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

  As she followed Bruno through the dark streets, she felt a terrible foreboding because he looked so small, almost indistinguishable from the walls that seemed to slant toward him as if to collapse.

  She called out his name.

  Startled, he turned.

  “I don’t want you out alone at night,” she whispered. “I was at the rally and—”

  He got so happy that he cried, going on about how he loved the Führer and the rally and his uniform.

  “Sshhh . . .” She glanced around, brought her index finger to his lips to calm him. “You’re tired.”

  “Now I know what it’s like to live.” He could be so pompous.

  “Oh, Bruno. I want you to promise me something.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to wake me up if you plan to climb from your window again.”

  “But—”

  “So that I can go with you. As long as one adult is with you . . .” She didn’t know how to end her sentence. Couldn’t promise him that his parents, in time, would let him belong.

  Still, he promised to wake her.

  Chapter 3

  WHEN THE PRAYER ends in Fräulein Jansen’s classroom, the only sound is that of pigeons scratching at the frozen dirt in the flower box that the boys and their teacher built last May and attached to the brick ledge outside their window. They planted flowers to attract butterflies: Gänseblümchen—daisies and Lavendel and Ringelblumen—marigold.

  Thekla used to buy corn for the street pigeons whenever she could afford it, but now, with her teacher’s salary, she can every week. Can afford to buy decent food for herself and give money to Mutti, who does Thekla’s laundry. Across her dresser, she has spread the table runner Mutti embroidered for her. Almut Jansen’s embroidery is treasured in Burgdorf, and she sells it at the Christmas market. She also barters it for groceries from Weiler’s store, books from the pay-library, and medical advice from Frau Doktor Rosen.

  Franz raises his hand. “How many kilometers to Berlin, Fräulein?”

  What her boys need from her right now is a lesson in geography—not the lesson about Lent she’s supposed to teach. She’s always willing to abandon her curriculum, teach instead what her boys want to find out that very moment, and it’s then that she feels her connection to them most deeply.

  “Identifying our students’ enthusiasm is half of our teaching,” her favorite teacher used to say. Fräulein Siderova taught every day as if it were her first, with that readiness for wonder and discovery. That’s how Thekla wants her boys to experience learning—through touch and memory. Once the knowledge is inside them, she can deepen it, let it support future knowledge.

  “Who can tell us how many kilometers to Berlin?” she asks. Granted, this will be geography via fear, but it’ll calm her boys and teach them to remember where Berlin is.

  “Is it over three hundred?”

  “Over two hundred?”

  A storm of hands, up, more enthusiasm than she can expect during her lesson on Lent. To lecture about Lent may be appropriate when there is plenty of food; but with such poverty in the country, it would be cruel to influence children to give up anything else. She’s seen devastating poverty when she’s visited some of her boys’ families; and yet, their mothers will offer her food they cannot spare. “I just ate,” Thekla will lie, even if she feels hungry, her saliva slick in her throat. She understands the shame of being poor, not letting on that your furniture is being repossessed, pretending you don’t witness your neighbors’ disgrace. Pretending—

  *

  She loves them all: the boys with crossed eyes and the boys with crooked teeth; the brainy boys and the beautiful boys; the boys from good families and the boys with Rotznasen—runny noses—who’ve been born into families where something as basic as wiping your nose is not done for you when you’re little, and you never learn how to do it for yourself. Like the Führer. This is where he came from, and the uniform can’t cover that. His skin may be clean and dry, but he’ll always have that Rotznase. It’s a way of living, a way of having been brought into life.

  At least my boys are thriving in school, Thekla reminds herself. At least they’re not as thin anymore. They’ve become more playful, mischievous, chasing each other with chalkboard erasers . . . gluing her chair to the floor . . . and she’ll play along by pretending to be exasperated.

  She smiles at Franz, whose Vater, after three years of unemployment, is working at the bakery, though only in the dawn hours; at Eckart, whose Mutter is finally back at her job cleaning St. Martin’s Church; at Otto, whose father repairs sewing machines in Düsseldorf.

