For the first time in his life, Xavier Tressenau had more to think about than learning the finer points of engine assembly. Sitting in his parlor in a sort of daze, wondering where it had all gone to shit and why, and what was in store for him next, Xavier tried to find some pattern, some meaning, to the events of the last five days. He thought, Women should come with schematics, like engines or electrical systems.
From the time he had first fallen for Maria in that long-vanished summer of 1928, he had come to feel as though she belonged to him. This would have been an odd conclusion even if Xavier hadn’t been poor as dirt. Maria Webern was easily the most attractive – and least marriage-minded – girl in the postcard village of Hergenstadt, a tiny Schwabian hamlet of about 50 or so inhabitants less than sixty kilometers north of Stuttgart. Nestled in the heart of the mountain range known to the locals as the Bauland, Hergenstadt was virtually unchanged since the early 16th century. A village of farmers and petit-bourgeois tradesmen, where local women sported dirndls and wooden clogs and prided themselves on being submissive, while the men went about their business in Loden jackets and puttees and Lederhosen in traditional folk patterns, with sprigs of edelweiss in the bands of their Tyrolean-styles hats, and the smug provincialism of the uneducated peasant. Hergenstadt consisted of little more than a town hall, a market square with a fountain depicting Henry the Fowler, and the village inn, Gasthof zum Bauland, surround by some twenty-odd thatched roof, half-timbered houses, all dating back to the 1520’s; a place where news and commerce still moved at the speed of a horse. Because of this, Maria stood out all the more, in her modern dress and make-up, her hair done up in the latest style — or as close to it as she could get from studying movie magazines. Her father was a journeyman joiner, plying his trade between Hergenstadt and the neighboring villages of Wemmershof and Leibenstadt while “managing” the two-hectare family farm on which they depended for almost half of their diet. That is, when he wasn’t downing pints of Dunkellager and arguing politics in the local pub. Maria and her two brothers did most of the work, tending to a few goats and chickens and an aging milk cow, while their mother, Edwige, did most of the actual managing, as well as cooking, cleaning, sewing, and acting as both family doctor and veterinarian, as needed. But while the other girls of the village spent their evenings quilting or trying to broaden their vocabularies by poring over well-worn copies of Sprach Brockhaus, Maria ditched her family to meet boys at pubs in Adelsheim or even Heilbronn, thirty miles away, indulging in such verboten pleasures as cigarettes, Rhenish, and the occasional sexual encounter.
Xavier Tressenau was the village dairy farmer’s oldest son. Always large for his age, by eleven he had already grown sick of pulling cow’s teats at four in the morning every day, longing instead for the life of a master craftsman. At seventeen he convinced Maria’s father, Alois Webern the Joiner, to take him on as an unpaid apprentice. This entailed two years of beatings interspersed with quick lessons on mortises and tenon joints and hand routing and bevelling, until finally Webern decided Xavier was ready to head out on his own. Xavier took the beatings stoically, especially when Maria was nearby. One morning, toward the end of his apprenticeship, after old Webern had finished raising a bump on the back of his apprentice’s head with a thick leather strap, Xavier ran out to the barn, for the duel purpose of hiding his tears from Maria and punching his fist through one of the old, oaken wine casks used to hold roofing nails, his only real coping mechanism. He had just balled his fist and steeled himself when a low moan arose from just overhead. He quietly climbed the wooden ladder to the loft and peered over the topmost rung. Maria was on her knees, naked, save for her stockings and garter. One of the village boys, Hasso the Baker’s son, stood before her, naked from the waist down and moaning softly as she wrapped her lips around his swollen cock and began fellating him with mounting enthusiasm. Xavier stood, mesmerized by the scene. When the two of them had finished and began to dress, Xavier slid down the ladder as quietly as possible and ducked behind the barrels until they had both gone. He had never seen anything remotely like it, not even among the postcards of French nudes his brother had brought back with him from the front after the Armistice. Now there were two more things Xavier needed to do, and soon.
