Olga Read online

  The year after their Confirmation, Viktoria started begging to be sent to the girls’ finishing school in Königsberg. At a soirée on a neighboring estate, the daughter of the house had told her about life at the school as if it were one of luxury and elegance, and as if it were out of the question for any self-respecting girl to grow up among peasants. Her parents didn’t want her to go at first, but Viktoria was stubborn. Just as stubbornly, once she had gotten her way, she continued to insist that the modest life at the finishing school was the epitome of fashionable living.

  Olga wanted to go to the state teacher-training college for women in Posen. For this, she had to demonstrate knowledge of the final-year syllabus at the girls’ secondary school. She would gladly have walked the seven kilometers to the girls’ secondary school in the district capital every morning and seven kilometers back every evening. But she didn’t have money for the school or an advocate to argue that she should be exempt from paying the fees; the village teacher and pastor both considered further education for girls unnecessary. So she decided to teach herself.

  When she went to the girls’ secondary school to find out what one needed to know at the end of the final year, she was so intimidated by the large building, the wide staircases, long corridors, and multiple doors, the ease with which the girls bustled about the corridor between bells, laughing and chatting, and the confidence of the female teachers entering and leaving the classrooms, heads held high, that she couldn’t find her way out of the corner by the stairs from which she was watching them. Until one of the teachers, whose classes were over, noticed her. She listened as Olga, close to tears, explained her concerns. Then she took her by the arm, led her out of the school, and brought her back to her house.

  “Religion, German, history, arithmetic, geography and natural history, calligraphy, drawing, singing, needlework—can you manage all that?”

  Olga had learned the catechism in Confirmation class; she had read Schiller’s plays, Freytag’s novels, and Saegert’s National History of the Prussians, and she knew poems by Goethe and Mörike, Heine and Fontane, and many songs from Erk’s Garden of German Songs by heart. The teacher asked Olga to recite a poem, sing a song, and do sums in her head. She inspected the little handbag Olga had crocheted, after which she had no doubts about Olga’s skill at needlework, or at drawing and calligraphy. Geography and natural sciences were her weaknesses: Olga knew a lot of trees, flowers, and mushrooms, but she had never heard of the evolutionary trees of Carl Linnaeus and Alexander von Humboldt.

  The teacher took a liking to Olga. She lent her a textbook on general geography and one on domestic science. If she needed more advice, she could come back. “And read your Bible—and Faust!”

  Herbert knew he would join the Foot Guards regiment when he was eighteen. Before then, he had to pass the high-school examinations. He obliged his tutor and governess by allowing them to prepare him for it, but his passion was for hunting and shooting, for riding, rowing, and running. He knew that one day he was supposed to take over the estate, including the sugar factory and the brewery, and that it was the right thing for his father to introduce him to the business and its management. But he didn’t see himself as a lord of the manor and boss of a factory. He saw the great expanse of the landscape and the great expanse of the sky. When he ran, he didn’t turn back because he was tired, but because it was dark and he didn’t want his mother to worry. He dreamed of running with the sun, all through a never-ending day.

  6

  After Viktoria left, it took Olga and Herbert a while to establish a new kind of familiarity just between the two of them. Visiting him on his own was different from visiting him and Viktoria. Olga noticed his parents’ suspicious glances and stopped her visits. Herbert hated the knowing smile on the villagers’ faces when they encountered him with Olga; he shunned the walks and rowing trips the three of them had taken together so unselfconsciously.

  Olga was trying to prepare for the entrance examination, but like the teacher and the pastor, her grandmother didn’t think it necessary for her to have any further education and gave her no peace at home, even when she didn’t need her help. So during the summer Olga fled with her books to an isolated spot at the edge of the forest. This was where Herbert came to visit her. He would bring his dog with him, and sometimes his gun, and he showed Olga a hunting lodge where she could study when it was raining. He often brought a little gift for her: some fruit, a piece of cake, a bottle of cider.

