Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  Trudi flinched.

  “I won’t celebrate Christmas until it’s here,” Ingrid promised. “I just want to look at your present.” Carefully, she unwrapped the gold paper and ran one finger across the red leather of the jewelry box. “It’s so pretty. Thank you, Trudi.”

  “You like it then?”

  “Oh yes.” She tried to wrap it again, but her father’s hand reached out and took it from her.

  “Let me see.”

  Don’t go with him, Trudi wanted to say. Stay here with me.

  “Fancy, fancy,” he said.

  “Your papers, please.” A uniformed official opened the door to their compartment.

  Ingrid’s father tossed the jewelry box onto the shelf above his seat. The beads of Ingrid’s rosary clicked inside her handbag as she dug for her Personalausweis and a small green folder.

  A stout woman came running from the red phone booth near the entrance of the station, two heavy baskets swinging in her hands. She nearly stepped on her skirt as she climbed into the train. In the open window of the next compartment appeared a gray-haired man, and a young soldier handed him a shabby suitcase, tied with string.

  “Remember to take your pills, Father,” he shouted.

  Two women with gray coats and flowered scarves knotted beneath their chins sat on a bench near the ticket office as if they’d been waiting a long time. The whistle blew again, and Ingrid waved through a cloud of steam as the train pulled forward and a late passenger leapt on.

  Trudi stood waving until the train had left the station, swaying in its tracks before it gathered speed. Only then did she feel the cold of the winter air. She turned up her collar, tightened the wool scarf around her hair. When she was about to step out of the station, she saw—as if framed forever by the wide brick arch of the entrance—four boys playing ball. In the pure, cold light of the sun, they chased one another, laughing, shouting. Their cheeks were red, and if it hadn’t been for their identical brown shirts, they could have been any group of boys, engaged in an ageless game. Trudi’s heart ached as their carefree voices drifted toward her, and she wondered how long anything could possibly remain a game.

  ten

  1934–1938

  TRUDI AND HER FATHER WERE TROUBLED BY THE RECRUITING SESSIONS in the schools that resulted in new members for the Hitler-Jugend. Their customers who still had children in school came into the pay-library with stories of how they’d been told by teachers it was a duty of honor for all families to guide their sons toward the Hitler-Jugend and their daughters toward the BDM—Bund Deutscher Mädchen— Alliance of German Girls.

  Trudi’s interpretation of the letters BDM made Frau Abramowitz worry for her safety. “Bund Deutscher Milchkühe—Alliance of German Milk Cows.”

  “Hush now, hush,” Frau Abramowitz said, her hands flying about her as if attempting to push the dangerous words down.

  “But they are like cattle,” Trudi insisted.

  Already most of the other youth organizations had been absorbed into the Hitler-Jugend according to Adolf Hitler’s request, ending the skirmishes between children from the HJ and other groups, while creating even more of a rift between the HJ and Jewish children. Emil Hesping knew quite a few group members who originally had objected to the merger but attended the new meetings to preserve the friendships they’d formed in their original groups. Some of the older boys, who still came to the gymnasts’ club, complained to Emil that, where their previous group leaders had taught them to be true to their individuality, they now were ordered to be true to the Führer.

  Teachers had to meet regularly with the new group leaders to ensure that their students registered, and employers were pressed to hire only apprentices who were members of the HJ or BDM. As a result, children were forced to think about their future much sooner than they used to: whatever work they wanted to do once they grew up, it was to their advantage to belong to the HJ or BDM now.

  And how could the children not love the roaring bonfires and the magnificent folk songs—dark and melancholy and strangely victorious—as their voices united and soared toward the night sky beyond the blades of red-yellow flames, intoxicating them with the promise of equality, those children of shopkeepers and teachers, of farmers and lawyers and tailors? All around them, they felt a dwindling of the rigid class differences.

