The blind side of the heart - By Julia Franck Page 0,35
to have learned all that matters. What you don’t know yet, you’ll have to learn as you go along. I’m dismissing the typesetter tomorrow. Without notice.
What? Martha dropped her fork. Mother, he has eight children.
So? I have two children myself, don’t I? We have no man around the house. We can’t pay the typesetter any longer. We aren’t making any profit these days. You know that better than anyone, Helene. What did last year look like in the accounts?
Helene put down her knife and fork. She picked up her napkin and dabbed her mouth with it. Better than this year.
And worse than any year before, am I right?
Helene did not nod. She hated the idea of presenting Mother with the words and gestures she expected.
There we are, then. The typesetter is dismissed.
Helene found the next few weeks a difficult time. She wasn’t used to being alone all day. The typesetter hadn’t been seen since the day he was dismissed. He was said to have left the town with his family. Helene sat in the printing works day after day, waiting for customers who never came. She was supposed to be studying from Martha’s book for the admission examination she must take for nursing, but she just leafed through it and found hardly anything she didn’t already know. The exact sequence of compresses and bandaging to be used for various illnesses was part of the final nursing exam rather than this one. Most of the book was concerned with what you would have to learn during your training, and after she had leafed through it the few details she hadn’t known before were fixed in her memory. So Helene began reading other books, the books that she found on her father’s shelves. His daughters were forbidden to take any volumes out of that mighty bookcase, but even in the old days when Father was still here, his daughters had felt that it was a particularly exciting adventure and a test of their courage to borrow those precious books. They would push Stifter’s The Condor further to the left so as not to leave a gap where Kleist’s The Marquise of O, had been standing. The books stood in no particular order on their father’s shelves, which upset Helene a little, but she wasn’t sure whether her mother kept an eye on this disorder, or what might happen if she took it upon herself to rearrange the books in alphabetical order. As she read, Helene kept her ears pricked, and as soon as she heard a sound she hid the book under her apron. She often looked out of the door when she thought she heard Leontine’s deep voice. Once, quite unexpectedly, the door opened and Martha and Leontine came in, laughing, with a big basket.
Goodness, how red your cheeks are! said Leontine, passing her hand briefly over Helene’s hair. I hope you aren’t running a temperature?
Helene shook her head. She had a treasure tucked under her apron. She had found it on the very top shelf of the bookcase, wrapped in newspaper and lying behind the other books as if hidden away. It was more than a hundred years old. The cardboard binding was covered with coloured paper and there was an embossed title: Penthesilea. A Tragedy. Helene apologized briefly to Martha and Leontine, bent down behind the big wooden counter and hid her treasure in the lowest drawer there. She put some of the old Bautzen Household Almanacs over the book to conceal it.
A farmer from the Lusatian Hills had given Leontine the basket of peas as a thank-you present. Months ago, she had splinted a difficult break of his wrist. Now Leontine put the big basket on the counter in front of Helene. It was full of plump green pea pods. Helene immediately plunged both hands into the basket and ploughed them through the pods. They had a young, grassy smell. Helene loved popping pods open with her thumb and the sensation of pushing out the smooth, gleaming, green peas from top to bottom in order of size, to roll down her thumb and into the bowl. She would put the tiny peas that weren’t fully mature yet straight into her mouth. Martha and Leontine were talking about something that Helene wasn’t supposed to understand, giggling and gurgling. They spoke only in mysterious half-sentences.
He was asking all the nurses and the patients about you. Oh, and to see his face when he finally found you! Martha was amused.