by Hegi, Ursula
“Promise you’ll leave my mother alone?”
I’d never noticed the downy hairs that grew along his chin and cheeks. His ears lay close to the sides of his head. Suddenly my face felt hot. I tried to duck out from under his arm.
He caught my wrist.
“I promise,” I shouted, running from him.
But the following week Renate and I staged the worst prank yet on Rolf’s mother. We set up two chairs with a wide gap between them, and when we covered them with my plaid blanket, it looked as if we had three chairs instead. Below the gap we set a water-filled tin tub from our basement.
After we cut out a crown from stiff silver paper, Renate and I sat on the two chairs, the blanket taut between us.
“Frau Brocker,” I yelled, “can you help us with our play?”
When she came into my room, her face looked flushed. She’d been in the kitchen, boiling handkerchiefs and underwear. Though we had a washing machine in the cellar, she did the white laundry on the stove, insisting it wouldn’t get clean otherwise. “What is it?” she asked.
“A play we have to practice,” I said. “You are the princess.”
“And we’re the ministers of the kingdom.” Renate shifted her wad of chewing gum to the inside of her other cheek.
“The old king has died”—I slowly raised the crown—“and it is our privilege to tell you that you have been chosen as his successor to the throne.”
“What do I do now?” Frau Brocker’s plucked eyebrows were penciled in brown. She wiped her palms on the front of her yellow dress.
“We, the ministers of the kingdom,” Renate said, “would like you to accept his crown and wear it with grace. Please”—she motioned to the blanket between us—“be seated on the throne.”
With both hands Frau Brocker lowered the silver crown onto her hair. “Right here, between you two?”
“Right here.” Lightly, I patted the blanket next to me.
She smiled and took a step forward.
I tried not to look at Renate whose chin was trembling. “The old king would want it this way,” I said in my most dignified voice.
The instant Frau Brocker sat down, Renate and I leapt up. The blanket around her back, she dropped into the tub of water. Her dress slipped up to the top of her nylons, exposing salmon-colored garters and slender thighs. Renate and I screeched with laughter. I felt it warm and low in my stomach, and rocked myself back and forth.
Renate danced around, one hand pressed against the front of her skirt. “I’m going to pee in my pants,” she gasped. “I will … I swear.”
But Frau Brocker didn’t laugh with us. The startled look on her face changed to pain.
All at once I felt sick at what I’d done to her. “Let me help you up—please?” I held out my hands.
She let out a moan. “I don’t think I can.”
Her buttocks were wedged in the small tin tub I’d been bathed in as an infant, and it took Renate and me several minutes to pull her out. Water had seeped through the cotton of her yellow dress, turning it darker, heavier. I felt the weight of her humiliation as she stood there in her wet dress. She didn’t even look angry. Just tired. And so pale that her lipstick was like ink.
It didn’t take Rolf long to find me. The next morning, when I passed the brook at the end of Schreberstrasse on my way to school, he stepped from behind a tree and blocked my path without saying a word. His dark brown hair fell over his eyebrows.
I wanted to tell him how awful I felt about hurting his mother, but I knew he wouldn’t believe me. He’d only think I was a coward. “I’m not afraid of you,” I said.
He squinted at me and crossed his arms in front of his windbreaker.
“What do you want?” I hooked my thumbs through the straps of my knapsack.
“I told you to leave her alone.” One of his hands shot forward and grabbed my elbow. “Didn’t I?”
“Get away from me, you—”
“And you promised, right?” His fingers dug into my funny bone.
I cried out.
“I guess Hanna Malter’s promise doesn’t mean a damn thing.” Still holding onto my elbow, he dragged me toward the brook.
As I fought to escape his grip, my shoes slipped along the muddy slope. “If you get me wet—”
That’s when he pushed me. I tumbled into the icy brook. My knapsack fell forward over my head, pulling my face underwater. When I raised myself on my hands and knees, my hair hung in cold strands across my cheeks. I spit out the fishy-tasting water, pressed down my plaid skirt as it ballooned around me.
