Читать книгу Breath and Bones - Susan Cokal - Страница 16

[ . . . ] a pleasant park, originally laid out in the French style but afterwards altered in accordance with English taste. It contains two cafés, a pavilion for the sale of mineral waters, etc., and is a great resort of nurses and children.

K. BAEDEKER,

NORTHERN GERMANY (WITH EXCURSIONS, ETC.)

Finally, there came the day Famke had food only to last out the week, and no money after that. She would have to find work. But who would engage a seventeen-year-old orphan who’d run out on her last position? She had no references, no friends, no way of earning next week’s beans and bread without selling herself.

Nå, she had one friend. With her last Øre she bought a sheet of writing paper and a pencil, and she wrote to Sister Birgit.

They met outside the King’s Garden. Birgit had stolen a few minutes by announcing a trip to the market; she carried an old basket heavy with withered apples and potatoes. Trying to please, Famke took the basket as she and Birgit walked slowly before the big fence, just in sight of the bronze statue of Hans Andersen.

They started with tentative greetings, restrained but affectionate on both sides. Birgit gave news of the orphanage. Since last she’d seen Famke, Jesus had lost a number of brides: Several sisters, including Saint Bernard, had coughed their way to the next world. It seemed poverty and hard work were taking their toll on the convent’s notoriously weak lungs; the doctors were saying it was the curse of urban living and its attendant excitement, but what were they to do? They had nowhere else to go.

Famke gave a shiver of combined sorrow and fear for her own life. If even Sister Saint Bernard had died of the chest, what would become of her? But she expressed only an unselfish sorrow, and Birgit received it with an approving smile.

Then Famke told her story. She told it simply and plainly, describing what she had done and how she had lived, and the great passion that had driven her to it all. “I let this man see me naked,” she said. “I let him paint me. I let him . . . touch me . . .”

Birgit listened with the silence of a confessor, learned over many years. While Famke spoke, she had time to prepare her response. She folded her hands carefully, and the thin gold band glinted dully on her ring finger. When Famke stopped speaking, Birgit stopped walking.

“My dear,” she said, “did we not teach you that your body is a house for the Lord?”

Famke imagined a transparent house with a ghostly God peering through the roof. She saw herself now cowering naked in a corner.

Birgit added, as she had so many times in her conversations with Famke, “A poor girl has nothing but her virtue.”

“My virtue.” Forgetting her vision of the house, Famke raised her free hand and dropped it helplessly at her side. “What use is that? There’s always some man who wants to steal it. So I gave mine to a man of my choice.”

“Did he promise to marry you?” Birgit asked.

“He promised me nothing,” said Famke, “but you see, I kept hoping . . . We were so happy together. And then he left.”

“Do you regret what you did?” Birgit asked, fearfully now.

Famke thought. It had never occurred to her. “My regret is that he left,” she said.

Birgit took a deep breath. “Then, if you are not repentant, I cannot help you.”

Famke stared. Her loving guardian, the woman who had tweezed glass out of her infant lips, who had given her a name—this woman was repudiating her, dismissing her as roundly as Albert had done. The sapphire eyes filled with tears.

“You are my only hope,” she whispered. She put her hands—a woman’s hands now, lean and bony—on Birgit’s two cheeks. Wetly she kissed Birgit’s nose, just as the child Famke had done a decade before.

So Birgit found herself beginning to weep, too.

It was the tears as much as the kiss that did it. And perhaps something more—Birgit, who had not planned on being a nun before her parents delivered her to the Immaculate Heart, who admired the lush paintings in her illustrated Old Testament, could have harbored some secret admiration for what Famke had done. Her tears were tears of passion, too. When they were finished, she prayed. She forgave. And by the end of the week she had found Famke a new position.

One of the orphanage’s chief patrons, an elderly importer named Jørgen Skatkammer, happened to be in need of a housemaid. Birgit worked secretly, behind the other nuns’ backs, to secure the job for Famke.

“Be good this time,” she begged as, once more under Hans Andersen’s blank eye, she gave Famke a letter of introduction and ten Kroner for a nest egg. “Don’t stray. Someday you may meet a nice man and marry him”—Birgit knew it wasn’t entirely moral to hold out this possibility after what Famke had done, but she had to give the girl some hope—“and you may put all this behind you.”

“But I want Albert!” Famke said, with the same stubborn head toss she’d used to demand the last bit of sugar in Birgit’s pocket.

Birgit fingered the rosary occupying that pocket now. It was a cool day for late spring, and the beads felt like ice. “And yet this Albert does not . . . no, he doesn’t sound a pleasant man.”

Famke, clutching the letter that was her salvation, allowed herself to laugh. “He is the most pleasant person I’ve known!”

“He left you behind, ruined, in order to pursue his own career.” Birgit did not add, As well he might, after you showed how carelessly you value your virtue.

Famke had no good answer even to what Birgit said aloud; she could only say, lamely, “But you did not see the way he used to look at me.”

Birgit sighed, thinking how little she knew of the world and how ill prepared she was to speak now. “Only do well for Herr Skatkammer,” she said. “And remember to pray.”

“I will pray,” Famke said, and added in her mind—I’ll pray that Albert will return.