He stroked life into her body; he awakened her. “You are so beautiful, I love women who are not anorexic.
Like you, you’re so alive.”
She became violently jealous of all the women he had made love to.
“How do you know that I’m so alive?”
“I feel it, even though you’re in your shell. I’m going to peel it from you, pluck your shell off, and show you to the world.”
She thought it was just something that a man would say, but she gave herself to him, totally.
She had never made love as a grown woman. After her child, her life came to an end.
Fragments of discussions between her father and Flora. Flora like an attack terrier: “It’s not just protecting her, you have to let her get well. We can’t do this here at home. You can’t, I can’t. She has to go to a clinic.”
She listened to her father’s footsteps, how doors slammed, how it thundered and shook through the entire house.
Finally he allowed a psychiatrist come to the house to examine her. He spoke of what happened and called it a miscarriage.
“You have to go on,” said the psychiatrist. “You have your whole life in front of you.”
He did not realize that for her, the reverse was true.
Yes, all the experts came to see her. He bought the best ones there were. Talk, talk, talk. He let her come with him on his trips, put her in the firm. Numbers and calculations, but nothing stayed in her mind. He brought home an electric typewriter, and Flora covered the keys so that she couldn’t see them. She learned
When Flora traveled to Maderia with her, her father set her up in his bedroom.
“Sleep in my room, so you can see when I fall asleep and when I wake up. If I have done you wrong in life, know that I didn’t mean it, I’ve only wanted the best for you, Justine; you are all I have left of what was once my whole world. You are all I have left.”
“What about Flora?” she whispered.
“Flora? Oh yes, of course, Flora, too.”
She lay in Flora’s bed, on Flora’s pillow. She saw her father with new eyes. She saw that he had long ago passed his youth. His hair was no longer brown, but thinner and drab; his eyebrows shot out like bushes. He was sitting on the chair by Flora’s vanity. He was looking in the mirror.
“What do you wish for in life, Justine?” he asked, and he had resignation in his bearing.
She had no answer.
He leaned forward over the table.
“That man who… came so close to you? You don’t have to tell me who he was. But… was he important to you?”
She ran away from him wearing her nightgown. Stood behind the door and refused to talk.
Her father had to coax and cajole. He handed her the horn, as if that would help, as if she still were a little girl that could be comforted with a musical instrument.
The horn’s mouthpiece against her lips, the song of the horn.
She turned around, reflected in his eyes; his eyes were filled with pain. She wanted to cling to him and disappear into nothing. She was his only daughter, with great sorrow.
After some time, she began to stabilize. Flora had great patience. Whenever her sister came to visit, that was all they talked about, Flora’s great, endless patience.
“You’re certainly giving her just as good care as she would have gotten in a mental hospital,” said Viola, smelling like perfume and flowers. “It must give her a sense of security to have you around her. And it gives him some peace of mind, too.”
“It wouldn’t make any difference whether she were here or in a hospital; she hardly makes a fuss these days. And Sven feels better, having her here at home. His little girl.”
She said the last words with a bit of sarcasm.
Viola crossed her nylon-covered legs, and called Justine over.
“If I took you into the city, Justine, bought you a dress.”
“Believe me,” said Flora. “We’ve bought her so many clothes! I can’t stop you, but it’s a wasted effort. She never wears new things. At the very most, she will put it on for one day, and then she’ll never wear it again. She says that it feels uncomfortable and affected. But it doesn’t really matter. I mean, she hardly ever leaves the house.”
“Don’t give up, Flora. Clothes create grace and bearing. It could be a way to help return her to normal.”
Flora lowered her voice.
“Normal! That child has never been normal! It’s genetic, an inheritance from her mother. She has also been, let’s just say, a little unusual, to put it mildly. Now I’m attempting to give her basic knowledge about running a house. That won’t be wasted. And once Sven and I are old, she can care for herself and for us. Then she’ll be of some use, both to her and to us. A human being has to have some value; that’s among the most important things in life, to be useful.”
Viola could not understand why Flora didn’t hire help for the house or the garden. Married into wealth and still no additional household help.
“You could sit here like a member of the nobility and just be waited on. And you would still be valuable as the wife of the well-known Sven Dalvik, just that alone.”
Flora had her unusual reasons.
“I don’t want strangers in my home. This is my territory.”
The territory became Justine’s as well. Slowly, she greased herself into it, although Flora didn’t realize that. Wearing her father’s cast-off overalls, she scrubbed the walls and the floors in the house. Spring and fall, year after year.
In the water were a few drops of blood from a cut on her finger.
Chapter TWO
The day her father died, she was working her hardest up in the attic. She usually began at the top and slowly worked her way down. She was on her knees, scrubbing and scrubbing. The floor boards cut into her knees and the pain felt good to her. The raw wood, the smell of well-scrubbed pine.
Then from far below a draft of cold air. She heard Flora call. Her father had collapsed on the outer stairs. He had lost a shoe. Mechanically, she took off his other shoe. Her hands were still damp from the cleaning water.
Together they managed to pull him into the blue room. Flora ran up and down the stairs, changing clothes, smoking.
“You should change clothes, too, if you’re coming with us. You can’t wear those overalls.”
She sat with her father’s head in her lap. It felt hard and little.
Only one of them could ride in the ambulance. Justine took the Opel. She had gotten the Opel as a present for her thirty-fifth birthday. She followed closely behind the ambulance with its shrieking sirens.
As she already realized, there was nothing that could be done. A worn-out doctor took them aside to a room. She remembered a bandage over a cut on her father’s throat. She sat and wondered what he’d done. Did he cut himself? Or was it a hickey? She thought of anything and everything in that room, just not her father.
“So here’s what’s going on. At the most, he’ll manage to live through the night. I want you to be aware of this.”
“We’re aware,” she said.
Flora became angry. She scratched her hands like paws. “How much do you want… to do your utmost?”
“My dear Mrs. Dalvik, there are some things that can’t be bought. We have done our utmost.”
They sat, one on each side.
“Poor Justine,” said Flora. “I don’t think you realize how serious this is.”
Her cheeks were spotty with mascara. Justine had never seen her cry before. The sniffling bothered her; she wanted to be left alone with her father. She thought of death as a woman, maybe her mother, who had been sent
