While the World Is Still Asleep (The Century Trilogy Book 1) (13 page)

By the time they reached the Herrenhus house, the open wound was throbbing and prickling uncomfortably.

“Hurry,” said Jo. “I want to get home quickly and clean my arm.”

Isabelle was about to push open the gate when it was pulled open suddenly from inside. Her father stood before them in a checked vest that he’d had specially made for cycling. He glared at the two young women.

“Just as I thought!” Although he began quietly he grew louder, and Josephine could hear the anger in his voice.

“Father . . .” The last drop of blood drained from Isabelle’s face.

He took a deep breath. “Just this once, I decide to treat myself to a well-earned ride on my Rover, and what do I find when I open the shed? Yawning emptiness and a pile of women’s clothes! I thought my eyes were deceiving me. Didn’t I
expressly
forbid you from riding the bicycles? And out on the street at that! As if that’s not enough, you decide to dress up in this . . . ridiculous way! That is the absolute height of impudence,” he ranted. Windows opened along the street, and a few curious faces appeared in them. Herrenhus grabbed the girls by the arm and dragged them inside the gate.

“I want an explanation. On the spot!” he snarled as soon as the gate was closed.

But apart from a whimper, Isabelle could say nothing.

Jo’s bleeding arm was forgotten, and with the courage of desperation, she cleared her throat. “It’s . . . not what you think. Isabelle and I, we . . .” Her mouth was so dry that her tongue felt glued to the roof of her mouth.
Oh, dear Lord, please find me an excuse!

“Isabelle told me that you’re celebrating an important birthday at the start of August. And I suddenly had an idea for a very special surprise.” The words began pouring from her mouth. She sensed Isabelle’s horrified eyes on her, but she didn’t stop. “Your daughter and I have been rehearsing a little . . . play. About two wheelmen. It seemed appropriate since you are so taken by cycling. We’ve been practicing in secret, not here in the yard where you would see everything. We wanted to surprise you and your guests, didn’t we, Isabelle?”

Isabelle stood wide-eyed in amazement. But she nodded hurriedly. “I thought Josephine’s idea was wonderful,” she said with a slight tremble in her voice. “Because you do so much for me, and I’m so infinitely grateful to you for all of it.”

The angry furrows in Moritz Herrenhus’s forehead deepened. He did not look satisfied with their explanation.

“I’m also very grateful,” Jo added. A little moisture was gradually returning to her mouth, and the words came more easily. “Now you’ve caught us in the act . . .”

“And our surprise is no longer a surprise,” Isabelle added, and promptly burst into tears.

Josephine felt a lump form in her throat, and tears started flowing down her own cheeks. Their morning rides were over. It was all over . . .

“I ought to tan your hides. But if things really are as you say, then you didn’t mean any harm. Still . . . that has to be the stupidest idea I’ve heard in a long time. Isabelle!” he growled at his daughter. “How could you even think that I would let you dress up in front of my guests in this . . . costume?” He gestured toward her outfit as he spoke.

“You wouldn’t? It was meant to be funny,” said Isabelle in a quiet voice.

“If your friend wants to dress up as a clown, I would certainly find it amusing. And it would no doubt be wonderfully entertaining for our guests. But your mother would bite my head off. She likes things to be stylish, you know that.” He actually sounded a little disappointed. Then he clapped his hands. “Enough of this monkeying around. Let’s get the bicycles back in the shed. And don’t let me ever catch you out here again! Isabelle, I want you decently dressed and in the salon in ten minutes. I’d like a word with you about yesterday evening. You disappointed me yet again . . .”

Isabelle and Josephine exchanged a relieved look. They’d gotten away with it! Then Isabelle trudged away behind her father, her head down.

“You wanted to break into the zoo? That’s how you injured your arm? And then Moritz Herrenhus caught you?!” Clara stopped in the middle of applying ointment to Jo’s elbow and looked at her friend in disbelief.

Jo nodded unhappily.

“You’re even crazier than I thought.” Clara slammed the ointment pot angrily onto the round table in front of her window. “And here I am mixing up a healing ointment for you!” With her lips pressed together tightly, she wiped her hands on a white cloth. “You can treat your own wounds in the future.”

“Oh, don’t be like this,” Jo pleaded. She rolled the sleeve of her blouse carefully over her injured elbow. “All our fun with the bicycles is over and done. At least for now. I could scream when I think about it.”

