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 (70 page)

“I don’t believe you.”

“Give me a chance to convince you then.”

She shook her head.

“I’m asking you to have a meal with me—not to discuss the names of our grandchildren.”

He grinned at her until she was grinning back at him. If only that secret of Angelika didn’t exist between them.… Just eating dinner with him on Sunday wouldn’t do any damage. But as she imagined sitting across the table from him, she felt the urge to confess how sorry she was to have played such an ugly game with him.

“I can’t,” she said abruptly, and when he nodded without trying to convince her, she felt she’d lost something she hadn’t even begun to value.

After that discussion, she was sure Max Rudnick would buy his tobacco
elsewhere, but he kept returning to the pay-library and talked with her father if she pretended to be busy, carrying stacks of books from one shelf unit to another. She thought of several other gentle ways to refuse his invitations, but he did not ask her again, not even when she began to join him and her father in their conversations.

One afternoon he told her father why he’d left his teaching job in Köln. He’d had a clash with one of the other teachers, who’d walked past his house one late afternoon when he was building a chicken coop in back of the garden.

“Can I take a look?” His colleague had studied the construction.

“Come on in.”

“What are you building?”

Max Rudnick laid his hammer aside. “This will be a chicken coop. And that I build here is thanks to the Führer.”

His colleague stared at him, horrified, and quickly walked away. Max Rudnick had intended his comment as a joke because it had become the custom that, wherever something was built, private or government, a sign would be attached to the building:
Dass ich hier baue verdanke ich dem Führer
—That I build here is thanks to the Führer.

The following day, the teacher did not speak to him in the faculty lunchroom, but in the afternoon he returned, opened the gate to the garden without asking, and stood by the chicken coop, watching while Max Rudnick continued the construction.

“Listen,” the teacher finally said, “because of you I had a sleepless night.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You were ridiculing the Führer.” He stood with his hands clasped in front of his stomach as if waiting for Max Rudnick to correct him, but when Max didn’t speak up, he worked himself into a coughing fit. “I had to fight with myself,” he sputtered, “and I’m still fighting with myself if I should notify the police.… They—they should know about you.”

“You do what you need to do.” Max resumed his hammering.

When he didn’t hear anything for two weeks, he figured his colleague must have decided against informing on him. But one morning the principal blocked his way to his classroom and handed him a letter of introduction to an industrialist in Düsseldorf who wanted a tutor for his children.

“You were lucky. I’d suggest you practice greater caution in the future.”

Max Rudnick was not allowed to say good-bye to his students or enter the classroom to collect his personal belongings from his desk. They’d already been packed into a paper bag, which felt ridiculously light as he carried it out of the brick building where he had taught for six years.

T
RUDI FOUND THE WOMAN HIDING IN HER MOTHER’S EARTH NEST ONE
chilly April afternoon when she carried the Persian hallway rug outside. She thought she must have imagined it—that flash of movement when she walked past the opening below the back of the house—and she kept walking and hoisted the rug across the metal rod and raised the rattan paddle. Her hair covered with an old scarf, she beat the rug, hard, while dust blossomed in thick plumes into the air. All at once she felt as though she were being watched. She turned toward the house, expecting to see her father’s face in the kitchen window, but instead she noticed it again—that motion beneath the elevated part of the house—as though her mother had returned.

Trudi stood still, absolutely still. Her neck felt cold. Wielding the rattan paddle, she approached the boulders and aged timbers where her mother used to hide. She heard the breath before her eyes adjusted, not her own breath but one—no, more than one, much faster than hers.

She stopped next to the rack with the garden tools and gripped the handle of a shovel. “Who is there?” she called out, finding the sound of her voice reassuring. “Who is there?”

Silence. Then something shifted—like fabric being dragged across the ground. Her eyes made out two figures, one large, one small, crouched in the corner.

“He is just a child. Please.” A high and urgent whisper as a child, a boy, was pushed toward Trudi. Behind him emerged a woman’s face and graceful hands with red-lacquered nails, locked on the boy’s shoulders as if in a death grip, holding him between herself and Trudi. “He is just a child.”

For an instant there, standing within the half-dark and the smell of old earth, Trudi felt her own mother’s hands on her shoulders, that taut grasp.
People die if you don’t love them enough.
She saw the glitter in her mother’s eyes, felt the secret kernels of sin beneath her mother’s skin, heard that wild, wild laugh.

“Don’t be afraid,” Trudi said, as much to herself as to the boy.

The woman jerked him back against herself, locking both arms across his chest as if to dare Trudi to take him from her. Her red hat slipped down her blond hair and dangled on the back of her neck, held by a coated rubber band that cut across her throat like a badly healed scar.

The boy watched Trudi quietly, his eyes nearly at the same level with hers.

“Don’t tell anyone we’re here,” the woman said.

“I won’t.”

“We’ll leave. As soon as it’s night.”

“You can stay inside our house.”

“It’s not safe.”

“Safer than out here.”

“How do I know—” The woman stopped. She shuddered, and her arms tightened around the boy, whose eyes hadn’t left Trudi’s face once.

“I want to help.” Trudi felt the woman’s fear for her life, for the child’s life, and when she reached forward and touched the boy’s shoulder, her arms grew weak as though she’d been the one who’d carried his weight in her arms as they’d fled.

It was partly from the woman’s jumbled words, but mostly from her anguished silences, that Trudi was able to assemble what had happened. They’d lost their house in Stuttgart eight months earlier when they’d been herded into one of the already crowded
jüdische Hauser
—Jewish houses—along with other families. During her first
week there the woman had woken up each morning, thinking: This is as bad as it will ever get. But soon she realized that she was capable of withstanding far more than she’d ever imagined possible as long as she had her husband and child.

