While the World Is Still Asleep (The Century Trilogy Book 1) (5 page)

“Has some marriage prospect turned up?” Jo asked, feigning interest. When would the guard come to fetch her? Did she have to go back to Krotzmann? A cold chill ran through her at the thought. Or would she have to go straight to the caretaker? If the caretaker was as repulsive as Krotzmann, then it was all over for her . . . Would she be able to work at all with her injured hands? That Krotzmann had better not try to strike her again.

“Me and marriage? Heaven forbid,” said Isabelle. “I love my freedom far too much for that.”

“So what became of that young Baron von Salzfeld, the one your mother thought so much of?” asked Clara. “She came into the pharmacy once and gushed about him as if wedding bells would soon be ringing.”

“The one with the castle out in the country and the extensive estates east of Berlin and the
brilliant
connections to the Imperial Court? He was just the type my mother loves,” said Isabelle derisively. “I, however, found him terribly dull, so I sent him fleeing, like all the others. I make a stupid remark or come up with an irritating mannerism—and they’re gone! It’s really very easy.” She laughed. “Father is still trying to guess why the young gentleman beat such a hasty retreat. ‘Dearest Father,’ I told him, ‘am I really supposed to marry some young peacock who can’t even hold a candle to you?’ I’ve always been able to calm him down that way.” Isabelle looked very pleased with herself.

Clara raised her eyebrows in surprise. “But if it all really means so little to you . . . including all the ball gowns and jewelry and constant visits to the hairdresser . . . why don’t you just tell your father you’re not interested in getting married? Wouldn’t that be better for everyone?”

“You don’t know my father! He’s got it into his head that through me—or rather, through the fine match I’ll make one day—he’ll climb into the highest social circles.”

“But he’s already there. He’s been up there for ages,” said Josephine. She was thinking of Isabelle’s family’s beautiful villa, which was stuffed full of valuable things. She had been wide-eyed when she had first seen it. She had never imagined that people lived like that, let alone that she would ever set foot in such a place.

Isabelle ran a hand through her mass of red curls. “Money is one thing. But there are many in the upper circles who still look at my father as a kind of tailor, an upstart
apron-maker
, someone who could never belong to the league of major industrialists like the Krupps or the Rothschilds. But that is exactly where he wants to be, and I am the means to that end.”

Josephine frowned. “You sound so bitter . . . I always thought you enjoyed all those balls.”

“You
thought
 . . . For a change, you might have
asked
me just once how I felt about it.” Isabelle looked from Jo to Clara. “How many times have I told you that these society balls are like an Arabian wedding market? And it’s never occurred to you that I’m supposed to be bartered away to the highest bidder? You seem to think I live in some kind of paradise . . .”

The mockery in Isabelle’s voice was impossible to ignore. Josephine, cut to the quick, looked down at her bloody hands. Had she really been such a bad friend? So selfish? She’d been so caught up in her own projects, her own thoughts. Only ever thinking of herself.

“Forgive me. I’m so sorry for everything . . .” she said, choking on her own tears.

Isabelle and Clara shifted uneasily on their hard chairs. Josephine cleared her throat.

“I don’t want to seem rude, but . . . I’ve been assigned to the caretaker as his assistant, and he’s probably waiting for me.” Without a word of farewell, without any embrace, Josephine fled the room in tears.

“So you’re supposed to be my new helper . . .” The caretaker looked Josephine up and down. “You’ve got a broad back, at least. Well, we’ll see. It’s actually too late to start on any new tasks today, but if I send you away now, they’ll stick you in the kitchen and I’ll be back to square one.” He turned to the guard who had brought Jo out to him in the yard. “You can go. Thank you.”

“OK, let’s get started.” He grabbed hold of the handcart and told Josephine to follow him.

Although initially hesitant, Josephine trotted behind him. At first glance, he made a friendly impression. He was middle-aged with a shaved head. He reminded her of the coachmen who brought their horses into the smithy. They liked to talk big, but under their rough exteriors they usually had soft hearts.

The caretaker stopped at a shed behind the main building. “My name’s Gerd Melchior.” He held out his hand to shake Jo’s. His handshake was firm and pleasant. “If you behave properly and work hard, we’ll get along just fine. If not . . .” He left the sentence unfinished, but there was a threat in his tone.

