Torey Hayden - The Sunflower Forest

A novel

Cover

Title Page Torey Hayden The Sunflower Forest A novel

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Copyright

About the Publisher

In that year what I wanted most was a boyfriend. I was seventeen and had never had a date. I had the rest: breasts, hair under my arms, my period, the desire. I certainly had the desire.

Once, when I was little and not too informed about the mechanics, my best friend and I had pretended to make love, our legs spread apart scissor-fashion, until we were crotch to crotch, one person’s sneaker under the other person’s nose. My grandmother had caught us at it. She sent Cecily home and spanked me with a wooden mixing spoon and made me sit in the pantry to say Hail Marys. There was no doubt in her mind, she said: I got such interests from my mother. Perhaps I did. However, even at that tender age, I had decided that they weren’t such bad interests to have.

Nonetheless, I had reached seventeen with nothing more than a valentine from Wayne Carmelee and three kisses stolen by a Danish Eagle Scout under the bleachers at the county fair in Sandpoint, Idaho.

This was a source of great personal dismay to me and not helped at all by my sister Megan, who was nine that year and always willing to confirm for me that I was just as ugly as I assumed I must be. She also suggested that I probably smelled bad to boys.

My father told me that all I needed was patience. It was a natural thing, and you couldn’t stop nature from catching up with you. My time would come, he said. I replied that if we hadn’t moved around as much as we had, perhaps nature would have already located me.

So, in the end, it was Mama I went to for comfort. I asked her when she first fell in love.

‘Hans Klaus Fischer,’ she said to me. She was scrubbing the floor in the kitchen when I found her. Down on her hands and knees on the linoleum, her hair tied up in a red bandanna, she paused and considered the question. And grinned. Reaching up on the kitchen counter for her cigarettes, she sat down again on the floor and leaned back against the counter next to the sink. She crossed her legs and balanced the ashtray on one knee. ‘That was when I was living in Dresden with Tante Elfie. You see, I wasn’t supposed to be seeing boys. I was just turned fifteen and Tante said I couldn’t go out yet. They were very strict in those days, you understand.’ She lit the cigarette and over the top of it, her eyes were smiling. We both knew that what Tante Elfie said probably never had much effect on what my mother did.

‘He was the baker’s son. I met him because Tante Elfie made me go after the bread every day. If she’d sent Birgitta, who knows? Perhaps I would never have met him. But Birgitta was the lazy one.

‘Anyhow, he was at the back of the shop each day, taking down the loaves.’ She paused and her eyes were still on me. ‘And do you think he was handsome?’

‘Was he, Mama?’ I asked. You always prompted Mama with her stories. That was half the fun.

‘Was he handsome? Well, I will tell you. His hair was maybe the colour of yours. A little darker, perhaps, and combed down like this. That’s the way the boys wore their hair in those days. His eyes were blue, well, maybe more a blue-green. And light. A light, light blue-green. Like the colour old glass is sometimes. And he had very fine lips. Thin. Normally, I don’t like thin lips on a man, but with Hans Klaus Fischer, they gave him such a very …what can I say? …important expression. Haughty, that’s the word for it. He would stand in the back room and take down the loaves, and I would think, “Mara, you must have that boy for your boyfriend.” You could tell how important he was just by looking at him.’

She grinned at me. ‘I was very much in love with him. I went every day for the bread, and while I waited, all I could think of was kissing those fine, important-looking lips.’

‘And did you?’

‘Well, in the beginning it was very hard to get him to notice me. I was just one girl, and there were many girls in love with Hans Klaus Fischer.’

‘But you did get him to fall in love with you, didn’t you?’ I asked.

She was still grinning. With one hand she stuck long strands of hair back up under her bandanna, and she said nothing. Mama didn’t have to. She just grinned.

‘What did you do? How did you get him to notice you when there were all those other girls?’

‘I began to come in wearing my Bund deutscher Mädchen uniform. Every day. Even when there wasn’t a meeting. You see, he was a group leader with the Youth Movement.’ She paused, reflecting, and studied the end of her cigarette. The smile came back to her lips. ‘Sometimes I would see him in the back of the shop, and he would have his uniform on. He was very handsome in that uniform. He had a sort of strut in his walk when he wore his uniform; I could tell he thought it made him somebody. So, I thought to myself, Mara, he’s going to like you if he thinks you’re a good member of the BdM .’

‘And did he?’

She winked at me.

‘What did Tante Elfie say then? Did she mind that you were seeing a boy when you weren’t supposed to?’

‘Well, she did a little. At first she did. But I told her what a fine family Hans Klaus came from. I told her what a good boy he was. He was very clever at his studies, you see, and I heard his father tell Frau Schwartz once in the bakers that Hans Klaus might be chosen for the Adolf Hitler School. It was almost a sure thing, he said. So when Tante knew that, she said I could go dancing with him on Friday nights. If Birgitta went along. You know.’ She laughed. ‘To make sure I never really found out much about kissing those fine lips. They were very strict in those days. Not like now.’

‘But how did you make him love you, that’s what I want to know. How did you get him to ask you out for a date in the first place?’

Holding the cigarette out, Mama gazed at it before finally snuffing it out in the ashtray. The floor all around us was still wet, and we sat together, barricaded behind scrub brushes, the pail and floor rags, our backs against the kitchen cupboard.

‘I did a rather naughty thing,’ Mama said. Her voice was low and conspiratorial.

‘What was that?’

‘Well, when he came to the front of the shop once to talk to me, I told him I was really the granddaughter of the Archduke.’

I laughed. ‘You did?’

‘I told him my grandfather was the Archduke and that I had been sent to Dresden for my safety. To live with Tante Elfie, who wasn’t really my auntie at all but just a nanny my family paid to take care of me.’

That struck me as amusing, just the sort of thing I could picture Mama doing with such melodramatic realism that poor Hans Klaus Fischer no doubt never knew what hit him.