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 (71 page)

“She kept making noise. Remember?” his mother said to him.
“She was drawing attention to us. How could we hide, having her with us?”

“She was a good cat.”

His mother gripped her lower lip with her teeth. “She was, but the noise—”

“She was learning to be quiet.”

“It takes a long time for animals to learn something. We didn’t have that time.”

But Konrad didn’t look at his mother. His eyes were on Trudi. “My mother says she gave my cat away. In the railroad station. While I was in the bathroom.” He closed his satchel. “I don’t know if it is true.”

His mother flinched and glanced at Trudi’s father as if to enlist his help. “I gave the cat to a little girl.…A girl with a warm, expensive coat who has a good home for her.”

He nodded, his face sad as though he not only accepted the loss of the cat but also his mother’s lie.

Trudi felt the lie in the kitchen with them and knew that the mother was the kind of person who would twist the neck of a cat and drop it into a trash can, if that could protect her son and herself, and who would then lie about it. Trudi loved her for that. She would have done the same to protect the boy if he’d been hers. “Your mother is keeping you safe,” she said.

“But I know that,” the boy said as if surprised she needed to tell him.

Late in the evening, after Trudi and her father had settled their guests on a mattress in the sewing room, they went into the cellar to see if they could arrange a better hiding space. They moved the potato bin and the shelves, rigged up an old blanket to isolate one corner of the cellar from the rest, but whatever they did only made it look more conspicuous.

“Anyone could find them here,” Trudi said.

“It’s worthless without a second exit.”

“A trap.”

“We need to figure a way for them to escape if the police come into the house.”

“The sewing room has to be enough for now.”

“For now.”

By midnight, they’d examined every nook of the cellar for possibilities and had relocated boxes and coals and the old laundry kettle
without establishing a secure hiding place. Exhausted, Leo Montag dropped onto the wooden trunk that still contained the box Herr Abramowitz had hidden there more than three years earlier.

Trudi sat on the cellar stairs and rested her elbows on her knees.
“From your house to mine.
.” Pia, she thought, feeling more of a connection to the animal tamer than she’d felt in a long time. She saw the two of them standing in the circus arena, their eyes at the same height, spinning the tale of the magical island…
a tunnel made of jewels” “It led from your house to mine, yes.”

Yes.
She leapt up. “What we need is a tunnel.”

Her father stared at the stone walls and shook his head. “Too thick.”

“Not if we get help.”

Gradually, as it began to seem possible that, indeed, they could build a tunnel, their tiredness turned into fresh energy. Not only would they have a safe passage for the woman and the child, but for others who would come here after that. Without saying the words aloud to each other, they knew they were ready to take that risk. They considered both neighbors, the Weilers and the Blaus. Though Frau Weiler was younger than the Blaus and eager to help with food and other supplies, she couldn’t be relied on because she’d never lie if questioned by the Gestapo.

Besides, Georg might come home on military leave and visit his mother. He’d been back once to marry Helga Stamm. After the wedding, he’d talked his mother into letting him take along his father’s old skis since he was stationed near Zakopane, the Polish ski resort. “He’ll probably gamble them away,” Frau Weiler had told Frau Buttgereit; yet, she’d found herself comforted as she’d pictured her son skiing down snow-covered mountain peaks instead of aiming a rifle at another human being.

It would be best to have the tunnel lead into the Blaus’ cellar, Trudi and her father agreed. Ever since he’d turned the young man away from his door, Herr Blau had changed. He would welcome the chance to help others. And his wife would keep quiet.

When Trudi finally went to sleep, she awoke soon after to a low, unfamiliar sound that came from above her ceiling, and for a moment she didn’t dare move because she was certain the Gestapo had found out about the woman and the boy. She had an image of herself locked up inside a cell and felt furious at the woman for endangering her. But
it was far too quiet for the Gestapo to be in the house—only that steady sound from the floor above. Ashamed for thinking only about herself, she wrapped herself in her bathrobe, lit a candle, and went up the stairs to the sewing room.

