The Woman Who Heard Color (4 page)

She walked around to the side of the building, staring up, wishing her sister’s face might appear. A woman stepped out on an upper balcony, stared down, then walked back in. Finally Hanna decided she must go to the back, to the servants’ entrance.

After several knocks an older woman came to the door.
“Guten Tag,”
she said, greeting Hanna with a smile.

“Grüss Gott,”
Hanna replied.

“You’ve come to seek work?” the woman asked.

“I’ve come to visit my sister Käthe.”

A smile of recognition spread slowly across the woman’s face. “
Ja
, I can see you are Käthe’s sister.
Bitte
, do come in.” She stood back, holding the door for Hanna. There was a narrow hall just inside the door and two sets of stairs, one leading up and one leading down. She motioned for Hanna to follow and they started down the steps. The smell of roasting meat laced the air, and Hanna imagined Käthe at work, preparing one of the lavish meals she had described in her letters. The woman asked her to sit in a room that appeared to be a dining area for the help, as there was nothing fancy about it. Two long wooden tables with roughly hewed benches were arranged in the center of the room. A fireplace stood against one wall, and a door on the other. The woman went through the door, and the warm smells grew stronger as the aroma of dinner drifted out and into the room where Hanna waited.

Within seconds Käthe appeared, wiping her hands on her apron, brushing a dusting of flour from her cheek, a wide, surprised grin lighting up her pretty, round face.

“Hanna,” she shrieked, throwing her arms around her sister. “Whatever are you doing here in Munich?”

“I’ve come to visit.”

“You’ve grown!” Käthe exclaimed, still smiling as if this were a good thing.

Hanna realized that she was now taller than Käthe. Bigger, too, in every way. Over the past months Hanna’s chest had gotten larger, as had her hips, causing her to question if she’d ever stop growing.

Käthe’s grin turned to a look of concern. “Everything is fine at home?”

“Fine?” Hanna replied with a sharp edge, wondering if Käthe understood that nothing had been fine at home since their father married Gerta, the tailor’s widow from Kempton, with her commands and demands and her whiny little daughter, Dora.

“You should have informed me that you were coming,” Käthe said.

“I didn’t know myself,” Hanna replied, the words catching in her throat, “that I . . .” How could she explain that she had simply left? Without telling anyone, not even Leni. She had not planned this visit, so she could not have let Käthe know she was coming.

She could barely believe it was just this morning that she was digging potatoes and baking bread with Leni, arguing with Dora over bringing in wood for the stove, commending Peter for his helpfulness, an image playing in her head all the while—her stepmother sitting in a café in Weitnau, sipping a nice warm cup of tea, nibbling on a bakery-made pastry. Hanna had told Leni she was going out to pee, but had instead run upstairs to the girls’ room, dug into the middle drawer of the dresser she shared with her sisters, slipped the coins—saved from her egg money and hidden under her pantaloons—into her pocket, placed Käthe’s most recent letter in the other, and then quietly tiptoed down the stairs, stepped out of the house, hurried down the lane toward the main road, and caught a ride with their neighbor Herr Hinkel. She told him she was going to Kempton on an errand for her father.

“Father is well?” Käthe asked in a soft voice.

Hanna nodded.

“The others? The children?”

“Leni is fine.” Leni was ten, still so much a little girl, the obedient daughter. Hanna doubted she would ever want to do anything other than tend to
küch
and
kinder
, kitchen and children, that she was perfectly content to peel potatoes, look after the little ones, and do exactly as she was told by Gerta. “Peter, as sweet as ever.”

Käthe smiled. At five, Peter was a delight. He had been so young when their mother became ill that he had received much of his tending from the two older girls.

“Dora, as spoiled as ever,” Hanna added. Their stepsister was just two months younger than Peter, but whined like a baby. “Karl is almost as tall as Father, and Frederick is in love with Helga Merkel.”