“Josephine Schmied. But everyone calls me Jo.”

“Fine with me,” said Melchior. Inside the shed, he rummaged briefly on a shelf and pulled out an old paintbrush. He gestured with his chin toward a pile of boards that lay in the center of the shed on a kind of tarpaulin. “That’s going to be the frame for a new compost heap. I don’t want it to rot out after a year, so it needs to get a protective coat. I need you to paint every board with the
goudron
. And you’ll do it carefully. No light spots, got it?”

“
Goudron?
Isn’t that just plain old tar?” Josephine asked, screwing up her nose at the familiar, biting smell emanating from the paint pot.

The caretaker looked at her in surprise. “One and the same. But how d’you know anything about tar?”

Jo smiled. “My father shoes horses and I’ve always helped him. We paint rotten hooves with tar.”

Melchior raised his eyebrows. “You’re a smith’s daughter? What are you doing in here?” But he immediately waved off his question. “I don’t want to know. You children are all so foolish! Instead of using the chances you’re given, you just get up to mischief. Now show me whether you can really work, or whether you’re just one of those good-for-nothings we already have too many of.”

The dormitory had been quiet for a long time. From here and there came a soft snoring or someone groaning in her sleep. But as exhausted as Jo was—more so than ever before—she could not fall asleep. Her eyes stung from the fumes of the tar that she had spent three hours painting onto the long boards. Afterward, when she had asked a guard for permission to wash her blood-crusted, tar-spotted hands, she was told that inmates were only allowed to wash in the morning.

“A lack of personal hygiene is behind many a malady,”
she suddenly heard in a voice from the past in her mind. Josephine sighed. Who had told her that? One of the doctors in the Black Forest, where she had spent some time because of her lungs? Or had it been Clara, with her pharmaceutical knowledge?

Before she could stop them, other voices joined in:
“All you could think about was your own obsession . . .” “You just get up to mischief.” “Sadly, your epiphany is a little late . . .”
Clara’s, Isabelle’s, and Frieda’s words fluttered in her mind like little bats; mixed up with them was Gerd Melchior talking about mischief.

“Sadly, your epiphany is a little late.”
Isabelle’s tone had been so bitter.

Josephine rolled from one side to the other restlessly. Hindsight . . . Could she even claim that? Or would she do it all exactly the same way again? Wasn’t everything that had happened a logical consequence of what had come before? Could it have happened any other way? Or was she oversimplifying when she thought about it like that?

As a wan moon shone through the close prison bars, Josephine’s thoughts drifted into the past.

Chapter Four

Berlin, spring 1889

“Tell her she’d better not cross my path at the funeral.” Schmied-the-Smith reached for his coffee cup with trembling hands, then thought better of it and pulled a hip flask from his pocket. His wife opened her mouth to say something but changed her mind.

Josephine inhaled sharply, horrified. “Father, I—”

The smith’s heavy fist thundered onto the table. Josephine jumped, as did her mother and her sisters.

“And tell her to keep her mouth shut. I don’t want to hear another word come out of it.” The icy coldness of his voice was worse than any shouting could have been.

Josephine looked to her sisters in despair. Like the rest of the family, the older Schmied girls were dressed in black, and both were holding umbrellas. The skies were weeping on this spring day. Gundel looked back at her blankly, but on Margaret’s face Josephine saw open hostility. Neither said a word in her defense.

Elsbeth Schmied laid one hand on Josephine’s shoulder and led her out of the kitchen. “Go to your room.”

“But he was my brother—” She broke off in a fit of coughing.

“You should have thought of that when you went sneaking off to see that fancy pharmacist’s girl. If you’d been looking after Felix like we told you to, our boy would still be alive!”

While Josephine’s family accompanied Felix to his final resting place, Josephine ran over to Frieda’s place. Pattering raindrops mixed with her tears and fell onto her carelessly bandaged hands. Beneath the strips of cloth, her flesh was inflamed and throbbing. The dressings should have been changed long ago. Dr. Fritsche himself had emphasized how important proper care and hygiene were for burns. And he had told Josephine’s mother that something had to be done about her daughter’s smoke poisoning. She needed to be inhaling menthol, eucalyptus oil, or a thin camphor solution. Elsbeth Schmied had nodded. But no one had yet paid a visit to Anton Berg to get the medicine.

