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

  Outside the circus tent Klaus picked a bouquet of clover blossoms and divided it equally between Ingrid and Trudi. In the crowded beer-garden tent, they ate crisp white sausages with spicy mustard and drank Berliner Weisse—beer mixed with a shot of raspberry syrup—while listening to the accordion band play waltzes and gaudy carnival music. Flies buzzed through the swirls of blue smoke and settled on forks and the rims of glasses. Where, the year before, the beer garden had been filled with balloons and streamers, it now was decorated with several huge, red flags displaying the black Hakenkreuz— swastika—inside a white circle. The same emblem was worn by quite a few customers on red armbands or on pins fastened to their collars.

  When Klaus wanted to dance with Ingrid, she shook her head. “Ask Trudi,” she said, and his moment of hesitation—before he asked Trudi and led her to the dance floor—was so brief that, even years afterwards, she would wonder if she had imagined it.

  Her legs felt clumsy, and her arms uncomfortable from stretching them up. Though her neck got stiff from looking into Klaus Malter’s face, she loved the dance, loved every moment of it. Klaus showed her how to move her feet, and between dances they returned to Ingrid, who looked heartbreakingly beautiful in her church dress and managed to discourage every man who wanted to dance with her. She had arranged the purple clover in an empty beer glass and set it next to her plush lion, but the waiter, who kept replenishing their Berliner Weisse, kept forgetting to bring the water she’d ordered for the flowers.

  It was close to midnight when Eva Rosen and Alexander Sturm entered the beer-garden tent, arms linked, faces flushed with an excitement that didn’t seem to have anything to do with drinking. Trudi had seen Eva excited, but Alexander, who’d been too serious even as a boy, had grown even more formal with his formidable Kaiser Wilhelm mustache. A man who chose his words carefully, he didn’t allow himself time for frivolities. He took pride in his toy factory, his apartment building, and gave far too much significance to what others thought of him. Yet, as Trudi watched him dance with Eva, he seemed changed as if some closed chamber in him had finally opened. Already, wonderful silver strands had begun to soften the starkness of Eva’s black hair, a contrast to her girl face that made her look both young and sophisticated. Alexander’s hair was a much lighter shade than hers, sandy almost. Trudi felt something new between the two, a connection, a secret that compelled her to watch them closely.

  Trudi hadn’t spoken with Eva for nearly a year, but when Eva stopped at her table to say “Guten Abend”—“Good evening”—it felt to Trudi as if they were continuing their last conversation. Eva talked with such ease about Trudi’s father and Seehund, about her classes at the Gymnasium in Düsseldorf and her plans to enter medical school that, for a moment, Trudi wanted to take her by the hand and lead her outside beneath the stars.

  “Do you think your father will ever get well again?” she would say and: “Is the red on your chest still like a flower?” and, most importantly: “I’m sorry I told”

  But Klaus was asking Alexander how the construction on his apartment house was progressing, and when Alexander only said, “Quite well, thank you,” Eva explained that the building was nearly completed, and that Alexander’s widowed sister, who was moving back into town, would live with her daughter, Jutta, on the third floor. “She’s had problems with her health and needs help bringing up the girl, who’s quite impetuous, from what I hear. I’m rather intrigued.”

  “Reckless,” Alexander said.

  “What?”

  “More like reckless. You said: impetuous.”

  “A blond girl, tall?” Trudi asked.

  Alexander nodded.

  “Didn’t she visit three summers ago?”

  “Yes. When her father was still alive,” Eva said. “Alexander says even then the girl was always getting into accidents. The day she arrived with her parents, she broke her left arm, and still, she went on to climb trees and managed to break the other arm.”

  “Only it was the right arm she broke first,” Alexander said.

  Eva shrugged. “Eventually both arms.”

  Alexander seemed about to correct her once more, but instead he turned toward Klaus Malter and told him he already had several tenants signed up for the stores. “The butcher, the optician, and the pharmacist for sure. Possibly the hardware store. We’re still negotiating.” But the cherry tree on the sidewalk across the street, he said, was a problem because the carpenters kept dragging red pulp from the fallen cherries into the house on the bottom of their shoes, staining the floors.

