an excerpt from The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls
The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls
One day in the summer of 1878, a Hundred-Year wave rises up in the Nordsee and crashes against the island of Nordstrand. Three mothers stand on the shore: Sabine, the seamstress who has come to town with the traveling Zirkus; Tilli, still just a child herself despite her swollen belly, living under the care of the St. Margaret’s Home for Pregnant Girls; and Lotte, whose three eldest children are swept away by the sea. Their lives bound together by this incredible loss, the three mothers must grapple with questions of grief, longing, and renewal in a shattering new work of historical fiction from the award-winning author of Stones from the River Ursula Hegi, The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls (Flatiron Books; August 18, 2020).
Men Who Turn to Stone
What seizes my heart the first time I see The Sensational Sebastian is how he fastens his eyes on me, only me, as he lets go of the trapeze and catapults himself through the air in his emerald suit. A man built for flying.
I’m sure he hasn’t performed with the Ludwig Zirkus because I went to the show every September when the Zirkus arrived in Rodenäs, my village near the German-Danish border where I went to school and served my apprenticeship at the Becker Mode Atelier. I came for the stories the ringmaster staged. Herr Ludwig had such high regard for his monkeys that he assigned them roles in his Biblical stories, elevating them to saints and angels. Affectionate and clever, they brought him whatever he wanted for his stories—banners or candles, a stuffed parrot or Moses’s stone tablets. Although his stories began with scenes from the Bible, he roused his audience to change the outcome with their imagination and memories. As ringmaster, he tapped into your hunger for magic because he understood you hadn’t come to see a performance. No. You’d come so that he could show you what you wanted, something fantastic, so uniquely yours that later—when you talked about the Ludwig Zirkus—you’d mention details others won’t recall, the white dog’s blue eyelids, say, or that Luzia The Clown reminded you of your Erbtante—inheritance aunt.
Outside the big tent, The Sensational Sebastian stands in his shimmering suit and extends one hand as if to bless me. He lays two fingers between my eyebrows.
“I have not seen you before,” I manage to say, intimidated by his elegance and confidence.
“It’s my first year with the Ludwigs.”
Instead of going home, I let him lead me toward a wagon decorated with panels of life-sized angels and saints. The entrance is in the center of a carved panel with the Annunciation scene. As he folds down his front stoop, the door swings open, and I have to laugh because here I stand in front of the Jungfrau Maria while the Archangel Gabriel informs her she’ll carry the son of God inside her womb.
“Why are you laughing?” The Sensational Sebastian asks.
I motion toward the panel. “Plenty of warning for any woman who has her doubts about immaculate conception.”
“Ah. So you would like to come inside.”
“I would like to stay outside,” I say, intent on hiding my awkwardness.
“Should I believe you?”
Quickly, I sit down on the front stoop. Hide my hands in the pleats of my skirt, hands chapped from fine stitching and from lace. “I’m a seamstress. Wedding and evening; silk and satin; lace and beads—”
“Does the seamstress have a name, or must I invent one for her?”
“Sabine Florian,” I say, wishing I’d let him invent a fashionable name for me.
The Sensational Sebastian lowers himself next to me on the stoop, one elbow braced against the Archangel Gabriel’s wooden knee. His thighs stretch the emerald fabric. Those eyes of his—burning my skin.
I want to touch the dip of his throat. No—
“Don’t let some archangel scare you away.” His smile. No woman in the world for him but me.
I know I can’t tell my mother about meeting him. She’s so proper and strict that she won’t see his beauty. Just his danger. As if I didn’t know. I turn from him, point at the pink-gray sky where geese pull their arrows toward the Nordsee—large arrows and smaller arrows—their harsh calls dwindling the farther out they fly.
But he won’t let me distract him. “All those Bible scenarios bring us customers. Even the preachy ones justify buying Zirkus tickets. The Ludwigs aren’t even like that.”
“Like what?”
“Church-fearing.” He tells me about growing up in a Zirkus family. “Once I was two I trained daily, bending and leaping and hanging.”
“That’s awfully young.”
“With children you have to start early.”
“Not that early.”
“I walked on my hands before I turned three.” He sounds proud. “I earned my own money before I could count it.”
