Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  “You’ve done a lot of good, working in the background.”

  “In furious silence.”

  “The change in policy—” Leo said, “killing the Jews instead of trying to push them out of the country.… Emil used to argue that it did not arise from the war situation but was intended all along.”

  “And you?” the bishop asked. “What do you believe?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve never been as sure about things as your brother. But in my darkest moments I agree with him.”

  “So do I.” The bishop hesitated. “There’ll be rumors … so you better hear this from me.”

  “What is it?”

  One of the flies that stuck to the amber fly strip above the table still twitched its legs.

  “I had a phone call from the owner of the gymnasts’ club. It turns out that, all those years Emil worked for him, he’s been embezzling funds.”

  Leo’s chin jerked up. “The gifts.”

  “What gifts?”

  “The unknown benefactor.”

  The bishop frowned.

  “That’s how Emil must have bought the gifts.” Leo told the bishop about the unknown benefactor, about three decades of gifts that had graced the lives of many people in Burgdorf. “Emil was the closest this town ever had to a hero.… And we didn’t even know who he was.”

  “Ah yes,” the bishop murmured and raised one hand as if in benediction, but halfway up he halted, a smile on his lips. “And we didn’t even know.…”

  Over the next weeks, Trudi and her father would marvel at long-ago incidents when, in Emil’s company, they’d mentioned that the Braunmeiers had lost a calf to the storm, say, or that the Brocker girl had been looking at a rabbit muff in a store window, or that Herr Buttgereit couldn’t afford coats for his family.

  “We helped him.”

  “He knew how to listen.”

  Soon, they could no longer understand how they could possibly have missed all along that Emil Hesping had been the unknown benefactor. And so it was all over town.

  “Remember when the pastor’s housekeeper broke the handle of her shopping basket in the market? By the time she got back, a new basket with two cabbages was already on her doorstep.”

  “Remember when Frau Simon’s bicycle was stolen and she found a new one right in her bedroom?”

  “Remember when the Weiler boy got those Lederhosen?”

  “Remember when the midwife—?”

  “Remember when—?”

  “Remember—?”

  The people of Burgdorf liked to see themselves as accomplices of the unknown benefactor, and they cherished whatever small part they might have played in carrying information to him.

  “I was the one who told him when Holger Baum lost his wallet.”

  “He heard about Frau Blomberg’s broken ankle from me.”

  “If it hadn’t been for me, he would have never found out about the Bilders’ sick dog.”

  The people brought flowers to Emil’s grave: tulips and forget-me-nots and lilacs; some whispered silent apologies about having ever considered him selfish or immoral. When they passed the Hitler statue, which had been bolted as well as chained to an iron base, they would cast sideways glances at the splatters of blood that had dried brown against the silver-white pigeon droppings on the Führer’s chest. Even Herr Pastor Beier, who’d never shown much regard for Herr Hesping, now wished he’d reported his need for a car to him, rather than to the bishop, and based a long sermon on the words that it is better to give than to receive.

  She arrived before Max and sat down on a rock wide enough for both of them. Within minutes the blue of the sky changed to gray, and a whitish mist began to roll in from the Rhein. It covered the end of the jetty, then whirled across the countryside as if summoned by a paintbrush, shrouding rocks, shrubs, and willows until Trudi, too, was surrounded. The quality of the mist—thick and white—made her eyes ache with its brightness, but as she adjusted to it, she felt invisible. She rather liked that sense of protection: she knew her surroundings well though she couldn’t see them, but others wouldn’t know where she was. It made her wish the mist had been there for the last decade, keeping all of them safe.

  The mist had a dense texture—denser, it seemed, than her flesh. If only Max were already with her: they could make love in this mist. Low in her belly she felt the warm heaviness as if he’d already touched her. To hell with all the hiding … If it were up to her, she’d walk into the center of Burgdorf, right now, holding hands with Max, and make love in the church square with the mist shrouding them from curious and shocked eyes. She smiled to herself, but instantly felt frivolous, considering that there was a war and that people were so hungry and poor that someone had even stolen the collection box for pagan babies from church. The last one of the geese behind the taxidermist’s shop had disappeared—into someone’s pot, no doubt—though everyone knew that Herr Heidenreich, who prayed for his daughter’s return every day, was saving that goose for her homecoming meal. While Trudi and her father kept trading library books for food, nearly everyone she knew had sold some belongings in order not to starve.

