by Ursula Hegi
“Let’s hope your prayers won’t get answered when you’ll take all of us with you.”
He looked up, startled. “Don’t be so angry. I only thought of myself.”
“Right.”
“Of my death,” he corrected her. “Maybe I ought to go into the army.… End it that way.”
“Fight for them?”
“Fight anyone. Till I get killed.”
“I want to know about Eva. What happened after she came to you?”
“I— I keep looking at those birds she collected.… Last week I bought her a stuffed nightingale.”
“Last week?”
“For when she comes back. A present. Remember the owl I gave her?”
“For your wedding, yes.”
“And that bird with the red chest that your dog killed.”
“It lived for a few days. Eva’s mother set its wing.”
“We should have gone with Eva’s parents. She wanted to. But she stayed because I didn’t want to leave.”
“After she came to you, Alexander—what happened that night?”
“Do you think someone tipped off the Gestapo?”
“I’ve wondered.”
“She kept after me to get the butcher out of our building, but he has a ten-year lease.… I have to honor the contracts I sign.”
“Ah yes, honor.”
He drew up his shoulders. “I don’t think the butcher turned her in. He didn’t know Eva and I were arguing about his lease.”
“They came to your house,” Trudi prompted him, “and then you—?”
“We ran up the stairs. Into the attic. Hid there.”
She could smell his fear of telling her too much. His eyes were guarded, and the words he gave her were insufficient by themselves. Yet it was his effort at shielding the truth that gave it away to her, evoking that night in the attic as if she’d been there herself. She inhaled the scent of the stored clay tiles and parquet wood as Alexander and Eva crouched behind the crates of building supplies. She heard steps approach on the stairs, felt the gush of air as the attic door burst open.
Sweat covered Alexander’s temples. “We had enough time to say that we loved each other.…”
Trudi felt his confusion at the hate that had urged him into saying those words of love, understood his relief as Eva freed her arm from his hand and stepped forward.
“My legs—I couldn’t move my legs.… Oh God.”
“They didn’t see you?”
“Oh God.”
“They didn’t look for you?”
He blinked, his eyes terror wide, and she heard the laughter as the Gestapo came around the crates and jabbed him with their feet.
“Some hero,” one of them said.
“Some hero you got here.” The other laughed as he turned toward Eva.
“You came for me. You found me,” Eva said, her back as straight as ever.
Trudi grasped Alexander’s hands. They were cold, damp. “What did you do then? Tell me!”
He snatched his hands from her and buried his face in them, trying to hide from her the spectacle of being forced to crawl around the attic on his hands and knees, two guns aimed at his head. But she could feel the rough wooden boards against his palms, could see Eva’s ankles as he was forced to crawl past her.
“They left me there,” he whispered. “On the floor.” His voice had lost its tension, and his eyes looked spent as though he felt relieved at having told.
When they climbed from the cellar, the air smelled burned. In the heat, they could barely breathe. A yellow haze was lifting, revealing shapes of other buildings and roofs, and Alexander pointed across the street where the Talmeisters’ house had been hit; yet, on the sidewalk the cherry tree stood intact, its leafless branches framing ambergray clouds of smoke that rose from the heaps of stones and drifted across adjoining roofs.
Drawing the heat of war into her lungs, Trudi ran toward the pay-library, shouting her father’s name. In her immediate neighborhood, the houses were still intact. Only three windows had been shattered in the library, and one section of roof above the grocery store had been torn off.
“All this can be repaired again,” her father said.
“All this can be repaired again,” Ingrid repeated after him, her body still wrapped in the blanket.
But Trudi shook her head, trying to combat the horror at all the lives that had been destroyed, including that of Alexander Sturm, who, though he walked and could point to a tree, had died as certainly as the Weskopp sons, who rotted beneath the earth.
Ever since Max had told her about his wife, she’d felt cautious around him. She wondered what he saw in her. Sometimes she was afraid that he only wanted to get even with her for humiliating him with the note, and that he would leave her once she loved him.
She finally found the courage to ask him. “Why me?” She came right out with it.
“What do you mean?” They were sitting at his table, and he was peeling an orange that one of his private students had given him.
“Why did you pick me, Max?”
Separating the cool sections, he arranged them on a white saucer. “Open your mouth,” he said and fed one of them to her. “Because I like you.”
After not eating an orange in years, the pleasure of tasting the sweet, juicy flesh brought tears to her eyes. “But how did it start for you?”
“I guess I was intrigued by you.…” He ate carefully, dabbing the juice from the corners of his mouth with one finger and sucking it as if not to lose one precious drop. “Here.” He fed Trudi another slice. “I guess I was curious about you.”
“Why?”
“Oh, that sense of mystery you have about you. I didn’t know we’d become lovers the day we met. It happened gradually.”
That evening he took her dancing for the first time, not to the Kaisershafen Gasthaus high above the Rhein, where she had imagined dancing with him, but in a cellar bar in Düsseldorf, where a saxophonist in a red vest played haunting variations of the same melody.