The first thing was easiest to accomplish, and the opportunity to do so came to Xavier the following Sunday, after Mass at St. Sebaldus. Hasso was already outside the church and making his way down the road leading to the market square. Just before Hasso passed through the arched stone gateway decorated with oak leaf boughs for the coming Harvest Festival, at the entrance to the square, Xavier slipped out from the shrubs nearby and, without a word, began pummelling him with every ounce of strength he could muster. When he had exhausted his fists on Hasso’s face and chest, Xavier paused and stood aside, watching intently as Hasso, bloody and dazed, staggered off home, convinced that Xavi Tressenau was mad, which suited Xavier’s purpose nicely. Xavier then made his way to Maria’s house, where he found her in the back garden in her Sunday best frock, smoking cigarettes and playing Skat with her brothers Felix and Pauli. He rinsed off his bloodied knuckles in the rain barrel and approached them just as Pauli laid down the Ten of Acorns.
“Hey, you can’t play that,” said Felix. “It’s still Bells.”
“I can if it’s ouvert, can’t I, Maisi? That’s how we always played.”
Felix picked up the Ten of Acorns and handed it back to his brother. “Doesn’t matter if it’s ouvert or not, you still gotta play Bells if you got ‘em. Tell him, Maisi.”
Xavier clutched his cap, twisting it in his hands. “Maria, I gotta talk to you.”
“Hey, Xavi,” said Pauli. “If it’s ouvert or Schwarz, I can play my Ten Acorns anytime, right?”
“Hi, fellows,” said Xavier, nodding nervously to them. “Hey, Maria, I got something to –”
“Aw, he don’t play Skat,” said Felix with a sneer. Felix was the only boy in town bigger than Xavier. In any case, Xavier wouldn’t touch either of Maria’s brothers for anything – and they both knew it. “C’mon, just play a Bell.”
Maria took a long, languid puff on her cigarette. “For God’s sake, play a Bell, Pauli, darling. The world is waiting.”
Xavier crushed his cap tighter. “Maria, I need to talk with you. Alone.”
She looked at him over her cigarette, smiled and stood up, showing a glimpse of creamy thigh as her knee-length skirt rose briefly and fell again. Xavier Tressenau was a boy in the body of an ox. But it was a well-sculpted body, as far as she could tell, and she liked what she could glean of it. In fact, he was one of the few boys in the village who Maria had never seen naked; and that included her two brothers. “You little boys fight over Bells and Acorns for a while. Come on, Xavi. We can talk in the barn.”
Felix and Pauli exchanged knowing smirks. “Better not lose your dress buttons, Maisi,” said Felix. “You’ll scare the goats again!”
She puckered her lips at them. “Don’t worry, children. I’ll save the goats for your little pricks!”
Once in the barn, Xavier turned on her with a fierce glare and said, “I seen what you did in the loft with Hasso Zweufel last week. You oughtn’t do such things, Maria.”
“Is that so? And just what things oughtn’t I do?”
“You know what you done. I ain’t gotta say it.” Xavier tightened his grip on his cap, as though he meant to strangle the life out of it. “I know why you done it, too. But you gotta stop it, right now.”
“Who says? How dare you, Xavier Tressenau!” She put her hands on her hips and stomped the ground with her foot. “Fuck you! I do as I please. And what do you mean, you know why I did it? You don’t know a thing about me!”
At the words “Fuck you!,” Xavier winced. “I know you. You want to get out. You hate bein’ trapped in a dirt road village like Hergenstadt. You want to live in a real city, like Heilbronn or even Stuttgart. You want to live where everybody has a radio and drives a car. And where they have paved streets and trams and buses and such. And there’s a movie house in every neighborhood. I know because…well, ‘cause that’s what…’cause that’s what I want, too. And I can take you there, Maria. Papa says, when I turn nineteen, I can have part of my inheritance right away. A thousand marks. Well, I’ll be nineteen in a few weeks. With a thousand marks we can get married and move to the big city, whichever big city you like. And you won’t never have to raise goats or chickens no more, or –”
“Why, Xavier Tressenau!” Maria plopped down onto a pile of hay, letting her skirt run up her legs so that her thighs shone brightly against the golden straw, and gazed at him with a smile that was half lascivious and half in awe of him. “Are you proposing marriage? Shouldn’t you be asking Father for my hand, first? Isn’t that how it’s done?”
