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

  After that first pregnancy, it took her four years to conceive again, long enough for people to speculate that she’d never have children; but then she had two in a row, first her daughter, Ruth, and the following summer her son, Albert, and when she’d go for her walks with Fräulein Siderova, one would be pushing the wicker carriage, the other the stroller.

  *

  Maybe, Thekla thought, she could form a friendship like theirs with Gisela. As girls, they’d played together. And Gisela likes it that her son’s teacher lives upstairs. Maybe they—

  “Four thousand arrests!” Emil. Still going on about the communists and intellectuals who were arrested that night. “That list was ready before. The arrests happened so quickly. Think of who benefited.”

  Him, she’d make wait. There was something delicious in waiting for what you could have now, prolonging your anticipation. Delicious. If waiting was what you chose—not what the priest chose for you.

  Emil reeled her against his body. “That mass obedience . . . I’ve seen it at the sports club, the attitude that they’ve given up rights for the greater good. They feel justified in demanding we all make the same sacrifice, and—”

  “Not so loud.”

  “—they get indignant when we don’t. It reminds them of what they’ve given up.”

  “Tonight you’ll sleep alone again,” she murmured.

  *

  Emil tilted his head to hear better, felt her palm against his chest as she pressed herself away from him, danced away from him, lithe, graceful, danced for herself, Thekla, not with him, eyes hooded, no smile, danced for herself only, nothing flowing around her, not even her hair, cap of black locks, dress sculpted to her so that her body beneath the fabric was all he saw as she danced, not seeing him in that dance where he couldn’t retrieve her into his arms as she came up against him because she retreated again, and he nothing but a body she needed across from her so she could do this in public, because to sway like that alone would be indecent, and tonight he was that body—it could be anyone for her—tomorrow some other man, dancing with her but not reaching her, aching to kiss those long eyelids, those upturned lips—duck lips, child lips—parted as if to ask something of him that he could never give her because she wouldn’t tell him what it was; and yet, yet, this dancing for herself only made her more seductive, inviting without welcoming him, and as he danced across from her, he found—for an instant—his reflection in her pupils, black pupils with those golden-brown rims, but his image couldn’t enter her, just flitted on the surface—he for himself, not for her—which would never be enough for him. While for her it was. As she danced. Swayed.

  1900

  Chapter 11

  WHEN ALMUT JANSEN was hired to keep house for a stonecutter, she couldn’t bring Thekla along, and it stunned her how deeply she missed this baby she hadn’t wanted till recently. The practical solution was to let her mother-in-law bring Thekla with her to work at the St. Margaret Home and settle her in the nursery.

  But practical is not necessarily good for the soul. Almut knew her mother-in-law would visit Thekla throughout the day in the nursery, just as she had her own son; but it chafed at Almut to imagine her daughter with those children in limbo, whose loneliness showed in their desperate eagerness whenever you walked toward them, and in their dispiritedness once they saw that you were not coming for them. The older these children got, the less likely they were to be adopted, and a few months before starting first grade, they were transferred to the orphanage in Husum.

  Almut couldn’t bear to have Thekla think of herself as one of these children without family; and when her former employer offered to hire her back, she asked Wilhelm about moving to Burgdorf. “I could bring Thekla with me to work.”

  “But how about the man who—?”

  “You said you didn’t want to know.”

  “Going to Burgdorf makes it different . . . if that’s where he lives.”

  “I have nothing left for him. Nothing.”

  Wilhelm opened his lips. Closed them.

  She told him that she was no longer drawn to the child’s father, that she knew too much about him. His habits. The hairs on his brush. His distance from his wife.

  “He is married?” Wilhelm was startled. And immediately relieved.

  “It has all gone to you now, that love,” she said, “to you and to Thekla. I’ll never touch him again.”

  Wilhelm felt uneasy. But he also knew that the people of Nordstrand would never forget that Almut had married him while pregnant with another man’s child. Burgdorf she had left before anyone knew of her disgrace, and she could return there proudly, a married woman with her husband and child.

