Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  The night before the priest was to leave the pay-library, Trudi watched him shave. She’d propped one of her gold-framed mirrors next to the kitchen sink for him. It was one of those hot, hot June evenings when the air is damp and your skin feels sleek with sweat. As Adolf lathered his face with her father’s shaving soap, he showed her where one of the guards on the train had pushed a thumb into the soft spot behind his ear.

  “For an instant there, I thought I’d die. That transport, it taught me about hunger. I didn’t know hunger like that could exist. I felt ashamed of it.” His voice was rapid, barely more than a whisper. “Beneath the hunger was a constant greed—like a wild dog that could be turned loose any moment. I was as afraid of that greed as of the guards, afraid of what it might make me do.…”

  He stared into the mirror and raised the shaving blade. “That hunger—it brought out the worst in some of us, the best in others. On the train I saw a father grab food away from his daughter.… I saw an old man trampled as others fought over one raw potato. Not everyone was like that, of course. Many sacrificed and shared what little they had. I was dizzy and cold and weak with hunger—that was my entire focus.… I longed for my connection to God, tried to remember the joy I’d found in playing the organ in our church, but everything was reduced to my belly. It was my God, my one companion.…

  “After I escaped—” He shook his head and started again, and what he told Trudi took away forever any doubts she might have still held on to, doubts that those rumors of people dying by the hundreds in camps were far too horrible to be true. She saw the priest crouched in the woods outside high loops of barbed wire, saw him stumble away from a vast grave—naked bodies shoved into the gouged earth, twisted in indecent embraces. He made his way through the woods to Weimar, where his favorite poets, Goethe and Schiller, had lived and written, and he hid between the tall monuments in the cemetery near the crypt where the two poets rested in splendid recognition.

  “Those nights in the cemetery.…” The priest scraped the foam down his left cheek. “I thought I’d go insane. I could not understand how some people’s graves could be marked while others were obliterated without evidence. It felt more horrible than any other injustice I’d ever known of. I couldn’t fathom it. I tried to, and the trying was crazy making.…”

  Gradually he’d moved west, aided by people he said he’d never forget. During his flight he’d met other fugitives but only one woman who’d actually escaped from inside a KZ, Dachau, smuggled out by a guard. The woman, who had shared a hiding place behind the false wall of a closet with the priest for eight days, had told him about the camp—the filth, the hunger, the open sores—but what had been the worst for her had been the washroom where, together with others, she’d had to strip, stand under the icy water, and get doused with disinfectants that made her eyes sting, while guards laughed or pushed them around.

  All at once Trudi wanted to stop the information coming to her, wanted to block the remembering of what the priest had already told her, but knew that his words were carved into her soul as surely as any moment she had lived. “What happened to the woman?” she asked hoarsely, her forehead covered with sweat.

  “They couldn’t take away her spirit, though every day others went insane in the camp. Every day. For her, that washroom became her salvation because that’s where the guard who would eventually help her to escape saw her.…” The priest winced as he cut his chin. “The guard didn’t expect to fall in love with her.” Blood ran down the white foam, spreading into a pink blotch.

  Trudi ran into the bathroom and brought him a few pieces of toilet paper. “Here.”

  He pressed them against the cut. “She used him. Pretended.”

  “I would have done the same.”

  “The guard had it all figured out. False papers for her so that they could marry. Imagine that.… He’d keep doing his death work and she’d be at home, cooking his meals, keeping his uniforms clean, having his babies for the Vaterland.”

  “How did she get out?”

  “She agreed to marry him, and he smuggled her out. Under layers of trash. He took her to this room he’d rented for the two of them above a bakery in München. At first he kept locking her in, but she made him believe that she would never want to go anywhere without him.”

  “And that’s when he gave her a key.”

  “Yes.”

  “My father had to keep my mother locked up.”

  The priest looked at Trudi. He’d stopped the bleeding by sticking a small triangle of paper to his cut.

  “He had to. She—she wasn’t well. She died when I was four.”

  “How terrible for you.”

  “It happened a long time ago. Besides, compared to what you and many others have to suffer—”

  “Ah, but we can’t do that—compare our pain. It minimizes what happens to us, distorts it. We need to say, yes, this is what happened to me, and this is what I’ll do with it.” He rinsed his chin. “You know what I’m going to do as soon as I can?”

  She shook her head.

  “Change my name. Legally.”

  She felt disappointed by his answer. It seemed petty, considering all he could be doing. “You don’t have to tell people that your name is Adolf. You didn’t have to tell me. You could have made up another name.”

  “But don’t you see?” He bent close to her. His face smelled of her father’s soap. “Right now there isn’t anything I can do legally without getting caught again, but that’s what I tell myself when I get worn down, that I’ll change my name. I despise that name. Of course there are things far more important that I want to do—like stop the transports, the camps—”

  “The war,” Trudi said.

  “Yes, but I know I can’t stop them, and so I need to fasten on one thing that’s within my power to do.” His eyes burned with conviction. “By saying that name aloud, I keep my rage, my determination.…”

  She wished he would stay longer, but he’d only be there for a few more hours because Herr Hesping had already arranged a new place for him. She and her father were just one station on his way toward shedding his name.