  “Our lives are getting better, right?” she asks.

  Only Otto nods.

  To reassure the others, she adds, “Remember, the Führer promised on the radio that he’ll make the world safer.” She doesn’t let on how she resents his grating voice whenever it interrupts her teaching.

  In the principal’s office the Volksempfänger is on constantly. Loudspeakers, once used for prayers, now alert nuns and teachers to listen with their students whenever the Führer gives yet another speech. Unsympathisch—unsympathetic, the man and much of his message. But as long as Thekla can choose what to believe in—his promises of equality and of dismantling the ridiculously complicated class structure—she can teach her boys to advance within that system. Just for now. She can wait this out. But some of her boys’ families don’t have the finesse to make that distinction.

  Messages change, but the teaching of knowledge is sacred. Certainly school knowledge, like botany and geography; but also life knowledge, like proper manners and good posture, deep breathing and—above all—how to adapt.

  *

  Thekla has adapted since she was a child, letting slide past her whatever unsettled her. That’s what got you through: you let slide past you, like wind, whatever unsettled you, did not stand in its track where it would topple you. Trains were like that, too, that whoosh going right through you. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina on the end of the platform, the hum and quiver of the approaching train rising through her arches and ankles and thighs and waist and collarbone before she steps forward. Killing herself to stop her anguish. And to punish Vronsky. All this over a man. So pointless, to let lust slide into despair. Still, of the Russian writers, Leo Tolstoy is the one Thekla Jansen admires most.

  Better check if Russian writers are still allowed.

  If not, she must hide them under the floorboards of the pigeon coop with her other banned books until the government wears itself down. Because it can’t last. That’s what Thekla tells herself whenever she gets furious at yet another indignity. It can’t last.

  “I know how far to Berlin, Fräulein. My Opa—”

  “Yes, Wolfgang?”

  “My Opa, he lives in Berlin, and he says it’s five hundred sixty-three kilometers.”

  “Excellent. Would you like to show us on the map?”

  *

  The two puckered maps on the wall are the same as when Thekla was a student in this very classroom. Sister Mäuschen, who is in charge of supplies, has refused to replace them with the current maps—false maps, she calls them—that shrank Germany’s borders after the Great War.

  Back then, when lands were confiscated and citizens turned into foreigners, Sister Mäuschen increased her nightly prayers, and she stormed God with her prayers to restore the borders and reunite the German Volk. She knew she’d swayed God when, the day after the Reichstag fire, Hitler pressed Hindenburg into signing two emergency decrees that gave him immediate powers to protect the people and to arrest opponents. Sister Mäuschen appreciated his decisiveness, his courage to dispute Germany’s guilt for the Great War, and she was willing to offer up certain freedoms—privacy and speech and press and assembly.

  *

  Shoulders raised to his ears, Wolfgang sprints to the front where the two maps hang between the chalkboard and the papier-mâché sculpture of the Trojan horse the boys built with Fräulein Siderova. One map is of the world,
the other of Germany. But they are the same size—as if that can be, Wolfgang puzzles, one country as big as the whole world?—and they smell like the chairs in his uncle’s barbershop. Except this smell is older, buried in the creases.

  Wolfgang is the fastest runner in Fräulein Jansen’s class, his body thin and long as if built for sprinting great distances. He can’t know that he will return from the next war an amputee, both legs shattered at the Russian front. Can’t know that there will be another war. How can he know? How can any of them? After all, today is four and three quarters years before Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, when synagogues and Jewish shops and homes will be torn apart. Today is still five and a half years before the German army will invade Poland one Friday dawn in a preemptive attack from the north, the south, and the west.

  *

  When Markus Bachmann’s parents decided to sell their house on Lindenstrasse—a bad choice; a rash choice—the pharmacist offered them half its worth.

