Stones From the River (13 page)

Slowly, Georg learned to look back into her sorrowful eyes that
peered into his, inspecting him for flaws. To avoid her gaze would have brought on questions. The first sin he became proficient in was lying. It became a necessity. But he would never tell a lie to Trudi. Not even after he’d grow up and marry Helga Stamm and lie to her. He’d never tell a lie to his first friend, the one who accepted his difference so much easier than her own, though he would come to betray her in other ways.

Leo Montag liked the playful, generous boy, whose movements became so much freer when he was away from his mother, and he encouraged Georg to visit Trudi whenever he wanted to. He brought the boy along when he taught Trudi how to build boats from birch bark and leaves. They set them to sail in the moat that encircled the Stern-burg. It no longer was a castle with knights and a drawbridge, but the moat and baroque tower still made it seem like a castle—even if the dungeon had become a storage cellar for potatoes, and the armored horses had been replaced by sedate white cows that left steaming circles of dung all over the meadows. In back of the Sternburg, a felled oak trunk lay across the moat, and you could balance across it if you dared. But if you slipped, you’d drop into the murky water and come up shrieking, with green and yellow caterpillars in your hair—like Alexander Sturm, whose friends had challenged him to cross the moat blindfolded the night he’d turned seventeen.

Though Alexander hadn’t been injured, the story of his mishap kept Trudi and Georg from trying to get across the moat, but some evenings, when she couldn’t fall asleep right away, she’d see herself crossing it, her arms raised on either side of herself, her bare feet on the white bark.

Once, Leo took both children to a puppet show in Neuss; another time he borrowed the Abramowitzs’ car to buy a sack of flour from the mill on the north end of town. With its brick arches and tall windows, the building looked more like a mansion than a mill, and when the children played tag in the surrounding woods, they ran not only from one another but also from a vague premonition of ruins and decay, a premonition which Georg would forget entirely and Trudi would not recall until one June evening, thirty-two years later, when she’d return to the flour mill long after it would have been destroyed by bombs and lie abandoned in a thickening tangle of forest and
swamp, while the rest of Burgdorf had already been rebuilt. She’d walk through the roofless building, pick a dried thistle from a clump of camomile, and see herself and Georg that day her father had taken them to the mill, pulling thistles from the ground by their roots and taking their prickly bouquets back to the pay-library, where they’d brought a pot and two spoons down to the brook and had mixed the purple heads of the thistles with water and sand. Thistle soup, they’d called their concoction when they’d offered it to her father, who’d pretended to slurp it with sounds of delight.

In November, Trudi came along when Georg and his mother walked in the All Saints’ Day procession. The procession started at St. Martin’s Church, went all around the church square and the adjacent streets, and wound past the Catholic school and the synagogue to the cemetery where the people of Burgdorf laid wreaths on their families’ graves and lit stubby white candles in glass lanterns.

Except for Trudi, Georg never invited any of his friends to come upstairs to the third floor with him, and even her visits ended the day she let him talk her into cutting his hair with his mother’s embroidery scissors. While he sat on a wooden stool in the kitchen, she perched on the edge of the table in the red wool dress and matching stockings that her aunt had sent her for Christmas, getting ready to guide the blades through Georg’s fine curls.

But something kept her from making that initial cut—the fear that, once Georg was more like other boys, she would lose him as a friend—and yet, she wanted him to be liked by others, wanted him to be happy. She held the scissors in one hand, a lock of hair in the other.

“Do it,” he said.

Four stuffed robins and one stuffed owl perched on top of the cupboard, their shiny, hard eyes watching her. It was cold in the kitchen, since Frau Weiler could only afford to heat the stove long enough to cook; yet, the skin on Georg’s neck was hot against Trudi’s fingers.

“Do it.”

The scissors screeched as they claimed one curl.

“Let me see.” He grasped it from her and stared at it, surprised to have this old enemy finally separate from his body. “Hurry up, Trudi.”

Quickly she cut, filled with a sudden rage at him for endangering their friendship.

