Stones From the River (45 page)

While her husband was in the war, Hilde lived with her son in the upstairs rooms, keeping the downstairs prepared for her mother-in-law’s return. She stored the cashmere shawl inside the linen closet for Renate, and she would not take it out until after the war when—a widow for some years—she would find herself pregnant with a child she felt certain was a girl, and she would start wearing the shawl as if it were an embrace, planning to give it to her daughter, whom she would name Renate. “It belonged to your grandmother,” she would say.

The one time Helmut visited home on leave, late in the spring of 1941, he was so moved when he took his son into his arms that he didn’t protest his wife’s foolishness. If Hilde had convinced herself that the downstairs was too big for her and little Adolf, Helmut had
no objections to her living upstairs. Until he returned. Besides—he was a man now and had experienced enough to know that women without husbands acted in ways that were not rational. You saw it with widows. With spinsters. It only followed that the wives of soldiers would get to be that way too after living without their husbands for so long. In a way it was proof of their chastity.

He couldn’t help thinking how pleased the Führer would be if he could see little Adolf, with his blond hair and sky-blue eyes, and when he tried to think of someone who could take the boy’s picture, he wished he’d kept Herr Abramowitz’s cameras instead of stepping on them. From what he’d heard, the Abramowitzs were still trying to leave the country. Helmut was all for that. “Let’s get the Jews out of here,” he’d told the taxidermist, and Herr Heidenreich had nodded and said, “All of them.” Apparently the Abramowitzs had applied to get into Argentina where their son lived, and they’d been approved, had paid their fees and bribes, but the day before their departure, their permit had been canceled by the Argentineans. Now they were starting the whole process of application over again.

Hilde, who had restored Adolf Hitler’s portrait to its old place of honor above the dresser for Helmut’s visit, did not mention his mother in his presence and was careful not to call the child Adi. She felt bewildered by her contentment when her husband departed again. Her first night without him, she took down the Führer’s portrait and stored it in its proper place behind the dresser, picturing herself living in the house with her mother-in-law and her son. That’s what it was like in many houses—women of two generations looking after the children.

As Burgdorf was turning into a town without men, Emil Hesping, who still managed several gymnasts’ clubs, was forced to close two of them, and he tried to keep the rest open by offering half-price memberships to women.

Gradually, Burgdorf also became a town without children. Ingrid Baum and Monika Buttgereit were two of the teachers who were sent to small villages with busloads of children whose parents had voluntarily registered them for the KLV—the Kinderlandverschickung—a program organized by the Hitler-Jugend to evacuate children who lived near cities that might be bombed.

It was Ingrid’s first real teaching job. Ever since earning her degree,
she had given private lessons to children who were hard of hearing. Teaching jobs were so scarce that others who had graduated with her worked in offices and stores, and she considered herself blessed to teach at all. After hearing rumors that teachers were being stationed in Poland, she had been relieved to be sent to the Black Forest instead. She would have preferred to teach at a regular school since the teachers in the KLV were treated like soldiers, but she knew she had to go wherever she was assigned.

The day Trudi helped Ingrid to get ready for her journey, the red jewelry box she’d given her stood no longer on the windowsill.

“Have you already packed it?”

Ingrid hesitated. “I traded it. For a rosary.”

“But I bought it for
you”

“The rosary was blessed by the Pope.”

“The box was blessed by the Pope too.”

Ingrid grew pale.

“It could have been,” Trudi said.

“Was it?”

“By the Pope and five bishops.”

“You’re not telling the truth.”

“And twenty-seven cardinals.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t lie.”

“Then it’s your fault if I go to hell for sinning.”

“I will pray for you.”

“I don’t want you to pray for me.”

“I often pray for you.”

“On the rosary you traded for my jewelry box?”

“When I pray, I sometimes can feel the presence of your guardian angel. She’s pure and bright—”

“Oh, Ingrid.”

“—much brighter than my own guardian angel. Often she goes away. Because I’m too sinful. And then everything goes dark.”

“If I made up a list of people who are sinful, Ingrid, you wouldn’t be on it.”

“How can you know?”

“I know, believe me. What I don’t know is who has my jewelry box.”

“I didn’t mean to make you angry.” Trudi waited.

“Klara Brocker.”

“Klara Brocker?” Trudi felt a sudden dislike for the tidy Brocker girl, who wore cheap jewelry and had worked as a maid for the taxidermist’s family ever since she’d finished school the year before. At least once a week, Klara slipped into the library to borrow the latest romances—for her mother, she said—as her eyes skimmed the jacket picture with polite greed.

Trudi could imagine her coveting the red leather box with that greed, scheming to offer Ingrid a worthless rosary in return. It felt as though the girl had stolen the red box directly from her to hoard her garish brooches and earrings, her flashy bracelets and rings, and Trudi found it difficult to be civil to her even after Ingrid left with the KLV to teach in the Black Forest.

After six years of polite engagement to the elegant and accomplished Fräulein Raudschuss, the dentist, Klaus Malter, fell in love one hot June afternoon of 1941—fell in love recklessly and irreversibly—shocking the town two months before his long-scheduled wedding day. His bride had her gown hanging in her closet, and every detail of the dinner had been planned, right up to the lemon and parsley fans that would decorate the cheese trays. Three years earlier, she had decided on the color of the damask napkins and tablecloth—a cool ivory—but only seven months before the scheduled ceremony she had followed an impulse that surprised her, and had ordered everything in a lavish pink that reminded her of sea roses—seen through a sheen of water when you lie beneath them. It was a color she’d never forgotten since that morning when she was two and had leaned forward to pick one of the perfectly round roses that floated in the pond behind the Swiss hotel where her family vacationed every August.

The water rocked her—smoother than her nursemaid’s arms—and the stems of the sea roses reached far below the leaves. Above her swayed the leaves, their undersides the palest of greens, and above them danced the globes of roses, each a planet to itself. Brigitte wanted to laugh with delight, but her mouth filled with water, and she felt as though she had turned into her favorite doll who would lie—just like her—arms stretched up whenever you’d put her down, and then she felt even more like a doll because the sky broke the leaves and the roses tilted as white sleeves reached for her. The nursemaid’s wail clogged the air, and Brigitte thought her heart would break if she could not lie beneath that shade of pink again.

She thought it was her nursemaid’s wail she heard when Klaus asked her consent—with the proper regret in his voice as if regret could ever be proper when causing pain—to end their engagement, but she still felt the wail in her throat, rough and common like that of a market woman, and knew that she, too, was capable of that sound while her thoughts scraped for words that would make Klaus stay—words to assure him that love comes back if you’re patient, and that many people learn to love after they are married. He listened—and that’s what she would not forgive him afterwards—that he let her beg him, yes, beg him to stay with her before he told her about this … this child, this nineteen-year-old girl who was about half her age, unformed and awkward, with no family to speak of except her Uncle Alexander, no match at all for Klaus whose family—for years now—had treated Brigitte as one of its own.

She heard that wail again when she confessed her dishonor to her father, and again when her father returned from his meeting with Klaus Malter. But during those hours while she’d waited for her father, who had influenced people far more powerful than an ordinary dentist, Brigitte Raudschuss would have gladly lain at the bottom of any pond, submerged as long as she could endure, if this would have brought Klaus Malter back to her, but as she imagined their wedding taking place after all, she feasted on the terrible need to make him suffer too. And yet, during those hours of waiting, she felt more love for Klaus than she had ever before, more love than she knew herself capable of, because she sensed that—like sea roses seen from beneath—Klaus could never be entirely hers. She was seized by a powerful yearning for a gown that splendid shade of pink, and she sat down with a pen and ink to sketch the outline of a fitted gown which she would still wear to the Opernhaus as an old woman, where she would share a loge with two other unmarried women.

The rumors about Klaus and Jutta kept Trudi busy for weeks as she distributed each unfolding of their romance throughout Burgdorf. As long as she kept telling and retelling that story, she didn’t have to let in her jealousy of Jutta that swallowed her when she was alone and silent, an ugly jealousy that found its only moments of reprieve when she could remind herself of her satisfaction that Brigitte had been ousted. Yet, Trudi had become so accustomed to seeing Klaus with the lawyer’s daughter all those years that her initial resentment had
been supplanted by the belief that the two suited one another.

