Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  Klara Brocker was one of those girls. At nineteen, she was the prettiest she would ever be—small and cheerful and neat—the kind of briefly held beauty that never fully flourishes but becomes contained, lacquered by its very tidiness. The Ami who was assigned to her house gave her a crate of peaches that annulled years of hunger in her flat belly. He brought her nylon stockings and paid for her new permanent. A blond man with a small birthmark on his temple, he was so much taller than Klara that she could fit her head below his chin when they danced.

  One day Klara Brocker’s American stopped by the pay-library because he’d heard that the Montags had relatives in America. While he and Leo talked, piecing together fragments of German and English, Trudi—who’d resumed her work in the library—stayed on the wooden ladder and busied herself by rearranging books on one of the top shelves. When the American said he’d like to come by with a young friend who’d grown up in New Hampshire, only an hour from Lake Winnipesaukee, where Stefan and Helene Blau lived, Trudi let herself imagine becoming friends with this young soldier and visiting him too once she went to America. He’d pick her up from the ocean liner, drive her to New Hampshire, where her Aunt Helene would welcome both of them to a big family dinner.…

  The young soldier, who came to the pay-library a few days later, turned out to be not nearly as tall as Klara Brocker’s Ami, and when he came back to the ladder to introduce himself to Trudi, she looked down into his lonely boy-face and shocked herself with the thought that it wouldn’t be all that difficult to get him into bed. It would serve Max right.

  Immediately, she felt unfaithful. The young soldier was saying something to her, but she couldn’t answer because she was back in the mist—only this mist was not beautiful, but gray and thick and suffocating, and it had grown thicker with each day that Max hadn’t returned to her. Once the mist lifted, she told herself, she’d be able to see Max. He would be much nearer than she’d expected.

  That night, she felt so angry at Max for not coming back that she reached for herself, trying to bring herself to that warm yellow-orange blossom, but what she found herself spinning toward was the terror in the barn, and she stopped before she could trap herself in the old hate.

  nineteen

  1945-1946

  WHEN THE MEN OF BURGDORF CAME HOME, THEY WERE SILENT, BUR-dened by secrets they couldn’t let themselves think about. Many of them had lice and diarrhea. Their faces were ashen and rough with beard stubble. Eyes ashamed or defiant, they’d come into the pay-library with the excuse to ask when Leo Montag expected to get a tobacco shipment.

  But Leo was no longer the leader he’d been for the soldiers who’d returned from the previous war; he’d grown tired, old, and he lived more and more in his books. Gradually, he’d begun to replenish his own collection, trading library books for works by authors who used to be banned. Trudi had taken over the raking of the yard, a task Leo had always enjoyed. His limp had worsened, and his left leg kept falling asleep. Already he’d slipped several times as he’d stood up on it, and Trudi was afraid he might break something. Mornings, before she’d open the green shutters of the pay-library, she’d settle him on the sofa that Emil had won in a poker game, his aching leg elevated on a pillow, a stack of books on a chair next to him.

  Families welcomed their husbands and sons back without daring to ask questions about what they’d done in the war. Since they didn’t want to believe that one of their own could have participated in the atrocities that the Americans claimed had happened, they focused on healing the wounds, finding crutches for the crippled, feeding the hungry. They cut SS and SA insignia from wartime photos, and when one of their men would wake from a nightmare, screaming so fiercely that even the neighbors would wake, there’d be a wife or a mother or a sister who’d bend over him, cradle his head, and murmur, “It’s all over now.”

  But of course it was not all over.

  For some, their own hell was just beginning. And Trudi was one of the few who made sure it did by prying at the words they’d buried beneath untold horrors. And what did you do in the war? she’d think when she’d look at them. And you? And you?

  Yet, what she shared with the returning soldiers and everyone else in town was a sense of wonder that you could simply go to bed at night and sleep, that you could lie down without half listening for the enemy or wondering when you’d have to leap up again.

