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