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

  Throughout the fall she daydreamed of being with Pia, feeling disloyal toward her father whenever she wished the Zwerg woman had taken her along. Her father was counting on her to start work full time in the pay-library in a few weeks, as soon as she’d finished the eighth school year of the Volksschule. She wondered if Stefan Blau had felt disloyal toward his parents when he’d run away to America. He’d been thirteen like her. Though she was certain that she, too, had the courage to leave Burgdorf, she knew that, wherever she went, she’d take her body with her—as it was now—while Stefan had grown, had changed to become a man.

  She was sure most of the boys in Burgdorf would trade places with Stefan in a moment: there was a restlessness about them as if they were bored with their monotonous lives and had little to be proud of. But many of the girls had been trained to endure without complaining whatever boredom and discomfort encumbered their lives, to wait for someone else to make changes. When it came to making changes, Trudi felt much more like a boy and became impatient with the girls.

  More than ever before, Stefan Blau came to engage her imagination as she pictured herself following Pia once she came back in the spring. There were lots of jobs she could do in the circus while Pia trained her to tame lions and elephants: sweep and cook, sew costumes, feed the animals. Stefan had chosen a new life, and his mother had survived—even with that sadness in her eyes. Trudi would come back and visit her father. Maybe she’d even get to America to see Stefan and her Aunt Helene, who still sent letters and gifts, though not as frequently as in the years after her visit, while Robert only scratched brief greetings at the end of his mother’s letters.

  In January Frau Abramowitz let Trudi copy the loden coat she’d just brought back from a trip to Austria. It had eight leather buttons, and Trudi bought just as many buttons for her coat and simply reduced the distance between the buttonholes to get the same effect. She wore her new clothes to school and church and even dressed up for her walks with Seehund, whose movements had long since lost their early exuberance. Figuring seven dog years for each human year, he was over fifty, older than her father, who—although patient with her and everyone else—would get frustrated with himself when he was rushing to do something and his sore leg wouldn’t carry him as fast as he wanted to go.

  Sometimes, at night, he’d bolt up from a dream of a war more terrible than the war he’d fought. In this dream—and it always was the same dream—columns of clean bones held up the sky, and it was up to him to keep them from collapsing. Voices, too weak to scream, held forth in a trembling wail that cut his chest without drawing blood, and he’d surface to Trudi’s face swimming above him.

  “Wake up,” she’d urge him. “You were crying in your sleep.” She’d prop an extra pillow behind him and boil him a pot of camomile tea before she’d go back to her room.

  He’d sit upright in his bed and keep his eyes wide open. On the wall across from him still hung the death photos of his wife. The wooden cross on her grave had long since fallen apart despite new coats of paint, and he’d replaced it with a marble stone. Her ashen stranger’s face in the coffin had become so familiar to him in the years since her burial that he hadn’t felt the desire to lie with any of the women in Burgdorf, whose vibrant complexions and smiles seemed unnatural in contrast.

  Yet, with each year of celibacy, Leo’s eyes stored more passion. They’d keep fastening themselves to a woman until she’d feel compelled to look at him. His gaze would be infused with tenderness, longing, admiration—with an undefined promise that could blind you. He’d feel alive, roused, when your eyes connected with his and kept returning to him as if a bond—far more significant than any touch could possibly be—had been established between the two of you. It happened in church, in stores, and of course in the pay-library, where the women asked his advice on books he thought they might like. They returned the books not only with praises of how well Leo understood their hearts, but also with delicacies from their kitchens: vanilla pudding with strawberry syrup; lentil soup with pigs’ feet; egg cakes filled with fruit preserves or diced ham.

  Occasionally, Leo’s hand grazed a woman’s arm, lightly, reverently almost. The women knew that his touch was not accidental, and they felt honored to be selected, but when they tried to feel out the promise of that touch, he spoke to them about Gertrud. Those who wanted more, he discouraged gently by confiding that he was still grieving his wife’s loss.

