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rainbowfic2024-02-06 03:56 pm
sunfright) wrote in rainbowfic2024-02-06 03:56 pm
heirloom silver, #6: terrier.
Title: Terrier
Author: S. /
Color: Heirloom Silver, #6: branding
Styles & supplies: Life drawing, panorama.
Story: The Attendant
Wordcount: ~900
Rating: Gen
Warnings: Mention of war, parental death, childbirth and postpartum complications.
Summary: They call him "der Jagdterrier".
They call him ”der Jagdterrier”, mainly it’s because they consider him German, which is practically an unforgivable sin, but it’s also a poorly disguised jab at his height; Anton’s not exactly tall, but he’s bulky and he’s broad-shouldered and they wouldn’t wanna meet him in a narrow corridor underground. Just like the dog, if they were some nest of critters. And really, that’s all they are. Critters. Prey.
He simply deals with them in a befitting manner.
Flensburg used to be Danish; that whole region, Schleswig, used to border on Germany, flying the Dannebrog flag and its inhabitants speaking Danish among themselves as their mother tongue. When Anton was born, he was born as a Danish citizen, to a poor Danish-Jewish mother and her employer, a German coachman working the rich households in the inner city.
Of course, the war of 1864 was gonna change all that.
His mother had served as a housemaid for almost ten years, when the unthinkable happened, she became with child while in the service of a man who couldn’t marry her because he was already married, already had two children of his own. Anton was a bastard, then, and Anton was a stain on the man’s honour. You know, if you’d say he had any fucking honour to stain in the first place.
Anton was also soon motherless; his mother died of complications only a few hours after his birth, sometimes he thinks he can remember the sound of her heart stopping, but what does an infant remember, really.
Jack shit.
No, he was a bastard, an eyesore and an orphan, that was what he was, all he was, for a whole day. He thinks he got his relentless patience from waiting those endless hours for news of his fate.
Although his father had been informed of his mother’s death late in the evening, he took only a single night to consider what to do. His wife wasn’t in favour, but neither she nor her two daughters, little ten-year-old girls, got a say in the affair. The coachman, Artur Neumann, chose to take Anton in, as my own, he’d always say, but for someone who said so little to begin with, his father said even less that wasn’t bullshit.
If nothing else, he was allowed to keep the name his mother gave him. The surname just meant he had options in life, all of a sudden. From a very young age, Anton regarded it as such.
An opportunity. Nothing more than that. A ticket to a freer life.
Because he sure got it better than his mother did. He wasn’t brought up to serve in other people’s houses; his father taught him his own trade, taught him to manoeuvre big horses, drive carriages, wagons, he taught him how to spy on people and know the whole town’s dirty secrets, but being discreet enough about it that no one would ever guess. Not until it was too late, and the secret well-revealed to people who’d pay decent cash for the information.
That was how a simple coachman owned his own house, put good food on the table and married his daughters off to merchants and vicars.
The trade.
When the war broke out, he was a young man. And, as all young men, Anton was drafted, sent to the front and made to drive the infirmary wagon around the trenches after every battle, picking up the injured and getting them to the nearest sickbays.
Maybe fortunately enough, his father chose that year, 1864, to die. Stroke; he unceremoniously keeled over in the dust and dirt of the stables where he had been clearing out the cubicles, and he hadn’t been found until hours later. Anton couldn’t honestly imagine a more suitable end for the old man.
So, Anton was relieved of duty, that he might return home and make funeral arrangements, now the only man in the household. Barely twenty years old, hated by his stepmother and feared by his stepsisters, Anton nevertheless decided the funeral would have to arrange itself, he had no stakes in that shit. Instead, he deserted, figuring Prussia and Austria were gonna win anyway, and started wandering the North German territories, staying at farms and stopping over in smaller villages for work.
You can make a life on many conditions, this was his butter out of sour milk, lemonade out of lemons.
For a few years, he lived as a wanderer. The war was, as he'd predicted, lost to the Danes, Schleswig became German territory, Danish was outlawed, but fortunately, Anton was brought up by a German man, wasn’t he? His German would suffice. It’d do just fine.
Even if he often thought of his Danish-Jewish mother who had spoken not one, but two very different languages. One that he knows, but for a long time didn't, couldn't use and another that has been lost to him entirely.
Much like her.
“Der Jagdterrier” they call him. Because they think he’s German and the Danes don’t like the Germans anymore than any dishonest man likes himself. Anton doesn’t tell them, naturally, because he doesn’t give that information out to anyone but Jonathan and even then, rarely in words, rarely as spoken truth, that his loyalty isn’t to any one country but to the people he has chosen, as well as those he didn’t get the chance to choose.
He lost once, when his fists were too small and weak to hold on to her, but he’s grown strong, steely hands since and he won’t again be letting go of what’s his. Never again.
Rather die, right? Rather die.
In that, maybe he really is as determined as a terrier.
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Side note? The war was, as he'd predicted, lost to the Danes, Schleswig became German territory I have relatives who are still bitter about this.
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