Stones From the River (68 page)

She kept returning to Kaiserswerth, and when the watchmaker told her, “I’ll have to rent the room—that is, if your friend doesn’t come back soon,” she left her shoes with the high, high heels inside Max’s wardrobe, but she took his paintings from the walls and carried them home, where she wrapped them and stored them in back of her closet.

A month after the firebombing of Dresden, the saddest of all trains passed through Burgdorf, a long train filled with people from a KZ, gray faces and striped suits behind the windows. Thin, hungry, and ill, they were transported to another camp because the Americans were getting close. When the train stopped at the Burgdorf platform for more than half an hour, none of the prisoners got off. Armed SS men stood along the platform, separating the train from the line of townspeople, who stood watching at a distance.

The air was damp and cool and still as if it were solid, poured around the three groups like those half globes of glass that fit into your hand and contain an entire town and which—unless picked up and shaken to distribute a shower of snowflakes—will remain immobile. Yet, all at once, something moved, a woman’s shape in a beige raincoat, loosening itself from the line of watchers, setting in motion a sequence of other motions. It was the third-youngest Buttgereit daughter, Bettina, flying from the restraining hands of her sisters toward the train, thrusting the half loaf of bread that she’d just traded from Frau Bilder for an embroidered purse, toward one of the half-open windows of the train. Several gaunt hands tried to clutch the bread, but before any could seize it, four SS men closed around Bettina
Buttgereit, their black uniforms one impenetrable knot that absorbed her pale coat and rendered her invisible until they disentangled. Gripping Bettina between them, they thrust her toward the train. Into the train.

Silently, the line of townspeople retreated, shrank. Just as the train pulled out of the station, the people noticed the face of an old man who looked strangely familiar, though no one could say who he was. Behind the passing window, he wrenched up his bony chin, pressed his fleshless lips together, and focused his sunken eyes on something above the people’s heads.

After that train, it felt as though the Americans might arrive any day. It was the end of March when they approached Burgdorf, and what announced them from a distance was the rumbling of their tanks. When Trudi rose from her bed and looked from the upstairs hall window, people in the street were running for shelter as though they’d heard the air-raid sirens. As she grabbed a white sheet and hung it from the window, the front door flew open.

It was Frau Weiler, carrying a basin of holy water. “Quick now, Leo, Trudi—” she yelled. “To the church. We have to hide.” She stared at Trudi as she came down the stairs, still in her nightgown, her hair disheveled. “At least put a coat on.”

Not too long ago, Trudi would have welcomed the Americans as rescuers, but since the firebombing of Dresden that had changed. Besides, her aunt had warned her in a letter that a lot of Americans thought all Germans were Nazis. Trudi already knew what it was like to be considered an enemy within your own country because you were against the Nazis, and now she felt even more isolated because she might well be regarded an enemy by both sides.

Her father’s hand on her elbow, she found herself in the street with him and Frau Weiler, whose scarf was slipping from her gray hair as she flung drops of holy water around them. They hurried across the church square and ducked into the cellar of St. Martin’s Church, where the priest was trying to calm nearly two dozen people, most of them more terrified than during the air raids which—compared to this—had come to feel familiar.

Leo and Trudi sat next to Ingrid, who was there with her baby and parents.

“Nothing will happen to us.” Frau Weiler was splashing her holy water on everyone.

The priest waved her away.

“Nothing will happen to us.…”

“Don’t be so sure,” the taxidermist said. “Those Americans have killed plenty of us with their bombs.”

Fräulein Teschner clutched a long white cloth that she’d snatched right from the altar during a quick detour on her flight from the rectory.

“They come with bayonets,” the taxidermist whispered. “And they stab anyone who resists them.”

“Someone has to be our messenger,” his wife decided.

“Someone who knows English,” the priest said.

“My daughter has studied English,” Herr Baum announced, and everyone looked at Ingrid, who sat there with Rita, rocking her stiffly.

