Ursula Hegi The Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set: Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River, The Vision of Emma Blau. Children and Fire

by Hegi, Ursula

  In school you also learned it was wrong to question anything that had to do with God and the saints. You had to believe. And for answers that demonstrated your belief you received holy cards—pictures of saints with rings of light around their raised heads. Questions were doubts. Doubts were sins. Even wondering why the Holy Ghost looked like a pigeon was a doubt. Or trying to figure out how that pigeon stayed up in the air between God and Jesus without having to flap its wings like other pigeons.

  “There are things we do not ask.…”

  “If God had wanted us to know, he would have sent us proof, but God wants us to believe.…”

  But for Trudi, questions that weren’t answered kept prodding at her. When she asked Sister Mathilde what God ate, the sister said, “God is nourished by his own eternal love,” and when Trudi wanted to know how Jesus could change from being God to being that small, heavy boy on the shoulder of St. Christopherus, the sister told Trudi. “This is what faith is all about—believing what cannot be explained.”

  But it wasn’t only during religion lessons that the sister talked about God. God and the saints had a way of appearing in every subject.

  “If Saint Hedwig has ten plums and there are five lepers—how many plums will she give to each leper?”

  “When God made the world, where did he put the North Sea?”

  “It pleases the Virgin Mother when she sees tidy handwriting.”

  The prettiest statue of the Virgin Mother was kept in the church basement, but the last day of November it was dusted off and displayed on the side altar of St. Martin’s, part of the nativity scene. Maria’s gown was the color of heaven, and her mouth curved in a cryptic smile as she knelt next to the pile of straw where the Christ Child lay. St. Josef looked rather stodgy and old, like Herr Blau, the way he stood behind her, leaning on a stick. But all three had identical glittering halos and were surrounded by nearly a hundred clay pots, filled with lush violets, that belonged to the winner of the annual violet contest, an honor that the old women of Burgdorf dreamed about all year and competed for, fiercely.

  That December Trudi became a member of the church choir. Sister Mathilde had selected her and Irmtraud Boden because they had the best voices in class and could memorize entire hymns. Trudi loved standing on the high balcony next to the organ, loved the way the other voices in the choir filled in around her voice, and as she belted out the hymns, she felt them vibrate in her chest, her toes, lifting her on the current of music.

  “She has the voice of an angel,” Herr Heidenreich, who also sang in the choir, told Trudi’s father. That compliment meant a lot coming from the taxidermist, whose voice was so beautiful that the pastor always chose him for solos.

  When, the first Sunday of Advent, Herr Pastor Schüler lit one of the four candles on the pine wreath that hung above the Holy Family, Trudi felt all sacred and still inside. The rich threads in the pastor’s brocade chasuble glistened, and the scent of incense wove itself into her breath. If only she could become a priest. But only men could be priests. Women could be nuns, but she didn’t want to be a nun. Nuns had to listen to priests and wear layers of black cloth and stiff wimples that made it hard to turn their heads. Still, if nuns went far far away and became missionaries, they were almost like priests. If she were a missionary, she could travel all over the world like St. Franziskus and baptize hundreds of thousands of pagans in India and China.

  When it started to snow one afternoon, Trudi played mass in the sewing room. She covered an apple crate with a white pillow case, lit two candles, and chanted Latin words she recalled from mass as she lifted the sacrament—disks of rye bread that she’d cut with the rim of a cup—toward the ceiling. But then she crumbled them up quickly and hid them inside the pillow case because she remembered that girls who wanted to be priests could be locked up like the young nun in the Theresienheim, who, it was rumored, had been caught trying to celebrate mass.

  “As if she were a man,” the old women said. “A priest, imagine.”

  Her name was Sister Adelheid, and she came from a noble family. She had stolen the holy host—three communion wafers—from the convent chapel, and she kept them in her toothbrush glass on a low altar she’d set up in her cell. Ever since she’d been found out, the other nuns had kept her in solitude on the top floor of the convent.

  “Banned and locked up,” the old women said, shaking their heads.

