Julia Franck - The Blind Side of the Heart

Ernst Ludwig Würsich took his wife home to calm her down.

Martha was entrusted to the maidservant’s care, and the husband sat beside his wife’s bed. He never expected her to show him respect, he said gently, he would ask her to keep quiet only to show respect for God. He stroked his wife’s brow. Sweat was running down her temples. Was she hot, her husband asked, and he helped his wife to take off her dress. He carefully stroked her shoulders and arms. He kissed the rivulet at her temple. God was just and merciful, he told her. Next moment he knew he had said the wrong thing, for his wife shook her head and whispered: Ernst Josef… Only when he closed her mouth with a kiss a few seconds later, and tried to soothe her, did she complete her sentence in a whisper:… was one of four. How can you call a God who has taken four sons from me just and merciful?

Tears flowed. Her husband kissed her face, he kissed her tears, he drank her unhappiness and lay down in bed beside her.

In the evening she told her husband: That was the last time, I don’t want to lose any more sons. She didn’t have to ask if he understood her, for whether he liked it or not, he surely did.

Almost ten months later a baby was born. Big and heavy, fair-skinned with a rosy glow, a bald head with huge eyes which within a few weeks were a radiant blue that alarmed its mother. The baby was a girl, her mother could not recognize her as her own. And when her father wanted to take his daughter to the pastor, it was Mariechen who chose the child’s name: Helene.

Helene’s mother paid her no attention, she wouldn’t pick up the baby and could not hold her close. The baby cried as time went on, she grew thin, couldn’t digest the goat’s milk she was given and spat out more of it than she drank. Mariechen put the baby to her own breast to soothe her, but her breast was old and had never smelled of milk, it could give no nourishment, so the baby screamed. A wet-nurse was found to breastfeed Helene. The baby sucked the milk, she grew plump and heavy again. Her eyes seemed brighter every day and her first hair came in, a pale gold down. Her mother lay motionless in bed, turning away her face when anyone brought her the baby. When she spoke of the child she did not say her name, she could not even say my daughter . She called her just the child .

Helene knew about these early years of hers. She had heard Mariechen talking to Martha about them. Her mother would not hear of any god. She had made one room in the house hers, a room for herself alone, and she slept there in a narrow bed under the feather dusters and spoke of them escorting souls. When Helene lay in Martha’s bed in the evening, counting freckles and pressing her nose to Martha’s back, she increasingly found herself adopting, without meaning to, the viewpoint that she supposed was really reserved for a god. She imagined all the little two-legged creatures scrabbling over the globe of earth, devising images of him, thinking up names for him, telling creation stories. The thought of them as ridiculous earthworms, as Mother called them, seemed to her reasonable in one way; in another she felt sorry for them, creatures who, in their own fashion, were doing only as the ants and the lemmings and the penguins did. They set up hierarchies and structures suitable to their species with its thoughts and doubts, both of those part of the system, since a human being free of doubts was unimaginable. She knew how touchily Father reacted to these ideas. And he was especially silent and serious when Mother said, laughing, that she had spent a night with all souls, or he might call it god, and now that she was carrying a son below her heart she felt blessed, so she would soon be going away with the souls, her flesh would be going with them for ever. Helene heard Father’s friend Mayor Koban trying to persuade him to put Mother in an asylum. But Father wouldn’t hear of it. He loved his wife. The idea of an asylum hurt him more than her withdrawal from the world. It did not disturb him that she spent many months a year in the darkened rooms of the house, never setting foot out in Tuchmacherstrasse.

Even when the footpaths through the house grew narrow because his wife kept dragging things indoors during her few wakeful months, collecting them, adding them to various piles over which she spread lengths of cloth in different colours, Father preferred this kind of life with his wife to the prospect of living without her.

While he had once protested against the collecting and gathering, occasionally telling her that she ought to throw some object out, whereupon she would explain to him at great length the possible use of that object — perhaps a particularly battered crown cork which she expected to metamorphose in some way if she kept her eye on it — over the last few years he asked his wife what use something could possibly be only when he felt like listening to a declaration of love. Her declarations of love for what generally seemed to be worthless, superfluous objects were the most exciting stories that Ernst Ludwig Würsich had ever heard.

One day Helene was sitting in the kitchen, helping Mariechen to bottle gooseberries.

Where’s that orange peel I hung up in the storeroom to dry?

I’m sorry, madam, the housekeeper made haste to say. It’s still up there in a cigar box. We needed the space for the elderflowers.

Elderflower tea! Mother scornfully distended her nostrils. It smells of cat pee, Mariechen, how often have I told you so? Pick mint by all means, dry yarrow, but never mind about the elderflowers.

My little pigeon, Father interrupted, what were you going to do with the orange peel? It’s dried already.

Yes, like leather, don’t you think? Mother’s voice was velvety, she waxed lyrical. Orange peel cut from the fruit in a spiral strip and hung up to dry. Isn’t the smell of it in the storeroom lovely? And you should see the spirals twist and turn when you hang them over the stove by a thread — oh, so beautiful. Wait, I’ll show you. And Mother was already racing up to the storeroom like a young girl, looking for the cigar box, carefully taking out the strips of orange peel. Like skin, don’t you agree? She took his hand so that he could feel it, she wanted him to stroke it the way she did, to feel what she was feeling, so that he’d know what she was talking about. The skin of a young tortoise.

Helene noticed how lovingly her father looked at his wife, his eyes followed the way her fingers stroked the dried strips of orange peel, raised them to her nose, lowered her eyelids to distend her nostrils and smell the peel, and obviously he wasn’t going to tell her that this wasn’t the time of year to heat the stove. She would keep the orange peel strips in the cigar box until next winter, and the winter after next, for ever, no one must throw anything away, and Helene’s father knew why. Helene loved her father for his questions and his silences at just the right moment; she loved him when he looked at her mother as he was looking at her now. In silence he was surely thanking God for such a wife.

Just under two years after the war had ended, Ernst Ludwig Würsich finally managed to set off for home, accompanied by a male nurse from Dresden who was also on his way back. It was a difficult journey. He spent most of it sitting in a cart pulled along by the male nurse, who swore at him for various reasons depending on the time of day: in the morning because he kept apologizing for giving the man such discomfort, at noon because he wanted to go much too far in a day and in the evening because in spite of his missing leg he still weighed several kilos too much.

To his disappointment, and because he had not reported to the barracks until some weeks after the beginning of the war, he had not been accepted into the 3rd Saxon Hussars, a regiment set up four years earlier. How could he tell anyone that his wife said she was dying, and without her in his life he might well not feel any inclination to be a hero? But even worse, certainly — and perhaps it was why he couldn’t talk to anyone about his wife’s threat of her imminent death — this was by no means the first time she had felt impelled to make it. Although he had lived with her words ringing in his ears for several years, and although she gave a different reason every time, he could not accustom himself to that most extreme threat. He was also aware how little such a reason could affect a garrison, how little it could ever be a valid reason for defying orders from a state requiring unconditional obedience. The threat of his Selma’s death appeared plain ridiculous and insignificant in the face of a German Reich for which he was in duty bound to risk his life.