by Ursula Hegi
Twice, when the police searched the neighborhood while fugitives crouched in the tunnel, Trudi was shocked at how easy it was to lie to them: “No, we haven’t had any visitors for days.… My father and I—we talk with customers who come into the library, but we lead rather private lives.… Eva Sturm?” She’d tilt her face toward them, sideways, draw her neck into her shoulders, make herself smaller, harmless, helpful. “Of course, I know Eva Sturm … have known her all my life.… I was invited to her wedding, you know. It was a beautiful wedding. You should have—No, no, I haven’t seen her. Not in months.…” Her body would lean into a limp, slowing them for a few precious seconds as she’d offer to lead them through the house, and she’d hobble out of their way as they’d crush past her.
Her heart numb with a cold certainty that the tunnel was safe—had to be safe—she’d wait for them by the front door, her pulse steady, her expression polite as she’d hold the door for them on their way out. Only then, after she’d turn the key inside the lock, would she start shaking. Holding on to the banister, she’d tell herself that it had to be far worse for Eva and the others in the tunnel, that she should rush to let them know they could come out again, but she’d have to lower herself to the steps and sit there before she’d be able to walk.
Emil Hesping and the bishop were coordinating a constantly changing number of hiding places from Köln north to the Dutch border. Since Emil had always traveled between the branches of the gymnasts’ club, people were used to his trips and didn’t get suspicious if they didn’t see him for days.
“It’s crucial,” he would remind Trudi, “not to have any of the groups know the identity of other groups. We also need to be careful what we say to the people we hide. Remember—they might be apprehended and forced to talk.”
“You don’t have to tell me again,” she’d say.
“It’s something I need to keep telling myself.”
Already, her gossip had taken on a new pattern: she would select her stories, conscious of preserving the safety of the people who relied on her, even though she’d feel restrained because there was so much she couldn’t tell—like about the woman crippled with arthritis whose husband had looked after her with such tenderness, unaware how amazed Trudi was by the kind of love that didn’t flinch from physical differences; or the young nurse from Berlin who’d stolen two spoons from the Montags before she’d been taken to a new place; or the young priest who despised his name, Adolf, and had given her a new respect for the clergy, not only because he’d hidden Jews in his church in Dresden, but also through his stories of other priests and ministers—some of them fearful souls, he admitted—who had spoken out against the oppression of the Jews and had been arrested or even killed.
Those stories swelled inside Trudi, forming a reservoir that she couldn’t draw on, though it deepened with each day of concern for everyone who’d left her house for an uncertain destination. She tried to tell herself that she’d be able to release those stories after the war, that she was only postponing them until then; and yet, part of her already sensed that those stories would never flourish, that—after the war—she would find very few who’d want to listen because the people of Burgdorf would be immersed in changing what had happened into a history they could sleep with, eine heile Welt—an intact world they could offer to the next generation. Ironically, Anton Immers—one of the few who would admit that he’d believed in the Führer—would make the good people of Burgdorf uncomfortable with his regret that the regime was over and with his dreams of its revival in even greater glory.
More and more, Trudi began to see herself as an underground messenger, safeguarding her stories while reporting details from the British radio station about the military situation, which usually contradicted what the German stations were broadcasting. She often thought of Konrad and fought the dread that, wherever he might be, he was in danger. With the priest Adolf, she’d known from the moment she’d met him that he would survive the war: it was in his eyes, that survival, in the way he moved his rugged body. Arrested during mass, he’d managed to escape into the dense forest just before the transport had reached the gates of the KZ Buchenwald outside Weimar.
The night before the priest was to leave the pay-library, Trudi watched him shave. She’d propped one of her gold-framed mirrors next to the kitchen sink for him. It was one of those hot, hot June evenings when the air is damp and your skin feels sleek with sweat. As Adolf lathered his face with her father’s shaving soap, he showed her where one of the guards on the train had pushed a thumb into the soft spot behind his ear.
“For an instant there, I thought I’d die. That transport, it taught me about hunger. I didn’t know hunger like that could exist. I felt ashamed of it.” His voice was rapid, barely more than a whisper. “Beneath the hunger was a constant greed—like a wild dog that could be turned loose any moment. I was as afraid of that greed as of the guards, afraid of what it might make me do.…”
He stared into the mirror and raised the shaving blade. “That hunger—it brought out the worst in some of us, the best in others. On the train I saw a father grab food away from his daughter.… I saw an old man trampled as others fought over one raw potato. Not everyone was like that, of course. Many sacrificed and shared what little they had. I was dizzy and cold and weak with hunger—that was my entire focus.… I longed for my connection to God, tried to remember the joy I’d found in playing the organ in our church, but everything was reduced to my belly. It was my God, my one companion.…
“After I escaped—” He shook his head and started again, and what he told Trudi took away forever any doubts she might have still held on to, doubts that those rumors of people dying by the hundreds in camps were far too horrible to be true. She saw the priest crouched in the woods outside high loops of barbed wire, saw him stumble away from a vast grave—naked bodies shoved into the gouged earth, twisted in indecent embraces. He made his way through the woods to Weimar, where his favorite poets, Goethe and Schiller, had lived and written, and he hid between the tall monuments in the cemetery near the crypt where the two poets rested in splendid recognition.
