Stones From the River (6 page)

She felt her father’s hand on her hair. “You haven’t opened all your presents, Trudi.”

When he carried her back into the living room, her mother was winding a red ribbon around and around her wrist. She laughed when she saw Trudi, and as she held out her arms for her, the ribbon sprang free and coiled at her feet like a blood-covered snake. That night, her mother did not talk about the baby again. She helped Trudi to fit together her new building-block puzzle. Each side of a block had a picture fragment of a fairy tale, and when you set them all on a flat surface and matched them, you could make six pictures, including
Hansel und Gretel, Schneewittchen und die sieben Zwerge, Rumpelstilzchen
, and
Dornröschen
, who’d slept a hundred years.

Her mother played
“Stille Nacht”
on the upright piano and Trudi sang along. Whenever her voice merged with her mother’s in one of the long notes, her body felt measureless and warm. But when her parents kissed her good night in her room and settled a wrapped warm water bottle by her feet, they laid the stiff baby doll next to her. After the house became silent and dark, Trudi pushed the doll under her bed, but she could sense the presence of its porcelain body through her mattress. The following evening, her mother folded Trudi’s fingers around two sugar cubes and lifted her to the wide windowsill in the kitchen, where she made her lay the sugar on a saucer for the stork.

As soon as she woke up the next morning, Trudi rushed to the window. Though it was closed, the saucer was empty. She pulled aside the lace curtain, but the only animal outside was the baker’s dog, who kept barking at the clothesline behind the house, where the frost had turned the laundry into stiff people shapes.

“The stork must have been here,” her mother sang, a flush to her cheeks.

Her father glanced up from his newspaper, his face grave.

Trudi could tell he didn’t want the new baby either. But if they kept leaving sugar on the windowsill, the stork would certainly bring her a brother or sister who’d soon be taller than she. She took to climbing from her bed whenever she’d wake up in the middle of the night. On bare feet, she’d steal into the kitchen, push a chair against the wall below the window, and—if the sugar cubes which her mother had handed her in the evening were still there—she’d cram them into her mouth, scanning the night sky for the white shapes of storks while she chewed, hard, to keep a sibling from arriving and pushing her out of the house.

Storks
. Though she hadn’t seen any of the tall birds in months, Trudi now looked for them everywhere: on chimneys, in trees, between clouds. She figured they couldn’t hide babies beneath their wings because, as soon as they’d spread their wings to fly, those babies would fall out. No, they’d carry the babies in slings attached to their long beaks or riding on their backs.

Sometimes, while sitting on the front step, prepared to chase off any stork with her mother’s rattan carpet beater, she’d hear the melodious voice of the Italian ragman.
“Lumpen, Eisen, Papier
…—Rags, iron, paper …” sang the ragman as his wooden cart rumbled
through the streets of Burgdorf. He rang his bell as he chanted,
“Lumpen, Eisen, Papier.…”
In back of his cart stood a scale where he weighed old clothes and metal and paper before counting out coins from the leather pouch at his waist.
“Lumpen, Eisen, Papier
…” The ragman’s name was Herr Benotti. He was from Italy and always wore a white shirt, even when he unloaded his day’s gathering in the fenced yard behind his house on Lindenstrasse.

Every day Trudi’s mother talked about the new baby, and Trudi increased her vigil for storks. The morning after Easter her father told her the baby had died. “Your brother,” he said. Though Trudi hadn’t seen the baby—how could a baby die before it was here?—there was a funeral. Frau Blau brought her best linen cloths to cover the tables in the dining room and kitchen, and the neighbor women spread out a funeral feast: sheets of plum cake and deep bowls of potato salad; tureens with pea soup and barley soup; platters with blood sausage and head cheese; loaves of black bread and baskets of crisp
Brötchen;
cheese from Holland and Switzerland; and delicious white asparagus from the Buttgereits’ garden.

Frau Doktor Rosen urged Trudi’s mother to rest, but she flitted through the rooms, rearranging the daffodils from Frau Abramowitz’s flower beds, offering food to the guests, her beautiful eyes feverish, her skin nearly translucent. From whispered comments Trudi understood that her brother had arrived too early to be alive. Now she knew six dead people altogether. But the other five had died old, like Herr Talmeister, who used to spit on the sidewalk before he’d enter the pay-library.

