threw her bouquet of roses and phlox onto the table and dropped, puffed out, into grandfather’s chair. She could breathe again: the town hall, the church, the celebration meal – it exhausted her to try to be civilized and charming. Anna observed her closely. A sturdy woman with a large, flat face, narrow lips and broad jawbones; above were her eyes, crooked, mysterious, unfathomable, sunken. Her shiny black hair was pinned up; the rose that had been stuck there that morning and had stayed in place the whole day now slid out slowly. Her cheeks looked unnaturally red. Anna thought that was because of the wedding, but later on it seemed that the blush in her cheeks had been tattooed, as though she were suffering from a permanent excitement that could find no outlet. ‘Send that child to bed,’ she said to Uncle Heinrich, waving her hand at Anna. ‘We’ve only justgot married and yet we’ve such a big girl already,’ replied the bridegroom with a false laugh. ‘Not many could imitate us.’ But the bride, who had had enough of Anna’s candid, staring gaze, did not see what there was to laugh about.
The one thing about Martha Höhnekop that worked was her womb: a child was born every year. Beyond that she did not make the grade at all. When she got up at nine o’clock, yawning and scratching her head, Uncle Heinrich’s day was already four hours old. From then on, she knew how, in her pigheaded manner, to give the impression that she was kept busy by the housekeeping, but in fact, with her gross body like an elemental force, she swaggered about the small dwelling without lifting a finger. Much work would have been left undone had an outlawed eleven-year-old girl not gone round seeing to it. A girl who actually belonged to no one although she ate with them and slept under the same roof. The one who is lazy has to be clever. Aunt Martha understood that an indispensable labourer had fallen into her lap in the form of this so-called niece.
With every baby that was born, a part of the child in Anna shrivelled up and the beast of burden increased in size in its place. Seven days of her week began with milking the cows – the churns had to be standing by the road by six o’clock. Then she had to feed the pigs, horses, cows, calves and chickens, pump drinking water for them, clean out the cowshed and cook the pigfeed, rub down the cows. This chain of activities was called morning work, the pendant of which was evening work. It began all over again in the afternoons at four o’clock – after school. If the pendants had been figurines on the mantelpiece, they would have shown two slaves sagging at the knees with their backs bent – the clock ticking inexorably between them.
The existence she had been dreaming of, that of a grammar school pupil, was becoming progressively more tenuous. In that dream her life was still proceeding according to the original plan, in which her father set high demands on her intellect – which fittedin badly between the cows and pigs. Two teachers and a pastor had naïvely come to the house to persuade Uncle Heinrich to permit her to go to the grammar school. But their hymn of praise to her talents was cast aside by that single primitive argument, ‘No, we need her on the farm.’
He was never to surface from the shock of his impulsive marriage . Apart from being an escape, his lightning raid had perhaps also been a juvenile attempt to repair the fragmented family life. That he had brought a much greater woe on himself as a result was clear. He armed himself against his disillusion by throwing himself into his work with grim doggedness. He acquired the harsh, fixed expression of a farmer who already knows early on that, however hard he drives himself into the ground, his fate is immutable, so out of pure masochism he adds a little extra to it. If Anna had not been there, his little companion in misfortune and sorrow, then he would have had to do battle with the primal force calling herself
The one thing about Martha Höhnekop that worked was her womb: a child was born every year. Beyond that she did not make the grade at all. When she got up at nine o’clock, yawning and scratching her head, Uncle Heinrich’s day was already four hours old. From then on, she knew how, in her pigheaded manner, to give the impression that she was kept busy by the housekeeping, but in fact, with her gross body like an elemental force, she swaggered about the small dwelling without lifting a finger. Much work would have been left undone had an outlawed eleven-year-old girl not gone round seeing to it. A girl who actually belonged to no one although she ate with them and slept under the same roof. The one who is lazy has to be clever. Aunt Martha understood that an indispensable labourer had fallen into her lap in the form of this so-called niece.
With every baby that was born, a part of the child in Anna shrivelled up and the beast of burden increased in size in its place. Seven days of her week began with milking the cows – the churns had to be standing by the road by six o’clock. Then she had to feed the pigs, horses, cows, calves and chickens, pump drinking water for them, clean out the cowshed and cook the pigfeed, rub down the cows. This chain of activities was called morning work, the pendant of which was evening work. It began all over again in the afternoons at four o’clock – after school. If the pendants had been figurines on the mantelpiece, they would have shown two slaves sagging at the knees with their backs bent – the clock ticking inexorably between them.
The existence she had been dreaming of, that of a grammar school pupil, was becoming progressively more tenuous. In that dream her life was still proceeding according to the original plan, in which her father set high demands on her intellect – which fittedin badly between the cows and pigs. Two teachers and a pastor had naïvely come to the house to persuade Uncle Heinrich to permit her to go to the grammar school. But their hymn of praise to her talents was cast aside by that single primitive argument, ‘No, we need her on the farm.’
He was never to surface from the shock of his impulsive marriage . Apart from being an escape, his lightning raid had perhaps also been a juvenile attempt to repair the fragmented family life. That he had brought a much greater woe on himself as a result was clear. He armed himself against his disillusion by throwing himself into his work with grim doggedness. He acquired the harsh, fixed expression of a farmer who already knows early on that, however hard he drives himself into the ground, his fate is immutable, so out of pure masochism he adds a little extra to it. If Anna had not been there, his little companion in misfortune and sorrow, then he would have had to do battle with the primal force calling herself
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