Regina Ullman: The Country Road

A little picture was mounted below it, newly acquired. A hunchback stood there, a clown. He was taking a bow, with one hand propped on his side while the other held his hat as politely as could be, bidding farewell to anyone who still had something to ask.—

We children were playing ourselves weary by the open window. The day had not yet faded, but for us it was an hour of rest.

My sister was speaking loudly.

Then a girl came into the room. Her hair was brown and hung down in long braids. Her dress gray, her skirt gray. We had to stop talking; this new girl looked so wise. “I heard that there are children in the house, may I play with you?”

We played, and when the clock struck eight, she took her knitting again and went back to her apartment.

Just then our mother came home, and we told her: “Susanna was here.”

Countless times in those years I sat alone with my doll by the wall of the house that faced the garden, dreaming my way down those trellised paths.

Once, when I found our door locked, I went to the upstairs apartment.

Susanna was there. She was standing at the kitchen window, erasing something from a drawing.

Her mother was slicing bread for a long table, each piece in its proper place.

That sight of her would stay with me forever: large and haggard, a dark countenance, her clothing all one color, black. She kindly offered me a piece of bread for my afternoon snack. Then I left again.

The next time I visited, it was already close to Christmas. A lamp cast its green light on the table. The family sat around it. The mother was knitting, the brothers were drawing. Others were flipping through illustrated magazines.

I didn’t see the father anywhere. So I made straight for the oldest brother and begged him in a whisper: “Make my doll better, her head fell off.” And there were a few little pictures on the music table, he gave them to me and pasted them onto the first page of an album. They always spoke in a whisper. They rarely had anything to say to each other. It never occurred to me to make noise, either. Just once I laughed, and the floor creaked under my foot. Then the man at the head of the table stood and leaned his white hair in my direction and roared: “Quiet!”

All these thoughts had been wiped away again by the time my mother said: “You can go up there again; Susanna’s there.”

I looked up into the air, asking questions in my mind.

“She had scarlet fever, she’s in bed.”

There was a room with two beds. Susanna was lying toward the window. Her eyes and her long brown hair were just like before. But her cheeks were pale.

Day after day I sat by her bed, and we chatted just as we had before. Her brothers and sisters, too, took turns sitting in her room, or sometimes neighbor girls visited to provide some entertainment.

And often, when the room was filled again with that old peaceful silence, I would pull a little gift from my pocket, one of my own prized possessions that my mother had put there as a present for her.

“But don’t you want it yourself?” Susanna would always ask before reaching out her hand. But the joy that I felt for her was so evident that we owned everything in common.

When I entered the living room another time, I found her sitting there in the corner of her sofa. “She’s visibly improving,” her mother told me. But to me Susanna seemed quiet and a little sad. After a time, her sisters led her back to her room. She walked like an old woman, and her shape had changed as well. That alone was enough to tell me that she wasn’t happy. When she was finally resting on her cushions, they told her about a wheelchair that they wanted to buy her to use during her recovery.

The doctors came. Two tall, dark men, and I thought that the man with the white hair must have done this to her.

I went down and played “Mother Hulda” by the little fountain in front of the garden. Weeks passed before I went up again to visit “Susi,” as they called my playmate.

Early one spring morning her brothers and sisters called me again. Susanna was sitting upright in bed, her cheeks a ruddy brown, fiddling with colorful swatches of fabric and singing. We were all so happy. The sun was not yet burning, but it shone into our souls.

Then a girl from the neighborhood entered the room. She brought a doll with delicate limbs and a little knit jacket and hat and other nicely sewn doll clothes, as if it were a gift. But it wasn’t. She pushed me away from the bed and played with the doll for Susanna to see. She made me angry with her skill and her eagerness. I always had to think about her red hair.

She turned toward the early morning sun and said: “Susanna, tomorrow’s your birthday! Aren’t you going to celebrate?”

Susanna was silent. But her mother smiled in from the living room, and from that we could tell that there was a pleasant surprise in store for us.

The neighbor girl, satisfied, gathered up her doll things in her arm and left.

After that, the mother sat down next to Susi on her bed and talked to her about the coming day.

“Of course we’ll leave the doors open for you.”

The day passed, and the morning came, as beautiful as the one before.

There were buttercups and forget-me-nots on the bureau, and all sorts of gifts. Susanna’s brothers had gathered the flowers for the bouquet very early, far from the city, and the table of gifts had been prepared with secret excitement before Susanna opened her eyes. They made her bed in festive white, and braided red ribbons into her hair.

In her hands she held a book of fairy tales that she always loved to read. Everyone was quiet. They all had jobs to do.

And so the afternoon arrived, and her thirteen guests sat around her in their festive dresses and white skirts, chatting. They told stories from school, and played forfeits, and then feasted in their cloudless gaiety.

We didn’t even think about the fact that Susanna was sick. The children brought in chairs and played a wild circle game to the sound of a march.

As they were gently being herded from the room, the big old father came home with a sizable package under his arm. “Susi, guess what’s in here,” he said to her. “It’s not for me, is it?” Susanna asked uncertainly, before she could think of anything. He pulled out a big doll with blonde hair and a blue necklace and a richly decorated little shirt.

Then he went back into his study. Just after that, the children all bid her farewell, and everyone wished her good health once again.

Susanna held the doll weakly in her hands. She reluctantly wrapped it up again and laid it at the end of her bed.

Then she held out her hand to me — to tell me that I should go, or should be quiet, or that I shouldn’t think about it. But the doll was looking at me coldly through the wooden wall of its box, and I didn’t move from my spot while Susanna fell asleep, sweating and moaning.

“Susanna has to die.” We knew that, she and I, because of the doll.

Someone quickly turned down the bedspread, changed the sheets, and helped Susi return to her peaceful sleep. But the doll fell and shattered.

My mother called me to dinner. As I unexpectedly opened my eyes in the dark of night, it seemed to me that someone was crying above me, in my Susi’s room.

The next morning, very early, I was with her again. With a mute sound she gestured to an oil lamp; she wanted it moved away from her. That was easy to understand. But she had no language anymore. It was even more silent up there now than it had been before, so that Susanna wouldn’t have to think about the fact that she was mute.

She lost her hearing. She lost control of her limbs. And her eyes dimmed.

Her father walked through the room, hunched to death.