by Ursula Hegi
“Don’t be silly, Hanna. That man’s clear cross the ocean. In one of those skyscrapers. I think Rolf just got tired taking care of his grandmother. Living in that cramped apartment isn’t—”
I tried the name of the American city that sounded most familiar. “In New York?”
She looked up. Frowned. “No, Florida. Where they grow oranges in their backyards.” Since Trudi Montag had relatives in America, she considered herself the local authority on that country.
“Which city in Florida?”
“Let me think.… Wait—something with an M or a P.”
“Did he have other children?”
“Who knows?” Trudi Montag shrugged. “Some of the soldiers showed us pictures of their wives and kids. This one had a wife for sure. A model, he told me when he first came to town.” She described him to me as a tall man with blond hair and a small birthmark on one temple, but she didn’t remember the color of his eyes. “He liked to dance,” she said. “Both of them—Klara Brocker too. He’d rest his chin on top of her head—that’s how much taller he was.”
On my way back I stopped at Becker’s grocery store next door and bought two chocolate bars with hazelnuts for Rolf. He moved aside to let me climb into the heart of the willow with him, and while I told him what Trudi Montag had said, he ate the chocolate, chewing slowly the way he always did, even though he hadn’t eaten since the day before.
“Most models don’t want kids,” I said. “It ruins their figures.”
“How would you know?”
“Things I read … They don’t want to stretch their stomachs. So maybe you’re his only child. Maybe—are you going to look for him?”
He crumpled the silver foil into tight balls. “You go home now.”
“What about you?”
“In a while.”
“What if you change your mind?”
“I won’t.”
But I was afraid he might vanish again. I kept urging him to go first and was surprised when he finally agreed. As he crossed the meadow, he glanced back toward the willow and raised one hand. Then he climbed the dike.
The truth about the American Soldier became our secret, a secret that became as strong a bond between us as the kisses we exchanged. It was strange, Rolf said, to know his father might still be alive. But he didn’t have any idea how to go about finding him.
Though he told me about the photo in his mother’s jewelry box, I didn’t see it until one afternoon that August when Rolf and I climbed the four flights of shadowy stairs to his apartment on Barbarossastrasse 15. He’d just had his hair cut; except for a pale stripe of skin along his ears and neck, he was tanned a smooth brown, and the sun had bleached the fine hairs on his cheeks.
His grandmother was asleep in the room she shared with Rolfs mother, her frail body covered by a worn nightgown. A feather comforter lay on the floor next to her bed. The right side of her face was pulled down toward her slack jaw from a stroke that had left the right side of her body paralyzed. Eleven times so far it had seemed as though she were ready to die, and Frau Brocker had sent Rolf to fetch the increasingly reluctant Herr Pastor Beier who knew, along with the whole town, that whenever he administered last rites to the old woman, she recovered within a few days as if cured by his final absolution.
A blue pack of Gauloises lay on the windowsill. On the table stood a teapot, a cup, and an empty plate. Every noon Frau Brocker carried over some of the food she had cooked at our house, sat on the edge of her mother’s bed, and fed her with a spoon.
“Stay here,” Rolf whispered.
From the door frame I watched him walk toward his grandmother, pick up the comforter, and spread it gently across her. At the foot end of his mother’s bed he crouched and slipped a flat red leather box from under her mattress. He walked past me on tiptoes and I followed him into the kitchen, which smelled of medicine and bleached laundry. We sat at the table and Rolf smoothed out the linen tablecloth before he opened the box.
“Here.” He took a creased photo from beneath the glossy jumble of fake pearls, ornate pins, and rings with glass stones.
I held the picture in both hands. It felt soft, as if it had been touched many times. The man in the photo wore trousers with a belt and a white shirt. He had a narrow face, and his eyebrows were a darker shade of blond than his hair. Rolf leaned forward, looking at the man’s faded features with such longing that I imagined his father reaching up toward the branches of an orange tree under a sun that was bright, white, a sun that soaked its rays into his shirt as he stood in that one luminous moment before breaking off an orange, forever reaching, forever there.
