Stones From the River (58 page)

A few times Trudi sat down on the linoleum floor, squeezing her thighs together to stop the urge to pee, but soon she’d be up again, pacing. Although they’d let her keep her coat, she was cold. And hungry. The uncertainty of why she’d been arrested grew until it reeled out of control like the walk of the Heidenreich daughter. The entire war was like that, reeling out of control, and for all she knew, Gerda Heidenreich might be dead, buried in a place where her watch without hands kept proper time.

Last summer, when a group of Jews had been rounded up outside the taxidermist’s shop, Gerda, who’d been sitting on the front stoop, had been taken away in the truck along with them, despite her father’s cry, “My daughter isn’t Jewish.” From what he’d been able to find out, she’d been brought to a research clinic, supposedly to be studied with other retarded people.

Herr Heidenreich—who went to every speech, every meeting, every parade—tried to convince his wife that their daughter would be returned to them, healed and more complete than she’d ever been before. His loyalty to the Führer was so absolute that he wouldn’t allow his wife to grieve. “They will find some treatment to help her, some operation or medicine …” he would tell the customers for whom he’d preserve a favorite cat, say, or a wild fox, endowing lifeless bodies with a vitality far more real than in nature.

At dawn, when light from the single window turned Trudi’s cell deep blue and then gray, she found that the wardrobe was unlocked and empty, except for a plaster statue dressed in white, a plaster thorn embedded in her forehead—St. Rita, married against her will at twelve. Twice a mother, once a widow, she’d kept trying to enter the convent despite rules that only admitted virgins. She was the patron saint of desperate causes. Trudi wondered what St. Rita would do if she were confined in this cell.

“Forgive me,” she whispered as she climbed into the wardrobe, “but this is a desperate cause.” Pulling up her wool dress, she squatted in the corner opposite the saint and peed, feeling the last warm part of herself gushing from her. “Forgive me,” she said again as she rocked herself on her heels to get rid of the last drip.

Several times that morning she heard steps in the hallway, voices, and by afternoon she had convinced herself that the officers who’d locked her up had forgotten to let anyone know she was here. She thought of Sister Adelheid.
“As long as you keep escaping, they never get you. Even if they think they do”
Her stomach ached, and her mouth felt sore. What if her hunger became as terrible as the hunger the priest Adolf had described to her? What if she got to where—after everything else had been taken away, her dignity as well as her possessions—she’d be reduced to the tyranny of her belly?

She thought of knocking against her door but was afraid of what might happen to her once that door opened. When it finally did, she was glad that the guard was a young woman.

“Stand up!” Long keys hung on a ring from her belt.

Trudi scrambled up, her back against the wall.

“Name?” On her lapel, the woman wore a round button with the
Hakenkreuz
. Her close-fitting uniform and polished knee-high boots made her look both sexual and dangerous.

“Trudi Montag.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Occupation?”

“Librarian.”

As the woman screamed questions at her, Trudi flinched and tried to answer them, even those that didn’t make sense.

“Why were you at the concert?”

“I like music.”

“Were you meeting someone?”

“No.”

“Was this meeting for the purpose of exchanging information?” The woman looked confident, the kind of confident that comes from wearing a uniform that gives you an authority you’ve never had before.

“I was there for the music.”

Trudi kept waiting for Eva’s name to come up, but the questions
were all about the concert, where she’d sat, what she’d talked about, whom she’d talked with, and while the woman was shouting at her to answer, she imagined herself traveling through China for one-quarter fare, going four times as far with her money as a regular-size woman like this guard. Finally she realized her arrest had nothing to do with Eva or with hiding other fugitives. Someone had overheard her remark to Frau Buttgereit.

But the grim expression of the guard gave her no reason to celebrate her relief. “So you admit making that statement about the flag?”

“I—” Trudi sighed and lowered her eyes. If the guard sensed that she was not totally intimidated by her, she’d make things worse. “It was thoughtless of me to phrase it like that. It really was. You see—what I meant was that the flag was in the way, making it difficult for someone my size to see the piano.”

