Hausfrau (26 page)

This is the grief that will eat you.

H
E HADN
’
T BEEN PAYING
attention.

He hadn’t been paying attention and he ran into the street.

What had they been playing, Charles and Victor? Was it cops and robbers? Tag? Red light, green light? Anna didn’t think children played those games anymore. Maybe they had just been chasing each other around in happy circles. The
brothers played well together almost half of the time.
Maybe this was one of those halves,
Anna thought. As if knowing that made much difference, if any at all.

It didn’t.

He hadn’t been paying attention.

By everyone’s account it was an accident. Terrible and unfathomable? Yes. But also entirely accidental. Ursula and Margrith saw the whole calamity unfold. They’d been standing in front of Hans’s tractor shed, just twenty feet away. Margrith was holding Polly Jean. Ursula had just gathered the last late vegetables from her garden and had brought them over to share with Margrith. A basket of turnips and potatoes was hooked in the crook of her arm. It happened in a startling instant. Charles ran into the street and almost immediately the car made contact. His little body hit the ground.
He ran in front of the car! He just ran in front of the car!
The driver was a man in his early thirties.
He ran in front of me! I couldn’t stop! Jesses Gott! Jesus Christ!

Victor, too, saw the accident. For the rest of his life, he would remember, in perfect, immutable detail, the shriek of the tires as they seized to a radical stop, the incomparable panic of disbelief that glazed the driver’s eyes, and the absurdity of the single red potato that fell from his grandmother’s basket and rolled close enough to Charles’s head that it had to be kicked away.

It was an accident. The driver—his name was Peter Oesch—had not been drinking, he had been paying attention, and he was not speeding. Charles ran into the road.
He just ran out in front of me! I wasn’t going fast!
This was true. Peter hadn’t been. But it wasn’t the impact that killed him. As quickly as Charles ran into the road, Peter hammered the
brake and swerved sharply enough that he didn’t hit him head-on. He clipped him. It broke his leg and his hip. That’s it. This alone, Charles would have survived. But when Charles fell, he cracked his skull. While improbable, the fracture was not impossible. His little head hit the ground at the exact right angle and with just enough force and velocity to split it apart. A betting man would have never taken the wager. A thousand to one chance against its occurrence. But it occurred. It was an open fracture, a lacerated artery. Paramedics couldn’t stop the blood. Charles died quickly, though not instantly.

Anna was asleep in the Hotel Allegra when he died.

S
TERBEN
IS THE
G
ERMAN VERB
“
TO DIE
.” I
T IS AN IRREGULAR
verb. This makes sense; no two deaths are the same.
Sterben
’s participle changes vowels mid-word: a usual, expected
e
becomes an
o
’s wide-mouth surprise.
Sterben
forms its compound past with
sein,
which means “to be.”
Er ist gestorben. Du bist gestorben. Ich bin gestorben.
He and you and I. The present being becomes the passed.

For dead is something you are. Forever and forever. You are dead and you’ll never be anything else.

T
HE TAXICAB PULLED UP
to the scene and Anna jumped out before the car fully stopped. She didn’t pay the fare. The driver yelled for her to come back, but when he saw the police, the women clumped in crying circles, and the tall man who stepped out from the crowd to grab hold of the woman who had leapt from his taxi, he guessed the rest. He turned the cab around and drove away. Anna craned to look past Bruno to the place in the road around which the policemen huddled.
Bruno blocked her, even though at this point there was nothing left for her to see. Anna yelled out a half dozen breathless questions.
Where is Victor? Where is Polly? Where is Charles?

She didn’t need to ask; she knew who’d been hurt without being told. This is a mother’s talent.
Hurt,
she told herself.
He’s hurt. That’s all. He’s okay. I
will
him to be okay.
But the same mother’s talent knew that he wasn’t. When Bruno explained what had happened, Anna’s yelling folded seamlessly into howling. She buckled at the knees and went limp.