  As during the First World War, boundaries between unmarried and married women had dissolved as they’d sustained one another and found strength in performing tasks they’d been taught to believe only men could do. But now that the battle had ended, Trudi noticed that women who’d never married were outcasts once again—less likely than ever to find husbands, since there were many more women than men in town.

  Wives whose husbands had died instantly seemed aged, as if flipped into the previous generation, a new crop of old women though they were not old in years. To look at these war widows made the women whose husbands had come back even more grateful, and they turned from the widows and toward their men. Children had to share their mothers with those awkward men they were supposed to call father, though some had been born after their fathers had left for the war, or had been too young to remember them. Though most widows were raising their children alone, some children had to become used to uncles—men who slept in their mothers’ beds.

  Despite pleasant façades of togetherness, Trudi would notice the fracture within families, the numbing that many of the soldiers only found with alcohol, the shame in the eyes of some wives when they walked at the arms of their husbands. To her, the town had a smell of death—almost more so than during the war—and it didn’t surprise her when three of the men killed themselves within a month after coming home, and when the wife of an SS officer started weeping one sunny morning at the breakfast table and didn’t stop until three that afternoon, when she took her husband’s razor to her wrists.

  “Focus on the positive things in life,” people would tell Trudi when she’d walk through town with those stories.

  “It’s not good to dwell on the things that were terrible.”

  “Let’s never talk about that again.”

  “Nobody wants to relive those years.”

  “We have to go forward.”

  Even people who’d always followed a code of personal values would become upset when confronted with the war years and would protect one another. “Our men have gone through enough.…”

  They did not understand why Trudi Montag wanted to dig in the dirt, as they called it, didn’t understand that for her it had nothing to do with dirt but with the need to bring out the truth and never forget it. Not that she liked to remember any of it, but she understood that—whatever she knew about what had happened—would be with her from now on, and that no one could escape the responsibility of having lived in this time.

  The people’s silence made Trudi think of her mother’s skin closing around her old sin, made her think of how the river, too, closed across everything in spring, even though, late in summer, it would reveal what it had hidden: the tips of the jetties, the rocks close to the bank, debris that had been tossed into the river. And she thought of how—even when the river ran high—she knew where the large stones lay and where the jetties ended because she had looked at the river for countless hours, just as she had looked at her community and knew its deepest currents.

  It amazed her, the ability of people to forget their support of the Nazis, to deny what had gone on right here in their country, events which—ten years earlier—they would have never believed could happen. From Klara Brocker’s American soldier she heard that even in the town of Dachau, where people had breathed the smoke from burned bodies, some still insisted the death camp had merely been a work camp.

  The townspeople worried and speculated about everyone who was still missing—everyone except the Jews, of course. Very few people shared Trudi’s excitement when she found out that Eva’s parents were alive in Sweden. They’d sent her their address in c
ase she ever heard from Eva.

  As the prisoners of war drifted back into town, you could tell by their appearance where they’d been held: if they came from Russian prison camps, they were in rags and wore shoes stitched from wood and scraps of leather and fabric, while soldiers released from England had new uniforms—the rich brown of a Sunday roast—and proper-fitting shoes made of leather; those from Russia carried the shadow of famine beneath their eyes, while those from England looked well fed; those from Russia were timid, while those from England dared to talk of a future.

  Georg Weiler arrived from a Russian prison camp, his fingernails chewed, his sun-colored hair without its luster. His laugh sounded flat, and when he spoke of the Russians, it was only to say that the prison camps had been their way of taking revenge for all the Russians who’d died in the war. Though Trudi felt compassion for him, she couldn’t bear to show it because his betrayal of her still leapt up between them whenever she saw him. It was from his mother that she found out about his ordeals. The prisoners had slept in an open field. In the mud, his mother said. Without adequate shelter, food, and medical care, quite a few of the men had died.

  “But I was lucky,” Georg told his mother. “They didn’t break me.”

