by Hegi, Ursula
*
All rain has ceased, but the air is drenched with the memory of water. Only one ribbon of snow lies along the edge of Bruno’s sidewalk, a ribbon the boys are not allowed to cross. While Bruno is on the other side of that ribbon. Inside his house. Inside the wardrobe.
But the police can cross.
And Bruno’s parents.
But only Bruno’s mother crosses, her fingers scratching up and down her arms. Scratching.
Bruno’s father does not cross into his house. Bruno’s father is howling. Feigling—coward, the boys think.
Because they would go inside. And look. And remember. Death has been glorious in poems about heroes, but this death here is different because Bruno is no hero, and Bruno’s father is a Feigling.
*
The wingbeats of pigeons as they land above on the windowsill of the teacher’s apartment. Her face is wet from crying. She’ll miss the sound of Bruno’s voice in the mornings, his visits to her. She can’t live here anymore. The Stosicks wouldn’t want her to. She hates herself for that selfishness. Her loss is nothing compared to that of his parents. Still—
And what if Sister Josefine dismisses her for not asking permission?
Did you ever ask permission, Fräulein Siderova, before you took us on a learning excursion?
Here she’s doing it again, worrying about herself when it is all about Bruno’s death.
“It’s always about you,” Dietrich used to say. She thought it was because of his envy. Having while he and Elmar didn’t: books and clothes and education and a good bicycle. Dietrich had facial hair early on, an amazing mustache when he was just seventeen and entered the seminary. “You’re doing it again,” he would tell Thekla if he were here. “Hogging. Hogging even grief.” Dietrich must be hell on his parishioners, especially in the confessional. For his first post as assistant pastor, he finessed an assignment to Nordstrand though he wasn’t supposed to ask, just obey his superiors and go where he was sent. It’s always about you, Dietrich.
*
Herr Stosick is still howling. To leave that greedy self of hers—greedy, Frau Abramowitz called her—and to make him stop this disgusting wet noise, Thekla steps toward him, touches his arm; but he startles her by flinging himself against her, howling, so massive and dense that his body feels like one block drumming against her, one block that cannot delegate different tasks to arms and legs because it’s moving as one, all belly, strong belly, muscles pounding against her, against her breasts, disturbing her, arousing her—
I’ve never been with a heavy man. Never expected that this mass of flesh in my arms would arouse me. She struggles to free herself from this odd embrace, but he holds on as though he had a right to her, and she suddenly knows he’s been getting part of her rent from Herr Abramowitz, knows it in a way so apparent it’s impossible not to know once you consider it. Her mother must have heard from Herr Abramowitz about the apartment, and they must have arranged it all before Thekla went to look at it.
So that’s why Herr Stosick avoided her comment about the low rent. Instead he distracted her with flattery. An honor to have her live in his house. Honor. His colleague, he called her. And her silly pride at being able to afford her own place. While all along Herr Abramowitz was paying for her. Being poor but looking rich. And again, that shame at having more than others. While Herr Stosick is howling, clinging to her. But I didn’t do anything wrong to get his apartment. I—
*
Cooking smells from the Stosicks’ kitchen. Himmel und Erde. Whenever Thekla’s mother cooks—
How can I think of food?
—Himmel und Erde, the smell is not this sweet because she mashes more potatoes than apples. Potatoes are free for Thekla’s family. Elmar smuggles them in, smooth contraband, so that Mutti doesn’t have to touch wrinkled potatoes and—
What did I already know when I drew Herr Abramowitz into my Noah’s ark? Thekla pushes it away, has to, but it reasserts itself, and she knows it will be there from this instant forward, knows it by her immeasurable sorrow for Vati. Nonsense, it’s all nonsense. Of course Vati is her father; and yet, Herr Abramowitz is forever carrying food and toys and clothes into the kitchen, where Vati sits without voice, without motion, sits forever in his shiny-bare Sunday suit as close to the stove as he can without burning himself, hands on his thighs like something broken as he stares at the floor between his black shoes.
