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

  One spring afternoon, when Helene balanced across the brook behind her house on a felled birch that Leo had dragged across the water, she felt graceful as she spread her arms and sang. She was Carmen, the tightrope walker from Brazil, Carmen in her silver dress right from the book jacket of Splendor in Rio de Janeiro, Carmen who sang the ballad of the famous matador as she raised her face to the sun and—

  Above her, in the branches of the willow, sat Stefan and Michel and Kurt. Heat climbed from her chest, painting her neck and cheeks. She missed her step. Swayed. Fell. And though the brook was cold, she was still burning, burning up, and wishing she’d drown. Afterwards she didn’t know if it was Stefan or one of the other boys who helped her—she was too embarrassed to glance beyond the smudged hands that reached for her—and it wouldn’t be until Stefan was an old man and asleep next to her one Sunday morning that she would look at the knobs of his wrists on the quilt and recognize the hands that had reclaimed her from the water, and as she’d see herself as that long-ago girl, it would be as though all she had done in those years was blush and fall. She would smile and, her left thigh touching Stefan’s, close her eyes with the tempered pain of the awkward girl.

  It was Margret who showed her the note Stefan left when he ran away from home. For over a year he had pushed at his parents to let him go to America. Frustrated by their repeated “you are too young,” he finally disappeared one night after his family was asleep.

  His parents looked dazed and brittle whenever Helene saw them. Stefan’s father had to close his tailor shop for a week because he punctured his right thumb at the sewing machine, and his entire hand swelled up red. Stefan’s mother who prided herself on her clean house and her Dutch ancestry, and who’d offended some in the neighborhood by insisting, “the Dutch are so much cleaner than Germans,” now sat at her kitchen table in a soiled dress, staring at the open star charts she’d pinned down with her elbows, her bent finger roaming the dense pattern of constellations as though she might locate her son there.

  Although the people of Burgdorf presumed Stefan dead, they tried to comfort his parents: “Some boys just need to see the world. …”

  “You’ll hear from Stefan. Soon …”

  “No boy could have asked for better parents. …”

  But Helene was certain that Stefan had reached America and that, someday, he would come back for her. By then, of course, she would have outgrown the blushing, the way your body outgrows a church dress that never was right for you. His arm around her, they walk through the meadow behind their houses toward the fairgrounds, and where the brook is at its widest, they stop as he pulls her toward him in a kiss.

  She wasn’t at all surprised when, three months after Stefan had vanished, Margret came running into her house, waving an envelope with foreign stamps that had just arrived and proved that Stefan was, indeed, in America. That night Helene stayed up late. Her feather pillow bunched up behind her in bed, she sat and composed a note to him. While her movements around him had been ungainly, her words on the page took on a grace that compelled Stefan to answer her with a postcard, and when she wrote him another letter, he began to see this newfound grace in the neighbor girl until he believed it had always been there and that he simply hadn’t noticed it.

  He started addressing her as Lenchen, the affectionate form for Helene. Liebes Lenchen, he would start his letters as they became lengthier. When the Hungarian died in the fire, she grieved with him, and when he first thought of opening his restaurant in New Hampshire, she encouraged him and dared to imagine herself there with him. She liked to write to him late at night, making her letters last several weeks, continuing them the way she might a diary. Usually she’d start a new one as soon as she’d send the last, but then she’d hold on to it and date it after she’d get his answer because she didn’t want to overwhelm him. She wrote him about her studies to become a teacher; cried as she wrote him about her parents’ sudden death from influenza; sent him details of her visits with his sister who now had a husband.… And all along she related the stories of his American life to the people of Burgdorf until, gradually, she knew far more about him than his family did, and they came to her with questions about him.

  When he married Elizabeth Flynn, Helene felt cut off from the possibility of her life changing; and she was still sick with a jealousy she believed she had no right to when Elizabeth died. He kept writing to her: when the walls of the Wasserburg were up halfway; when Greta learned to walk; when he married once again. She swore to herself that she wouldn’t let him block off any part of her life. Reminded herself that she had her friendships and the satisfaction that came from them. The satisfaction she found in her work.

  Yet, while she taught children born to other women how to form their numbers and letters, she sometimes felt a sharp envy of her married friends, wishing poverty and illness on them. The biter in me. She’d feel mortified. And it was not even that she wanted any of their men. True, no one had actually asked her to be his wife, not even the biology teacher Axel Lambert who walked her home after school once or twice a week. A shy man, a decent man who did not excite her, he sometimes reached for her hand with such hesitancy that she knew it must have taken him planning and courage, and after she’d briefly squeeze his fingers in hers before withdrawing her hand, he would not touch her like that for months to come. He was a good teacher, liked by the children in his classes, yet stiff with adults, a loner who didn’t like to be around his family but preferred evenings alone in his apartment next to the synagogue, writing crossword puzzles for the newspaper.

