Greta’s earliest memories were not particularly dramatic.
She remembered her mother turning stale bread into soup.
She remembered her father repairing a chair with wood taken from a broken wardrobe.
She remembered waiting while her mother counted coins on the kitchen table before deciding whether they could afford fresh milk.
What she remembered most clearly was the silence that accompanied those calculations.
Adults spoke differently when there was not enough money.
Their sentences grew shorter.
Their expressions became guarded.
Small requests could provoke disproportionate irritation.
Greta learned to recognise a difficult week by the way her mother looked into her purse.
She also learned that refusing to buy something did not necessarily mean you did not want it.
Sometimes it meant wanting something else more.
At sixteen, Greta began working in a textile shop.
By twenty-three, she had married Franz Weiss, a tram mechanic with a gentle disposition and a laugh that began in his chest before reaching his face.
Franz was generous in ways Greta found both charming and exasperating.
He bought flowers when there was no occasion.
He took colleagues out for coffee when they had a bad week.
He once spent almost an entire month’s discretionary money on a secondhand record player because Greta had mentioned liking a particular piece of music.
She scolded him for it.
Then she listened to the record every Sunday for twenty years.
Their marriage was not unhappy, but it was never financially comfortable.
They raised two children, their son Martin and daughter Claudia, in an apartment above a bakery.
Franz worked long hours.
Greta cleaned offices in the evenings and supplemented the family income by taking in alterations and repairing curtains.
They saved when they could.
They worried when they couldn’t.
When Franz died of a heart attack at sixty-one, Greta was left with a modest survivor’s pension, some savings, and an apartment that needed repairs.
She was fifty-nine.
Claudia was already married.
Martin lived in Linz.
Both children offered help.
Greta refused most of it.
She preferred earning extra money by sewing.
She hemmed trousers, altered dresses, repaired jackets, and occasionally made curtains for neighbours who had known her for decades.
At first, the work kept her occupied.
Later, it became one of the few ways she could maintain financial independence.
She had always been disciplined, but after Franz died, her habits became more pronounced.
She kept receipts.
She saved string.
She washed glass jars and reused them.
She turned off lights immediately after leaving a room.
She refused to replace functioning furniture simply because it was old.
And every Friday, she went to the bank.
Nobody in the family attached much importance to this routine.
Greta received her pension and sometimes deposited earnings from sewing.
She had accounts to manage.
Banks were where people went to do those things.
Even her children, who considered themselves familiar with her habits, did not know that Friday was the most important day of her week.
Hannah was born on a cold Friday morning in February.
Claudia had endured a difficult labour and was exhausted by the time Greta reached the hospital.
The baby was small, red-faced, and deeply unimpressed by her arrival into the world.
She cried whenever anyone disturbed her.
She cried when the nurse adjusted her blanket.
She cried when her father tried to photograph her.
She cried when Greta leaned over the cot and touched one tiny hand.
Martin, visiting later that afternoon, joked that the child had inherited the family temperament.
Greta ignored him.
She stood beside the hospital cot for a long time, examining the baby’s fingers.
Ten of them.
Small, perfect nails.
A dark patch of hair.
A face that seemed constantly on the verge of objection.
Claudia watched from the bed.
“Mum, you can pick her up.”
Greta shook her head.
“She’s sleeping.”
“She won’t break.”
“I know that.”
But she waited until Hannah opened her eyes.
Then she lifted the child carefully into her arms.
The baby quieted almost immediately.
Claudia laughed.
“Oh, that’s unfair.”
Greta smiled.
“She knows good company.”
Hannah’s small hand opened against her grandmother’s blouse.
Greta examined it.
She had held babies before. She had raised two children herself.
But something about this child made her think of the years ahead in a way she had not expected.
She wondered what school Hannah would attend.
Whether she would like books.
Whether she would be afraid of the dark.
Whether she would grow up in Austria or go somewhere far away.
She wondered what sort of person the baby would become.
And then, unexpectedly, she thought about money.
Not because she wished to purchase things for Hannah.
She wanted the child to have choices.
Greta knew what it meant to want something and be unable to pursue it because the family had already decided for you.
Her mother had once wanted to train as a nurse.
There had been no money.
Greta herself had been offered a place in a commercial training programme at seventeen, but her wages were needed at home.
She had never regretted working, exactly.
She had liked sewing.
She had liked the satisfaction of making something useful.
But she knew the difference between choosing a life and accepting the only one available.
Looking down at Hannah, she found herself making a promise she did not speak aloud.
The following Friday, Greta went to her bank.
She opened a savings account in her own name and deposited twenty euros.
It was not a large amount.
She did not expect it to change anyone’s life.
But she planned to return the following week.
And the week after that.
She had no precise idea what Hannah would need when she grew older.
She knew only that eighteen years passed whether people prepared for them or not.
That evening, Greta placed the new savings document inside a small rust-coloured metal box she kept beneath the bed.
