by Hegi, Ursula
The clamor of fire bells burst through the smell, the screams, through night that was brighter and hotter than noon as horse-drawn fire engines pulled up, brakes screeching. When Stefan hoisted the Hungarian’s weight higher, rocking him up, up in his arms, he felt Tibor’s face dry and hot against the side of his neck, felt it slide and, for the instant of that motion, let himself hope his friend was still alive, though he knew it was Tibor’s skin coming off against his neck.
After the flames had been extinguished and the bodies taken away, Stefan peeled off what was left of his white jacket and staggered home. His hands were blistered, and all hair was gone from his arms. Though his room was warm and stuffy, he was shivering as he crawled between the sheets in his scorched clothes. He slept, only to wake sobbing from dreams in which he was enveloped by fire and the familiar stench of burning flesh, dreams that got jumbled with memories of being small and soiling the kitchen floor with cow manure he’d dragged home on the bottom of his shoes, and his father—“How often do I have to tell you to wipe your feet?”—carrying him to the barrel of rainwater out back and then being inside that barrel—headfirst and cold and not breathing because how could you?—and afterwards the fever, hands like wicks of candles and yearning to cool them in the barrel that’s no longer there.
When Stefan finally got up, a sticky, clear-yellow fluid was seeping from his arms and hands. It hurt to wash himself, to chew a piece of rye bread, to think of the Hungarian on whose sofa he’d often dozed after a poker game. He wished he could open his window. As he stared at the ashen wall of cinder blocks across the alley, even the light that leaked into the alley was ashen. Ash. Used up by fire. All at once Stefan was taken by such a powerful longing that his throat felt raw, a longing for air and clear light and his parents and the Hungarian’s laugh and his hometown and family’s dog, Spitz, and the French restaurant—but most of all for himself as a boy. And it was then that he remembered Tibor Szilagi telling him about the lake that reminded him of Germany.
The smooth skin on Stefan’s arms felt stretched as he rowed a wooden boat out on Lake Winnipesaukee, and as the oars spooned the water and left swirls that trailed behind him, he thought of the whirlpools in the Rhein where it flowed past the meadows of Burgdorf. From the boat, the stone gables of the church looked like St. Martin’s where he’d gone to mass every Sunday as a boy, but beyond the outline of this town rose mountains, unfamiliar and stark. Tibor had been right: this lake was too large to see all at once. Wherever Stefan looked, his eyes came up against land: peninsulas and islands and the curving shoreline—the promise of water around each turn.
He glanced back toward the dock where he’d rented his boat and toward the vacant clapboard house next to it. On the other side of the dock grew a cornfield, and all at once, within the shimmer of summer air, he saw the farm where he’d played as a boy, the Sternburg—star fortress—a castle for centuries until it was turned into a farm. With his friends Michel Abramowitz and Kurt Heidenreich he’d swung from the chains beneath its drawbridge, played hiding games in the stone tower. In that instant, as the water between him and the shore became the moat of his childhood, he saw the house he would build in the cornfield, a tall apartment house with pillars and a flat roof… a substantial but graceful building with a courtyard … rooms with high ceilings … windows that gleamed in the light.… He could even see the reflection of his house and understood how water retains the memory of all that is reflected in its surface, takes it and holds it in its depth, and that the deeper the water, the more it can retain, including your vision, and mirror it back to you. Wasserburg, he decided to call the house. Water fortress. And he would build it with bricks the way they built houses in Germany, not of wood like so many American buildings. Deep within his chest something settled—solid and calm—and he knew he would not return to New York.