“Shorter,” he said when he looked into his mother’s hand mirror. His hair still covered his ears, and he kept urging Trudi, “Shorter,”
whenever she stopped, until he no longer looked like Georg, but like other boys who taunted her, and she readied herself to start pretending that she’d never liked him and kept snipping, snipping, till his ears and forehead were exposed and only a few pale tufts rose from his skull. He grasped her hands, jumping up and down with her on the polished floor, but she couldn’t bring herself to laugh with him.

Leo Montag was about to close the pay-library when Hedwig Weiler dragged her son and Trudi in the door.

“Your daughter did this,” she whispered. The lines in her cheeks looked deeper, and her lips trembled.

Quietly, Leo Montag inspected the boy, the sullen and fearful eyes, the proud tilt to the neck. “Like a little man,” he said. “Georg, you look good.”

“Your daughter had no permission—” Frau Weiler started.

But he shook his head. “Hedwig,” he said gently, “Hedwig,” turning his gaze on the angular woman in the black dress until—for an instant—she felt he understood everything that troubled her. It was a gaze a woman could rest herself in, a gaze that respected and sheltered her. And as he recognized that overwhelming sadness in her eyes, Leo thought of what people in town said about Frau Weiler—that she was a bitter woman who’d pulled down her husband and made her son resort to luck—but since he’d always seen deeper than most others, beyond façades to the many nuances of shade and light, Leo knew that Hedwig Weiler was not only terrified of God and of what the neighbors might say about her, but that she also yearned to be considered generous.

“Hedwig, it was time,” he said, giving her that chance to be generous, as he recalled for her the day his father had taken him to the barber. “It’s a big day in the life of a boy, Hedwig, an important day. Most remember it forever. I was three, and I can still feel that draft on my neck.”

She looked down at her son’s shorn head and raised one hand to touch it carefully.

“Doesn’t he still have those
Lederhosen?”
Leo asked.

Georg’s face shot up. His eyes leapt from his mother to Herr Montag to his mother.

“From the unknown benefactor.” She nodded. “But they’re probably too small by now.”

“You’ll be surprised, Hedwig, how much they adjust.”

“He’s grown a lot.”

“One pair I had as a boy—I must have worn it for years.…”

Though Trudi was no longer allowed in the apartment above the grocery store, Georg became adept at sneaking out when his mother was busy with customers, and the two children would play between the shelves in the pay-library or sneak away from the neighborhood with chocolate cigarettes that Georg had stolen from his mother’s store. They’d pretend to smoke, blowing imaginary puffs into the sky; chase pigeons across the church square and through the wheat and potato fields that surrounded the town; tease the geese behind the taxidermist’s shop and run away when the huge birds waddled toward them, hissing through their hard bills. Georg was much faster on days he was allowed to wear his Lederhosen, but they never looked quite right because his smocks would be tucked inside.

In Trudi’s room, they’d fit fairy-tale blocks into pictures or stack them on the windowsill until they toppled onto the painted floor boards. Georg was always trying to make bets with her—like how many birds would fly by her window, or how many worms they’d find by the brook.

Sometimes they climbed the circular stone steps to the tower of the Catholic church, where Trudi felt taller than anyone she knew, and when she watched her town from high above and imagined herself through the roofs and chimneys into the houses of the people, it no longer mattered that her body was stunted.

There, in the tower, Georg told her he wanted to die at age thirty-three. “The age Jesus was when he died on the cross.”

“Thirty-three is very old.”

“Maybe we can die together.”

“All right.”

Sometimes she’d try to scare Georg by telling him stories of skeletons and the ghosts of hanged people. If she succeeded so much that not only Georg but she, too, wanted to race down the circular stone steps, she switched to tales of water fairies that swam in the Rhein, of stars with bright tails that flared through the night, until she could actually see them, those stars and water fairies. It was something she would return to even as an adult—telling stories to keep fear away.

Georg was not allowed to play with Protestant children or with the Jewish children who went to the Catholic school since it stood across
from the synagogue. The Protestant school and church were on Romerstrasse, far from the center of town, where the tower of St. Martin’s Church pointed at the clouds. Georg and Trudi wondered what it looked like inside the Protestant church, which was lower and wider, without a bell tower and steeples—much more like a house than a church. But going inside a Protestant church was a sin. Georg said the devil could catch you if you opened the door, and even if you got away from the devil, Herr Pastor Schüler would know by simply looking at you.

