Julia Franck - The Blind Side of the Heart

The girls looked up, curious to see the visitor. Martha and Helene had never met an aristocrat in person before. But it soon turned out in conversation that he wasn’t a baron, that was only his surname: Baron, Heinrich Baron.

He didn’t have much of anything and in particular he didn’t have much money. What little he did have, he would like to share with a pretty young girl who would model for him and get him drawing and drawing until he dropped. The Baron was a small man; any man the same height as Helene wasn’t tall. His forehead was high, his hair sparse, with a parting from his hairline to the back of his head. She liked his eyes. Their sad, lost expression easily inspired confidence and yes, they could make a young girl like Helene seem larger, more important.

Even if Helene didn’t quite like the way the Baron’s eyes lingered on her, to be the object of his attention promised her some protection from tall Erich, who could hardly find a moment now when they wouldn’t be disturbed if he manoeuvred Helene into a dark corner, and while Fanny had popped into the kitchen to look for Otta and Martha was working at the hospital, and there was no one around to see it but Cleo with her watchful eyes and the trustful wagging of her tail, he put a hand on her breast and stuck his fat, wet tongue into her ear, breathing heavily as he moved it around inside. As soon as Helene, holding her breath in alarm — for it never occurred to her to cry out — heard first from the light padding of Cleo’s paws that Fanny was on her way back from the kitchen, and then Fanny’s own footsteps were audible, Erich would let go of her as suddenly as he had seized her and stroll easily away to meet Fanny. Why didn’t she get her tennis racket, he asked, and go to Grünewald with him? He had borrowed a car and he knew she liked driving.

One day the Baron took off his glasses, cleaned them and ran his hand lightly over his high forehead. He asked Helene if she would like to earn a little something. Helene felt flattered; no artist had ever wanted to draw her before. She also felt shy and ashamed. Who, aside from Martha, had ever seen her naked?

Shame was for other girls, not for beauties like her, said the Baron out loud from the other end of the room where they had agreed to meet, on a Sunday morning when no one was going to church or even thinking of God. He hoped that this remark would bring Helene out from behind the screen. She wasn’t being asked to show herself for nothing, she’d be paid for it. The Baron waved a banknote. He didn’t mind that her breasts were tiny, he took it as a sign of her youth. He liked her blonde hair. He laughed: why, she was still just a child. He liked that, and he drew and drew, though he never did drop from exhaustion. Helene felt tired. After several weeks he told her she was an enchantress who looked different every day, she helped him to see in a new way. The Baron said she presented him with new eyes daily. He gave her newly minted coins and banknotes fresh from the printer in the Reichsmark currency, superseding the Rentenmark notes first issued in 1923, and to Helene they seemed like tickets to a new life of her own choosing.

She went to the pharmacist’s during the day now, she showed how discreet she could be there, and in the evening she undressed for the Baron who regarded her as both an enchantress and a child, but in whose presence she felt like a woman for the first time. She didn’t let him know that. After all, she felt that way because of the sense of shame and the excitement, not because of the assessing look with which he walked around her, asked her to sit down, to lie down, to hold her arm at a certain angle, to move her left leg a little further, yes, to spread her legs like that; and then, quite soon, he contracted tendonitis. Helene couldn’t help being reminded of those dragons who lived among rocks and ate virgins. Not that she felt guilty in any way; she was sorry for him. He couldn’t hold his charcoal any more, Helene wasn’t asked to undress again. So she no longer earned her share of what little money he did have, but worked longer hours at the pharmacy instead.

In the evening, when she came home from the pharmacy, Helene brought back a small box of white powder and placed it on Fanny’s bedside table without a word, as evidence that she was trustworthy. Leontine provided for Martha’s needs, if reluctantly, and it was only on rare occasions, when a good opportunity offered, that Helene brought some morphine back from the pharmacy for her sister. The Baron sat on the chaise longue in his room in the Berlin apartment, waiting for Helene with his sad, lost eyes. Helene was glad he just looked at her and didn’t touch. All the women around her were involved in relationships. Helene didn’t feel too young for that any more, it was just that she couldn’t make up her mind. She bandaged the Baron’s arm and put cold and warm compresses on his tendon. He gave her a bunch of bright yellow daisies, which she happily accepted. As she put the flowers in a vase she imagined that they were late roses and wondered how she would have felt if Clemens the pharmacist had given them to her. Helene wanted to be in love, to know all the boundless ardour and the fears that she supposed went with that condition. Was this all there was to it, a tingling sensation in the pit of her stomach, a trembling below her breasts? She had to smile. She couldn’t agree with Fanny’s belief that Clemens was one of her suitors. The gaunt pharmacist — Helene thought of him all the time when she had a day off — wouldn’t look Fanny or any other woman in the eye a moment longer than necessary. He didn’t watch any of them walking away either, he never said a word more than he had to. Only when his wife came into the pharmacy with two or three of their five children clinging to her skirts, to fetch something or ask him a question, her round face red with cold and her big blue eyes shining, did the pharmacist’s face open up and then he came to life. He would kiss his wife and hug his children as if he hardly ever saw them.

The apothecary did not come from a prosperous family; he worked hard for his money and still had debts against the pharmacy. If Fanny thought of him as a friend it might be because she didn’t realize how important money was to him. Helene typed his orders, letters and accounts for him. He showed her the consistencies to which fats and acids could be mixed, taught her what she needed to know about the reactions of bases with acids, and finally lent her a big book to read at home. Helene knew that this information might come in useful for any future medical studies of hers, and she mastered all the knowledge that came her way. She made it her habit to pack up five of the woodruff-flavoured sweets called May leaves for the pharmacist every evening, and if the big jar holding them was empty to take raspberry and violet-flavoured sweets out of the little jar instead. His children liked them. Helene did his accounts, she mixed ointments, and she stayed in the pharmacy after closing time when he hurried home to his wife and children. Abstracting drugs was easy. After a while Helene recognized the signatures and stamps of the various doctors; she knew who prescribed what for whom and where she could add a nought to the orders. Two grams of cocaine became twenty, but only very occasionally did she make one gram of morphine into ten or a hundred. She took the orders herself and she knew when the supplier came. She arranged the jars and boxes herself too, signed receipts for the substances, weighed them out. The pharmacist knew he could trust Helene. She relieved him of responsibility and of part of his work as well. When she ground crystals to powder and put them into capsules, or poured liquids into small bottles, all she needed was brief instructions and a fleeting smile. In the course of time Helene also learned to mix alcohol with expensive active agents and to calculate the mixture of bases and acids for tinctures, so that she didn’t have to pester the pharmacist with questions any more.