk over it, and be reminded of it again and again?”

            Each person shakes his or her head. Some even have sheepish expressions on their faces now.

            “Forgiveness,” Groening tells them softly, “comes not just from God. It comes from each of us. Do not keep the evil in your hearts!”

            While the people in the room mull over these statements, Groening once again walks over to the little table and picks up the glass of water. He takes a leisurely drink and sets the glass back down. Then he strides quickly across the room and halts three feet in front of Lina.

            “Stand up!” Groening tells her stridently, in a voice that brooks no opposition.

            And Lina stands.

            “Now, walk!” Groening commands her, stepping backwards to give her room.

            Lina looks at him and begins to reach for the arm of her wheelchair, but Groening shakes his head. “Now, walk!” he repeats.

            Lina takes first one tentative step toward Groening, and then a second.  A third step follows, and a fourth, until Groening, who has been taking one step backwards with each of Lina’s toward him, has backed all the way up against the wall.

            “Now turn around and walk back,” he tells her.

            As she slowly puts one foot in front of the other, Groening motions – without taking his eyes off Lina – to Egon Arthur Schmidt. Schmidt gets up, picks up his own chair and comes around behind Groening, who is matching Lina’s movement forward, step by step. Groening motions to Schmidt with this left hand, and his helper deftly rolls Lina’s wheelchair away and replaces it with the wooden chair.  When Lina reaches the chair that now stands where her wheelchair had been, Groening instructs her to turn around and sit down.  This she does.  In a daze, she, like her father a minute before, is unaware of any of what is going on around her. She hears only Groening’s voice instructing her, and feels only the sensation of her legs moving beneath her.

            Now that she has sat back down, Lina assumes that she is done, but that is not the case.

            “Stand up again, please,” Groening tells her, and then instructs her to walk back and forth across the front of the room.  She does so, slowly at first, and Groening walks alongside her, his smile growing broader with each turn, as he sees her movements gaining in both strength and speed. Lina, too, is beaming.  I am walking! she tells herself. Walking! She starts to turn to look at her family, but Groening tells her quietly to focus.

            “Just walk now.  You can look at them in a bit. I can tell you that they are all smiling. Your mother is crying,” he says with a smile, at which Lina laughs a bit. She is crying, too.

            “That’s enough for now,” Groening tells her tenderly, after they’ve walked to and fro before the guests five or six times. “The muscles are still a bit weak. But you are walking! You are healed!”

            Lina, who is, indeed, feeling tired now, but pleasantly so, turns to Groening before returning to her seat.  “But Mr. Groening,” she asks, a puzzled look on her face, “How did it happen? Why now?”

            Those present are leaning forward in anticipation of the reply.  Groening looks at her, and there is a twinkle in his eye.

            “All evening, instead of handing your burden over and trusting the Heilstrom to work, your family has been thinking only about your healing. Wishing for it so strongly that the divine power could do nothing.  But when I was talking with your father here, everyone’s thoughts turned to him. For a second, they forgot about you. Then there was an opening. Then IT could work! And you were healed.”

            Lina barely notices how the rest of the evening passes.  She is in a daze of exhilaration and exhaustion and joy. She notices that Groening gives a photograph of himself to each one of them.

            “The power of the Heilstrom is contained in it,” he tells them.  “I do not need to be physically present in order to help you.  You need only address me in your thoughts, and I will help.”

            Lina holds the photo he gives her in her hand gently, so as not to bend it.  Somehow, she understands that it is time to go, and stands up. As she is walking out of the room alongside her father, Bruno Groening comes over to him. “I will be in touch with you,” Groening tells him. “I am going away for some time now, but I will get word to you about when and where to come. But for now, use the photo to connect with me. And this.” Then Lina sees him hand Viktor a tin foil ball just like hers.

            What Lina does not see is when Marcus approaches Groening, just as the crowd of guests is beginning to disperse. But Kristina sees this, because Marcus whispers to her that he’ll return in a minute, and then walks up to Groening. Kristina sees that her fiancé’s manner is humble and thoughtful. He and Groening exchange a few words. Marcus places his hand on his own abdomen. Then, it seems to Kristina, Marcus asks Groening a question. She can tell by the intensity of Marcus’ expression, and by the focused way he gazes at Groening, that the answer to whatever question he has posed is very important to him.

            As Kristina looks on, Groening takes a moment to look Marcus in the eye. Then he tips his head slightly to the side, as if considering his reply. Then, finally, he nods and gives a slight smile, an expression that is both warm and a bit stern. He lays his hand on Marcus’ shoulder and nods. Marcus immediately rises up a bit taller, and Kristina can tell that he is pleased by Groening’s answer, excited, even. Groening’s smile broadens, and, at the same time, he wags a finger at Marcus. Marcus nods, and Groening places something into his hand. Then, a moment later, the small, unassuming man moves out into the hall. Marcus looks over at Kristina and gives her a little wave. “We’re going now,” he mouths to her across the room. He rejoins her and Ingrid, and they, too, exit the Birkners’ parlor.

            The next thing Lina notices is that she has walked all the way to the car on her own – after Groening cautions her family to believe that she is fully healed, and to treat her accordingly, after giving her a few days to rest up.  Then, she is in the car, with Marcus driving and Renate, Ulrich, Kristina, and Ingrid squeezed into the back seat. Before they have been on the road for even ten minutes, she is fast asleep.

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Above the River, Chapter 31

~ Sue Downing

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.   

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Above the River, Chapter 30

~ Sue Downing

Chapter 30

Marcus and Kristina planned to announce their engagement to the family the next morning at breakfast, over coffee and sweet rolls. It was either that, or wait until the evening meal. They both knew that Kristina wouldn’t be able to keep the secret all day, so they decided to tell everyone first thing. 

Kristina did tell Ingrid the news as soon as the little girl got up, but asked her not to say anything at breakfast until she and Marcus told the rest of the family.  But Ingrid, who was excited that there would be a wedding, and that she would be allowed to be a flower girl, found it hard to sit still at the kitchen table. She fidgeted so much on her chair, looking up at her mother, or nudging her elbow, that Renate finally asked whether she had ants in her pants.

Instead of answering, Ingrid glanced up at her mother again, her eyes wide. “Mama?”

Everyone laughed, thinking that Ingrid was asking Kristina to answer Renate’s question. Kristina obliged.

“Not actual ants,” she said, smiling. “Ingrid’s just excited.” 

“About what?” Renate asked. “Something at school?”

Ingrid shook her head and smiled, thrilled that there’d be a game. “Guess again!” she said eagerly.

“Is Stick going to have puppies?” Peter asked, playing along.

“No, Silly,” Ingrid replied indignantly. “Stick’s a boy. He can’t have puppies!”

“True enough,” Viktor said, reaching up to pat Ingrid on her shoulder. “Good girl.”

“Keep guessing!” Ingrid seemed to be fidgeting even more now.

“Did you make a new friend at school?” Ethel asked.

Ingrid shook her head again. “I told you, it’s not about school.  It’s about here!”

“Is one of the goats going to have babies?” Lina asked, inspired by Peter’s question.

“No, no, no!” Ingrid told them.  Then she burst out with, “But maybe Mama will!”

Kristina’s face went crimson, and she put her arm around Ingrid and whispered something in her ear.  Then she looked over at Marcus with an expression that said, “Help!”

“What Ingrid means, I think,” he said, for some reason rising to his feet, “is that, last night, I asked Kristina to marry me, and she said yes!”  Clearly, he wanted to make a toast to his future bride, but, lacking any drink that would be suitable to the occasion, he picked up his coffee cup and raised it. “To my dear Kristina!”

A bit awkwardly, everyone at the table followed suit, except for Ingrid, who raised her glass of milk. “But there might be babies, right Mama?” she asked Kristina in a whisper so loud that the others couldn’t help but hear. 

Lina stifled a laugh and called out, coffee cup raised high, “To puppies and goat kids and human kids!”

Ingrid put down her glass and clapped her hands, bouncing up and down merrily on her chair.

The others also raised their cups, but it was clear that they were all feeling uncomfortable.  It was partly the suddenness of the announcement. Ever since they’d been to see Bruno Groening, the whole homestead seemed to be in motion: There was Peter’s healing, and Lina’s tumble in the woods, and her discovery that being in the trees helped her pain fade, and now this.  There were also the insights and subtle interior changes that many of them were experiencing as a result of the trip.  It was so much to take in, to make sense of, and they all felt a bit off balance. 

Maybe that was why Peter had asked whether Stick was expecting puppies.  With so many parts of their physical and interior landscapes shifting, he thought that he might not have been surprised at all for a male dog to give birth! Later that day, when he considered this new development, he told himself he shouldn’t have been surprised.  After all, I saw Marcus and Kristina  kissing outside the workshop that evening a while back. But still…

Renate seemed the least surprised of them all. Why did they think I sent him out with the tea last night? she wondered as she looked at her family’s confused faces.  I guess they haven’t been paying attention. She was pleased. Kristina would now be a true member of the family. She’d be a Bunke soon, with full rights to stay here forever.

Lina’s voice, as she offered her impromptu toast to puppies, kids, and kids, carried more enthusiasm for this match than she actually felt in her heart. Why is that? she wondered. Was the strong pain that had crept back into her legs overnight impairing her ability to feel joy?  Or was it her disappointment that Kristina hadn’t told her how much she cared for Marcus?  Or perhaps it was her concern that her best friend was now engaged to the man who had terrorized Peter when they growing up? Both of these possibilities ran through her head as she studied Kristina’s face.  Although clearly still embarrassed by the way Ingrid had shared the news, she looked happy and more at ease than she had in the four years since she’d come to live with them.  That’s a good thing, Lina told herself. A good sign.

But it wasn’t just these thoughts that left everyone not quite sure how to respond to what Marcus had said.  It was the way he’d said it. “My dear Kristina.”  No one in the family had ever heard him talk that way to anyone, or about anyone. And they certainly had never heard in his voice what sounded like genuine affection, like love.  Ethel glanced over at Viktor during the coffee toast and caught his eye. “Is that our Marcus?” she seemed to be asking him.  He shrugged, and his slightly raised eyebrows told her that he was as mystified as she by their son’s new demeanor. Is this a new Marcus? Viktor was asking himself. Or just a more skillfully manipulative old Marcus? He wasn’t alone in his wondering. Among the Gassmanns and Bunkes around the table, Renate was the only one who didn’t share the skepticism and wariness which crept immediately into the other family members’ thoughts and hearts.  Perhaps these feelings had arisen in her mind, too, but if they had, she had ignored them, choosing instead to trust her heart and its devotion to Detlef Gassmann’s long-cherished wish to see the log cabin he built full to bursting with new life.

            Despite the new family composition that was now on the horizon, breakfast finished up in the usual way,: Renate, Ethel, and Lina cleared up from the meal, Kristina saw Ingrid off to school; Ulrich and Viktor headed out into the woods, and Peter into the workshop; and Marcus was waiting at the end of the driveway for his office colleague from Bockhorn, who picked him up each day on his way to work in Varel.

            As Kristina walked back into the kitchen, she saw that each of the other women was already settling into her task for the morning, as if nothing at all was different. Do they not care? Kristina thought to herself. The joy and lightness she’d felt after they saw Bruno Groening were nowhere to be found now. They had been usurped by doubt. The feeling of terror she’d experienced so often as she and Ingrid were fleeing their home – and which had lain in her heart and chest as a layer beneath every other emotion for the past four years – was beginning to make itself felt anew, creeping stealthily into her mind.  Maybe they won’t really accept me after all… That’s the thought that had just risen up in Kristina’s mind, when Ethel suddenly turned from where she’d been standing at the counter, measuring out some sourdough starter for the day’s bread.  She brushed a curl out of her eyes and then, opening her arms wide in that odd, but graceful way she had of spreading them as if they were wings, she walked over to Kristina and embraced her.

            “I’m so happy for the two of you,” she said warmly, taking a step back to look at Kristina, and then placing her hands on the younger woman’s shoulders.  “Marcus couldn’t have found a better woman for his wife,” she went on. 

            Renate looked back over her left shoulder at them. “That’s the absolute truth!” she said, tapping her hand on the counter for emphasis.  “These last four years, I’ve been afraid some local lad would snatch you away from us.  Now I don’t have to worry about that anymore.”  She smiled and turned back to the cucumbers she was getting ready for pickling.

            Lina, who had rolled up to the table with some mending, raised her threaded needle in a repeat of her earlier toast. “Here’s to your future wedding dress! We had better sit down today and start designing it.” She shifted her gaze to Ethel. “Don’t you think so, Mama?”

            “Oh, yes,” Ethel said, bringing one hand to the side of her face, index finger pointed up, to express that there was thinking to be done. “Unless, of course,” she added, smiling widely, “you want to follow the family tradition and get married in a flour sack!” Ethel looked back at her mother, and the two of them laughed heartily.  But since it was clear from Kristina and Lina’s faces that they didn’t get the joke, she explained it for them.

            “Both my mother and I felt – at first! – that we had no need of a nice dress to get married in. Why make such a fuss and spend all that time on it?”

            Lina knitted her brows. “But Mama, your wedding picture is right there on the wall. You wore a beautiful dress! Not a flour sack at all. I’m confused.”

            Ethel went over to where the photo of her and Viktor in their wedding clothes hung on the wall, near the door that led into the addition.  It had been a long time since she’d looked at it, and when she did, now, she was struck by the joy in their faces. They looked so young and radiant.  She smiled, grateful that she and Viktor were once again beginning to regain the closeness and intimacy they’d had at the beginning, and had then gradually lost. She took the photo off the wall and handed it to Kristina.

            “Lina’s right,” she said.  “Mama,” she went on, gesturing at Renate, “convinced me that it really was right to make a fuss over a wedding dress, because it marks the beginning of your new life with your husband.  Nothing will be the same after you get married,” she told them, coming around to look at the photo over Kristina’s shoulder. “It’s a new stage of life, and dressing up for it helps you – and your husband – recognize that you’re leaving some things behind. And that other things will be required of you in life now, things you can’t even imagine on the day you get married.” 

            “You make it sound a little scary,” Lina told her, sounding like a normal twenty-year-old young woman who has yet to find the man she’ll marry, and who isn’t quite sure she’s up to what that new stage of life might demand of her.

            Ethel raised one eyebrow and tilted her head to the right. “Well,” she finally replied with a sigh, “married life can have its scary moments. Mine has had them. I won’t deny it.” She looked down at her wedding photo again. 

            “But knowing about them now,” Lina asked, her mending forgotten in her lap, “you’d still marry Papa, wouldn’t you?”

            Ethel paused so long that Renate stopped slicing the cucumbers and turned around, a curious look on her face.

            “Yes,” Ethel said slowly.  “Yes, I would. I imagine every couple goes through very hard times. Do you think so, Mama?”

            Renate shrugged.  “I imagine so, Sweetheart. Your father and I have been very lucky. Hardly a disagreement in all these years.”

            “That,” Ethel said with a smile, “is because Papa manages the forest, and you manage the family. We all know that!”

            “You do?” Renate asked, looking genuinely surprised that her secret was out.

            Ethel nodded. “Now, your father and I,” she said, nodding to Lina, “we both think we know what the other should do, and we haven’t hidden those opinions from each other.”

            “But that seems like the right thing to do,” Lina told her.  “Why wouldn’t you talk about everything?”

            “Ah, Lina, Darling,” her mother said, coming over and smoothing her daughter’s hair, “that is the question, isn’t it?  When to talk about things and when not to.”

            “As you may have noticed, Kristina,” Renate threw over her shoulder, since she’d turned back to her cucumbers by this point, “our family is not big on talking about things.”

            “Mine isn’t – wasn’t – either,” Kristina replied, not sure how much she should say about her own views on this topic, although this response seemed sufficiently neutral.  The last thing she needed was to offend her future in-laws on the morning of her engagement by giving them the impression that she would be too outspoken or too meek in her relationship with Marcus. Without even realizing it, she was still doing what she needed to do to protect her position on the homestead.

            “Now, that’s true,” Ethel said, placing the photo back on its nail on the wall, “About us not liking to get into big conversations as a family.”

            “Only leads to trouble,” Renate put in, shaking her head. They could hear the rhythmic thud of the knife she was using to slice the cucumbers.

            “But, just think,” Lina objected. “If I hadn’t mentioned Bruno Groening, and if we hadn’t talked about it over supper that day, we never would have gone to see him. Peter never would have gotten his healing.”

            “Not necessarily,” Renate announced. Her remark was rendered all the more enigmatic by the fact that they couldn’t see her face. All they saw were her elbows bobbing along in a motion that matched the sound of the knife against the cutting board.

            “I think what Mama – Grandma – means,” Ethel said, as if translating from a foreign language for Kristina and Lina, “is that there are various ways one can help a situation move in the direction you want, aside from bringing it up to the whole family for discussion.”

            “Amen to that,” Renate said, and they could hear the smile in her voice as they saw her head nod.

            “What does that mean?” Kristina asked, quietly and hesitantly. She was still standing just inside the doorway, but she didn’t move, fearing that this would somehow cause the conversation to shift its focus. And the current conversation suddenly seemed desperately important to her and her future married life. Somehow, it had never occurred to her to think about this when she was married to Artur, Ingrid’s father. With him, she’d never felt the need to nudge anything in a given direction.  Things just flowed. But maybe that’s just the way it seems to me now… Kristina thought to herself. I was so young then…

            Renate finally turned around.  She took her apron in her hands and slowly wiped them clean as she spoke.

            “Get to know what is most important to your husband, what he knows the most about.  And let him make all the decisions about that part of your life. Then get to know what is most important to you, what you know the most about. And make it clear to him that if he tries to encroach on your territory, he’ll regret it.”

            Ethel and Kristina and Lina exchanged glances, and it was clear that all three of them were shocked as much by what Renate had said as by the fact that she had said it at all.

            “But Mama,” Ethel said, her hands spread wing-like once again, “you never told me that when I got married.”

            “You never asked me,” she replied, a gleam in her eye. “Kristina here did.”

            Open-mouthed, Ethel stared at her mother. “But you might have shared that with me, as a bit of motherly advice, on my wedding day, for example.”

            Renate shook her head. “You wouldn’t have listened.” When Ethel raised one finger, in preparation for objecting, she asked her, “Would you?”

            “I don’t know,” Ethel answered honestly, and then she smiled. “Maybe not. But still, Mama –“

            “Don’t ‘Still, Mama’ me, Dearie,” Renate told her lightly.  “Kristina here asked, and it’s a good thing she did.  Took me long enough to figure this out myself –“

            “But Grandma,” Lina objected, “didn’t you know this all along, with Grandpa?”

            Renate’s eyes twinkled. “I just really understood it last night,” she admitted. “Isn’t that something?”

            “So,” Ethel clarified, “you couldn’t have told me when I got married, then, even if I had asked?”

            “I don’t imagine I could have,” she said simply.

            Ethel shook her head in amused dismay, and she felt both relieved that her mother hadn’t consciously withheld valuable advice from her more than two decades earlier, and also sorry that Renate hadn’t had this insight into things sooner. She could have used the guidance.

            “But now I can,” Renate went on. “And given our Marcus, I think it might come in handy for you, Dear.” Here she nodded at Kristina.

            Kristina was not quite sure how to interpret the remark, especially since Renate turned back around to her cucumbers before she could interpret the expression on the older woman’s face. Lina and Ethel gave her no help, either. 

            “Do you have any other words of wisdom for us married or soon-to-be married ladies?” Ethel asked, only half joking.  “Now that we’ve opened that door?”

            Renate shook her head sharply.  “Nope. A one-time special.” And with her left hand, she made a gesture of pushing a door closed.

            “Then that makes Kristina very, very lucky,” Lina announced, picking up her needle and thread again.  “And what about you, then, Mama?” she added, looking up at Ethel.

            “Well,” Ethel began, as she retrieved a crock with flour from the shelf on the wall near the stove, “I may have missed out on the key advice, but I’d say I’ve gathered a bit of knowledge in the past twenty-seven years.  Mostly the hard way.”

            “That’s always the way it is,” Renate put in, matter-of-factly. “For all of us.”

            “So, what did you learn the hard way?” Lina asked the question she knew Kristina was eager to have answered, and she herself wanted to hear her mother’s thoughts, too. She knew enough from growing up in this household that moments of such openness were rare indeed.

            Ethel paused, wrapped her arms loosely around the flour crock, and stared off across the room, past Lina. “What have I learned the hard way?” she asked, as if posing the question to herself. 

            “About things being required of you that you didn’t expect, maybe?” Lina piped up, impatiently.

            “Just let her tell it herself,” Renate chided her. “She’s spent her whole life raising you and your brothers and living through a war, and not philosophizing about how she’s lived her life.”

            Ethel gazed affectionately at the older woman. Although Ethel knew that her mother loved her, Renate didn’t often directly offer words of support, so she took some time to savor this moment before speaking.

            “What I would say,” she began finally, “is this.  When things happen that you don’t expect, things that make you wonder who the man in front of you is… I mean, when it seems to you that some stranger has replaced the man you married… When that happens, you have to look into his eyes and struggle as hard as you can to see – in the eyes of that stranger – the man you married, the man you fell in love with.  That’s the only thing that will give you a fighting chance.”

            Neither Kristina nor Lina had expected such a serious and disquieting bit of advice. Kristina wasn’t about to say anything here, since she sensed it was a delicate family moment that she couldn’t possibly grasp. Lina, who had no more insight than Kristina into what events had enabled her mother to gain such insights, did speak up.

            “What happens otherwise? If you don’t fight to see him?”

            Ethel looked Lina in the eye and then Kristina. “Then your marriage is over,” she said, simply, in a deadly serious tone.

            Kristina and Lina exchanged glances. Then Kristina, who hadn’t had enough years with Artur to encounter such a situation before he was killed on the Eastern front, asked, “But what do you do then?”

            Ethel pursed her lips, then replied. “Either you stay, or you leave.”

            The two younger women looked to Renate, hoping she would clarify things somehow. But the Gassmann family matriarch remained where she was, her back to them, slicing cucumbers for pickles, just as she had done in this very same kitchen for more than forty years.

*          *          *

            During the days that followed, before the family’s next trip to Bremen to see Bruno Groening again, each of them was engaged in the process of not only understanding what had or had not changed for him or her in the time since the first meeting, but also observing what was different with others in the household. This was a week of changes, both visible and unobserved, physical and internal. The healing of Peter’s leg was clear to them all, and all of them, at this point, applied the word “healing” only to the physical body.  Although they all found themselves looking at the world, each other, and themselves, in new ways during these days, none of them would have claimed that they had been “healed” of anything, despite the fact that they each underwent shifts after the meeting with Bruno Groening. Rather, the whole Gassmann-Bunke clan spent that week in something of a daze, experiencing certain thoughts and feelings, but without analyzing them.

            For some of them, like Renate, long-suppressed memories came to mind. One day in the forest, Ulrich found himself thinking of his mother with kindness, even though she had died when he was just a babe, leaving him to be raised by his father and volatile step-mother.  Others, like Ethel, felt unexpected lightness and joy. The closeness that she and Viktor had regained of late only deepened after they went to see Groening, and by the middle of the following week, Ethel found herself singing in the kitchen and looking forward to sinking into her husband’s arms at night.

            Kristina, who at first was filled with relief and happiness, then sank suddenly and inexplicably into the terror of the past. Had she been able to ask Groening about what had happened that evening in the forest, when Lina fell from her wheelchair, he would have told her not to worry. He would have explained that this was simply part of her healing, a release of the old fears – the evil – that had settled into her body. “Regelungen” is what he would have called it, even though he’d spoken only of physical Regelungen that evening in Bremen, and not of the sometimes terrifying way the mind and heart also release long-held burdens.  But Groening was not there to reassure Kristina. So, she ended up spending the next week alternating between joy at her engagement to Marcus and a low-level, but still perceptible, concern that her old fears would come back again and spoil her new-found happiness.

            Marcus, whose sudden expressions of affection stunned those around him, was not at all aware that he seemed to them like an entirely different person.  He just delighted in the openness of his heart and in the warmth and love that now filled it, sensations he never recalled having experienced in his whole life. He spent no time analyzing why this was happening now. But while he strode around the homestead with unprecedented lightness of bearing, his brother and sister and parents seemed to be holding their breaths, as if waiting for the “old” Marcus to reappear in an outburst of rage or recrimination.

            Viktor was the only one among them who was able to place the breathtakingly painful sensations he had felt at the Birkners’ house into a larger context: He understood that the energy of the forest and the power that Groening called the Heilstrom affected both his body and mind, and in nearly identical ways: this power somehow enabled deeply-held terrors to be freed and released. For some reason, he didn’t try to explain this to himself. Rather, he found himself picturing the injured swallow Lina had mentioned to them. He kept seeing, in his mind’s eye, the moment when the swallow gained the strength to lift off the ground, free. And he knew that, although what he had gone through both times – in the forest, and in Bremen – disturbed, and even frightened, him, it was all meant to help him.

            Lina, who was able to detect a persistent sense of inner peace during this time, nonetheless struggled to maintain her faith that the pain that came and went in her legs really was the Regelungen Groening had described, and that the Regelungen would lead to complete healing for her. During this time, she also strived not to compare herself to Peter, not to entertain the thought that perhaps he had been healed, while she hadn’t, because he somehow believed more perfectly than she did. When the temptation to invite these thoughts in did arise, she would, through force of will, shift her attention back to repeating the phrase Groening had whispered in her ear: Trust and believe. The divine power helps and heals.

            Lina also felt the loving support of her family in a way that she hadn’t before.  It wasn’t that she had felt a lack of concern before. Or, at least, she hadn’t felt that for four or five years now. But when they all enthusiastically jumped on the Bruno Groening bandwagon, when they all went to see him with her, she began to sense that they had come together as a kind of team to help her. That was something new.  She believed – unlike in those darker moments early on – that each member of her family, did think about her situation, that they did want to help her. But until Bruno Groening came along, there just hadn’t been any force that could unite them to fight for her and for her return to health. That’s exactly how Lina thought of Groening: as a force that somehow managed to give everyone in her family the hope that she would be able to walk again. 

            Thinking about Bruno Groening in this way, Lina was also, like her father, reminded of the swallow with the injured wing. She recalled what she’d told her family about how she’d first despaired that it would die, and how she’d then seen it summon strength from somewhere and rise up and fly off.  She remembered telling them that she felt that power must have come from God. The day after they visited Groening, as Lina called to mind the image of that swallow, she knew that she’d been right about how the wing had been healed, and about how the swallow had been able to fly again: It took in the power of God and was healed, she told herself. And now, here’s Bruno Groening, giving us all hope and strength, by connecting us to God’s power. That’s the way Lina saw it, even though she couldn’t begin to explain how Groening was able to do that.  But she saw no need to strive to explain it rationally. She was just grateful that he could do it. More and more often during the week between the first and second trips to see Groening, Lina thought of the swallow, of its injured and then healed wing, and of her own legs. Trust and believe, she repeated to herself. The divine power helps and heals.

            Once the swallow made its way back into her consciousness, Lina also found herself reflecting back on the day she had caused such controversy at the supper table the month before by asking, “Does God have a plan for us?” Lina recalled Marcus’ vigorous rejection of this idea, based on his belief in our absolute free will: There was no use in God making up a plan for our lives – a “wish”, as Marcus had called it – since He was, in fact, powerless to affect our actions in any way.   Given that Marcus thought this way, it wasn’t surprising, Lina thought now, that he had also scoffed at her when she suggested that perhaps any suffering we experience is really part of God’s plan for us. She and Kristina had gone on to discuss this question on their own.  Was it God’s plan for her to become paralyzed? For Peter to be injured in the war? For Kristina’s husband to die in the war, and for Kristina and Ingrid to experience those horrors as they fled to safety? The two of them hadn’t come to any conclusion about whether such things really could be in God’s plans for them, much less why this would be the case if it was the case.  But now this question arose once more in Lina’s mind.  Maybe she would have the chance to ask Bruno Groening about it when they saw him next.

            One clue to the answer Lina was seeking was actually right in front of her, although she didn’t realize it. But what she did notice, the very first day after their trip to Bremen, was that everyone in the household was suddenly going out of their way to let her know they believed she’d be healed.  Throughout the day, one or the other of them would lean over and pat her on the shoulder and say, “Just a few more days until we go back,” or “You’re looking stronger already,” or, in Ingrid’s case, “Will you push me in the wheelchair after you’re healed?”  Kristina was always reminding her to keep hold of the tin foil ball. Lina guessed that Kristina must have told Ethel and Renate Groening’s parting words, because one day she heard the two of them in the kitchen softly singing, ‘Trust and believe, trust and believe,” to some made-up tune.  All of this shored up Lina’s own belief that she would actually walk again soon.

            She was also strengthened by daily trips into the heart of the woods. This new daily routine came about in the following way: Thanks to her foray to the treehouse with Peter and also to those heavenly minutes she spent lying on the forest floor that same evening as she waited for Kristina to bring help, Lina was able to convince herself that she did, indeed, feel less pain in her legs when she was amongst the trees. No one could explain why this was, at least not in words.  But Ethel surmised, and the others agreed, that this shift was connected to the divine energy they associated with the forest, with God’s energy that somehow circulated through the trees.   So, already on Saturday, the day Ingrid announced that her mother and Marcus were getting married, Viktor decided that they should make sure Lina spent a good amount of time in the forest each day, so that she could absorb the heavenly there.

            That first day Viktor carried her into a lovely, sunny clearing in the woods and lowered her gently onto a thick fallen log so that she could sit.  But Kristina, who had also come along, noticed right away that Lina wouldn’t be comfortable sitting like that for long, since there was nothing to lean back against.  So, she ran back to the house and enlisted Peter, who soon reappeared in the clearing, carrying a wicker chair from the porch. He and Viktor lifted Lina off the tree trunk and eased her down into the chair.  She smiled as she leaned back and rested her arms on the rounded chair arms.  Kristina sat down on the forest floor, using the fallen log as a back rest. 

            “Go off back to work, you menfolk,” she said to Peter and Viktor. “We’ll be fine here for a couple of hours, won’t we Lina?”

            Lina nodded, indicating the knitting bag she’d brought with her.  And Kristina pointed to her basket.

            “I’ll collect some berries, and Lina will knit.”

