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

  If her mother still lived, Trudi was sure, she would have clothes that fit her just right—like that white glitter dress that looked as though it had been designed for Pia. Trudi wondered if Pia, too, had tried to force her body to stretch, but Pia was no taller than she. Despite everything Trudi had done, her limbs had stopped growing entirely by the time she was eleven. Pursuing the limits of her body with a magnificent hatred, she’d not only hung by her fingers from door frames but also from tree limbs, and occasionally she had fallen, causing bruises and scrapes. Often her arms and shoulders had ached for days, and she’d consoled herself with the promise that, once her body was fully grown, she’d move to a distant town where no one would know that she used to be a Zwerg. There, she’d imagine, it would be easier to confess to theft or murder than to having been a Zwerg.

  A fat clown on a tiny bicycle wobbled into the arena, shrieking while a parrot with glorious tail feathers clung to his back like a vulture. After riding wildly around the animal tamer, who watched the spectacle with an amused frown, the clown threw himself into the sawdust at her feet as though begging her to rescue him.

  Pia snapped her fingers, and the parrot fluttered up from the clown’s back and settled on her wrist. “I need a volunteer from the audience,” she announced with a confident smile.

  Instead of raising her arm like others, Trudi slid from her seat and stepped forward, the ruffles of her dress scratching her elbows.

  For a moment Pia looked startled, and her black eyes skipped past Trudi and back as if snared by her own reflection. But then she laughed with delight. “Come.” She extended her free hand, and Trudi held herself straight as she walked toward Pia. “It looks like we have a volunteer. From the magic island which I call home. The island of the little people, where everyone is our height.…” She waved her hand from Trudi to herself. “Where figs and oranges and orchids fill every garden, where birds like Othello”—she whispered to the parrot, and it settled on Trudi’s wrist—“are as common as your ducks.”

  Trudi held her wrist steady. The claws of the bird were cool like the rind of an orange.

  The clown squealed, grabbed his bicycle under one arm, and left the ring with a sequence of cartwheels.

  “It is an island very few people know of.” The animal tamer fastened her gaze on Trudi. Her face was ageless—unlined, yet ancient—and beautiful with its painted mouth and broad cheekbones. “Do you remember our island?”

  Trudi’s neck felt stiff as she nodded.

  “And what do you remember best, my lovely friend?”

  Trudi was afraid to look past her at the familiar faces in the audience, faces that certainly had to be filled with ridicule, but when she did, they were watching her with admiration. She stroked one finger across the back of the parrot and took a long breath. “The waterfall,” she said.

  “She remembers the waterfall,” Pia announced. “And a splendid waterfall it is on our island. Cool in the summer, warm in the winter.” She whisked three golden loops from the empty air, and as she held them out, the parrot shrieked and flew through them as if they formed a tunnel, landing back on Trudi’s wrist.

  “And the tunnel,” Trudi spoke up, drawn into the gaudy luster of the moment. “I remember a tunnel… made of jewels.”

  “It led from your house to mine, yes.” In the eyes of the animal tamer was a mischievous glint that urged Trudi to go on.

  Between them they wove the story of an island so glorious that everyone in the audience would have followed them there without questions, and all along the parrot flew between them like a weaver’s shuttle, coming to linger on Trudi’s wrist between its stunts. Once, as it shook its feathers, it tickled Trudi’s face, and she stopped the urge to sneeze by touching the roof of her mouth with her tongue the way Eva had shown her. If only Eva could see her here with Pia. But Eva was now a student at the Gymnasium in Düsseldorf, and though she’d stop to greet Trudi if they saw each other on the street, it was not like being friends with her.

  Before Pia led Trudi back to her seat, she reached into the empty air, extracted an immense wrinkled paper rose, and presented it to Trudi with a kiss on the cheek.

  While the clowns and acrobats entertained the audience, Trudi barely looked at them. She kept waiting for the animal tamer to return, but Pia appeared only once more—at the end when all the performers ran into the arena and bowed to lengthy applause. Surrounded by others of normal size, she didn’t look nearly as impressive.