  When Helmut Eberhardt had heard the Führer’s promise that each worker would have bread, and that he would lead the Vaterland to greatness, happiness, and wealth, he’d felt consumed by the same holy feeling he’d first known as an altar boy. That feeling stayed with him and grew stronger with each month in the Hitler-Jugend, until he felt powerful in a way he’d never experienced with the priests. He trusted the Führer when he proclaimed that he would not rest until each and every German was an independent, free, and happy person in the Vaterland.

  At home, that new power changed Helmut’s days with his mother. No longer did he mind her words, and if she reproached him, he fixed his eyes on her until her words withered. Soon, he stopped asking for things and simply took them. While he felt the accumulation of his power in the lengthening of his body and his impact on the much older Hilde Sommer—who was far more enticing than girls his own age—he felt his mother growing weaker, paler.

  Eva Rosen and Alexander Sturm married the month before the Nürnberg laws would deprive Jews of their German citizenship and forbid marriage, as well as Geschlechtsverkehr—copulation—between Jews and Germans. The day of their wedding, an August Sunday in 1935, Trudi felt her heart swell with love when she saw Eva, her rich dark hair in a braided crown, the white strands at her temples swept back from her young face like the wingtips of a tamed bird.

  “I’m so glad you are here,” Eva said and bent to embrace Trudi. She wore a fitted wedding gown with a short open jacket that was decorated with a pearl-embroidered collar and matching cuffs.

  I am sorry, Trudi wanted to say to her, but she didn’t because Eva would have only asked what she was sorry about, and Trudi didn’t know herself, except that it had something to do with having failed her friend.

  Though Eva had resisted Alexander’s appeal to convert to Catholicism, she’d agreed to five sessions of marriage guidance with Herr Pastor Beier, despite his attempts to talk Alexander out of marrying her. She had even promised to have their children raised within the Catholic church, something that deeply hurt her mother, who tried to justify her daughter’s decision to her Jewish friends.

  “It’s the only way Alexander can marry Eva and stay in the Catholic church.”

  “Theirs is not the most generous church,” Frau Simon reminded her.

  Fräulein Birnsteig said that nothing was irreversible.

  “They might not even have children,” Frau Abramowitz offered.

  The Frau Doktor touched the ivory scar above her upper lip. “Is that supposed to console me, Ilse?”

  It was a small ceremony, celebrated in the white chapel near the Sternburg. The reception was held in the garden behind the Rosens’ house. Eva’s brothers had arrived from Switzerland, where they’d both been studying for the past years. Her father had risen from his invalid’s bed for the occasion of his daughter’s wedding; dressed in a huge black tuxedo, a glass of champagne in his hand, he chatted with the guests as though he’d only seen them the day before. His large face was tanned as always, and had it not been for his lounge chair on the balcony, the plaid blanket folded across the armrest as if awaiting his return, you might have forgotten that this was the same man who’d been resting up for decades. His appearance would only feed the gossip that he was not really sick—even though by the following day he would be reclining again in the sunshine, at most raising one slack hand if you called out a greeting to him.

  His new son-in-law, Alexander, who’d gone far too quickly from a serious boy to a serious man, looked changed today, sultry and almost beautiful. It was as though with Eva he’d regained some of those lost years, and he moved like a boy—not a businessman. A jaunty set to his hips, hi
s neck, he danced with Eva. When his niece, Jutta, dropped an entire Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte on the lawn, he laughed and helped her scrape bits of cherries and whipped cream and chocolate cake from the grass.

  “Let’s blame it on your foot,” he teased her.

  “What’s wrong with her foot?” Klaus Malter asked. “I thought she was limping.”

  “Nothing.” Jutta shrugged.

  But her mother told Klaus that she had stepped on a rusty nail. “Barefoot. She was swimming in that awful quarry hole again,” she said, and Trudi recalled the night she’d seen Jutta by the quarry, the night before water had sprung from the bottom of the hole as if invoked by the girl.

  Jutta’s mother was telling the dentist how Jutta had hobbled over to the Theresienheim, where Sister Agathe had pulled the nail from her foot.

  “When did that happen?” he asked.

