by Ursula Hegi
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know if I’ll see him again.”
Whenever Emil Hesping came over, Trudi and her father would listen with him to the forbidden British station on the radio that her father kept hidden in the back of his wardrobe. Herr Hesping understood enough English to translate the news for them. As the foreign words traveled to them on a crackling wave, they’d keep the volume low and press their ears against the curved wood of the radio that was the same shade of honey blond as the woodwork in Leo’s bedroom. The station identification—lalalala—was so recognizable that, if you weren’t careful, someone passing in the street might hear it and inform against you.
The information in newspapers and on the German stations was controlled, but from the British station you could at least find out how far the war had advanced. It felt essential to Trudi to get the correct news of what was happening, and to distribute it even if many of the people who used to wait for her stories were afraid to hear the truth about the war. They’d rather pretend that the British were not bombing the big German cities, or that the Germans had not killed every man in Lidice—the Czechoslovakian town that had harbored the assassins of Reinhard Heydrich, who’d been called the brain behind the persecution of the Jews.
“What do you think the Americans will do?” Trudi was asked frequently, as though her Aunt Helene in New Hampshire provided her with a direct link to the plans of the American military.
“The Americans won’t let this go on for much longer,” she’d declare with a certainty she wished she felt.
She was able to circulate her news faster with the bicycle that she’d bought with money her Aunt Helene had sent her the previous Christmas. It had been in the last package that had made it through from America. At first she’d hesitated to spend the money on herself, but half of the banknotes hidden inside the wooden cores of thread spools had been designated especially for her. In her letter Aunt Helene insisted she buy something for herself, and as soon as Trudi unrolled the bills, they sprang back into coils. After Trudi gave the thread to Herr Blau, who often sewed for the fugitives until late into the night, she bought a bicycle from Ingrid’s father, a child’s bicycle that made her a far more efficient messenger.
It was ironic—adult-size bicycles and tires were no longer available because the shortages of materials reached into every part of people’s lives—but Herr Baum still had two children’s bicycles, luxuries no one could afford, and he gave Trudi a good price on the one she liked best. He added a set of spare tires and an air pump without charging her—“Since it’s for you,” he said, bringing his smile close to her face—but she took care to step away from him, quickly, before he could pinch her bottom.
It was the first bicycle she’d owned. The tricycle she’d been given as a child had never been right for her: at first she hadn’t been able to reach the pedals, and by the time she could, other children her age were racing around on two-wheelers and she felt ashamed to be riding a tricycle. But this new bicycle had the proportions of an adult’s bicycle, except it was smaller altogether, built low, and there was nothing childish about its solid white frame and black seat.
Trudi learned how to ride it within a day. To make sure it wouldn’t get stolen, she kept it indoors. Some evenings she taught Konrad, who hadn’t learned to ride a two-wheeler yet, to ride it up and down the hallway, running behind him laughing as he wobbled along.
Now, if she had to, she could be ready to ride anywhere in minutes: not bothering with a corset or stockings, she’d throw on clothes without stopping to think if they matched. Once, when she saw her reflection on the bicycle in the window of the grocery store—her striped cardigan flapping around her flowered dress—she thought how horrified Frau Simon would be at her appearance.
Konrad was helping her to polish the bike with a chamois cloth the night they heard the shots nearby, but she didn’t find out till morning what had happened. Two Jewish men had been discovered in the attic of the pharmacist’s son-in-law, who was fighting in Russia. They’d both been shot immediately, in front of the pharmacist’s daughter and her mother, who’d covered their faces with their aprons to keep from seeing the blood. When the women were taken to the Theresien-heim for questioning, the pharmacist was brought in, too, still in the long gray underwear he’d been sleeping in when yanked from his bed.
He tried to convince the officer that he hadn’t spoken to his daughter in over thirty years. “She married a Protestant,” he said as if that would absolve him from any suspicion of complicity in hiding the Jews. His wife had divorced him the year after the daughter’s wedding, he explained, and he hadn’t said a single word to her since then. Or to his grandchildren, who were fully grown and lived elsewhere by now.
