Authors: Ursula Hegi
When the train with Almut Bechtel arrived on Nordstrand in the spring of 1899, it slowed before it reached the station, crossing vast meadows with sheep and cattle and horses. One mare stood in the backyard of a small farm, nuzzling a foal that lay on its side, all four legs stretched in one direction, as if felled from the effort
of being born.
I don’t have to think of that yet,
Almut told herself.
I don’t have to think about that till the day it wants to be born, and then I can be as afraid as I need to be. I know I can get through what needs to be gotten through.
She’d been on trains all day, leaving Burgdorf before dawn. At the St. Margaret Home, a kind nun with wide hands gave her a gray woolen cape and words of caution about the steep marble stairs between the second floor and the third-floor dormitories, where one might take a shallow step and fall and lose one’s baby.
*
When Almut entered the dining room, she came to a halt in front of the diptych, studied the first panel without flinching, and laughed aloud at the second panel, where St. Margaret stood above the felled dragon, one bare foot on his green lizard skin, her raised cross dripping with dragon gore, her dress immaculate.
“Why would you be laughing?” the midwife asked.
“I can get out the worst stains . . . coal and blood and gravy and red wine. But that dress?”
“No?”
“How can it be that white after her ordeal?”
“Proof of her virginity?”
“Please!”
The midwife’s face opened into one of the rare smiles that let others forget her sorrow, and she motioned the new St. Margaret Girl to sit with her.
Here’s one who won’t be broken either.
While Almut ate her lentil soup, she considered the panel. “That picture is a lie,” she concluded. “Because I could not get that dress clean again.”
“Are you practical? Or irreverent?”
“Both,” Almut said without hesitation.
It started there for the two women, the recognition of something kindred; and from that day forward, a friendship grew as they
sat next to each other at meals, facing the diptych to mock it and to spare others the sight.
*
Between the St. Margaret Home and the St. Margaret Church, an alley of birches and more substantial chestnut trees arched above the brick path, concealing the St. Margaret Girls on their walk to mass. To keep the Girls from distracting the parishioners, the Girls had to use the side door. They were the first to enter, the last to leave, causing the younger children of the parish to assume the St. Margaret Girls lived and slept in these pews.
As Almut Bechtel followed the pregnant Girls into the pews to the left, beneath the pulpit, the smell of the ancient stone floor and painted stone walls reminded her of her cellar in Burgdorf. One of the altar boys latched the low gate at the end of each pew before the parishioners began to arrive through the large main doorway, pouring down the center aisle, where they genuflected and separated, filing into long pews on the women’s or the men’s side of the church.
When the old priest lumbered up the steps to the black and gold pulpit, his sermon fell on the St. Margaret Girls as though it were the voice of God.
They all worked in the nursery of the Home, longing for the day when their bellies would be flat again, their infants adopted by kind families, and they could return to their hometowns with stories to be believed, stories they revised during pregnancy as they inspired one another, a story of visiting an ailing godmother in Bremen, say, or sitting by the deathbed of a grandfather who’d made death wait for seven months.
*
While the nuns counseled the St. Margaret Girls on abstinence, the midwife counseled them on pregnancy and birth. Some were
so naïve that she had to explain how they’d come to be with child. They’d been seduced, or forced, or had yielded to the confusing insistence of their own bodies. What the midwife’s patients had in common was that they felt trapped and wanted to be separate, once again, from what was crowding them inside. Some had tried old-fashioned methods of prevention: jumping backward seven times after intercourse to dislodge the seeds, or rotating their hips during intercourse to keep the seeds from attaching, or catching a frog and spitting into the frog’s mouth three times, or tying a pouch with a cat’s liver around one ankle.
The midwife shuddered to imagine what had happened to the rest of the cat. She was impatient with myths that lured women into trusting they wouldn’t get pregnant. That’s why, secretly, she helped those St. Margaret Girls who asked her how to avoid pregnancies. Since nearly all would leave without their babies, they didn’t have the choice that married women had: to breast-feed for a year or more, as the midwife had with her own babies, thereby tricking their bodies into presuming they were already pregnant. But what the midwife could do was insert a little wooden block in front of the cervix before her patient reentered the outside world. These blocks the midwife ordered from local toymakers by the dozen—smooth and unpainted with rounded edges—allowing the men who sanded them to assume they were for the children at the St. Margaret Home. To let them find out that these blocks served to prevent children would have meant banishment.
