‘They love us,’ Matthias whispered eventually. ‘I think they’ve just forgotten how to show it.’
I settled my head on Matthias’s shoulder and the next thing I knew it was morning, Papa was bellowing Matthias’s name, and Mama’s head appeared in the hatch to the loft. Her expression when she saw me in my brother’s bed was odd.
‘What were you doing?’ Mama asked me later as we prepared the midday meal.
‘What?’
‘This morning.’
‘You mean, why was I in the loft?’ I cut slices of Mettwurst.
‘Hm.’
‘Oh. I couldn’t sleep.’
Mama hesitated. ‘It’s not appropriate that you go to him.’
‘We slept in the same bed when we were little. Matthias calms me. He’s my brother.’
‘You’re not little anymore, Hanne. You’re a woman.’
I groaned aloud.
Mama placed the steaming plate of potatoes down on the table then abruptly left the room, footsteps loud on the stairs. A few minutes later she returned with a full bucket and set it at my feet. Water glimmered pink over swathes of suspended rags, and I realised, with horror, that they were the soiled cloths I had left to soak in the cellar.
I looked up at her, appalled.
‘You know what these mean?’
‘Mama . . .’ I glanced at the front door, anxious Papa or Matthias would come in and see them there.
‘Hanne.’ Mama’s voice was calm. Insistent. ‘These mean you are a woman.’
‘Yes, I know.’ My mouth was dry with shame.
‘The time has come to farewell childish things. God is preparing your body so that it might be blessed with children, and so you, too, must prepare yourself for the other blessings of womanhood.’
I stared at the floor, face crimson, mortified.
‘A home of your own, Hanne. Marriage.’
I bent down to pick up the bucket, but my mother quickly reached out and took my wrist. Her hands were damp.
‘Now is the time to renew your faith in and submission to Christ,’ Mama said, her voice low and urgent. ‘God has created a place for you and a role for you, and now that you are grown, you must learn to fulfil it. It is one thing for a girl to come home smelling of . . . of weeds and river mud . . .’
I tried to wrest my hand from her, but her grip was firm.
‘Hanne, I haven’t finished. It is one thing for a little girl to share a bed with her little brother’ – she inclined her head, eyes seeking out my own – ‘another for a woman.’
I let my hand go limp in hers and stared down at the bucket of bloody water, willing myself not to cry. My pulse jumped in my fingertips. I wanted to run from the room. I wanted to run into the forest and never come back.
Mama suddenly pulled my head towards her, kissing it so hard I felt the press of her teeth beyond her lips. ‘Do you understand me?’
‘Yes,’ I whispered.
She nodded at the bucket. ‘You can put it back now.’
It is hard to remember these moments with my mother. I wish I knew then what I know now. That Mama’s withholding from me was not a sign that she disliked me or suspected me flawed, as I believed at the time, but a sign of a fear she could not articulate. She was afraid to declare her love for me: she did not want to tempt fate by it. Since I have had a child, in my own way, I understand the terror a mother feels at the prospect of loss, and how easily superstition creeps into the smallest of gestures.
If I bless you every night, you will remain here.
If I keep your teeth, no harm will come to you.
If I do not praise you, I will not attract the sweep of a scythe that takes the best, the sweetest, the most loved.
There have been times when I have ached over things that have not happened to him but could. Might still. If I could divine his future in the entrails of animals, there would not be a living thing left ungutted.
Understanding, though, is cold comfort when it comes long after the opportunity for amends has passed. I see now that Mama wished for me a life like her own, and that she truly believed I would only find it – acceptance, motherhood, fulfilment – through subservience to Christ and convention and husband. It is not true, of course. I know now that marriage is no assurance of safety, that adherence to convention can estrange the soul from the spirit. But at the time I did not fathom any of this. I was a girl shrouded in a curtain of unknowing. I believed she was ashamed of me, that she thought me dirty, and the disquiet I already felt within myself was affirmed and deepened.