Listening hard, she laid the side of her face against the cool paint of the door. She could feel the boy’s closeness. I’m not going to let them get you, she thought, I won’t. Eyes half closed to hear better, she stood motionless. The sound was slow, grating. Carefully, she opened the door and stepped next to the mattress. She set down the candle holder. The woman and the boy were fast asleep, and he was grinding his teeth. His dark head rested on his mother’s shoulder, and a deep frown made his features look far more grown-up than he was. Like a
Zwerg
man, Trudi thought, and clasped her hands in front of herself, her fingertips digging into the tender spots between the knuckles.

In the morning the water was frozen, and she had to break the ice in the porcelain basin on her dresser before she could wash. When she took breakfast upstairs to the sewing room, the boy was waiting for her on the other side of the door as if he’d stood there all night.

That first week, Erna Neimann slept much of the time, deeply, as though flinging herself into a bottomless lake. You’d find her asleep wherever you’d left her, while the boy would sit next to her, keeping vigil. Trudi took to spending more hours with him while her father did some of her duties in the pay-library, the connecting door to the hall locked to delay anyone who might try to enter that way. Trudi would tell fairy tales to the boy, comb his pale hair, build card towers for him, wash his face—always ready to rush him upstairs to the sewing room if someone came to the house.

When she found out that he didn’t know how to swim, she taught him the movements in dry air. “Like a frog,” she said. “Pretend you’re a frog. That’s how I learned to swim in the river.” She made him lie with his belly on a stool and showed him how to move his arms and legs.

There was something invigorating about having Konrad in the house, something unsettling, too, because he made Trudi think of the times she’d imagined having a family of her own, a family as shown in magazines and movies, with a husband and children—even though her own body did not belong in any of those pictures; she would
never look like those smiling young mothers, would never have what they had. And yet, sometimes she felt an unspoken communication with a small child she might see in church or on the street. She’d feel drawn, deeply, into the child’s eyes, into a moment of recognition that choked her with love.
I know you
, something within her would chant, though her lips wouldn’t make a sound.
I know you, and you will always remember me.
She’d feel a connection beyond that moment which—for a while at least—would lull the random longing for a child of her own. And when Konrad looked at her, it was with eyes that seemed to understand all that.

It pleased her that he, too, benefited from the narrow platform next to the kitchen cabinets which her father had built for her years ago. She let Konrad sit on her two special chairs, the birch chair with the short legs in the living room, and the eating chair with its three wide steps leading up to an elevated seat that made it possible for him to rest his elbows on the table.

Once, Trudi saw Erna Neimann enter the bathroom and back out immediately, fanning her face. Instantly she knew why. Her father’s bad habit of lingering on the toilet with his cigarettes and newspaper had embarrassed her ever since she was a child, and she’d backed out of the bathroom many times just like that, waiting for the air to clear; yet, it made her feel defensive to see Frau Neimann do it. Still, the incident finally made her suggest to her father that, since others lived in the house now, it would be considerate to do his reading and smoking outside the bathroom. And when he said without hesitation, “Of course,” she realized that she had asked for others what she would have liked for herself. No more, she thought. If he starts it again, I’ll ask him to stop for me.

Nights she helped with the construction of a tunnel that would connect the two cellars. The wall of the Blaus’ house was only a little over a meter away, but it took more than a week to dislodge the massive stones that had come from the river and dig a passage through the earth, deep enough so that it would not cause the ground above to collapse. Emil Hesping and Leo Montag did most of the digging, while Trudi and old Frau Blau carried the excess earth outside and distributed it in the brook. Even Konrad and his mother helped, though they did not leave the house: they carried pails of earth to the top of the cellar stairs, where Trudi and Frau Blau would pick them up.

Although the old tailor couldn’t keep his hands from shaking, he insisted on doing his share of the digging. He was determined to make up for his failure of not sheltering the young man, but he was so slow that he got in the way.

“I bet Anton Immers would love to know what we’re up to,” he said one night in the cellar while trying to move an enormous stone, which Emil Hesping would take away in his car.

“No need to advertise it.” Herr Hesping crouched and lifted the stone.

Frau Blau said she thought she’d heard years ago that Herr Immers’ grandmother was Jewish. “If so,” she said, “it would make sense why he’s like that.… He’d be afraid of it, that part of himself.… Maybe that’s why he can hate the Jews so.”

“That man would deny his grandmother in a minute,” her husband said.