  In the deep silence of the mist, as Trudi longed to survive the war—even if just to know what would happen—she saw herself as an old woman, face lined, eyes tranquil yet knowing, and understood with absolute certainty that she would be alive for a long time to come. She wished she had that same certainty about her father and Max and Eva, or about Alexander Sturm who, after wavering between imagining Eva alive and dead, had convinced himself last month that she was dead. After making out a will that left everything to Jutta, he had enlisted in the army.

  The mist gave a sameness to everything. Before, there’d been countless nuances in color and shape, but now everything was white-gray. Trudi could make out the shape of the bush right in front of her and then the shadows of birds flitting past her, but they only appeared for an instant before they were blotted by the mist. It was quite beautiful and eerie and made it possible to pretend there was no war and that—in some well-lit future—she might be able to remember whatever she chose.

  She wondered how close Max was and if he too was discovering the beauty of the mist. Though she saw him once or twice a week, she thought about him when she was not with him. Sometimes too much, she worried. What if he turned away from her greed for his love? What if her love flipped into hate as it had before with others? The mist that separated her from him made her understand what it would be like not to have him in her life again, and she felt that old and absolute panic that, if you couldn’t reach someone, that person had died or was lost to you. Only now there was no locked door to fling her child body against and bruise her fists, just that white barricade of mist that yielded to her movements, shaping itself to her body like new skin.

  When the fog lifted, she realized she’d been sitting less than twenty meters from Max. At first neither of them moved. She felt a sharp bliss at having him in her life. All at once he laughed and sprang up, and she stood up too, amazed that the air offered no resistance to her body.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What is it?” and brushed her hair from her cheek. “You weren’t afraid, were you?”

  She shook her head, and the air around her neck felt light and cool.

  The first day Ingrid Hebel brought her newborn daughter to the pay-library, Frau Weiler came running over from next door, wiping her hands on her starched apron. “Can I hold the baby?” she asked and stretched out her arms before Trudi could even get a look at the newborn. Ever since Frau Weiler had become the grandmother of twin girls, she’d blossomed. Now she fussed over every baby she saw, even boy babies.

  “If only she’d been that way with Georg,” people would say, remembering the pathetic-looking boy in girl’s clothing.

  Frau Weiler’s protruding eyes peered at the baby’s face. “What’s her name?” She tickled her chin.

  “Rita.”

  “She looks just like your husband.”

  Ingrid’s face,
which was already red from the sun, turned an even deeper red. She had moved into the apartment above the bicycle shop with her parents the day after she’d arrived in the potato truck, and Trudi had heard Ingrid’s father screaming three blocks away. From the Heidenreichs Trudi had heard that Ingrid’s father had met with the pastor and that they’d made a number of phone calls from the rectory, including one to the army, requesting that a certain Ulrich Hebel, who used to work for the railroad, be granted leave in time to give his child a name.

  The beginning of July, a week before the baby’s birth, the soldier Hebel arrived in Burgdorf for a hasty wedding. He didn’t look at all the way Trudi had imagined—a movie-star body and passionate eyes that would have persuaded someone like Ingrid to part with her purity. Rather, he was shorter than Ingrid and quite a bit older, a considerate man, it was evident, who was easily flustered and adored his new bride, even though his future father-in-law had boxed him in the face upon meeting him, so that at the wedding ceremony as well as on the day of his departure for Hamburg, where the British had attacked, the bridegroom’s right cheek was the color of beef kidney past its peak of freshness.

  “Let me have the baby now,” Trudi reminded Frau Weiler.

  Leaning forward, Frau Weiler reluctantly positioned Rita in Trudi’s arms. “Careful now.”

  “You think I’m going to drop her? And that she’ll turn out to be a Zwerg too?”

  “Oh, Trudi.” Frau Weiler gave a quick, exasperated sigh. “You get so … so—”

  “What?”