“When did you see your wife last?”
“Yesterday, but—” He pressed his narrow lips together, yet his fleshy cheeks kept working as if he were chewing the words. “It’s not like that. I see her nearly every day. Because she lives around the corner and has to walk past the pharmacy on her way to the market.” His eyes leapt to his ex-wife, then back to the officer, who looked totally unconvinced. “Tell him, Anneliese.” His voice was shrill. “Tell him that we never talk.”
She didn’t answer.
“You are speaking to her now,” the officer reminded him.
“But don’t you see …” He offered the names of witnesses, Anton Immers and two other men from the chess club—good old friends, he called them—who turned out to be cautious about confirming any kind of close association with the pharmacist and could not make a definite statement as to the alleged silence between him and his former wife.
Despite his protest, he was held at the Theresienheim and, within a week, transported to a work camp on the same train with his wife and daughter.
“Those two women could have been shot, too,” Emil Hesping told Trudi. He’d been urging her and Leo for nearly a month to send Frau Neimann and Konrad to a new hiding place. “It’s dangerous to keep them too long. Not just for you. For them too.”
Trudi gave him the same argument as she had before, “No one knows they’re here.” But what if Herr Hesping was right? She dreaded to have Konrad leave, and she couldn’t bear the thought of not knowing what would happen to him. That uncertainty was much harder for her than the fear for her own safety.
Herr Hesping rubbed his thumb across a tiny spot on the lapel of his suit jacket and waited for her.
She felt pushed into agreeing with him. “All right,” she said angrily. “All right then.”
“I’ll let you know the time. And, Leo, those banned books you still keep in the library—”
“I know. With people hiding here, I’ve been thinking I should get rid of the boxes.”
“Burn them.”
“That’s what I was trying to avoid.”
“I’m not going to cart them away in my car and get caught because of something like that.”
“Burn them …” Leo said softly.
“I’m sorry.” Trudi touched his arm. She turned to Emil Hesping. “Where will you take Konrad and his mother?”
“Someone else has already been lined up.”
“And I can’t ask.”
He shook his head.
“I know,” she said miserably.
“You’re only good to us if we can keep this going.”
“Us… Who is this us? Who else—?”
“You think it’s a good idea for me to answer that?”
“Yes,” she said. “No.”
The following morning, Leo Montag issued calligraphy dinner invitations to Trudi, Eva, Frau Neimann, and Konrad. He banished everyone from the kitchen and refused to answer Trudi’s questions about what was going on, except to request that they all dress formally. She felt impatient with his playfulness, his secrecy—it seemed trivial in view of sending Konrad away. Yet, because the boy was excited about the invitation, she pretended to look forward to the dinner.
All day she worked in the pay-library by herself. A few times, when she didn’t have any customers, her father came in and removed an armful of books from the bottom of the boxes. “Actually,” he told her, “these don’t make bad cooking fuel.”
“We’ll replace them after the war,” she said though she felt jumpy, without hope.
So far, she hadn’t told Konrad and his mother that they would leave soon. Why worry them? It might be weeks. Or hours, she thought. Or hours. She had to force herself to listen to the gossip that her customers brought her. Reluctantly, she got ready for the evening. She dressed in the linen suit she’d sewn the year before the war, and she lent her good fringed shawl to Frau Neimann. Eva wore her pleated skirt and a green silk blouse, and the boy looked quite grownup in a dark suit with knee-length pants that Herr Blau had tailored for him from ancient cloth.
When Trudi’s father finally let them into the kitchen, he had changed into his Sunday suit and gaudy tie. Its stripes glittered and swirled in the light of six wax candles that he’d set on the table. There was a roast—an entire roast in a tureen of thick gravy. Trudi couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen an entire roast. Somehow, her father had conjured up peas and asparagus and potato dumplings, even a strawberry pie and two bottles of champagne. A vase with red and yellow tulips sat in the middle of the table.