  But Trudi’s communion wafers weren’t real, just bread. Even God knew that. She had seen Sister Adelheid only twice, flanked by older nuns on her way to the cemetery, her heart-shaped face swiveling from side to side as if not to miss one minute outdoors, the range of her restless steps tempered by the pace of the other sisters. Trudi wondered if Sister Adelheid scratched messages into the walls of her cell. Although new wallpaper covered the letters that her mother had scratched into the walls of the sewing room—Gefangene—Trudi knew where the words were because if you pressed your fingers against the striped paper you could feel the gouges.

  Some of the older girls in school whispered that Sister Adelheid was a saint because she bled every Friday from her palms. Like Jesus on the cross. Stigmata, those wounds were called. You were a saint if you had them. But how could you tell the difference between a locked-up saint and a locked-up crazy woman? How could anyone tell them apart?

  High in the hazy sky, the snowflakes looked tiny and all alike, but as they drifted past the narrow window of the sewing room, all were unique—long or round or triangular—as if they’d borrowed their shapes from the clouds they’d come from. Random gusts of wind swept between them, molding them into wild hoops before letting them resume their solitary descent. Her face against the cold glass, Trudi tried to follow the course of one flake, but as soon as she had singled it out, it dropped past her and she lost it. Soon, a smooth, white layer capped the roofs and frozen ground.

  Before dinner, Trudi’s father oiled the runners of the wooden sled that had belonged to Trudi’s mother when she was a girl. He tied a rope to it and pulled Trudi through the center of town and all the way to the Rhein, his shoulders arched into the wind. On top of the dike, he sat down on the sled behind her, his bad leg extended, and folded her into his arms. She laughed aloud as he raced with her down to the meadow while Seehund ran alongside, barking, the white powder flying around them. At the bottom, the dog stopped and rolled in the snow, wiggling his body like Herr Blau whenever he scratched his back against a door jamb. On the way home, when Seehund licked a frozen puddle, Trudi could hear the rasping of his tongue against the ice.

  She described that sound to Frau Abramowitz, who drove her to Düsseldorf to buy a Christmas present for her father. She’d saved most of the birthday money her Aunt Helene had sent from America last July. Already she’d made him two small gifts—a crocheted pot holder and a felt bookmark—but since she’d never bought him anything, she wanted her big gift to be magnificent. The one extravagance he allowed himself was an occasional record for the phonograph. What he wanted more than anything, she thought, was a car of his own. Riding the bicycle hurt his stiff leg. Ever since the Talmeisters’ bicycle had been stolen, he’d been keeping his inside the hallway. “It’s the unemployment,” he’d said to Herr Hesping when they’d talked about the increase in thefts, and they’d agreed that poverty was corrupting the young, who were growing up without ideals.

  “Maybe I can buy a car for my father,” she told Frau Abramowitz.

  “Maybe you can … once you’re grown-up. Cars are very expensive.”

  Frau Abramowitz took her through five stores, and it was not until Trudi saw the golden tie with silver stripes that shimmered when you moved the fabric that she knew she’d found the perfect present for her father—at least until she was grown-up—and even Frau Abramowitz’s hint that a tie as festive as this might not be for everyday use couldn’t sway Trudi from buying it.

  In a restaurant that overlooked the Hofgarten, Frau Abramowitz ordered hot chocolate with whipped cream. Their table looked out over the
frozen ponds, and Trudi wondered what had happened to the swans that were here in the summer. As Frau Abramowitz talked about her trip to Italy, the winter landscape outside their window was transformed: earth-colored houses of the Amalfi coast stacked up against the hillside above the sea; rows and rows of grapevines grew along the shore of Lago di Garda.… Trudi could even feel the bright sun that started the instant you stepped across the Italian border, where smiling guards presented you with rounded bottles of red wine.

  When Frau Abramowitz buttoned Trudi’s coat for the drive home, she kissed her forehead. She was far more affectionate than most grown-ups, who did not hug or kiss in public. Sometimes Trudi wished Frau Abramowitz lived with her and her father. She could tell that Frau Abramowitz liked her father—not just because she enjoyed bringing them things, like vegetables from her garden in summer or pies filled with her fruit preserves in winter—but because she confided in him.

