Under a Changing Moon, page 2
Paula shrugged. How could the boys know how beautiful it all had been!
“Konrad Overberg has asked to be remembered to the ladies,” said the Amtmann. “He traveled from Frankfurt in the same coach with Paula.”
They all sat down at the long table with an enormous pound cake in the middle of the white damask tablecloth.
“Ah!” said Aunt Rikchen. “So he is back again.”
The aunts exchanged a quick glance.
“Well, some mothers’ hearts will be jumping like spring lambs, I bet. He is, after all, the most eligible bachelor in Nassau, if only he weren’t such a Don Juan.” That was Aunt Rikchen again. She had a hard time keeping her tongue in check, even though gossip was strictly barred from the family table.
“Rikchen!” Aunt Stina admonished her mildly, but it was Uncle Emmo who suavely saved the situation. “A young gentleman with perfect manners, I’d call him. Well-read, widely traveled. You’ve only got to see him handling rare books to know that they are more important to him than the prettiest girl. I wonder what he has brought for his father’s library this time. Maybe even a Livre d’Heures for me! I’ve been looking for one for years.” He smacked his lips like a gourmet anticipating a delicacy.
Meanwhile, the boys had been devoting their attention to the coming-home cake. It needed a special occasion for such a cake to be baked in the middle of the week. But this family knew how to celebrate whenever an opportunity turned up, and there were opportunities enough in a house with so many birthdays and name days, besides all the feast days of the year.
“May we be excused?” Georg asked when only a few crumbs of the cake were left. “On the ice, men! Only five more days and they’ll put our noses to the grindstone again.”
“Your grinding never seems to start before Christmas, my boy,” Uncle Emmo remarked. “May I recommend my well-known services as a coach in Latin and Greek? I presume you want to pass at Easter, anyway.”
“Thank you, sir,” Georg answered without enthusiasm. It was true that he never started to work before Christmas, and against all the laws of fairness, he had so far managed to pass each year.
“Out with you,” Mama said. “Fresh air is good for you.” In an instant, the boys had left the room, clattering down the stairs with shouts and laughter, the dog joining in with his barking. Nicki just blinked behind them unconcernedly from Uncle Emmo’s shoulder.
“I’ll take you up to your room now, Paula,” Mama said. “You’ll want to wash up and comb your hair. There is a clean dress for you hanging in the cupboard on the landing. You mustn’t forget to see Babett before supper or she’ll grumble for days.”
“Dear old Babett! Papa said she was just the same as ever,” Paula said as she went up to the top floor with her mother, where her old room was between the maids’ room and that of the boys.
“The same indeed,” Mama confirmed with a little sigh. “She still helps with the darning and patching and knitting. In addition, she advises me how to handle my husband, bring up the boys, and run the house. Through her ever-open door, she rules the maids in the kitchen who consider her a holy terror but mind her or else! Poor thing, she’ll be ninety this fall, and she has become rather stiff with rheumatism lately. She scarcely leaves her room now, and I often send one of the boys down to read a little to her or to listen to her stories about the glorious reign of King Jerome of Kassel.”
“Oh, I remember . . .” Paula said. Like all the children in the house, she had grown up with these stories about court life in Kassel. Babett was a relic of the Amtmann’s first marriage to the beautiful Françoise Dudon d’Enval, to whose mother Babett had been chambermaid. With the two ladies—the belle-mère, as the Amtmann called his mother-in-law, and the young bride—Babett had come, and she had stayed on when after only one year of marriage Françoise had died in childbirth and her heartbroken mother had followed her soon. It was then that the Amtmann’s two aunts, Christine and Ulrike, had come to comfort their widowed nephew and, for ten years, with Babett’s help, had taken care of his ménage and brought up little Franziska. At this time, Jacob Eisenberth had been a young judge, transferred almost every two years to another part of the small duchy of Nassau. Eight years ago he had become Amtmann—both judge and administrator—in Limburg, the cathedral town on the river, where he hoped to spend the rest of his active days.
