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’re humming,” Yvonne whispered.

  Startled, he looked up from his plate.

  “You were.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “I don’t mind,” his mother said.

  Emma watched him set his fork aside. Take his napkin. Dab his lips. She slipped from her chair and walked toward the front door, trapping her sorrow in a list for Opa. Paint over scuff marks on walls next to elevator. Shampoo the rugs. A list of things to do in the house, to fix, to tell Danny Wilson about. Wax the lobby. Polish the mailboxes. Fix the drying racks. Outside, in the fountain, water was flowing sideways as the wind curled itself beneath. It seized Emma’s hair, billowed her black dress. As she let the wind turn her body and raise her arms, it spun her around the fountain. Oil the door hinges. Again. Faster. Rake the leaves. Hose down the sidewalk. Faster and faster the wind twirled her.

  Totally unsuitable, Noah Creed thought when he saw Emma. Totally unsuitable for a day of mourning. “Would you like me to stop her from dancing?” he asked Helene.

  “Stop our Emma? My husband would have liked to see her like this,” she said, not knowing that Stefan had already witnessed this dance half a century ago and—all his life since then—had been waiting for it to happen again.

  When the wind tapered off, Emma stood still and looked around, suddenly aware of the grown-ups. Only one was missing. Opa. Her mother said he was gone forever, but Emma knew that wasn’t true. He was just away for a while. Soon he’d come looking for her. He always found her when they played their hiding game. The first place he’d search would be one of the cubicles. But which one? His own? Her parents’? Usually she made her choice so it would be hard for him to find her. But today she wanted it to be as easy as possible. The Braddocks’. That’s where she’d hidden the last time he’d found her.

  Emma wedged herself inside the cold metal liner that smelled of milk gone sour, of apples gone too ripe. How tight the cubicle was getting. It used to be so spacious. Through the inside door of the cubicle she could hear the radio. Ever since Mr. Braddock had died, Mrs. Braddock had been sick in bed, listening to the radio, waiting for Fanny to bring her food from Mrs. Bloom’s apartment. That’s where Fanny really liked to be. Getting paid for what she enjoyed—mopping floors and washing counters. Once, Emma had seen Fanny hose off stones she’d brought up from the beach. That’s how much she liked to clean. The other thing Fanny liked was calling the weather report, keeping the line tied up for others who tried to call in and were already impatient enough with the weatherman who had a stutter; but that stutter was exactly what Fanny liked. Because the weatherman didn’t rush. And if she stayed on the phone at the end of his report, he’d start all over.

  Emma tugged her knees close so her body would fit better and waited for Opa. All at once it came to her that he was in Germany, that he must have been getting ready these past years to move there altogether by speaking the language and telling her stories about Burgdorf. But now he had gone ahead of her, and she didn’t know why. Was it because she’d done something wrong? Or because he had forgotten her? No, Opa would never forget her. Any minute now she’d hear his step outside the cubby. He knocks and calls out, “Emma? Now where did my girl hide this time?” Safe, she was safe again. She closed her eyes, thinking of moments she knew when the entire world felt safe: watching the stars with Opa; following him around the house; turning off her bedside lamp in that first drowsy slide toward sleep. All around her, she could feel the Wasserburg, and the cubicle that had been too tight now fit her just right, contained her, made her part of the house. “Emma? I just saw Emma a minute ago.” And even before he opens the door of the cubby, he’s laughing, they’re both laughing. “You’re getting too big for this hiding place, young lady.” And then light in her eyes as he pulls the door open and—

  Dead people turn into rice, Robert dear.

  “Where are you going?” Yvonne asked when he stood up.

  “I’ll be back.” Black as beneath-earth fear spread in his belly, made him dizzy with hunger as he headed for the elevator. His hands shook when he bolted the apartment door behind him. Rice, moist and white and swarming. He heated a pan, made a cheese omelet. Four slices of toast with butter and strawberry jam. As he soaked up the last bit of egg with an edge of toast, he suddenly felt his father standing behind him in the kitchen, and though he couldn’t possibly be there, Robert was afraid to check, afraid to see the disappointment in his father’s eyes as they appraised him—soft in body and will. The Halloween candy in the children’s rooms. No. He was not about to take candy from them. But it might be good to make sure nothing they’d been given was bad for them. After all, last year he’d found moldy cookies in Caleb’s stash. This Halloween they’d each collected half a pillowcase full of sweets from tenants and neighbors.

