Julia Franck - The Blind Side of the Heart

She didn’t even whisper the words: I love you. Her lips formed them, that was all, as she kissed his forehead.

Hoar frost, only a small one. My little pigeon. We’re not freezing any more, her father stammered. He hadn’t spoken for weeks. She hardly recognized his voice, but it must be his. Helene stayed with him, she touched his forehead with her lips and stayed there. Her head suddenly felt so heavy that she wanted to lay her face on her father’s. She knew that her father had always called her mother his little pigeon.

The body is only a disguise, her father whispered. That’s all, and invisible. It’s warm inside the house, come in to me, little pigeon, no one can find us, no one can scare us. Father put his hands to his ears and held them there. Stay with me, my words, don’t run out. My pigeon is coming, my little pigeon is coming.

For a moment Helene was ashamed; she had heard the words spoken to her mother, or at least meant for her mother, and would be keeping them to herself.

Only when the shivering began did Helene stand up. She caressed her father’s head. Countless numbers of his hairs, grown long now, stuck to her hand. So many hairs sticking to Helene’s hand. Full of surprise, she wondered how he could still have any left on his head. What had begun as shivering became more violent; her father’s body was shaking, spittle flowed from the corner of his mouth. Helene expected him to turn blue as she had seen him do a few days ago. She said: It’s me, Helene.

But through his shivering, his words sounded unnaturally clear. Such a sweet smile, you have. We two together. Only the shells explode and give us away, they’re so loud and we are so soft. Too soft. It’s spurting, take care!

Helene took a step back to avoid her father’s fist as it lashed out.

Father, would you like something to drink?

A legbone, a legbone, a legbone dancing on its own. Her father laughed and with his laughter the shivering died down. Ripples moving away from their point of origin. Helene was not sure whether he was talking about his lost leg.

Something to drink?

Suddenly her father’s hand shot out, unexpectedly strong, to seize Helene and hold her firmly by the wrist.

Helene was alarmed. She turned, but there was no sign of Martha coming back. Indistinct sounds from the floor below showed that she and Mariechen had managed to get into the room, that was all. Helene twisted out of her father’s grasp, and next moment he seemed to fall asleep. She took the carafe of water from the bedside table and poured some of it into the little bottle that Martha had been using for the last few days to get liquid into her father’s mouth.

As soon as she put the little bottle to his lips he said, still in the position of a sleeping man: Drunken women in my mouth.

He couldn’t drink, couldn’t take any more water. Helene moistened her father’s lips with her fingers. She resorted to the syringe for aid, taking out the needle and dripping water into his mouth from it.

Then she replaced the needle and filled the syringe with morphine to the lowest mark, held it up and expelled the air. Her father’s arm was covered with puncture marks, so she looked for somewhere on his neck. An abscess had formed there, but next to it she found a good place for the injection. She pressed down slowly.

Later, she must have fallen asleep at his bedside from exhaustion. Twilight was falling as she raised her head and heard her mother cursing as she approached. Obviously she was being forcibly brought upstairs. Martha’s voice was heard, loud and determined: You must see him, Mother.

The door was opened, their mother was resisting, she didn’t want to enter the room.

I won’t, Mother kept saying again and again, I won’t. She hit out. But Martha and Mariechen were having none of that; they propelled her to the door and then, now that she was clinging firmly to them both, hauled her over to Father’s bed with all their strength.

There was a moment’s silence. Mother stood up straight. She saw her husband, the man she hadn’t seen for six years. She closed her eyes.

Just what did he do to you? Martha asked her, breaking the silence and unable to hide her indignation. For the first time in her life, Helene heard Mariechen speaking her own Sorbian language, a soft sing-song. She was familiar with its rhythm from the women in the market place. Mariechen folded her hands, clearly in prayer.

Ignoring that, Mother groped her way towards the bed like a blind puppy, a creature that doesn’t yet know its way but is instinctively getting the hang of it. She took hold of Father’s sheet and bent over the sick man. When he opened his sound eye, she whispered, with a tenderness that frightened Helene: Just say you’re still alive.

Her head sank on Father’s chest and Helene was sure that now she would shed tears. But she stayed where she was, motionless and still.

My little pigeon, said Father, laboriously searching for words. I didn’t give you a room in my house just for you to shut yourself up in it.

Mother withdrew from him.

Yes, you did, she said quietly. All the things in my room, all the hills and valleys they make, that’s where I’m at home. Nowhere else. They are me. Who knows what care I put into laying out my paths? Clearings. Your daughters wanted to throw away the Bautzen News , tidying up they call it. They tore away the chiffon as if it wasn’t hiding anything, they took last December’s editions apart, I worked for days stacking them up again. By subject. According to subject, theme, material, putting them together, stacking them, putting them in order that way, not by the date. I’m a nocturnal creature. It’s dark in me, but never dark enough.

Helene glanced at Martha, looking across the bed and over her parents’ heads. They were so preoccupied with each other that Helene felt as if she were at the theatre. Perhaps Martha was thinking the same. Mother’s heart has gone blind, Martha had once said when Helene asked what was wrong with her. She can only see things, not people any more, that’s why she collects those old pots and pans, scarves with holes in them and common-or-garden fruit stones. You never knew when this or that might come in useful. Only the other day she’d been sewing a peach stone to her woollen cape. Mother could see a horse in a piece of bent tree root and would tie a tail of hair recently cut from one of her daughters’ heads to the back of it. She had drawn a strand of wool through the hole in an enamel dish which said SOAP on it in large letters, and tied assorted buttons and pebbles collected over the years to the strand. This soap dish now hung over her bedroom door to act as a bell, so that she would have warning, even in a drowsy state, if anyone came in. Helene remembered a walk many years ago, perhaps their last outing together before Father left for the war. Mother had gone on this walk with her family only with reluctance and after repeated requests from her husband. She had suddenly bent down, picked up a curved piece of iron from the rim of a cartwheel and cried happily: Eureka! She recognized the earth in the iron and the fire in the shape of it, picked it up, held it in the air and took it home, where she found it a new function as a shoehorn, discerning a soul in the thing. She talked a soul into it, gave it a soul, so to speak. Mother in the role of God. Everything was to have its being through her alone. Eureka: Helene often wondered about the meaning of the word. But her mother could no longer recognize her younger daughter, her heart had gone blind, as Martha said, so that she couldn’t see people any more. She could tolerate only those whom she had met before the death of her four sons.

Helene looked at her mother, who described herself as a nocturnal creature, pointing out the attention she paid to the existence of her paths and clearings, making all these confessions like a brilliant actress. Malice had become second nature to her: it was the effect that counted. But Helene could be wrong. The appearance of malice was Mother’s only possible armour, malicious words her weapons, in her triumph over what had once bound the couple together as man and wife. Something about this woman appeared to Helene so immeasurably false, concentrating as she did so mercilessly on herself, without the faintest trace of love or even a glance for her father, that she could not help hating her mother.