Ursula Hegi The Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set: Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River, The Vision of Emma Blau. Children and Fire (112 page)

Stefan wrote to Helene when Agnes died, when Tobias was born, and a week later when Sara died, and then she didn’t hear from him for over half a year—though she kept writing to him, worrying about him, hoping—until one July afternoon in 1911 when he knocked at her door, wearing the black suit of the widower. With both hands he reached for hers, making her feel mute and far too tall. He hadn’t grown much in the seventeen years he’d been away, was shorter than in her fantasies and quite a bit hairier. His fingers were steady, dry, and she longed for the composure she’d felt while reading and rereading his letters.

Instead of looking up into his green eyes as she had imagined, she had to look down. “No one told me you were coming,” she managed to say.

He didn’t offer any reason why he hadn’t answered her last letters but told her he’d just arrived in town. “My parents don’t know yet that I’m here. I came to you first.”

His voice sounded odd to her.
An accent. He has an accent in his own language
. He stood close enough for her to smell the manscent of his skin—so different from Leo who was part of herself, a man too, but not unsettling like this. She couldn’t help staring at Stefan while her nose and thighs felt larger, while sweat collected on her palms. Pulling her fingers from his, she dried them against the sides of her navy-and-white-striped dress. The air was hot,
moist, and on the Abramowitzes’ roof across the street, sparrows were fighting over some scrap of food.

“I walked here from the railroad station,” he said.

She admonished herself for not inviting him in, for standing there so stiffly. He looked accustomed to sorrow—so serious, distracted even—and she was sure he had to be thinking about his dead wives. From the window of the pay-library came the voice of Frau Simon, the milliner, and the high laugh of Gertrud Hagen. Helene wanted to tell Stefan how her brother had surprised himself as much as everyone else in Burgdorf by getting engaged to Gertrud after breaking up with her at least once a year over the past decade; but considering how Stefan had buried two wives, any mention of marriage felt inappropriate. Or about the bride-to-be who was older than her brother. Even if just one day. Not two years, like the gap between Stefan and herself. Leo had told her it was Gertrud who’d proposed. “I’ve never heard of a woman asking a man first,” he’d said, “but then I thought if I married—and I always figured I would, eventually—it would be good if it were to someone I’ve known since we were children, someone where everything won’t be so new all the time.”

In the street the Abramowitz children, Ruth and Albert, were skipping rope, counting aloud: “…
elf, zwölf, dreizehn, vierzehn, fünfzehn…”
The girl’s dress was as purple as the geraniums in her mother’s window boxes.

“Michel and Ilse’s children,” Helene said.

“Ilse Korfmann?”

“I wrote you when she married Michel Abramowitz.”
Is that all I can talk about? Marriage?
Quickly she added, “He’s a lawyer now. I wrote—”

“You did. He must be good as a lawyer … the way he loved to talk, wearing us down with endless discussions. Still—those are old children.”

“Not much older than your Greta. The girl is seven, the boy six. Ruth and Albert.”

Stefan shook his head, slowly. “I guess whenever I think of people back home, they’ve stayed the same age.”

As Helene tried to recall what she’d looked like at fifteen, her face turned hot. “Remember Gertrud Hagen?” she blurted. “She was in Leo’s class.”

“I got whipped by the priest because she confessed to helping me paint those rocks around St. Stefan’s feet.”

“I can still see Herr Pastor Schüler marching up your front steps, shouting this was going to be your last prank. Why did you do it?”

“Because that saint is my namesake. Because he was the first Christian martyr stoned to death. And because those rocks should not be sky blue. I thought rocks should be brown.”

“The priest must have agreed. He never changed them back to blue.”

“When I sneaked in there, I was sure the church was empty. I didn’t see Gertrud because she was behind a pew. Kneeling on the floor because it was harder on her knees.” He motioned toward Ruth Abramowitz. “She was only about her age. But that’s the way she was.”

“She still is.”

It occurred to him how much easier it was for both of them to talk about others than about themselves. “Gertrud came up to me,” he said, “and asked what I had in my bucket. When I said chocolate for the saint, she dipped her finger into the paint. I stopped her before she could lick it off, told her it was holy chocolate. ‘Only for saints,’ I told her. ‘Wipe your finger on those rocks. If you promise to be quiet, I’ll let you cover one rock with holy chocolate.’ She promised and held out her hand for the brush. Then she painted a rock and watched me do the rest. Without one word.”

“Leo—he got engaged to her.”

“Little Leo.”

She had to smile. “Well … he’s actually taller than you.”

Stefan grinned back. “It doesn’t take much for that, does it?”

Just then, the cart of the ragman turned around the corner, and Ruth Abramowitz ran toward it, followed by Albert. Shaking his bell, the ragman called out,
“Lumpen, Eisen, Papier
—Rags, iron, paper.” His shirt glinted white in the sun.

“She’s a thin wire,” Stefan said.

“Gertrud?”

He nodded.

“What’s a thin wire?”

“Something my grandfather used to say about people who were stretched so tight they could snap any moment.”

As I could too
, Helene thought, wanting him to fit both palms beneath her breasts and rub his thumbs up her nipples.
As I could too
.

“I can’t believe how much shorter the distances here are,” he said. “I’d forgotten what it’s like to walk through streets where the houses share connecting walls or are just a meter apart.”

“It must feel foreign to you. After all these years.”

“In the town where I live buildings are surrounded by open spaces.”

She saw his American town,
hundreds of huge, ornate houses like the apartment house he’d described in his letters, each building set apart from the next by orderly squares of forests and meadows. There, wind and air move freely between the buildings, cooling her neck, her ankles
.… “Could you imagine yourself living here in Burgdorf again?” she asked.