            Later on, toward supper time, a whole parade of Gassmanns and Bunkes made their way into the woods to see how their Lina was faring.  She laughed as she saw both of her parents and grandparents, along with Kristina and Peter, walking gaily amongst the birches and alders.

            “Are you off on a picnic?” she asked them.

            “We just came to collect you,” Ethel told her, leaning over to kiss her daughter on the cheek and give her braid a playful tug.  

            “Now there’s an idea, though,” Renate exclaimed.  “A picnic!”

            Ethel, who was standing with her arm hooked around Viktor’s elbow, surveyed the treetops above her. Closing her eyes, she took in a deep breath and slowly let it out. 

            “It’s been so long since I’ve been out here at all,” she said. “I’ve forgotten how divine it feels.” She turned to Viktor and smiled. The light in her eyes made his heart fill with tender feelings of love for her. Afraid he might start crying, he summoned up a husky voice.

            “Then why not have a picnic out here tomorrow?” he suggested.

            Ulrich seconded the idea. “We’ll get that other spruce down by the end of today,” he said to Viktor. “A picnic will be a nice reward for us all.”

            “Can we have it at the treehouse?” Peter asked, sounding almost like a little boy in his joyful anticipation.

            “No, Peter, that’s too far for you to carry me again,” Lina said, not wanting to put anyone out.

            “Oh, I’m not planning to carry you,” he said, turning to her with a crafty smile.   

            Now Lina felt very awkward. “Well, we can’t ask Papa or Grandpa,” she began.

            “Nope,” Peter agreed. “But we won’t have to!”

            “Why’s that?” Renate asked.  Then she saw Ulrich smile.

            “Peter’s come up with something to spare his grandpa and papa’s backs,” he told them.

            “What is it?” Kristina asked.

            “Well, I took one of the other chairs like this one, and I lashed two poles to the sides of it, like this.” He indicated with his hands where the poles were, running front to back, and extending out about three feet in front and back.

            “It’s a palanquin,” Ulrich told her, smiling. 

            “Fit for a queen!” Ethel chimed in, leaning down to kiss the top of Lina’s head.

            “But…,” Lina replied, looking from one to the other of them, “someone will still have to carry me.”

            Peter nodded. “Yes, but there will be two of us in front and two in back, so it won’t be difficult at all.”

            “We’ll be your litter-bearers,” Ulrich said with a smile. 

            He had been so happy when he’d walked into the workshop a bit earlier and seen Peter’s contraption. Although he hadn’t talked about it these past four years, it had been a terrible blow to him, too, when Lina was paralyzed. In his view, she was the person in the family whose ties to the forest equaled his own, and the one he could count on to continue his collaboration with the trees with the same heart he possessed.  There was Viktor, of course, but his connection to the trees, while strong, had also waxed and waned over the years. It now seemed to be waxing steadily once more, but even so, it was in Lina that Ulrich had always seen the future of his life’s work.  Thus, he had been devastated by her accident, which seemed to deprive him of both his vibrant granddaughter and his rightful forestry heir. Already a taciturn man, Ulrich had grown even more so over the past four years, speaking little with the family, except about the running of the business. 

            Renate noticed during these years, that Ulrich barely listened to all her commentaries and calculations regarding the family. But she was at a loss when it came to knowing how to bring him out of the melancholy that had seeped back into him. It was only when she handed him the newspaper clipping about Bruno Groening that a hint of the old spark came back into his eyes. Seeing this convinced Renate that taking Lina to see Groening would be the right thing to do, and not just for Lina, but for Ulrich, too. What she didn’t realize then, was that it was the right thing to do for every single one of them.  

            Thus it was that all the members of the extended Gassmann-Bunke family, which Kristina and Ingrid were now just a few months’ shy of joining officially, made their way to the treehouse late in the morning on Sunday. The women wore their everyday dresses and aprons, the men an assortment of more of less clean work clothes.  Wicker baskets abounded, some brimming with loaves of bread, while others covered in worn, but still cheerful, kitchen towels concealed chunks of cheese and ramekins of butter. Yes, Renate assured Marcus, slapping his hand playfully as he bent to lift one towel to peer beneath it, there was sausage! There were also bottles of homemade cider and even their home-brewed beer.  And, of course, cake: a simple sheet cake topped with raspberry jam and dusted with powdered sugar.  

            If this group picture was all you saw on this morning, you’d say that this troupe looked like any other family heading into the woods for a mid-summer picnic. But if you shifted your gaze to the front of the group, you’d see Lina sitting erect in a wicker chair, while the four male members of her family walked along – two on her right, and two on her left – with the poles that Peter had lashed to sides of the chair resting on their shoulders. Their slow walking and the fact that Lina sat at their shoulder level, so that her head rose higher than theirs, lent a certain regal air to the whole procession. In fact, Lina’s bearers were making their way along the path at a measured pace because none of them wanted to be the one to trip on a branch and send Lina tumbling to the ground.  So, they directed their eyes downward as they walked. This also enhanced the impression that they were carrying a queen who commanded their utmost respect and devotion. For her part, Lina sat as still as she could, resisting the urge to look back over her shoulder and wave at the adoring masses – namely, Renate, Ethel, Kristina, and Ingrid – who were bringing up the rear.  Ingrid, who wanted to help carry Lina, but whose head barely came up to the shoulders of the men, made one brief foray to the front of the procession, walking between Marcus and Ulrich, her right arm raised and her little hand touching the pole, to symbolize her contribution to the effort.

            Even once they reached the old beech tree and Viktor, Ulrich, Peter, and Marcus gently lowered themselves – and thus, Lina – to the ground, Lina still felt quite queenly, since everyone around her took seats either on the ground or on the nearby large fallen tree trunk.

            “We’re not allowed to have our heads higher than yours,” Ingrid announced solemnly, as she walked around, bent over and carefully measuring her own height with her hand and comparing it to Lina’s.   They all laughed at this, and Lina found that she did, indeed, appreciate the higher vantage point that she’d enjoyed on her “ride” here and even now.  How liberating! she thought, realizing the toll that spending four years at the level of everyone else’s waists had taken on her. It was exhilarating! She swore that the cheese and sausage had never tasted as good as they did today. 

            Viktor noticed this, too: Renate’s cooking had grown even tastier since the visit to Groening. He hadn’t realized, back in 1921, when he complimented his future mother-in-law’s cooking, that the quality of her cooking would, like his step-mother’s, suffer under the sorrow she endured when Hans left for America.  In the past few days, though, Renate’s stews and side dishes had regained the sublime quality that Viktor had noticed when he first came to the Gassmann homestead. Now, it was finally beginning to peek out of her heart once more, and into the dishes she placed before her family.

            Even Marcus, who, to Lina’s surprise, had not balked at being one of the chair-bearers, looked relaxed and happy as he leaned back on one elbow, his crossed legs stretching out before him, alongside his fiancée. Peter, who was sitting opposite them, between Renate and Ulrich, was looking at Kristina with an intensity that surprised Lina.  How did I not see this before? she thought, as she grasped how her brother felt about the woman who would soon be his sister-in-law.  How much I’ve missed these past four years, she thought. But this realization did not sadden her. Rather, she delighted in what she was now able to observe about her family members.

            Viktor and Ethel had taken seats on the fallen log kitty-corner to Lina, and Lina was struck by the way they seemed to have eyes only for each other.  Occasionally, Viktor would reach out to take his wife’s hand, and his cornflower blue eyes looked brighter than Lina remembered them ever being. She also saw what appeared to be almost a halo around her mother’s head. Lina concluded that this was just the light through the trees playing on the strands of blonde hair that had escaped from Ethel’s braids and framed her head.

            “Can I go up?” Ingrid asked, addressing all of them.  She was standing at the foot of the treehouse’s rope ladder, one small foot already poised on the lowest rung.

            Marcus jumped up and brushed off his pants.  “Come on, then. Let me help you,” he offered.  She’s going to be my step-daughter before long, he was thinking.  But even he, so unused to being connected to his heart, noticed that the thought to help Ingrid climb the ladder had come not from his head, but from his heart, where he detected a little bit of happiness and warmth toward Kristina’s nine-year-old daughter.

            “I don’t need help,” Ingrid announced brightly.  “Just permission.”

            They all laughed, and Marcus, who had, by now, reached the ladder, demonstratively spread his arms wide, ceding her point, and directing a wink and a smile toward Kristina.

            “I think we all see who’s really going to be able to keep Marcus in line,” Renate joked, and the crowd laughed once more.

            Marcus stood alongside the ladder (and surreptitiously placed his foot on the lowest rung to steady it, once Ingrid began making her way up). The little girl confidently climbed upward, hand over hand, until her head and shoulders cleared the top. 

            Watching Ingrid, Viktor was overcome by the memory of watching Ethel climb up the ladder on that first day she brought him here. She’d seemed so self-assured, so strong and graceful, then – so free.  He looked at her now, took in her smile as she watched Ingrid, and smiled back at her when she turned and caught him gazing at her.  Their eyes met, and Viktor recalled the evening he proposed to her, how he told her that he wanted her to be guided by God to give him the answer that was right for her, even if that meant refusing him.  He told her that he would never want to lead her off a cliff. Looking at his wife now, Viktor recalled how confused she was by his words about the cliff.  She said she couldn’t imagine him ever leading her off a cliff.  And yet, he ended up doing just that. All the same, she had remained strong and graceful and confident to this day, even as she found herself pushed to the very edge of the cliffs that neither of them could have imagined as they sat up there in the treehouse.  He felt so much love for her now, as he stared into her eyes and saw in them her love for him.  The now-familiar pain had returned to his chest, alongside the joy and peace that the love brought.  I just want to make it all right.    

            Ingrid paused at the top of the ladder, trying to figure out how to maneuver herself up onto the treehouse floor.

            “Grab the second floorboard from the edge,” Ulrich called out.

            At this, Ingrid shot back, “I know, I know!”, and a moment later, they all saw her again. Now she was leaning over the treehouse railing and announcing what she had found up there.

            “Leaves. Some pine cones. But why pine cones?” she asked with a frown. “This isn’t a pine tree, is it?”

            “It’s a beech tree!” they all answered, nearly in unison.

            “She needs some tutoring,” Ulrich said, smiling.

            “Don’t worry about it, Kristina,” Viktor told her. “Your future grandpa-in-law will teach her everything about the forest.”

            “Just like he did me,” Lina affirmed with a nod.

            When Kristina heard these words, her heart melted. She gazed at each member of the Gassmann-Bunke family, these people who would soon be her family, too, hers and Ingrid’s. We are blessed, she thought. And for the first time since she’d been living here, she truly believed her own words. There was no trace now of the earlier terror that had descended on her when Lina fell out of her chair in the woods. Now she really did feel like she belonged.

            She glanced at Lina and was surprised to see a cloud-like figure standing behind her. Kristina immediately recognized this as the old man whose spirit she’d glimpsed in her room years earlier.  She couldn’t forget those gray-blue eyes and long gray beard. So, Wolf, she thought, You’re here, too. This seemed so fitting to Kristina that she nearly pointed him out to Marcus.  But then she restrained herself, afraid her fiancé would think her crazy. She could have mentioned it to Viktor, though: He was, at the same moment, also looking at the space behind Lina’s chair. It had been nearly twenty-five years since he’d heard the old man’s ringing laugh, but he heard it now, and he smiled to himself.

            Lina, however, did not sense her great-grandfather’s presence. She’d never seen him. But she did notice something that touched her deeply. She glanced over at Ulrich and saw how he was beaming as he looked up at Ingrid.  It reminded her of the way his face looked when she was Ingrid’s age, when he’d bring her out here into the forest and introduce her to each tree.  “Miss Lina,” she remembered him saying, “meet Mr. Pine.”  Now, it might seem that this memory combined with watching her grandfather and Ingrid now, might leave Lina feeling a bit sad, for any number of reasons. But this wasn’t the case at all.  Rather, Lina suddenly felt an upwelling of tenderness for Ingrid.  Maybe it was that she saw herself in the little girl, the way Viktor saw Ethel in her.  Or perhaps it was that, as Lina concluded from watching Renate’s face, her grandmother was glimpsing the bright future that this new addition would bring to their family. 

            Lina couldn’t put her finger on why she felt the way she did, but she didn’t feel any particular need to figure it out.  At that moment, she was content with the happiness that was filling her heart and lending a distinct lightness to her whole body. In the course of these hours spent in the company of her beloved family and the trees she adored, the pain in her legs had vanished entirely. And this was enough for her right now: for all of them to be here together, smiling, with love and affection flowing between them.

            Lina was certain that their family had never experienced a time together like this, at least never since she’d been alive.  Is this what happiness is? she wondered. Is this God’s plan for us all? To be together and to share this kind of joy and love? Lina caught sight of her grandmother’s face – her smile so broad, her eyes so brightly lit now – and as she did so, a swallow, iridescent black and purple in the sunlight, swooped down between the trees and landed on one of the beech’s low branches.  Lina’s mouth opened in surprise. A swallow here? I never see them in the woods.  The bird was looking right at her, and – Am I imagining it? –  it extended one wing down to touch the branch it was resting on.  Then, in one, swift, powerful movement, it lifted off the branch and, giving a sharp chirp, rose sharply into an opening between the beech tree and the surrounding pines, and vanished in the sky. 

            Lina was too shocked to speak, or to call anyone’s attention to the bird. Besides, it was gone in an instant.  But in the brief time of its visit, Lina felt herself filled up with power, a force that tingled throughout her body and brought her a lightness that gave her the sensation that she was floating above the seat of her chair.  She felt weak in the knees and, simultaneously, full of gratitude, for she knew that this was a gift from God.  And at this very moment, a flash of insight came to her: It was in God’s plan for me to have my accident.  She glanced around once more, shifting her gaze from one to the other of those sitting here with her; and then up at Ingrid, too, who was continuing to entertain them by piling dried leaves on top of her head as a crown, and striking the most regal pose she could. I had to have my accident, Lina thought, for this:  to bring us all together, in happiness.  

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Above the River, Chapter 29

~ Sue Downing

Chapter 29

Once the family came out of the Birkners’ house, they pushed Lina back out to the car and got her settled in. Marcus drove the car, and their grandparents rode in the back seat, just as they’d done on the drive to Bremen.  Peter rolled Lina’s empty wheelchair over to the pickup truck, easily hoisted it into the back, and then joined his parents in the truck, stepping lightly up into the cab and taking a seat next to his mother, who was sitting in the middle. 

When they arrived back home, it was already so late – after eleven – that everyone’s sole focus was on helping Lina out of the car and into the house, so that Ethel could get her ready for bed.  They were all dead tired, but, at the same time, each of them was also filled with a strange energy.  It was a mental alertness that was unfamiliar to them, and which made no sense, since Mrs. Birkner had not served any coffee or tea.  They all felt something in their bodies, but the something varied, and the intensity varied from person to person: Marcus barely noticed any physical sensations, but was surprised at his wakefulness. He also perceived a certain clarity regarding his situation, even though he couldn’t yet articulate it. Renate and Ulrich, too, just couldn’t get to sleep, so they lay awake, discussing the evening. 

At one point, Ulrich asked Renate to lay her hand on his arm and tell him whether she could feel the strong vibration he was sensing in his body.

“No,” she replied, after doing as he’d asked. “But maybe that’s because my own hand is tingling.”

“It’s odd, Renate,” he said then. “Mr. Groening was talking about the current – the Heilstrom, he called it, right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Well, that’s what I feel when I’m amongst the trees,” Ulrich told her.  “I know I’ve always said that I feel God out there, feel God in the trees.” He saw Renate nod. “So is that what I’ve felt all these years? The Heilstrom?”

“I can’t say, my dear,” Renate replied, surprised at her own lack of certainty about this, after a lifetime of feeling certainty about everything.

“It felt pretty much the same,” Ulrich went on.  But then he noticed that Renate didn’t seem interested in exploring this fascinating topic.  She looked distracted.  “What is it?” he asked her.

“You know, it was strange,” Renate told him.  “There was a moment, when Mr. Groening was looking at each of us. Remember?” Ulrich nodded, and she went on. “Well, when he looked at me, I suddenly remembered Anna-Liese.”

Ulrich raised himself up on one elbow and looked at his wife with a shocked and concerned expression. “You did?”

Renate nodded. “I could see her face, Ulrich, so clearly. But not her face when she was a baby.” She paused. “Not when she was still alive.”

“How, then?”

“She looked older. Maybe ten? Eleven? But I knew it was her, Ulrich. I recognized her.”

Ulrich said nothing, but drew her to him.

“What can it mean?” Renate asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” Ulrich told her.  “You’re the expert when it comes to that kind of thing,” he said jokingly, although he could tell that this was nothing to make light of.

But Renate went on, as if she hadn’t noticed his tone, and she certainly hadn’t taken it amiss. “It was so, so long ago.  Why did I see her? An older her?”

“I can’t say,” Ulrich replied.  “But how did it make you feel when you saw her?”

Here Renate began crying.  Ulrich started to get worried, but she patted him on the arm. “At first, I felt a bit frightened. I’ve never seen her – that way, seen her face – since she died. I thought maybe she was coming to blame me.”

“No, no,” Ulrich said, seeking to comfort her. “You said it yourself. It was so long ago. If she wanted to blame you, she would have done it years ago.  And besides, she has nothing to blame you for.” He could feel Renate shaking her head.

“That’s not true. What happened was all my fault.” Now the tears poured out of her even more, and Ulrich held her tight as she cried.  The first, faint light was creeping into the sky by the time they finally drifted off to a restless sleep.

* * *

Viktor and Ethel were also too worked up to sleep.  Viktor was consumed with thoughts of the sensations he was feeling in his body.  Back in the Birkners’ house, when Groening came into the room, Viktor begun feeling hot all over. He’d been overly warm even before that, but once Groening began talking, he suddenly felt warmer than he had ever felt in his whole life, as if he was surrounded by a blazing fire. It also felt like flames were scorching him from the inside, especially in his stomach.  The pain from it was intense, right from the start, but he didn’t want to let on to anyone about it, not during the gathering, and especially not afterwards, because Lina was the one who was really suffering. They needed to get her home and into bed as soon as possible.  He was grateful that it was already dark by the time they were driving home, so that Ethel beside him in the truck couldn’t see his clenched jaw, or the way he gripped the steering wheel to keep his attention focused on the road.

But it wasn’t just heat that Viktor felt at the Birkners’ house, or pain in his stomach. Something also happened in his heart, although it was gone now.  If he hadn’t known better, he would have been certain he was having a heart attack. But he did know better. He recognized this pain: It was exactly what he’d felt in the woods the other week. Well, maybe not exactly, since he managed not to double over or scream or cry or vomit right there in the Birkners’ parlor, the way he did in the treehouse. But it was the same kind of pain as then. 

As unhappy as Viktor was to go through that again, he realized that something else about this second experience was familiar to him, too. Lying in bed now, with his stomach still burning inside, he noticed a little well of tenderness inside him, where the pains in his heart had been earlier.  That’s what he had felt after the afternoon in the treehouse: First the terrible dam opened up inside him, and all that pain and sadness came out, and then he suddenly begun to feel alive again.  Just a bit of joy emerged at first, just a bit of tenderness and love for Ethel. That was how it started. And over the next couple of weeks, he noticed that he was feeling more loving toward her. They were falling asleep each night holding hands, or embracing. 

Tonight, at the Birkners’, when Groening looked at him, when the pain in his heart began, and grew, that pain was accompanied – which made no sense to Viktor at all – by the sweetest feeling of love for every member of his family.  Lying in bed with Ethel now, Viktor recalled how he looked at each of them, one by one, as they sat in the parlor listening with rapt attention to Bruno Groening, and how he was overcome by such a wave of gratitude for each of them, and by the strong wish to make everything all right for all of these ones who were so dear to him.

Of course, he didn’t express any of this to Ethel, or ask her what he had asked himself: Could these pains be the Regelungen pains Groening spoke of? He contented himself with drawing his wife closer to him, holding his arm around her shoulder as she rested against his chest.  But he needn’t have worried that Ethel would ask him anything about his own experience that night.  She seemed to be floating on the clouds.  It’s a good thing I’ve got an arm around her! Viktor thought to himself with a smile.  This really was the Ethel of the period of their courtship and early marriage: so joyful and vibrant.  The only thing that tempered her flight into the ether was her concern about Lina.

“Viktor,” Ethel said, “she was never like this – in this much pain, I mean. Not even at the beginning, right after the accident.”

“They gave her some kind of pain medicine then, didn’t they?” he asked, as he gently stroked her blonde curls.

“Yes, in the hospital they did,” she told him. “But before that, right after it happened, before we got her to the hospital, she didn’t seem to be having any pain at all.”

“That happens,” Viktor said, “especially with serious injuries. I don’t know why it is. The brain seems to shut down. It’s as if the person doesn’t even understand that they’ve been terribly injured.”

Ethel realized that he must know this from the war, so she didn’t ask him to explain.  “But,” she did ask, “why would she be having pain now, if she didn’t have it then?  This kind of horrible pain?”

“And in her legs,” Viktor added thoughtfully.

Ethel nodded and raised herself up so that she could see his face. “She felt something in her legs tonight, Viktor.  For the first time in four years.  Surely that must mean something, something good.”

Viktor wrapped his other arm around her and leaned down to kiss the top of her head, so tenderly that he saw tears come to her eyes. 

“I do think it means something,” he said softly.  “Let’s pray to God that it means she’s going to get better.”

*          *          *

Alone in his own room, Peter undressed, and pulled back the bedcovers. Then he sat down and swung his right leg up up onto the bed. He followed with the left and lay down, pulling just the sheet over himself, since the summer night air was still warm.      He had barely closed his eyes – even though he, like the rest of his family, felt too full of energy to sleep – when a thought came into his mind.  He had not noticed it at the time, when they were getting ready to leave the Birkners’ house, or when they arrived back home, but now he realized something.  He’d been the one who helped Lina out of her chair and into the car. Then he’d rolled her chair over to the truck and stowed it there.  After that, he had hopped right up into the front seat of the pickup.  And hopped right down once they got home.  He’d rushed to get Lina’s chair for her, and he’d pulled her up out of the car and into her seat. Then he’d pushed her into the house.  And all – this was the part that gave him pause – without limping, without any pain whatsoever in his mangled right leg.

Peter stopped breathing for a moment or two, and went over all the details in his mind again.  Yes, there really had been no pain. He was sure of it.  Still lying down, he took a deep breath. Then he began slowly bending his right knee and tilting his leg this way and that.  It didn’t hurt.  Next, he sat up in bed, pulled the covers off, and swung first his left, and then his right, leg over the side, until both feet rested on the floor. He did it effortlessly, with no discomfort.  His stomach fluttering now, he stood up and looked down at his right leg, before taking a few steps across the room.  Still no pain. He strode back and forth across the room, faster and faster.  Nothing hurt. 

Next, he lifted his left leg and stood there on his right foot. He hadn’t been able to do that since before the war, because the muscles had been so damaged, and the break a bad one.  That’s what the doctors had said.  But now, he was standing on his “bad” leg. Eager to test what was now possible, he lifted himself up onto his tip toes, and back down again.  It was as if he’d never been wounded. After a few rounds of lifting and lowering himself, Peter suddenly found himself hopping on that right leg, hopping lightly and effortlessly, just the way he’d done as a child. He hopped around the room, his chest bursting with joy.  He had to stop himself from laughing out loud.  He didn’t want to wake anyone.   How? he asked himself in amazement, tears running down his cheeks? How did it happen?

In the room kittycorner from Peter’s, Lina lay in her bed, eyes swollen from all her crying, her jaw clenched from the pain that was coursing ruthlessly through her legs. One hand clutched the bedsheet, and in the other she held the tin foil ball Bruno Groening had given her. “Trust and believe.” That’s what he told me. “The divine power helps and heals.” Squeezing the ball tight with her fingers, she began repeating these two sentences, over and over, over and over. When the morning light streamed through the curtains of her bedroom window and Ethel came in to help her get up, Lina was still holding the tin foil ball, and Ethel could tell by her face that she hadn’t slept at all.  Her face was contorted by pain, but when Ethel leaned over to kiss her daughter on the forehead, Lina looked up at her and whispered, in a tired, but determined voice, “Trust and believe, Mama. The divine force helps and heals.”

*          *          *

The next day was Friday, and the family assembled for their usual breakfast of coffee and sweet rolls before Ingrid headed off to school and Marcus to the office in Varel. Despite the excitement of the previous evening – or perhaps because most of them had not slept so much during the night –no one seemed eager to talk about their visit to the Birkners, or Bruno Groening.  They could all see that Lina was in excruciating pain: Her face was pale, and she sat at the table with her eyes closed, except when she was eating.  Her left hand, which lay in her lap, was wrapped around the tin foil ball Groening had given her.

Kristina, who had helped Lina get washed and dressed that morning, looked across the table, hoping to catch her friend’s eye.  In the nearly four years since she and Ingrid had come to live with the Gassmanns, she had seen Lina hostile, bored, angry, lacking in hope, and full of hope.  But until this morning, she had never seen her in pain, as she was now.

“My God, Lina!” Kristina exclaimed when she walked into Lina’s room and saw her friend sitting, staring glassy-eyed at the door – not at Kristina – one hand gripping the wheelchair’s arm, the other folded around the tin foil ball.  Her lips were moving slightly, but Kristina couldn’t hear any sound.  “What is it?” Kristina asked her. “What did you say?”

Now Lina shifted her gaze to Kristina’s face.  It seemed to take her a few seconds to recognize Kristina, who had to repeat her question once more before Lina answered.

“Trust and believe,” she said, so softly that Kristina just barely caught the words. “The divine power helps and heals.”

Not knowing how to respond, Kristina just nodded.

“Mr. Groening told me that last night before he left,” Lina explained, having realized that Kristina wanted an explanation, but hesitated to ask.

“Ahhh.” Kristina stood looking at Lina for a bit before continuing.  She thought about asking whether she was in pain, but that was clear without even talking about it, so she forged ahead, to the heart of the matter. “Lina,” she said, crouching down next to the wheelchair, so she could look up into Lina’s eyes, “what do you think the pain means?”

“Kristina,” Lina said in a tired voice, “this is the first time I’ve felt anything in my legs in almost four years…”

“That has to be a good sign!” Kristina burst in, eager to encourage her friend.

  “That I’m feeling something?” Lina nodded. “I believe that. I do. But I’m also so scared, Kristina.”

Now Kristina saw that tears were forming in Lina’s eyes. She placed her hand on Lina’s, the one holding the ball, and noticed that her own hand began to tingle immediately.

“Why are you scared?”

“What if this is the way it’s going to be, for the rest of my life?”  Lina grabbed Kristina’s arm with her free hand. “What if it keeps on hurting like this, and I still can’t walk?  Or if I am able to walk, but the pain stays?” She looked at Kristina with genuine fear in her eyes.

Kristina stood up and wrapped her arms around Lina.  “No, no, it won’t be like that, Lina!  It can’t!”  Now she felt tears coming to her eyes, too. For she wondered – just for a brief second –  whether Groening could have somehow harmed Lina. What if he is a charlatan after all? But then she forced this thought out of her mind. She didn’t really believe it, anyway, but even if this was the case, mentioning her thought to Lina would only make things worse. So many people have tried to rob her of her hope and faith. I won’t be one of them. I have to trust and believe, too.

“But, Kristina, it might be like that – that I’m doomed to feel this way forever!  And then what will I do? I don’t think I could go on living like that.”

Kristina had nothing to say to this, so she just kept hugging Lina as she cried.

“That’s what I’ve been thinking about, all night long,” Lina said finally. “Here is how it goes for me: First the pain comes – really, it never goes away. It’s there – strong, strong strong. And I get so frightened that it’ll be this way forever.  Then I repeat, Trust and believe. The divine power helps and heals. And the pain quiets down a little. Then it starts up all over again. Again and again, that’s what I’m thinking and feeling, Kristina.” She leaned her head forward so that it rested against Kristina’s shoulder.

“So when you say that, it helps?” Kristina asked. 

Lina nodded.  “I realized that, toward morning, so now I’ve taken to repeating it.  It helps keep the fear out of my mind.  Not totally, but it helps.”

“Trust and believe,” Kristina said, trying out the words aloud. “The divine power helps and heals.” Then she repeated the phrases a few more times. This felt right to her, and the doubts she herself had been struggling with faded away.  “Let’s just keep saying that, all day long, if we have to.”  She took Lina’s hands in hers. 

“They’ll all think I’m crazy,” Lina replied, and she even managed a thin smile.

“Let them!” Kristina told her. “We need to do whatever we have to do to help you make it through this next week, until we take you to see Mr. Groening again.”

“Oh, Kristina,” Lina cried, “but what if we go back and my legs hurt even more?  I really couldn’t stand that.  I couldn’t!”  The look of fear returned to her eyes.

“Trust and believe,” Kristina told her sternly.  “And remember all those people who got healed in Herford.”

Lina looked her in the eye. “What if that was all a lie?” she said softly. “People planted in the audience to pretend they were healed?”

Oh, so that’s occurred to her, too… Kristina stood up and put her hands on her hips. “But what about that man last night, Mr. Handler? You saw with your own eyes how his leg was healed.  You saw the way he walked around the room, how Groening broke his cane!”

“He could have been a plant, too,” Lina whispered, as if simultaneously wanting to confide in Kristina, but also not voice her doubts.

But Kristina shook her head vehemently. Her own mind was clear now. No doubts!   “No, Lina! No!  I won’t believe that, and you shouldn’t, either!” She pointed at the tin foil ball in Lina’s hand. “How could that be fake, whatever it is that makes my hand tingle when I touch it?”

Lina’s mouth opened in surprise. “I’ve been holding it all night. It makes my whole body vibrate, just like I felt at the Birkners’. You feel that, too?”

Kristina nodded. “And it gives me a peaceful feeling, a feeling of being loved. He couldn’t fake that, could he?” Kristina asked.

Lina shook her head. “I feel that, too, despite how much my legs hurt.”

The two of them were silent for a moment. Then Kristina cried, “But Lina – the newspaper clipping!  We both felt something from that.  For me it was a tingling. And happiness. And I felt that last night in the room. You did, too. I know it. You told Mr. Groening.”

“Yes, but…”

“What I’m saying is this: Even if somehow he could put something in the room that could make us feel that way – although who knows how that would be possible – even if he did, how could he put something into a sheet of newspaper? Something that would cause us both to feel that way when we held it, when we looked at his photo?”

