citizen of Bautzen Herr Würsich the master printer, but she was still a foreigner, even behind the counter of his printing works or out in the street with their daughters. Although it was very usual in Lusatia for couples to marry in the bride’s home town, even ten years after the marriage there was still gossip about the origins of this particular bride. It was said that husband and wife had been married at a registry office in Breslau. A registry office – there was a dubious sound about that. Everyone knew that the foreign woman didn’t go to St Peter’s with her husband on Sundays. Rumour said she was ungodly.
Her daughters had been baptized in the cathedral, but that made no difference. The inhabitants of Bautzen obviously felt that a wedding not celebrated in church tainted their own respectable reputation. No one would deign to pass the time of day with the foreign woman. Every glance was accompanied by whispering and a disapproving shake of the head, even if Selma Würsich couldn’t meet that glance because, with wise foresight, she paid more attention to the rare finds she might spot on the paving stones than to the citizens of the town. Whether proudly or awkwardly, the people in the street ignored Helene and her mother, looking over the head of the woman crouching on the ground or right through her. If Helene met her father’s friend Mayor Koban while she was holding her mother’s hand, the mayor crossed the road without a word. Judge Fiebinger’s sons laughed and turned to stare, because they thought the flimsy fabrics Mother wore in summer were improper and her voluminous skirts in winter odd. But Mother seemed to notice none of this. She bent down, radiant, and showed Helene a little glass bead she had found. Look, isn’t that lovely? Helene nodded. The world was full of treasures.
Whenever Mother left the house she collected things she found on the ground – buttons and coins, an old shoe that looked as if it had another few months’ wear in it, perhaps it would be good for something, at least the shoelace was new, unlike the sole, and the hooks on the upper part seemed to Mother very rare and particularly valuable. Even a coloured piece of broken china down by the river would elicit a cry of delight from her if its edges were washed smooth by the water. Once, right outside their door, she found a goose’s wing that could be used as a feather duster and wept tears of emotion.
On that occasion Martha had said it was more than likely that someone had left the feather duster there on purpose, just to see the foreign woman bend down and pick it up. The feathers were already worn short with use, and several of the quills stuck out like broken teeth, shiny and bare.
Mother collected such feather dusters, although she seldom used them. She hung up the birds’ wings on the wall over her bed. A flock of birds to escort souls, that was how she described her collection. Only wings that she had found herself earned a place there above her bedhead. There were nine now, this one included, and she was hoping for a tenth. Once there were ten, she could complete the twenty-two letters of the alphabet and cast light on the roads ahead, as she put it. Neither of her two daughters asked where which souls were coming from and where they were to be escorted. The significance of a wandering soul, founded on or borrowed from the idea of parallel worlds, seemed to them eerie. It implied that side by side with their own world, where an inanimate object was an inanimate object and a living being a living being, there was another in which a reciprocal relationship between lives and objects existed. Helene covered her ears. Wasn’t it difficult enough even to imagine what a soul was made of? And what might happen to a soul if it went wandering? Did it stay the same soul, individual, identifiable? Were we really destined to meet again in another world at a given time? That was what Mother threatened them with. When I’m dead we’ll meet again, we’ll be united. There’s no escaping it. Helene was so scared that she didn’t want to know any more about souls. Mother knew of an alleged purpose for every object, inventing one if necessary. Over the years of her marriage the house