  When he came, he had usually been running; he would lie down beside her in the grass and wait for her to take a break. Then his first question would be: “What do you know that you didn’t know this morning?”

  She enjoyed answering him. In doing so she became aware of what she had retained and what she had forgotten and needed to reread. He was particularly interested in geography and natural sciences and how to live on what the land provided.

  “Can you eat lichen?”

  “You can eat Icelandic moss. It’s a remedy for colds and stomachache, and it can also be used as food.”

  “How can you tell if a mushroom is poisonous?”

  “You have to memorize them, either the three hundred edible ones or the three hundred inedible ones.”

  “What plants grow in the Arctic?”

  “Ones that grow in the tundra include—”

  “I don’t mean the tundra, I mean—”

  “The frozen wastes? Nothing grows in the frozen wastes.”

  He brought his schoolbooks with him, at her request, and she saw that she had no reason to be ashamed in front of him. The only subject where he was ahead of her was languages; his governess spoke English and French with him, whereas no one spoke with Olga. She didn’t need languages for the entrance examination, but she wanted to go to Paris and London one day, cities she had read about in Meyer’s Conversation Lexicon; she knew her way around them better than Herbert did.

  7

  Just as Herbert wanted to hear from Olga what she was learning, he wanted to tell her what he was thinking. One day he confided in her that he had become an atheist.

  He’d been running again; he stopped in front of her, bent double, hands on knees, and said breathlessly, in a rush: “There is no God.”

  Olga was sitting cross-legged, with a book in her lap. “One moment.”

  He waited until his breath had slowed, lay down beside her in the grass, and clasped his hands behind his head. He gazed at her, at the dog—she to his right, the dog to his left—and at the deep-blue summer sky with its quick, white scraps of cloud. Then he said it again, quietly and firmly, as if he had made a discovery—or rather, a decision. “There is no God.”

  Olga looked up from her book at Herbert. “But?”

  “But?”

  “What is there instead?”

  “Nothing.” Herbert thought her question odd and shook his head, laughing. “There’s the world, but there’s no heaven and no God.”

  Olga set the book aside, stretched out beside Herbert in the grass, and looked up at the heavens. She liked the heavens: blue, or gray, and when it was raining or snowing and all you could do was blink into the falling drops or drifting snowflakes. God? Why shouldn’t he live in heaven? And come to earth sometimes, in church or nature?

  “What would you do if he were suddenly standing in front of you?”

  “Like Livingstone in front of Stanley? I’d make a little bow and offer my hand. ‘God, I presume?’”

  Herbert, delighted with his joke, slapped his hands on the ground and laughed. Olga pictured the scene: Herbert in leather knee breeches and a checked shirt, God in a white suit and pith helmet, both slightly confused, both consummately polite. She laughed with him. But she felt that you shouldn’t make jokes about God. You shouldn’t laugh at jokes others made about God either. Above all, though, she wanted to be left to study in peace. With God, if he wanted to help her, and, if not, then without him.

  But Herbert wouldn’t leave her in peace. He had identified the ultimate questions. A few days later he asked her, “Is there such a thing as infinity?”

  They were lying side by side again, her face in the shadow of the book she held in her hands, his bathed in sunlight, eyes closed, a grass stalk between his lips.

  “Parallel lines intersect at infinity.”

  “That’s the stupid stuff they teach you in school. If you keep walking on and on between two railway tracks, do you think you’ll ever reach the point of intersection?”

  “I can only walk a finite distance between railway tracks, not an infinite one. If I could run like you . . .”

  Herbert sighed. “Don’t laugh at me. I want to know whether infinity has any meaning for finite people with finite lives. Or are God and infinity the same thing?”

  Olga placed the open book on her stomach but didn’t let go of it. She would have preferred to hold it up again and continue reading. She had to study. She didn’t care about infinity. But when she turned her face to Herbert, he was looking at her in anxious expectation. “What is it that bothers you about infinity?”

