The Blind Side of the Heart (9 page)

Although the winter battle had been won, that success was to remain as remote from Ernst Ludwig Würsich as the question of there being any point in the war. When the field hospital closed down one day just after the end of hostilities, he and the other wounded men were to be taken home. But transport turned out difficult and tedious. Halfway through the journey some of them deteriorated; typhoid spread among them, many died and the survivors were temporarily accommodated in a small colony of huts near Warsaw. From there they went on to Greifswald in a larger convoy of the injured. Week after week now he was told that they were only waiting for his health to improve before sending him back to Bautzen. But however much it improved, there were still stumbling blocks: he needed the financial means to get back and someone to help him physically, and those he did not have. He wrote two or three letters home a month, addressing them to his wife, although he had no way of knowing whether she was even still alive. No answer came. He wrote telling Selma that the stump of his leg refused to heal, although the injuries to his face near the socket of his right eye had healed nicely and the skin around the scars was smoothing out more every day. Or at least, so his sense of touch told him; he couldn’t know for certain because he had no mirror. He hoped she’d recognize him. Of all his features, his nose was almost the same, he said. Yes, his face had healed up extremely well, he assured her, very likely it was only on close inspection, and by drawing conclusions from the rest of his physiognomy, that anyone could see where the right eye had once been. In future, when they went to the theatre, he’d be glad to borrow the gilded opera-glasses he had given her for their first wedding anniversary, and then at last he’d offer her his monocle in exchange. He knew she’d always thought the monocle suited her better than him, he added.

That, he thought, might at least make his wife smile her enchanting smile if she were still alive, if she read his letter, if she learned about his injuries from it. Merely imagining the sparkle of her eyes, their colour changing between green and brown and yellow, sent a shiver of desire and a sense of well-being down his spine. Even the pain, so far unidentified, that sprang from a sore place on his coccyx, throbbing and spreading up his back as if the upper layers of skin were being sliced into very thin strips, even that he could ignore for minutes at a time.

How was he to guess that his wife Selma handed the letters to her housekeeper Mariechen for safe keeping, unread and still sealed?

With abhorrence, Selma Würsich told Mariechen that she felt more and more disgusted to be receiving wartime letters from That Man – as she now referred to him – a man who, allegedly for love of her but against her express wish, had wanted to go off and be a hero. She thought that in these signs of life from him she detected a kind of mockery, something of which she had suspected her husband for no real reason ever since they had known each other. Inwardly, she was waiting for the day of his return and her chance to say, with a shrug of her shoulders expressing utter indifference, the following words of welcome: Oh, so you’re still with us, are you?

After the first weeks when he went missing, and the following weeks and months of fury that he had ever gone away at all, such a display of indifference promised to be her ultimate triumph. The Wendish housekeeper, that old maid, as Ernst Ludwig had once described Mariechen in their daughters’ hearing, was now the only person to whom she ever spoke, not that she spoke much at all.

Selma Würsich lay in wait season by season. She had no time to spare; an inner restlessness chased her out of doors in spring. Suddenly, there stood one of her daughters in front of her asking something, the word Ascension came into it, and Selma was turning away, for such words, she thought, were none of her business, but still they rang in her ears; a pair of eyes belonging to one of her daughters was fixed on her, but it couldn’t possibly be anything to do with her. She simply said she didn’t want to be disturbed, and demanded peace and quiet.

She left decorating the Easter eggs to Mariechen, who was better at it anyway. Indeed, Selma found being with other people more and more of a burden, she simply lacked the patience to tolerate her daughters’ chattering and questions. How gratefully, in secret, she thanked heaven for Mariechen, who kept their cheerful company at a distance from her.

In summer Selma picked the last few cherries from the large unpruned tree that had been plundered for weeks by the street urchins and her own daughters. To go cherry-picking she wore one of her broad-brimmed hats, a hat with a veil beneath which she could watch the Kornmarkt less conspicuously, and as she stood on the ladder she kept looking the way she thought she would see her husband approaching. Sitting on the steps in front of the house with her basket full of cherries, she nibbled the meagre, maggoty fruit off the stones. It tasted sour and slightly bitter. She laid out the stones to dry in the sun, where they bleached like bones. Every few days she took a handful of cherry stones and shook them in the hollow of her hands. The sound warmed her. Happiness might sound like that, thought Selma.

