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

  Sometimes, when Jutta came to retrieve her daughter, she’d hold her tight and study her small face as if searching for something that might have been taken from her during her absence. Once, she didn’t bring Hanna to the pay-library for ten days because she felt like an unnatural mother for cherishing her time alone; and since she didn’t know how to explain this to Trudi, she avoided her by varying her walks with the child. But it was impossible to immerse herself in her work when her daughter was with her, and she finally convinced herself that Hanna enjoyed her time with Trudi.

  Since Trudi refused to accept money for looking after Hanna, Jutta invited her over one afternoon, while her husband was pulling Frau Weskopp’s infected wisdom tooth, and told Trudi to choose any one of her canvases. The painting of Trudi was safely hidden beneath her bed, and she’d leaned the rest of her work against the sofa, chairs, and table legs in her living room.

  “I see you’ve kept Eva’s sofa,” Trudi said.

  “It reminds me of her and my uncle. Most of the furniture stayed when we moved into their apartment.”

  “Eva would have wanted you to have them.” Trudi looked around. “But you didn’t keep the stuffed birds.”

  “I think of them as dead birds. There’s been too much death already.” Jutta pointed toward her painting of Schreberstrasse. “Recognize it?”

  Trudi nodded. Jutta had painted her street at an odd angle, tilted toward the fiery sky, with the pay-library, the grocery store, and the Blaus’ house blazing blue triangles.

  Jutta had figured Trudi would choose that one, or the one she’d done of the quarry during a thunderstorm with slashes of light above the shadowy caldron of water, but Trudi walked past the paintings of the town, pausing in front of the canvas with two red figures floating from a yellow sky.

  “Your uncle?”

  Jutta nodded.

  “And Eva?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Trudi nodded. “It has to be Eva.”

  Goose bumps rose along Jutta’s arms. Of course it’s Eva, has been Eva all along. How could I have not known and yet painted her?

  Trudi headed toward the painting that Jutta had never considered giving away—her only one of Hanna so far—and stood silently in front of the square canvas that was filled with the shape of Jutta’s child, a week after her birth, and with Jutta’s hands in a deep hue of green, cradling the small, perfect body, which was the color of clay as though it had just been carved from the earth. And with this painting, features had emerged under her brush—unmistakably Hanna’s.

  “There are others,” Jutta said, uneasy with the way Trudi stared at the picture.

  “That one,” Trudi said in a voice that did not allow discussion.

  She hung the canvas in her bedroom along with Max’s paintings. Sometimes those hands that held the child became her own, and she had to remind herself that Hanna had Jutta and Klaus as parents. Once again, she found herself aching with fantasies of a marriage and family, and she’d admonish herself: Who are you to believe you can have that? Yet, that old urge of needing, of wanting, would burst through her, fastening itself to this child, Hanna, whose parents had the power to keep her away—as they had on Hanna’s first Christmas, when they’d taken her on a visit to one of Klaus’ rich relatives, while all along Trudi had looked forward to Christmas Eve when she would give her the doll clothes she’d sewn so lovingly on long winter evenings.

  She had bought the fabric in Düsseldorf, in Mahler’s department store, and the saleswoman had asked her what she was making.

  “A dress. For a doll.”

  “Your daughter’s doll?”

  Somehow, she’d nodded.

  “What’s your daughter’s name?”

  “Hanna.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Six months.”

  “A lovely age.”

  “She’s starting to sit up.”

  “Does she have your hair?”

  “Very light, yes.”

  “And blue eyes?”

  “Yes.”

  It didn’t feel like lying. Especially since she’d started off with the truth. Yet, she felt uneasy about that conversation when she sewed the outfit for Hanna’s doll, a pink dress with royal-blue trim and a royal-blue hat so stylish even Frau Simon would have admired it.

  When Matthias Berger returned to Burgdorf to visit his grandmother, he stopped by the pay-library and confessed to Trudi that he was thinking of leaving the seminary. He’d been in for a year and a half, and with each day, he said, he felt more set apart from the other seminarians.

  “You can live with us,” she offered impulsively.

  “I— I couldn’t impose.”

  “You’d be renting a room. The whole third floor, actually. You know how scarce apartments are.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Have you been playing the piano?”

  “Not since I entered the seminary.”

  “Such a waste … There’s a piano waiting here for you.” Her voice skipped with excitement. “Let’s tell my father.”

  “Wait,” he said, “wait.”

  “He’ll be so glad. I haven’t thought of renting to anyone until now. Imagine—having you live in the house with us.” Already she could see her day-to-day life with him, meeting him in the hallway, eating meals together, watching him play chess with her father. Of course he’d take up the piano again.

  “I haven’t decided for sure. About leaving.”

  She knew she was being pushy but she couldn’t stop. “It would be such a comfort to my father to have you here. He hasn’t been well.”

  Matthias brought his hands to his face and pressed his fingers against his temples.

  “You still get those headaches?”

  He nodded, and then he was silent for so long that she thought he’d forgotten her.

  “Something happened,” she said. “Something happened in the seminary. I know it.”

  He looked startled.

