Julia Franck - The Blind Side of the Heart

Helene cleared the stockrooms and the office shelves. Thick dust lay on the upper shelves, along with a number of small composition patterns for type that no one would be needing now. Helene had kept paper in the lower compartments in past years, but much of it had found its way into the stove these last few weeks. The brief warmth as it burned was better than no warmth at all. The long planks forming the top shelves would be sure to give a good heat and there’d be no need to take all the shelving apart. Helene planned to use only the wood from those two planks at the top, which were firmly anchored in their supports. The shelving covered the whole long wall of the room from floor to ceiling, then ran from the far corner to the door and beyond. There would still be plenty of space without the top shelves. Helene climbed the ladder with a hammer in her hand. A piece of cardboard had slipped behind one shelf and was stuck there between the plank, the wall and the support. Helene leaned forward, held on to a shelf with one hand and tried to pull the cardboard out. Then she intended to knock the top shelf right out of its anchoring. The cardboard was still stuck. Helene groped her way along the wall and was trying to free one corner of it from the supporting post when she was aware of something metallic moving. She felt behind the outer support for the object, pulled it out and found that she was holding a key. It was a little rusty, but Helene knew at once what it was. She was familiar with its shape and the unusual ornamentation of its head, even with its weight, yet she had never held it in her hand before. It looked a little smaller, as if it had shrunk. Helene well remembered how, before the war, her father used to clear the till at the end of the day, take the key and go into the back room with the money in his hands. Then he opened the large cupboard. Although Helene might already be turning to the door when he opened the till, he winked at her every evening with the eye that would be missing later and said: You stand guard at the doorway, will you? And if anyone comes, just whistle. Sometimes Helene said: Girls aren’t supposed to whistle. Then he would smile and reply: Oh, are you a girl, then? And once, half hidden by the open cupboard door, he chanted the lines he had written in her album: Sweet as the violet be, /virtuous, modest and pure, /not like the rose whom we see/flaunting her full-blown allure. Then he changed his tone of voice, adjuring her almost menacingly: But all girls must know how to whistle, just you remember that.

Helene knew that the door to the safe was in the back wall of that cupboard. In all the years of her father’s absence the key had not turned up, and after his return there had been no opportunity to ask him about it. Helene loved her father and, in the old days, when he stroked her hair and drew her head towards him as if it were the head of his big dog, she wouldn’t for anything have endangered that sense of security; she would keep still until he sent her out to the kitchen or into the street with a kindly little tap on the behind. All the same, Helene didn’t care for those lines about the violet. She liked the sweet scent of violets and their delicate appearance, but she admired the upright growth of roses at least as much, the thorns they grew to protect themselves and their bright colours, pink unfolding like dawn, yellow like late October sunlight. In particular she loved the old song about the Virgin Mary walking through a wood of thorns, which all burst into flower and bear roses. Leontine had taught it to them before she went to Berlin. Weren’t those thorns showing Mary how much they respected and even worshipped her by flowering? Everything about the rose seemed to Helene admirable, even enviable. Out of respect for her father she made an attempt to like the allegory of girls seen as flowers, but it was only an attempt and went no further. Since last year Helene had been growing roses, not violets, in the garden outside the house. They were not really garden flowers but wild roses that she had found and dug up on the slopes of the Schafberg.

Now, when Helene and Martha opened the safe for the first time, they found old banknotes arranged in several wads, amounting in all to a good two thousand marks, which made them laugh. To think what they could have bought with that years ago! Now it might buy a whole loaf, or anyway half a loaf. At least half a pound of bread. Two thousand loaves back then, claimed Martha. They discovered a leather address book with the cut edges of the pages gilded, and a folder containing lithographs of various sizes and, judging by the typography, of different origins, arranged in no particular order. The lithographs were pictures of women with nothing or very little on. Curvaceous women, very unlike the sisters themselves and their mother. Women in just their stockings, women with veils and tight-fitting basques, as well as women wearing nothing whatsoever.

