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

  “You see, my Homer’s sister, she’s been ill with lung problems ever since she left Orlando with some fellow and took Danny along, that’s her son, and we’re first in line to adopt him since he’s got no father, never had, at least not one who’d stay long enough to give him his name on a certificate, so Danny’s last name is already Wilson which means he won’t even have to change his name once he’s ours, once his mother dies, that is just so you know he’ll be living with us.”

  Stefan blinked. “Of course.”

  She laid one hand on his sleeve. “You of all people know what a tragedy that is for a child, Mr. Blau, losing a mother and—”

  “I need to get to my restaurant.”

  “He’s eleven, our Danny is, born a month after our girl, but she only lived five hours, that’s all, and it broke my heart all over again when Danny’s mother took off with him like that two years ago, and for what, I ask you, to come north and end up working at a factory that makes hosiery, dragging all of us up north, never mind that Homer has a hard time getting used to the cold, and the time, I tell you the time it took us to look for work that’s right for both of us, that’s why we’re so glad you hired us, well, at least Homer’s sister did that much for us, wrote to us about your building when it was going up so that we—”

  “I’m sorry about your daughter.”

  “Homer and me, we can’t have no more.”

  As religious as her husband was irreverent, Mrs. Wilson wavered between praying for her sister-in-law’s recovery and her swift death. The boy would visit on weekends, lanky and sullen, and Mrs. Wilson would cry Sunday evenings when she’d surrender him to his rightful mother.

  From her apartment in the basement, she supervised four maids who lived in a suite across the hall from her, ready to be summoned by the tenants. All four were young, local girls who moved about the house in crisp, gray dresses and white aprons that never seemed to get soiled, and who rotated their one day off so that there always would be at least three of them. They liked Miss Garland because she never talked down to them and did her own housework, and they looked forward to being called to her apartment because it meant a rest. Unlike some tenants, Miss Garland remembered their names, and after urging Birdie or Heather or Gladys or Stella to sit, she’d brew a pot of strong tea, knowing exactly how much sugar, milk, or lemon each of them liked. Along with her tea she’d offer stories about her dead fiancé and delicious peanut brittle that she made every Saturday. In return, the maids brought her gossip from other apartments: Mr. Bloom, so wasteful with his money, saved slivers of old soap in a canning jar by his bathroom sink; Mr. Blau—God bless him—had not been with a woman since his last wife died; Mrs. Wilson kept a chart in her closet and marked down her sister-in-law’s visits to the hospital; and Mr. Bell, that retired lawyer from New York, cooked on a hot plate that sat on top of his four-burner stove.

  If the maids visited for too long, Mrs. Wilson would come looking for them. She worked much harder than Stefan expected her to: not only did she keep the hallways clean, but she even scrubbed the floors of the incinerator rooms; and she demanded that same kind of exertion from the maids and her husband, who’d shrug and let her do most of the talking. Usually she’d find him puttering around the garage that was separated from the basement by a fire door. His jobs included stoking the furnace and washing the tenants’ cars. He also had a knack for fixing them. Though only a few had automobiles, Stefan figured most would within a few years, and he had planned the garage large enough for twenty stalls. Already, over half a million people in America owned cars—powered by steam, gasoline, or electricity—and that number would likely triple in another decade.

  Each time he thought of making a payment to Elizabeth’s parents, he reasoned with himself that the loan could wait till everything was completed. He expanded his restaurant to include the second floor where he used to live. From Boston, he brought in a designer of gardens and, on the flat roof of the Wasserburg’s garage, had him lay out a long, symmetrical space with lawns and hedges, flower beds and a stone bench, a swing set and a sandbox where his and the tenants’ children could play.

  Once, in the bleak morning hours, after Stefan had paced through the house, he entered the rooms of his children, and when he found them both asleep as of course they would be at that time, it struck him as such incredible faith—sleeping here like that—faith in him, that he was overwhelmed by the sum of their future needs. He felt as though he were the only person awake in the town, perhaps even the world, and he suddenly knew his next wife would be here entirely for his children’s sake—not his; that he would not kill another woman with his seed.

  And that’s when he thought of Helene Montag.