  “They need toymakers in Burgdorf,” Almut told him. “There are so many of you here.”

  He nodded. So many that it seemed he’d always be one of the new toymakers, no matter what his age, working on the crowded main floor instead of upstairs in the design studio where he longed to be.

  “Go to Burgdorf,” his mother told him.

  “You don’t want me to stay?”

  “Here, they will always gossip.”

  Almut stroked her mother-in-law’s arm from the wrist up to the elbow and back again, and she felt her shiver. “I wish you’d come with us.”

  “Yes,” Wilhelm said. “We want you to come with us.”

  “I know you do,” Lotte told them. “But—”

  “They need midwives in Burgdorf, too,” he said.

  “Midwives and toymakers . . . I can’t leave here.”

  “But you’ll visit?” Thekla asked.

  “Christmas. You’ll come to me in the summer.”

  *

  Wilhelm was accustomed to the sound of the sea at high tide and the absolute stillness at low tide, but in Burgdorf his wife taught him to listen to the murmur of the river that you could hear from anywhere in her village, at any hour, a constant murmur that touched upon her lifeblood. He could see that this village was as much a part of his wife as the shape of her face and her long neck. Here in the Rheinland everyone talked in her melodic dialect. Here, she could be joyful with their daughter, promenade her around town in a wicker carriage.

  Alexander Sturm hired Wilhelm as a master carver. Though the toy factory had every tool a toymaker might desire, Wilhelm used only the tools he’d brought with him from Nordstrand, and he never had to replace a single tool because he kept them meticulously cleaned and oiled.

  The factory made jumping-jacks and spinning tops and stuffed lambs and—the owner’s favorite—fairy-tale building blocks that fit into puzzles, six sides to each block, nine blocks to each puzzle, that Wilhelm Jansen carved with infinitesimal scenes from “Aschenputtel”—“Cinderella,” “Rapunzel,” “Froschkönig”—“Frog King,” “Schneewitchen”—“Snow White,” and other fairy tales. If you didn’t fit those blocks together as they were intended, they’d form strange tales that could make you laugh or cry out or ponder the twists in your own life.

  *

  Every noon, after the Abramowitzes had eaten, Almut would ladle the rest of the food she’d prepared in their kitchen into pots with lids that she’d stack inside a pail because the pots were hot to the touch. It embarrassed Wilhelm when he walked home for his midday meal and came upon his wife carrying his meal in a pail. Hog slop? He felt petty. Reminded himself how eagerly she loved him at night. What an accomplished cook she was. How she anticipated his hungers and kept his clothes clean. How she noticed the chafing of his trousers against the insides of his thighs and sponged him with a tincture she boiled from chamomile. How she served meat more often than their neighbors because the lawyer Abramowitz could afford it. Still, whatever his wife served him came after the lawyer had eaten his fill.

  As Wilhelm dreamed of toys he wanted to make, he tried to reassemble the stories of his own life the way they were given to him at birth, building blocks of one mother and one father and four children, and how those blocks—scattered underwater—were still unsettling the blocks of his
own family. With Almut, he had believed he could fit these blocks together, make the picture whole, but his daughter’s likeness to the lawyer Abramowitz was disturbing the pattern, though Wilhelm fought knowing for sure, fought the inertia by reminding himself what mattered was his own devotion to the girl. Thekla. Always at him with her adoration, her curiosity, till he gave in to her, let her careen with him toward the tilted sea, where direction was no more than something to fall away from, where nothing but his daughter’s voice, her hands, could lure him back. Thekla. Her fierce tug on his fingers when she learned to walk. Thekla. Right at his elbow when he built a box for his tools, dismantling twelve cigar boxes that Leo Montag had saved for him at the pay-library and assembling them into one double-layered box that he sanded and lacquered with Chinese red. He let Thekla choose the color. After he nailed brass reinforcements on all corners, he didn’t have to carve his name into the front panel because no other toymaker in Burgdorf and the surrounding villages owned a toolbox that magnificent.

