The blind side of the heart - By Julia Franck Page 0,13
had filled up with things, not just in the closets and glass-fronted cupboards; a landscape with a will of its own was always threatening to grow in the attic among the pieces of furniture there. Mother laid out hills and mounds of objects, collections of items for purposes both certain and uncertain. Only Marja the housekeeper, who was called Mariechen by her employers and was no more than a few years older than Mother herself, managed, by dint of great patience and perseverance, to create any visible kind of order in some of the rooms. Mariechen ruled the kitchen, the dining room and the narrow stairs to the two upper storeys. In Mother’s bedroom, however, and the room next to it you could hardly find any path to tread, and there was seldom a chair clear enough for anyone to sit on it. Mother collected branches and pieces of string, feathers and pieces of fabric, and no broken china could be thrown away; no box, however battered; no stool eaten away by woodworm, even if it wobbled because one of the rotten legs was now too short. If Mariechen turned anything out of the kitchen Mother took it to the upstairs rooms, where she would deposit the pan with the hole in it or the broken glass, confident that one of these days she would find a place and a use for the item. No system was discernible in her collection, only Mother herself had any idea which pile to search for a certain newspaper cutting and under which heap of clothes she had put the valuable Sorbian lace. Wasn’t the filigree pattern of that lace wonderful, where had such delicate lilies ever been seen as those growing vigorously in it?
In search of a woollen winter dress now to be Helene’s, a dress that Martha hadn’t worn for nearly ten years, Mother had been rummaging inside the highest mountain of clothes, which rose almost to the ceiling. She had soon disappeared entirely under it and finally crawled out with a different dress, one that was already too small for her younger daughter. In the course of her search the pile of clothes had been scattered far and wide, and now covered the bookshelves, two chairs and the beaten track through the room itself. It seemed to Helene as if the house must soon burst apart from the sheer volume of stuffing inside it. Mother bent down, picked up something here and something there, put those items aside to left and right of her, and thus worked her way to the corner of the room. There she came upon a round hatbox near the floor. She clasped the hatbox to her breast as if it were a prodigal son.
She had once brought back the hat she wore at her engagement party to her married home in this box, an unusually wide-brimmed hat with a veil and magpie feathers shimmering in shades of dark blue, almost black. Tenderly, she stroked the fine grey paper of the lid and caressed its almost pristine sides. But then she eyed the hatbox suspiciously, she turned it this way and that, she shook it and there was a clinking inside as if the engagement hat had turned into nails or coins. For a while, Mother tried undoing the violet satin ribbon wound several times round the box with shaking fingers, until she lost patience and her face twisted with anger. She flung the box at Martha’s feet with a cry of: You do it!
Martha picked up the hatbox, which now had a large dent in it. She looked around; she couldn’t see a place clear for her to put down this treasure. So she took the box to the kitchen and placed it on the table there. Helene and Mother followed her. Martha’s quick hands skilfully undid the knots.
Mother wanted to lift the lid herself. She sighed when she looked into the box. A sea of buttons and other sewing things came into view, flowers worked in lace, small scraps of fabric presumably kept for covering buttons still bare or in need of renovation.
Mother had to sit down on a chair and breathe deeply. As she did so her ribcage rose and fell as if she were fighting off rising excitement with all her might. She sobbed, tears ran down her cheeks and Helene wondered where, in her slender mother, such an apparently inexhaustible supply of tears could be stored.