Are Herr Abramowitz and Mutti still lovers? He provided for Thekla like a father, but not for her brothers, though he could have paid for their education, too. Instead he set her apart from Elmar and Dietrich. Set them against her. Dietrich, no more than four years old, screaming: “You stay away from Vati. He’s mine.”
What did I already know? Because if Herr Abramowitz is, if he really is my father—
A jolt of fear. And what will happen to me then? No—
Because what if thinking comes from wishing and makes it so? What then? What if I want his courage and strength instead of Wilhelm’s shadows? What if that’s all?
How much do the Stosicks know? The townspeople? No proof.
I don’t have to tell anyone.
No proof at all.
*
Her boys are scowling at Bruno’s father. If there had to be a man for their teacher, they’d want someone handsome. He’s clinging to her so hard that she feels his suspenders through his jacket.
“You should be with your wife.” She wedges her palms against his chest.
But his arms only tighten around her.
“And I should be with my students.”
He doesn’t budge. Not when Frau Doktor Rosen and Herr Pastor Schüler are rushed into his house. Not when Trudi Montag tugs at his elbow and asks what she can do to help him. Others are arriving as if catastrophe had pulled them here. As they all wait, the wet air hangs around them, fills them.
“What can we do?”
“How did it happen?”
Wind rustles the dry Hortensie—hydrangea against the brick wall. Winter lace in his winter garden. It was blooming when Thekla rented her apartment. Already, a splinter of waning moon is rushing them past Bruno’s death, toward the memory of his death, less acute with each day, each year, as all of them hurdle toward their own deaths.
Mine, too.
My death, too.
Chapter 31
SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN GOOD as the mother of a dozen children.”
“It would have given her some spare children.”
“She doesn’t know how to be alone.”
By the edge of the house, a tangle of women whisper how difficult it was for Gisela to conceive and carry a child to term, how she’ll be alone once again and forever, alone in the way you can’t be if you have a child who’s always one heartbeat from yours, one heartbeat, until one of the hearts stops beating, yours or your child’s, and if it is your child’s heart—out of sequence, not right, not thinkable—your heart may as well stop, too.
Those women who’ve lost a child know that.
A child lost soon after birth.
Or in its early years: death from influenza . . . falling from a tractor.
A grown daughter lost to childbirth.
A grown son—half grown, really—lost to the Great War. Some women held still for ceremonies that honored them for being mothers of heroes, rewarded them for not raging publicly at their sons’ deaths but waiting with that rage till they could crawl back into the barren of their lives. Other women took solace from the ceremonies because it was tempting to believe their sons had been felled by the enemy while protecting the homeland. These women carried the weight of that glory, rather than the weight of their sorrow. Still, always, always, there were those mothers who would not submit to the ceremonies; who carried their sorrow and rage in the blaze of their faces, their bodies; who’d rather spurn honor than pretend it replaced their sons.
*
Herr Stosick, pressing against Thekla. And her body—Pressing back? She feels sick with guilt and disgust
. He has lost his son, has come to her for comfort, and all she offers him is her twisted lust. The men she’s been with are like Emil. Muscular. Slender—
And there he is, Emil, as if she had evoked him. With him is Leo Montag. “Günther,” they say and take Herr Stosick by the shoulders. “Günther—”
He shakes his head as if rising from a daze, and it takes the strength of both men to pry him away from Thekla.
An icy draft against the front of her coat where the heat of his body was before.
While Leo Montag leads Günther Stosick into the house, Emil stays with Thekla, nudges her lips with a cigarette. But they stay closed. He takes off his right glove, strokes her lips with his index finger till she opens them.
As he strikes a match, she murmurs, “Van der Lubbe had matches on him when they caught him.”
Normally Emil would tell her that was not enough evidence. But he doesn’t.
So she says it: “Not enough evidence.”
He studies her. Nods.
“Still . . . they blamed him.”