When he married again, ten years after the death of his first wife, his bride, young Margarete Thour, took over the reins of the household, but nobody thought of parting with the three old women who had taken care of him and little Franziska when he was in need of help. They were part of the ménage and were taken along the same as bed and chest, table and chair, from one place to the next. Four years ago, Emmerich, Jacob’s unmarried brother, an antiquarian and bibliophile, had joined the household; in fact, he had come to spend a few weeks with his relatives and had stayed on. There was ample room in the garden wing of the courthouse, and families were a close-knit unit.
Franziska, Jacob Eisenberth’s daughter by his first marriage, lived with her husband—also a judge—and family in a small town in the Taunus Mountains, near enough for her much younger half brothers and Paula to visit her in the holidays. Her eldest son was almost the same age as Karl.
Paula was thinking of all this as she stood in the room that was now to be hers again in the early dusk of the December day. The walls had been newly whitewashed; there were starched muslin curtains around the bed and the windows. A small cherry-wood desk from her mother’s girlhood had been brought down from the attic and an old armchair covered with gay chintz. Behind a screen, which evidently her brothers had made and painted, the iron washstand was hidden, and opposite the bed was her little shrine with the Madonna; even the small basin with holy water at the door was still the same. Mama had dipped her fingers in it and made the sign of the cross on her daughter’s forehead. “God bless your return, child,” she had said, and gone downstairs again.
The room was cold. Bedrooms in the courthouse were not heated, whatever the temperature outside. Mama did not believe in coddling her brood; she trusted in cod-liver oil, fresh air, and what she called her “blood-cleansing tea” during Lent. To this and other beneficial herb teas, she credited the fact that, apart from mumps and measles, her children had scarcely ever been ill.
Paula walked over to the window and looked down at the river and the familiar landscape of rolling countryside beyond the thousand-year-old bridge—the fields now covered with snow, the hedged orchards, the dark patches of forest. The river was a sheet of sparkling ice, interrupted only by an island with wintry-looking trees. It was still called the leper island because, long ago, the lepers had been brought out there and, according to an old chronicle, a monk, sick himself, had nursed them and cheered them with sweet songs in praise of the Queen of Heaven. Now the ice was tinged with pink by the setting sun and dotted with schoolboys chasing to and fro. The three arches of the bridge stretched across to the farther bank and to the grim tower that had once been the town gate and was now the prison. On the parapet of the central arch, where the gray stonework thrust out over the river, stood a statue of St. Nepomuk in episcopal attire, cross in hand. For five years, Paula had walked past him, in rain and shine, summer and winter, on her way to the girls’ school run by the Pallottine nuns. How long ago it all seemed! It was like another life, and she did not yet know how to pick up the threads.
She heard her brothers’ voices from the ice below, where they were playing with their friends, moving as easily as though they had been born with skates on their feet. Right now they were in a contest, jumping over a barrel at full speed, the barrel presumably being on loan from the courthouse cellar. Adolf’s dog was competing as eagerly as the boys; with four legs and no skates, it was easier for him than for them. There was shouting and laughter, scorn for those who landed on their stomachs or on their seats, and clapping and shouts of admiration for the successful jumpers. Paula had never had the chance to become so good a skater or swimmer as her brothers. Her long skirts and starched petticoats had always been a handicap to her in the boys’ games, and Mama was cross when she came home with her braids undone, a tear in her dress, or a cut knee. Things like that were not proper for a girl. From the age of eight, she had had to look after her youngest brothers, to knit and darn stockings, and to perform all kinds of duties in the house and garden. The boys, also, had to do some chores, but not nearly so many as she.
