by Hegi, Ursula
“Axel? It’s me. Helene. Helene Montag.”
He dropped both arms, then raised them, one toward his nose, the other toward his chest, touching briefly with his forefingers, then dropping his arms again.
“Axel?” A half-forgotten fondness for him rushed in on her. “Don’t you remember me? Helene Blau. It used to be Montag. This is my son. Robert. And I’m sure you know Trudi. Leo’s daughter.”
Up came Axel Lambert’s arms again, graceful, purposeful. Unstoppable.
Ilse Abramowitz came walking toward them in a beige linen dress with deep pleats on one side. “He doesn’t understand.”
“What is he doing?” Helene whispered.
“Touching his heart? Who knows … But that’s what people call him now, the man-who-touches-his-heart.”
“Who looks after him?”
“This month his sister. Then he’ll live with his cousin for a month. His parents take him in after that. Then back to his sister.”
“But he’s never liked being around his family much.”
“Well, he’s lucky he has them now.”
“He always preferred his time alone.”
“Not as much as he enjoyed being with you.”
“He was a very shy man.”
“Not like your Stefan.”
“Not like Stefan at all… Listen—” Impulsively, Helene laid her hand on Use’s arm and took her aside, making sure the children couldn’t hear her. “Something’s been bothering me. I said something foolish to Leo when I first arrived here. I offered to take Trudi back with me to America.”
Ilse winced.
“I wanted to help.”
“Of course you did.”
Axel Lambert brought his left hand to his chest, the right to his face.
“Still—” Ilse hesitated. “It must have been hard for Leo to hear.”
“I told him how I admired all he did for her, even mentioned what a good cook he has become—have you ever tasted his Eierkuchen with onions?—but he’s been guarded with me as if waiting for what I’ll propose next.”
Ilse glanced toward Trudi, who was sitting with Robert on the front steps of the butcher shop. “I’ve watched out for Leo’s girl ever since she was born. Maybe you won’t worry quite this much about her if you know that I’ll keep doing that as long as I live.”
Because she’s Leo’s. But Helene didn’t say that, though Ilse looked at her as if she knew exactly what Helene was thinking. And didn’t mind. Delicate embroidery on her linen collar emphasized her smooth neck. How Leo used to adore that neck. That beautiful skin. “I’m sorry,” Helene said. “I’m staring at you.”
“Leo knows that I’m here for Trudi.”
“Thank you. It’s important for me to know.”
Down again and up went Axel Lambert’s hands. This time the right to his chest, the left to his nose.
Helene stepped in front of him. “Come,” she said. “Come home with us. I’ll go to the butcher shop later. We still have Linsensuppe— lentil soup—from yesterday.” To Ilse, she said, “Where should I take him afterwards?”
“He knows how to get to his sister’s apartment from your house.”
Axel Lambert’s reflection in the glass panel of the front door stopped him for a moment, but then he followed Trudi into her house without hesitation. While the children ran into the pay-library to visit Leo, Helene heated a bowl of Linsensuppe for Axel. What would have happened if Axel had come for her that day of the wedding instead of staying away? She knew he couldn’t have stopped her from marrying Stefan, and yet, as she watched Axel eat—his table manners oddly controlled as if his childhood training were taking over at the table—she pictured herself as the wife of this man, a good teacher not too long ago, who had returned broken from the war, making her an almost-widow, one of many almost-widows in Burgdorf because there were other men like Axel, men who—though still alive—had left pieces of themselves in the war. The life I would have led had I stayed… and always with that longing for Stefan.
Grateful that Leo had survived with only a knee injury, she wanted to tell Axel that, if she still lived in Burgdorf, he could stay with her and Leo for a month each year. Two months even. He lives in the sewing room. She steadies his hands, curves his fingers around a pencil, helps him with words that get him back into writing crossword puzzles for the paper—
But I won’t be here.
