The Woman Who Heard Color Read Online Free PDF

for several moments, and then said, “I will speak with Frau Metzger, but first a letter to Father.” She knelt on the floor, pulled a box from under the bed, and took out paper and pen. She scribbled a note and sealed it in an envelope. “I will ask Frau Stadler to post it when she goes to market early tomorrow morning.”
    Having brought nothing other than the skirt and blouse she wore, Hanna slept in her chemise and bloomers that night, snuggled against Käthe’s side. She woke often, an excitement jumping inside her, anticipating this new life that she was about to begin.
    The following morning, Käthe talked to Frau Metzger and came back with a long dark skirt, white blouse, and starched apron. “You are about the same size as Brigitte and these should fit perfectly.” She handed the uniform to Hanna. “Congratulations, you are now an employee of Herr Moses Fleischmann.”

    The Fleischmann home was indeed as beautiful as Käthe had described, and over the next days, as she received instructions from Frau Metzger, Hanna was able to explore nearly every corner. Heavy velvet drapes hung in the formal rooms on the ground floor. The doorframes were made of smooth, rich marble from Italy, or carved wood, one in the shape of a mythical figure with the face of a lion and the claws and wings of an eagle. The walls in the parlor were covered with flocked paper in deep, rich red. The walls and ceilings in the library and music room were made from luscious dark wood. The fine carpets, Frau Metzger told Hanna, had been imported from the Orient. Pots of shiny green ferns grew inside, which to a farmer’s daughter was very strange, and made her giggle, but they were also beautiful and exotic, as was everything in the Fleischmann home. Hanna had truly entered a new world. And the sculptures displayed on pedestals in various rooms, the pictures that hung on the walls—she had never seen anything like them. She had seen paintings of saints and angels and the Lamb of God in the church at Weitnau, but nothing like these. Scenes of nature done in the most unusual colors, and paintings and sculptures of women, slightly draped or completely nude. And mythical figures like those described in the books they had borrowed from the library.
    A piano, shining and finely polished—Hanna knew because she polished it herself—stood in the music room, though it sat quietly without music. There were no parties, no entertaining of important guests as Käthe had described in her letters. The few dinners in those first weeks were attended only by Herr Fleischmann’s bookkeeper or banker in very austere businesslike settings. Käthe said it was because of the mistress, but she was sure that she would get better, and soon there would be dinners and parties again, she promised.
    Even after a full week, Hanna had barely laid eyes on Herr Fleischmann, who rose early to go to the gallery and returned late. He was a stout man with dark curly hair, who spoke in a slow, deliberate, thoughtful tone. His voice was the color of the deep violet-blue of the Alpine gentian.
    Hanna did not see the mistress of the house. She did not clean her room just down the hall from Herr Fleischmann’s room, which she cleaned and dusted and swept with a little sweeper with wheels and a moving brush that was much handier than the broom they used at home.
    Frau Fleischmann took her meals in her room, delivered by Frau Hirsch, a kindly older woman with eyes as large and brown as the cows on the farm. Frau Hirsch was the only one who attended to Frau Fleischmann. Hanna was told by Freda, who worked as the laundress, that Frau Hirsch had been employed by Frau Fleischmann’s family since the mistress was a child and had come with her when she married Herr Fleischmann just two years after the first Frau Fleischmann had passed away.
    The second Frau Fleischmann, Hanna learned, was much younger than her husband. A daughter from the first marriage lived in Berlin and was married to