  She grasped his elbow, led him between the shelves, and climbed to the fourth rung of the ladder, where she sat, her face at the same level with his. “Tell me.”

  “I should go.”

  “Please.”

  “It’s so ugly.”

  And it was ugly. A group of other seminarians had surrounded Matthias outside the chapel after night prayers, dragged him into the forest behind the buildings, and knotted a rope tightly through the belt loops of his trousers. After forcing castor oil down his throat, they hunted him through the woods with sticks, hissing “queer, filthy queer,” while he struggled to get his pants down and crouch behind a tree away from them to relieve the terrible pressure in his bowels. But their sticks kept him from untying the rope, and soon he was sobbing with humiliation while feces ran down his legs.

  “Those bastards.” Trudi was furious.

  “You know what I kept thinking while they were chasing me?” His face was strained. White. “That I deserved it. Even though I’ve never touched one of them.”

  “No one deserves to be treated like that. Those bastards. And they weren’t even original. Mussolini’s Fascists—they used to do that to people. You were just a boy then.… Did you report them?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve tried … For other things. Before. Nothing that bad. Only shoving around. Taunting. Our superiors don’t take it that seriously. They have me figured as different anyhow.”

  “Our country has a history of that, justifying attacks on those who are different. Erasing them.”

  “You’re making this into something bigger than it is.”

  “It’s much bigger than anything I could make, believe me, Matthias. Don’t you see—this war is still going on. And will be going on … Until we all accept everything that has happened, we won’t have the peace that people believe we already have.”

  He was silent for a long time. Finally he looked into her face. “What do you do if you’re called to the wrong thing?”


  She was terribly afraid of saying words that would make him feel even worse. It was obvious to her that he was not talking about the church, but about battling that within him that called him to seek out his own gender. She wanted to lay her hand on his arm, yet he looked so brittle as he stood before her that she was certain he’d splinter if she touched him. “It must be awful,” she said carefully, “to be called to something one, does not want.”

  “And what does one do with that?” His voice was raw. Mocking.

  “I don’t know. Unless—”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless there’s some way one can learn to want what one is called for.” You’re a good one to preach, Trudi Montag, she told herself. How about you, how well have you learned to want what you’re called to be? Body and soul and mind. All. Like Pia. Who wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

  Pia would have never believed the traveling healer, an ancient Dutchman with youthful steps and mesmerizing eyes, who’d come through Burgdorf and into the pay-library only two months earlier with his magic potions. Of course Trudi hadn’t believed either that this sweet-smelling liquid he’d tried to sell her would really make her grow. And yet, how could she pass up the chance that the healer might be telling the truth? And so she bought the potion, quickly, before a customer could enter or before she could talk herself out of it.

  She was glad Max wasn’t there because if she looked through his eyes at her decision it embarrassed her. Or through Pia’s eyes. She didn’t need their voices of reason. That evening, when she took the first dose of the thick, honey-flavored liquid—doubling it so it would work faster—she found herself believing with the same intensity that she’d brought to the God-magic as a girl. And of course she felt betrayed when the potion did not change her and furious at herself for that bottomless capacity to believe and let herself be swindled.

  “What if that calling is a sin?” Matthias whispered.

  Trudi shook her head, slowly. “My father—he has a theory about sin.… I’m sure the pastor wouldn’t agree with him, but my father says much of what the church calls sin is simply being human.”

  “I wish I could agree with that.”

  “He says being kind is the most important thing.”

  “I’ve always liked your father. He—” Matthias stopped and looked at Trudi as if worried she’d ask him to leave. “Not like that, I mean, liking him. More like—like admiring …” His voice faltered. “I hold your father in the highest esteem,” he said stiffly.

  “And he would be honored to know that. He’d also be honored to hear you play our piano. There hasn’t been enough music in this town for too long, Matthias. Don’t forget—your gift with music is a calling too.”

  His eyes filled with tears.

  “A calling more sacred than the priesthood,” she whispered.

  He watched her without speaking.

  “Will you think about what I said?”

  He nodded. “I have to go.”

  “But you haven’t seen my father yet.”

  “I—I’ll come again. I promise. Tomorrow.”

  But when he returned the following afternoon, it was only to say good-bye to her and her father. He was returning to the seminary early, he said, and she could tell it was to end the chaos of indecision.

  Angry at him for betraying his talents, for seeking punishment, she demanded, “Why would you want to go back there?”

  “Because …” His smile sad, he crouched next to her and took one of her hands into his. “If I stay on the outside, the temptation is stronger.”

  “But the seminary is not a safe place.”

  “Maybe not for my body. But at least for my soul.”

  • • •

  One morning in April of 1947, Ingrid Hebel tried to save her children by giving them the greatest gift she could fathom: an eternity in heaven. Nights when she had knelt by their beds in prayer, God had reminded her that no one but she loved her children enough to do this for them. It would be their one chance at redemption. If they continued living, they would reach the age of reason and succumb to sin as she had. Now they were both still pure, although she’d seen their greed—even in the eyes of her younger daughter when she nursed her.