  Two grades ahead of Stefan in school, Helene Montag would have been mortified had the other kids discovered she loved him. That in itself would have been bad enough; but to be taunted about a boy two years younger than you, a boy nearly a head shorter than you, would have been excruciating. She tried to stop that passion which confused her, but it remained part of her—gaudy and persistent—concealed even from her best friend, Margret, Stefan’s sister, with whom she had shared every secret since kindergarten.

  The window of Margret’s room above the tailor shop next door was so close to Helene’s bedroom window that the girls could lean out and pass messages to one another across the span between the stucco houses. Both would have liked to have more glamorous names—Carmen, perhaps, or Odelia, or Isabella—like the heroines in the books that Helene’s parents lent out in their pay-library. Since their own names struck them as the kind other people’s great aunts had—names that suggested varicose veins and inherited fox stoles with beady eyeballs—the girls would call each other by new names; but soon they’d forget or discover even better ones that they’d test on Margret’s mother while she’d fry Reibekuchen for the girls or let them help her bake bread.

  Helene’s mother was always reading or sewing or writing in her diary, and any preparation of food seemed an inconvenience to her. Quite often, meals would be overcooked until most color had leached from them. But her soups were rather good. She only made them in winter, and they were different each time since she was too impatient around the kitchen to follow a recipe and would just leave the soup kettle on the stove for days, adding ingredients as the level went down. She would urge her children to read Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Theodor Storm. “Minds like yours need substance,” she would remind Helene and her little brother Leo. They were not allowed to read anything from the pay-library. “Schmutz—filth,” their parents called those romances, mysteries, and war novels that embarrassed them, yet provided an income for the family.

  Some evenings their father would sit at the piano in their living room, shirt collar unbuttoned, his pale, thick fingers stubborn—so stubborn—in pursuing harmony with this instrument that had resisted him since he was a boy. It baffled Helene that a man as quiet as her father would want to make sounds this loud. If she stood next to him at the piano, she could smell his sweat. Those were the only times she could smell it. Nowhere else. Not even when he raked the earth behind the house. Only at the piano. Sweat strong enough to mute the scents of tobacco and mothballs.

  Usually her mother would pull her and Leo into the kitchen where the noise wouldn’t be so hard on their ears. “When your father was a boy,” she told them one spring day while he was practicing Easter hymns with dreary devotion, “he dreamed of being a musician. It’s the saddest thing, wanting something so much and finding out it’s not in you. That’s why you must always love him hard.” She would slice apples for them and recite lines of poetry that were filled with colors and sounds and smells they recognized, with the cries of roosters at dawn and the whisper of bushes in the dark, with bees that hung from twigs and white kittens born in May. Poems, she told them, could take them to places they’d never been to and make them familiar: islands in the ocean; a gray city in the mist; a balcony in a tower. “If you have books in your life,” she told them oft
en, “you’re never alone.”

  Helene read every book her mother gave her, but since she’d fought the habit of obedience ever since she was a small girl, she also smuggled romance novels from the pay-library into Margret’s room where, fascinated by the forbidden, the two girls would read love scenes aloud to each other. They’d practice dancing with each other. Practice passion by kissing each other’s forearms until their lips would leave prickly red circles that would take days to fade.

  Inspired by the romance novels as well as stories of their own families, they’d make up plays and bully their brothers into being their audience in the dusty, half-dark attic of the pay-library. Stefan—just two years younger than the girls and unwilling to mind them—would get away from them to run around with his dog, Spitz, or his noisy friends, Michel Abramowitz and Kurt Heidenreich. In that group of three, Kurt was the only follower, while Stefan and Michel were usually fighting for leadership. Both knew what they wanted, though they went about getting it in different ways—Stefan by simply doing it without thinking of what it might mean to others, and Michel by striving for agreement. Not that it was all negative. Quite often what they wanted had to do with excelling at school or collecting money for the poor at Michel’s synagogue or Stefan’s church.

