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When Else Mülleryn’s son is five years old, he finds his mother sobbing behind the house.
(Not sobbing, really; that sounds loud, uncouth, and Else has never been either of those things. Paul is five years old. She’s had time enough to learn how to cry quietly.)
He throws himself at her, his little body clobbering against her knees, tugging at her skirts; she’s pressed herself against the back wall, where the kitchen is, the timber digging into her back and stones scattering grit down her clothes. Her face is wet. Her veil is slipping. She is crying – quickly, in the way she sometimes does, with tears smeared across her cheeks and her chest heaving, a fist pressed to her lips. It’s hard to keep her breathing silent like this, when her heart is beating double-time and her lungs seem to be trying to suck breath in at the same time they shove it out. In-out, in-out. She needs to pin her veil again. She needs to stop crying. She doesn’t even have anything to cry about.
“Mama,” says Paul, whispery, stumbling over the vowel sounds in the way he does when he forgets to speak carefully. He’s pulling at her skirt, at her hand, thumb pocked with little marks from the days she couldn’t find her thimble. He’s pulling her down, so she goes; crouches inelegantly, skirts rumpling over her knees, over the grass, and when she’s at his level he lets go and takes her face in his clammy little hands, fingers fumbling over her cheeks as he wipes away her tears. He almost jabs her in the eye with his thumb. Her breath is catching in her lungs. “Mama,” he repeats. “Don’t cry. Don’t cry.”
Else doesn’t know how to stop. She feels like she’s been weeping all her life. (She doesn’t want Paul to see her like this; she wants him to think that she knows what she’s doing. She wants to be someone who he can lean on, not the other way around. He’s only five. Dear Lord, he’s only five.)
“Mama,” Paul says again, in the way he does when he doesn’t know what else to say, leaning into the word like her name might hold all the answers in the world. His fingers brush over her cheeks again. He shushes her, gently, which makes her want to laugh, which makes her choke on her air; “It’s all right,” he promises, and his hands are so small, and even crouching she’s taller than him. He’s so small for his age. So quiet. So watchful, with those dark damp eyes. Lenhardt says he stares too much; just stands around gawking like a halfwit. The thought makes Else wince.
Paul is clever. He knows how to look, and how to listen. They’re important skills. Else’s had to learn them late.
He shushes her again, and it’s only then that she really recognizes what he’s doing. When Paul cries Else whisks him away to a quiet place and pulls him onto her lap, cradled in her arms like a baby. She wipes his face carefully with the pads of her fingers; hushes him; assures him that it will be all right. Sings, sometimes. Paul doesn’t tend to like music but she thinks he’s reassured just by hearing her voice.
She feels unwieldy, pressed against the stone foundation of their home, clumsy-limbed and quiet. Paul presses his palms to her face. Else sets her hands over his, meets his wide eyes, the solemn look in his round face, and she begins to sing. It’s a lullaby; it feels a little off, and her voice is wavering, but at least it’s soft. At least it’s quiet. After a moment, Paul joins in. His voice is too high, scratchy, and he is always a few notes off. It’s the most beautiful sound in the world.
When they’re done, Else’s face is dry.
“Don’t cry,” Paul says again, solemn, even though she isn’t, not anymore. He squeezes her hand with all his tiny might. “Don’t worry, Mama. I’ll help you, all right?”
Else smiles. “Thank you, Paul,” she says, and it doesn’t waver any more than usual. “You’re a very kind boy.”
“I know,” Paul replies seriously.
It’s three days before he stops inspecting her face for tears.
…
There is a ghost at the dinner table.
A misshapen stranger with too-familiar eyes, dressed in dark robes streaked with dirt and fraying at the hems. Else feels half-desperate to start darning them, for the sake of having anything to do with her hands. Anything to do that isn’t just sitting there, reeling. (He’s alive – he’s been alive, all these years – all these years she’d felt guilty for not having the presence of mind to mourn him – all these years he’d been counted among the death toll – all these years he came up in conversation at unexpected times, and there was no-one in town old enough to remember that night who didn’t immediately know him by name. Else feels a little like the world has gone backwards. Like some thread has been pulled loose from the tapestry. It’s all a wonderful shock – it’s a crying miracle – but it is such a shock.)
(Else remembers Andreas Maler well. She knows that she and Paul aren’t the only ones who’ve lit him a candle from time to time in the twenty years since he ran into open flame and never came back out again.)
(Nigh on two decades alone; in the forest, in the ruins, in the shadows on the outskirts of town. Else Mülleryn is not a blaspheming woman, but Christ.)
The children are away, at least. Grett – always so understanding – offered to take them for the night before Paul even asked. Else loves her grandchildren beyond almost anything else on this earth but Ulrike can certainly be a handful when the mood takes her and little Andreas can be highly strung. They always manage to get into mischief whenever they’re hosting a guest; Paul had said that he thinks this will be difficult enough without them, and from what little Else has seen, she doesn’t disagree.
Paul is trying to ease their guest into everything as simply as possible; helping him through the door, pointing out a chair to sit in, making some attempt at easy chatter, though it’s never come naturally to him. Anna is a godsend in that regard – “Andreas Maler,” she says, shiny-eyed, and then she blinks and takes up a water-jug and starts talking. Some comment about the weather they’ve come through, how he must be chilled to the bone – easy small talk, all of it. Else’s never been able to remember how to have that kind of conversation.
She notices that Anna spills a little of the water as she pours it out. Her hands are trembling.