Lina considered this, stopping for a moment as a wave of pain flooded through her.  Then she said, “Yes, you have to be right. He couldn’t fake that.”

Kristina saw a bit of light come back into her friend’s eyes.

“All right then,” she told Lina, stern again. “Then we don’t spend a single minute thinking any more about whether it’s all true or not. You just hold that ball and remind yourself of what Mr. Groening told you. We’ll say it together when we’re working or walking. Agreed?”

Lina nodded. Then she added, “You really felt all of that last night, too, Kristina?” she asked quietly.

“I did.  It felt like a wave came up from the floor, into my feet and up through my body.  A wave of energy, I guess I’d call it.  Like the tingling I felt when I held the clipping, but stronger. Wider, I’d say, if that makes any sense.”

“It does.”

Now it was Kristina’s turn to look off across the room, as if she was thinking back to the evening before and trying to regain full awareness of what she’d experienced then.

“And I felt such calm, Lina.  For the first time since the war began, I felt at peace.  It’s as if a load has been lifted off my shoulders. All the worries. I’ve worried so much about Ingrid, about what I’ll do if another war comes. Even about how I can manage to stay here.” She could see that Lina was about to object, to reassure her, but she shook her head. “I know what you want to say, that we are like family now, that we can stay here forever.  But Lina, I have dreams all the time, where I’m rushing to pack things up, waking Ingrid up to drag her out into the night to flee.” She looked at Lina and took her hands again. “But last night, when Mr. Groening was talking to us, I started to feel so light. That wave – it was more of a trickle, really, but it was still there – it flowed through my body, and I had a feeling, that…  No, I knew it. Everything will be okay. Everything is okay. For the first time since the war began, I went to bed last night feeling at ease, and really knowing that we can stay here with you all.”

“That’s so wonderful, Kristina,” Lina told her. “But I’m so sorry.”

“Whatever for?”

“That I never knew you felt that way.  I mean, I knew you were happy to be living here, to have a more normal life again. But I didn’t know you had those dreams, that you were still so worried. I’ve been so consumed with my own state that I never asked about yours. Forgive me.”

“No, no. There’s nothing to forgive. I have to tell you, Lina, I wasn’t fully aware myself of how strong the worry has been, until it lifted last night. I guess I just lived with it.  But even if I had fully realized it, I wouldn’t have said anything.  After all,” she said with a smile, “it’s not the way we are, we Germans, right?”

Lina shook her head, and knew that she didn’t even need to ask Kristina not to share the conversation they’d just had.  And when she happened to open her eyes and look over at Kristina during breakfast, Kristina blinked once at her, and Lina could see her lips silently mouthing Mr. Groening’s phrases, encouraging her.  That was a good thing, too, because in the next moment, Marcus, holding a hard-boiled egg in his left hand, began gesturing toward Lina with his right.

“I know we don’t talk about things in this family,” he began sarcastically, “but don’t we have to talk about this?”

“What precisely do you mean?” Viktor asked in a flat tone. He had hoped they would be able to get through breakfast, at least, without this conversation.

Marcus tapped the arm of Lina’s wheelchair with the egg, to crack i. “This!  The fact that she is still using this!”

“First of all,” Ethel told him sharply, “you’re talking about your sister, who has a name. Lina.”

Marcus raised his hands in his familiar gesture of mock surrender, then put the egg back down on his plate and directed a challenging gaze at his mother. “And second of all?”

Ethel stared him down.  “Second of all, why do we have to talk about it at all? Mr. Groening asked us all to come back next week, and –“

Shaking his head, Marcus brought his hands to his forehead and ran them back, smoothing his hair. “That charlatan?” he said with a smirk, looking around the table.

“Don’t say that,” Lina told him softly.

“Why not? Let’s call a spade a spade, for once, in this family!”

“Marcus, please!” Renate asked, even reaching toward him. But he just looked at her hand as it approached him and kept talking.

“I agreed with this insane plan to humor you all,” he said.  “But now it’s clear that the experiment has failed. Why can’t we just admit it and get on with our lives?” They all heard the bitterness that had crept into his tone.

“No, Marcus,” Viktor replied, an edge to his voice now, too. “You agreed because there was something in it for you if Lina was healed. You’d be able to stay at your job. Remember?”

Marcus knew that his father was trying to embarrass him, but he wasn’t going to go down that road. “But now the whole thing is irrelevant, because Lina’s never getting out of that chair. She’s stuck there.  All because that fake, Groening, took you all in. And I’ll be stuck here on the homestead for the rest of my life, too.”

At this point, Ulrich and Viktor rose to their feet in unison. But before they could speak, Peter suddenly stood up, too. He’d been sitting at the opposite end of the table from Marcus, on the other side, next to Viktor, and no one had noticed that his shoulders and face went tense when Marcus began his tirade.  The last thing anyone expected was for Peter to get involved in a dispute, even verbally, and much less, physically.  So, all eyes turned to him, and they all fell silent.

“Groening is not a fake,” Peter said in a soft, but strong voice. 

“Peter,” Lina told him, “you don’t have to protect me. I know it looks bad –“

“I’m not protecting you,” Peter replied.  “Well, I am, I guess, but what I’m saying is that I know Groening is on the up and up.”

Marcus guffawed, and they all looked back to him. “Right.  And just how do you know that?” He shook his head, picked the boiled egg up again, which he’d peeled in the meantime, and shoved it into his mouth whole.

“There was that Mr. Handler last night,” Renate put in. “The one whose leg was healed.  We all saw it!”

Marcus shook his head again and spoke with his full mouth, but they all understood. “A plant.  Handler never had an injury in his life.”

“And the woman behind me,” Kristina boldly reminded him.  “Her pain went away.”

Marcus rolled his eyes. “So she said.  I can’t believe you were all taken in by him.”

“But thousands were healed in Herford,” Lina said, and then, silently, kept repeating in her mind, Trust and believe. The divine power helps and heals.

Marcus was about to offer a retort, when everyone noticed that Peter was now standing near the corner of the table, between Ethel and Ulrich, in the middle of the kitchen floor.

“And not just in Herford,” Peter said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Marcus asked, not even turning to look at his brother.

“This,” Peter replied simply.  Then he slowly lifted his left leg and stood there, balancing on his right leg, the one everyone knew was his “bad” leg.  At first no one grasped the significance of this posture. It was only when Peter began hopping on his right leg that it slowly dawned on them.  Ethel started out by wondering why Peter was jumping up and down like a schoolboy, but ended by springing from her seat and grabbing him by the elbow. Even so, she couldn’t get any words out. Nor could any of the rest of them.  Marcus finally deigned to turn his head, and when he saw what Peter was doing, his mouth fell open. Bits of hard-boiled egg dropped out and onto his shirt.

Peter stopped hopping and proceeded to walk the length of the kitchen, from the back door to the fireplace. His gait was as smooth as it had been before the war. 

Ingrid was the first to speak. “Mama,” she said, leaning over to Kristina, “Can I hop, too?” Kristina looked at her, as if she hadn’t even heard her daughter, and then shook her head.

“Peter?” Lina asked finally. “What –“

But he put up his hand and said to them all, “That’s not all.  Look at this.”  He walked through the doorway into the addition to the house. Although only Renate could see what was happening from her seat, all of them could hear that Peter was climbing the stairs to the second floor.  They could hear the sound of his footfalls on the wooden steps, moving steadily and evenly up, and then back down again.

When he reentered the kitchen, his face flushed and his eyes shining, with a broad smile on his face, everyone was speechless for a long moment, even Marcus.  Then Viktor and Ulrich, who had remained standing following Marcus’ earlier remarks, both made their way over to him.  A moment later, everyone was standing around him, except for Marcus, who remained seated on principle, and Lina, who had backed her wheelchair up and rolled over next to Peter. 

“You see, Marcus,” Peter said to his brother, speaking strongly and clearly now, “Groening really can heal. How could he have faked this?”

  A chorus of voices asked him to explain how and when it had happened, and he told them the whole story of when he had realized he was healed, and of his nighttime gymnastics.

“You should have awakened us,” Renate said.  “Our room is right across from yours.”

“You should have told us all!” Ulrich added, realizing too late, from the awkward look on Peter’s face, and from the way Lina had bent her head down, why it was that Peter had kept the news to himself.

In the silence that followed her grandfather’s words, Lina raised her head back up. She reached over and took Peter’s hand in hers.

“I understand why you didn’t wake the whole household,” she told him tenderly. “You’re always trying to protect me.  But you should have told us right away.”

Peter, who was experiencing a mixture of elation at his own healing and despair at the knowledge of how his success would affect his dear sister, leaned down and hugged her tightly around the shoulders.  At this gesture of loving affection, she began to cry, but then hastened to reassure them all.

“No, it’s all right. I am so happy for you, Peter.  It’s a miracle!”

Kristina, who was standing behind Lina’s chair now and also next to Marcus’ chair, spoke up. “But not just that.” They all turned to look at her. “Don’t you see? It proves that Mr. Groening isn’t a fake.”

Renate nodded. “Yes, it certainly does. The living proof is right before us!” She wrapped an arm around Peter’s waist and hugged him to her.

“And if Peter has been healed,” Kristina went on, more outspoken in this moment than she had been in her four years with this family, “then Lina can be, too.”

“Yes, yes!” Ethel affirmed. “She will be healed, too.”

“We’ll see Mr. Groening again next week,” Renate added. “You just have to hold out until then, Lina, dear.”

At this point, Ingrid, who saw no reason why she shouldn’t have some fun, if a miracle had just occurred, wedged her way between Renate and Peter and took Peter’s hand.

“Uncle Peter,” she said, “let’s hop, together!” 

This brought a laugh from everyone, even from Marcus.  Although he had remained seated during the flurry of activity and excitement around Peter, scowling, as if he was furious at having been proved wrong, now he pushed back his chair. He stood up and slipped an arm around Kristina’s waist. She turned and gave him a questioning glance, surprised that he would show her this affection in front of his family. She was also taken aback by the change she saw in him. Two minutes earlier, he had been filled with vitriol, but now his eyes were bright, his smile genuine.

“Hop to your heart’s content, Brother!” he called out to Peter, raising his right arm in an expansive, celebratory gesture.

Everyone turned to look at him, wary that his remark was but another sarcastic attack. But the change in his demeanor struck them all, too.

“Now that you’re back on your feet, soon you’ll be back in the forest, too.  Which means I’ll be staying in Varel for good!”

At this, the family members fell into an awkward silence. Marcus seemed not to understand why.  He felt Kristina slip out of his embrace. 

“Ingrid, come on,” she said a bit curtly, “let’s get you off to school.”

Even Ulrich sounded gruff when he said to Marcus, “Don’t you have a car to get back to your boss?”

Lina, without a word to anyone, slowly turned her chair. Rolling through the kitchen door that Kristina held open for her after she and Ingrid had gone out, she pushed herself down the ramp and into the yard, over to where the path led into the forest.  There she sat, squeezing the tin foil ball in her right hand, and soundlessly repeating Groening’s phrase over and over again.

It wasn’t long before Peter came out of the house, too. But instead of heading into the workshop as he usually did following breakfast, he strode over to where Lina was sitting and crouched down beside her, resting on his knees.

“Lina, I’m so sorry,” he said quietly, laying his hand on her arm.

When she turned to him, he saw not the blame he had feared he’d find in her eyes, but love.  Certainly, he could see the pain on her face, too, but he realized now that he was not the cause of it.

“Peter,” she asked quietly, “why are you apologizing? You have nothing to be sorry for!”

“But I do,” he told her. “For getting healed while you’re still in this damned chair!” 

“How could that be your fault?”

Peter shrugged. “I don’t know… Believe me, Lina, last night at the Birkners’, I wasn’t thinking of myself at all!  The whole time, I was just thinking of you and asking Mr. Groening for you to be healed.  I didn’t stop doing that – not for a single second!” 

“Peter,” Lina said firmly, “it’s not your fault that I wasn’t healed last night!”

“But then whose fault is it?” Peter replied, almost angry now. “Damn it, Lina! It should have been you, not me!”

Lina shook her head. “Don’t talk like that, Peter.  I’m really, truly, so happy that you got healed.”

“If I could trade places with you, you know I would,” Peter told her, grasping her arm more firmly now.

“I know you would, dear Peter,” Lina said, her voice as full of love as her eyes, even though her whole body seemed to be tensing with pain now.  “But I wouldn’t want you to.”

“Why not?  You should want that. I was the one who crippled you in the first place. It should be me who’s in that chair, not you!”

She pulled her arm from his grasp and, taking hold of the wheelchair’s wheels, turned herself so that she was facing him.

“How can you say that, Peter?” she said, leaning forward and taking his face in her hands. “It wasn’t your fault I got hurt.  I don’t blame you!”

“But I still blame myself,” he said. 

“Please, we’ve been over that! It wasn’t your fault! And besides,” Lina went on, “did you see the look on Marcus’ face this morning when you got up and started hopping around? Good God, Peter, you proved him wrong!  In front of everyone!” Here Lina began to smile as she remembered the scene.

Peter smiled back at her and nodded his head. “I have to admit that it did feel good to get the better of him, for once.”

“It’s not just that,” Lina told him. “Seeing you this way – the new you! – gives me hope, just like Mama and Grandma and Kristina said.  Hope that I can be healed, too.”

“I believe it, too!” Peter said earnestly.

“But you don’t know how many doubts kept rushing into my head last night, Peter.”

“Because of your pain?”

Lina nodded.  “And because I felt like a failure, somehow.”

“Why a failure?”

“Because that Mr. Handler got healed, and the woman behind Kristina, too.  And all I got was pain. The thought kept coming into my brain that I did something wrong, and that’s why I wasn’t healed, too.”

“Oh, God, Lina,” Peter cried, grasping her hands that were still cupping his face, “And then I come in this morning and announce that I got healed, too. I’m so sorry!”

“Stop that!” Lina told him sharply.  “You are my hope, don’t you understand? Now I can watch you walk, as if nothing ever happened to you in the war, and that reminds me that Mr. Groening is not a fake, not a charlatan.  You are living proof of that for me.”

As Peter listened to her speak, he noticed that his left cheek was feeling very warm beneath Lina’s palm, and that she was holding something against his cheek. Reaching up and taking her hand, he saw the tin foil ball that Groening had given her the night before.

“It felt so warm where it was touching my cheek!” he told her, leaning over and looking at it with curiosity.  “Is it just tin foil?”

She grasped it between her thumb and forefinger. “I think so.  But I feel heat when I hold it, too. And tingling. The way I felt it in the room last night.” She held it out to him. “Here, hold it yourself.”

Peter hesitated at first. “But Groening gave it to you,” he said.  But when Lina moved it toward him once more, he opened his hand so that she could lay it onto his palm. He felt the warmth again, and then a slight tingling appeared, first in his hand and then up through his entire arm.

“Did you feel that at the Birkners’?” Lina asked him.

“I’m not sure,” he told her.  “I don’t really recall feeling anything then. I was concentrating on watching Groening and watching you, too, to see if anything was changing. So, maybe I just wasn’t paying attention to what I was feeling, even when he asked us to do that.  But I feel it now, holding this.”  He closed his eyes and sat crouched there like that for a few moments, taking in the sensations that were flowing not just in his arm now, but through other parts of his body, too.  When he looked back up at Lina’s face, their eyes met, and Peter felt a great joy.  He could see that she felt the same way.

“You know what this is?” he asked her, indicating the ball.

  “Besides just a tin foil ball, you mean?”

Peter nodded, and Lina shook her head.  Then he leaned forward,

“It’s a fairy rune,” he said, a conspiratorial smile on his face.

Lina laughed now, a sweet, tinkling laugh that reminded Peter of their mother’s. “How did I not realize that?” she asked him, opening her eyes wide and then winking at him.

“I don’t know!” Peter replied. “It’s obvious!” He was so happy to see her smiling. “And do you know what this means?  This part here?” He pointed to a series of small wrinkles on the ball’s surface that did, in fact, resemble tiny versions of their old fairy runes’ letters.

Lina leaned over to scrutinize the wrinkle-letters, eager to play along.  She looked back up at Peter.

“No, I don’t.” She couldn’t wait to hear what he’d say.

“Hope,” Peter replied, with an impish grin, holding his sister’s eyes with his own. “Just the same as on our runes.”  He handed the ball back to Lina, who brought it up close to her eyes and examined it.

“You’re absolutely right,” she told him, taking his hand in hers now. “How did I not realize that, either?”  And when she began to cry, a frown came to Peter’s face. He was about to apologize for upsetting her, but she shook her head. “Mr. Groening knows us well, doesn’t he? To give me a fairy rune?”

“And thank goodness I was here to interpret it for you!” Peter said, smiling again now.

Lina nodded. “Yes, thank God.”

Peter lowered himself down until he was sitting on the ground, with his knees bent. He wrapped his arms around his knees and clasped his hands together, marveling at how comfortable he felt.  Lina, who had seen her brother struggle over the past four years to find a position in which he could comfortably sit or stand, was struck by how at ease he looked.

“So,” she asked him, almost gingerly, “your leg doesn’t hurt anymore?”

Peter shook his head. “It isn’t just that I can move it normally again. There’s not the least bit of pain.”  He didn’t want to go into it in detail, fearing that Lina might feel discouraged.  But she forged ahead.

“How did you realize you’d been healed, anyway?” she asked, and Peter could tell she was truly curious.  So he told her once more the story of what had happened when he’d gotten into bed the night before.  She smiled as he told her how he’d been hopping all over his bedroom.

“I can’t believe I didn’t hear you!” she said. “Or Grandma and Grandpa.  They’re just a stone’s throw away from your room.”

“But their hearing isn’t as good as yours,” he replied, and they both laughed.

For a few minutes, they both directed their gaze into the forest, which was coming alive in the early morning light, innumerable insects and spider webs visible in the thin rays of sunshine that made their way to the spaces between the trees.

“It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?” Lina asked, her voice calm.

“The forest? Yes.”

“Even though I haven’t been able to go in there,” Lina went on, “just sitting here these four years has helped me a lot.”  She looked over at Peter.  “Even from here I can feel God. Not as much as when I was amongst the trees, of course.  But I can still feel Him.”

Peter nodded.  Then his mouth opened, as if a thought had just come to him, and he jumped – easily! – to his feet.  He stood so that his back was to Lina, right in front of her chair.  Then he crouched down once more and bent his arms so that his hands stretched back toward Lina.

“Lean forward and put your arms around my neck,” he said to her. “Can you do that?”

“I… I don’t know,” she said, perplexed as to what he intended. “I can try.  But why?”

He turned and looked back over his shoulder at her. 

“Remember back after the accident, when I said I wished I could carry you to the treehouse?”

“Yes, but…”

“Well, now I can carry you.”

“But, no, Peter!” Lina cried.  “You’re not strong enough!”

He turned around again. “I don’t believe that, Lina!  I’m healed!  I am strong enough.  Do you doubt that Groening healed me entirely?”

This gave Lina pause.  She didn’t want to doubt that, because then she might start doubting that she could be completely healed, too…

“All right,” she said, finally. “Let’s try it. But if you get too tired –“

“Don’t even say that!” Peter told her.  “Just lean forward and put your hands around my neck.  I’ll reach back and hold onto you under your knees. And with any luck, I’ll be able to tip you forward and walk that way.”

“A piggy back ride,” Lina said, her voice growing light again.

“That’s right,” Peter told her. “Just like when you were a little girl.”

And that is exactly what they did.  It took a couple tries for Peter to lean forward the right amount so that he could both get Lina squarely onto his back and slip his arms beneath her knees without them getting caught on her skirts. But then, suddenly, there they were, moving slowly, but surely along the path that led into the forest. 

Lina was still holding the tin foil ball in her right hand, which made it harder for her to hold onto Peter, but he didn’t mind having it press against his collarbone. Quite the opposite, really: It helped him feel stronger, somehow. Since coming back from the war, he’d never hauled this much weight around, so he was surprised at how easy it was for him to carry Lina through the woods. It felt to him like Bruno Groening was walking along the path with them, helping him carry Lina, helping her hold onto him.

When they got to the old beech tree, Peter was all set to try to climb the ladder with Lina on his back, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

“That ladder may hold one of us, but it’ll never hold us both,” she told him, laughing. “Just lower me down here, and I’ll lean against the trunk.”

And so it was that Lina and Peter came to be sitting at the foot of the beech tree that had played such an important role in their parents’ lives.

“Remember how Mama would tell how she and Uncle Hans used to play up there when they were little?” Lina asked, leaning her head back to look up at the logs that formed the floor of the treehouse.

Peter nodded. “They played Hansel and Gretel, right?”

“I know she said they played that when they went out in the woods and built little lean-tos to play in, but probably they did it up there, too. It’d be easy to pretend that was a witch’s house, don’t you think?”

“I do!” Peter looked up, too, and reached out a hand to take hold of the rope ladder.  “Why do you think you and I never played Hansel and Gretel?” he asked as he absentmindedly swung the ladder to and fro.

Lina shrugged and stared off into the woods, noticing how happy she felt being out amongst her dear trees again, after such a long absence. Then a thought came into her mind.  More of a memory, really, of their childhood.

“Maybe it was because we didn’t need to make up a witch.  We had a real, live terrifying creature right at home.”

Peter turned and saw that she was looking at him.  She held his gaze and then slipped her arm through his.

“You mean Marcus?” Peter asked her finally.

“Mmhmm.”  She looked away. “God, I’m sorry to say that.”

“But it was true, Lina. And you’re right. We didn’t need to invent a witch.  We needed to escape one.”

They both sat silent for several minutes, each taking in the freshness of the morning air, listening to the insects that flew around them, and delighting in the smell of the earth beneath them. 
            “You’re right,” Lina told him at last.  “This – not just the treehouse, but the whole forest, our fairy runes, all of it – it was our sanctuary, wasn’t it?”

Peter nodded.  “It really was.” He swung the rope ladder again.  “I don’t think I ever told you the feeling that came over me every time we climbed up the ladder and then pulled it up behind us.”

“No, I don’t recall you ever telling me that. What was it?”

“It felt like such a relief. I knew we were safe up there. Safe from him.  That he wouldn’t be able to get us if we just scrambled up there and hauled up the ladder.”

“I did notice that you always seemed to run the last little bit to the treehouse, that you always hurried me to climb up. I just thought it was part of a game. Sometimes we pretended wolves were chasing us. Remember?”

“I do.”

“But it wasn’t a game you were playing, was it? You really were scared.”

Peter nodded.  “I was. For myself. But more for you. You were so defenseless.”

“But you were the one he took everything out on. I don’t think I was ever really in danger. I was so scared of him, but I don’t think he would ever have hurt me, not really.”

Peter’s face grew stern now. “I would have killed him if he had.”  He looked at Lina, extracted his arm from hers and wrapped it around her shoulder. “I mean, really. I told him so. That if he ever laid a hand on you, I would kill him in his sleep.”

Lina stared at him, her eyes wide and her mouth open in shock. “You did?”

“Yeah.  I don’t know why he believed me, but he did.  Maybe because he sensed I really would do it. And I would have.”  He tightened his arm around her shoulders and pulled her toward him.

“My God, Peter,” Lina said quietly. “I never knew that. Never had any idea.”

“You couldn’t see how truly monstrous he was, Lina.  I saw it, even before you were born. The things he said and did. The anger in him.”

“I saw that, the anger. And felt it.  He didn’t have to actually do anything to me.  I felt that he wanted to. But he took it out on you, instead.  But why didn’t you fight back when he attacked you?”

“I didn’t believe I had any choice.  Doesn’t make much sense, does it? It was like an unspoken bargain I made with him. As if we both understood that his hatred had to expressed somehow – that he just couldn’t hold it inside him – and that someone had to bear the brunt of it.  And that if it wasn’t going to be you – which I told him I would not allow to happen – then it would be me.”  Peter said this in such a matter-of-fact tone that Lina didn’t know quite how to respond. 

“You make it sound like just divvying up the chores or something,” she said softly. “It’s horrific, Peter.”

“I guess it was,” he replied.  “But it was worth it.  Every second of it.”

“But why didn’t you tell Papa?” Lina cried. “Surely he wouldn’t have let it go on?”

“Marcus also made it clear to me that if he got punished, then you would be the one who’d suffer.  So, as much as I could, I kept quiet. Sometimes I just couldn’t. If the bruises were too big, and so on.”

“But Peter,” Lina said, crying now, “I wasn’t worth you going through that!  There’s no way I could be worth that!”

“Lina, you were always worth it.  You’re my sister.  We’ve always been a team, haven’t we? From the time you were little.”

“It’s true,” Lina replied. “Especially when we came out here. It was as if no one else existed, and especially not Marcus. We really were safe here. With each other, and with the forest.” She paused and reached up to touch his hand.  “I’ve loved you more than anyone in the family, Peter.  Something about you – I have always felt so close to you.”

She felt him nod.

“I’ve always felt that, too,” he said.  “Like there was – is – some invisible connection between us.”

“Yes,” Lina told him. “It’s as if I can sense you, somehow.  I can’t explain it. As a spirit, maybe?  It doesn’t make any sense, but that’s the only way I can put it.”

“I understand.  I have always felt that way, too. From the time you were born.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I’d stand by your cradle, and I’d look at you, and when our eyes met, it was like somehow we’d known each other already for a lifetime. And now we were together in one family again.  I couldn’t get enough of looking into your eyes when you were a baby.  To see in you someone I recognized, and who recognized me, too.”

“I don’t remember that, of course – that recognition, I mean – but I do recall you standing by my cradle a lot, and just being with me.”

Peter laughed.  “It was funny.  Mama would chide me for it. She thought I was trying to avoid doing my chores, so she’d chase me out of the room.  She didn’t realize that I just loved you!”

Lina smiled at this story.  “I knew that you loved me!  I felt that so strongly, Peter.  I never thought of it as some kind of connection from another lifetime.  But the ties were there, even so. When you went off to the war, I thought I’d die.  You felt so far away, and I couldn’t feel your presence in the same way as when you were home.”

Peter just nodded in affirmation that he had experienced the same thing.

“And then you came home, wounded,” Lina went on, “and I was beside myself with worry.  I kept thinking that if I had been there, it never would have happened.”

“Me getting wounded?” Peter asked in surprise.

“Yes.  That sounds silly, doesn’t it?  How could I think I could have prevented it? What could I possibly have done to keep you safe? Nothing!”

“Maybe not in the way you’re talking about. But knowing that you were at home and still loving me – you and the rest of the family, too – that helped so much. It gave me the will to survive, and to not be captured, that day when I was shot. It was thinking of you all here – and especially of you – that got me back to my unit. I’ll still never understand how I managed to run on that injured leg.”

“God must have protected you. Don’t you think?” Lina asked him.

“I do.”

They were both looking off into the trees again.  Lina noticed that the pain in her legs had quieted down.  In fact, she couldn’t detect any discomfort at all in them at the moment. 

“Are you in pain now?” Peter asked, as if reading her thoughts.

She shook her head. “Not really. Just a few aches. I don’t know why that should be.”  Then she laughed. “Why am I looking for a reason? I should just be happy about it!”

“Are you?” Peter asked, his tone serious. “Happy, I mean?”

“Yes, I am,” she told him.  “I am.  But what makes me happier is that your leg is healed.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know, to be honest,” Lina told him. Once more, she took hold of his hand that was lying on her shoulder. It was a minute before she spoke again.  “As strange as that sounds, I think I feel relieved.”

“Relieved? Because if Bruno Groening healed me, then he can heal you, too?”

“No, that’s not it.”

“What, then?”

She paused again, as she tried to work it out in her mind. “I just now realized that I have felt responsible for you getting wounded in the war.”

Peter leaned forward now and turned to face her. “But Lina, that’s insane!  You weren’t even there!”

“Exactly,” she told him. “I’m not saying it makes sense.  I’m just telling you what I have felt, deep inside me, ever since you came back from the war, with your leg mangled.”

“You’re right! It makes no sense!” He hugged her. “As you are always telling me, it was not your fault!” He smiled, trying to shift her out of this odd frame of mind.

“Yes, and that’s the other thing. Me getting hurt was not your fault. It was mine!  I can see it now.”

Now Peter removed his arm from around her shoulders and took both her hands in his.  “That is simply impossible, Lina,” he told her sternly. “I won’t listen to you talk like that.”

“No, but do listen!” she said to him, equally sternly. “Remember how no one could understand how the accident happened?”

“I understood it,” Peter said petulantly. “I gave the horses the signal to move, and they did, and the wood rolled out onto you.”

“Do you actually remember giving them the signal?” Lina questioned him.

“No. But I must have done it.  There’s no other explanation,” he insisted.

“Yes there is,” Lina told him.

“Well, I’d like to hear it, if there is one, after all this time!”

  “I gave them the signal,” Lina told him softly.

He just stared at her.  Before he could object, she continued.

“Those horses know me as well as they know you,” she said. “And I banged on the side rail of the wagon, just the way I always did when I was letting them know we were done putting in a load and they could start off.”

“But I don’t remember hearing it,” Peter said.
            “And I don’t remember giving it,” Lina replied.

Peter gave her a confused look.

“Or, rather, I should say, I didn’t recall giving them the signal, not until last night.”

“At the Birkners’?” Peter asked her.

“Yes.  We were sitting there, and Mr. Groening was talking. And all of a sudden, a picture flashed into my mind. It was like a newsreel, except that it was in color.  I saw myself, from a distance, well, not from a big distance. But I was standing there behind the wagon, and the back railings weren’t up. And then, very methodically, I reached out and rapped my palm against the side of the wagon. Twice.  Very firmly.  And they started off.  And the wood fell.”

“Is that all you saw?” Peter asked, clearly shaken.

“Yes.  It didn’t make sense to me at the time. It was only last night, when I was lying there awake and in pain in the darkness, when the vision came back to me again, that I understood. It was all my fault. I made the mistake that day, not you.”

Peter leaned over and put his head in his hands.  Lina watched as he began to shake his head back and forth.  “No, no, Lina!” he cried. “That can’t be what happened.”

“But I’m telling you, it is,” she insisted, calmly, her voice full of love.  “That’s why I’ve always been able to tell you you weren’t to blame – because you weren’t! Even if I didn’t remember what I’d done until last night.”