As he rowed back toward shore, he could already see marble fireplaces as wide as the ones in the Frenchman’s restaurant, fulllength beveled mirrors, a carpeted elevator with a brass gate that pulls apart like an accordion…. Raising his face into the moist wind, he felt the breath of the lake on his skin as it rushed past him like fire. Not here, fire. Fire wouldn’t live this close to water. He shook himself. Saw wrought-iron wall sconces in the hallways of his house, tiled windowsills wide enough for flowerpots. It didn’t occur to him to wonder where the money would come from—all he felt was a wild confidence that, in time, he would build this house just as he saw it now. Because he wanted it. Had he known how the Wasserburg would seduce and corrupt him and his family, Stefan Blau would have taken the train back to New York that day, but to detect rot is often impossible in its early stages: it starts beneath lush surfaces, spreading its sweet-nasty pulp, tainting memories and convictions. It entangles. Justifies. But what Stefan saw that summer afternoon was only the splendor of the Wasserburg as it would be the day he would finish its construction.
And he saw more— a small, stocky girl in a black dress whirling through the courtyard as if she were dancing or, perhaps, throwing a tantrum. Her skirt fans around her, and as her arms move in a windmill pattern, white-blonde hair flies around her face and shoulders. Graceful and robust, she spins around a fountain, face bursting through her hair only for flashes as if she were sculpting her own features that moment. The boat swayed as Stefan stood up, one hand raised toward the shore to touch this child. He would search for her face in his daughters, but it wouldn’t be until his granddaughter Emma was born that he would recognize the girl he had seen from the boat.
With his poker money he rented the clapboard house by the lake and installed a used stove in the kitchen. In one of the upstairs rooms he set up a cot and a dresser for himself. He sold his stocks to buy good china and tablecloths, but saved on pots and other items that his customers wouldn’t see by bidding for them at auctions. After he built tile counters, he hired a waiter and opened a small restaurant, a French restaurant of course, much appreciated by the French-Canadians in Winnipesaukee. But most of the townspeople asked him why he wasn’t running a German restaurant. And the name, they said, was hard to remember—Cadeau du Lac—even after he told them it meant Gift of the Lake. Why couldn’t he just call it that? Besides, it was too fancy, they complained, too expensive. They’d speculate about where he got his money because he used it so easily—his own as well as theirs—yet, they’d arrive in their Sunday clothes to test the food at the Cadeau du Lac, and they’d go home with tales of Stefan’s oyster soufflé, his cassoulet, his crêpes au chocolat.
Still, they didn’t think his restaurant would last. After all, ordinary people didn’t spend their money eating out. Yet, they’d return with their friends, with relatives. It turned out that the tourists were his best customers, already in the mood to spend from the moment they arrived on the Boston and Maine Railroad in their city clothes and loaded their fishing rods and beach umbrellas and sand pails and dogs and croquet sets into the horse-drawn cabs that would take them from the station to the hotels, the small cottages along the lake, or to the marina from where they could get a boat to the islands. Though most of the cottages were small, others were more substantial with lawns and porches and docks. A few even had boathouses or floating gazebos.
New Hampshire was not at all the way Stefan had imagined America back in Germany. No tall buildings like those in New York. No buffaloes. It reminded him much more of Germany with its small towns, except that forests here were denser, mountains higher, and the lake larger than any he’d seen before. Stone walls, flecked with lichen and moss, fenced in cattle and sheep. Some of the farmers in town liked to say their land grew rocks. After clearing their fields and meadows, they could always expect to find more rocks in the spring when the ground, upon thawing, heaved them to the surface as if giving birth to them. Early crop, the farmers called these rocks, and they’d pile them on the low stone walls that marked their boundaries. Building these walls continued every year and was hard work, as hard as bringing ice in from the lake. His first winter in Win
nipesaukee, Stefan learned to cut slabs of ice from the lake, drag them to shore on a sled, and store them beneath layers of sawdust in the icehouse that was built into the earth against the side of the foundation.
By April, the hair on his arms finally began to grow again, though not black and curly as it had been, but reddish as though it held the memory of fire, and it would never grow beyond a stubble that felt coarse to the touch. In May he offered to buy the building from its owner, a widow in her eighties who still had all her teeth, and when she refused to sell, he purchased a porcelain statue of St. Joseph, about a foot tall with a brown porcelain coat and a patient smile that suggested eternal waiting. It was night when Stefan dug a hole into the hard earth next to the front steps of his restaurant, lowered the saint headfirst into the ground, and packed the hole with dirt. That’s how the nuns back home had come to own the land for their convent.