  “My children don’t need me anymore,” she’d told Trudi’s father once, her smile brittle, her eyes blinking tears away.

  Trudi hid the Christmas tie beneath her bed when they returned to the pay-library, and Frau Abramowitz borrowed two romance novels, insisting to Trudi’s father, as she had for the past year, on paying for them. It was a conversation Trudi could predict, a conversation she knew would happen again.

  “Please, let me pay for them.”

  “Absolutely not, Ilse.”

  “Our original trade was the mirror for five years of borrowing books. It’s more than six now.”

  “But we’re still enjoying the mirror.”

  That night Trudi left her shoes outside her bedroom door for St. Nikolaus, and in the morning they were filled with nuts and marzipan. St. Nikolaus arrived in school at recess in his crimson bishop’s robe, carrying a scepter, accompanied by Knecht Ruprecht, all dressed in black and hunched over. While St. Nikolaus gave sweets to children who’d been good all year, Knecht Ruprecht chased the children who’d been bad and gave each a bundle of dried birch switches. Most received at least a few pieces of wrapped chocolate tied to the twigs, but Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier’s switches were bare. A gangly boy with defiant lips, he came to school with dirt under his fingernails. He could whistle better than any of the other kids, but he lied to the nuns, stole coins and cookies from the girls, and bullied the boys in the schoolyard.

  Hans-Jürgen hit Paul Weinhart with an ice ball outside the Theresienheim when Sister Mathilde took the first graders there to sing Christmas carols and recite poems to the old people. You lived in the Theresienheim if you were old and didn’t have anyone left to take you in—say, if you hadn’t married or if your children had died before you. As long as you had even nieces or nephews, you lived with them. The Buttgereits had both grandmothers living with them; one of them had been blind since birth. “A house of women,” Herr Buttgereit would mutter.

  Most of the old people sat in the dining room, which was decorated with fresh boughs of pine and countless candles. Their movements were slow, and in their eyes Trudi saw a wonder and stillness that didn’t need words and lent them a dignity despite their missing teeth and the age spots on their hands and faces. Some of the old people listened to the carols from their beds, their doors wide open as the lovely Sister Mathilde led the children through the long white corridors, and it was hard to tell if their tears sprang from gratitude or despair.

  Trudi got to recite her favorite Christmas poem twice: “Es weht der Wind im Winterwalde…”—“The wind blows in the winter forest …”—letting the w’s in weht and Wind and Winterwalde hum from her lips like a swarm of bees. She remembered every word of the poem. Remembering things had always come easy to her, and she’d felt proud when she’d started to read complete words and sentences long before the other children; yet, she found it tedious to guide her hand in forming the perfect letters the sister expected from her. When she’d do her homework in the pay-library, her father would guide her right hand through the frustrating loops and lines of the letters, but he never had to help her with adding or subtracting numbers. That she could do inside her head.

  Sister Mathilde praised her for being so good with numbers, but Trudi’s favorite class was history. There she listened to stories about people who no longer lived, stories that gave her a new kind of satisfaction—that of knowing how something ended. History intensified her longing to find out ahead of time what would happen next in her own life, partly from curiosity, but mostly to protect herself against anything she didn’t want to happen. And yet, she already sensed that, had she known her mother would die in the asylum, she could have done nothing to keep her safe.

  History was unlike the fairy tales she loved: in fairy tales, there usually was a meaning to what happened and good people triumphed in the end even if they had to suffer; but in history the bullies often triumphed. History was also unlike the stories that continued to unfold around her every day without apparent endings—and yet, history began to influence how she saw those current stories: it taught her how people behaved and about the patterns between them. Like Napoleon—knowing how he’d kept invading new countries to protect his previous victories made her understand the bullies in the schoolyard. And the old Romans—finding out that only five of their many emperors had been good emperors helped her to grasp the disillusion in her father’s voice when he discussed politics with Herr Abramowitz, who was often drafting letters on behalf of other Communists, many of them unskilled laborers without great prospects.

