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

  Not that the police figured out immediately that the thief was the unknown benefactor—that came when they searched his apartment and found a worn ledger, the kind a bookkeeper might have used decades ago, with detailed entries dating back over thirty years, listing people’s shoe and clothing sizes, ages of children, illnesses, hobbies, needs, and secret wishes. Columns with check marks and dates documented all the gifts he’d mysteriously smuggled into houses—bicycles and baskets of food and books and toys and money and coats—including roller skates for a boy by the name of Andreas Beil, who had since grown up to become one of the policemen who’d shot the unknown benefactor.

  “My God,” Andreas Beil groaned when he discovered his name in the ledger. “All those years I’ve wanted to thank him.”

  “Why did Emil risk his life for such a useless stunt?” Leo Montag grieved.

  Trudi shook her head, dazed.

  The entire town was dazed. Where had Emil Hesping obtained the money for all those gifts? How had he found out about their secret wishes? Why hadn’t they ever suspected him?

  “Even I didn’t know.” Leo stroked the polished wood of the phonograph that the unknown benefactor had smuggled into the pay-library the first time Gertrud had been sent to the asylum. “You’re too young to remember this … but Emil was rather fond of your mother.”

  The feeling of gravel beneath skin. A motorcycle tilting, tilting— Trudi glanced up at her father. How much did he know?

  “Some might say he adored her.”

  Gray spring light pressed against the front window, somber and ancient, challenging any bright color with its sameness. Trudi saw a chimney sweep pass by. Georg used to believe chimney sweeps brought you good luck. But Emil Hesping had not been lucky. Or perhaps he had been, living the mystery of the unknown benefactor for so long.

  “… but Gertrud, she didn’t want him around those last years. Now they’re both dead.” Her father’s voice carried a strange longing.

  “I worry about that ledger,” Trudi said. “What if he kept track of the hiding places, the people—”

  “Not Emil. He wouldn’t. Remember how he cautioned us against writing down any of the names or what we were doing? He wanted us to forget whatever it was we’d just done. There was no past, no future. That’s why the gifts are different… something he could envision doing again. Those lists meant that there was a future he could believe in.”

  When Andreas Beil managed to get the body released, Emil’s brother arrived for the burial and prayed over the grave. The bishop looked the way Emil would have with hair—same posture, same dense eyebrows, even the same laugh. Though it offended Pastor Beier, the bishop turned down the invitation to spend the night at the rectory and stayed with the Montags instead.

  After Trudi had gone to sleep, Leo and the bishop sat at the kitchen table, between them a bottle of cognac, which the bishop had brought in his black suitcase.

  “Emil valued his friendship with you,” the bishop said.

  “If only he’d spoken with me,” Leo said. “We could have laughed about his plan, imagined carting that statue off together. It would have been as if we’d done it, and then I would have talked him out of it.”

  “Maybe something gave…. Maybe—” The bishop shook his head. “I was afraid it was getting too much for Emil. I just didn’t know it would happen this soon.”

  “Are you saying he let himself get caught?”

  “I don’t believe he mapped it out like that. It’s more like … even as a boy, when school got too much for him, Emil would take crazy risks.”

  In the alley between the library and the grocery store, two cats screeched, and as Leo stood up to close the window, a surge of lilac scent made him dizzy, and he steadied his hand on the windowsill.

  “Like once,” the bishop was saying, “Emil must have been ten, a year older than I, and afraid of getting the Blaue Brief—blue letter—and having to repeat fourth grade. Behind our house was this barn, and he climbed onto its roof and balanced along the top until he fell off. He broke his leg and two ribs. Another time he threw eggs at a church window.… I used to admire and fear Emil at the same time. Back then, we were not very alike at all. But now …” He turned his face aside.

  Leo waited. Finally he said. “You have the same kind of courage.”

  “Really?” The bishop looked grateful. “I always thought of myself as rather timid. In comparison to Emil, that is.”

  “My daughter and I—” Leo sat back down. “We still want to help.”

