Thea sat down next to me.
‘They came back,’ I added. ‘They came searching for Pastor Flügel and ransacked homes. Then they arrested people and chained the doors of the church.’
We were silent a moment.
‘Do you hear anything in here?’ she asked. ‘Singing?’
I shook my head. ‘Only outside.’
The snow on Thea’s headscarf was melting. She took it off and shook the water from it, then balled it in her lap. In the low light her hair seemed to glow. ‘You know what you said about Christiana earlier?’ she murmured.
‘Mm.’
Thea leaned against me in the pew. ‘Well, I don’t think you’re nothing.’
Blood rushed to my face. ‘Thank you,’ I whispered.
We stayed in that church abandoned to dust and mice droppings, talking in hushed voices, finding empty swallow nests and tracing our fingers over the engravings in the dry baptismal font, until the light began to dim. When I suggested to Thea that she ought to go to ensure she could return home before nightfall, she went to the door and bent down to retrieve her clog.
She looked up at me, alarmed. ‘I can hear voices.’
I froze.
‘Quick,’ she said, pulling her shoe free. ‘Close it.’
I pushed the door shut and the church collapsed into darkness. Sinking to the floor, I felt Thea find my hand and hold it, hardly daring to breathe. From the other side of the door came the faint suggestion of women’s conversation.
‘Did you see who it was?’ I asked, bending my mouth to Thea’s ear.
‘Yes,’ she breathed. ‘The Radtkes. Probably coming back from your house.’
We waited in silence. In the thick darkness I was aware only of the fading murmur of voices outside, Thea’s fingers entwined with mine and then, when we could no longer hear anything, when we creaked the door ajar and glanced out, faces pressed cheek to cheek, our bodies seizing with laughter and relief.
giblets and bacon
Thea and I fell into friendship like rain to the ground, like stones into water.
At their insistence, I began to eat at the Eichenwalds’ every Sunday, occasionally calling in on Saturdays too. Anna Maria had a gift for cooking that made my own mother’s offerings seem dismal; for all that the Wend would shout at her badly drawing chimney, slipping from German into Slav in her frustration, she worked magic with her three-legged oven bowl. On Saturdays, her baking days, she would lower round after round of smooth dough into its iron belly, carefully covering the heavy lid with embers each time. The dark loaves of bread she turned out smelled glorious, crusts crackling as they cooled. When I asked what her secret was, Anna Maria told me that she let the dough rise in her bed the night before, that a sleeping body offered the best temperature for yeast to ferment. The following Sunday, when I told her I’d suggested to Mama that she might improve her rye loaves by sleeping with them, Anna Maria shrieked with laughter.
‘What did she say?’
‘She told me to mind my mouth.’
Anna Maria wiped tears from her eyes. ‘Oh, I do hope she tries it. I love the thought of Johanne Nussbaum sharing a pillow with a dough bin.’
Thea’s home was a happy place to be, for all the winter winds breached the cottage walls and the roof leaked. Friedrich Eichenwald was a quiet man, content with his work and his family, and Anna Maria swept me up in the expansive love she showed her daughter. Theirs was a place of ready laughter, and while at first I found the family’s affection for one another odd and uncomfortable to behold, I soon could not help but compare my own parents unfavourably to the Eichenwalds. Anna Maria embraced me more than my own mother did, and when I heard Friedrich talk with his daughter, I wished that my own father would show the same interest in me, would speak to me of his own accord and not through the borrowed word of God. At home, the family table had become less a place of fellowship than a pulpit for my father’s denunciation of the Union Church and despair at the ever-shrinking possibility of religious freedom. His earthly sight seemed levelled only at his fields, our animals. Mama never placed her hand on Papa’s neck as she served him his dinner. Papa never commented on Mama’s beauty, though it was there, remarkable and singular, every hour of the day. They worked within their own spheres, remote and distinct from one another. Papa spoke of Mama as his helpmeet and he only ever called her Mutter. Friedrich referred to his wife by her name. He uttered it like an affirmation.
Matthias, ever my comfort, offered moments of light amidst the endless labour and criticism. During the week I lived for the rare hours when we might be in each other’s company: I relished his kicks under the table, the green bean tucked in his upper lip when he thought Mama wasn’t looking. But his days were spent in my father’s dominion and I was trapped in my mother’s.