Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  Nights, the woman and the boy slept in the kitchen. Leo Montag had rehearsed their escape with them so many times—a quick rap against the wall—that even the boy would automatically reach for his blankets and run down the stairs. One of the trunks in the cellar was left open for the bedding, and the two would throw everything in there, close the lid, climb into the damp tunnel, and pull the empty potato bin into place. On the Blaus’ side, they’d push the armoire aside, replace it, and hide inside. Herr Blau kept a feather puff and pillows for them in the armoire, and Herr Hesping had drilled air holes into the top, which you could only see if you climbed on a chair.

  To stay inside the tunnel for longer than a few minutes was even harder than they’d thought because water kept seeping through the ground. At first, Herr Blau had tried to line the tunnel with blankets, but they’d soaked through so quickly that they were useless. Finally, Trudi remembered that the Weskopps used to go camping, and she managed to trade two years of free library books for the huge tent, dodging the widow’s question about what she was going to do with it. After Herr Blau cut the green canvas to fit the walls of the tunnel, the moisture still kept coming through, but at least the woman and the boy didn’t get smeared by mud each time they fled to the tunnel.

  So far, none of the visitors to the Montags’ house had been a real danger to the fugitives, and if any of them noticed that Trudi and her father rushed them out of the front door soon after they arrived, they didn’t say so.

  “We’ll stop over soon,” Leo would say, or, “Come by the library tomorrow when it’s open. I’ll have time to talk then.”

  But it hurt Trudi, having to lie to Matthias Berger to keep him from coming back. And her father—he used to look forward to those visits too. Matthias had been playing chess with him about once a week and had ended each of his visits by playing the piano. His lessons with Fräulein Birnsteig had refined his technique without diminishing his intensity. He was accustomed to staying for hours at a time—an impossible risk now with Frau Neimann and Konrad in the house.

  “The piano is broken,” Trudi told him.

  “Let me take a look. Maybe I can fix it.”

  “It needs major work. I—I’ll let you know when it’s ready.”

  “I could still play chess with your father.”

  “He hasn’t been up to chess much lately. Better to wait for the piano.…”

  Matthias left, confused she could tell, as she watched the slope of his shoulders. Even before he’d turned away from her, she’d already missed him. She worried about his headaches; though he never complained about them, she usually could see when he was about to get one because he’d press his palms against his temples as if to keep the pain out, and she’d make him camomile tea or urge him to lie down on the sofa until he felt better.

  She would have liked to tell the truth to Matthias and Eva and the Abramowitzs, who’d been forced to vacate their house and now lived in one furnished room on Lindenstrasse, but Emil Hesping had impressed on her that each additional person who knew about the fugitives increased the risk of capture. “For all of us,” he’d said.

  He was against including Frau Weiler in any way, but since it was impossible to feed four on food rations that were barely enough for two, Leo managed to enlist Frau Weiler’s support by asking her if she could spare some groceries for two people he knew were in need. “That’s all I can tell you, Hedwig,” he said when she wanted to know more.

  “It’s easy enough,” she said, “with a grocery store. Setting aside a bit. Even the government can’t always keep track, right? Things spoil, after all.…”

  Though Ilse Abramowitz no longer received letters from Frau Simon, she kept mailing packages, depleting her own scant resources as if sending the supplies would keep her Jewish friends from vanishing.

  “They’ll be back,” she insisted, refusing to listen to her husband’s speculation that they might have already been killed in camps.

  It was a Wednesday evening in May, and they were alone in their tiny room. He sat on the bed, which they’d covered with an embroidered tablecloth to make it look more like a sofa. The linen cloth was one of the few things they’d managed to bring from their house. He was reading the photography book that someone—no doubt, the unknown benefactor—had left outside his door early that morning. Despite his gratitude, he felt betrayed because what he really needed—protection for himself and his wife—not even the unknown benefactor could give him.

  Ilse was darning socks at the scarred table, a silver thimble on her right forefinger. “They’re for work, those camps,” she said.

  “That’s what they tell us.”

  “You can’t prove any of this,” she cried.

  He nodded, gravely, and told her she was right. “I can’t prove any of this, Ilse.” His hands itched. They’d been puffy and red for nearly three months, ever since he’d started forced labor in the soap factory. It took half an hour by streetcar and another half hour to walk there. Quite a few Russian prisoners worked alongside the Jews, and they weren’t allowed to talk to each other.

  “I’d rather be subjected to injustice,” his wife said, “than to be the one who inflicts it on others.”

  “It doesn’t have to be one or the other.”

  “But given a choice, Michel. If you had a choice … The price they pay is so much higher.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “If you—”

  “They might survive, but they’ll never recover.”

  He raised his hand to ward off the compassion in her voice—compassion not for their own people, but for the persecutors.

  “And maybe the worst thing is that they won’t know.…” Her voice grew soft. “… that they mistake what they are for being human.”

  “Don’t ask me to feel sorry for them.”

