Chapter Two
JOHANNA
The kitchen was stifling. Johanna had rolled up the sleeves of her blouse, but it still stuck to her shoulder blades and perspiration beaded between her breasts. Her mother was baking bread, and Johanna, of course, was helping.
Johanna could not remember exactly when the lines in her family had fallen as they did—Birgit helped her father in the shop, she helped her mother in the house, and Lotte…
what did Lotte do? Lotte laughed and sang and made everything brighter, and no one begrudged her for it, because she was Lotte, and she decorated all their lives with grace and cheer.
And, starting in September, she would be a student at the Mozarteum, to study voice and theory and composition, their little lark spreading her wings at last.
“Johanna, the oven,” Hedwig commanded, and wordlessly Johanna went to the oven and stoked the fire, shoving a few sticks of wood inside before closing the door. Her mother’s kitchen had to be, she sometimes thought, the most old-fashioned in all of Salzburg.
There were no modern conveniences for Hedwig Eder; she based her kitchen on the one of her childhood, and stepping into the large, square room, one might think they’d stepped into a Tyrolean farmhouse.
It was furnished with a wooden table and benches, and an old-fashioned cooking range, while bundles of dried herbs and ropes of onions hung from the ceiling alongside well-used copper pots and pans.
She had grudgingly allowed her husband to buy an icebox only a few years ago, for it was hardly practical to keep food in an icehouse or stream as she might have done back at her home in the mountains.
Still, Hedwig insisted on doing everything as she had done it as a girl—whether it was baking bread, or dying cloth, or drying herbs, or bottling jam. Modern methods were to be disdained, and as for buying something in a shop…!
It was bad enough that she had to get her milk from the wagon that came down the street every morning with its rattling cans, just like everyone else did in Salzburg; if she could have managed it, Johanna thought she would have kept a cow in the courtyard.
And in all these domestic endeavors, Johanna was her helpmeet.
It was a role she’d taken on with the same determined pragmatism her mother possessed, working alongside her in silent solidarity, finding satisfaction in the small yet significant achievements of a golden loaf of bread, a freshly starched shirt, a polished table.
She had never been particularly interested in school learning, despite her father’s love of books and music; Johanna preferred the practical and tangible to the obscure or abstract.
But four years on from finishing at the convent school all three girls had attended, unmarried and without any prospects of changing that state, Johanna had started to feel stifled in a way that had nothing to do with the hot kitchen.
“There.” Her mother took the round, golden loaves of bread from the oven, a look of almost grim satisfaction on her face.
“They are done.” She glanced at the clock that hung above the door, and Johanna reached for the small copper pot they always used to make coffee—every afternoon Johanna would bring a tray down to Birgit and her father before sitting down with her mother at the kitchen table to drink their own, usually in fairly companionable silence.
Sometimes Lotte would join them, although more often she would take her coffee to the sitting room with a book, and leave Hedwig and Johanna to their quiet.
Their places, Johanna was realizing more and more, were marked and always had been, but today she was determined that it was going to be different.
She waited until the coffee had been made, the tray of cups and saucers, accompanied by glasses of water, delivered to her father and sister, who were bent over their work in the back room, squinting at the bits of metal that Johanna found so tiresome.
“Thank you, mein schatz,” Manfred said with an affectionate smile and Johanna dipped her head, too nervous now to make a reply.
It wasn’t like her to be nervous; she was direct to the point of bluntness or even awkwardness, so sometimes her father would laugh that one never had to ask Johanna to “Rede nicht um den heissen Brei herum,” or “stop talking around the hot mash.” “Our Johanna will dump the mash on your head!” Manfred would laugh, his eyes twinkling and Johanna would smile, taking it as a compliment, as a sign of her strength.
And she needed that strength now.
Upstairs her mother was already sat at the table, her normally straight back slightly slumped with fatigue as she sipped her coffee in the afternoon sunlight. She’d eased her shoes off, for her ankles had swollen in the heat, her thick-knit stockings gathering around them in elephantine wrinkles.
