It was at the end of March, when the warm winds began to blow up from the south, that Werner Bamberg’s good new teeth began to fall out. They didn’t loosen first, like they do with children. They just fell out, one by one, like rose petals. They came out when he was eating, a sudden hard pebble between his back gums, and they came out when he was biting other things: a tooth lodged in a candle, an unexpected gap where the clay pipe would settle. He collected each one in a teacup from a cupboard that hadn’t been opened since his wife died. It was a thin, gold-rimmed teacup with pink daisies on it, and he kept it on what had once been her nightstand.
By April all eight teeth were out, although there were only seven in the cup, for he had swallowed one without knowing it. His life became dark and numb again just as the world was becoming sharp and new. He slept, he dressed, he emptied his bowels, he slurped thin soups, he rubbed his frail body against Käthe’s warm bulk. In the village the bakers opened their windows and filled the air with the smell of bread, but Herr Bamberg’s windows remained shut.
He continued his little walks that spring and summer, but now he took nothing with him to eat, for you couldn’t bring soup on a walk. His pockets were empty except for a handkerchief holding the lock of Elsie’s hair, which was starting to leave traces of itself in his pocket. When he got to the old beech tree he just leaned there working his gums back and forth, fondling the lock of hair but feeling nothing, sniffing the warm breeze but smelling nothing, exposing his face and arms to the sun, hoping that it would sear him, that he might come home with a burn that would weep and itch for days, but it never worked. He felt nothing. People who saw him on these walks said that he looked much older than he had even a year ago, that he was stooped nearly horizontal now, that he practically seemed to be crawling. Käthe worried about him, too, and while he was out seeking the pain of a sunburn she continued her prayers in the sitting room, not thanking God now but imploring Him to send more teeth.
When he wasn’t out walking Herr Bamberg stayed in bed, scoring the skin of his torso with his long fingernails, twisting his limbs into terrible shapes, pulling his hair, trying to squeeze tears out of his eyes, trying to squeeze up an erection, and always it was the same numbness. He felt nothing. He was ready, he thought, to die.
Then one day in September, while the warm winds were still blowing, it happened again: the midnight shrieking, the drooling, the sharp little peaks in the soft, pink ridgeline. They all came back, all eight of them, as bright and straight as before. Once more he put on a bib, once more he chewed the soaked cloth. And within a month he was eating raw young turnips again, and sausages again, and all the delicious things he had thought were to be denied to him forever again. He began smiling again, and they had a Christmas tree again, and he opened his window to the singing children again. Käthe thanked God with redoubled fervor.
At the end of the festive season and at the start of spring thaw, his teeth fell out once more. Neither Herr Bamberg nor Käthe were surprised. They placed them in the teacup one by one, all eight this time. The following spring and summer were a little less gloomy than before, for they expected the teeth to come back in the fall. And they did.
This continued for four years, long enough for Herr Bamberg and Käthe to anticipate the midyear gloom and prepare themselves for it, long enough for twenty-three teeth to accumulate in the little teacup. Then one March day, about the time the teeth would be falling out again, a visitor arrived.
Herr Bamberg was sitting at his bedchamber window, gnawing his cork and watching men in heavy boots trudge through the grey mud toward the fields beyond the village, when he heard a carriage coming from the opposite direction. He turned and saw a driver and a single passenger, an old man in black, who stepped out and banged the knocker with a gloved fist. He heard the door creak, and Käthe called out that he had a visitor.
Käthe knew who the visitor was before she opened the door, and she treated him with the coldness he deserved. When he announced himself as Hermann Bamberg, Herr Werner Bamberg’s son, she noticed that he was missing several front teeth. She made him wait outside while Herr Bamberg slowly made his way down the stairs.
It took Herr Bamberg some time to recognize his son, for he hadn’t seen him in nearly twenty years. He was stout and slow-moving, with dark hairs in his ears and heavy glasses on his nose. He was leaning on a cane.