  While one after another of her classmates got married, she still slept in her childhood room in the house she shared with her brother, who had taken over their parents’ pay-library. The six-year span between them had seemed vast when they were children, but now it no longer mattered, and she savored those evenings when Leo was not at the gymnast’s club or the chess club or out dancing, because then he’d sit with her in the living room, reading or talking. He was a considerate brother, a kind brother she could trust, but she pitied the women who were drawn to him because his very kindness was dangerous to them. She’d seen it happen again and again, the way he held himself apart from women by adoring them without giving much of himself—not because he was stingy, but rather because he was so accepting of them that he didn’t yearn to bridge the distance between himself and these women. And always he was bewildered by the pain he caused them. But inevitably there were new admirers because Leo was considerate and polite, a good listener who was truly interested in what each woman told him. And he had such a fascinating face, they agreed, a bony face both delicate and strong.

  The first few months of each new courtship would be pleasant because Leo enjoyed being adored as well as being the adorer, but as soon as a woman tried to cross that gap between them, he’d retreat. Pope Leo, some called him behind his back. Holy man Leo. In their attempts to hold him or take revenge for his aloofness, they’d confide in Helene, who knew more about her brother than she wanted to: that he simply did not like sex; that there was a fastidiousness about him, a shrinking back when it came to physical contact; that he was still a virgin.

  Virgins, she thought. A family trait. We’ll both be ancient and alone.

  One of his earliest girlfriends, Ilse Korfmann, had cried when she’d told Helene, “He would make a great father if he ever went that far with a woman. But not a husband.”

  Leo didn’t mind when women who once had loved him found other men, and when Ilse married Michel Abramowitz, Leo felt more comfortable around her because now he could adore her once again from a distance. He valued his friendships with women who’d once turned from him in hurt or anger.

  “Ein ewiger Junggeselle—an eternal bachelor,” people said about him.

  The woman Helene felt most sorry for was Gertrud Hagen—wild and fragile—who believed Leo was the only one for her, had always been the only one for her even when they’d been schoolchildren, sitting next to each other at their desks
or catching tadpoles by the Rhein; Gertrud who was prepared to wait till he was free from his next new love because she knew that this new next love would try to seize more of him than he wanted to relinquish; Gertrud who was always willing to start over as his friend, start with that first sweet and hesitant grazing of hand against hand; Gertrud who took what she knew he was capable of giving—tender, brotherly affection—and learned to hold him by pretending contentment in that, by letting him detain her in that limbo of not touching, that limbo where other women had learned to leave.

  But then she would forget.

  Hold him too tightly.

  Press her lips against his too fervently.

  And watch him step from her arms.

  Sometimes Helene was afraid for her, afraid her brother would push Gertrud deeper into the craziness that seemed to live just beneath her jittery smile, once she understood that ultimately she would never reach Leo, and that a kiss on the forehead was just that—a kiss on the forehead—and not a prelude to greater passion.

  Helene thought he was far more passionate about chess than she’d ever seen him about a woman. Usually he’d have a board set up on the counter of the pay-library next to the bins with tobacco for sale. While stacks of books waited to be shelved, he’d study his chess moves with unwavering intensity. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the bodies of women. Once, while cleaning beneath his bed, she’d seen two magazines with pictures of naked women and men. She was sure he’d gotten them from his friend, Emil Hesping. Though she found Emil intimidating in the way all handsome men intimidated her, she knew he tried to come across as more of a cad than he really was. Actually, he was quite generous. When she’d turned her mother’s old sewing room into a study for herself, he’d helped Leo carry her rosewood desk up the stairs, and the two had built bookshelves for her and papered the walls with purple-and-yellow pansies.

  Leo’s friendships with Emil and other gymnasts and chess players were long lasting and far less complicated than his connections to women. As much as Helene enjoyed her brother’s company, she also cherished her evenings alone in her study where she wrote some of her letters to Stefan, who by now knew every one of her students by name, knew of her concerns and hopes for them. But of course he had no idea that she compared every man to him and that, quite often, she imagined her wedding to him, looking up into his eyes as they promise each other eternal devotion, walking on his arm from St. Martin’s church into the bright-white sun while the townspeople congratulate them. It was always summer in those picture-book fantasies that came complete with the texture and style of her dress, with a reception on the lawn behind the paylibrary and tailor shop, with the smell of cut grass and of sun-warmed camomile and roses, with the taste of wedding cake and the delicacies that the women of Burgdorf brought to her celebration.

