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

  Once in a while he’d get Emma to dream along with him, pick out a house and imagine what it looked like inside and what the people who lived there were like. He called it the people game and loved playing it with his sister, but soon she’d be running off again. She was all body. Liked to jump. To touch things. To have things. Keep them and hoard them: feathers and rocks and coins. Caleb didn’t care about having things. Only cared about living inside his head and dreaming. Till dreaming becomes seeing. Becomes the I-can-use-this. Use for what? Saving what he sees as if a camera inside his head were recording what happened outside of him, pulling it inside, making the inside-seeing and the outside-seeing one. Much of the time the I-can-use-this was his friend, but sometimes he hated not being able to turn it off. Like when his mother watched his father eat. Or when the kids had shouted, “Hazi tazi…”

  Wind blew through the wet fabric of his trousers, made his legs feel like ice. The screen. He brought himself back to the film, to the boy. And to help the boy, he put the boy’s father on the screen too, who takes the boy’s hand. And after the father leads the boy home and draws a warm bath for him and promises not to tell anyone about the pee, the boy in the warm tub knows that the boy waiting in the snow is ready to get up from the rock and go home by himself. But as he approached the Wasserburg, it was not his grandmother he encountered, but his mother who’d come looking for him because Miss Heflin had phoned her. When she ran toward him, he started crying, and she lifted him up, carried him into the building without getting angry at his mess and smell. She sat on the edge of the tub while he bathed and told her what had happened. And while he dried himself off, she called his grandmother.

  When he came into the living room, his grandmother was already there, angrier than Caleb had ever seen her. “I’ll talk to that Miss Heflin tomorrow. She should have stopped those children from calling him that. That woman couldn’t even walk with her polio until her parents brought her to Greta.”

  Caleb’s mother surprised him and his grandmother by kneeling in front of him and saying fervently, “You are not a Nazi.” Her eyes were close to his, troubled. “Your grandparents have lived in this country since long before the war. Your grandfather was a boy when he came to America at the end of the last century.”

  Caleb’s grandmother was leaning forward, listening gingerly as his mother explained to him how just as there were different kinds of Americans—Democrats and Republicans—there were different kinds of Germans. “And Nazis were one kind of German,” she said. “The bad kind. Bad, evil people. But what I want you to understand and remember is that not all Germans are Nazis. And knowing that makes you wiser and smarter than those other children.”

  “Thank you, Yvonne.” Caleb’s grandmother was looking at his mother with respect.

  “It’s what I believe.”

  “Yes, but because you’re American, you can say it aloud. Because I’m from there, I can’t. Americans would only assume I’m defending all Germans. I wish they’d understand that talking with a German accent does not mean I supported the terrible things—” She faltered. Cleared her throat. “What the Nazis did to the Jews over there … crimes like that, they go against everything I think of as German. Human.”

  “We know you didn’t support any of that,” Caleb’s mother said.

  “Being German is my oldest identity.…” Caleb’s grandmother ran one hand up her throat. “I didn’t know how afraid I’ve been of that word until now … afraid someone would call me Nazi. No one did…. I never thought it would happen to one of my grandchildren. Seven years after it all ended. Maybe it never ends.” She shivered. “Maybe it will always be there in some form. It was already going on way back, when I was pregnant with Robert. I tried to be as American as my husband. Even in small things. For so long now, being German has been tied in with being careful about German customs, German food.”

  Caleb blinked. Other than food and stories about Burgdorf—what else was there to being German? It wouldn’t be until fifth grade that he’d begin to understand what else there was to being German, understand it as much as an eleven-year-old can in a history lesson; and he would remember being called Nazi on the playground, remember his mother being there for him while explaining about good Germans and Nazis, remember his parents meeting with Miss Heflin, remember Miss Heflin’s mother giving him a long strand of red licorice for free and saying he was a decent boy, really; but most of all he would remember how being German had shifted that winter day into something far more shameful than wetting your pants, although that, too, the wetting, would enter the film he would make as a man—not his first film, but the one he would put off as long as he could because he was fearful of looking that closely at the history he had inherited, put off until he would be in his sixties and feel driven to finally take all those other moments that had sucked themselves onto that winter day of shame, snagging him with the potency of their own picture-making that continued as if independent of him while he slept or hiked or loved, fusing moments that conjured feeling German although these moments might not have had anything to do with being German, and—from that fusion—begetting further pictures and fostering all within the fascia of his imagination.

  Greta saw her father’s decline nearly two months before he had his stroke: it assembled itself in sudden images of a half moon lying cold upon the lake. She wished she could warn him, but ever since she was three and had felt Sara’s death waiting, she’d understood that she could do nothing to prevent illness or death. The only person she could talk to about the burden of the gift was Noah Creed when she visited him in Boston. He understood that her gift was such that she could soothe, heal even.

  To caution her father would not help him and only betray that gift. But what she could do was urge him to have a checkup, persist when he objected, and accompany him to Dr. Miles, who’d recently brought his nephew, Justin Miles, from Chicago into his practice with the intent to have him take it over once he retired.