  But Leo always listened to what his big sister and Margret told him to do. For hours he’d sit on an apple crate, skinny elbows propped on his knees, watching the two girls with such rapture that they’d feel real as ballerinas and pirates and heiresses. Already, his eyes had the look that would eventually mesmerize most women who came close to him. Here, in the attic, with Leo as their witness, Helene and Margret became anyone they wanted to be; anything they wished could happen because he would make it so. Born when both girls were six years old, he had become their favorite toy—much better than a doll. For hours they’d played family with him, taking turns being mother or father. On him they’d practiced diapering a baby, feeding a baby, burping a baby; and he, of course, worshiped them. For a few years they’d lost interest in Leo, but now he was their best audience: he frequently applauded, and he only got up if they needed him to play a minor part or fetch some prop.

  Next to the attic was the room where Frau Montag sewed at night after the pay-library closed, but during the day the third floor belonged to Leo and the girls. Draped in a torn lace curtain or wearing huge boots and a top hat, Helene and Margret would perform for him in front of their stage curtain, a gray blanket they fastened between the window and the closest rafter. They had splendid props: false teeth inside a leather pouch; a porcelain clock that forever showed ten to five; two trunks with ancient clothes; a frayed hammock; white gloves with an oval red stain; a brown sofa with its stuffing poking through; a walking stick with a silver grip; rusted ice skates; a broken shovel; a wooden chair with a missing leg; a blue hat with a veil.

  Helene would wear that blue hat and her mother’s high-heeled shoes and a goose pillow under the front of one of the old-fashioned dresses she chose from the trunks when she played Lieselotte Montag in “Ja, Manfred,” a play about her grandparents. When Lieselotte was a young woman, Manfred got flustered whenever he noticed that his wife was pregnant once again. From what Helene had overheard from her parents, Lieselotte would try to hide her condition by wearing shawls and loose dresses, but inevitably her husband would catch her one morning as she strained to close a button over her belly or her breast, and he’d ask: “Lieselotte?” Margret, who wore a captain’s hat and jacket for the part of Manfred, had his voice just right—stern and blaming and just a bit tremulous. “Lieselotte?!” she would ask, and Helene, who had turned from the accusing gaze, would glance at Margret over her shoulder, letting her body follow the motion of her neck as she raised the veil of her hat and admitted, “Ja, Manfred.”

  While Leo applauded, out flew the pillow, and he got to catch it and hold the baby in his arms while Lieselotte and Manfred sat down to eat pretend food from real chipped plates. As soon as they lay down on their hammock-bed, Manfred began to snore with his mouth open, and Leo got to pass the baby to Lieselotte, who yanked it beneath the sheet. By the time she arose, it was back in place, a good-sized pregnancy. As Lieselotte fussed with her buttons and shawl, Manfred sat up in the hammock, yawned twice, then stared at her in disbelief and bellowed, “Lieselotte?!” Since the real Lieselotte had given birth to eleven children, “Ja, Manfred” was a long, long play.

  At fourteen, Helene was brilliant, clumsy, shy, and far more flamboyant within her fantasies than in a reality where she frequently blushed. Just worrying about blushing would make her feel hot: the humiliating rose color would splash from her chest to her hairline, causing others to stare at her as though the blushing had something to do with them, while she’d shrink further into the curve of her shoulders and try to avoid occasions where she might blush.

  Once, when Stefan passed her on the stairs to his sister’s room, Helene got so hot and embarrassed that she spent an entire afternoon in the library of St. Martin’s church, searching through medical reference books for remedies that would terminate the blushing forever. When Kurt Heidenreich’s sister, Anita, said that her grandmother used to blush too until she’d stopped it forever by drinking vinegar, Helene forced down two cupfuls of vinegar, but she only gagged. Nothing else changed. She didn’t even feel light-headed, though Anita had warned her that drinking vinegar could leave you so pale that you’d faint. Finally, Helene went to the pharmacy and asked Herr Volkenstein if he sold any medicines that cured blushing. At first he didn’t understand what she meant, and as she repeated it, she loathed herself for turning red, while he consoled her, “It’s becoming for a young girl to blush.”

