by Ursula Hegi
One of the acrobats pointed Trudi past the merry-go-round and the fortune-teller’s tent to a blue trailer that sat in a patch of clover and buttercups. A laundry line with lacy underwear and stockings hung between its side window and a birch tree. Glossy paint covered the wooden sides, even the stairs that led up to the door. For a moment Trudi was afraid to knock, but then she imagined her mother simply walking up those steps and raising her hand. The anniversary of her mother’s death was only two days away. Strange how it took her time to remember the date of her mother’s birth—somewhere the middle of March—yet, the day she had died, July 9, was engraved in her mind. She dreaded that date because not one year had passed when she hadn’t relived that last hour of watching her mother die in the asylum, where they locked up people who took off their clothes for the angels. And it was unsettling to consider that the date of her own death already existed, that it passed each year without her knowing and—this was perhaps the worst—that it would never be as important to anyone as the death date of her mother was to her.
She pushed her shoulders back and knocked. Pia was in a silk embroidered dressing gown and didn’t look surprised to see her.
“There must be others,” Trudi blurted.
Pia stepped aside to let her enter. The inside of the trailer was the same cornflower blue as the outside: blue pillows, blue cabinets, a blue-fringed tablecloth.
“I have never met anyone like me.” Trudi said it slowly. And then she said it again. “I have never met anyone like me.”
“Oh, but they’re everywhere.” The Zwerg woman rolled a fat cigarette with nimble fingers and lit it. “In various places. All of them alone. In my travels, I never have to look for them. They find me.” Her eyes were at the same level with Trudi’s. “They want to know, just like you, about others.”
“That island…?”
“For all of us. Yours to dream your way to.”
“Why can’t we all be in one place?”
“We are. It’s called earth.”
“Not that. You know.”
“Would it be any better?”
“I wouldn’t be the only one then.”
“You’re not.”
“In this town I am.”
Pia nodded, gravely, and picked a shred of tobacco from her tongue. Her lavish hair fell to her shoulders. “When I get that feeling of being the only one, I imagine hundreds of people like me … all over the world, all feeling isolated, and then I feel linked to them.” She pointed to a low stuffed chair. “Sit, if you like.”
When Trudi sat down, her feet touched the floor instead of dangling high above it. She smiled to herself with the promise that in this world of high streetcar seats and store counters, of tall benches and chairs, she would from now on have furniture that was right for her inside her house. While other children had grown into their parents’ furniture, things had remained too big for her; yet, she’d kept adjusting, scaling chairs, reaching up to the counter to prepare food, moving a wooden stool around to climb on whenever she needed to reach something. No more, she thought, no more.
“Tell me your name.” Pia puffed on her cigarette.
“Trudi. It’s short for Gertrud.”
“A strong name. It suits you.”
“Have you met a hundred like us?”
“One hundred and four.”
“You count then.”
“How can I not?”
“But there are even more.”
“Oh yes. In Russia and Italy and France and Portugal…”
Dizzy with joy, Trudi could feel them—those one hundred and four—linked to her as if they were here in the trailer, and in that instant she understood that for Pia being a Zwerg was normal, beautiful even. To Pia, long arms were ugly, long legs unsteady. Tall people looked odd, too far from the ground with their wobbly gait. Trudi glanced at Pia who was watching her, silently, as if she knew what Trudi was thinking, and she felt herself connected to the earth, far more solidly than if she had long legs.
She thought of the book jackets of women and men looking into each other’s eyes and wondered what it would be like to kiss and marry a Zwerg man. Part one of a kiss—so she’d been told by Hilde Sommer, who had heard it from Irmtraud Boden after she’d been kissed by the butcher’s son—was lips against lips. Part two of a kiss was the man’s tongue—regardless how disgusting that sounded—inside a woman’s mouth.
Trudi swallowed hard. She had to ask Pia. Not that she expected to have a man ever love her or to have children, but—“Do any of them get married?”
“Some do.”
“To each other?”
“Yes. Or to tall people.”
“And their babies …?”
“Some are Zwerge. Others not.”
“Do you have a baby?”
“He’s a grown-up.” Pia laughed. “An odd word for us: grown-up. We become grown-ups even if we don’t grow.… But my son—he’s both, a grown grown-up.” She stopped laughing. “Do I confuse you?”
“No.” Trudi twirled the paper flower between her fingers. “Will you come back here?”
“Perhaps. I can’t know those things in advance.”
“What if I want to ask you questions?”
“Send them to the stars—they’ll find me.”
“Do you ever wish you could look straight into people’s faces?”
“Instead of always looking up and seeing the underside of their chins or the hair in their noses?”
“And the boogers.” Trudi giggled.
“Don’t look up.”
“But then I’ll only see their bellies, their elbows, their belts—”
“Their fat bottoms. Girl…” Pia dabbed tears of laughter from her eyes. “But not for long. Tell me this—what do you do if someone has a very soft voice?”
“I lean closer.”
“Right.”
Trudi waited, but Pia watched her without saying another word, an amused expression on her face.
“You mean …”
“Try it.”
“They’ll bend down to me?”
“Not all of them. But many. As long as you remember not to look up.”