“Nuns can get any land they want,” his mother had told him when he was a small boy. “All they do is bury St. Joseph upside down.”
“Why?” Sitting on the edge of the table, he watched her as she kneaded dough, her forehead moist with sweat, a smudge of flour on her chin. She believed things were safest in the earth. She even had a burying box for her silverware—tin lined with wood—that she’d dig up for special occasions and then bury again behind their house as though it might grow roots and flourish. Multiply. But he’d never seen nuns bury anything. “Why?” he asked again.
“Because St. Joseph is known for his patience,” his mother said.
“But why upside down?”
“Because then the saint is uncomfortable and wants to work his way out.” As she leaned into the dough, her fists sank into the pale mound, folding it over, punching it down. “Once the nuns have their land, they make sure to dig St. Joseph back up again. Because he keeps working as long as he’s in the ground. You see, if you forget to take St. Joseph out, the land keeps going to new owners.”
His mother was more superstitious than anyone Stefan knew: scratches stopped hurting if you blew on them and then sang, “Heile heile Segen, morgen gibt es Regen…”—“Heal heal, blessings, tomorrow there’ll be rain …”; white spots beneath your fingernails revealed how many mortal sins you had committed; the small crab inside her amber necklace protected her from spider bites; and her favorite saying, “wer sich das Zeug am Leibe flickt, der hat den ganzen Tag nicht Glück,” meant that if you darned your clothes while you still wore them, you wouldn’t have luck that entire day.
Small towns fostered superstitions. And yet, ironically, after crossing an ocean, Stefan had ended up in another small town with its own superstitions: if a bridegroom dropped the ring, it meant bad luck; if you had a cold, you should rub your feet with butter; if you bit your baby’s fingernails, it wouldn’t become a thief.
But it felt familiar to live in a town where, soon, he knew almost everyone: Frank Weber who owned the hardware store; Father Albin who placed the communion wafer on his tongue every Sunday; Clem Weeks who had his cigar stand on Main Street; Lucie Magill who’d just opened a store called Magill’s Fine Clothing; Jules Margaux, the lamplighter, who came down Main Street at dusk with his ladder to turn on the gas streetlights. Stefan wrote to Helene that he enjoyed walking through town and having people greet him by name, enjoyed welcoming them into his restaurant, which was already known for the finest meals around the lake.
Within a year, he dug up his St. Joseph and rinsed him off in soapy water because his landlady was moving to Boston to marry a coffin maker young enough to be her grandson, and she was eager to sell her building, along with the cornfield, for a price Stefan could afford. Some days he worked sixteen hours. He expanded his kitchen. Hired two more waiters. An assistant cook. A kitchen helper. By adding an enclosed porch that overhung the water, he doubled his seating capacity and gave his guests the illusion of floating above the lake. He liked to make decisions on his hunch of things to come. That was the American way, he explained to Helene Montag in a letter, to plan beyond the obvious. He wrote to her about becoming an American citizen. About the satisfaction of accomplishing something that you first just see in your mind and then make real by doing it.
To honor the porcelain saint, Stefan built him a shelf in the lobby, and when he climbed on the old piano bench he’d set beneath it and positioned the statue on the shelf so that St. Joseph could see everyone who entered the restaurant, he thought he heard the voice of the Hungarian. “You’re far too lucky.” Stefan spun toward the door. But he was alone, except for a hint of cinnamon and tobacco in the air and the Hungarian’s infectious laugh. “… far too lucky.”
The winter he was twenty-four, he married his first wife, Elizabeth Flynn, a flutist with delicate wrists whose pale hair covered her entire pillow at night. Though she’d never kissed a man before him, her fingernails were speckled with mortal sins and were so thin that they seemed transparent.
