Helene knew about these early years of hers. She had heard Mariechen talking to Martha about them. Her mother would not hear of any god. She had made one room in the house hers, a room for herself alone, and she slept there in a narrow bed under the feather dusters and spoke of them escorting souls. When Helene lay in Martha’s bed in the evening, counting freckles and pressing her nose to Martha’s back, she increasingly found herself adopting, without meaning to, the viewpoint that she supposed was really reserved for a god. She imagined all the little two-legged creatures scrabbling over the globe of earth, devising images of him, thinking up names for him, telling creation stories. The thought of them as ridiculous earthworms, as Mother called them, seemed to her reasonable in one way; in another she felt sorry for them, creatures who, in their own fashion, were doing only as the ants and the lemmings and the penguins did. They set up hierarchies and structures suitable to their species with its thoughts and doubts, both of those part of the system, since a human being free of doubts was unimaginable. She knew how touchily Father reacted to these ideas. And he was especially silent and serious when Mother said, laughing, that she had spent a night with all souls, or he might call it god, and now that she was carrying a son below her heart she felt blessed, so she would soon be going away with the souls, her flesh would be going with them for ever. Helene heard Father’s friend Mayor Koban trying to persuade him to put Mother in an asylum. But Father wouldn’t hear of it. He loved his wife. The idea of an asylum hurt him more than her withdrawal from the world. It did not disturb him that she spent many months a year in the darkened rooms of the house, never setting foot out in Tuchmacherstrasse.
Even when the footpaths through the house grew narrow because his wife kept dragging things indoors during her few wakeful months, collecting them, adding them to various piles over which she spread lengths of cloth in different colours, Father preferred this kind of life with his wife to the prospect of living without her.
While he had once protested against the collecting and gathering, occasionally telling her that she ought to throw some object out, whereupon she would explain to him at great length the possible use of that object — perhaps a particularly battered crown cork which she expected to metamorphose in some way if she kept her eye on it — over the last few years he asked his wife what use something could possibly be only when he felt like listening to a declaration of love. Her declarations of love for what generally seemed to be worthless, superfluous objects were the most exciting stories that Ernst Ludwig Würsich had ever heard.
One day Helene was sitting in the kitchen, helping Mariechen to bottle gooseberries.
Where’s that orange peel I hung up in the storeroom to dry?
I’m sorry, madam, the housekeeper made haste to say. It’s still up there in a cigar box. We needed the space for the elderflowers.
Elderflower tea! Mother scornfully distended her nostrils. It smells of cat pee, Mariechen, how often have I told you so? Pick mint by all means, dry yarrow, but never mind about the elderflowers.
My little pigeon, Father interrupted, what were you going to do with the orange peel? It’s dried already.
Yes, like leather, don’t you think? Mother’s voice was velvety, she waxed lyrical. Orange peel cut from the fruit in a spiral strip and hung up to dry. Isn’t the smell of it in the storeroom lovely? And you should see the spirals twist and turn when you hang them over the stove by a thread — oh, so beautiful. Wait, I’ll show you. And Mother was already racing up to the storeroom like a young girl, looking for the cigar box, carefully taking out the strips of orange peel. Like skin, don’t you agree? She took his hand so that he could feel it, she wanted him to stroke it the way she did, to feel what she was feeling, so that he’d know what she was talking about. The skin of a young tortoise.
Helene noticed how lovingly her father looked at his wife, his eyes followed the way her fingers stroked the dried strips of orange peel, raised them to her nose, lowered her eyelids to distend her nostrils and smell the peel, and obviously he wasn’t going to tell her that this wasn’t the time of year to heat the stove. She would keep the orange peel strips in the cigar box until next winter, and the winter after next, for ever, no one must throw anything away, and Helene’s father knew why. Helene loved her father for his questions and his silences at just the right moment; she loved him when he looked at her mother as he was looking at her now. In silence he was surely thanking God for such a wife.
Just under two years after the war had ended, Ernst Ludwig Würsich finally managed to set off for home, accompanied by a male nurse from Dresden who was also on his way back. It was a difficult journey. He spent most of it sitting in a cart pulled along by the male nurse, who swore at him for various reasons depending on the time of day: in the morning because he kept apologizing for giving the man such discomfort, at noon because he wanted to go much too far in a day and in the evening because in spite of his missing leg he still weighed several kilos too much.
To his disappointment, and because he had not reported to the barracks until some weeks after the beginning of the war, he had not been accepted into the 3rd Saxon Hussars, a regiment set up four years earlier. How could he tell anyone that his wife said she was dying, and without her in his life he might well not feel any inclination to be a hero? But even worse, certainly — and perhaps it was why he couldn’t talk to anyone about his wife’s threat of her imminent death — this was by no means the first time she had felt impelled to make it. Although he had lived with her words ringing in his ears for several years, and although she gave a different reason every time, he could not accustom himself to that most extreme threat. He was also aware how little such a reason could affect a garrison, how little it could ever be a valid reason for defying orders from a state requiring unconditional obedience. The threat of his Selma’s death appeared plain ridiculous and insignificant in the face of a German Reich for which he was in duty bound to risk his life.
On his arrival at the Old Barracks on the outskirts of town, he was immediately stripped of the hussar’s uniform and curved sword he had acquired only a few months earlier, and was told that another man had ridden his horse to France, where he had already died a hero’s death. The artillery had also left, so he was to report to the new infantry barracks. On all these journeys he was accompanied by his dog, old Baldo. He had told him to go away, but Baldo was having none of that; he simply would not leave his master. God with us! Ernst Ludwig Würsich had shouted at Baldo, gesturing to him with outstretched arm to go away. Perhaps it wasn’t so hard to understand that a dog called after Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg could not part with his master on hearing him utter the Chancellor’s own slogan. Baldo lowered his head and wagged his tail hard. The dog followed him so persistently from barracks gate to barracks gate that tears came to Ernst Ludwig Würsich’s eyes and he had to threaten to strike Baldo with his bare hand to make him go home, where no one expected him. At the infantry barracks they handed Citizen Würsich, until recently a hussar, a private soldier’s uniform that had obviously seen action already, then they pondered for some weeks which way to send him. In mid-January he set off for Masuria. He could hardly move for the driving snow. While the men in front of him, behind him and beside him spoke of revenge and striking back, he longed to be at home under the warm goose feather quilt in his own bed in Tuchmacherstrasse in Bautzen. Not long afterwards the army he had been sent to join did indeed fight a battle among frosty fields and frozen lakes, but before Ernst Ludwig Würsich could even use his gun in a copse of oak trees — the saplings were still young and not very tall — he lost his left leg to his immediate neighbour’s hand grenade, which went off at the wrong time as the troop attacked. Two comrades carried him over the ice of Lake Löwentin and in February took him to a field hospital at Lötzen, where he was to lie forgotten and thus unable to return home for the rest of the war.