How different life in the convent had been! Of course, there were duties there, too, and strict rules, but everything had been shared by forty companions of the same age, enlivened by ardent friendships, little jealousies, deep secrets; by discussions about the few carefully selected books that, apart from their textbooks, they were allowed to read; by the daily excitement of seeing which girl an adored nun would choose to walk by her side in the promenade or which would be chosen to wear the blue ribbon of the Enfants de Marie on the next feast of our Lady. They studied languages, geography, history, and art, as well as music, all within the limits of what was regarded as suitable for the education of a young lady. They did fine embroidery, and there was some instruction in cooking and running a household, just enough to enable them to rule their servants one day. Nobody had asked them to knit ghastly, long black-wool boys’ stockings, a task Paula had had to learn as a very little girl with clumsy, sticky, hot fingers. And every day at the convent school had begun and ended with prayers in the lovely chapel; all the hours had passed peacefully against the golden background of a sweet and untroubled piety, as yet unshadowed by doubt. When the girls left to go back into the world, the good nuns warned them gravely of the dangers they would encounter “out there.” As to the precise nature of these dangers, they had only the vaguest ideas.
I wonder . . . Paula thought, sniffing with her straight little nose, as though she could catch a whiff of the fire-and-brimstone smell arising from the abyss of this dangerous world.
She took off her school dress, washed her face and hands in the ice-cold water from the big jug, combed her long hair and put it up again, donned the checkered wool dress Mama had hung in the big cupboard on the landing for her, cast a rather uninterested look at her reflection in the little mirror, and prepared to go downstairs, where the new duties of daughter-of-the-house awaited her.
From the cathedral and the other churches of the town came the ringing of the Angelus bells, and all the village bells from the countryside answered. St. Lubentius in Dietkirchen, equal in age and dignity to the Limburg Cathedral, also joined in the evening song.
In Nancy, Paula thought, they would now be going in procession two by two, followed by Mère Celeste, to the chapel for the Angelus and rosary—and a wave of homesickness flowed over her as she prayed. But then, Mère Celeste’s beloved voice, along with the voices of the bells, was with her in her cold room. “Patience!” it said as it had done so often, and just as often Paula had shaken her head half-embarrassed, half-smiling: “Patience is not the most notable characteristic of my family, ma Mère.” Only Papa was patient—how could he have been a judge otherwise?
“. . . but you will have to prove now what you learned while you were with us, ma petite Paulette!” the voice said with the gentle firmness that was never contradicted.
“Oui, ma Mère,” she replied, ready to begin her new life.
Winter II
ON JANUARY seventh, the day after the Epiphany and the first school day after the Christmas holidays, Adolf went alone for the first time to the cathedral to ring the Angelus bell and serve Mass. The vacation was over; the austerity of school life would start once again. They had celebrated New Year’s Eve in the courthouse, as they did every year, with a crowd of friends and relatives. The women had been hard at work in the kitchen for two days beforehand preparing everything, since on the evening itself there was only a cold buffet so that the maids—Gretel and Kettchen—could have the time off to go dancing. The enormous traditional salad had to be made the day before in any case so that it had time to marinate properly. Paula had helped her aunts with the unending task of cutting up and shredding. The three of them sat at the bright, scrubbed kitchen table and diced the roast veal, the apples and celery, hard-boiled eggs and pickled herrings, beetroots and cucumbers, and the long kidney potatoes, which were grown specially every year in the garden. Nuts were cracked and chopped to put in, as well. The black coal stove glowed. Eclairs, cheese straws, and white bread were baked. The Amtmann and Uncle Emmerich discussed the choice of wines. On the day itself, Mother filled big dishes with what was left of the Christmas baking—cinnamon stars and almond cakes, honey cake, shortbread, gingernuts, and hazelnut macaroons. The brothers were given their share in advance, each a plateful, for who could say whether or not the guests would leave any!
The big drawing room next to the living room was opened up, and the dust covers taken off the furniture. In the prisms of the chandelier, the multicolored light from forty candles was reflected. The festivities continued long past midnight, and on New Year’s Day, all the friends met once again at Mass in the cathedral.
