by Ursula Hegi
“What are you doing here?” Fritz demanded.
“Swimming. Like you.”
“You were spying on us,” Hans-Jürgen said.
“I was not.” She felt furious at them. For finding her. For ruining her place. “I was here first.”
Seehund’s bark was at a high pitch. He was racing up and down the beach, his paws kicking up sand whenever he turned. Paul Weinhart dove and came up with a flat rock, which he flung at the dog. Seehund howled.
Trudi pushed Paul’s shoulder. “Leave him alone.”
“You make him shut up then.”
“Down,” she cried. “Down, Seehund.”
The dog stopped. Body quivering, he lowered his hind legs halfway as if ready to leap up again.
“Down, Seehund.”
He whimpered and lay down.
“Georg,” Paul yelled. “Trudi says she wants you to take your pants off again.”
“Liar,” she cried.
His back to the river, Georg struggled into his shirt, his pants and shoes.
“She wants all of us to take our pants off,” Hans-Jürgen declared.
Paul and Fritz laughed, high nervous laughs, as they grabbed Trudi’s arms and dragged her toward the beach. Gathering gray and brown pebbles in the shallow water, Hans-Jürgen pelted Seehund as he charged toward them.
“Go home, Seehund,” Trudi shouted. “Down—Home—”
But Seehund anchored his teeth in Fritz Hansen’s calf. The boys let go of Trudi and fell upon the dog with fists and rocks.
“Stop it,” she screamed, “stop,” and heard Georg’s voice too, “Don’t hurt him.”
Seehund kept fighting, but each time he was kicked or hit, his attempts became weaker.
“Go home,” she shouted, tears in her mouth. She wished he’d run from those feet that kicked him away from her, but he kept yelping, coming back, until Paul hurled a sharp rock at him and Seehund fell over and lay still. When he tried to get up, his hind legs wouldn’t straighten. Whimpering, he dragged himself toward Trudi, the whites of his eyes showing.
“Let her go.” The skin around Georg’s mouth was taut.
“So the Zwerg is all yours?” Fritz grinned.
“Don’t be stupid.” A slow, red burn stained Georg’s neck and rose to his face.
Paul’s hand shot out and pinched Trudi’s breast.
She cried out.
“Your turn,” he challenged Georg.
Georg’s face stiffened. His eyes were right on Trudi, glassy and frightened, without seeing her. He tried to laugh. “Who wants her?”
Although he looked as though he were about to run, he stayed with his friends, even when they dragged Trudi across the meadow and the dike. She screamed, trying to wrest her arms—those useless arms that were solid but not strong—from the boys, and once she broke away, embarrassed that her legs, those Zwerg legs, were moving in the old sideways waddle that she’d tried to unlearn. Feeling the pulse of hate in her temples, she ran from them, faster than she’d known she could run, until Fritz tripped her. Seehund stayed further and further behind. Soon she could no longer see him. Her bare feet and legs got scratched, and she didn’t know if she felt more horrified at the prospect of being rescued by others who’d see her body half naked in her swim suit, or at not being rescued before the boys got her to the Braunmeiers’ barn—because that’s where she realized they were heading. When she kept screaming, one of the hands—she couldn’t even tell who it belonged to—clamped across her mouth while she was tugged and pushed around the back of the barn and into the side door that faced away from the farmhouse.
