Hesitantly, one foot at a time, Thomas went down the steps and tiptoed into the darkness. His fear of the dark and the fright he’d had didn’t cancel each other out, but it must have been the cold making his teeth chatter. He stopped on the bottom step and held out his hand to her. Sorry, he said, putting an arm round her shoulders. Then he examined her knees, helped her up the steps and took her indoors, where he washed her injuries and put iodine on them.
Later, Ella and Thomas had beaten the carpets and swept the floors, then wiped them with a damp cloth. When they were dry, they had rubbed in beeswax, then brushed the floors and finally polished them shiny with a cloth. They had been cleaning the house for hours, and then they fell into bed well after midnight, exhausted. Next morning they got up early, while it was still dark outside, and set to work without stopping for breakfast. They lit all the stoves in the house, including the bathroom stove; it was possible that Käthe might want a hot bath when she got home. They scoured the bathtub and wiped down the doors, they hung the freshly washed curtains at the windows they had cleaned. At midday they put more coal on the stoves; acting the part of stokers they took the ash bucket out with the rubbish and cleaned the outside of the dustbin, they raked up the leaves under the elm tree, pulled dead plants out of the flower beds and swept the steps from the veranda down to the garden. Ella went all round the house with a feather duster, getting cobwebs out of corners and dusting the paintings. Something in her chuckled when she came to the oil painting of the cherry blossom in the garden on the Wannsee. That picture, Käthe told admiring visitors when they looked at it, was a masterpiece. Their reverent nods always delighted Ella. A few years ago, when she was sick and had to stay in bed, and no one came to keep her company for weeks, she had tried to paint a picture of her family in oils on a wooden board. It had not been a success: she herself was huge, larger than her mother and hovering in the room, her brother looked like a gnome, the tiny twins were attached to their mother’s breasts like rodents, and her breasts themselves, emerging from her blouse, were far from rosy — against the green fabric of the blouse they were a strident scarlet. It was true that Ella had only just started school at the time, but the picture had made great demands on her, and she knew she could never show it to her mother. Then, however, her glance fell on the cherry blossom beside the Wannsee, and she couldn’t resist it; she had got out of bed and added tiny white dots to the grass on the banks of the lake with her brush. She had also added a hint of yellow, only a slight one, because white was never sheer white. And didn’t they seem to be daisies if you looked at them closely? No one was to notice those little white dots, so that over the following years Ella kept altering tiny details of the great master’s picture. There was no time for that today. She just smiled as she flicked the feather duster over the cherry blossom beside the lake. Thomas and Ella dusted every piece of furniture in the house, they rubbed down the chairs with warm, soapy water and then oiled them, leaving a glow as golden as honey on the wood. Only Eduard’s room remained as it was; they were strictly forbidden to go into it. In secret, Ella opened the door; the room smelled nasty, of stagnant flower water. But Ella couldn’t see a vase of flowers anywhere. Eduard’s absence was a provocation to Ella; she felt she simply had to go into his room, as if she were looking for something and wasn’t sure what. She slipped in quietly, although there was no one within earshot, and she knew that Thomas was far off in the kitchen. The desk drawer was locked. How often had Ella tried to open that drawer already? With a hairslide, a safety pin, a stray key that she had found while sweeping under the carpet. Was she the person who had scratched the varnish round the lock?
They left everything exactly as it was in the studio, they didn’t touch any of the wax models, although the older ones had layers of hairy dust sticking to them, and one of them had lost its arms through drying out and age. They didn’t touch the plaster models either, all Ella did was stroke the rounded hips of the reclining figures. No one had told them not to touch, but it was an unwritten law that nothing must happen to these fragile models, and more particularly, children must not play close to them. The broken bits of sandstone in the bin under the gallery, the clay keeping moist, and the smaller scraps of marble on the windowsill, it was all left as it was. They didn’t even pick up a broom to brush up crumbs, they didn’t remove cobwebs here. Dusk was falling when Ella, her legs weary, went out into the garden to pick a bunch of mauve Michaelmas daisies. She also broke some bare twigs of bright red rose hips off a rose bush.
Thomas made lentil soup, although he’d never made it before and there were no cookery books in the house. He was breathing through his mouth as he did it, because it cost him an effort to fry the bacon. The smell of smoked meat frying made him want to retch; it wasn’t that he liked pigs any better than, say, hares, but he disliked the idea of any animal being killed solely to be eaten. He suspected, however, that Käthe would think lentil soup inedible without any bacon in it. Ella made fun of the way he breathed through his mouth, saying he looked like a fish gasping for air. The bacon was sizzling over the flame; later, in the soup, it would turn transparent and flabby. Thomas cut up the potatoes and carrots small, and he had bought celeriac because he remembered Käthe’s grunt of pleasure at the mere mention of the word. He added two cloves of garlic to the pan. Nor did he forget the bay leaf; he spiked an onion with a bay leaf and a clove and put it in the pot for flavour. Käthe would never in her life have had such good lentil soup. Ella sat on the flour chest, swinging her legs and folding the napkins she had ironed, she watched Thomas cooking, and now she too was breathing in through her mouth.
I can hear her! Ella jumped up. There was a high-pitched clattering in the distance. It came closer, and now it was echoing across the yard as the sound was cast back and forth between the house, the studio and the shed. Nothing else made a noise like Käthe’s two-stroke motorbike; its sound was unmistakable. Ella and Thomas went into the dining room and looked down to the yard from the window to make sure. There she was: Käthe with her leather pilot’s cap on her head. She was bending over the wooden crate on the carrier and unstrapping a large, rather shapeless bag. Then her dog arrived, jumping happily around her now that he had caught up. He spent most of the time on the way home in the crate on the carrier. Käthe would let him out near Rahnsdorf, in the woods on the Püttbergen, so that he could run the last few kilometres. Dogs and children loved the tall dunes into which the sand had formed on the south-eastern side of the glacial valley where Berlin stood. 1954, there were woods as far as the stream of the Fliess and the banks of the lake, the Müggelsee. Isolated houses, a part of the city like a village on the edge of Berlin, the tall pines of the Brandenburg Mark with their red trunks rising above the tops of oak, maple and beech trees. Käthe seldom went out of the city without her motorbike, but she would have liked a car for transporting her materials and tools. Small sculptures fitted into the trailer of the motorbike. And when she took models to be fired or cast, she had to telephone and claim friendship with neighbours who were really just acquaintances, so that she could borrow their car.
Thomas went back to the kitchen, tasted the soup and burned his tongue. How was he to tell whether or not there was too much salt in it? He liked salt. Thomas turned down the flame. You taste it, he asked Ella, but she was already running past him. From the front hall they heard a clatter, and then the barking of Käthe’s dog. Thomas followed Ella into the smoking room.