The ghost that is, impossibly, Andreas Maler, does something with his face that could be, if one were being generous, called a smile. He greets Anna, belatedly – looks around the table and thanks them all. His voice makes her think of sticks of chalk. He meets no-one’s eyes.
Else wishes he would. She can scarce recognise him – the years have warped her memory of his face, and she’s sure that’s part of it; that it’s been lost in the same vein as the faces of her parents, or of everyone else in town that was lost that night or since. (She really wants to believe that the time, the fading of memory, matters more here than it really does.) He has a beard now, a matted, unwieldy thing, knotted together with his trailing hair until it’s difficult to see where the beard ends and the hair begins. There is dust on his face, on his hands; his clothes are crusted with filth. His skin seems thinner, somehow, than it should be; it’s pale at the joints, as if it’s stretched over the bones. His face is cragged. He’s greyer than she remembers. He looks tired.
He looks sad, mostly. It makes Else’s chest ache.
Anna gives him the mug of water, filled almost to the brim. He drinks it, predictably, like a starving man; loudly, quickly, water tipping down his front in his haste, wetting his clothes, his beard, drops splattering on the floor. He must choke on it a little, because then he starts coughing. It’s awful, hacking, like his lungs are trying to expel themselves violently through his throat. Paul, sitting in the chair next to him, almost leaps up – begins patting him, rather awkwardly, on the back as he wheezes.
When Andreas catches his breath again, he apologises. Paul tells him not to; there is nothing to apologise for.
He drank like a man desperate, but when Anna sets out the food – simple bowls of bread pottage and soft sheep’s milk cheese – he just stares. He murmurs amen after Paul says grace, the word sounding strange from his mouth, as if he’d half forgotten it, and then there are several seconds spent in silence as the rest of them wait for him to touch his spoon. Else’s fingers play at the lining of her napkin.
Finally, “It’s hot,” Andreas says, as if it’s a perversion of the laws of nature. As if it’s a surprise. Else bites down on the inside of her cheek; she watches Paul’s brow knitting, his hands twisting to pick at the dry skin around his fingernails.
(There is a flash of memory, so sharp it aches; sitting around the same table, Lenhardt leaning over a plate of her roast beef and carefully steamed custard pie, Andreas speaking confidently enough to draw his attention from Paul’s hunched shoulders and hangnails and Else’s white lips.)
Andreas is persuaded to eat a few bites. Dinner is a quiet affair, save for Anna’s deft small talk; none of them are prepared for real talk. At least, Else isn’t. If she tried to formulate her feelings into something that could be expressed by words right now she thinks she would just start crying. She can’t imagine that would be helpful. And Paul was worried about overwhelming him – worried that talking about it too much would be tiring, that they should let the poor man have a night of sleep, first. That it might make it a little easier to get a meal and a bed, no questions asked.
Nothing is going to make any of it easy. Paul’s been panicking since he made the offer to take him in; but not offering would be so much worse. Not offering would be unthinkable. More than almost anyone in Tassing, they have the room; and it’s Andreas. How could they not?
Andreas eats the barest edge of his food and sets the spoon down. Once Anna’s exhausted her favourite repertoire of stories about the children – she must be enjoying having someone to tell who hasn’t heard them twice already – Paul twists his spoon in his hands and begins telling Andreas about the guest room upstairs.
“It’s small,” he says, fingernails blanching where he’s pinching the wooden handle, “and it’s not entirely walled off, but it’s in the warmest part of the upper floor and the window opens if you need fresh air.”
Andreas stares at the smooth red weave of the tablecloth. His face pinches.
After a moment, he speaks. “I don’t think I can sleep,” he tells them, dry-voiced and crackling. There’s a faint stutter on some of the vowels, words tearing themselves from his lips with more force than really necessary. “I – I can’t go back.”
Paul sets a hand on his arm. “You won’t have to.” It’s as solemn as it ever was when he was small and promising Else that everything was going to be all right. “You’re welcome to stay here for as long as you need. We –” and he pauses, tips his head back. Else watches his throat bob as he swallows. “We’re so happy to see you safe, Andreas.”
The ghost that is Andreas Maler watches him with too-familiar eyes. His face creases. He says nothing; but he leans, ever so slightly, into the soft grip of Paul’s hand on his shoulder. In the flickering nighttime light of the fireplace, he looks like he’s barely there.
…
Some days, when the fire burns warm and golden and the children are laughing on the stairs, Else can scarcely believe it’s the same house.
It’s been eighteen years. Time enough for her memory to go hazy. But some mornings she wakes up to that old bitter taste beneath her tongue, the jangling thrum of her nerves kick-starting her into motion, and then she remembers – and maybe her memory of that time isn’t particularly reliable, but the relief she feels then is too sharp to mistake. The house had been different then; or she had been different then; or both, probably.
It was colder, she’s sure. Quieter. The mantel always needed dusting, particular care paid to the trophies; the meat hung up to smoke never quite dried right. No matter how many candles she lit she’d still jump at shadows. She memorised which floorboards creaked with unfailing precision. Even now, eighteen years later, she still finds herself avoiding them.
It had been quiet. Lenhardt couldn’t bear how silent it was, sometimes; but then he couldn’t bear when they made noise. Else had been scared into stillness; Paul grew up in the hush of that house, steeped in the unease pressed into the very walls. It pickled him like a mixture of brine. Made its way into his bones. When he was small he’d walk with his shoulders locked up and his fingers curled like claws. Else remembers how she’d sit him down, take his hands in hers – she remembers how small they were, how smooth the skin, how ragged the nails – and rub the joints of his knuckles, even and soothing, until he let his hands relax. She’d tried to knead his shoulders into softness, too, but it hadn’t worked. The muscle had felt flat and hard as bone.