And she was leery of her noble offers. What good could it do to give Axel a picture to hold in his mind for a moment—if that was possible for him at all—a picture of something he would never have? It would be cruel. All at once she felt more aware of what it meant to have left her hometown, aware of all she could not be part of: she could not give Axel promises that might make her feel better and leave him with yet another loss; she could not be a mother to Trudi; could not give Trudi as much as Ilse could; not even as much as any woman in Burgdorf who might take Trudi home one afternoon each month. And as she came up against the loss of not being able to do this for Leo’s daughter, Helene mourned not only what she had left behind, but also what she had missed in the eight years since she’d left here, and what she would miss in the years to come.
Once, she had tried to talk with Stefan about the lives they would have lived had they both stayed in Burgdorf, and he hadn’t been able to imagine himself as a man in their hometown, maybe because he’d been so much younger than she when he’d left and—even while still living there—had been so focused on getting away. Helene didn’t think they would have married, simply because there would have been other women for him to choose from—younger women, prettier women—and he would have never come to know her through their letters. What she regretted was that parts of her had been asleep while she had waited for him to come for her. Quite likely she had made a mistake in marrying Stefan. And yet she would have married him had she known how it was to be between them, because she had believed—and still believed—that she could win him over.
It would be difficult to leave Burgdorf. But the instant she thought of postponing her return, she saw the familiar view of Lake Winnipesaukee, saw herself talking with Pearl, and understood it would always be like this: that the place where she was not would superimpose itself on the place where she was. It had been like that when she’d first come to America, when images of her hometown had shifted themselves between her and the landscape that surrounded her. It had to do with having a home in both countries. With having an accent in both languages. As Axel Lambert spooned the brown Linsensuppe into his mouth, she saw herself in the Wasserburg, stepping toward the silver bud vase that Stefan has given her for her last birthday, and as the vase reflects her shape, fuzzy and long, moving and always moving—Helene Montag felt herself arrive in America although she still stood in her brother’s kitchen, felt herself arrive more completely than she had in the years she’d lived there. Astonished by how much she felt linked to her adopted country, she already understood that she would be able to return there now, no longer feeling that she belonged to neither country, but with a deeper sense of her connection to both.
Axel Lambert had finished eating. His hands resumed their journey, and as he rose as if pulled upward by their momentum, Helene caught them on their way up and held them between her own where they fluttered, trembled, and curled inward. As she leaned forward to kiss his cheek, he stood as if stunned, and Helene recalled what Lelia Flynn had told her: “… they’re the men we remember when we’re old because their fascination with us will forever stay the same. You see … it was never tested. Never had a chance to fade in marriage.” But already Axel’s hands were breaking her clasp in a flight even she couldn’t halt, his right to his chest, his left to his face, keeping her from coming closer, then his right to his face and his left to his chest as though he were touching his heart for her.
1920–1924
Though he wasn’t five yet, Robert could already read the names of the dead mothers on the tall granite headstone:
ELIZABETH BLAU 1883–1
906
SARA BLAU 1888–1910
While his Mutti pulled weeds and watered the bush with the prickly roses, Robert stood with his hands linked behind his back, staring at the grave. Dead people turn into rice. He knew that from Miss Garland, who made peanut brittle for him. Inside the grave is space for Mutti too. Fear as black as beneath-earth filled his belly—don’t think that, no, not Mutti—and he rummaged in his pocket for a lemon drop, closed his eyes as the sweet-sour puckered the insides of his cheeks and melted that fear till all he knew and felt was the lemon taste in his mouth. He swiveled his head away from the grave: all around him, everything was green—lichen and moss and leaves—so very green; and the light coming through the leaves from above was turning their undersides pale green, much paler than the pines that circled the cemetery like a fence.
