Work Text:
A house can remember things. So can a bath buried below a thousand years, as we know, or as in our case, so can a mill, and the house adjacent to it. A mill can remember a long long time, and sometimes it can borrow memories from the skeletons it grew on top of from much earlier than that, and a mill can be completely certain that never in all those long years has there been so much joy in it.
What a wonderful thing it is to have walls just covered in little drawings! Scribbles of animals, flowers, drawings of home and family, dragons here and there, tall ships. Not to mention scraps and rags lying around on most every surface—if unadorned, only temporarily. It was something of a tradition there for waiting guests or customers to be given a piece of chalk or charcoal.
If you polled all the mills in Bavaria and asked them to describe what love means, you would probably end up with some strange answers. But in this mill’s humble opinion, to be loved means to be drawn upon.
Before the burning, the mill was so lonely, and the silence was terrible: like a storm cloud, heavy and threatening. No children came there except for Paul, and the silence lay so heavy on him. Now the friends of Ulrike and Andreas were constantly there running around the base of the mill, rolling down the hill, gleefully practicing inscrutable rituals down at the aqueduct, and of course, drawing. And when it was quiet, the quiet was of peace and content, not of fear. The balcony was one of the best cloud-watching spots in Tassing.
The first Christmas after the church fell through its floor and the elder Andreas came to live with them was another one of those “coldest winters anyone in Tassing had ever seen.” After the celebration, when they returned to settle in for the night, they stayed up around the fire for a few hours later than usual. Ulrike betook herself to roving the floor and singing what she could remember from earlier that night, and anything else that came to mind. She had been singing practically ever since the traveling musicians had performed for them a year ago. Andreas the Younger and Andreas the Elder stayed closer by the fire, sketching out figures on the hearth, and Paul and Anna near them in chairs.
Anna watched her daughter proudly. As she skipped, she jumped just a little too high, and her venerable hat flopped over and abandoned ship in midair. Ulrike turned around, blinked, and set it aright, and Anna saw that Andreas too was watching. She could not help but grin, and he grinned back, and pulling his new cap off of his own head, deposited it onto hers.
A few minutes passed and Paul held up the page he had been sketching: it was a likeness of Ulrike, as she had been a moment ago, and the hat suspended between heaven and earth.