Margrith stepped forward to steady her but Bruno shook his head. “Put your arms around my neck, Anna. That’s it. Try.” Bruno lifted her and carried her into the house like a new husband delivering his bride across the threshold of their first home. He brought her into the bedroom, laid her on the bed, sat down next to her, took her shaking hands inside his own, and told her everything. Each detail forced Anna’s body into a tighter ball. The driver’s name. The time of death. Which leg the impact broke. Bruno stroked her hair with his right hand and with his left, he rubbed his own tears back into their sockets. “We tried to call you.”

Anna spoke to the pillow beneath her head. “My ringer was off. I forgot to turn it on.”

Bruno didn’t respond. There was no reason to.

I
DREAM
I
AM
at the Hauptbahnhof with two pregnant women, one quite young and the other a bit older. They deliver their babies at the same time, but the infant of the older woman either dies or was born dead to begin with. She shrugs and says, “It’s okay. I’ll figure something out.” I tell her I’m sorry but I don’t know what else to add. When I turn back, the younger woman
is gone. She has left a note that says she needs to be home before her husband starts to worry. She has forgotten to take her baby. I get very upset and start to look for her but the older woman stops me and makes me give the baby to her. “See?” she says. “It all worked out.” I say I suppose it did.

M
ARY CAME TWENTY MINUTES
later and joined Anna and Bruno in the bedroom. The women looked at each other and both began wailing with despair. Bruno rose and stepped aside. Mary took his place on the bed and reached to Anna and pulled her into her soft, maternal body and rocked her back and forth as she cried into Anna’s hair, and as Anna, in turn, cried into Mary’s chest. A policeman stepped into the doorframe and motioned for Bruno to come outside with him. Mary nodded in a way that meant
It is all right; I will take care of her.
Then she looked back down to Anna and continued the rocking.

“Hush. I have you.” Mary rubbed Anna’s back and smoothed her hair. She noticed Anna’s missing earring. “We’ll find it later,” she whispered and Anna began to sob with even more hysteria.

“I’
M TERRIFIED OF DEATH
,” Anna said.

“Why?” Doktor Messerli responded. “What use, fearing the inevitable?”

But the fear is in the inevitability,
Anna thought. “Do you believe in God?”

“I believe in a benevolence around which the universe revolves.”

Anna made a face. “Do you believe in Heaven?”

Doktor Messerli avoided the question. “No one knows what happens after death. The dead. They so rarely come back.”

Anna repeated herself. “I’m afraid of death.”

“Death is transformation, Anna. That’s all.” This was not the concrete answer Anna longed for. “Death is the soul’s way of becoming something new. All living beings die. It’s just what we do. It is just how it is.”

“I’m still frightened.”

For the next several seconds, doctor and patient watched each other with solemnity, waiting for the other to speak first. Doktor Messerli interrupted the silence. “Death is change. Nothing more. Metamorphosis. A movement from one state of being into another. Like walking into a different room in your house, Anna. Does it help to think of it in those terms?” It didn’t. Doktor Messerli sighed. “Anna, I only know this: when it is your turn to die—my turn, anyone’s—when it is time for you to let go of one life and reach out for another, you will be left with no other choice but to hurl yourself willingly into the mother arms of transfiguration. It’s not an end. It’s a beginning.”

A
NNA HAD NOTHING TO
do with planning the funeral. She was too unwell to be of any use. Services were held three days after the accident. It was a Saturday and the church—the church of which Charles’s own grandfather had been the pastor—was full. So many people came. All the Benzes’ friends, their family, the men and women Bruno worked with, the students in Anna’s German class, members of the church, townspeople, friends of Ursula—people Anna didn’t even know, had never
even met—everyone came to the service. Charles’s teacher, Frau Kopp, was also there. Anna couldn’t bear to look her in the eye, and Frau Kopp was kind enough to avoid all direct gazes.
Thank you,
Anna said inside herself. Archie came to the funeral but slipped away before it was over. Anna had seen him sitting in the back when she’d turned in her seat to survey the church before the service began. His head was down and he was pretending to read the printed-out order of service. Anna’s stomach soured. She vowed to never lay eyes on him again. And she didn’t. Karl was there as well, of course. He was a friend of the family. The sight of Karl had no effect on Anna. She looked at him and felt an absence of feeling. A blank nothing. A nothing so blank that it was brutal. The parents of most of the children in Charles’s class came to the church, though many had left their children home. Tim and Mary also came alone. Anna understood. She wouldn’t have brought Charles to a funeral either, even a funeral for one of his friends.
He is too young, too tender,
Anna thought in present tense. She hadn’t yet begun to think of him as past.

