Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  Like many in town, Trudi referred to the priests according to their sizes: old Herr Pastor Schüler was the little priest, while the assistant pastor, Friedrich Beier, was the fat priest. Trudi liked the little priest much better, even if he had powder on his shoes and took forever to absolve you. Once, he had assigned her two rosaries for sins she hadn’t committed, as though the transgressions of the previous sinner still crowded him in the stale chamber of the dark confessional. The fat priest would never make mistakes like that, but then he was not nearly as kind as the little priest. The fat priest got things done. The fat priest would not forget a sermon or your sins, and his raised eyes bored into whatever came into their path—except food: then those eyes would lose their focus and he’d sigh with contentment.

  “Look.” Ingrid pointed toward the Venetian mirror that used to belong to Trudi’s mother. A spider was crawling along the top edge of the golden frame. “That’s what’s so hard about original sin,” she said as the spider disappeared behind the mirror. “From now on, I’ll see that spider whenever I look at the mirror.… Even when I just think of the mirror, I’ll see the spider.”

  Trudi smiled. She would be good for Ingrid. She’d get her to shed some of this awful shame. Ingrid would be so glad that she was her friend. They’d pick raspberries and red currants by the river, go to a concert at Fräulein Birnsteig’s mansion, take their sleds to the dike, sit in a movie theater in Düsseldorf, take a trip to the Mosel and stay in a youth hostel.…

  But Ingrid was still staring at the mirror. “The spider will long be gone,” she said, “and yet it will always be there. It’s like that with original sin.”

  “But don’t you see—” Trudi said. “You can choose another mirror.” She motioned to the opposite wall, where a small, round mirror hung in an even more ornate frame. She’d bought it one afternoon in Düsseldorf when she’d been caught by a jagged longing for her mother, and when she’d hung it across from the Venetian mirror, she’d felt an odd peace as if two mirrors would be more effective at holding the reflection of her mother inside the house.

  That night, Trudi awoke long before dawn and finally stopped trying to force herself back into sleep; instead, she let herself imagine trading places with Ingrid. She kept her own features, her own hair, but her body became tall and slender like Ingrid’s, and her head narrowed. Her arms and legs lengthened, and she watched herself stride down Schreberstrasse, taking long steps, a white blouse tucked into the waistband of her slim skirt, a shiny leather belt around her waist. Wind cooled her forehead and blew through her hair, and she smiled to herself as she made a left turn on Barbarossa Strasse. She wandered past the rectory and the open market where farmers sold their vegetables and fruits, and wherever she went, people stared at her, but not the way they usually did; she saw the lust Ingrid had spoken of in the eyes of some men; envy in the eyes of some girls and women; and the joy of simply looking at her in the eyes of others.

  I could live with this. I could learn.

  But then she glanced over her shoulder and saw Ingrid following, close, her body solid and short and wide, wobbling from side to side on curved legs like some horrible windup toy, and she wanted to run from her, keep her from demanding that she trade back their bodies. Yet Ingrid’s broad face was suffused with tranquillity, and the fear that used to thrive in her eyes had given way to a gentle fatigue as if she’d struggled for a long time to arrive at this.

  eight

  1933

  WITH EACH INSTANCE THAT TRUDI IMAGINED HERSELF INTO INGRID’S body, she became more aware of people’s responses to Ingrid. It made her uneasy when Ingrid’s father chuckled and tried to pinch his daughter’s buttocks while telling her to put on a decent skirt, even though the one she wore was as modest as all her clothes. And it confused her to see how Klaus Malter, the young dentist with the shy eyes and red beard, who had set up his new practice half a block from the pay-library, looked at Ingrid. She could tell he liked Ingrid, and it startled her when she found herself returning his feelings as though, indeed, she had become Ingrid.

