Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  Rita pulled at her mother’s black coat, but Ingrid’s eyes stared past her.

  “Come,” Trudi said and lifted Rita onto the wooden swing. “Hold on tight. I’ll push you.”

  “He cuts out Hakenkreuz pins from lapels.…” Ingrid’s voice rose above the squeaking of the swing chains. “He cuts out hands that hold flags. He cuts out the insignia on my brother’s and husband’s uniforms.…”

  Ingrid’s husband, Ulrich, had arrived home from the war in May, found work with the railroad in August, impregnated Ingrid in September, and died in October, when a coal train derailed in Bonn. Ingrid was certain his death was her penance, that she’d been meant to be an illegitimate mother.

  “But you’re a widow,” Trudi had pointed out to her the morning of his funeral.

  Ingrid had shaken her head. “It’s God’s way of telling me he never accepted my marriage.”

  As far as Ingrid was concerned, she had two illegitimate children—one already born and another expanding within her—and she fretted that this tainted her children’s status regarding original sin. “It has to be even worse for them than for children who come from blessed marriages.”

  “The priest blessed your marriage,” Trudi reminded her.

  “It was a coverup marriage. I already was with child. It would have been better for my daughter never to have been born.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “For the new child, too … The sin begins with the parents. It’s passed down.”

  Ingrid even felt responsible for the sins and suffering of her brother, Holger, who’d been a member of the SA and was a prisoner in an American camp near Würzburg. Before Ingrid’s husband had died, he’d taken her on the train to visit Holger. Though they couldn’t enter the camp, they were allowed to talk with her brother through the links of the fence. At first Ingrid didn’t recognize him—his face was gaunt, and his body was stooped like that of an old man.

  Her brother looked worse than Judge Spiecker, who’d weighed less than ninety pounds when he’d come home after being in an American hospital in Berlin for months. The judge still seemed too weak to climb the front steps of the pay-library when he visited Leo, and he had aged a generation in the years he’d been away. The only reason he’d survived at all, he told Leo, was because he’d escaped three weeks before the end of the war, when he and all other prisoners were taken out of their KZ to be herded through woods and grassy areas toward an undisclosed destination, prodded by the rifles of camp guards. Those who got tired or were too ill to continue the gruesome march were shot.

  One night in the forest, when he knew he could not walk another step, the judge threw himself behind a dense growth of blackberry bushes and crawled into their thorny center, certain he was about to be found and killed. But as he crouched there, oddly revived by the scratches and the thorns embedded in his skin, the wretched line of prisoners passed him by. Four days later, straying through the woods, incoherent, he was found by a black American soldier, who carried him to a truck and drove him to a hospital.

  When the judge arrived in Burgdorf, he found out that the lawyer who’d denounced him had prospered during the war and was a partner in a law firm. Though his wife urged him to inform the Americans, Judge Spiecker didn’t want to live with revenge.

  “What about justice then?” his wife wanted to know.

  “Not everything can be just.”

  “That’s not what you used to believe.”

  The judge was offered his old position and accepted before he’d recovered his health, but he seemed far more interested in playing with his children, especially his eighth, the girl Heide, who’d been born after his arrest.

  “It’s as if he knew he’d die soon,” his pregnant widow would tell Leo Montag after the judge would collapse on the sidewalk, and the old women would try to console her by reminding her it was a miracle the judge had come back at all, a miracle considering how much he’d suffered, and that at least he’d known happiness with his family in those brief months.

  “He left you with a new life,” they’d say, their fingertips reaching for the new widow’s belly, yet pulling back as soon as they’d touch her, as if not quite trusting their words that, indeed, this was something to be thankful for.

  After the judge’s funeral, Herr Stosick stayed behind to light a candle on his son’s grave. When he reached home, two Americans were waiting for him, and he was taken in for questioning. It turned out that a certain Günther Stosick had been responsible for the deaths of several hundred Jews in the KZ Buchenwald, and though Herr Stosick told the Americans that he’d fought on the Russian front and had never been near Buchenwald, he lost his teaching position and was imprisoned.

