Authors: Ursula Hegi
I
T WAS AT
Sunday mass where Wilhelm Jansen first saw Almut Bechtel, enfolded in the honey-colored light from the stained-glass windows, where she knelt in the St. Margaret Home pews with other Girls in gray capes. Her freckles and her hair were the color of honey, too, so that she seemed to be made of light and of joy, and the toymaker believed that she was the opposite of him and that he could love her.
That’s what he heard himself say aloud when he waited for her after mass—“I believe I could love you”—when what he’d intended to say was that he’d like to invite her on a walk.
Of course she shook her head.
Of course he was mortified.
Of course he was certain, in the week that followed, that he could never again enter this church where he’d been christened and had received first communion. If necessary, he would become a Protestant to avoid her.
*
Yet, the following Sunday the young toymaker was back—to apologize to her, he believed—and knelt in the last pew on the men’s side of the church. Quite a few of the men were watching the St. Margaret Girls, speculating that it was easier to sweet-talk women into opening their legs once they’d done it, because doing it made them need it from then on. Even the toymaker, still a virgin, found himself thinking that, and he felt so ashamed that he fled while the priest gave the final blessing.
He made it to the bottom of the church steps before a voice called out to him. “Wait . . .”
Feeling caught and prickly, he turned.
The St. Margaret Girl with the freckles stood on the top step, her boots at the same level as his eyes—sturdy and laced to above her ankles, old leather made smooth with much polish and brushing—and he thought how odd her boots looked with her church dress, which hung in pleats from her shoulders beneath her open cape.
He hoped she didn’t think he was pretty. He’d heard people say that about his father, that he was too pretty.
Almut was thinking how beautiful he was, this man with the fine-boned features. Pointing her toes inward, she motioned to them and grimaced. “I wore my hiking boots to mass. . . . In case you’d still like to take a walk?”
He laughed with relief, no longer certain what he had said to her. His words and thoughts must have become jumbled so that, indeed, he had invited her for a walk.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
*
He walked with her along the top of a dike where sheep grazed on both slopes, one curving down toward the ocean, the other toward the windmills and the brick or stucco houses. Some of the older
sheep were so huge that, when they lay down, their backs spread as wide as a child’s mattress. But the lambs were running and hopping, kicking their hind legs.
“Like fawns,” Almut said with delight.
Fields of rapeseed stretched beyond the neighborhoods, yellow and swaying.
“
Raps,
” Wilhelm said. “People make oil from it. Honey, too.”
“Your clouds are different from where I come from,” she said.
“In what way?”
She pointed toward one of the islands where wind bunched the clouds into tight formations. “The way they move. With a river, they move in streaks, like the current, almost.” She spoke in a dialect that enchanted him because it was like singsong running alongside words.
He told her about his fear of the sea, about the gray waves inside his head that claimed him time and again; and as she listened, closely, he could see she wasn’t afraid of him.
“Maybe,” she said, “it’s because you have the fanciful mind that goes with making toys . . . with dreaming.”
“This is not like dreaming.” He told her about his sisters and brother drowning, about his mother pulling him from the sea and then flinging him back in, about a pale sky suddenly tilted and replaced by muddy water.
Almut reached for his hand. “I’ve heard.”
“I think I know why. Because—how could she not?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Wouldn’t you trade one child for three?”
“I won’t even keep this one.”
“Don’t you wish you could keep it?”
“It wouldn’t be . . . practical.”
He took that in. Waited.
“I already promised to let it be adopted.”
Damp air shimmered around them, silver-gray air the color of
sky, of water, shimmering and holding them separate from the rest of Nordstrand, and he realized he was afraid of losing her. And her child. How could that be? He barely knew her.
He moved his shoulder so she could lean against it, and when she did, he asked her, “What if you could raise the child . . . you and a husband?”
*
When he asked his mother if he could invite Almut Bechtel to their house for coffee and cake, she said yes and of course.
The following Sunday, after he left to pick Almut up at the St. Margaret Home, his mother set the table in the living room with her best china and tablecloth. She cooked coffee and whipped cream to serve with the
Erdbeertorte—
strawberry tart she’d baked that morning. Behind the lace curtain, she waited for them, heart beating—
for what?
—for what she didn’t let herself hope.
When her son led Almut into the house, the midwife stepped forward and took both her hands. “I am so glad,” she said. And then said it again. “I am so glad.”
Wilhelm seemed boylike next to Almut, though he was older—just by a month; still, older—and for an instant the midwife was afraid he might not be enough for Almut. And yet, there was something different about Wilhelm, passion, and it felt odd to notice that about her quiet son, unfamiliar and surprising. Suddenly, the midwife felt taller without the familiar weight of her worry for him.
E
VERY SATURDAY AFTERNOON
the toymaker went to confession, knelt on the outside of the wooden latticework, and received absolution and penance: twelve Hail Marys plus six Our Fathers for lusting after a pregnant woman.
That August, when Almut had been on Nordstrand five months, the old priest informed her during her confession that the toymaker was eager to save her from shame.
Her face burned. “Is that what he told you?”
“Your initial sin has been confessed properly and—”
Your initial sin, succumbing to being needed that morning in the kitchen when Michel Abramowitz touches your elbow, courteous and kind and something unfamiliar, too, his urgency that makes you feel chosen, and you know he’ll stop if you say so, that’s why you don’t need to stop him, still, as he raises you, there’s an instant of doubt, yet to push him away now would make you a . . . a bad hostess, no, not hostess, there has to be a better word, and whatever it is, you’re not like that
word, but just then you’re stunned by your own moaning need that cleaves you in half and—
Your initial sin. Your one-time-only sin. Both of you horrified. Afterward. Even before afterward begins.