  “It’s too dangerous. Your connection to Emil… They’ll be watching you. We need to be careful. I get so tired of being careful.… Sometimes I wish I could come out with what I think about the Nazis, use my influence—”

  Leo shook his head.

  “I know.” The bishop refilled their glasses. “I’ve seen too many others pulled out of high positions. The only one I know of who’s spoken up without harm to himself is the bishop from Münster. It’s a mystery to me.”

  “You’ve done a lot of good, working in the background.”

  “In furious silence.”

  “The change in policy—” Leo said, “killing the Jews instead of trying to push them out of the country.… Emil used to argue that it did not arise from the war situation but was intended all along.”

  “And you?” the bishop asked. “What do you believe?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve never been as sure about things as your brother. But in my darkest moments I agree with him.”

  “So do I.” The bishop hesitated. “There’ll be rumors … so you better hear this from me.”

  “What is it?”

  One of the flies that stuck to the amber fly strip above the table still twitched its legs.

  “I had a phone call from the owner of the gymnasts’ club. It turns out that, all those years Emil worked for him, he’s been embezzling funds.”

  Leo’s chin jerked up. “The gifts.”

  “What gifts?”

  “The unknown benefactor.”

  The bishop frowned.

  “That’s how Emil must have bought the gifts.” Leo told the bishop about the unknown benefactor, about three decades of gifts that had graced the lives of many people in Burgdorf. “Emil was the closest this town ever had to a hero.… And we didn’t even know who he was.”

  “Ah yes,” the bishop murmured and raised one hand as if in benediction, but halfway up he halted, a smile on his lips. “And we didn’t even know.…”

  Over the next weeks, Trudi and her father would marvel at long-ago incidents when, in Emil’s company, they’d mentioned that the Braunmeiers had lost a calf to the storm, say, or that the Brocker girl had been looking at a rabbit muff in a store window, or that Herr Buttgereit couldn’t afford coats for his family.

  “We helped him.”

  “He knew how to listen.”

  Soon, they could no longer understand how they could possibly have missed all along that Emil Hesping had been the unknown benefactor. And so it was all over town.

  “Remember when the pastor’s housekeeper broke the handle of her shopping basket in the market? By the time she got back, a new basket with two cabbages was already on her doorstep.”

  “Remember when Frau Simon’s bicycle was stolen and she found a new one right in her bedroom?”

  “Remember when the Weiler boy got those Lederhosen?”

  “Remember when the midwife—?”

  “Remember when—?”

  “Remember—?”

  The people of Burgdorf liked to see themselves as accomplices of the unknown benefactor, and they cherished whatever small part they might have played in carrying information to him.

  “I was the one who told him when Holger Baum lost his wallet.”

  “He heard about Frau Blomberg’s broken ankle from me.”

  “If it hadn’t been for me, he would have never found out about the Bilders’ sick dog.”

  The people brought flowers to Emil’s grave: tulips
and forget-me-nots and lilacs; some whispered silent apologies about having ever considered him selfish or immoral. When they passed the Hitler statue, which had been bolted as well as chained to an iron base, they would cast sideways glances at the splatters of blood that had dried brown against the silver-white pigeon droppings on the Führer’s chest. Even Herr Pastor Beier, who’d never shown much regard for Herr Hesping, now wished he’d reported his need for a car to him, rather than to the bishop, and based a long sermon on the words that it is better to give than to receive.

  She arrived before Max and sat down on a rock wide enough for both of them. Within minutes the blue of the sky changed to gray, and a whitish mist began to roll in from the Rhein. It covered the end of the jetty, then whirled across the countryside as if summoned by a paintbrush, shrouding rocks, shrubs, and willows until Trudi, too, was surrounded. The quality of the mist—thick and white—made her eyes ache with its brightness, but as she adjusted to it, she felt invisible. She rather liked that sense of protection: she knew her surroundings well though she couldn’t see them, but others wouldn’t know where she was. It made her wish the mist had been there for the last decade, keeping all of them safe.