  When the oldest Weskopp son died on the Russian front that fall, the widow Weskopp, who had suffered silently, screamed and kept screaming. When the neighbor women came running, they found her standing in the room that her two sons used to share, staring at the framed butterfly collection—dusty shapes, once vibrantly colorful, impaled on stick pins—that hung on the wall between the two beds. You could hear her screams all over town. They couldn’t have lasted very long, but they seemed to be there all day. And even during the night people would wake up and think they heard those screams, which gave voice to the pain that the town had endured—far more penetrating and unsettling than the sirens that warned when planes crossed Burgdorf on their way to drop bombs on Düsseldorf or Köln.

  The widow Weskopp, who hadn’t yet finished the year of wearing mourning clothes for her husband and youngest son, would stay in black from this day forward, the only color in her life except for the violets which she grew on every windowsill in her house as if to balance the harsh black of her garments.

  When Trudi returned from the funeral of the Weskopp son, Eva stood waiting for her in the kitchen.

  “I’m going home,” she said, her voice clipped.

  “You know it’s not wise.”

  “I also know I can’t go on like this. Sometimes I forget that you’re my friend.… All I see is my jailer.”

  “Eva—”

  “People can die. You’ve seen how quickly it happens. The Weskopp boy—”

  “He was in the war.”

  “Alexander might be sent off to war any day.”

  “It’s not his life I’m worried about.”

  “One short night, Trudi. One Goddamn beautiful night. Is that too much to want?”

  “To want? Of course not, but—”

  “If I can have one night with Alexander, I know I’ll be able to deal with the hiding again.” />
  “It’s not worth it, Eva.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “At least talk to my father.”

  “There’s nothing he can say that will keep me here.”

  She left through the kitchen door after the streets were dark and empty, promising to return before dawn, and Trudi set her alarm clock. When she woke up, the sky was still black, and she felt that slow buried ache in her hips. She washed, dressed, and went downstairs into the kitchen. They’d had no fugitives for a week, and with Eva gone, the house felt like a shell, a useless prop that a strong wind might blow away. She pictured Eva embracing her husband good-bye, rushing from the apartment building, careful not to be seen, cutting through the market and past the church square. Any moment now her knock would come on the backdoor. Trudi would pull her inside, search her face for traces of that one Goddamn beautiful night.

  But outside it was silent.

  Now, if she had one Goddamn beautiful night in her lifetime coming to her, Trudi pondered, and the choice with whom to spend that night… She found an immediate certainty within her: Max Rudnick. Not even Klaus Malter? No, Max Rudnick. But probably Max Rudnick hadn’t even considered a night with her. She wondered where he was, that night, that moment. It had been fifteen months since she’d met him, six months since she’d seen him.

  “Stay out of danger,” she whispered.

  The sky was changing from black to a deep purple blue, then to a medium blue, and finally to the flat light blue of a cloudless morning. And when the knock on the kitchen door came, it was not Eva, but Frau Weiler, the scarf around her frizzy hair half undone.

  Nearly incoherent with the news that she’d become a grandmother during the night, she dropped herself on the nearest chair. “Twin girls, Trudi. You have to see them. Oh—” She clasped her hands by her throat. “Eva Sturm—have you heard about Eva Sturm?”

  “What happened?” Trudi gripped her arm.

  “I was there when they were born.” Frau Weiler sucked her false teeth into place. “Helga let me help. They’re both—”

  “Eva—what happened to her? How did it—”

  “She was arrested. They searched the apartment, then the whole building, and found her in the attic.”

  “Where is she?”

  “No one knows.”

  “Oh God, I was afraid of that.… Who told you?”

  “Jutta Malter. She was there when they took Eva.”

  “And Alexander?”

  “They didn’t take him.”

  “He’s still there?” Trudi started for the door.

  “Locked inside his apartment, I hear.”

  sixteen

  1942

  ALEXANDER DID NOT ANSWER THE DOOR THAT DAY OR THE DAYS AFTER. Outside his windows hung the voices of women like souls of stuffed birds. Some he identified by sound: Trudi Montag, his niece, the butcher’s daughter-in-law. Others blended into a chorus, faded out, returned. He sat on the Danish sofa, and whenever he dozed off, he made sure it was while sitting: at least he could do that for Eva—not take comfort in lying down though his limbs yearned for rest. Stop it, he’d admonish his body when it complained, this is not about you. This is about Eva.

  Sometimes he staggered to the bathroom.

  Sometimes he ate and drank, disgusted that his body could force him into those functions.

  Trudi Montag came back.

  Others.

  Knocking.

  Knocking and calling his name.

  If the Gestapo returned, they would break his door down and he’d welcome them. No reason to get up for anyone else. His mouth felt dry and salty—not the fresh salt taste of the sweat beneath his wife’s breasts—but a nasty salt taste, old and used up. One evening he sat on the sofa when the sirens wailed, heard his tenants rush to the shelter he’d established in the cellar. Some banged on his door, shouted for him to follow them.