  When Klaus suggested he’d keep water pails by the front door and ask them to rinse their soles before entering, Alexander nodded thoughtfully and thanked him for his advice before he took Eva to their own table.

  The waiter poured more of the red Berliner Weisse, and Ingrid whispered to Trudi when the foam left a white stripe on Klaus Malter’s beard. When he insisted on knowing what they were saying, Ingrid refused and Trudi reached up to wipe the foam from his face. His beard was dense, yet soft, and she blushed and pulled her fingers away; but he caught her hand, and all she could think of was how glad she was that she’d been using lotion so faithfully.

  “What were you whispering?”

  “That Alexander is a stuffy man,” she lied.

  “Strange to think that he makes toys,” Klaus said.

  When the band played the last round, Trudi thought the tent was whirling around her as the young dentist led her in a waltz. He laughed aloud and she laughed with him, and it no longer mattered how hard it was to keep her neck and arms at that angle, and his lips were wet as he drew her closer and lowered his face toward hers, whirling her around all along, and his tongue tasted of sweet berries and beer, and it was only after they were back at the table and the accordionists were playing the national anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles …,” that she realized she had just received her first kiss.

  “Stop” she wanted to shout at him, “stop, we have to do this over. I didn’t even know what was happening” but the musicians were packing up their instruments, and Klaus didn’t look any different than he had before, even though he had taken her across a border she’d never expected to cross: she had joined the legion of women who had been kissed.

  Klaus Malter took both Trudi and Ingrid home as he had before, walking between them, his arms linked through theirs, and he dropped Trudi off first and said she was a fabulous dancer. Her house was dark and silent, but the moon scattered enough light for her to find her way into the living room, where she explored her face in the gold-framed mirrors. Each reflection gave her a face that was leaner, paler—as though she’d lived through uncountable experiences since she’d left the house earlier that day. It was the face Klaus had looked at when they’d danced, the face he’d bent toward and kissed.

  She tilted her head, smiling with the assurance she’d seen in Pia’s smile, and thought of Pia’s magic island with its waterfall and jewels and orchids, the island she had helped to create—a place to go to in her thoughts, hers as long as she remembered it was there for her.

  “Trudi Malter,” she whispered to herself. “No, Gertrud Malter …” But the name Gertrud—the full version of her name, the adult version—carried that tinge of her mother’s craziness.

  “Trudi Malter,” she practiced again. Klaus Malter was ten years older than she—a perfect age gap, since she was far more mature than other eighteen-year-olds.

  “Frau Malter,” she said aloud, trying to ignore Pia’s voice deep inside her head: “Some are Zwerge. Others not.”

  She shook her head, hard.

  “Some are Zwerge. Others not.”

  But Pia’s baby was not a Zwerg.

  “A grown grown-up” Pia had called him.

  Klaus was tall. Their babies would be tall like him. They would sleep in a wicker carriage in the pay-library while she’d work. She’d play records for them, rock them in her arms. Klaus would kiss her in the mornings before he’d walk across the street to
open his office, and he’d come home for his noontime meals. All her customers would have their teeth fixed by him. He’d accompany her to church, and Sunday afternoons he’d walk with her everywhere in town, proud to be seen with her, his love for her so evident in his eyes that no one could help noticing. For their wedding—

  She laughed aloud, reminding herself that the marriage would have to come before those babies. For their wedding she would sew a white satin gown with a train and wear the highest heels she could buy. “Trudi must have grown” people would say when they’d see her sweep into church. After the wedding she’d dye the gown a deep blue to match her eyes and wear it for special occasions, to the Opernhaus in Düsseldorf, say, or to a fancy restaurant.

  But when Klaus came to the pay-library two days later and played chess with Leo, he didn’t mention the kiss, not even when Trudi walked him to the door. He crouched to stroke Seehund’s back—as if to restrain his hands from touching her, Trudi thought as she looked down at the crown of his hair, where it grew in a cowlick.