Paul had awful stomach-aches, on and off, all through the years as he grew up. Else always had awful pains in the head and could never seem to sleep easily. She still takes the posset Agnes presses on her whenever they meet, but the pains subsided in the first few years after Lenhardt’s death. She can’t say she’s surprised.
She can’t say she’s sorry.
Whenever his father didn’t demand his presence Paul would cling to her like a shadow; they’d sit together in the dim kitchen with the wrongly-dried sausages, the rifle gleaming in pride of place on the cabinet. Always polished to a shine.
(Else hated that thing. Its well-loved gleam, its obtrusive size, the way it winked at her as she cooked. She didn’t want a tool of violence presiding over the dining table. And having it there didn’t help the dread.)
(It isn’t as if it were ever a threat to her – it was unloaded in the house, not prepared for use, and Lenhardt wasn’t a monster. He never even looked to it in anger. But when he was angry, Else always, always did. She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t forget it was there.)
(She wasn’t sorry to see it dug out of the rubble. She’d been bringing food and water to everyone who helped them clear the burned-out detritus from the base so she and Paul could get the mill back in working order, when Endris had lifted something out of the dirt and ash – a length of metal, twisted and tarnished, its barrel half-melted and handle broken. They’d sent her away, then, so that she wouldn’t have to see what would be unearthed next. Lenhardt never could bear to be parted from that rifle.)
The house is different now; different from how it was before her husband died and different from the first few haunted-feeling years afterwards. Else knows it’s logically impossible but she could swear the house is brighter now. There’s more light coming in through the windows. The tablecloths and cushions are more colourful. When the door is open enough to let the wind move through, the whole house smells like the herbs standing in the vases and hung to dry over the sideboard. The children’s toys are scattered across the rooms, laid out in the corners and on the tables, messier than Paul ever had been; their drawings, smudgy ink on paper or fraying linen scraps, are pinned up all over the walls. Ulrike’s passionately sketched sheep and her ambitious landscape pieces; Andreas’ carefully-proportioned cats, neatly drawn windmill, lopsided attempts at family portraits. In one, hung up over the staircase, a narrow-faced Else with a twiggy plait stands with an arm around a smudge-faced Andreas, Ulrike leaning over his shoulder with her patched hat covering half his hair and their parents standing rather taller than seems realistic behind them. There’s a dedicated shelf for ink materials and the stones the children find for chalk in the shed behind the mill, and more herbs strung out in the sun. Ulrike and Anna are both always talking, always laughing; Anna hums hymns to herself while she sews and mumbles when she cooks. Even when the house is quiet, these days, it doesn’t feel like waiting, like living in suspended animation in endless preparation for the other shoe to drop. It’s just quiet. It’s peaceful.
Some days Else feels like she’ll never get used to it. Some days she can’t imagine living otherwise. The old house feels, sometimes, like a haunting; she isn’t sure if it’s the ghost, or if she is.
…
The children return when the sun is high, the sky cool and cloudless. Andreas walks sedately, a wicker basket held in careful arms; a few steps back, Ulrike romps along the hill, kicking up half-melting snow, trying to catch her brother’s hands and bring him into her dance. He bats her away, but he’s smiling. (Else thinks, anyway. They’re still a ways away down the hill, and it’s hard to quite see.) When she points them out through the smooth glass of the window, Anna sets aside her work and goes to catch them on their way in. Paul must spot them, as well; across the room, he looks up, and speaks a few words to rouse their guest.
Andreas Maler isn’t sleeping. Paul led him, earlier in the morning, to a chair by the fireplace; he hadn’t said that he was fretting about his health, but it’s obvious enough. Reasonable enough, too. Andreas looks rag and bone, a strong breeze or a cold snap away from crumbling to pieces. So Paul sat him by the fireplace, with a cup of water and a rug; he went without objection and has sat there, staring unmoving at the hearth, ever since. It takes a tap on the shoulder to catch his attention; Else watches him shake himself and turn to look at Paul, hand fisting in the fabric over his thigh. His clothes need darning, she thinks; and then, they’re not even worth it. He needs new clothes – and a haircut, and about thirty square meals to put a bit of meat back on his bones, and a poultice for the scarred skin on his hands, and time. It’s a shame they can’t give him all of it at once.
He looks up at Paul. They speak briefly, in tones too quiet for Else to catch their words as she sits with her book, waiting for the half-made cheese hung up over the countertop to drain. She closes the book, marking her page with a smooth strip of cloth; as soon as she sets it aside the door cracks open and the children pour in.
Despite Anna’s best efforts, Ulrike makes a beeline for Paul and Andreas by the fireplace; her brother hangs back, pressing a hand against the smooth wood of the table, watching. Ulrike grabs at the rug laid over their guest’s knees and asks if he knows that he has the same name as her brother – asks how he grew his hair so long, she can’t even grow hers past her shoulders without her mother cutting it shorter again – asks if he likes biscuits, because they made some with their grandma, because they told her that their parents said they had a friend staying with them, and she always likes to make food for her friends, and so they made biscuits, and she let them take some home – Andreas is carrying the basket, he’s over there by the table, it’s so funny he has the same name! – so would he like to have a biscuit? They made it specially.
It's all said with scarcely a pause to draw breath. Ulrike is a marvellous talker.
Andreas blinks.
Paul, brow creasing, holds out an arm to his daughter. “Slow down, schnucki,” he says, anxiety edging his voice. As if he worries their guest might not be able to bear the pressure of her chatter without buckling.