As Johanna paused in the doorway, she was suddenly accosted by how old her mother looked—her hair, scraped back into its usual tight bun, held far more gray than blond, and there were deep wrinkles etched into her forehead, her ruddy cheeks a spiderweb of broken veins, her body’s solid form softened.
She’d never been a beautiful woman, but her husband had been devoted to her all his life.
Five years younger and four inches shorter than his wife, Manfred had met her on a walking holiday near Innsbruck.
Many times Johanna had heard him tell the story of how he’d seen her mother herding goats across a meadow and fallen straight in love.
It seemed to Johanna both romantic and absurd, that someone like her mother, so plain, so stolid, could have had a man as gentle and charming as her father fall in love with her on sight, and yet she did not doubt the truth of it; she saw it lived out every day.
“It is a good day’s work,” Hedwig said as Johanna joined her at the table. It was what she always said, as if a script had been written and her mother was following it, line by painstaking line.
“Yes, a good day’s work,” Johanna repeated dutifully. She picked up her coffee cup and then put it down again without taking a sip. “Mama?—”
Hedwig’s eyes narrowed at her meaningful tone, the change of the script. “What is it?”
Johanna took a deep breath and lifted her chin, giving her mother as direct a look as her father praised her for. “I want to go to school.”
“What…!” Hedwig expelled the word like a breath. “You’ve already been to school.”
“I know that very well,” Johanna replied.
“I’ll be twenty-three in December. I mean I want to go to secretarial school, Mama.
To learn shorthand and how to type and useful things like that.
” In truth she did not exactly know what she would learn; she had seen the leaflet at the Volksbibliothek, advertising a secretarial course for young women, but the advertisement had only offered vague promises of decent wages and “respectable office work.” It had been enough to fire Johanna’s soul.
Her mother shook her head slowly, more in confusion than outright refusal, which gave Johanna at least a little hope. “Why would you want to do this?” she asked, sounding genuinely bewildered.
“Because I want to work. I would bring in money, you know. It could be useful?—”
“We do not need money,” Hedwig retorted quickly. “Not like that. You do not need to do this thing on our account, Johanna.” She sounded reproving as well as relieved, as if bringing in a few schillings for the tin above the range was all Johanna aspired to.
Johanna took a sip of her coffee as she fought down an entirely expected rising frustration.
She’d known her mother, so traditional and set in her ways, would resist the idea.
In her mother’s world, women did not work in offices with men.
They baked bread and stitched shirts and took pride in a polished teapot or a well-swept floor.
They stayed at home until they married, and then they moved to their new home, with their husband, and did the same as before there.
It was how it had always been and how it always would be, world without end, amen.
Carefully Johanna set her cup back on its saucer, it was part of the dinner set of Hutschenreuther china her parents had received as a wedding present; each precious plate and cup her mother’s pride and joy. “I want to do something,” she said.
“Do something? You aren’t busy enough? Shall I give you more of the sewing, the stitching, the cleaning, the baking?
There is always more work to do, Johanna.
If I had known you were so restless, I would have offered you more.
” Her mother shook her head and then finished her coffee, the conversation clearly over, needing no more words.
“I mean something else, Mama.” Johanna strove to keep her tone measured.
“And what else is there?”
“Mama… surely…” She stared at her mother in frustration. “You know I’m not married.”
“Pfft. You’ll meet someone one day.”
How, Johanna wondered. She could not herd goats down the Getreidegasse like her mother had back in the mountains, and there were no longer any eligible men at St. Blasius, where they attended mass every Sunday.
In the last few years, the three potential suitors at church had all left—one to Vienna, one to be a priest, and one to become a school teacher.
She didn’t go anywhere else than home or church, not any more. There was no way to meet anyone.
A few years ago she’d been part of Naturfreunde, an Alpine club for young people that had sponsored hikes up the Monschsberg and Untersberg, treks through the Salzkammergut. Once there had even been a skiing trip.