  Politics were like history. Only they were happening now. But they were linked to history. Her father had told her about the feudal system, in which people used to get land from lords in return for total allegiance. Like fighting in battles. “We Germans have a history of sacrificing everything for one strong leader,” her father had said. “It’s our fear of chaos.”

  Fates, Trudi discovered in history class, had a way of repeating themselves, even if through someone else, and feelings that might seem unique to her—like that rage when other children taunted her—had probably been experienced by some girl hundreds of years ago. Because of the people in history, Trudi felt a far stronger link than ever before to the people in her town, and from all this grew new stories, which she told to Eva and her father, and to Frau Abramowitz who listened to every word and sighed, “Trudi, you and your splendid imagination.”

  But in school you couldn’t tell stories.

  In school you had to sit at your double desk and wait—the only child whose feet dangled high above the floor—and answer just those questions that Sister Mathilde asked. You had to raise your hand before you said anything, and if you forgot the rules and blurted out the answer, you had to stand in the corner to the left of the chalkboard. The dry scent of chalk tickling your nostrils, you’d wait there, your face to the wall, which was painted kaka brown on the bottom half and white above the stenciled trim. It happened to Trudi at least twice a week, but Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier, who fought in the schoolyard and always had bruises on him, spent more time in that corner than all the other students together. They became accustomed to the worn seat of his trousers, his frayed suspenders, his uneven heels.

  You would have never guessed from the way Hans-Jürgen’s parents dressed themselves and their four children in hand-me-downs, that they owned the biggest farm in Burgdorf. All Braunmeiers had bony faces and thin limbs, but while the parents and younger siblings slunk through town like shrinking ghosts, Hans-Jürgen stalked around with vengeful eyes, searching for fights as if seeking to get even for something too big to settle in one single battle. Lush brown curls, which even drastic haircuts couldn’t tame, sprang from his head as if he were always walking into a formidable wind.

  Since he occupied the corner several times a day, it was difficult for Sister Mathilde to punish other children for passing notes in class, say, or forgetting the line of a prayer, or throwing stones at the pesky ravens that hovered above the schoolyard during recess, screeching for bread crumbs. After conferring with the principal, Sister Ma
thilde assigned Hans-Jürgen his own corner—to the right of her desk behind the rubber plant that the bishop had given her. Whenever Trudi was sent to the corner, she’d glance over to Hans-Jürgen’s corner, and he—without turning his head—would grin and stick his tongue out at the wall in front of him. In return she’d roll her eyes and make a fish mouth at the wall.

  In second grade, Hans-Jürgen was the one student not allowed to come to the annual spring concert at the mansion, the only place where children from the Catholic and the Protestant schools came together peacefully. It was a concert that Fräulein Birnsteig, who was famous through all of Europe, gave for the children of Burgdorf every June. She hired farmers with hay wagons to bring them to her mansion, which was four kilometers from the center of town. They loved the concert, which began at dusk and lasted long past their bedtime.

  She would play the piano in her music room, where flames from countless candles shimmered in the air, her beautifully shaped head thrown back, her lace-covered arms like the necks of swans as her hands descended on the keys. Although she’d never married, she had an adopted son who studied law in Heidelberg. As a young woman, she’d been disinherited by her parents because she’d chosen music over marriage, but she’d become so famous that her fortune now was far greater than her parents’.

  She took on protégés—always just one at a time—and worked with them without charging. To be her student was a tremendous honor and meant acceptance to the best music programs in the country.

  The double glass doors of her music room were flung wide open to the flagstone terrace, where canvas lawn chairs for the teachers had been set up. Sister Elisabeth, the second-grade teacher, was so big that she needed help lowering herself into her chair. Vines of ivy climbed up the stone walls of the white villa and cascaded from the red roof tiles. The rich scent of blooming lilac hedges suffused the air as the children spread blankets on the thick grass in the rose garden, where the pruned bushes were sending up new shoots.