  Like many other soldiers, he’d come home from the turmoil of war without having been properly dismissed from the military: he had no paperwork, nothing to prove where he’d served. When Leo Montag went to the prison to find out what was happening to Herr Stosick, the American officer who met with him spoke German and was kind to him.

  “I can vouch for Herr Stosick,” Leo offered. “I’ll send you a letter. I know him well—as a friend and a chess player. It’s not in his nature to attack.” He told the American about Bruno, who’d killed himself after his parents had taken him out of the Hitler-Jugend. “He was opposed from the very beginning.”

  Although the officer listened with obvious sympathy, he said Herr Stosick’s background needed to be checked, and that it would take time.

  “My friend never joined the Partei,” Leo persisted, trying to draw on reserves of strength he no longer felt. “He didn’t support the Nazis.”

  “Not exactly a common name,” Günther Stosick told Leo when they were permitted to speak. “I can see where they’d have to make sure I wasn’t the one.”

  When Leo reached home, Trudi had to help him from the car into the house. His hands shook as he sat down on the sofa and lifted his left leg so that she could push a pillow beneath it. Carefully, she helped him to roll up his pants leg. The steel disk that had replaced his kneecap over thirty years ago pushed against his skin, which was red and tender to the touch.

  She rinsed a towel in cold water and folded it across her father’s knee. “Is this better?”

  He mumbled something, and though she bent closer, she couldn’t understand him.

  “What is it?”

  “Wenn man älter wird, stirbt einer nach dem anderen hin, bis man endlich ganz alleine ist…”—“When you get older, one after the other dies until you’re finally all alone.”

  “You’re not going to die.” She wrapped his gray cardigan around him, covered him with a blanket. “How about some tea? I’ll make you Russian tea.”

  “No.”

  “Something to eat then.”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re not going to die. And you’re not alone. Don’t forget that. You have me. And I know Herr Stosick will get out of prison.”

  They kept waiting for Günther Stosick all that winter, and one morning in March of 1946 he was released unexpectedly: the Americans had tracked down the other Günther Stosick, who’d been at Buchenwald. Herr Stosick did not stop to call home—he only wanted to get out. It was snowing when he ran from the prison to the train station, the bag with his few belongings thumping against his legs. Platforms were crowded, and as the train pulled in and mobs of people shoved and hollered to get on, he was afraid he’d never see his wife again. Behind him the lines pushed forward. He fell. Scraping his hands on the cement, he roared with his final strength, “I won’t be trampled,” and in that moment—when he took hold of his future and the people behind him hesitated—Herr Stosick scrambled onto his feet and climbed into the train.

  The pregnant women that spring of 1946 made Trudi long for Max Rudnick more than she’d longed for him in months. Although the awareness of him had never left her, those high, swollen bellies that flaunted new life made it unbearable to be without her lover. She took his paintings from her closet, hung them up in
her room, but looking at them only increased her sadness. “My light spirit” he’d called her. People claimed sadness lessened with time, and perhaps that was so, but what Trudi found harder than sadness was the uncertainty. What had happened to Max? If she knew for sure that he was dead, she could at least grieve for him and trust that each single hour would move her further away from the moment of his death; even if she could be certain that he was alive and had no intent of returning to her, she could rage and cry and begin getting over him; but this not knowing—when she might learn of his death or, all at once, come face to face with him—was wearing her down.

  Some days, when the longing pressed on her, she would try to escape it by thinking of people who were much worse off than she—like the many amputees who’d come back from the war. One of them, the barber’s nephew Wolfgang, had lost both legs. Trudi had seen his widowed mother hoist him into the wheelchair with amazing strength: the old woman would bend toward him, and he’d link both arms around her neck while she’d lift him, cradle him like the infant he used to be, as if trying to undo all harm that had come to her son since she’d first held him like this.