The sisters set to work to write the names and addresses from the leather book on envelopes. They put a death announcement for their father in each envelope. Under ‘S’ they found the name of an aunt or maybe cousin they had never heard of before. It said: Fanny Steinitz. Under the name their father had written, in the fine script of a meticulous bookkeeper, a note in brackets: (Selma’s cousin, the daughter of Hugo Steinitz’s late brother). The address for Fanny Steinitz was number 21 Achenbachstrasse, W 50, Wilmersdorf, Berlin.

Even before Helene managed to catch her mother at a moment of mental clarity during the next week and took the opportunity of asking about her cousin who lived in Berlin, she wrote a short letter on her own initiative. Dear Aunt, she began, unfortunately we are sending you sad news today. Our father, your cousin Selma Würsich’s husband, died on 11 November last year from the consequences of his war wounds. You will find our death announcement enclosed. Helene wondered whether, and in what words, to mention and explain her mother’s condition. After all, the cousin would be surprised to get a letter from her nieces, not her cousin in person. She added: I am sure our mother would send you her best wishes, but sad to say she has been in very poor heath for the last few years. With our very best wishes, your nieces Martha and Helene Würsich.

Helene could not be sure whether their aunt still lived at the same address. Wouldn’t she have married some time over the past years, in which case her surname would not be the same today? Their aunt might well be surprised to find them getting in touch after such a long time — moreover, there must be some reason for the absence of any mention of this maternal cousin of theirs in the family stories they had been told. But Helene wanted to write this letter. Her curiosity and her hope of receiving an answer from Berlin outweighed her doubts, and she quickly dismissed them all.

It was Easter before the postman brought a strangely narrow, folded envelope addressed to Fräulein Helene Würsich. Their aunt wrote in a bold hand, the letters leaning far to the right, the upper loops of the ‘H’ in Helene’s name just touching the finely traced letter ‘e’. This, wrote Aunt Fanny, was a wonderful surprise! After that exclamatory opening she left two lines blank. It was a long time since she’d heard anything of that crazy cousin of hers. She was delighted to hear that two children had obviously arrived over the years, for they had not been in touch since the birth of the first child, Martha. She had always wondered whether her cousin had broken off contact with her because of their old quarrels, or might even have died in childbirth. In a postscript Aunt Fanny asked her nieces whether their mother was seriously ill.

A correspondence began. There was little to say about their mother, Helene replied, she hadn’t been well for years and it was unlikely that any doctor could help her. She consulted Martha about the best way to describe their mother’s condition. To say she was in poor health did not mean much, particularly as there was nothing organically wrong with her. They remembered Lady Midday, the Noonday Witch whom Mariechen mentioned now and then, saying with a curious smile that her lady, as she called the girls’ mother, just wouldn’t speak to the spirit who appears in the harvest fields at noon and can confuse your mind or even kill you, unless you hold her attention for an hour by talking about flax. There was nothing to be done about it, said Mariechen, shrugging her shoulders, although all her lady had to do was talk to the Noonday Witch for an hour about the working of flax, that was all. Mariechen’s eyes twinkled. Just passing on a little wisdom, she told the girls. Martha and Helene had known the tale of the Noonday Witch as long as they could remember; there was something comforting about it, because it suggested that their mother’s confused state of mind was merely a curse that could easily be lifted. Nothing to be done about it, however, Mariechen repeated, shrugging again, and her smile showed she was sure of the spirit’s powers and felt only a tiny scrap of sympathy for her disbelieving mistress. On the other hand, as things were Mariechen had her lady to herself, along with her beliefs. Her lady couldn’t run away. But Martha and Helene did not write to their aunt in Berlin about the Noonday Witch; they did not want Fanny Steinitz thinking of them in connection with rustic superstition and supposing that they must be simple-minded. So they merely gave a factual account of some malady that no one could explain: it was hard to pin down any cause for their mother’s mental anguish and it seemed impossible to treat it.