“It doesn’t make sense, though,” Peter told her, looking at her now with eyes full of tears. “You loaded the wagon and worked with those horses for years, just like you said. And you never did that before – giving the signal before everything was ready.”

“And yet, I did it that day.  And what’s more,” Lina said, “it looks like I did it deliberately.”

“What does that mean?” Peter asked, his brows knitted. “I can’t make sense of any of this.”

“I mean, when I saw the newsreel, or whatever you want to call it, in my head, I could see it all very clearly. I looked at the wood, oh, and I didn’t tell you this part: I noticed that the back rails were not up – I know that, because I saw myself look over to the other side of the wagon, where they were lying on the ground. And then I paused and then, I consciously raised my hand and gave the signal.  It was quite deliberate, Peter, not an offhand, absentminded action.”

“But why would you do that deliberately?” Peter nearly shouted, slapping his knees with his open hands.  “Why??”

“I don’t know,” Lina told him simply. “And I never remembered it after the accident.  Why didn’t I remember doing it? And why did I do it? God, I wish I had remembered. It would have saved you feeling like you were to blame these past four years. Peter, I’m so sorry!”

“No, Lina, no!” he cried, rising to his feet. “I can’t accept this.  I’m the one who made the mistake, not you.  And what does this have to do with you feeling guilty about my wounded leg? Is everything suddenly your fault now?”

“I have no idea, Peter,” she told him, suddenly sounding tired. “I’m just telling you the way it feels to me, and what I experienced last night.”

As Peter was standing before her, Lina caught sight of someone coming toward them through the forest.  Seeing Lina looking at something behind him, Peter turned and saw their father gradually making his way through the dry leaves and small branches that lay in his path.

It was odd for them to see Viktor from such a distance.  Usually they saw him from across the table or across the yard, but not from fifty yards away. There seemed to Lina to be something lighter about his gait than before, and at the same time, stronger. Her father had always seemed strong to her, but in a deeply-rooted way.  Now he was moving through the trees in a confident, but also fluid, way, and he swayed a bit as he walked, the way the trees around him swayed when the wind came through the forest.  If Lina squinted a bit, he resembled the pines he was walking amongst, his arms out a bit from his sides, angled down toward the forest floor. Then, realizing that Peter and Lina had seen them, he raised both arms in greeting, and suddenly, he was an aspen, his hands waving at them the way the aspen leaves always waved at him.

“Mama and Grandma were starting to worry about you two,” he said cheerfully when he’d gotten close enough for them to be able to hear him.  “But I saw you set off along the path, and I figured this was where you were headed. I told them I’d come look for you.”

“I’m sorry they were worried,” Lina told him.  “It was just a whim.”

“I wanted to bring her here,” Peter explained.  He leaned over and patted the trunk of the beech tree. “She’s missed this old friend so much.”

Viktor nodded and took a seat in front of Lina, then motioned for Peter to sit back down, too. Now that Peter could see their father clearly, he, too, noticed that something was different about him.  The cheerfulness was new.  His smile looked relaxed.

Viktor leaned over and touched Lina’s foot affectionately. “How are you feeling?”

“It’s strange, Papa, but since I’ve been out here, my legs have almost entirely stopped hurting. Just some little aches now.”

A broad smile came to Viktor’s face. “Really? Lina, that’s wonderful! There’s something about this forest, isn’t there?” he asked, looking up to take in the treehouse and the spreading branches of the beech tree.  “You two, you’ve known it all your lives. You know that you feel something special here – heaven, that’s what your grandfather calls it. I didn’t believe it at first.  Didn’t know what he meant. I was never any place like this until I came here, back in ’21.”

“Aren’t there forests in Schweiburg?” Lina asked. “I don’t recall seeing so many trees when we were living there, but then again, I was little.”

“And we weren’t there for so long,” Peter added.  “But mostly, there was the water, what with the coast being so close.”

Viktor nodded.  “That’s right. I grew up with the coast, but the water never really called to me.  Nature in general didn’t.  Not until I came here and started working with your grandpa.”

“Why do you think that was, Papa?” Lina asked.

Viktor reached down and picked up a handful of leaves in varying stages of dryness and decomposition.  Then he closed his eyes and took in a deep breath.  Watching him, Peter and Lina naturally did the same. 

“This smells as good to me as Mama’s rabbit stew,” Viktor said after he’d let his breath out, and they all laughed. “But it really is like your grandpa says.  You feel God out here.  I know you feel it, don’t you?”

Peter and Lina both nodded.

“That’s why I brought her here,” Peter said. “I could tell she needed to feel that.”

“We all do, Son,” Viktor replied, his tone softer than they’d ever heard it, tender even. “This forest – it saved me, back then.  Being out with these trees and taking in God’s divine energy.  I felt like I could stand among them and take in their strength.”

“But then why did we move to Schweiburg?” Lina asked.

Peter looked at his father intently. Lina saw the look and realized that Peter, since he was four years older, must remember that time more than she did.

But Viktor deflected the question.  “That is another story, for another day.  Not a happy story. And so, not for today. Because today is a happy day. Right?”

“Yes!” Lina chimed in. “Peter was able to carry me all the way out here, Papa.  It really is a miracle.”

Viktor nodded.  Then he took hold of the toe of Lina’s shoe and gave it a playful shake. “And soon, no one will need to carry you to the treehouse.”

“Peter was all set to try to haul me up there when we got there, but I wouldn’t let him,” Lina said.

“Probably just as well,” Peter said with a chuckle. “That would have been quite a sight for you, Papa, if we tried it and the ladder gave out, and you came upon us both lying on the ground in a heap!”

Viktor smiled, and then recalled his first visit to the treehouse with Ethel.

“The first time Mama brought me here,” he began, leaning back on his elbows and crossing his legs out in front of him, “I was worried about that ladder, too.”  He glanced up at it. “It’d been lying up in the treehouse for who knows how many years.  Could have been rotted through.”

“But it wasn’t, right?” Lina said.  She hadn’t heard this story since she was little.

“Nope.  I climbed up on that branch there,” Viktor told them, pointing to the branch in question. “Then I managed to lean over and grab hold of the rope, up there, right where it’s tied to the floor.  Of course, I was doing my best to impress Mama with my strength and daring.” He winked at Peter, as if sharing a secret, man to man.

“And did you?” Lina asked.

“Of course!” Viktor told her with a laugh. “Or, in any case, at least I didn’t fall down, and the ladder didn’t collapse.  I considered that a success.”

“But how did you manage to make her the ring in secret?” Peter asked.

Viktor winked at him again. “That information’s classified.” He tipped his head in Lina’s direction. “But don’t worry, I’ll share it with you when you need it, Son.”

“And when you find out,” Lina said, “you’ll tell me, right?”

“I don’t think you have clearance,” Peter told her sternly, and they all laughed. 

“Feels good to laugh, here in the heart of the forest,” Viktor said.  “Especially right here. At this treehouse, where Mama and Uncle Hans played, and Mama and I fell in love, where the two of you played.  Where your children will play, too, God willing.”

This heartfelt sharing of feelings and wishes left all three of them feeling tears rush to their eyes, but Lina was the only one who let them flow. Peter hastily got to his feet and tugged on the ladder.

“But I say we replace the ladder before then. If I’m going to ask a girl to marry me up there, I don’t want to risk making a fool of myself by falling through a rotten rope.”

“Agreed,” Viktor said, leaning forward and brushing the dead leaf fragments off his shirtsleeves. “But now, I think we’d best get on back to the house.  Otherwise, Mama and Grandma are likely to mount a search party themselves. And you know what that means, don’t you?”

Peter and Lina shook their heads.

“Dinner will be late!” Viktor said with a laugh. “And we don’t want that.”

Lina and Peter laughed at this, and in Lina’s voice he heard her mother, twenty-eight years earlier, standing at the foot of this very tree, back in the days before things needed to be made right.

They decided that Viktor would carry Lina out through the forest. It was a good thing he had come out to find them, because Peter now realized he would have had a hard time getting Lina situated on his back again, since she was sitting on the ground.  But father and son managed to first lift Lina up beneath her shoulders until she was leaning more or less upright against the beech trunk. Then Viktor was able to crouch down before her, and, with Peter’s help, Lina leaned onto her father’s strong back and wrapped her arms around his neck. 

Viktor straightened up and gave a little hop to settle Lina into a more comfortable position, and then began walking.  He felt that she was holding something in her hand that was pressing against his neck, but it wasn’t bothersome. In fact, he began to feel more energetic. He was sensing not just the divine energy of the forest now. There was also a tingling that reminded him of what he’d felt at the Birkners’ the evening before. But he didn’t give it any real thought. Instead, he focused his attention on how good it was to be helping Lina.  He was glad for the conversation they’d had, too. It reminded him of the early years, when he and the kids would play together.  Too bad Marcus wasn’t here with us today.  Although he knew, deep inside, that if his oldest son had been there, things would have played out differently.

Little by little, Viktor told himself as he walked toward the end of the path and the bright sunshine that awaited them there. Step by step.  Soon it’ll all be good again.

*          *          *

After the foray to the treehouse, Lina noticed that although the pain in her legs eased when she was among the trees, it gradually increased again once Viktor had carried her back to the yard and then into the house.  At first, Lina grew frightened when her legs began to ache once more.  That evening, on her walk with Kristina, she expressed her worry.

“Kristina,” she told her friend, even before they rolled out onto the main road, “why do they hurt again?  I felt so light and happy by the treehouse.  And now… What did I do wrong?” Her long braid was wrapped around her wrist, the end tucked into her left hand, while her right held her tin foil ball.

Kristina heard the fear creeping into Lina’s voice, and although she had no real answer to Lina’s question, she knew that she couldn’t give into the doubt that was knocking at the door of her own mind. Trust and believe, she told herself. And then some words came.

“Maybe you should ask what you did right.”

“What do you mean?” Lina asked her.

“Well,” Kristina continued, allowing the sense inside her to form into words, “you felt better in the woods. That’s true, isn’t it?”

Lina nodded.

“Maybe that was the right thing.  You did a right thing.”

“Going into the woods? That was the right thing, you’re saying?”

“I don’t know. I just have a feeling that this is the way to look at it.”

Lina fell silent, and they walked, by which we should understand that Kristina pushed her in the wheelchair, as she’d done nearly every day for the past four years. Kristina rolled the chair along, and Lina held the tin foil ball in her hand, alternately squeezing it lightly and bringing it up to her face so that she could inspect the so-called writing she and Peter had detected on it.

“To our usual spot?” Kristina asked as they neared the spot where they could see the fallen log where they would often sit and discuss the day’s events.

“No,” Lina said, in a tone whose lightness surprised Kristina, given the fear she’d detected just minutes earlier. 

“Where, then?”

“I mean, go to the log, but then on along the path there. Even just a little ways.”

They had never done this before, since the path was overgrown with grass and small bushes and blocked by fallen branches.  The family didn’t use it now, and Lina had never wanted to ask Kristina to go to the effort of clearing a space or maneuvering the heavy wheelchair along. But now, she thought it might be worth a try.  An experiment.

Kristina understood what Lina had in mind, and she eagerly set about removing the smaller debris from the path.  Lina watched as twigs, larger branches, and pine cones flew into the underbrush where Kristina tossed them along the sides of the path, along with clumps of the taller grasses.  After about ten minutes of this, Kristina straightened up, turned to Lina, then rubbed her hands together vigorously to shake off the dirt. Then she pushed aside tendrils of the wavy, brown hair that had come free of her braid and fallen into her eyes.

“Ready?” she asked, wiping her hands on her apron.  When Lina nodded, Kristina got behind the wheelchair and rolled it over to where they could now see a space that looked slightly navigable. 

The sky was still light out by the road, but even just a small distance inside the forest, the shadows were already deepening, and the sounds of the evening bugs louder.  They managed to move to the end point of where Kristina had removed the obstacles, about twenty feet in, without much trouble, although Kristina did find it harder to push the chair here than out along the grass or the road. The two young women didn’t converse.  Kristina was silently leaning against the chair, to move it forward, and Lina was softly repeating, Trust and believe. The divine power helps and heals.  From her position behind the wheelchair, Kristina couldn’t see the path, but she kept pushing anyway.

At some point, she noticed that the grass was taller beneath the wheels and her shoes.  Then she bumped over a small branch in the path. In the next moment, she felt the left wheel dip sharply and then come to an abrupt halt.  Kristina’s legs somehow kept moving, though, and she found herself leaning forward over the back of the wheelchair, which had stopped short.  And as she herself was resting with her stomach against the back of Lina’s seat, she saw that Lina, too,  had continued moving: She was toppling out of the chair, a surprised, “Oh!” escaping from her lips.  Kristina managed to catch hold of Lina’s shoulder as she tipped, but with the chair between them, she couldn’t break Lina’s fall.  She watched in surprise and horror as her friend half slid, half pitched, forward and onto the ground. She came to rest on her stomach. 

“My God, Lina!” Kristina cried, rushing to Lina. “Are you hurt?”

Lina remembered the day not many weeks earlier, when she had tried to stand up and had similarly found herself sprawled in front of her wheelchair.  This time at least I made it further into the forest!  she thought to herself.  “Yes,” I think I’m all right,” she said aloud.

  “The wheel must have gone into a rut, “Kristina told her, inspecting the wheel. “Lina, I’m so sorry!”

“It’s all right,” Lina told her.  “I really thing I’m okay. But there’s no way you’ll be able to get me back into this chair on your own.  Go back to the house for help.”

Kristina turned this way and that, biting her lip. Her eyes grew wide, and suddenly she sounded very agitated.  “But I can’t!” she cried. “I can’t leave you here!  There’s no telling who could come by.  It’s not safe!” She was beginning to cry.  Lina reached out and tugged on Kristina’s skirt.

“Kristina,” she said calmly, “Look at me. We need help. I’ll be all right here while you go get someone.”

Kristina grabbed her long braid in both hands and began picking at the end of it, still biting her lip. “I don’t know, Lina…  I don’t think it’s safe for you here alone.”

“I’m telling you. I know this forest. This is our forest.  No one will hurt me here.  Just go. Now. Run!”

Somehow this got through to Kristina, and she did run.  She raced back to the where the path opened out onto the grass, and then she sped off down the road, calling out for help.  As she came to the drive that led to the homestead, she saw Marcus walking across the yard. She shouted to him to follow her.

“Lina… she fell… in the forest,” she explained breathlessly as they both ran.

When they reached the path once again, Kristina led Marcus along the trail the wheelchair had made. Lina was lying only about twenty feet into the woods, but Kristina fell to her side as if she’d been miles away, deep in the wilderness.

“Lina, dear one, are you all right?” she asked in a frenzied voice, her cheeks streaked with tears.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” Lina told her, and then grimaced in embarrassment when she saw Marcus. But for once, he didn’t seem annoyed.  He sat down beside her and helped her sit up, taking care to ask her whether anything hurt. Once he determined that she really did seem not to have hurt herself, aside from a deep scrape on her left hand, which she’d used to break her fall, he inspected the wheelchair. 

“It just went into a hole,” he announced. Then, giving the handles a quick jerk, he pulled it backwards and freed the stuck wheel.  “Seems all right,” he added, after rolling the chair back and forth a bit. “I don’t think the rim got bent. Let’s get you up and back into it, Lina.” 

While Kristina steadied the wheelchair, Marcus somehow – Kristina was amazed at how strong he evidently was – slipped his arms under Lina’s, tipped her up and onto his chest, and then gently lowered her down to her seat. 

On the short walk back to the homestead, Marcus pushed the chair, while Kristina walked alongside them in a daze, one hand picking at the end of her braid, the other gripping Marcus’ elbow tightly.

“I really am fine,” Lina told them all when Marcus rolled her into the kitchen and explained what had happened. Indeed, she looked calm.

“How about your legs?” Ethel asked, a concerned look on her face.

“Well,” Lina told her, even smiling now, “I still can’t walk, but they’re hardly hurting again at all, just like when Peter and I were at the treehouse this morning. And you may not believe it, but when I was lying there on the ground just now, before Kristina came back with Marcus, I felt so peaceful. As if God was right there with me, taking care of me.  As if He had wrapped a blanket of love around me to keep me safe.”

This seemed to allay everyone’s concern, except for Kristina’s.  She looked so dazed that Renate insisted on making her a cup of tea.  Ingrid, who had been in their room in the workshop, reading before bed, came in now, since she’d heard the commotion in the yard. 

“Is there a party?” she asked brightly, holding her book in one hand and scanning their faces. It never happened that the whole family gathered like this in the evening, but their expressions didn’t look like party faces. Before anyone could explain, Kristina caught sight of her daughter and, leaping up from her chair, rushed to the door and took Ingrid in her arms.

“You’re all right, too, aren’t you?” she cried, leaning back to look her over, before hugging her once more.

“I’m fine, Mama, just fine,” Ingrid told her, a bit of annoyance in her tone.

“Kristina,” Renate said to her gently, “why don’t you take Ingrid out and get her settled in for bed, and I’ll bring your tea out to you?”

Kristina nodded tensely, muttered her thanks, and left the kitchen, clutching Ingrid as if for dear life.

In the kitchen, no one knew what to say.  This was exactly the kind of display of emotion that made this family feel awkward.  It was as if they had accidentally witnessed some intimate moment that none of them was ever meant to see.  Ethel made a point of examining Lina’s arms and face for scratches and bruises.  Renate was getting tea ready to put into a small pot for Kristina. She paused, as if considering whether to speak, and then turned to face everyone.

“There was one night, during those first few months after Kristina and Ingrid came to us.  I had a feeling in the middle of the night. I don’t know why, but I got up and came out into the kitchen here. I looked out toward the workshop and saw a light burning in their room. I just had the sense that something was wrong.  So I went out there.  The door to their room was wide open, and when I walked in, there was Kristina, with her suitcase open on the bed. She was in a frenzy, grabbing any of their things she could lay her hands on, and stuffing them in the suitcase, willy nilly.”  She paused to check the tea kettle, which had not yet boiled.

“I asked her what she was doing, and she looked at me with these wild, terrified eyes.  Kind of like tonight, but worse.  And she said, ‘We have to leave. It’s not safe here in the woods for Ingrid.  The men took that other girl.  They’re coming back for her. I have to get her somewhere safe.’”

A small cry of sorrow escaped Lina’s mouth, and she brought a hand to her face and covered her mouth.  

“My God, Mama,” Ethel said to Renate, “and you never told me. Or any of us.” She looked to each of the others in the room, and they all shook their heads. They hadn’t known, either.

The teakettle had come to a boil now, and Renate slowly poured a stream of the hot water into the waiting pot. “It wasn’t mine to tell,” she said with a sigh.

“There are so many stories of the war,” Ulrich said softly.  “And just because Kristina wasn’t on the battlefield doesn’t mean she didn’t suffer.”

“Her husband was killed on the Eastern Front,” Lina said.  Apparently they all knew this much, at least.

“How she and that little girl ever made it to Danzig from where they were, I don’t think I even want to know,” Ulrich told them, shaking his head.

“And then those months in Bergen-Belsen,” Renate added. “It’s horrible.”

“Bergen-Belsen?” Viktor asked sharply. “They were there?”

Ethel looked at him in surprise. Surely he knew that… But then she remembered that Kristina and Ingrid had already been here for a little while when Viktor was decommissioned and came home.  Maybe she hadn’t told him the details of how they’d come to be there, or maybe she had, and he just didn’t remember. That wouldn’t be surprising.

“Yes,” Ethel told him, “but not for long. Somehow they were sent there, to the Polish camp – as displaced persons, you know – even though they weren’t Polish. Maybe because they’d come through Poland. I don’t know.  But it was a hideous place – that’s what she said.”

Viktor just nodded.

“Thank God they made it here,” Peter said quietly.

“Marcus,” Renate said at that point, indicating a small wooden tray that now held the teapot and a cup, “you take the tea out to her, will you? She’ll like that.  Ethel and I will get Lina cleaned up for the night.”

            Marcus was, for once, happy to do as his grandmother asked.  He’d never seen Kristina so upset. It had shocked him a little, since she generally acted so meekly, keeping her emotions inside even more than the rest of them – or at least more than he did.  Her unassuming way of moving through the world and the way she deferred to him in their conversations made it difficult for him to determine with any certainty where he stood with her.  That had changed with their recent declaration of love for each other, of course.  Aside from that one time, though, she seemed never to tell him what was on her mind. This frustrated him, because he saw the way she and Lina laughed with each other. That must mean they were telling each other their secrets.  Had she told Lina about her flight through Danzig? About her fears for Ingrid’s safety?  Or other thoughts and feelings she had kept from him? Tonight, though – tonight she had shown him more of herself. The way she called out to me for help, and the way she clung to my elbow as we walked back to the house – she’s opening up to m, Marcus concluded.  She does need me, he thought to himself as he approached the side door with the tray that held the teapot and cup. Balancing the tray on one hand, he opened the door with the other.

Inside, the workshop was dark, and Marcus saw that the door to Kristina and Ingrid’s room was shut. But a dim thread of light spread out beneath the door. Flipping on a light in the workshop, Marcus set the tray down on one of the workbenches across the room and gave a light knock on Kristina’s door. It was the first time he’d ever done this – come to her room after Ingrid’s bedtime – and he felt a mixture of apprehension and excitement.

“Kristina,” he said softly, but loudly enough that she’d surely hear him, “Renate sent me out with the tea for you.”

For a long half a minute he heard nothing, but then the door opened slowly, and Kristina slipped out.

“Ingrid’s just getting to sleep,” she told him softly, and then turned to close the door quietly behind her. 

They were standing close together there, with Kristina’s back nearly touching the door, and Marcus just a few inches in front of her. Standing like this, the difference in their heights was striking. Marcus, tall and lanky like Viktor, towered over Kristina, so that she had to tip her head back to look up at his face.  He thought about kissing her right there, but then held back. It didn’t seem right, somehow, with Ingrid just on the other side of the door.

“I put the tea over here,” he said instead, gesturing to the workbench against the wall. “Come on, I’ll pour it for you.” He held out his hand to her.

She grasped his hand and followed him across the room. Walking with him, she squeezed his hand, seeking some explanation of where the physical strength he’d displayed earlier came from. He looked at her and smiled, then brought her hand up and kissed it. They took seats on two of the tall stools next to the workbench.

As he poured the tea for her and stirred some sugar into it, she was studying him, as if for the first time.  He really did resemble his father – especially in his build and in those cornflower blue eyes – but his hair was dark, like hers, not sandy like Peter’s.  Viktor didn’t look strong, either, she mused, but she’d seen him move logs like they were nothing. Marcus must have that same kind of strength.  She found that comforting.

“Thank you for saving Lina tonight,” she told him as she accepted the cup of tea he held out to her. He could see that tears were welling up in her eyes as she spoke.

He laughed lightly. “I didn’t save her.  I just picked her up off the ground.” But inwardly, he was pleased she had put it that way.

“Well, I do say you saved her,” Kristina insisted, smiling now, too, although the tears still seemed prepared to fall at a moment’s notice.  “Who knows what might have happened there in the woods, with her being helpless, and it getting so dark.”

Marcus leaned forward. “The wolves don’t come out until much later,” he said, in a mock serious tone.

“Don’t tease,” Kristina told him, only half-kidding. 

He could see that she genuinely was a bit hurt by his joke, and as he watched her take a sip of the tea, for the first time in his entire life, he felt a twinge of regret at causing someone else distress.  As she moved the teacup away from her lips, he took it from her, set it down, and wrapped his hands around hers. He was sitting facing her now, his legs bent to the side, so that her knees touched the outside of his thigh.

“Forgive me, my dear Kristina,” he said earnestly. “I was just trying to cheer you up.”

She sighed deeply and nodded, and now two preliminary tears did escape onto her cheeks.  She looked down. “Ingrid and I had some terrible nights in the woods. During our flight.” Marcus squeezed her hands, but didn’t say anything. He hoped she’d tell him more, and after a minute of silence, she did.

“I don’t know where it was… Somewhere before we got to Danzig, at least.  We would camp anywhere we could.  Sometimes there was a farmhouse with a barn.  And once or twice, a family even took us into their house, but that was only once or twice.” She looked up to see whether he was listening, and when he nodded to show her he was, she looked down again.

“So, groups of us often slept out in the woods.  I tended to think we were safer, Ingrid and I, if there were more of us.  There was something quite frightening about sleeping just the two of us in the woods, not knowing what each sound meant, whether it was a person or an animal…”

“If you’re not used to being in the woods at night,” Marcus said, “it really is frightening.” Not that he remembered ever being scared out in the woods, but he thought this might encourage her.

“It is!” she said, sighing again. “One night, there were, I don’t know, perhaps twenty of us, all camped out in one area. Five or six small groups of us.  No camp fires or anything. We just all huddled in our own little spots, but not right next to each other.” She paused, trying to find the best words to express what she’d experienced. “You see, some of those people I’d seen now and again in the weeks before that.  We were all heading in the same direction, and so you recognize faces. But at the same time, we all kept to ourselves.”

“But why not get to know people?” Marcus asked, his question quite sincere. He knew nothing about what these refugees had gone through, but he found that he very much wanted to understand what Kristina and Ingrid had experienced.

“Because you never knew what they might do,” Kristina said quietly.  “None of us had enough food or clothing, and it was cold by then.  So some people would steal what little the others had.  Kill them for it sometimes, even.”

Marcus squeezed her hands to show encouragement, and he felt a tenderness welling up inside him as she told her story. “Kristina, did anyone ever attack you?”

She didn’t answer him directly. “That one night, I heard a woman a ways off from me scream, not very loudly, and then her screams were muffled. And then they stopped. And in the morning, at dawn, when we all left, I saw that a woman was still lying over by a pine tree.  I wondered why she hadn’t gotten up to leave – because everyone would get on the road as early as possible. I did ask one of the other travelers, a woman about my age, one I’d seen before, whether she’d heard the screams during the night, and whether that woman under the pine tree was all right.”

“And what did she say?”

“She just asked me under her breath whether I had a knife with me.  I told her I did, and she said, ‘Be prepared to use it. And don’t sleep a wink at night when it’s like this.’ She told me then that a week earlier, when she and her husband and their two girls were spending the night in the woods, two men who were drunk – Lord knows where they got the liquor –dragged away a young girl – someone else’s daughter –  during the night.” She looked up at Marcus. “I don’t want to tell you what they did to her. But she was barely alive when they found her the next morning. And crying that she wished they had just killed her.”

Now Marcus released Kristina’s hands and wrapped his arms around her. “If that had been Ingrid,” he found himself saying, his voice full of quiet anger, “I would have killed those men with my bare hands.”

Kristina’s head was leaning against his chest now.  She kept on talking, but very softly, and he couldn’t hear her so very clearly. But he didn’t want to ask her to repeat herself, so he just leaned his head against hers and strained to catch what she was saying.

“I did have a knife,” she was telling him.  “I was so terrified after that night, Marcus. I spent each night with that knife in one hand, and my other hand on Ingrid next to me.  When I just couldn’t stay awake, I’d lean on top of her and doze that way, so that I’d wake up if anyone tried to take her from me. But how can you really sleep that way? I don’t think I slept more than a few minutes each night the whole rest of our flight, until we got onto the boat. Even there, though, it wasn’t so safe.”

“And in the refugee camp?” Marcus prompted softly, gently rubbing her back as she spoke.

“I slept there,” she said. “There we women did come to know each other a bit, and we took shifts, sleeping and watching each other’s children. We did feel safer there, because the men were separate from the women, of course, but even so, you never know… We still didn’t have enough food, or blankets. And my God, it had been a concentration camp before we got there. How can you rest knowing that?”

Marcus listened silently. He noticed that, as Kristina spoke, his anger faded, and he felt love welling up inside him, for her, and for Ingrid, too.  And sadness that they had gone through all they had.  This feeling of sadness at others’ suffering was new to him, but as Kristina leaned against his chest, he felt more connected to her in his heart than he had ever felt to another human being. He was struck by this feeling of connection to her, by the sense that their hearts were beating as one. His whole life, he had rejected this kind of phrase as ridiculous romanticism, but now that they were leaning together like this, and love was flowing so strongly in him, he marveled at what he was feeling, amazed that it was even possible to feel this way.

Kristina had stopped talking by now, and the two of them sat perched on the stools like that, as if holding each other up, in silence, for several minutes.  Marcus was the first to speak. 

“You don’t ever have to worry again, Kristina,” he whispered into her ear. “Do you hear me?” he asked, stroking her hair.

He felt her nod. “I will take care of you. You and Ingrid.  Make sure you’re safe.  Do you hear?”  Again, she nodded.

Then he felt the love well up in his chest even more strongly, and a thought came to him.  He leaned back and moved her gently backwards, too, so that she was sitting far enough away that he could see her eyes. 

“Will you let me take care of the two of you?” he asked, in a voice so tender that he didn’t even recognize it as his own. “So that you’ll never feel abandoned or in danger?”

Kristina nodded once more.  She wiped her eyes with her arm, and looked at him with her chestnut brown eyes.

“What I mean,” he said then, “is this… Will you marry me, Kristina?”

She stared at him so long with her lips parted, but without speaking, that Marcus began to fear that he had badly misjudged the situation.  He was about to try to recover from his mistake, when she nodded once more, first just slightly, and then more forcefully, until, finally, she threw her arms around his neck and looked him directly in the eye.

“Yes, Marcus,” she said, the smile he had been waiting for spreading across her face now. “Yes! I will!”

They kissed then, their first kisses as an engaged couple, and Kristina had to tell Marcus over and over again that her tears were different now.  These were tears of happiness, tears of joy. Of relief. She didn’t voice these last two words, though.  Perhaps she didn’t fully hear them herself, in either her head or her heart, but they were certainly there in her soul. As Marcus held his fiancée, and her head rested once more against his chest, they both felt her body relax, as the strain of so many years began to loosen its grip on her being.

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Above the River, Chapter 28

~ Sue Downing

[Author’s note: The words of Bruno Groening’s in this chapter that are in boldface are his actual words. I have excerpted them from lectures and talks that were recorded during his lifetime and later transcribed and translated into English by the Bruno Groening Circle of Friends, which has very kindly given me permission to use them.]

Chapter 28

July, 1949

Gassmann-Bunke homestead and Bremen, Germany

            The days following Lorena’s announcement that Bruno Groening had left Herford and gone who knows where, were among the hardest for the Gassmanns and Bunkes since the period following Lina’s accident.  Now, as then, the family members did their best to project an air of hope and confidence that they would find Groening. 

