Stones From the River (41 page)

But Leo recalled what his wife had said to him the year before their wedding—that things in Burgdorf happened slower and later than in most other places—and he kept troubled watch over his friends. That night, very few people in the neighborhood slept well, but when in the morning only a few broken windows were discovered in town—though the demolition was said to continue in Düsseldorf and Oberkassel—Leo hoped that Frau Abramowitz had been right.

Friday afternoon Trudi gift-wrapped a set of china cups that she and her father would take to Helmut Eberhardt’s wedding the following day. His mother had come over to invite them in person, and they’d only accepted because they didn’t want to disappoint her. Helmut was marrying Hilde Sommer, who had finished her training as a midwife and shared his passion for order. According to the pharmacist, she was pregnant, well on her way to a
kinderreiche Familie
, but Trudi found it impossible to confirm that rumor even when she got close to
her, because Hilde was a heavy woman to begin with. Well, at least if she was pregnant, Helmut wouldn’t be able to divorce her for
Unfruchtbarkeit
—barrenness—or
Nachwuchsverweigerung
—refusal to have offspring. Both were considered direct opposition to the government and had become valid causes for divorce.

Late Friday night, less than twelve hours before Helmut’s wedding to the blond midwife at St. Martin’s Church, he and two other SA men dragged Herr Abramowitz from his bedroom, and when the tall lawyer tried to protest, his pipe collection and cameras were trampled in front of him, and he was dragged across the fragments, screaming as they cut his feet and ankles.

Frau Abramowitz clung to Helmut Eberhardt’s arm, begging him to leave her husband alone. And because she couldn’t think of anything else, she cried out, “I know your mother well. You come from a fine family.”

“Stay back,” he warned her.

She heard them in the street—the smashing of glass, their heels on the sidewalk, car doors slamming. An engine started. Then silence. Tears clogging her breath, she tried to phone her daughter in Oberkassel, but she could no longer remember Ruth’s number, though she dialed it nearly every day, and she had to look it up. Her hand shook so badly that her finger slipped from the dial, and she had to try several times before she reached her daughter.

When Ruth—against the advice of her husband—offered to drive to Burgdorf, Frau Abramowitz refused. “Don’t come here. It’s not safe.”

“Then it’s not safe for you either,” Ruth argued.

“They didn’t take me this time.”

“Mother—Mother, I love you.”

“I love you too, Ruthie.”

“Let me send a taxi for you.”

“I have to be here. For your father when he comes back.”

There was a long pause on the phone.

“He will come back,” Frau Abramowitz said.

“Of course he will.”

“He is a lawyer, after all. He’ll make them understand it’s a mistake.”

She hung up the phone after promising to call Ruth the moment she heard anything. Her beige sweater pulled over her nightgown, she
dashed across the street, barely avoiding the broken glass on her sidewalk, but before she could bang at the Montags’ door, Trudi opened it.

“What happened?” She grasped Frau Abramowitz’s hands.

“Michel…” The older woman began to cry. “They came for Michel—took him away.”

“Come inside. Please …”

“I can’t.” She kept looking toward the door. “He may come back any moment.”

Not right away, Trudi thought, but what she said was, “I’ll watch for him from the window. Stay with us tonight.”

“They made such a mess, breaking things … without any reason.”

Trudi’s father came hobbling down the stairs in his bathrobe. “Frau Abramowitz,” he said, “Ilse,” his voice helpless with grief, and opened his arms, embracing her as Frau Abramowitz must have imagined it many times, only under much different circumstances.

She briefly leaned into his embrace, then stepped away. “I must go home.”

“You can stay here,” Leo offered.

“Michel might phone.”

“I’ll go with you then.”

“You will?”

“Of course. Let me get some clothes on.” He started toward the stairs.

Though Trudi wanted to come along too, she sensed that her father, alone, would be able to comfort Frau Abramowitz far more than if she were with them. From the open door she watched the two, Frau Abramowitz in her thin nightgown, her father oddly formal in his Sunday suit as if the occasion deserved no less, their arms linked in such a way that they seemed to hold one another up—not unlike old couples who have decades of practice in adjusting their pace to one another. Carefully, they stepped across the shards. Trudi thought she heard the key turn after the Abramowitzs’ front door closed behind them, as though they belonged inside that house together.