Käthe nodded knowingly. Käthe the romantic. Then she sighed with what Hanna perceived as homesickness. Neither girl mentioned their stepmother. “It is so wonderful to see you, to have news from home, but you have not chosen the most joyful time to come for a visit.” She took Hanna’s arm and led her down the hall. “The mistress,” she whispered as they entered a tiny nunlike cell, one of many off the long narrow hall, “she is not well.” She patted the quilt spread over the narrow bed butted up against the wall and the girls sat. Taking her younger sister’s hands in hers, Käthe asked, “You’ve brought nothing with you?”

Hanna shook her head and lowered it, the excitement of this grand adventure again overtaken with the enormity of what she had done. “Father doesn’t know,” she said softly.

Abruptly Käthe released Hanna’s hands, and her own rose to her mouth, reminding Hanna how everything had been so dramatic with Käthe. She wondered if life in the Fleischmann household was truly as exciting and lively as she’d written in her letters, and if her sister, who surely must have been confined to the kitchen, could really be aware of the activities she’d described taking place in the dining room, the parlor, and the music room.

“Oh, Hanna, you haven’t run away from home?” Käthe squealed in horror.

Hanna nodded.

“Father will be so worried.”

“If he should even notice I’m missing . . .” Hanna giggled nervously, but wondered how she could ever face her father again. She replayed the thoughts that had moved in her mind on her walk through the city. “Is there work for me here? Could I get a position like you?”

“You plan to stay?”

Hanna raised her shoulders.

“Perhaps,” Käthe replied thoughtfully. “Brigitte has gone back home to tend her mother who is very ill. I will ask Frau Metzger, the head housekeeper. But first we must send word to Father. We must post a letter immediately to let him know you are safe, that you are here with me.” Again she took her sister’s hand and held it tightly, then touched Hanna’s face. They had not seen each other for almost six months, since Käthe had come to visit last Easter. “You have grown into a lovely young woman. You look very much like Mother.” She reached over and lifted a braid, wrapping it around Hanna’s crown. “So very much like Mother,” she said.

Everyone in the family had hair with a touch of red, from Frederick’s dark auburn to Leni’s blond, which in a certain light held a hint of ginger. But Hanna’s, more than anyone else’s, resembled their mother’s, which was a fiery red. Hanna generally covered it with a good bandana because people stared, but she had neglected to cover it in her hurry.

Käthe planted a kiss on her cheek. “Oh, my dear sweet little sister, what have you done?” She studied Hanna for several moments, and then said, “I will speak with Frau Metzger, but first a letter to Father.” She knelt on the floor, pulled a box from under the bed, and took out paper and pen. She scribbled a note and sealed it in an envelope. “I will ask Frau Stadler to post it when she goes to market early tomorrow morning.”

Having brought nothing other than the skirt and blouse she wore, Hanna slept in her chemise and bloomers that night, snuggled against Käthe’s side. She woke often, an excitement jumping inside her, anticipating this new life that she was about to begin.

The following morning, Käthe talked to Frau Metzger and came back with a long dark skirt, white blouse, and starched apron. “You are about the same size as Brigitte and these should fit perfectly.” She handed the uniform to Hanna. “Congratulations, you are now an employee of Herr Moses Fleischmann.”

The Fleischmann home was indeed as beautiful as Käthe had described, and over the next days, as she received instructions from Frau Metzger, Hanna was able to explore nearly every corner. Heavy velvet drapes hung in the formal rooms on the ground floor. The doorframes were made of smooth, rich marble from Italy, or carved wood, one in the shape of a mythical figure with the face of a lion and the claws and wings of an eagle. The walls in the parlor were covered with flocked paper in deep, rich red. The walls and ceilings in the library and music room were made from luscious dark wood. The fine carpets, Frau Metzger told Hanna, had been imported from the Orient. Pots of shiny green ferns grew inside, which to a farmer’s daughter was very strange, and made her giggle, but they were also beautiful and exotic, as was everything in the Fleischmann home. Hanna had truly entered a new world. And the sculptures displayed on pedestals in various rooms, the pictures that hung on the walls—she had never seen anything like them. She had seen paintings of saints and angels and the Lamb of God in the church at Weitnau, but nothing like these. Scenes of nature done in the most unusual colors, and paintings and sculptures of women, slightly draped or completely nude. And mythical figures like those described in the books they had borrowed from the library.

