Read Online Chasing the King of Hearts (Peirene's Turning Point Series) by Hanna Krall - Free Book Online

on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince…
    Józio doesn’t like fairy tales. He wants to hear something real, most of all something about love.
    I’ll tell you about a girl, she begins. She had green eyes and ventured out of the depths of the forest to visit her lover, always at daybreak…
    And so she recounts the story of
Ingeborg
, her and Hala Borensztajn’s favourite book. The summer was hot that year and the earth was on fire, as though someone had baked bread on the very ground. The sunlight was hot, too…
    Sunlight at daybreak isn’t hot, Józio corrects. And the earth can’t be on fire, especially in the forest.
    Don’t interrupt, she says. They felt like they were on fire, so that’s how the earth felt, too.
    Izolda and Hala were always very envious of that Ingeborg. Not over Axel – he would have been much too old for them – but because he loved her so much. On the way home from school they promised each other that neither would get married unless they found a love like that.
    We made a promise… she tells Józio.
    Who’s we?
    Hala Boren… my friend Hala and me.
    And did you wait? asks Józio.
    I waited.
    And your friend?
    What about my friend?
    Are you listening to me? Is your friend still waiting?
    She’s still waiting, Józio. Now go to sleep.
    The farmer’s wife wakes her up in the morning and sends her to the cowshed to milk the cows. Izolda has never seen cows up close. The farmer’s wife watches her trying to take the udder, then sends her to help with the threshing instead. Izolda has never seen a thresher before either. The German woman tells her to sweep the bits of straw off the machine, watches her and sends her back to the cowshed, where a cow knocks out one of her front teeth. So she’s sent to the washroom. Izolda has seen a tub and washboard before: their servant girl used them. She sits down to use the washboard… What do you know how to do? asks the German woman. I know how to take care of people who are sick. (She almost blurts out: Sick with typhus.) Nobody’s sick here, everyone’s healthy. The German woman is getting annoyed. And what else? Izolda thinks for a moment. I’m pretty goodat French… The German woman starts to yell and sends her back to the thresher.
Charmante
    The news that Izolda speaks French makes its way to the prisoner-of-war camp.
    An officer stops in for a visit. His uniform is dirty and marked with white letters: KG for
Kriegsgefangener
–prisoner of war. He’s longing to talk to a charming woman,
avec une femme charmante.
He bows and kisses her hand.
    She smiles to the officer as winsomely as she can with a missing front tooth. She tries to recall what charming women talk about with handsome men. Not about typhus. Not about Pawiak. Not about packages to Auschwitz either… The Frenchman calls her his little girl,
ma petite.
It would be good to know what little girls talk about. The war will end and then what? She won’t know how to talk with a man?
Factory
    The farmer’s wife is fed up with her milking, laundering, threshing and French and sends her to the labour bureau. She’s reassigned to a canvas mill, where she works alongside German women. They tend the looms, fixing any broken threads. There are several hundred looms in the hall, the women run from thread to thread. They’redeaf from all the noise, they have varicose veins on their legs and white dust in their hair, eyelashes and brows… They aren’t good to her. They aren’t bad to her. They are tired. She asks how long they’ve been running from thread to thread. Fifteen years. Twenty… My God, she says, shocked, but the German women cheer her up: You’ll get used to it.
A Walk
    They don’t work Sundays and are allowed to go into town on a pass. The French POW receives a pass as well, he borrows a civilian jacket, drapes it over the KG sewn on his coat, and they go for a walk.
    The city is called Cottbus. They see men on crutches and haggard, badly dressed