Andreas blinks again. He has the look of a man resurfacing from a lake. “I’m not very hungry for a biscuit right now,” he says seriously, his voice rasping, “but I appreciate the thought. Thank you very much, Mistress Mülleryn.”
“I’m not Mistress Mülleryn,” Ulrike tells him, aghast, “I’m Ulrike.”
Paul looks just as aghast at her manners – Andreas’ lips twitch into something approximating a smile. “My mistake. It’s nice to meet you, Ulrike. And you as well, Andreas.”
Andreas, standing with a hand on the table and an elbow crooked around a biscuit-basket, nods. Ulrike’s forehead wrinkles up thoughtfully. She asks, “Are you going to live here forever?”
The fire crackles, sent flickering by the air streaming in through the open door; Andreas Maler’s face drops. “I,” he says – the vowel drawn-out and stuttering; an ember spits itself out of the hearth to die on the stones of the floor. Andreas’ mouth is open. He is not speaking.
“Andreas is going to live with us for as long as he needs,” says Paul.
Ulrike tugs insistently at Andreas’ clothes. “Because, the matter is, Mama says you’re sleeping in the spare bed, and Andreas needs to lie down underneath it when he gets unhappy.”
Andreas’ eyes flicker over to her brother, standing stock-still with a hand on the table. “Oh,” he says, hoarse. “Well. Andreas can crawl under the bed if he likes. I don’t mind.”
Ulrike beams, her neck craned to look him in the eye, her nose still red with the outside’s cold. She asks brightly, “Do you know how to do a headstand?”
…
The children bring out the biscuit-basket when they dine that night; Andreas sets one on each plate, painstakingly neat. Ulrike swings her legs so excitedly she kicks the bottom of the table and makes the plates rattle. Anna sets a quiet hand on her thigh, and, grumpily, she subsides long enough for Paul to say grace.
Just like the previous night, their shadow-thin guest eats less than anyone would prefer; a few scant bites of pottage (which Anna cooked again, mostly for his sake; it’s easier on the stomach than just about anything else) and a little picking at the bread. He eats most of the biscuit, though.
Someone must have taken the children aside to tell them not to comment on his eating. Ulrike stares at him with some fascination, turning her food over with her spoon as if it’s earth that needs to be tilled, but she says nothing untoward. Her face glows golden in the candlelight.
Else eats her biscuit. It’s soft and buttery and wonderful.
…
The days go on, wending in and out of themselves like the weft threads of a tapestry, and Andreas more or less settles in.
More or less. It’s strange; a miracle no-one could have dared to imagine – a wonder Else can’t think about too much at once or it might still make her cry. Twenty-five years ago, she vaguely recalls, a visitor to the abbey told the town’s children the story of Lazarus. She wonders if the Bible passage says how his sisters felt – wonders if it describes how jarring it is to mourn someone only to have them walk through the door. Wonders if it says what to do with the grief you now hold with no object, especially when the object comes back – strange.
Else was never crying herself to sleep over the death of Andreas Maler. It did not make it hard for her to eat or sleep or pray. But she grieved; all mixed-up and confusing with all the rest there was to grieve at the time, but she grieved. She still prayed for him, every now and again, all these years on. He didn’t haunt her thoughts but he wasn’t too far off to brush by them, either. Perhaps she mourned more than she thought; perhaps his return is exacerbating it; because now that he’s back, it all makes her want to weep. It’s all so strange. It’s been eighteen years spent in ruins and wilderness; of course he’s strange. She doesn’t understand how he’s become so different. She doesn’t understand how he’s still so very much the same.
She speaks with him (of easier things), and she watches the others speak to him, too – Paul never strays too far from him unless Anna is there with her busy hands and easy talk, and the children remain ravenously curious. When they try to catch him up on the changes in town since he was last here, he listens with interest, though it seems that some things he already knows; Else tells him about her book club in town and learns that he’s read one of the books they chose, so they’re able to discuss that at length; Ulrike continually comes up to tug at his sleeves and ask that he watch her do some kind of trick. She’s recently mastered the backwards roll and is exceedingly proud of it. She’s now trying, quite insistently, to learn to do a handstand. Andreas goes dutifully to stand in the doorway, swaddled in the rug that Anna will not let him remove for fear he’ll catch a chill, and watches as she tumbles about in the melting snow. Her attempts are enthusiastic, if not skilful. Even little Andreas has gotten comfortable drawing or playing in the same room as his namesake, and when spoken to he speaks back.
At times, Andreas acts just like Else remembers. He responds to conversation with great interest and treats the children with a playful solemnity she remembers so startlingly well. But he still never quite looks anyone in the eye. There’s a tremor in his hands that hasn’t yet subsided. The marks the years have taken on him are all too clear; he remains worryingly thin – his back is hunched, his walk looking crooked and painful – when he walks up the stairs ahead of Else she catches a glimpse of a thick, ropy burn wrapped around his calf and disappearing under his filthy footwraps. He’s still in all the same clothes, fraying to bits and covered in dirt. Sometimes he acts like she remembers, but sometimes he loses the thread of conversation, growing confused and apologetic; sometimes he falters, speech catching in his throat, face twisting; sometimes he stops talking entirely, grows still, and it can take hours for him to come back to himself.
Oddly enough, it makes her think of Paul when he was small.
