by Ursula Hegi
I waited for the freighters at a safe distance, treading water with my legs. After the stern of the first barge passed me, I swam out to find a good spot where I could grasp the cable. I reached for it about one meter before it dipped underwater.
The pain was incredible as the skin was torn off my palms. It felt as if the force of the barges straining against the river would tear out my arms. My hands slipped to where the fraying cable disappeared in the current, and I was thrust beneath it. I fought to get away, but the cable cut across my stomach and pulled my head underwater. Somewhere I’d heard your entire life flashes in front of you before you die. Oddly calm, I found myself waiting for that moment, one compact time capsule. But all I felt was a dark pressure against my ears, my mouth, a pressure that would surely fill me, soothe me, replace me if I let it. For an instant I considered giving in—it would be so easy—but then I thought of my mother on that empty stretch of highway, driving too fast, too close to the concrete divider. Something within me protested, and I fought once more against the cable.
But it only cut deeper into my stomach, my arms. My lungs hurt as though they were about to burst. I pushed down and away, arms and legs kicking, freeing myself from the cable, then up, up. I stretched for air. Was blinded by yellow dots. My eyes ached. A deep, hollow sound, then voices, all at once, loud and angry. And the barge, the second barge—blurred at first—was less than ten meters from me, advancing. Aboard two men and a woman shouted. Waved me away.
As fast as I could, I swam toward the embankment and pulled myself out of the river. I crawled on my hands and knees, fell onto the hard pebbles. My hands were bleeding, palms raw with steel splinters, blackened by tar. My bathing suit was ripped. Bleeding welts had sprung up on my thighs and stomach.
It took months for the skin on my body to heal, and for the splinters, which the doctor could not remove, to work their way to the surface of my palms.
In the evenings my father spread ointment on my hands, and I tried not to flinch at its cold sting. “If only you didn’t have to take such risks…,” he’d say as he wrapped fresh lengths of gauze around my outstretched hands. It sounded as if he were talking to my mother.
I was still picking at those splinters in November when my father took Fräulein Mahler to the family reunion at the Kaisershafen Gasthaus. She wore a brown silk dress and smiled with her expensive teeth as she admired my great-aunt Augusta’s opal ring. Uncle Viktor showed her the silver Venice emblem on his cane, and Aunt Bettina invited her to visit for a weekend in Köln. My father looked so pleased that I couldn’t bear to watch.
I walked out through the double glass doors and onto the empty terrace. Tables and umbrellas had been stored away for the winter. The huge planters were empty, the wide stone steps covered with a delicate pattern of frost. Already the light was changing to a hazy shade of gray, and in the turrets above me most of the small windows were lit. One hand on the iron railing, I walked down the stairs to where the smoke-colored waves tossed themselves against the embankment. I sat on a step, and as I traced the swirls of frost with one finger, I had a sudden image of my mother, climbing the stairs in the red swimsuit she’d lost in the North Sea, smiling to herself as she walked into the lobby, past the bewildered head waiter, and flung open the door to the dining room where the relatives were gathered.
My father and Fräulein Mahler married the following February, less than a year after my mother’s accident. By then I was in boarding school—a request I’d made which my father had approved after much hesitation. Fräulein Mahler had surprised me by trying to talk me into living at home with her and my father. When he picked me up from school the day before the wedding, he drove silently, and I figured he was worried about how I might behave during the ceremony, but then I realized it was something else when he reached over to me and said, “It doesn’t mean that I’ll ever forget her.” His hand felt warm and light on my arm.
In St. Martin’s Church I knelt between Renate and Rolf in the first of the birch pews. A red carpet partially covered the marble steps that led to the altar where Herr Pastor Beier stood one level above my father and Fräulein Mahler. The three stained-glass windows behind the marble altar filtered the winter light through their intricate pattern of red, white, and black crosses.