  Since Ingrid barely nodded to Klaus when he greeted her, he began to ask her and Trudi out together. Trudi was the one who’d talk with him, who’d answer his questions about Ingrid, and he took to stopping at the pay-library to visit when he didn’t have patients. Wearing his starched white jacket, he’d sit on the edge of the counter and peer through the window, ready to run across the street if a patient approached his door. His beard was full and curly, his hair cropped close to his head. Often, Leo Montag would set up one of his chessboards, and the two men would play a few slow moves before one of them would be interrupted. A game between them could easily span a week. Though Klaus had joined the local chess club, he still belonged to a club in Düsseldorf, where he’d grown up and where his mother taught philosophy at the university.

  Leo had introduced Klaus to Herr Stosick, the principal of the Protestant school, at whose house the chess club met every Monday night. Herr Stosick was known for decisive, brilliant moves. “Don’t let your hands betray your mind, Günther,” his father had advised when he’d taught him to play chess at age three. To keep himself from rash moves, Günther Stosick had developed a habit that still served him well as an adult—that of rooting both hands in his thick brown hair when he sat at a chessboard, forcing himself to weigh each option beyond his instinct, though he usually returned to that first instinct.

  The club had been founded in 1812 by a man who had left his family for chess. His name was Karl Tannenschneider, and the men in the club talked about him as though he were still a member.

  “He left his wife and children for chess,” they’d say with reverence and envy.

  “He left everything for chess.”

  While Leo liked to ponder his moves in silence, Klaus enjoyed talking with Trudi while he played chess. “I don’t have enough patients,” he confided to her one afternoon. “People keep going to Dr. Beck.”

  “They’re used to him—even if they come out hurting worse than when they went in.”

  “There’s no need for that.”

  “I always dread going to him.”

  “With all the modern inventions in dentistry, it’s almost painless now.”

  “I wish someone would tell Herr Doktor Beck. No one likes him much. He’s not friendly like you.”

  Klaus grinned. “Maybe people don’t want a friendly dentist. Maybe they want a dentist they can be afraid of.” He raised his hands, curling them into claws, and the fine reddish hair on their backs and on the lower joints of his fingers gleamed like thin copper wires.

  Trudi crossed her arms to keep herself from touching those beautiful hands. “I’ll tell everyone you’re real scary,” she promised. “Just wait—soon your office will be full.” She imagined herself asking In grid, “Do you think Klaus Malter is handsome?” Ingrid would frown and say something like, “Just average looking” or—and this would be worse—“He is awfully handsome”

  Klaus rolled a cigarette. “Can I offer you one?”

  She shook her head. “I like the smell, but not the taste. Probably from almost burning the church down when I was seven.”

  “How did you do that?”

  Her father glanced up from the chessboard.

  “Eva Rosen and I, we smoked our first cigarettes behind the rectory and threw them across the wall when we heard a noise. I didn’t sleep all night.”

  “That could have cost you fifty years of rosaries,” Klaus said.

  “At least.”

  “Or life in the convent,” her father said. “I guess I’m lucky I don’t know everything you’ve done.”

  The boys in the barn—The room tilted. “Lucky, yes.” She pointed to the chessboard. “Whose move?”

  “Mine.” Klaus advanced his black knight. “Thank God for large families. The Buttgereits have been sending their daughters—two last week, two next Friday, three of them the week after.… How many of them are there?”

  “Nine. But in that fam
ily daughters don’t matter much. I remember when the boy was born.… I saw a stork that day.”

  “I used to believe in storks, too.”

  “The Buttgereits, see, they had given up on ever having a son after all those girls—I feel sorry for those daughters, I tell you—and when they finally had the boy, Herr Buttgereit kept parading him around as if he were their only child, talking about him inheriting the farm before he could even walk.”

  “I haven’t met the boy yet.”

  “You won’t. He lives away from home. A special school near Bonn. When he was three, he fell off the hay wagon and hurt his spine. After that, his back grew crooked. He can’t walk straight.”

  Leo tapped against the chessboard. “Your turn.”

  “Thank you, Herr Montag.” Klaus paused to assess his position, then castled on the king’s side and turned back to Trudi, waiting for her to continue.

  She made her voice go soft to bring him closer. “Frau Doktor Rosen told his parents that he will never be strong enough to be a farmer, and that he won’t live much beyond twenty.”

