When he finished his breakfast, he pushed the plate away and stretched his arms wide. His nose twinkled greasily in the candlelight, the lines on his face looked a little less deep, and he said that he had never eaten so well. He called for a toothpick, and when Käthe told him that there was no such item in the house he told her to fetch a sharp knife, which she did with a smile. When he was done with the knife, he called for his writing implements and wrote his son the same letter that he sent every year, inviting him and his family to dine at the family home on Saint Martin’s Day.
Then he told Käthe that he was ready to resume the chess game they had started some days ago, but by the time he made it into the sitting room he was too drowsy with bacon to do anything but lie on the sofa and listen to her sing quiet songs to him. He slept a long time that day. Then he rose, played a little chess, ate some diced sausages and potatoes that Käthe had somehow procured, and went up to bed to sleep some more.
Late at night, when she came to him, Werner Bamberg used his good new teeth on Käthe. He closed them ever so gently over her earlobes, over her nipples, careful not to overdo it. She let him do this, let him nibble at her fleshy ends like a baby, because it felt good, and because sometimes when she came to him like this he gave her something from his wife’s old jewelry box. She knew just what she wanted next, and while she lay there feeling his dry teeth on her moist skin she pictured it: a white porcelain brooch with a black silhouette of a fine lady holding a parasol in one hand and a tulip in the other. When he ordered her to nibble him back, she refused. And she smacked him when he tried his teeth on the tender inner flesh of her thigh. “Ach, Herr Bamberg,” she said. “Your teeth are like knives down there. That is a place for softer things.”
Soon November came, and with it the sounds of the grouse hunt rolling up from the dark woods beyond the village. In the street outside, Käthe and Herr Bamberg heard children laughing and bickering as they prepared for the feast of Saint Martin, stringing garlands across the roads, gathering tinder for bonfires, learning and relearning the old songs. Inside the old house, Herr Bamberg spent most of his time eating, testing out his new teeth. He sliced great chunks out of apples, nibbled on carrots like a bunny, ate young turnips raw. He tore the dark flesh from chicken legs, popped through the casings of sausages, tugged on the tough crusts of Käthe’s rolls. He nibbled on hard biscuits and soft taffies, wolfed down pork dumplings and fish pies, expertly separated the pits from the juicy flesh of olives and grapes. There remained the problem of chewing, and he was sad to still be denied the toughest foods: no mutton, no chestnuts, no dried fruits. But still, he was tasting things he thought he would never taste again, and his sleep was improved, and his sagging skin began to plump up under new fat. His wife would have disapproved of all this reckless eating, would have said he was becoming soft and indolent, which was the same thing his mother would have said. But Käthe just smiled and thought up new things to bring him.
Few people in the village of Remchigen saw old Bamberg during these days, and none knew about his teeth. When he went out for his weekly strolls to the soft hills he kept the teeth hidden, for he knew how superstitious these people were. They’d start looking for the witch who had enchanted him, and it wouldn’t take them long to blame Käthe, who was a stranger in the village and already suspected of doing more for him than just nursing. Some people greeted him on these walks, nodding to him as they would to a soldier or priest, and he might nod back, but that was the limit of their civility. Many in Remchigen remembered the justice he had meted out there, the crack of his chair as he leaned forward to interrogate a prisoner, the black cloak in which he wrapped himself as if against an ill wind. Many of the fathers and sons and brothers of Remchigen had been touched by his justice, and few who had felt it could forget it. And Herr Bamberg, well, Herr Bamberg despised them all.