  “Yesterday.” She sighed as if exhausted by her daughter. Her skin was waxen, her voice limp. “I keep telling her to be more careful.”

  “Mother—”

  “Make sure you keep your foot clean to avoid an infection,” Klaus Malter warned the girl.

  “It doesn’t even hurt.”

  “Infections can sneak up on you.”

  “Listen to the doctor,” Jutta’s mother murmured.

  “He is just a dentist.”

  Instead of acting offended, Klaus surprised Trudi by smiling at the girl. “You’re right. Still—dentists know about infections.”

  Jutta spun away. “The sister gave me something to bathe my foot.”

  Klaus had brought Fräulein Raudschuss to the wedding. She stood close to him, her arm touching his with such familiarity that Trudi knew instantly they’d been sleeping together for some time. She tried to feel amused: after all, it was a challenge to estimate the progress of a romance by watching people’s bodies, the casual touching of arms or legs, how closely they sat together. She could tell—even with those who sat stiffly, afraid to betray their lust by touching out of habit. Not that Fräulein Raudschuss and Klaus Malter were trying to hide anything: her hand stroked his cheek; he let his hand rest on the small of her back as they walked around; she fed him a piece of wedding cake from her fork.… And if that wasn’t enough to make Trudi feel hot with spite, they announced their upcoming engagement.

  “It’s not fair.” Startled, Trudi realized that she’d thought aloud. She glanced around. But the only person who’d heard her was Eva’s father.

  “What isn’t fair, Fräulein Montag?”

  “To—to upstage Eva like that. It’s her wedding day.”

  He nodded, solemnly. “It’s not fair,” he agreed, looking at her with such compassion that she wondered how much he observed from his balcony.

  Alexander had claimed the largest apartment in his building for his bride and himself, and Eva set upon decorating the spacious rooms with teak furniture imported from Denmark and her collection of stuffed birds of all sizes, including an owl which her new husband had bought for her as a wedding present from Herr Heidenreich. But her favorite was still the gray bird with the crimson chest that Trudi’s dog had caught. It looked as animated as the day Herr Heidenreich had stuffed it and arranged it in a nest, far more animated than Seehund, who found it harder and harder to get up from the floor. His hind legs were covered with teethmarks, where he’d tried to chew out the ache, and when he stood up, you had to remember not to pat his back because he might collapse.

  Often he moved with such difficulty that Trudi was afraid he might not survive the night. But he endured, all through that winter and into spring, which dragged on, a sodden extension of the long cold months, clustering around the old people’s aching joints, even affecting their memories: they’d raise their hands to their foreheads, straining to retrieve thoughts that had just become lost to them. Even the insides of their heads had grown soggy, jumbling their yesterdays with what had happened to them decades ago. They walked slower and relied on canes to support themselves.

  Eva and her new husband seemed to be the only ones who were celebrating—as if in defiance of the laws that shrank the world of the Jews, forbidding them to marry Germans or to employ German household help under the age of forty. “Never mind that we’re German too,” Eva told her mother, who’d lost the maid who’d worked for the family nearly ten years. So far, Frau Doktor Rosen hadn’t been able to find a replacement. Her medical practice had dwindled in the past two years since health insurance no longer covered patients who chose to go to Jewish physicians. Though some of her Aryan patients still slipped into her office after dark for consultations, a few conveniently forgot to pay her.

  Ever since the wedding, Trudi had become more a part of Eva’s life again. Eva was no longer attending the university and would stop at the pay-library—not to get books but to talk with Trudi or coax her into letting her father take care of customers by himself while she’d take a walk with her. She’d tell Trudi about all the exciting things she and Alexander were doing—eating out and going to dances and giving parties—but not about her rage at the atrocities that happened all around her.

  Trudi was invited to two of Eva’s parties, a small dinner that included Eva’s parents, who hardly said anything all evening, and a fabulous costume ball, where people arrived dressed as gypsies with gaudy jewelry and scarves, Chinamen with yellow jackets and pointed hats, Indians with feather headbands, and fairy godmothers with magic wands. Trudi disguised herself as a little Dutch girl with wooden clogs and a starched white kerchief that Frau Blau had arranged in a triangle on top of her head, and her father went as a gambler, wearing the old eye patch from his pirate costume and his golden tie with the silver stripes that Trudi had given him many years ago.

