by Hegi, Ursula
One winter morning, years after his death, when Manfred and I were sitting in the same algebra class, I looked at him from the side and it was as if I could see his father’s vicelike palms around his temples, holding him suspended above the night. I imagined those hands closing around my head, imagined the endless drop from the third floor to the packed dirt of the backyard, felt a cold surprise that made my spine and feet heavy, stiff, and felt the sudden rush of icy night air moving upward through my body.
But Manfred’s father did not drop him.
He held him out of the kitchen window long enough to force his wife, Helga, to tell him where she’d hidden the grocery money, and then he pulled Manfred back into the kitchen and—gently—laid him on the floor.
The Weilers rented a small apartment on the third floor in the other arm of our L-shaped building. In the backyard Manfred and I learned to ride our tricycles. We fought. Played with his dachshund puppy, Ola, which his father had won in a poker game. Escaped together across the fence my father had raised to keep us safe, and ran to the playground of the Catholic school, which we were too young to attend.
When Manfred’s father was sober, he gave us candy sticks and told us all about luck. “You have to believe in it if you want it to work.” He’d pull us along on our tricycles by tying a frayed length of manila rope to our handlebars. He’d step into the loop and—the rope tight against his belly—he’d run while we screeched with laughter. Sometimes, when he had money and the bell of the Hansen bakery truck rang from the street, he bought us Schnecken, and we’d uncoil the glazed pastry ribbons so we could loosen the raisins with our tongues and eat them first.
Manfred’s father had a chicken coop in the backyard, and whenever he slaughtered a chicken, he gave the feet to Manfred and me. We’d chase his older sisters down the stairs and around the yard, pulling the tendons that hung out like pieces of string and made the claws open and close.
One warm day in spring we let out one of the new chicks. Its legs were gawky, its feathers the color of lemon. Careful so it wouldn’t get away from us, we played with it on the ground. It kept drawing its head back like an old man hunching up his shoulders against the wind. Though the sun was out, the earth was still moist from the night’s rain, and whenever the chick staggered and fell, particles of dirt clung to its feathers.
It was Manfred’s idea to give it a bath in one of the puddles, but I was the one who held it submerged in the shallow water. While it tried to squirm from my hands, Manfred rubbed at the dirty spots. A few times it shrieked, but as its feathers plastered themselves against its body, the chick turned silent, skinny.
“It’s stopped moving.” I lifted it from the puddle.
Manfred splashed some water on its head. “Come on you. Wake up.”
Gauzy skin over the hills of its eyes, the chick lay in my palms. My stomach cramped as I tried to push the chick into Manfred’s hands.
“You killed it!” He took a step back. “You’ll be in trouble.”
“I did not!”
“My father—” He started to cry.
“We—we can bury it.”
He sniffled, ran the end of his sleeve under his nose. “Where?”
The chick felt limp, wet. “Over there.” With my chin I motioned toward the white lilac bush outside my parents’ bedroom window. “No one will find it under there.”
The ground was soft enough to dig a shallow grave with our hands among the lilac shoots. We lowered the chick into the hole, covered it with dirt, and tried to flatten the mound with our hands.
“You better stomp it down.” Manfred’s face was streaked with dirt and tears.
“Not me. You do it.”
Perhaps I only imagined the fine crunch of bones below his feet as he stepped on the small grave, but I felt certain I heard something as his soles left deep prints in the earth.
Though his father found out about the dead chick from Manfred’s sister Margit, who’d watched us from their kitchen window, he didn’t punish Manfred. Instead he sat with both of us on the back steps and made us promise not to open the door to the chicken coop again. He didn’t even yell at us. It was one of those times when his eyes were clear and the sleeves of his shirt buttoned. He told us his luck was starting to come back—that he could feel it. I remember loving him for a brief time that day while we sat on the stone steps, loving him for his free laugh and the promise of luck and the excitement in his voice and the way the sun slanted on his blond hair and caught itself in his eyes.
And yet—many nights his shouts and the sounds of things breaking drifted across the yard. When we heard the cries of Manfred and his sisters, my mother turned on the light above our back door. Arms crossed, she stood by the window. The skin around her nostrils turned white, and she looked as if she were about to storm out of the apartment, through the dark backyard, and up the stairs to the Weiler’s apartment.
Sometimes Manfred’s mother knocked at our door, pale and silent and ashamed, a raincoat covering her nightgown. One of the children carried the short-legged brown dog. My mother spread sheets on the sofa for Frau Weiler, and my father blew up air mattresses for Manfred and his two older sisters.
Frau Weiler usually disappeared for a while and returned to her apartment where her husband lay snoring across the bed. Careful not to wake him, she located his trousers on the floor and found his shabby wallet. If he ever missed any of the fives or tens, he didn’t say. Perhaps his wife’s thefts gave him a sense of absolution. Perhaps he was too drunk to remember how much money he’d brought home. Resentful that he was forcing her to do something she detested, she kept taking the money to buy food and replace the children’s outgrown clothes and shoes.
The night Herr Weiler hung himself is framed by facts which Frau Weiler later told the police and the neighbors; yet, within that frame so much is left blank that each time I imagine what happened, the picture changes as I fill in details and try to hush my questions with answers that make sense.