  Though the age of reason was seven years of age, Ingrid didn’t dare wait that long: she had to assure her children’s safe passage into eternity. And fortunately God was calling her while they were still pure. Once she decided to obey, the turmoil that had been hers for as long as she could remember fell off her. She felt tranquil. Almost holy. The one thing that saddened her was that she would not be with her children; but since she was tainted already, leaving her life behind would be a mortal sin. No, her own redemption would come from relinquishing her daughters to heaven and then waiting until God called her to join them.

  Rita was nearly four and the baby, Karin, was just learning to walk when Ingrid took the two in the streetcar to the Oberkassel bridge, a bottle of holy water in her purse. It was early in the morning, and her daughters wore the matching long-sleeved white dresses she’d knitted for them over the winter in preparation for this day. She carried the baby, and Rita held on to her hand as they climbed from the streetcar and walked toward the bridge that spanned the Rhein between Oberkassel and Düsseldorf.

  The river was running high, and its sounds rushed across her children’s voices. Halfway across the bridge, Ingrid stopped. Pale light was shrinking the edges of the gray clouds, breaking through to link heaven and river in translucent steps. Rita saw it too: she laughed and pointed to the gap in the clouds. Ingrid lowered the baby, Karin, to the sidewalk, and transferred the fine chain with the golden cross from her own neck to Rita’s. Then she opened the holy water, blessed both children—“Im Namen des Vaters und des Sohnes und des Heiligen Geistes”—and lifted Rita toward the radiant steps. Suffused by such a warm and unfamiliar joy that she felt certain she was doing God’s will, Ingrid kissed Rita, whose forehead was still damp from holy water. “Yes,” Ingrid told her, “yes, God is waiting for you … soon we’ll all be together again … don’t forget to prepare a place for me too …” and then Rita was weightless in her arms—an angel already, an angel—as she flew from her and up those steps, singing, singing high—and as Ingrid bent and reached for her baby girl—This is what I was born to do.… Into your hands, your heart, O Heavenly Father… whispering: “Oh, my sweet my sweet—” Karin’s body was heavier than Rita’s, far heavier; it resisted Ingrid’s arms, stayed on the ground as if God were rejecting her even though Ingrid strained, strained to raise her arms against the weight that held them down, weight that became hands, then bodies, pinning her, snatching her daughter from the grasp of God—So near, my Lord, so near—offering God instead the arched body of a woman—far too old for redemption—leaping toward the light… blocking the light… extinguishing the light—

  “She was too late,” Ingrid’s mother told Trudi when she met her outside the locked room where Ingrid was kept in the Theresienheim. “The woman who tried to save my granddaughter—” Frau Baum was crying. “She was too late.”

  The river had been so cold and fast that Rita had been dead by the time a barge had found her ten kilometers downstream. The woman and two men had been driving across the bridge to work when they’d seen Ingrid raise the older girl toward the railing, but they didn’t get to her in time to stop Rita’s fall into the Rhein. While the men held Ingrid and wrestled the baby from her arms, the woman climbed onto the railing and leapt.

  “That woman—she could have died, too. She’s still in the hospital.” Frau Baum dried her eyes with a wadded handkerchief and rapped against the door till a tall, slender nun unlocked it. “Come.” Frau Baum nudged Trudi forward. “Maybe Ingrid will speak to you.”

  Ingrid was lying on her back, eyes glazed, unseeing. Her features were flat, sunken, as if her flesh had disintegrated in the three days since she’d taken her daughters to the bridge. On a chair next to the bed, the nun was guiding the wooden beads
of a rosary through her skilled fingers. Until the night before, Ingrid had been in jail, where she’d refused food and drink, and when the police had acknowledged that she was too ill to be kept there, the sisters had offered to guard her and nurse her back to health so that she could stand trial.

  “Has she eaten?” Frau Baum asked the nun.

  “Not yet. We’ve tried to feed her.”

  As Trudi reached for Ingrid’s hands—those same hands that had brought death to Rita—they felt like wax that had melted into the white blanket. In contrast, the surviving child had been warm flesh and skin. Trudi had held Karin hours after Ingrid had been seized. When she’d arrived in the apartment above the bicycle shop, Karin had been sitting on her grandfather’s lap, playing with his mustache, giggling, and it had seemed terrible and miraculous that she could giggle and play.

  “I wonder how much she remembers,” Trudi had said.

  Herr Baum stroked his granddaughter’s neck. “Very little … and she won’t know what it means. Tomorrow she’ll remember less. And soon she will have forgotten. Children are like that.”

  “Ingrid never forgot,” Trudi whispered.

  His broad hand moved down Karin’s back. “Here now,” he said, “here, girl.”

  That’s when Trudi had reached out to lift Karin from his lap. How she wished she could have brought her along now, pressed her into Ingrid’s arms, and said, “This is your daughter. You can’t leave her like this.”

  Frau Baum was bending across Ingrid, crying again. “Say something to her, Trudi.”

  “Ingrid? It’s me, Trudi.… Please, look at me?”

  But Ingrid was suspended on the bridge of nothingness, arrested in that moment when God had stunned her by redeeming and denouncing her in one fiery breath of omnipotence, scorching her soul, forsaking her body a shell that would wither and, in less than a week, lie beneath the earth with her older daughter, whose funeral had been held only that morning.