  That’s what her mother’s friend, Frau Buttgereit, had told Helene too, but Frau Buttgereit couldn’t even see, had been blind all her life, though it wasn’t her fault. Everyone in Burgdorf knew the ill-fated story of how her blindness had come about the night of her birth in the convent hospital, when her mother had raised herself on her elbows and demanded the nuns take the crucifix from the wall. “I don’t want my child to see that Jew when it opens its eyes.” No one in town had been surprised when the child had been born unseeing. God’s punishment. Helene’s Catholic youth group had adopted the blind woman for their purgatory project, and the girls took turns reading to her in the evenings. There were two benefits to that: the immediate one was the pleasure Frau Buttgereit found in those readings; but the more significant one was the reduced time in purgatory the girls were accumulating for her.

  Their group leader, Ingeborg Weinhart, had taught them that although you couldn’t diminish your own purgatory ahead of time, you could do it for others through good deeds and prayers. How you prayed made all the difference. For example, if you made the sign of the cross with holy water before you said a prayer, it counted for three and a half prayers. That meant ten prayers with holy water added up to thirty-five prayers. A hundred prayers became three hundred and fifty. And consider a thousand!

  For confirmation, the youth group leader had given all the girls glass vials filled with their personal holy water. Helene and Margret hoped that they, too, would find people to donate purgatory reduction to them once they were old, and they made a pact to pray for the other if she died first; but in the meantime they cleansed their souls every Saturday in the confessional. While Margret was constantly confessing to Herr Pastor Schüler about being greedy and vain—something that likely would get worse with age unless she changed quickly, so the priest warned her—Helene worried about her temper but even more so about impure thoughts.

  The temper had to do with being a biter, her mother had told her. As a two year old, Helene had bitten several children in the neighborhood, and one afternoon her mother had cured her by biting her right back. Carefully, she had taken Helene’s arm into her mouth and clamped her uneven teeth shut, leaving deep marks and smudged lipstick. Then she had cried, harder even than Helene, and had rocked her in her firm arms until they’d both stopped sobbing. “This will t
each you not to bite,” she had whispered. And it had. Except the rage then found its way out in other ways, in feet-stomping and ugly words, and her mother would remind her that the biter still lived within her.

  But impure thoughts were even uglier than rage. At school, the nuns warned the girls about impure thoughts and urged them to avoid near occasions of sin. Dancing with a boy could be a near occasion of sin. That’s why it was so important to always leave space for the Holy Ghost while dancing with a boy. So far, Helene had never danced with a boy—only with Margret and that didn’t count—but she’d had lots of impure thoughts. She was convinced her blushing would go away if only she could stop those impure thoughts. Because surely that’s what they had to be, those pictures that stirred her when her room was dark at night. The ones that agitated her the most were about the girl ready to be married. Her fiancé’s parents insist on sending her to the priest—always a faceless priest—to insure she is pure for their son and sometimes the priest comes to the girl’s room but usually the girl has to go to the sacristy where the priest takes the crucifix from his neck touches it against her breasts in a blessing and tells the girl to hold it and lie down and open her legs and the girl obeys has to obey of course because the priest tells her to—you have to he says it’s all part of pronouncing you pure—and then Helene is the girl almost pure almost and afraid not knowing why this is happening no no and ashamed because she feels herself getting wet there as he presses one hand against the girl there and searches her there and maybe he will scold her for getting wet against his fingers—not clean he will say—and the girl wants him to stop to go away to stop now now oh don’t don’t and the edges of the crucifix cut into her palms and a sweetness steals into her belly now a sweetness that makes her warm dizzy as it kneads itself into the panic and her heart is pounding and she feels warm so warm hot and wet and doesn’t want it to stop no don’t but she can’t say it of course doesn’t say it hears her breath only and then the priest has his mouth against her down there oh God oh down there and whispers into her do you want me to stop do you do you and she doesn’t say anything doesn’t because any word of hers will stop the sweetness down there and if she doesn’t speak it is all the priest’s doing who keeps his lips there in the name of the father and the son heavenly scepters of fire and the holy spirit as he whispers deeper into her in the name of the father burning her up with his prayer and the son and the holy spirit and the holy spirit oh God absolving her because she doesn’t choose this doesn’t tell him to go on as he whispers his prayer into her hard now his prayer so hard whispers do you want me to stop do you want me to stop do you do you and she crushes herself against his words around his words silent so silent and her fear so sweet against his prayer his hard whispered prayer—