He doesn’t have the propriety to spare me from his gaze as most people will when your face is afire, and I long to brush against his thigh, undo the braided closures on his emerald jacket. The fabric is worn shiny, but the design is fashionable, sculpting his chest and waist and shoulders.
I can learn to copy this design once I sew his clothes . . .
Though my mother has warned me about the fragile worth of a young woman’s reputation, I follow The Sensational Sebastian into his Annunciation wagon.
“I’ve never been with a woman who wants sex as much as a man,” he tells me when I wake to sun through the curtain and the shadow of a wash line against the wall.
The heat of his breath races from my ear to my down-there. I feel luscious. Greedy.
“Women,” he says, “endure men’s lust without pleasure.”
“I can’t believe I’m the only woman who—”
“Oh . . . but you are, Sabine.” He studies my face, closely. Is he shocked by my appetites? Intrigued? Trying to prove to himself—and to me—that I’m not like other women?
I’m embarrassed, push back. “How many women?”
He makes a fist, counts his fingers as he lets them pop up, makes another fist, and continues counting. “Eight. That includes you.”
“Hardly enough for your assumption about women.”
He laughs. “You’ll make me reconsider.”
“About those women before me . . .”
He presses himself against me, traces my jaw from one ear lobe to the other.
“. . . those women merely endured you?”
He yanks an invisible blade from his chest. “How about you and men?”
“Nine,” I lie, tripling my sins to be ahead of him.
“Did you count me?”
I try for a mysterious smile.
“Did you, Sabine?”
“Not yet.” I swing myself across his thighs, flick my thumbs across his nipples, then rake my fingers toward his navel—who am I? what am I doing?—and down through his pubic hair without touching him, there, not yet, though he bucks to get himself into my hand.
The Sensational Sebastian and I live three wagons from the kitchen wagon called The Last Supper. I’ve missed my chance of returning home the night of the show. Missed it again the following morning. And now that I’ve missed that chance for eleven days, it’s too late to go home. Too soon. I earn my wages: mend costumes, match old designs, help The Sensational Sebastian brew an elixir that he claims will make mortals live forever. Though skeptical, I make sure he swallows a spoonful at breakfast, because every time he performs I’m terrified he’ll tumble into death: his hand will sweat and slip from the trapeze or he won’t catch the trapeze as he flies toward its arc. I cannot imagine being without him.
At the concession stand, before and after each show, I sell his elixir in clay pots with calligraphed labels, Für Immer—Forever. Next to me our cook sells Würstchen—sausages, and Brötchen mit Fisch—rolls with fish. Her face is lovely except for the lower half, sunken as if her features were patched from different lifetimes.
“If you are ever ill,” she tells me, “I’ll make your favorite food for you, but I need to know what it is. Now. You may not be able to tell me if you ever get deadly ill.”
“Kuchen. Apfelkuchen.”
Customers wait in line for our Venetian candy, a golden confection of nuts and honey, so unlike the cheap candies other Zirkusse sell. Our recipe comes from Herr Ludwig’s dead wife, Pia, who grew up in Venice where she sold her confections from a wooden display strapped to her waist.
“And your second favorite?”
“Some other Kuchen.”
She nudges me. “Confess.”
“Erdbeertorte.”
“A sweet lining to your stomach, then, Danish Woman!”
“Why do you call me that?”
“Because you’re from the Danish border and are fluent in German and Danish.”
Everyone at the Ludwig Zirkus speaks and dreams in several languages, evidence of where we’ve lived and worked, plenty to serve us as we cross the borders. Dutch, German, and Italian for both Ludwigs. French and German for The Sensational Sebastian. Russian and German for Luzia The Clown. Half a dozen languages for Marliss The Cook and her husband.
Back home in Rodenäs, I recalled my dreams upon waking, but being with The Sensational Sebastian erases those flicker images of night, draws me beyond my skin, toward him.
We travel north, cross the border into Denmark to perform in Tønder and Boderslev. No matter where we stop, we barter Zirkus tickets for food: vegetables and fruit in season or canned; wrinkled apples and pears and carrots from the root cellars of farmers; fish and sometimes meat.
In the towns where we set up the big tent, The Sensational Sebastian points out statues in parks and cemeteries. “Men who turned to stone because they settled in one place.”
“Those statues have never been anything but stone.”