  Thekla was appalled that anyone would seek to benefit. “At least hold on till you have a better buyer,” she told Markus’s parents.

  Their friends at the synagogue urged them to last it out.

  “You’re too quick to worry.”

  “The political pendulum will stabilize. It always does, after it swings too far to one side.”

  “Hitler won’t get away with this for long.”

  “Even the Rabbi says not to make big changes right now.”

  “You don’t see us leaving.”

  “If this gets worse, we’ll all speak out.”

  But Markus’s parents warned that those who had the most would also lose the most. Quietly, they accepted the pharmacist’s offer and began to sell off their collection of carvings. During their final week in Burgdorf, Thekla went to their house every afternoon on her way from school and tutored Markus so he’d have enough assignments while at sea. She didn’t accept payment from his parents, though they tried to insist, but she finally let them give her a small altar panel carved by a student of Tilman Riemenschneider in the sixteenth century.

  “We haven’t been able to sell it,” Markus’s parents said when they urged Thekla to take it. “And we can’t bring everything with us to America.”

  “It’s premature, leaving the country,” she told them again.

  *

  But within a few weeks after Markus left, Jewish children were no longer allowed in her school. Instead, they were taught all their subjects in the synagogue across the street.

  Thekla steps toward the window of her classroom. Steadies herself with one hand. How much do I know? How much must I try to find out? Once you know, it’s tricky to keep the knowing at bay, to press it back into the before-knowing.

  Wolfgang aims the pointer at the Rhein where Burgdorf is just a speck against the embankment, then sweeps the pointer north a bit and way to the east. “Berlin,” he announces. As he pivots, he has to laugh because he’s looking straight through the frog house on the piano, and beyond the glass and the pebbles and the moss and Icarus are his classmates, as if they, too, were inside the frog house.

  But his teacher has her back to him. When she was his age, Jewish children went to the synagogue for religious instruction, while Catholic children and Jewish children who were raised Catholic went to St. Martin’s. Afterward, they’d all come back here to school for their other subjects.

  “See how far Burgdorf is from Berlin?” Wolfgang asks the teacher. When he turns to his classmates for help, they, too, are studying her.

  For her birthday last month, they bought her a green wooden frog and hid it in plain sight, waiting for her to find it. Even the boys in the last row could see it sitting inside Icarus’s glass house, but their teacher didn’t, not even when she stood next to it while they sang “Happy Birthday.” When they giggled and whispered, she asked what was going on. When Bruno said something was wrong with the frog, Andreas giggled more, and Richard said that the frog hadn’t moved all morning—not a lie because this was all about the wooden frog. All worried, their teacher leaned over the glass house and laughed aloud. Clapped her hands and laughed. “You boys . . . you and your pranks . . .”

  *

  The boys’ favorite prank is the Trojan horse, the ultimate prank.

  But what they want, now, is for their teacher to turn away from the window and toward them, tug at her blue-and-yellow scarf so the blue lies at her collarbone. Sometimes they’re sure she wears that scarf just for them. But they’ve also seen her wear it with her camel hair coat when she walks arm in arm with Herr Hesping. The boys admire him because he’s a famous gymnast who has won more trophies than anyone else in Burgdorf, so famous that the owner of the gymnasts’ club hired him as the manager.

  Still, at school the teacher belongs to them. She tacks their best work to the walls of their classroom: their puppets and their weather charts; their collages of bark rubbings with flecks of bark; and sketches of the trees that bark came from.

  “Fräulein Jansen?” they call out to her.

  Even the new boy, Heinz, who’s scared to talk in class, murmurs, “Fräulein . . . please?”

  But her breath is melting the frost-blossoms on the classroom window.