  “I like seeing Georg with the twins,” Frau Weiler said to Trudi. “He is a wonderful father to those girls.…” She glanced around to make sure no one overheard her. “Except when he drinks. He’s always liked a Schnaps or two, but not like this.… I’m sure that’ll stop. It’s still close to the war. Once he gets all that behind him—”

  “He’ll never forget,” Trudi said.

  Georg found work at a farm near the cemetery, where he cleaned stables and cleared rocks from the fields. One day, when Trudi came out of the cemetery, where she’d watered the family grave, Georg was loading manure onto a wooden cart.

  When he noticed her, a sudden shame came into his eyes. “Some day I’ll drive a car again,” he called out to her, his voice defiant as if he’d always owned a car.

  She thought of the car he’d won and gambled away before going into the war. “You only had it for a few days.”

  Though he grinned at her and raised his pitchfork as if in a greeting, she still saw his shame: it connected him to her; it was better than nothing.

  All of the Bilders’ sons, except for the fat boy, of course, who’d vanished about twelve years ago, returned to Burgdorf, beaten down by the war, but not crippled like some—their mother would tell her friends—not killed like most of the boys they’d grown up with, including the Weskopp brothers next door. It was out of pity for the widow Weskopp that Frau Bilder restrained her joy at having her sons back: she did not hold the elaborate feast she’d dreamed of whenever she’d been paralyzed by uncertainty during the war years and had found comfort in imagining the homecoming dinner, from soup to the last sprig of parsley, even the tablecloth that her grandmother had embroidered with a border of blue roses.

  At times, it felt suffocating to Trudi to have the four from the barn back in town. The war hadn’t claimed a single one of them, though Hans-Jürgen had been presumed missing in Russia, and Fritz Hansen was almost like a dead man without his jaw. Despite five surgeries, Fritz still looked hideous. His parents had reopened the bakery with the help of Alfred Meier, who drove the bakery truck, but their own son worked only in the cellar, where the bread ovens were. Though Fritz wanted to wait on customers, his parents figured people wouldn’t buy from them if they had to look at their son’s mangled face and the gauze which, regardless how often Fritz replaced it, looked soggy and quivered with each breath like a small, white animal that had sucked itself to his throat.

  Paul Weinhart had escaped miraculously when American tanks had advanced toward the trenches that he and nearly two hundred German soldiers had dug—rain-drenched ditches in which the men had squatted, dozing off from fatigue and hunger. Only Paul and four others managed to scramble up into trees and hide before the tanks pounded across the muddy ground and buried the Germans alive. And it was not an accident, because Paul watched as the tanks backed up and, beneath their heavy tracks, crushed all life below.

  Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier had surfaced in an American prison camp. When his mother came to the grocery store, she told Frau Weiler that some of the Americans had taunted prisoners by withholding water even though the barracks were on a hill next to a clear brook. One twenty-year-old from Bavaria, crazed with thirst, had crawled under the wire fence and rolled himself down that slope toward the brook. As he immersed his face in the stream, he was shot. Her son, Frau Braunmeier said, was certain that, even though there’d been enough food in the camp, the Americans had kept their prisoners close to starvation, with only two bowls of soup per day. “Their idea of punishment,” Hans-Jürgen told his parents. “They said it was only fair because the Jews got even less food in the KZs.”

  Comments like that evoked indignation throughout town. Hadn’t they all been deprived of housing and food? They too had lost husbands and sons—not to the KZ, granted, but to the war and to prison. And for them it hadn’t stopped with the end of the war. At least the Jews had been released from the KZs.

  In the American camp where her son had stayed—so Frau Braunmeier reported to the taxidermist—prisoners had been forced into hard labor, restoring demolished streets. Every day, two or more of the underfed prisoners had collapsed. Quite a few died. For a while her son was allowed to work in the camp kitchen, but after he was caught eating potato peels from the trash heap, he was assigned to the latrine crew.

  “The Amis acted like each one of our men was Hitler,” Frau Braunmeier whispered to the priest’s housekeeper. “My son says it brought out the worst in them. And to think they believe they’re better than the Germans.”