Slow patterns of muted light and shadows wove through the dust motes, and the highest rafters were hazy, enveloped by a viscous layer of air. Two metal pails were propped upside down on a table to dry. She hadn’t been in the barn since that day Hans-Jürgen had killed the kitten, and that vast, lofty space still reminded her of a church. At the same time there was the scent of the cows, a forever kind of warm scent that, somehow, made what happened so much worse, and what happened was warm and in some ways cold—the cold of the huge space, the warmth of cowering in one small space that was ablaze with the heat of her fear and the heat of their breaths and the heat of the cows, though nothing, nothing could touch that ice-cold space deep inside her, the space they couldn’t reach, the space that could freeze them to death because she finally knew that praying would not make her grow, knew that the Zwerg had closed around who she really was, knew herself in a deep and distant way as she was and had been and would be, while a lifetime of images passed through her soul; and the worst thing was not that the boys tore off her swimsuit and fingered her breasts—that was terrible enough, but they would have done that to other girls too; no, the worst thing was their curiosity, those hands that explored her difference, those voices that laughed at the way her neck grew thick from her torso, at the short span of her legs as they pulled them apart—not to plant themselves in her, no—but to see how far her thighs could be spread, and what made all of this even worse was that, even here, she inspired their curiosity, not their desire, and yet, and yet, through her rage, she felt a dreadful longing to be liked by them, to have them see beyond her body inside her where she knew she was like every other girl.
Georg did not touch her. Hands jammed into his pockets like pieces of wood, he stood to the side, ready to flee, and once, when his eyes let themselves be trapped by Trudi’s, they were wild with anger at her—for letting herself get caught.
“Frau Braunmeier …” A voice, so low-pitched it could only belong to Alexander Sturm, came from outside the front of the barn.
Hans-Jürgen dashed from the side door with Paul and Fritz close behind him.
“Ich möcht nur ein paar Eier kaufen… ”—“I just want to buy some eggs.…”
Georg grabbed a cattle blanket and threw it across Trudi before he ran out.
“Auch ein Pfund Butter”—“Also a pound of butter.”
Trudi couldn’t understand the muffled reply of Frau Braunmeier. She imagined herself shouting for help, imagined Alexander bending over her and helping her up, taking her home on the back of his bicycle, but then she thought of her father walking her to school in his Sunday suit to talk to the sisters, felt herself pushed into that closed circle of girls, and she knew she could never tell—not him, not anyone.
She waited until it was quiet outside again. Gripping the blanket around herself, she walked toward the door, feeling a curious absence of fear. It was over. She felt certain. They would not come back.
When she stepped from the barn, she felt as if she were standing on broken glass, though the ground was hard dirt, packed down by the hooves of cattle. It felt dangerous to step out of the space she had come to know as intensely as her room. Being inside that barn had made her even more separate from others, and the only kinship she could feel was to those boys, who had become far more like her than anyone else because they, too, had been part of what had happened to her. She felt the wind on her face, drying the cold snot against her cheeks and lips, stretching her skin taut the way egg whites will when you get them on your hands while baking.
Walking carefully as if crossing a desert of broken glass, Trudi thought of the shards that spiked the top edges of the walls which surrounded the Grafenberg asylum and understood why someone might wish to stay there. She saw herself within those walls with her mother, and she thought how comforting it would be to live there. Forever. Her legs ached, and her body felt monstrous beneath the blanket as she headed back toward the river, which now was a uniform leaden color that showed the pattern of ripples but no longer held those washes of light.
She wanted to crawl into the river with the shame of having been touched like that, singled out. As she bent and reached beneath the bushes to retrieve the clothes she’d sewn so carefully, it occurred to her that to girls of normal height it didn’t mean a thing if a certain style made them look one or two centimeters taller. But she could change hemlines of skirts and jacket
s and, still, she would never be like other girls. Seehund grasped the side of her hand between his teeth, lightly, as if to console her, and she swung toward him and kicked him away—this witness to her shame. Beneath the cover of the blanket, she dressed herself hastily while Seehund limped around her, his seal-gray coat blotched with dry patches of blood.
Again, his damp snout nudged her hand.
Again, she kicked him away.
He followed her to the tip of the jetty, where she knelt in the cool pocket of sand and howled her rage. Frightened, the dog squirmed close, pushing his head at her, and though she blamed herself for his injury, she couldn’t bear to touch him. She felt as hideous as Gerda Heidenreich, whose lips were always wet with saliva, as repulsive as the youngest Bilder boy, whose layers of fat nearly swallowed his eyes—the sum of all the freaks she had avoided.