She was sure her brother’s death had to do with the sugar she’d stolen; because of it the stork had punished the baby. It would follow her, that guilt, even as an adult, making a sick-sweet bile rise in her throat whenever she tasted sugar; and yet, the craving for it would return, a craving for the forbidden delicious taste on her tongue, followed by the shame she’d felt that day of the funeral feast, when she’d eaten three pieces of plum cake and two chocolate eggs from her Easter basket and—with one unexpected hiccup—had spewed purple-brown vomit over the front of her dress.

Her mother took her out the backdoor. Their feet flattened the thin ribs of earth that Trudi’s father had raked early that morning. He raked the yard once a week and had already finished it two days earlier, but this morning, when Trudi had woken up, he’d been out there
again with his bamboo rake, snagging twigs and stones and pigeon droppings.

By the muddy edge of the brook, her mother squatted down, trapped the swift cold water in her fingers, and cleaned Trudi’s face and dress. “Look,” she said and peered into the brook as if trying to find something lost.

Slowly, beyond the surface of the current, another pattern emerged for Trudi—that of new leaves, their long reflections bobbing in one place while the water rushed through them, and amongst the leaves, the silver moon-shapes of two faces.

From that day on, her mother seemed distracted—even in her frantic behavior she seemed distracted, as if already drawn to something beyond the house and the town. No longer would she grasp Trudi to pull her against herself or lift her to the window; it was almost as if she were returning to that time after Trudi’s birth when she hadn’t wanted to touch her at all.

In May, Frau Doktor Rosen recommended another stay in Grafenberg, and Gertrud Montag went willingly, but Trudi was inconsolable. Leo found that he could soothe Trudi with music, and he’d lift her on the counter of the pay-library, where she’d sit quietly next to the phonograph, one finger tracing the swirls of the rich wood as she’d listen to the records. It made him uneasy when his customers would praise him for bearing up well under the burden of his wife and child. “They’re no burden,” he’d say.

When Gertrud returned home, she was even more bewildered than before. If Trudi reached for her, she’d smile and, perhaps, bend to adjust Trudi’s collar or retie one of her shoelaces, though it was good and tight. She no longer had to be coaxed into the sewing room, but sought out that isolation and even took to sleeping on the velvet sofa, curled on only half of the space as though her body had shrunk.

Every morning, as soon as she was dressed, Trudi would dash up the stairs to be locked in with her mother: she’d pretend to make tea and place an imaginary cup into the slack hands; she’d dress the paper dolls and climb on the sofa to hold them up to the mirror so that each doll had a twin; she’d sit on her mother’s lap and stroke her face. But beneath all that, she fought the shame that her mother’s vision was forever tangled.

The last time Gertrud Montag went to the asylum, she hugged
Trudi by the open door of her wardrobe, holding her close for so long that it seemed she would never release her. It was the beginning of July, two weeks before Trudi’s fourth birthday, and her mother was wearing a cotton dress printed with peach-colored roses. One of her travel bags was packed, but the suitcases and hatboxes were still stacked on top of the birch wardrobe—a sure sign that she wouldn’t be gone for long.

“When I get back,” she said, “things will be better between us.”

And Trudi—her face against her mother’s hip, breathing in the familiar clear scent of her skin and clothes—Trudi believed her.

That day, she stayed next door with Frau Blau, whose house always smelled of floor wax. While the old woman polished her keys and dusted her windowsills, Trudi followed her around. The tip of Frau Blau’s right forefinger was bent to the side, and Trudi felt convinced it was that way from too much dusting. Frau Blau had soft, powdered cheeks and a broken heart. People said her heart had broken in 1894 when her son, Stefan, had run away to America. It was a sorrow that lapped into two centuries, a sorrow that already had lasted—so Trudi counted—twenty-five years.

Since the Blaus didn’t throw anything away, their house was crammed full with ancient toys and furniture, doilies and flower pots, gifts that their son shipped from America, and clothes that had belonged to their children and long-dead ancestors. Of Dutch descent, Frau Blau cleaned her house every single day. If her Saviour came to her at night, she told Trudi, she wanted him to find her house in order.

“You can help,” Frau Blau decided and showed Trudi how to dust the table legs, each ending in a lion’s claws gripping a ball. A cloth around her crooked forefinger, she guided it into every little crevice.