Saving a Life
The summer of 1960 I was fourteen and I wanted to save someone’s life. It was the only thing I was sure I could do. About everything else I felt uncertain: my legs were too long, my face was too round, my hair was too straight… Although the woman who wanted to marry my father—Fräulein Mahler—told me I was beautiful, I knew she only said it so I wouldn’t try to talk my father out of marrying her. She’d inherited the Mahler department store in Düsseldorf, and whenever she visited us, she gave me books or records or white chocolates in silver foil. When she smiled, I could see the gold crowns my father had put on her back teeth. She was older than my father’s other female patients who’d brought cakes and casseroles to our house after my mother had died in April.
My mother had been a good swimmer. I had that from her. I’d passed each test with the highest marks, including the life-saving test and had dreams of proving myself as a saver of lives. It would be better if the drowning person were a man twice my weight. He struggles. He’s heavy and balding like Herr Stosick, who plays chess with my father on Monday nights, and I stun him by knocking my fist against his temple. Keeping his chin above water with one arm, I drag him to safety. Sometimes it takes over an hour to get him to shore while people watch from the dike and admire my courage. Other times I save him in less than ten minutes. During the TV interview I speak firmly and smile without showing my gums. In front of the bathroom mirror I practice different versions of that dazzling, yet modest smile I’ll flash when the mayor hands me the medal. I make sure they film me in my new swimsuit.
But the people who swam in the Rhein were cautious and stayed close to the pebbled embankment. Adults waded in up to their waists, and children held on to inner tubes. Here, the river was wide and flowed evenly; it ran straight without obstructions, and the next bend was half a kilometer downstream. Along the river stretched the town of Burgdorf, both ends clinging to its bank like tentacles that thinned out against the boundaries of adjoining towns.
Whenever the sun became so hot that it made me dizzy, I left my watching post on the flat boulders at the end of the jetty and swam out into the river; floating on my back without moving my arms or legs, I let the current carry me. Sometimes I pretended my mother was next to me: the slapping of the waves became the sound of her arms parting the water. But then I’d remember the car accident and feel everything happen all over again: the call from the police; rushing with my father to the hospital; arriving too late. It was one of the few times I’d seen my father cry. In the corridor of the hospital he’d gathered me into his arms, my damp face pressed against his jacket. His arms and shoulders trembled as he cried with me until my terror became contained within his sorrow.
He said the river was too dangerous. He asked me not to swim there. Just as he had asked my mother not to smoke or drive so fast. Renate and Rolf swam in the town pool; they said the Rhein was too dirty. I found it boring to paddle in water that didn’t carry me forward; yet, I could never stay in the river as long as I wanted because it was impossible to swim against the current, which ran at eight kilometers an hour. Whatever distance I drifted, I had to walk back. Frau Brocker knew I swam in the Rhein, but she was good at keeping secrets. She had never told my father about all the times my mother and I used to swim while it rained. On summer days when dark clouds moved across the sky, my mother would clean the paint fro
m her hands and leave her studio; we’d pull on our swimsuits and loose dresses over them, then head for the river or the quarry.
My mother swam with smooth strokes. She didn’t like wearing a bathing camp. Her blond hair looked darker when it was wet, straighter, and it trailed behind her. When I grew confident swimming in the quarry, she took me to the river, where we rode the current together. I let my ball with the sisal net keep me above water. By the time I was seven, I didn’t need it any longer.
One Sunday afternoon, only a year ago, we’d floated for hours, talking and laughing; sometimes we were silent and let the sun warm our faces. It was the kind of silence that fills you with light and makes you believe you can do anything you want. We drifted until we got to my father’s favorite restaurant, the Kaisershafen Gasthaus, which overlooked the Rhein. High above us, in the turrets, the many small windows glistened like mirrors. Every November we had my father’s family reunion here: uncles in expensive suits with vests; aunts who wore silk dresses in dark colors; cousins who went to private schools and talked about dances and tennis matches; Great-aunt Augusta with her opal ring and varicose veins; Great-uncle Viktor with his cane that was covered with silver emblems of places he’d never been to.
