As well as all these painful questions about why it had happened, there was also the fear of possible consequences. When her period started, she felt a great weight fall from her heart.
Of course it wasn’t long before the rumors that Strobel had started about Johanna spread to Lauscha. As tongues began wagging, nobody quite knew what to make of it. People never went so far as to say out loud that they thought Johanna was a thief. The Steinmann girls were not like other women, certainly, but that didn’t mean that they were criminals. The villagers were much more inclined to believe that the rumors from town were all about making one of their number look bad.
Thomas Heimer needled his wife to tell him more, but she remained steadfastly silent. Eventually most people chose to believe the Steinmann version, which was that Johanna had come home because of a serious illness. Nobody was much surprised when she chose to stay. Lauscha folk liked to stay close to home. Hardly any of them had ever left, and of the handful who did, most came back again, as Magnus Grün’s return confirmed.
At first neither Ruth and Marie nor Peter had believed that Johanna would be able to find her way back to normalcy. But gradually, day by day, she grew more like her old self; every time Johanna laughed at one of Ruth’s jokes, made some sarcastic remark about a neighbor, or left the house to fetch butter from the store, the others breathed a sigh of relief. Only then did they realize how tense they had been. Instead of tiptoeing around the house, they resumed their daily tasks. Johanna took on the housekeeping that had been so badly neglected. Ruth began to come by only once a day, and no longer stayed for hours on end. Peter got to work on his backlog of orders. And Marie finally dared to sit down with her sketchpad in the evenings after work.
10
“I’m off then,” Ruth said, poking her head round the kitchen door.
Thomas had been lying on the kitchen bench after a long day at work, but now he sat up.
“Where?”
Ruth switched Wanda over to her other hip. “To see Johanna, of course!” She tried to keep her voice light and easy.
“Have you forgotten that we’re supposed to join the others? Father has some business he wants to discuss with us,” he said.
“No, I haven’t forgotten,” Ruth answered. “But Wilhelm and Sebastian will be smoking their disgusting pipes, and that would just make Wanda’s cough worse. I don’t know what to do about it as it is. A cough like this in the middle of summer, it’s just not normal. Why can’t Wilhelm talk to you while you’re working?”
“You’re coming,” Thomas said, so quietly that for a moment Ruth didn’t understand him.
She stood in the doorway, indecisive.
“I can come later,” she offered. She didn’t want yet another argument. “It won’t take long. I just want to take them a pot of . . .”
“Damn it, are you deaf?” Thomas took two steps and struck a short, sharp blow across the back of Ruth’s head. Wanda whimpered softly.
Please, child, don’t cry!
Thomas hated it when Wanda cried.
“I don’t like the way you spend all your time with your sisters. Eva doesn’t run off to Steinach every day; she knows where she belongs. But I have to keep on reminding you that you’re a Heimer now!” He was shouting by now. “I want to know what the three of you get up to all the time!”
His face was just a handsbreadth from hers, his too-big eyes boring into hers.
“I asked you a question, woman! What do you get up to? That busybody Johanna isn’t normal!”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Ruth replied, her eyes downcast. “If you came to call on them sometime, you could see for yourself that there’s nothing out of the ordinary going on.” She put more courage into the words than she really felt.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Thomas retorted. “And you’ll stop taking your sisters food and who knows what else! From now on you’ll look after my family.” He gripped her wrist and twisted.
Ruth howled with pain.
“So, where are you going this evening?”
The pain shot up toward her elbow, then higher and higher and . . . “To your family,” she said between clenched teeth. She hated herself.
Thomas let go of her wrist.
They had no sooner arrived at the Heimer house than the trouble started again.
Thomas sat down with the other men at the table, ignoring Ruth altogether. Eva gave him a stein of beer, then nodded curtly at Ruth.
“Come and help me with supper! The bread still needs to be sliced, and the butter fetched up from the cellar. And the dishes from lunch still need to be washed as well,” she declared as she set to work slicing a ham.