  “It’s good to see you,” she said.

  “What have you and Ingrid been doing?” he asked without glancing up at her.

  As the dog arched his neck, pushing himself closer against Klaus Malter’s hands without any shame, Trudi felt envious.

  “I haven’t seen Ingrid since the carnival,” she said, stressing the word carnival to jolt his memory.

  He scanned the street as if waiting for a prospective patient and stood up. “I must get back to my office.”

  “What’s wrong?” Leo asked when Trudi stormed past him and up the stairs.

  But she didn’t answer. In her bedroom, she pulled out the pattern and fabric for a new dress and began to pin and cut out the striped material, allowing for added centimeters on the side seams while shortening the bodice and skirt. Even if she was condemned to see the world from the angle of a child’s height, the range of that vision was no longer enough for her desires. By the time she fed the second sleeve through the sewing machine, it was getting dark outside, but she kept standing by the machine, balanced on her left foot while her right foot pumped the wide pedal, and her reckless fingers rushed the fabric toward the rapid needle.

  She felt afraid of her passions, afraid of her mother’s passions revisiting themselves in her, afraid of losing her dignity by bursting into Klaus Malter’s office and throwing her arms around him. She laughed bitterly. Throwing her arms around what? His waist? His belly? She’d have to get him to sit down before she could imagine the rest of that futile fantasy. Now, if she were tall like Ingrid, she could walk up to him and, lightly, raise one hand to his cheek.… An embrace from her own height would be obscene.

  When—all that week—Ingrid didn’t mention the kiss either, Trudi suddenly wondered if she had imagined it. By now, it felt as gaudy and unreal as the carnival. Perhaps Klaus had just bent down and touched her lips with his by accident. But no—his tongue in her mouth had definitely been part two of a kiss. Even if part one—the touching of the lips—had been accidental, she could think of no reason why his tongue could have filled her mouth, other than that he had intended to kiss her.

  Although the beer garden had been crowded that night, none of the people in Burgdorf said anything about the kiss to her. She waited, but even without confirmation she knew that she was a woman who had been kissed and that—at least in that one moment prior to the kiss—she must have evoked lust in the young dentist.

  The end of that summer one of Trudi’s molars began to ache. She tried to keep her tongue from darting back because its left side was rubbing itself sore against the edges of the tooth. The more she decided to ignore the pain, the more she thought about it. Her tongue probed the surface of the molar until she no longer was sure if she imagined a small hollow or if it really was there. What if she had only talked herself into a toothache to find a reason to have Klaus touch her again? He would know it the moment he’d examine her.

  His visits to the pay-library had become rare, but Trudi would find out about him from her father, who saw Klaus every Monday evening at the chess club. Though she wouldn’t come right out and question him about Klaus, she might ask—in passing—who’d been at the club. At times she wondered if someone had told her father about that kiss at the carnival, because he’d look at her as if hesitant to stoke her feelings for Klaus with new information; and yet, he’d give her what she wanted, waiting however until she’d bring up the chess club as if he hoped that, somehow, she would forget about the young dentist.

  From her father she learned that Klaus was thinking of hiring an assistant, and that he’d sprained his ankle when his bicycle had overturned in the ditch. If she saw him on the street or in church, they’d nod to one another or exchange a few polite words. Afterwards she’d go over those words in her mind, trying to find significance in his inflections and pauses, imagining what she could have said.

  Perhaps he was even shyer than she.

  Perhaps he’d been waiting for her to mention the kiss.

  Perhaps he was devastated that she acted as though nothing had changed between them.

  She daydreamed about him nearly all the time: his image had attached itself to her eyes, a silvery sheen through which she had to view everything else. He interfered with her days, fastened himself to her dreams. Sometimes she wished she could scrape him from her eyes. Too often she succumbed to the promise of his kiss and let herself imagine a continuation of that dance, spinning into marriage, his arms around her and a red-haired infant.