Yesterday the Three Wise Men had made their journey through the town, the well-known figures that appeared every year on the sixth of January. They went from house to house, piously singing the endless verses of their song and collecting a few coins for their efforts, for they had to recover from the cold and the strain of holiness at every inn on the way. Alas, they were by nature neither holy nor wise, and no one for a moment supposed they were, least of all they themselves. Nonetheless, on this one day of the year, under a cloak of shabby velvet, a burnoose made from a patched bed sheet, and a piece of threadbare brocade, some of the splendor of the old legends was about them. There were some tongues in town wagging about the old reprobates, to be sure, yet everyone would have missed them had they not gone through the streets on the evening of the Epiphany. They were a part of the Church’s changing seasons; a venerable custom, even though in themselves far from venerable; a part of the established devout ritual that gave life its rhythm and meaning.
Adolf was already awake when the clock from the Cathedral of St. George sang out a single resounding stroke over the sleeping town—a quarter past five. It had not really been necessary for Mother to knock from the floor below on the ceiling with the handle of the broom she kept ready.
“Are you coming to early Mass, too?” Adolf had asked his sister the evening before. But this was the bread-baking day, and Paula was to prepare the dough herself for the first time.
In the boys’ room, there were two beds against each of the long walls. August and Georg slept along the opposite wall. Ferdinand and Karl shared a bed on Adolf’s side. They were lucky, particularly in winter: two get warm more quickly than one. In compensation, Adolf had his dog as a foot warmer, although this was kept a secret from the adults in the family. There was an old carpet beside his bed for Aquarius, but every evening as soon as Mother had said evening prayers with her sons, wished them good night, and put out the candle, the dog jumped up, snuggled his head into Adolf’s armpit, and they went off to sleep peacefully together.
“You can’t come with me today,” said Adolf as he felt for his clothes in the dark. “You’re not allowed in the church, and it’s too cold outside.” The dog understood him, as he understood everything his master said. Wherever he came from, it was in his blood to obey every word or signal.
The boys wore the shirts, which Mama put out clean, for them on Saturday evenings, day and night—a charitable custom, since it saved them from having to slip into a cold shirt in the mornings and let them take some of the comforting warmth of bed into the cold outside world with them. Adolf pulled on his long underwear and black hand-knitted stockings, then his thick winter suit, and he was ready. In winter, thorough washing was done in the evening in the washhouse, which was warmed a little by the embers in the kitchen stove next door. On Saturdays, water was heated in the big copper wash kettle, and all the members of the family bathed in a large wooden tub. Again and again Holwein would have to fetch more wood from the shed; again and again he would take turns with the maids and the boys to go to the pump and carry in pailfuls of water. Saturday was a black day for Holwein.
Adolf ran the washcloth once quickly over his face (it was frozen and crackled nastily) and the comb through his hair. He didn’t light the candle, as that would have disturbed his brothers, who need not get up yet. By common consent, a boy old enough to go and ring the bells in the morning dressed in the dark. Previously, it had been only August and Georg. But now Adolf was going to take turns with the older brothers every third week.
He wound the knitted scarf around his neck and crept downstairs in his stocking feet. In the hall on the ground floor were two benches, one in front of his father’s office, the other next to the courtroom. Beyond was the chancery, where the young clerks wrote with their quills in thick pigskin tomes or on paper stamped with the arms of the Duke and where the filing shelves reached up to the ceiling. Beside the front door, Holwein had his room, but nothing was stirring there yet.
Adolf sat down on one of the benches and laced up his high boots. From the box room under the stairs came the heavy breathing of someone sleeping there. Sometimes a suspect would be locked up there overnight, if Wittich the beadle or the nightwatchman had picked him up late in the evening, ready for the Amtmann to question early the next morning.
Outside, the dark January morning lay bitterly cold over river, valley, and town. Adolf hunched up his shoulders, dug his chin deeper into the folds of the woolen scarf, and stuck his hands in his pockets. Schoolboys neither wore nor indeed possessed overcoats. Even the rich Trombetta boys put theirs on only on Sunday to go to church.
Adolf walked quickly up the steep narrow alley that led from the courthouse to the cathedral. In a few of the workmen’s houses, candles were already flickering. There was no question of lighting lamps in the mornings; oil was expensive and had to be saved for the long winter evenings.