  The mist had a dense texture—denser, it seemed, than her flesh. If only Max were already with her: they could make love in this mist. Low in her belly she felt the warm heaviness as if he’d already touched her. To hell with all the hiding … If it were up to her, she’d walk into the center of Burgdorf, right now, holding hands with Max, and make love in the church square with the mist shrouding them from curious and shocked eyes. She smiled to herself, but instantly felt frivolous, considering that there was a war and that people were so hungry and poor that someone had even stolen the collection box for pagan babies from church. The last one of the geese behind the taxidermist’s shop had disappeared—into someone’s pot, no doubt—though everyone knew that Herr Heidenreich, who prayed for his daughter’s return every day, was saving that goose for her homecoming meal. While Trudi and her father kept trading library books for food, nearly everyone she knew had sold some belongings in order not to starve.

  In the deep silence of the mist, as Trudi longed to survive the war—even if just to know what would happen—she saw herself as an old woman, face lined, eyes tranquil yet knowing, and understood with absolute certainty that she would be alive for a long time to come. She wished she had that same certainty about her father and Max and Eva, or about Alexander Sturm who, after wavering between imagining Eva alive and dead, had convinced himself last month that she was dead. After making out a will that left everything to Jutta, he had enlisted in the army.

  The mist gave a sameness to everything. Before, there’d been countless nuances in color and shape, but now everything was white-gray. Trudi could make out the shape of the bush right in front of her and then the shadows of birds flitting past her, but they only appeared for an instant before they were blotted by the mist. It was quite beautiful and eerie and made it possible to pretend there was no war and that—in some well-lit future—she might be able to remember whatever she chose.

  She wondered how close Max was and if he too was discovering the beauty of the mist. Though she saw him once or twice a week, she thought about him when she was not with him. Sometimes too much, she worried. What if he turned away from her greed for his love? What if her love flipped into hate as it had before with others? The mist that separated her from him made her understand what it would be like not to have him in her life again, and she felt that old and absolute panic that, if you couldn’t reach someone, that person had died or was lost to you. Only now there was no locked door to fling her child body against and bruise her fists, just that white barricade of mist that yielded to her movements, shaping itself to her body like new skin.

  When the fog lifted, she realized she’d been sitting less than twenty meters from Max. At first neither of them moved. She felt a sharp bliss at having him in her life. All at once he laughed and sprang up, and she stood up too, amazed that the air offered no resistance to her body.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What is it?” and brushed her hair from her cheek. “You weren’t afraid, were you?”

  She shook her head, and the air around her neck felt light and cool.

  The first day Ingrid Hebel brought her newborn daughter to the pay-library, Frau Weiler came running over from next door, wiping her hands on her starched apron. “Can I hold the baby?” she asked and stretched out her arms before Trudi could even get a look at the newborn. Ever since Frau Weiler had become the grandmother of twin girls, she’d blossomed. Now she fussed over every baby she saw, even boy babies.

  “If only she’d been that way with Georg,” people would say, remembering the pathetic-looking boy in girl’s clothing.

  Frau Weiler’s protruding eyes peered at the baby’s face. “What’s her name?” She tickled her chin.

  “Rita.”

  “She looks just like your husband.”

  Ingrid’s face, which was already red from the sun, turned an even deeper red. She had moved into the apartment above the bicycle shop with her parents the day after she’d arrived in the potato truck, and Trudi had heard Ingrid’s father screaming three blocks away. From the Heidenreichs Trudi had heard that Ingrid’s father had met with the pastor and that they’d made a number of phone calls from the rectory, including one to the army, requesting that a certain Ulrich Hebel, who used to work for the railroad, be granted leave in time to give his child a name.

  The beginning of July, a week before the baby’s birth, the soldier Hebel arrived in Burgdorf for a hasty wedding. He didn’t look at all the way Trudi had imagined—a movie-star body and passionate eyes that would have persuaded someone like Ingrid to part with her purity. Rather, he was shorter than Ingrid and quite a bit older, a considerate man, it was evident, who was easily flustered and adored his new bride, even though his future father-in-law had boxed him in the face upon meeting him, so that at the wedding ceremony as well as on the day of his departure for Hamburg, where the British had attacked, the bridegroom’s right cheek was the color of beef kidney past its peak of freshness.

