“You come with a lukewarm recommendation from the Baron, but beggars can’t be choosers, and we’ve exhausted the stock of available help nearby,” said Gerwig Pfeiffer. The man was a cheery enough sort, if beleaguered. Perhaps his establishment had more work than it could handle. He rubbed his scalp until his hair was flyaway thistle, and mopped his sweating temples with a cloth he kept in a saucer of water. “Everyone wants to read these days, Dirk, can’t keep up,” he explained. “Gluts of broadsheets. For us merchants of paper, it keeps idle hands busy and it renders holidays scarce.”
“How do you know the von Koenig family?”
“You mean how does the merchant hobnob with the nobleman? I sell paper to the Baron for the printing of transcripts of his scientific companions. The wealthy have peculiar hobbies. Commerce is commerce.” Pfeiffer began to lay out for Dirk a few metes and bounds of the trade. Dirk prepared to earn his keep through the gathering, soaking, sieving, pressing, and bleaching of rags into paper. And the sizing, trimming, bundling, carting, and delivery of it. At least until something better might offer itself.
Pfeiffer broached the topic of general finance. What constituted a profit; why profits ought to be reinvested into the business. Who kept the books （Pfeiffer himself） and the keys to the warehouse （Pfeiffer again）。 Who brought the takings to the countinghouse （guess who）。
As Pfeiffer was about to go into a disquisition about the autumn schedule, the door behind Dirk opened. Swiveling on his stool, Dirk prepared to stand up in case it was the mistress of the household. A swish of skirting brushed against the doorsill. She may have been startled to find a visitor, as she didn’t come in. The door closed softly.
“Ah. So now you’ve witnessed my wife,” said Pfeifer. “The lovely Frau Pfeiffer. She enjoys being shy. What are your experiences with bookkeeping?”
“I’m not good with children.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“I can try to learn about bookkeeping, I guess.”
“Numbers obey. At least something adds up around here.”
27.
Shy meant more than shy; it meant clandestine. Dirk was lodged in the Pfeiffer establishment for almost a week before he caught a real glimpse of Frau Pfeiffer. Well, he had the place itself to learn as well as its ménage.
The boys dragged Dirk throughout the house, upstairs and down. A cook lumbered in and baked and roasted things and left them out on the table at noontime. A girl drifted by at dusk to wash down the boys and wash up the dishes and store anything uneaten. Though Dirk sometimes heard steps upstairs, or in the hall behind closed doors, Frau Pfeiffer failed to emerge.
He didn’t know if the establishment was characteristic of the area—he’d so little experience with houses. （The von Koenig schloss outside ?berlingen had seemed like a palace-in-training, while the Pfarrer’s cramped suite of rooms had been too spare of comfort.）
The property, though shabby, was generous enough to have not one but two wide buildings squeezed upon it. One behind the other, with a space between them. The tall, timbered house and offices fronted the road with a formal walled garden conferring a sense of status—slightly shabby status, because the garden was overgrown and the gate to the road was in need of painting. In the shallow courtyard behind the house, though, scrappy chickens pecked and herbs were hung to dry and broken equipment fell into further disrepair.
Beyond this cloistered utility yard loomed the twin structure, of similar dimensions to the house. It was fronted with open porches looking down at rusting harrows, a butter churn, and stacks of firewood. For another family it had been a genuine barn; Pfeiffer apparently used some of the upper rooms for the storage of supplies. As Dirk wasn’t sent out there, he didn’t know for sure.
Most of the houses in Meersburg proper had swollen to the margins of their properties, it seemed. This short way out from the center of town, the walled garden with a street gate was an anomaly: neither rural orchard nor coachyard. The boys told Dirk that their mother often spent whole days in the garden. No windows from the house looked out on it, and the walls were high enough to promise privacy all around—excepting the gate, of course.
On the sixth day, a Monday, a girl arrived to do the washing. She was a pasty thing with hair tucked so tightly under her cap Dirk couldn’t guess at its color. She hollered at Dirk to clear the boys away, they were splashing in the water, which was a labor to draw and to heat, or didn’t he know that?
He took them out. They walked the streets of the upper town and then wandered down to the water. The great steamboat that had brought Dirk here at the start of the summer was nearing the jetty, making a silhouette in front of the ice-grey Swiss Alps in the distance. Dirk and the boys climbed on the rocks, enjoying the spray and the noon light. After that, they made a circuit of the town by the lanes that had grown up outside the medieval walls. By the time he had exhausted the boys and returned them to the household, the laundry maid was done with the washing and had already hung it to dry on ropes slung between house and barn. She sat down with Dirk, the boys, and their father, and they all made a late lunch out of headcheese, mustard, and brown bread.
“Take them up to the nursery and read to them or something,” said Pfeiffer when the meal was through. “I have to go see someone about an unpaid bill of lading.”
“I don’t think I am a governess,” said Dirk.
“I don’t think so either, but try,” replied his boss.
The nursery, which doubled as a haphazard schoolroom, faced the courtyard between house and barn. Settling the boys with graphite and paper—there was always a lot of paper in this house—he turned when flashes of light began to arc across the walls. In the summer heat that lingered into early autumn, the glaring white sheets had already dried, it seemed. With large motions, the laundress was harvesting the dried sheets and table runners.
“Tillie,” called Moritz, “let me see if I can hit you through the sheet with this ball!”
“If you muck up this laundry,” began the girl, Tilda, but left the threat unstated.
“Sit down and draw,” said Dirk, “or I’ll teach you something about hitting.”
He stood at the windowsill and watched. The sheets were like pieces of cloth paper, in a way. Shining panels. He noticed four hands above the lines, untying knots, folding the bedding away. Frau Pfeiffer was helping.
He might catch a glimpse of her if the laundry came down in the right sequence. He watched as, behind the remaining panels, the two women worked together, folding great cloths in a kind of shadow-puppetry dance sequence.
Now this one must be the last. He would see what she looked like. Perhaps she was monstrous, and kept to herself out of courtesy for others.
Not yet—what revealed itself wasn’t Frau Pfeiffer but yet another panel more like a banner than bedding. That is to say, it was a sheet upon which something had been painted. Dirk made a tchhh sound, and the boys looked up.
“Good work, Mutti!” cried one of them.
“Whatever is that?” asked Dirk.
Tapered hands, more refined than a washerwoman’s, loosened the pennant from its ropes. The sheet swooped around in a zephyr caused by quick movement, and Frau Pfeiffer disappeared through a door into the barn before Dirk could learn anything of her but that she could move swiftly.