by Ursula Hegi
At night, he’d try to wrap his limbs around Gertrud to keep her safe, but she’d laugh in his arms, an odd, wild laugh that made his groin numb with coldness, and though she’d fit the skin of her body against his length, his genitals shrank from her and he could only hold her like a sister.
Before their daughter’s birth, Gertrud had gone about her work in the house and pay-library joyfully, but now she moved abruptly and loudly. She’d forget what she had come to buy when she did the marketing, and she’d spill ashes when she’d clean out the kitchen stove or the green tile stove that was set into the wall between the living room and dining room.
One early morning in September, when Leo woke before her and watched her tranquil face, she looked just as she used to, and he felt convinced that she would return to her old ways, that she was ready to be a mother to their child. Pulling back the weightless feather comforter, he got up and dressed in his good suit though it was a weekday. He fetched his daughter from Frau Abramowitz across the street where she’d stayed—the night before it had been with Frau Blau next door—but instead of settling her in the crib inside the nursery, out of her mother’s sight as usual, he sat with her on Gertrud’s edge of the bed.
Trudi was the first infant he’d held, and to him she didn’t seem any different from the infants he’d glanced at over the years from a cautious distance. As he peered into her sage eyes, he marveled that, between him and his wife, two long and angular people, the child was like a pebble—round and solid. She had his light coloring, his strong chin and high forehead. Her tongue nudged at her upper lip as if trying to grasp some nourishment, forming a tiny, luminous bubble of spit. He let her suck on his little finger, amazed at the fierce tug of her tongue and gums. Lace curtains billowed in the open window, and in the morning light, the smooth brown woodwork glowed the color of honey. When he felt the high curve of Trudi’s palate against his fingernail, he gently turned his finger sideways so as not to scratch her.
“Look at her, Gertrud,” he said when his wife opened her eyes and sat up, startled. “Just look at her. Please.”
But his wife, after whom he’d named the child as they had planned during her pregnancy, squeezed her eyes shut and twisted her face aside.
The pay-library was in its third generation of existence, providing an income for the Montag family even during the lean years of war because the people carried in coal and food and clothing in trade for the brightly colored books that brought a different kind of adventure into their bleak homes than the adventure they were living—the gray adventure of war, of poverty, of fear.
You could also buy tobacco in the pay-library. Wooden cigar boxes and glass bins that contained nine sorts of tobacco were set up on one end of the long counter, next to the ledger where Leo Montag recorded the books in the library, a separate page for each title. The length of each column below a title, listing the names of borrowers, would show how popular a book was.
The side walls of the Montags’ house were less than an arm’s length from the walls of the adjoining buildings—the Weilers’ on the left, the Blaus’ on the right. Herr Blau was a retired tailor, and Frau Weiler ran the grocery store. The façades of the three narrow houses were white stucco with a row of bricks set below the windows and above the high doors, and the foundations were built from great, smooth stones that had come from the bed of the Rhein. Most of the other shops and businesses in Burgdorf were also on the streets closest to the church square: Hansen’s bakery and the beauty parlor, the hardware store and the milliner’s shop, two taverns and the open market.
The Weilers had one son, Georg, who’d been conceived the night before his father had left for the Eastern front. Of an age to have grandchildren by the time she’d birthed Georg, Frau Weiler had a wide face with sad, protruding eyes, and often sounded frantic as if worried she wouldn’t get all her work done. She’d never forgiven her son for not having been born a girl, and she was still trying to correct that error by dressing him in smocks and refusing to cut his hair.
The Blaus’ children were already grown: Margret and her family rented an apartment near the chapel, and Stefan Blau, who’d run away to America as a young boy, had returned to Burgdorf only once, in 1911, to take Leo Montag’s sister, Helene, with him as his third bride and mother to the children of his first two wives, who’d died in childbirth. Recently, Leo had been wishing that his sister still lived with him and Gertrud. She’d know how to get Gertrud to accept their child. But Helene was thousands of kilometers away and had three stepchildren and a child of her own now.