“Fun! Is that all that matters to you? With all the
fun
you’re having, have you forgotten how to tell the difference between right and wrong?” Clara began counting off Jo’s sins on her fingers. “You lie to your parents. You ‘borrow’ Moritz Herrenhus’s bicycle. You dress up as a man. You ride a bicycle through the city, which is clearly something for men! And then you break into the zoo! If you ask me, it’s outrageous!”

Jo could not remember Clara ever being so angry at her. “I know that what I’m doing isn’t right. But I’m not doing anyone any harm. Moritz Herrenhus’s bicycle was standing around, unridden, for months. How were we supposed to know he’d suddenly get it into his head to go for a ride?” She took Clara’s hands and squeezed them. “Please try to understand. The moment I sit on a bicycle, all the anger and strain of my life at home simply vanishes. And the feeling of freedom . . . All these years, my life has been limited to our little street. Thanks to the bicycle, the world has suddenly become limitless.”

Her eyes swept across Clara’s desk, which was piled with heavy books:
Handbook of Modern Pharmacology
,
Toxic Diseases of the Skin and Their Treatment
, and several more—Clara seemed to be taking her work in the pharmacy very seriously indeed. Just a few weeks earlier, Josephine would have teased her friend, but now she could understand her hunger for knowledge. She thought of her visit to the bookstore that Isabelle had recommended. She had found one book in there about competitive cycling. It was almost two hundred pages, packed with illustrations and exciting information—she would have given anything to be able to walk out with it. The bookseller had proudly explained to her that an academic publishing house in Munich had just released it, and he asked if she wanted to buy it for her father. Jo had simply nodded and asked about the price. Afterward, she had crept out of the store like a beaten dog. She had never considered how much books cost. She would have to save her tips for a very long time to be able to afford it . . .

“Limitless freedom! Don’t make me laugh. Your freedom disappears the moment the sun rises and the city wakes up,” Clara said, jolting Jo out of her thoughts. Clara pressed the pot of ointment and a rolled bandage into her hand.

“I’m worried about you. Really. When I see the dark rings under your eyes, it scares me. But it’s no wonder, considering how little sleep you’ve had in the last few weeks, on top of all your hard work in the smithy. Sooner or later, you’ll be so exhausted you won’t be able to concentrate properly, and you’ll have a serious accident. Maybe at work, maybe on the bicycle. What then? Frankly, I’m relieved that you can’t go out riding again.”

“I feel better than I ever have before,” Jo answered defiantly. “And as far as the smithy is concerned, I may not be there much longer. I have plans of my own . . .”

Clara raised her eyebrows. “Oh yes?”

Josephine nodded toward the stack of books. “You’re not the only one with a hankering to learn.”

Chapter Eleven

The following evening, Josephine headed out the door as soon as she’d finished work and went in search of Oskar Reutter, who was just closing up his emporium. She helped him carry in the baskets of small items that stood in rows on the sidewalk in front of the store, then took a look around inside. She pointed to the shelves in the back that held various small appliances and gadgets—cameras, alarm clocks, kitchen helpers, and the like.

“Who repairs all these things?” she asked.

“Why? Do you have something that needs to be repaired? I can’t remember your parents ever coming in here.”

Jo laughed. “No, it’s that . . . I’m interested in how mechanical things work myself.”

“Mechanical things.” Oskar Reutter frowned. But if he found her statement curious, he did not let on. “Well, if something on a grandfather clock or some other clock breaks, you’d normally take it to a mechanic. For the more complicated timepieces, it’s a little different. In that case, you’d be better off going to a good watchmaker.” The emporium owner stepped over to a shelf and took down a black, boxlike device. “To repair a transformer like this would require an electrician. And if you’re talking about optical equipment, then you’d want to speak to someone skilled in precision mechanics.”

Josephine swallowed. “It all sounds so complicated! I thought there’d be one man for everything . . .”

“Once upon a time that was probably true. You took whatever was broken to a metalworker or a carpenter. He took his hammer, file, or anvil to it and fixed it for you. But things have gotten more specialized since then . . .” He indicated to her to follow him into his office. Once inside, he sat down at a small table on which stood a plate with several slices of bread and liverwurst. He offered the second chair to Josephine.

“My wife made this for me, because I have to do the books later. Help yourself. If I remember right, you quite liked the sandwiches I had on the train on the way to Stuttgart.”