Her hands found a heavy stone crusted with sand. Orange-red, the sun glowed through the hazy sky, and the air was soaked with the smell of her sweat as she raised the stone high above her head and hurled it into the Rhein. Georg. She reached for another stone. Holding it in both hands, she leapt up and flung it into the waves. Paul. Another stone. Hans-Jürgen. Fritz. The stones broke the skin of the river and sank to the bottom. Georg. Fritz. More stones, from the jetty now, some of them glistening with water that had splashed across them. Her eyes ached, and she squinted against the sun. Near the opposite bank of the river a dark cloud of swallows skimmed across the surface of the water. The rocks became weightier. Hans-Jürgen. Paul. Sharper. Georg. Georg.
seven
1929-1933
SOME DAYS SHE COULDN’T EAT. HER MOUTH WOULD FEEL DRY, SWOLLEN, and if her father urged her to take at least one bite of the food she’d prepared for him, it would sit on her tongue, heavy and revolting. The only craving she had was for sweets, and she’d feel ill after eating them.
At night, she found it difficult to sleep, and she’d get up before dawn, sit in the living room with a blanket wrapped around herself, and read books from her father’s personal collection. She rarely left the house. Her tailored clothes felt stiff, phony, and she hid her body behind the loose fabrics of housedresses, camouflaged herself with cardigans. When her father surprised her with a sewing machine for her fourteenth birthday, she set it up in her room but didn’t use it.
She couldn’t bear to touch her dog. His eyes would follow her with sad devotion, and occasionally he’d raise his head as if about to nudge her, but he’d learned it was wiser to wait for her to come to him than to startle her with his touch. Though she hadn’t hurt him since that morning by the river, he dimly sensed that she was capable of a tremendous act of violence, punishing that part of herself that had been marred, punishing him for being her witness.
She wished she could travel like Frau Abramowitz and her husband, Michel—except she would never come back to Burgdorf. The Abramowitzs were always planning trips, the most recent of them to China, and their dining room table was usually covered with brochures and schedules. Frau Abramowitz had ordered an extra Chinese train schedule for Trudi; it was written in odd symbols that looked more like pictures than letters.
“If you ever go to China,” Frau Abramowitz had said, “you’ll be able to travel the trains for almost free. They don’t go by age, but by height. If you’re below one meter, you don’t pay anything, but of course you’re too tall for that.”
Too tall. No one had ever told her that she was too tall for anything. “I’m one meter eighteen.”
“Then you’ll only pay one-quarter of the total fare. That’s if you’re between one meter and one meter twenty-nine.”
What sustained Trudi was her work in the pay-library. There, wrapped in the impassioned music that spun from the gramophone, she could almost forget those boys while she bartered information, invading the lives of her customers with her questions, feeding them rations of gossip to lure them into sharing their secrets.
Yet she never bartered her own secrets. In the earth nest beneath the house, her mother had initiated her into the power of secrets. By taking Trudi’s hand and pressing it against her knee, she’d transfused her with the addiction to the unspoken stories that lay beneath people’s skins.
Trudi would reveal to Frau Simon what Judge Spiecker had told her the last time he’d come in to borrow mystery novels, while Frau Simon, in turn, would confide in Trudi what Herr Immers had said about Herr Buttgereit. She was discovering when to stay silent, when to let an interminable pause fill itself with the discomfort of the other person and hastily whispered information, while she—always the talker believing in words—listened, reeling in new material.
Yet, beneath the stories that poured through her and numbed her was her pain and the fear of her own rage. All that spring and summer she stayed inside the house, eating and sleeping very little, moving about the pay-library like an invalid, dodging her father’s concerned questions—all through that fall and winter until the early spring when the flood loosened her rage.