While the Montags’ pay-library, kitchen, and living room with its piano took up the main floor of their house, the bedrooms were on the floor above. On the third floor was a sewing room with pansy wallpaper and a narrow window; it was there that Leo Montag would lock up his wife to keep her safe after she began to take off her clothes for the angels. The first time it had happened right at Sunday mass. Leo, who sat between two of the older men, was aware of the priest up in the pulpit, preaching, but he wasn’t listening to the words because he was noticing how the light—even though it was raining outside—blazed through the stained-glass windows in blue and purple and gold stars as though the sun were shining. He hadn’t even realized that Gertrud had her dress unbuttoned until the priest stopped in the middle of a sentence, raising one scrawny arm toward the women’s side of the church, causing everyone to stare at Gertrud for that interminable moment before Frau Eberhardt, who knelt in the pew behind Gertrud, threw her coat across Gertrud’s shoulders.
The next time Gertrud hadn’t been caught that early: she’d slipped out while the iceman was delivering a block of ice. After Leo had paid, he’d watched the horse-drawn ice wagon pull away, and it was only then that he’d seen Gertrud strolling toward the end of Schreberstrasse, naked, her head high. He’d grabbed the red-and-white-checkered tablecloth from the kitchen table and had run after her.
From then on—every morning before he’d open the pay-library—he’d squeeze a glass of the carrot juice Gertrud loved, slice an apple for her, and struggle to get her upstairs to the sewing room, where he’d lock her in. To please her, he hung up a small, gold-framed mirror that she’d admired in the Abramowitzs’ living room. They had brought it back from their trip to Venice, along with enough photographs to fill an entire album, as always when they traveled to places as far away as China and Venezuela. In trade for this mirror, Leo had offered Frau Abramowitz five years of all the books she wanted to borrow.
“I’d rather just give it to you,” she’d said. Her countless delicate wrinkles, which had been there since she was a young woman, were not visible until you looked closely—like the texture of a silky fabric that has been crushed and then ironed out, leaving the surface smooth except for the deeper, finer wrinkles.
“But I want you to have something in return.”
“Two years of books are more than enough.”
“Five. At least five.”
“I guess I’ll see more in those books than I’ll ever see in that mirror,” she had conceded.
Leo bought Gertrud a porcelain chamber pot with roses painted along the rim and eight shiny cardboard sheets of paper dolls with their lavish clothes. Reluctant to let her use the scissors, he cut out the dolls and showed Gertrud how to fit the gowns, coats, and hats to their wafer-thin bodies by bending paper tabs around their shoulders and waists.
He brought her a blue velvet sofa that Emil Hesping had won in a chess game, but he didn’t tell Gertrud where the sofa had come from. Though Emil had been his friend since first grade, Gertrud no longer tolerated him inside the house. She’d leave the pay-library if Emil came in to buy his tobacco.
“It’s not your doing,” Emil would assure Leo, who’d try to apologize for his wife’s behavior. Emil was the brother of a bishop but did not go to church. Though only in his early thirties, he’d been bald for ten years; yet, he looked younger than other men his age because the pink skin of his face simply continued beyond his forehead and
down the back of his head. He laughed a lot, and when he did, the only hair on his face—a nearly solid line of black eyebrows—would join above his nose.
Leo, who’d been a member of Emil’s gymnasts’ club until he’d been injured in the war, missed flying on the trapeze, swinging his body across double bars of smooth wood, and leaping across the solid leather body of the horse while his fingers barely touched the hide. And he missed the easy camaraderie of being near Emil. Earthbound with his aching knee, he felt in Emil the excitement of winning that he’d known as a member of the team. Emil Hesping could make you believe you still had it in you to win. He got you to smile, to laugh even. He got you to meet him at Die Traube for a beer or two when your wife no longer allowed him inside your house.