  “I haven’t been able to become interested in another woman,” he’d tell them, as though revealing a tragic illness which—each woman came to believe—only she could heal. “If things were different…” he’d say, letting each woman fill in her fantasies as his hand rose to stroke his own cheek.

  Their eyes locked with his, the women encouraged him to talk about his wife. They found they could captivate him by sharing their memories about Gertrud: they reminded him how—as children—he and Gertrud had built kites of red silk paper and thin strips of wood, decorated with tails made of string and paper bows; they teased him about how nervous he’d been at fifteen when he’d asked Gertrud to go dancing with him; they described the day of his wedding and Gertrud’s radiance as she walked on his arm from St. Martin’s Church; they tempted him with fragments of half-forgotten incidents about Gertrud and fed his yearning by fabricating the rest.

  It was from those overheard conversations that Trudi began to gather what her mother’s life had been like before she had given birth to her, and she drank in those stories, relieved that no one spoke of the few mad years before her mother’s death.

  When the women were near Leo Montag, they felt coveted yet virtuous, and if they became uneasy with the yearning he evoked in them—a yearning that kept them from sleeping or praying because, say, they’d wonder what his hands would feel like if he were to loosen their hair and caress their faces in one long-drawn motion; or if that first time, that very first time, he would take them lying down or standing up against the wall of the locked pay-library—they could reassure themselves that nothing, really, had happened and that nothing was about to happen, a conviction that made it possible for them to extend their tongues to receive the blessed sacrament and return to their husbands with their honor intact.

  And when they’d hear the translucent voice of Leo’s Zwerg child in the church choir, floating from the high balcony, they’d touch their bellies through the fabric of their coats, reminding themselves of the fate of the one woman whose womb had given shelter to Leo’s seed, and affirm their resolution to stay faithful to their husbands. Trudi’s voice would shine during mass—high and strong and clear—soaring above the torrent of organ music. It was a voice that evoked your earliest longings—those ecstasies that had attached themselves safely to religion before you’d been given your family’s approval to aim those passions at one particular Catholic boy. To name those feelings any sooner could have led you to sin. It was wiser to postpone, to harness that passion into singing in the choir or swooning at the communion bench, or feeling Christ’s ultimate pain—at three o’clock each Good Friday—as the nails were pounded into his sacred palms.

  As the women listened to Trudi’s pure voice, they knew it was a voice you could never return to, a voice you could never reclaim as yours once your body had known the caresses of another body, once you understood what those old ecstasies had strained toward all along. Yet, some autumn at dawn, say, when you were the first to rise and light the kitchen fire, you might wonder if the passions of those women who had become nuns had surpassed your own passions, and you’d feel jealous of their power because they were the ones who taught your children and whose authority was held above yours.

  Nuns shrouded their passions as well as their limbs. Nuns concealed their hands in their sleeves, baring only a fragment of their faces—eyes, nose, and mouth—scant evidence of womanhood. Though some of the nuns were bitter and petty women, the very best of them had eyes that contained a passion so pure that you could never look at them for long. Leo Montag had almost achieved
that ecstasy in his eyes again—as if to validate that tasteless joke that his friend Emil Hesping kept circulating about people turning into virgins if they hadn’t had it—and everyone knew what it was—for five years.

  Though Emil Hesping still hadn’t married, there was no danger of him turning into a virgin. People wondered what his brother, the bishop, would say if he knew about all those women—not just from Burgdorf but also from other towns—who’d been seen with Emil Hesping. Even walking on his arm across the church square was enough to taint your reputation. He had an ever-changing sequence of women except for one, Frau Simon, who had remained constant in his life. They’d flaunted their lust in public before she’d married her husband, and since her divorce he’d returned to her between his countless liaisons. With each year he seemed to look younger: his face had no lines, and his skull was still as smooth as ever.

  All winter, Trudi kept waiting for the weather to become mild enough to swim again, and the first warm Sunday in April she got up at six, pulled on her swimsuit, a dress and jacket over it, and headed for the river with her dog.