  When the tent had emptied, Trudi went looking for Pia, the paper rose in her hand. She didn’t have any idea what she would say; yet, she had to speak with her. Pia would be able to look at her and see beyond her body. The people in town only saw her body and dismissed her as not being one of them.

  One of the acrobats pointed Trudi past the merry-go-round and the fortune-teller’s tent to a blue trailer that sat in a patch of clover and buttercups. A laundry line with lacy underwear and stockings hung between its side window and a birch tree. Glossy paint covered the wooden sides, even the stairs that led up to the door. For a moment Trudi was afraid to knock, but then she imagined her mother simply walking up those steps and raising her hand. The anniversary of her mother’s death was only two days away. Strange how it took her time to remember the date of her mother’s birth—somewhere the middle of March—yet, the day she had died, July 9, was engraved in her mind. She dreaded that date because not one year had passed when she hadn’t relived that last hour of watching her mother die in the asylum, where they locked up people who took off their clothes for the angels. And it was unsettling to consider that the date of her own death already existed, that it passed each year without her knowing and—this was perhaps the worst—that it would never be as important to anyone as the death date of her mother was to her.

  She pushed her shoulders back and knocked. Pia was in a silk embroidered dressing gown and didn’t look surprised to see her.

  “There must be others,” Trudi blurted.

  Pia stepped aside to let her enter. The inside of the trailer was the same cornflower blue as the outside: blue pillows, blue cabinets, a blue-fringed tablecloth.

  “I have never met anyone like me.” Trudi said it slowly. And then she said it again. “I have never met anyone like me.”

  “Oh, but they’re everywhere.” The Zwerg woman rolled a fat cigarette with nimble fingers and lit it. “In various places. All of them alone. In my travels, I never have to look for them. They find me.” Her eyes were at the same level with Trudi’s. “They want to know, just like you, about others.”

  “That island…?”

  “For all of us. Yours to dream your way to.”

  “Why can’t we all be in one place?”

  “We are. It’s called earth.”

  “Not that. You know.”

  “Would it be any better?”

  “I wouldn’t be the only one then.”

  “You’re not.”

  “In this town I am.”

  Pia nodded, gravely, and picked a shred of tobacco from her tongue. Her lavish hair fell to her shoulders. “When I get that feeling of being the only one, I imagine hundreds of people like me … all over the world, all feeling isolated, and then I feel linked to them.” She pointed to a low stuffed chair. “Sit, if you like.”

  When Trudi sat down, her feet touched the floor instead of dangling high above it. She smiled to herself with the promise that in this world of high streetcar seats and store counters, of tall benches and chairs, she would from now on have furniture that was right for her inside her house. While other children had grown into their parents’ furniture, things had remained too big for her; yet, she’d kept adjusting, scaling chairs, reaching up to the counter to prepare food, moving a wooden stool around to climb on whenever she needed to reach something. No more, she thought, no more.

  “Tell me your name.” Pia puffed on her cigarette.

  “Trudi. It’s short for Gertrud.”

  “A strong name. It suits you.”

>   “Have you met a hundred like us?”

  “One hundred and four.”

  “You count then.”

  “How can I not?”

  “But there are even more.”

  “Oh yes. In Russia and Italy and France and Portugal…”

  Dizzy with joy, Trudi could feel them—those one hundred and four—linked to her as if they were here in the trailer, and in that instant she understood that for Pia being a Zwerg was normal, beautiful even. To Pia, long arms were ugly, long legs unsteady. Tall people looked odd, too far from the ground with their wobbly gait. Trudi glanced at Pia who was watching her, silently, as if she knew what Trudi was thinking, and she felt herself connected to the earth, far more solidly than if she had long legs.

  She thought of the book jackets of women and men looking into each other’s eyes and wondered what it would be like to kiss and marry a Zwerg man. Part one of a kiss—so she’d been told by Hilde Sommer, who had heard it from Irmtraud Boden after she’d been kissed by the butcher’s son—was lips against lips. Part two of a kiss was the man’s tongue—regardless how disgusting that sounded—inside a woman’s mouth.