  In Emma’s room, he straightened the yellow bedspread, adjusted the stack of library books on her built-in desk. She’d hidden her candy. A hoarder, this one. But in Caleb’s room the top of his desk was heaped with candy bars and bubble gum, bags of peanuts and those little Drake’s coffee cakes topped with crumbs. Caleb won’t mind if I eat just one thing. As long as he told him and gave him money to buy himself something else. Sitting on Caleb’s bed, Robert ate a Snickers. Then a Hershey’s bar. Enough already enough. Four Drake’s coffee cakes. No good as a father, a husband, a son.

  By the time he had finished the peanuts, he knew he had to get to the store to replace what he’d eaten before anyone found out. Suddenly he had a purpose. Energy. He grabbed his keys, took the elevator to the basement. From there to the garage and into his car. At the Heflins’ parking lot, Danny Wilson was pulling out in his truck, his silver hair brushed into meticulous wings over the tops of his ears. Always so vain about his hair. Robert hunched over, hoping Danny wouldn’t notice him. Inside the store, he quickly found a Hershey’s bar, Snickers, and peanuts, but the only Drake’s—easy to spot with the duck on the label—were slices of marbled pound cake with the same brown-and-white pattern. He hesitated but then figured he’d tell Caleb he’d eaten his crumb cakes and bought him pound cake instead. Jelly beans. Some jelly beans would be good right now. A bag of chocolate chip cookies. What else? Nauseous with hunger, Robert approached the cash register.

  As Mr. Heflin added up the purchases, his wrinkled hands touched each item, turned it, brought it up to his glasses to search for the price. “I’m sorry about your father.”

  “Thank you.” Robert felt conspicuous. Like a drunk in a liquor store. With a small cough he said, “My mother needed a few more things. Primarily for the children. Primarily…” He dropped a quarter and felt bulky, awkward as he bent to retrieve it.

  Mr. Heflin glanced at him as if embarrassed for him. The way my father would if he could see me now. Dead people turn into rice, Robert dear. Inside his car he opened the cookies, careful not to get crumbs on the seat that Yvonne might ask about—and he was having a feast, the Fatboy, crooning to himself, absorbing the cookies while driving away from town, absorbing the peanuts and jelly beans, the candy bars and slices of pound cake—just tell Caleb you took a few of his Halloween things and will take him to the store—making up lies to tell his child. Only when it was all gone was Fatboy silent. And Robert felt so bloated he could hardly move. As if he weighed at least five hundred pounds. This was the worst in months. While all over the world people were starving. He felt haunted by pictures he’d seen of skeletal children with distended bellies and eyes huge with hunger. It frightened him, having forced food into himself after it became painful. Even if he fasted, he’d be in his biggest clothes for at least a week. He felt useless. Trapped in this moment. In this body he hated.

  He still had to get rid of his empty wrappers since Danny Wilson saw all trash that went down the chute to the incinerator. At a gas station Robert cleaned out his car, asked for the key to the men’s room, kept the faucet running to muffle the retching. How he loathed himself as he knelt in front of the stained toilet. Loathed himself while dro
ps of water and vomit splashed from the stained bowl into his face. While he soaped his face and neck and hands. While he gargled. Bent to brush dust from his knees. Wiped specks of vomit from his tie with toilet paper.

  Light in her eyes—

  Light in her eyes.

  “Opa?”

  “Emma?”

  Tilting her face toward the light, toward—

  “Emma?” It frightened Caleb, finding his sister folded into that cramped and dark space, looking much smaller than she really was. Seized by a sudden and deep urgency to reclaim her, to get her out of there and into the sun to offset that darkness, he felt his own grief for his grandfather, felt it all coming together in one moment that would reverberate in his films—that urgency to move from shadow into light. He pulled both his sister’s hands toward him, and after he got her to stand next to him, he closed the cubby door on the smell of long-spoiled food and tears. And then they were sitting on the stone bench in their garden, the cold of stone through their clothes, solid and chilling. Below them on the street Mrs. Perelli—still in the ruffled black dress she’d worn to the cemetery—was coming around the corner, slow on high heels, her left shoulder drawn down by a large shopping bag.

