A House Too Small: And Other Stories

Hester’s Folly

123 Hester’sFolly How still the night is. The queen surely sleeps, protected by a lady keeping a faithful, loving watch there Libretto from Il Trovatore It shot out of the sky. Like a cannon ball, the thing plummeted to earth. It trailed a red and white plume that looked like something being peeled, perhaps ripped, off something else. It had rained the night before . Water pooled in troughs. Just beyond the cowshed, where on clear days outdoor milking was once a joy, the ground it struck was moist. At great speed it whistled down, hissing as it went, like an angry witch. The impact made a loud plunking sound. It reminded the girl of cows’ hooves emerging from mud. Instantly, air rushed in, trying to fill the hole, for Nature abhors a vacuum. But the object was not freed. It went in deeper, entering the yielding earth with great force. Although the girl did not yet realize it, the deadly power of gravity was spurred by conflict. A House Too Small 124 “Secret, yes. Disguise, no,” Frau Anneke Gluckel, the girl’s foster mother decided on the day that Hester was “given” to her. When Anneka and her husband lived in the village, before moving to the farmlands, she loved her neighbor, the beautiful Jewish woman with dark eyes and black hair who had only one child, little Hester. Frau Gluckel had no children of her own. She was my best friend. We shared the delight of confidences . . . love beyond love . . . loneliness . . . longing. . . . Things that women tell each other and nobody else, without fear of betrayal. “I will save her.” Those last words passed from one woman to another as a declaration of the deepest reciprocal affection. Days later, without time for farewell, Hester’s mother disappeared , and her father too. They were put in a cattle car heading “east.” An only child, small and extremely quiet, Hester had become an orphan, even before her parents were exterminated , although mercifully she was too young to know it. The girl wanted to walk around the small farm before full daylight emerged. Without conscious reason, Hester always liked the half-light, a dappled time of solitude and serenity. The earth seemed fresh. Life felt abundant. No veils of rain had covered the face of a new day. Only a fragile mist hung in the shadowy air, like a celestial smile. “It’s dangerous,” Frau Anneke told Hester. “Why?” the child asked, her lips puckering. “The war rages on and on! We see no end!” Frau Anneke replied, sighing fearfully. “Not here,” the girl insisted with childish conviction. “Yes, even here,” Anneke said, her blue eyes brimming with transparent tears. “We may not see it. But it is all around us. If you must go outside, be careful, Liebschen,” she added, her voice trailing off. Before she came to the farmlands, her husband, a roughhanded but sincere man, kissed her goodbye as usual. Herr Werner Gluckel headed to work in the railway station near their old town. It was there that a stray aerial bomb fell. The Hester’s Folly 125 explosion decapitated him, leaving his dismembered body smoking and unrecognizable to rescuers. Frau Anneke identi- fied him by the ring on his finger. As she removed it, a part of her died too. She kept to herself. The other farmers’ wives were infrequent visitors to the solitary widow. Contact seemed to have withered, like shrunken grapes left unpicked on a vine. People are afraid. Neighbors are suspicious. This was not always so, she thought, remembering better times. However because of the girl, Anneke was thankful for her solitary life. I can keep her safe with me! The widow had let word leak out that her niece had come from Hamburg, after my sister died, she said. Anneke had never mentioned a sibling before. Nor did she say how her “only relative” had passed away. Nobody asked. They just assumed that the war took her. Residents of the small town near her farm nodded at the news. Death in families was common. When greetings were exchanged, sympathy did not stray into speech. Lips were tight. “One never knows who is listening to what,” the inhabitants had learned, fear having taught them well. Frau Gluckel had a plan for wartime survival. She determined to be as self-sufficient as the yield of her small plot and three...