  “It’s just they’re fragile at that age.…” She turned for the door.

  “Bring her by soon, Ingrid.”

  “I will.” Ingrid’s voice was flat. “Sit down,” Trudi invited her.

  But Ingrid stayed next to her, eyes trained on Rita as if waiting for her to sprout horns or make some horrible mistake. To Trudi, the baby looked beautiful with her dark halo of straight hair and tiny hands that curled into loose fists. She wore a smocked dress from the midwife’s supply. Despite her mother’s urging, Ingrid had refused to sew or knit for the baby during her pregnancy. She’d spent most of her days on her knees in church, asking God’s forgiveness, while her body continued to swell until it looked as if a single pew could no longer hold her.

  “She’ll feel better after the wedding,” her mother had told the neighbors, but Ingrid continued her empty-eyed pilgrimages to the church, even after she’d become Ulrich Hebel’s wife.

  “She’ll feel better after the baby’s born,” her mother had told the neighbors to still her own worries about how Ingrid might be with her child; and she was relieved when Ingrid looked after her infant daughter properly, even though it seemed that only her body took over that function while her soul tangled with her sin.

  “It takes longer for some women than others to feel like mothers,” the old women would console Ingrid’s mother while, amongst themselves, they’d whisper, “She’s unnatural,” and recount memories of that stunning blaze of love they’d felt as soon as their infants had been placed in their arms.

  They were appalled that Ingrid hadn’t even thanked the midwife, who’d arrived for the birthing with a flour sack full of tiny shirts and booties and dresses. Even the diapers had been ironed and folded and smelled as fresh as the air inside the midwife’s house. Her floors were always spotless because the midwife not only cleaned every day but also took off her and her son’s shoes inside the house. Before she’d let visitors enter, she’d inspect the soles of their shoes to make sure they hadn’t stepped into pigeon droppings or dog shit.

  But that August, a month after the midwife had delivered Ingrid’s daughter, she did not check her visitors’ shoes. Her face was swollen red from crying when they came into her house, wearing the summer grieving clothes they’d aired out overnight, bringing her generous cakes and meats and salads from their meager supplies to make up for the scant words of sympathy they managed to summon up for the man who’d turned in his own mother.

  Late that evening, the midwife asked one of the old neighbor women to watch over Adi’s sleep while she returned to the cemetery, where the wreaths and bouquets on her husband’s new grave gleamed under a quarter moon. “I love you,” she whispered, trying to evoke Helmut the last time she’d seen him, but instead she saw his mother the day she’d been taken away. “I love you,” she tried again. Sometimes she had listened to Helmut’s heart after he’d fallen asleep. Her cheek against his chest, she’d felt the slow, steady beat of his heart against her skin. No more.

  “I’ll miss you,” she whispered, but already she knew that, in the few days since Helmut’s body had been sent back to Burgdorf for his soldier’s funeral of honor—including a mass for which the priest had decorated the altar with a steel helmet and Hakenkreuz flag—the people had begun to accept her far more than before.

  She thought of her favorite red dress that she wouldn’t be able to wear for an entire year. Maybe she should dye it black. Widow’s clothes. At least the black would cover the stain from last Sunday, when she’d worn the red dress to mass. Just as she’d been about to faint again, she’d pressed Adi toward Frau Heidenreich, who’d knelt next to her, and when she’d come to on the church steps, her dress had been smudged and the Zwerg woman had been bending over her, fanning her with both hands. Trudi’s face had looked so soft, dreamlike almost. Why, Hilde remembered thinking, Trudi looks like a woman who is loved.… But immediately she’d said to herself, No, this can’t be, not the Zwerg, and she hadn’t shared her observation with others because they would have laughed at her.

  She shouldn’t be thinking of clothes. Or other people. Only of Helmut, her husband. Husband. Hus—band. Hus —band. If you looked at it just as a word, it didn’t mean anything. Strange to think she had ever been married.

  “I miss you.”

  She said it again. “I miss you.”

  A shadow moved from a nearby grave as though she’d invoked a straying soul.

