Ursula Hegi the Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set

by Ursula Hegi

  “And future children,” he made sure to remind God.

  The construction of the Wasserburg was progressing, and the town had become accustomed to the sight of Stefan’s short, solid body—always in a dark suit and crisp white shirt—as he strode among the workmen with blueprints from the linen originals, issuing orders in an accent that sounded both stern and melodious to the townspeople, who still whispered about him as much as the day he’d arrived: that he had a way with money; that he looked like a Frenchman—not a German—with those black curls and fierce green eyes; that the bathrooms in his apartment house would be divided—toilet and a sink in one room, tub and sink in another. At a town meeting some complained that his building blocked their view of the lake, while others speculated that it was too big to ever fill with tenants.

  But what they talked about most was that the fire inspector had said it was ten times as safe as any other structure in town. “Goddamn thing’s so heavy,” he’d muttered, “it’s anchored right to the middle of the earth.”

  Between each floor were ten inches of cement, ten inches of sand, and another ten inches of cement—an impenetrable fire barrier. The outer walls were built of brick and heavy timber, while the inside walls had masonry between layers of plaster.

  Sara preferred their rooms above the restaurant and felt uneasy with the growing debt. “A banker’s taste,” she called the Wasserburg late one evening when she and Stefan were sharing a custard tart from the restaurant as they often did before they went to bed.

  “And what would you want?” he challenged her. “A baker’s taste?”

  She took a small bite, set the tart back on the plate between them, and chewed slowly before answering him. “Tell me then—what is wrong with a baker’s taste?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Both elbows on the tablecloth, she leaned toward him. “I like the baker’s taste.”

  “I said I’m sorry.” He dabbed one finger against the side of her mouth. Smiled at her. “You got custard on your face,” he said and licked off his finger.

  “And the farmer’s taste. And the chimney sweep’s taste. This entire town is built in that kind of taste. It suits me. The house you’re building does not fit into this town.”

  “It’s the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen.”

  “Oh, Stefan. Of course it’s beautiful. But it’s so large that it changes the way the other houses look … so large that I get embarrassed.”

  “Embarrassed?”

  “It’s like … bragging, a house like that.”

  “Not to me. And you knew. … You knew from the beginning that I was building it.”

  “But I didn’t know how much it lived inside you. With something that big there isn’t much room left. And what’s left is still taken up by her.”

  “So that’s what all this is about? About Elizabeth?”

  She looked straight at him. “It’s her name that’s still on the deeds.”

  “I told you I would change them over to you. I just haven’t had time.” Marjoram, he reminded himself. I’m also running low on pepper. Plenty of paprika left, though, and salt.

  “And you did nothing to stop her mother when she ordered me to visit.”

  “I thought you like visiting there.”

  “I go because of Greta and you. But when I’m there, I still feel like someone who stole you from their daughter.”

  “Elizabeth was dead before you and I—” He stopped. Be patient, he reminded himself. Patient. He kissed her forehead. “The Flynns are always kind to you.”

  “They are. The way they would be to a servant. Because I’m from trade.”

  To agree with her would mean admitting that equality was not as total in America as he had figured it was, and letting in the uneasy certainty that Elizabeth’s parents had never really accepted him either. “No. It’s because they’re both generous people.”

  “The kind of generosity that comes with conditions.”

  “They’ve never pushed me for the loan.”

  “Because you’re the father of their grandchild.”

  “I don’t understand you,” he said, feeling this one chafing hurt between them that he’d sensed before, though it had never risen like this in words. To reassure Sara, he added, “It’s you I’m married with.” Right away he knew he should have said married to. Elizabeth would have mentioned his mistake. But Sara didn’t even know enough to notice.

  The morning he felt movement beneath the swelling of her belly, he went to mass though it wasn’t a Sunday, and when Father Albin’s wide, pink hand floated up to bless the congregation, Stefan felt a deep conviction that God would keep Sara alive. Still, the evening her labor began, he was snagged right back to the night of his first wife’s death. Sara’s screams were ripping through him, and when he tried to get into the room where her mother and Dr. Miles bent over her in the wide birch bed, they kept him from her and sent him to look after Greta who was alone in her room.