In autumn she once thought she saw her husband trudging through the fallen leaves on the opposite side of the street, and turned back quickly so that she would be at home when he arrived. She tried hard to feel nothing but indifference. But her efforts were wasted; the doorbell was silent and he did not appear. The man trudging through the leaves must have been someone else, probably a man who, welcomed home with a passionate embrace, was now sitting laughing with his wife over their supper of hot cabbage soup.

Early in winter Selma Würsich removed any green walnut husks and those already black and dried from the inner shells with a knife, and as she worked she looked out of the window into slowly drifting snow. Flakes tumbled up and down as if ignorant of the force of gravity. She often saw him coming down Tuchmacherstrasse. He would have aged in these last few years, he would smell of strange places. If he came back – well, he’d soon see!

But her long wait for next spring and summer, for the delightful revenge she longed for, was followed by a time of exhaustion. Business was slow; hardly anyone wanted anything printed. Paper was getting expensive. While Selma sat at the window, empty-eyed, Helene worked out new prices for letterheads and death announcements every quarter. Sales of picture postcards were so poor that she hadn’t been able to get any more printed for months, and there were hardly any orders for menus, since most landlords and café owners wrote up the names of their few dishes on blackboards. The savings of the pre-war period, when the printing works were still flourishing and Helene’s father had begun printing marriage advice manuals, collections of crossword puzzles and finally poems, suddenly lost their old value. The number of copies of the calendar they sold annually had recently dropped to less than a hundred. Designing the calendar pages for 1920 looked like costing more than prospective sales would bring in.

Acting on an idea that came to her one night, Helene’s mother had begun paying the wages of the typesetter who had worked for the firm for many years several months in advance. She obviously thought that this was a way to counter the price rises and help her to get around them, so to speak. But fewer and fewer orders came in, and the typesetter sat around without any work to do, solving crossword puzzles. Booklets of the puzzles piled up in the stockroom because no one was buying them any more. The army hadn’t accepted the typesetter as a wartime recruit because he was too small and his legs were too short. His wife and eight children went hungry with him, many of the children begged for bread and lard in the Kornmarkt, and they were always being caught stealing apples and nuts.

One evening Selma found a handful of sugar cubes in the typesetter’s overall pocket, after he had hung it up beside the door before going home from work. Because of the shape and colour of the sugar cubes, she found it easy to believe they had been stolen from her kitchen. Next morning she felt sorry for the man when she saw him sitting there with no work to do. Selma felt a great reluctance to speak to him about the sugar and how much he was costing her. She expected excuses and thought she would rather find a way to stop employing him. She would get him to teach her younger daughter how to set type, and handle the characters and the press. After all, she wouldn’t have to pay Helene for the few jobs and orders that still came in.

The girl was bored to death in her last year of school; it was time she made herself useful. Helene’s mother would not give in to her ardent wish to go on to a High School for Girls. If she had found school so tedious until now, it seemed to Selma far too expensive an indulgence to pay for her to do nothing in comfort for another two years.

Selma Würsich stood at the window and looked up Tuchmacherstrasse, holding her dressing gown closed. It was days since she had been able to find its belt. The bells were ringing; her daughters would soon come out of church. Selma was not at all happy with the idea that her younger daughter might become a teacher and had once, in her artless, childlike way, even expressed a wish to study medicine. That child is unruly and rebellious, she whispered to herself.

Martha was arm in arm with Helene as they strolled down the street from the Kornmarkt. Selma saw a violet satin gift-wrap ribbon lying on the glass display case. Mariechen must have rolled it up tidily and put it down there. Selma put it round her dressing gown instead of the missing belt. With great care, she tied a bow and smiled at her idea. Now she heard the shrill sound of the doorbell ringing.