As others were shoved into the
jüdische Häuser
, the cold and hunger and constant bickering over the shrinking space grew worse. But even then she reminded herself that at least they were not taken away in cattle cars to unknown destinations, limited to bringing what they could fit into one suitcase. And she knew exactly why: There was a difference between her and those Jews who had been taken, a way of being in the world that did not allow for that kind of ultimate defeat. Not that she could escape the indignities altogether—that would have been unrealistic for someone like her who’d been trained as a biologist—but there were limits to the horrors she would let herself imagine, and that ability, she reasoned, kept her rational, that and her determination to survive, even if it meant taking a step away from whoever happened to be the next victim, and refusing to identify. The ones who suffered most, she’d observed, were those who panicked and saw no way out.

Her husband was like that. But she was able to keep him safe until one evening when he didn’t return as usual with scavenged bits of coal. She waited for him through the night and all of the following day and the night after that until early morning. Then she woke her son, made him leave his cat in the cellar, and set out for the hotel where her husband’s uncle had lived ever since he’d lost his villa. If only she had the money to stay in a hotel without worrying about food rations. She wanted to spit in the old man’s face when he invited her and Konrad to have breakfast with him—“Before you go on your way,” that’s how he said it—but she stayed, though she couldn’t bear to eat, and made her son finish his milk and eat her boiled egg too. Though convinced that she’d never see her husband again, she left a message for him with the uncle and accepted his gift of a leather suitcase before she returned to the
jüdische Haus.

But the door stood open. One broken cup on the front steps was the only sign of struggle. All of the occupants had been taken away, validating the woman’s beliefs about her survival as she scooped what she could use for herself and her son into the uncle’s suitcase and a rucksack that used to belong to one of the other residents, a musician from Wildbad. With her nail scissors, she separated the cheap yellow
fabric of the
Judenstern
from her coat and burned it in the sink, together with her identification papers; but a faint outline of the star remained visible—much like the contour of a picture after it has been taken from a wall—and she rubbed a pumice stone across the wide lapel until it was no longer visible.

Her son’s cat was still in the cellar, and he cried and refused to leave the house until she allowed him to bring the cat along in his satchel. The knowledge that they might be arrested any moment—on the street, in the railroad station, on the train—set her face into a rigid smile that would frighten her son into a silence so constant that she wouldn’t even have to remind him not to answer anyone’s questions.

They took the train from Stuttgart to Frankfurt, where her brother-in-law lived, but when they rang his doorbell, he was afraid to take them in. She remembered a cousin, a distant cousin, who lived near Düsseldorf in a small town called Burgdorf. On the train, she was asked for her papers and travel orders, a question she had dreaded, but the official accepted her fixed smile and explanation that her papers had been stolen.

The cousin had disappeared from Burgdorf, and she found the hiding space beneath the pay-library when she got water from the brook because the boy was thirsty. But she’d slipped on the muddy bank and her hem was still dirty.

“See?” she said and raised the hem toward Trudi as if that one detail—the dirt-crusted fabric—proved that she had told the truth about everything else.

“I saw white cows,” the boy suddenly said. “I didn’t know there were white cows.”

“Where did you see them?” Trudi asked softly.

“From the train. Many of them, all white. Have you ever seen white cows?”

“Yes, at the Sternburg. It’s a farm now, but hundreds of years ago knights lived there. It still has a drawbridge.”

“Like a castle?”

“With a beautiful round tower.”

“And knights?”

“Not anymore. Just farmers.”

“Will you take me there?”

Trudi hesitated. “If it ever becomes safe.”

He nodded as though he’d anticipated her answer.

Trudi looked at his mother. “I’ll come for you tonight and bring you into the house.” She got the clean Persian carpet and spread it on the ground. “You can sit on this till then.”

The woman’s eyes probed into hers. “Promise you won’t tell the police.”

“I promise.”

“If you do, I’ll—”

“I promise.”

“Who else lives with you?”

“Only my father. He’ll want to help. Are you hungry?”

The woman nodded and let out a small sob as if humiliated by her hunger.

Trudi was back within minutes to bring them what was left of her meager rations of bread and of milk so thin it looked blue.
Blauer Heinrich
—blue Henry—people called the watered-down milk they’d come to associate with the war, and when the boy drank, he swallowed so hard that Trudi could hear him.

As soon as it was dark, she led the woman and the boy into the house, where she had closed the drapes and set the kitchen table with two soup plates and spoons. When her father took the woman’s suitcase from her and welcomed her, that fighting stance left her body, and she slumped down in a chair as if, for the first time in months, she knew that others were looking out for her and that she no longer had to do it alone. Leo pressed one of his wife’s flowered porcelain cups into the woman’s hands. She drank the tea slowly and told them her name, Erna Neimann, and the boy’s, Konrad.

Trudi heated the pea soup she’d made the day before, stretching it with water and a cubed potato to have enough for the four of them. “It’s best if only two place settings are out at a time,” she told Frau Neimann as she urged her and the boy to eat first. “In case the house is searched.” She and her father waited to eat until they’d refilled the soup plates of their guests.

“I had a cat,” Konrad said when he was finished. “She was on the train with us.” His face took on an old look. “On the first train that is. I carried her in my satchel.” He slid from his chair and opened the satchel for Trudi and her father to inspect. It was empty except for a folded dingy towel. “She slept in here,” he explained, “until—”