  Hilde cried out.

  “Sshh—it’s only me.” The shadow carried a tin watering can in one hand, and turned out to be the widow Weskopp, who came to the cemetery every day to tend the wide grave that held her husband and sons. Some people said she practically lived at the cemetery. “Hot days like this,” the widow said, “it’s better to water the flowers after the sun is down.”

  She pressed her watering can into the midwife’s hand, grasped her by the elbow, and guided her to the nearest faucet, where she waited while Hilde filled it with cold water.

  As Hilde tilted the can toward Helmut’s grave, silver worms of water fused her hand to the dark earth. She dropped the handle. Leapt back as the tin clattered against the stone edging of the grave.

  “Not like that.” The widow hunched over to pick up her watering can. “It’s important to water every day.” There was something watchful about her. Everyone knew she prided herself on growing the best flowers, not just in her garden and house, but also at the cemetery.

  As if those flowers could be a substitute, Hilde thought. At least I still have a son. Ashamed of her cruelty, she tried to come up with something kind she could say to the widow, who was walking along Helmut’s grave, sweeping her arm in long practiced motions to douse every last flower petal.

  Hilde tried not to look at the arc of silver worms.

  “Don’t forget the candles,” the widow continued her instructions. “It’s important to buy the right candles.” She set the watering can down and took Hilde to her family grave. “Thick, short candles.” She pointed to the flicker of light in the glass lantern that sat between two perfect rosebushes. “Some candles are too thin and tall and burn right out.”

  “I don’t have a lantern.”

  “I’ll bring you one. You also need a vase with a point at the end so it’ll stay in the ground.”

  Now I’m one of them—a widow. For an instant the midwife felt a cloying sense of comfort, but then she saw herself, forever in black, riding her bicycle to the cemetery with her very own w
atering can, instantly aged as she stooped over the flowers and the earth that separated her from her husband’s spoiled flesh—

  “No,” she said, “no,” unable to move as the black shape of the widow Weskopp swayed toward her as if to absorb her.

  eighteen

  1943-1945

  “I WISHED FOR HELMUT’S DEATH THE DAY I STITCHED HIS MOTHER’S blankets into a sleeping bag and watched her touch the pear tree.…”

  Trudi and Max lay in the sand pocket near the tip of the jetty, their hair wet from swimming in the river. Her head against his shoulder, she told him about the day Renate Eberhardt had been taken away. Beneath them, the sand was still warm from the sun though dusk had begun to blot the brightness from the sky, sharpening the contours of trees and rocks and freighters. Max was still naked, but Trudi had already slipped back into her dress, as always.

  “I feel sorry for the midwife. Helmut’s funeral is the only one I’ve been to where most people seemed glad to get someone beneath the ground—even people who’re all for the brown gang. We stood by his grave, but I bet we all were thinking of his mother. I wish you could have met Renate Eberhardt. She was one of the best-liked women in town.…”

  She raised her head toward the hollow wail from one of the Braunmeiers’ cows and listened for a moment. “I once stole from her. Pears. When I was five. Georg Weiler and I, we sneaked into her garden, and when she came out of the house, Georg ran off and I was caught. She was pregnant with Helmut then.”

  Linking one hand through hers, Max rested the knot of their fingers on her stomach.

  Trudi felt the warmth through her linen dress and shivered with pleasure. “You know what she did? She gave me two pears, and a few weeks later she came into the pay-library with her new baby and brought me another pear.”

  Warm wind carried the scent of camomile from the dike. Max raised himself on one arm and swung his body across Trudi’s, keeping himself light above her on his elbows. He had taken off his glasses, and the pale skin around his eyes was in stark contrast to his tan. She pulled him close, let him block the first stars as she caressed his naked back. Her fingers circled the ring of hairs that grew low on his spine. She loved touching that ring of hairs—it was silky, and even though she couldn’t see it now, she knew the exact pattern the hairs formed, an oval swirl like the crown of a small child’s head. It filled her with wonder to know another person’s body so completely—by touch and taste and smell and sound and sight—know it with a delight that had begun to carry over into an enjoyment of her own body.