Andreas had always reminded her of Paul. In all fairness, during his first visit, everything reminded her of Paul; he was the centre of her world. There was little else to be reminded of. But speaking to Andreas felt a little like speaking to the kind of person she imagined Paul could become. Someone clever. Someone friendly. Someone kind – he indulged all her questions about his travels and asked her things in turn, as if any of her domestic little stories could be half as interesting. He encouraged her, quietly, to have a life outside of her marriage, and looked at her husband with an unconcealed disdain that both terrified and thrilled her – but, crucially, never where he could see or hear. Never where he could get irritated, as if Andreas knew, intrinsically, who would have to deal with that irritation once he’d gone back to the abbey or the meadow or the town commons. He spoke to Paul about art, conspiratorially, told him about shading techniques and perspectives, things he was probably a little too young to understand. He was always an odd man – prone to laughter, moving his hands in grand arcs as he spoke, forever tramping through the forest and trying to learn to spin or bake or fish, flipping from merry to grave at a moment’s notice. There was an intensity about him that she never quite knew what to do with; it was disarming.
Paul was an intense child, quiet and serious and passionate. She’s not sure if they were really so similar or if it had been wishful thinking. She always liked to imagine a Paul who could follow his passions, who could move freely, who could laugh easily. At the time it had seemed such a far-away possibility.
Now, Andreas is quieter. More hesitant. He moves as if the space he takes up is some kind of affront to decency, as if he’s trying to go unnoticed. His hands are always shaking. When asked directly how he is, he waves it off.
It’s all the parts of Paul’s younger years that Else had been so eager to see him grow out of. And Paul is always hovering nearby, trying to draw him into conversation, making sure he isn’t falling into some place inside his head where they can’t reach him. It’s a staggering reversal. It’s striking, the difference all this time has made.
But time goes on, all the same. The sun keeps rising and falling. Else digs out her copy of the book she’d bought from poor Claus a year ago and they flip through its passages together. Ulrike discovers that her handstands are a lot steadier if she leans her legs against the wall. Andreas is allowed to look at one of the children’s private drawings, which he is assured is high praise; and at Anna’s gentle nudging, he consents to meeting with some of the other folk in town, a little at a time.
…
Ever the light sleeper, Else wakes when she hears the door shoved shut.
She’s sitting up before she’s even processed that it’s still pitch dark; the sky outside her window is still a soft velvety black, the soft warp of the glass obscuring the stars. It’s colder than it should be. There are goosebumps running up her arms, under the sleeves of her shift. The outside of the window is frosted over, just slightly. The house is silent.
Else stands – legs tingling with cold as she pushes the blankets back – to look at the window more closely. She doesn’t know the time; only that it’s still dark. If she can see the sky beginning to lighten, or windows burning in town, she’ll know it’s almost morning. The frost makes it difficult to see, so she cracks it open.
No light in the sky; no light in town, from what little she can see. But she hears speaking, the tail end of a sentence she doesn’t quite catch; her eyes snag on the white-grey snow dusting the hillside, slowly turning to slush, and the dim shapes marring it, just a little away from the house.
There’s a few silent moments; speech, again, that she can’t make out. A breeze kicks up, cool air swirling in through the crack of her window, carrying the sound to the glass. Distantly, she hears, “… Paul?”
“Hey.” Paul’s voice is quiet. “What are you doing out here, Andreas? It’s the middle of the night.”
The stars glitter in the sky, a tapestry of light. The moon is half-full. “I,” Andreas says, stuttering; a pause; “I left the door open.”
Paul’s voice says, “I closed it.”
“They’ll be cold.” Another dragged-out pause; the faint dark form of Andreas, curled up on the snow, shifts. The indistinct voice is scratchy, with all the strength of the twiggy end of a tree branch scraping at the shingles of a roof. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re the one sitting in the snow. Aren’t you cold?”
Distantly, an owl calls. Andreas says, “Not really.”
Paul’s silhouette shifts. “Really?” he asks, and then it moves again. “Come inside. You’re going to make yourself ill.”
(Else can’t see either of them clearly – as anything more than vague blots on a lighter backdrop – but she can imagine what Paul is seeing, clear as day. Andreas’ wrists are narrow as chicken-feet. His face is seamed and sallow. They’ve not yet seen him eat a full meal – he hardly seems ready to be gadding about in the snow at all hours.)
“I’m not cold,” Andreas says. “I’m –” and he falters, the word choking itself out before he can move on to the next.
“Andreas,” says Paul, the sound of it fluttering on the breeze, “I’m worried about you. What are you doing?”
A pause. When Andreas speaks, there’s a wretched rasp to it. “I didn’t mean to bother you.”
“I’d rather be bothered than leave you here to freeze,” Paul says – the end of the sentence raised loud enough that Else doesn’t have to strain so much to hear it. It drops lower again. “Please come inside, Andreas.”
Perhaps the breeze shifts directions, then, so she can no longer make out their words; perhaps they speak more quietly; perhaps they don’t speak anymore at all. But after several seconds of silence she sees their dim shapes shifting and slinking back along the snow. Paul holds Andreas’ elbow. They vanish from view, lost in the shadows of the house; distantly, Else hears the door be nudged open and pulled closed again. She hears the muffled pattern of footsteps.
Outside, the wind blows frozen cold. She can make out the distant silhouette of town. It looks odd without the low tower of the church standing out above it all.
She can hear muted voices downstairs; the sharp sound of a fire being struck. With one last glance at the spangled pattern of the stars, Else pulls the window shut.
…
It’s been eighteen years since Lenhardt died, and some days Else still can’t quite rid herself of him. On those days, she moves carefully; steps, by instinct, over the boards that creak, and she does not speak unless spoken to, and the children’s playing drives her almost to tears. (Ulrike’s romping frightens her; Andreas’ muttering, the withdrawn way he waves his toys about, fills her with dread.)