  Somehow, Eva had gotten hold of a nun’s habit, going too far, most of her guests—and especially people who had not been invited but heard about her brazenness—would agree afterwards, especially considering the way she danced with her husband, who was dressed as a sheik. For all the layers of cloth between the two—her black habit and the white sheet he’d wrapped around himself—they could have been naked, rubbing against one another like that. But then, people said, it was known that Jews had huge appetites when it came to pleasures of the flesh. Marriage had changed Alexander, the people agreed. But maybe that wasn’t all that surprising, considering the influence. He used to be so dignified, a decent man, the kind of decent that’s glad to help you out but wants everyone to know about the good deed. Not that he was no longer a decent man—although that quality did come under doubt that night of the costume ball. Even when he stopped dancing with his wife and opened another bottle of cognac at the opposite side of the room from her, it felt as though the two of them were still touching.

  In April, Seehund began to lose control of his bowels. Trudi would feel his shame when she’d come downstairs in the mornings to light the kitchen stove and find him lying in his stench, dried feces crusting his fur. Pinching her nostrils to keep from gagging, she’d hoist the dog up and half carry him outside, where she’d settle him down while she’d return to the kitchen to clean the floor and warm a pail of water for cleansing him.

  Some mornings, frost still laced the air and shimmered in the sun, tiny particles of ice, reminding her of how Seehund had enjoyed his first winter. She wished she could bring him a huge bowl of snow and let him lick it, but the snow had melted, and only membranes of ice shrouded the puddles. One day, while washing his haunches, she knew he wouldn’t live another winter. She grasped his leather collar and tried to take him to one of the frozen puddles—a poor substitute for snow, but perhaps the closest he would come to it. When he hung back as if reluctant to trust her, that long-ago love for him broke through, and she cried and stroked his fur. He nuzzled against her neck.

  “Come,” she said, and he followed her to the puddle.

  With her bare hands, she broke the flimsy ice and held out a long sliver to him, letting him lick it as if, somehow, it could replace what she hadn’t been able to give him sin
ce that day by the river when he’d absorbed her humiliation. Each impaired step he’d taken since had reminded her that she, too, was damaged. He licked at the ice until the heat of his tongue had melted it, and then he kept licking her hands and wrists, his raspy tongue far more alive than the rest of his body.

  That afternoon, he dragged himself away.

  When he hadn’t returned by dusk, Trudi grew restless. She dusted every piece of furniture in the living room, then took all the rugs to the low carpet rod behind the house and, with her long rattan paddle, beat them until they did not even have one puff of dust left in them. Her father was silent while they ate their dinner of potatoes with pickled herring and beets, but twice he stepped outside to call Seehund’s name.

  Trudi left the dishes in the sink and lit two lanterns. Throughout the evening, as they searched for the dog, she felt a revival of the sadness that the fat boy, Rainer Bilder, had made the town’s legacy, and whenever she looked up at her father, she could tell that he, too, felt that sadness which was inflating to contain the loss of her mother.

  It was after ten when they cleaned silver-white pigeon droppings from a bench in front of the chapel and sat down to rest. Pigeons, hundreds of pigeons, dozed on the slate roof, their whisper of talons like gravesite prayers, reminding Trudi of the pictures of the dead bride on her father’s wall and of the rumors that she was the cause of her mother’s craziness. For an instant she felt as though she were falling, falling, but her father spoke into the dark as if taking up her thoughts and pulled her into the safe and constant web of his acceptance.

  He said, “She was not always like that.”

  Across the meadow, a half-moon illuminated the onion-shaped tower of the Sternburg, and a high moving wind bent the leafless crests of the poplars.

  “She was not always like that,” he said again, “and yet, it was always there … underneath somewhere. I don’t know why.”