  Without his legs, Wolfgang was shorter than Trudi. Although she would never grow another centimeter, she had at least functional legs and could go wherever she wanted. Looking at him filled her with empathy and reminded her to focus on what she had, rather than on what she would never have. She told herself that, if she looked at her life—all thirty years of it—in one flash, one overall view, it had been good. Not that she had forgotten or dismissed every moment of despair or fury, but the total sum of her life was good. She thought of Max and how fortunate she was to have her memories of him.

  Max—It always came back to him.

  She might never have Max in her life again.

  Sometimes she’d find refuge from her pain by picturing herself escaping from Germany altogether. Her Aunt Helene and Uncle Stefan would be glad to see her. After all, she’d had an invitation to visit since she was four. She’d see herself walking through the building that her aunt had described to her, speaking words of English that she’d practiced with the American soldiers. In the carpeted elevator she’d ride to the sixth floor and admire the view of the lake and mountains, sit in front of a marble fireplace with her aunt and uncle while Robert played the piano.

  Packages from America had begun to arrive again since the end of the war: Aunt Helene had adopted Trudi’s entire neighborhood, sending crates with dry milk, dry eggs, rice, and flour not only for her relatives but also for their friends. In her apartment house she’d organized people to help, filling the lists she’d asked Trudi to send to her, but as Trudi wrote those lists, which contained many basics—food, clothing, soap—they only reminded her of the lists people used to make for their final journeys to KZs. This past Christmas, eight packages had arrived from America, each of the gifts beautifully wrapped, including a huge red blouse for the midwife, who’d been in the pay-library the last time a package with staples had arrived and who’d sighed, “I wish I had family in America.”

  “But they don’t even know me,” the midwife exclaimed as she buttoned the red blouse. “It fits, and they don’t even know me.”

  “Now they do,” Trudi said, and stirred dry milk into a cup of water for Adi.

  In spring, Robert, who was already the father of a one-year-old, Caleb, started to send his son’s outgrown clothes. Some of them were hardly worn, and Trudi took them to Ingrid, who’d entered her seventh month of pregnancy, and to Jutta, who was a few weeks further along.

  The day Jutta had found out about her pregnancy, she’d surprised Trudi by confiding that she’d been trying to have a child ever since her wedding and had come to believe that she was barren. There was a part of Trudi—the nasty, greedy part—that could have easily said, Hey, you who have everything, the man I once wanted, the child I would have liked to give birth to.… It is easy for you to look down on me. Only Jutta did not look down on her. And that’s why Trudi decided to honor her confidence by not turning it into gossip. It felt good to deal with a secret mercifully, especially if it belonged to someone else who wasn’t accepted by the town. People said Jutta set herself apart from them with her painting; and her husband’s family—except for his mother—had never taken to her as they had to Brigitte Raudschuss. Jutta was too tall, too young, too independent. She smoked too much, was not refined enough, didn’t try to flatter the old aunts at the family reunions.

  Of all the unborn children in Burgdorf, the child of Jutta Malter was the one whose progress fascinated Trudi the most. To follow the changes in Jutta’s body, she often took walks past Alexander Sturm’s apartment house, hoping to see Jutta. While Jutta walked with her belly out as if glorying in her pregnancy, Klara Brocker was ashamed to be seen by anyone. Though she concealed her body in loose coats and dresses, her belly pushed from her tidy frame with the life that her American soldier—who’d given her so many other gifts—had planted in her before he’d let himself be transferred from her reach. All Klara had left of him were eleven canning jars with peaches and the contempt of the townspeople, who used to shake their heads when they’d seen her in nylon stockings. And the child, of course; she had the child who was distorting her body and parading her sin.

  The judge’s widow was bigger than Jutta, Klara, or Ingrid, perhaps because her body had expanded so many times already. The midwife took care of the pregnant women, except for Jutta, who’d chosen to go to Sister Agathe, unaware that the sister was suffering a crisis of conscience. All Jutta remembered was how skillful and gentle the sister used to be when she’d performed medical procedures, and how she’d never blamed her for not being careful enough.