“I’ll try that. Thank you.” Trudi looked around the trailer, which was smaller than her bedroom. Still—she didn’t need much space and could always sleep on the sofa. “What if I came with you?” she asked, her heartbeat high in her throat.
“But you don’t want to.”
“How can you say that?”
“This is where you belong, this town … where you matter.”
“I want to come with you.”
“You are still a child.”
“I’ll be fourteen next year.”
“A child.” Pia nodded. “And even if I welcomed you—it wouldn’t change that feeling of being the only one. No one but you can change that. Like this.” She wrapped her short arms around herself. Rocking steadily, she smiled.
Trudi frowned at her.
“Some day you’ll remember this,” the Zwerg woman promised.
After the carnival left Burgdorf, Trudi began to sew her own clothes. Up to then she had dreaded sewing lessons in school, but after seeing how well that dress fit Pia, she thought of ways to change the patterns and shorten them before she pinned them to fabric. Herr Blau showed her how to use his old sewing machine: she had to stand to operate it, but he was an eager teacher, giving her advice on darts and hems and interfacing, and cautioning her to keep her fingers away from the rapid needle so they wouldn’t get punctured like his thumb.
In the upstairs room, from where the Blaus’ daughter used to pass notes to the young Helene Montag across the narrow alley, Trudi stood at Herr Blau’s sewing machine, one foot pumping, surrounded by bolts of leftover fabrics and headless dummies—stained cottoncovered torsos on poles—while Herr Blau, who was older than anyone she knew, kept rubbing his stiff hands and blowing on his fingertips, as though impatient to do the sewing for her.
The first project she finished was a
blouse the same shade of blue as Pia’s trailer. She sewed a skirt to match, a white jacket with blue leaf-shaped lapels, a white coat. No longer for her the styles of children. She sewed slips that kept her skirts and dresses from clinging to her legs, silky linings that made jackets lie smooth on her back, a swimsuit which she wore only twice before autumn chilled the depths of the river. Buttonholes were the most difficult part, and she was grateful when Herr Blau volunteered to do them for her.
When Frau Simon complimented her on her appearance and told her how important self-improvement was, Trudi went after self-improvement with an obsession that depleted her savings and crowded her dreams with visions of shoulder pads and lapels, tailored waists and high-heeled shoes. Many women destroyed the style of a dress by wearing a cardigan above it, and Trudi swore to herself that she’d never take up that habit.
“You can tell so much by a woman’s hands,” Frau Simon said and wrote down the brand of her hand lotion for Trudi. “They only sell this in Düsseldorf.”
When Trudi told her father about Pia’s furniture, he was so apologetic that he hadn’t thought of it himself, that she almost wished she hadn’t said anything. But then he bought lumber and built her a birch chair with low legs. When he saw how pleased she was with the chair, he went into a fit of modifications. In the kitchen, he assembled a platform next to the cabinets and icebox, high enough for Trudi to stand on and reach counters and shelves, narrow enough not to get in his way when he worked in the kitchen. He agonized over whether he should build her a table to go with her chair, and when she assured him that she wanted to eat at the same table with him, he designed a chair higher than his with three wide steps leading up to the seat. He built several wide stools and placed them in the pay-library and all over the house. One evening, when Trudi went to bed, she was startled to discover that she no longer had to climb up on the mattress; after one delirious moment of believing that her body had suddenly sprung into its full height, she noticed traces of yellow dust on the floor, and when she crouched to check beneath her bed, she saw that her father had sawed off the bottom halves of the supports.
The day Hilde Sommer mentioned to her that eyelashes get longer and darker if you cut off the tips regularly, Trudi borrowed Frau Abramowitz’s curved nail scissors and trimmed her blond eyelashes. She waited for them to come in, thick and dark, and when they didn’t change at all, she asked Hilde, who, it turned out, hadn’t tried cutting her own eyelashes—not yet, she said—but had heard about it from her cousin in Hamburg, who swore it worked.
“Maybe now I better wait until I see what happens with your eyelashes,” she told Trudi.
Hilde, who wanted to be a midwife when she grew up, was friendlier to Trudi than most of her classmates. She liked to wear red, and even thinking about the smell of incense could make her faint. It was her ability to faint that made Hilde popular in school, where she taught the girls how to sway from side to side and buckle at the knees. They took turns competing over who could faint the fastest while others stood by to catch them by the elbows and carry them toward an imaginary church door. Even though Hilde was the heaviest of the girls, she was carried more often than anyone else.
When one of the girls in their class had to leave town and live with her aunt because she was getting big, Hilde told Trudi that the girl was pregnant. Though Trudi no longer believed in storks and had her doubts about Eva’s theory that hair from down below grew toward your belly button when you were pregnant, she sometimes still checked the pale hairs that curled from the hard triangle between her thighs. Babies, she’d figured out, came from inside women. But she had no idea how they got inside. What she knew though was that plenty of babies came as a shock to the mothers; that some women died when babies were born; and that other women did mysterious things to keep babies from getting inside or from growing once they got in.
