“Get married.”
Her amused laugh robbed me of any hope that I might be able to foster some doubt in her. She could have left it at that, but she took my hand and said, “Arkadiusz is the most beautiful, the best man there is. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love him.”
When Anni went off to finalize the preparations for the wedding, I went looking for distractions. I needed distractions. Right away. Unfortunately, the innkeeper was no longer an option. Still, I had an idea of where I might go.
Mina turned out to be sensational. A multiple widow couldn’t have acquitted herself better. Out in the barn, we helped each other explode. The whole time, Mina wore the wedding dress. I’d made her a present of it. Over her tanned skin, the fragile white seemed somehow darker, nearly gray, and suited Mina’s hair — which had become more gray than blond by now — perfectly.
“When are we getting married?” she asked, rolling herself on top of me and thereby ending our pause for breath.
“My sister’s first,” I said.
“But I already have a dress! We have to get married, too!”
“We will.”
“Did you come back to Segendorf because you wanted to marry me?”
“Why else would I come back? You have to look after that dress. So that I can lead you to the altar in it.”
“I’ll look after it perfectly!”
“You promise?”
“I promise,” she said — and exploded once again.
Mina took her promises very seriously. While all the women in Segendorf were dolling themselves up for Anni and Arkadiusz’s wedding — pinking their cheeks with drops of blood, gracing their high-piled hair with wild-flowers — she folded her wedding dress up and laid it away in a box, in the safest place in the world: under her bed. She didn’t let even a fleck of dust anywhere near it. Every morning after getting up, and again before her evening prayers, she wiped the lid clean with care. As the Sacrificial Festival approached, she told the dress, “From now on, you’re no longer my Most Beloved Possession.” And once the Sacrificial Festival was over: “From now on, you’re once again my Most Beloved Possession.” Sometimes, long after I’d moved in with Anni and Arkadiusz, she brought me the box, and lifted the lid to remind me of its brightness, and whenever she did I’d smile and lie, telling her how much I was looking forward to our wedding, I could barely wait, but she had to be patient just a little while longer. And Mina was patient. Simple enough, since she was up to her ears in work, helping her mother at the bakery (at seven seconds, she held the Segendorf record for pretzel preparation). But in the evenings, when she’d run through her daily ration of patience and had nothing to think about but her intended, the handsome Julius Habom, all she wanted was to be able to fall asleep, to recharge herself, and the more she wanted to fall asleep, the wider awake she felt. Then she had no alternative but to pull on the wedding dress. She slipped out into the Segendorf night, looking for all the world like the ghost of a bride. She stood before our house, not approaching the door, but rather moving from window to window until she’d found me and waved to me, and distracted me from watching Anni, who for her part had eyes only for Arkadiusz; she danced with him, tickled him with the ends of her hair, fed him raspberry marmalade, kissed him, sat on his lap, rubbed his neck, read to him from the Bible, held his hand. As though I weren’t even there.
On one of those nights when Mina was once again circling the house, she noticed a shape crouching by the kitchen window. Pig Farmer Markus. In his eyes, she told me — and it disturbed me to hear this — she recognized the same look with which I observed Anni. His right hand gripped a hunting knife. Mina hid herself behind a wheelbarrow. Markus raised his arm — as he did, a bit of his hair shifted oddly — and scratched something into the kitchen window. When he was done, he looked at the result with satisfaction. Then he slipped away. Mina glided over to the window and examined it. Markus had left a pair of similar-looking signs behind, of which the first came together at its tip; and though Mina couldn’t read, she felt that these were more than just a couple of scratches.
“It’s just a couple of scratches,” I said to her when we met in the barn the next evening and Mina told me about what she’d seen. “What are you doing at our house at night, anyway?”
“I don’t have much patience.”
“You can’t just lurk around after dark. What will people think?”
“I don’t know what people think.”
“That’s not quite what I meant.”
“Julius, when will we get married?”
“We’ll be married soon,” I said, and plunged swiftly beneath the skirt of her dress. “Very soon.”
A Human Anchor
Very soon was still several months away, months in which the bridal gown began to stretch across her hips, and then wouldn’t slip over her belly any longer, so that she brought it along to our meetings in the barn only to cover the two of us with it. One night, while Mina slept, I laid a hand on the spot just above her bulging belly button, and whispered:
“Can you hear me? Do you recognize my voice? Do you like it? It must sound completely different from in there.
“Sometimes I wish I could crawl in there with you.
“You should take your time. You’ll never again be as safe as you are right now. There aren’t any safe places out here. That’s why people say they feel safe — because they can never be safe. Maybe a little creature like you doesn’t feel anything yet. But you are safe.
“Do you know that your aunt’s belly is getting bigger, too? It frightens me. Anni isn’t ready, not yet. Ever since I came back, I’ve been thinking about the fire. I’m not angry with her. She didn’t know what she was doing. But … but she doesn’t know what she did, either. Her memory is wrong. It wasn’t an accident — it certainly wasn’t a stray spark.
“Should I tell her the truth? Should I tell her how I found her with the torch in front of our burning house? Can you even tell someone something like that? And if so, how?
“Sometimes I wish I could crawl in there with you.”
I made Mina promise me something else: to keep the name of her child’s father a secret. Having no father, I thought, would still be better than having me as a father, an undertaker who loved nobody but his sister; who couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth about her past; who lived in her house and stuffed wax into his ears every night, because he was afraid he might overhear her and her Pole, and that would remind him of Jasfe and Josfer; who slaved away at the Segendorf cemetery, digging more graves than anyone needed, just to let off steam; who slept for the same reason with a Klöble who adored him and was convinced that any day now he’d make her a proposal of marriage; who, whenever he started awake from dreams of the house in flames, always immediately touched his elbow.
You could say that only my ears experienced the birth of my son. Mina’s piercing shrieks kept all the customers far away from the bakery. In my room at Anni’s house, which stood close by, I paced back and forth, pausing only when Mina’s screams went silent and were replaced by those of our child. As night fell I crept to Mina’s window: she opened it, grinning, and passed me the little boy. I asked Mina if I could take a little stroll with my son, at which she smiled and nodded eagerly, as if I’d finally proposed to her. I walked with my son counterclockwise around the bakery.