One afternoon Emil stopped by the pay-library with an old class picture of the fifth grade, Leo standing next to him, while Gertrud knelt in the front row with the other girls. “Look what I found,” he said excitedly and pressed the photo into Gertrud’s hands. “Do you recognize us?”
For a moment she stood holding the sepia picture, lips pulled back from her teeth as if she were about to snarl; then she dropped the photo at his feet and darted into the kitchen.
When Leo followed her, she was opening and slamming the white cabinet doors so hard that her great-grandmother’s collection of flowered porcelain cups and saucers trembled on the shelf above the sink.
“Emil used to be your friend too,” Leo reminded her.
“He thinks he can take whatever he wants.”
“He was bringing you something. Besides, he pays for his tobacco.”
She stared at him, her eyes savage, stared at the gentle face and stiff collar of the man she’d loved since they’d both been eight years old, the man who often stood for everything she disliked about this town, where life happened slower than in the city where she had spent her first years.
“We all pay, Leo.” She listened to her words and had to laugh. “We all pay.”
While his daughter lay in her wicker carriage between the wooden counter and the shelves, Leo would wait on his customers or study intricate chess moves on the carved board that was always set up on the counter in various stages of a game against an imaginary opponent. Occasionally, one of the old men would stop by to play a game against Leo, and they’d talk about the men at the front. They’d reminisce about the Burgdorf chess club and make plans to resume the Monday-night meetings once the war was over.
From time to time Leo would glance toward the ceiling to reassure himself that his wife was still in the sewing room. His eyes would narrow as if to penetrate the span of stone and lumber that lay between him and the third floor. He’d feel worried when he’d hear her agitated steps, but even more worried if he couldn’t hear anything because—at least once a week—Gertrud managed to escape. He couldn’t figure out how the only key to the locked door—a long key which he’d leave outside in the keyhole—ended up inside Gertrud’s pocket when he finally caught her.
One day, when he saw her darting down the hallway past the open door of the library, he grabbed Trudi from her carriage and, holding her pressed against his chest, limped around the side of the house to the back.
“Gertrud?” He bent and peered into the dark gap. “Gertrud, are you there?”
It took a few moments before he could make her out, cowering among the weeds and boulders, her face half hidden by her hair. Leo didn’t know why he did what he did next—didn’t even know he was doing it until he found himself holding his daughter in front of him, much like a priest extending the sacrament. Suspended in the beams of pearl-gray light, he kept Trudi there though his arms began to quiver with her weight, held her there between him and his wife for what seemed the span of an entire lifetime, her round infant hands stirring the layers of air like tropical fish, until his wife scuttled toward them with a sob and snatched the child from him with her smudged hands, enveloping the three of them with the musty smell of earth.
Leo’s arms felt weightless—like wings almost—and as the lightness moved into his chest and throat, he wanted to fold his arms around his wife and child to keep himself anchored to the ground; yet, he stepped back, not far enough to startle Gertrud, but enough to grant her the seclusion to peel off their daughter’s tiny socks and dress and undershirt and diaper, to examine each part of the three-month-old body—toes, navel, neck, buttocks, fingers, ears—the way a new mother will when her child is handed to her at birth.
To Leo, that day would symbolize his daughter’s birth, as though all the moments leading up to this had merely been a preparation for what he had expected a family to be, and he was struck by a boundless hope—even when Gertrud fumbled with her dress and pressed the child’s mouth to her dry breast. Although he would tell Trudi that it was impossible to remember something that far back in your childhood, the girl would retain that moment when her mother first touched her, and that sharp bliss she felt even though her belly remained hungry and her mother’s hands were rough, as if accustomed to moving aside great pockets of dirt.