As my father exchanged vows with Fräulein Mahler, I reached for a black prayer book and held it closed in my hands. Against the smooth leather binding, I felt the scars on my palms. Perhaps I needed to believe in something that day, something just for myself, because I emerged from the church convinced that the scars on my hands would guard me like magic against making mistakes in the future. But of course it didn’t work that way, and it only occurred to me much later that the summer I was fourteen I had saved a life—not the life of a stranger as I had imagined—but the life I had taken for granted and which, in the years to come, I would take for granted again.
Also by Ursula Hegi
INTRUSIONS
UNEARNED PLEASURES
AND OTHER STORIES
FLOATING IN MY MOTHER’S PALM
SALT DANCERS
TEARING THE SILENCE:
ON BEING GERMAN IN AMERICA
Stones from the River
Ursula Hegi
for Gordon
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter One: 1915-1918
Chapter Two: 1918-1919
Chapter Three: 1919-1920
Chapter Four: 1920-1921
Chapter Five: 1921-1923
Chapter Six: 1923-1929
Chapter Seven: 1929-1933
Chapter Eight: 1933
Chapter Nine: 1934
Chapter Ten: 1934-1938
Chapter Eleven: 1938
Chapter Twelve: 1939-1941
Chapter Thirteen: 1941-1942
Chapter Fourteen: 1942
Chapter Fifteen: 1942
Chapter Sixteen: 1942
Chapter Seventeen: 1943
Chapter Eighteen: 1943-1945
Chapter Nineteen: 1945-1946
Chapter Twenty: 1946-1949
Chapter Twenty-One: 1949-1952
About the Author
Acknowledgments
I’m deeply grateful for the generous help and support I received while writing this novel. My godmother, Kate Capelle, had the courage to answer questions I couldn’t ask as a child while growing up in the silence of post-World War II Germany. In her late eighties, Tante Kate broke the silence by documenting her memories of the war years on tape for me. Author Ilse-Margret Vogel, who became active in the resistance before immigrating to the U.S., lent me photo albums of her childhood and offered valuable insights on what it was like to live in Germany between the two wars. Historian Rod Stackelberg trusted me with journals he wrote as a boy in Germany. Together with Germanist Sally Winkle, he guided me in my research and read the manuscript for historical accuracy. Author Sue Wheeler, whose wisdom and love for literature keep challenging me to reach further in my writing, has read drafts of nearly everything I’ve written since we met in graduate school. My agent, Gail Hochman, helped me with my research of Jewish traditions. Gordon Gagliano welcomed the essence of Trudi into our house and advised me in all matters Catholic and architectural. The women in my women’s group have given me their loving support during eight years of sharing and celebrating our histories. The Northwest Institute for Advanced Study awarded me a faculty research grant during the summer of 1992. Vielen herzlichen Dank.
one
1915-1918
AS A CHILD TRUDI MONTAG THOUGHT EVERYONE KNEW WHAT WENT on inside others. That was before she understood the power of being different. The agony of being different. And the sin of ranting against an ineffective God. But before that—for years and years before that—she prayed to grow.
Every night she would fall asleep with the prayer that, while she slept, her body would stretch itself, grow to the size of that of other girls her age in Burgdorf—not even the taller ones like Eva Rosen, who would become he
r best friend in school for a brief time—but into a body with normal-length arms and legs and with a small, well-shaped head. To help God along, Trudi would hang from door frames by her fingers until they were numb, convinced she could feel her bones lengthening; many nights she’d tie her mother’s silk scarves around her head—one encircling her forehead, the other knotted beneath her chin—to keep her head from expanding.
How she prayed. And every morning, when her arms were still stubby and her legs wouldn’t reach the floor as she’d swing them from her mattress, she’d tell herself that she hadn’t prayed hard enough or that it wasn’t the right time yet, and so she’d keep praying, wishing, believing that anything you prayed for this hard surely would be granted if only you were patient.