The making of toys was the second largest industry on the peninsula; but since there were too many toymakers—as if to make up for too many babies—the apprentices would donate their experiments to the St. Margaret Home, where the children who’d been left behind got to play with toys that were unlike others and would never reach the market.
Some toymakers felt sorry for these children when Lotte Jansen ordered her plain blocks, and they couldn’t stop themselves from
carving pictures into the surfaces of these blocks and painting them with their brightest colors, feeling generous as they imagined the joy of the children.
Of course, Lotte would thank them and hand the blocks to the children who did, indeed, enjoy them. Then she’d order another dozen—smooth and unpainted with rounded edges—from a different toy shop until, finally, she found one that did not improve her order.
*
There were always St. Margaret Girls who felt guilty about releasing their children for adoption. They knew the midwife would not judge them because what she’d done to her youngest was a thousand times worse than giving your child away to a decent family. That’s why they trusted her, came to her with their guilt. Some did sign the papers, then; but others wanted to wait with deciding, leave their infants in limbo at St. Margaret’s, where a new crop of pregnant Girls would feed them and bathe them and murmur endearments their own children would never hear from them.
Here, in spacious rooms lined with cribs and tall windows, these children learned to walk and pray and sing. A few of their mothers would visit with gifts and with tears. Most would not return. Still, you’d come to recognize them in towns afar or near because they’d glance away from children as if stung, or they’d stare at them with such hunger that children would want to hide from them.
Once or twice a year, a new mother would insist on taking her child with her, raise it alone. Foolish, the nuns would say. Yet, they’d bundle diapers and clothes and tiny blankets for her to take along, advise her to tell people she was a new widow. It would bring her compassion. Respect.
*
For twenty-one years, Lotte Jansen had known there was no God.
She had still believed in God that August day she’d taken her
four children to the traveling Zirkus. On the way home, they’d run onto the tidal flats as they often did, laughing and chasing after the tide that would retreat for kilometers, Lotte with the baby, Wilhelm, in one arm, her other children linked to her by holding hands: Bärbel with her tiny fingers clenched around Lotte’s thumb; Martin in the middle; her oldest, Hannelore, on the outside.
Clouds of seagulls rose from the damp flats, an entire sky in each vale between the sand ridges that would fill once again in a few hours when the incoming tide would meld a thousand skies into one. But for now it was only sand that squeezed itself up between their toes, golden and wet, sand and shallow puddles that sloshed around their feet.
Running and laughing with her children, Lotte, because tomorrow she would take them to the Zirkus again, for free again, because their father, like other toymakers on Nordstrand, worked there as a roustabout for a week every summer. Running and singing with her children, Lotte,
wunschlos glücklich
—happy without a wish, until another sound muffled the screeching of the seagulls and the laughter of her children, a roaring, a rushing, as a freak wave galloped at them—
No—
Too soon for the tide to—
She had never seen a wave that colossal. “Hold on to each other!” Lotte shouted and tightened her grip on Bärbel. “Deep breath! Duck into the wave—” Because that was how she and her husband, Kalle, had taught their three oldest to swim. That’s how all the people on Nordstrand learned to swim as small children, facing a wave and then ducking into it before it curled, before it could tumble them.
But Lotte had never been seized by a wave this crushing. Still, she believed in God when it toppled and spun and choked her, when she burst into light, dizzy and coughing, with her youngest in her arm—
Both arms—
“Bärbel—” she screamed. “Martin—Hannelore—”
They were bobbing just two church-lengths away from her as the wave took them toward the horizon, then four church-lengths, leaving behind nothing but soaked ground. Clutching Wilhelm, Lotte ran after them to where she’d spotted them last—
Bärbel Martin Hannelore—
pushing at God with her prayers, her rage.