            But beneath the outward profession of positivity lay the persistent fear that they had missed their chance. And their chance was precisely the way they all thought of it. After all, it wasn’t just Lina who had something to gain if the visit to Groening took place and Lina was healed.  Each of them was invested in the success of this venture for his or her own reasons, even if these reasons were never voiced out loud. They all spoke only of how Lina’s life would change – and for the better! Lina, of course, sensed her relatives’ unspoken thoughts, but she didn’t judge them harshly for wishing for their own lives to be easier, too.  In fact, she appreciated it that they did keep their own desires to themselves. It made her feel that they really did care about what happened to her: After four years of what seemed to her like no one doing anything to change the situation, at least they were all working toward a common goal. 

            Even so, Lina was realistic enough to understand that if there wasn’t some progress soon, enthusiasm for the project would wane. They might all slip back into a state of stagnation, like the swallow she’d seen on the riverbank, one wounded wing in the mud. But that was just the way it was at the beginning, Lina reminded herself, before the bird summoned the strength and took flight once more.  As the days passed, Lina kept calling to mind that swallow, panting in the mud. That’s where I am now, she told herself over and over. Just waiting for that power to flow into me.  And then I’ll fly!

*          *          *

            The first encouraging moment came two weeks after the evening they had all gathered around Marcus’ boss’ car, so looking forward to heading to Herford the next morning, the evening when Lorena had rushed over to tell them the bad news.  Now, it was Marcus who rushed into the yard after work, beaming with excitement.

            “Bremen!” he cried out, bursting through the door, expecting the whole family to be gathered for his announcement. But it wasn’t quite suppertime yet, and only Renate and Ethel were in the kitchen.

            “Where is everyone?” Marcus said, annoyed.  “I have news!”

            Renate, who had been pulling plates off the shelves to set the table, turned to face him, her arms cradling the stack of dishes.  Ethel wiped her hands on a dishtowel and walked toward Marcus.

            “What news?” she asked softly, studying her son’s face for clues.

            But he shook his head, refusing to tell them.  “Where’s Lina?” But before they could answer, he was already out the door and searching for his sister.  He found her on the other side of the sheets that were drying on the clothesline. She and Kristina were just taking down some laundry that was dry. 

            “There you are!” Marcus called, running over to her.

            Startled, Lina dropped the clothespin she was holding. When Kristina bent down to pick it up off the ground, Marcus took it from her and threw it aside.

            “Forget the laundry, Kristina!” Then he got crouched down in front of Lina and took hold of her hands.  “Bremen!” he nearly shouted. “He’s in Bremen!”

            Lina grew pale and looked back and forth between Marcus and Kristina.  “Bruno Groening?” she whispered.

            Marcus nodded.  “Yes, Groening!  Who else would I be talking about?”

            Now Lina allowed herself a smile.  Seeing that, Marcus smiled, too.

“That’s my girl!” He jumped up, stepped behind Lina, took hold of the wheelchair’s handles and began pushing his sister around the yard, in and out beneath and between the hanging sheets. Kristina and Lina shrieked with laughter and begged him to stop before all the laundry lay in the dirt. 

All this commotion drew everyone out into the yard: Renate and Ethel from the kitchen, Peter from the workshop, and Ulrich and Viktor, who were just coming out of the forest, carrying a two-man saw.

“What’s the excitement about?” Viktor asked, and looked to Ethel, who came over to stand next to him and slipped her arm through his. He realized from her expression that she, like he, was trying to remember a time when Marcus had ever treated Lina this way – as a loving older brother.  He couldn’t. Neither could Ethel. 

“Papa,” Lina called out breathlessly, although it was Marcus who’d been moving the wheelchair.  “Marcus said Mr. Groening is in Bremen!”

“Ahhhh!” Viktor exclaimed. “Now that’s some news!”

“And only a couple of hours away,” Ulrich noted with an approving nod of his head.

“Marcus,” Renate asked, “how did you find that out?”

“From my boss, Mr. Weiss,” Marcus told them, leaning over to brace his hands on his thighs.  He was feeling a bit winded from the exertion.

“But how did he know?” Renate continued.  “Lorena’s been listening to the radio non-stop for the past week, and she hasn’t heard anything.” She was frowning, as if somehow insulted that she hadn’t been the one to learn the news and present it to the family.  Ulrich put his arm around her shoulders and laughed.

“Hush, Renate, and let the young man tell us!”

It was a funny scene, with all of them standing around the yard, instead of taking seats indoors. No one wanted to wait to hear Marcus’ explanation. Even Stick, the dog, was racing around them in excitement, his tail catching on the sheets and causing them to dip and billow.

“It happened like this,” Marcus began, gazing around at his audience and pleased that everyone was now present.  “Mr. Weiss came in this morning… Oh, well, of course, I told him what happened, when I took the car back to him last Friday. I had to explain why we didn’t go to Herford after all.”

“Yes, yes,” Renate said impatiently, waving her hand to hurry him along. “Mr. Weiss knew about why we were going to Herford. But how did he find out where Mr. Groening is now?”

“Mama!” Ethel told her with a laugh, “Marcus is telling us.  Just let him tell us!”

Renate nodded, and Marcus continued.

“So, evidently, Mr. Weiss told his wife the story – about Lina and how Groening was in Herford and then had to leave.  Turns out she – Mrs. Weiss – has been following the whole thing in the papers, too. And apparently, Mrs. Weiss has a cousin who lives in Bremen, and this cousin said that her next door neighbor, a woman named –“

“For heaven’s sake, Marcus, we don’t care what her name is!” Renate burst in, but she quieted down when Ulrich squeezed her shoulder.

“Right, Grandma,” Marcus said. “To make a long story short, Groening was at the cousin’s neighbor’s house two nights ago, and a group of people came.  The neighbor even invited the cousin, but she didn’t go. But she did tell Mrs. Weiss about it, because it seemed like such an unusual occurrence.  She –“

“She? Who?” Lina asked, and no one shushed her, figuring that if anyone had a right to ask for clarification, she did.

“The cousin,” Marcus said.  “A Mrs. Schneider.  Mrs. Schneider said she saw a man go into the house – and this is a side-by-side house, connected, so she got a good look at him – and she said he was on the short side, with long, dark, wavy hair –“

“That’s him!” Lina cried, her eyes shining brightly.

Marcus nodded.  “Yes, it was Groening. And Mrs. Schneider said that as she was looking out the window, trying to get a look at him, he stopped on the walkway and turned. And he looked right at her!  As if he knew she was there watching him, even though she was kind of hiding behind the curtain so he wouldn’t see her. And he just looked at her for a few second, in a serious way, and then he continued walking and went into the house.  And Mrs. Schneider said that she felt something when he looked at her.”

“What?” they all asked, hanging on Marcus’ every word. “What did she feel?”

But Marcus wanted to drag out his moment in the limelight.  So he paused, looking at them each and taking Lina’s hand.  Finally, he said, “Love. That’s what she said, Mrs. Weiss told her husband. And peace.”

Lina squeezed her brother’s hand, and they could all see that she had begun to cry quietly.  Kristina, who was standing on the other side of the wheelchair, leaned over and hugged Lina. Then she asked Marcus:

“Did Mrs. Schneider go over to the neighbor’s then, too?”

Marcus shook his head.  “Seems she was too embarrassed. But after everyone had left, she did go next door…” Here he paused again, for effect, before continuing. “And the neighbor told her that Groening is coming back again… tomorrow night!”

Now everyone in the yard began talking and gesturing, nodding and clapping their hands and hugging. Stick began racing around once more.

“Well, then,” Viktor said, smiling broadly, “we have some plans to make, don’t we?”

  “We might as well all go in now,” Renate announced. “Supper’ll be ready in a few minutes. Everybody get washed up, and we can discuss it all when we sit down.”

Ethel looked at Viktor and raised her eyebrows.  He could see a smile in her eyes, as if she was asking him, “When has Mama ever said we’d discuss something over supper?” Viktor hugged her and whispered in her ear, “Maybe a new day is dawning for this family.”

*          *          *

So it was that, the next evening, the Gassmanns and Bunkes and Kristina (Ingrid had reluctantly gone to the Walters’ farm) found themselves at the curb outside the home of the Schneiders’ neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Birkner.  Kathrin Schneider hurried to the front door of her house as soon as she saw them pull up.  She watched, mouth agape, as Marcus, Kristina, Renate and Ulrich climbed out of the Opel Kapitän, which Mr. Weiss had generously offered Marcus for the trip.  Lina was still seated in the front passenger seat, waiting for Viktor, who had driven to Bremen in the pickup truck with Ethel and Peter, to park and unload Ethel’s wheelchair from pickup’s bed. Mrs. Schneider, a short woman in her fifties, with small eyes and tightly curled, dark hair that hugged her head just so, was amazed not only by this large number of people who had come together, but also by the juxtaposition of her brother-in-law’s Opel and the family’s dusty farm truck.  They seemed a motley crew, indeed. Not raggedy, no.  They were all dressed in their Sunday best, that was clear.  But it was also clear that these were country folk.

Mrs. Schneider stepped outside onto her own front stoop, now, and watched them all make their way up toward the Birkners’ side of the house. Still, she pointedly didn’t look at Lina, who was now being moved into the wheelchair by two men Kathrin assumed must be her father and brother. Even so, her gaze settled on this scene. Kathrin immediately averted her eyes, not wanting to be caught staring, especially since the girl herself was casting glances around, as if she didn’t want to be seen.  But then Kathrin caught sight of a young man who was limping, too.  There’s nowhere to look! she thought.  So, she walked right over to them and introduced herself.  Then she turned and led the way up to the Birkners’ door, taking on the role of guide. She, after all, was the one who had learned about Groening’s visit in the first place! 

Inside – once Viktor and Marcus lifted Lina’s wheelchair up the one step and over the threshold into the house – Mrs. Birkner greeted them warmly. A tall, lithe woman, with her wavy, straw blond hair pulled back loosely, she seemed both relaxed and energized. She leaned down to take Lina’s hand in her own and give it a firm shake as a heartfelt smile came to her face. 

“Miss Bunke? I’m Silvia Birkner. I’m glad you’ve come.” She looked to the entire assembled family as she spoke the last sentence.

“Come along in here,” she continued, walking ahead of them. She indicated with her hand that they should make their way through a large, arched opening, and into a parlor of sorts.  At least that’s what Renate thought she’d call this room, since it was neither kitchen nor dining room, and seemed to function solely as a place where people would sit and chat.         

The room measured about fifteen feet across and twelve feet deep, and there was a small fireplace with a dark surround and mantel fashioned out of wood that matched the rest of the trim in the room.   An assortment of upholstered and wooden chairs, settees and benches faced the fireplace and had been arranged in rows, along with two small couches along the two outside walls. Just to the right of the fireplace, where, it seemed to Renate, one of the armchairs must usually go, there stood a little table. It held a small lamp, already lit, and a glass of water that had been covered with a small lace doily.

Ethel was taking a good look around, too. She’d been wondering what kind of house they’d be in, and she was relieved to see that the Birkners were not some fancy, rich people who might object to them being foresters and cabinet makers.  The furniture was not new, but not overly worn, either, a hodgepodge of designs and ages.  The room’s wallpaper was a big dingy, but not torn, and the curtains looked like Mrs. Birkner gave them regular airings and washings.  On the wall hung several photographs – family portraits, Ethel assumed. There were also several paintings of landscapes, originals, probably by someone in the family. A few more, smaller, photos in simple frames occupied the fireplace mantel, along with a vase of flowers, probably from the Birkners’ flower garden, and a clock. A floor lamp stood in one back corner, and a table lamp was perched atop a bookcase on the other wall, near the arch. Ethel caught her mother’s eye, and the two women nodded subtly to each other, acknowledging that both had surveyed the room and felt that everything was going to be all right.

While her mother and grandmother took in their surroundings, Lina looked nervously at the how the furniture was laid out. She wondered where her wheelchair could possibly fit in this tightly-packed arrangement.  But Mrs. Birkner already had a plan.  She moved aside the last chair in the front row, closest to the large arch that met the hallway.

“Here you go,” she said to Lina.  “Mr. Bunke, you can park your daughter’s chair right here, if that’s all right.”

Viktor thanked her and rolled Lina first forward and then back into the spot Mrs. Birkner had indicated.

Lina felt her cheeks burning, and she could barely breathe, although the windows in the room were open and a pleasant breeze was pushing the curtains aside and flowing into the room. Why isn’t anyone else here? she wondered.  And where is Mr. Groening?

            The rest of the family, and Mrs. Schneider, too, were obviously all asking themselves these very same questions. Mrs. Birkner hastened to put them all at ease.

“Don’t you worry, now,” she said as she showed each of them in turn to a seat with a gentle wave of her hand.  “Others are coming,” she went on, “and Mr. Groening will be here soon, too.  He called a bit ago and said he wouldn’t be long.  So, you just make yourselves at home.”

“She’s nice enough,” Renate whispered to Ulrich after Mrs. Birkner left the room, “but how are we to make ourselves at home? I wish we’d just get started. It’s hard to wait, isn’t it?” she asked, turning now to Lina.

But the only response Lina could manage was to nod.  Her throat felt so tense that she doubted she could get any words out, even if her life depended on it.  As she tipped her head in acknowledgement to her grandmother, she felt Kristina’s hand come to rest on her right shoulder and give it a squeeze.  Grateful, Lina brought her left hand (because her right was inside her pocket, grasping the newspaper article about Bruno Groening) up and laid it atop Kristina’s.

            Kristina ended up sitting directly behind Lina, with Marcus to her left and Viktor and Ethel and Peter in the seats heading the rest of the way down that row.  In the front row, Renate sat next to Lina, and Ulrich was on her left.  Mrs. Schneider was directed to the chair next to Peter. The two seats to the left of Ulrich were, evidently, saved for other guests.  On the closest one lay a folded newspaper, and a small scarf was bunched up on the next spot. As Ulrich took this in, he glanced at the man, who looked to be in his fifties, sitting in the third seat to his left. He turned when he noticed Ulrich’s surveying glance, and extended his hand.

            “Helmut Birkner,” he said simply. When Ulrich made a motion, as if to indicate Mrs. Birkner, he nodded and smiled.  “Yes, that’s my wife, Silvia. She’s the organizer. I’m the waiter,” he told Ulrich with a laugh.

            Ulrich introduced himself, and then he, too, went back to waiting, wondering whether Mr. Birkner was waiting for something in particular. The man had no obvious disabilities or injuries, but Ulrich knew full well that not all infirmities were outwardly visible.

In the fifteen or twenty minutes that followed, other people did, indeed, arrive, mostly in twos, and mostly women, but a few individual men and women also came into the room.  One man, in his mid-thirties, Peter guessed, walked in slowly and deliberately, leaning heavily on a cane and dragging his right leg behind him. Another man, who caught Viktor’s eye, held his left arm to his chest, bent at a right angle, but there was no sling holding it, and no cast, as there would be if the arm were broken. Finally, an older, gray-haired woman, in her sixties, perhaps, doubled over in pain and supported by a much younger man – her grandson? – made her way toward the seat directly behind Kristina.  As the young man helped her align herself to sit down, she was bent so far forward that Kristina could feel the woman’s ragged breath on her neck, and her hand actually clutched Kristina’s shoulder as she settled back onto the chair.

“Oh, please excuse me!” the woman half-whispered, half-cried out.

Kristina sensed that this effort to observe the social niceties had cost the woman dearly: As Kristina turned around in her seat to reassure her, she glimpsed a drawn face and eyes glassed over in agony.  “Don’t give it a second thought, Mother,” Kristina said kindly, patting the woman’s clenched hand with her own, before turning back around.

Some of the people who came into the parlor greeted those who already sat in the rows, or made eye contact with them, but the majority stared down at the floor and simply made their way silently to the seats that were still unoccupied. Each person in the room seemed focused on his or her own distress, or that of the person he or she had brought here.  It seemed to Ethel, who slowly turned this way and that to take in the room, that it wasn’t so much that these people were self-absorbed, able to think of nothing but their own suffering.  There was that, of course, but something else was at play here. In all the guests with visible burdens or pain, Ethel recognized the attitude she had seen in Lina these past four years: A keen awareness of how obviously they did not fit in to the society around them, and a strong desire to remain unnoticed. 

Back in the early days following her accident, Lina never shared with Ethel the fear that haunted her for months, that some town official would suddenly come by and cart her off to be euthanized or, at the very least, locked away in an institution for citizens who were no longer of use to their great country.  But Ethel had seen this fear in her daughter’s eyes, especially during her immediate recuperation period in the hospital.  She’d seen the way Lina looked at her whenever she came back into the room after stepping out into the hall to speak with the doctor. 

Ethel never revealed to Lina – and she had no intention of ever telling her this – that the doctor had, in fact, raised the possibility of sending Lina to the very kind of institution (“home”, he called it unctuously) that terrified Lina so much that she often lost entire nights of sleep over it. But Ethel told him in no uncertain terms that they would care for Lina at home, and that if he ever mentioned this option to anyone in their family again, she would report him to the head of the hospital for promoting eugenics. 

In fact, Ethel was not fully informed about the details of this policy that the Nazis had enacted, but she knew enough – they’d all heard reports and propaganda during the war – to know that Lina might well have been taken from them if she’d been paralyzed earlier in the war. She also knew that, these days, the government had an official policy of cracking down when anything resembling these views popped up now. At least, Ethel thought at the time, that’s what she thought she’d read.  Whether this was or was not the case, Ethel’s threat was effective.  Lina’s doctor never mentioned the “homes” again.

But here, in the Birkners’ parlor, Ethel could see that new government policies didn’t necessarily mean that crippled or otherwise disabled German citizens felt comfortable being out in public, where their infirmities were on display for all to observe.  In Bockhorn and Varel, you almost never saw anyone out on the street who was not in good health, at least physically. Even Lina preferred to stick to the homestead and the area of road between their house and the Walters’.  Never mind that it was a production to take her anywhere – just getting her here had taken so much time and effort.  That was the least of it. Ethel knew that.  Steeling herself for passersby to gawk at her, pity her, disdain her… That was what took a bigger toll on Lina.

Ethel knew this, and she sensed that Lina was feeling this discomfort right now, amidst strangers.  And Lina wasn’t the only one who felt that way, Ethel concluded as she glanced around the room.  The shame of being different, of not being seen as whole and healthy, the fear of denunciation by others… Ethel glimpsed all of that and more in the eyes and posture of the people who filled this room. She knew she couldn’t entirely grasp what they were feeling. But she did understand that it had taken unimaginable strength and courage for them all to come here tonight and to face being ridiculed, shunned, or perhaps even verbally assaulted.  And yet, they had come.  Certainly, Ethel concluded, each one of these people, like Lina, had been given up on by the doctors, told there was no hope for them, told,  “You just have to learn to live with it,” just as the doctor had said to Lina.  Yet, something had given them the power to hope. And so, here they were, grasping at this very last straw: Bruno Groening.

Viktor was already feeling overheated in his buttoned-up shirt, and judging by the fidgeting of those around him and the way some women were fanning themselves with their hats, he was not alone.  Ethel, moved by the scene around her, and by the fact that her husband had come home from the war in one piece, took his hand and gave it a squeeze. They exchanged tense smiles as they waited.  Marcus and Kristina were enjoying the sensation of being seated so close to each other that their shoulders touched if they both leaned the tiniest bit toward each other.  Peter, meanwhile, felt that Kathrin Schneider was staring at his wounded leg, at the same time as she was making a point of not wondering about how the young man next to her had acquired his limp, or how the others around her had come to be so physically wrecked.

It wasn’t just the temperature in the room that was causing the guests to shift in their seats.  Nearly everyone noticed that the atmosphere had grown tense, in the sense that it felt filled with anticipation, as if a guitar string was being slowly tightened more and more.  And just when it seemed to them that this string would break and they would all explode, Mrs. Birkner reappeared in the room, her step lighter than before, her face joyful.   Behind her came a tall, slim man with dark blond hair slicked back from his forehead.  The two of them came to stand at the front of the room, facing the guests, which now numbered about twenty-five.

Mrs. Birkner indicated the man at her left. “Those of you who were here the other night know Mr. Schmidt,” she began. “Egon Arthur Schmidt. He is one of Mr. Groening’s helpers, and he’s brought Mr. Groening here tonight.”

At this, everyone in the room began leaning this way and that, trying to get a view of the hallway outside the arch.  But there was no Groening there to be seen. And at the same time, they all noticed, the uncomfortable tension in the room hadn’t lessened with Mrs. Birkner’s reappearance. In fact, it seemed to have intensified.  Lina felt she might very well faint, or cry out.  It wasn’t anything painful, just the difficulty of waiting. For heaven’s sake, where is he?? She heard someone behind her, a woman, moaning.  Another further back and off to the side, was crying quietly, while someone shushed her, but not unkindly.

Now Mrs. Birkner sat down next to her husband, having picked up her scarf from the seat. Mr. Schmidt smiled and continued to stand before them, his hands at his sides. “Yes, dear ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “Good evening.” He paused and glanced out across the room. “You have all come here seeking healing. I know you’re anxious to see Mr. Groening, and I assure you that you will, in just a few moments. But first, he has asked me to give you these instructions, instructions that will help you take in everything you can receive here tonight.  So, I ask you first of all, to sit so that you are not touching anyone else, whether next to you, or in front of or behind you.”

At this, the sound of chair legs scraping on the wood floor and rug could be heard, as people shifted this way and that.  Marcus and Kristina reluctantly moved their chairs just far enough to comply with Mr. Schmidt’s instructions. 

“Thank you. Next, Mr. Groening asks that you sit without crossing your arms or legs.  Just let your hands rest in your lap without clasping them.  This will allow the current to flow freely through your body without short-circuiting.”

“Current?” Marcus whispered to Kristina.  “What current?” And he was not the only one in the room who glanced at the floor around the chairs, to see whether there were electrical cords running throughout the room. But there were none.

It is at this moment, as the guests are occupied with arranging their arms and legs in the correct position, that those of them on the hallway end of the rows notice a small man move quietly into the room.  Lina feels rather than see him at first.  She senses a strong heat along the right side of her body, as if she were out in bright sunlight on a sweltering day. She feels drawn to turn her head to that side, to determine the source of this great warmth. And there he is: Bruno Groening.  He walks silently to the front of the room, passing a mere six inches from her as he des so.

All movement and noise in the room ceases as the guests realize that Bruno Groening is finally before them.  No one wants to miss a single word from this man. Groening now stands next to the small table, with his back to the front wall of the room.  Mr. Schmidt has taken a seat in the front row, next to Mrs. Birkner. The first thing Groening does is to take his keys and lean over slightly to lay them on the table next to the water glass. Then he straightens back up and, still silent, slowly directs his gaze to each person in the room, his eyes moving down one row and then back up the next, pausing for a moment as he encounters the face of each sufferer or the person who has brought him or her here tonight.  Mesmerized, no one speaks, but their faces show a whole range of emotions: here, someone smiles tentatively at Groening; here, another person looks down; tears well up in many eyes, while others stare back at the small man with skepticism; other faces show just pain; and often, there is desperation and a silent plea for help.

When Groening’s gaze reaches Lina, she feels as though his shining blue eyes are looking into the depths of her soul, seeing everything about her. And although he is not smiling, and his expression looks serious – stern, even – what Lina feels coming from him is not criticism or condemnation, but love.  That is how she described it later, anyway, even though it was not like any love she had ever felt from another human, not even her mother and grandmother.  This was both an emotion and a connection of some sort. Maybe this was what Mr. Schmidt meant when he spoke of a “current”. 

What Lina senses now reminds her of the tingling and lightness she felt when she read the newspaper articles about Groening, only so much stronger. And back then, there hadn’t been this feeling of love, of a clear connection.  Connection to what? Lina asks herself, watching Groening survey the men and women before him. Is it to him that this love and this current are connecting me? She attempts to think about this, but then the tingling in her body grows more intense, until finally she notices that her whole body is vibrating, and she’s simply no longer able to engage in thought. If she were able to think at this moment, she would notice that her feet and legs were tingling and vibrating just as much as the rest of her.  But she is too caught up in experiencing the love that is flowing into her, and the peace that now reigns inside her, to pay attention to anything else.  All she can do is to allow what is flowing to flow, and to take in Groening’s appearance as he stands just a few feet in front of her.

Lina’s attention is drawn first to his eyes, to his gaze, and then to his expression.  Considering his entire face now, she can’t decide whether or not she finds him handsome. This question seems somehow irrelevant, given all that she feels radiating from him.  But, she decides, if she were to judge him objectively, by his physical features alone, she would have to say that in appearance, he was unassuming. Small in stature and build, he is also dressed in a way that would attract no one’s attention: a dark blue polo shirt with a zippered opening, beneath a neat but worn dark gray suit jacket.  His slacks are also dark gray, and the toes of his plain black shoes are scuffed. He holds his arms crossed in front of his chest, and his hands look like they have seen quite a bit of manual labor. 

As he turns his head to take in the other side of the room, Lina has to admit that his hair is quite unusual. Although she’d seen the newspaper photo of him, she hadn’t gotten a look at his hair. Dark, and slicked back from his face to reveal a receding hair-line, it is thick and falls in waves, all the way to the base of his neck.  And his neck! Lina thinks as he turns to face the room straight on once more. What is that? Groening’s polo shirt is unzipped to just below where his collar bones meet his chest, and his throat is bulging out in two big puffy sections, one on each side of his neck.  How did I not notice that before? Lina wonders. Was it like that when he came in? As she stares at his neck, it seems to her that it swelled out even more. A goiter, perhaps?  But again, her thoughts are quieted by the tingling and growing feeling of peace she is sensing in her body.  And then Groening speaks.

            “My dear seekers of healing,” he begins, in a voice that is quiet, but strong. “Your pleas to the Lord God were not in vain. Dear friends, I want to briefly introduce myself to you here.  I say it to you very clearly.  I don’t know much – I only know that which man today no longer knows, is no longer able to know. He has fallen prey to the human way, and he regards everything from the human, rather than the divine, viewpoint.  Therefore, dear friends, it looks sad for every individual person.  He can no longer find the path.  He no longer knows what is true.  He – the human being –has, practically speaking, fallen prey to every great sin without knowing it, without even perceiving it, without a guilty conscience, i.e..

            “What he does feel, is that a dissonance has not only arisen around him, but it has seeped into him, and everyone – you as well – will ask himself the question, ‘How is all that possible?’ How did it come to the point where evil – what you call ‘illness’, but I tell you that it is the evil – seized your body? So that you really no longer feel comfortable in it, so that you yourself have perceived that your body no longer obeys you, that you can no longer give it orders, that it has, so to speak, gone on strike?”

            Tears rush to Lina’s eyes now, as she feels deep within her, that what Bruno Groening is saying about their bodies – her body! – is true. Part of her wants to think about this, but only this thought comes to her: The evil? How did it do this to me? She reaches up to wipe her eyes, then focuses on simply listening.

            “Evil is around us,” Groening continues,“and man can easily – very easily! – take it into himself if he forgets himself only once. It’s like the radio.” Here he stops and gestures to the radio set on top of a side table at the back of the room. “We can also receive everything. We only need to tune into the divine transmission,the healing stream: the Heilstrom. However, if someone comes and misleads you, leads you to what is satanic, to what is evil, then you are tuning in to the evil transmission. ‘I am curious,’ you say. ‘I just want to try to hear the evil transmission.’  You see, you can also receive the evil transmission in your body, and up until now, that has been the casewith you. This is what you have done.  I believe you understand me now. It depends totally on your attitude, on how you tune in here. Yes, friends, you have such a wonderful body. If today I were to tell you about everything you are capable of when you take possession of the divine power, meaning, that first you are worthy of taking it in… oh, then you could do so much good!”

            Here Groening smiles, and it seems to Lina that his eyes are shining more now.

            “I make you aware,” he says, now beginning to walk slowly back and forth across the room, his arms still crossed in front of his chest, “that healing only benefits those who carry in themselves faith in our Lord God, or who are prepared to take faith in.”  Here he pauses, as if giving the assembled guests the chance to consider where they stand on this question. There is some shifting in the seats. ”Or who are prepared to take faith in,” he repeats.

            Here Groening gazes at Marcus, who shifts in discomfort. Does he know I have no faith? But Groening’s expression doesn’t strike him as condemning. As well, Marcus senses what he can describe only as love, flowing toward him from Groening. If he does know, then how does he still have that love for me? Or maybe it’s not for me. Marcus glances at Lina. Maybe it’s for her. She believes. He looks at his parents and grandparents, at Kristina, at Peter, too, at their rapt gazes. They all believe.”

            “Man should now,” Groening continues, “once and for all, come to self-reflection. He should know that he is a divine creature, a divine being, and that it is God Himself who has granted him this body of his for an earthly life!”

            Is this true? Marcus wonders. Would I really not be here, if not for God? Don’t I exist without God?

            “But we are earthbound after all,” Groening asserts, “earthbound through this body of ours. And thus, it is our first duty, the first task of every single individual, to pay attention to this unique body of his and to grant his body what God has intended for it.”

            ‘What God has intended for it’? Marcus muses. So, we’re back to this question of God and His plans for us. He frowns.

            Suddenly, Groening looks in his direction, and now his face is stern, although Marcus still feels the love flowing, and recognizes that this love is, indeed, directed towards him, too.

            “Don’t think,” Groening says, focusing his eyes first on Marcus, and then shifting his glance to encompass everyone in the room. “Don’t think. Feel! Your thinking is blocking the flow of the Heilstrom.”

            The Heilstrom? Marcus thinks, in spite of himself, despite his willingness to follow Groening’s instructions. Is this Heilstrom the love I’m feeling? But then he consciously turns his attention to Groening and his words, instead of the words in his own head that seek to distract him.

             “Pay attention to this unique body of yours,” Groening repeats, by way of a reminder.  “Grant your body what God has intended for it.”

            Yes! Lina thinks to herself, and she is not the only one. But what has God intended for my body? And how to give it that?

            “But this will only be possible,” Groening tells them, answering her unspoken questions, “if you pay attention to yourself,or, to put it more clearly, to your body, and if you tell yourself –  where you, that is, your body, has been seized by evil –   ‘That is not in order.’  You would use the words, ‘It is sick’” or ‘The sickness is here and there’  You even maintain that it is your sickness”!