The flood began with rain one April night. It rained the next day and the day after that, keeping most of the regulars away from the pay-library, even the wife of the taxidermist, who kept coming back for the same books. Both Trudi and her father had explained to Frau Heidenreich that it would be far less expensive for her to buy the books she reread, but she enjoyed leafing through the books on the shelves. She’d always bring her daughter, Gerda, and the big girl would sit on the floor and play with a fancy pocket watch that no longer had hands.
For weeks it kept raining, and the river kept rising. Although the people of Burgdorf filled potato sacks with sand and raised the dike with them, the water poured into the streets and gushed down cellar stairs. Trudi helped her father carry the books from the pay-library upstairs into the sewing room and stack them against the walls. The flood covered the two lowest shelves throughout the library, soaked the legs of the wicker table, and stained the underside of the sofa, even though Trudi’s father, with the help of Herr Abramowitz, had lifted its legs onto bricks. They wound the ends of the long drapes around the curtain rods, creating an odd rococo effect that made the living room look far more elegant than before.
The third week of the flood the rain ceased, but the surface of the gray waters kept rising. It was a Sunday, and since the pews of St. Martin’s Church were half under water, the people took boats to the chapel which stood on a hill near the Sternburg. It looked as if all the pigeons of Burgdorf had sought sanctuary on top of the bell tower, and it was impossible to see the slate roof tiles among the swarms of gray and iridescent birds.
As the Rhein kept rising in Burgdorf and other towns along its banks, Trudi felt as though the river were coming after her, urging her to take revenge on Georg, Hans-Jürgen, Fritz, and Paul—the only people in the entire world who shared with her the secret of what had happened. Gradually her movements took on her old energy, and she forced herself to leave the house at least once a day. She was amazed how the boys averted their eyes when they encountered her, how they flinched when she scorched them with the fury of her gaze. Their shame, she discovered, gave her power over them. And as the weight of what had happened kept gathering within her—dark and turbulent, threatening to obliterate her—she knew she had to release it.
Hans-Jürgen would be the first one, she decided.
She didn’t know what she would do to him until she saw him hand in hand with a blond girl. From the way he looked at the girl, Trudi could tell he adored her. His first love, she thought, how sweet, how very sweet. She felt calmer than she had in many months as she settled into a patient wait for a chance to encounter him alone.
One morning in July, when Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier was getting ready to set up a stand in the open market with products from his family’s farm, he saw it coming toward him, the short, rounded girl-shape that kept fastening itself to his dreams, evoking fear and that strange lust he despised in himself, unsettling him for hours after waking up. Quickly, he bent over an open crate, whistling as he pretended
to busy himself.
When he was certain she’d passed his stand, he cautiously turned his head, but she stood right behind him, her moon face set into bitter lines, her skin the color of new frost as if to negate the heat it had sent to his fingers not too long ago. He wiped his hands against the sides of his trousers.
She stood there, not saying anything, forcing him to look at her as if taking pleasure in the discomfort he had with her body.
To his horror, he felt his flesh rise for her, and he hated her for that. “What do you want?” he blurted.
“I know something.”
“So?”
“About you.”
“I have work to do.”
“Go ahead.”
He slammed the supports of the wooden stand into position, lifted the crates to display fruits and cheese, marked slate markers with prices. And throughout all this she stood there, stubby arms crossed in front of her flowered housedress, simply stood there, making him want to bolt, even though it would mean the wrath of his father.
“So then—what is it you know?” he finally asked.
“That she does not love you.”
His neck itched—hot and sudden. “Who?”
She lowered her eyes, murmured something he couldn’t hear.
“Who?” As he crouched to bring his eyes down to hers, he thought she smiled, but it passed so quickly that he figured he’d imagined it.
“You know who.”
“Go away.”
“Don’t you want to find out why?”
He shook his head, unable to pry his eyes from hers.
“I’ll go then,” she said and walked from him.
He told himself he’d be better off not to ask. Whatever she had to say to him would be worse than not knowing. “Why?” he shouted after her.
