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

  It worried Trudi that life had become even more difficult for unmarried women since Hitler had come into power and had declared that the family was the most essential unit of the nation. Only the interest of the nation was more important than that of the family. The word family had worked its way into most political speeches. It had become a sacred word, a powerful word. And of course you were not a family if you were unmarried, because the individual was the least-important unit of the nation. Trudi doubted that she and her father were considered a family. You were only a family if you married, preferably young, and were on your way to become kinderreich— child rich. To strengthen your family and encourage you to reproduce, the government gave you incentives, interest-free loans of up to one thousand marks—about what the pay-library brought in over five months. For each child you set into Germany, your loan was to be reduced by one quarter, and after four children it would become a gift. And there was an even greater reward: honor.

  When the organ music began, Trudi’s voice rose with the other voices in the choir. As always, Herr Heidenreich sang with his head tossed back, his chest heaving, and the pharmacist’s fleshy cheeks trembled while the corners of his thin lips strained toward his chin. The priest and four altar boys, led by Helmut Eberhardt, had barely positioned themselves in front of the marble altar when Hilde Sommer brought one pudgy hand to her throat, swayed, and crashed into a faint that brought four men running from their side of the church to carry her outside. The priest had to nudge Helmut, who had spun around at the commotion and was staring at Hilde as if wanting to carry her off all by himself. Just the week before, Trudi had spotted him outside Hilde’s house as if waiting to see her walk past the window.

  Of course she’d told Hilde when she’d come into the library for one of the doctor-and-nurse novels she liked, expecting her to laugh and say something like, “Such a little boy” but Hilde—who was five years older than Helmut and outweighed him by at least fifty pounds—had seemed pleased.

  Soon after Hilde was carried from the church, the girl Jutta rushed in, hair tangled, shoulders rising and falling beneath her unbuttoned coat as though she’d run all the way from her Uncle Alexander’s house. Hastily forming a lopsided sign of the cross, she pressed herself into the pew next to Fräulein Raudschuss, who pulled her arms against her body as if greatly inconvenienced and appraised the girl through a polite, sour smile.

  Trudi could tell Fräulein Raudschuss was the kind of woman who gave great significance to what people wore to church: she’d time her own arrival late enough to be seen by those already there, yet early enough to size up everyone else; she’d dismiss a girl like Jutta as insignificant while being impressed by someone like the pharmacist, who was always formally dressed and wore a suit with a vest and hat even to picnics.

  I know you, Fräulein Raudschuss, she thought, suddenly in awe of her own gift. I know all about you. She was glad she was ten years younger than the lawyer’s daughter. Since she had been different from the beginning, no one in Burgdorf would scorn her for not getting married. Even if it turned out to be her choice to stay alone, it would be what everyone expected of her in this town, which judged harshly whenever a woman would not conform to its codes of behavior. In a strange way, she had more freedom than other women: the freedom to make her own decisions, to provide for herself with her work at the library, to listen to her own counsel.

  Her difference was good for something after all.

  It made her smile, made her sing louder. For most women, Trudi knew, it was not a preference to stay unmarried. Some did not find a suitor, while others didn’t dare marry a man from another religion or a lower class. To marry into a class above yours was desirable but seldom possible. In some families the oldest daughter had to be married before the next one could encourage a suitor, resulting, as with the Buttgereit family, in nine unmarried daughters, whose gradual aging removed one after the other from the wedding market while the parents fretted over finding a husband for their oldest, Sabine, whose disposition and features were equally piercing.

  Actually, if Klaus liked women with sharp features, he could marry Sabine Buttgereit and free Monika and the other daughters for marriage. Trudi grinned to herself. Now, that would be a good deed, something worthwhile. No need to go out of town for a sharp-featured old maid.

  Ever since Klaus had kissed her, Trudi had been trying to figure out what men looked for in women. The marriage ads in the newspaper were the best place to start. She’d skim across the women’s section to the briefer list of announcements from men who wanted to meet women for the purpose of possible matrimony. Many were searching for healthy Aryan women who were younger than they, women who possessed warm hearts or their own businesses, women who liked children and cooking and leisurely walks and opera. None of the men ever advertised for a Zwerg woman who knew people’s secrets. They usually described themselves as cultured or successful—sometimes both—gave their height to the last centimeter, but left out any reference to hair color, making Trudi deduce that, quite likely, they were going bald. Herr Hesping was the only man she knew who looked good without hair—probably because he’d been like that since he was a young man.

  To see how closely those men resembled the way they had advertised themselves, Trudi had answered two of those ads and had arranged a meeting with both men—who of course did not know about each other—one Sunday afternoon at four in the same restaurant in Düsseldorf. She arrived before they did. Both looked older and stodgier than she’d expected, and they ended up at tables next to one another, each with a maroon kerchief in the chest pocket of his suit jacket, the sign by which, according to her letter, she would recognize him. Although their eager, nervous eyes evaluated every woman in the restaurant, they didn’t even consider that she might be the one they were waiting for.

  At first it all felt like a hoax to Trudi: their impatience, their discomfort seemed funny to her, and she felt a peculiar satisfaction when they fussed with their maroon kerchiefs to make sure they were still in place; but what persisted in her long after that encounter was an overwhelming hate, a hate so ugly that she was afraid it would make her ugly inside, too.