As he speaks, he looks at various people in the audience, as if he knows that this woman has suffered for three months, and that man for seven years.  

“My dear seekers of healing,” Groening says, “Do not think of your illness now. Put it behind you and concentrate just on what you are feeling in your body! What must happen for each individual, what they deserve, and what they wish for themselves: It is already happening. Your heart, your body, your soul must be pure. Then God can enter, where Satan has been until now. Then I can help you all! In the end, you are all God’s children. But the greatest physician is and remains our Lord God!’”

Here he pauses, as all the people before him turn their attention to their own bodies, some with eyes closed, others staring blankly at a spot on the wall.  Groening has stopped pacing and is now standing in front of the fireplace again, studying the people in the chairs and taking note of each of them.  Finally, he begins speaking once more.             

“So, my dear friends, pay attention to your body now. Do not take in any thought from the outside, but pursue the feeling, how it –this Heilstrom, the divine current from God – is working in your body.  Do not think of home now. Do not think of your business. Do not think of your job, or of your neighbor. No. Think only of yourself.  And now, as you pay attention to your body, you will receive so many realizations, that you will have to say to yourself, ‘Yes, what he has just told us is correct. I do notice it. That is new to me!’ In ultimate peace and calm, only observe the body, what is going on in it!”

Here Groening again starts to walk back and forth before the people who are listening to him in rapt attention. Now and then, he stretches out a hand to indicate one of them with his hand.

  “What do you feel?” he asks, and at one point, it is Lina whom he addresses.

Embarrassed at being singled out, she shrugs at first, and then, when Groening continues to look at her, waiting, she realizes she must give some answer. She does what he has told them to do: She observes what she is feeling inside, and is surprised at what she finds there. “Peaceful,” she tells him. “I feel peace. And happiness.”

Groening nods. Then he turned to the man with the bent arm. “And you, Sir? What are you feeling?”

“Nothing, I’m afraid,” the man replies, in an apologetic tone.

Groening waved his hand. “That is of no consequence. The current is already flowing through you.” He turns back to Lina then. “What do you feel now?”

She directs her awareness inward. “Tingling, Mr. Groening.”

“Where do you feel it? Pay attention to your body and tell me.”

Lina closes her eyes and concentrates. Then, she slowly opens her eyes, her lips parted in amazement. “I feel it through my whole body.”

“Even in your legs?” Groening asks sharply.

“Yes,” Lina tells him, sitting up straighter in her chair now.  Renate turns to her granddaughter, but before she can say anything, Groening raises a finger to his own lips to silence her.

“You have the connection to Him now,” he says, indicating not just Lina, but everyone in the room now. “But I warn you, you won’t be filled with the good until you have really disassociated yourself from evil, until there is no more evil left in you, and you say, ’I no longer want anything to do with evil!’ Only then will you be worthy to receive the divine transmission, to get all the good back in your body that belongs to you, that God has determined for you, that God has determined for your body.”

Silently, he once again fixes his intent gaze on each of them in turn.  Only after he has met the eyes of every person in the room does he speak again.

            “I ask each of you now: Give me your illness. Throw away all the dirt, and then promise yourself, ‘Now I’m going to stop, I’m not going to take in anymore evil.’ This is what I urge you to do, to first give away all the evil. Give it to me, and I offer you health.  I bring you the healing for which you have been longing for so long!”

Now everyone in attendance is staring fixedly at Groening. Does he mean it? they wonder. Can he really do it? Marcus, back to reflecting now, thinks, So, he, Groening, he’s the one who brings us the healing… Others, in a near frenzy, ask themselves, But how? How do I give him the illness, what he calls the evil??

Lina is among this latter group. And as she tries in her mind to understand how she is supposed to do what he has asked, all of her family members (except for Marcus) are either looking right at her, or – in the case of Renate and Ulrich, who are seated in her same row – holding her image in their minds. And each one of them, except for Marcus, who is musing on his own thoughts, is urging her, with all of his or her heart, Do it, Lina! Give away the evil! Give it away now!

  Groening waits for what seems to everyone an agonizingly long time, standing silently before them. Then he speaks, his voice ringing.

“In the name of God, I declare you all healthy!”

Those in attendance are quiet, as if each is now searching his or her body for a change, some shift. Groening stretches his hand out in the direction of the woman sitting behind Kristina.  “Madame, what do you feel?”

She doesn’t reply at first, evidently still in the process of completing the inventory of her body. Then she raises her eyes to meet Groening’s and says, in a soft, nearly inaudible voice, “I feel nothing, Mr. Groening.”

“What do you mean, precisely?” Groening presses her. “Nothing at all?”

She shakes her head.  “No. I mean that I feel no pain.” 

At this, Kristina turns in her chair and sees that the face of this woman, who had come in wracked by pain, is now as if full of light. She is smiling from ear to ear. 

“Did you have pain when you came in?” Groening asks her.

“Why, Mr. Groening, I have been full of nothing but pain for two years now.  The doctor, he told me he couldn’t help me. Told me it was stomach cancer…”

But Groening interrupts her. “Madame, we don’t speak of the evil here. And no need to speak of that burden, because now you are free of it. Tomorrow, go to your doctor and ask him to do his tests. He will confirm your healing.”

At this pronouncement, a buzz spreads through the room, as people turn in astonishment to their neighbors. Marcus turns and gazes at the woman. So, Groening healed her! he thinks, without noticing the joy that has crept into him.

Groening says no more to the healed woman. Instead, he crosses the room and casually picks up his keys from the small table where he’d placed them at the beginning of the evening. Standing by the table now, he motions to the man who had come in with the cane, dragging his right leg. He is sitting at the end of the first row, ahead of Peter.

“Sir,” he says, “may I ask you something?”

The man nods, and Groening, who looks like he is about to pose his question, and even opens his mouth to speak, instead suddenly drops his keys onto the floor, as if they have slipped through his fingers.  Seeing this, the man who was waiting to be questioned springs from his chair, takes two quick steps, and leans down to pick up Groening’s keys. As he straightens up, he looks in surprise at the keys and then at Groening, and, finally, at his cane, which is lying on the floor by his seat.

“Thank you,” Groening says simply. “Now,” he continues, laying a hand on the man’s shoulder, “Would please do me the favor of walking over to the archway there, and then back to me again?”

This the man does, tentatively at first, and slowly. But once he reaches the arch and turns around, he strides confidently back to where Groening is standing.  He, like the woman behind Kristina, is beaming. Tears are streaming down his face. 

“Now,” Groening asks him, his hand on the man’s shoulder again, “which leg is it that was crippled during the war?”

The man, who towers over Groening, now that he is no longer hunched over a cane, ponders this, and then replies, his brows knitted, “I…I don’t remember!”  Laughter breaks out in the crowd. Someone calls out, “It was your right leg!  I saw you pulling it along when you came in.”  And the man himself chuckles, realizing the absurdity of his response. “Really, I don’t recall!” he cries.

“And indeed,” Groening tells him, “Mr. Handler, why should you remember? That leg which you broke when an ammunition box fell on it –  it’s now right as rain!”

The man looks at Groening and wonders how this man could know how his leg had been broken, or his name, for that matter. But before he can pose this question, Groening makes another request.

“Kind Sir, will you please hand me your cane?”

Handler walks easily to his seat, bends down and picks up his stick, and strides back over to Groening.  Groening takes the cane in his right hand and studies it for a moment.  Then he stretches his left arm out straight before him, raises the cane with his right hand and brings it down onto his left arm with a sharp whack. The cane breaks in two. The shocked audience members respond, some shouting, others clapping, still others simply nodding and smiling. Groening leans down to pick up the pieces of the cane that now lie on the floor, and then holds them loosely in his hands.

“You won’t be needing this anymore, will you?” When Handler shakes his head, Groening adds, “Please accept this broken cane as a reminder of your healing.”

In the first moment after Groening breaks Handler’s cane over his arm, Lina suddenly feels a strong and sharp pain in her legs. It starts in her ankles and then runs quickly up through her calves and thighs, and then into her hips.  The pain catches her so off guard that she cries out, but no one seems to hear her, since so many of the people in the room are responding to what Groening has done.  Only Renate turns to look at her granddaughter, who has now gone very pale and is staring straight ahead of her, at the fireplace.  Renate lays her hand on Lina’s, but she seems not even to notice. 

What’s going on? Lina asks herself, although her whole lower body hurts so much that she can’t formulate any explanation for what is going on.  The pain is intense, and searing, as if she is being simultaneously torn apart and compressed beneath an anvil.  She can’t understand this with her brain, but as time passes – really, only a few minutes go by, but Lina has a sense of being outside of time, in a space of eternity – she gradually comes to recognize what she’s feeling. Not a memory, but a recognition.  This is what I felt that day. When the wood fell on me.  

In the nearly four years since her accident, Lina had never remembered what her body experienced following the accident.  In the early weeks, she sometimes wondered why it was that she had no memory of the pain that she must have felt when the crushing load of wood tumbled on top of her.   Then how can I recognize it now? That thought does penetrate her mind now, but again, what she is feeling at this moment is a knowing, not a remembering.  She is sure of it, even if she can’t explain it.

And once she knows what it is that she’s feeling, Lina is suddenly overcome by fear.  Now she turns to her grandmother, and Renate sees the terror in her eyes. Lina grasps Renate’s hand in a vice-like grip, but can’t get any words out.  “Lina, Dear,” Renate whispers, leaning over, “What is it? What’s happening?” But Lina just shakes her head.

Then, in an instant, Groening is standing before them.  “What do you feel, Miss Bunke?” he asks Lina.

“Mr. Groening,” she cries, “I feel terrible, terrible pain.”

“Where do you feel it?” 

“All up and down my legs.” She begins to cry now, for it hurts so much.

“Do you recognize these pains?” he asks.

Lina nods.  Her family members are exchanging glances. What can he mean by asking her this?

“Where do you know them from?” Groening asks her.

“From the accident,” she says, sobbing. Now she is leaning forward, rubbing her thighs with her hands. Renate reaches over to put an arm around her shoulders, and Kristina leans forward to embrace her, but Groening waves them off.

“Do not touch her. It will interfere with the current.” After making sure that they will heed his words, Groening looks intently at Lina.

“Please check your body.  Are these the same pains as before? The same as when the wood fell on you from the wagon? And in the period before your casts were removed and the pain went away?”

All the Gassmanns and Bunkes look at Groening in amazement.  How does he know this about her? Kristina turns to Marcus with a question in her eyes, but he shakes his head. “I didn’t tell anyone what happened to her,” he whispers to her. “Only that she was paralyzed.” How does he know these things?

Lina sits, directing her powers of observation to her legs.  It’s so odd to feel anything at all there, after all these years, all this time when I seemed not to have any living legs at all. But are these pains the same as before?  Lina looks up at Groening like a schoolchild who’s been asked a math question far more complex than she’s able to comprehend.  But he just waits for her to come up with answer.  She closes her eyes, concentrates.

“They are in the same spots,” she finally says, slowly.  “But…”

“But what?” Groening prompts her, his voice gentle now.  Now the room is so silent you can hear the gentle ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece.

She looks up at him, and Renate can see that the fear is gone from her eyes. “They are not accompanied by the same thoughts as before.”

“What thoughts did you have, then, with the old pain?” Groening persists.

Lina inhales deeply, as if deciding whether or not to share what she has never revealed to anyone. Finally, she begins.

“’A home.’ ‘Get rid of me.’”

Groening interrupts her. “Speak up, Miss Bunke, please.”

‘Useless,’” she goes on, after clearing her throat. “‘Euthanasia.’”  As Lina speaks, she hears her mother inhale sharply.

Groening nods. “And now?”

“There aren’t any of those thoughts now. And I feel peaceful. Even though it hurts so much.”

Groening nods again, and he smiles at her, in such a kind way that she feels even more peaceful inside, even a bit happy.

Then a question bursts from Renate’s mouth. “But Mr. Groening, why does it hurt so much? That can’t be right! Can’t you help her?”

“It is right,” Groening says, answering Renate’s plea, but still focusing his gaze on Lina. “And it has to be that you feel pain. Those are the Regelungen – the regulation pains.The body is being brought into order.  After being paralyzed for four years, you can’t expect the change to occur without any pain. Pains occurring after the healing imply Regelungen.They will stop.  Observe your body. Observe it attentively.  In three or four days, you will notice more changes. I ask you to come back with your family in a week’s time and report these changes to me.”

“Mr. Groening,” Ethel queries from the row behind Lina, “does that mean, then, that Lina is healed?” She and all other members of the family barely dare to breathe at this point.

“The pain will come and go until the healing has been completed,” he replies, speaking to the group as a whole now.

Ethel turns to Viktor and frowns, and then asks, “But this pain… Why does she have to feel it? It went away. Why did it come back?”

Groening is now standing once more in front of the fireplace.

“Healing is a Regelung. Every illness that finds its Regelung will be accompanied by Regelung pain.” He points now to the woman sitting behind Kristina. “This is true for you, also. An organic disease needs Regelungen.  The illness disappears, but on the other hand, the Regelung does cause pain.”

“But I feel no pain,” the woman sitting behind Kristina reminds him.

“There is still evil within you that must leave. And when you experience that, do not fear that the healing has not been successful for you.The Regelungen – these are the evil leaving the body.”

Certainly, there are many confused looks on the faces of the people in attendance. Mr. Handler is sitting with his eyes closed, as if trying to determine whether he is feeling any of these regulation pains. He notices nothing that he thinks might qualify, and looking at Lina, who is smiling despite the fact that her body is now wracked by pain, he counts himself lucky.

Everyone seems in a daze.  Lina barely notices when Mrs. Birkner stands up and thanks Mr. Groening for coming.  Their hostess tells them that they are invited to come back the following week, and that they may bring others with them, too.  Groening speaks some words of encouragement to the guests – although neither Lina nor her family members are taking them in at all. Then Groening starts walking toward the door, and Lina feels a new burst of fear.  She reaches her hand out, but she needn’t have worried.

He stops in front of her and places one hand on her shoulder.  Then he reaches into his pocket and pulls something small out of it. It’s a small, round, shiny ball, she realizes when she sees it. It looks like it’s made out of tinfoil. Groening places it into her hand, which begins vibrating once her fingers close around the ball. The sensation is similar to what she is already feeling throughout her body, only stronger.  Is that ‘current’ in it??

“Keep this with you at all times until you come back next week.”

“Mr. Groening,” Renate breaks in, “will she be able to walk?”

Groening does look at her this time, but his words seem meant for all of them.

“Do not demand that order manifest immediately,” he says.“The more extensive the disorder, the more work is required in the body, and so it will be, for as long as it takes, until complete order manifests.” Then he leans over and says, to Lina alone, “Trust and believe. The divine power helps and heals.”

At this point, Egon Arthur Schmidt comes up behind Groening and touches his elbow lightly. Groening nods, and the two men stride out of the Birkners’ parlor, leaving the people in the chairs wondering what they have just been a part of.

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Above the River, Chapter 26

~ Sue Downing

Chapter 26

July, 1949

Gassmann-Bunke homestead

The day after Viktor worked the equivalent of a magic trick that secured Marcus’ support for taking Lina to Herford to meet Bruno Groening, an atmosphere of excitement and almost frenzied activity dominated throughout the homestead. This was so unlike these people who, despite the fact that they all had the ability to see clearly the path before them, generally moved along that path with deliberateness, rather than wild abandon. Ethel was the only one in the family who tended to float ahead with a lightness that seemed based on whims, but which was, in reality, based wholly in her strong intuitive connection to the world around her. 

But this ethereal nature of hers had, as we’ve seen, been a bit dampened by the struggles of the previous two decades.  Even so, when the decision was made to take Lina to Herford, Ethel’s lightness somehow worked its way back up through the layers of sadness and worry that had settled upon her over the preceding twenty years.  Viktor was the first to glimpse its reappearance, when she broached the topic of the trip with him that one night before bed.  He saw that, as his wife told him about Groening and about how Lina wanted to go to Herford to see him, she seemed to come alive.  It was as if little points of her long-buried light began to penetrate her skin, more and more, until, finally, he saw before him the Ethel of 1921, fully illuminated, the way she had appeared to him in the early days of their acquaintance, and then, courtship. It was this sight, combined with his own, heart-opening experience in the forest that one day, that made it possible for something of the Viktor of those early days to resurface, too. And although neither he nor Ethel spoke about these changes that were taking place in each other, something shifted between them, as we have seen, and it was this shift that convinced Viktor that they must get Lina to see Groening.  He couldn’t explain why he was so certain of this, but he felt very keenly that therein lay the key to making things right in his family. If just the thought of taking Lina to Herford brought the brightness back into Ethel’s whole being, then what might happen when they actually got there?

   Perhaps surprisingly – because in other ways he was so very calculating – Marcus was the other member of the family who tended toward impulsiveness.  He seemed to have inherited his father’s ability to see every situation for what it was and judge where the personal benefit lay.  Still, the two of them differed: Viktor, by the time he reached the age Marcus was now, had realized his tendency to manipulate others, and had sworn to follow a different road for the rest of his life. But Marcus had not yet gained this insight. He was still firmly on the path of self-interest. 

Like the younger iteration of Viktor, Marcus had no use for, or belief in, God. His suppertime refutations of God’s existence were quite sincere, rather than constituting the idle philosophizing he tried to pass them off as. Early in his life – even on up into early adolescence – he made a great effort to believe in God. There was a great deal of mention of God and His supposed powers in the household, even though the Gassmann-Bunkes were strictly Sunday worshippers. So, when Viktor beat him for an infraction, Marcus cried out to God in his heart, begging for an end to his father’s brutality. The beatings persisted. When he prayed to be allowed to use the rifle, this prayer was, indeed, granted, but the terms of the agreement turned out to be so harsh that it felt to Marcus as if God was just laughing at him. It was this incident with the rifle that destroyed any scrap of belief in God that he might have still had. After that, Marcus swore he would never pray for anything again. And on the recent evening, when he fled to the forest after Viktor’s announcement that Marcus would have to come back and work at home, all of Marcus’ resentment toward both his father and toward God erupted in an explosion of anger: As he swung the dead birch branch against the ground, over and over again, it was the rifle he was imagining smashing, smashing, smashing.

Thus, early in his life, Marcus was left without God to turn to. Finding himself in this predicament, he didn’t seek guidance from the trees, or from some thin stream of the divine deep within himself. Rather, much in the way his grandmother, Renate, had done before the suppertime discussions about God led her to see things differently, Marcus felt – no, knew – that he could rely only on himself. He would determine and forge his own way, based solely on his own judgment.

Let’s be clear: In this approach, he did differ from his grandmother in one important way. Renate had always firmly believed in God. It was just that she never – until now – included Him in her decision-making process. Marcus, however, felt that he was fully on his own. He saw no one around him whom he could trust to help him make his way through life. As he saw it, his father actively strived to thwart him. (When following this train of thought, Marcus conveniently disregarded how Viktor had gotten him placed in the Censorship Office during the war, and in that plum Civil Service position afterwards.)

The Civil Service position in Varel was absolutely key to Marcus’ long-range plans, and he was committed to fighting to keep it. He may not have heard God whisper to him in the darkest part of the night that this job was part of His plan for Marcus. And he may not have felt this idea flow into him from the sturdy, reliable trunk of a spruce tree at his back. But he did feel every bit as convinced of the plan’s rightness as if he had come by this guidance in one of those ways. That was because Marcus did feel something deep inside him, a power that he tapped into when he was faced with making a decision. He found it more difficult to calm himself down than Viktor did with his spruce tree, more difficult to get into a state that would allow him to sense this “something”, but he had developed a way to do this. 

Not every night – because sometimes he was just too agitated, as he’d been when he pounded the birch branch against the ground – but every couple of days, late at night, he took a seat on the edge of his bed. The first time he did this was the night before he started working in Varel. Full of anxiety at beginning this new post, overcome by fear of not meeting his new boss’s– or his father’s – expectations of him, he found himself sitting on his bed, bent elbows resting on his knees, his head in his hands. He was so anxious, so beside himself, that he even stopped breathing without noticing it.  But he still felt his heart pounding.  Then, reflexively, he gasped. The sudden intake of air calmed him, and the loud exhale through his mouth helped slow his heart rate, too.

In the years following that first experience, this process grew into a habit of sorts. Marcus rested his hands on his knees and breathed deeply – in through his nose, out through his mouth, until he felt his breathing slow – until it felt like the very core of him shifted out of his muddled head or his tight throat or chest, and settled firmly into his abdomen. When that happened, Marcus felt both calm and strong. First his belly grew warm, and he felt a mild pulsing there which grew in intensity as the minutes passed. Then this pulsing spread outward, in all directions, throughout his body.

Marcus never would have described the pulsing he felt as the divine power that Lina and their grandfather mentioned feeling when they were in the forest, or as something that came from God. As we’ve seen, God was just not in the picture for Marcus. What he sensed within him as he sat on the edge of the bed of an evening – he thought of it as just a power. It was a neutral strength that existed in him without any of the divinity or sweetness or loving overlay that Lina and Ulrich seemed to associate with what they felt flowing inside them.  If someone were to push Marcus to define this power, he would say, with a shrug, that it was simply his core, his essence. It didn’t come from anywhere or anyone else. It was just… him.

Marcus had developed the habit of embracing the ideas and insights that came to him when he felt this power pulsing steadily within him. He somehow recognized that the ideas that came through to him when his essential power was flowing were to be trusted – he just knew what to do – but that the ones that flew into his head when he was agitated did not serve him well. This he learned through trial and error. And although it was often very difficult for him to keep from acting on the spur of the moment, under the influence of the agitated thoughts, he tried his best to hold back at these times. He strived to wait until he could have a quiet moment alone, before making any decision. It seemed to him that following this procedure represented the key to expressing his own free will – which he prized so highly – and to avoiding falling under others’ control.

So, what about the moment at the supper table, then, when Viktor extended his hand to Marcus, with the promise that Marcus could stay in his job in Varel, if Lina went to see Groening, and was healed? Wasn’t it an impulsive decision that led him to reach out and take his father’s hand? In fact, it was not. As Marcus listened to what Viktor said, he sensed his power, his essence, settling firmly into his core. He felt strong and calm, and deep within him, he felt clearly that agreeing to this bargain was the right step to take, even though he couldn’t have said, at that moment, why it was right. He just knew that it was.

For this reason, once Marcus accepted his father’s offer – and hand – over supper the day before, he felt an inner urge to move, move, move, to make everything happen before it could fade away like a mirage.

Certainly, everyone else in the family felt an urgency about the situation, too, even if each individual had his or her reasons for supporting the plan.  They were all grateful that the initial discussion did not devolve into a tense argument over the real heart of the matter: Could this Groening really heal Lina? No one could explain what had kept them from talking about this over supper the day before – and since then, too. It was as if everyone knew that they were on the cusp of an event that could truly transform all their lives, and understood intuitively that asking the obvious question might destroy the fragile fabric of this opportunity that had somehow come their way.  For this reason, they focused on the practical details: Since the unanimous thought was that time was of the essence, they decided to head off for Herford on Friday.  Today was Wednesday. That gave them only two days to make all the decisions prepare for their journey.

Looking at the maps, they calculated that it would take them half a day to drive to Herford, and half a day to drive back. But there was no telling how long they would have to wait to see Mr. Groening, assuming they were able to see him at all.  This thought – that something might prevent the meeting – came to everyone in the family, but, being Gassmanns and Bunkes, they didn’t voice it, as if they feared that expressing it aloud might draw that result toward them.  Instead, they threw themselves into preparations for a trip that might stretch to two or three days, if they ended up having to wait for an audience.

  So, in addition to carrying out their usual daily chores and work, each family member took on additional tasks that would contribute to putting the plan into action – except for Lina. She had no extra assignments.  She was in such a state of anticipation and distraction, that it was all she could do to take care of darning the socks without stitching the mending to her apron through inattention. Finally, seeing how worked up her daughter was, Ethel rolled her out into the yard. “Take a good, long stroll, dear one,” she told Lina.  “Enjoy that wheelchair while you still can. Once we’re back from Herford, we’re going to really put you to work!”  Lina laughed and began rolling herself toward the gate. A minute later, she was moving faster and faster down the lane, for once full of joyful expectation, instead of frustration and hopelessness.

Given the high level of excitement around the homestead, everyone was actually grateful to have extra chores: It wasn’t just Lina who had excess energy to work off! It was Wednesday morning, and Renate was baking extra bread to take with them. Meanwhile, Ethel checked the cheese supply in the cellar and set about making some fresh goat cheese for the trip.  There was plenty of bacon they could take, and some smoked sausage, too.  Kristina offered to take on the task of readying pillows and blankets: If they did end up having to stay in Herford for several days, who knew what conditions there might be like?

Peter and Viktor loaded a china cabinet they’d just completed into their pickup truck (acquired two years earlier, thanks to the extra income Marcus’ job brought in) and set off for Varel to deliver it to clients there. On the way, they dropped Ulrich off at the Walters’ farm, where he planned to talk with Lorena and Stefan about possibly borrowing their truck. Of course, they’d need it only if Marcus failed to complete his assignment: He was to ask at his office to see whether any of his coworkers would lend him a car for a few days.  If not, the whole extended Gassmann-Bunke family would head south to Herford in the two pickup trucks.  That wouldn’t be ideal, and even if Marcus arranged a car, they’d still have to take one of the trucks, because they certainly could not all fit in one car…

It was quite the discussion at the table the evening before all this activity, when they got down to deciding who would go to Herford, and who would not.  At first, Viktor said that he and Ethel would take Lina on their own. But then, Renate asserted her right to come along. “It was my idea in the first place!” she cried, although by then, nearly everyone knew this was not the case.  Next, Lina declared that she didn’t want to go without Kristina (who was grateful for her friend’s devotion). Marcus insisted on being part of the travelling party, if only so he could make sure the plan proceeded in a timely fashion. As he saw it, the sooner they got Lina to Herford, the sooner he could rescind his letter of resignation. Ulrich had been hanging back in the conversation, but when Renate looked pointedly at him, he coughed and said that, as head of the family, he’d better come along, too. Besides, he was the one who knew how to get the pickup started up again if it stalled. At this point, Peter, who’d noticed his own secret hopes in his heart, announced firmly that he wasn’t about to be left behind, if the whole rest of the family was going.  That left only little 9-year-old Ingrid.

“What about me?” she asked, brightly, already looking forward to the prospect of what she interpreted as an adventure, rather than a last-ditch effort to help Auntie Lina.

Almost in unison, and with only slight differences in phrasing, Kristina, Renate, and Ethel immediately told her, “You’ll stay with Aunt Lorena and Uncle Stefan while we’re gone.” Crestfallen, Ingrid was about to object, but Kristina silently gave her a stern look, and she closed her mouth and slumped in her chair, dejected.

By late afternoon on Wednesday, all was in readiness, or on track to be ready by Thursday evening, when they intended to pack everything, in preparation for an early morning departure on Friday. Loaves of bread were cooling on the counter, and fresh cheese was draining and would be ready to be packed in crocks the next day.  These would be placed into baskets alongside cured sausage wrapped in cloth. Renate made sure there was also plenty of fruit – fresh berries and dried apples.

But all of these preparations seemed minor achievements compared to the news that Marcus shared when he arrived home from work.

“I’ve gotten us a car!” he announced proudly as he sat down with them around the table for their evening bread and salami. “I’ll pick it up after work tomorrow.”

Lina, who’d been sitting with her long braid wrapped around her wrist, raised her arms in such jubilation that the freed braid flew into the air above her before falling back to her chest. “Marcus, you did it!” she cried gleefully. She clapped her hands together with a joy that reminded her parents and grandparents of the light-hearted young woman Lina had been before her accident. It did their hearts good to see it.

Spirits were understandably high that evening. They all felt restless, and since the sun was still setting late in the evening at this point in the summer, they didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves.  If Marcus had brought the car home this evening, they would certainly not have been able to restrain themselves from heading out that very minute.  As it was, though, they had to wait another day. And after all, as Ulrich reminded Renate, there were still things to take care of on the homestead tomorrow, so that they could be sure that everything would run smoothly while they were away.

Renate and Ulrich were the only ones who remained at the house that early evening, having decided to “take in the air” by sitting outside the back door in two rocking chairs Viktor carried outside for them.  Peter headed to the workshop to start organizing the wood for a set of dining room chairs he and Viktor would work on once they got back from Herford. Marcus, feeling in an expansive mood, uncharacteristically offered to help his brother. Like the others, he didn’t quite know what to do with himself, and he had to keep himself busy until it was time for his usual evening chat with Kristina.  As for Viktor and Ethel, without even talking it over, they immediately set out for the treehouse, where they had both found so much peace in the past.  With a bit of luck, perhaps they could resurrect this way of connecting to the divine and to each other.

Lina and Kristina had hoped to have a bit of time to discuss the events that were about to unfold, but Ingrid, knowing that she would soon be separated from her mother for at least a day or two, pleaded to be able to join them on their evening stroll. Kristina didn’t have the heart to deny her this, and Lina acquiesced, too.

“Come on, little one,” Lina told Ingrid. “I’ll race you to that fallen log by the path into the woods. See it?”  She leaned forward in her chair, hands poised on the wheel rims, and made the noises of a car engine being revved.

Ingrid laughed and set off at full speed before Lina could even call out, “Ready… Set… Go!”

Lina smiled, too, and turned around. “Come on,” she told Kristina, “You’re going to have to push me if we’re going to have any chance of catching her!”

And thus it ended up that the three of them reached Lina and Kristina’s favorite talking spot almost at the same time. But Ingrid was the first to touch the log. In fact, she sprawled across it, holding her side, although none of them could say whether the ache was from exertion or laughter.  Just a moment later, Lina’s toes touched the log, too, as Kristina pushed her right up to it.

“You cheated!” Ingrid chided them. “Mama, she was supposed to do the race on her own!”

Kristina froze for a moment, wondering how Lina would respond.  But she needn’t have worried.

“I will race you on my own next time,” Lina told Ingrid cheerily, reaching out to touch the girl’s flushed cheeks with her two hands.  “I promise!”