  Caleb glanced at his sister. “What’s in her bag?” he asked, trying to cheer her out of her sadness, though that sadness was wedged inside him too.

  She shook her head.

  “She just bought food for her pet,” Caleb said.

  Emma watched as Mrs. Perelli climbed up the front steps of the Wasserburg.

  “I wonder what kind of a pet it is.” Caleb waited for her to move into the people game with him. “I wonder … I wonder …”

  “A monkey.”

  “A monkey? A monkey fits right into the Perellis’ apartment. With the leopard and the baby zebra…. Only this monkey is not stuffed. This monkey is alive. That’s why Mrs. Perelli carries—”

  “Bananas.”

  “Lots of bananas in her bag. Because that monkey is huge.”

  Emma nodded. “And very very hungry.”

  “Mrs. Perelli has to rest after each step. Because that bag is heavy. And she’s scared of the monkey.”

  “Because he throws fits. When she doesn’t bring him enough bananas.”

  Caleb could see the monkey breaking all the dishes and glasses. “He breaks the dishes,” he told Emma.

  And now she could see the monkey too. Could hear dishes crashing against the wall. The glasses. She said, “And he breaks all the glasses.”

  “Right. Then he swings from Mrs. Perelli’s big plants.”

  “Like a jungle.”

  “Birds fly around in Mrs. Perelli’s jungle. Green and red birds.”

  “Yellow too. Don’t forget yellow.”

  “They shriek at Mrs. Perelli. That’s why she wants to run away.”

  “But the monkey only gives her money for groceries. Not for a train ticket.”

  “A train ticket? To where?”

  “Burgdorf,” she said without hesitation.

  “You can’t go to Germany by train.”

  “Can so,” she protested and was right back inside her sorrow. “Once you get off the ship. Opa says so.”

  When Greta visited her stepmother, she noticed how her accent that had smoothed out over the years was becoming more pronounced. What she noticed too was how much closer Caleb and Emma had become. Changes like that were more obvious when you didn’t see them every day. The week after her father’s funeral she had moved into a suite at the Blanchard Hotel in Boston but came back to her apartment in the Wasserburg at least once a month to see her family.

  According to Helene, Emma had taken the St. Joseph statue and was hiding it somewhere in her room. Helene had decided not to say anything, but to watch Emma closely. The girl wasn’t eating well and was clinging far too much to Caleb. Often he was patient with her; but sometimes he’d disentangle himself, run off and roam the neighborhood in ever widening circles where Emma wouldn’t follow him—not only because she was two years younger and therefore restricted in how far she was allowed to go, but also because she missed the Wasserburg when she was more than a few blocks away from it. Opa had told her that the house spoke a language of its own, and she imagined that language to be much like his. It was only inside the house that she could hear his voice.

  One afternoon, when Caleb was playing hide and seek with her, he found her hiding on the second-floor balcony above the front door. To tease her, he locked the window she’d climbed from.

  At first it was funny when Emma banged her palms against the glass. “Let me in,” she screamed.

  He waved to her as if about to leave. Took several steps back.

  As she rattled the window, she was suddenly filled with the certainty that she was forever shut out from the house. There was a sense of death in that certainty. Pressing her eyes closed, she could see her bedroom with its white built-in desk and shelves, her Oma’s tiled kitchen on the floor above, the peacock rug in the staircase, and as she felt the loss of all that, she cried out, “No. No,” and walked through the glass, blindly, head first beyond that initial resistance into the breath of the house, birthing her face—bloody like that of a newborn—into familiar and sacred territory.

  “I didn’t think you’d do that,” Caleb whispered when he saw the blood. “I didn’t think you’d do that.” Next to his sister—sturdy and screaming—he felt insubstantial. Too light. Too slender. Too pale. Hers was a screaming of rage without tears, face red beneath the blood, and it was with awe that he raised his hands to her cheeks as if to anoint himself with her blood, her strength.