Josephine, whose stomach had started growling the moment she saw the bread, did not need to be asked twice. The liverwurst was spread thickly on the bread, not the way it was at home, with the merest scrape. After the first bite, she said, “You have one of the new bicycles, don’t you? Are you happy with it?”

When Oskar Reutter had finished singing the praises of his bicycle, Josephine said, “And do you happen to know if there are people who repair bicycles?”

Oskar Reutter laughed. “Can you read minds? Two weeks ago I had an accident and the front fork broke. My beautiful boneshaker has been lying in the stable ever since. The metalworker I went to refused to weld the fork back together because he was afraid it wouldn’t be stable enough. And it will be quite some time before the manufacturer can send a replacement.” He opened a bottle of beer with a loud pop and held it out toward Josephine. “Would you like some?”

Josephine shook her head. Her mind was spinning so fast that she had to make an effort to keep her thoughts organized. So there was nobody who specialized in repairing bicycles . . .

“May I ask you something else?” she asked as she took another slice of bread.

“Of course.”

“How does one become a mechanic? Or an electrician?”

“A very good question. There are special professional apprenticeships these days. They take at least two years but more often three or four years to complete. Usually it’s the big factories who train such specialists to meet their own requirements, but there are also small workshops where master tradesmen train young men as apprentices.”

“Young men? So you’ve never heard of a . . . girl becoming an apprentice?”

“Ah, so that’s what you’re getting at! I’m a bit slow on the uptake this evening,” Oskar Reutter replied, laughing. “So you plan to abandon your father and finally do something for yourself?” When he saw the shocked look on her face, he threw his hands up defensively. “Don’t worry, this stays between us. Do you really think I’d run to Schmied-the-Smith first thing tomorrow morning and tell him about our little conversation?”

Josephine gave a sigh of relief and leaned back in her chair.
Would it be all right to take another slice of bread?
she wondered.

“Your idea isn’t a bad one, my girl. And I dare say you’d do a good job of it. Quite frankly, though, I don’t think any girl is likely to find her way into such a profession. But the moment I hear of anyone in the mechanical trades who is prepared to take on a young woman as an apprentice, I’ll let you know. And when you’re ready, I’ll be your first customer.”

“I must be jinxed. I’ll have knocked on every door in Feuerland soon, and I have nothing to show for it,” said Josephine to Frieda two weeks later. They were sitting at the old kitchen table in Frieda’s garden, protected from the midsummer sun by the heavy foliage of the walnut tree. The table was covered with tubes of paint, brushes, old cloths, and a container of turpentine. In front of Frieda, there was an easel with a blank canvas. Painting was her latest passion.

“I’ve tried at least ten different factories, from an iron foundry to a huge engineering works. Every one turned me away.”

“Feuerland?” Frieda mumbled, holding a paintbrush between her teeth and looking quizzically at her palette.

“That’s the industrial area behind the Spandau Ship Canal. I know it from our cycling trips,” said Josephine impatiently. “You should have seen the reactions I got when I asked about apprenticeships! ‘Women have no technical understanding whatsoever. It’s simply not in their blood,’ one man declared. ‘Women aren’t intelligent enough for such work,’ said the next, and he looked at me like I was mad. Another one explained that women have no ‘spatial awareness,’ which makes a technical profession impossible for them. Yet another said that all they needed was for ‘harpies’ like us to take over the workbenches.” She threw her hands up in despair. “They think we’re all fools. Not one—not one!—was willing to take a chance on me. The fact that I’ve been slaving away in my father’s workshop for years counted for nothing.” Jo slumped in her chair like a bellows drained of all its air. After what Oskar Reutter had told her, she had known that her search for an apprenticeship would not be easy. But she had not thought that it would be impossible.

Frieda dabbed some yellow paint on her canvas and scrutinized the effect for a moment before putting the brush aside.

“Good things take time! So now you’ve been to ten factories, fine. You may have to visit twenty or thirty to find a master prepared to take you on as a toolmaker.”

“Mechanic,” said Josephine. “That’s the person who puts machines together or takes them apart and fixes them. A toolmaker makes tools.”

Her old friend waved off the distinction. “Makes no difference. The important thing is that you don’t give up too soon!” She pointed to the extension built onto her house, which used to house her husband’s workshop. “You can have a look in there. Perhaps you’ll find a tool or two you can practice with.”

Josephine smiled affectionately at Frieda. “That’s very kind of you. But I don’t just want to tinker about. I want to really
learn
something. I—” She broke off and sighed. “It makes no sense. Women are just second-class human beings, whether we want to learn something useful or join a cycling club.”