Patience and obedience—they were almost inseparable, and the training for them began with the first step you took: you learned about obedience to your parents and all other adults, then about obedience to your church, your teachers, your government. Acts of disobedience were punished efficiently, swiftly: a slap on your knuckles with a ruler; three rosaries; confinement.
As an adult Trudi would scorn the patient fools who knelt in church, waiting. But as a girl, she’d go to mass every Sunday and sing in the choir; during the week she’d sometimes slip into the church on her way home from school, taking comfort in the holy scent of incense as she whispered her prayers to the painted plaster saints that lined the sides of St. Martin’s Church: St. Petrus next to the confessional, his eyebrows perpetually raised in an expression of shock as if he’d overheard every sin the people of Burgdorf had whispered to generations of weary priests; St. Agnes with her mournful eyes rolled up and her fingers clasped to her bosom as if rehearsing to withstand countless other attacks on her purity; St. Stefan with a pile of chocolate-colored rocks hiding his feet—except for one pasty toe—his bleeding arms extended as though inviting his enemies to hurl even larger stones at him and ensure his eternal salvation.
To all of them Trudi prayed, and her body grew, but—as though her prayers had been twisted in some horrible joke—her body did not stretch itself upward as she’d presumed it would, yet had failed to specify in every single prayer, but expanded into a solid width that would eventually make her forearms as massive as those of Herr Immers, who owned the butcher shop, and her jaw as formidable as that of Frau Weiler, who ran the grocery store next door.
By then Trudi had come up against that moment when she knew that praying for something did not make it happen, that this was it: that there was no God-magic; that she was as tall as she would ever be; that she would die some day; and that anything that would happen to her until that day of her death would be up to her to resolve. She knew all this with a stunning clarity that chilled her to the core that April Sunday in 1929 in the Braunmeiers’ barn, when the circle of boys closed around her—those boys who spread her legs, who spread her soul until it felt as if that dried snot on her face would always be there, tightening her skin like spilled egg whites—and she saw herself as a very old woman and, simultaneously, as an infant, as if her past and future were at opposite ends of a taut rubber band that someone had let go of for just an instant, causing her entire life—every minute she had lived and would live—to coil in on itself and touch where she was that moment in the barn, and she knew that she’d be able to see that way again: she watched herself pull her mother from the earth nest beneath the house; dismantle a section of the stone wall in the cellar and dig a secret dirt tunnel to the Blaus’ house; stroke her lover’s back with both hands, and feel the fine oval of hairs at the base of his spine as the night sky swirled around them; recoil from the heat of the flames that spurted from the broken windows of the synagogue and showered the school and the Theresienheim with sparks the color of the fabric star, Judenstern, that her friend, Eva Rosen, would have to wear on her coat.
For months after Trudi Montag’s birth, her mother wouldn’t touch her at all. From snatches of gossip the girl would later conjecture that her mother had taken one glance at her and had covered her face as if to shut out the image of the infant’s short limbs and slightly enlarged head. It didn’t help that Frau Weiler, upon peering into the wicker carriage, had inquired: “Hat das Kind denn einen Wasserkopf?”—“Does the child have water on the brain?”
Trudi’s eyes seemed older than those of other infants, as if they held the experiences of someone who’d already lived a long time. The women in the neighborhood took turns keeping her alive and clean. They were the ones who brushed her silver-blond hair into one wispy curl on top of her head and secured it with a dab of pine honey, who boiled goat’s milk and fed it to her in a bottle, who whispered as they compared her shape to that of their own children, who sat next to the bed of Trudi’s mother and guarded her restless sleep whenever she was carried home after running away from her house on Schreberstrasse.