“Ach, Sabine . . . Sabinchen.” He cups his long hands around my face. Kisses me. And again.
“Chiseled from stone to resemble humans,” I whisper into his mouth.
“I love you so much.” Tears in his eyes. He blinks them away. “You’re so lucky it’s me you found.”
“Before you turn to stone?”
“No no.” His laugh lines deepen.
“I miss my dreams.”
“I mean lucky you didn’t get seduced by one of those fellows who have a new woman every season. Some women will follow a Zirkus for months.”
“And now I’m one of them?”
“Not like you. Last spring a woman from Oberkassel followed us. She was after the Twenty-Four-Hour Man. As usual.”
“Every night I used to dream.”
“Audiences think Zirkus people are amoral. That’s why they expect behavior they won’t tolerate in their towns. I still don’t see why the Twenty-Four-Hour Man. He’s so ugly.”
“So ugly he’s handsome.”
“Is that what you think?”
“It’s what Cook says.”
“What else does she have to say about her husband?”
“It’s . . . confidential.”
“Tell me.” He plants flutter kisses all over my neck.
I laugh. “He isn’t just called the Twenty-Four-Hour Man for arriving twenty-four hours ahead of the Zirkus.”
“Too fast, then?”
“Stamina.”
The Ludwigs barter a young lion from a big Zirkus that won’t keep crippled animals. His left hind leg turns inward—a genuflection, a curtsy—so that he stumbles over himself; but he doesn’t look clumsy.
“He looks majestic,” says Luzia.
“Like a Sphinx,” Herr Ludwig says.
“Good temperament,” Silvio says.
“Let’s name him Egypt.”
Egypt becomes ours for two ponies and forty hours of tent repair by The Whirling Nowacks—Icarianists—not only quick and talented at foot juggling one another, but also at patching and mending canvas, using pliers to yank long needles with twine through the stiff fabric.
At the Ludwig Zirkus, the lion Egypt does not have to brace the head of the ringmaster between his jaws.
He does not have to leap through burning rings.
He does not have to feign fury.
He is Egypt now, the leading actor in Herr Ludwig’s scenario: The Seven Plagues of Egypt. Egypt is content to amble around our arena, led by Luzia The Clown. I design a saddle for him, silver and cognac damask, and one matching stocking that we pull up high on his injured leg and anchor to his saddle where seven monkeys teeter and clutch one another.
Every performance is unique. What remains the same is Herr Ludwig’s dignity when he strides into the ring, tuxedo and top hat, giving all of you magic and exhilaration that make the intake of your breaths more vibrant.
Young Widows with Infants
Once I’m with child, I stop correcting The Sensational Sebastian about staying in motion to prevent his body from turning to stone. It’s a story he needs to believe—just as I need to believe that with me he’ll be different. Stay. Forever the playful lover who turns to me, only me, after he’s dazzled every female in the audience.
But he grows restless. Smokes more. Can’t fall asleep in the quiet. We winter on farmland by the Rhein in Emmerich, the last German town before the Dutch border, where local children come to spy on our training sessions.
I nest. Sew blue curtains and line them with muslin. Stencil the wooden floor of the Annunciation wagon with clouds.
The Sensational Sebastian likes my decorating.
Then The Sensational Sebastian does not like my decorating.
“Too much like a woman’s place.”
“Herr Ludwig likes it.”
“That man is unnatural. Just watch him with those monkeys.”
“What are you saying?”
“You know why he is famous as a monkey trainer?”
“Because he is very good at it.”
“Because he has...unnaturally close relationships with monkeys. That’s why he looks like a monkey.”
“He does not!”
“Crossing over. A territorial thing. I heard one of his monkeys mauled him.”
“Heard from whom?”
“From him—I heard it from him. So proud of being understood by monkeys. Accepted by them. Not a word about the danger.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“He thinks he is so remarkable. Courting monkeys.”
“That’s nasty. You get like that when you’re bored.”
He stretches out on our bed. “Come here, Sabine.”
I shake my head. “Don’t talk nasty about him.”
“Just look at his ears.”
The second week of February 1859, it gets so cold that The Sensational Sebastian and I don’t want to get out of bed. Snow pelts the river at a slant as if drawn with chalk, but inside our Annunciation wagon we keep each other warm.