  When both doctors assured her father he had the body of a man ten years younger, she wanted to haul him back into the examining room and tell both doctors—one too young, she thought, the other getting old—to be more thorough with her father, but she pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth, barring those words because she knew her father would not go back in there again.

  “Satisfied now?” her father asked her as they got into the car.

  In the weeks to come, she increased her visits to his apartment. To ward off his loss, she’d touch his shoulder or his arm, casually, the way you would during a conversation. Quite often she’d find Emma sitting on Stefan’s knees, twisting the buttons of his suit jacket or patting her fingertips against the loose skin beneath his jaw to make it sway.

  “Your grandfather is not strong enough for that,” Greta told her one afternoon.

  “Not so.” Emma shook her head.

  Stefan laughed and repeated what Dr. Miles had told him. “Ten years younger than other men my age.”

  “Don’t let her tire you.” As Greta reached for her niece, trying to distract her, the robust little legs scissored her waist. She was a bold child, Emma, a child who liked to get her face right against yours and stare into your eyes as she did now while Greta swung her around. White blond hair—so frizzy and fine it lifted at even the slightest movement or draft—floated around Emma’s round face as if about to leave her altogether.

  As soon as Greta was gone, Emma climbed back onto her Opa’s knees and got him to sing with her the rhyme his mother had taught him when he was a boy, the one about the little flag—“Wie das Fähnchen auf dem Turme sich kann drehn bei Wind und Sturme…” They stretched their hands up as high as they could and watched them become flags that turned high on the tower in the wind.

  Afterwards they played the finger rhyme: “Dies ist der Daumen, der schüttelt die Pflaumen…,” wiggling one finger at a time to the rhyme of the five brothers who went to fetch the plums, starting with the thumb, the big brother, and listing the chores e
ach brother had: shaking the tree, gathering the plums, carrying them home until—how could it be otherwise?—the little finger, the youngest brother, ate up all the plums.

  That spring Stefan had the first of several small strokes. It was a mild stroke, following a morning when he had seemed confused, unable to understand what Helene was saying to him, so she would report to the young Dr. Miles, who would keep him at the hospital for six days. Although Robert and Yvonne sat by his bedside every evening, Tobias did not visit when Greta called him with news of their father’s stroke.

  “He’s weak,” she told him. “Harmless. He will never hurt you again.”

  “I don’t understand you,” she said when she called him once more.

  The people of Winnipesaukee were convinced the stroke would have been worse had it not been for Greta’s intervention, and they envied Stefan Blau a daughter like that—“better than having a doctor in the family”—and gossiped that the most noticeable effect of his stroke was how he’d lost the English language. “As if all his years in America had been taken away,” they said. Most didn’t mind his German words because he’d become too frail to fit their notion of the enemy.

  Tenants who would encounter him in the hallways or garden would greet him loudly, slowly, the way you would speak to a child who was learning to talk, and they’d strain to hear what words—if any at all—he’d use to respond. A few, like Mrs. Klein and Stanley Poggs, even made the effort to learn a few German words and would greet him with “Guten Tag.”

  When Helene’s brother died in Germany, it felt to her like a prelude to her husband’s death, a rehearsal. In grieving Leo’s loss, she found herself preparing for her life without Stefan, mourning him though he was still alive. She longed to walk through the rooms where Leo had last breathed, plant flowers on his grave, and whisper to him past the kernels of dirt. Certainly, there in the cemetery, she would feel his presence once again, this brother whose kindness had remained in her life even after she’d moved thousands of miles away from him.

  On the phone, she told Trudi that she wished she could be with her in Burgdorf, but that Stefan wasn’t well enough to travel or leave behind. She didn’t dare promise Trudi what she had promised herself—that she would visit Leo’s grave after Stefan was gone. It felt wrong to say that to anyone, wrong to even think it, because it could only rush the day of her husband’s death.

  For the next year and a half, Stefan would live within the language of his childhood, excluding anyone who could not follow him there, even his children, though Greta tried with words she remembered from her early years; but Robert found it difficult to understand enough German.

  Stefan didn’t need those two. Or the son who didn’t come to see him. The son who’d never tried to learn his language at all. He had all he wanted in his granddaughter who followed him with ease as if she’d never spoken English. To have more than one language in the world struck him as unnecessarily complicated. Ludicrous even. A trick people played on themselves and others. He felt as though he’d been scattered for decades across two continents.

  As Helene felt a funneling of her world into his, into one language where once there had been two, she chose to join him in that tightening circle, knowing she would not limit herself to this forever. Sometimes she’d see him smiling secretly as if he’d gotten away with something. And he had. Because he’d be off somewhere in his memories, playing with Michel Abramowitz by the brook behind his house or watching the stars with his mother—not the way she was in the last photo his sister had sent, past the age of ninety—but round-faced and laughing, one arm pointing toward the stars. Summer vacation and they’re at the North Sea, digging their heels into the sand as the waves come up and swirl around their ankles. When the water is drawn out again and they step back, his footprints are not as deep as hers.

  “Look,” he says as the next wave washes over their prints, wipes them from the sand as though he’d never stood here. “Just think of all the footprints that are gone … even thousands of years ago.”