A piano, shining and finely polished—Hanna knew because she polished it herself—stood in the music room, though it sat quietly without music. There were no parties, no entertaining of important guests as Käthe had described in her letters. The few dinners in those first weeks were attended only by Herr Fleischmann’s bookkeeper or banker in very austere businesslike settings. Käthe said it was because of the mistress, but she was sure that she would get better, and soon there would be dinners and parties again, she promised.

Even after a full week, Hanna had barely laid eyes on Herr Fleischmann, who rose early to go to the gallery and returned late. He was a stout man with dark curly hair, who spoke in a slow, deliberate, thoughtful tone. His voice was the color of the deep violet-blue of the Alpine gentian.

Hanna did not see the mistress of the house. She did not clean her room just down the hall from Herr Fleischmann’s room, which she cleaned and dusted and swept with a little sweeper with wheels and a moving brush that was much handier than the broom they used at home.

Frau Fleischmann took her meals in her room, delivered by Frau Hirsch, a kindly older woman with eyes as large and brown as the cows on the farm. Frau Hirsch was the only one who attended to Frau Fleischmann. Hanna was told by Freda, who worked as the laundress, that Frau Hirsch had been employed by Frau Fleischmann’s family since the mistress was a child and had come with her when she married Herr Fleischmann just two years after the first Frau Fleischmann had passed away.

The second Frau Fleischmann, Hanna learned, was much younger than her husband. A daughter from the first marriage lived in Berlin and was married to a wealthy jeweler. She infrequently visited the house of her father. She did not like her stepmother. Even though Hanna had met neither of them, she, too, decided she did not like the stepmother. She understood how it felt to have a woman come, disrupt the entire household, and attempt to take the place of your mother. Hanna had also left the house of her father to seek a new life. Oh, that she would have had a wealthy jeweler from Berlin come to her rescue, to shower her with diamonds and love.

Hanna’s duties involved a variety of tasks—dusting, sweeping, polishing, watering the plants, cleaning the lampshades, scrubbing the bathrooms, serving meals. The part she liked best was dusting the frames on the numerous pictures that hung along the walls in the hall and in every room. She was instructed not to touch the paintings themselves. Some were enormous in large gilt frames, others smaller drawings without color. Just as she was getting used to one, getting to like it, or deciding that she did not like it, it would disappear. Frau Metzger explained it had been taken back to the gallery to show or had possibly been sold.

One day, as Hanna was carefully running the cloth along the lower edge of the frame of a new painting that had arrived the previous afternoon, staring up at the colors, studying the thickness of the paint in one particular area, wondering how the artist knew how to do it like that, daydreaming a little, a voice from behind startled her.

“Cézanne.”

Hanna easily recognized the voice as Herr Fleischmann’s, and it frightened her because she realized that she was not dusting as efficiently as Frau Metzger expected. Though the woman had never scolded her, as her stepmother might have, she’d once told Hanna that she worked too slowly. But if the paintings had remained the same, perhaps she could have worked more quickly. And this one was so different from anything Hanna had ever seen. The colors were brilliant. The paint seemed to dance and vibrate. At first she was unable to determine exactly what it was, but the more she looked, she could make out the shapes of a mountain, a grove of trees. She discovered if she stood back, rather than examine it up close, the strokes of paint would blend together and it actually became a scene. Hanna wondered how the artist did that, and smiled at the thought that he had painted it with a brush twice the length of his arm.