“—and absolved properly,” the priest continued, “but you must know—”
“To save me from shame? Is that what Wilhelm Jansen said.” Her words bounced off the priest’s body. They had nowhere to go because his bulk and smell filled the cubicle of the dim confessional. Back home, with skinny Pastor Schüler, there’d always been enough air between him and Almut.
She shifted to ease the pressure of wood against her knees. Again, she asked him, “Is that what Wilhelm Jansen said?”
“Not like that, no, Fräulein Bechtel.”
He called me by my name?
She had believed you could tell a priest everything because you were anonymous in the confessional. Bound by his vows, a priest would rather endure torture or death than reveal your name and sins to others. How about all those stories of murderers confessing, unburdening themselves, knowing the priests could never turn them over to the police?
“You called me by my name,” Almut told the priest. “That’s wrong.”
“You must know that to continue sinning like this will mean losing your soul and residing in hell forever. It is God’s will that you marry the toymaker.”
“Not like this.”
“The toymaker is a shy man. He doesn’t think you’d want to be his wife. But it’s God’s will.”
There was not enough air between her and this priest’s wall of flesh.
“Think of your soul,” he pressed.
Priests, Almut thought, were the same no matter where. That pious and lust-denying façade of theirs squeezed women into chastity
and corsets. And yet, she still needed the solace of church. Still. Already, she had confessed far too much to this priest.
“Think of your child’s soul,” he warned.
Your child’s soul. That, too. Soul and bones and skin . . . and how you imagine Michel leaving his wife when you tell him you’re with child . . . and how instead he confesses to his wife—
No more confessing—
Dizzy in the moist August heat, Almut Bechtel raised herself from her knees.
“Wait—” the priest called after her, one hand flailing from the confessional in a lopsided blessing. “Remember . . . in the face of God, my dear child.”
*
The following Saturday, in the very same confessional, the toymaker was assigned his usual twelve Hail Marys and six Our Fathers for lusting after a pregnant woman. He crossed himself and left the confessional. In a pew, nearby, knelt that very same pregnant woman as though he’d summoned her with his sin, and she beckoned him to her. When he knelt by her side, she opened one button of her gray cape, pulled his hand inside where her belly was taut, high, where it felt holier than church with his hand against her belly beneath her cape, and he wanted to stay like this in the amber light with her and the child who was part of her.
“Still?” She raised her face to him.
“Still,” he said because he knew what she was about to ask him.
And she did. “You still believe you could love me?”
“Even more so.”
She closed her eyes, and her face grew composed, as if—Wilhelm thought—she was allowing herself to love her child. Until this moment, she must have steeled herself to let another family raise it; but now her palm slid across the back of his hand that lay on her belly, and as he felt enveloped by the child and by her, he
wanted to say, “Who could possibly be a better father than a maker of toys?” But it felt too light, felt only half true, felt as though he suspected her of wanting to marry him for his name only. Just then she opened her eyes to him, and he was struck by the force of her love, on him now, too.
*
That Sunday he took her in the horse-drawn carriage up the school hill, the highest point on the peninsula, and told her it was the custom on Nordstrand to propose on the tidal flats at sunset.
She smiled. “So that’s why you and I are not on the tidal flats?”
“No,” he said. “I mean, yes. Because I can’t . . .”
“Go out there again. I know.”
“But will you?”
“Yes.”
“I mean—Will you? Marry me?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Why?”
“Because—”
“I can’t believe I asked why.”
“Because of your kindness. Because of your beauty—”
He groaned. “I’m not beautiful.”
“Because I like your face. Because I can’t stop thinking of you at night.”
Wilhelm blushed. She had told him he was inventive, joyful, and he was trying to be all that for her.
“Because you are brave.”
Brave?
He shook his head. “Being brave is not in me.”
“It is brave to marry a woman who carries another man’s child.”
He winced.
“Do you want me to tell you who he is?”
Up here all around them the land was dry, but the slopes were increasingly damp where they descended into soggy marshes, where wind swept through tall grasses with such recklessness that they heaved like waves.
“Don’t,” he said, quickly, because if he let her, she would tell him the other man’s name. In all truth.
She studied him.
“I don’t want you to be lost to me,” he said.
From the village, people could see the back of the carriage but not inside, where Almut unbuttoned Wilhelm’s shirt. At first he was anxious about the child whose movements rippled the wall of Almut’s belly, but when she let him know with her body how she wanted him, straddled him, he stunned himself, and her. This here—This—He was good at this, amazingly so . . . this giving of pleasure and this taking of pleasure all at once or not all at once, and already he knew this would be there from now on—for him, and between him and Almut—his to return to even if the shadow wings were to spread again.
*
Wilhelm adored the girl who was born one month and four days after his wedding to Almut. Long-limbed and narrow, with beautiful hands, Thekla smiled like a child who’d never been at risk of not having a father, and he took that as trust in him and devoted himself to her. For weeks at a time, he’d forget that she hadn’t come from his seed. She was here, and she was his.
From
Kirschholz—
cherrywood he carved a kitten that slept curled in one smooth ball, too wide for this daughter to fit into her mouth, too light if she were to drop it on her belly. He sanded the reddish golden wood till it felt silky. His mother showed him how to comfort his daughter when she was crying, and he’d lay Thekla
on his knees, her back on his thighs, and bounce her gently, one hand rubbing her belly.
*
Though Wilhelm found an apartment as far as possible from the St. Margaret Home, some gossiped that of course the child did not resemble him with her bold gaze and brown curls, that his love for her sapped him of the honor he’d offered her mother in marriage.
But Lotte Jansen sensed that Almut had chosen her son because he needed her strength as much as she needed his name. Almut would never have just taken the respect that came with his name for her child and herself—she wasn’t like that—but she was giving Wilhelm confidence, joy.