  When he opened her door, his daughter was crouching against the wall in the far corner of her bed, legs drawn to her chest. “Fröschken,” he whispered. “Fröschken?”

  A gingham pillow was crammed in the tight space between her knees and stomach as though she, too, were giving birth. When he picked her up, she was shivering so hard that he knew those final screams of her mother had survived in her memory. Touching his lips to Greta’s forehead, he wished he could reassure her that Sara would soon be well again, but since he didn’t know how to ease his own fears, he was silent as he guided her arms into the sleeves of her checkered coat and tied the ribbon of her matching hat beneath her chin. After he buttoned her shoes, he lifted her on his shoulders, and as he walked along the dark lake with her, she linked her fingers across his forehead, preserving the heat of his skin in her palms. Autumn wind molded the trees to the shoreline, their branches reaching for the restless surface of the lake with the promise of a diviner’s rod.

  “Look, Vati,” Greta said and pointed to the reflection of the half moon that swayed on the water like a slab of frost. It was an image that would come to her in later years—the moon, just like that, on the water—usually before she perceived something about people that most others could not see, and it was like that now though she was too young to frame it with words.

  1909–1911

  Stefan’s second daughter was born in the early morning hours. When he knelt next to Sara’s bed, her eyes were tranquil, and he knew God had honored his bargain. Sara agreed to call the child Agnes, another name that was the same in German as in English, though she told him it made her wonder if, eventually, he wanted to return to Germany.

  “Only for a visit.” He pressed his lips to her wrist, and as he tasted the cooled sweat of her labor, he felt her waiting for him to see the uniqueness of their daughter; but to him Agnes looked like a tiny, old woman. Black tufts of hair like spider silk. Face heart shaped—wide temples, pointy chin. A band of freckles across the bridge of her nose like a minus sign. When he picked her up she began to cry, and he quickly handed her back to Sara. “A visit with you and our daughters,” he said.

  “That’s good.” Her long eyelids closed. “Our daughters …”

  On the wall behind the bed was the pattern of roses his first wife had chosen, and as he watched Sara sleep, he felt unfaithful because he saw Elizabeth’s fingers flattening the paper against the wall, saw translucent fingernails so short that her hands looked like those of a child.

  At church his tenor climbed above the other voices, and if you listened closely, you could make out his lavish accent in the higher notes. He relinquished ten percent of his income to the priest though it slowed the completion of the Wasserburg and meant delaying the installation of the elevator and the arrival of the South German carpenter from Wolfeboro, who would set up his workshop in the basement of the restaurant and carve arched doors for each apartment. Instead of ordering new fire escapes from Boston, Stefan bought used ones when the local hospital was renovated. His workmen atta
ched the sets of metal steps to each end of his building, where they hung ten feet above the sidewalk and sank down only if weight was applied from above.

  His contributions to the church also postponed the return of the loan to Elizabeth’s parents; but they urged him not to worry whenever he brought it up—not just once, but on three separate occasions, so he would remind himself in later years—when he arrived at their house on Sundays with Sara and his daughters. Though Lelia and Hardy Flynn made a fuss over Agnes and welcomed Sara, it was evident that their real delight was in Greta. Sara could understand that: after all, her own parents were closer to Agnes than to Greta, and that was only natural—the ancient tug of blood—while she, however, felt linked equally to both children because Greta had been in her life longer than the daughter who’d grown from within her own body.

  But what troubled her was that Stefan did not seem interested in Agnes. One morning while she was nursing the baby, she said to him, “Maybe you’re not close to Agnes because she never shared your evenings. The way you did with Greta.”

  He closed his starched collar, put on his cuff links. “What do you mean?” he asked and reached for his waistcoat, ready to take the stairs down to his restaurant. In his mind he was already measuring ingredients for the potage à l’oignon gratiné—onion soup—and the rognons à la dijonnaise—veal kidneys—he would serve tonight.

  Sara bent across Agnes and adjusted the white-and-yellow blanket that Stefan’s mother had knitted for the baby in Germany. “Maybe it’s because the two of you lived alone.”