Konrad clapped his hands.
His mother took a step toward the table.
“Allow me.” Leo Montag extended his right arm to her, his left to Eva, and led both to their chairs.
Trudi worried what he might have traded for all the food. Not the radio, she thought. Not that.
“Please, sit down,” he said.
She climbed up the three steps of her dining chair, and when she looked at Eva—who had the same determined expression of gaiety on her face as that night of her costume ball, when she’d danced in her nun’s habit with reckless abandon—Trudi decided to let herself get caught up in her father’s celebration, a celebration that had also sprung from chaos.
And even if their laughter felt stolen from an unreliable future, the food warmed and filled their bellies, and the champagne flushed their faces. Her father was summarizing the silliest plots from the romance novels in the pay-library, and Trudi could see that Frau Neimann and Eva were dazzled by him. The feast he’d prepared and his tales of predictable love twists, which always resulted in sentimental reconciliations and sappy endings, were softening the terror that all of them had come to take into their beds at night and brace themselves against in the early hours of waking.
This is dangerous, Trudi wanted to tell them. Until now they’d been so careful, never having more than two place settings on the table, but as she glanced at the radiant faces around her, she knew that not to continue the celebration would be even more dangerous, a rotting of the spirit which, tonight, they were reclaiming.
Yet, as the evening wore on, Leo Montag became serious as though it took him effort to continue entertaining everyone.
“What is it?” Trudi finally asked.
He looked from her to Frau Neimann, who brought her hands to her mouth.
“No,” Frau Neimann said.
The boy’s head snapped up. His eyes were wild.
Leo nodded.
“Where?” Frau Neimann asked.
“I haven’t been told. It’s better that way. But I know you’ll be secure there.”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
She jutted her chin toward Eva. “How about her?”
“Just you and your son.”
“I see.… Who is taking us?”
“Herr Hesping. You can trust him completely.”
Trudi climbed from her chair and brought her arms around the boy.
“Are you coming with us?” he asked.
“I can’t.”
“Why do people have to hide?”
Tears pressed into her nose, her eyes, and she held them back with one deep sob. “It wasn’t always like that.”
The wildness had left the boy’s eyes. He was looking to her for an answer, not to his mother.
She began to shape her farewell story for him. “Let me tell you what it was like before people were hunted, Konrad.…” To stop all time, she closed her eyes and imagined Pia in the kitchen with her, imagined the parrot Othello flying between them as she and Pia wove the tapestry of the island for the boy, a tapestry so rich and enchanting that he could step right into it if he needed to.…“And on this island the sidewalks were built of white marble. Every night, a warm rain rinsed the streets and the thick leaves of the trees. During the day, the sun was always out, and you could swim in the bay.”
“Even in winter.”
“Even in winter. The trees, they were filled with tropical fruits and nuts, and no one knew what it meant to be hungry.”
He sighed. “Why can’t we go there?”
If only the island really existed. “Perhaps,” she said, “it is time for me to return to the island.”
“What is it called?”
“The island of the little people. Where I grew up.” She felt her father’s eyes on her, and when she glanced over, they were filled with almost unbearable anguish and love. “A magic island, Konrad, where no one is taller than you and me, where orchids and parrots and—”
“But why did you leave such a place?”
“Because …” She reached inside herself for the core of the story, and when she found it, it startled her because it would not sustain the boy as she had anticipated; and yet, she had to reel the story out for him, all along trying to understand its meaning for herself. “Because the waterfalls dried up. Birds dropped from the sky. Everything withered. Mountains caved in on themselves, burying beautifully arched tunnels.…”
“Why?”
God, she didn’t want to let Konrad go. She’d never loved a child this way before, and she wanted to claim him as hers, shield him with her body against anyone who’d dare take him from her. He’s not mine. Not mine. As she took a step away from him, it came to her that she hadn’t even begun to comprehend the abrupt separations from family and friends that Jews suffered every day. She had lost her mother, had felt that grief, but that was one loss, not a sequence of losses encumbered with that constant fear of your own death.
