Chapter 18
Elsebeth
Ursula draws me up and makes me look into her eyes. They are brown, like many good things are: rich earth, and bread, and the rabbits I often spy when the sun sets, playing in the fields like children do, fast, fierce, and full of joy.
“Do you trust me, mein Liebchen?” she asks.
How could I not when she calls me her little darling?
I nod; I can’t speak yet, for a pain has risen from my heart and locked my throat as tightly as my father’s chest of tools.
She touches my cheek, and it’s so tender that I feel like I might cry again, likely would, had I not spent all my tears just now. They have made my head pound, and my eyes and throat ache, though I feel a little lighter for having shed them.
Ursula undoes the buttons of my dress, and my breath comes quick and fast, and doesn’t seem to travel far into my chest at all.
I stand very still. One by one the buttons yield to her touch.
She takes her time, and I know not if she does that because she enjoys this, or she fears I shall buck and shy in the way a horse does when it has been ill-used, as I have been by Gottfried.
The dress is too big on me now, but starvation can’t alter the shape of our bones, and I am broad hipped, so she still has to tug on the fabric to get it to come down.
She places her hands—so hot, so beautiful, so soft—on my shoulders, the fingers questing underneath the straps of my shift and touching my skin, and it’s so sweet I shiver.
There’s that pull low in my hips again, which I have only ever felt with that soldier before and then not always, and I wonder, is this the devil tugging at me, gathering me to him, impatient for a soul he knows he’s owed?
I moan, this sad, frightened sound.
Ursula freezes, but only for a moment. I swear she can read my thoughts again as if they’re pictures painted on my forehead, for she cups my cheek and says softly, “If something is done to make you well again, it’s not a sin.”
And I want to believe that, I really do, but I don’t know if I can.
She must sense this doubt in me, for she says quickly, “Trust me, mein Liebchen. Trust me, and let me make you well.”
Why not trust her? She is sweet and knows many things that I do not, bookish things, not like the farm things I know, like how to pluck a chicken, how to know if there’s rot upon a plant, and how much vinegar to add to a jar to pickle the Lord’s bounty so we may last the winter.
And have I not trusted her so far already? I trusted her enough to come with her, no matter that this journey seemed a foolish papist quest to me from the start. To doubt her now when I know her much better, well, that strikes me as silly.
“I trust you,” I say.
She smiles, and it’s like a bank of clouds breaking so that golden sunlight can fall on the earth, and I think to myself that life may not be so bad after all if I had her to smile at me like that every day.
My shift follows the way of my dress. Ursula holds my hand to steady me as I step out of the pool of fabric at my feet.
My legs are like reeds, all hollow. I stumble.
She steadies me, and we are flush against each other now.
I think again of rabbits. I caught one once and felt its little heart pound like a war drum in a chest so small, I could have crushed it with my hand.
My heart races as quickly as that rabbit’s heart, and I feel just as vulnerable.
Ursula takes a shuddering breath, then steps away. Whilst I fold my clothes neatly, Ursula unbuttons her own dress, but when the time comes to take it off, she falters.
“What is it?” I ask.
“At the convent, we always keep our shifts on, even when we wash. For chastity, you see. There’s a trick to soaping up your body whilst still clothed. It has been such a long time since I’ve seen my own body naked…”
That only proves to me that nunneries are queer places indeed. I have often seen my grandmother, my mother, and my big sister, Margarethe, naked, and my little brothers, Friedrich and Johannes, as well. My father, too, when I was still a child.
“Are you afraid?” I ask.
“I don’t know that I am.”
“You said there’s no sin in it if it is done to make me well,” I say.
She laughs. “I can’t argue myself out of that one. How right you are.”
I am broad hipped and strong, a farm girl through and through.
If these times weren’t so lean, I’d likely go to fat, and gladly so.
Ursula is shaped differently, tall and thin, though not strong.
It’s a marvel to me that they say God has shaped us in His own image, yet our bodies differ so; if He exists, mayhap God has more than one shape?
When we are done drinking the other in, she takes my hand and leads me into the water of the river. I hiss, it’s so cold, but I don’t resist, for I trust her even if I don’t know quite what she means to do with me.
