Beautiful
Isabella remembers the birth of her son:
“First with child at the age of twenty-four, Isabella had wished herself a son but bore a daughter. She was anxious, having no experience of sisters, and only her own uneasy girlself to measure things by: she had been small and round and plain as a day-old loaf of brown bread. But Luise, like Margit to come after her, took after Alois: long and bony, with spindly fingers and toes; this set Isabella’s mind at ease. She gave everything affectionate she could find in herself to her girls, and in time came to the belief that a woman must have a daughter to rest easy in her grave.
Then Peter was born, and Isabella fell into a new kind of devotion, awash in an unexpected energy that made her arms quiver and her fingers jerk. She realized, with some guilt but no regret, that she had been holding back the quick of herself, the bloody beat of her heart, for a son. For Peter. It took her a long time, too long, to find some balance, to show an interest in the girls again. Even then, when no one was looking, she would pick Peter up and draw in his scent. She chided herself for taking such pleasure in his smell, even as she ran her nose over the crown of his scalp, pink and firm and fuzzy as a peach but much sweeter. She would fit her lower face to his small one, her nose buried in the soft folds between ear and shoulder, and inhale until she was dizzy. She did this until he was too old to tolerate it, and then she mourned the loss.”
Now Peter is a grown man, gone off to war, and his mother and family await his return:
“There are three men still gone, one fighting in the South Tirol. Two others, including Isabella’s Peter, are in Galicia. They have had no news of Peter in four months. Now the whole household - Isabella, Alois, and their widowed daughter, Barbara, as well as Peter’s wife and four children - lives with an ear turned toward the road. They wait for the sound of his step, or for word that he has fallen. The weight of this, all of them leaning toward the road, seems to have tipped the family out of balance and set them spinning haphazardly. They are moons of a missing planet.”
Peter returns from the war missing a leg, some fingers, and an eye.
“Now Isabella spends as much time as she can spare at the window watching Peter, who spends his days whittling in the Schopf with the shutters propped up to let in the light. She tells herself that he doesn’t know about this habit of hers.
Peter sits with the damaged side of his face bared to the mild winter sun. Like a blessing, the sunlight strokes what his mother cannot bring herself to look at: it moves tenderly over the mass of scar tissue that ripples from his hairline down the left side of his face to puddle on what was once a smooth cheek, a well-formed ear, a clean jaw. It soaks deep into the patch that hides the empty eye socket.
Isabella watches Peter as he turns his one eye and his mind, still whole and sharp, to the piece of wood wedged against his right thigh. Beneath his blade a world has come to life. A meadow of flowers twists and twirls around the long, tapered shaft of wood. Half hidden in a mass of blossoms, a stag raises his head. There are birds, squirrels, ibexes, and he is working now on a small group of marmots.
Quietly, the youngest of his boys slips into the Schopf to sit with his father. Peter makes no move to discourage him, but he pulls his cap down low over the left side of his face. Shavings still fall in fragile tendrils from the point of his knife. Isabella listens as Peter and Leo talk. Leo is seven, and so in love with his father that his ruined face is no penance at all. They talk about the marmots, who live in the highest ranges and cut grass and spread it to dry on rocks in the sun, using the sweet hay to build nests in their burrows. Leo imitates the high warning whistle the marmots make to their young, and Peter laughs out loud; Isabella feels her insides clutching. She chides herself for her weakness, for her jealousy of a seven-year-old child.
When Peter puts aside his knife, Isabella turns away quickly. She will not watch her son take up his wooden prosthesis, now covered to the hinged knee with flowers and vines and animals, and strap it to the stump where his left leg used to be.”
A mother’s love:
“Isabella goes down on her knees next to her son, her bones snapping and protesting, but she goes down anyway. There is a rustle as Anna moves away, but Isabella takes no note of this; she puts her hand on her son, her right palm on the ruined left side of his face, to turn him full toward her, to meet his eyes. He has been waiting for her all these days, all these weeks: he has been patient. But there is something of wariness, come caution in his eyes as well; Isabella sees this now and it makes her cringe. She runs her fingers - gently, gently - over the waves of flesh, red and purple; she traces the thick seams the doctors left behind; she cups his sunken cheek in her own seamed palm. There is murmuring around her: Alois, Anna, Barbara’s voice rising shrill. Only Peter is quiet. Peter doesn’t protest or turn away, and this gives her the strength to stay.
He smells of linseed ointment, of pipe tobacco and wood sap, of his wife and his union with her - this gives Isabella pause, but only for a moment. She draws in his smell and now she finds him again, the boy he was, a boy running bare-legged down the road while his mother watches at the window. When his arm comes up and around her shoulder, Isabella slides her fingers into her son’s hair, puts her face to the hollow between ear and shoulder, and draws in a breath.”
(All quoted passages are from Homestead