By the time the sun set and darkness was beginning to fall, Ingrid was in bed. Lina and her parents and grandparents were all inside the house, busying themselves with whatever they found to occupy their hands or their minds.  Peter was still in the workshop, sitting at the workbench, shoulders hunched, staring down at the plans for the chairs, but without really taking them in.  Having Marcus out there with him had done the opposite of quell his anxiety, and he was grateful when his brother finally went outside to talk to Kristina.  The door to the yard was shut, and Peter was happy about that.  He had no desire at all to hear their personal discussions.

Peter knew the two of them were courting, of course. No one in the family had any doubts about that. What Peter couldn’t understand was why Kristina had fallen for his brother.  Doesn’t she see through him?? Without even realizing he was doing so, Peter viewed Marcus and everything he did through the lens of their childhood. When he looked at Marcus, he only ever saw a bully.  It was beyond his capabilities to imagine that his brother could actually feel tenderness for someone.  As Peter saw it, his brother was tainted by meanness and aggression. It never would have occurred to Peter that his own experiences shaped how he saw his brother.  Once a bully, always a bully. That was Peter’s view regarding Marcus. And so, over the previous two years since Marcus began courting Kristina, a combination of anger and worry and indignation and envy took root in Peter. Since he was convinced of the durability of Marcus’ negative character traits, he worried that Kristina might suffer at Marcus’ hands, and when this thought came to him, his own persistent anger at his own and Lina’s mistreatment rose up.  But he immediately stuffed it down again. (After all, Marcus was the angry one, not him!)

Then there was his disbelief that Kristina had chosen Marcus over him. Not that Peter saw himself as any prince charming, but for God’s sake! He, Peter, was the nicer one, the better carver, the handsomer one.  He knew all of this to be true.  Of course, there was his gimpy leg, and Peter had spent the previous two years telling himself that if only he was as physically whole as Marcus was, then Kristina would see clearly which of the two brothers was the better bet for her. Hence the envy.  Hence the high hopes that he, too, placed on the visit to Bruno Groening.  If Lina managed to see Groening – even if they all just had to stand out in that yard, in front of the house – then they’d all be there with her. That meant there was hope. For now, though, it was Marcus and Kristina sitting together outside the workshop.

Like everyone else on the Gassmann-Bunke homestead, Kristina was full of excitement about the coming journey to Herford, and when Marcus joined her, her face – her whole being, really – shone with joyful anticipation.  She even patted the spot next to her on the bench, something she had never done before.  Every other night, she waited meekly, her hands folded demurely in her lap, as if she were holding her breath and waiting to see whether Marcus would really come out to talk with her.  Now, though, she seemed to have come alive in a way he hadn’t seen before. 

Seeing this change in her, another person might have drawn the conclusion that she was just excited for Lina, but Marcus – being Marcus – interpreted her new openness as an adoring response to the tremendous feat he’d accomplished that day: securing his boss’ car for the trip.  She’s proud of me!  This emboldened him, so that he gave her a big smile and a strong hug as soon as he sat down. He leaned back against the wall behind them, still smiling, stretched his arms out above his head, and then slowly lowered them, so that one fell to his side, while the other came to rest around Kristina’s shoulders.

“I can hardly believe it,” Kristina said, turning to him. “Lina’s actually going to get to see Bruno Groening!” She raised her hands in front of her and brought them together, as if she was getting ready to clap them together.

Marcus nodded and ran his right hand over his hair, smoothing it, but said nothing.

“I can’t wait to see what it’s like there – in Herford,” Kristina went on, animatedly. “How does he actually heal the people who come?  It’s so mysterious!”

“Hard to know what to think of all that,” Marcus replied, in a noncommittal tone, “but if she gets back on her feet again, that’s what counts.”

“When she gets back on her feet,” Kristina said, as if reminding herself. Then she turned herself on the bench so that she was facing him with her whole body. “We all have to believe he can do it, believe for her!”

  “I’ll leave that to you all,” Marcus told her.  “I’m just the driver.” He smiled, to underscore the joke, but Kristina looked at him closely.

“Do you not believe that Mr. Groening can heal her?” she asked quietly.

“Kristina,” he said, gently pulling her closer to him, “What do I know about these things? I don’t believe or not believe.  Seeing is believing. Isn’t that what they say?”

She nodded, and he went on.

“Right. So, if Lina gets healed, then I’ll believe it. Like I said, for now I’m just the driver.”

“Don’t you think, though, that it will help her if we all believe it’s possible?”

Marcus paused, trying to find a softer way to express what he was thinking. Finally, he said, “Don’t you think that if he can really do what all those people say he can do, then it doesn’t matter what we think?”

Kristina pondered that. “I never thought of it that way,” she replied thoughtfully. “You mean, if he really is that powerful, then one of us not believing won’t keep Lina from being healed?”

“Something like that,” Marcus said. He wanted to distract her from this potentially dangerous topic, and he was happy that his words had come across as more positive than his actual thoughts on the subject. “The main thing is, day after tomorrow, we’ll head down there and find out exactly what this Groening can do.” 

Kristina, shifting her focus to the actual trip, began talking about what was really most important to Marcus. “It’s so wonderful that you were able to convince your boss to lend you the car!”

“Didn’t take much convincing,” he told her, sitting up a little straighter.  “He was happy to help.”

Kristina leaned her head on his shoulder. “He must think a lot of you, Marcus.”

She couldn’t have said anything more pleasing to him, or in a more adoring tone.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he laughed, but he squeezed her shoulder and briefly leaned his head down to touch hers.  His tone sounded light, but his stomach was in knots, as he tried to judge when the best time would be to say what he wanted to say.

Kristina allowed her head to remain on Marcus’ shoulder. She was enjoying this closeness with him and the new lightness between them.  He seemed so at ease…

“He’s not the only one, you know,” she said after a minute.

“Not the only one what?” Marcus asked, turning his head toward hers.

Here Kristina grew shy and, sitting up again, looked down at her lap.  “The only one who thinks a lot of you.”  She waited a moment and then glanced over and met his gaze.  He was smiling, and in just a very genuine and happy way, so she went on. “What I mean is that I think a lot of you, too, Marcus. More than a lot.  Much more than a lot.”

He removed his arm from around her shoulder and took both of her hands in his.  “I’m so happy to hear that,” he told her, his voice low, but strong. “Because I think a lot of you, too.” He paused.  Now! “In fact, Kristina, I’ve been wanting to tell you that I love you.”

Although she had thought he might have been about to say this, Kristina still blushed and took in her breath sharply. Then she smiled with her whole heart, looked down at her hands inside Marcus’, and said, so softly that he asked her to repeat herself, “I love you, too.”  She wanted to ask him why he had waited until now to tell her this, but her heart was so full of joy that she pushed the thought aside and concentrated on wiping away the tears that suddenly began to flow from her eyes.

Marcus reached up to dry the tears, telling her tenderly not to cry.  Then they leaned their heads together and kissed.  First it was just tentative, soft pecks, but these soon gave way to deep, heartfelt kisses that left them oblivious to everything and everyone but each other. They were so locked in each other’s embrace and joy, that they didn’t even notice Peter when he emerged from the workshop to head back to the house.  He caught sight of them, sitting there in the near darkness, and in his shock and disgust, he nearly said something he would certainly have regretted later. But he caught himself in time and moved soundlessly along his way, toward the dim light that still emanated from the windows of the log home.

*          *          *

It was past the time when Marcus usually got home from Varel the next night, and although no one said anything about it as they sat at the table, eating a light supper, they were all worried that something might have gone wrong. Then, just past 5:30, they heard a motor outside.  They all craned their necks to look out the windows, and Ulrich, who sat closest to the door got up from his seat with surprising speed. He leaned out the open door and then turned around to address them, his eyes shining.

“He’s here!” he shouted, although there was really no need to shout. “With the car!”

They all immediately rose from their seats and headed out to the yard – with Kristina pushing Lina’s wheelchair ahead of her.

What they saw, amidst the dirt and sparse grass and clumps of flowers in front of the workshop was a gleaming, black Opel Kapitän. Marcus climbed out of the driver’s seat, beaming as if he himself owned the car.

“So this is your boss’ car?” Ethel asked, clearly impressed. She ran her hand over the hood, while Ulrich bent down to examine the headlights. 

“Must be one of the new ones,” Ulrich announced. “The old ones had those hexagonal headlights.” He shook his head. “Must have cost a pretty penny.”

“How’d you arrange it, Son?” Viktor asked, and Marcus felt himself swell with pride, hearing the approval in his father’s voice.

“I just talked to him, to Mr. Weiss,” he explained. “Told him we had a family emergency with Lina, here, that we had to go to Herford, and said I was looking for a car to borrow for a few days.”

Renate had come over now and was peering through the windows at the leather seats. “And he just offered you his, just like that?”

“More or less,” Marcus replied.  “He wants me to keep working there as much as I want stay, so he told me he’d help.  And that’s why I’m so late. I drove him home and then took the car.”

Kristina had come up beside him now and was smiling and shaking her head in amazement. “Marcus, you did it! You really did it!” she said, excitedly, and slipped her hand into his without thinking how this would look to the rest of the family.  It did not escape anyone’s notice.

Turning to Kristina, Marcus asked, “Did you doubt me, Tina?”  He had a smile in his voice, but even after the previous night’s avowals of love between them, his heart still seemed to stop as he awaited her response.  But he needn’t have worried. She shook her head fiercely.

“Never, Marcus. Never!”

Just then, their old hunting dog, Stick, came bounding out from behind the workshop and ran full tilt toward Marcus who had, for some reason, always been his favorite. Full of joy, Stick propelled himself headlong at Marcus, leaping up and knocking him back against the car. Marcus laughed and wrestled playfully with the dog, but when he let go, Stick, still playing, leapt up and, missing Marcus, came down against the car door. Marcus’ face went white. Pushing Stick aside roughly, he immediately crouched down to examine the finish.

“Get him out of here! Marcus shouted, to no one in particular. “He scratches this car, and I’m done for!” He tried to make a joke out of it, but they could all see the genuine anxiety on his face. Peter took Stick by the collar and led him to the workshop, where, after moving the water bowl inside for him, he shut the dog up for the night. 

He was just coming out of the workshop when Stefan pulled into the yard, his wife, Lorena, sitting next to him in the cab of their pickup truck. 

As Lorena lowered herself slowly out and down to the ground, Renate, confused, asked:

“Did Ulrich not tell you we won’t need your truck tomorrow? Marcus’ boss lent him this Opel. Look!”

Lorena shook her head, gave the car a glance without really taking it in, then gestured to Renate that she wanted to speak with her in private.  By now, Stefan had gotten out of the truck, too, and joined the crowd. But all eyes were on the two sisters.

Renate bent her head close to her sister’s mouth, because Lorena was speaking in such a low voice it was barely audible.  But when Renate heard what Lorena had to say, she straightened up and looked her sister in the eye, and the rest of them could see her shaking her head, while Lorena slowly nodded, confirming that her words were true.

Visibly saddened, Renate walked over to the assembled family, with Lorena following behind her, and took a position next to Lina.

“Grandma?” Lina asked, her voice tight.  “What is it? Is something wrong?”

“We won’t be going to Herford tomorrow after all,” Renate intoned flatly.

Various cries of disbelief could be heard, and everyone began questioning her at once, demanding an explanation.

“Well,” Renate began, and then, as if she couldn’t bear to go on, said, “Lorena, you might as well tell it, since you’re the one who heard it.”

Lorena, who was shorter and slighter and less imposing than her sister, nonetheless managed to imbue her words with authority.

“I was listening to the radio just a bit ago,” she told them, standing up as tall as she could, hoping her stance could lend them all the strength they’d need.  “And there was a story about Mr. Groening.” She paused, glancing at the confused faces of those before her.  A story about Mr. Groening, Lina thought.  That must be good. More healings, perhaps. But if that’s the case, why does Aunt Lorena look so serious?

“Go on,” Renate whispered, laying a hand on her sister’s shoulder.

“Yes.  Well, they said that as of yesterday, the city of Herford has issued a healing ban against him.”

Lina’s face went pale. She couldn’t speak. 

But Ethel found her voice. “A healing ban? What does that mean, exactly?” she asked, looking intently at her aunt.

“According to what they said on the radio, it means that the city has forbidden him to do any healing work at all there.  And all the people who’ve come to see him – everyone waiting out on the square in front of the house – they’ve been ordered to leave.”

“But what about people who just come to see him at that house?” Lina asked in an agitated voice.  “Maybe he’s still allowed to help them?”

“I’m afraid not,” Lorena replied.  “He can’t do anything that the city officials might consider healing work.”

“But they can’t just drive people away!” Kristina cried, releasing Marcus’ hand and making her way over to Lina, who was sitting stock still, staring at Lorena.

“That’s exactly what they’re doing,” Lorena told them all. “Not like they’re criminals or anything, mind you. But they’ve ordered everyone to leave.”

“It’s a disgrace,” Peter said bitterly. “No one wants anything to do with the sick and the hurt. Just imagine what a scene that must be, thousands of people in front of that house.  People that that city – and our whole country, too – don’t want to admit exist.  Not in our perfect Germany –“

“Stop, Son,” Viktor said firmly, but with kindness. He laid his hand gently on Peter’s back, a gesture that did not escape Marcus’ notice.  “The city probably just doesn’t want giant crowds, unpredictable crowds, gathering to see a man who –“

“Who what, Papa?” Lina asked softly. “Who can do something that no doctors in our country seem to be able to do? Where’s the harm in that?”

“There’s no harm, Lina, of course,” Ethel said.  She’d crouched down beside Lina now and was holding her hand.

Viktor looked down at his hands and paused before he spoke. “It’s just that people, and by that I mean the government, are understandably skittish. I mean, a man comes out of nowhere. A charismatic man…” He didn’t need to go on.

“But Papa!” Lina cried, speaking through tears now, “that’s not what’s going on with Mr. Groening. He’s helping people! Don’t you believe that?”

They were all staring at Viktor now.

“I do believe it, Lina,” he told her, and he was speaking the truth.  “I’m just trying to imagine what the city officials’ reasoning was.”

“From what I could tell from the radio story,” Lorena said, “it was partly that they said the big crowds were a public health concern.”

“Meaning what?” Ulrich asked. Until now, he’d remained silent, standing next to the car and listening to everything that was being said.

“Apparently, they were worried that disease might spread, what with folks all crowded together there.”

Peter snorted.  “What a lie.  What they were really worried about was that good health would spread, and then there’d be no more work for the city’s doctors.” He punctuated his words by jabbing his right index finger into the air before him.

“There was that, too,” Stefan confirmed.  “I heard that part. Seems it was the city’s doctors who went to the city government with complaints.  Something about Groening violating some healing practitioners law.”

“Of course he did,” Peter said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

By now, all the women had crowded around Lina and were hugging and comforting her in any way they could think of.

“But what about Groening?” Ulrich asked.  “What’s he going to do?”

“They didn’t say,” Stefan replied.  “Just that he had to leave town. Not that they were driving him out. But he knew that if he stayed there, then people would just keep coming, hoping to see him, even if he told them he couldn’t see them.”

Marcus, who had been leaning against the car with his arms crossed this whole time, finally spoke.

“Lina, don’t worry,” he said, his voice calm and confident.

But his sister looked at him in disbelief.  “Not worry?” she shouted.  “Not worry, when now I have no hope of seeing Mr. Groening?  Now that I’m condemned to this chair for the rest of my life?”

Even Ethel was looking daggers at her son, wondering what had led him to say something that came out sounding so cruel.

Marcus stood up and put his hands out in front of him, palms open. “Sis, who says there’s no hope of you seeing him?”

“Didn’t you hear Aunt Lorena?” Ethel asked him tartly. “He can’t do his healing work any more.”

“Not in Herford, he can’t,” Marcus responded calmly. “As I understand it, it was just Herford that banned him.  Is that right, Aunt Lorena?”  He turned to his great-aunt, who nodded.

“I mean, they didn’t say that exactly,” she replied, “but they didn’t mention that any other city had banned him.  That’s true.”

Now Marcus allowed a bit of a smile to come to his lips.  “Well, then.  So this Groening has left Herford.  All that means is he’s gone somewhere else, and wherever that is, no one’s keeping him from healing people.  At least not yet.”

“But what good does that do us?” Lina replied, dejected.

“Yes,” Kristina asked Marcus, “After all, he could have gone anywhere. Even out of the country, for all we know.”

“Did the radio say where he was going to go?” Renate asked Lorena, but keeping one hand firmly on Lina’s shoulder.

Lorena shook her head. “I’m afraid not.”

“Don’t worry,” Marcus said again, and this time, Peter took a step toward him.  But Marcus waved him off in a genial way. Then he walked up to Lina, squatted down in front of her, and placed his hands on the wheelchair’s arm rests.

“Sis, we’ll find him.”

Lina shook her head. “But how, Marcus? It’s not possible.”

Marcus leaned in until his face was right in front of hers. “It is possible, Lina, and we’ll do it.  We’ll find this Groening. And we’ll take you to see him.”

This was the first time Lina could ever remember Marcus offering to do anything for her, anything kind.  But she could feel that he really meant it, and she wasn’t ready to let go of the straw she’d grasped onto. She looked into his eyes and, seeing there, too, that he was sincere, she spoke.

“Promise?” she asked quietly.

“Promise,” he said with a smile.  And he held out his hand to her.  “Let’s shake on it.”

Lina didn’t hesitate. Wiping her tears away with one hand, she stretched out the other, which was still shaking from all the shock and emotion of the past few minutes, and felt Marcus’ close around it.  She felt the strength in his grip. That didn’t surprise her.  But what did was something else she sensed there. It seemed to her that it was love.

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Above the River, Chapters 1 and 2

~ Sue Downing

Starting today, I’m going to be publishing my novel, Above the River, right here on my blog feed, in serialized form. Every week or so, I’ll put up one or two chapters as a new blog post. I’m going to be continuing to put up my regular blog posts here, too. To make it easier for folks to want to keep up with the novel without having to scroll through blog posts, I’ve added a new page to this site: “Above the River”. Each time I post a new installment as a blog post, I’ll also add the new chapters to the bottom of that page. You’ll still have to scroll down to find the new chapters, but at least they’ll all be there in one place. It feels very exciting and fun to be sharing the novel with you in a serialized form. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it this way, too!

Above the River

by Sue Downing

Author’s Note: What follows is a work of fiction. All characters in this novel are fictional, with the exception of Bruno Groening (1906-1959, Germany) and his assistant, Egon Artur Schmidt. Dubbed “The Miracle Healer” by the media, Groening attracted great crowds and a large number of followers, beginning in the late 1940s.  Thousands of these people were healed of a wide variety of diseases and disorders after spending time in Groening’s presence. Groening had no medical training. Nor was he licensed as a healing practitioner. He asserted that any healing people experienced through their encounters with him was brought about not by him, but by God, whom he called “the greatest physician”. The German government initiated several legal cases against Groening, on the grounds that he had violated the Healing Practitioners Act. Although he was fined for his activities, he was never jailed. No verdict was rendered in Groening’s final trial: He passed away while it was still in progress.

            Groening appears in this novel, as does his assistant, Egon Artur Schmidt, but the novel’s characters, and the scenes depicting their interactions with Groening, are entirely fictional. However, I have used many of Groening’s own words in these scenes: extracts from lectures he gave, which were recorded, and subsequently transcribed, and translated into English. I have used boldface type in the text to indicate the phrases and sentences which are Groening’s. I am deeply grateful to the Bruno Groening Circle of Friends for granting me access to these transcribed, translated lectures, and for granting me permission to use excerpts from them in this novel.

* * *

Above the River    

Thoughts are free. Who can guess them?

They fly by like nocturnal shadows.

No person can know them, no hunter can shoot them

with powder and lead: Thoughts are free.

I think what I want, and what delights me,

Still always reticent, and as it is suitable.

My wish and desire, no one can deny me.

And so it will always be: Thoughts are free!

And if I am thrown into the darkest dungeon,

All of these are futile acts,

Because my thoughts tear apart

All gates and walls: Thoughts are free!

– From the song “Thoughts are Free”,

Hoffmann von Fallersleben

Chapter 1

August 6, 1949

Gassmann-Bunke family homestead

Near Varel, Germany

            It is time. Ethel Bunke comes into the kitchen of her family’s log home. Her hazel eyes float quickly and almost haphazardly over this small and that large object. It’s as though she wishes to slowly take in every detail of this kitchen that has formed the comforting shape of her daily life for the forty-five years she has been alive.  There’s the stove, so central and friendly that her fingertips can feel its scratches and firmness without even touching them.  A jar of flour, not quite two-thirds full, stands on the wooden counter.  This reminds her of the crock of sourdough starter in the cellar.  A sudden wish to pack it into her suitcase floods her heart.  No. No need. Mama and Kristina will use it here. And anyway, Ethel reminds herself, I’ll be back in a few months! Besides, she knows that there is plenty of flour where she’s headed. Even so, she also knows that the new and, as yet, un-breathed air, different humidity levels, and unfamiliar yeasts of the air there will create an entirely new sourdough starter.  A new starter. Their entire family desperately needs a new start. Really, Ethel thinks, I suppose we’ve already gotten our new start.  Now we each have to choose how to make use of it.

            She is moving around the kitchen, her slim body appearing to float, her arms resembling wings riding the air currents. The sunlight creates a halo around her blonde curls.

            “Lina?” she calls out to her daughter, in a what is barely even a whisper. Then, realizing how softly she’s spoken, she calls out again. “Lina?” There is more volume in her words this time, and more depth.  “Your brother’s pulling the car up.  Did you hear? Are you ready?”

            Her twenty-year-old daughter’s answer flows forth from the bedroom next to the kitchen. Her voice is light and melodious, like her mother’s, and quiet, but assured. “I heard, Mama.  I’m just about ready.”

            “Good, because the train won’t wait.”  Looking around, Ethel’s gaze falls upon her right hand. She turns her hand this way and that, contemplating the wooden ring that adorns her third finger.  The ring has been worn smoother over the past twenty-seven years, and the carved flower atop it is chipped in one spot. But it is still beautiful.  Ethel runs the fingers of her left hand over the ring, recalling the joy she’d felt on the day Viktor placed it on her finger.        

            Now she stands up, walks over to an open wooden shelf on the plaster wall to the right of the stove. She picks up the photo that is leaning there, a close-up of a man’s face. Lacking a frame, the photo, although on thick, postcard stock, has bowed slightly in the middle under the influence of humidity, and its bottom edge and corners are roughened from frequent handling. Ethel places the photo inside a largish envelope that holds her and Lina’s travelling documents, and slips the envelope into a large, brown leather handbag that she hardly ever uses.  She rarely leaves the homestead, after all, except to do this or that shopping, or to visit her great-aunt Lorena, who lives a couple of miles down the road on her own family’s farm.

            Lina, meanwhile, sits for another minute in her familiar chair. In a gesture she perfected in childhood, she wraps the end of her waist-length dishwater-blonde braid around her right wrist and lightly grasps it with her fingertips Unlike her mother, she is not casting any final glances around this room. She feels no need to seek to imprint anything here on her mind.  In the course of the past four years, she has, without even trying to, committed every sensory detail of her bedroom to her memory.  The plaster walls, stained here and there by dampness, or marred by small holes.  The scent of the air during the various seasons, the spots where her featherbed is higher or lower, firmer or softer.  The way the upholstered chair’s arms and cushion feel beneath her forearms and thighs. She knows it all by heart.

            Her left hand is lying, palm up, on her lap.  In the palm of her right hand, beneath the tuft of braid between her thumb and forefinger, there lies a small fabric pouch with a drawstring cord that is looped around Lina’s middle finger. The pouch contains something small and round and hard.

            “Just about ready,” Lina repeats softly, as she closes her hand gently over the pouch.  Shutting her eyes, she sits that way for a brief minute. Then an exuberant smile spreads across her face, and she opens her eyes. She turns in her seat to the small table that stands between her chair and the bed, and shifts her gaze to the photo that leans against the reading lamp on the table.  A close-up of a man’s face.  She looks into his eyes. He into hers. She whispers two short phrases.

            Then Lina picks up the photo and slips it into what is, essentially, a fabric envelope, and folds the flap over it, as an extra layer of protection. She leans over and picks up the large hand bag that is leaning against her chair. Opening it, she carefully slips the now-cushioned frame inside.  But the small pouch remains in Lina’s hand, as it generally does, both day and night, the object it holds thus protected. And also protective.

Ethel ethereal and yet fully human figure appears in the doorway. She smiles when she sees her daughter’s glowing face and shining gray eyes.  “Ready?”

Lina smiles back as she rises from her chair. Her mother is struck by how tall and strong she looks. And yet flexible, like a sapling that’s been replanted in a new spot, in fresh earth.

“I am now,” Lina tells her. 

Chapter 2

August 10, 1944

Gassmann-Bunke homestead

No one could quite explain what happened on that day in 1944. Not at first, anyway. Only five years later would Lina finally understand it all.

On that morning of August 10th, 1944, Lina’s older brother, Peter, was about to set off to drive over to their great-aunt Lorena’s farm with the wagon, which was over-filled with 2-foot thick slices of pine firewood. Peter – Ethel and Viktor’s middle child – was four years Lina’s senior, and a year younger than his older brother, Marcus. At this point, Peter was only five months back from the front, discharged after his right temple had been grazed by a bullet and his right thigh had been wounded by a bullet that hadn’t missed its intended target. Back in 1942, he went into the army a tall young man with sandy-colored curls.  He had his mother’s wispy build, but his father’s strength.  Constantly in motion, he had a vigilant gaze, continually observing what those around him were doing, and trying to predict what they would do next.

It was because he’d always been so observant, that Peter felt so mystified by what happened on August 10th. As a general rule, very little escaped him. But, as he was always quick to admit later on, when the subject of the accident came up, his attention at that moment had not been fully on what he was doing.  Maybe the pain distracted me, Peter sometimes suggested to himself when he considered what had happened. Since he’d been back home, he’d noticed that when his leg was really bothering him, he would sometimes lose track of what was going on around him.

This was not surprising, really, given what he went through after being wounded. The injury to his right leg was severe: a compound fracture of the femur, and massive tissue damage. He endured more than one surgery in the military hospital to push his bones into place and stitch his shredded muscles back together. He’d been “just this close” to a severed femoral artery, the doctor told him. He was lucky to be alive. He then spent two and a half months in a cast before finally being released from the hospital.  Now, at age twenty, Peter was back at home, in possession of a card that listed him officially as eighty-percent disabled.  The cast had been off for some time now, but Peter was still in strong, nearly constant, pain. By way of explanation – but certainly not encouragement – the doctor had informed him that because his muscles and bones had been so badly damaged, it was unclear whether they’d ever function fully again.  And due to the long period of time he’d spent immobilized in the hospital and nearly immobile in the cast, both of his legs were weak from lack of exercise. He still walked with a stick. 

This, combined with the chronic pain, meant that Peter struggled to do much at all around the homestead. It was impossible for him to even think about going back to the forestry work that provided the main support for the extended Gassmann-Bunke family. It had been that way since his great-great grandfather had purchased the 11-hectare forest nearly a hundred years earlier. The one saving grace in the situation was that, although Peter could no longer work in the forest, he was able to contribute to the furniture-making side of the family business. He had begun learning these skills already before the war, by working alongside his father and grandfather. Peter’s father, Viktor, was a master furniture-maker, and Peter himself had shown promise. His grandfather, Ulrich, told him he would become a good cabinet-maker in his own right someday. So, now Peter was glad to at least have the chance to hone his skills in this area. Drawing up plans for a sideboard, or planning the wood for a tabletop – which he could manage without experiencing extreme discomfort in his leg – helped him feel a bit less guilty about not being out in the forest.

If Peter’s mother, Ethel, had had her way once he returned from the war, she would have pampered him.  She wanted him to rest longer, to regain his strength, without even working on the furniture.  But she knew as well as anyone how much her father, Peter’s grandfather, Ulrich, needed help to keep the furniture-making going, even if the orders at that time were few and far between.  This was because Ulrich was terribly short-handed when it came to labor for the forestry: Peter’s brother, Marcus, was still deployed, as was Viktor, who had been Ulrich’s right hand man for most of the past twenty-three years. It was true that by the time Peter came home, Ulrich had more help out in the forest, from the Polish prisoners billeted in nearby Buckhorn who worked there each day.  These prisoners helped haul the logs from the forest and cut and stack the wood. But they didn’t have the skill to fell trees or identify which ones could be cut now, much less do any of the small scale cutting of the wood that would be used to make furniture.

That was where Lina came in. Thank goodness for Lina! Peter found himself thinking during those months when he was just getting used to being home. His younger sister, Lina had always loved the woods. Starting from the time she was a little girl, she would tag along with her father and grandfather whenever they’d allow her to.  Gradually, having grown weary of her nagging, persistent requests that they teach about the forest, they began telling her all that they themselves knew, showing her how to do this and that.  At that point, it was still Peter and his twin brother Marcus who were being groomed to take a large part in the forestry work: They were several years older than Lina, and, well, they were boys… 

But Lina had such a strong love for the trees and such a keen desire to learn forestry, that she made sure she was right in the thick of things whenever her mother and grandmother didn’t need her help in the house.  Even when they did need her, Lina could often be found in the forest instead, learning to notch a tree, or how to decide which trees in a stand should be cut down, and when.  Then the war came. First her father, and then Peter and Marcus, went off: Viktor to an undisclosed post at an undisclosed location, then Peter to the infantry, and Marcus to the Censorship Office. Back then, in 1942, Lina was only fourteen, but there was still work to be done in the forest…

Ethel wasn’t entirely in favor of Lina being involved in the forestry work. On the other hand, she had to admit, that Lina never looked happier than when she came out of the woods for supper, or at the end of the day.  She’d been telling them all since she was nine years old that she planned to become a full-fledged forester and carry on her grandfather’s work. As unconventional as Lina’s wish was, for a woman in Germany in the 1940s, it gave them all a great deal of comfort, especially Lina’s grandfather, Ulrich. So, even Ethel refrained from putting forth any objections when Lina altered some of Peter’s pants to fit her slightly smaller frame and headed off into the woods with her grandfather Ulrich. Over the next two years, she became an invaluable part of the Gassmann forestry team.