Since Trudi was Georg’s only friend, he was glad to help her with the errands she had taken over after her mother’s death, making daily rounds to Anton Immers’ butcher shop, to the open market where farmers sold fruits and vegetables, to Hansen’s bakery for
Brötchen
or
Schwarzbrot
, to the Braunmeiers’ farm for eggs and milk, which she’d carry home in a one-liter metal pail, and occasionally to the Buttgereits’ house near the north end of town for white asparagus. The Buttgereits had nine daughters, and sold the most delicious asparagus in town. People would come from as far away as Düsseldorf to buy it. White and tender, it had a delicate taste that no one else in town who grew asparagus had been able to duplicate, and which the Buttgereits kept a family secret.

When Trudi was finally allowed to take piano lessons from the butcher’s wife—a trade her father had worked out for library books—Georg came along and patiently sat in the Immers’ kitchen, listening to the abrupt sounds and pauses that came from the next room as he watched the butcher’s mother-in-law, a shrunken woman with bad hearing, who lived with the family and usually sat in her rocking chair by the stove, silent except when she slurped her saliva with great sighs.

It infuriated Trudi that the jarring sounds she produced on the ivory keys didn’t match the music that had filled her with such awe ever since she was an infant. She couldn’t reproduce it even when she practiced for hours, and she dreaded that pinched look that would come over Frau Immers whenever she’d hit a wrong key. But she was determined to be as good a player as Robert before she’d visit him in America. She knew it would be some time before she and her father would take their trip because the pay-library barely brought in enough earnings for food and wood.

Once, when Herr Abramowitz bought a new camera, he took a
photo of Trudi and Georg down by the brook. They had built a dam from stones, and their clothes and faces were smeared with mud. Though Trudi stood on a boulder with her chin held up, it was evident that she was much shorter than Georg. Her torso was wider than his, and her hips had already begun to spread as if some giant’s hand hovered above her, trying to press her into the ground, causing that slow, deep buried pain in her hips and back that would afflict her throughout her life.

As a young woman, Trudi would come across that picture in an old praline box that held her other childhood photos, some of them of her as an infant, and she’d wonder how her mother had known right away that she was different. In the early photos, the differences were so slight—almost imperceptible. Perhaps her mother had seen something else in her—that wicked part Trudi hated and nurtured in order to survive.

Ever since the river had taken her husband, Georg’s mother had kept the grocery store open by herself. Standing behind the U-shaped counter, which separated the line of waiting customers from the wide shelves that were stacked with boxes, cans, and bags, she fetched the items that people read to her from their grocery lists. On a piece of brown paper, she’d figure the sum of their purchases and wipe her fingers on her white apron, which would be smudged by the end of the day. When children brought their
Pfennige
to buy licorice or candy, she’d fix her protruding eyes on them and ask if they had their parents’ permission. If they hadn’t, but wanted the sweets, they had to buy the sin of lying along with the pleasure.

It was in church that the children of Burgdorf learned all about sin. Sin was lying or taking something that didn’t belong to you. Sin was talking back to adults or refusing to obey. Sin was touching yourself between the legs or letting someone else touch you there. Even thinking about that was sin and so was rubbing the washcloth there for too long. Some people had sins attached to them like second skins, even the sins of their parents. Like Anton Immers, the butcher, who was older than many of their fathers, but everyone in town knew that he’d been born three months after his parents’ wedding. A three-month baby. That meant sin. Or like Helga Stamm, who was Trudi’s age but a bastard because her mother hadn’t married at all. That skin of sin—the
town wouldn’t let the people take it off entirely even though everyone pretended it was not there. The town knew. Except for those sins that penetrated the skin and remained secrets—then the town didn’t exactly know what had happened except that whatever had happened had changed that person. Like the bits of gravel under the skin of Gertrud Montag’s left knee. They had stayed there, a reminder to her but to no one else unless she gripped your hand and guided your fingertips across the raised bumps below her skin, saying, “There, feel this?”