  Those stories made the people of Burgdorf wary of the American soldiers who lived in their midst, those men who were kind to them on occasion, who let the small children ride on their shoulders. It was evident that the Amis were much tougher with the men, interrogating them and demanding proof that they had not participated in what the Amis called Kriegsverbrechen—war crimes.

  Even men who had not fought were questioned, including Herr Pastor Beier, who was exhausted from trading absolution for dreadful war confessions. Irate at being summoned to the Rathaus— though it was only across the street from the rectory, where his housekeeper was complicating his life enough with glances that made him feel he’d failed her in some significant way—he had to wait nearly an hour before a young American officer, whose knees quite likely had never pressed the hard wood of a church pew, inquired what the priest’s position had been during the war.

  “I lived for my parish.” Hands folded on his raised belly, Herr Pastor Beier recited the statement that he’d worked out more carefully than any sermon. He had written it the morning after the Americans had come to Burgdorf, and he’d since revised it daily. As he told the Ami officer about everything he’d done for his parishioners, his voice shook with conviction as it would in his very best sermons. “I know you people are attacking us because we stayed silent. What good would it have done? Look at all the priests who tried.” He paused dramatically. “They were arrested. Killed in KZs. I chose to be silent because I knew I’d be of greater help to my parish if I could stay here.”

  Though the pastor worried that his reputation might have been sullied by the questioning, he consoled himself after dark by spreading three Brötchen with Leberwurst and starting in on the Graupensuppe—barley soup—that Fräulein Teschner had cooked for the following day. As he ate, he imagined the car the bishop would surely provide for him now that the war was over. A car… the priest thought as he finished the rabbit stew and opened the last jar of canned cherries, a nice car … with blue upholstery if he were given the choice.…

  He dreamed about the car that night, and in his dream the car had soft blue upholstery, new, but the steering wheel was an egg, a huge egg still in its shell, and when he tapped it with the golden cross that his mother used to wear ar
ound her neck when he was a boy—carefully, of course, because he didn’t mean to break the shell but simply test how strong it was—it stayed intact while from within its oval shape came the ringing of a single bell. Though the priest didn’t know what to make of that dream, it seemed like a good omen, and he wasn’t at all surprised when he received a letter in the morning, informing him that the bishop was considering his request for transportation.

  Trudi had waited for Max Rudnick when the camps had emptied, thinking that surely now, if he had been imprisoned, he would return to her. And when he didn’t, she tried to accept that he must be dead. But if he were, his flesh would be decaying somewhere beneath the earth, and she couldn’t allow herself to envision him like that. It was less painful to think of him somewhere with Ruth Abramowitz, who had become his lover. He must have found her right away in Dresden, the night before the firebombing, and they’d taken one look at each other and fallen in love, even though Ruth’s front tooth was chipped and Max was blind without his glasses. Maybe his lenses had been broken, and he couldn’t see her chipped tooth. Without his glasses, so he’d told her, everything looked blurry, a merging of colors without distinct outlines. But then a man who could love a Zwerg woman could probably love any woman.…

  With the Abramowitzs’ treasures, which would afford them a rather cozy life, the two had driven in Max’s car to a small hotel in South Germany, where Ruth had once stayed as a child with her parents. She’d always wanted to return there, and as soon as she saw Max, she knew she’d go there with him. By now, the two of them were talking about names for the children they would have.

  Even though Trudi knew that the scenarios she imagined were as predictable and foolish as the plots in the romance novels she lent to her customers, she couldn’t cast off her jealousy. She’d picture the two in their hotel room, or in the apartment they’d found, always making love, always. The windows would be open, wide open, and a warm breeze would billow the lace curtains and nuzzle their nude bodies. Stop it, she’d tell herself, stop it. But instead she’d simply place Max and Ruth somewhere else, north of Dresden, say, in Hamburg or on the island Rügen, where they’d stroll by the water, arm in arm.