  One morning, as he carved the blocks for “Rumpelstilzchen,” he had an image of his wife peeling potatoes in the lawyer’s kitchen, sunlight on her hands and on the long curlicue peels while she spun golden spirals like the miller’s daughter, who was forced to spin straw into pure gold.

  Tuesday, February 27, 1934

  Chapter 12

  THE TAXIDERMIST ALWAYS gets dachshunds, and he—”

  “He stuffs his dead ones.”

  “If you ask him, he lets you pet them.”

  “And then he—”

  Fräulein Jansen’s students are giggling like six-year-olds.

  “And then he buys a new one, a live one, and—”

  “And . . . and he introduces the live one to the stuffed ones.”

  “No.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Once he gave me a glass eye.”

  “When I was your age,” the teacher says, “the taxidermist gave glass eyes to the children of Burgdorf on St. Martin’s Day, not sweets or apples like other merchants when we came to his shop with our paper lanterns. Those eyes . . .” She rolls her eyes, makes the boys laugh. “Actually, I liked getting those eyes.”

  “Did you use them as marbles?” Andreas asks.

  “Oh yes.”

  “Because that’s what my father did with them.”

  “We have three of those eyes,” Eckart Holthusen says. “They’re painted over in back of the glass.”

  The teacher nods. Taps her left ear to remind him.

  Eckart winces. Pulls his finger from his ear and hides both hands on his knees.

  Slack manners, she thinks. Everyone in the Holthusen family has slack manners. Eckart’s mother. His grandmother. Two women raising one boy. Whenever his mother cleans St. Martin’s Church, the sharp odor of her sweat hangs in the vestibule for hours after. The parishioners know to stay away when she lifts her broom to get at the cobwebs above the confessionals, say, or the ceilings of the side altars. Keeping the church clean but not herself. That stickiness of body secretions. Armpits. Ears. And worse. Some parishioners say it’s because she carries her mother’s sin. Being born out of wedlock will mark a family for generations, so that even grandchildren will feel dirty by the way others treat them.

  *

  Eckart wishes he could lay his head on the desk and shut his eyes. Last night he awoke crying again, his ear tight and hot. His Mutti got him up, took him into the kitchen, where she filled a spoon with cooking oil and held it above the stove. When it was warm, she soaked a shred of Watte—cotton in the oil. He knew what came next, cocked his head to the right so that his left ear was up and Mutti could stick in the Watte. Some drops trickled deeper than the Watte could go, making him shiver and swallow as they warmed up the pain, shrinking its edges.

  He slept, then, while Mutti sat by his bed. But this morning the cotton was little and so deep inside his ear that his mother couldn’t pull it out with her fingernails or her tweezer, and she said she’d take him to Frau Doktor Rosen today after school.

  *

  “Bruno’s family never gets the same kind of dog,” Franz says.

  “Because they’re so ugly that there is no same kind.” Wolfgang tap-taps one finger against Bruno’s back.

  Bruno jerks away from him, draws into himself as far as he can, elbows tight against his sides.

  “Wolfgang,” the teacher warns.

  But he persists, one finger tap-tapping down Bruno’s spine. Maybe tomorrow he’ll tie Bruno’s shoelaces together again. So easy to get him flustered.

  “Stop it!” The veins in Bruno’s skinny neck stick out.

  “Your last dog was fuzzy with a tail like a pig,” Eckart joins in.

  “It will make you so happy to know my last dog got trampled dead.”

  “Not happy,” Eckart protests.

  “By the ragman’s horse. But the day after, a spotted dog came to our door, and I named her Henrietta.”

  “Henrietta was lucky to find Bruno,” the teacher says. “Right, boys?” But her eyes are on Wolfgang.