The
Pfarrer
conducted the service in Swiss German. The bells rang.

The graveside service had been earlier in the day. Anna relied on Bruno and Ursula to hold her up as she cried into one of the handkerchiefs that Mary had given her for her birthday.

Charles was cremated. They buried his urn in the graveyard’s children’s section.

That was all Anna remembered of either service. After the funeral Bruno and Ursula and the rest of the mourners went to the
Kirchgemeindehaus
for a light lunch, coffee, and more tears. Anna didn’t follow them. Mary took her home, helped her out of her clothes, and put her into bed.
Please don’t leave,
Anna asked when Mary moved toward the bedroom door. Mary shook her head and said of course she wasn’t leaving but that she would be right back. A few minutes later, Mary returned with a tray of food that Anna had no interest in eating. Mary asked her to try her best to eat a little, reminding her gently that Victor and Polly would need her and that to be strong she could not starve herself. Anna took two bites of the sandwich and drank only one sip of the tea. Mary took the tray away and then returned. She sat in a rocking chair next to the bed and kept vigil over Anna for the rest of the day.

Victor and Polly will need you, Anna.
In the days after Charles’s death, Anna had caught herself forgetting she had two other children. Anna’s neighbor Monika babysat Polly Jean for several days, to Bruno and Anna and Ursula’s immediate relief. But they couldn’t shield Victor from the experience. He’d shared a room with Charles. He’d shared toys and parents. Victor’s usual sullenness had been replaced with a blank, baffled face that revealed a sadness that existed somewhere beyond the reach of comfort. At the church he sat between Anna and Bruno. They hadn’t allowed him at the burial. Victor didn’t need to see that. Anna hadn’t either.

T
HE DAY BEFORE THE
funeral the Benzes received, in their mailbox, Charles’s
Bestattungsanzeige.
Anna found it in Bruno’s nightstand drawer. She was hunting down painkillers; the crying had induced a migraine. Bruno had slipped on the ice last winter and sprained his back. Anna banked on at least one leftover pill.

The announcement lay at the top of an assortment of other ephemera: a drawing Charles had done in school, a photograph
of Anna holding Polly Jean, the card his mother had sent him on his last birthday. He had folded the announcement into careful quarters. When Anna opened it, she couldn’t read past her son’s name. It was a feeling more closely related to embarrassment than to grief.
This is something I’m not meant to see.
Anna returned the death announcement to its place in the drawer where Bruno kept his private things.

Bruno never once asked where she had been the day Charles died.

T
WICE IN THE LAST YEAR
A
NNA HAD BEEN IN THE CITY WHEN A
woman (a different woman on each occasion) approached her with a clipboard and asked in Swiss German whether she had time to spare. The women were market researchers seeking ordinary people to participate in taste tests. In both instances, Anna had agreed (what else would she have done?) and each time, she followed the women into a nearby hotel’s conference room. For the first test, Anna was asked to sample and rate several coffees.
Is it bitter? Can you describe its aroma? What would you say about the body of the coffee? Would you describe it as “full”?
Anna hadn’t begun her German classes yet, and she and the market researcher struggled through the next twenty minutes, the woman miming questions with her hands, and Anna answering those questions with blinks and nods. For her troubles, Anna earned a jar of instant coffee and a large bag of assorted mini chocolates. Anna shoved the coffee to the back of the pantry but—over the next three days—ate the entire bag of chocolate herself.
Why should I share?
she thought. I’m the one who took the test. She considered it her
reward for trying. Sometimes Anna tried. Sometimes she tried very, very hard.

The second time Anna was approached (on the same street corner, no less) occurred after she’d completed the first month of her German class. This test ran far smoother than the previous one. Anna smiled through it, stumbling over only a few sentences and even fewer words. She vetted pickles that day and this time received a jar of cocktail onions, which, like the instant coffee, had also been pushed to the back of the pantry. There were no chocolates but that was okay. Her poise, the smoothness of speech—those were her reward.