Rolf stood at a safe distance, too far to splash. “How does it feel?” His hands in the pockets of his jacket, he squinted at me.
I started shaking—from cold and shame and fear of what I was about to say—and kept shaking as I shouted at him, “At least I know who my father is! At least I’m not an illegitimate bastard like you!”
He ran and kept running until he reached the Rhein, which still flowed high from the last flood. The fine mist that rose from the river coated his face and seeped between the collar of his jacket and his skin. Illegitimate. When he’d heard the word, it had taken him a moment to absorb it. Another moment to doubt it. But then he knew. Knew forever. And beyond. As though the knowledge had always been with him. He felt certain everyone in Burgdorf knew. He remembered his mother’s uneasiness when he’d asked her about his father, what he’d been like, and her reluctance to speak of him at all. Then the story about the fire in the kitchen—lies—all of them. Lies.
An Esso container ship made its way upstream, spitting foamy streaks of water from its back. Some of the freighters had cars parked on top. Most of them flew the German flag.
“Your father was killed in the war soon after you were born,” his mother had told him when he was four. “He was a soldier.”
When he’d begun asking questions, that answer was enough, but soon he wanted to know more. “Why don’t we have any pictures of him?”
“They—they burned. We had a fire in the kitchen right after you were born.”
Rolf stopped next to a huge willow that spread into five powerful arms where the trunk thickened above ground. Some of them were so long they hung into the river. He climbed into the dip formed by the branches of the tree. Above him, the many new leaves made a lacy pattern filled in by gray slivers of sky.
“But what did my father look like?” he had asked his mother.
“His hair was lighter than yours. He was tall and his eyes were—it’s been such a long time, Rolf.”
Finally she told him that his father’s name was Walter. Rolf liked the name: Walter. It had a clear, strong sound like water rushing over rocks. Once he’d found an old photo at the bottom of her jewelry box. It showed a man whose age was hard to tell because a web of creases ran across his face and body. Taken against a light background with the sun shining, the photo was altogether too faded to make out the man’s features. It looked as though a thin layer of light had wrapped itself around him and, for an instant—not more than one beat of his pulse—Rolf knew he was seeing his father.
In the mirror he sometimes stared at his dark eyes, at the wide features that resembled his mother’s, and he was seized by a longing for his father that stayed with him for days before it lifted, a cold weight deep inside that could return at any moment.
At times he imagined his father tall with reddish hair, a low voice, and kind eyes. Almost like Hanna’s father who’d taught him to play chess when he was seven. With hands that were gentle even when they drilled his teeth. Some days Rolf came by Hanna’s house to pick up his mother after work, but his real reason was to see Hanna’s father, who usually stopped what he was doing and talked with him.
“My father was killed in the war,” Rolf had told him during one of their talks and, after a brief instant, Herr Malter had nodded. “I’m sorry, Rolf.” Then he’d taken his wooden chessboard from the carved chest in the living room. “Would you like to stay for a game?”
&nb
sp; “My father was killed in the war,” Rolf had told Hanna and the other kids, even the teachers, for all those years. Many of the children in Burgdorf had lost their fathers in the war, but they were all older than he. In 1946, when he was born, the war had been over for a year.
“Your father was killed in the war soon after you were born. …” Just a few hours earlier he’d still believed her.
Crouched in the heart of the willow, Rolf shivered. His stomach ached, and he pressed both hands against it. In a couple of months raspberries and red currants would grow along the Rhein. Below him lay pebbles in shades of brown and gray and white, some of them half buried in the sand. He would have liked to fling them at Hanna. She had everything—her own room with books and toys, two parents, even his mother, who always picked up after her.
Around the middle of the afternoon the sun appeared briefly in the sky, and when it vanished, it sucked into itself most of the light that had streaked the Rhein, replacing it with a somber gray that settled low among the boulders and shrubs, blotting out their shapes.
