by Ursula Hegi
“Here.” Helene crouched to help him raise himself up.
As he looked at the wide face of his third wife, he felt a sudden fear of death—hers… her death? But there was something not right about that fear. He yanked himself back into the kitchen where Helene’s hands were pulling him up, yanked himself back to what he knew: that this wife was healthy, strong; however, just then, he felt it again, that fear, as though it were a separate person standing there in the kitchen, and he knew his wife felt that fear too, except that she felt it about him—my death?—and it was then that Stefan knew he was the one who would die, knew it in the way you touch your own arm in the dark and know it’s yours, in the way you know that light flitting over the lake’s surface comes from above, not below.
So that’s how it is.
But before he was going to die, he had to let his wife know what he wanted to happen with the Wasserburg. Heavily, he leaned against her. “Lenchen—”
“Let me get you to a chair. Hold on.”
“Wichtig—important.” From his knees to his feet to the chair.
“What is it?”
“Halte alles zusammen—keep everything together.”
“Ich werde das Richtige tun—I’ll do the right thing.”
And he knew she would. Knew he didn’t have to specify that, eventually, she would leave everything to his children. “Don’t sell it, Lenchen.”
Again she promised, “Ich werde das Richtige tun.”
He nodded, relieved. His wife would do the right thing—just as she had done the right thing in raising the children of Elizabeth and Sara as though they were her own, never preferring Robert over them. Fair, she was, his wife. Fair even in allocating her love.
Sterne. Stars. Their patterns and legends. More familiar to him now than in half a century. Because he was approaching them with the words in which he had first learned about them. My mother’s words. That’s why he could teach Emma about the Sterne: he did not have to translate them to her. With his own children the Sterne had eluded him because of the translation. And therefore had been lost to his children. But now that the Sterne had come near him once again, shifting the entire sky closer to earth, he marveled at their fabulous stubbornness, their wisdom, and took delight in revealing them to his granddaughter.
For her he set up the telescope that Helene had brought back from Germany when Robert had been Emma’s age. What happened to all those years in between? Faded. Even the wanting that used to drive him had faded, had become a recollection. How often had he deluded himself with the wanting that he trusted to get him what he set out for? What had he missed while rushing from one achievement to the next, convinced he was doing the best for his family? Instead it had been much more about the finest satisfaction he knew—the satisfaction that came from effort and success.
Oh, but he could still recognize that wanting in others, even in the son who disappointed him because he was too mild to ask for anything beyond the piano, but who was manifesting his silent wanting in the mass of his body. But there was nothing silent about Emma, his favorite, who’d been born with his furious wanting in her blood, and for now, her wanting was directed toward him and the Wasserburg.
Mornings, as soon as she’d wake up, she’d insist on visiting him.
“You’re too heavy for Opa,” Helene would say when she’d catch Emma climbing on his knees.
“Let her,” he’d say. And though it sometimes made him dizzy to play “Hoppe, hoppe Reiter…” with her, he still did that too. For her.
Even if his arms ached after letting her drop and pulling her up again.
Even if Helene fretted that Emma would hurt him. “She’ll be the death of you.”
But he’d laugh, not knowing that Emma would remember those words and carry them with her after his death. “She’ll be the death of you.” He found he didn’t need much—far less than he’d ever thought—as he moved deeper into the German language and took Emma with him, connecting her to all he’d left behind in Burgdorf as a boy. “Someday I’ll take you there,” he said.
“We’ll make a list of things to bring.”
“A list… ja.”
Here she was, six years old, and the spark between them was all that mattered. But it had taken him his entire life to get to her, and all they would ever have together were these brief years where their lives overlapped. If you knew, he wondered, if you knew you’d only get that kind of love once—would you want it at the beginning of your life or the end? Oh, but he wanted more for Emma. Still, if six years were all you were given—what would I have chosen for her? The first six years or the last?
Opa took a lot of short naps in his leather chair—her mother said he had little strokes—and sometimes Emma would watch him sleep and dab her fingertips at the prickly red-and-silver hairs on the backs of his hands, gently, so she wouldn’t wake him. When she was with him—even while he was asleep like that—she’d feel quiet and pink inside, and as she’d breathe with him, for him, she’d feel the house all around her, breathing along, helping her to keep him alive. The house was as much a part of Opa as his heart, and often her love for both felt undistinguishable.
Some days she’d surprise him by slipping a treat for him into his toolbox—a picture she’d drawn of him or a Christmas ornament she’d snitched from Mr. Hedge’s tree—but Opa never got well enough to return with her to the elevator housing. Days when Opa was too sick to have her visit, she’d take solace in following her brother and telling him Opa’s stories of Burgdorf. Caleb would fill in the gaps that surrounded these stories with stories of his own that sometimes had little to do with what had actually happened, stories that Emma would eventually tell the son she would name after her grandfather. That’s how Opa swimming in the Rhein became the story of how he almost drowned and was saved by his sister, Margret. That’s how, at the wedding, every single one of Oma’s students, past and present, came to honor her. In Caleb’s stories Opa played the lead in all the plays in the Montags’ attic, and winters in Burgdorf were so harsh and sudden that the ferry would get trapped by slabs of ice in the middle of the Rhein and sit there for months.