  Trudi swallowed hard. She had to ask Pia. Not that she expected to have a man ever love her or to have children, but—“Do any of them get married?”

  “Some do.”

  “To each other?”

  “Yes. Or to tall people.”

  “And their babies …?”

  “Some are Zwerge. Others not.”

  “Do you have a baby?”

  “He’s a grown-up.” Pia laughed. “An odd word for us: grown-up. We become grown-ups even if we don’t grow.… But my son—he’s both, a grown grown-up.” She stopped laughing. “Do I confuse you?”

  “No.” Trudi twirled the paper flower between her fingers. “Will you come back here?”

  “Perhaps. I can’t know those things in advance.”

  “What if I want to ask you questions?”

  “Send them to the stars—they’ll find me.”

  “Do you ever wish you could look straight into people’s faces?”

  “Instead of always looking up and seeing the underside of their chins or the hair in their noses?”

  “And the boogers.” Trudi giggled.

  “Don’t look up.”

  “But then I’ll only see their bellies, their elbows, their belts—”

  “Their fat bottoms. Girl…” Pia dabbed tears of laughter from her eyes. “But not for long. Tell me this—what do you do if someone has a very soft voice?”

  “I lean closer.”

  “Right.”

  Trudi waited, but Pia watched her without saying another word, an amused expression on her face.

  “You mean …”

  “Try it.”

  “They’ll bend down to me?”

  “Not all of them. But many. As long as you remember not to look up.”

  “I’ll try that. Thank you.” Trudi looked around the trailer, which was smaller than her bedroom. Still—she didn’t need much space and could always sleep on the sofa. “What if I came with you?” she asked, her heartbeat high in her throat.

  “But you don’t want to.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “This is where you belong, this town … where you matter.”

  “I want to come with you.”

  “You are still a child.”

  “I’ll be fourteen next year.”

  “A child.” Pia nodded. “And even if I welcomed you—it wouldn’t change that feeling of being the only one. No one but you can change that. Like this.” She wrapped her short arms around herself. Rocking steadily, she smiled.

  Trudi frowned at her.

  “Some day you’ll remember this,” the Zwerg woman promised.

  After the carnival left Burgdorf, Trudi began to sew her own clothes. Up to then she had dreaded sewing lessons in school, but after seeing how well that dress fit Pia, she thought of ways to change the patterns and shorten them before she pinned them to fabric. Herr Blau showed her how to use his old sewing machine: she had to stand to operate it, but he was an eager teacher, giving her advice on darts and hems and interfacing, and cautioning her to keep her fingers away from the rapid needle so they wouldn’t get punctured like his thumb.

  In the upstairs room, from where the Blaus’ daughter used to pass notes to the young Helene Montag across the narrow alley, Trudi stood at Herr Blau’s sewing machine, one foot pumping, surrounded by bolts of leftover fabrics and headless dummies—stained cottoncovered torsos on poles—while Herr Blau, who was older than anyone she knew, kept rubbing his stiff hands and blowing on his fingertips, as though impatient to do the sewing for her.

  The first project she finished was a blouse the same shade of blue as Pia’s trailer. She sewed a skirt to match, a white jacket with blue leaf-shaped lapels, a white coat. No longer for her the styles of children. She sewed slips that kept her skirts and dresses from clinging to her legs, silky linings that made jackets lie smooth on her back, a swimsuit which she wore only twice before autumn chilled the depths of the river. Buttonholes were the most difficult part, and she was grateful when Herr Blau volunteered to do them for her.

  When Frau Simon complimented her on her appearance and told her how important self-improvement was, Trudi went after self-improvement with an obsession that depleted her savings and crowded her dreams with visions of shoulder pads and lapels, tailored waists and high-heeled shoes. Many women destroyed the style of a dress by wearing a cardigan above it, and Trudi swore to herself that she’d never take up that habit.