             This was especially true now, in 1944, since Marcus had never shown interest in the forest, and Peter could no longer perform that kind of work.  Although Viktor, too, was a forester and furniture-maker of nearly unparalleled skill, his behavior in the years leading up to the war had given his family members reason to wonder how committed he would be to the family’s business once the war ended and he returned home. Assuming he made it home. Despite not knowing precisely where Viktor was, Ethel had a feeling that her husband would return home safe. This feeling was somewhat irrationally based on the fact that he would regularly send them mysterious care packages with cigarettes and liquor that they could parlay into cash on the black market.  If he had access to such things, she reasoned, he must be in a position of relative importance and safety…

*          *          *

Such was the state of life on the Gassmann homestead.   So, on the morning of August 10th, 1944, despite the strong pain in his leg, which made it challenging for him to climb up onto the wagon, Peter felt determined to be of use and deliver the firewood.  It didn’t seem wise to send two of the Poles to deliver and unload it: A guard would have to go with them, and that would leave only one guard here at home.  Who knew what the Poles might take into their heads to do along the four-mile stretch between here and Lorena’s, with two horses and a wagon and firewood at hand? 

            Up until today, Lina had been the one to drive the wagon over to Lorena’s. There was always someone there to help unload it when she arrived. Besides, sending Lina gave the two women the chance to visit a bit over coffee (ersatz though it was) and cake that was still just as buttery and leavened by farm eggs as before the war, despite shortages elsewhere.

            But on this day, Lina wanted help her grandfather, Ulrich, with the felling of several pines. So, once the Poles had grudgingly rolled and shoved and, finally, hoisted the thick rounds of wood into the wagon, Lina came out of the workshop to wish her brother a good ride.  She put one foot onto the step at the front of the wagon and hopped up to plant a kiss on his cheek. She noticed as she did so that, despite all he’d been through, and all he was still going through, her brother looked as dreamily handsome as he had before the war.  She reminded him to ask Lorena to send back the length of fabric her mother needed to move ahead with an upholstery job she was doing for someone in town.

            Then she tousled her brother’s hair and hopped lightly back onto the ground. As she headed back toward the workshop, Lina noticed that the Poles had not replaced the wagon’s back railing slats.  She paused there, her left hand against the side of the wagon. That was when she caught sight of the slats lying on the ground, off to the wagon’s other side.  She stepped behind the wagon, intending to pick up the slats and put them onto the wagon. At this moment, evidently perceiving something that went unnoticed by Peter or Lina, the horses suddenly lurched forward and took two big steps. Peter now seized the reins which had, until then, been lying in his lap, in a firm hold. But it was already too late. Once the horses plunged ahead, the obedient wagon also jerked forward. This set off a cascade of wood rounds which, free to escape through the rail-less opening at the rear of the wagon, tumbled and rolled out of the wagon, and onto Lina.  Caught unawares, she was unprepared to defend herself from the sharp edges and unforgiving density of the wood blocks that now bombarded her.

            The thunderous noise of the wood hitting the ground, mixed with Lina’s cries, brought the Poles, and Ethel, and Lina’s grandmother, Renate, racing to the area in front of the workshop. Peter sprang down from his bench atop the wagon, ignoring his own pain. The scene, it struck him, looked just as it had earlier in the morning, when the pile of wood rounds had, as yet, been only half loaded onto the wagon. There was the same pile, in nearly the same configuration.  But this time, his beloved sister lay half obscured by the pile, her one, long braid flung out to the side, her gray eyes wide.  Peter noticed, as he gripped his head in horror, that it was as if only half of her was left: From her hips down, there was only wood.  He watched as she tried in vain to lift herself up. Peter began stumbling in this direction and that, pushing at one chunk of wood, then pulling at another. The Poles, too, were struggling to shift the log pieces off of Lina. Meanwhile, Renate, with her solid body and air of authority, was holding Lina’s shoulders firmly to the ground, to keep her from thrashing about. Ethel was gracefully and gently, but purposefully, moving her hands up and down Lina’s arms and across her forehead, in an attempt to calm her daughter, while speaking softly to her. Peter couldn’t make out what she was saying.  

            This was the scene that played on an endless loop in Peter’s mind from that morning on: the wagon half full, with no Lina on the ground beneath the rest of the wood that was waiting to be loaded; then the wagon fully loaded; and then the wagon only half full once again, as if a film strip had simply been run backwards, except that when it was run back, somehow Lina was under the wood. Who had suddenly inserted Lina into this movie of the mundane activities of their life in such a horrifying way? And how? And now what would they all do?

*          *          *

In the months that followed, these were the very questions that Lina’s mother and grandparents often discussed, but always only in pairs, and always only in spots where they thought Lina or Peter wouldn’t hear them: Ethel and Renate engaged in hurried chats in the kitchen while Lina was out in the yard in her wheelchair; Renate and Ulrich reviewed the situation in their bedroom at night. This was safe, they figured: They assumed that Lina must be asleep, or that, if she was still awake, she wouldn’t be able to make out what they were saying through the wall that separated their two rooms.  Peter, just like Lina, was excluded from these discussions. But he, too, knew that they were going on.

It was autumn now, and Lina knew her family members were talking behind her back. What she couldn’t understand was why.  I’m healing, right? They all know that, so why do they need to talk about it, especially in secret? Certainly, she reasoned, decisions needed to be made about how to keep the household running. But can’t we make them all together? It’s as if they think my brains were fractured in the accident, too! Lina told herself.  But, in the moments when she was clear-headed enough that this next thought could penetrate, she reminded herself: This is the way we Gassmanns and Bunkes do things. Grandpa and Grandma and Mama and Papa talk about what needs talking about. Then they present Marcus and Peter and me with their decisions. And that’s that! That was the way it had always been when Lina and her brothers were growing up.  But we’re grown now!  she thought.  Shouldn’t we have a say? She never raised the topic with Peter. The situation was painful enough for him, without her bringing it up, Lina reasoned.

But, Lina sometimes wondered: What if it isn’t these new arrangements they’re all discussing in low voices, like spies?  What could they be talking about, if it isn’t about that? 

When Lina did occasionally reflect on what else her family members might be discussing, several possible and disturbing answers would come to mind. But the one that would most often pop into her mind was this: They’re talking about how useless I am to them now. I can’t pull my weight.  They’re talking about how to get rid of me. Why else would they be so secretive?? Somebody probably went into Varel to look at one of those awful homes… If Lina had been able to think clearly, that’s how the thoughts might have been expressed.

            But she wasn’t able to think clearly.  Even now, after the initial tumult of the accident and the hospital and surgery seemed to have subsided, Lina found it difficult to follow a train of thought.Besides, these ideas were so upsetting to Lina that she didn’t even really want to think them. So, it ended up that, instead of complete thoughts, bits and pieces – sometimes just words and phrases, such as “a home” or “get rid of me” or “euthanasia” or “useless” – would fly relentlessly, uncontrollably, and unbidden into her consciousness, day after day. Even these snippets of ideas were enough to leave her distraught and frowning, the fingers of her right hand toying with the tuft of hair at the end of the braid she compulsively wrapped around her wrist and then unwrapped again. Why do I have to be at the mercy of these awful thoughts? She wondered, in desperation. If she’d had sufficient focus to be able to pray, she would have prayed to be freed of them.  But that was beyond her. One night, she did manage a brief, wordless plea in her heart, but then she instantly forgot it, as the unwanted thoughts rushed in once more. 

*          *          *

Lina knew as well as the rest of them what the doctors had told them after the wagon had been used to deliver her to the hospital in Varel instead of to haul wood to Lorena’s farm: multiple broken bones in both legs, a broken foot.  A dislocated hip. Quite possibly some nerve damage, too, from all the crushing weight.  Lina had to take her family’s word for this: She didn’t remember hearing any of it. Even though she’d been present in the room for the whole examination and discussion, she couldn’t recall a thing, no matter how hard she tried in the days and weeks that followed.  She remembered being beside the wagon and then beneath the wood, but even that last part was a hazy recollection at best. There hadn’t even been any pain, not until afterwards, when she was lying in the hospital bed. That was so strange!   How could it not have hurt to have all those bones broken? she would ask herself later, in the periods when she wasn’t experiencing the pain that followed having her bones set, and the surgery… Following those terrible and terrifying minutes with the doctors – which had seemed like hours or, rather, of indeterminable length – she would recall the pain-free time that followed the accident and wonder why she had to feel it now.

When the pain streamed through her now, Lina would comfort herself with the thought that it wasn’t as bad as it had been right before and after her surgery.  It had been worst of all before the surgery, she reminded herself. She thought back on it in a distanced kind of way, as if she were observing someone else undergoing that procedure: At first, her mother and grandmother, and Peter, too, were with her.  Then only her mother was there. The orderlies held her down by the arms and shoulders while the doctor set the bones that could be set. She remembered screaming from the pain, while her mother held her hand tightly, as tears rolled down their cheeks. She so wanted to fight them off, but she couldn’t do that, of course. Why didn’t anyone keep them from hurting me? she would wonder later. Why didn’t Mama do anything? Had they given her any pain killers before setting the bones?  It certainly hadn’t felt like it.

After the bone-setting and the surgery, the doctor told them – Lina did recall this – that what Lina needed to do now was be patient and wait for her bones and tissues to heal enough that all the swelling would go down. No casts could be put on while the swelling was so great, he said. Besides, he needed to be able to inspect the stitches on her left foot and lower leg, where he’d had to perform surgery: Her broken left fibula had ended up piercing the front of her calf, and that had had to be repaired.  She’d been lucky, the doctor assured her: The left femur and right tibia had suffered only simple breaks – one transverse, the other linear. “Only simple break”s? Lina thought indignantly whenever the pain started up.  Simple for whom?

As the doctor examined her during the several weeks she spent recuperating in the hospital, he regularly expressed his opinion, that the swelling was going down. Lina herself could see this, and she was anxious for the casts to go on, so that she could go home. The forced immobility in the hospital bed was like torture: She wanted to get up, but wasn’t allowed to do so, and there was also the pain to contend with. They gave her morphine in small doses when she most needed it, but often she just had to endure the pain, lying in her bed with nothing to distract her from her torment.  True, Ethel spent a large portion of each day sitting by her bed, tenderly rubbing her arm or brushing her hair out before rebraiding it. Ulrich and Renate and Peter came every evening and chatted with her, or brought her a piece of cake (which she rarely felt much like eating).  But even in their company, Lina felt alone: The constant series of inner battles to not give in to the pain kept her isolated from her loved ones. And although they tried to cheer her up in every way they could imagine, they could see from her strained expressions and the far-off look in her eyes, that she wasn’t fully with them.

After a few weeks of daily examinations, the doctor announced that the surgery sites were healing well.  He was happy about that.  The swelling had lessened considerably.  This pleased him, too.  The casts could go on soon. What did not please him was the fact that Lina couldn’t feel anything in her feet and legs, except pain. This seemed particularly unfair to her – and to all her family members, too.  But the doctor explained it to them, in a calm and matter-of-fact voice: “Lina can feel pain because those signals come from higher up in her nervous system, not in her legs themselves.”

Each day now, the doctor came in and pricked the bottoms of her feet with a pin and asked her to wiggle her toes.  Both Lina and the doctor looked expectantly at her toes, but they never observed even the slightest movement.  Immediately following the operation, the doctor had said that the most likely explanation for all of this was that the swollen tissues were pressing on the nerves of her legs. He kept repeating this conclusion each day for all the weeks Lina lay in the hospital bed. “We’ll see how you do when the swelling is down.”  Finally, four weeks in, Lina noticed his tight-lipped expression following one of the daily examinations. She decided to speak up.

“The swelling is down, isn’t it, Doctor?”

He nodded, but didn’t meet her gaze. “Yes.  That means we’ll be able to put the casts on in the next few days.  Then you can go home. That will be a relief, won’t it?” Now he looked up at her, straining his mouth into a tight smile. 

“But you told me that once the swelling was down, I’d be able to feel my legs again, and move them,” Lina said, knitting her brows. “But I can’t.”

The doctor patted her foot, where the stitches made the skin look like a quilt made of jagged fabric scraps.  “Not to worry, Lina.  All in good time.” Then he walked out of the room.

*          *          *

Autumn had come, and Lina was back home, with a small wheelchair to move around in. She had her casts on now, but still felt nothing in her legs or feet, aside from pain. Lina could propel her wheelchair through the house on her own, and make her way around the yard, but she still needed someone else to get her chair out of the house into the yard.  Naturally, she also depended on others to move her from bed to wheelchair to toilet. Also naturally, all of these limitations on her freedom of movement frustrated her.

She discovered early on, that when she was outside in the yard, as near to the forest as possible, her spirit would feel a bit lighter.  One of her family members would push her wheelchair outdoors, and then she’d roll herself over to where the main path into the forest began.  This was her boundary.  She could go no further. Well, that wasn’t strictly true: She could have rolled a ways down the path, which was wide enough for a wagon and a horse.  But instead of being smooth, it was scored with several sets of deep ruts made by wagons, and the spaces between the ruts were overgrown with grass and littered with rocks and twigs and even small branches.  These features, which she’d barely noticed when she’d had the use of her legs, seemed to be taunting her as they blocked her movement into her beloved forest. 

Knowing how much Lina missed being amongst the trees, Ethel tried one day to push the wheelchair along the path into the forest. But it immediately became obvious that the chair was no match for this terrain. But, perhaps more importantly, each jolt of the chair as it passed over a twig, each slight dip into a rut, sent pain surging through Lina’s legs. She begged her mother to go back to the yard.

But her grandfather, Ulrich, didn’t want to give up so easily. His first idea was to lift Lina up onto the buckboard of the wagon and drive her into the forest that way.  But, as much as Lina detested her wheelchair, she had, by this time, come to see it as a kind of protective armor. She feared that without the arms to grip and the footrests to keep her feet in place, she might just topple off the front of the wagon. Peter, Ethel, and Renate all offered to sit alongside her, to make sure she couldn’t fall, but Lina shook her head adamantly in refusal.

Ulrich’s next plan was this: They would construct a ramp out of planks, push her up into the back of the wagon in her wheelchair, and then drive her deep into the woods. Once there, they’d roll her back down again, and she could sit amongst the trees. “We can make it a picnic!” Renate even suggested. But Lina, terrified that riding in the wagon at all would bring on pain, rejected this plan, too.  She couldn’t bring herself to take the chance.

So, instead of risking going into the forest, she made it a habit to sit and stare into the trees, straining to catch sight of the old treehouse deep amongst the beeches, even though she knew it was far too distant for her to be able to glimpse.

Nearly all the time Lina was sitting outdoors – or anywhere, in fact – she experienced either physical pain or emotional and mental distress.  Over the past couple of months, Lina had come to the conclusion that these two had made a pact: One of them had to keep her company at almost all times, with only brief breaks between shifts. So, first her legs would be wracked by pain for an hour, or more, and then the pain would fade. But before Lina could even catch her breath, deep sadness and fear would flood her mind. And they’d drag the horrid words and phrases – “a home” or “euthanasia” –along with them.

On one of these typical days, Lina was sitting, as usual, at the edge of the forest, looking at the trees, and enduring yet another series of physical an emotional attacks – and then those words! In despair at having to go through this torture day after day, she heard herself cry out, “Dear God! Please take these thoughts! And the pain! Please take all the pain, too! I can’t bear this any longer!”

            Then, at some point – Lina couldn’t have said precisely when this happened – she realized that things had shifted a bit. It seemed to her that maybe a couple of weeks had passed since she had wished in her heart for respite from the awful thoughts and the pain.

What, exactly, was different now?  It wasn’t that she never heard the upsetting words any more.  No. But she noticed that a new thought had appeared, or, rather, a new word. Her mind was now racing from dawn to dusk, fueled by an agitation that manifested consistently as this one, new word. It was a command: Move!  Of course, this command from within contrasted sharply with what she was physically capable of doing. She could still not move around under her own power.  Even so, it was a new word in her head, and something about it felt positive.

Move! she heard throughout the day, no matter where she was. Sitting pushed up to the kitchen table, she’d hear it. Move!  Or as she mended clothes by lamplight in the evening. Move! And very often, after her wheelchair had been pushed to the edge of the forest and she was sitting gazing into the woods, it would come. Move! Since Lina couldn’t walk, she’d move in whatever way she could when she heard the word. During the day, she’d push herself back from the table and wheel her chair slowly across the kitchen, through the door to the other part of the house, behind and around under the staircase, and back again into the kitchen. 

Moving herself around out in the yard was easier, which was a blessing, because it was out here, in close proximity to the forest she was unable to enter, that her two pain companions were always most active.  But when she felt despair beginning to set in, or a pain deep in one of the spots where her bones had broken, then she’d heard Move! sound loudly inside her head. Move! Move! Move!  The repeated word sounded like the movement of a soft breeze. And then she’d begin her “strolls”, as she called them.  There were just as many obstacles out here as indoors: the chicken coop, the goat pen, the clotheslines’ poles, the garden.  But there were also paths of sorts that wended around and between them, and which were basically worn flat, in contrast to the forest path.  So Lina followed these paths, weaving in and out, all around the features of the yard that she’d never thought too much about, back when she’d been able to walk. She rolled and rolled and rolled, until whichever pain companion was on duty went on break.  Then she had a brief respite until its replacement’s shift began.

During these brief periods, Lina allowed her arms to rest after spinning, spinning, spinning the wheels of her wheelchair, propelling herself around her chosen obstacle course. Lina felt calm and even light in these minutes, her whole upper body energized by the exertion. Then she could think clearly – she’d finally gained the ability to do this, after weeks of mental chaos following her return from the hospital. And the thoughts that came in these moments were positive, optimistic. Every once in a while, when she saw Peter still hobbling, unable to work in the woods, instead of thinking, I’m the same as him! she quietly but forcefully repeated to herself, over and over again, I’m not Peter. I’ll be in the woods again.Lina noticed that sometimes this focused repetition would even drive the pain and the unwanted thoughts away for a time. During these minutes, parked by the path that led into the woods, she felt in her heart that it was just a matter of time before she was out of the chair, back to helping her grandfather with the work in the forest.  She closed her eyes and imagined herself out there with him, clothed in her familiar pants.  The traditional dresses and aprons she’d begun wearing again after the accident – to make it easier for her mother and grandmother to care for and dress and undress her – seemed foreign, a symbol to her of her confinement. That was why she always closed her eyes when imagining herself in the forest: so that she wouldn’t see the full skirt covering her legs.  These were happy minutes, sometimes whole half hours, when Lina was able to hold onto the good. Once this respite even lasted an hour, by Lina’s reckoning.  She thought of the strolls when this happened as her “lucky” strolls.

Then there were the “unlucky” strolls.  On those days, each landmark she rolled past served as a cruel reminder of what she was no longer able to do: the narrow dirt lanes inside the garden, where she used to sow seeds or weed; the clotheslines she could no longer reach; the henhouse where the eggs would lie, waiting for her to collect them.  At these times, when her focus shifted to what was unattainable, she was flooded with despair. She still heard Move! in her head, but the old words and phrases reasserted themselves, too. You’ll never walk. Useless cripple. They might as well just kill you. This shift signaled to Lina that her pain companions’ break had ended, and she’d struggle to hold onto the vision of herself as healthy again: Don’t go! she’d whisper frantically as she felt her calm beginning to slip away, and the optimistic thoughts along with it.  When a “stroll” turned unlucky in this way, Lina would race ahead as fast as she could, as if trying to outwit the thoughts by racing past the offending spots before her brain would notice them.  It usually did not work, and when that happened, she seemed to be hearing not Move! but Move! Or else…

Lina had to devise different strategies for moving around in the evening, as she sat with the rest of the family in the main room. With everyone there, occupying chairs and space around the table, she had no room to maneuver.  But Move! still sounded in her head.  So, she got into the habit of reaching down and slowly wrapping her hands around the metal guides that framed her chair’s wheels. Laying one finger at a time on the guides, she took in the sensation of the cool metal against her warm fingers and palms, allowing herself to feel that fully, alternately tightening and loosening her grip. Then she began moving the wheels forward and backwards, ever so slightly.  Sometimes she did this for an hour at a time.  At times, she thought the rubber tires must be wearing soft grooves in the wooden floor beneath her.

Why doesn’t anyone ever ask me why I do this? Lina often thought. They can’t not notice.  Do they not care?

Although Ethel, Renate, Ulrich, and Peter did, indeed, all notice Lina’s wanderings, they acted as if they didn’t, or as if there was nothing the slightest bit unusual in her movements. As you might imagine, this was something they did discuss amongst themselves, but only in private. In secret.   Why call attention to it? they all reasoned.  They didn’t want to upset Lina by questioning her about it.  If it helped her, then it was a good thing. Let it be, they decided.

*          *          *

Although Lina’s agitated mind consistently jumped to the most upsetting possible explanations for her family’s silence, the fact that they weren’t including her in their conversations didn’t necessarily mean there was anything for her to worry about.  At sixteen, Lina was too young to know that the Gassmanns had learned “the hard way”, as Grandma Renate put it, tonot betray strong emotion about anything, and not to discuss delicate topics in public. (To them, “in public” meant during meals or where anyone who might be the subject of a third–party conversation was present.) At least that’s how Renate described the upshot of what had happened more than twenty years earlier: Renate still remembered every detail of that terrible conversation– about God and faith and healing – that had thrown her family into upheaval in 1921. She concluded that if no one had been allowed to have that discussion, what had come to a head then would never have come to a head. Nor would the subsequent events have occurred. And she wasn’t about to let that happen again, ever.  The cost might be too great.  So, Renate thought about it, and she decided that the way to avoid such calamities in the future was to make certain that the family’s conversations never strayed onto that topic again.  Or, for that matter, onto any other topics Renate herself deemed likely to cause dissent, discord, excessive displays of emotion, or rifts between family members. 

As the Gassmann-Bunke family’s self-appointed guardian of peace and harmony, Renate exercised constant vigilance during mealtimes. She was always prepared to deftly guide the conversation in a different direction if she sensed trouble looming.  She was so skilled at this, that her grandchildren never even noticed when she steered them away from what they’d been intending to talk about.  The adults, meanwhile, were thoroughly trained by the time Viktor and Ethel’s first child, Marcus, was born in 1923. Thus, they needed only a bit of nudging to keep conversations safe and on track.  Although Renate never explicitly told Lina or her brothers not to talk about the question of God and faith and healing – or other topics Renate preferred to skirt – they quickly gained an intuitive grasp of what could be talked about, and what couldn’t.  So, mealtimes among the Gassmann-Bunkes generally played out the same way day in and day out, with the identical, approved topics repeatedly coming under discussion.  Only the details varied: Which stand of trees were they were considering cutting, or who had ordered a piece of furniture, or who was Ethel making a quilt for now, or how was the cheese making coming along, etc., etc.

For this reason, no one in the household was surprised when Renate took each of them – even her own husband! – aside in August of 1944 and told them that they were to discuss Lina’s accident and her current state and what might be done about it only behind closed doors or in the depths of the forest, where Lina wouldn’t overhear them.  For Ulrich, Ethel, and Peter, who was surprised that his grandmother had approached him, too, this directive simply reinforced the message they had all long since internalized: No talking about things that might upset anyone.  But the fact that Renate had actually spoken to each of them about it, instead of relying on her usual hints or redirection, made it quite clear that this was a matter of particular seriousness for her.  She would brook no dissent and no slip-ups. In her letters to Marcus and the messages she sent to Lina’s father Viktor, she went so far as to warn them, too, not to say anything about it in Lina’s presence – even though at that point they were still away at war and far from home!  Thus, once these two remaining family members returned after the war, they reintegrated into the household without ever talking at the table about what any of them – and not just Lina, but Peter, Marcus, or Viktor, too – had gone through during the war years.

True, they each shared certain details with one or the other family member, in private.  But there was a great amount of work to be done on the homestead once the war ended. This provided all of them with a convenient excuse for focusing on day-to-day tasks instead of baring their souls to each other.  Maybe this was just as well. Every single one of them lacked the necessary words to either ask or try to answer the most burning questions they held persistently and tightly in their hearts.  And so, grandparents, parents, and children alike threw themselves headlong into those day-to-day responsibilities. It was only Renate and Ulrich who would find themselves lying in bed at night, searching for the words to express to each other what they were feeling, and discussing how they could shift things back to normal.  But what does “normal” even mean? Renate and Ulrich both asked themselves.  They both knew full well that even the years between 1921 and the start of the second war had been rocky for their family.  When Renate thought about it, she had to travel in her mind all the way back to before the fall of 1921 to find a period she could point to and hold on tight to as her ideal of family harmony.  She so wanted to get things back to how they’d been then. She dreamed of somehow transporting all of them back to that happy time before everything started going haywire.

Of course, Lina, like her brothers, knew what had happened in 1921: Her Uncle Hans and the rest of the family had had a falling out of sorts, and Hans now lived abroad. But she and Marcus and Peter didn’t know exactly what had transpired to bring it about.  This was another thing the Gassmanns and Bunkes didn’t talk about.  Although Lina did once ask both Ethel and Renate – separately, of course – to explain it to her, both said only that Uncle Hans had gone his own way.  What is that supposed to mean?? Lina wondered.

Given this family approach to dealing with disturbing or potentially disturbing topics and events, perhaps it shouldn’t seem surprising that Lina’s family wasn’t talking with her about anything in the early period of her convalescence. After all, those first months that followed the accident were a period of adjustments for every one of them. It was all they could do to figure out how to both keep Lina as comfortable as possible and do what needed to be done around the homestead. They also had to make decisions about who would carry out absolutely every task in the house and in the forest. Renate and Ethel set up a schedule between them for Lina’s personal care, and they ran themselves ragged doing both that and everything else. It didn’t even cross their minds to ask Lina to pitch in around the house.  She has her healing to do! they both thought. On top of all this, there were always more visits from the doctor, and consultations with him, too.  (This was the one time Renate and Ethel did talk about Lina’s condition in her presence.) There was physical reorganization in the house, too: Lina switched bedrooms with her grandparents, so she’d be adjacent to the kitchen and closer to the bathroom. All of these changes left everyone in the family exhausted and disoriented, as if they were continually being blown hither and thither by new tornados that seemed to materialize each and every day.

It was in the midst of this chaos that Lina was supposed to be making her way through “her healing process”.  That’s what the doctor called it the first time he visited her at home following her hospital stay. “Just make her as comfortable as possible,” he told the family.  “She needs to be comfortable and calm during her healing process.”  Then he went away, leaving them with no idea whatsoever about how they were supposed to run a household and a forestry operation and take care of Lina, too, all while she was still in pain. Comfortable?  No, that didn’t seem possible, not to Lina or her family. 

So, each time the doctor came, repeated these same sentences, then left once again, abandoning them to their whirlwind of a household, Lina slipped back into the knitting or sock darning she’d picked up over her mother’s and grandmother’s objections.  “Just relax, Lina!” they constantly told her. “Get your strength back!” They could see from her eyes that she was present in body, but in some world of her own in her mind, her brows knitted, her upper body tense, while her lower body remained slack.  She’s tired, Renate or Ethel would decide from looking at her.Or, She’s sad today.  Or, She’s in pain. Not that they ever asked Lina directly.  They preferred to intuit what her state was and to tend to and console her in actions rather than words.

That silence again, Lina often thought (about her mother and grandmother’s reticence, not her own).  And this pattern of theirs upset her, even though she somehow had the presence of mind to realize it was nothing new: Why bother asking me what I’m feeling, when you can just figure it out on your own? she observed, annoyed. These Gassmann women think they’re mind-readers!

*          *          *

When Lina’s casts came off at the end of October, it seemed to her that the silence grew even deeper.  How can what’s already silent become more so? she asked herself. But that was certainly the way it was.  Maybe what intensified the silence was that everyone, Lina included, had to work even harder to maintain it in the face of one fact: Even though the casts were off, Lina still found herself unable to walk, or even to feel any sensations in her legs. Any sensation at all. Not even pain.  Lina wasn’t able to tell the doctor when, precisely, the pain had stopped. It was after I started hearing ‘Move!’ Lina decided. I know that much, at least. (Not that she told the doctor or anyone else about “Move!”)All Lina knew was that the pain wasn’t there anymore.

Certainly, she was grateful that her unpleasant companions seemed to have decided to leave her in peace. But her initial elation at being free of pain faded quickly when she saw the look on the doctor’s face as he examined her.  His knitted brows conveyed what his words (“I cannot explain this”) did not. His face told them, “This cannot in any way be construed as a positive development.” They were left with the strong and disquieting thought that, at this point, Lina might be even further from ever walking again than she had been before the casts were put on.

The lack of serious conversation with her family members about the only thing that really mattered to her right now left Lina to converse on her own, with herself. And with her legs. It was nearly three months since she’d seem them. They’d been shrouded in plaster for that long.  Once the legs reappeared, Lina spent quite a bit of time contemplating those two parts of her as her mother dressed or undressed her. Lina even pulled her nightgown up in bed so she could study them. She was both fascinated and repelled by the sight of her legs.  She’d been so eager to see them again, but when she did, it looked to her as if she had somehow acquired dead tree trunks where her legs should have been: fallen tree trunks overgrown by thick pink lichen that was darker in some spots, and punctuated in others by white lines. These lines gave the impression that the trunks had been hit by lightning that had zigzagged from here to there before springing up and then diving down once again, into her foot, and then onward into the earth.

Lina felt compelled to make a habit of studying her tree trunk legs, although she didn’t know why. Part of her wanted never to have to see them again: They reminded her of the accident.  That’s no excuse, though, she chided herself. Just being in this chair reminds me of it every second. Even so, there was something about the spots where her skin had been broken and then stitched back together that kept attracting her attention. She seemed to think that, if only her legs could speak to her, they might reveal things to her:  how the accident happened, what the meaning of it all was.  

The white traces drew her hands to them, too.  Lina often felt the urge to trace the course of those lightning track scars with her fingers, especially the ones on her left lower leg and foot. When she lifted her nightgown in the privacy of her room, though, she could only reach the ones on her thigh and calf.  But if the light was right, she could see the tracks on her foot, and so she got into the habit of tracing the pattern in the air before her.  After a few days of this, she didn’t have to look at her foot any more to know the design of her lightning-touched foot-trunk.  She had it memorized.  From that point on, she found herself absentmindedly drawing it with her fingertip, on her coverlet, her lap, the kitchen table…  She found it soothing, somehow, this way of staying in touch with a part of her she couldn’t reach and which remained mute, whether out of desire or inability to communicate with her. My mind has so much to say to me.  Why are my legs so still?

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