When other losses fill her memory, she lights a candle in their name. But there is no time when she is less likely to pray in her husband’s honour than when she feels like she is still with him. Like she can’t peel herself away, no matter how she tries. The more she remembers, the less she wishes him well; it’s a sad testament to his character, and probably a just one. Lenhardt Müller was not a loved man. His wife and son were too busy adjusting to their relief to mourn him.
It isn’t that he was heartless; that he could display no better qualities. In the beginning, Else quite liked him. He was a bit overbearing, but she’s always been passive; she needed someone who could take charge. (She thinks. He might have said something to that effect an awful lot. She doesn’t know if that makes it less true.) She’s sure she liked him; sometimes, at some points. It’s confusing. She wants to remember clearly but the days she most remembers are the days she likes him least.
She doesn’t know how Paul feels, these days. It’s not something they talk about. But the beginning, which she thinks was better, was long before he was old enough to remember; by the time Paul was older than six or seven, the easy times were precious few and far between. Neither of them could ever do anything well enough to please him, no matter how they tried. And they did try, up until they couldn’t.
Else was the one to drag Paul through the mill door; Paul was the one to shout at his father that it was over.
They tried until there was nothing else to give, and then they gave up; very quickly, all at once. And it felt like deliverance.
She thinks, sometimes, on days when she can’t stop thinking about him, that he would despise them now. Paul’s gentle hand with his children would fill him with scorn. He’d mock Anna’s cooking and easy talk; if he saw her light-heartedly scolding Paul for forgetting to wipe the dirt off his shoes before he came inside, and handing him a rag to wipe the floorboards with, Else thinks that mere words would be insufficient to express his disgust. And Andreas –
If anyone had ever asked Lenhardt to open his home to a man who could offer him nothing in return, deep in the throes of a decades-long crisis that left him half-starved and alone in the ruins of the abbey that burned down around him, Lenhardt would have laughed. He would have thought it absurd; an impossibility; he would have thought Andreas’ state great sport. He would never have imagined that anyone would think differently.
Paul didn’t even have to be asked.
Lenhardt never believed in kindness. It was a fancy name the craven used to mask their frailty. To him, there was only cruelty and cowardice; it was a miserable worldview, Else thinks, and if she had not had to live under it for so long she might even pity him for it.
If Lenhardt could see how they live now, he would be appalled; and on days when Else can’t shake off the weight of his ghost, it’s that thought that gives her the most strength.
…
Paul is working in the granary shed, standing amongst sacks and sacks of grain. The wind whistles through the slats of the wall, the gap between the door and the doorframe; cold pours in from the little windows cut in near the roof. The shed is always cold; built that way, so it works as something of a storehouse. He looks up when Else comes in.
She wipes off a hand on her skirt. “Sorry to interrupt,” she says. “I’m just fetching something for Andreas.”
Paul almost replies – pauses. Quirks a brow. “Maler or Müller?” he asks, with a twist to his lips.
Else smiles. “Müller.”
Paul huffs a laugh; Else steps over a sagging sack to search through one of the low shelves. She has to crouch to reach it in a way that makes her back protest. (She is, she thinks with some dissatisfaction, beginning to get old.) At least she finds the pen – Andreas’ favourite, a little reed thing sharpened to a wisp, often left about the house in odd places. The granary is a favourite, and he never remembers to look there, and then he starts fussing.
The chill wind whistles through the slats. When Else picks up the pen, stained with dark ink that smudges slightly along the heel of her hand, and turns, she sees Paul bent over his tools. She can’t see most of his face, but his brows seem drawn more than usual, and he’s absent-mindedly picking at the skin around his thumbnail.
“Paul,” Else says, and he turns. “Are you all right?”
Paul’s face does something complicated, too quickly for her to follow.
Ah. It’s like this, then; Paul has such a tendency to fixate on things until they seem insurmountable, and he never seems to just talk about it. Else tucks the pen into her belt pocket. She asks, “What are you fretting about?”
“I’m not –” Paul starts, sounding not far off from a petulant youth; a strand of hair falls in his face and he sighs. “I would actually like to talk it over. I’m worried about Andreas.” A moment’s pause; he adds, “Maler.”
“The poor man certainly gives us enough to worry about,” Else says wryly. She’d left him in the sitting room, Anna keeping an eye on Ulrike as she tried to clamber over his knees. He seemed alright, as he goes. His hands had been trembling, but Else isn’t sure they’re ever still.
Paul scrapes at the skin by his thumbnail. “He keeps apologising,” he says, pushes his hair out of his face. “I don’t – I want to help him, but I don’t know what to do.”
Else presses her lips together, steps over one of the sacks. “You’re doing a lot already,” she says. “Don’t sell it short.”
“But it isn’t –” Paul falters, shoves his hair back again. The cool air of the granary keeps sending it askew. His hands are clenching.
“Careful of your hands, schätzchen,” Else says. Paul huffs, half-amused, but he stops picking at his nails. She says, “I know. I don’t like to see him like this either. I wish it were an easier thing to fix, but…”
Paul tucks his thumb into a loose fist. “I know,” he echoes. “I just – it’s just so much.”
(It is a lot. Else wouldn’t think of herself – or of her son – as any strangers to hardship; they’ve seen enough grief, if not directly experienced it themselves, that should give them some kind of rough understanding of tragedy. But trying to help rehabilitate a person who feigned their death and spent close to two decades in near-total isolation, in ruins and wilderness – it’s not something that they’ve built any background for. It’s not something anyone is at all prepared for.)
