This is a one-shot dedicated to all those who, like me, were curious about Isla Hermann.
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At this point, I am well aware of the question residing in the more primal area of your mind: were there women? You are human, after all, so I will forgive your use of the plural. In fact, I'll do more. I'll reward it with an answer.
Of course there were.
Not, however, in the sense that you are doubtlessly imagining.
No sighing. No surging. No sweating.
In my time I have touched a hundred women. A thousand women. A million women. All without taking them, at least not at the time. Please forgive the double entendre. As I passed them – the elegant and the cross, the sad and the smiling, the proud and the stooped – I never could resist. A brush of my fingers. A brief caress, intended to console as they considered their loss. Most would shiver, slip out of my grasp and move back towards whatever warmth, if any, remained available. They would live by choice, even if they did not acknowledge it.
Some did not.
Perhaps they enjoyed wrapping their misery around their shoulders like a thick black cloak. Maybe it was simpler to be defined purely by tragedy than the precarious balance of triumph and failure termed humanity. I don't know. It's not a truth they want to share, for fear of tearing the gossamer shroud of their mystery.
One such woman was Isla Hermann.
She floated face down in a stagnant pool of her own despair. The mayor's wife was never quite strong enough to submerge herself in the murky depths. Every so often, one thing and one thing only would tug persistently at her fluffy hair until she was forced to tilt her head upwards and inhale: curiosity.
~ Mysteries Provoking Reluctant ~
~ Interest ~
1. What did Mayor Heinz Hermann think of the Germany they lived in?
2. Was she losing the questionable vestiges of her sanity?
For the most part, Isla didn't care about what occurred outside of the Hermann household. It was a world without her son, the seed of future she had created and nurtured. The pinnacle of her achievements.
While I was collecting armfuls of men like Johann Hermann, she had watched proudly as her son's regiment stood to attention. Isla was struck by how big Johann looked in his uniform. His hair was cropped short underneath his cap, not a trace of the downy fuzz that identified him as her child remaining. Johann had grown. He was a tall, broad man. Bigger than she or Heinz. Part of her suspected that he had not really needed help locating the partner of a solitary sock, or fold his favourite shirt before he had packed or duty. Johann had seemed so small when they had brought him back.
Heinz had observed the scene with stoicism, the barest hint of an approving smile around his mouth. There was nothing in his eyes to indicate concern. This was to be the expression he would don whenever he appeared in an official capacity. The patriotic German did not believe that any military pursuit could go badly for his or her country.
After the death of her son, Isla had no reason to sit and wait for a telegram. So she sat and waited for nothing. There was something so perfect, so mathematical, about the morose curvature of her shoulder that I couldn't help but want to make contact with it. Isla leant into my touch. Her eyes were glazed with hurt, yet she found a kind of peace as we sat, recalling her dead son.
Johann's eyes were the brown of his father, but as I leant forward to pry him from the frosted mud, they possessed all of what I came to consider Isla's vagueness. The sky was a drab, watercolour blue. The same weak hue that seeped from every defeated pore of the body of the mayor's wife during each of my visits, and, I'm sure, every moment in between.
Solitude, not myself, not her husband, not even the book thief (although I'll tell you more about her momentarily) was Isla's greatest companion. It never attempted to draw her back into life, enticing her with the world's greatest pleasures. Not once. After he gave up all thoughts of trying to recover his wife from the debris of the previous war, Heinz became acceptable company too.
~The Character of Heinz Hermann ~
He was a practical man, and when it became clear to him that his wife possessed no desire to relinquish her sadness, he devoted his energies to other causes. Chiefly, his career.
During the moments in which his presence registered with Isla's consciousness, she regarded her husband with almost affected disinterest as he read his newspaper. The mayor's wife sat dreading the perfunctory damp kiss goodnight, pressed awkwardly into her cheek like an unwanted present. On one such night, I sat behind Isla. She was nursing hurt, her husband a glass of whisky. A particularly strong brand of each.
You may be interested to know that Adolf Hitler was also in the room; Die Führer stared unblinkingly from the cover of the broadsheet. I wonder if Isla resented the intrusion in her home. Heinz nodded every so often, the aloof smile surfacing as his eyes marched across the page. He read and nodded. It was like a private demonstration of the formal persona belonging to the mayor. There was nothing to suggest that he was anything other than pleased by what he read. No sharp intake of breath. No frown.
In the throes of agony, after the news had been delivered, the mayor's wife had wondered if other mothers had felt the same way when they discovered that their children were dead.
~A Brief Description of the Mayor's Wife~
Hollow.
Once her grief had become self-indulgent, Isla scarcely had such thoughts. Until the politics of the day had infiltrated her home. I couldn't stay away, It was reassuring to witness proof that the souls I carried away during their lives had touched other souls.
Communism meant nothing to the mayor's wife. It was an abstract idea. The same went for homosexuality. She believed half-heartedly in the greed of Jews, an easy concept to latch onto because of the power it afforded her husband.
A few weeks after she had learned of what truly happened to those who were taken away, the mayor's wife gave brief consideration to the situation. This was something she rarely devoted to anything other than her dead son.
~Taken Away~
Minus.
Informal use: euphemism for death.
Johann had been taken away from her. Isla's existence revolved around him being taken away from her.
Parents cannot always determine the fate of their offspring. Needless to say, if she had known that Johann would be taken away from her, leaving a negative space in her life, she would never have allowed her husband to encourage their son to enlist again after his national service was complete. Maybe, thought Isla, parents have no way of stopping communism from taking root. In likening herself to the parents of communists, Isla had a profound thought.
~The Revelation Experienced by Isla Hermann~
Their loss was the same as hers. A sacrifice made to the greatness of Germany.
This knowledge did not change her way of life in the slightest way, for which I find it difficult to condemn a figure as tragic as the mayor's wife. There was an occasional twinge of empathy, but Isla was too scared to examine her thoughts more closely. She wondered if her husband experienced the same sense of blind panic, or if the idea that something was wrong had occurred to him. How he suppressed it, like he had Johann's death.
As for the second mystery, it lacked the moral gravity of the first. And it was considerably easy to solve. Isla saw the muddy tracks of the book thief. She heard the not-so-surreptitious footsteps of Liesel Meminger. Having the book thief sit in her library and read allowed Isla to consider how the eyes of a child might think of books. She tried to think of how Liesel would consider the war, the child that had traced her fingers over the name of her dead son.
Since she was not brave enough to cease her suffering, Isla Hermann knew that she wasn't brave enough to understand Germany, or the way the world worked. There was a chance that the book thief might be. So Isla gave her a tool that would allow her to learn. A dictionary. As she wedged it between the window and the lintel, the weak sun warming her hands, Isla tried not to think.
I'm not convinced that she succeeded. Although she did not smile, the mayor's wife came closer to doing so than she had done in years. Or maybe that's wishful thinking on my part...
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