“But I’m an American now,” he said, tilting his face up to study her kind eyes, the high forehead, the firm curve of her chin. Yes, she would be good to his children. But she was so unlike the articulate woman he knew through her letters. She was stiff and awkward—the way he suddenly remembered her from his childhood—and he felt saddened, sensing that if she agreed to marry him, he would forfeit that part of her that had been linked to him all those years with written words. “How about you?” he asked gently. “Would you ever leave here?”

“Oh yes,” she said before she could lose the boldness to give him the response she’d kept prepared for him since she was a girl. At twenty-nine, he was still a young man who could easily find himself a bride five or ten years younger, as was the tradition, while as a woman of thirty-one she was considered beyond the age of being asked to marry. And yet, by being here, Stefan made real her secret knowledge that one day he would return for her. She wanted him to go away, wanted him to press himself against her, back her into the hallway and against a wall.

He reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out an envelope
with photos of his children. “They’re with their American grandparents while I’m away. Tobias in the apartment above the bakery, Greta in the banker’s house.”

As Helene touched the photos, she surprised herself with an odd yearning for these children as if they were her own and had already been separated from her far too long, and by the end of that week, when she would wear the white lace gown that Stefan’s father would sew for her in his tailor shop, she’d feel oddly removed from the festivities because she was already picturing herself with Stefan’s children, far away in America.

Years later, whenever she would think about her wedding, she’d remember most of all her impatience to be done with it because she had already lived that day so many times in her fantasies. All the details matched—the groom, the sun on her veil, the scent of fresh grass, the tables with white cloths behind the pay-library. While Herr Pastor Schüler blessed her union with Stefan, and while Michel Abramowitz was taking the wedding photos, she saw the ritual as if set in a frame—already defined, already completed—hers to review from a distance of decades if she chose to.

Yet, as always, her good manners saw her through: she thanked Margret and her husband for setting up all the tables, and she comforted Stefan’s mother who was irritated with Gertrud for taking apart her white-and-pink flower bouquets and mixing them with clumps of cornflowers and camomile she’d pulled from the Rhein meadow at dawn.

When Helene followed Gertrud to the pay-library, she found her crying behind the last shelf of romance novels. “Thank you for the wildflowers,” she whispered to her. “I’m so glad you remembered how much I like them.”

Gertrud hiccuped with tears and embraced Helene, face hot and damp. “I’m afraid of her.”

“Frau Blau? It’s just that she’s fussed all day over those flowers. She’s really quite friendly once you—”

“Not Frau Blau. This one here.” Gertrud laid one palm against her flat belly. Her lips pulled away from her teeth. “The girl who’s coming into me here.”

“Are you— You and Leo?” Helene asked though she didn’t think her brother and Gertrud had slept together.

“Not yet and it’s your wedding and you have to dance.” Gertrud laughed shrilly and pressed her index finger against Helene’s lips.

All at once Helene felt afraid for her. Gertrud was so physical. So passionate. Not at all like Leo. She’d seen the way he held Gertrud, lightly. Had witnessed the faint brush of his lips against Gertrud’s cheek. Some in town gossiped about Leo being more comfortable with the touch of men. They saw his easy camaraderie with men and didn’t know him well enough to understand that this was not because he desired men, but rather because touching them in competition or play was less complicated than touching a woman who might then want more of him.

“You have to dance with every man,” Gertrud sang out and bolted from the back door.

“Wait—”

But Gertrud was already flying toward the tables, black curls springing loose from her knot, the sleeves of her yellow dress flapping around her arms, the tips of her shoes leaving imprints in the fine, orderly ridges of earth that Leo had raked behind the pay-library. As Helene followed her, people kept stopping her to compliment her on her new husband, her new life in America, her new children. Even more people than in her wedding fantasies were here: neighbors, friends from church, colleagues from school—though not Axel Lambert—and several of her students. It was summer as in her fantasies, and though her gown wasn’t as elaborate as the one she’d pictured herself in—not enough time to prepare, after all—it didn’t matter to her.

Guests had arrived with gifts and with food: cream of leek soup and cucumber salad, sheets of plum cake and roasts with gravy, liver sausage and herring salad, pickled beets and sliced peaches. Three dogs were sniffing the grass around the tables, tails twitching as they waited for scraps. While Frau Buttgereit turned her sightless gaze toward the sun, her daughter-in-law, Ottilia—much beloved by the older woman because, ironically, she’d been named after the patron saint of the blind and therefore seemed to offer a direct link to the saint—was arranging white stalks of asparagus on a platter,
tender points meeting in the center, clouds of parsley in the gaps between them. Ottilia’s husband stood too close to the baker’s wife, who used to be the second-most-beautiful girl in school. The first-most-beautiful girl he had married eight years ago, never guessing how drastically childbirth would transform her. Each child, four living daughters and two stillborns so far, had either added to Ottilia Buttgereit’s body or taken away from it, but all in the wrong places—a rising of her belly so that she seemed perpetually pregnant; a drooping of her breasts and the corners of her mouth; a waning of her neck until it looked stringy—while her husband, with increasing fervor, sought to recapture her beauty in other women. “This one for sure will be a boy,” he would tell people each time Ottilia was pregnant, not knowing that she would have to give birth to nine daughters altogether before his one son would be born, and that this son would not live for long.

Leo was halfway into a chess game with nine-year-old Günther Stosick, a superb player despite his youth and shyness, who kept his eyes on the board, elbows on the table, fingers in his dense hair to keep himself from making rash moves. He seemed more grown up than the rest of the children, who played hide-and-seek in the dark space beneath the back of the pay-library, where massive stones from the riverbed formed the foundation as for most houses in Burgdorf. When the music started—one accordion and two fiddles—Günther didn’t even glance up, but the other children came running, faces and clothes smudged, and danced with each other.