With each new story, Caleb would carry a more detailed picture of Burgdorf, part true and part distorted, not unlike the way his grandfather, as a boy, had believed all of America to be occupied by tall buildings and buffaloes. It made Caleb grasp how—if you yearn for a place you’ve never been to—what you’ve heard about it will fuse with what you envision, engendering something far more real than you will find if you’re ever to come to that place. Then, of course, you will have to adjust how it first resided in your soul.
Half dozing in his leather chair, Stefan watched Emma count her Halloween candy and print the words she’d learned in school that day: DOG, LOG, BOG … “Don’t forget FOG,” he said and heard the voice of the Hungarian, “… too much fog out there.” Only Tibor didn’t say it right—but who am I to tell him, an immigrant myself?—said fock instead of fog while the others in the kitchen were laughing and yelling that they wanted some of that fock if there was too much fock out there for the Hungarian, teasing him even months later that it was very focky outside or asking him, “Hey, Tibor, have you had a good fock lately?”
Stefan tried to laugh, but his face felt numb. Ghosts. Some burned dead. Along with Tibor who led me to New Hampshire, who still comes to me. The slant of his back as he limps toward a stove. Specks of cinnamon and tobacco in the lining of his pockets … As the numbness spread into Stefan’s skull, he was back on the Dutch freighter, bending across the injured seagull, its frail cry rising from Stefan’s own throat, the wound in its back becoming Stefan’s, a wound so deep it pierces his chest—now, as one day I too will have to die alone? Now?—and as the membrane across the seagull’s eye dims Stefan’s sight of his living room, he feels the flutter of small fingers on his arm, Emma’s, as she ties his shadow to his chair.
“Opa? There now … Opa? Wake up? I said wake up!”
He heard Emma breathe—in out
in out in out in—and suddenly, suffocated by the splendor of the Wasserburg, by the costly weight of every single tile and brick and timber pressing down on him, he understood that the vision he’d seen from the rowboat that longago day had contaminated something within him. He wanted to warn Emma, but when he raised his eyelids once more—now? alone? as one day I too—she was standing by his chair, one hand plucking at the long-burned stubble on his wrist, the other covering her mouth, and as he recalled that she, too, had been part of his vision, he felt terrified for her.
The morning of his funeral she awoke with red imprints of her fingernails on her palms from clutching her sorrow inside her fists all night. She’ll be the death of you. Emma will be the death of you. And still climbing back on his knees. Once she opened her fists, her sorrow was everywhere, in her father’s eyes, in the drinking water, in her Oma’s steps one floor above her.
Slow, Helene’s movements were slow as she dressed. Now and again she’d find herself stopped altogether and would need to remind herself to do whatever was next: attach your stockings to your garters; button the cuffs of your dress; buckle your belt; brush your hair; put on the emeralds. She felt tired as she opened her jewelry box, reached for the necklace Stefan had given her on their tenth anniversary. During the night she’d read some of the letters she’d written to him but had never mailed, and as she’d looked at the familiar slant of her writing and tried to recall the passion she’d felt for him, it was as though she were reading the words of someone she didn’t know very well. What surprised her was that he—at a time not so long ago—had been able to draw words from her that struck her as far too dramatic now, reminding her of stories she’d read of bundled love letters discovered in some ancient trunk. But then she opened the very first letter she’d kept from her husband—That love is a hollow ache, a constant part of me that makes it difficult for me to be near you…—and was right back to the day she’d written those words, right back to the old sorrow that fused with her sorrow over his death. Other letters. You’ve drawn back with such a cruelty that confuses me, that contradicts what I believed we would have between us. It was hard to continue reading. I fall asleep and wake with the awareness of your indifference. And yet, as she held the letters, she preferred that old sorrow to the caution that had set in afterwards.
Four decades she had been married to him, though people back home had predicted she’d be an old maid forever. Even Agathe Lange who’d been about to become a nun. “I’m so pleased it’s your wedding. I never thought you—”
Silly bride of Christ.
Silly pious bride of Christ.
I did better than you.
Got myself a bridegroom in the flesh—not on the cross.
And I did not hate you that day of my wedding.
Then why now? She wanted to smash Agathe Lange’s pious face. Sister Agathe, pardon me. Smash the silly pious face of the silly pious bride of Christ. Smash Stefan’s face for betraying her with his absence of passion. Stop it. Make yourself do whatever is next. The necklace. Put it on. As she fastened it around her neck, it suddenly stood for everything Stefan had given her—opulent and uncomfortable—and she resolved to wear it from this day forward. To keep Stefan and her rage present for herself, she would continue to dress in black like the widows she had known as a girl in Burgdorf. Against the black of her clothes, those green stones would look so remarkable that within weeks of her husband’s funeral, the people of Winnipesaukee would remember her as having always worn that necklace; and they would come to think of her as the Widow Blau who wore her grief in public, who made others speechless with her grief; and they would tell one another she was the most beautiful old woman they had ever seen.
‘Like she was always meant to be old,’ they would say.