• • •
They began the search for Rolf late that evening—after his mother had found out he hadn’t been in school, after his friends had been asked if they’d seen him.
Nobody questioned me.
When I’d returned wet and cold that morning, my teeth chattering, I’d told Frau Brocker that I’d slipped and fallen into the brook. “I’m sorry,” I said to her. “I really am.” And I was. But she acted as if I were talking about getting my clothes wet and made me take a hot bath, wear my flannel pajamas, and stay in bed all day with a hot-water bottle at my feet.
My parents were among dozens of adults who searched for Rolf while I lay awake, waiting for their return. It was silent in our apartment, silent and too hot. I imagined Rolf somewhere alone with his pain. My face burned, but my hands felt like ice. I threw off my covers. From the drawer in my night table I took out the blue journal Veronika had given me.
My parents had taken my flashlight as well as the large one from the kitchen. I pictured a file of flickering light beams in the woods near the abandoned flour mill and among the piles of debris at the dump, along the river and around the quarry hole. I imagined their voices calling his name—short sounds swallowed by the darkness. What if Rolf lay somewhere with a broken leg or, worse yet, what if he were dead?
He had to be all right. He had to be. But what would he say when they found him? Suddenly I was afraid of him. Everyone would be angry at me, especially my parents. Frau Brocker would quit her job. Herr Pastor Beier would assign me hours of prayer. I wrote in my journal about what I had done to Rolf. If only I could find him first. If only I could talk to my parents about what I had said. But with each hour they stayed out, my crime seemed to grow, and by the time they came back at daybreak, cold and tired, it was impossible to tell them.
Frau Brocker did not come in that morning. When I got dressed, my parents were sleeping. I packed my knapsack for school but hid it behind the lilac bush in our backyard. The least I could do was search for Rolf. If my parents found out I’d skipped classes, it was nothing compared to what I’d already done.
Rolf woke to the sound of waves slapping against the jetties, and in that blurred moment of emerging from sleep, he was six again and the water was slapping against the side of his house while he knelt on a chair, looking from the fourth-floor window into the street where people were floating in rowboats and kayaks.
He blinked. That had happened the year the dike in Burgdorf had broken. The Rhein had frozen, blocking the flow of water, and when the ice melted, masses of water pressed forward until the river left the bed where it belonged. It flooded the meadows and raged against the dike which people tried to support with sand-filled burlap bags and slabs of sod. But the river forced a gap into the barricade and icy water rushed through, widening the break; it washed across streets, spilled down basement steps, and climbed up table legs on all first floors.
People moved their belongings to the upper stories of their houses. Rolf helped Herr Flemern, who lived downstairs, up the steps, guiding the old man’s skinny elbow as he wheezed and stopped on each landing. Rolfs mother took in the retired tailor although their apartment had only one bedroom, which she shared with Rolfs grandmother. She let the old man sleep on the living room sofa—Rolfs bed—and pushed together two overstuffed chairs in front of the window as a sleeping area for Rolf.
For five days and nights long threads of rain linked the sky to the surface of the gray water, which rose steadily. In St. Martin’s Church the water covered the pews, and Herr Pastor Beier held mass at the chapel which stood on a hill far from the dike.
That Sunday Hanna’s father picked up Rolf and his mother in a rowboat to take them to the chapel. He smiled at Rolf as he lifted him into the boat. Sitting on the dentist’s knees, Rolf helped move the oars through the sluggish water. If his father were alive, he’d row the boat with him just like this. Hanna’s father tied the boat to a maple at the bottom of the hill where other boats were already fastened to trees and fences. He held Rolfs hand as they walked in their Sunday clothes up the path toward the white chapel, but when Rolf saw that Hanna and her mother were already waiting, he pulled his hand away. More pigeons than he’d ever seen sat on the bell tower and slate roof; they screeched from the crowns of the poplars and swarmed low above the waters that covered the surrounding wheat fields.
