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

  “But he is a suicide,” the pastor had insisted.

  “There’s nothing to prove that.”

  “Frau Talmeister saw him jump.”

  “Maybe he was inspecting the roof. He’d been away for a long time.”

  “A deserter. You know, don’t you, that two other soldiers, too cowardly to fight our war, were shot near the Sternburg while stealing vegetables.”

  “Maybe they were the heroes. They refused to be part of—”

  “I won’t listen to this.” The priest took a step away from her. “Frau Talmeister watched your uncle from her window.”

  “If Frau Talmeister doesn’t have anything better to do than hang in her window all day, it doesn’t mean she knows what’s going on.”

  “I wish I could help you—I truly do—but the rules of the church are clear when it comes to suicide.”

  “It matters nothing to me where my uncle is buried. The only reason I’m here is because I know it would have mattered to him.”

  They kept looping back through the same words, and when Jutta left, the pastor felt weak with hunger. It seemed that his hunger grew with each year, leaving him dissatisfied only minutes after a large meal. Yet, his body kept expanding, straining against the seams which his housekeeper grudgingly let out or reinforced with inserts.

  All that night Jutta painted, unable to step back from the canvas that summoned from her the bright red shapes of two bodies whirling from a yellow sky like winged seeds.

  Early the following morning, before mass and breakfast, she rang the doorbell of the rectory and walked right into the priest’s study though Fräulein Teschner tried to stop her.

  “Herr Pastor Beier is still asleep.”

  “Wake him then. Please.”

  “Once I do, he’ll have to get ready for mass.”

  “This won’t take long.”

  Jutta stood in the middle of the study when the priest came in, his hair combed only in front. Apparently he hadn’t stopped to brush his teeth because his night breath preceded him.

  “You keep my uncle out—you keep me out too.”

  “Now… now, Frau Malter.” The priest laid one hand on her shoulder.

  She dropped her shoulder, stepped back. “No. I won’t be back in church.”

  It was the determination in her eyes—much more than her words—that convinced the priest she meant what she said. How could he let her soul slip from the graces of the church? Besides, his parish had shrunk and become so poor that he couldn’t afford to lose someone prosperous like the dentist’s wife, who, everyone knew, was her uncle’s only heir.

  “Tell me …” He looked at the polished tips of his shoes, the only part of them that wasn’t obstructed by his belly. “So your uncle was in the habit of doing some of his own repairs?”

  “Usually he hired people.”

  “But first, first he would check out himself what needed to be done?”

  “Seldom.”

  “Still—” He peered into Jutta’s eyes. “This is a unique situation, returning after a long absence.… Tell me,” he prompted her, “were there problems with the roof?”

  “No.”

  The priest kept his impatience from his voice. “But if there were problems …” he said, blotting out Frau Talmeister’s description of Alexander Sturm standing on his roof for several minutes in his Sunday suit, arms spread—“Like the statue of an angel,” Frau Talmeister had told him—“If there were problems,” the priest said, “it could have been treacherous … that high up.”

  • • •

  Ingrid lived with her daughter, Rita, above the bicycle shop in the room that used to be hers as a girl, and every night she prayed for Rita’s salvation. Her new husband had returned to the war, and she felt guilty for not missing him.

  At least once a week she’d bring Rita to the pay-library and let her crawl and play between the shelves where she and Trudi had held their very first conversation. They’d watch the little girl from the wooden counter where the glass bins stood empty. It had long since become impossible to get tobacco, and the customers who walked through the door came for books or gossip.

  Since just about every able-bodied man between fifteen and sixty was being drafted, most teaching positions were filled by women. When Ingrid found work at a school in Düsseldorf, her mother offered to look after Rita. Ingrid’s class was huge, more like a holding tank for hungry children than a place where they might learn anything. Nearly sixty students filled the benches, squatted along the walls when they got too tired to stand, and sat on the windowsills, eyes dull in their thin faces.