“You can do the next leg,” she said and extended the cloth.

Trudi hid her hands behind her back, terrified her finger would turn out like Frau Blau’s. She didn’t know if it would be worse to have a crooked finger or a thumb like that of Herr Blau who—during his many years at the sewing machine—had run a needle through his thumbnail, leaving a black crater-shaped puncture.

“Children have to obey,” Frau Blau reminded her.

Trudi stared at Frau Blau’s sturdy shoes. The cracks in the leather were magnified by layers of wax.

“Children have to obey!”

From the roof came the low, moaning call of pigeons. As Trudi felt
Frau Blau waiting, she was glad she didn’t have a grandmother in her house, even if grandmothers baked and ironed and knitted and grew beautiful flowers. Most houses had grandmothers in them. Grandmothers made you finish what was on your plate and told you it was not polite to stare at grown-ups. Grandmothers made you say your prayers and wash behind your ears. Grandmothers could make you do whatever they wanted because they were old.

Frau Blau patted Trudi’s hair. “Is it because you miss your mother?”

“Because I don’t want my finger to look like yours,” Trudi blurted.

“Ach so.”
Frau Blau chuckled and held her crooked finger up between herself and Trudi. “Is that what you think? That it’s from cleaning?”

Trudi nodded.

“Oh, but that finger was always like that. From when I was born. Just like you—” She stopped.

“It was always that way?”

“Always. You can tell a lot by a person’s fingers. Let me look at yours.” She crouched and brought her face close to Trudi’s hands. Her gray hair was stiff and wavy from the beauty parlor. “See those white specks under your fingernails?”

Trudi looked at her fingernails. They were the color of her skin, only shiny, and some had tiny white spots.

“That’s how you can tell how many mortal sins people have committed.” Frau Blau ran one thumb across Trudi’s fingernails. “Now with children … until they reach the age of reason, those specks are just a warning of mortal sins they might commit if they aren’t careful. You have… let me see—five altogether. That means you have to choose five times against the devil. Come—” She straightened with a sigh and, still holding Trudi’s wrist, headed for the kitchen. “Let me warm you a cup of milk.”

Every morning Trudi would wake with the memory of what her mother had said—
“When I get back, things will be better between us”
—and she’d try to imagine their new lives: her father’s eyes would lose that worry; she and her mother would sit by the river instead of in the sewing room or beneath the house; the three of them would stand in the church square after mass, talking with other families.

Except, her mother didn’t make good on her promise.

She never came back.

And she didn’t recognize Trudi the next time she saw her in Grafenberg. The rattle of her breath forced her neck into an arch on the hospital pillow. Above the metal bed hung a wooden crucifix. Jesus had his fingers spread as if to ward off the nails that held his palms to the cross. It was the only indication of a possible protest: the rest of his body had adapted itself to the shape of the cross as though made for it.

For over an hour Trudi listened to her mother’s breath, standing frozen, her back to the window, enveloped by the asylum smell of candles and cinnamon. Her mother’s features were distorted with the effort of straining for yet another breath that filled the room and made Trudi feel as though she herself were suffocating. She felt an urgency to know what would happen in her life from now on—every hour, every moment even, because if you knew ahead of time, you could stop bad things from happening.

When her mother’s dreadful breathing finally stopped, Trudi was relieved at the silence until the nurse bent over the bed to close her mother’s eyelids. The nurse had hairy wrists, and Trudi’s father stopped her by grasping those wrists. Then Trudi ran.

From the room.

Down the corridor.

Past opened doors.

At the end of the corridor, the nurse caught her by the locked metal gate. Holding Trudi, she whispered words that the girl couldn’t hear because her own breath had taken up the pattern that her mother had abandoned.

The nurse led her into a green room and made her swallow a bitter green liquid that looked as though it had bled through the green walls. After a while Trudi found herself sitting on a wooden slat seat in the streetcar next to her father, a heavy glow behind her eyes and in her legs. Her father stared straight ahead, his fingers tight on the rim of his black hat, which lay on his knees. When the
Schaffner—
conductor—came through to collect money for tickets, he had to click the silver change maker that hung on his chest by a leather strap before Trudi’s father noticed him and fumbled for his wallet.