Stones From the River (55 page)

All day she worked in the pay-library by herself. A few times, when she didn’t have any customers, her father came in and removed an armful of books from the bottom of the boxes. “Actually,” he told her, “these don’t make bad cooking fuel.”

“We’ll replace them after the war,” she said though she felt jumpy, without hope.

So far, she hadn’t told Konrad and his mother that they would leave soon. Why worry them? It might be weeks. Or hours, she thought. Or hours. She had to force herself to listen to the gossip that her customers brought her. Reluctantly, she got ready for the evening. She dressed in the linen suit she’d sewn the year before the war, and she lent her good fringed shawl to Frau Neimann. Eva wore her
pleated skirt and a green silk blouse, and the boy looked quite grownup in a dark suit with knee-length pants that Herr Blau had tailored for him from ancient cloth.

When Trudi’s father finally let them into the kitchen, he had changed into his Sunday suit and gaudy tie. Its stripes glittered and swirled in the light of six wax candles that he’d set on the table. There was a roast—an entire roast in a tureen of thick gravy. Trudi couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen an entire roast. Somehow, her father had conjured up peas and asparagus and potato dumplings, even a strawberry pie and two bottles of champagne. A vase with red and yellow tulips sat in the middle of the table.

Konrad clapped his hands.

His mother took a step toward the table.

“Allow me.” Leo Montag extended his right arm to her, his left to Eva, and led both to their chairs.

Trudi worried what he might have traded for all the food. Not the radio, she thought. Not that.

“Please, sit down,” he said.

She climbed up the three steps of her dining chair, and when she looked at Eva—who had the same determined expression of gaiety on her face as that night of her costume ball, when she’d danced in her nun’s habit with reckless abandon—Trudi decided to let herself get caught up in her father’s celebration, a celebration that had also sprung from chaos.

And even if their laughter felt stolen from an unreliable future, the food warmed and filled their bellies, and the champagne flushed their faces. Her father was summarizing the silliest plots from the romance novels in the pay-library, and Trudi could see that Frau Neimann and Eva were dazzled by him. The feast he’d prepared and his tales of predictable love twists, which always resulted in sentimental reconciliations and sappy endings, were softening the terror that all of them had come to take into their beds at night and brace themselves against in the early hours of waking.

This is dangerous, Trudi wanted to tell them. Until now they’d been so careful, never having more than two place settings on the table, but as she glanced at the radiant faces around her, she knew that not to continue the celebration would be even more dangerous, a rotting of the spirit which, tonight, they were reclaiming.

Yet, as the evening wore on, Leo Montag became serious as though
it took him effort to continue entertaining everyone.

“What is it?” Trudi finally asked.

He looked from her to Frau Neimann, who brought her hands to her mouth.

“No,” Frau Neimann said.

The boy’s head snapped up. His eyes were wild.

Leo nodded.

“Where?” Frau Neimann asked.

“I haven’t been told. It’s better that way. But I know you’ll be secure there.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

She jutted her chin toward Eva. “How about her?”

“Just you and your son.”

“I see.… Who is taking us?”

“Herr Hesping. You can trust him completely.”

Trudi climbed from her chair and brought her arms around the boy.

“Are you coming with us?” he asked.

“I can’t.”

“Why do people have to hide?”

Tears pressed into her nose, her eyes, and she held them back with one deep sob. “It wasn’t always like that.”

The wildness had left the boy’s eyes. He was looking to her for an answer, not to his mother.

She began to shape her farewell story for him. “Let me tell you what it was like before people were hunted, Konrad.…” To stop all time, she closed her eyes and imagined Pia in the kitchen with her, imagined the parrot Othello flying between them as she and Pia wove the tapestry of the island for the boy, a tapestry so rich and enchanting that he could step right into it if he needed to.…“And on this island the sidewalks were built of white marble. Every night, a warm rain rinsed the streets and the thick leaves of the trees. During the day, the sun was always out, and you could swim in the bay.”

“Even in winter.”

“Even in winter. The trees, they were filled with tropical fruits and nuts, and no one knew what it meant to be hungry.”