She still believed in God while the townspeople and the Zirkus people fanned across the tidal flats, clowns and acrobats still in their costumes, side by side with farmers and nuns and toymakers. Most hunted the wave on foot, but some rode out on horses and Zirkus ponies.
Even when Kalle reminded her what good little swimmers their children were, Lotte still believed in God. Even when the tide came back in and divers searched for the children, Lotte believed God was keeping them afloat nearby until the sea would spit them out.
And it was the immensity of her belief in this all-powerful and all-merciful God that led to her bargain with God. She drew the sign of the cross on her baby’s heart, kissed his lips, his forehead. “Take Wilhelm in return for the other three,” she wailed and flung him into the sea.
But God did not keep Wilhelm. And that’s how she knew there was no God. Kalle scrambled into the sea, horrified by what his wife had done, and raised his youngest into his arms. At home, he laid the boy against Lotte’s breast, and she cupped Wilhelm’s head in her palm the way she had with all her children. But her breasts had gone bone-dry, and Wilhelm twisted his face aside.
When Kalle sent to the priest for help, he arrived with Sister Franziska and a St. Margaret Girl who’d recently given birth. From her, Wilhelm accepted the breast, so hungry that he was sobbing with each swallow.
For five days, Kalle tried to look into his Lotte’s face, to match his sorrow to hers. But he couldn’t. When he left with the Zirkus,
the people of Nordstrand said he could have forgiven his wife for losing three of his children to the sea—a wave like that happened once in a lifetime, no, once in a hundred years—but that he would never forgive her for what she’d done to Wilhelm.
*
The nuns understood Lotte Jansen’s sorrow. Scripture and life had taught them about sacrifice, about a mother offering up her child to God. They brought Lotte and Wilhelm to the St. Margaret Home. While she slept or cried in the small room next to the dormitory, Wilhelm lived in the nursery where Sister Franziska, the midwife, would rock him, play with him, and tell him stories of the Virgin Maria who had relinquished her son to God when he was thirty-three.
During the weeks and months his mother was lost to Wilhelm, he was breast-fed by St. Margaret Girls who’d given up their infants soon after birth and pitied this boy who brought them relief from the fullness in their breasts. But some were so shocked by an unforeseen longing for their own babies that they wouldn’t go near Wilhelm again.
When Lotte was able to sit up in her bed, she could see across the dike and the edges of land that had been reclaimed so often from the Nordsee that the people were accustomed to shifting ground beneath their feet and beneath their houses, even in their connections to others because those, too, could be washed away. In a landscape like this, you could not presume.
*
Twice a day, Sister Franziska would carry Wilhelm up the marble steps to the third floor, lay him on the pillow next to his mother’s face, and quietly sing to them both. Once Lotte was ready to get up, Sister Franziska offered her paying work, trained her in the nursery, then in the delivery room, though Lotte was terrified that her touch might cause death.
Sister Franziska would listen, nod, then fill the young woman’s arms with newborns. For each of her own, lost, Lotte helped another child into the world. Then ten. Thirty. And more until she, too, had become a midwife.
Every dawn, Lotte Jansen would walk by herself along the edge of the sea. Some people said it was odd; others speculated she was still waiting for her drowned children. But there were enough people, including the priest, who believed the legend of Rungholt, a wealthy city swallowed by the Nordsee over five centuries ago; they found it comforting to think of Lotte imagining her children safe in Rungholt, surrounded by treasures and toys made of gold.
Wilhelm grew accustomed to nights at home with his mother and days with other children in the nursery of the St. Margaret Home, where his mother was the one who fed him, rocked him, and came back to play with him whenever she could between patients. His mother and Sister Franziska fussed over him because he had trouble filling his skin and drew unsettling pictures of a boy with dark waves inside his head.
He would not forget the briny taste of the sea, and he’d become a slight man with pale eyes and pale hair, a boy of a man who’d never quite reclaim his flesh from the water-grave of his siblings. He’d become a toymaker like his father, who continued to work for the Zirkus, where he used his skills to repair broken equipment, wheels and poles and yokes, and carve toy animals, tigers and elephants and monkeys and giraffes, that he sold outside the tent whenever the Zirkus arrived in a new place.