The Weather in Berlin by Ward Just

Author:Ward Just
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

11

GREENWOOD walked with Reinhold down the path to the road, where they waited for the women. Reinhold had slung a twelve-gauge shotgun over his shoulder. They stood facing the gatehouse, the barn and the main house high in the distance. Reinhold was saying something about the village, its population and agriculture, its history and economy. Greenwood was half listening, and when his eye strayed to an upstairs window he saw Ingeborg glittering in the sun, her glass ornaments dancing with light; she looked like a princess in a fairy tale. She leaned against the windowpane and stared into the middle distance, swaying to some mysterious rhythm. When the sun’s rays flooded the window she seemed to burst into fire, and then a cloud intervened and she became only a troubled girl staring into the desolate landscape, her grandfather and a stranger in her line of sight. She slowly lifted her fingers to her mouth and drew deeply on a cigarette, smoke spilling from her mouth like steam from a cauldron.

There is no work for her, Reinhold said.

Does she want to work?

No, Reinhold admitted.

Isn’t it difficult? So much unemployment—

She doesn’t know how, Reinhold said. None of them do.

She’s waiting for us to leave, he added bitterly. Then she may leave also, without making false explanations to me as to where she is going and who she is going with. What her plans are, and when she will be home.

Teenagers, Dixon said.

Ingeborg is twenty-four, Reinhold answered. He turned abruptly and set off down the road at a brisk pace, the women strolling far behind, Willa and Anya in heavy coats, Karen and Sophie in sweaters. They all wore bright scarves and ski hats. In short order, Reinhold turned off the road and onto a cart path. He increased the pace until Dix, leaning heavily on his cane, began to lag. The land fell away from the path in a gentle slope. Here and there were the buildings of working farms, small holdings from the look of them, the fields carelessly cultivated. To love this terrain would take a stubborn pride, along with the knowledge of the bones of your ancestors underfoot. Dix looked for some variation in the landscape, and began then to wonder about the effect of terrain on human personality. Did vast distances, brutal sun, and the monotonous contours of sand account for the sublime hospitality of the desert Arabs? This land would induce stoicism, a steely patience and resolve. Perhaps also a feeling of undeserved inferiority. Dix thought of his own upbringing in the country north of Chicago, the rambling house on three acres of land, the lake nearby, huge oak trees flanking the driveway, some of them two hundred years old and more. They were flourishing when Lincoln was a boy. Of course he found the physical surroundings consoling; it was the people who were monotonous, so as soon as he could flee, he fled. He believed the North Shore simple arithmetic when he craved higher mathematics, and

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