Furious that she had to live in this time, with these laws, she fused her gaze to the boy’s, imprinting herself on his soul. You will always remember me. You will.
“Why did everything wither?” he wanted to know.
“You see—regular-sized people wanted to live on the island.…” She found it difficult to talk, but she kept going. “They too wanted to dwell within the magic. But the little people were divided about what to do. Some of them said, ‘Yes, let’s all live on the island, regardless what size we are.…’” Her chest ached. Her head ached. “But most of them wanted to keep the tall people out. They didn’t know much about them—that’s how prejudice starts, Konrad—and so they were afraid of their difference. They wanted their island all to themselves and began to hunt the tall people … hunt even those little people who were trying to protect the tall people.”
She could feel the ending of the story curling around herself and the boy, drawing in the others at the table: they were listening closely—not with laughter as they had to her father’s stories—but with a stunned sadness. “Everything on the island withered. The palm trees lost their big leaves. Peaches shriveled hard around their pits. Oranges turned brown. Even the biggest waterfall dwindled to one muddy trickle.”
It was silent in the kitchen.
“Is that the end?” Konrad asked.
“For now.” If only she’d found a story of hope to send with him on his way. If only she could get out of Germany with him the way Stefan Blau had nearly half a century before.
“It will change some day,” Konrad surprised her by saying.
“It will have to,” she agreed quickly.
Her father stood up. Everyone looked at
him, but no one spoke.
Frau Neimann pushed her chair back. “I need to pack. It’s—” Her voice skipped. “It’s time. Isn’t it? It must be time.”
He nodded.
“I’ll help you get ready,” Eva offered.
Trudi dashed over to the sink and picked up the nearly empty bottle of lotion. “Don’t forget this.”
Frau Neimann’s chin puckered. She shook her head.
Trudi pressed it into her hands. “Please. You and Konrad—you’ve brought so much into our lives.”
By the middle of summer the canvas that lined the tunnel smelled of mildew, and when Leo Montag and Herr Blau peeled it off, patches of mold bloomed behind it, and a fine shower of dirt drifted down on them.
Their latest fugitive, a taxi driver from Bremen, who’d been hidden in nine other places so far, was concerned there might be some caving-in above. “If so, it could be seen from the street,” he warned.
Herr Blau assured him, “No one walks between my house and the pay-library.”
But when Leo checked the narrow strip of grass, he found a shallow puddle right above the area of the tunnel. That night, he and the taxi driver shored the tunnel up with posts and rafters that Herr Blau had kept stacked in his cellar. They debated about filling the puddle with dirt and decided against it, since dirt would be even more noticeable with all the grass around it.
Their next visitors, two elderly sisters from Köln, suggested laying boards across the floor of the tunnel to keep their skirts dry.
“Then the water could seep under the wood,” the taller one said after Trudi had rehearsed the escape pattern with them.
“Yes,” the other sister said. “We’d be able to crawl across the boards without getting muddy.”
In some way each fugitive contributed to improving the tunnel. Eva stretched thin fabric from her nightgown beneath the ceiling to catch specks of earth that might sift into your eyes or settle between your neck and collar. She was the only one who’d been staying with Trudi and Leo since spring. The others came and departed quickly, bearing dreadful stories, far more dreadful than anything Trudi could have invented, as if some deity had gone mad while contriving demented plots; and each plot telescoped within itself the plots of others that the fugitives had encountered on their desperate journeys. As Trudi listened to them, she was overcome by a sense of the unbelievable, as if it all were transpiring in a world far more outlandish than Pia’s island. Whatever had happened in her family and her town before Hitler and his brown gang had seized power—including the death of her mother and the disappearance of Georg Weiler’s father and the wedding of Klaus Malter, even her rape in the Braunmeiers’ barn—she could have imagined herself, spun forward into the texture of a much greater motif; but these new stories, carried to her by the people she harbored, she could have never invented: they stopped her, bludgeoned her with their finality, although their endings were obscure.