Max leaned his face close to hers. “I didn’t know you were such a good dancer.”
She smiled. “I’ve been told I have talent.”
“I’ve been told that I am beautiful,” he said, quoting what she’d written in the Angelika letter.
She stiffened. “Keep moving your feet.”
“When?” she asked, her voice high, dry. “When did you know?”
“The week after we met, when I came into the library and you weren’t there. Your father was entering some books in the card file.…”
A frozen caricature of a dancing woman, she felt her feet shift to the left, to the right. Her hand was a wet stone in his palm. She stared straight ahead at the buttons of his suit jacket.
“I recognized your handwriting. I didn’t even want to check out a book, but I did, just to get a look at another card.”
“But then why did you come back?”
“I almost didn’t, remember? I stayed away for eight months.”
“Almost nine.”
“That was a quite an overdue fine I’d accumulated.… I guess what brought me back was wanting to find out why you’d done it—brought that note to my table.”
“Your ad said you were curious.”
“Your letter said you were tall.”
She flinched.
“I’m sorry, Trudi.”
She wanted to run from him, slam the door of the bar, storm up the stairs to the street. “At least you told the truth.”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“I’m the one who needs to apologize.”
“I didn’t know how angry I still am.”
She looked up. “I have felt terrible about hurting you. Ashamed. Many times—I wish I could undo that.”
“Then we wouldn’t have met.”
“Why didn’t you tell me right away?”
“You would have fled from me.”
“And now?”
“Now you won’t.”
“H
ow can you be so sure?”
“Because what we have now is strong enough to withstand that.… And it’s not that I’m sure, rather that I’m hoping.”
“We’re still dancing.”
“Would you rather sit down?”
“No.” She shook her head. “That day in the restaurant—it all started as a hoax.” She felt scared and relieved as she told him about reading the ads, about choosing his ad without any intent of meeting him, and then deciding to watch him. “I felt so furious. Humiliated.”
“Why?” He stroked her hair, from the crown to where it ended in a thick line below her ears.
“Because you never saw me.”
“Have you considered that you might have had something to do with that?”
“It was as if I didn’t exist. That’s when I decided to hurt you.”
“I saw you,” he said gently. “I saw a short, blond woman with extraordinary eyes. But I was waiting for a tall woman with auburn hair. And I kept looking for her.”
All at once she didn’t know what to say.
“I’m glad it’s out.” He drew her closer. “It’s hung between us.”
“Like your wife,” she said, and instantly remembered her vow not to bring up his wife again if they both survived the bombing.
“Like the woman I used to be married to. Maybe now you understand why I didn’t tell you right away.”
“You still are married to her.”
“Not in my heart.”
“But by law.”
“It bothers you a lot?”
“Whenever I think of her.”
“Don’t think of her then.”
“But I do.”
“She doesn’t want me back. I don’t want her back. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“It’s not that simple.”
When they made love in his room, that night, it didn’t take any effort to ban the savage fantasies that usually snared her. This is Max, her body sang to her, this is now.… And when she soared with him, it was as though she were leaving everything she knew behind—her country, language, customs. She’d heard women talk about giving birth like this—that flash of hesitation before you get to the moment when you can no longer reverse the process.
Now that he knew the secret of Angelika, she could tell him about her shame at returning to fantasies she didn’t want. “But not tonight,” she said. “Tonight I didn’t need them.”
He didn’t ask what those fantasies were like. “And you may not need them again,” he said. “But if you do, it’s all right. Lots of people go away inside their heads when they make love.”
“And where do you go, Max?”
“You already know.” He motioned toward his walls.
“Are you telling me you climb the walls?”
He laughed. “My watercolors. I—I’ll get embarrassed explaining this to you, but I think of them as orgasm pictures. That’s what I see when … you know?”
She took in the lavish colors that spun into marvelous structures and soared toward the sky. “There’s so much light and joy in those pictures. No darkness at all.… Can I ask you something?”
“If any of them are ours?”
She nodded.
He pointed to one above the table, another one by the window. “My best ones.”
“Orgasms or paintings?” She smiled.
“I can’t separate them.”
“And the others?”
“Before you… Here, I want to show you something else.” He climbed out of bed and returned with a charcoal sketch. “I did it this morning. It’s my Russian grandmother, who brought me up.”
“She has a wonderful face.… Those lines around her mouth—there’s real kindness. Something childlike too.”
“This is how I remember her. Ever since she died, I’ve tried drawing her from photos, but the sketches never looked right.” He ran one thumb across the paper, softening the edge of his grandmother’s chin. “But when I woke up today, I’d been dreaming about her, and I could still see her—just like this.”
“How old was she when she died?”
“Almost eighty. She was born in 1863. In Smolensk. When she was two, she rode to the cemetery on top of her mother’s coffin. It was her first memory. She talked about it more and more as an old woman.”
Trudi saw her own mother’s open coffin, her wrists crossed, and that lily—though it had not been there until her father had taken Herr Abramowitz to the cemetery chapel with his camera. “My mother died young,” she whispered.
“How old were you?”