  “That’s awful.” Klaus Malter slid off the counter and crouched next to her. “How old is he now?”

  She felt the warmth of his body, his breath. “Almost eleven. I think. Yes, that’s right.” Flustered, she took a step away from him. “Everyone says he’s very intelligen.… That’s why they sent him to this school. Paid for by the asparagus money, I guess.”

  He leaned toward her. “The what?”

  Pia, she thought, some advice you’ve given me there. What do I do now? “The money the Buttgereits used to earn selling asparagus,” she explained. “Until we found out, we all bought it from them. Now only the restaurant people from Düsseldorf come for it. It was the most delicious asparagus, tender and—”

  “Found out what?”

  “I thought you didn’t like gossip?”

  “I don’t.”

  “This is gossip. Last week you told me the one thing you despise about small towns is gossip.”

  “Don’t torture me. What did you find out about the Buttgereits?”

  “They kept the asparagus in their bathtub after they cut it, and people would go to their house and buy it right out of that tub. Two years ago, Monika Buttgereit swore Helga Stamm to secrecy and told her how her family got the asparagus to taste so good.…” Trudi waited, letting her words settle, and just as Klaus opened his mouth to ask his next question, she whispered, “Pee.”

  “What?”

  “Pee. Everyone in the Buttgereit family pees into that bathtub.” Another meaningful pause. “That’s why their asparagus tastes like no other asparagus in the whole world.”

  He shook himself like a wet dog. “I’m glad I’ve never eaten it.”

  “Oh, you may have.” She smiled. “Some of the restaurants in Düsseldorf serve it. They still do.”

  “I don’t want to know. Why doesn’t someone tell the restaurant owners?”

  “Helga told Georg Weiler, and his mother told Frau Abramowitz and the fat priest.…” She shrugged. “In Burgdorf, word moves around fast, but—” She moved her solid hands as if rotating a large ball. “—it usually stays right here, in town, as if held within some invisible borders.”

  When the carnival returned to Burgdorf that July, Klaus invited Ingrid and Trudi to go with him. While Ingrid wore sensible shoes and her gray Sunday dress, Trudi had sewn herself a chiffon dress that matched the embroidered bolero jacket Frau Abramowitz had brought her from Spain for her eighteenth birthday. Although the high heels of her sandals kept sinking into the ground, forcing her to walk on her toes, she didn’t let that keep her from enjoying rides on the Ferris wheel and carousel, and when she and Klaus took turns at the shooting booth, she was the one to win a plush lion with a stiff mane, which she gave to Ingrid.

  As each July since she’d met Pia, Trudi searched for the Zwerg woman’s blue trailer, and though she didn’t find it, she sat between Ingrid and Klaus in the circus tent, expecting Pia to lead the animals into the ring. Pia would know about her and Klaus the moment she’d look at her.

  But the animal tamer was the same burly man with the same sure smile who’d come here for the past four summers, the same man who had stared at her when she’d asked him about Pia that summer after she’d met her.

  “I don’t know of anyone like her,” he had said.

  Trudi had raised one level hand to the top of her head. “About this tall.”

  “No.”

  “She was here … with the elephants and the lions and a parrot named Othello and—”

  “It’s not work for a woman.” He straightened his shoulders, making his chest swell.

  “Pia knew what to do.”

  He started to walk away.

  “Pia was magnificent,” Trudi shouted after him. “A lot better than you.”

  He turned and stared at Trudi as if to appraise her. “Listen, little girl—” His voice had lost some of its gruffness. “We circus people are an odd sort. We don’t always stay with one outfit. Some of us find a place we like and—” He let out a surprising giggle and lifted his bulky arms as if to release something. “—we stop there for a while until we get restless, until a new circus with new dreams comes along.”