  Must I keep asking till I find out what I’m afraid to know? Or can I decide to be satisfied with not knowing beyond what we are told? Because once I know, must I then come forth with that? The risk—

  Chapter 4

  SUDDENLY THE BOYS are afraid she’s about to vanish through that widening circle of frost, vanish like their old teacher, Fräulein Siderova, whom they adored before this young teacher came to them. Beyond the glass, the pigeons are shadowy outlines like souls with sins on them. From their religion lessons with Herr Pastor Schüler, the boys know their bodies are for carrying their souls around and keeping them pure. Pure means without sins. But that can get tricky because of the near occasion of sin: like when your body wants to throw rocks at another boy’s body for pinning you down on the sidewalk; or when your body wants to steal candy cigarettes at Weiler’s grocery store; or when your body makes you feel nasty.

  *

  Sins have to do with commandments. Ten commandments. Some are clear enough, like you shall not murder, and you shall not steal. But some the priest had to explain to the boys, like bearing false witness, which means lying. Most of the boys have lied. But not killed. And not stolen—except that in itself can be a lie, or rather bearing false witness. When the boys asked what it means to covet your neighbor’s wife, Herr Pastor Schüler warned that impure thoughts can sneak inside your soul and that you must be vigilant. Because if your soul gets lost, that’s it. Hell.

  Now, your body is the tool of the Devil. That’s why your body gets stinky. Your soul does not smell—except, maybe, of holy water, evidence that you’ve been to mass. God and Devil fight all day long for souls. And when it’s night in Burgdorf, God and Devil fight for the souls of people on the day-side of the world.

  *

  The boys wonder if Fräulein Jansen is by the window with her back to them because she is disgusted with their sins. Already, they miss her terribly. For her, they are willing to stop their bodies from sinning. That’s what their souls are for, they’ve learned from the priest. And for that, your soul needs the conscience, the tool of God, which is fastened to your soul with ribbons. Red ribbons. Or maybe white ribbons. The priest didn’t know for sure when the boys asked him, but he said they were strong ribbons, almost like chains. Whenever your conscience yanks those ribbon-chains, it’s to alert your soul that your body is about to stain your soul, maybe for eternity, which means you’ll end up living in hell. Or at least in purgatory, where it’s not as hot and you have a chance of getting out and ascending to heaven after thirty years, say, or a thousand years. So, whenever you ignore the nagging of your conscience, you should remember that you’re weakening it more, tipping the seesaw from right to wrong.

  *

  When the teacher finally turns toward them, the boys are so rel
ieved that the souls switch back into pigeons, strutting past the space cleared by their teacher’s exhalations.

  “An anniversary . . . ,” she says softly, “will evoke the actual day of it happening, evoke all its sadness or its joy. Can you name some of your own anniversaries?”

  “When our baby came out dead,” Otto says, though he’s learned not to speak of the baby because it makes his mother cry. But he’d say anything to keep his teacher here.

  How sad, she thinks. Otto’s family must have told him his sister was born dead—not that she died when his mother carried her home from the hospital in a shopping net. Dignity could get in your way of asking for help. Ruin you. People lost their shops and restaurants and offices. Were afraid of starving, of living on the streets. Quite a few killed themselves. So many layers of poverty—depending on how much there was between you and nothing. And how long you could last if you never had food again.

  *

  One Sunday last December, when Otto was playing at Markus’s house, the teacher arrived with schoolbooks for Markus to take with him to America. Twice, she hugged Markus, crying, but she didn’t hug Otto. When she gave Markus her own pocket dictionary, Deutsch-Englisch, Otto felt slighted. He didn’t have anything that had belonged to her.

  “Maybe I’ll go to America, too,” he told her.

  But Markus had relatives in America, his Tante Trina, in whose house Markus and his family would live. While Otto didn’t have anyone in America. Except—

  Except for Markus.

  Once the teacher was outside, Otto and Markus watched her from the high bathroom window. They had to stand on the toilet, elbows on the windowsill. On the crusty snow, the soles of their teacher’s boots squeaked, and when she got to the big puddle that was frozen hard, she took a run and slid on the ice like a girl. The boys thought she was playing. Until she knelt on the ice and pounded it with her bare fists, mouth open to the sky, screaming.