  As the priest raised the blessed sacrament toward the dark-eyed apostles in the “Last Supper” mural above the marble altar, Jutta blew her nose and Fräulein Raudschuss shrank further into herself. Klaus Malter bowed his head, and Judge Spiecker buried his face in his hands. As Trudi watched them pray, she felt impatient with them and all the others who found such easy solace in church; and yet, at the same time, she envied them because—until that day in the barn—she too had known that solace.

  The members of the choir filed down the stairs and toward the altar to receive communion, and when Trudi raised her face and opened her lips to receive the round white wafer, a sudden longing for a child of her own cast her neck, her thighs in cool sweat. Though she told herself that she did not want children, all she could think of was what she did not have and would never have. She could no longer name anything worthwhile about her life and knew that the rich lawyer’s daughter would get whatever she wanted.

  That night, Trudi tried to evoke that old dream in which she grew. Though she had tried to temper her consuming wish to grow by reminding herself of how Pia accepted her size, she wanted that dream—just for now—wanted to feel her arms and legs stretching, her body growing agile, wanted that familiar bliss of the dream to blunt the edges of grief over her love for Klaus, which was turning into hate as other loves had before. But what she dreamed of instead was the jetty, the Braunmeiers’ jetty—only it no longer jutted into the current but arched high across the Rhein in one mass of earth and stones. Klaus was shouting her name from the other side of the river, but she knew the arch would collapse if she stepped on it.

  At daylight she awoke with the panic of Klaus being lost to her forever. She knew she had to return to the Braunmeiers’ jetty, and she was afraid; yet, she slipped on her clothes as if acting out the final phases of her dream and walked through
the cold, vacant streets, past windows that were still obscured by wooden shutters, and as the houses gradually fell back behind her as if wiped from the surface of the town, she smelled the river, that profuse scent of water and trees. Fallen leaves crunched beneath the soles of her black lace-up shoes, and when she reached the summit of the dike, two freighters with red smoke stacks struggled against the current. The jetty was the way it had always been—flat and solid and surrounded on three sides by water. It didn’t look nearly as terrible as all those times she’d pictured it.

  As she walked toward the jetty, it came to her that what Klaus had done was not all that different from what the boys had done. While they had violated her with their curiosity and contempt, Klaus’ violation lay in his silence, in his pretense that nothing had happened. Her feelings toward all of them were so jumbled and intertwined that it made sense to be here in this place she had avoided, and when she dropped to her knees in the circle of sand at the end of the jetty and raised a rock, she suddenly was thirteen again—only this time she did not hurl the rock into the river, but placed it in front of her knees like some offering to an unnamed power and murmured, “This one is for you, Klaus Malter.”

  She took that panic she felt at not being able to be with Klaus and added four stones—one stone for loving him, one for hating him, one for her longing, one for her rage. The rocks were cold to her touch, and she set a fifth one—for being ashamed of loving Klaus without him loving her back—on top of that formation, then other stones for feelings she couldn’t understand, piling them up while those feelings welled up a hundredfold, making her jaw ache and filling her chest until she was nauseated. All at once she saw herself as a child standing outside the sewing room where her tall, beautiful mother used to be locked up, felt the unyielding door against her raised fists while her father’s arms drew her away. “Your mother has found a more peaceful place.” That awful darkness that filled her soul now—it must have felt like that until, finally, years later, the recognition had broken through that she would never see her mother again.

  “People die if you don’t love them enough” Her brother had died before his birth, her mother the week before Trudi’s fourth birthday. The last year before her mother had died, Trudi had sometimes felt embarrassed for her. And she had never wanted her brother to be born. The day of her brother’s funeral, when her mother had washed Trudi’s face by the brook, she’d pointed beneath the surface of the brook, where their faces bobbed silver among tongue-shaped leaves. That moment of clarity—of how things could be—what had happened to it? Had it been swirled away by the muddy flow of the brook? Or had her mother reached for her hand and taken her back to the house, surrendering their images, intact, to the water?

  Teeth chattering, Trudi added stones for her mother, for her brother, stones for Georg, stones for Fritz and Hans-Jürgen and Paul and Eva and Brigitte Raudschuss, until her head was spinning. Bracing herself on her hands, she waited for the dizziness to subside. It felt like the end of something, the death of something—and yet, as her eyes followed the river, she could all at once see how the end of every motion became the beginning of the next, how the water that came up against a rock found a new pattern as it joined the rest of the stream, how the crest of every wave became the descent into the rocking hollow, where the movement of the water took on a momentary apple-green sheen.

  Trudi sucked in a long breath, letting the power of the river flow through her. The pile of stones in front of her made her feel safe, made this place hers—more intimately hers than anything that had ever belonged to her before, more so even than Pia’s island of the little people.

  She saw Pia wrapping her arms around herself, rocking herself, giving her words, which—until now—Trudi had not understood: “Some day you’ll remember this.” Slowly Trudi raised her arms, hesitating before she brought them around herself as far as they could stretch. What else had Pia said? “No one but you can change that.” They’d been talking about that dreadful loneliness that comes from believing there’s no one else like you. Trudi felt the solid shape of her body, held herself—careful at first, then exuberant—as she rocked that body in her arms, claiming it as hers.