  Except for a few stray bombs that planes had dropped on their way back from attacking much larger targets, Burgdorf had remained almost intact. Strange to think how afraid he’d been of bombs. He used to open his windows during bombing raids to keep them from vibrating until they broke, and then he’d dash down the stairs to his shelter. But now he remained sitting on his sofa and longed for the kind of sky he’d once seen in Köln during a bombing—a sky bright with shapes not unlike Christmas trees, sinking toward the city, casting their eerie glow over everything. He longed for his windows to shatter, letting in gusts of heat and smoke that would make it impossible to breathe. He longed for suffocation, for obliteration, for a sky brushed with fire. Without moving, he sat, praying to be buried in the rubble of his building. And then it was morning and his house stood around him and he sat on the sofa and his wife was gone. Normal.

  She kept coming back, his wife’s Zwerg friend, fists fluttering against his door, his caged heart. Soon it felt as though she were out there all the time, and he’d find himself listening for her wingbeat even in the void of night when all else was silent. The muscles in his thighs and buttocks felt flattened out. Against his skin, the clothes he’d worn when they’d taken Eva away were stiff and rank. He’d stumbled into them—trousers and a white shirt—when he’d heard the car stop outside the building.

  Lucky I was awake, lucky, lucky.… He’d tossed Eva’s clothes onto the bed. “Get dressed.” Through the gap in the drapes he’d watched them get out of the car. Two of them, their suits blotted by the dark, balancing ghostly balloons of faces.

  Before they reached the front door of the building, he had Eva by the wrist and was out of the apartment door with her—lucky, lucky— clicking it shut and up the stairs to the second floor, where he made her wait, each pulse of her wrist a shock through his entire body, until they’d broken into his apartment, giving him and Eva time to race up the rest of the stairs.

  It was too new, the attic—not enough trunks and furniture and boxes stored yet to allow for shadows to grow into cluttered corners. It was an attic you could almost see all at once—not like his grand-parents’ attic, where each step had meant a discovery, a distraction. Quickly, he pulled Eva behind the crates of leftover building supplies: clay tiles for the roof; thin strips of wood for the parquet floors; rolls of wallpaper; cans of paint.

  It took a lifetime for them to make their way to the attic—he heard them on the second floor in his niece Jutta’s apartment, in the rooms on the third floor, their voices rising through the boards where he crouched with his wife, his wife—but then they were on the attic stairs.

  He saw himself sitting in the police station, handcuffed in a cell, crowded into a train with Eva. If it weren’t for her—Suddenly he hated her. “I love you,” he whispered hoarsely. His fingers ached as they pressed into her arm.

  “I love you, too.” Her face was a painting, one-dimensional, still. She stood up. Slipped his fingers from her arm like a useless bracelet.

  His back and neck felt drenched with sweat.

  “Stay there.” She was already walking toward the attic door as it flew open.

  Afterwards, though not for long, Alexander would try to tell himself that his legs failed him when he tried to stand up as they took Eva away, stand up to join her as she must have believed he would—even during her last gesture of heroism—because that was what they had promised one another.

  “I thought you’d like to be there,” Matthias said as he handed Trudi two cream-colored envelopes, one addressed to her, the other to her father.

  “What is it?”

  “An invitation.” He’d come to the pay-library but had waited between the stacks of books until Frau Bilder had checked out five war novels and maneuvered her bulk out of the door.

  Trudi opened the envelope and read the announcement for his piano recital. “Oh, Matthias,” she said. “I’m so pleased for you. Of course we’ll be there. Thank you.”

  He flushed with pride. “I even have a tuxedo.”

  “You’ll look all grown up then.”

  “The unknown benefactor
left it in our kitchen.”

  “How about that? When?”

  “Just this morning.”

  “And it fits?”

  “The jacket. The pants are too long, but my grandmother is turning over the hem.”

  “He’s been at it again, the unknown benefactor. I heard that Frau Immers—you know she gets that awful rash on her scalp—found two bottles of the medical shampoo she hasn’t been able to buy. Right in her chicken coop.… Listen, can you stay and visit? My father is in the living room.”

  Matthias hesitated.

  “I know he’d be glad to see you.”

  “Are you sure it’s all right to go in?”

  She thought of the times she’d sent him away from her door when she’d been hiding fugitives. “Just go on through.” She motioned him toward the open door that led to the hallway. No need to keep that door locked any longer. Her house had been empty for two weeks since that night Eva hadn’t returned.

  Emil Hesping was refusing to bring them anyone else. “Let’s wait a while,” he’d said. “You have some recovering to do. And we don’t know what she’ll tell them.”

  “Not Eva,” she’d said.

  And he’d shaken his bald head but hadn’t said anything that she hadn’t already imagined about torture.

  What Trudi knew of Eva’s arrest had come from Jutta, who’d followed the Gestapo into the attic after they’d torn her rooms apart, searching for Eva. They’d found her standing in the middle of the attic, not even trying to hide.

  “She walked toward them,” Jutta had said when Trudi had come to see her.

  “And Alexander?”

  “They only took Eva.”

  Trudi looked at Jutta, hard. She felt Jutta was holding something back, but she couldn’t tell what it was. “Did they search for him?”