Come over here. When I’m working by hand I can’t see you behind the stone.
Thomas changed his place.
Now, raise that one. She took his other arm as if he were a puppet and raised it, pushed, pressed the ulna. No; she shook her head. Now let it drop. Just let it hang loosely. She took his dangling hand in hers and looked at the fingers. Back to the angle again. Thomas crooked his arm as he had been doing for weeks. Käthe walked round him, taking small steps, stared at his collarbone again, his armpit and finally his fingers. She chose a different chisel and put it to her stone. Thomas blinked; the hand she was working on looked gigantic, his hand, as big as a log.
The bearded man and Käthe had reached Tessin with frozen toes. Thomas saw the scene in his mind’s eye, the two men taking it in turns to haul the sledge with the woman’s heavy weight in it over the mountains. But didn’t anyone help you? Your father who was my grandfather? Nothing doing, Käthe had told him abruptly, without a shred of self-pity. They had sent telegrams to friends and relations in Germany and France from the post office in Bellinzona. After a long time, they had heard the first news at the post office: heroic fighting in Stalingrad. Soldiers sheltering in foxholes. A German U-boat had torpedoed a British passenger steamer off the Azores. Nearly seven hundred people said to have lost their lives. The destruction not only of civilians but of civilisation, Käthe called it. Perhaps that was a quotation, perhaps Thomas’s father had said it. How had he thought, how had he spoken? Käthe and the bearded man stayed in Bellinzona for a good two weeks, going to the post office every day. But in such circumstances friends in the north did not respond, and help was in short supply, Käthe’s father, that worthy professor, sent a telegram asking his dear Käthchen not to come to Berlin. Her condition would create a great sensation, her arrival could endanger her mother’s life. Humboolabye fong fong. On that walk through the night, Thomas had looked for any kind of emotion in Käthe’s face, but it was too dark for that. Her voice was steady: So fat Käthe was holding the telegram from the professor. The bearded man tried to take her in his arms, but she shook her head. My dear father, he couldn’t do anything else. He has always been able to protect us, all of us. Thomas wondered whether Käthe hadn’t been seething with indignation and despair, at least at the time. Of course, he thought now, the realisation that her father, to whom she owed everything and who meant everything to her, was now powerless and could only warn her in no uncertain terms not to go back to them, not to come to Berlin where she had naively been hoping for his help, must have sunk inexorably in and finally made its way into her mind. In addition, Käthe’s dismissal four years earlier from the masterclass she was taking had presumably shaken her self-confidence. Finding out that a professor’s daughter had no immunity had not only hurt her feelings but astonished her. And then her self-confidence was to be not simply shaken but destroyed, like her will. Back then in Berlin, being thrown out of the university had been a fleeting source of annoyance; the beauty of Italy had moved her more deeply and more enduringly. In the scent of orange blossom there she had entirely forgotten that in the opinion of some people in Germany she herself ought not to exist. The danger had been left behind in the north, thousands of kilometres away. Until Käthe, driven out of the orange grove at Castelvetrano, had no idea where to go and went to knock on the southern gateway to Germany. Thomas himself, at such a moment, would have felt no injury and betrayal as keenly as that of a father who a few years ago still did all he could for his children. It must have sickened Käthe to find that he of all people, the man who had opened up her fatherland and half the world to her, who had not only taught at the university and headed the nitrogen research programme, the man who only ten years ago had taken his wife and children travelling in the Engadin valley, to fashionable Paris and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, had shown her the fractured beauty of the Alpine slate, the turquoise glow of Lake Constance and the Musée Rodin in Paris, that this man, her father, was now skulking in his gloomy house in the Westend district of Berlin with the curtains drawn, not allowed to teach, dismissed from his position as head of research into nitrogen, was whiling away his days in his laboratory and was in bondage to those who obliged him to keep his wife in the cellar of his house. Käthe guessed that he was hiding her there, if not in the bushes in the square in front of the building then in his own father’s garden house on Wannsee. Her mother was in danger. Mortal danger? Would she be taken away, was that possible? Käthe knew that her father had been told, several times, that he ought to divorce his wife, mother of his four children. In fact it was a good sign, thought Käthe, that she was endangering her mother, his wife, as they reached Rahnsdorf after two hours of walking and crossed the bridge. It meant she was still alive. It meant that a certain amount of protection was still possible and was tolerated. Heavily pregnant Käthe had been glad to hear that her mother was well, was still alive, and was still under her husband’s protection, even if in hiding and conditions where she could not be sure of toleration. Käthe would make it on her own. Perhaps the bearded man would stay with her.
They had trudged through the snow to their hotel room — hamboolabye fong fong. The bearded man had said he was going to the post office again to see if his parents had sent any money. He stood in the doorway and Käthe looked at him: Are you coming back? The bearded man could say whatever he wanted — was he to be trusted? The bearded man’s father, not a professor but an upright pastor in Halle on the River Saale, replied to say God be with his son. He could give his regards to the pastor of Bergalingen near Bad Säckingen, when he passed that way in the Hotzenwald district of the Black Forest. His call-up papers for the front had arrived and were urgent, said his father. Not a word by way of invitation to them, no money transfer, nothing about the woman who was trying to palm her coming child off on his son. Perhaps pregnant Käthe didn’t even exist in the mind of the pastor at Halle. God be with him, it sounded chilly. Yet the bearded man and his pregnant lover saw the message for the pastor of Bergalingen, the precise information conveyed by its geographical situation, and its proximity to Switzerland as a hidden sign that they might hope to find help there. Hip hip hooray!
Inside himself, Thomas stretched; his exterior maintained almost the attitude that Käthe wanted. He pressed his shoulder blades together, straightened his backbone. All that standing in front of Käthe’s eyes hurt; when he thought of Bellinzona, Thomas felt like bursting into tears. She had told him about it only once, as a result of that motorbike breakdown and their nocturnal walk, and she had told him about it with her usual rock-hard cheerfulness. But there was a glitter in her eyes, something was tipping over and cracking deep inside her. He wanted to hug Käthe. He had tried several times, but to this day she always just stood there like a chunk of wood. She was strong. He admired the way she set her chisel to the stone, carved her stone, and never complained on her own account.
Käthe put her tools on the wooden table and stretched her arms, she was jubilant, she yawned and straightened her back. Working on stone might be strenuous, but it made her happy. Käthe’s rosy cheeks were glowing like a girl’s, her cry of glee was the shout of a child.
Thomas smiled at her, but Käthe didn’t seem to notice his smile. She shook the stiffness out of her arms and hands and cleared her throat noisily, in a way that Thomas had only ever heard otherwise from men in company. He tried to imagine what she must have looked like back then, a young woman with a big belly. Käthe picked up her chisel, took the wooden smoothing tool and shaved tiny pieces of stone off the head.