Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  “They can’t get away with this,” Klaus said.

  “Oh, but don’t you see? They are getting away with it.”

  “I’ll call the police,” Trudi decided.

  “We’ve written letters, made complaints.… Nothing. They want to drive us out, and they’re succeeding. I know at least five Jewish families who’ve left town.” She walked away, shoulders drawn forward as if she were a much older woman, but then she stopped. “It wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” she said, “if Frau Weiler got into trouble for chasing those boys off.”

  Trudi glanced up at Klaus, who suddenly seemed embarrassed at finding himself alone with her on the sidewalk. He pulled an ironed handkerchief from the back pocket of his trousers. His face set in a grim frown, he wiped the window until the red smears were gone. Then he stared at his bloody handkerchief, confused as to what he could possibly do with it.

  Not too long ago, she thought, I would have offered to wash it for him.

  Awkwardly, he folded his handkerchief, trying to keep the soiled fabric on the inside. “I better get back to my patients.”

  “You do that.” Trudi’s voice sounded sharp and she headed toward the grocery store.

  “Trudi—”

  Her hand on the door, she turned.

  He looked like a boy who’d been caught in the middle of a mistake. Raising both hands in a helpless shrug, he gave her an uneasy smile. He opened his lips to say something, and she could tell he was thinking of that kiss he’d never acknowledged—like our bastard child, she thought with surprise—but when he finally spoke, it was not what she knew he had intended to say. “I… I hope Fienchen won’t have bad dreams.”

  She felt herself softening toward him. “Is that what happens to you, Klaus Malter? Does it all go into your dreams?”

  His face stiffened.

  “We’ll look after Fienchen,” she said.

  He nodded, hard. “We all have to look out for one another,” he said with a sudden urgency.

  Frau Doktor Rosen was right because the following morning Hedwig Weiler was arrested for attacking six children. Although Leo followed her to the police station to verify that she’d come to the rescue of a girl far younger than those boys, Frau Weiler was jailed for a week. The oldest of those children was the eighteen-year-old son of the butcher, Anton Immers, who not only carried his father’s name but also his enthusiasm for the Nazis; he walked through town with clean gauze bandages on one cheek and both wrists, claiming to have suffered serious injuries from the witch.

  In the butcher shop, his father speculated to any customer who would listen that Hedwig Weiler quite likely had at least some Jew blood in her.

  “I wish they’d make up their minds,” Michel Abramowitz said to Leo when he bought his pipe tobacco. “Is Hedwig a witch or a Jew?”

  “Why not both? The more labels they find for her, the more justified they can feel in what they’re doing.”

  “Labels.… Well, she is a widow.” Herr Abramowitz tried to laugh but his eyes were grim. “They might come up with a law against widows.”

  “Ah, but Hedwig is only a possible widow. Don’t forget—Franz Weiler may have gotten out of the river alive after all.”

  “A possible widow then. But that’s even worse! There should be a law against possible widows. I might propose it myself.”

  Leo’s voice was soft. “Jews, witches, and possible widows whose husbands may still be floating in the river.” He rubbed one palm up and down his right cheek.

  “At least Franz got away. Without a passport.”

  “Any news on getting yours back?”

  “We got the passports back some time ago. Along with the encouragement to move out of the country and practically give my property away … to pure Germans, that is—No insult to you intended, Leo. And I’m not just talking about the house. They want my law practice, everything.…” His voice rose. “I’m fifty-three, Leo, too old to start all over again. I have worked all my life. For now, Ilse and I have agreed to stay—even though it’s not for the same reasons: she’s waiting for things to return to normal, while I refuse to be forced into giving up my legal practice.” He was breathing heavily, and his collar was limp as he told Leo about colleagues who’d emigrated to France and America, where they’d found it impossible to practice law because of language barriers and extensive exams. “One of them works as a janitor.… We’re told we can go to Palestine, that we’ll be taken care of there and—”

  “Herr Abramowitz?” Trudi pulled a chair over to where he stood. “Sit down. Please.”

  Leo laid both hands on his shoulder. “It’s easier for the young to leave.”