One arm around her back, he steadies her.
How could I have ever thought of letting him go?
Otto is glaring at his teacher. She has gone from one man’s arms into another’s, and Otto doesn’t like it one bit. He longs to betray her—but just for that instant, because already she’s walking away from the man, toward Otto and the other boys.
*
The shame of their excitement has made them jumpy because from now on they’ll be the boys who knew Bruno before he made himself dead. Bruno, who’ll stay forever the age they are today. While they’ll grow up past where he stopped it for himself, the growing up and the growing beyond.
What can I possibly do to calm them?
And then Thekla knows. Schiller’s “Der Taucher”—“The Diver.” No need to wait with the poem till tomorrow. She motions her boys closer, keeps her voice low as she recites the first stanza:
“Wer wagt es, Rittersmann oder Knapp,
Zu tauchen in diesen Schlund?
Einen golden Becher werfich hinab,
Verschlungen schon hat ihn der schwarze Mund.
Wer mir den Becher kann wieder zeigen,
Er mag ihn behalten, er ist sein eigen.”
The boys are holding their breath for the young diver who, like many of them, is both sanft und keck—mild and audacious, as he takes the reckless king’s challenge and leaps into the churning waters to retrieve the golden cup.
“Repeat after me,” their teacher says.
Her boys huddle, repeat her words: the first stanza, the next, and the ones after that. Their voices grow hopeful when the diver’s pale arm emerges from the sea with his prize.
“The end,” the teacher says.
The boys don’t suspect that she’s ending the poem before Schiller did.
She doesn’t want to frighten them with the king’s grausame Spiel—cruel game as he goads the diver to take the second leap into the rough waters that will crush him against the cliff. The poem isn’t even about courage that’s asked of you by fate. No, what the mad king asks for is loyalty to him during chaos of his making.
She feels guilty for bending Schiller to fit what her boys need. She’ll owe Schiller—and her boys—these missing stanzas. Next week.
Or next month. For now, let them believe that the young page gets to keep the golden cup. Let them believe he gets the princess and the fairy-tale ending: living vergnügt bis an ihr Ende—joyously until their end.
*
Members of the chess club are still arriving—not to play chess but to offer their stunned condolence through their presence. Some leave right away, reluctant to be seen with the Stosicks, who forced their son to quit the Hitler-Jugend and will likely be blamed for his death.
But those who stay cluster outside the house in the membrane of their freezing breaths and cigarette smoke, voiceless at this child’s willful death, the only sound their feet scuffing the frozen ground. They would never admit that already they feel more intelligent, freed to compete against one another from now on, not against this strange and brilliant boy, who made them feel slow and forgetful as if all the chess games they’d studied and analyzed for decades were leaking from their minds. They will come to remember that they were the dead boy’s mentors, that his certainty with chess moves was the result of what they’d taught him, a certainty that was appropriate in unnerving out-of-town opponents but disrespectful when used against his mentors.
Finally, one speaks: “Supposed to get even colder.”
Then another: “Have they cut the boy down?”
“You can’t wash in frozen water, my Mutter used to say.”
“Why would they leave him hanging like—”
“This will cost Günther . . . taking his boy out of the Hitler-Jugend—”
“They’ll have to use pickaxes on the earth.”
“To open it for the body.”
Just four hours from now, the people of Burgdorf will be aware that—exactly one year ago—the Reichstag burned. Once tonight passes, most will feel safe once more because the Führer’s foresight and decisiveness prevented it from happening again.
But some will recognize the queasy weight of premonition having come into being. They all feared that the catastrophe would repeat itself in its familiar shape: fire. Instead the catastrophe destroyed one of their children.
*
“When you get home,” the teacher tells her boys, “I want you to think about Schiller’s poem and draw a picture of the diver.” It feels odd to assign them homework. But not to would leave them idle, open to fear. She wants the assignment to occupy the space in their minds where Bruno’s death is.
