summer longing on the wind
Springtime tastes like cherry blossoms and faint disaster lingering on the brink of corn fields. It danced tantalizingly by the school children, inviting them into the mist, never to return again.
Ilse's visit comes and goes- she surfaces one June evening like a pretty ghost and disappear three nights later. She stays long enough at the fringes of the village to receive disapproving stares from the men and women who brush by her, forgetting to pretend that they don't know her. Few people speak to her- Moritz, in the woods on that fateful night; Martha at the tail end of his funeral; Georg calls out to her as she leaves, but Ilse rushes on and doesn't respond.
Soon after the mysterious resurfacing of Ilse, Melchior is sent away to a dingy reformatory school "somewhere outside Frankfurt." Georg, Hanschen, Ernst and Otto have an idea of why he is banished; the rest of the village ponders aimlessly in their grief and ignorance.
Wendla does not arrive for school four days in a row. Martha and Thea, ever the concerned friends, visit her house with a basket of cottage cheese pastries that she loves. Her mother turns them away quite suddenly at the door. No explanation is given. The two girls walk home slowly, dragging their black shoes in the dirt as they try to understand the tragic and inexplicable events that keep happening around them.
"Maybe Wendla has consumption. It's an embarrassment, you know. Contagious and everything," Thea ruminates.
"That's nonsense," Martha says. "You can only get consumption from Hanschen, you know."
"Eeew!" squeals Thea. She dances off the road and twirls in the wind, letting her woolen skirts sail around her. The sky is pale grey; clouds bunch together and darken.
"And Melchior liked her," says Martha. "So why should she have spent any time with Hanschen?"
"Maybe it was a dare," giggles Thea, as thunder rumbles in the distance.
"But still." Martha attempts to steer the conversation back to more serious matters. "She and Melchior have both disappeared at the same time. It's a bit strange, isn't it?" A cool raindrop slides on to her forehead triumphantly.
"I think Melchior is getting punished," suggests Thea. "For not believing in God. You know what'll happen to you if you don't believe in God?"
Martha looks down and feels her face grow warm, though the charged June air is cool.
"Moritz Stiefel didn't believe in God."
Thea pushes back her skinny braids and swings the basket of pastries back and forth. Suddenly, Martha hikes up her dress and starts off. Jogging at first and then faster and faster along the road she runs, skirts flying wildly in the breeze. The sky bellows again and more raindrops fall down, speckling the earth.
"Martha!" screams Thea. "Where are you off to?"
She pounds the ground faster, far surpassing the cows grazing in the meadow ahead of Thea.
"Martha! Martha!" shrieks Thea. "I didn't mean that, honest!" She squints off into the distance as rain falls down, dampening her skirts resting in beads on her leather shoes.
Wind blows harshly across the fields, pushing the water droplets across the road and the meadows, tangoing in the air until they spatter against a grove of trees. The last days of spring's awakening rain down angrily from the sky until the summer sets in, still and humid after the storm.