  When he looked at her, her lips were pressed together, her Schlafzimmeraugen anxious as if it were crucial that he find the reason that very moment, find it and remedy it and move on from there. And because he felt a sudden tenderness and pity for her, he did not contradict her. One of the baby’s feet, impossibly tiny, poked from the blanket. Squatting by Sara’s chair, he laid one side of his face against her belly—already pushing at him with a new child—and rubbed one thumb across his daughter’s velvety arch. “Agnes is still so … young,” he said carefully. “Once we get used to each other … You’ll see.” It was kinder than telling Sara how Greta still evoked Elizabeth for him. Simpler than telling her how he had somehow expected this second daughter to be the girl he had seen from the boat. It made him uneasy, this vision of a time he hadn’t lived, and he never invoked and nurtured it; yet, it rooted itself in his mind as potent as memory, influencing his decisions, shaping his future.

  It pleased Sara when—that June as soon as the lake began to warm—Stefan taught Agnes to swim. From the dock she watched as he walked into the water with their daughter, grimacing and shivering before he carefully lowered her. Agnes took to the lake instantly, kicking her legs and arms, cooing and laughing.

  He held on to her. “This one will never be afraid of water,” he called out to Sara, but what he really thought was: This one won’t drown. In the cemetery on the hill were already too many graves of children who had drowned. Wedged between rocks on the Robichauds’ family plot was a glass case containing a white-and-pink china doll that used to belong to a daughter who’d fallen into the lake when she’d scrambled down the bank to get some flowers. Not my daughter.

  But even though Agnes learned to swim quickly, she never got old enough to walk. And it was not the lake that claimed her that November, when her mother was in her last month of pregnancy. For over an hour that afternoon Sara had been expecting her daughter to wake crying, wanting to be picked up and fed as Agnes did after every nap, anxious to have it all that very instant she opened her eyes—the holding and the feeding—as if she already sensed that there would never be enough for her. And what Sara would not forgive herself later was how she had savored that quiet time, how she had wanted it to last—though not a lifetime, not that—while she’d sat by the window. She had pulled a chair into the path of the low November sun, letting it warm her breasts and shoulders. Stefan was downstairs in the restaurant, Greta with her Grandmother Flynn shopping for Christmas presents in Concord, and for these few rare hours the apartment was Sara’s alone. Twice, she raised herself up, awkward with the bulk of the new child, and wandered down the hall to the open door of the girls’ bedroom, smiling as she watched Agnes sleeping on her belly as usual, one side of her tiny face pressed against the crib sheet, lips puckered as if in anticipation of being fed. Like a young, hungry bird. Little bird. It made her think of how Stefan called Greta his little frog—Fröscbken—and she reminded herself to ask him what little bird meant in German. Little frog and little bird. Humming to herself, she returned to her chair and closed her eyes, letting the sunlight paint the insides of her eyelids the color of pumpkins. It was the third time Sara stood in the doorway of the bedroom that she knew—knew all at once and with undeniable conviction—that her daughter was dead, had been dead each time she had checked in on her in the hope she’d stay silent a bit longer, and she didn’t have to step into the room because she could feel the death—beaks and claws and feathers—pecking at her womb where the new child shifted with sudden violence to remind her of its claim on her.

  Dr. Miles could give her no reasons. Not even after he had taken the small body to the hospital for an autopsy. When he released Agnes to be buried, he tried to comfort Sara by telling her of other infants who’d suddenly stopped breathing without anything obstructing the passage of their breath.

  “Your wife did nothing wrong,” he assured Stefan.

  Sara’s parents arranged the details of the funeral while Stefan stayed with Sara day and night, feeling inarticulate because his own grief felt paltry in the face of her magnificent despair. The day of the service, Lelia Flynn made sure Greta was dressed properly in black, her face clean. “Don’t cry,” she said. While Hardy Flynn reminded Greta to mind her manners, to say hello and thank you, the girl kept her lips closed and stretched her tongue into the high curve of her mouth, trapping the sad words and tears.