  “My son—he’s pulling at me to get out. He’s ready to go to London, to Argentina … anyplace, as long as it’s away from Germany. I’m losing my son, Leo.” He turned his unlit pipe in his hands. “My daughter, she wants to be near her mother. Now that she’s married, she’s closer to Ilse than when she was a girl.”

  Trudi and her father had been invited to Ruth Abramowitz’s wedding the year before. Her husband was a wealthy throat specialist with a clinic in Oberkassel, who treated singers and actors and teachers suffering the strain of using their vocal cords too much. According to Frau Abramowitz, he was an ambitious, but kind man. Ruth worked as a nurse in his office.

  “Ilse thinks all this won’t last long,” Herr Abramowitz said, “that all we have to do is keep from being noticed. Be nice. Polite.”

  • • •

  While Hedwig Weiler was in jail, her son, Georg, asked for time off from his job in the big city grocery store and moved back into his old room. His mother’s customers told one another that Georg had a talent for building occasions out of fiascos: they were amused when he’d guess what they wanted before they read him their shopping lists; they enjoyed his easy laugh and pointed out to one another that he was like a different person when his mother wasn’t around. He’d persuade them to make bets with him about the next day’s weather, say, or the color of the fourth bicycle to pass by the store window, staking half a pound of store cheese or a pound of flour against a jar of Frau Eberhardt’s pear jelly or two pieces of Frau Heidenreich’s plum cake. Even those who did not care to gamble would go along, flattered that this handsome young man would try to extract from them the one specialty they prided themselves on.

  Georg didn’t seem to care if he won—to him the excitement lay in making the bet—and he’d part easily with what he’d wagered; yet, somehow, he always managed to come out ahead because his mother’s customers would press upon him jars of preserves and wrapped pieces of fragrant cake. While he captivated the women with his charm, he won over the children of Burgdorf by giving them extra licorice and chocolate for the coins they counted out on the counter.

  Trudi stayed away from the store while Georg worked there. To see him so content and well liked unsettled her, and she consoled herself with her premonition that she didn’t have to do anything as she had with the others from that long-ago day in the barn, that he was moving toward his own destruction. It was a premonition that grew so strong while he lived next door that one morning she surprised herself by wanting to warn him—of what exactly she didn’t know, only that it had to do with Helga Stamm.

  Even those of Frau Weiler’s customers who had waited for her return felt disappointed when, a week after her arrest, they walked into the store, the payoffs of their latest bets with Georg in their shopping nets, and found Hedwig Weiler behind the counter. The part in the center of her hair had widened, but the sadness in her eyes had been replaced by rage, as if—for the first time in her life—she had discovered a valid reason to vent decades of fury.

  “A homecoming gift for you,” her customers mumbled and handed her a jar of cherries, half a marble cake, a basket of fresh eggs.

  “Look at this,” she told Leo Montag, her voice shaking with emotion, “just look at all those presents. I had no idea people cared about me like that.”

  In the weeks to come, the town noticed
a new vitality about Frau Weiler, a fighting energy that manifested itself even in the way she packed butter and weighed lentils. Without any regard for caution, she ranted against the Nazis to anyone who came into her store. Certain that Frau Weiler would soon be arrested again, some of her customers—including old Herr Blau who worried he might be implicated by being around her—began to buy their groceries across town, while Herr Heidenreich and others admonished her for not appreciating their government.

  Leo finally had to take her aside. “You’re taking unnecessary risks, Hedwig.”

  “We can’t just be silent.”

  “No, but we don’t have to put ourselves in danger.”

  “You share my views. I know you do.”

  “Yes, and I’ll talk about them with people I can trust. Like you.”

  “My customers won’t report me.”

  “Don’t be so certain. Last week Herr Weskopp turned in one of his colleagues at the bank. His wife’s in your store often enough.”

  “But she’s not like him.”

  “Who knows what she tells him? Besides, you won’t have any customers left if you keep talking like that. People are afraid, Hedwig.”

  “With good reason too.”