“Please, bring your drawing to class tomorrow,” she reminds them.
Once again, she recites the poem from the beginning, but as her boys repeat after her, their chorus gets smaller because some parents are arriving, taking their sons home. Other parents stay. When Thekla has only three students left—Eckart and Heinz and Andreas—she takes them home in the dusk though they’re accustomed to walking back and forth to school alone.
Only then does she run toward Fräulein Siderova’s apartment on Schlosserstrasse.
1933
May 10–12
Chapter 32
THE SECOND WEDNESDAY of May 1933 a Fackelzug—torch parade marched past Fräulein Siderova’s window. Songs and uniforms. Students wheeling handcarts full of books. Quickly, Fräulein switched on her Volksempfänger. A broadcast from Berlin. And its echo—
—an echo that filled the streets and seemed to come from the Burgdorf market square, condemning writers for lying, exploiting the German language to write undeutsche Gedanken—un-German thoughts and thereby betraying the German youth. From now on forward, the German youth would be called upon to ensure that German literature would be noble and clean.
*
Thekla pressed herself against the wet stone wall of the Rathaus. In the market square, rain and smoke thickened the air so that it flickered like a stage curtain made from strips of gauze to keep people from seeing clearly. As they passed through that flicker, their movements were jerky, the way you’d see them in a lightning storm if they were to run for shelter. Except they were not fleeing; they were rushing toward the pyre in the middle of the square, children and women and men, hurling books through the arc of smoke into the flames, shouting Feuersprüche—fire recitations, as if part of a staged performance with a huge cast, like Wagner’s Meistersinger when the cobbler sings about watching out for the evil tricks that threaten the German Volk and Reich.
*
Twice, Fräulein Siderova made sure her door was locked. A nimbus of fire shivered from the direction of the square. Then shouts, a chorus of Feuersprüche.
“Gegen Klassenkampf und Materialismus—against class-struggle and materialism . . . Ich übergebe der Flamme die Schriften von Karl Marx—I relegate to the flame the writings of Karl Marx . . . .”
“Gegen seelenzerfase
rnde Überschätzung des Trieblebens—Against soul-shattering exaggeration of the sex life . . . Ich übergebe der Flamme die Schriften von Sigmund Freud—I relegate to the flame the writings of Sigmund Freud!”
For weeks now, Fräulein Siderova’s school had become a drop-off center for undeutsche Bücher—un-German books, and schoolchildren had been ransacking classrooms, stacking books in the corridor. Some children brought in books they’d located under their grandparents’ beds or behind their parents’ bookshelves. Townspeople arrived to relinquish undeutsche Bücher: dirty books, books that belonged to the past. In the corridor, students could no longer run without toppling over these stacks that grew taller against the walls and around the statue of the giant, St. Christopher, until the little Jesus who sat on the saint’s shoulder seemed to float on a sea of books.
*
Thekla hoped Fräulein Siderova couldn’t hear the loudspeakers set up in the square, Goebbels’s voice from Berlin urging all Germans to prove their courage by burning undeutsche Bücher. Seventy-one writers on the blacklist! Arthur Schnitzler and Anna Seghers and Marcel Proust and Upton Sinclair and Theodor Wolff and Georg Bernhard and Erich Maria Remarque . . .
“Gegen literarischen Verrat am Soldaten des Weltkrieges, für Erziehung des Volkes Im Geist der Wahrhaftigkeit—Against the literary betrayal of soldiers in the Great War, for the education of the Volk in the spirit of truth . . . Ich übergebe der Flamme die Schriften von Erich Maria Remarque—I relegate to the flame the writings of Erich Maria Remarque. . . .”
How could Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues—All Quiet on the Western Front suddenly be unpatriotic? A novel that had been praised and read by over a million? Thekla knew if she asked that aloud, she might be accused of strengthening the enemy, perhaps even arrested like Herr Zimmer, who was trying to prevent two of his students from emptying a handcart of books into the fire.
*