  Repeated bombings of Düsseldorf made the teaching even more difficult. Ingrid would have to interrupt her lessons to hurry the children into the huge cellar. There, she’d make them pray with her till the end of the air attack, and whenever she worried about her daughter’s safety, she’d remind herself that, if God chose to claim Rita this young, she’d go to heaven for sure.

  Sometimes when she emerged from the cellar, Ingrid would be confronted by new horrors: mutilated people transported in hand carts to the hospital; dead goats or cats in the middle of the street; people buried beneath the ruins of their houses while others tried to dig them out. Some would be found alive, most dead. One of her students, eight-year-old Hermann Blaser, was missing after a bombing and not found until hours later, his body burned. On her way from the school to the streetcar, Ingrid encountered his mother who, demented with grief, carried a cardboard box that used to contain soap and in which she’d collected Hermann’s bone remains.

  The earth of the cemeteries was never at rest. It became confusing to Ingrid to figure out where the front was. Didn’t the civilians suffer as badly as the soldiers? What kind of world was it where you could emerge from a cellar after a bombing, emerge into air that was opaque and dense, and feel relieved that you’d been spared?

  In her neighborhood, Ingrid saw people become more sober about the government as they suffered destruction and witnessed each other’s powerlessness and anguish. She’d never seen the people of Burgdorf this poor, this hungry, this afraid, and she envied Trudi’s father, who was content even with Steckrübensuppe—turnip soup—and who had the gift to see the good in everyone, even in her who was always so hungry that she even craved the smell of boiling potatoes and sour milk. On the outside she knew she didn’t show her greed and discontent, but within she railed against her hunger.

  Many in town longed for the days of the unknown benefactor, when their distress would have summoned a gift from him. As winter began, the cold intensified the hunger. Refugees from Schlesien and other parts of the country settled in Burgdorf. Several old people and two infants froze to death in their houses.

  Cellars were colder than any other place, and even prayers did little to alleviate the physical pain that came with extreme cold. In her parents’ cellar it occurred to Ingrid that her concept of hell had to be all wrong because, surely, hell must be the coldest place you could imagine. During air raids, she’d try to keep her daughter warm by wrapping her in extra layers of her own clothes, which she kept in her broken suitcase by the stairs. The floor, where she and her parents spent many nights, was hard despite the blankets that her father spread out. Those blankets were the only comfort she would accept from him; whenever he’d offer her one of his jackets she’d decline, unable to tolerate anything he’d worn so close to his skin. Yet, even with several blankets and two coats, she’d feel cold. And something would always stick out—her legs, her arms, or her cold, cold neck. Though she never mentioned the cold, she felt selfish for noticing it, for crying inside about the misery it caused her.

  Throughout that winter, Max talked more and more about finding Ruth Abramowitz and introducing Trudi to his aunt. By then, Leo’s car had been seized for the war effort, and when Trudi asked Max how he planned to get to Dresden, he said they could go on the train. To get money for the tickets, he sold three of his paintings to a wealthy woman whose daughter he used to tutor. He preten
ded to be ill at the ammunition factory, collapsing several times at his desk, until he was told to stay home for a week. The second Sunday of February 1945, a day before his thirty-eighth birthday, he and Trudi were prepared to set out for Dresden and Leipzig on the train, when her father developed a sudden high fever and cough.

  “Just go,” Leo told Trudi. “I’ll be all right without you.”

  But she seized the chance of staying with him. She had been nervous about meeting Max’s aunt. How would she react if she saw her nephew walk up to the front door with a Zwerg woman?

  “We could make the trip later,” Max suggested.

  “Why don’t you go without me?”

  “Because we’ve wanted to do this together.”

  “We’ll make another trip. In the summer. Maybe you can … you know, get your aunt sort of ready for me? Besides, it would be good if Ruth knew about her parents.”

  “But I don’t want to take the jewelry and things if I go by myself.”