“I think Luzia likes the giant Nowack,” I say.
“What did you find out?”
“Nothing for sure. Just intuition.”
“She’s a great performer.”
“So is he.”
“But that huge forehead!” The Sensational Sebastian leaps up, pounds the window.
I rise to my knees, brace my belly. “What is it?”
“Stop it, you!”
A cluster of farm boys, hooting and throwing snowballs at two dogs frozen together while mating. As the dogs yowl and try to scramble in opposite directions, the boys throw more snowballs.
“Stop it, you!” The Sensational Sebastian pounds the window.
The boys shriek. Clap.
In a frenzy now, the dogs bite the air. Struggle to pull apart.
Stark naked and yelling, The Sensational Sebastian leaps from our wagon, shakes his fists at the boys; a thick stripe of brown hair crawls up his back and neck; tufts of hair sprout on his shoulders. Like a bear, a savage beast. The boys scatter.
As he kneels in the deep snow and steadies the dogs, rubbing their throats and muzzles, I think what a tender father he will be after all. I had no idea he could be that gentle, that patient. Tears in my eyes, I watch him slide his hands low beneath the dogs’ bellies, stroking and talking and warming them till he can guide them apart.
The Sensational Sebastian loves me for as long as he can see the exit. As I grow wider around our child, I block the light. Still, he gets past me. Joins another Zirkus that’s traveling inland. Proves himself a visionary. And me a dreamer.
“There are men like that . . .” Herr Ludwig tells me. “Always on the way to somewhere else.”
“Was he more restless than others?”
“He was terrified.”
“Of me?”
“Of living in any one place and forgetting the road. Many of them are. I hope you’ll stay with us.”
I thank him. Because how can I go back home to the shame of being with child but without husband? “At least here no one knows me.”
Silvio Ludwig yells for the runt. Testy with one another, they haul the Annunciation wagon next to the Ludwigs’ as if the Zirkus had been expecting me all along.
“Now that we’re neighbors,” Silvio tells me, “I hope you won’t hear my father’s snoring.”
“I’m far enough away.”
“His snoring wakes me up several times a night.”
“I usually fall asleep early.”
“It’s been getting worse. I’m tired all the time.”
I don’t tell him that, by three in the morning, I’m awake, mouth dry with fear of what’s going to happen next. To keep that fear at bay, I recite a list of my sewing plans till I doze off.
new outfits for dancing dogs
iron Luzia’s cape
take in seams on Herr Ludwig’s tuxedo + remind him to
eat more
mend costumes for Whirling Nowacks
buy fabric for Egypt’s stocking and saddle blanket
blankets and clothes for the baby
I promise myself to stop believing anything The Sensational Sebastian tells me, including the powers of his elixir Für Immer. No more flimflam guarantees. No more concocting Forever. Silvio Ludwig shows me how to concoct his mother’s Venetian candy, sticky and sweet.
My dreams come back to me.
The child of The Sensational Sebastian begins her break from me six weeks and three days after he’s made his break. Pains take me while our caravan travels along bumpy roads through flat terrain, far from any town. Silvio Ludwig saddles a horse and rides off in search of a midwife.
His father stays with me. “It always gets better,” he says when I scream.
The iron smell of blood so strong it’s like a taste.
I curse The Sensational Sebastian. “What’s his true name?”
“Didn’t he tell you?”
“He said The Sensational Sebastian.”
“Fritz.”
“Fritz?”
“He was born Fritz Fuchs.”
Laughing pulls my belly against its own rising, crushes the layers of myself. I heave.
“Would you like me to get one of the women?”
“I came to many of your shows before I met him. I—”
“Tief atmen, Sabine.” Breathe deeply.
“You are the best storyteller.”
“This story is for real.”
“I looked forward to your stories in the ring all year long.”
“Let me get Luzia.”
I’m taken by an abrupt longing for my mother. Want my mother with me. Now.
“Luzia said to get her if you need her.”
“She’ll keep talking and talking, not listening, just talking.”
“I can ask Cook.”
“She’ll want to stuff food into me.” I feel nauseous, as if I’ve eaten too much.
“She gets like that. With all of us.” He smiles. “Tell me about your mother.”
“How do you know I’m thinking about her?”
“Tell me your mother’s name.”
