Julia Franck - The Blind Side of the Heart

Downstairs, Helene found Martha sitting in their father’s armchair. She was helping Mariechen to mend sheets.

Helene and Martha thanked Aunt Fanny for her help over the legacy in a long letter full of detailed accounts of the weather and descriptions of their everyday life in the town of Bautzen. They told her that they had made a second sowing of winter salad greens in the garden behind the house and next day it would be time to sow overwintering cabbage varieties. No one would expect a flower garden to be kept going in times like these, but they did it for love. Although the water rates were rising in an alarming way, they had managed to keep the flower bed in front of the house from drying up all summer. Late summer meant a lot of outdoor work. Now Helene had cut off all the rose leaves and burned them. They had made a copper brew to spray the roses against rust, and a lime and sulphur brew to ward off mildew. The Michaelmas daisies were in full flower. They just weren’t sure when to put in flowering bulbs: Mariechen said now was the time to plant scilla and daffodils, tulips and hyacinths, but last year they had planted those bulbs early and they had frozen during the winter. They liked spinach and lamb’s lettuce very much, and had sown plenty for the winter, for no one could say when the general situation would improve. Last year, after all, they had printed small calendars for the coming year on a little press that had been standing idle in the workshop, fully operational but covered up, and now they were colouring them in by hand in the evenings. They hoped very much that the calendars would sell at the autumn fairs, or at the latest at the Christmas fair in winter. Thank goodness, they wrote, the Christmas market was reserved for local traders, or the hill farmers would force down prices. People had to look out for themselves these days. Only yesterday they had designed a little calendar with texts quoting rustic lore and maxims giving good advice. The provincials here liked to be exhorted to be virtuous in the sight of God, and it increasingly seemed to Helene, she added, that agreement on such matters was what created a sense of community here in Lusatia, bringing consolation and giving courage. And what could be more important these days than confidence and hope? What, for instance, did her aunt think of such precepts as: moderation and hard work are the best doctors; work sharpens the appetite and moderation prevents its wrongful satisfaction? People so often confuse education and good conduct with etiquette and will forgive a boy’s prank more easily than anything offending against the usual forms of social intercourse. The surest way to spoil a young man is to lead him to value those who think as he does more highly than those who think otherwise. A resolution cannot be more certainly thwarted than by being frequently uttered.

These reflections appeared to Helene and Martha like the yearning of their own graceful souls for the heaven of Berlin, and they hoped for nothing more fervently than to touch their aunt’s heart by writing in such terms. True education enables you to set the right tone with anyone, striking a note that chimes harmoniously with your own, don’t you agree, dear Aunt Fanny? And you are a sacred example to us there.

Helene and Martha went to great pains to show their aunt, line by line, how cheerfully independent they were and at the same time how grateful to her. Their very existence was a real joy! Helene thought this assertion too fine not to be written down. Martha, however, felt that such an expression was a demeaning lie in view of the sheer exhaustion that came over her when she thought of her life in Bautzen. Adopting a tone that trod the narrow line between pride and modesty appeared to them the real challenge of the letter they were writing. Time and again sentences were crossed out and rephrased.

Sacred example, said Martha doubtfully, she might take that the wrong way.

How do you mean, the wrong way?

She might think we’re making fun of her. Maybe she sees herself as anything but sacred, so she wouldn’t want to be a sacred example.

You think not? Helene looked enquiringly at Martha. Well, in that case at least she’ll have a good laugh. We really must put that in or we’ll never meet her at all.

Martha shook her head thoughtfully.

It was hours before they could get down to the fair copy, which had to be written out by Helene, because Martha’s handwriting often looked unsteady and crooked these days. Something wrong with her eyes, Martha claimed, but Helene didn’t believe her. She put in the bit about the sacred example and finally, in the last sentence of all, she politely asked their aunt if she would like to visit them in Bautzen some day.

When days passed, then a week, then two weeks and no answer came Helene began to worry.

There was nothing at all the matter with Martha’s eyes. If they went for a walk and Helene pointed out a dog a long way off, a sandy-coloured dog like their father’s old Baldo, who had disappeared on the day when he went away to the war, or if she showed her a tiny flower by the roadside, Martha had no difficulty in making out in detail both dog and flower. Helene suspected that her untidy handwriting, like her sudden dreamy moods, was to do with the syringe she had sometimes seen these last few months lying beside the washbasin, where Martha had obviously left it. Often as Helene handled syringes herself at the hospital now, the sight of one on their washstand at home made her throat tighten. Everything in Helene protested against the sight of that syringe when she didn’t want to see it. The first few times she was so shocked and ashamed on Martha’s behalf that she wanted to hide it before Mariechen found it, or Martha herself noticed her carelessness. But if she hid it that was sure to be noticed and would make it impossible for them to go on saying nothing about it.

As time went on, Helene became used to the idea that Martha had formed the habit of using the syringe every day. She did not speak directly to her about it. Nor could she honestly have asked questions, since she knew perfectly well that since their father’s death and Leontine’s departure Martha had been injecting small quantities of drugs now and then, presumably morphine, perhaps cocaine.

In the time just after her father’s death it was Aunt Fanny’s letters more than anything else that kept Helene hoping for a life beyond the town of Bautzen, a life she did not yet know. Even the pictures of Berlin that she had seen made her wax enthusiastic about the many different aspects of the city. Wasn’t Berlin, with its elegantly dressed women and never-ending nights, the Paris of the east, the London of Continental Europe?

But no reply came from Aunt Fanny all through October in response to that letter from Martha and Helene, the best, most detailed letter they had ever written her. Early in November Helene couldn’t bear the waiting any longer and wrote again. She hoped, she said, that nothing was wrong with her aunt? Here in Bautzen, anyway, they were more than grateful to her for getting in touch with Uncle Herbert’s relations in Breslau. Had their last letter arrived? Life went on in the usual way in Bautzen. After passing her examinations successfully (Helene had first put brilliantly, but struck it out again), she had begun work in the surgical department of the hospital in September. It meant that she was earning more, but she specially liked the work for its own sake anyway. Martha took the pen from Helene’s hand and added, in her scrawl, that Helene had filled the position left vacant by Nurse Leontine, a friend of theirs, when she moved to Berlin two years ago. The professor wanted to have Helene beside him more and more often these days, when he needed someone with great powers of concentration and sure hands to help with difficult operations, because she was very talented in that way. Helene wanted to strike out what Martha had said; it seemed to her boastful and ill-judged. But Martha said Helene’s worst mistake could be to hide her talents under a bushel, it would mean she ended up a helpless little thing in some man’s arms, begging for his favours. She held out the pen to Helene.