  “Let me have the baby now,” Trudi reminded Frau Weiler.

  Leaning forward, Frau Weiler reluctantly positioned Rita in Trudi’s arms. “Careful now.”

  “You think I’m going to drop her? And that she’ll turn out to be a Zwerg too?”

  “Oh, Trudi.” Frau Weiler gave a quick, exasperated sigh. “You get so … so—”

  “What?”

  “It’s just they’re fragile at that age.…” She turned for the door.

  “Bring her by soon, Ingrid.”

  “I will.” Ingrid’s voice was flat. “Sit down,” Trudi invited her.

  But Ingrid stayed next to her, eyes trained on Rita as if waiting for her to sprout horns or make some horrible mistake. To Trudi, the baby looked beautiful with her dark halo of straight hair and tiny hands that curled into loose fists. She wore a smocked dress from the midwife’s supply. Despite her mother’s urging, Ingrid had refused to sew or knit for the baby during her pregnancy. She’d spent most of her days on her knees in church, asking God’s forgiveness, while her body continued to swell until it looked as if a single pew could no longer hold her.

  “She’ll feel better after the wedding,” her mother had told the neighbors, but Ingrid continued her empty-eyed pilgrimages to the church, even after she’d become Ulrich Hebel’s wife.

  “She’ll feel better after the baby’s born,” her mother had told the neighbors to still her own worries about how Ingrid might be with her child; and she was relieved when Ingrid looked after her infant daughter properly, even though it seemed that only her body took over that function while her soul tangled with her sin.

  “It takes longer for some women than others to feel like mothers,” the old women would console Ingrid’s mother while, amongst themselves, they’d whisper, “She’s unnatural,” and recount memories of that stunning blaze of love they’
d felt as soon as their infants had been placed in their arms.

  They were appalled that Ingrid hadn’t even thanked the midwife, who’d arrived for the birthing with a flour sack full of tiny shirts and booties and dresses. Even the diapers had been ironed and folded and smelled as fresh as the air inside the midwife’s house. Her floors were always spotless because the midwife not only cleaned every day but also took off her and her son’s shoes inside the house. Before she’d let visitors enter, she’d inspect the soles of their shoes to make sure they hadn’t stepped into pigeon droppings or dog shit.

  But that August, a month after the midwife had delivered Ingrid’s daughter, she did not check her visitors’ shoes. Her face was swollen red from crying when they came into her house, wearing the summer grieving clothes they’d aired out overnight, bringing her generous cakes and meats and salads from their meager supplies to make up for the scant words of sympathy they managed to summon up for the man who’d turned in his own mother.

  Late that evening, the midwife asked one of the old neighbor women to watch over Adi’s sleep while she returned to the cemetery, where the wreaths and bouquets on her husband’s new grave gleamed under a quarter moon. “I love you,” she whispered, trying to evoke Helmut the last time she’d seen him, but instead she saw his mother the day she’d been taken away. “I love you,” she tried again. Sometimes she had listened to Helmut’s heart after he’d fallen asleep. Her cheek against his chest, she’d felt the slow, steady beat of his heart against her skin. No more.

  “I’ll miss you,” she whispered, but already she knew that, in the few days since Helmut’s body had been sent back to Burgdorf for his soldier’s funeral of honor—including a mass for which the priest had decorated the altar with a steel helmet and Hakenkreuz flag—the people had begun to accept her far more than before.

  She thought of her favorite red dress that she wouldn’t be able to wear for an entire year. Maybe she should dye it black. Widow’s clothes. At least the black would cover the stain from last Sunday, when she’d worn the red dress to mass. Just as she’d been about to faint again, she’d pressed Adi toward Frau Heidenreich, who’d knelt next to her, and when she’d come to on the church steps, her dress had been smudged and the Zwerg woman had been bending over her, fanning her with both hands. Trudi’s face had looked so soft, dreamlike almost. Why, Hilde remembered thinking, Trudi looks like a woman who is loved.… But immediately she’d said to herself, No, this can’t be, not the Zwerg, and she hadn’t shared her observation with others because they would have laughed at her.