The flood drenched the cemetery and toppled several headstones; it uprooted many of the shrubs that adorned the graves and left long indentations in the earth as if some of the coffins had been stolen.
As the slapping of waves against the jetties blended with the sounds that Rolf remembered from the flood, his eyes closed. He felt drowsy, heavy, and just before he sagged into sleep, he recalled seeing straw in the upper branches of some trees after the gray waters had receded.
When I found him half hidden by the leaves of the willow, he was lying on his side, knees drawn up to his chest. Even in his sleep he shivered. His face looked pale and damp, and as I tried to think of a way to wake him without startling him, he opened his eyes and stared at me without moving. His eyes were three different shades of brown, lightest around the pupils, then darkening and ending in a deep brown ring where the white started. All at once I felt I didn’t know him at all—my enemy for years—and because I didn’t know him, I could say anything. Or nothing. I stared back at him.
“What do you want?” His voice made me jump.
I touched his sleeve. Pulled back my hand. “They’ve been searching for you all night.”
“Go away.” He sat up. Hunched his shoulders as if to hide himself in the hollow formed by his body.
I took a long breath, then another. “I—I was rotten. I shouldn’t have said—”
“Who told you about him?” The right side of his face was red and puckered where the bark had pressed into it.
“Trudi Montag.”
He groaned. “That means everyone knows.”
Two ducks bobbed around the submerged trunk of a willow. A brisk wind moved the smaller branches. I rubbed my arms.
“I hate her,” he said, “for not telling me. For having me.” He rested his head on his knees. His voice sounded hoarse. “What else do you know about him?”
“That he is an-American.”
“What?”
“He was stationed in Burgdorf for a while—in the house where you live.” I looked away from him. The sand was dark and wet above the water line. “I guess that’s when they—your mother and he—you know …”
“What else?”
A freighter passed by, raising waves that broke against the embankment.
“Hanna—what else?” Even then he was good at persisting with questions which pushed you into answers you didn’t want to give. It was a skill he would develop further in law school and court, a skill which would earn him a certain admiration from the people in Burgdorf where he would choose to set up his practice fifteen years later.
> “Hanna—”
I twisted my left foot from side to side, worked it through the top layer of pebbles and sand. “He was married.”
He started to cry then—long, raging sobs that made me want to bolt. I climbed into the willow next to him. He smelled like my wool coat after it got drenched in the rain. Cautiously I laid one hand on his shoulder and when he didn’t pull away, I rubbed back and forth across the trembling I felt through his windbreaker.
“Did he have other kids?”
“I don’t know.”
He wiped one sleeve across his face. Sniffled, “Then find out.”
“You could ask your mother.”
“No,” he said. “No.”
“Or my parents.”
He shook his head. “Ask Trudi Montag,” he said. “And then come back here.”
“Here? It’s cold. Besides—everyone’s worried about you. They’ve been searching for you all night.”
“Who?”
“My parents. Matthias Berger. The Talmeisters. Frau Weiler. Lots of people. Your mother …”
“If you tell her where I am—”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“How do I know?”
That’s when I did it—pressed my lips against his, so hard I could feel his teeth beneath the softness. He sat very still, and I didn’t pull away. Eyes open, we stared at each other. His lips were dry, his mouth larger than mine. It seemed like a long time since I’d been afraid of him.
“How—” I swallowed and moved my head back. “How about after I find out more—will you come back with me then?”
He nodded. With one thumb he pushed a strand of hair from my face. “I think so,” he said.
• • •
Before I left, I promised him once more I wouldn’t tell anyone where he was hiding. It was a promise I kept despite the conviction that what I was doing was getting worse. If Rolf disappeared from the willow and never returned—I tried not to imagine him running along the river in the direction of Düsseldorf or floating away on one of the barges.