  “You can tell so much by a woman’s hands,” Frau Simon said and wrote down the brand of her hand lotion for Trudi. “They only sell this in Düsseldorf.”

  When Trudi told her father about Pia’s furniture, he was so apologetic that he hadn’t thought of it himself, that she almost wished she hadn’t said anything. But then he bought lumber and built her a birch chair with low legs. When he saw how pleased she was with the chair, he went into a fit of modifications. In the kitchen, he assembled a platform next to the cabinets and icebox, high enough for Trudi to stand on and reach counters and shelves, narrow enough not to get in his way when he worked in the kitchen. He agonized over whether he should build her a table to go with her chair, and when she assured him that she wanted to eat at the same table with him, he designed a chair higher than his with three wide steps leading up to the seat. He built several wide stools and placed them in the pay-library and all over the house. One evening, when Trudi went to bed, she was startled to discover that she no longer had to climb up on the mattress; after one delirious moment of believing that her body had suddenly sprung into its full height, she noticed traces of yellow dust on the floor, and when she crouched to check beneath her bed, she saw that her father had sawed off the bottom halves of the supports.

  The day Hilde Sommer mentioned to her that eyelashes get longer and darker if you cut off the tips regularly, Trudi borrowed Frau Abramowitz’s curved nail scissors and trimmed her blond eyelashes. She waited for them to come in, thick and dark, and when they didn’t change at all, she asked Hilde, who, it turned out, hadn’t tried cutting her own eyelashes—not yet, she said—but had heard about it from her cousin in Hamburg, who swore it worked.

  “Maybe now I better wait until I see what happens with your eyelashes,” she told Trudi.

  Hilde, who wanted to be a midwife when she grew up, was friendlier to Trudi than most of her classmates. She liked to wear red, and even thinking about the smell of incense could make her faint. It was her ability to faint that made Hilde popular in school, where she taught the girls how to sway from side to side and buckle at the knees. They took turns competing over who could faint the fastest while others stood by to catch them by the elbows and carry them toward an imaginary church door. Even though Hilde was the heaviest of the girls, she was carried more often than anyone else.

  When one of the girls in their class had to leave town and live with
her aunt because she was getting big, Hilde told Trudi that the girl was pregnant. Though Trudi no longer believed in storks and had her doubts about Eva’s theory that hair from down below grew toward your belly button when you were pregnant, she sometimes still checked the pale hairs that curled from the hard triangle between her thighs. Babies, she’d figured out, came from inside women. But she had no idea how they got inside. What she knew though was that plenty of babies came as a shock to the mothers; that some women died when babies were born; and that other women did mysterious things to keep babies from getting inside or from growing once they got in.

  To improve herself, Trudi studied how others walked—not rotating from side to side like her, but straight forward—and she practiced that new stride, catching her reflection in every window she passed, monitoring her progress. Graceful hats from Frau Simon’s shop added a few centimeters to her height. She felt delighted when she discovered she could make herself look even taller by wearing slightly longer skirts and keeping her jackets short. By now she could walk into any room and estimate anyone’s height to the last centimeter by comparing it to her own.

  She had her braids cut off so that her hair ended in a line with her shoulders, like Pia’s, but the hairdresser talked her out of dyeing it blue-black and showed her instead how to pin the left side behind her ear to make her face look slimmer.

  Whenever she’d imagine herself to be Pia, something would change in the way she’d touch her body. She found new pleasure in bathing herself in perfumed water—not just on Saturdays but also on Wednesdays—pleasure in washing and rinsing her hair. With her fingertips she’d rub scented lotion into her face and throat, relishing the contact with her own skin.

  “You look perfect,” her father would tell Trudi whenever she modeled her new clothes for him.

  The people of Burgdorf commented to him that—almost overnight—his daughter had changed from a child into a young woman. It amazed Trudi how many of them would bend and bring their faces to the same level with hers if she remembered to keep her voice soft and avoided looking at them while she spoke.