“And our national anthem?”

“I have always preferred it at the end of a concert, rather than the beginning.” When she leaned her head back and shot an appealing glance upward, she could tell the guard wasn’t convinced. “I agree—it is unfortunate the way I expressed it.”

“More than unfortunate.” In the guard’s eyes, Trudi recognized that old flash of curiosity she’d encountered from others all her life. “It undermines our country.”

Late that evening, Trudi was given a bowl of pea soup and one slice of
Schwarzbrot
—black bread—and in the morning she was taken to the second floor and locked in a room with three other women, all much older than she. She’d only met one of them before, Frau Hecht, a Jewish seamstress whose husband had fought in Poland and become the town’s first war casualty. The other two had been brought here from outlying towns.

Frau Hecht was ill. Her skin felt hot to the touch, and whenever she coughed, her entire body trembled. The others kept her covered up with their own blankets and saved some of their water ration for her. They begged the guard who brought the food and wasn’t old enough to grow hair on his face to get one of the sisters to bring medicine for Frau Hecht.

But he shook his head as if afraid of listening to them. “Nuns are not allowed to talk to prisoners.”

While Frau Hecht slept most of that day, mumbling fevered words,
the other women were frantic, speculating where they might be sent. They worried about what had happened to their suitcases and lamented about what they’d had to leave behind. Upon their arrival at the Theresienheim, their luggage had been seized, and they were still waiting to have it returned.

That night, when the women slept in their clothes—two to each narrow bed—the young guard brought Sister Agathe. “Five minutes,” he whispered and locked her inside the room with them.

The sister drew in her breath when she saw Trudi. “You—I didn’t know you were here, Fräulein Montag.”

“It’s my third night.”

“Where’s the patient?”

Trudi motioned to Frau Hecht next to her in bed. “She’s burning up.”

After the nun unbuttoned Frau Hecht’s blouse, soiled and reeking from having been worn too many days and nights, she inserted a thermometer beneath her left arm. Her fingers found the pulse. “This is not good,” she said after a silence.

“Is she dying?” one woman asked from the next bed.

“Of course not,” the other woman said.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“Well, she might hear you.”

From deep within the folds of her habit the nun produced a small bottle. She made Frau Hecht swallow two pills and pressed the bottle into Trudi’s hand. “Give her two of these every four hours.”

The door opened a gap. “Quick.” The man-boy voice said, “Quick now.”

“Please, tell my father—” Trudi whispered, but the nun rushed out without a glance back.

In the morning, when an older guard led them to the bathroom, Trudi was afraid the young man had been caught, but that evening he was back, carrying their food.

Trudi wondered what it was like for him, following orders, yet risking arrest for one act of kindness. “Thank you,” she whispered to him.

His eyes skipped away from her with the beat of fear, and he set the lines of his mouth, hard. “No talking,” he snapped.

She lowered her eyes. I’m sorry, she wanted to say, but even that would frighten him, implicate him. They both had to pretend nothing had happened that night.

During the brief periods away from the room, while waiting in line outside the bathroom door, Trudi found out about other prisoners. She’d stand close enough to whisper but not close enough to be reprimanded by a guard. She spoke with a young Jewish woman, a sales clerk, who’d been caught in a train station after she’d bought her ticket. A retired locksmith, whose spectacles were bent and had one lens missing, told her about the feather comforter he’d brought in his luggage; he was furious that it had been taken away from him, considering how he’d abandoned a lot of other belongings he could have brought instead.

“They would have taken those too,” Trudi reminded him.

“It’s not fair.”

“Of course not.”

Another man, a Jewish professor, had been arrested while stealing eggs. Two years earlier he’d left Heidelberg, and he’d been hiding ever since, sleeping in barns and forests, traveling on a bicycle though its tires had long since worn out and he’d had to tie rags around its metal rims.

“I won’t be here for long,” he assured Trudi. “It’s not in my nature to stay anywhere more than a week.”

