Beyond the open window, earth and sky met at the horizon. She was sealed in. She'd wanted to leave Berlin, not slip off the edge of the earth. But it was not so much a matter of geography as of time. The years of her old life had run out. She swallowed hard.
Here, not there.
Under the neatly folded underwear in her suitcase, she found her old address book and brought it to the window. The names of her classmates were written in a childish script. Her eyes blurred over those who had not survived the war.
Folded up between the pages, she found the advertisement and read it again.
Farmers in Iceland seek strong women who can cook and do farm work.
No mention of companionship, certainly not with this ungainly farmer. Still, his hesitating manner and his stained gray sweater suggested a pleasant humility. Perhaps he'd be more at ease outdoors. She placed her clothes in the chest of drawers. At last there was nothing left in her suitcase but her paintings. No place to hang them in this bedroom.
A shuffle of slippers, and he was back. Smiling awkwardly, he beckoned her to follow him into the kitchen. He seemed to have forgotten about the coffee. Fish sizzled in a pan, and potatoes rattled in a pot. He gestured toward the two place settings. The rest of the table was covered with stacks of bills and receipts. He placed these on the floor, opened the cupboard, and brought out a cracked plate. She sensed this would be her own special plate until it broke or she left.
The old woman gestured toward the steaming fish and potatoes. Then she drizzled a woolly smelling fat over her food. With their eyes on her, Charlotte did the same. Mother and son chewed the saltfish in silence while Charlotte had the feeling she'd interrupted a conversation begun long before she arrived.
There's a hole in the fence out by the main road. That chicken isn't laying.
The old woman dropped her gaze, and Charlotte studied the thick gray braids, looped against her sun-dried neck. The shiny hair appeared to have sucked the juice out of her face.
That night, Charlotte waited in the hall outside the bedroom until the swish of skirts stopped. When she heard the bed boards creak, she tiptoed into the room, slipped off her clothes, laid them at the end of the bed, and crept under the stiff sheets.
A sliver of moonlight revealed the old woman's stony profile, still but for the lips, vibrating with each breath. A cow lowed in the home field. On the moor, a horse neighed.
But sometime in the night, Charlotte's two worlds collided. She hadn't expected the ghost of Max—full of blame and love—to cross the Atlantic, to follow her up the hillside. His lean body pressed against hers in the narrow bed. He whispered about Monet's blues and greens. And she felt safe. But he wouldn't stay the night. When he slipped away into the mist, tears slid down her cheeks and into her ears.
A Creature Going Ashore
The sunlight drifted through the panes of the little window. Facing the old woman's empty bed, Charlotte dressed slowly. A burlap apron hung on a hook. She tied it around her waist and went to the kitchen. A rust-colored cat sat hunched over a saucer, picking at fish bones. Somewhere outside, milk pails rattled.
Between the kitchen and the cowshed, she made her plan for hitchhiking back to Reykjavík. Getting off the boat, she'd seen smoking chimneys in the town. They'd need maids— maybe German tutors—in those big houses.
A lamb grazed on the shed roof. Charlotte ducked her head under the wooden frame of the door and entered a shed that was dark but for one small window. Unlit oil lamps hung on the walls of piled stone. Under her feet, she felt the grit of a dirt floor. Her lip curled at the stench of ammonia, and she nearly tripped over a tub of soaking overalls.
Ragnar stepped out from behind the wooden framework that separated the cow stalls from the washroom. In this setting he looked almost graceful, walking toward her, trailing his fingers along the cow's spine. Nourished perhaps by the warmth of the animals, his voice had a resonance.
"Good morning."
She imitated the greeting as best she could. A follow-up phrase came to mind, but the words knotted her tongue. She watched him pour milk from a bucket into a waist-high canister that stood in the center of the room.
The angular haunches of cows rose above the wooden framework that separated one stall from the other. The cows' tails were looped up with string attached to the splintered beams over their heads. The old woman wore a smock of burlap bags and a brown bandanna over her forehead. She sat on a stool tugging the teats, sending streams of milk crashing into the bucket.
"Skjalda," she said, introducing the cow.
Shifting her bound hooves, Skjalda sent a canary yellow cascade into the dirt gutter.
The old woman cheered like a Berlin soccer fan, picked up her bucket and spun it away from the downpour of pee. Nimbly, she lifted a jar from the shelf and held it with both hands under the flow. When the cow had squeezed out the last drop, the old woman carried the jar back to the shelf, placed a lid on it, and reached for the milk bucket again. Other jars lined the shelf, each one full of yellow liquid.
Ragnar led Charlotte to the next cow. He tied the cow's hooves together and greased her teats. Then, holding one in each hand, he milked a bluish beam into the bucket. When it was her turn, the rubbery flesh swelled in her hands, but no matter how hard she squeezed only a tiny dribble hit the bottom of the bucket. To relieve the pain, she spread her fingers.
The next day, the milking went better. But later, when Charlotte was pulling up weeds around the yarrow in the garden, her hands hurt. Alone in the kitchen, she held up her right hand, counted the fingers. How many ways could you use a hand? She'd brought her little box of colored pencils. Drawing moss wrapping itself around lava rocks could keep her here.
That and a man's voice—if only he'd use it more.
The old woman entered the kitchen. She handed Charlotte a dirty smock and a pair of work gloves. Back in Berlin, she'd avoided the Imperial School for Secretaries, dreading the short skirt and nubby sweater uniform that typists wore. Now she slipped her arms into a uniform stiff with filth.
A wheelbarrow stood against the wall of the shed. The old woman grasped the handles, and rolled it to the shed door. Charlotte stepped over the high wooden threshold into the winter residence of Dark Castle's sheep. The fresh manure squished under the toes of her boots. Ragnar held the handle of a square shovel with both hands, leaned his weight into it, pushed down with a grunt, and sliced through the layers of manure that had accumulated during the winter. He dumped the dark wedge onto a pile in the front of the shed.
Humming again, the old woman bent over, arms extended, embraced a brown load, staggered toward the door, cleared the threshold and dumped the manure into the wheelbarrow.
The sharp, blue eyes carried a challenge.
Your turn.
Charlotte pulled her sweater sleeve down to the cuffs of her gloves, lifted the waste in her arms, and inhaled the smell. In the sunlight, the layers of manure looked like an archaeological lesson on Germania under the Romans, the layered history of sheep cloistered in the dank shed from October to May, months devoted solely to chewing and defecating.
Pushing the full wheelbarrow to the smoke shed, sweat pearling on her upper lip, Charlotte felt sympathy for the churlish Bavarian farmers her bureaucrat father had laughed at.
Sometime that week, the clouds pulled away from the sun.
"Drying Day," the old woman said, raising her hands toward the crack in the ceiling in a gesture of gratitude.
Charlotte