Stones From the River

Also by Ursula Hegi

INTRUSIONS

UNEARNED PLEASURES
AND OTHER STORIES

FLOATING IN MY MOTHER’S PALM

SALT DANCERS

TEARING THE SILENCE:
ON BEING GERMAN IN AMERICA

SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION

Rockefeller Center

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1994 by Ursula Hegi

All rights reserved,

including the right of reproduction

in whole or in part in any form.

First Scribner Paperback Fiction edition 1995

SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION
and design are trademarks of

Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc. under license by

Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

Designed by Songhee Kim

Manufactured in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21

Hegi, Ursula.

Stones from the River / Ursula Hegi.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. City and town life—Germany—History—20th Century—Fiction. 2. Women

librarians—Germany—Fiction. I. Title.

PR911.9.H43S76    1994

 823—dc20    93-33533

                   CIP

ISBN-13:   978-0-684-84477-0

ISBN-10:         0-684-84477-X
eISBN-13: 978-1-43914-476-3

An excerpt from
Stones from the River
entitled “Trudi” appeared in the Spring 1993 edition of
Story
magazine.

for Gordon

I’m deeply grateful for the generous help and support I received while writing this novel. My godmother, Kate Capelle, had the courage to answer questions I couldn’t ask as a child while growing up in the silence of post-World War II Germany. In her late eighties,
Tante
Kate broke the silence by documenting her memories of the war years on tape for me. Author Ilse-Margret Vogel, who became active in the resistance before immigrating to the U.S., lent me photo albums of her childhood and offered valuable insights on what it was like to live in Germany between the two wars. Historian Rod Stackelberg trusted me with journals he wrote as a boy in Germany. Together with Germanist Sally Winkle, he guided me in my research and read the manuscript for historical accuracy. Author Sue Wheeler, whose wisdom and love for literature keep challenging me to reach further in my writing, has read drafts of nearly everything I’ve written since we met in graduate school. My agent, Gail Hochman, helped me with my research of Jewish traditions. Gordon Gagliano welcomed the essence of Trudi into our house and advised me in all matters Catholic and architectural. The women in my women’s group have given me their loving support during eight years of sharing and celebrating our histories. The Northwest Institute for Advanced Study awarded me a faculty research grant during the summer of 1992.
Vielen herzlichen Dank
.

A
S A CHILD
T
RUDI
M
ONTAG THOUGHT EVERYONE KNEW WHAT WENT
on inside others. That was before she understood the power of being different. The agony of being different. And the sin of ranting against an ineffective God. But before that—for years and years before that—she prayed to grow.

Every night she would fall asleep with the prayer that, while she slept, her body would stretch itself, grow to the size of that of other girls her age in Burgdorf—not even the taller ones like Eva Rosen, who would become her best friend in school for a brief time—but into a body with normal-length arms and legs and with a small, well-shaped head. To help God along, Trudi would hang from door frames by her fingers until they were numb, convinced she could feel her bones lengthening; many nights she’d tie her mother’s silk scarves around her head—one encircling her forehead, the other knotted beneath her chin—to keep her head from expanding.

How she prayed. And every morning, when her arms were still stubby and her legs wouldn’t reach the floor as she’d swing them from her mattress, she’d tell herself that she hadn’t prayed hard enough or that it wasn’t the right time yet, and so she’d keep praying, wishing,
believing that anything you prayed for this hard surely would be granted if only you were patient.

Patience and obedience—they were almost inseparable, and the training for them began with the first step you took: you learned about obedience to your parents and all other adults, then about obedience to your church, your teachers, your government. Acts of disobedience were punished efficiently, swiftly: a slap on your knuckles with a ruler; three rosaries; confinement.

As an adult Trudi would scorn the patient fools who knelt in church, waiting. But as a girl, she’d go to mass every Sunday and sing in the choir; during the week she’d sometimes slip into the church on her way home from school, taking comfort in the holy scent of incense as she whispered her prayers to the painted plaster saints that lined the sides of St. Martin’s Church: St. Petrus next to the confessional, his eyebrows perpetually raised in an expression of shock as if he’d overheard every sin the people of Burgdorf had whispered to generations of weary priests; St. Agnes with her mournful eyes rolled up and her fingers clasped to her bosom as if rehearsing to withstand countless other attacks on her purity; St. Stefan with a pile of chocolate-colored rocks hiding his feet—except for one pasty toe—his bleeding arms extended as though inviting his enemies to hurl even larger stones at him and ensure his eternal salvation.

To all of them Trudi prayed, and her body grew, but—as though her prayers had been twisted in some horrible joke—her body did not stretch itself upward as she’d presumed it would, yet had failed to specify in every single prayer, but expanded into a solid width that would eventually make her forearms as massive as those of Herr Immers, who owned the butcher shop, and her jaw as formidable as that of Frau Weiler, who ran the grocery store next door.