The Emigrants

Now I am standing in the living room once again, writes Luisa. I have walked through the gloomy, stone-flagged hall, have placed my hand cautiously on the handle, as I do almost every morning at that time, I have pushed it down and opened the door, and inside, standing barefoot on the white scrubbed floorboards, I look around in amazement at all the nice things in the room. There are two green velvet armchairs with knotted fringes all round, and between the windows that face onto the square is a sofa in the same style. The table is of light-coloured cherrywood. On it are a fan-like frame with five photographs of our relatives in Mainstockheim and Leutershausen and, in a frame of its own, a picture of Papa's sister, who people say was the most beautiful girl for miles around, a real Germania. Also on the table is a china swan with its wings spread, and in it, in a white lace frill, our dear Mama's evergreen bridal bouquet, beside the silver menora which is required on Friday evenings and for which Papa cuts paper cuffs especially every time, to prevent the wax dripping from the candles. On the tallboy by the wall, opened at a page, lies a folio-sized volume ornately bound in red with golden tendrils of vine. This, says Mama, is the works of her favourite poet, Heine, who is also the favourite poet of Empress Elisabeth. Next to it is the little basket where the newspaper, the Miinchner Neueste Nachrichten, is kept, which Mama is immersed in every evening despite the fact that Papa, who goes to bed far earlier, always tells her that it is not healthy to read so late at night. The hoya plant is on the cane table in the bay of the east window. Its leaves are firm and dark, and it has a lot of pink-hearted umbels consisting of white, furry stars. When I come down early in the mornings, the sun is already shining into the room and gleaming on the drops of honey that cling to every little star. I can see through the leaves and flowers into the grassy garden where the hens are out pecking. Franz, our stable boy, a very taciturn albino, will have hitched the horses to the calèche by the time Papa is ready to leave, and over there, across the fence, is a tiny house under an elder, where you can usually see Kathinka Strauss at this time. Kathinka is a spinster of perhaps forty, and people say she is not quite right in the head. When the weather permits, she spends her day walking around the chestnut tree in the Square, clockwise or anti-clockwise according to whim, knitting something that she plainly never finishes. Though there is little else that she can call her own, she always wears the most outrageous bonnets on these walks; one, which featured a seagull's wing, I remember particularly well because Herr Bein the teacher referred to it in school, telling us we should never kill any creature merely in order to adorn ourselves with its feathers.