Читать книгу A Piece of Me - Beatrix Ost - Страница 21

The farmyard spread out in a rectangle, with the farm buildings and stalls on three sides. Opposite our house lived the workers. A short way down the road stood the little house where the Tafelmeiers lived. Behind it was a perfect green piece of meadow, dotted with black molehills. There were always moles, lots of them.

Josef Tafelmeier was our carpenter, a tall, lean, muscular figure who smelled like pine sap and chewing tobacco. To make sure we children would not play with his dangerous tools, he looked up from his workbench with his earnest, inquisitive stare, a thin sickle of white appearing beneath his eyelids. His wife, Maria, helped out in our kitchen and in the chicken coop. Whatever time remained she spent in my mother’s garden—or wherever she could spread her silly chatter.

Maria Tafelmeier, her robust figure wrapped in wide skirts, childless and ever driven by insatiable hunger for gossip, divided her world into two categories: Strangers and Us. Strangers were everyone outside her familiar order, hence incomprehensible, the rebellious forced laborers above all. With those people one had nothing, really nothing at all in common. They came from the eastern countries Hitler had conquered first. There were about twenty of them on the farm, from Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania.