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 (53 page)

The film was about to start: it was about the love between a blond forest warden and the blond daughter of a doctor. They finally got married despite the attempts of a Jewish banker to steal the young
woman’s affection. Not that he ever had a chance—considering how all the others would pinch their nostrils to avoid his terrible smell.

Trudi found it unbearable to keep looking at the movie. It was frightening to see how people felt justified to discriminate, how that attitude of superiority was drilled into ten-year-old children like Bruno Stosick. More than once she’d overheard comments on streetcars or in restaurants about Jews smelling bad. Though not directed at specific Jews, who’d sit stiffly, their arms tight against their sides, the remarks were always loud enough for everyone to hear. Some people would laugh, but most would pretend not to hear. Including herself. It was terrible, that uninvolvement, and she wished she knew what to do about it without getting hurt. But she’d seen people shunned or beaten because they’d come to the defense of Jews. Once, she’d witnessed a group of schoolboys push a woman from a moving streetcar when she reprimanded them for taunting a gray-haired Jewish man. As they shoved her toward the door, they shouted that she was ignorant, that it was a scientific fact that Jews smelled, that they’d learned about it in school.

And they didn’t even feel ashamed, Trudi thought, as the black and white of the screen flickered across Ingrid’s face and hands, summoning images of Bruno Stosick bending over his father’s chessboard, riding his bicycle past the pay-library, saluting the flag.… She shut her eyes, but it was impossible to dodge the final image, the persistent image that all the others pulled her toward—that of clumps of earth dropping on the small coffin.

Only a few of the people in Burgdorf had read
Mein Kampf
, and many thought that all this talk about
Rassenreinheit
—purity of the race—was ludicrous and impossible to enforce. Yet the long training in obedience to elders, government, and church made it difficult—even for those who considered the views of the Nazis dishonorable—to give voice to their misgivings. And so they kept hushed, yielding to each new indignity while they waited for the Nazis and their ideas to go away, but with every compliance they relinquished more of themselves, weakening the texture of the community while the power of the Nazis swelled.

But not everyone looked away when injustices happened to others. When little Fienchen Blomberg was stoned in front of the Weilers’ grocery store by six older boys, Frau Weiler let out a howl, grabbed
her broom, and whipped from the store. The boys were smashing Fienchen into the display window, smearing the glass with blood. Wielding the broom handle like a sword, Frau Weiler forced herself between the thin girl and the knot of boys.

“I’ll tell your parents,” she screamed, and pounded at whatever parts of the boys’ bodies she could reach.

They covered their faces, their chests, as they backed away from her. “Witch,” they howled, “crazy old witch.”

“I’ll tell your parents.”

“Witch.… Witch.…”

“Enough, Hedwig.” Leo Montag caught her in his arms. “It’s enough. They’re gone. Trudi is getting the Frau Doctor.”

Frau Weiler’s great jaw trembled, and in that moment when she let herself be braced by Leo’s body, too weary to continue on her own, it occurred to her how foolish it was to live next door to this man, both of them without someone to warm them at night. A slow heat climbed into her cheeks. She freed herself from his arms and comforted the crying girl.

Klaus Malter came running across the street, the sides of his white jacket flapping. “It’s an outrage,” he said, “an outrage.”

Leo Montag carried Fienchen into the storage room behind the grocery store. Several of the stones had cut her skin, leaving gashes on her arms and forehead. Blood from her nose was running into her mouth and down the front of her sailor collar. While Leo sat down on a wooden crate and held the girl on his knees, Klaus carefully washed off her blood.

“How about a nice piece of chocolate?” Frau Weiler offered, eyes glistening with sadness.

Fienchen nodded, parting her lips as though she could already taste the rare treat.

But Klaus advised, “Better wait until Frau Doktor Rosen has taken a look at her.”

“Here.” Frau Weiler slid a wrapped piece of chocolate into the girl’s skirt pocket. “You can eat it later.”

Fienchen sniffled and leaned her head against Leo’s chest.

“It may be a good idea,” Klaus told her, “to have a few friends with you when you walk around town.”

The girl mumbled something.

“What is it?” Klaus bent closer.

“I don’t have any.”

“Friends, you mean?”