Except for Oma, none of the relatives liked my mother. I’m not sure why—perhaps because she wore bright colors and had gone to art school. She was taller than the other women; yet, during those reunions she felt small to me, and I stayed near her. She smoked more than usual, inhaling quickly, lighting a new cigarette as soon as the last one was finished.
That summer afternoon my mother and I—wearing our wet swimsuits—climbed the stone steps that led to the terrace of the Kaisershafen Gasthaus. She smiled as we walked past the planters that overflowed with fuchsias, past the tables with their striped umbrellas, where people sat in their Sunday clothes, eating pastries and drinking coffee or lemonade. Everyone watched us. My mother’s back was straight, and her hair lay like a silk scarf on her shoulders, covering most of the freckles that spread across her back. Through the double glass doors we walked into the lobby where she asked the head waiter for the phone so she could call my father to pick us up. We left dark puddles on the carpet and on the upholstery of our car. My father’s face looked pale and helpless as he drove us home. “What you’re doing is dangerous,” he told both of us.
The second Wednesday of August Fräulein Mahler came to our house and invited me to go shopping with her. “So we can get to know each other better,” she said.
I wished I could find real reasons to dislike her, reasons that would convince my father to stop seeing her, but all I could think was that she was too friendly and kept giving me things. “I’ve already made plans,” I said. “With friends.”
For a moment she seemed disappointed, though I was sure it was only an act for my father’s benefit. She was about my father’s age, nearly twenty years older than my mother, and I couldn’t imagine her ever doing anything dangerous.
It was his day off, and he sat close to her on the sofa in our living room, taking small bites from a buttered slice of raisin bread she had baked for us. His cardigan was unbuttoned, and he still wore his deerskin slippers. On the wall across from him hung my mother’s painting of the flooded meadow between the Rhein and the dike, the dark reflections of willows blurred in the silver-green waters.
“Can’t you change your plans, Hanna?” my father asked softly. New strands of gray wove through his reddish-brown beard, and the bald spot on top of his head had widened.
I wanted to shout that my mother had been dead less than four months, wanted him to remember her as he sat there so snug next to Fräulein Mahler with her turquoise dress and her gold teeth, but somehow—that moment—I couldn’t even remember my mother’s face.
Fräulein Mahler smiled at him. “Hanna and I will have many other times together.” She waved aside the flies that had come in through the open window, wrapped two pieces of her raisin bread in a napkin, and handed them to me. “In case you get hungry.” Her fingernails were perfect ovals the color of squashed cherries.
I said, “Thank you,” as always when she forced her presents on me, presents I never used. Well—never wasn’t quite true. I’d eaten some of her white chocolates, though I hadn’t enjoyed them, and I’d read two of her books before stacking them behind the hamper in back of my closet with her other stuff.
When Fräulein Mahler had started coming to our house, Frau Brocker and I had thought up several plots to get rid of her, from chasing her out the door with a broom to questioning her sanity by pretending we’d never seen her before; but then our housekeeper had begun to like her. “She’s good for your father, Hanna.”
As I pushed my bicycle out of the shed in our backyard, one of the dried blossoms from the lilac bush scratched against my forehead. Though the leaves had stayed green, the blossoms had shriveled into brown scepters. I ripped one of them off the bush and crumbled it between my fingers; it looked like tobacco but felt like dry dirt. The day of my mother’s funeral the blossoms had been white and I’d dropped a bunch of the lilacs into her open grave.
Trudi Montag stood in front of the house across the street, talking with Frau Talmeister, who leaned out of her window, a cup of coffee in her hand. The sidewalk was a slippery mess with all the cherries that had fallen from the Talmeisters’ tree. Despite the heat, Trudi Montag wore a pink cardigan over her housedress, and her O-shaped legs were in ankle socks. Since my mother’s death I hadn’t wanted to be with any of my friends, not even with Trudi Montag in her pay-library.
Both women waved to me; I raised one hand, though I would have liked to pretend I hadn’t seen them. They were probably talking about my father and Fräulein Mahler, whose BMW was parked in our driveway entirely too often.