That night—after he held his son from the window and after he found the money in his wife’s summer shoes—Herr Weiler was stunned as he stood there with the bills in his hands. All at once he felt a lightness rolling up in his stomach—laughter. He tried to choke it, to disguise it as a coughing fit. No. It rolled and bounded from within him.
His wife crouched on the floor, her arms around their son. Both stared at him, their faces pale. The window was still open, letting in ice ribbons of wind. His daughters pressed against the wall furthest from him, one of them clutching the dachshund in her arms.
“I’m sorry,” he wheezed, holding his sides. They stung. Stop. It made everything worse, knowing that he shouldn’t laugh, but those sounds that rose from inside him were more powerful than he. He tried to straighten his face into serious lines as he moved toward the door. “I’m sorry,” he said again and stumbled from the apartment.
As he entered the Traube, he felt his shoulders loosen, felt his body melt into the dark warmth of the bar. Smoke circled in irregular swirls to the wooden ceiling. The memory of his son’s face between his hands tugged at him, but he didn’t let it. This was real—the smell of tobacco and beer, the familiar faces. Chairs were moved closer together as his friends made room for him. He felt contentment as if it had a texture of its own, something he could almost touch and hold in his hands.
“He didn’t seem different,” his friends would say in the days to come whenever they talked about his death. “Not different at all.”
When he lifted the heavy mug to his lips, it seemed to float. A pleasant glow started behind his cheekbones. Everything was smooth. When the others got ready to leave, he tried to convince them to have just one more. Half rising from his chair, he laid his hand on someone’s coat sleeve, but the men were already on their way to the door. Heavily, he sank back. He was the only man sitting alone.
He motioned to the waiter. “A round for everyone.”
Faces turned and glasses were raised toward him. But it wasn’t as i
t had been before, and it didn’t last.
“He was still there when we left,” his friends would remind each other. “Alone at the table.”
He got up, staggered to the door. In the cold night air he was caught in a sudden remorse that brought out the sharp smell of sweat all over his body. He didn’t mean to hurt his son. He didn’t mean it. He’d change. He’d tell Helga in the morning. But when he opened the apartment door, she was sitting at the table, hands folded on the bare wood.
“Manfred—” He swallowed hard. “Is Manfred all right?”
Her eyes, unwavering and huge, looked through him.
“Please,” he said, “Helga?”
When she didn’t answer, he rushed toward his son’s bedroom. The shaft of ivory light that fell through the door from the kitchen didn’t reach the bed. He bent closer, stopped. The breathing—he couldn’t hear any breathing. In an instant it brought back to him the many times he’d gotten up in the middle of the night to check on his children when they were infants. All three were healthy; yet, he’d always had the fear that suddenly they might stop breathing. Invariably there would be that endless moment of straining to hear their breath, so faint he’d have to lay two fingers against their fragile necks to reassure himself.
But that was a long time ago and Manfred’s breathing was usually strong. Herr Weiler threw back the covers. The bed was empty. So were his daughters’ beds in the next room.
“Where are they?”
It seemed to cost Helga great effort to part her lips. “Where you can’t hurt them.”
“I would never hurt them. I’m sorry. I promise it won’t happen again. I—” He lowered his face into his hands. His shoulders trembled as he waited for her to say that she forgave him.
But she remained silent.
His hands sank to the table where they lay close to hers, a terrible distance, a distance he saw in her eyes and the line of her chin and the stillness of her body.
“Here—the money—I’ll give it back.” He emptied the leftover bills and coins from his pocket, pushed them toward her on the table.
She didn’t look at the money.
“Please, forgive me.” Suddenly he was afraid that she would disappear like his children.
“You almost killed Manfred.”
“I’m sorry.” The fear tasted like iron in his mouth. If only he could think of something that would make her forgive him. “Maybe I should kill myself,” he heard his voice, quick and high before he had time to think. “If you can’t forgive me, I don’t want to live.”
She didn’t speak.
He looked at the plaster ceiling with its threadlike cracks, at the massive cast iron lamp. “I’ll hang myself.”
Her hands, still folded, tightened.
“Please, Helga—”
Her eyes were dark.
In the closet he found the coil of manila rope. Placing his chair under the lamp, he stepped onto it, steadying himself with one hand on the back rest. She’d forgive him. She had to. All he needed was another chance to show her he could change. He tied a loop and guided the rope through it. His hands felt frozen. Throwing the other end of the rope over the top of the lamp, he pulled it until the noose was next to his face. The weight of the loop kept forcing the sliding noose down, and he had to adjust it to the right height before securing the rope to the lamp. Any moment now Helga would stop him. Surely now she would have to tell him that she believed him, that she forgave him.
“Is this what you want?” he asked and opened the noose far enough to thrust his head through. It slid easily down to his neck, and he was surprised at its lightness. “Helga? It’s up to you, Helga.”
As a child he had liked to stand on the wine-red chair in his parents’ living room, scanning the street far below where people and bicycles and cars moved in barely changing patterns; he became so familiar with the way things appeared from above that—even when he was outside and on the same level he knew what they looked like from a distance as if he had absorbed a double yet lucid exposure of their image.