Fienchen squinted.

“You must have at least one,” Klaus pressed.

“Don’t—” Leo started.

“I used to have two.” Fienchen’s voice was monotonous as if reciting something she’d been told repeatedly. “They are not allowed to play with Jews.”

“But that’s—” Klaus Malter looked startled. “That’s not right. You—you are a good girl, a sweet girl. You—” He would have kept talking if Frau Doktor Rosen hadn’t rushed in, followed by Trudi, who was out of breath.

“You can stay right there, Fienchen, on Herr Montag’s lap.” The doctor knelt in front of the girl, and as Fienchen rested against Leo’s knitted vest, the doctor’s fingers moved across her face as if in a caress. Her dark eyes barely contained the anger, which did not spill from her until Trudi and Klaus walked her back out through the grocery store, where the display window was still smudged with Fienchen’s blood.

“There has been more and more of this. The children who’re brought to me, the adults too—as if some essential law had dissolved.… A free hunt, and we’re the trophies.”

“They can’t get away with this,” Klaus said.

“Oh, but don’t you see? They are getting away with it.”

“I’ll call the police,” Trudi decided.

“We’ve written letters, made complaints.… Nothing. They want to drive us out, and they’re succeeding. I know at least five Jewish families who’ve left town.” She walked away, shoulders drawn forward as if she were a much older woman, but then she stopped. “It wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” she said, “if Frau Weiler got into trouble for chasing those boys off.”

Trudi glanced up at Klaus, who suddenly seemed embarrassed at finding himself alone with her on the sidewalk. He pulled an ironed handkerchief from the back pocket of his trousers. His face set in a grim frown, he wiped the window until the red smears were gone. Then he stared at his bloody handkerchief, confused as to what he could possibly do with it.

Not too long ago, she thought, I would have offered to wash it for him.

Awkwardly, he folded his handkerchief, trying to keep the soiled fabric on the inside. “I better get back to my patients.”

“You do that.” Trudi’s voice sounded sharp and she headed toward the grocery store.

“Trudi—”

Her hand on the door, she turned.

He looked like a boy who’d been caught in the middle of a mistake. Raising both hands in a helpless shrug, he gave her an uneasy smile. He opened his lips to say something, and she could tell he was thinking of that kiss he’d never acknowledged—like our bastard child, she thought with surprise—but when he finally spoke, it was not what she knew he had intended to say. “I… I hope Fienchen won’t have bad dreams.”

She felt herself softening toward him. “Is that what happens to you, Klaus Malter? Does it all go into your dreams?”

His face stiffened.

“We’ll look after Fienchen,” she said.

He nodded, hard. “We all have to look out for one another,” he said with a sudden urgency.

Frau Doktor Rosen was right because the following morning Hedwig Weiler was arrested for attacking six children. Although Leo followed her to the police station to verify that she’d come to the rescue of a girl far younger than those boys, Frau Weiler was jailed for a week. The oldest of those children was the eighteen-year-old son of the butcher, Anton Immers, who not only carried his father’s name but also his enthusiasm for the Nazis; he walked through town with clean gauze bandages on one cheek and both wrists, claiming to have suffered serious injuries from the witch.

In the butcher shop, his father speculated to any customer who would listen that Hedwig Weiler quite likely had at least some Jew blood in her.

“I wish they’d make up their minds,” Michel Abramowitz said to Leo when he bought his pipe tobacco. “Is Hedwig a witch or a Jew?”

“Why not both? The more labels they find for her, the more justified they can feel in what they’re doing.”

“Labels.… Well, she is a widow.” Herr Abramowitz tried to laugh but his eyes were grim. “They might come up with a law against widows.”

“Ah, but Hedwig is only a possible widow. Don’t forget—Franz
Weiler may have gotten out of the river alive after all.”

“A possible widow then. But that’s even worse! There should be a law against possible widows. I might propose it myself.”

Leo’s voice was soft. “Jews, witches, and possible widows whose husbands may still be floating in the river.” He rubbed one palm up and down his right cheek.

“At least Franz got away. Without a passport.”

“Any news on getting yours back?”