  Swallows rose from the willows when she ran down the far side of the dike, and for a moment the beat of their wings drowned the rush of the Rhein, which had been straining against its boundaries that spring without leaving its bed. Last fall’s leaves covered the path, matted and brown, so unlike the airy shapes that had drifted from branches in showers of red and yellow. The grass—still dead and yellow-brown—lay flat against the earth, and the crowns of the trees looked tangled. A few bricks, half broken, were strewn among the pebbles. The sky was blue, but dark gray streaks ran across it, blocking the sun intermittently.

  This early in the morning, no one else was on the path. The river looked moss green. Sometimes—even in the span of an hour—Trudi had seen it change from brown to gray and green, even silver, depending on how the light fell. Two ducks fluttered from the bare bushes as she neared the bank. She stepped across blackberry brambles that had grown over the path. In a few months she would come here to gather the purple-black berries and red currants, pour them into a deep soup plate with milk and sugar, and eat them with a slice of dark bread.

  A fine column of mist rose near the river, thick enough to look like smoke from a fire, and for a moment she felt as if she were no longer alone, as if something were warning her to stay away. She called out to Seehund, just to hear the sound of her voice, but kept walking toward the mist. A branch tugged at her skirt. She froze. Her eyes skittered toward the dike. The entire hillside was moving, shifting each rotting leaf, each blade of grass, as if about to form an immense wave. The whole dike was whispering, whispering brown words, whispering, “Come up here, now, now.…” She felt those words, felt someone there, calling her. She cut through the bushes toward the river, away from the voices and the dike, and when she reached the willow with the braided length of rope, the gray mist was just that—mist—and already the sun was diluting it, and the dike was just a solid ridge of earth built to protect the town from the river.

  The bay was calm, and the choppy current surged past the tip of the jetty. She walked beyond the jetty toward the far end of the elbowshaped embankment, where she took off her jacket and dress, hid them with her shoes between two bushes, and adjusted the straps of her swimsuit. Seehund was turning, sniffing the ground, before he settled on a patch of sand at the base of the bushes. As Trudi stepped into the water, it was far colder than the air, but she didn’t let that stop her. Like a frog, she cut beneath the surface, brushed against some slimy rocks, and veered to swim into the deeper water. Here, the river belonged to her. Feathery strokes propelled her forward as she came up for air. From the bank, her dog watched her through sleepy eyes, his snout resting on his crossed paws. The rest of his body was hidden among the branches. She waved to him before submerging herself again. Eyes wide, she swam straight into the brown-green particles of mud that rose from the bottom. As the sun grazed them, they turned amber as if to encapsule her like that drop of amber Frau Blau wore around her neck on a silver chain; her Dutch great-grandfather had found it in the North Sea: in its center sat a tiny, bone-colored crab that looked as if—any moment—it could crawl out of that translucent drop of amber and up Frau Blau’s neck.

  Trudi kicked her feet, hard, heading for the shallow regions that were shaded by the willows. She shot up from the water and shook the river from her hair. In three months the circus would be back in town, and she’d bring Pia here to swim. As she tried to imagine the Zwerg woman in the water next to her, she couldn’t see her in anything except that glittering dress. Drifting on her back, she kicked her feet and hands, making silvery loops. She’d look for fabric like that for Pia—something silvery and swirling—and sew a swimsuit for her. Smiling to herself, she glanced toward Seehund. He was sitting up, his head raised, his ears alert. From the other side of the jetty came voices.

  Quickly, she lowered herself beneath the water and swam toward the end of the jetty. Holding on to the rocks to keep from being sucked into the current, she pulled herself out to where she could see: there were four of them—Georg, Hans-Jürgen, Fritz Hansen, and Paul Weinhart—absorbed in a competition of making water farts. Each artillery of bubbles was greeted with hoots and laughter. They were showing off for each other, taking loud gulps of air and holding their breaths as they tried to force the air through their intestines. When the bubbles broke through the surface, they leapt back in mock horror.