  “What bothers me about it?” Herbert sat up. “If something is infinite, it’s also unreachable, isn’t it? But is there something that’s unreachable per se, not just at the current time and by current means?”

  “What do you want with infinity if you reach it?”

  Herbert fell silent and gazed into the distance. Olga sat up. What did he see? Beet fields. Green plants and brown furrows in long lines, the lines straight at first, then curving over a dip in the ground toward the horizon and merging finally in an expanse of green. Solitary poplars. A group of beech trees, a dark island in the bright sea of beet fields. The sky was cloudless, and the sun at Olga’s and Herbert’s back made everything glow, the green of the plants and trees and the brown of the earth. What did he see?

  He turned to her and smiled shyly, because he was at a loss, although he was sure there must be an answer to his question, something that would satisfy his longing. She would have liked to put her arm around him and stroke his head, but didn’t dare. His longing touched her like the longing of a child for the world. But because he was no longer a child, she sensed in his longing, in his question, in his running, a desperation of which he was not yet aware.

  A few days later, he wanted to know if there was such a thing as eternity. “Are infinity and eternity the same? Infinity relates to space and time, eternity only to time. But do they, in the same way, both transcend what we have?”

  “There are people who are still remembered after many years. I don’t know about eternally, but Achilles and Hector have been dead for two or three thousand years and we still know about them. Do you want to be famous?”

  “I want . . .” He propped himself on his right arm and turned to her. “I don’t know what I want. I want more: more than this, the fields, the estate, the village, more than Königsberg and Berlin, and more than the Guards—not because it’s the Foot Guards, if it were the Horse Guards, it’d be no different. I want something that leaves all this behind. Or beneath—I’ve read that engineers want to build a machine you can fly with, and I think . . .” He looked over her head and up at the sky. Then he laughed. “Once you have the machine, and you sit in it and fly in it, that too is just a thing like other things.”

  “I’d like to have things. A piano, a Soennecken fountain pen, a new summer dress and a new winter dress, a pair of summer shoes and a pair of winter shoes. Is a room a thing? If that’s not a thing, money is a thing, and I’d like to have the money for a room. Perhaps you’re . . .”

  “Spoiled?” Herbert had turned more toward Olga, propping himself up on the ground with his right hand and tousling his hair with his left. He looked at her.

  “I’m sorry. You’re not spoiled. You don’t know what it’s like to be me. But I don’t know what it’s like to be you either. I think you have it easier in life than I do. Or I think I would have it easier if I had your life or Viktoria’s, and could go to the girls’ secondary school and teacher-training college just like that. But if I had Viktoria’s life, perhaps I’d just want to be sent to finishing school, too.” Olga shook her head.

  Herbert waited, but she didn’t say anything else. “I’m going.” He got to his feet. The dog immediately got to its feet as well and gazed up at him. It had snuggled up against Olga, and she had been stroking it. Olga had grown accustomed to Herbert’s unceremonious departures; that the dog could be so close to her one minute and so aloof the next pained her every time.

  Herbert set off; the dog jumped up at him, wanting to run with him. Herbert playfully fended him off while at the same time picking up his pace. Then he stopped and turned to Olga. “I don’t have money. I only get money if I need it for something, and then I get as much as it costs. The first time I earn money of my own, I’ll buy you a fountain pen.”

  He ran off, and Olga gazed after him. Along the edge of the forest, through the beet fields, then onto the path that led to the horizon, where he and the dog got smaller and smaller until they finally disappeared behind the horizon. She gazed after him, full of tenderness.

  8

  Perhaps Olga and Herbert would not have fallen in love, had Viktoria not torn them out of their companionable routine. The finishing school closed for the summer, and when Viktoria came home in July, Olga and Herbert were looking forward to spending the weeks together in the old, familiar way, but they were disappointed. Viktoria wanted something different. She had been invited to balls and parties on neighboring estates and expected Herbert to accompany her and do the honors.