He sighed. “Why can’t we go there?”

If only the island really existed. “Perhaps,” she said, “it is time for me to return to the island.”

“What is it called?”

“The island of the little people. Where I grew up.” She felt her father’s eyes on her, and when she glanced over, they were filled with almost unbearable anguish and love. “A magic island, Konrad, where no one is taller than you and me, where orchids and parrots and—”

“But why did you leave such a place?”

“Because …” She reached inside herself for the core of the story, and when she found it, it startled her because it would not sustain the boy as she had anticipated; and yet, she had to reel the story out for him, all along trying to understand its meaning for herself. “Because the waterfalls dried up. Birds dropped from the sky. Everything withered. Mountains caved in on themselves, burying beautifully arched tunnels.…”

“Why?”

God, she didn’t want to let Konrad go. She’d never loved a child this way before, and she wanted to claim him as hers, shield him with her body against anyone who’d dare take him from her.
He’s not mine. Not mine.
As she took a step away from him, it came to her that she hadn’t even begun to comprehend the abrupt separations from family and friends that Jews suffered every day. She had lost her mother, had felt that grief, but that was one loss, not a sequence of losses encumbered with that constant fear of your own death.

Furious that she had to live in this time, with these laws, she fused her gaze to the boy’s, imprinting herself on his soul.
You will always remember me. You will.

“Why did everything wither?” he wanted to know.

“You see—regular-sized people wanted to live on the island.…” She found it difficult to talk, but she kept going. “They too wanted to dwell within the magic. But the little people were divided about what to do. Some of them said, ‘Yes, let’s all live on the island, regardless what size we are.…’” Her chest ached. Her head ached. “But most of them wanted to keep the tall people out. They didn’t know much about them—that’s how prejudice starts, Konrad—and so they were afraid of their difference. They wanted their island all to themselves and began to hunt the tall people … hunt even those little people who were trying to protect the tall people.”

She could feel the ending of the story curling around herself and the boy, drawing in the others at the table: they were listening closely—not with laughter as they had to her father’s stories—but
with a stunned sadness. “Everything on the island withered. The palm trees lost their big leaves. Peaches shriveled hard around their pits. Oranges turned brown. Even the biggest waterfall dwindled to one muddy trickle.”

It was silent in the kitchen.

“Is that the end?” Konrad asked.

“For now.” If only she’d found a story of hope to send with him on his way. If only she could get out of Germany with him the way Stefan Blau had nearly half a century before.

“It will change some day,” Konrad surprised her by saying.

“It will have to,” she agreed quickly.

Her father stood up. Everyone looked at him, but no one spoke.

Frau Neimann pushed her chair back. “I need to pack. It’s—” Her voice skipped. “It’s time. Isn’t it? It must be time.”

He nodded.

“I’ll help you get ready,” Eva offered.

Trudi dashed over to the sink and picked up the nearly empty bottle of lotion. “Don’t forget this.”

Frau Neimann’s chin puckered. She shook her head.

Trudi pressed it into her hands. “Please. You and Konrad—you’ve brought so much into our lives.”

By the middle of summer the canvas that lined the tunnel smelled of mildew, and when Leo Montag and Herr Blau peeled it off, patches of mold bloomed behind it, and a fine shower of dirt drifted down on them.

Their latest fugitive, a taxi driver from Bremen, who’d been hidden in nine other places so far, was concerned there might be some caving-in above. “If so, it could be seen from the street,” he warned.

Herr Blau assured him, “No one walks between my house and the pay-library.”

But when Leo checked the narrow strip of grass, he found a shallow puddle right above the area of the tunnel. That night, he and the taxi driver shored the tunnel up with posts and rafters that Herr Blau had kept stacked in his cellar. They debated about filling the puddle with dirt and decided against it, since dirt would be even more noticeable with all the grass around it.

Their next visitors, two elderly sisters from Köln, suggested laying boards across the floor of the tunnel to keep their skirts dry.

“Then the water could seep under the wood,” the taller one said after Trudi had rehearsed the escape pattern with them.

“Yes,” the other sister said. “We’d be able to crawl across the boards without getting muddy.”