1953–1956
Inside St. Paul’s church the air was clotted with prayers and incense and flowers that surrounded Stefan’s coffin. Father Creed had arrived on the train from Boston to say mass, and nearly everyone in town was there—merchants and teachers; tenants from the Wasserburg; people who’d eaten at Stefan’s Cadeau du Lac. At his grave, Helene stood between Greta and Robert, with Danny Wilson close behind her as if he were prepared to catch her if she fell. As she heard English spoken around her, she felt herself re-entering a wider world she used to be part of before she’d joined Stefan in the language of their childhood.
Tobias’ absence was so noticeable that it felt like a presence. When Greta had called him—angry with him for many months now because he hadn’t visited their father—she had told him about their father’s death as though he had caused it. “He’s dead and you were not here.”
“I am sorry.”
“Is that all?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Are you coming to the funeral at least?”
“I can’t. It’s a promise I made to myself when I was eleven.”
“This is not about you, Tobias.”
“I know.”
“And you’re no longer eleven and building matchstick animals.”
“Believe me, it’s hard for me not to come to his funeral.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“I do want to be there for my family, but I need to do this for myself.”
“This is not about you.”
This is not about you. But then, ironically, early this morning it had all turned and become about her—about her and Noah—when he’d come to her apartment for breakfast after staying at the rectory overnight. While she told him about her phone call to Tobias, he stood in the middle of her kitchen, shy and stubborn and looking at her so closely that her skin strained toward his. She did not ask him to sit down. Did not offer him coffee. Did not turn on her stove. When she took off her thick glasses, Noah brought both hands to her face and held her in his palms like the most valuable offering he’d made at any altar in his lifetime. Though she didn’t care if God sanctioned or condemned them, she felt certain he was their witness, evoked by the priest’s loyalty to this God as much as by her respect for the priest’s loyalty.
And somehow their witness did not hinder them, but rather filled them with sacred purpose. Their bodies had fought so long to uphold a wall to keep their flesh from touching, but now that they finally lay on her bed with daylight on their skin, touching became more than they had imagined in their loneliness. What was happening between them was totally right and totally wrong, was what it all had come to—those many hours of talking, of writing letters to each other—and God was here with them in this love, the kind of love that should have been celebrated in a church or at least a sacristy.
Her hands followed Noah’s bony limbs where they sprung from his body to where they tapered off in fingers and toes, traced the pattern of gray hair around his genitals, weighed his warm testicles in one palm. God was not her rival. God was the high priest who measured the union between them. She kept her eyes open when Noah Creed’s hands and mouth found all of her, and though she had known it would be like this, she had not known all of it, had not known how deeply it would resound in her, how her body would demand its own way as it surpassed reason and fantasy. The voice of her body rode her, pressed her back. It taught her to open herself to Noah, to hold nothing from him or herself. Taught her to not feel embarrassed by her soft thighs and belly, by the coarse skin beneath her feet. And then he was ready too and she was whispering, “here, here,” though what she meant was now. Now.
He expected both of them to be clumsier, less certain, but there was a grace about their coupling as if they had decades of holding and loving. As her hips rose to meet him once again, Noah understood what prayer could be because he became his own messenger to a God who certainly would understand, who had understood all along. Not in spite of God. But with Him. Because of Him this rapture. And praise.
“This is not about you,” Greta had told her brother, and at her father’s grave site she was still angry at him, unaware that Tobias had started out for the funeral that morning and driven as
far as Concord before a ridge of nausea had slammed up in front of him, forcing him to the side of the highway. As he leaned his forehead against the steering wheel, he saw himself as a boy stepping on his miniature animals and knew that if he went to the funeral he would undo the vow that had kept him and Agnes alive. Sane. Circling through my blood—someone like me; almost like me. “Through your severed head,” he whispered to himself, summoning the steam-filled drying room and the bleeding head of the dream-calf that always instilled in him that odd mix of power and guilt and revenge. And of being damned by this image. “Your bloody head. And I won’t come to your funeral.”
Robert kept looking for his brother at the cemetery and later in the lobby of the Wasserburg where Pearl Bloom and several other women had set up tables and food. When he reached for a piece of chocolate, Yvonne caught his wrist before he could take off the silver foil.
She dropped it back into the glass dish. “Let’s have some vegetables and turkey.”
“We’ll die anyhow.” He picked up the piece of chocolate once more, unwrapped it, and slipped it into his mouth.
“I am sorry about your father.”
He nodded. Turned from her to help Pearl light the candles.
Yvonne adjusted the belt of her black chiffon dress. “We should sit with your mother and the children.”
Eating, he swallowed the loss of his father, swallowed it over and over, and as its sharp edges were smothered, he thought of Miss Garland and how she used to love those dinners. He refilled his plate—corn niblets with butter; chicken and gravy; sliced tomatoes—secured his napkin between the buttons of his new black suit jacket, and listened to the hum of food inside his temples until a sleepy feeling came upon him.
“You’re humming,” Yvonne whispered.
Startled, he looked up from his plate.
“You were.”
“I didn’t notice.”
“I don’t mind,” his mother said.