“He always seemed larger than life when I was a kid,” Paul says, more than a little desperately. “All the stories about travelling and university – and he encouraged me to draw, when I was little. I thought he was the most interesting person in the world. I mourned him more than I mourned Dad.”
The grain sacks lie on the floor, choking around his ankles. Else lets him talk.
“It helped me so much,” Paul says. “He probably didn’t realise – didn’t mean to – but it was so important to me, and now he needs help, and Mum, I don’t know what to do.”
Else pulls him into a hug.
(He’s so much taller than her, these days, but it still feels like lifting that fretful little boy onto her lap. She thinks, somehow, that it always will.)
“Do you remember,” she says over his shoulder, “staying with the townsfolk after the revolt?”
Everything had been such a mess, then; everyone lost and terrified and clinging to one another, all the children crying without pause and too many people still reeling to properly reassure them. Paul and Else ran from the mill when given the chance; sprinted down the hill, stumbling, and fled into the town square. Grett had seen them through the window she was shuttering and ushered them into the bakery.
They’d smelled the smoke before they’d seen it. They hadn’t gone back to the mill at all for days. First because there was too much to do – almost everyone in town discarding half of their regular work to help Father Thomas with the corpses needing proper burial or to Agnes Steinauryn and Doctor Stolz with the wounded. (Mostly Agnes – the doctor had wanted little assistance.) Everyone was bereaved, grieving; Else and Paul stayed with whoever was kind enough to host them until they gathered strength enough to go back to living in the mill. It took weeks.
It was a difficult time for everyone, and still there were some who found the generosity to host them, and the patience, too.
Else wasn’t easy to live with, then; or, rather, she’d been too easy. Lenhardt was a fresh wound that hadn’t had time to scab; he’d been gearing up to one of his worse phases when it was cut short, and something inside Else was still preparing for it. She was fidgety and high-strung, scarcely spoke for fear of insulting their hosts, apologised excessively at every minor misstep – of which there were many. Nerves made her clumsy. She was a nightmare to be around, and for much less good reason than most of Tassing.
Grett – who they stayed with the most – was endlessly forbearing. She talked a lot, of both the small things and the large; reassured Else at every turn; was so kind that thinking of it moves her to tears, even now. She hopes she was able to return a fraction of that compassion for Grett’s loss. It was an awful time for so many, and no-one had the power to make it easy; but Grett, and Anna, and so many others in town, made it a little easier.
Else feels Paul nod more than she sees it. She squeezes his shoulder and pulls away. “Andreas,” she says gently, “has been thinking a certain way for a very long time. He’s become used to living with these ideas. It’s not a weed that can be uprooted in one pull.”
Paul wraps his arms around his middle. He asks, “Then what do I do?”
The wind whistles through the slats; Else can’t suppress a smile. “Paul, schatzi, you don’t need me to tell you how to be patient, or how to be kind. Just keep doing what you have been. Let him improve at his own pace. I’d wager you’ve already done more than you think.”
He’s so much taller than her, now, but when he nods, she sees him as he ever was; small and solemn and earnest, with gentle hands and the kindest heart in Tassing.
“Andreas will be all right,” she says with certainty. With her son to help him, how could he not?
…
At length, Andreas is persuaded to go into town. Anna sets a time with some of the women – her friends, some of them, and some merely concerned parties – who have offered to help with the issue of his hair. It hasn’t gotten any better; it’s too much and too messy to comb, and it must weigh him down something awful. Anna says they’ll get it all cut off and neatened out. Andreas looks anxious – wringing his hands with ineffective unease – but he says nothing against the plan, even when asked directly. (Else wouldn’t be surprised if, perhaps, he were attached to the beard, or afraid of the change; to be fair, there’s little Andreas Maler could do at this point that would be surprising, poor soul. But when she asks he says it needs to be done; that it will be a relief to be rid of it. She hopes, for his sake, that he’s telling the truth.)
Anna takes him out in the mid-afternoon, with a promise to be back by sundown.
They fulfil that promise, though they certainly leave it to the last minute; Paul has just come down to eat after finishing the bulk of the work he’d planned to do for the day, and Ulrike and Andreas are setting the table (a task they regard with great gravity). Else carries the larger dishes, though Ulrike begs to be allowed to put the plate of pretzels on the table. The large crockery is too heavy for the children to hold; and besides, they’d have to stand on a chair to reach the middle of the tabletop.
Ulrike is trying to argue that she ought to be repaid for this slight with an extra pretzel at dinnertime when the door creaks open, sending the low, soft sun flooding over the floor. Anna steps inside, and with her – it takes a little more attention than usual for Else not to drop the dinnerware.
It’s not that he’s unrecognisable. Quite the contrary – the hair is clipped short, almost to the scalp, and the beard is all cut away; without the overpowering tangle of grey mixed with the original ruddy blonde, Else can actually see his face, and it’s so astoundingly familiar. His skin is still just as weathered, wrinkles dug into his brow, his cheeks all too hollow; but by God, it’s him. Else sets the dish she holds down carefully on the table.
Andreas has gotten some new clothes too, it seems; simple, clean things, that must have been gifted from some of the women, hand-me-downs from their husbands and brothers and children. The fabric is wrapped tight around his frame. Even so, it gapes.
“Andreas,” Else says. (Her grandson looks up.) “Look at you! I almost didn’t recognise you.”
(She can see his face now – the quirk of his lips, the slope of his nose, his jaw. She can actually see him.)
