Clarissa
At the beginning there was the place. A small village, a hamlet almost, where everybody knew everybody and talked not just about those alive but even those who had long passed, for there were few pastimes cherished more than simple gossip.
When Emma gave birth to a baby girl there, right in the middle of that most vicious 20th century war, people were suitably surprised. How will the parents feed this little creature amidst all the hardships and deprivations? What if the father were to take ill and could not work anymore? Or worse still, what if he were to be arrested, finally, for stealing wood in the forest? Tom told me later that other people had apparently stopped having babies.
Emma presented her little girl at the nearby small-town registry six months later, entering her name as Clara Elisabeth, explaining that she could not come earlier as it had been snowing heavily and she was afraid the baby could catch cold or worse – they could simply get lost in the forest on the way to town. The girl would later be called simply Clarissa (and later still just Clari). She looked way too large for a six-month-old baby, and rumors had started there and then that Emma may have stolen the child somewhere, or that some refugees had left her behind, or even that she could have been, god forbid, her husband’s child from a different relationship. All this because Emma had longed for a child for so long, almost an eternity, that the actual birth seemed unreal. Moreover, nobody remembered seeing Emma pregnant.
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