“You’re to blame, you’re to blame—I can’t bear to hear it one more time,” Frieda said to her as she removed the dirty bandages from Josephine’s hands. “Do you really think you’re lord over life and death? What happened was God’s will and
only
God’s will. Yes, you should perhaps have listened to your parents and stayed with Felix. But that act of disobedience is the only thing you can blame yourself for. Your father could just as easily accuse himself of being careless with the key to the barn. Or of not locking the matches away. Your little brother was obsessed by fire. Everyone on this street knew that. Wherever he went, wherever he was, he was always pilfering matches. Something was bound to happen sooner or later. Once, I left my reading glasses and newspaper outside. And when I went to get them, there was Felix holding the glasses up to the sun, using them like a magnifying glass. The newspaper was already in flames! Because I love footbaths so much, I was lucky to have a bucket of water under the table. Who knows what would have happened otherwise.”

“You never told me that,” said Josephine, her voice low. She wrapped the old cardigan that Frieda had given her tighter around her body. A moment later, another fit of coughing racked her body.

“Child, you’re going to cough to death!” Frieda handed her a cup of sweet herb tea. Then she began wrapping Josephine’s hand in fresh white cotton gauze. “Your mother knew that Felix liked to play with fire. She clipped his ear every time she caught him, and that was that. Of course, she was deathly afraid that something worse would happen one day. But what was she supposed to do? Keep watch on a twelve-year-old rascal, day and night? Impossible.” Frieda laid her calloused hand on Josephine’s arm. “God’s will is stronger than we mortals are. Besides, you did everything you could. You risked your own life trying to get Felix out of that barn alive. When the men from the fire department found you, you were unconscious in front of the barn. A minute, two minutes later and you would have been dead yourself.”

Josephine shook her head. “No, I can’t let myself off so easy. If only I’d . . .”

The weeks passed. Josephine withdrew more and more into herself until, soon, there was nothing left of the sturdy, curious, and bold young woman she had once been. Pale, with sunken eyes, she dragged herself to school, where Clara, trying her best to console her friend, read her one Bible passage after another during the breaks. But Josephine’s feelings of guilt carried more weight than the words of Matthew or John. After school, she continued to help her father at his forge. Schmied-the-Smith had begun the work of rebuilding his workshop the day after Felix’s funeral. The people called him brave and clapped him on the shoulder. But they avoided Josephine’s eye.

It was rare for Frieda to visit one of her neighbors.
Now and then one has to make an exception,
thought Frieda, as she wrapped her “going-out” shawl around her shoulders on the evening of the first day of August 1889.

She made her way along the street, noticing the men and women in every yard as they battled through the last of their daily chores with worn-out faces and bent backs. She thanked her lucky stars again for her own beneficent fate. For fate had seen to it that, after the death of her husband, Robert, a toolmaker, she was finally able to live as she wanted. She could sleep late in the morning, then sit comfortably with her cat and the daily newspaper on the bench in front of her house. Or she could spend a whole day in bed with the books she indulged in from time to time. Other days, she spent hours learning the flute—music had always fascinated her—and she loved to paint and draw, too . . .

She wasted no worry on money. Thanks to the formidable sum her grumpy husband had stashed in the bank without her knowledge, she led a carefree life. The house and the large garden were hers, debt free. Of course, her neighbors were suspicious of her way of life. At first, they had all believed that she would sell the place or rent out the workshop. Or that she would marry the bachelor who had previously helped out in the workshop, and that he would continue to manage the business the way it had always been. But with the passing of time, they had grown accustomed to Frieda’s eccentricities, and a few even discreetly dropped by for a glass of wine and good conversation from time to time. Schmied-the-Smith and his wife, however, were not among them, which left Frieda with no choice but to go and visit them.

“Josephine’s coughing is growing worse. She probably breathed in too much smoke when she tried to rescue Felix. If you don’t do something soon, you’ll be carrying a second child to her grave,” she said as she sat across the table from the smith and his wife. Josephine had been washing the dishes when Frieda arrived, and they had sent her out of the kitchen.