  She pulled the wicker sewing basket closer and busied herself with the mending of his black socks, weaving the thread through the thinning material again and again and again—anything, her husband thought, to keep from thinking about what was happening to their people. As she finished mending the hole, she methodically pulled the thread through, twice, to make a knot, and then bit it off with her even teeth, although the scissors lay next to her. He used to remind her that she’d ruin her teeth doing that. But what difference did it make now?

  As she rolled the sock with its matching partner into a tight, neat ball and picked up another sock, Michel Abramowitz turned the page in his book, though he couldn’t remember a single word he’d read. There was so much he couldn’t say to Ilse. He couldn’t tell her about the rumors he’d heard of prisoners who’d had to undress in groups before they’d been shot in the neck. It was something he kept thinking about—especially at night when he lay awake. How could any country be this cruel, humiliating people before killing them with such gruesome efficiency? And what he kept coming back to was the question of the clothes. What had happened to the clothes after the people had been shot? It seemed like a petty question, considering the scope of devastation, and yet it was the one that tortured him. He’d find himself obsessed with visions of those clothes, being handed to new prisoners, who would wear them for a while until they, too, would be forced to strip for their deaths. And so on, and so on—until the one constant element was those clothes.

  His wife had finished darning the next sock and was biting off the thread.

  It’s amazing, Michel thought, what people can get used to and still call life: we have lost most of our belongings; we have been crowded into small rooms; we’re not allowed to leave our hometown; we can’t use public transportation unless we work more than seven kilometers from home; we’re no longer permitted to possess cameras or binoculars or opera glasses or electrical appliances; we’ve had to turn over our radios and jewelry; we’re not allowed outside our rooms between eight at night and six in the morning; we’ve been kicked, beaten, and humiliated; we’ve had our families ripped from us … and yet, and yet, we go on living.

  He thought of all the times he�
��d raged against his wife for accepting each new attack with dignity. “Deine Anpassungsfähigkeit—your ability to adapt—is far more dangerous to you than any of them will ever be.…” But how much better was he? He’d come to accept all that too—only out of fear.

  “Don’t work so hard, Ilse,” he said gently.

  Looking up, she smiled at him and threaded her needle.

  It occurred to him how—all at once it seemed—she’d aged rapidly, the fine wrinkles in her face deepening, that stiffness in her shoulders and hands. Although still lovely, she had lost the essence, the spirit.… Still, she held on to that dignity of hers, keeping up her appearance and her hope even though—as of tomorrow—she too would have to work in the soap factory. At sixty, she was far too old for heavy work like that. But the new laws said that Jewish men up to seventy-five and Jewish women up to seventy had to do forced labor. That meant another thirteen years for him. Michel couldn’t allow himself to think like that. Hitler’s madness had to stop. Had to be stopped. Every night he prayed for Hitler’s assassination.

  At least his son had gotten out in time. And he and Ilse had come so close. At the Argentinean consulate in Düsseldorf, they’d received confirmation that they would get visas. But first, they’d been told, they had to get certificates of health and the necessary vaccinations. Four times they’d gone through the process, and each time a letter had arrived that their visas could not be issued since new directions from Argentina had arrived. Four times their son had sent the money for their journey, and four times they’d paid for that journey which, now, he doubted they would ever make.

  And then there was his daughter, who had decided to divorce her husband because, she said, it would harm his practice if he stayed married to a Jewish woman. Noble, Michel Abramowitz thought; even here Ruth protects him. But he knew Fritz well enough to figure that he’d requested the divorce to cleanse himself from any Jewish connection. Ruth had found work in a small clinic in Dresden, and she’d written her parents not to worry about her, that her room had a sink and a view of the Zwinger.

  A view of the Zwinger, Michel Abramowitz thought. As if that solved everything.

  His wife rolled up the last socks. Gathering scissors and needles into the basket, she placed the tight balls of socks in the curve of her elbow and carried them to the dresser. “Ready to go to sleep?”

  Michel closed his book. Together, they lifted the tablecloth from the bed, shook out its creases, and stepped toward each other to fold its length like so many decades of desire until the gap between them had waned to the thickness of the folded square of embroidered linen.

  fifteen

  1942

  ALEXANDER STURM INSISTED ON BEING PRESENT WHEN HIS WIFE WAS questioned about her parents. Stunned that his request had been granted, he sat next to her; yet, his one act of assertion had drained him so of his fighting spirit, that he could only listen silently as she denied any knowledge of her parents’ plans to escape. He admired how calmly she lied, how regally she held up her head. She hadn’t looked that composed the night her parents had left in a car they’d bought on the black market. They’d been urging Eva to come with them, south, and across the border into Switzerland, where Eva’s brothers had settled after completing their studies.

  “You know I’d go if Alexander came along.…” She was crying, her eyes blurred behind her boyish glasses.

  Alexander told her again it was a lot less safe—to drive through Germany like that—than to wait out the war in Burgdorf. “It can’t last much longer,” he said, and he listed all the laws her parents were breaking. “Simply being out at night, not wearing the yellow star, owning valuables…” He felt furious with Eva’s father, who was practically helpless, a burden, yet was prepared to risk his wife’s and daughter’s lives with his impossible scheme for escape. “You can be stopped. Arrested. Shot.”