Without speaking, she laid her daughter in Trudi’s arms though her mother reached for her. Trudi blinked. The child was peering into her face with Ingrid’s eyes. Curving her arms, she brought Rita closer.
Max. If only you’d waited. Seven weeks. That’s all it’s been since you left. Seven weeks
.

“To signal peace.” Fräulein Teschner thrust the white cloth at Ingrid.

“You don’t have to do this,” Leo Montag told Ingrid as she stepped next to the door.

The taxidermist was saying, “They push their bayonets into straw and mattresses to see if anyone is hiding.”

His wife nodded. Her hand trembled as she applied fresh lipstick.

But Ingrid was wearing the expression of a martyr who has finally found the tormentor who’ll grant her eternal salvation.

“Remember now,” the priest said, “you need to talk English with them when they come.… Tell them—tell them that we surrender. That we have suffered, too.”

“That we are glad they’re here,” Ingrid’s father said.

Leo Montag spoke up. “First tell them there are no soldiers here.” His eyes skimmed across everyone in the cellar and returned to Herr Heidenreich. “That pin—” He motioned his chin toward the
Hakenkreuz
on Herr Heidenreich’s lapel. “—today it could cost you your life.”

The taxidermist, who’d once prided himself on having shaken the Führer’s hand, fumbled with the clasp.
“Mein Gott
, I can’t get it off. I—”

The pastor’s housekeeper darted across the cellar, shoved his fingers aside, and yanked at the pin so hard that a piece of fabric came off with it. Her eyes wild, she scanned the cellar and ran to the corner where the life-size nativity set was stored. Without hesitating, she shoved the pin beneath Maria’s long plaster skirt.

They all stared at the statue.

“Don’t look at it,” she hissed.

Ingrid began to flap her white cloth.

Her mother was reciting the Lord’s Prayer:
“Water unser, der Du bist im Himmel…”

“They’re here!”

Herr Baum whimpered.

…geheiligt werde Dein Name…”

“I don’t hear any—”

“Sshh—”

… zu uns komme Dein Reich…”

The priest’s chins trembled.

… Dein Wille geschehe…”

The altar cloth billowed in Ingrid’s hands as four American soldiers charged in. “No German soldiers here,” Ingrid cried. “No German soldiers …”

“No—German—soldiers,” the priest echoed the foreign words.

The taxidermist joined in. “No—German—soldiers. No—”

… wie im Himmel so auf Erden …”

“We surrender,” Ingrid cried, forgetting any aspirations of martyrdom.

“Surrender … surrender …” other voices echoed.

The people of Burgdorf told each other they were glad the Americans—Amis, they called them—were the ones who occupied their region, not the Russians. Although several civilians had been killed while resisting their occupiers, all that was in the past now, and the Americans were organizing
Schulspeisung
—meals in school. Children who arrived for class, some barefoot, all hungry, were each given a tin container and a spoon to keep. Between ten and eleven on school mornings, they’d line up and proceed toward the smell of the hot soup that simmered in tall kettles. The recipe changed frequently: pea soup, mixed vegetable soup, beef broth with rice, cream soup, lentil soup.

The children’s favorite was
Kakaosuppe
—cocoa soup: sweet and brown, it filled more than their bellies, saturating them with memories of chocolate they’d tasted long ago. Some days, if they could no longer tolerate their hunger and soup time seemed too far away, the children would bang their spoons against their tin containers. One of them would start, a hesitant clang that immediately drew a chorus, steady and mounting until the voices of the teachers were drowned. Some teachers would take their soup portion home with them to share with their families, grateful for what the Amis were doing.

American soldiers were stationed in houses throughout Burgdorf. Despite warnings not to trust any German, some of them became friendly with the townspeople and showed them photos of their wives and children. The
Rathaus
and the former Hitler-Jugend quarters became offices for the American military, and the pianist’s mansion—where Fräulein Birnsteig had committed suicide in January after learning that her adopted son had died in a KZ—was turned into an officers’ club.
Hakenkreuz
flags and SS emblems disappeared from the graceful rooms, and on Saturday nights a dance band played American music.