  “Why not? I trust you. And she may need them.”

  When Max left, he told her, “I still wish you’d come, or that we’d go later, together.”

  Afterwards, she would go over these two options in her mind, again and again—picturing herself in Dresden with Max as the firebombs annihilated the city, then picturing herself postponing the trip. If only they had waited as he had suggested. Then they’d both still be alive. And they would have celebrated Max’s birthday on its proper day. She should have known better than to let him talk her into wishing him happy birthday one day early, considering the misfortunes those early celebrations had brought upon her father’s side of the family. But the morning of his departure Max had brought a cake made out of turnips to the pay-library and had teased her into letting him have his gifts, two shirts and a vest she’d sewn for him. Her misgivings had felt silly—after all, nothing terrible had happened in her lifetime—but then again, maybe that was only because she had honored the superstition she’d grown up with and had not celebrated anything before its time. When Max vanished in Dresden two days after his departure from Burgdorf—or perhaps on the way to Leipzig, Trudi would tell herself, hoping that he’d first visited his aunt or that even, against all reason, he’d absconded with the Abramowitzs’ treasures though she knew he’d never steal from anyone—it was as though his disappearance proved the superstition.

  • • •

  She felt stunned by the magnitude of the destruction. Thousands and thousands of people had perished in Dresden that February Tuesday, many of them refugees who couldn’t be accounted for. Canisters of phosphorus had been dropped on the city, turning people into live torches, driving hordes of burning, shrieking bodies toward the ponds that had been established for extinguishing fires and now became graves as many drowned, trampled or crowded by others into deeper water. And then the bombs began to rain on the city. For forty minutes. Everywhere. Without selection. On churches and hospitals and prisons and schools. Killing, maiming. A carpet of bombs.

  With each horrible detail she’d find out, Trudi would despair more; and yet she’d try to picture Max alive—wounded and unable to let her know what had happened to him—but alive. She’d be patient. She’d wait. For as long as it would take. Nights, her fears presented her with every possible disaster that could have happened to him, and the worst was that he’d become one of the burned bodies buried in the mass graves that had been dug in an immense ditch around the center of Dresden.

  Wavering between fear for his life and feeling rejected—maybe he’d wanted to get away from her; maybe he’d returned to his wife—she wandered through Burgdorf, searching for him though she was sure she wouldn’t find him. She tried to imagine him close by, tried to evoke him by willing him to return to her.

  Several times she took the streetcar to Kaiserswerth and talked to the watchmaker, who hadn’t seen Max since he’d left for Dresden. “He said he’d be back in a week,” he’d tell her and let her borrow the key to Max’s room above the shop, where she’d sit for hours.

  If an airplane passed low above his roof, she wouldn’t even bother to look from the window. She remembered how impatient she’d become with Alexander for praying his house would be hit by bombs. I didn’t understand then, she thought and sent him a silent apology.

  Most of the time she’d be staring at the paintings, and she’d see herself in his arms, asking him, “What did you see this time?” And Max would tell her, first with words, then with colors. In his arms, she had tried to see what he saw—exotic buildings, entire cities—and once she’d managed to glimpse a yellow flower at the moment, the brink, a flower the warm shade of yellow-orange that blossomed behind her eyelids, blotting out everything else until all of her was yellow-orange warm.

  She walked. She slept. Without regard for time. In the middle of the night she might find herself by the river or on the fairgrounds without recalling getting there. On her face, she’d feel the old tears and snot, and she’d move her arms to shake off invisible assailants. She stopped caring for her clothes, her hair. Since the town had not known about her love for Max, people did not come forward to comfort her, to share her grief, or tell her that she was not the only one who’d lost someone, that all of them had friends and family who’d vanished—dead perhaps, or living in foreign countries. The only one who understood was her father, who’d close the pay-library to look for her as he once had for her mother, who knew how to find her and bring her home, who’d sit her down and feed her something warm and soothing, who’d pull his comb from his shirt pocket and untangle her hair.