It was the summer of 1915, and the town belonged to the women. With their husbands fighting on the Eastern front for the past year, they had relearned to open even the most difficult snaps on their salmon-colored corsets; they had become accustomed to making decisions—like which repairs to do themselves and which to leave until after the war; they continued to sweep their sidewalks and to remind their children to practice the piano; they persuaded Herr Pastor Schüler to invite an old chess champion from Köln to give their children lessons for one entire week after school; they banned the trick images of their husbands’ faces below the earth when they watered the plants on their families’ graves. At times, when they forgot their hunger and their revulsion to turnips, which had become their major nourishment, it seemed odd that, all around them, a celebration of life persisted as if there were no war: the blossoms of the cherry and apple trees, the singing of the birds, the laughter of their children.
In this small town that was encumbered by centuries of tradition, women without husbands did not fit in: they were objects of pity or gossip. But the war changed all that. Without men, the barriers between the married and unmarried woman blurred: suddenly they were more alike than different. No longer did respect come to them because of their husbands’ positions, but because of their own abilities.
It was something the old widows had figured out long ago. They were the ones who truly governed the town but were wise enough to keep this a secret. They defined the boundaries of the community with an invisible chain of their linked hands as they filtered their advice to their children and told ancient fairy tales to their grandchildren as if they’d never been told before.
They felt suspicious of the few men who had stayed in Burgdorf and they gossiped about them—like Emil Hesping, a skilled athlete, who managed the gymnasts’ club and claimed to be unfit for military service because of weak lungs, and Herbert Braunmeier, who insisted that no one else could possibly take care of his dairy farm. Selfish, the old women said, but they coddled those men who’d been wounded in the war, like Leo Montag, the first soldier to return; they knitted woolen vests for him and brought him canned plums from their meager reserves to make up for his injury.
Two months after the battle of Tannenberg, in October 1914, Leo Montag had limped into Burgdorf, a steel disk in place of his left kneecap, wearing a long seal coat that used to belong to one of the Russian prisoners. It was on that silver-gray fur coat—spread on the floor between the shelves of the hastily closed pay-library—that Trudi Montag was conceived the afternoon of her father’s arrival. He had only been away from home for a few months, but he clung to his wife as though he’d been gone for years. Gertrud’s face, which often looked feverish when she got excited, was almost transparent in its loveliness, and she laughed and cried as she held him. People in Burgdorf said about her that she absorbed the joys and pains of others as if they were her own.
It wasn’t like her, most agreed, to refuse her child. And it wasn’t like her to run away from home. But a few would claim to have sensed that seed of craziness in Gertrud long before it flourished: they spoke of that summer when she was four and had stopped t
alking for an entire year, and they reminded each other of her first communion, when she’d refused to open her lips to receive the sacred host, making the other children wait at the altar railing until the pastor had finally agreed to absolve her from sins that had attached themselves to her in the hours since her last confession.
It was three days after Trudi’s birth that Gertrud Montag fled from her bedroom and from the cries of the infant that caused her breasts to sting with unspilled milk. Blood from her hollowed womb had blossomed through the front of her batiste nightgown by the time Herr Pastor Schüler found her behind St. Martin’s Church, her arms spread across the door of the sacristy as if to keep him from entering. Without thinking, he crossed himself as though compelled to imitate the contour of her body. While he tried to loosen her hands from the door and pull her into the sacristy to protect her shame, one of the altar boys ran to summon Trudi’s father, who quickly hobbled the two blocks from the pay-library, where the people of Burgdorf continued to borrow those trashy romances and detective novels that Herr Pastor Schüler preached against in his Sunday sermons.
Leo Montag carried his wife home, wrapped in one of the altar cloths. Her blood seeped into the ancient lace, and although the pastor’s housekeeper would soak the cloth in salt water, the stains would merely fade into rose-colored clouds. Soon Gertrud was back at the sacristy door—properly dressed—was the priest’s first thought when he discovered her in her wool dress and her husband’s gray cardigan, even though the air was moist and much hotter than he liked it. Already he felt the itch of his sweat on his chest and beneath his private parts, a sweat he detested yet was unable to restrain with anything except medicated foot powder that left bone-colored rings on his garments and a chalky trace of dust on the tops of his shoes.