She kneels, and I want to tell her not to do that; she might cut her knees on the sharp stones hiding in the riverbed, and her knee must still be tender from when she bruised it when that soldier attacked her, but again there is a moment in which my thoughts seem to leap out of my head and into hers, for she looks up at me and smiles sweetly and says, “Don’t fret, mein Liebchen.
I am used to kneeling, and the riverbed is quite soft. Feel for yourself.”
I kneel down also and groan as the water streams over my thighs, my rear, my cunny. It’s really awfully cold.
In the moments that follow, Ursula washes me with handfuls of water and sand.
She doesn’t rush, even though it’s cold.
She even scrubs carefully between my toes.
When she has arrived at my face, she draws me to her, eases me onto her lap so that my head rests in the crook of her elbow, as if I am her babe.
She looks at me with those big brown eyes of hers, cow eyes really, just as beautifully fringed and mournful.
This unearths a memory, something I had forgotten until now, of our cow, whom Margarethe had called Kamille, and how I used to stroke her warm hide as she stood cropping the grass with her blunt teeth.
My father said she had no soul, but my grandmother told me sometimes cows could speak, and if I was kind to her, and kept her fed and clean, perhaps Kamille might one day tell me one of her cow secrets.
When this war is over and I can live somewhere without the fear of soldiers—but with Ursula—I hope to have another cow like Kamille.
Ursula touches my eyebrows, my nose, even traces the whorls of my ears with her wet fingers, burying the memory of Kamille. I wonder briefly if she’s anointing me or means to baptize me into her faith, but no, she’d not shame my trust like that.
She gently lowers me into the water. It rushes into my ears and nose.
When she pulls me out, I gasp and splutter.
She smooths my wet hair out of my face, tucks it behind my ears.
I want to tell her then that it used to be very long and thick, and Gottfried used to marvel at it, wind his hands into it, and tug on it, and so I cut it all off when I fled from him, for he had soiled it with all that grasping, but I say nothing.
Sometimes, to speak is to sully.
I am scrubbed clean now. We get out of the river. With my shift, we dry ourselves. I make to put my dress on, but Ursula shakes her head at me. “I’m not done yet,” she says. She goes to the tree where her shift is drying and breaks off some twigs, and I know then what she means to do.
My throat locks again. It’s so like her, so sweet and innocent, to think that a bit of scrubbing and a beating can cure me of what I did and was done to me. It does not work like that.
But I promised to trust her, and to go back on a promise is a kind of lying, so I let her lead me to the tree, and I wrap my arms around its trunk.
I shiver. It’s not from the cold this time; I know that much.
The first touch of the twigs against my skin makes me flinch, though only because it startles me. Ursula beats me all over, doing it very gently, not enough to hurt but just hard enough to redden my skin and get the blood to flow.
It vexes me, this gentleness. She keeps treating me with a kindness I know in my heart of hearts I do not deserve, no matter that I crave it.
I look at her over my shoulder. “Harder,” say I.
“I don’t want to break the skin and draw blood. I don’t—”
“Harder,” I command, for wickedness cannot be driven out by a soft hand.
The next slap of the twigs lands on my rear with a meaty thwack. It stings my skin, makes it burn. I can’t help but gasp.
Such strength!
Such fervor!
Such viciousness!
I never thought her capable of it, and it is both startling and delightful. I close my eyes. “Yes,” I say, and I laugh a little, “like that.”
Soon, the blows are falling down on me like rain upon the land.
Ursula seemed so sweet and frail to me. I never expected such passion from her.
As Ursula beats me, I flinch, writhe, and shy away; I cry out, laugh, and moan.
For a moment, I act like my mother when she was overcome with love of the Lord and fell to the ground grimacing and gibbering, only it’s not a godly love that I feel.
This beating does what no amount of hard work or prayer ever did before: It turns my mind upside down and lets everything pour out, all thoughts of sin and shame, and all memories of Gottfried and my poor sister, Margarethe, and many other foul things besides.
Out, out, out they tumble.
And then
my mind is empty
I need not
think
and it is
sweet
it is
bliss
it is
heaven
heaven
heaven…