He sat down on a fallen log, pulpy beneath its new growth of tiny trees and plants. With one heel, he kicked a line of half-moons into the raked sawdust that covered the ground all around him, left over from the brush that the townspeople cleared early every summer to keep the forest out of the cemetery. Birdie Robichaud had said it would take the forest only one year to grow all across the graves and stones if it were left to its will. The will of the forest…
It made Robert wonder what the forest would want to do to one boy alone. Branches crisscrossed the sky like spiderwebs, and the moss that hung from the branches was a different kind of green altogether, the kind of green that had brown and yellow mixed into it. Some of the moss was low enough to touch when he stood up. As he pulled off one long strand and wound it around his hand, it felt stiffer than it had looked while still moving with the wind. And even after he slipped it from his hand, it kept that circle shape, so stiff and strong that he could imagine tying something with it, something that needed to be fastened. Like maybe the altar gate at St. Paul’s. Or the cross that tilted sideways at the cat grave, the smallest grave of all. Birdie Robichaud had told him about the boy who’d climbed up here one night to dig a grave for his cat. When the priest had ordered his parents to get the cat out from the sacred earth, the neighbors had written letters to the bishop, who’d finally allowed the cat to stay.
But only this cat. No other animals. Robert liked animals. His father said they were messy, and he wouldn’t let him keep any in the apartment. But once he was grown up, Robert knew, he would have four dogs and four cats. Maybe five dogs and five cats. And they’d never die. He swallowed, searching for the lemon taste, but it was gone, and the old stubborn fear was tumbling right back. If my Mutti gets another baby, she’ll die. Then Vati’s next wife will bring me and Greta and Tobias here to plant flowers on the grave. HELENE BLAU will be the third name on the headstone, right beneath ELIZABETH BLAU and SARA BLAU. That’s what happens to mothers. They die. First they have babies. Then they turn into rice. Both Greta and Tobias killed their mothers when they were born. Babies can kill mothers. He popped another lemon drop into his mouth, fuzzy from being inside his pocket, and curled his tongue around it—babies can kill mothers … babies all powerful, all frail—and swallowed the tangy saliva. Mutti knows I don’t want to kill her. She’s smart. Mrs. Wilson is smart too. She gave her baby back to God before the baby could kill her. Trudi’s Mutti also gave her baby back to God. But not soon enough.
Babies can kill mothers.
Miss Garland was peering through the ornate brass screen in her door when she saw him by the mailboxes with a basket to pick up his parents’ mail as usual. “Robert dear,” she called, “why don’t you come in for a little treat?”
His round face swiveled toward her voice, and he smiled. She liked him better than his brother and sister, this thoughtful boy who had inherited his father’s short frame, his mother’s large bone structure, and a craving for sweets that made him look as though he were about to rip his seams. Even new clothes soon pinched him.
“Come in. Come in.” She opened her door.
He loved Miss Garland’s flutter of kisses against his forehead. Though Greta said Miss Garland’s apartment smelled fussy—“of old lady’s corsets and false teeth”—Robert visited her every day. Sitting across from her at the lace-covered table, he’d color pictures of castles and kings in the coloring books she bought for him and saved inside an old shoe box. He’d hum to himself with the pleasure of chewing, while she’d fill him with peanut brittle and stories of gala balls, of her father’s mansion, of six handsome and wealthy admirers from whom she had chosen the kindest for marriage.
“The ring, Robert, you should have seen my engagement ring….” She raised her left hand and stroked her bare ring finger. “A flawless diamond set in a circle of sapphires.” When the young fiancé had died two days before the wedding—“of causes so tragic that even to speak of them would break the heart of anyone who were to listen”—she had buried him with her ring. “He wore my engagement ring on a bracelet, Robert dear. I braided that bracelet from my very own hair and slipped it on his left wrist before they closed his coffin.”
He looked at her hair—as silky and white as her crinkled skin—and saw a bracelet of her white hair on a man’s wrist, a wrist like his father’s, saw it as clearly as the castle and horses he was coloring, the trees that were shaped like huge mushrooms; and as he listened to Miss Garland with a devout expression—his usual response to unlimited sweets—the details of her stories became so true to her that, once again, she ached with the loss of that fiancé, a sorrow so genuine that it would become part of her memories and embellish the embroidery of her life.