“Have you joined the ranks of doctors now? What do you care about Josephine’s cough?” asked Schmied.

“Dr. Fritsche has no explanation for her coughing,” said Elsbeth. “She’s probably just doing it for show.”

Frieda sighed. She had not imagined that the Schmieds’ bitterness could be so deeply embedded. She turned to Elsbeth.

“Dr. Fritsche must have given you some sort of directive?”

“We’re supposed to send her up to the North Sea or the Baltic. The clean sea air is said to be good for ailing lungs,” Elsbeth Schmied said, rolling her eyes to show what she thought of the doctor’s advice.

“Clean sea air! I slave away at the forge all day long and you don’t see me in need of any sea air,” said her husband derisively. “You want us to reward the little tramp with a long summer holiday while Felix is down with the worms?”

Frieda suddenly felt that she would not last another minute in that gloomy kitchen. She took a deep breath.

“I’d like to make a suggestion,” she said, looking forcefully at the smith and his wife. “I have relatives down in the Black Forest, in a village called Schömberg, to be exact. My nephew works as the caretaker in a sanatorium there. It’s a special hospital for people with lung diseases. They say the climate there is excellent. It could be just the thing for Josephine’s cough. Joachim—that’s my nephew—could arrange something for your daughter. A few weeks there, a small room, medical attention . . .”

“A sanatorium at the edge of the empire? Wonderful!” said the smith sarcastically. “And who’ll help me in the workshop? Who’ll pay for it? I’m not spending a cent on such an extravagance.”

“Do you think I expect you to?” Frieda replied coldly. “If it helps the girl recover her health, I’m happy to pay whatever it costs. If you agree, Josephine could travel down there in mid-October. My nephew tells me that a room will be free then. And Oskar Reutter from the emporium on the corner will be going to Stuttgart on business at that time; he would be an ideal traveling companion for Josephine.”

“Looks like you’ve put a lot of thought into this. But why wait? You might as well take the worthless thing with you right now. Then at least I won’t have to look at her anymore. I can always find another helper.”

None of the adults knew that Josephine was eavesdropping behind the door and heard every word with a stony face and a broken heart.

The evening before she left, Josephine took the small, cheap suitcase Gundel had borrowed from her employer and stuffed her underwear, socks, and three dresses inside. Her hand already on the doorknob, she cast one last look around the room. Sadly, there was nothing that she wanted to take along. No book, no worn-out but beloved toy, not a single memento. She just wanted to be gone, gone from her father’s hatred and her mother’s coldness. Gone from the house, gone from the walls that seemed to accuse her day in and day out, gone from that gloomy place where even the air despised her.

When she went to the pharmacy to say good-bye to Clara, she was told by her friend’s mother that Clara was busy.

The train departed very early in the morning and the journey proved uneventful. The steaming locomotive stopped only once, just before Nuremberg, on an open stretch of track. No one knew why. “Just a technical failure, I’m sure,” said her traveling companion, Oskar Reutter, as he shared the food he’d brought for the journey with her. “The train is the greatest invention of our century. The railway network has been growing steadily, and soon, trains will be able to travel to the farthest corners of our empire. Distances that once seemed insurmountable are turning into nothing more than lines on a map. It is truly a blessing!”

Josephine could only agree as she—a girl who had never before left the Luisenstadt district—sat watching the many different landscapes pass by from the comfort of the train compartment. An unfamiliar sense of elation—of freedom and distance, of inspiration and boundlessness—came over her. She already felt as if she could breathe more easily.

Beyond Nuremberg, Oskar Reutter pointed out a large building to her. “Mr. Joseph Obermaier’s telegraphic equipment factory. They’re building the future there,” he said enthusiastically. “We live in exciting times!”

They went their separate ways in Stuttgart once the emporium owner had ensured that Josephine was settled in the right train for the next leg of her journey.

Two hours later, Josephine arrived in Pforzheim. Mr. Reutter had explained to her that the railway had not penetrated beyond that point into the Black Forest region but that there were always people with wagons offering their services outside Pforzheim station. She would have to bargain hard, of course, but one of them would certainly be willing to drive her the final stretch to Schömberg.