  “I sometimes feel that way when I study the constellations. How people used to see the same stars and believe they were lamps lighted by the gods.”

  “But none of the people lasted.” He picks up a flat pebble. Skips it across the waves. “Only the stars. And the ocean. Does it—does it make you afraid?”

  “Because we won’t last?” She skims one hand across his forehead. “Sometimes, yes. But I also like knowing that the stars will go on, that hundreds of years from now others will enjoy them. … Come here.” She walks with him toward the brown strip of tangled seaweed by the high-tide line, and they sit in the warm sand. “There may even be another boy who’ll stand where you stood before, and for a moment his footprints will exist. If he wants to, he can make other sets of prints or build a sand castle that might stand for days.”

  “If it’s far enough from the water.” Leaning against the curve of his mother’s arm, he watches the waves run up the shore. They leave puffs of foam that flatten out and vanish into the sand. In a wide band that stretches from the damp sand to the horizon, sun shimmies across the waves in yellow splashes, making the ocean look as though it were exhaling light.

  After consulting with Robert and Stefan’s American children, Helene arranged for the sale of the restaurant to two sisters from Maine. When Stefan wanted them to have guidelines for operating the Cadeau du Lac, Helene took his words, translated them inside her head into English before she set them down on the lined page, and then gave the words back to him in German, reading aloud, pausing to ask now and again, “Is that what you wanted?” as she transformed them on their passage between the two languages. It pleased him, her careful attention to his wishes. But he was furious when he found out that the new owners had changed the restaurant’s name to Homestead, abandoned the French menu to solid American fare, God forbid—pot roasts and steaks and fried chicken—and refurbished the airy porch into a gift shop where you could buy trifles like scented soaps wrapped in gingham, embroidered finger towels, and fancy jams with gingham-bordered labels.

  Every afternoon Helene took Stefan for a walk around the block. Since the Wasserburg contained all he wanted, he didn’t like to go further than that. She’d feel sad for him because as a boy he had loved to roam, had wanted his freedom so much that he’d left a continent; but now he was content to sit with her on the bench at the end of the dock while waves bobbed the planks beneath them. His eyes would travel the magnificent lines of the house he’d built, its long windows with their leaded panes, the blue tiles in the brick facade, the graceful steps leading to the polished oak door. Periodically Helene would notice his brief spans of disorientation. Both doctors had told her these would happen with little strokes.

  Stefan was a tender old man, a thoughtful and even funny old man who could be alert but then retreat into memories, into sensations, wanting to be touched, to be held. During these final months, he finally offered Helene the passion she had longed for as a young woman. Nights he would roll on his side, facing her, nestling his head on her shoulder, fondling her nipples, her genitals as well as his own, curious about their bodies as if he’d forgotten all previous experience.

  Sometimes she let him. But usually she would distract him.

  She liked it whenever they talked till dawn, isolated within their native language from the rest of their adopted country, and as they spoke of their childhood, the lines of immigration shifted once again, a fluid border, spilling the two of them across distance and time to Burgdorf, which kept reasserting itself as home despite the horrors of history, claiming them with memories of a time before the horrors. The river. The dike. The church tower. The fairgrounds. The pay-library.

  Though Helene had been aware of Stefan since childhood, she was stunned to find how much he had noticed about her: the candle with the white silk ribbon she carries in her first communion procession; that green dress with the heart-shaped buttons she wears on his sister’s eleventh birthday; the attic in her house and wa
tching her act.

  While Stefan would forget things that had happened the day before, details of his childhood would swell into that void, invoking those memories for Helene too. The wooden barrel for catching rain outside his parents’ house. The clear taste of new rain from the dipping cup. And the day when he comes home with manure on his shoes, and his father, angry—as angry as Tobias? Is that where his anger comes from?—dumps Stefan into the rain barrel, dumps him upside down. A fever, that’s what he gets, hands hot, so hot, that he cries for the cold water of the barrel, wants to put his hands into that very same cold water….

  And then he’d be lucid again, noticing his surroundings, forming links between the now and before. Like one afternoon when it was too blustery to sit on the dock and she took him inside the restaurant. While they drank hot chocolate, he glared at the decor and the gift shop where his best tables used to be, whispered loudly that the new owners suffered from Geschmacksverirrung, a term that carried no direct translation but meant that their taste had gone hopelessly astray.

  On the way up to their apartment, he fretted about the elevator. “It doesn’t sound right.”

  “It sounds the way it always does.”

  He smoothed down his tie where it disappeared into his suit jacket, always neat, wearing a suit even on days he didn’t feel well. “People could crash if the elevator fails.”

  “If you want, we’ll have Danny check it.”

  He got even more agitated when they found wasps in the apartment, five wasps that swirled upward from the kitchen counter and toward the fan above the stove. He grabbed a newspaper, folded it. But as he swung it at the wasps, he stumbled and fell. Ashamed that he couldn’t take care of something that simple, he felt the sum of all he hadn’t been able to do. Like keeping Elizabeth alive. Sara.