Stones From the River (76 page)

Looking at his lined face made her think how her mother had stayed young for her. While her father was aging, her mother would always be thirty-five. Once, in the bathroom of a restaurant, Trudi had seen an elderly woman studying her reflection—the carefully coiffured hair, her mask of makeup—with such panic and concentration as though it took enormous effort to keep her face together, to not let it slip. That tightness. Once she must have been beautiful. It
had to be harder for a beautiful woman to age than for someone like herself, who’d never been beautiful. Everyone had something to battle—something that could either destroy you or strengthen you—and what she had battled was maybe not all that bad. At least by now she was used to her body, even if she might never get used to the word
Zwerg
. It would be easier for her to age than for this woman. Amazing—how something could actually be easier for her than for others.

It came to her that, though she still had quite a few years to go, she was on her way to becoming part of a community, that of the old women who held the real power. How comforting that she would not have to go it alone, that finally there would be a circle to enfold her readily because, as old women, they too would have come to terms with their own changes and be less unforgiving of otherness because it would have claimed them too.

All that December Trudi spent more time with Hanna because Jutta was recovering from the birth and death of her son. Joachim had died during his second week of life, and from what Trudi had heard, Jutta had rocked the dead infant in her arms, refusing to yield him to Klaus or to the doctor for hours.

When, at the funeral, Frau Weskopp, who’d worn widow’s black for over six years, had tried to comfort Jutta—“Little Joachim is lucky he was christened so that he won’t be in purgatory”—Jutta had turned her rage on the old woman, shouting at her to worry about her Nazi sons, who were frying in hell.

Outbursts like that against one of their own didn’t make the townspeople any fonder of the dentist’s young wife, who spurned their traditions and now—when the death of a son could have earned her their compassion—became only more reclusive and stopped attending church.

Though Klaus Malter continued to take Hanna to mass, this wasn’t enough for Herr Pastor Beier, who felt cheated by Jutta because he’d buried her uncle, the suicide, in order to keep her in church. He felt the dentist’s wife had cheated him out of her promise, and when he followed his impulse—to ride his motor scooter to her house and arrive unannounced the way she had forced her way into his study—she opened the door, wearing a black dress and over it a man’s shirt with red and green paint smears along the front and sleeves as if to deny that she was a woman in mourning. She was smoking, fast, and her
daughter was clinging to her leg, peering at the priest with curious eyes.

“Yes?” Jutta said. “Yes?” as if the priest’s reason for being here could be stated with one word, too.

“We have missed you in church.”

She stood in his way without asking him inside, her lips as pale as her face, blond hair limp on her shoulders.

“I’d be glad to hear your confession,” the priest said, and she laughed, once, as if amused by the thought of confession. “I know it’s terrible for both parents when a child dies,” he continued, “but worse for the mother … like having part of her die.”

“What do you know?” she accused him. “What can you possibly know?”

“Is your wife getting proper care?” the priest asked the dentist when he stopped by his office on the way back to the rectory. “She does not look well.”

Klaus Matter, who had made a sizable contribution toward the replacement of the stained-glass windows above the altar, which had been shattered during the war, assured the priest that Jutta was doing as well as any woman after losing a child.

“I will pray for your wife,” the priest offered.

And he did. As soon as he’d parked his scooter behind the rectory, he entered the church, where, as usual, several old women knelt in the light that fell through the modern windows in the colors he had chosen—red, white, and black. Soon, he’d have enough funds to commission wood carvings of the fourteen stations of the cross and mount them along the side walls, beneath the old windows, which some day he hoped to replace too.

Making the sign of the cross, the fat priest lowered himself to his knees in front of the altar and fastened his eyes on the Last Supper mural. The bread in Christus’ hands was golden brown, as though it had just been baked. Stomach rumbling, the priest asked Christus to guide Jutta Malter back to church, to show her his mercy by forgiving her arrogance. Above him, the painted saints were feasting, and behind him, he could feel the comforting presence of the plaster saints—St. Stefan and St. Agnes and St. Petrus—and of the confessional where people left their sins for him to swallow. And he could smell fresh bread—no, flowers—though it was winter and the altar
vases were empty; but centuries of church flowers had left their scents in the stone walls.

