window. Just enough to see by. Under the coolness of the cloth, Gerhard goes still. A word sighs out between his lips, and after a moment Elfriede recognizes the syllables: her name.
She sets aside the book and walks to the window. Not the one with the lamp, the dark one, though her mind craves something light, something coppery and joyful. Craves Wilfred. His absurd figure. Big, plain, bony, ginger head atop long, spindly, freckled limbs. Laugh like sunshine. She’s drawn to the thought of him like birds are drawn to the sky. But no. No sky for her. No sunshine. The hateful gazes of her sisters-in-law, blaming her for this catastrophe, for all catastrophes: that’s what she deserves.
Elfriede lifts the curtain and stares through the glass. The peculiar darkness before dawn, the coldest time of day. Naturally the master’s bedroom occupies a favored position at the back of Schloss Kleist, overlooking the formal gardens and the lake beyond, on which Gerhard used to take her rowing. A deep, pure lake, stocked with fish. On the opposite shore begins the woods, thickening eventually into acres of untouched forest, where Gerhard sometimes went hunting for boar. Altogether the estate is from another age, a feudal age. You might be gazing five hundred years into the past, gazing out this window. Except, at this hour, you can’t see anything at all.
And yet. And yet.
There it is again. A tiny flash of white. On the ground below, the terrace, reflecting the light from the paraffin lamp in the other window.
A strange fear grips Elfriede’s heart. Now her eyes adjust. The flash becomes an object, bobbing against the shadows. Elfriede turns and runs out of the room and down the corridor, down the back staircase, out the French door to the terrace. (Noting that the door was ajar.)
By the time Elfriede returned to Schloss Kleist from the hospital outside Berlin, the stitches in her wrists had been removed, the scars were fresh and pink, and she was—according to the doctors—healing nicely. Her baby had turned six months old and changed beyond recognition. He was enormous and round-cheeked, a roly-poly darling who sat up and ate pap and tried mightily to crawl. On his formerly bald head, a fine down of hair now grew, so pale it was almost white. They would not leave her alone with him, of course. The nurse remained in the room, within arm’s reach. She was maybe thirty years old, blond and sturdy, and had been advertised for the instant Elfriede was whisked away to the hospital. Wanted, nurse for infant, three months of age. Mother of recently deceased infant preferred. Female of good character only. References required. Wages 5 marks weekly. The aunts desired a bereaved mother because they thought she would devote herself wholly to Johann, and this proved to be the case. Her gaze, pained and possessive, never strayed from Johann’s white head. She regarded Elfriede with a suspicion bordering on hatred. Elfriede, cradling Johann to her chest, playing helplessly at peekaboo, felt like an intruder. When the baby cried for food, Charlotte snatched him back and assumed an air of command as she unbuttoned her bodice and produced a large, blue-veined breast for him to suckle. Which he did, eagerly. Closing his eyes in bliss. His tiny, beautiful fists clutching at Charlotte’s skin. Elfriede watched those fingers knead and felt them ripping her flesh from her own chest, sucking her blood from her own heart. She had nothing to give him.
I have lost him, Elfriede thought. And then:
He was never mine.
But she carried the image of that round, fragrant white head to Switzerland with her. She carried it on the armchair in Herr Doktor Hermann’s office, carried it on the bench in the courtyard, carried it along the narrow goat paths that crisscrossed the mountain, carried it in bed and at the table and buried in the meadow grass with Wilfred.
She carries it now as she darts across the cold terrace stone and calls his name.
Johann.
Johann.
Little white-haired boy, where are you?
She isn’t allowed to see him. The germs, you know. Johann and Nurse sleep upstairs in the nursery wing and take their meals in the nursery kitchen, from food carried there directly from town. Herr Doktor Rosenblatt is specific in these points. Had, in fact, wanted Johann and Nurse to remove from Schloss Kleist altogether, except there’s nowhere to send them except Elfriede’s family, and that’s out of the question, apparently. So Elfriede hasn’t seen Johann once