  And now Eva had to deal with the aftermath.

  He was convinced the officer didn’t believe her when she said she’d last seen her parents five days before. No, she had not noticed anything unusual. Her father had been resting in the living room—“he’s an invalid, as you certainly must know”—while she and her mother had made potato pancakes in the kitchen. No, her husband had worked late that evening. No, her parents did not own a car. No …

  Several times during the interrogation Alexander sensed Eva glancing at him as if for confirmation, but he felt paralyzed with fear. He’d always been able to count on himself to do the proper thing, to schedule and manage his life as well as his work, to follow the law. He couldn’t believe his stupidity at having demanded to be here with Eva. If both of them were to be arrested, he wouldn’t be able to do anything for her. Or myself, he thought, his palms wet.

  He was shocked when he and Eva were allowed to leave. As he stepped out on the sidewalk, the sun on his forehead, he wanted to cry with gratitude. The sky was crisp and blue, and the wind carried the scent of the river meadows and the cooing of pigeons. Eva’s arm locked into his, he hurried her home, all along checking over his shoulder, positive they were being followed. He didn’t answer her until they were inside their locked apartment.

  “What is it?” She grasped him by the hands. Behind her glasses her eyes looked magnified.

  He slumped against the wall. “We have to hide you. We—”

  “Wait. If I wanted to hide, I could have gone with my parents.”

  “There’ll be other questions. They’ll come for you again.”

  “And I’ll answer them. As I did today.”

  “We were lucky today. You heard what they said, that they’ll contact you if they need to know more.”

  “Your hands are ice cold.”

  He pulled them from her. “Your parents should have thought of this before they—”

  “Maybe you should have thought of this before you refused to come with us.”

  “I didn’t make you stay behind.”

  “Oh, but you did,” she said softly. “I’m still here because of you.”

  He drew her close, his chest heaving. “I don’t want to lose you, Eva.” But her body felt stiff in his arms, and she turned her face away from him. “I’m sorry.” He thought of the stories he and Eva had heard and retold to one another to keep up their courage, stories of courage—about the doctor who’d joined a group of his Jewish patients about to be transported to Poland, the young woman who’d accompanied her Jewish husband to the KZ. Until today Alexander had believed that he, too, would make that choice. But today he had tasted the danger, had felt the power of the enemy. He wished he had the courage of the doctor, of the woman, but what he couldn’t stop thinking was, fools.… Fools.

  “We have to hide you, Eva,” he said.

  “You need to hide,” Trudi Montag told Eva that evening.

  “Did Alexander talk with you?”

  “No, I heard it from Jutta Malter. She told me about the interrogation this afternoon. I wanted to come right over, but I thought it would be better to wait until after dark.”

  “Alexander is after me to go into hiding. I don’t want to.”

  “Of course not. No one wants to hide. But sometimes it’s necessary. At least for a while.” Trudi hoisted herself onto the Danish sofa with the teak armrests.

  “I’m so afraid that something happened to my parents. I wouldn’t even know.… And I can’t imagine hiding in some strange place.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a strange place.”

  Eva frowned.

  “Think of it as … a visit. To a friend. An old school friend.”

  “Oh, no. I’m not putting you and your father in danger.”

  Trudi thought of Frau Neimann, who never once had shown concern for the risk taken by those who hid her. “That’s all very admirable,” she told Eva, “but not—”

  “A few weeks from now they will have forgotten about my parents.”

  “Good. Maybe then it’ll be all right for you to surface.”

  “In the meantime, they’ll come to y
our house and find me and arrest you and your father in the process.”

  “Come here.” Trudi motioned to the sofa. Her polished leather shoes dangled high above the parquet floor.

  Eva sat down next to Trudi, her spine as straight as it had been in school—an example of good posture. The many tiny pleats of her skirt spread around her. She didn’t look at Trudi but at her stuffed owls and sparrows and robins and swallows, preserved on the tops of the bookshelves in eternal poses of flight.

  “They wouldn’t find you,” Trudi said.

  “You have a potion that will make me invisible, right?”

  “Let’s say—” Trudi hesitated. “Let’s say we’re prepared.”

  “My cat lives in a railroad station.”

  “What?” Eva blinked, still half asleep. A boy’s face was floating above her, blond hair swinging above his eyebrows. All at once she remembered Trudi bringing her here during the night, showing her a tunnel before she’d made up a bed for her on the kitchen floor near the cellar door.

  “My cat lives in a railroad station.”

  Eva fumbled for her glasses. The boy was bending over her. Beyond him, a woman slept, curled on her side, her back toward them.

  “People feed my cat. Every day.”

  “What a lucky cat.”

  He nodded. “She doesn’t need much.”

  “What’s your name?” Eva linked her arms beneath her neck.

  “Konrad.”

  She almost said, “Eva Sturm,” but figured it would be better for the boy not to know her last name if he ever were questioned. “You can call me Eva.”

  “Do you like to watch cats eat?”