“Just before my fourth birthday.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She had a lover. Before I was born.”
Max curved his arm around her.
“He had a motorcycle. My father was in the war then.” She told him about the earth nest beneath the house and the asylum, about the stork’s sugar and her brother’s funeral.
And as he listened to her, totally absorbed, asking questions only when she paused, and then taking her further with those questions, she knew she’d found what she had been longing for—someone who wanted her stories, someone to whom she could tell everything, someone with whom she did not have to be selective about what to keep quiet. It was a link she’d had for brief intervals in her childhood, to Robert and Georg and then to Eva, and she hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it until now.
That spring, Max’s car was confiscated for the war effort, but the watchmaker from whom Max rented his room let him borrow his rowboat and bicycle. As the evenings grew warmer, Max would bring the bicycle in the boat across the Rhein and ride it to the Braunmeiers’ jetty, where Trudi would meet him. Each time they made love on the jetty, Trudi felt herself reclaiming the place a little more.
“That cairn—” Max had asked when he’d first seen the pile of rocks at the end of the jetty, “Does it mean anything?”
She saw herself at thirteen, hurling stones into the river and coming back here, more than five years later, after seeing Klaus Malter with Brigitte Raudschuss—one stone for loving him, one for hating him, one for her longing, one for her rage, one for her shame at loving him without him loving her back.…
She felt a story stirring within herself, and she spun it for Max, for herself. “The cairn is hundreds of years old.” She began her tale about a water fairy, a tale of betrayal and love and shame even though she didn’t know the details yet. “Each stone means one life, and those longago people, who survived the revenge of the water fairy, swore to always remember her with this cairn.
“Those stones are restored after each flood, though no one knows who keeps up the ritual. Some say she’s still there, in these waters, keeping vigil over the cairn, waiting to add other stones for other lives.”
“What happened to her? Why was she so vengeful?”
“She wasn’t always that way.” Trudi spoke slowly, giving words to the images as they rose within her. “People used to watch her swim in the river, admiring her—uniqueness, her grace. You see, from the waist up, she was shaped like a woman, but instead of legs, she had the tail of a fish. It was silver and green and flashed when the sun touched it. Men fell in love with her beauty and wanted to possess her, and one morning four of them—” All at once she couldn’t go on.
Max took her hands.
“They—they lured her to shore. Right here. With promises. Promises of being her friends. And then they carried her off… into a church, and tried to split her into being like a woman. But she escaped.” Now the words were rushing from her. “She escaped from them and dragged herself back to the river, bleeding. It took her many months to heal, and after she was strong again, she brought the river into their houses and took her revenge. She drowned one of the men in his bed, another in his cellar.
“She killed every one of them,” Trudi whispered, “every single one. And always—afterwards—she would bring a stone from the bottom of the river.” She pointed to the cairn.
“To remember the dead,
” Max said.
“The living, too.”
“There are more than four stones.”
“Because when she was done, she came after their families too, after every person who had loved them.” The story was frightening Trudi. She remembered hiding with Georg in the tower of the church, scaring him and herself with ghost stories, and then scattering their fear with stories of comets and water fairies. Water fairies. But now even her story about the water fairy was grim, and she couldn’t think of a new story that would undo her fear.
“She went too far,” Trudi said, “and with each stone she added she felt heavier inside. Colder.” She glanced out over the river and thought how she’d undermined the boys who’d hurt her. Now the war had become her instrument of revenge—at least for two of them: Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier was reported missing in Russia, and Fritz Hansen had returned six months ago without a jaw. It had been shot off. Already, he’d had two surgeries and would need seven more, she’d heard from his mother, before his jaw would be restored as much as possible. He wore gauze from his neck up, and saliva ran down the front of it, making it look soiled even if it had just been changed.
“What if the water fairy were to toss those stones into the river?” Max asked.
“Why?”
“To release centuries of hate.”
“But once the stones are gone, she might forget.”
He looked at her steadily. “Right,” he said. “She might forgive.”
The identity of the unknown benefactor was discovered one night in May when—instead of following his pattern of leaving gifts—he attempted to take something away. What he stole was the Hitler monument in front of the Rathaus, the greenish statue with the flawed ear and crusts of pigeon droppings. The unknown benefactor was apprehended in the process of loading the short statue into a wheelbarrow, his open tool box next to him. From what the people of Burgdorf would hear afterwards, he was shot right there while trying to joke about taking the Führer for a stroll because it had to get boring standing in one place for so many years.
Not that the police figured out immediately that the thief was the unknown benefactor—that came when they searched his apartment and found a worn ledger, the kind a bookkeeper might have used decades ago, with detailed entries dating back over thirty years, listing people’s shoe and clothing sizes, ages of children, illnesses, hobbies, needs, and secret wishes. Columns with check marks and dates documented all the gifts he’d mysteriously smuggled into houses—bicycles and baskets of food and books and toys and money and coats—including roller skates for a boy by the name of Andreas Beil, who had since grown up to become one of the policemen who’d shot the unknown benefactor.