Frieda looked up abruptly from her palette. “Cycling club? So has Herrenhus allowed you and Isabelle to start cycling again?”

“No. That’s why I went out to Schönefeld last week. There’s a cycling association out there with its own training track, and they even hold small race meetings. At least, that’s what it said on the poster I saw at Görlitzer station. I thought that if became a member, I might have another way to cycle.” She paused and frowned. “Frieda, it was horrible! There were lots of handsome, athletic men cycling around on terribly expensive bicycles, laughing and joking, drinking beer, and having the time of their lives.”

“What’s so horrible about that? That sounds very pleasant.”

“I know! But the problem is that they don’t accept women in their club!”

Frieda laughed. “What did you expect? That they’d welcome you with open arms? Offer you their bicycles and cheer you on? Men prefer to be with other men, whether it’s in the workshop or in a bicycle club.”

“You know what I’d love to do?” Without waiting for Frieda to answer, she continued, “I’d love to start my own women’s cycling club! Find some empty hall or bare patch of land where we women can cycle without being attacked for it. And without someone like Moritz Herrenhus telling us yes or no.”

“Then do it,” said Frieda.

“Father’s rekindled his interest in cycling,” said Isabelle as she took a sip of lemonade. “He goes out for a ride almost every morning. I wish he’d invite me to go with him!” she added. “I wonder why he even bothered giving me a women’s bicycle if I’m only allowed to ride it around in the yard. Sometimes I think he didn’t buy it for
me
at all, but really he just wanted to use such a flashy gift and the outing to the cycling track as a way to show off to his business friends.”

It was the start of August, Isabelle’s summer vacation had just begun, and the young women were sitting in the Herrenhus garden in the light of the setting sun, enjoying a glass of lemonade. Clara had wanted to join them, but she had not appeared yet. She was probably still at the pharmacy. Again. Isabelle’s parents had gone out and, for once, had not insisted that Isabelle accompany them, leaving the girls in peace.

Josephine nibbled at her bottom lip. The thought of father and daughter taking a congenial bicycle ride through the city did not please her at all. She would have much rather gone out cycling with her friend
herself
. But after the incident with her father a month earlier, Isabelle said she no longer trusted herself to secretly “borrow” the bicycles. Josephine had begun to feel that she was slowly going mad without the cyclist’s wind in her face.

“If we could only go away in the summer the way my school friends do! But no, Father is ‘indispensable’ at the factory right now. He’s instructed Mother to organize as many picnics and coffee get-togethers as she can over the next few weeks—and to invite all the eligible men in the city! Yesterday we had a visit from a Baron von Salzfeld. Most of the time he sat there as silent as pillar of salt. I get a headache just thinking about our conversation. Besides, he had bad breath,” said Isabelle, continuing her tirade. “If we could go cycling now and then, I’d at least have a little distraction from the agony. I swear, suffocation couldn’t be any worse than this!”

“I’ve had an idea for how we can cycle without getting harassed,” Josephine suddenly said. “Let’s set up a cycling club just for women!”

She told Isabelle about her visit to the cycling club in Schönefeld, and when she was finished Isabelle said, “A cycling club for women . . . that’s not a bad idea. I can’t believe we’re the only young women cycling in secret. There must be lots of us. We wouldn’t lack for members, that’s for sure.”

Josephine’s eyes shone as Isabelle went on, “We’d finally be able to cycle in peace. But what about the cost? We’d have to rent an empty hall somewhere. Or better yet, buy one. Rent, maintenance—it would take loads of money. My father certainly gives me a generous allowance, but that would never come close to covering the costs. And I don’t imagine other young women are much better off. No, perhaps it’s not such a good idea after all.”

A despondent silence settled over them, the only sound the hum of hundreds of wasps in the wild grapevines covering the wall of the house. After a while, Josephine could no longer stand the oppressive silence.

“I’ve got another idea to add a little spice to the school holidays. What would you say to getting the bicycles out after midnight? Your father will be sound asleep and would never miss his Rover.”

“You want to ride at midnight, in the pitch darkness?” Isabelle looked at her with incomprehension.

“Summer nights aren’t as dark as in winter. We’ve got a full moon at the moment and the skies are clear.” Jo swept a lock of hair from her forehead. “Think about the advantages: if Berlin is asleep, we can ride for much longer than we ever could in the morning. We could finally explore the Spree out to the east! Or visit the southern part of the city.”