In some way each fugitive contributed to improving the tunnel. Eva stretched thin fabric from her nightgown beneath the ceiling to catch specks of earth that might sift into your eyes or settle between your neck and collar. She was the only one who’d been staying with Trudi and Leo since spring. The others came and departed quickly, bearing dreadful stories, far more dreadful than anything Trudi could have invented, as if some deity had gone mad while contriving demented plots; and each plot telescoped within itself the plots of others that the fugitives had encountered on their desperate journeys. As Trudi listened to them, she was overcome by a sense of the unbelievable, as if it all were transpiring in a world far more outlandish than Pia’s island. Whatever had happened in her family and her town before Hitler and his brown gang had seized power—including the death of her mother and the disappearance of Georg Weiler’s father and the wedding of Klaus Malter, even her rape in the Braunmeiers’ barn—she could have imagined herself, spun forward into the texture of a much greater motif; but these new stories, carried to her by the people she harbored, she could have never invented: they stopped her, bludgeoned her with their finality, although their endings were obscure.

Twice, when the police searched the neighborhood while fugitives crouched in the tunnel, Trudi was shocked at how easy it was to lie to them: “No, we haven’t had any visitors for days.… My father and I—we talk with customers who come into the library, but we lead rather private lives.… Eva Sturm?” She’d tilt her face toward them, sideways, draw her neck into her shoulders, make herself smaller, harmless, helpful. “Of course, I know Eva Sturm … have known her all my life.… I was invited to her wedding, you know. It was a beautiful wedding. You should have—No, no, I haven’t seen her. Not in months.…” Her body would lean into a limp, slowing them for a few precious seconds as she’d offer to lead them through the house, and she’d hobble out of their way as they’d crush past her.

Her heart numb with a cold certainty that the tunnel was safe—had to be safe—she’d wait for them by the front door, her pulse steady, her expression polite as she’d hold the door for them on their
way out. Only then, after she’d turn the key inside the lock, would she start shaking. Holding on to the banister, she’d tell herself that it had to be far worse for Eva and the others in the tunnel, that she should rush to let them know they could come out again, but she’d have to lower herself to the steps and sit there before she’d be able to walk.

Emil Hesping and the bishop were coordinating a constantly changing number of hiding places from Köln north to the Dutch border. Since Emil had always traveled between the branches of the gymnasts’ club, people were used to his trips and didn’t get suspicious if they didn’t see him for days.

“It’s crucial,” he would remind Trudi, “not to have any of the groups know the identity of other groups. We also need to be careful what we say to the people we hide. Remember—they might be apprehended and forced to talk.”

“You don’t have to tell me again,” she’d say.

“It’s something I need to keep telling myself.”

Already, her gossip had taken on a new pattern: she would select her stories, conscious of preserving the safety of the people who relied on her, even though she’d feel restrained because there was so much she couldn’t tell—like about the woman crippled with arthritis whose husband had looked after her with such tenderness, unaware how amazed Trudi was by the kind of love that didn’t flinch from physical differences; or the young nurse from Berlin who’d stolen two spoons from the Montags before she’d been taken to a new place; or the young priest who despised his name, Adolf, and had given her a new respect for the clergy, not only because he’d hidden Jews in his church in Dresden, but also through his stories of other priests and ministers—some of them fearful souls, he admitted—who had spoken out against the oppression of the Jews and had been arrested or even killed.

Those stories swelled inside Trudi, forming a reservoir that she couldn’t draw on, though it deepened with each day of concern for everyone who’d left her house for an uncertain destination. She tried to tell herself that she’d be able to release those stories after the war, that she was only postponing them until then; and yet, part of her already sensed that those stories would never flourish, that—after the war—she would find very few who’d want to listen because the people of Burgdorf would be immersed in changing what had happened into a history they could sleep with,
eine heile Welt
—an intact world
they could offer to the next generation. Ironically, Anton Immers—one of the few who would admit that he’d believed in the Führer—would make the good people of Burgdorf uncomfortable with his regret that the regime was over and with his dreams of its revival in even greater glory.