From that day on, Trudi became the only one who could lure her mother from her nest beneath the house without force—initially in her father’s arms, and as she learned to walk, by herself. It was there that she’d start her search whenever her mother disappeared. A clean pinafore over her dress, leather shoes laced up to her ankles, she’d set out to find her mother, and what she discovered was an odd beauty in that dark space which was lit by her mother’s voice and airy movements, the kind of beauty that belongs to the underside of things and rarely becomes obvious, the kind of beauty that—once you know of it—will compel you to seek it out. You begin to recognize it where no one else will—in the intricate pattern of creases around an old man’s lips; in the way the air grows dense with a potent egg smell moments before lightning splits the sky; in the high-pitched scream of a small child’s rage.
And because she had begun to see like that, Trudi never thought to shrink away that afternoon her mother caught a black bug, popped its round body between her fingers, and sniffed it with an expression of rapture. “It smells like strawberries,” she said and thrust her fingertips beneath Trudi’s nose. And it did. It smelled like fresh strawberries, and the specks of red on the white of her mother’s fingers could easily have been sweet bits of fruit pulp.
Even at two, Trudi felt far older than her mother when she’d follow her beneath the house and sit with her, keeping her entertained by telling her of everyone who’d come to the pay-library that day. She’d make her visit so pleasant that her mother would want to follow her back into the light, and then she’d coax her, gently, until her mother would crawl toward her in sideways movements like a crab.
And it wasn’t merely getting her out, but doing it without witnesses so that the neighbors wouldn’t tell her father who’d only lock her mother up again. That’s why it became Trudi’s secret when her mother hid beneath the house—her earliest secret, a weighty secret for someone her age, especially since her mother had shown her the trick of escaping from the sewing room: you slipped a piece of paper below the door, jabbed at the keyhole with a hairpin, and when the key dropped outside the door on your piece of paper, you carefully pulled it into the room and unlocked the door.
To lead her mother by both hands from the dark—it was the one thing Trudi could do to offset her guilt that her mother had crossed the line to insanity because of her. She knew this not only from overhearing Frau Weiler and Frau Buttgereit in the grocery store, but also from staring into her mother’s eyes and watching the swirl of images behind the blue irises, a web of images which confused her mother and which Trudi did not understand though she felt their terrifying force. And she saw something else: that her mother blamed herself, that there was a long-ago sin so loathsome that her mother believed it was the cause for giving birth to a child with a misshapen body.
To bring her mother from the dark and across that network of gouges from her heels that crisscrossed the dusty earth like the tiny patt
ern of tracks from the feet of the strawberry bugs … To rinse her mother’s hands in the brook that ran from the end of Schreberstrasse behind the pay-library, where it forked on its way toward the fairgrounds … If only she could have brought her back to sanity like that, Trudi would have undone her birth and every breath she’d drawn since then. If only she could have returned this tall woman with the shadow hair to the way she’d looked in the old photos. But how could she, if even the priest and the doctor didn’t know how?
• • •
It was the united decision of the old women in town that Gertrud Montag—discovered without clothes on the front steps of the Catholic school—should stay at the Grafenberg asylum for a while. The old women had been patient with her illness, but indecency was hazardous because it corrupted the young. They sent a delegation to Herr Pastor Schüler, who invited Leo Montag to the rectory where, over coffee and Apfelstrudel with raisins, he informed Leo of the town’s concern.
“I wish I knew of an easier way,” the pastor began, his voice filled with pity.
Leo listened, politely, as he had been taught as a boy; he praised the crust of the Strudel, accepted a second helping, but resisted the pastor’s advice to send Gertrud to Grafenberg. Just as he accepted his daughter’s difference and the aches in his leg—with occasional bursts of regret but an overriding hopefulness—he accepted his wife the way she had become. It was only after Gertrud broke her wrist during one of her escapes, and Frau Doktor Rosen, after setting Gertrud’s wrist, suggested it might be best to have her examined in Grafenberg, that Leo gave in to the priest’s urging—though not until he’d suggested the Theresienheim instead, the convent around the corner where the nuns cared for the old and the ill.