“Those nights in the cemetery.…” The priest scraped the foam down his left cheek. “I thought I’d go insane. I could not understand how some people’s graves could be marked while others were obliterated without evidence. It felt more horrible than any other injustice I’d ever known of. I couldn’t fathom it. I tried to, and the trying was crazy making.…”
Gradually he’d moved west, aided by people he said he’d never forget. During his flight he’d met other fugitives but only one woman who’d actually escaped from inside a KZ, Dachau, smuggled out by a guard. The woman, who had shared a hiding place behind the false wall of a closet with the priest for eight days, had told him about the camp—the filth, the hunger, the open sores—but what had been the worst for her had been the washroom where, together with others, she’d had to strip, stand under the icy water, and get doused with disinfectants that made her eyes sting, while guards laughed or pushed them around.
All at once Trudi wanted to stop the information coming to her, wanted to block the remembering of what the priest had already told her, but knew that his words were carved into her soul as surely as any moment she had lived. “What happened to the woman?” she asked hoarsely, her forehead covered with sweat.
“They couldn’t take away her spirit, though every day others went insane in the camp. Every day. For her, that washroom became her salvation because that’s where the guard who would eventually help her to escape saw her.…” The priest winced as he cut his chin. “The guard didn’t expect to fall in love with her.” Blood ran down the white foam, spreading into a pink blotch.
Trudi ran into the bathroom and brought him a few pieces of toilet paper. “Here.”
He pressed them against the cut. “She used him. Pretended.”
“I would have done the same.”
“The guard had it all figured out. False papers for her so that they could
marry. Imagine that.… He’d keep doing his death work and she’d be at home, cooking his meals, keeping his uniforms clean, having his babies for the Vaterland.”
“How did she get out?”
“She agreed to marry him, and he smuggled her out. Under layers of trash. He took her to this room he’d rented for the two of them above a bakery in München. At first he kept locking her in, but she made him believe that she would never want to go anywhere without him.”
“And that’s when he gave her a key.”
“Yes.”
“My father had to keep my mother locked up.”
The priest looked at Trudi. He’d stopped the bleeding by sticking a small triangle of paper to his cut.
“He had to. She—she wasn’t well. She died when I was four.”
“How terrible for you.”
“It happened a long time ago. Besides, compared to what you and many others have to suffer—”
“Ah, but we can’t do that—compare our pain. It minimizes what happens to us, distorts it. We need to say, yes, this is what happened to me, and this is what I’ll do with it.” He rinsed his chin. “You know what I’m going to do as soon as I can?”
She shook her head.
“Change my name. Legally.”
She felt disappointed by his answer. It seemed petty, considering all he could be doing. “You don’t have to tell people that your name is Adolf. You didn’t have to tell me. You could have made up another name.”
“But don’t you see?” He bent close to her. His face smelled of her father’s soap. “Right now there isn’t anything I can do legally without getting caught again, but that’s what I tell myself when I get worn down, that I’ll change my name. I despise that name. Of course there are things far more important that I want to do—like stop the transports, the camps—”
“The war,” Trudi said.
“Yes, but I know I can’t stop them, and so I need to fasten on one thing that’s within my power to do.” His eyes burned with conviction. “By saying that name aloud, I keep my rage, my determination.…”
She wished he would stay longer, but he’d only be there for a few more hours because Herr Hesping had already arranged a new place for him. She and her father were just one station on his way toward shedding his name.
When the oldest Weskopp son died on the Russian front that fall, the widow Weskopp, who had suffered silently, screamed and kept screaming. When the neighbor women came running, they found her standing in the room that her two sons used to share, staring at the framed butterfly collection—dusty shapes, once vibrantly colorful, impaled on stick pins—that hung on the wall between the two beds. You could hear her screams all over town. They couldn’t have lasted very long, but they seemed to be there all day. And even during the night people would wake up and think they heard those screams, which gave voice to the pain that the town had endured—far more penetrating and unsettling than the sirens that warned when planes crossed Burgdorf on their way to drop bombs on Düsseldorf or Köln.
The widow Weskopp, who hadn’t yet finished the year of wearing mourning clothes for her husband and youngest son, would stay in black from this day forward, the only color in her life except for the violets which she grew on every windowsill in her house as if to balance the harsh black of her garments.
When Trudi returned from the funeral of the Weskopp son, Eva stood waiting for her in the kitchen.
“I’m going home,” she said, her voice clipped.
“You know it’s not wise.”
“I also know I can’t go on like this. Sometimes I forget that you’re my friend.… All I see is my jailer.”