“We got the passports back some time ago. Along with the encouragement to move out of the country and practically give my property away … to pure Germans, that is—No insult to you intended, Leo. And I’m not just talking about the house. They want my law practice, everything.…” His voice rose. “I’m fifty-three, Leo, too old to start all over again. I have worked all my life. For now, Ilse and I have agreed to stay—even though it’s not for the same reasons: she’s waiting for things to return to normal, while I refuse to be forced into giving up my legal practice.” He was breathing heavily, and his collar was limp as he told Leo about colleagues who’d emigrated to France and America, where they’d found it impossible to practice law because of language barriers and extensive exams. “One of them works as a janitor.… We’re told we can go to Palestine, that we’ll be taken care of there and—”

“Herr Abramowitz?” Trudi pulled a chair over to where he stood. “Sit down. Please.”

Leo laid both hands on his shoulder. “It’s easier for the young to leave.”

“My son—he’s pulling at me to get out. He’s ready to go to London, to Argentina … anyplace, as long as it’s away from Germany. I’m losing my son, Leo.” He turned his unlit pipe in his hands. “My daughter, she wants to be near her mother. Now that she’s married, she’s closer to Ilse than when she was a girl.”

Trudi and her father had been invited to Ruth Abramowitz’s wedding the year before. Her husband was a wealthy throat specialist with a clinic in Oberkassel, who treated singers and actors and teachers suffering the strain of using their vocal cords too much. According to Frau Abramowitz, he was an ambitious, but kind man. Ruth worked as a nurse in his office.

“Ilse thinks all this won’t last long,” Herr Abramowitz said, “that all we have to do is keep from being noticed. Be nice. Polite.”

•   •   •

While Hedwig Weiler was in jail, her son, Georg, asked for time off from his job in the big city grocery store and moved back into his old room. His mother’s customers told one another that Georg had a talent for building occasions out of fiascos: they were amused when he’d guess what they wanted before they read him their shopping lists; they enjoyed his easy laugh and pointed out to one another that he was like a different person when his mother wasn’t around. He’d persuade them to make bets with him about the next day’s weather, say, or the color of the fourth bicycle to pass by the store window, staking half a pound of store cheese or a pound of flour against a jar of Frau Eberhardt’s pear jelly or two pieces of Frau Heidenreich’s plum cake. Even those who did not care to gamble would go along, flattered that this handsome young man would try to extract from them the one specialty they prided themselves on.

Georg didn’t seem to care if he won—to him the excitement lay in making the bet—and he’d part easily with what he’d wagered; yet, somehow, he always managed to come out ahead because his mother’s customers would press upon him jars of preserves and wrapped pieces of fragrant cake. While he captivated the women with his charm, he won over the children of Burgdorf by giving them extra licorice and chocolate for the coins they counted out on the counter.

Trudi stayed away from the store while Georg worked there. To see him so content and well liked unsettled her, and she consoled herself with her premonition that she didn’t have to do anything as she had with the others from that long-ago day in the barn, that he was moving toward his own destruction. It was a premonition that grew so strong while he lived next door that one morning she surprised herself by wanting to warn him—of what exactly she didn’t know, only that it had to do with Helga Stamm.

Even those of Frau Weiler’s customers who had waited for her return felt disappointed when, a week after her arrest, they walked into the store, the payoffs of their latest bets with Georg in their shopping nets, and found Hedwig Weiler behind the counter. The part in the center of her hair had widened, but the sadness in her eyes had been replaced by rage, as if—for the first time in her life—she had discovered a valid reason to vent decades of fury.

“A homecoming gift for you,” her customers mumbled and handed
her a jar of cherries, half a marble cake, a basket of fresh eggs.

“Look at this,” she told Leo Montag, her voice shaking with emotion, “just look at all those presents. I had no idea people cared about me like that.”

In the weeks to come, the town noticed a new vitality about Frau Weiler, a fighting energy that manifested itself even in the way she packed butter and weighed lentils. Without any regard for caution, she ranted against the Nazis to anyone who came into her store. Certain that Frau Weiler would soon be arrested again, some of her customers—including old Herr Blau who worried he might be implicated by being around her—began to buy their groceries across town, while Herr Heidenreich and others admonished her for not appreciating their government.