To improve herself, Trudi studied how others walked—not rotating from side to side like her, but straight forward—and she practiced that new stride, catching her reflection in every window she passed, monitoring her progress. Graceful hats from Frau Simon’s shop added a few centimeters to her height. She felt delighted when she discovered she could make herself look even taller by wearing slightly longer skirts and keeping her jackets short. By now she could walk into any room and estimate anyone’s height to the last centimeter by comparing it to her own.
She had her braids cut off so that her hair ended in a line with her shoulders, like Pia’s, but the hairdresser talked her out of dyeing it blue-black and showed her instead how to pin the left side behind her ear to make her face look slimmer.
Whenever she’d imagine herself to be Pia, something would change in the way she’d touch her body. She found new pleasure in bathing herself in perfumed water—not just on Saturdays but also on Wednesdays—pleasure in washing and rinsing her hair. With her fingertips she’d rub scented lotion into her face and throat, relishing the contact with her own skin.
“You look perfect,” her father would tell Trudi whenever she modeled her new clothes for him.
The people of Burgdorf commented to him that—almost overnight—his daughter had changed from a child into a young woman. It amazed Trudi how many of them would bend and bring their faces to the same level with hers if she remembered to keep her voice soft and avoided looking at them while she spoke.
Throughout the fall she daydreamed of being with Pia, feeling disloyal toward her father whenever she wished the Zwerg woman had taken her along. Her father was counting on her to start work full time in the pay-library in a few weeks, as soon as she’d finished the eighth school year of the Volksschule. She wondered if Stefan Blau had felt disloyal toward his parents when he’d run away to America. He’d been thirteen like her. Though she was certain that she, too, had the courage to leave Burgdorf, she knew that, wherever she went, she’d take her body with her—as it was now—while Stefan had grown, had changed to become a man.
She was sure most of the boys in Burgdorf would trade places with Stefan in a moment: there was a restlessness about them as if they were bored with their monotonous lives and had little to be proud of. But many of the girls had been trained to endure without complaining whatever boredom and discomfort encumbered their lives, to wait for someone else to make changes. When it came to making changes, Trudi felt much more like a boy and became impatient with the girls.
More than ever before, Stefan Blau came to engage her imagination as she pictured herself following Pia once she came back in the spring. There were lots of jobs she could do in the circus while Pia trained her to tame lions and elephants: sweep and cook, sew costumes, feed the animals. Stefan had chosen a new life, and his mother had survived—even with that sadness in her eyes. Trudi would come back and visit her father. Maybe she’d even get to America to see Stefan and her Aunt Helene, who still sent letters and gifts, though not as frequently as in the years after her visit, while Robert only scratched brief greetings at the end of his mother’s letters.
In January Frau Abramowitz let Trudi copy the loden coat she’d just brought back from a trip to Austria. It had eight leather buttons, and Trudi bought just as many buttons for her coat and simply reduced the distance between the buttonholes to get the same effect. She wore her new clothes to school and church and even dressed up for her walks with Seehund, whose movements had long since lost their early exuberance. Figuring seven dog years for each human year, he was over fifty, older than her father, who—although patient with her and everyone else—would get frustrated with himself when he was rushing to do something and his sore leg wouldn’t carry him as fast as he wanted to go.
Sometimes, at night, he’d bolt up from a dream of a war more terrible than the war he’d fought. In this dream—and it always was the same dream—columns of clean bones held up the sky, and it was up to him to keep them from collapsing. Voices, too weak to scream, held forth in a trembling wail that cut his chest without drawing blood, and he’d surface to Trudi’s face swimming above him.
He’d sit upright in his bed and keep his eyes wide open. On the wall across from him still hung the death photos of his wife. The wooden cross on her grave had long since fallen apart despite new coats of paint, and he’d replaced it with a marble stone. Her ashen stranger’s face in the coffin had become so familiar to him in the years since her burial that he hadn’t felt the desire to lie with any of the women in Burgdorf, whose vibrant complexions and smiles seemed unnatural in contrast.
Yet, with each year of celibacy, Leo’s eyes stored more passion. They’d keep fastening themselves to a woman until she’d feel compelled to look at him. His gaze would be infused with tenderness, longing, admiration—with an undefined promise that could blind you. He’d feel alive, roused, when your eyes connected with his and kept returning to him as if a bond—far more significant than any touch could possibly be—had been established between the two of you. It happened in church, in stores, and of course in the pay-library, where the women asked his advice on books he thought they might like. They returned the books not only with praises of how well Leo understood their hearts, but also with delicacies from their kitchens: vanilla pudding with strawberry syrup; lentil soup with pigs’ feet; egg cakes filled with fruit preserves or diced ham.
Occasionally, Leo’s hand grazed a woman’s arm, lightly, reverently almost. The women knew that his touch was not accidental, and they felt honored to be selected, but when they tried to feel out the promise of that touch, he spoke to them about Gertrud. Those who wanted more, he discouraged gently by confiding that he was still grieving his wife’s loss.
“I haven’t been able to become interested in another woman,” he’d tell them, as though revealing a tragic illness which—each woman came to believe—only she could heal. “If things were different…” he’d say, letting each woman fill in her fantasies as his hand rose to stroke his own cheek.