Come up here, I want to speak to you two! Their mother was standing on the landing, beckoning to Helene and Martha to join her. She didn’t wait until the girls were sitting down.

You’ve been doing the accounts for years, Helene, it wouldn’t hurt you to learn the practical side of the business too. Their mother cast a cautious glance at her elder daughter, whose criticism she feared. But Martha’s mind seemed to be somewhere else. Even now I couldn’t manage the deliveries without your bookkeeping, and you see to buying paper and the maintenance of the press. The typesetter will eat us out of house and home one of these days. It would be a good idea to get him to show you what you need to know, and then we could fire him.

Helene’s eyes were shining. Wonderful, she whispered. She flung her arms round Martha’s neck, kissed her and cried: First of all I’ll print us some money and then I’ll print a book of family records for you.

Martha shook Helene off. She went red and said nothing. Their mother took Helene by the arm and forced her down on her knees.

What nonsense! I don’t like to hear you sound so delighted, child. The work won’t be easy, you know. Then she let go and Helene was able to stand up again.

Untroubled, Helene looked at her mother. She wasn’t surprised to find that Selma thought the work difficult; after all, her mother very seldom entered the rooms housing the printing works – she had probably never seen type being set, and from a distance the business must seem to her mysterious. Helene thought of the clicking and quiet chuffing of the press, the crunch of the rollers. How differently people could see something! What appeared all right to the typesetter made Helene uneasy. She had a clear picture of herself spacing the letters and words properly at long last, with the gaps between them ensuring harmony and clarity. The idea of operating the big press on her own was exciting. She had often wanted to improve on the typesetter’s work.

Selma was watching Helene. Those shining eyes seemed uncanny to her. The child’s joy made her seem even taller and more radiant than usual.

What you lack, said her mother sternly, is a certain sense of proportion. Her voice was cutting, every word finely judged. You don’t understand the natural order of things. That is why you find it hard to recognize order among us all. Subordination, my child, is important and you’ll be able to learn it from our typesetter. Subordination and humility.

Helene felt the blood rise to her face. She lowered her eyes. Darkness and light broke apart, colours blurred. She had no idea yet what to say in reply. The kaleidoscope went round and round, several times a rusty nail moved near some walnut shells, you never knew when that nail or those shells might come in useful. It was some seconds before she had a clear picture inside her again. Her mother, who as Helene now saw was wearing the violet satin ribbon, looked all done up like a present. The violet bow shook as Mother spoke. It wants to be undone, Helene thought, it really does. Helene scrutinized the maternal landscape, consisting as it did of remnants of clothes, feather dusters encrusted with black blood at the ends of the quills, pillowcases with cherry stones coming out of the holes in their corners and mountains of old newspapers. She could not make out the summit from which her mother was trying to tell her something about understanding the established order of things. Helene could not raise her eyes to meet her mother’s. She looked for help to Martha, but this time Martha did not come to her aid.

Within a few weeks Helene lost her veneration for the
pièce de résistance
in her father’s printing works. The platen press, which bore the brand name Monopol, no longer inspired awe in her but demanded physical effort. While the typesetter, who was too small for his legs to reach the pedal from her father’s stool, skilfully raised one of those short legs and kept the pedal in motion by kicking it vigorously, at Helene’s first attempts she couldn’t move it a millimetre. Although she could work the sewing machine and had no difficulty in keeping it going by stepping on the treadle, the Monopol press obviously called for a man’s strength. Helene put both feet on the pedal and pushed down. The wheel simply jerked forward once. The typesetter laughed. Perhaps he’d like to show her how to clean the rollers, said Helene sharply, looking pointedly at the thick layer of dust lying on them.

She wasn’t going to accept that she wasn’t physically strong enough to learn to use the press. As soon as the typesetter had left in the evening, she went over to the Monopol and practised with her right leg. She leaned on the paper holder and trod down and down again, until the big wheel was turning faster and faster and the friction of the rollers made a wonderfully deep sound. She was sweating, but she couldn’t stop.