Xavier couldn’t tell if she was serious or not, so he forged ahead anyway. “Oh, I will. I’ll ask him, proper, once I get my thousand marks. Only, I wanted to let you know how I feel.”
“So, what do you know about a big city, anyway? Have you ever even been to a real city?”
“I was in Heilbronn a few months ago. I delivered a chair there for your father.” He strangled his cap as though it had committed some grave offense against him and deserved to die. This was not going as he had planned it in his head that morning. “Look, I just…I want us to be a couple, is all.”
Maria burst out laughing. “Oh, dear God! The boy is so serious! You can’t possibly mean it, silly!” She laughed again, throwing her head back and clutching at her bodice, and then lay back in the hay as her laughter subsided, eyes closed, arms over her head, as if she had just had an orgasm.
Xavier turned beet-red. He glanced around the barn, as if looking for help from the rusty scythes and old oaken barrels. Finally he threw his cap at her and said, “Dammit, Maria: I mean to take you for my wife!”
She opened her eyes, lifted her head, and eyed him hungrily. “If you want to take me, dear boy,” she said, unbuttoning her dress with deliberation, one button at a time, “then take me now. But you’d best hurry: those asshole brothers of mine could walk in at any moment!”
He glared at her, irresolute, ready to stomp out and never look back at her, but for the sudden, tantalizing glimpse of her firm breasts straining against the silk of her brassiere. Instead, he lunged for her, landing squarely on top of her. They clawed at each other’s clothing until her dress fell open, her panties hanging from one ankle, while his trousers and shorts were bunched at his feet. He was awkward and shaking, so that she finally had to take hold of him and guide him inside her. She was just about to reflect on how clumsy most boys were when he suddenly lifted her legs high into the air and spread them wide before thrusting himself into her with such force that she let out an involuntary, high-pitched shriek of pleasure.
Outside, Felix and Pauli threw down their cards and ran to the barn. Felix had had some notion of coming to his sister’s defense by punching Xavier in the gut or something. Instead, he and Pauli stood transfixed, watching them copulate on the hay like rutting goats. Had it been the first time they had ever seen their sister engaged in that activity, they might have been a bit more circumspect about it. And Felix almost certainly would have felt compelled to defend the family honor by beating the crap out of Xavier. Instead, he and Pauli exchanged knowing looks, then went back outside, picked up the nearly-full rain barrel, and heaved its contents over Xavier and Maria just as they were both about to reach climax. The screams of the lovers all but drowned out Felix and Pauli’s laughter. Xavier hastily pulled up his trousers and raced off for home, while a mortifed Maria clutched her unbuttoned dress around her and ran for the house, just ahead of the taunting cries of her brothers: “Bull and Cow, Bull and Cow; no one wants to touch her now!”
Within six months, Xavier and Maria were husband and wife.
A year later they were living in Stuttgart, and he was making furniture for Mehlstein’s Moebelhaus on Hirschstrasse until the Depression forced Mehlstein to close up shop in 1932. Hitler’s rearmament program finally bore fruit for Xavier four years later, when he landed a spot on the Mercedes Benz assembly line in the giant factory in the suburb of Sindelfingen. Now he stood before the broken mirror on the wardrobe with a rueful smile and shook his head. Perhaps if he had allowed Maria’s brothers to move in with them that same year, she might never have found the opportunity to have an affair with Bodo Tomasky in the first place. And she almost certainly would not now be lying on the floor of the parlor, dead, her head caved in by the bloody fireplace poker in Xavier’s hand. His other hand cradled the Walther PPK she had tried to pull on him. In his oversized hand the gun looked like a child’s toy. He brought it to his mouth, wrapped his lips around it, and squeezed the trigger.