  Once, she found herself free of her infatuation for nearly two hours after spotting him from the window as he headed toward his office where, just before he opened the door, he reached back to pull the fabric of his trousers from the crack between his buttocks. Delighted with the absence of those intense feelings, she thought they were gone for good, but as with anything you let go of abruptly, they left a void, and soon her infatuation rushed back into that void, familiar and heavy.

  When her tooth continued to hurt, leaving a sweet, crumbling sensation deep inside her mouth—as much a taste as it was a smell—she briefly considered going to her old dentist, Dr. Beck. But if this toothache was real, it was too valuable to waste on Dr. Beck.

  The raw side of her tongue chafed against her molar the Tuesday she saw Alexander and Eva in the open market with a long-limbed, blond girl, tall enough to pass for fifteen if it hadn’t been for the scraped shins of a child. She turned out to be Alexander’s eleven-year-old niece, Jutta, who had just moved into his apartment building with her widowed mother. Jutta’s eyes were curious when she was introduced to Trudi—not the kind of curious that irritated Trudi—but rather a way of seeing, a total absorbing without judgment. When Jutta looked at you, it felt as though you were held and stored by the eye of a camera—except there was nothing impartial about her glance: she had a wildness about her, a passion that made Trudi want to pull her aside and find out everything about her.

  Eva grasped Trudi’s shoulder. “Alexander and I—we got engaged yesterday,” she said, her thin face radiant.

  “Congratulations. Both of you.” Trudi managed to smile though she was annoyed—not only because she hadn’t been invited—but because she hadn’t found out about the engagement till now. Usually she knew about things before they happened and relished choosing the best time to tell others.

  “It was a small family celebration,” Alexander said as if to appease her.

  “How about your studies, Eva?” Trudi mumbled without glancing up.

  “My what?” Eva bent until her face was in front of Trudi’s.

  “Your studies. I was asking about your studies.”

  Alexander lowered himself too as if not to miss one word.

  Only the girl stood tall, watching the three of them with almost the same amused expression as Pia’s that day she’d taught Trudi this trick.

  “I’ll wait until after the wedding,” Eva said.

  “But you still want to be a doctor.” It came out like a
reminder, not a question.

  “Some day. For now I’ll do some office work for my mother.”

  After that meeting in the market, Trudi saw the girl Jutta nearly everywhere, as if she’d been there all along, roaming through Burgdorf with impatient strides, a dog-eared sketchbook under one arm. One blustery September evening Trudi followed her past the wheat and potato fields to the quarry hole at the south end of town. For the past months, cranes had scooped out the ground, loading gravel onto trucks that rumbled through the center of Burgdorf, but now all the equipment was gone. Trudi saw the girl on the opposite side of the wide hole, her dress blowing around her like a bell as she stood high in the branches of an unsteady birch that clung to the edge of the gouged earth by its roots. All at once—though her own feet were on solid ground—Trudi became the girl Jutta: she felt the tree swaying beneath her, felt a deep identification as their lives fused in an inexplicable way that would endure long beyond that day and shift itself to Jutta’s unborn daughter, whose birth was still more than a decade away.

  Beads of cold rain began to slant to the earth, and from a distance a low thunder reeled closer. The roots of the tree were half exposed, and it struck Trudi as an omen that Jutta would never be entirely safe in Burgdorf. As the egg smell of lightning suffused the air, Trudi raised one hand to warn the girl, but the young face was turned toward the sky—not in surrender, but rather in a fearless greeting of the elements, as if Jutta were welcoming her equals—and Trudi decided against disturbing her solitude and dropped the cool back of her hand against that side of her face which was swollen hot from her tooth.

  When she reached home, the wind had plastered wet, long leaves from the chestnut tree against the door. Her clothes were molded to her body, and Seehund sniffed her drenched shoes without getting up as she stepped across him. Lately, it had become harder for him to raise himself onto his old legs, and she had to hoist him up most mornings, steady him as she led him to the backdoor. Her father liked to save morsels from his meal for the dog. Since Seehund could no longer climb the steps, they’d moved his blanket next to the kitchen stove, but he slept wherever the sun left a warm pool of light.