  Wolfgang nods, folds his hands on his desk. Once, in the barbershop, he heard his uncle say that the Stosicks got only ugly dogs—the kind that come from two mismatched breeds getting stuck to each other—and Wolfgang pictured a dog with two heads and two tails, one set at each end, so that it could run in both directions.

  *

  During recess, several boys breathe against the ice-flowers and ice-stems, nudging one another aside, melting larger circles that remind them of something Fräulein has told them: once a hole opens in how you’ve been looking at the world, everything else pushes through. Beyond their breaths, dormant wisteria vines twist around the window. In the school yard, the fruit trees are bare.

  All grown and bare now, the teacher thinks, as she steps behind the boys and rests her hands on Richard’s bony shoulders. Such a heavy head on a slight neck. Such a burden . . . She wishes she could do more for Richard. Some people still cross the street to avoid an illegitimate child or the woman who’s borne that child.

  Around the fruit trees the ground is still frozen, and a timid sun casts its peculiar light on the hoarfrost, illuminating and devouring at once. When Fräulein Siderova planted these trees with her students one long-ago May—one pear, one apple, one plum—they were knee-high on Thekla.

  Chapter 13

  YOUR BIRTHDAY,” Thekla Jansen says to her students, “is the anniversary of the day you were born. And don’t we look forward to those anniversaries?”

  “To getting a present,” says Andreas, who wants to be a policeman.

  “Every day has an anniversary attached to it,” she says, “but the ones we remember are those that transformed us.” Just then a reckless thought comes at her—When you shake out the night, this is what falls out—

  Just as it came at her last April when she saw the Führer at a huge rally in Düsseldorf. He didn’t know how to speak properly, how to walk properly, how to comb his hair, and she felt embarrassed for him as he shouted about restoring jobs and national honor, about a better and splendid Germany. The mob applauded, shouted. Did people really believe that he wanted what was best for Germany? That history would prove he was on the good side? When the Führer was a boy—Thekla was sure of that—no one taught him how to conduct himself. If Fräulein Siderova had been his teacher, he would have learned to stand tall but not rigidly, to pace his voice along with his breath instead of letting it flare into hysteria.

  At the edge of the crowd, a child was trying to leave. Thekla couldn’t make out who it was, only that people were making space for someone short who was moving against the thrust of the crowd. But it wasn’t a child, Thekla finally saw. It was Trudi Montag from the Burgdorf pay-library. Thekla wanted to follow her, get out of there with her; but just then a cheer soared from the masses as the Führer reached into the sea of bodies and plucked a little girl from her mother’s arms—there must have been hundreds of children thrust at him by adults—and lifted her higher yet, a girl
with blond braids, too high. Some felt an odd sense of alarm, and they’d think it was because he might drop the girl, because he was that awkward, but when he lowered her into her mother’s arms and picked another child, they shook off that warning.

  *

  When you shake out the night—

  Thekla Jansen sets one index finger against her lips to keep herself from saying it aloud to her boys: When you shake out the night, this is what falls out.

  And to think that some say the Führer is Germany’s savior.

  Messages change. Right and wrong can trade places, fall out of fashion.

  As a student teacher she was assigned to a school in Neuss, where children—as was the custom, and to teach them to obey—were punished with a quick slap on the cheek for whispering in class, say, or with a ruler on their fingers if they didn’t sit still. When Thekla was a child, she, too, was punished like that. Sister Elisabeth used to grasp the shell of a student’s ear between her fingers, twist it, and Thekla dreaded that ear-twist more than a slap or the ruler.

  But one morning, when Thekla was the one to snap her ruler across the knuckles of a small boy, she suddenly knew it was wrong, knew it in her bones and in her gut. Punishment wasn’t effective in guiding a child toward learning. Far more effective to bind a child to you with devotion so that it longed to follow your teaching. From that day forward, she decided, she would teach according to her own moral compass.

  And that’s becoming more important now.