Trudi could understand why Jutta no longer went to church. At times she, too, had considered staying away, but she still liked the music, the rituals, and even the church smell that occasionally clung to people’s clothes when they came into the pay-library. Besides, Hanna was at mass every Sunday morning, and though her father would hold her hand as they’d walk down the church steps, the girl would squirm away from him and run toward Trudi while he’d follow her with one of his formal greetings. Already his red beard was muted by threads of gray. “It’s time to go home, Hanna,” he’d remind her, or: “Say good-bye now to Fräulein Montag.”

Once, when Hanna didn’t look in Trudi’s direction after mass, Trudi felt betrayed, though she told herself the child had simply forgotten. But it took several of Hanna’s visits before she got past that hurt. She hated being so defenseless, hated how she missed the girl on days she didn’t see her.

One rainy afternoon in July, while Jutta was painting, Trudi took Hanna into her mother’s earth nest. “I used to play here with my mother when I was a little girl like you.” She spread a towel for them to sit on.

Hanna pointed to the tiny tracks in the dust. “Tchoo-tchoo,” she said. “Tchoo-tchoo train.”

“Strawberry bugs,” Trudi looked around. “I don’t see any today. Strawberry bugs have little feet that make those tracks. And they smell like strawberries.”

Hanna picked up a dry twig and scratched her own tracks into the ground. Beads of moisture glistened on the delicate strands of a huge spider web, and the musty scent of earth was comforting. If only she could stay here with Hanna. Forever. Or go far away with her, live with her in a town where no one knew them and where she could raise her as her own. Because the way she felt about her had to be how a mother felt about her child. All at once she felt angry that Max had never come back to have children with her. And yet if he had returned and married her, what would have happened to their love then? Would it have worn thin, used up and bitter, like the love in so many marriages she saw?

“Berry berry bug …” Hanna was singing, poking at the earth.

Trudi stroked her silky hair. Two weeks from now, Hanna’s parents would take her away on a trip to Wangerooge, an island in the North Sea where they vacationed every summer. Trudi wished they’d leave Hanna with her. If Hanna were told that Trudi was her real mother, she would begin to love her like a daughter. She was only three, still young enough to forget her parents. Like, say, if they died. Both of them. If something happened to Klaus and Jutta—a train crash or some quick and fatal illness—she would bring Hanna up. She’d fix up a room for her with white lace curtains and pink—no, sun-yellow wallpaper. She’d sew dresses with ruffles for her, buy her that plush giraffe she’d seen in Mahler’s department store, take her to the playground, to Alfred Meier’s for
pommes frites
, read her stories at night and—

But what if Klaus Malter’s relatives stepped in? Came at her with their money and power and lawyers and demanded she hand Hanna over to them? How could she make them understand that Hanna had to live with her? That none of them could possibly love her this much?

For a love like that, you deserved something in return.

She saw herself running for a train, the child in her arms though she was quite heavy, fleeing from Klaus Malter’s relatives.… Thoughts and pictures spun through her, making her dizzy. Queasy. She scrambled up, anxious to bring Hanna back out into the light. It was raining harder than before. Inside the house she scrubbed their hands, their faces, talking fast: “Your mother will pick you up soon. Do you know what a fine artist your mother is? So beautiful… And your father, he’s a good dentist. You’re lucky, so lucky to have two parents.…” Afterwards she wouldn’t remember most of what she’d told Hanna, only that it was a list of her parents’ virtues.

Wind and rain scraped the branches of the chestnut tree against the windows of the pay-library while she waited for Jutta to appear, and when she finally arrived and the child turned her face toward Trudi for her customary good-bye kiss, she couldn’t bring herself to touch her and pretended not to see.

“I’m not feeling well,” she told Jutta. “Better not bring her over for a while.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?” The tall woman bent and laid her cool palm across Trudi’s forehead.

“It’s nothing.” Trudi backed away. “Nothing.”