She didn’t point out to him that it was no longer his choice. “If you ever need help—” she started.

“That’s kind of you, my dear. But you’re hardly in a position to help.”

She was glad for him when, the morning after their conversation, she heard he had managed to escape from the Theresienheim. Nearly everyone she saw that day whispered about him excitedly, even two of the guards, but the stones conflicted: the professor had climbed onto the roof and let himself down with a rope he’d made from bed sheets; the professor had walked right out of the front door, wearing a stolen uniform; the professor had bitten his way out.…

Trudi wasn’t quite sure what it meant, biting your way out, but that was the version she liked best and circulated with her own stories because it embodied what she was beginning to feel herself capable of. But in the meantime she was not doing anything except waiting. She worried about her father, hoped that he wasn’t risking his safety for her.

Frau Hecht was still sick though her fever had come down. She told Trudi that Sister Agathe had visited her once before. “To bring me a boiled egg … Imagine. She’s like that, the sister, taking things to prisoners
when she can, even though it puts her in danger. One widow—she’s gone now—lost her shoes when she was arrested, and the sister found her a pair, black leather, only a little too big.…”

When the two other women in their room were taken away within a day of each other, they offered no resistance. Eyes dazed, they retreated into decades of good manners, mumbling polite words of good-bye to Trudi and Frau Hecht.

One of Trudi’s new roommates, a gypsy woman, had deep gashes down her back from crawling under barbed wire into a meadow, where she’d hidden for three weeks in a clump of bushes, drinking milk directly from the udders of cows until the farmer had spotted her one dawn.

Many of the prisoners were Jewish, but there were others like Trudi who’d said the wrong thing or, worse yet, had been caught hiding fugitives. The end of her third week in the Theresienheim, she was brought downstairs late one afternoon and led into the office that used to belong to the mother superior.

“The little girl from the hat shop.” The man who sat behind the desk brought his bone fingers together as if in prayer—though without his palms touching—and drummed his fingertips against each other. “You didn’t keep your mouth shut?”

Though she’d only seen him once, that day he’d arrested Frau Simon, she recognized him immediately. His face had lost more of its flesh, pushing his eyes further into their sockets, and he looked even more tired, more aloof.

She wanted to tell him again that she was not a little girl, but she remained silent because four years had passed and she understood more about things that could happen to you, understood hunger and fear and his authority to send her to her death. Her wool dress was matted beneath her arms, making her feel dirty.

He said: “The rules that used to temper curiosity no longer exist.”

She waited, confused.

“Do you understand what I say?”

“No.”

“You should. Don’t you know what can happen to someone like you in our country?”

The Buttgereit boy …the man-who-touches-his-heart… the Heidenreich daughter
… No, she was not like them.

“You become an experiment… a medical experiment for the
almighty profession,” he said, and told her of operations performed on twins, on people afflicted with otherness. “Because the rules that used to temper curiosity no longer exist… Some people might even tell you that a
Zwerg
has no right to live.”

She felt her back seize up on her. Bracing herself against the familiar heaviness at the base of her spine, she asked, “And you? Is that what you believe?”

He looked at her, evenly, and she read in his eyes what she’d known four years before—that he didn’t believe in anything or anyone.

She kept her expression impassive to match his. It still chafed at her—to hear the word
Zwerg
said aloud—but if she’d learned anything, it was how to be the
Zwerg
, to play the
Zwerg
. Funny almost, the way it gave you a strange power to let others look down on you, to let them bask in their illusion that they were better than you. That illusion was a gift—hers to grant, simply by being—a gift that turned some of them ugly and others defenseless and, therefore, useful.

A muscle jumped beneath his left eye, quivered, and jumped again. He raised one hand halfway but dropped it before it could reach his face. “What is it like, being a
Zwerg?”

She knew it was a game for him, a distraction from his indifference, because it didn’t matter to him what happened to her. For that to matter, she’d have to figure out exactly what it would take to yank him out of his apathy. The secret, she thought, the secret of not caring about anything, as she remembered her first impression of him years ago.