“Even if his grandmother was Jewish,” Trudi said, “he’s probably convinced himself that she wasn’t. You know how he is.” Until now, she’d never thought of the butcher as afraid. She’d only seen his loathing for the Jews, his malice, but now she wondered if all of that was just fear and, perhaps, contempt for himself.

Recently, he’d hung up a flower shelf in the shop beneath the portraits of himself, the Führer, and the saint, and he was always fussing with the potted violets on that shelf, making you wait for your order and listen to his opinions while he watered the plants or snipped their dead stems and leaves. She pitied the prisoner from Cracow who had to help him in the shop. For some time now, prisoners of war had been arriving in town, some Greek and French, but mostly Eastern Europeans, who were assigned to farms and businesses for menial labor. Pressed into service, they had a place to stay, but no place they could run to without being hunted, and so they worked alongside the families. The Heidenreichs had a quiet, burly Frenchman from Avignon living with them who, the taxidermist suspected, understood German though he pretended not to. And Herr Buttgereit had warned the Polish prisoner who worked the fields with him to stay away from his daughters and reminded him that it was criminal for Poles to have sex relations with Germans.

“Herr Immers,” Frau Blau said, “tells everyone who comes into his store that, if Germany loses the war, everyone’s going to die … that there’ll be no future.”

Emil Hesping laughed, and his thick eyebrows touched above his nose. “There’ll be even less of a future if the Nazis win the war,” he said with absolute assurance, and shoveled harder.

There was something dangerous in his laugh, something that gave Trudi the feeling that, to him, building the tunnel was an adventure, a way of getting back at the Führer. It made her wish her father hadn’t asked for his help. But Herr Hesping knew how to get fugitives out of the country; he was the one with connections, among them his brother, the bishop, who’d often disapproved of Emil’s schemes and now found himself united with him in the same quest.

She watched him dig, his movements fast, his face and bald head smudged with earth.

“I’ve been wanting to ask you something for some time now,” he whispered to her when he caught her looking at him.

She glanced around, startled. Her father was loosening mortar from an egg-shaped rock, and the others weren’t close enough to hear. “What?”

“That day of your mother’s funeral…”

She felt the gravel under her mother’s skin, saw the motorcycle tilt—

“Why did you play the piano, Trudi?”

She didn’t remember playing the piano, and when she told him, he said, “I wanted to make sure I remembered it correctly.”

“Well, I didn’t.” She looked at him, puzzled, and when he said nothing else, she picked up a pail and filled it with dirt.

When Leo Montag and Emil Hesping tried to do the heavy lifting and digging for old Herr Blau, he objected, and the two put in a secret shift one night after the Blaus had gone to sleep. If Herr Blau noticed the progress on the tunnel the following night, he didn’t mention it, perhaps because he was preoccupied with ideas for decorating his cellar. He talked about hanging up pictures to brighten the space for his Jewish visitors, as he called them, and he dragged bolts of fabric downstairs, intent on covering long pillows that would double as mattresses if laid side by side.

When Leo pointed out that the cellar had to look like a cellar, and that any touches of comfort like that would give it away as a hiding place, Herr Blau was disappointed.

“There’s so much else you can do with the fabric,” Emil Hesping comforted him. “They’ll need clothes. Blankets.”

Sometimes, while hauling pails of earth to the brook, Trudi would think of Max Rudnick and wonder where he was. She felt sure he’d want to help with the tunnel if she asked him. Not that she would—still, she had a feeling she could trust him. He hadn’t come to the library in weeks, and she hoped nothing had happened to him. Not that she missed him, she reminded herself.

Working with the others on the tunnel—dirty, sweaty, and aching—she felt more of a sense of belonging to a community than she ever had before. When finished, the passage would allow people to escape from one house to the other in moments. The openings in the wall would be well hidden: on the Blaus’ side, an old armoire was to be pushed in front of the gap, while the Montags had already emptied their potato bin to make it light enough for one person to pull in front of their entrance. If the police searched one house, the fugitives would enter the other house through the tunnel and pull the façade back into place. It would be a problem if both houses were searched at the same time: the tunnel was so short and low that, at most, two people could hide inside, and then only for a short while. But mostly the fugitives would live on the first floors of the houses, close enough to the cellar stairs to rush down if anyone knocked at the door.