“Hanna has done something to upset you.”

“Of course not.”

“I’m not feeling well,” she told her father when Jutta had left. “I’ve closed the library.”

“Where are you going?” he called after her as she started for the door.

“I need some air.”

“The storm is getting worse. Take a coat, at least.”

But she was already out in the rain. Instantly, her hair and clothes were wet. She had no idea where she wanted to go, only that she had to get away from the place where she’d come up against her own brokenness. She should have seen that brokenness when she’d cloaked her love for Hanna with silence. There was an edge of craziness to her love—that same edge of craziness she’d seen in Ingrid when she’d spoken about God; in her own mother when it came to her escapes; in the face of Herr Heidenreich when he used to praise his Führer. And, as with all of them, that edge of craziness also presented a haven where they belonged or felt peace. As she did with this love for Hanna.

With Hanna, she was at her best.

At her worst.

And she had to stop.

Ahead of her the earth rose, and she recognized the long, even curve of the dike. She nearly slipped as she climbed up, and when she stood on top, she couldn’t see the river, only the rain that slanted in a gray sheet. But she thought she could smell the river—the way she’d smelled it in her mother’s hair after she’d come home from one of her flights. As she made her way down the other side of the dike, she could already feel the loss of Hanna, then the loss of Max and her mother and Ingrid and Frau Simon. For an instant there in the meadow, she thought she could see the man-who-touches-his-heart, but it was only a stunted tree. It struck her that her life was filled with ghosts: some days she thought more often of the dead than the living. She saw Frau Abramowitz standing by her window in the dark, saw the outline of her body as the sky grew lighter around her, forcing itself into a halo that enveloped her. She saw Fienchen Blomberg inside the grocery store, Eva on her wedding day, both surrounded by rims of light, and she felt terrified of all the losses that lay ahead of her, especially the loss of her father.

Blades of wet grass, icy and sharp, stung her nose and cheeks as she fell. Curling her fingers, she tried to sink them into the ground, hold
on to something solid that could ward off this soul-chilling loneliness, but all she gripped were weeds and grass. The earth beneath her was unyielding, indifferent. If her body hadn’t been in the way, the rain would have fallen on the soil that she obstructed. Suddenly she remembered the first blouse she’d sewn after meeting Pia: she could feel its soft texture, the particular shade of blue, like Pia’s trailer, and was suffused with a powerful longing for that blouse; yet, at the same moment she knew that the blouse stood for a part of her life that was irrevocably over.

She could hear the steady fury of the Rhein above the roar of the storm. Slowly, she stood up. Her hips were aching, her legs numb. Still—she headed toward the river, her soggy hem swinging against her calves. The water was an even deeper gray than the rain, but once her eyes adapted to the various shades of gray, she could make out rocks and bushes and tress and barges and even a swallow, a single swallow, fluttering toward a willow tree and coming so close to the trunk that it looked about to collide just before it veered off with shrill cries.
A matter of timing
. It made her think of how Eva had joked about Catholics timing their final confession five minutes before their death.

As she lowered herself to a log, she could see how the pattern of the water changed as it made its way past a rock that jutted from the river. She knew the rock well: in the early floods of spring it lay submerged, hidden from your eyes though the river knew where it was and washed across it, but by midsummer it always was exposed. Still, the river did not stop at its base, wailing, blocking all the water coming after it. No, it continued to flow, parted, foamed, but then became whole again after it had passed the rock, leaving its impact on the rock, just as the impact of every hour she had lived was still with her, shaping her like the people who had fed her dreams—the earliest of them her uncle Stefan Blau, who’d journeyed to a distant continent. All at once she felt as if she were the river, swirling in an ever-changing design around the rock, separating and coming together again without letting herself get snagged into scummy pools. Over the years, she had learned more from the river than from any one person, and what she’d been taught had always come with passion—intense pain or joy. It was the nature of the river to be both turbulent and gentle; to be abundant at times and lean at others; to be greedy and to yield pleasure. And it would always be the nature of the river
to remember the dead who lay buried beneath its surface.