  “Listening to you is dangerous. Emil Hesping has two friends in the police who’re always getting denunciations at the station. They have to follow up on all of them, even those they know are mean-spirited or vindictive.”

  She gave him an impatient laugh. “So what do we do, Leo? Just sit here, afraid of what anyone might say about us? Wait for it to get worse?”

  “It will get worse. Much worse. Maybe all we can do is what you did with Fienchen—keep vigil right here. And if you’re in jail, you won’t do any good to anyone.”

  Occasionally the people who came to the pay-library brought Trudi bits of gossip about Klaus: he had spent four days on his uncle’s estate in Bremen; he was about to buy a second chair so that one patient could recuperate while he tended to the next one; he’d had an ear infection, which Frau Doktor Rosen had treated with yellow pills big enough to get stuck in an elephant’s throat; he’d gone dancing with a teacher from Oberkassel.

  Strategically placed questions to Frau Simon and the pharmacist led Trudi to the information that the teacher’s name was Brigitte Raudschuss, and that she was nearly twenty-nine, the same age as Klaus. The following week Klaus and the teacher were seen together on three separate occasions—one of them on the white excursion boat that floated between Burgdorf and Düsseldorf. Frau Weiler heard that Fräulein Raudschuss was from a good family, and Herr Immers confirmed that her father was a wealthy lawyer and her mother a baroness.

  She sounded like the kind of woman Klaus would be proud to introduce to his family. “She’s perfect for my son” Klaus Malter’s mother would tell her cousins on the phone, and at the family reunion they’d all be waiting impatiently to meet her. “What lovely manners,” they’d whisper to one another, while Fräulein Raudschuss would lift her elbow, just so, to bring dainty bites to her lips.… Still—if she was all that remarkable, why hadn’t this Fräulein Raudschuss caught herself a husband by now?

  The Sunday Trudi finally saw Brigitte Raudschuss, she felt as though all the guts in her body dropped down into her legs, leaving her head curiously light. She was standing with the choir on the church balcony, between Herr Heidenreich and the polished organ pipes that pulled her reflection sideways like a funhouse mirror, and she steadied herself with one hand against the cold metal when the teacher entered through the arched door below her, tall and slender, one gloved hand on the pin-striped cloth of Klaus Malter’s suit jacket as if she owned him.

  Trudi wished Fräulein Raudschuss would faint or, even better, start foaming at the mouth, embarrassing herself irreversibly, but the teacher kept walking at Klaus Malter’s side, her moss-colored fall dress rustling with each deliberate step as if, already, she were practicing her wedding-day walk toward the altar. Ten rows from the front, she turned her face to smile at Klaus, lifted her gloved hand from his sleeve, and slid into a honey-colored pew on the women’s side of church, while he found a place on the men’s side next to Judge Spiecker.

  A dainty ivory hat with moss-colored silk leaves hid most of her hair, but Trudi could tell from above that her features had that sharp, anxious look that settles on some women who long to get married and worry about getting too old to attract a husband. The two older Buttgereit daughters, Sabine and Monika, had that look, and even the flamboyant hats that Monika Buttgereit ordered from Frau Simon—hats so bright they hurt your eyes—did not conceal that look.

  It gave Trudi a spiteful pleasure to think that Brigitte Raudschuss was getting to the age where her father’s status would no longer matter. Soon, she would be too old to be anchored in her role as daughter—like other women without husbands whose connection to their fathers no longer carried the same value, isolating them within their families and community. Old maids—strange, how their otherness was not physical as with herself, or the crippled Hansen boy, or even the Heidenreich daughter, who’d recently been sent to live in an institution, but how it came upon them at a certain age, turning them into outcasts even though, up to then, they had belonged to the community.

  It worried Trudi that life had become even more difficult for unmarried women since Hitler had come into power and had declared that the family was the most essential unit of the nation. Only the interest of the nation was more important than that of the family. The word family had worked its way into most political speeches. It had become a sacred word, a powerful word. And of course you were not a family if you were unmarried, because the individual was the least-important unit of the nation. Trudi doubted that she and her father were considered a family. You were only a family if you married, preferably young, and were on your way to become kinderreich— child rich. To strengthen your family and encourage you to reproduce, the government gave you incentives, interest-free loans of up to one thousand marks—about what the pay-library brought in over five months. For each child you set into Germany, your loan was to be reduced by one quarter, and after four children it would become a gift. And there was an even greater reward: honor.