Andreas runs a self-conscious hand over the shorn back of his head. “It feels strange,” he says. “I keep expecting to feel it.”
From the basin where he’s washing his hands, not turning to face the door, Paul calls, “I felt the same when I cut my hair off a while ago. But you get used to it – or it grows out again.” He dries his hands on a little towel; turns around, startles. “Oh, that’s very different.”
Andreas nods, tugging the door closed behind him.
“I think it suits him,” Anna says.
“The beard was silly,” Ulrike agrees seriously. “It’s good it’s gone. Mum, can I have an extra pretzel?”
Anna looks at Else. “What else is there?”
“Vegetable pottage,” Else says, which is a given – a simple soup seems about as much as Andreas is able to get down, though she thinks he’s eating a bit more of it, now – “and salmon.”
“Only if you eat your pottage and your salmon,” Anna tells her daughter, and Ulrike makes a face.
Little Andreas is staring from behind the table. Quietly, he says, “You’re wearing a vest like mine.”
Andreas blinks, looks down at himself. “So I am, Master Müller,” he says, “thought I think yours is a prettier colour.”
“Yours doesn’t fit you,” Ulrike tells him importantly.
“I can alter it,” Else says, “if it’s really too big.” It would be easy enough to hem the excess fabric away with loose stitches, easy enough to cut to let the garments out again once he’s put on a little weight.
They all sit down to eat, talking quietly through the meal. Ulrike powers grimly through her food to earn her second pretzel; Andreas eats most of a bowl of pottage and a forkful of salmon, which feels, maybe, like some kind of progress. When it’s all finished, Paul begins stacking up the dishes to ready them for washing; Anna takes the children upstairs to begin getting ready for bed. Andreas sits, with his fingers pressed flat against the wood grain.
Paul shakes his head. “I just can’t believe it,” he says, and Andreas looks up from the tabletop. “Sorry, you just – you look so different.”
“So people keep saying,” Andreas says with a half-smile. “You’re making me curious.”
Else glances at him; Paul stops so abruptly the dishes clatter in his hands. “You haven’t seen it?” Else asks, with some astonishment; Andreas shakes his head.
Paul sets down the dishes. “Do you want to see?” he asks. “I can go fetch my glass.”
The surface of the table is smooth, the edges sanded down so the children can’t bruise themselves on the corners. Andreas says, “Don’t – don’t trouble yourself.”
“It’s just upstairs,” Paul replies. He’s already walking. “I’ll go get it. No bother at all, honestly. You should get to see what you look like!”
He’s gone before either of the others can make any reply.
Just a moment later, he comes quickly down the stairs again, brandishing an object with particular determination. Paul’s shaving mirror is small, a little glass oval with a metal handle and a flat base. The glass can be angled with creaky hinges at the sides. It’s a convenient little thing, and the only mirror in the house that can be easily moved by hand.
Paul carefully secures the tilt of the mirror against the handle and holds it out. “You need to see,” he insists. “You look like a different person than you did this morning. It suits you.”
Andreas takes it, rather gingerly. (Else wonders how long it’s been since he’s seen himself reflected in anything clearer than the dull sheen of metal utensils, or the rippled surface of a pond.) He twists it, so that it’s angled toward his face, held a distance away from his body with a callused hand; he looks into the glass.
There is a moment where nothing happens. The fire spits, throwing its orange-gold light against the mirrored gleam of the glass, over the shapes and shadows of his face.
Slowly, he raises a hand; his fingers press at his jaw, brush over the hollow of his cheek, the downturned edge of his lips. He presses hard enough that he must be able to feel the teeth through the skin; all bone-hard edges and the firm press of skin, still a little raw from shaving. His eyes don’t move from the surface of the mirror; he holds it in his hand by the heavy handle, still and steady as breathing.
And Andreas Maler bursts into tears.
It’s sudden, desperate, ugly; almost dropping the mirror with spasming hands, face twisted, the heel of his hand pressed bruisingly to his cheek, fingers grasping at the strands of his shorn-off hair. Paul, wide-eyed, catches the mirror and sets it hurriedly down. Else stands, feet stuttering against the floor at the same time Andreas’ elbow cracks loudly against the tabletop. He’s sobbing with such force that it frightens her – it sounds like he might be trying to speak, but she can’t make out a single word. She pulls the looking-glass away, further down the table so he can’t knock it over by accident. Paul sets a hand on Andreas’ back.
“Hey,” he’s saying, voice tilting, “hey, Andreas,” and Andreas is slumped heavily over the table, trembling, his voice cracking hoarse on every breath. Paul drags out the next chair over with his foot, brought so close the legs bump together, and sits down; only when he’s on the same level does he take his hand from Andreas’ back, and only then to put his arm around him, elbow crooking around his shoulders. Else is scrambling for a handkerchief and a glass of water. Andreas keeps weeping. Else doesn’t think that, even since his return, she’s ever once heard him cry. (Certainly not like this – never like this – like an open wound, like the ragged weight of tumbling stone, like a shot deer seeing the light of God.) “It’s all right,” Paul is saying, like it’s a benediction. “It’s all right. You’re safe, Andreas. We can help, all right? You don’t have to do this alone.”
When Else turns to set the mugs down on the table, Paul’s eyes are shining; Andreas is weeping like a snowmelt-fed river, cheeks splotched with colour, clinging to her son’s sleeve as if the weld-dyed cloth is stitching him together at the seams. The fire bathes them in its glow; flickering out over the hearth, warm and bright as a second sun.