  Prayers in church for the Vaterland became a custom, and frequently the assistant pastor—that’s how some people still thought of the fat priest though he’d since become their pastor, while the little priest lived out his last frail years in the Theresienheim, pampered by the nuns, who shaved him and cooked the gravies he craved—would add a fervent prayer for the Führer, his hands raised toward the black marble altar, where five stocky candles burned evenly. When he christened newborns—his favorite ceremony since it always included an invitation to the celebration meal—his hands would draw the sign of the cross on their foreheads, lips, and hearts, and he’d rejoice if the infant was named Adolf, by far the most popular name for boys that year.

  In school, a brisk Heil Hitler had replaced the morning prayer, and only a few teachers and students dared not to raise their arms in the prescribed greeting. Brown shirts and uniforms were everywhere—you saw them in stores, in restaurants, in train stations—trim and crisp, marking those who didn’t wear them as outsiders, part of a mismatched crowd that shrank with each day.

  For Trudi, it was amazing to discover how many reasons other than size could turn you into an outsider—your religion, your race, your opinions. Enemies could endanger you with rumors; friends might involuntarily destroy you by repeating something they’d heard you say.

  She saw people arrested for their political beliefs, and she watched how Herr Stosick, who used to be one of the most respected men in Burgdorf, was made an outsider. The day after his son’s funeral he’d been demoted from his position of principal at the Protestant school to that of a teacher. People shunned and harassed him as though he had caused his son’s death. His salary was cut to less than half, and he could no longer afford payments on his new car. When he tried to sell it, he received such ridiculous offers that Leo Montag, who didn’t really want a car, decided to buy it from him at a proper price.

  The majority of the men in the chess club voted to move their meetings from his house to the narrow room in back of Potter’s bar. Nearly half of them wanted Günther Stosick to resign from the club altogether, but when Leo Montag and five other members threatened to resign along with Herr Stosick, they agreed to let him stay, though certainly not as president.

  Quite a few of the members were acting like soldiers even though they were civilians. When Leo Montag turned down the nomination for president, the chess club was without a leader for months until the pharmacist convinced several members that he was the best candidate. Two of the chess sets were stolen from Potter’s bar, and Monday evenings took on a friction that went far beyond the challenge of the game.

  Günther Stosick appeared at only three of the meetings, looking decades older with his hairless skull. His skin was puffy, unhealthy, and he’d hesitate before making even the simplest opening move, his rootless hands—no longer safely anchored in abundant hair—hovering above one chess piece, then another, as though he’d lost his old decisiveness.

  At school he had been pressured to join the Nazis like others who were employed by the government, but he had managed to stay out, and he was relieved that the party was currently closed to new members. “To ban opportunists and ensure selectivity,” the pharmacist had told Trudi and her father when he’d reminded them that it was a disgrace for any business owner in Burgdorf not to belong.

  “Why would they want someone like me?” Trudi had asked him, her eyes challenging him with the knowledge of her otherness.

  After that, the pharmacist left her alone, but whenever he came in to buy his cigars, he urged Leo to make sure he joined as soon as the membership opened again.

  “I’m too old for all that,” Leo objected.

  “Nonsense, Leo.” The pharmacist gripped his elbow. “You’re a month younger than I.”

  “Then I must be too young.”

&n
bsp; “It’s nothing to laugh about.” The pharmacist’s neck expanded. “I can put you on a waiting list right now. All you have to do is pay five Mark.”

  “It is not for me, Herr Neumaier.”

  “Someone might find all this highly suspicious.”

  “What I find suspicious is your five-Mark waiting list.”

  Herr Neumaier raised both hands as if to ward off an attack. “I wouldn’t turn in another chess player. But you are being careless.”

  He was more successful with Frau Stosick. When she came to his pharmacy to buy ointment for a rash that had sprung up on her hands, he inquired, “Since when has your husband been a member?”

  “He isn’t,” she mumbled and drew the black coat she’d sewed for her son’s funeral closer around herself.

  “Haven’t you lost enough, Frau Stosick?”

  She looked down at her hands and rubbed the raw knuckle of her thumb.

  “Do you have any idea what danger your husband is in? He’ll lose his job. You’ll lose your house and end up on the street. Is that what you want?”

  She shook her head.

  “We have to change this. Immediately. You should be at least on my waiting list. I’ll take care of it for you right now so there won’t be any trouble for not having done it before. This is what you’ll do. You pay five Mark for each of you, and once you’re members, you’ll get the papers in the mail.”

  “But then I won’t have enough money for the medicine.”

  “What’s more important? Your husband will be grateful to you.”

  But her husband was not grateful when she told him, and he swore he would tear up the papers once they arrived. In the meantime, the two of them waited, a silence between them which grew colder with each day that Herr Stosick had to face a classroom filled with children whose arms snapped upward from their bodies with an enthusiastic Heil Hitler, with each day he had to forfeit the words of warning that he yearned to howl at them.