A visit to the workshop also increases the likelihood that the following remark will be uttered: I’d have loved to learn how to do something with my hands like that. Or: I’d love to learn, etc. Or: one of these days I’ll learn, etc. Frau Reiff’s pottery courses are booked up well in advance, anyway. People come from all over the German Republic north of Kassel. When the students stop for a break, they like riding on the swing in the apple orchard when there’s a couple taking the course, or when two of them have come a little closer to each other in the workshop. Someone always asks about the kayak. Frau Reiff doesn’t know the answer. The kayak has always been there, she says, and she likes having a kayak in an apple orchard.
Others like the dry-stone wall round the garden. Frau Reiff tells them that whenever something worries her, she goes out into the fields until she finds a stone, it must be roughly the same size as her worry, and then she brings it here, puts it on the wall, and her worry immediately gets less. The lady who is the archivist here, she says, has told her that a smith did the same thing hundreds of years ago. She likes to think that her own worries are stacked on top of the worries of a man who lived in this place so many years before her.
Frau Reiff has made the stable into a showroom. Pale blue vases, pale blue dishes, pale blue mugs standing on small pedestals, monuments to the skill of her fingers. Sometimes there’s a price on them, sometimes there isn’t. Much of what she makes is not for sale. We could claim that those are the most filigree pieces. But what do we know? Perhaps Frau Reiff just likes them, and it’s a good thing not to let what you like go.
Sometimes Frau Reiff sits at the foot of the stairs, and the children come down to drink water. Their fingers slide through the glass and close in a gesture of drinking, with nothing in their hands. Frau Reiff offers them bread as well, but they all leave the bread alone, except for a girl with greedy hands that can’t catch hold of anything. Finger by finger, then her arm, then her foot, the girl eats herself instead.
Frau Reiff’s apple cake tastes all right. If mankind were on the brink of annihilation and had to rely on homemade dishes, the people of Fürstenfelde would all survive, you’d be surprised, but you wouldn’t be surprised for very long because we’d survive you.
Frau Reiff comes from Düsseldorf, which of course is a very long way off geographically, but in other respects as well she’s not one of us. We may distinguish between those who come here from outside and the old inhabitants, as people do everywhere; the difference is that we make no secret of it. Those from outside have to take part in the life of the village, must commit themselves, must make their mark, although not with too much enthusiasm, because that in turn makes us skeptical. They must show concern and not just want to live their own nice, comfortable lives.
Frau Reiff did nothing at the old smithy without letting the village know. She sits on the parish council, and is in favor of street lighting and movement sensors. That could save us a good deal of money. Like us, she thinks windmills are beautiful, and like us she thinks wind turbines are ugly. Frau Reiff has made her mark all right.
Among other entertainments at the Feast, there will be African harp music at Frau Reiff’s. Everyone will be there, apart from Rico and Luise. If she wasn’t one of us, only casual customers would come to hear the harp music.
On the other hand, if you think about it for any length of time, those children can’t be the children of exiles. None of them stayed in the village and died here, and if one thing is obvious about the subject of ghosts, then it’s that they are not necessarily known for haunting places where they spent a few months once as children.
There’s a plow stuck deep in the ground among the apple trees, as if it had fallen from a great height. The steel roller attached to the plow is a little rusty. The village asked what the plow was for. Frau Reiff said everything was staying put.
There were mud floors in the house in the old days, heating was by means of a ceramic stove. Polish forced laborers slept on the floor in front of the stove, and later on German refugees. All of them caught and cooked pigeons. They were put in the same camp in Fünfeichen, not far from here, but at different times. They slept under the same roof, separated only by a little time and history.
Frau Reiff doesn’t know the life story of the plow.
She has a long day ahead of her. After the children have had their drink of water, she sees to the cat. He scurries out of the garden and into the house. Frau Reiff takes the last apple cake out of the oven; she has made six for the Feast. She drinks tap water from the hollow of her hand. The cat winds round her legs, purring.
A characteristic of raku pottery is the fine cracks that form at random as the glaze cools. They never run the same way. Like breaks and cuts in our life stories that become a part of them. The glaze of raku pottery melts at 800 °C to 1,000 °C. Frau Reiff is experimenting with mixed colors, but pale blue predominates.
ON THIS NIGHT THERE ARE MISDEEDS ON THE roads but no injustice. Error but no mistakes. A court of law but no verdict. A wind still blowing but no rain falling now.
It is Anna who asks questions once she has calmed down a little. Nothing surprises Herr Schramm any more. Frau Schwermuth is sniffling, her pale forehead furrowed with anxiety. She has wedged the spiked helmet under her arm. Her answer to the first question was that she wants to get back to the Homeland House as quickly as possible; she’s afraid she has locked her son up in there. And to the second she replied that of course she knew what the matter with her was, but she couldn’t explain why it was so bad tonight of all times. It was the stories’ fault. They kept her awake when her medication made her tired and fat. But the medication kept the lid on the stories. The stories and the characters populating them.
Anna stares at Frau Schwermuth as hard as she has been staring at Herr Schramm all night. She thinks of the field on Geher’s Farm. Of the characters populating it. Of those she imagined in the field as a child when she couldn’t sleep. Anna says she can imagine how Frau Schwermuth feels. Frau Schwermuth says that’s nice of her, but no one can imagine what she can imagine, no one. Then Frau Schwermuth says: I am empowered to call the night by its name.
Anna asks no more questions. Herr Schramm thinks about that “I am empowered.” And how he has never said a sentence beginning “I am empowered.”
The name of this night is tide, flood tide, now it is ebbing, let’s see what has been washed up. We will go walking among the flotsam and jetsam, taking care not to step on anything! Frau Schwermuth has such long, beautiful eyelashes, and when she blinks waves of darkness break.
Frau Schwermuth goes into the cellar first. She quickly taps in the code and opens the door. Faint light. Books, notebooks, paper, on the shelves and in stacks. Thick folio volumes, loose pieces of parchment, the leather skins.
“Aha,” says Herr Schramm. Herr Schramm is not all that fond of reading.
There is a little light up near the ceiling, the machine beeps, regulating the temperature. It’s cold. The leather on the walls shimmers and moves. It’s a skin of stories growing on us.
Johann is sitting on the table with his feet on the chair, a fat book on his lap. Beside him is his bell-ringer’s top hat. Johann is freezing. Frau Schwermuth drops the helmet, swerves neatly round the mountains of paper, clasps Johann’s legs, sobs. Johann puts his hand on his mother’s back.
“Come on, Ma.” He doesn’t sound cross. It does no good when Ma is in this state. “It’s all right, it’s all right.”
So much paper, and not a handkerchief anywhere. Frau Schwermuth touches Johann’s cheek. Is everything really all right? No, but it will be. And how about her? No, and it probably never will be.