  Outside the circus tent Klaus picked a bouquet of clover blossoms and divided it equally between Ingrid and Trudi. In the crowded beer-garden tent, they ate crisp white sausages with spicy mustard and drank Berliner Weisse—beer mixed with a shot of raspberry syrup—while listening to the accordion band play waltzes and gaudy carnival music. Flies buzzed through the swirls of blue smoke and settled on forks and the rims of glasses. Where, the year before, the beer garden had been filled with balloons and streamers, it now was decorated with several huge, red flags displaying the black Hakenkreuz— swastika—inside a white circle. The same emblem was worn by quite a few customers on red armbands or on pins fastened to their collars.

  When Klaus wanted to dance with Ingrid, she shook her head. “Ask Trudi,” she said, and his moment of hesitation—before he asked Trudi and led her to the dance floor—was so brief that, even years afterwards, she would wonder if she had imagined it.

  Her legs felt clumsy, and her arms uncomfortable from stretching them up. Though her neck got stiff from looking into Klaus Malter’s face, she loved the dance, loved every moment of it. Klaus showed her how to move her feet, and between dances they returned to Ingrid, who looked heartbreakingly beautiful in her church dress and managed to discourage every man who wanted to dance with her. She had arranged the purple clover in an empty beer glass and set it next to her plush lion, but the waiter, who kept replenishing their Berliner Weisse, kept forgetting to bring the water she’d ordered for the flowers.

  It was close to midnight when Eva Rosen and Alexander Sturm entered the beer-garden tent, arms linked, faces flushed with an excitement that didn’t seem to have anything to do with drinking. Trudi had seen Eva excited, but Alexander, who’d been too serious even as a boy, had grown even more formal with his formidable Kaiser Wilhelm mustache. A man who chose his words carefully, he didn’t allow himself time for frivolities. He took pride in his toy factory, his apartment building, and gave far too much significance to what others thought of him. Yet, as Trudi watched him dance with Eva, he seemed changed as if some closed chamber in him had finally opened. Already, wonderful silver strands had begun to soften the starkness of Eva’s black hair, a contrast to her girl face that made her look both young and sophisticated. Alexander’s hair was a much lighter shade than hers, sandy almost. Trudi felt something new between the two, a connection, a secret that compelled her to watch them closely.

  Trudi hadn’t spoken with Eva for nearly a year, but when Eva stopped at her table to say “Guten Abend”—“Good evening”—it felt to Trudi as if they were continuing their last conversation. Eva talked with such ease about Trudi’s father and Seehund, about her classes at the Gymnasium in Düsseldorf and her plans to enter medical school that, for a moment, T
rudi wanted to take her by the hand and lead her outside beneath the stars.

  “Do you think your father will ever get well again?” she would say and: “Is the red on your chest still like a flower?” and, most importantly: “I’m sorry I told”

  But Klaus was asking Alexander how the construction on his apartment house was progressing, and when Alexander only said, “Quite well, thank you,” Eva explained that the building was nearly completed, and that Alexander’s widowed sister, who was moving back into town, would live with her daughter, Jutta, on the third floor. “She’s had problems with her health and needs help bringing up the girl, who’s quite impetuous, from what I hear. I’m rather intrigued.”

  “Reckless,” Alexander said.

  “What?”

  “More like reckless. You said: impetuous.”

  “A blond girl, tall?” Trudi asked.

  Alexander nodded.

  “Didn’t she visit three summers ago?”

  “Yes. When her father was still alive,” Eva said. “Alexander says even then the girl was always getting into accidents. The day she arrived with her parents, she broke her left arm, and still, she went on to climb trees and managed to break the other arm.”

  “Only it was the right arm she broke first,” Alexander said.

  Eva shrugged. “Eventually both arms.”

  Alexander seemed about to correct her once more, but instead he turned toward Klaus Malter and told him he already had several tenants signed up for the stores. “The butcher, the optician, and the pharmacist for sure. Possibly the hardware store. We’re still negotiating.” But the cherry tree on the sidewalk across the street, he said, was a problem because the carpenters kept dragging red pulp from the fallen cherries into the house on the bottom of their shoes, staining the floors.

  When Klaus suggested he’d keep water pails by the front door and ask them to rinse their soles before entering, Alexander nodded thoughtfully and thanked him for his advice before he took Eva to their own table.