  With an odd mix of fear and excitement, Trudi saw them the way they would never let any girl or adult see them, and she knew that by watching them without their knowledge she was taking something from them, something they’d never yield willingly to her. Those were the secrets she liked best—the ones that were stolen, the ones that made her tongue go light in her mouth at the thought of being caught, like that day in the bakery when Herr Hansen had sold Brötchen to Frau Buttgereit while hissing at her to keep her husband in her own bed; or that evening when she’d watched from the kitchen window as Frau Blau buried a small bundle next to her back steps; or that afternoon Frau Abramowitz had pressed her breasts against the arm of Trudi’s father when she’d asked him to get a book for her from one of the upper shelves in the library.

  Only Trudi’s eyes and forehead were above water as she spied on the boys; she would raise her face long enough to take a deep breath, then submerge herself again. Seehund had settled down, and she was glad that the bushes protected him from being seen by the boys.

  When Georg clambered into the willow, took off his swim trunk and draped it across a branch, she closed her eyes for a moment, not from embarrassment, but rather from compassion that—in his efforts to be like the other boys—he went further than they would have. The boys screamed with laughter and applauded. Georg grinned and waved both arms at them. Without his clothes he looked thin, defenseless, endangered even. His hair was trimmed so short you could see the bones of his skull.

  Paul Weinhart cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. “There’s a naked boy here …”

  Startled, Georg dropped his hands and covered his private parts.

  Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier whistled.

  “… and his name is Georg Weiler,” Paul continued.

  “Shut your mouth!” Georg grabbed the braided rope and swung himself into the river. He dropped near Paul and started splashing him.

  “A naked boy …” Fritz and Hans-Jürgen howled.

  Georg tried to get out of the river and back to his swimsuit, which dangled high on that branch, but the other three blocked his way, their arms like wings of a windmill, flinging gauzy sheets of water at him.

  “Let me out!”

  As Trudi heard the tears behind his voice, those images of Georg leaping naked into the river tumbled into a story, and she felt a familiar power building in her—the power that came from her choice to tell or not to tell this story. And she felt something else that she knew well—a connection as potent as love or hate to everyone whose story entered her and began t
o ripen into something that belonged to her.

  Georg retreated from the boys toward the open river. Kicking water with his feet, he swam on his back toward the end of the jetty, as though he’d decided to get out on the other side of it. As the three boys took up the chase, Trudi ducked between the rocks, hoping Georg would stop or that the others would catch him before he’d see her.

  But he bumped right into her. Alarmed, he swung around, stared at her, and as she stared back into his sand-colored eyes, she was aware of his father who’d drowned in these waters that surrounded their bodies. Georg shivered as though he’d just had the same thought, and it seemed almost possible to her that they could both preserve the silence of their encounter and turn away from one another as if it had never happened.

  But the other boys swam up behind him.

  “That’s why Georg took his pants off.”

  “Georg loves Trudi.”

  “Shut your trap!” Fists up, Georg threw himself against the other boys.

  “Georg loves the Zwerg”.

  She pushed herself away from the rocks and beneath the water, darting away from them. A frog. She was a frog. But her legs were mere hindrances, and her arms felt too short to move the masses of water that pressed against her. A hand caught her right ankle and yanked her up. Hans-Jürgen.

  She coughed and spit water. “Let go.”

  Seehund ran along the bank, barking, but as soon as his paws touched that damp line where the river darkened the sand, he leapt back, yelped, and advanced again as if fighting with himself to overcome his ancient fear of water.

  Fritz Hansen grabbed Trudi by a strap of her swimsuit.

  “Let go,” she hissed, surprised when the boys dropped their hands from her. As she tried to touch bottom with her feet, the river was too deep, and she felt it again—that strange foreboding she’d ignored on her way to the river, that leaf-brown whisper of the dike, the column of mist.…