  Stefan would never know that, more and more, he took the place of the priest at night, no longer faceless, though his features were still those of a boy because all Helene remembered was how Stefan had looked as a thirteen year old. And if the priest fantasy didn’t take, she would shift to others, like that of the bride stolen by the ushers and the best man from her own wedding reception. Whenever Helene knelt in the confessional or parted her lips to receive communion, she’d feel guilty about that deep-hungry woman inside her, but that didn’t stop her. The best man is tall and looks like Stefan and he and the ushers take the bride to an attic and promise they won’t do anything to her if she lets them make sure she is still intact and they open her salmon-colored corset to caress the pink marks the stays have left on her skin where no man has seen or touched her before—and never will, Helene thought to herself, touching the silk rosebud at the cleavage of her corset—but now one of them touches her breasts and they all kiss her there and touch her between her legs and say do you want us to stop and the bride doesn’t answer and they say we will stop if you tell us to and she is silent with her face turned away so they can’t see how much she wants it as they take her each of them each of them and the heat comes into her and she wants it too only she doesn’t let them see that she wants it wants each of them in her again and they never know they’re doing it for her for her—

  1911

  Stefan wrote to Helene when Agnes died, when Tobias was born, and a week later when Sara died, and then she didn’t hear from him for over half a year—though she kept writing to him, worrying about him, hoping—until one July afternoon in 1911 when he knocked at her door, wearing the black suit of the widower. With both hands he reached for hers, making her feel mute and far too tall. He hadn’t grown much in the seventeen years he’d been away, was shorter than in her fantasies and quite a bit hairier. His fingers were steady, dry, and she longed for the composure she’d felt while reading and rereading his letters.

  Instead of looking up into his green eyes as she had imagined, she had to look down. “No one told me you were coming,” she managed to say.

  He didn’t offer any reason why he hadn’t answered her last letters but told her he’d just arrived in town. “My parents don’t know yet that I’m here. I came to you first.”

  His voice sounded odd to her. An accent. He has an accent in his own language. He stood close enough for her to smell the manscent of his skin—so different from Leo who was part of herself, a man too, but not unsettling like this. She couldn’t help staring at Stefan while her nose and thighs felt larger, while sweat collected on her palms. Pulling her fingers from his, she dried them against the sides of her navy-and-white-striped dress. The air was hot, moist, and on the Abramowitzes’ roof across the street, sparrows were fighting over some scrap of food.

  “I walked here from the railroad station,” he said.

  She admonished herself for not inviting him in, for standing there so stiffly. He looked accustomed to sorrow—so serious, distracted even—and she was sure he had to be thinking about his dead wives. From the window of the pay-library came the voice of Frau Simon, the milliner, and the high laugh of Gertrud Hagen. Helene wanted to tell Stefan how her brother had surprised himself as much as everyone else in Burgdorf by getting engaged to Gertrud after breaking up with her at least once a year over the past decade; but considering how Stefan had buried two wives, any mention of marriage felt inappropriate. Or about the bride-to-be who was older than her brother. Even if just one day. Not two years, like the gap between Stefan and herself. Leo had told her it was Gertrud who’d proposed. “I’ve never heard of a woman asking a man first,” he’d said, “but then I thought if I married—and I always figured I would, eventually—it would be good if it were to someone I’ve known since we were children, someone where everything won’t be so new all the time.”

  In the street the Abramowitz children, Ruth and Albert, were skipping rope, counting aloud: “… elf, zwölf, dreizehn, vierzehn, fünfzehn…” The girl’s dress was as purple as the geraniums in her mother’s window boxes.

  “Michel and Ilse’s children,” Helene said.

  “Ilse Korfmann?”

  “I wrote you when she married Michel Abramowitz.” Is that all I can talk about? Marriage? Quickly she added, “He’s a lawyer now. I wrote—”

  “You did. He must be good as a lawyer … the way he loved to talk, wearing us down with endless discussions. Still—those are old children.”

  “Not much older than your Greta. The girl is seven, the boy six. Ruth and Albert.”

  Stefan shook his head, slowly. “I guess whenever I think of people back home, they’ve stayed the same age.”

  As Helene tried to recall what she’d looked like at fifteen, her face turned hot. “Remember Gertrud Hagen?” she blurted. “She was in Leo’s class.”

  “I got whipped by the priest because she confessed to helping me paint those rocks around St. Stefan’s feet.”

  “I can still see Herr Pastor Schüler marching up your front steps, shouting this was going to be your last prank. Why did you do it?”

  “Because that saint is my namesake. Because he was the first Christian mar
tyr stoned to death. And because those rocks should not be sky blue. I thought rocks should be brown.”

  “The priest must have agreed. He never changed them back to blue.”

  “When I sneaked in there, I was sure the church was empty. I didn’t see Gertrud because she was behind a pew. Kneeling on the floor because it was harder on her knees.” He motioned toward Ruth Abramowitz. “She was only about her age. But that’s the way she was.”

  “She still is.”

  It occurred to him how much easier it was for both of them to talk about others than about themselves. “Gertrud came up to me,” he said, “and asked what I had in my bucket. When I said chocolate for the saint, she dipped her finger into the paint. I stopped her before she could lick it off, told her it was holy chocolate. ‘Only for saints,’ I told her. ‘Wipe your finger on those rocks. If you promise to be quiet, I’ll let you cover one rock with holy chocolate.’ She promised and held out her hand for the brush. Then she painted a rock and watched me do the rest. Without one word.”