The curtains were always drawn; I sat in endless half-darkness. I no longer wandered when my chores were completed but remained indoors, changing Gottlob’s bedclothes, dribbling gruel into the corners of his mouth, turning his man’s body and attending to the sores that erupted on his skin. For weeks I sat next to my dying brother and, as I sat, my own body was altered. In the time it took for Gottlob to die, my own vigour made itself certain. It was as though my physical being, forced to dwell in such close proximity to approaching death, sought to assert its own vitality. As I sat and watched my elder brother’s ribs emerge, I felt my own chest swell painful against the stitching of my clothes. My wrists stretched beyond my cuffs. My toes strained against my stockings. Already tall, I grew taller, but where once I was sleek, epicene, utterly at one with my frame, I now felt a fracture between myself and my body. I did not recognise the new weight, the new shapes I felt under my hands or glimpsed in the glass of my mother’s framed wedding myrtle. I was suddenly softer than I knew myself to be. My skin smelled different. One night, lying in bed after a long day listening to my brother’s lungs lift and fall in awful gurgling slowness, I realised that I now possessed the body of a stranger.
Gottlob died in the early hours of a Tuesday morning, seven weeks after he fell from Otto’s great height. I was seated at his side, dozing, bare feet resting on the edge of the bed. The room was lit only by moonlight escaping through the curtains; I had long blown out the candle. In my half-sleep, I realised that I could no longer hear Gottlob’s rattling breath and the awful certainty that he was gone pierced through me. I was immediately awake. I leaned over him. My brother’s chest was still.
It seemed impossible, despite his weeks of unconsciousness, that he was gone, and yet it had happened. Gottlob had always seemed much older than me – there were five years between us – and we had not been especially close. Matthias had always been my favourite brother. But in the minutes after Gottlob’s death I climbed into the bed and cradled his head and imagined him walking my father’s holy orchard.
It was not until the morning of the funeral procession, Gottlob in his coffin and ready for the waiting Totenbahre, the bier, that Mama noticed my body fighting my clothes. The buttons were straining at the back of my best dress, my breasts pressing uncomfortably against a panel of material sewn to fit a child. I appeared at breakfast, mortified. Mama took one look at me, quickly stood up from the table and swept me into my bedroom, where she made me undress and try on one of her own dresses. It didn’t fit. I sat on her bed in my shift, on the edge of tears, while she went to ask Beate Fr?hlich if she could find something suitable amongst the women of the congregation within the hour. Eventually Beate came into the bedroom with an old dress from Eleonore Volkmann, the only woman in Kay who was of my height. There was no time to take it in at the waist and it smelled of mildew, and as Gottlob was returned to God by wagon and service and soil, I felt hot with shame. Shame that my grief for my brother on the day of his burial was so easily usurped by grief at the loss of my child’s body.
That afternoon, as the congregation ate in the shelter shed of the cemetery, I felt a new slipperiness between my legs. I sought a private place behind the wall of yews, and there I lifted my dress. My fingers came away bloody. Only then did I cry.
My sister Hermine was a pink, unpleasant baby. My father could not abide her crying at night. He and the other elders of our village had received word from Pastor Flügel, secretly fled to London, that they should renew their petitions and applications for emigration, and the work – requiring much letter writing and intellectual argument – taxed him and left him emotionally and spiritually worn. Mama was anxious he get his sleep, and so Hermine’s cot was placed in my room. Every two or three hours I would be roused by her rising wail and would stumble from my bed and pick her up, bouncing her listlessly until Mama came in and fed and settled her. It was expected that I change my sister and bathe her, soothe her and hold her, as well as complete my usual chores, and I grew to deeply resent Hermine’s presence, the cloths streaked with mustard shit, the spumy trails of sick down my back. It was no longer easy to visit Thea on my day of rest. When I told Mama that caring for Hermine seemed as much work as any other chore forbidden on a Sunday, she paused, swept Hermine out of my arms and placed her in her little cradle.
‘Let us leave her until Monday, then,’ she said.
I do not know how she bore the screaming that followed, but she did not touch Hermine. I waited for as long as possible, dark and angry and exhausted, and considered setting out for the forester’s cottage, but I did not dare test Mama’s stubborn streak and nor could I bear the grating cries of my sister. I picked her up and she rewarded me with a sudden eruption of curdled milk.