Stefan adored her small, bony face. Adored her extreme shyness that kept her from talking to people. Even adored the tenacity that replaced the shyness once she knew you well. When he built a fire escape and tiled the upstairs floors to block any flames that might start in the restaurant, Elizabeth decided she’d learn how to paper their walls. Though her parents objected, she stripped the bedroom walls by herself, covering them with bottle-green paper that was scattered with white roses—the same pattern she’d had in her childhood room. Since her fingernails kept breaking as she worked, she trimmed them close to the tips of her fingers. In the evenings guests in the restaurant would hear the haunting sound of her flute above them.
What Stefan did not adore about her was her mischievousness. She liked to hide things when he wasn’t looking: his toothbrush or his coffee cup or his slippers. She’d laugh, make him search, even though he’d grow irritated. “It’s childish,” he’d tell her and stalk off to his restaurant. Only to come home and find that she’d knotted the bottoms of his pajamas.
They used some of her dowry to order a birch armoire, bed, and two nighttables from a South German carpenter in Wolfeboro on the other side of the lake. Most afternoons Stefan would slip from the kitchen for a while, and they’d tumble onto their mattress and sink into the feather quilt, laughing as he’d peel her out of her petticoat and corset cover. Still, even here, he would stay aware of what needed to be done next in his restaurant—dice carrots, marinate veal, sauté mushrooms, order sugar and olives—while below them in the kitchen, his assistant cook and kitchen helper would stare at the ceiling, placing bets on how long the thudding of the bed would last.
“I’m so glad we met here in America,” he told her one evening.
In the light from the oil lamp, she ran one thumb around his ears, down the frown lines between his thick eyebrows. “Tell me why.”
“Because in Germany the president of a bank would never allow his daughter to marry the son of a tailor.”
“Fuck him then.”
“Don’t say that.”
But she liked to shock him by talking dirty, and it astounded him when she told him she’d gotten that way in college. “Women alone, locked away in a school… you’d be surprised what we talk about.”
That lewd side of hers made him feel he was guarding a secret whenever they were in public, and he’d wish for her shyness to come back. Still, knowing what she might say was exciting. Troubling. Certainly her parents didn’t know that side of her. They were polite. Formal. Sitting across from Elizabeth at her parents’ cherrywood dining table, Stefan would compliment her mother on how she’d decorated the ceiling fan with silk flowers, say, or with vines, while all along he’d be afraid his wife would say something vulgar, and that her parents would blame his influence on her.
He knew it meant entirely too much to him to be accepted by a wealthy family like hers, and that embarrassed him because it was so … German. He was in America now. Where everyone was equal. What embarrassed him too was that he couldn’t stop feeling proud when on Sundays after church, his in-laws would stroll with
him and Elizabeth along the lake, his wife’s shoulders at the same height as his, her gloved hand floating in the bend of his arm, her Persian lamb coat with its seal collar shielding her from the cold. And if he sometimes felt irritated because Elizabeth would correct his pronunciation, even in bed, he would tell himself that it was to his advantage to shed his accent and sound like an educated man.
As soon as Elizabeth discovered she was pregnant, she urged Stefan to borrow money from her father’s bank to build his apartment house in the cornfield.
But Stefan was reluctant. “I figured on waiting until I’d saved enough from the restaurant.”
“That could take ten years,” she persisted.
Every evening she talked about it.
Every morning.
“That’s what banks are for,” she’d remind him.
It was her father who summoned Stefan to his bank and took him into his office, a suite of three rooms divided by velvet drapes that were tied open with silk tassels. “Sit,” Hardy Flynn said, “sit,” his voice high and impatient as he pointed Stefan toward an overstuffed leather chair, smooth and golden-brown.
The color of wealth. Stefan sat down, knowing that one day he would buy a leather chair for himself in that color.
Hardy Flynn remained standing. His gray beard looked out of place in his pink, unlined face. “Take one of these.” He extended a silver box with cigars, lit one for himself, then Stefan’s. “A personal loan. That’s how I want to do it. Without interest, of course.”
“That wouldn’t be right.”
“What’s not right about me helping my daughter get ahead?” The banker stroked the forked ends of his beard. “What’s not right about you wanting the same for her?”
“I—”
“Elizabeth should not have to fill the lamps. She should not have to live in rooms full of cooking smells from your restaurant.”