  But now the sister had become hesitant. She barely ate and declined the other nuns’ advice to rest. Her body sweated easily, drenching her undergarments and habit. Throughout the winter and into spring, her flesh had grown nearly translucent as though she wanted to see into her own womb, which was no place for babies, like the distended wombs of women all over Burgdorf.

  When Herr Pastor Beier was brought in to speak with her, Sister Agathe asked to meet with him in the cloister garden, where she confessed that she’d helped the Nazis during the war.

  “But that’s impossible.”

  “Oh yes. By trying to bring comfort to the prisoners. I wanted to make their lives more bearable and took them medicine and food whenever I could. Now I wish I’d urged them to run instead, to escape.”

  “You did what you believed was right at the time.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “You did the best you could.”

  “The best for myself… Don’t you see? It made me feel better when I could ease their suffering.”

  “We couldn’t know how it would all end.” The priest stared down on his hands, plump white hands with square nails, hands that still looked the way they had when he’d entered the seminary. All at once he was choked with the loss of everything he’d believed in then. “I…” He raised one of those hands to his forehead. “I’ve questioned some of my decisions since.”

  “That’s good,” the nun murmured.

  He raised his eyes, startled.

  “I handed the prisoners over to the Nazis … that terrible obedience. I wanted to make their last days here as comfortable as possible, to have them leave with dignity.… Yet, looking at all that happened, I was only one more tool, an accomplice.”

  “Don’t say that.” The priest’s round face looked distraught. “That would make all of us accomplices.”

  “But we are. Don’t you see?”

  To lay her hands on the taut belly of the dentist’s wife troubled Sister Agathe, and she was terrified when, one morning in May, she felt no life. Convinced that her touch had brought on the unborn child’s death, she called her supervisor, Sister Ingeborg, who confirmed that the child was dead. Sister Agathe tried to soothe Jutta and felt devastated when the young woman climbed from the white-shrouded table and stormed out of the Theresienh
eim. From that day on, the sister took to her bed; and even when she would find out the following day that Jutta Malter had ridden in back of the bakery truck to the midwife’s house, where she’d given birth to a girl—alive and healthy—Sister Agathe would refuse to harm anyone else with her care.

  The pastor had never held that many christenings in such a short time: there was the Malter girl, Hanna; Georg Weiler’s son, Manfred; old Anton Immers’ granddaughter, Sybille; the children of the two widows—a son, Heinz, for the judge’s widow, a second daughter, Karin, for Ingrid Hebel; and then, of course, Klara Brocker’s illegitimate son, Rolf. The Klein family followed with a daughter, the Müller family with a son, and two other unmarried women with children whose fathers were American soldiers.

  Then, as if by mystery, another child appeared. Afterwards the people would say that it all started when the midwife—after tending to the last of her pregnant patients and waxing her floors—left Burgdorf one Thursday with her son, Adi. When she returned to her stucco house the following afternoon, she carried an infant in her arms.

  “Whose is it?” people asked.

  “Where did you get it?”

  But the midwife only said, “This is my daughter, Renate.”

  The townspeople approved that Hilde Eberhardt named the infant girl after her mother-in-law as if to make amends for her husband who, everyone knew, would have never let her use the name Renate. Though the girl was dark and foreign-looking—not at all like her blond mother and grandmother—she reminded the people anew of the gap that the older Renate Eberhardt’s absence had left in their midst, and they welcomed the child as one of their own.

  They were ready for this child and asked fewer questions than usual, though this didn’t stop them from making guesses about Renate’s parents. Some wondered if she’d been adopted from gypsies. Renate had that look, that intense darkness. Still—not too many gypsies had survived the KZs. Others figured that the midwife was her real mother and that the bulk of her body had made it possible for her to conceal her pregnancy. She could have birthed the child alone, propping her back against pillows and reaching between her massive thighs. When even Trudi Montag couldn’t find out from where the midwife’s child had come, the town resigned itself to this being one of the secrets it would never know.