  At the cemetery a hole had been hacked into the frozen earth next to Elizabeth, and earth-covered rocks were piled up next to the gravestone. Along the sides of some older graves, mounds of rocks were overgrown with lichen as if, when the grave diggers had opened the earth for death, they’d only returned the soil once the coffin was inside, and what had stayed outside were the leftover rocks, looking almost like another grave, though less orderly.

  As Sara felt Greta’s hand slip into hers, she envied Elizabeth who would get to lie with Agnes beneath the earth as though they had traded children—the wrong mother with the wrong child. Shadows of clouds raced across the granite stone, across the graves and the plateau, toward the islands where the crowns of trees blurred as if painted onto one huge, multicolored surface, while—in the lower rows—their trunks stood separate. Straight and separate. And recognizable. The wrong mother with the wrong child. Sara tightened her fingers around Greta’s. Look after Agnes, she implored Elizabeth. Guide her through wherever she needs to go… I’ll do the same for your child. In life.

  Wind ruffled the blond fuzz on Father Albin’s pink cheeks. After he raised his strong arms to make the final sign of the cross over the coffin, he turned to Stefan and Sara. “It is God’s will to have little Agnes with him and the angels.”

  “God’s will?” Sara whispered, her lips gray. She felt her mother’s touch on her shoulder, felt her sisters and brothers right behind her.

  “You are more blessed than other women,” the priest said, “because you have been graced with another child ready to come into God’s world.” Though the priest’s hoarse words carried the proper sum of compassion, it was still the voice of a man who had not lost a child, a man who could not possibly grasp that kind of loss.

  Blessed— The word filled Sara’s head—blessed blessed—made it hard to breathe, made her drop Greta’s hand and glance around wildly for a paring knife, a scythe even— blessed blessed blessed—anything she could use to slash the priest’s fleshy throat, his pious throat, before he could say more, but then Lelia Flynn’s slend
er shadow darkened the priest’s chest as she stepped between him and Sara, who felt the pulse of her words though she could not hear them because her head was swarming with the blessed blessed bless—

  The townswomen worried that Sara Blau’s grief would mar the soon-to-be-born child. Once it lived outside her body, they could help care for it, of course, wean it from the poison of sorrow that now was its sole sustenance. Till then they did what they could to pull Sara’s will back to the living by bringing her their pies and their gossip; by stitching the softest clothes for her new child; by praying their efforts would lessen Sara’s pain, although—from their own sorrows—they knew only time could diminish them, and even then never fully.

  The morning Sara’s belly rose and hardened, Stefan held her, kissing her forehead again and again until Sara’s mother and Dr. Miles sent him away; and when he stood waiting outside the bedroom door, her mother called out to him to take Greta for a walk to the bakery. After he pulled Greta’s moccasin boots over her ribbed wool stockings, he walked with her along the icy path by the lake to the bakery, where his father-in-law, a slight-shouldered man with broad hips—body shaped like a pine tree, Sara was fond of saying—fed them gingerbread cookies, hot from the oven, and wrapped a loaf of rye for them to take home. On the way they stopped at St. Paul’s where Stefan lit a dozen candles by the side altar.

  For three days after Tobias’ birth, Sara looked radiant, smiling when she held him up and watched his legs uncurl like petals of a tropical plant. The boy had been born with his knees tucked up high, but with every day the muscles in his legs seemed to ease more, and it looked to Stefan as if his son were growing rapidly while he watched him.

  As long as Sara held him, Tobias seemed content; but if Stefan touched him, his bright, curious eyes became guarded and his scrawny body grew rigid. With his wisps of black hair and heart-shaped face he could have been Agnes’ twin: all that stood between those two was time—fourteen months since Agnes had left the shelter of Sara’s womb; fourteen months during which Agnes had lived and died and been buried and Tobias had been born. He even had that same line of copper freckles high across his nose, and by the time he would be a young man, these freckles would have darkened so much that he’d look as if his eyebrows were touching, but once he was in his seventies—when his niece, Emma, would beg him to lift the curse that encumbered the house and their family—his freckles would have paled and merged into a smudge that would make some people want to step up to him and wipe it off with spit the way their grandmother, say, or a favorite aunt might have done.