  She kept returning to Kaiserswerth, and when the watchmaker told her, “I’ll have to rent the room—that is, if your friend doesn’t come back soon,” she left her shoes with the high, high heels inside Max’s wardrobe, but she took his paintings from the walls and carried them home, where she wrapped them and stored them in back of her closet.

  A month after the firebombing of Dresden, the saddest of all trains passed through Burgdorf, a long train filled with people from a KZ, gray faces and striped suits behind the windows. Thin, hungry, and ill, they were transported to another camp because the Americans were getting close. When the train stopped at the Burgdorf platform for more than half an hour, none of the prisoners got off. Armed SS men stood along the platform, separating the train from the line of townspeople, who stood watching at a distance.

  The air was damp and cool and still as if it were solid, poured around the three groups like those half globes of glass that fit into your hand and contain an entire town and which—unless picked up and shaken to distribute a shower of snowflakes—will remain immobile. Yet, all at once, something moved, a woman’s shape in a beige raincoat, loosening itself from the line of watchers, setting in motion a sequence of other motions. It was the third-youngest Buttgereit daughter, Bettina, flying from the restraining hands of her sisters toward the train, thrusting the half loaf of bread that she’d just traded from Frau Bilder for an embroidered purse, toward one of the half-open windows of the train. Several gaunt hands tried to clutch the bread, but before any could seize it, four SS men closed around Bettina Buttgereit, their black uniforms one impenetrable knot that absorbed her pale coat and rendered her invisible until they disentangled. Gripping Bettina between them, they thrust her toward the train. Into the train.

  Silently, the line of townspeople retreated, shrank. Just as the train pulled out of the station, the people noticed the face of an old man who looked strangely familiar, though no one could say who he was. Behind the passing window, he wrenched up his bony chin, pressed his fleshless lips together, and focused his sunken eyes on something above the people’s heads.

  After that train, it felt as though the Americans might arrive any day. It was the end of March when they approached Burgdorf, and what announced them from a distance was the rumbling of their tanks. When Trudi rose from her bed and looked from the upstairs hall window, people in the street were running for shelter as though they’d heard the air-raid sirens. As
she grabbed a white sheet and hung it from the window, the front door flew open.

  It was Frau Weiler, carrying a basin of holy water. “Quick now, Leo, Trudi—” she yelled. “To the church. We have to hide.” She stared at Trudi as she came down the stairs, still in her nightgown, her hair disheveled. “At least put a coat on.”

  Not too long ago, Trudi would have welcomed the Americans as rescuers, but since the firebombing of Dresden that had changed. Besides, her aunt had warned her in a letter that a lot of Americans thought all Germans were Nazis. Trudi already knew what it was like to be considered an enemy within your own country because you were against the Nazis, and now she felt even more isolated because she might well be regarded an enemy by both sides.

  Her father’s hand on her elbow, she found herself in the street with him and Frau Weiler, whose scarf was slipping from her gray hair as she flung drops of holy water around them. They hurried across the church square and ducked into the cellar of St. Martin’s Church, where the priest was trying to calm nearly two dozen people, most of them more terrified than during the air raids which—compared to this—had come to feel familiar.

  Leo and Trudi sat next to Ingrid, who was there with her baby and parents.

  “Nothing will happen to us.” Frau Weiler was splashing her holy water on everyone.

  The priest waved her away.

  “Nothing will happen to us.…”

  “Don’t be so sure,” the taxidermist said. “Those Americans have killed plenty of us with their bombs.”

  Fräulein Teschner clutched a long white cloth that she’d snatched right from the altar during a quick detour on her flight from the rectory.

  “They come with bayonets,” the taxidermist whispered. “And they stab anyone who resists them.”

  “Someone has to be our messenger,” his wife decided.

  “Someone who knows English,” the priest said.