  She had not forgotten Olga and invited her, out of politeness, to go for a walk and take tea. Afterward, though, she confessed to her brother that she felt she had nothing in common with this simple girl.

  “A teacher? Do you remember Fräulein Pohl, the old spinster we had when the teacher was sick? That’s what Olga wants to be? She certainly has as little fashion sense as Fräulein Pohl. I tried to help her, to show her she needs to gather her sleeves and wear her skirts tighter, and she looked at me as if I were speaking Polish. Although actually she probably speaks Polish. Doesn’t she have a Slavic face? Isn’t Olga Rinke a Slavic name? And why does she act so proudly around me? As if we were equals? She should be happy to learn from me how one ought to dress and behave.”

  Herbert was offended by this. Olga wasn’t good enough? Her face not beautiful enough? The next time they met, he examined it carefully. He inspected her wide, high forehead, her prominent cheekbones, her green eyes, slightly slanting and wonderfully bright. Could her nose and chin be smaller, or her mouth bigger? But when her mouth laughed or smiled or spoke, it was so lively, so dominant, it had to have exactly that nose above it and that chin below. This was even the case when, as now, her lips moved silently as she studied.

  Herbert’s gaze followed the line of Olga’s neck to the nape, paused at the curve of her blouse over her breasts and the suggestion of thighs and calves beneath her skirt, and lingered on her naked ankles and feet. When Olga was studying, she took off her shoes and stockings. But although Herbert had often seen her ankles and feet, he had never contemplated them, the dimple beside her ankle bone, the curvature of the heel, the delicacy of the toes, the blue veins. How he would have liked to touch those ankles and feet!

  “Why are you staring at me?”

  Olga looked at Herbert, and he blushed. “I’m not staring at you.”

  They sat opposite each other, both cross-legged, she with a book, he with a knife and a piece of wood in his hands. He bowed his head. “I thought I knew your face.” He shook his head and cut a few chips from the wood. “Now . . .”—he raised his head and looked at her, still blushing—“Now I want to look at it all the time, your face, your neck, your nape, your . . . just you. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”

  She also blushed. They gazed at each other, all eyes and soul. They didn’t want to look away, to become the familiar Olga and the familiar Herbert again. Until Olga smiled and said, “What are we going to do? I can’t study when you look at me. And when I look at you.”

  “We get married, and you stop studying.”

  Olga leaned forward and put her arms around his neck. “You’ll never marry me, not now, when you’re too young to marry, and not later, because your parents will find you a better match. We have one year until you join the Guards and I go to training college. One year! All we have to do”—she smiled again—“is agree on when we’re going to look at each other and when I’m going to study.”

  9

  Until autumn, Olga and Herbert could be alone together at the edge of the forest or in the hunting lodge. This was where she studied; this was where he came to find her. But in October it grew cold, and in November the first snow fell. The organist had given Olga the key to the church so she could practice the organ and stand in for him occasionally on Sundays. So she studied in the cold church, which was only heated for services. It was warmer than outdoors, and Olga actually found it warmer than at her grandmother’s, whose harsh coldness froze her in spite of the warm stove. Olga didn’t know that her grandmother found their imminent parting painful, and that this was making her harsher and colder than usual. Even her grandmother didn’t know it.

  The church, a neoclassical Romanesque building dating from 1830, had a patron’s box, which had passed from the aristocratic former owners of the estate to Herbert’s family along with the patronage of the church. Herbert hated his place in the box, where he was exposed to the stares of the congregation every Sunday. This was why it didn’t immediately occur to him that the patron’s box had its own heater, built in under the floor and lit via the staircase. On very cold days, Olga and Herbert could see their breath in here as well. But the floor was reasonably warm, the roof and balustrade of the box provided some protection against the cold of the nave, the chairs were upholstered, and while she studied, Olga knitted a long, thick jersey for Herbert and another for herself. Herbert fantasized about spending winter days in a hunting lodge as cozy as this and shooting the royal stag his father had seen and failed to hit.