  When the organ music began, Trudi’s voice rose with the other voices in the choir. As always, Herr Heidenreich sang with his head tossed back, his chest heaving, and the pharmacist’s fleshy cheeks trembled while the corners of his thin lips strained toward his chin. The priest and four altar boys, led by Helmut Eberhardt, had barely positioned themselves in front of the marble altar when Hilde Sommer brought one pudgy hand to her throat, swayed, and crashed into a faint that brought four men running from their side of the church to carry her outside. The priest had to nudge Helmut, who had spun around at the commotion and was staring at Hilde as if wanting to carry her off all by himself. Just the week before, Trudi had spotted him outside Hilde’s house as if waiting to see her walk past the window.

  Of course she’d told Hilde when she’d come into the library for one of the doctor-and-nurse novels she liked, expecting her to laugh and say something like, “Such a little boy” but Hilde—who was five years older than Helmut and outweighed him by at least fifty pounds—had seemed pleased.

  Soon after Hilde was carried from the church, the girl Jutta rushed in, hair tangled, shoulders rising and falling beneath her unbuttoned coat as though she’d run all the way from her Uncle Alexander’s house. Hastily forming a lopsided sign of the cross, she pressed herself into the pew next to Fräulein Raudschuss, who pulled her arms against her body as if greatly inconvenienced and appraised the girl through a polite, sour smile.

  Trudi could tell Fräulein Raudschuss was the kind of woman who gave great significance to what people wore to church: she’d time her own arrival late enough to be seen by those already there, yet early enough to size up everyone else; she’d dismiss a girl like Jutta as insignificant while being impressed by someone like the pharmacist, who was always formally dressed and wore a suit with a vest and hat even
to picnics.

  I know you, Fräulein Raudschuss, she thought, suddenly in awe of her own gift. I know all about you. She was glad she was ten years younger than the lawyer’s daughter. Since she had been different from the beginning, no one in Burgdorf would scorn her for not getting married. Even if it turned out to be her choice to stay alone, it would be what everyone expected of her in this town, which judged harshly whenever a woman would not conform to its codes of behavior. In a strange way, she had more freedom than other women: the freedom to make her own decisions, to provide for herself with her work at the library, to listen to her own counsel.

  Her difference was good for something after all.

  It made her smile, made her sing louder. For most women, Trudi knew, it was not a preference to stay unmarried. Some did not find a suitor, while others didn’t dare marry a man from another religion or a lower class. To marry into a class above yours was desirable but seldom possible. In some families the oldest daughter had to be married before the next one could encourage a suitor, resulting, as with the Buttgereit family, in nine unmarried daughters, whose gradual aging removed one after the other from the wedding market while the parents fretted over finding a husband for their oldest, Sabine, whose disposition and features were equally piercing.

  Actually, if Klaus liked women with sharp features, he could marry Sabine Buttgereit and free Monika and the other daughters for marriage. Trudi grinned to herself. Now, that would be a good deed, something worthwhile. No need to go out of town for a sharp-featured old maid.

  Ever since Klaus had kissed her, Trudi had been trying to figure out what men looked for in women. The marriage ads in the newspaper were the best place to start. She’d skim across the women’s section to the briefer list of announcements from men who wanted to meet women for the purpose of possible matrimony. Many were searching for healthy Aryan women who were younger than they, women who possessed warm hearts or their own businesses, women who liked children and cooking and leisurely walks and opera. None of the men ever advertised for a Zwerg woman who knew people’s secrets. They usually described themselves as cultured or successful—sometimes both—gave their height to the last centimeter, but left out any reference to hair color, making Trudi deduce that, quite likely, they were going bald. Herr Hesping was the only man she knew who looked good without hair—probably because he’d been like that since he was a young man.