“Heike.”
“Tell me about how it was between you . . . before you came to us.”
“My mother has secrets. My mother—” I moan.
“Go on, Sabinchen.”
“—only eats half of the communion host. My mother says—”
“Go on.”
“—one must never use up all of the Lord.”
Herr Ludwig cups the crest of my belly with his hands, leans in to listen. His hair falls away from the ear that faces me, a nubble, a chewed-up nubble that he usually hides well under his hair or hat.
I don’t feel disgust. Just a strange tenderness for him.
He raises his head, shows me how to draw with my fingertips, circles small and large that reach along the sides of my belly. “Like this, Sabinchen.”
I whisper, “You have secrets too.”
“Many secrets.”
My belly rises and hardens. “Secrets about . . . the monkey.”
“What monkey?”
“The one that mauled you.”
“Circles. Make circles . . . Circles.”
I concentrate on those circles, make them come together around the peak of my belly button, then widen along my ribs, my waist.
“Very good.”
His praise brings me to tears. “Thank you.” Crying and gasping for air.
“Tief atmen, Sabinchen,” he reminds me.
I suck in all the air in the wagon. All the air in the world. Push it out.
“I was arrogant,” he says. “Assumed a human code of behavior from animals. Gratitude and ethics—”
“My mother—”
“Tief atmen.” He guides my hands around my belly. Hums to me.
“My mother walks with the whole length of her body leaning forward—”
“So do you, Sabine.”
“My mother makes . . . lace.”
Screaming, then.
“—lace . . . the most . . . expensive lace in Rodenäs.”
Screaming I’m the one screaming, while Herr Ludwig keeps humming and saying, “It always gets better. It always—”
Hands limber and sturdy tug the child from me. “A girl,” he announces in his ringmaster’s voice just as she wails and flings out her arms as if startled by her own voice. “What a little performer.”
I reach for her.
“Already she wants applause.” Gently, he lowers her onto my belly.
Slippery, she is. Slippery with whitish streaks and with blood. No air between her and me, that’s how close, except now she is outside me and already rooting about. I didn’t know it was possible to love like this, and with this love comes the shock that my mother must have loved me like this. How I must have devastated her by leaving without word. To lose my daughter is too much to fathom. I hold on to her. Give her my mother’s name. Heike.
“Young widows with infants,” Herr Ludwig says, “can count on the mercy of their neighbors.”
“Everyone knows I’m not a widow.”
“Your child doesn’t.”
“How about old widows?” I laugh though I’m stretched sore.
“What separates us young widows from old widows?”
“Youth and—”
“—and evidence,” I claim, feeling reckless, giddy.
“Evidence?”
I caress my baby’s sticky belly. “Evidence of fögeln—” I cover my mouth. But I’ve only shocked myself.
Herr Ludwig chuckles. “How very . . . astute.”
“I never talk like this.”
He kisses the baby’s feet. Kisses every one of her toes.
“I’ll name her Heike.”
“After your mother.”
“But what do I tell people about her father?”
“You may give him my wife’s death.” Tears in his voice. “Pia loved the high-wire.”
As he tells me the story of her last performance—so dazzling, so audacious—I see Pia Ludwig spin, not the rapid fall he witnessed as a young husband, but the forever-spinning toward the arena, and as the sawdust rises around Pia’s sequined bodice and settles on her throat, her lips, I feel the tearing of my heart that I didn’t allow when The Sensational Sebastian became lost to me.
“Wait here.” Herr Ludwig hurries for the door.
“Where would I go?”
Within minutes he’s back with something bundled in linen. “Think of it as a gift from my beloved Pia.” He folds back the linen and shakes out a huge shawl—deep blues and purples so close in color that the strands shift as he drapes it around us.
The baby and I flicker in and out of sleep nursing and sniffing each other—drowsy and moist and warm—and when I open my eyes Luzia is swaddling the baby, then cleaning me while the baby tugs at my nipple with tiny piglet slurps, tugs me toward a sweet-swampy pond of sleep till a smell hauls us to the surface, vanilla, and Luzia dribbles Vanillepudding between my lips while we flicker out again in the midst of swallowing, fusing.
From The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls by Ursula Hegi. Copyright (c) 2020 by the author and reprinted by permission of Flatiron Books.