She wrapped the coat of the Russian soldier around herself and climbed onto the counter of the pay-library. From there, she could see through the window. The light in the Abramowitzs’ living room was off, and Frau Abramowitz stood framed by the splinters that stuck from the window frame like translucent petals of an outlandish flower. The outline of her pale sweater filled the gap where the glass
had been, unmoving, as if she had always been there, a guardian, until it became impossible for Trudi to remember a time when that window had not been filled with her shape.

The taller outline of Trudi’s father saturated the space around Frau Abramowitz like a cloak. That entire night the two of them stood in the dark window above the littered street, waiting for Michel Abramowitz; and whenever Trudi dozed off on the counter, she was soon awakened by some faraway screams and shattering glass, and she’d see the contour of Frau Abramowitz in that window and, behind it, her father’s as though the two of them had not moved at all, as though every word spoken had passed between them like this.

When the dense texture of night wore thin and cries of roosters swirled above the roofs, Trudi spotted something crawling across the intersection of Schreberstrasse and Barbarossa Strasse, an injured dog, perhaps, or some ancient beast dragging itself toward the dawn of mankind, the doom of mankind. It was a shape that embodied the ugliness of the night, and Trudi wondered how long it had been crawling toward them. Perhaps it had been there for a long time and only dawn had revealed it. But just then Frau Abramowitz loosened herself from the window and flew from the house—Trudi’s father close behind her in his uneven gait—toward whatever it was that was crawling toward them.

Hoisting the seal coat to her knees, Trudi raced after them, and when she caught up, she saw Herr Abramowitz, his neck and face bloodied, his pajamas ripped. He could not stand, not even when Leo Montag tried to support him, and they had to spread the seal coat on the ground, roll him onto the rugged hide, and carry him—Frau Abramowitz and Trudi on one side, Leo on the other—up Schreberstrasse and through the arched door of his house. Trudi’s arms were aching as they used to when she’d hung from the door frame, and her father’s breath was coming in hard gasps. Only Frau Abramowitz’s breath was even, because carrying her husband took far less strength than waiting for him.

When they laid Michel Abramowitz down on the sofa in his living room and washed him, careful not to touch his bruises, they found that his nose and several ribs had been broken. All along the inside of his left arm were cigarette burns, and his back was swollen with raw welts. He had lost quite a few teeth, all from the outer row, and his
wife could see the second row—a quirk of nature, she used to think—as if he’d grown that extra set of teeth for this night.

His voice was hoarse, and they had to bend close to hear him when he forbade them to take him to the Theresienheim or the hospital in Düsseldorf. “I’m safer at home,” he insisted in a murmur and asked his wife to bring him the
Watte
—cotton—that she used for earaches and taking off nail polish.

She looked confused but left the room to get it.

He gripped the lapels of Leo’s Sunday suit. “I’ll go into the river before I let those
Schweine
get me again.”

“Michel—”

“I mean it, Leo. Promise you’ll look after Ilse if that happens. There’s nothing that can make me go through this again if—” He let go of Leo as his wife returned with the
Watte
, and he tore off two pieces, rolled them into wads, and quickly inserted them in his nostrils. Tears ran down his mangled face.

Leo steadied him by the shoulders. “It’s a promise.”

“What is he doing?” Frau Abramowitz cried out.

“Trying to reshape his nose,” Leo said.

“Let me get Frau Doktor Rosen,” Trudi said.

Michel Abramowitz groaned. “I don’t want to put her in danger.”

“Let her decide.”

“I have decided for her. She would come. You know her.”

Frau Abramowitz dampened her handkerchief with spittle and wiped the blood from his nostrils.

“Stop it, Ilse.” He averted his face. “I’m not a child.”

“What if it sets crooked?”

“Then you divorce me.” He winced at his attempt at humor. “Get yourself a husband with a nice straight nose.”

“And
a nice disposition.” She slipped an embroidered pillow behind his head. “I’ll start looking.”

He circled her hip with one arm. “I bet you will.”

Her face flushed, Frau Abramowitz looked at Leo and Trudi. “Thank you for your help,” she said, her voice oddly formal. “Michel needs to rest now.”