At the end of the street, the Hansen bakery truck pulled away from the curb, and I pushed back against my bike pedals to slow down. Manfred Weiler’s mother walked toward me carrying two loaves of Schwarzbrot, looking down as if counting the cracks in the sidewalk. In the years since her husband had hung himself, she hadn’t come to our door, though she still lived in our building. Her son, Manfred, dropped off the rent check on the first of each month. He’d become one of those boys who stood in groups at street corners, watching girls’ legs and whistling dirty. When we were six, we had dared each other to steal an egg from his father’s chicken coop. With a sharp stone we’d jabbed a hole into the shell and taken turns sucking it out, lying to each other about how delicious it was.
I rode my bike to the Rhein and dropped it next to the boulder I used as a lookout. The air was hazy and tinged with the scent of grass and wildflowers—bright red poppies and blue cornflowers—that grew in the meadow between the dike and the river. Streaks of sunlight broke the white-crested waves into layers the color of slate. I ripped Fräulein Mahler’s raisin bread into shreds and tossed them into the water, satisfied at the thought of fat gray fish crowding below and feeding on them.
The river was calmer than during the spring when I sometimes came here to watch the floods that swirled against the dike, covering the lower trunks of the trees, making them look less sturdy than on land. The worst flood my mother had ever seen had happened when she was a girl: the Rhein had flooded nearly a hundred towns, killing five people, eighteen cows, and seven horses in Burgdorf alone. It had torn out trees and created a deep basin near the embankment; after the floods had receded, the basin remained filled with water and became a swimming hole.
When I was smaller, I used to ride my sled down the dike in the winter; my mother would run alongside, laughing, catching me whenever I fell off, and then pull the sled with me on it back up the dike. Her hair would be tangled, her face red from the wind.
My stomach felt withered and cold. Clasping my arms around my knees, I held my legs close and rocked myself back and forth. From the river sounded the blast of a freighter’s whistle, deep and sorrowful like the bellows of the cattle that often drifted from the Braunmeiers’ farm when dusk set
in.
A flat-nosed barge pulled its heavy load upstream. Long and narrow, it had two cabins, one in front and one in back. They were painted white, their roofs and smokestacks red. Between them stretched a clothesline with laundry that whipped the wind like an exhibit of odd flags: a child’s yellow dress, white bedsheets, a blue towel.
I wished I could live on one of those barges with the river people. Float far away and never come back. I scratched my shoulders where the last sunburn had peeled, leaving shiny patches of new skin. At the river’s edge, next to the weathered bench, two women had spread a blanket. One of them held a baby whom she nursed by covering her breasts with a towel and holding the baby’s head beneath. The other woman had a small son who tottered around on unsteady legs, tore clumps of camomile from the meadow, and presented them to his mother, their dirty roots swinging against his chest.
Yesterday I had walked upriver for almost three kilometers, way past the meadow where the architect Siegfried Tegern used to take his seven dogs. I’d let the current carry me back to where I’d started. But today I didn’t feel like walking. I picked at the blue nubs of nylon on my old bathing suit, pulling until they hung by one last transparent thread.
In the middle of the Rhein, two barges strained upstream, connected by a long cable. Puffs of steam blew from the stack of the first barge. Where the smoke came out, it looked smudged, but the wind blew it toward the sky, fraying it until it became white and, further up, almost translucent. I could see where the steel cable from the stern of the first freighter entered the water and where it came out again, fastened to the bow of the second ship. I imagined myself swimming out there, holding on to the cable, and letting the barges pull me upriver. I’d get a closer glimpse of the people who lived on them. As long as I stayed away from the hulls, the suction around them couldn’t pull me under. Then I’d be able to drift back here without having to walk.
Waves splashed around me as I swam out to where the barges approached. The swift water felt good against my body. I felt strong. Nothing could happen to me. Floating in the current with me, my mother had told me about whirlpools and what I should do if I got caught in one. She told me of people who’d drowned fighting the downward spiral, trying to break out of its sides—something that was impossible. The only way to survive a whirlpool, she said, was to go down with it as deeply as possible and then, where it weakened at the bottom, swim out. I knew I could even save someone caught in a whirlpool.