  “Go—” A deep voice right behind him. Danny Wilson. “Get Dr. Miles.”

  “I didn’t think you’d do that,” Caleb whispered again.

  “Go get Dr. Miles. Now. Where is your mother?”

  “Reading. On the dock.”

  The doctor’s hands smelled of milk and of medicine as he extricated slivers of glass from Emma’s face. She tried not to blink. Every thing was red in Oma’s kitchen, and she could feel Oma holding her on her lap, steadying her with strong arms clasped around her.

  “It’s not wise to lead with your face.” Oma’s breath, warm against the side of Emma’s neck.

  “That’s right.” Emma’s mother, still in her swimsuit, was weeping. “You don’t go through things with your head. You just don’t.”

  “Your head is for thinking,” Dr. Miles scolded gently, “not for butting through walls.”

  “I didn’t think you’d do that,” Caleb said. “I wouldn’t have locked you out.”

  “And it doesn’t matter if those walls are made of glass or stone,” Oma said. “I know what I am talking about. Your grandfather was like that… leading with his head … always his head.”

  Emma tried to imagine Opa with blood on his face. But she couldn’t see him at all. Not even when she tried to put him next to the doctor.

  “You have to lead with your heart, Emma,” Oma said.

  The doctor was swabbing something cool against Emma’s forehead and eyelids, blotting the red, turning it cool, transparent. “Am I hurting you?”

  Emma shook her head. I’m back inside. At least I’m inside.

  “I don’t think we need stitches.”

  Emma blotted their voices till they too became transparent, a cool, transparent hum, but soon Oma’s rose above the hum—“Congratulations on getting married”—pulling other voices right behind her.

  “Thank you,” the doctor said.

  “She’s not from New Hampshire, I hear.”

  “Chicago. Laura and I used to work at the same hospital until my uncle brought me into his practice. Laura is a nurse. We just bought an old Victorian. About four blocks away on Gilman Street. It needs fixing up, but that’s all right. What we both love about it is the porch.”

  “I’ve always liked that porch. And that great old maple tree right across the street. A girl who used to work here as a maid when first I came from Germany, Heather
, she grew up in that house.”

  “First thing we’ll do is paint it. I don’t like yellow on a house.”

  “Emma?” Her brother’s hand on her arm. “I’m sorry, really.”

  Her cheeks hurt when she tried to smile at Caleb, and all at once she wanted to be sitting with him beneath one of the tables in the lobby, surrounded by the legs of the grown-ups while above them voices and laughter mingled with the scent of food, wanted to return to those celebrations she relived so often that they seemed to have happened constantly—not just twice a year—making up her entire childhood … people in festive clothes talking, laughing, … everyone there… her grandparents and parents, all the tenants, Uncle Tobias, Aunt Greta and Father Creed, Danny Wilson … eating the delicacies that Opa always prepares in his restaurant for his summer solstice and Christmas dinners. Her mother in a gay mood and pretty in her new dress, walking among the courtyard tables that are set up with white linen. Emma in her white dress and Caleb wearing his white suit, sitting together beneath the longest of the tables, playing with each other’s hands: they link their fingers; stroke thumbs; explore each other’s hands as if studying intricate maps. They breathe fog against Pearl Bloom’s patent leather shoes, right next there to Stanley Poggs’ shoes. A couple they are, Mr. Poggs and Mrs. Bloom. Through the white fringes of the tablecloth, Caleb and Emma see candles on the other tables, people strolling past their table without noticing them, some with wine glasses and cigarettes. Old Buddy Hedge and his even older father hobble past them, heads down, bad backs curved, giving Caleb an idea for the people game. There, beneath the table, he and Emma play Krieg der Greise—war of the old men—the fight Mr. Hedge has been having with Mr. Evans for years now, not speaking though they come to the same parties and rush to the mailboxes every day as soon as the mailman arrives, seeking out occasions when they can ignore one another in public though no one remembers what their feud is about.

  Hands, long hands, cupping Emma’s ears. “Look at me. Good.” The doctor’s eyes, moving up her face golden and smooth and slow like honeybees. “Good. Good.” Nodding, he was nodding, saying, “You should never let yourself get that angry, Emma.”