“Let us know what we can do,” Trudi offered.

“Lock the door behind us,” Leo reminded Frau Abramowitz.

Throughout the morning, Michel Abramowitz rested on the sofa, dropping into brief, fitful periods of sleep from which he woke moaning,
while his wife sat on the floor next to him, her photo albums spread around herself, staring at the images that had emerged through the eyes of her husband’s cameras. But now the cameras were broken: she knew because she had stepped across the shards, and it seemed like a trick that the photos were not broken. She remembered the endless arranging Michel had done, posing her and the children just so, telling them to smile as he prepared to fix their images for the future. But when all was added up, you could never do that: you could never take three or four people, say, and arrange them in such a way that they would remain like that forever. They were only like that for the moment of the photo, and it seemed a mockery that—all these years later—the pictures still held those images as if they could be true.

From the Catholic church came the ringing of the bells, celebrating the marriage of Helmut Eberhardt and Hilde Sommer. Frau Abramowitz stepped up to the broken window. The air was cold, laced with frost. She felt a deep compassion for Renate Eberhardt, whose body had carried Helmut toward the moment of his birth, Frau Eberhardt who—while Michel had crawled home with his wounds—must have already been up, preparing for her son’s wedding reception, which was to be held at her house. Frau Abramowitz wondered if Helmut’s mother knew what her son had done during the night, and she pitied the midwife, whose body would lie beneath Helmut’s in the nights to come. A thought came to her that had insisted on settling with her for some time now, a thought that would anger Michel if she ever told him: given a choice, she would rather be the one who was persecuted than the one who did the persecuting. Both had a terrible price to pay, but she would rather endure humiliation and fear than grow numb to what it was to be human.

To Leo Montag’s surprise, Trudi insisted on attending the Eberhardt wedding with him, and he understood why when he saw her step up to Helmut’s mother before the ceremony and motion to her to bend down so that she could whisper into her ear. At least Trudi could have waited to tell her what her son had done until after the wedding, he thought as a look of desolation passed across Frau Eberhardt’s face. It was a look that stayed on her face throughout the wedding mass and the reception, even though she tried to force a smile to her lips, a look that caused her new daughter-in-law to come up to her twice, asking if there was anything she could do. But Renate Eberhardt only
looked at the young blond woman and shook her head.

Around noon, the Abramowitzs’ daughter, Ruth, arrived on the streetcar despite her husband’s misgivings, a large shawl around her head as if to disguise herself. She cried when she embraced her parents, and she cried again when she picked up the open albums and stacked them back on the shelves, assuming the SA had strewn them about the floor.

She told her father she was sure her brother would do whatever he could to help.

Her father nodded. “Albert is trying to get us out. He knows we’re ready.”

“And you, Ruth?” her mother asked. “What will you do?”

“If Fritz were Jewish too, we’d come with you, but he’s so well respected—I don’t think anyone would dare go after his wife.”

“I hope you are right,” her father said without conviction.

“We’re careful.” She touched the edge of her chipped front tooth, a habit that made her look like the girl she’d been when she’d jumped from the moving streetcar. “I— I keep out of sight. I mean, Fritz thinks it’s better if I don’t work in the office for a while.”

“I see,” her father said gravely.

“Only until things are back to normal,” she said quickly.

Everyone in the neighborhood was shocked at what had happened to Michel Abramowitz. Frau Weiler prepared a basket of delicacies for them. “They are honorable, dear people,” she said.

“Those who did it,” Frau Blau said, “they’ll find their own vengeance. They’ll never have any luck.”

“How could they do this to him?” Herr Meier asked when he parked the bakery truck in front of the Abramowitzs’ house. “They shouldn’t be allowed to,” he said and insisted on leaving four glazed buns and a dozen
Brötcben.

Herr Kaminsky, whose upholstery shop had been overlooked during that night of destruction, said he knew some people among the SA—their wives were customers of his—who were nice, who did not commit any crimes.

But Anton Immers and some of his friends said it was about time the Jews were shown reality, and when they heard that the mansion of the concert pianist, Fräulein Birnsteig, had not been damaged at all, Herr Immers figured it had to be because it was too far from the center of town.