But even the gossip about the dentist’s reckless love made it impossible to forget that war kept spreading like ink on a linen cloth, and she gathered and distributed facts about the war along with gossip about Klaus. She read in the newspaper that the June attack on Russia had resulted in three hundred thousand Russian prisoners. It worried and infuriated her that the situation had worsened for the Jews: they were no longer encouraged to emigrate, but instead were ordered to vacate their homes on short notice. They were restricted to living in houses that had been declared Jewish houses, supposedly to monitor and hinder any interaction between Aryans and Jews. Closer and closer they had to live together, separated from the rest of the town by an invisible wall.

In some of the Jewish houses, the windows stayed covered with wooden shutters all day. Herr and Frau Kaminsky had been moved to one of the houses behind the cemetery, where they shared one small room; but some of the wealthier Jews lived in hotels or inns where their meals were included, freeing them from the humiliating and time-consuming shopping for decreasing food supplies. Though merchants like Frau Weiler helped as much as they could, others—including the butcher and pharmacist—took satisfaction in enforcing the laws that constricted the world of the Jews even further.

The number of Jews in Burgdorf had shrunk drastically. Two families had disappeared from the Catholic congregation, leading to speculations as to where they’d been taken. Even the priest hadn’t known they were Jewish until the Gestapo had investigated their backgrounds. They’d attended St. Martin’s for as far back as anyone could remember; their children had been christened there, had received their first communion.

Many others had fled, trying in vain to sell their pianos and large pieces of furniture, settling their neighbors with the nasty fear of the survivor and with a yearning for news that could distract them and engage their imagination—like which wedding the dentist would go through with.

From the window of her pay-library, Trudi had watched Brigitte Raudschuss’ father arrive at Klaus Malter’s office. He stayed one hour and twenty minutes. During that time, Trudi saw five patients enter. None of them departed. She imagined them cramped in the waiting room, which barely held four wooden chairs, hearing the voices of the
lawyer and the dentist through the walls. If only she could be in that office. Perhaps the lawyer would challenge Klaus to a duel at sunrise to avenge his daughter’s honor. He’d pull off one glove and—

No, it was summer. Too warm to wear a glove. Besides, duels happened only in those romances her customers kept borrowing. The lawyer would be more likely to offer Klaus money to rescue his daughter from everlasting spinsterhood. “An increase in dowry,” he would call it.

Surprised by her compassion for Brigitte Raudschuss, Trudi wondered if Klaus was trying to pretend with her, too, that nothing had happened between them, although that would be much harder to accomplish after a six-year engagement than after one kiss. She thought of that morning in church when she’d seen Brigitte Raudschuss for the first time, and she asked her a silent forgiveness for the rage she’d sent her way. That rage should have been for Klaus—not for another woman.

She remembered Jutta running into the church, late, squeezing herself into the same pew with Brigitte Raudschuss, who yielded reluctant space to her. It would have never occurred to the lawyer’s daughter then that the disheveled girl would dislodge her from the position she’d taken for granted.

“Did you hear anything? Anything at all?” Trudi would ask each of Klaus Malter’s patients the day after he’d walked Brigitte’s father out, their faces solemn as they parted with a polite handshake. But from what she could surmise, the voices of the two men had stayed muffled during their lengthy discussion.

“What was he like when he drilled on your tooth afterwards?” she would ask, nodding with satisfaction when she was told that Klaus Malter’s eyes had looked sad and that his hand had not been as steady as usual.

Yet, the day of his wedding to Jutta, Klaus Malter’s eyes were not sad. He arrived at St. Martin’s too early and stood on the front steps with a dazed and exultant smile, the kind of smile you get when you amaze yourself by risking something you’ve never considered before. It was only a week after his meeting with the lawyer, sooner even than his wedding with the lawyer’s daughter would have taken place, and when his relatives arrived in the expensive clothes they must have planned to wear to Brigitte’s wedding, they looked disapproving, except for his mother, the professor, who took both of Klaus’ hands into
hers and kissed his face before she let herself be escorted to her place in the front pew. Her white hair, which—Klaus had told Trudi a long time ago—used to be the same hue of red as his own, was braided in a thick coil around her head.