“Eva—”
“People can die. You’ve seen how quickly it happens. The Weskopp boy—”
“He was in the war.”
“Alexander might be sent off to war any day.”
“It’s not his life I’m worried about.”
“One short night, Trudi. One Goddamn beautiful night. Is that too much to want?”
“To want? Of course not, but—”
“If I can have one night with Alexander, I know I’ll be able to deal with the hiding again.”
“It’s not worth it, Eva.”
“How can you say that?”
“At least talk to my father.”
“There’s nothing he can say that will keep me here.”
She left through the kitchen door after the streets were dark and empty, promising to return before dawn, and Trudi set her alarm clock. When she woke up, the sky was still black, and she felt that slow buried ache in her hips. She washed, dressed, and went downstairs into the kitchen. They’d had no fugitives for a week, and with Eva gone, the house felt like a shell, a useless prop that a strong wind might blow away. She pictured Eva embracing her husband good-bye, rushing from the apartment building, careful not to be seen, cutting through the market and past the church square. Any moment now her knock would come on the backdoor. Trudi would pull her inside, search her face for traces of that one Goddamn beautiful night.
But outside it was silent.
Now, if she had one Goddamn beautiful night in her lifetime coming to her, Trudi pondered, and the choice with whom to spend that night… She found an immediate certainty within her: Max Rudnick. Not even Klaus Malter? No, Max Rudnick. But probably Max Rudnick hadn’t even considered a night with her. She wondered where he was, that night, that moment. It had been fifteen months since she’d met him, six months since she’d seen him.
“Stay out of danger,” she whispered.
The sky was changing from black to a deep purple blue, then to a medium blue, and finally to the flat light blue of a cloudless morning. And when the knock on the kitchen door came, it was not Eva, but Frau Weiler, the scarf around her frizzy hair half undone.
Nearly incoherent with the news that she’d become a grandmother during the night, she dropped herself on the nearest chair. “Twin girls, Trudi. You have to see them. Oh—” She clasped her hands by her throat. “Eva Sturm—have you heard about Eva Sturm?”
“What happened?” Trudi gripped her arm.
“I was there when they were born.” Frau Weiler sucked her false teeth into place. “Helga let me help. They’re both—”
“Eva—what happened to her? How did it—”
“She was arrested. They searched the apartment, then the whole building, and found her in the attic.”
“Where is she?”
“No one knows.”
“Oh God, I was afraid of that.… Who told you?”
“Jutta Malter. She was there when they took Eva.”
“And Alexander?”
“They didn’t take him.”
“He’s still there?” Trudi started for the door.
“Locked inside his apartment, I hear.”
sixteen
1942
ALEXANDER DID NOT ANSWER THE DOOR THAT DAY OR THE DAYS AFTER. Outside his windows hung the voices of women like souls of stuffed birds. Some he identified by sound: Trudi Montag, his niece, the butcher’s daughter-in-law. Others blended into a chorus, faded out, returned. He sat on the Danish sofa, and whenever he dozed off, he made sure it was while sitting: at least he could do that for Eva—not take comfort in lying down though his limbs yearned for rest. Stop it, he’d admonish his body when it complained, this is not about you. This is about Eva.
Sometimes he staggered to the bathroom.
Sometimes he ate and drank, disgusted that his body could force him into those functions.
Trudi Montag came back.
Others.
Knocking.
Knocking and calling his name.
If the Gestapo returned, they would break his door down and he’d welcome them. No reason to get up for anyone else. His mouth felt dry and salty—not the fresh salt taste of the sweat beneath his wife’s breasts—but a nasty salt taste, old and used up. One evening he sat on the sofa when the sirens wailed, heard his tenants rush to the shelter he’d established in the ce
llar. Some banged on his door, shouted for him to follow them.
Except for a few stray bombs that planes had dropped on their way back from attacking much larger targets, Burgdorf had remained almost intact. Strange to think how afraid he’d been of bombs. He used to open his windows during bombing raids to keep them from vibrating until they broke, and then he’d dash down the stairs to his shelter. But now he remained sitting on his sofa and longed for the kind of sky he’d once seen in Köln during a bombing—a sky bright with shapes not unlike Christmas trees, sinking toward the city, casting their eerie glow over everything. He longed for his windows to shatter, letting in gusts of heat and smoke that would make it impossible to breathe. He longed for suffocation, for obliteration, for a sky brushed with fire. Without moving, he sat, praying to be buried in the rubble of his building. And then it was morning and his house stood around him and he sat on the sofa and his wife was gone. Normal.
She kept coming back, his wife’s Zwerg friend, fists fluttering against his door, his caged heart. Soon it felt as though she were out there all the time, and he’d find himself listening for her wingbeat even in the void of night when all else was silent. The muscles in his thighs and buttocks felt flattened out. Against his skin, the clothes he’d worn when they’d taken Eva away were stiff and rank. He’d stumbled into them—trousers and a white shirt—when he’d heard the car stop outside the building.