Although the townspeople approved when some of the more industrious boys ran errands for the soldiers or shined their shoes, bringing home packs of chewing gum and narrow bars of American chocolate, they scorned the young girls who dared to go dancing with the soldiers or were seen taking drives with them.

Klara Brocker was one of those girls. At nineteen, she was the prettiest she would ever be—small and cheerful and neat—the kind of briefly held beauty that never fully flourishes but becomes contained, lacquered by its very tidiness. The Ami who was assigned to her house gave her a crate of peaches that annulled years of hunger in her flat belly. He brought her nylon stockings and paid for her new permanent. A blond man with a small birthmark on his temple, he was so much taller than Klara that she could fit her head below his chin when they danced.

One day Klara Brocker’s American stopped by the pay-library because he’d heard that the Montags had relatives in America. While he and Leo talked, piecing together fragments of German and English, Trudi—who’d resumed her work in the library—stayed on the wooden ladder and busied herself by rearranging books on one of the top shelves. When the American said he’d like to come by with a
young friend who’d grown up in New Hampshire, only an hour from Lake Winnipesaukee, where Stefan and Helene Blau lived, Trudi let herself imagine becoming friends with this young soldier and visiting him too once she went to America. He’d pick her up from the ocean liner, drive her to New Hampshire, where her Aunt Helene would welcome both of them to a big family dinner.…

The young soldier, who came to the pay-library a few days later, turned out to be not nearly as tall as Klara Brocker’s Ami, and when he came back to the ladder to introduce himself to Trudi, she looked down into his lonely boy-face and shocked herself with the thought that it wouldn’t be all that difficult to get him into bed. It would serve Max right.

Immediately, she felt unfaithful. The young soldier was saying something to her, but she couldn’t answer because she was back in the mist—only this mist was not beautiful, but gray and thick and suffocating, and it had grown thicker with each day that Max hadn’t returned to her. Once the mist lifted, she told herself, she’d be able to see Max. He would be much nearer than she’d expected.

That night, she felt so angry at Max for not coming back that she reached for herself, trying to bring herself to that warm yellow-orange blossom, but what she found herself spinning toward was the terror in the barn, and she stopped before she could trap herself in the old hate.

W
HEN THE MEN OF
B
URGDORF CAME HOME, THEY WERE SILENT, BUR
-dened by secrets they couldn’t let themselves think about. Many of them had lice and diarrhea. Their faces were ashen and rough with beard stubble. Eyes ashamed or defiant, they’d come into the pay-library with the excuse to ask when Leo Montag expected to get a tobacco shipment.

But Leo was no longer the leader he’d been for the soldiers who’d returned from the previous war; he’d grown tired, old, and he lived more and more in his books. Gradually, he’d begun to replenish his own collection, trading library books for works by authors who used to be banned. Trudi had taken over the raking of the yard, a task Leo had always enjoyed. His limp had worsened, and his left leg kept falling asleep. Already he’d slipped several times as he’d stood up on it, and Trudi was afraid he might break something. Mornings, before she’d open the green shutters of the pay-library, she’d settle him on the sofa that Emil had won in a poker game, his aching leg elevated on a pillow, a stack of books on a chair next to him.

Families welcomed their husbands and sons back without daring to ask questions about what they’d done in the war. Since they didn’t
want to believe that one of their own could have participated in the atrocities that the Americans claimed had happened, they focused on healing the wounds, finding crutches for the crippled, feeding the hungry. They cut SS and SA insignia from wartime photos, and when one of their men would wake from a nightmare, screaming so fiercely that even the neighbors would wake, there’d be a wife or a mother or a sister who’d bend over him, cradle his head, and murmur, “It’s all over now.”