The Other Place

 The following is an excerpt of a short story from the collection The Other Place ©Regine Haensel. More excerpts from the collection will be available on this blog each Sunday this month.

 

Besides the main farm where we lived, Mr. Bradley had another farm where he kept pigs. We called it the other place and when Papa talked about it his eyes lit up.

          “A house is there,” he said, “empty.” And a look passed between him and Mutti, one of those looks that meant they were thinking the same thing and didn’t need words to know what it was. “Also a barn. Graneries, a machine shed; everything like a proper farm, Annelise. Just no one living there.”

          Mutti looked around the room and my eyes followed hers. The stove in one corner, a wood stove, (we’d had a gas one in Germany) a small set of cupboards beside it. My foldout cot stood against another wall, a sofa bed and a table with four chairs crammed in the middle. One room, while in Germany we’d had a small apartment. There it was my grandfather who had to sleep on a cot in the living room. Had he minded I suddenly wondered. He never said anything about it, but my parents had often talked about the difficulties of finding an apartment after the war. If only we could have a house, a house like Tante Dorothea’s with a red and gold rug on the floor, a blue room for me with a desk, a room for Mutti and Papa, a kitchen and living room.

 

(The next section skips to Greta and her Papa’s visit to look at the other place. He goes to look after the pigs while Greta explores the house.)

 

I wandered off by myself. The room beside the kitchen had two large windows and against one wall, a stairway. Upstairs there were three doors. I opened the one directly ahead of me, a closet with a couple of wooden hangers swinging on the bar. I stepped inside and poked around. There was nothing else, but I thought it would make a good hiding place. The other two doors opened into bedrooms. Papa and Mutti could have the larger one and I would have the room with tiny blue flowers in the wall paper. I leaned my arms to the window sill and flattened my nose to the glass. The back yard was brown and white, splashed here and there with puddles, a line of bare black caragana hedge and then the beige and white fields, stubble and snow, stretched on to meet the distant sky. Nothing moved in that world. I seemed to be looking at a picture. Then I heard Papa’s step on the stairs and turned. He was smiling.

          “It is a good house, ja, Greta?”

          I nodded.

The short story collection The Other Place is available through the Saskatchewan Library system, for purchase from SaskBooks, Other Place, The (skbooks.com), or from booksserimuse@gmail.com

Goldenrod

 The following is an excerpt of a short story from the collection The Other Place ©Regine Haensel. More excerpts from the collection will be available on this blog each Sunday this month.

 

I remember my mother’s eyes the first time she saw the place where we were to live, the grey weathered boards, the rickety steps, and inside, the single room where we would eat, sleep and cook. My father didn’t notice because he stood behind us, but I saw the look of shock, the indrawn breath and then the instant swallowing of it all. She walked up the steps, through the open door and marched inside as if she wanted to get it over with. My father followed slowly.

          “It’s not much, Annelise, I know . . .”

          She turned to him, her face calm. “It will be all right, Franz.”

          His words rushed out, he took her hands. “Herr Bradley says he will build something better soon . . .”

          She answered the hesitation in his voice with a small smile. “It will be all right.”

          I was surprised that she didn’t talk about how she had not really wanted to move to the farm, but I was finding out that my mother never said, “I told you so.” We moved into the bunkhouse and unpacked our trunks and suitcases. It was good to have a few familiar things around us, but I discovered that one of the blocks from my Grimm’s fairytale puzzle was missing. No matter how hard I looked I couldn’t find it.

          During the days when Papa worked, I watched Mutti, trying not to let her notice. I wanted to know how she could be so quiet about all the things that had happened to us. Sometimes I would see a far-away look in her eyes and I would wonder if she was thinking about Germany.

          This farm was not at all what I had expected. First, the tiny bunkhouse which Mutti cleaned from front to back. When I asked to help, she gave me a bowl with soapy water and a dish cloth, and told me to wash out the lower cupboards. There was a huge yard with fences here and there, and buildings that I didn’t know the use of. The big house was where Mr. and Mrs. Bradley lived. I didn’t know why they couldn’t let us live there, too, but if Mutti wasn’t going to ask, neither would I. There were a couple  of dogs and some cats, but the dogs were chained up and barked very fiercely whenever anyone came near. The cats lived in the barn and ran away when I tried to get close enough for petting. I was starting to wonder about this better life that Papa said we would have in this country.

The short story collection The Other Place is available through the Saskatchewan Library system, for purchase from SaskBooks, Other Place, The (skbooks.com), or from booksserimuse@gmail.com

If You Move Away

The following is an excerpt of a short story from the collection The Other Place ©Regine Haensel. More excerpts from the collection will be available on this blog each Sunday this month.

It was a Saturday in 1955 when Lotte and I shared one of the wooden benches by the sandbox in front of the white stucco apartment building in Kiel, Germany. We talked about Das Doppelte Lottchen, a film neither of us had seen, but wanted to. I had the book from my Tante Dorothea, and I told Lotte about the black and white pictures and drawings.

          “Can I come look at it?” Lotte asked.

          “Later,” I said, knowing Mutti and Opa were arguing.

          Lotte had the same names as one of the twins in the story. The other was Luise, and I said I wished my name was Luise so that we could be like those girls. Two girls, separated as babies when their parents divorced, met by accident at a summer vacation home for girls, and were able to bring their parents back together.

          “My Papa is dead,” Lotte said, “and yours has just gone away for a while. And we have different Mutti’s. That’s not the same.”

          I sighed. Sometimes Lotte could be a dumm-kopf. “But I’m going away, too,” I said. “Mutti and I are going where my Papa is. “I swallowed a lump in my throat. What if I never saw Lotte again?”

          Lotte stared at me for a minute or two with her eyes scrunched up as if the sun was too bright and she couldn’t see very well. Then she jumped from the bench and stood with hands on hips, just the way I’d once seen her Mutti stand when she was scolding one of the bigger boys for throwing sand.

          “If you move away,” Lotte said, “I won’t like you anymore.”

          It seemed that a cloud had slipped in front of the sun and meant to stick there. All of the things I’d been trying not to think about tangled and made a knot in my head. I wanted to explain things to Lotte, in words slow and clear, but how could I when I didn’t understand myself? Like in the fairy tales where a wicked stepmother or a witch came and made things hard for children in the family, it wasn’t fair! I stood in front of Lotte, holding my hands in fists at my sides so that I wouldn’t hit my best friend. Lotte glared and suddenly I felt tears prick the corners of my eyes. I blinked hard. Why couldn’t Lotte see that if your family was leaving you had to go with them?

          “I don’t care if you don’t like me,” I said through clenched teeth.

 

The short story collection The Other Place is available through the Saskatchewan Library system, for purchase from SaskBooks, Other Place, The (skbooks.com), or from booksserimuse@gmail.com