Tilli gulps and sniffles and lifts her arms to her baby. To the sweet weight. Oh— But the generations are all mixed up. How can my own girl look like the Lämmles? We will raise your child with love, they’ve promised. But Tilli knows once she lets go, they’ll take her own girl and not return. If only my baby had a clubfoot. A clubfoot and a harelip! Then the Lämmles won’t want her.
Tilli holds on to her own girl who wiggles her tiny body against her. Roots about. Bumps one cheek into Tilli’s collarbone. Tilli pulls her lower, against her breast; but Sister cups the baby’s head, gently, guides the rooting mouth away from Tilli.
Girls who give away their babies for adoption right after birth don’t get to nurse. Still, their breasts make milk that distends them. Some get blocked milk ducts. Sister Franziska is meticulous when she binds their breasts. Some homes won’t bind unmarried Girls, let them suffer for their sins. Like the home in Bonn forty-one years ago. Sister has never spoken of her son, not even in confession; yet, she holds him with every newborn who passes through her hands—that swirl of hair on the back of his neck, that tiny pucker of lips, eyes ancient and wise imprinting her on his memory—only to release him anew, with grace. This path toward grace exhilarates Sister Franziska with depths of faith she couldn’t have imagined in her prayers when he was taken from her.
* * *
She wishes she could imprint this grace on Tilli, temper her wild grief. “Tilli?” She caresses the Girl’s shoulder.
But Tilli hides her face against her newborn. Hide her hide her—
“Do you believe everything happens according to God’s design?”
Hide her where? Tilli grunts.
“If you can believe in God’s design for you and your child—”
A flutter of breath against Tilli’s throat and her own girl has a face and flawless feet and no clubfoot. Tilli tugs the bedding into a cocoon with space for her own girl to hide and breathe, locks her arms around the cocoon. You must grip what you cannot bear to lose.
“—then no one can shame you for having this child.” Shame. The poison of shame. Sister Franziska shivers and is fourteen again, still fourteen, and must confess, run away before her parents notice. At the first church beyond her village she stops, anxious to have it over with—confession followed by absolution. That’s how it’s been every time since she was seven and taught to examine her soul for sins, to be ashamed and ask God’s forgiveness. After her first confession: lightness where the burden of the sin was before. I could be so fromm. Pious. It’s that very lightness she yearns for as she waits on the stone steps for a priest who’d rather die than reveal her sin. It’s like that for every priest, part of his vows. Some of the martyrs were priests—beheaded or strangled or burned or drowned—because they wouldn’t betray a confession.
As Sister strokes Tilli’s shoulder, Tilli imagines rising in the smell of her own girl who is without sin, rising from this bed—oh, I can be cunning, can run so fast—and escaping. She must not fall asleep. Must stay watchful until she’s alone with her own girl—oh, we can be cunning, can run so fast—
—awake, she’s awake—still? again?—and the infirmary is dark and keening and she’s terrified of the keening and of the empty where her own girl—
is?—
was?—
how did they get you away from me?—
“Ssshhhh … Ssshhhh…” Veronika climbs across Tilli, spoons her.
Tilli keens and the keening funnels from her baby to her brother always curled around one another in the womb in the wicker cradle in the first bed in the hayloft curled and nothing changes as they inhabit one another and they never expect it to end and Veronika scoots her bony knees into the backs of Tilli’s knees, rubs the sides of Tilli’s belly while Tilli keens.
Keens.
5
This Odd and Sweet Fusion
Tilli. Breasts swollen, hot with milk her own girl will never drink because the new parents have left with her. To ease the swelling Sister Franziska packs cold, dry cabbage leaves around Tilli’s breasts where her chest, just last Christmas, was as flat as her twin brother’s when she wrestled him in the hayloft. They’ve wrestled since before they could walk, in their cradle, their bed, poking and pinching each other, more freckles than white skin all over their bodies, the comfort and familiar shape soothing.
Older by forty-one minutes, Tilli is the stronger twin.
That’s what their father says. He likes to tap-tap their noses with his own. “Listen to your sister, Alfred.”
Their mother says, “You are the oldest, Tilli. You must look out for him.”
Sister Franziska leads Tilli to the house of the toymaker. The instant they enter, the cries of a baby make Tilli’s breasts leak. Like wetting myself, only in the wrong place.
In the kitchen the priest and toymaker wait. Upstairs the toymaker’s wife sits on the bed, clutching a big, furious baby who’s straining away from her. Sister catches the baby, swirls him around and toward Tilli who hides the front of her blouse with both hands. Sister asks Tilli to open her arms for the baby. But when she tries to reach across him to unbutton the blouse, Tilli holds the baby like a shield. Wet and hot on the insides of her thighs dripping from the hollow wet and hot and open and the baby shrieks and Tilli squeezes her thighs together to keep from spilling herself on the floorboards and the amber beads of Sister’s rosary suck the light from the window as she peels back the cabbage leaves. Slippery—
* * *
As a child, Tilli played with chunks of amber she and her twin gathered along the Baltic Sea. You can tell amber from other stones: it makes sparks when you rub it against your clothes, and it makes the hairs on your arms stand up. At home, they line up their treasures on the windowsills with amber their mother collected as a child, the biggest a quarter-pound. Together, they study each find, fascinated by tiny animals trapped in golden resin from pine trees—a beetle or a worm or a spider still in its web—so lifelike that any moment they may crawl again.
“Relics,” Alfred says.
Their mother wears her favorite amber on a ribbon around her neck. To keep it shiny, her mother polishes it with her spit. One edge chipped after it was smoothed by the sea, but inside the green moth levitates, unharmed.
“Insects,” she teaches her twins, “are lured by the smell of resin that will trap them, preserve them for millions of years. Since amber is heavier than water, it drifts along the floor of the seas with the currents until a high tide throws it ashore.”
In the Stone Age, Tilli and Alfred learn, humans used amber for trade and for ornaments. And for healing. Worn in a pouch near your pain, amber cures toothaches and bellyaches. If you rub Bernstein across a snakebite, it nullifies the poison; and if you lay amber on the collarbone of a pregnant woman, she’ll confess her secret the moment she wakes up.
* * *
“Here now here…” Sister tugs at Tilli’s nipple.
Tilli flinches.
“For the baby.” Sister tugs Tilli’s nipple into the baby’s mouth.
Thin and sharp and fast like an arrow shot from inside tracking the trajectory of need.