He saw himself like that now, standing on the chipped kitchen chair, the rope loosely around his neck, its other end fastened to the lamp, and he was aware of every detail in the room at once: the blue and white linoleum squares, the fine cracks in the ceiling, the dog’s water dish in the space below the sink. His cheeks ached. This was as far as he could go. He tried to postpone the moment when he would have to take off the noose and admit to Helga that even this was just another lie. If she gets up, he wagered, everything will be all right. If—if someone knocks at the door…
“Do you want me to die?”
She brought her folded hands to her face and opened them, ran them across her eyes as if to clear away a vision.
“Please, Helga, say something.” He longed to touch her face, trace the lines that ran from the sides of her nose to the corners of her mouth. Sometimes at night, when she was asleep, he’d roll over on his right side and fit himself along the curve of her body. His left hand on her stomach, he’d bury his face against the back of her neck and breathe in the fresh, bitter scent of camomile; she rinsed her hair with tea she brewed from the yellow and white blossoms that grew along the Rhein. He’d cup her breasts with his hands, coaxing her from sleep toward the moment when she woke softly, her body aroused before her mind had cleared. It was always a gamble—depending on how she woke up. If it was too abrupt, she’d twist from his embrace and turn from him. In the morning she wouldn’t even remember that he’d tried. But if her body awoke before her mind, she’d drowsily receive him, her hands moving down his back as her body arched up against him. Yet, sometimes his luck felt too flimsy and he couldn’t take that chance. He’d get up instead, careful not to wake her as he adjusted the blanket around her shoulders.
“Helga, please, say something.” He ran two fingers between the rope and his neck. How dark her eyes were. Didn’t she see him at all or was she looking right through him? I’m just unlucky, he thought. Nothing ever goes right for me. Even my children are afraid of me. And Helga. She doesn’t think I mean this. I’ll show her. By God, I’ll show her. Then she’ll have to believe me. Then she’ll—
Before he could stop himself, he stepped from the edge of the chair with his right foot. No, something within him screamed. No. I didn’t mean it. But as he tried to regain his balance with his other foot, the chair toppled over, the sound of its fall like something crashing far away. Put it back, Helga, put it back, he wanted to cry, but his words were gagged. Falling, falling, he felt the noose tighten around his neck. His feet kicked, stretched for the floor, just out of reach. As his hands flew up to ease the pressure around his throat, he felt as though two large thumbs were pressing against his temples.
Through a whirl of red and yellow circles he saw Helga at a great distance, growing smaller, as her hands gripped the edge of the table. Faster the colors twirled, faster, becoming one with searing pain and lightness.
• • •
This is the only memory that’s entirely mine about that night, a memory I don’t have to expand with imagined details to make it whole: Manfred and his sisters sleeping with their dog, Ola, in our living room; Frau Weiler coming to our door early the next morning, her face chalky, her voice without tone as she tells her children and us: “It’s all over now.”
I remember the funeral, remember Margit’s marriage to a florist from Oberkassel, Manfred’s departure for military training in Frankfurt. But all that happened later. Much later. And whenever I think of Manfred’s parents in their kitchen I see him standing on the chair while his wife sits silently at the table. I want to stop that image, keep it from moving toward an ending that continues to haunt me, preserve it in that instant before Herr Weiler kicks over the chair, that instant when Frau Weiler can still accept his promises. Fixed in my mind, they have stayed like this—in that instant when everything is still possible, when luck lies suspended and wants to mold itself into a new beginning.
The Truth About the Amer
ican Soldier
If anyone had told me Rolf Brocker would be the first boy I’d kiss, I would have kicked shins. Jealous of the caring his mother gave me, he taunted me whenever he could and shoved me when others weren’t looking. He was taller than I, stronger, but three weeks younger. One April, when he discovered that I had locked out his mother during a rainstorm, he pulled me into an empty doorway after church and pressed me against the wall with the weight of his body. Around his neck hung a small crucifix on a silver chain.
“Just because your parents pay her to clean up after you—” His eyes were dark. Angry. “—doesn’t mean you can play stupid pranks on her.”
“That’s not why.” I played pranks on her because she believed everything. Usually she ended up laughing with me, even if she started out angry. But it didn’t seem like a good idea to tell this to Rolf.
He smelled of chalk and fresh grass clippings as he leaned against me, his body flat and hard, so different from eight years before when he’d first come to our house with his mother and we’d fought, even wrestled, over toys and snacks and games. A pudgy boy with sullen eyes, he’d lost many of our fights because I was faster and, for a few years at least, bigger. Every morning when he arrived with Frau Brocker, my mother would seclude herself in the third-floor studio where she painted all day. It was the year before Rolf and I began school, but even then we seldom played well together.
“My father was killed in the war,” Rolf had told me when we met, and I’d believed him until Trudi Montag had told me that Rolf was illegitimate, that his father was an American. “One of the soldiers who was stationed here the end of the war.”
The rough stucco of the doorway pressed into my back. “Let me go, Rolf.” I brought my hands between us, pushed them against his stomach. The lace collar of my Sunday dress cut into my neck.