All at once she felt deeply tired. She pulled out a handkerchief, dabbed at her lips. “On your way home, Robert dear … would you drop off those flyers for me?”
He hesitated before he nodded. Mrs. Wilson always scowled at him when he delivered those flyers. Captain, she called Miss Garland, Miss Captain, and some of the tenants had picked up on that name.
“The role of a messenger has always been one of great value. And responsibility.” Miss Garland walked to her desk where a typewriter with silver-rimmed keys stood among boxes of stationery and carbon paper. There, she always composed her long lists, titled: Helpful Suggestions from Miss Garland, President, Tenants’ Society. When she had first approached Helene Blau with the suggestion of forming a tenants’ society—“A little community,” she’d said, “where people will get together at each other’s apartments once a week for dinner or a slice of cake”—Helene had told her she was too busy, but she had come to regret that she hadn’t discouraged Miss Garland from the idea.
Although the tenants’ society collapsed after one meeting at Miss Garland’s apartment where only six people appeared and left early, mumbling excuses when she asked who would like to host the next gathering, Miss Garland kept writing new lists. Living in the Wasserburg was the best thing she had ever made happen for herself, and she was so devoted to the house that she thought about it constantly and annoyed nearly everyone who lived there with her ideas to make it better yet. She didn’t mind the work of typing everything six times, one original and five carbons, making a total of thirty-six flyers that she’d either leave in people’s mailboxes or send with Robert who’d deliver them door to door. In addition to these flyers, she posted hand-printed reminders in the appropriate places that Mrs. Wilson took down with decreasing patience: Please, close door of incinerator room! Please, shake your umbrellas before bringing them into the building! Please, don’t leave laundry in the drying room longer than necessary because others want to use the rods too! Please, don’t drag sand into the lobby from the beach!
The only tenant who valued her notes was Yates Hedge, a widowed geologist who’d recently moved into the apartment next to her with his forty-year-old son, Buddy, an accountant who’d never married. Since Buddy was sensitive to bright sun, he worked nights in the office of the Winnipesaukee School.
“Without you,” Yates Hedge liked to tell Miss Garland, “we wouldn’t know half of what’s happening.”
When Robert knocked at the Hedges’ door
, Buddy led him into the living room where all windows were boarded up to keep the light out. The only picture in the apartment was of his mother, a huge oil portrait that hung in one of the shut windows and showed Mrs. Hedge in a gravy-colored suit and matching hat.
“May I please look at your Christmas closet?” Robert asked.
Buddy rubbed the top of his bald head. “Oh, sure …” He shrugged. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He headed for the coat closet to pull out the decorated Christmas tree that he took out every December or whenever one of the children in the building asked to see it. Like this boy who asked for it at least once a month. Or the Braddock girl who liked to sit on the floor next to it, all quiet with that loopy smile of hers.
Reverently, Robert touched the stiff silver branches, the glossy red balls, the strands of tinsel. Accustomed to his Mutti taking an entire day to decorate the family’s Christmas tree with ornaments and real candles that she never lit because their father wouldn’t permit it—too dangerous; fire can kill—he was fascinated by a tree that was ready any day of the year.
“Visit is over,” Buddy said. “Make sure to tell Miss Garland thank you from us.”
But Mrs. Wilson did not say thank you when Robert arrived with peanut breath and yet another dispatch from the tenants’ society. “So involved with such trivia,” she muttered. As usual, she tossed Miss Garland’s latest ideas into the trash can. “Acts like she’s the self-appointed captain of the building.”
“You know why Miss Captain mixes into everyone’s business?” Mr. Wilson asked Robert, and when the boy shook his head, Mr. Wilson leaned down and whispered, “It’s because she never had sex.”
“What are you telling that boy, Homer?”
“That she’s one lonely old broad.” He winked at Robert and scratched the long creases on his forehead.
Though Robert didn’t know what having sex meant, he suspected from Mr. Wilson’s tone that not having sex had to be one of the worst things that could happen to anyone.
