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 (76 page)

She could feel the ending of the story curling around herself and the boy, drawing in the others at the table: they were listening closely—not with laughter as they had to her father’s stories—but
with a stunned sadness. “Everything on the island withered. The palm trees lost their big leaves. Peaches shriveled hard around their pits. Oranges turned brown. Even the biggest waterfall dwindled to one muddy trickle.”

It was silent in the kitchen.

“Is that the end?” Konrad asked.

“For now.” If only she’d found a story of hope to send with him on his way. If only she could get out of Germany with him the way Stefan Blau had nearly half a century before.

“It will change some day,” Konrad surprised her by saying.

“It will have to,” she agreed quickly.

Her father stood up. Everyone looked at him, but no one spoke.

Frau Neimann pushed her chair back. “I need to pack. It’s—” Her voice skipped. “It’s time. Isn’t it? It must be time.”

He nodded.

“I’ll help you get ready,” Eva offered.

Trudi dashed over to the sink and picked up the nearly empty bottle of lotion. “Don’t forget this.”

Frau Neimann’s chin puckered. She shook her head.

Trudi pressed it into her hands. “Please. You and Konrad—you’ve brought so much into our lives.”

By the middle of summer the canvas that lined the tunnel smelled of mildew, and when Leo Montag and Herr Blau peeled it off, patches of mold bloomed behind it, and a fine shower of dirt drifted down on them.

Their latest fugitive, a taxi driver from Bremen, who’d been hidden in nine other places so far, was concerned there might be some caving-in above. “If so, it could be seen from the street,” he warned.

Herr Blau assured him, “No one walks between my house and the pay-library.”

But when Leo checked the narrow strip of grass, he found a shallow puddle right above the area of the tunnel. That night, he and the taxi driver shored the tunnel up with posts and rafters that Herr Blau had kept stacked in his cellar. They debated about filling the puddle with dirt and decided against it, since dirt would be even more noticeable with all the grass around it.

Their next visitors, two elderly sisters from Köln, suggested laying boards across the floor of the tunnel to keep their skirts dry.

“Then the water could seep under the wood,” the taller one said after Trudi had rehearsed the escape pattern with them.

“Yes,” the other sister said. “We’d be able to crawl across the boards without getting muddy.”

In some way each fugitive contributed to improving the tunnel. Eva stretched thin fabric from her nightgown beneath the ceiling to catch specks of earth that might sift into your eyes or settle between your neck and collar. She was the only one who’d been staying with Trudi and Leo since spring. The others came and departed quickly, bearing dreadful stories, far more dreadful than anything Trudi could have invented, as if some deity had gone mad while contriving demented plots; and each plot telescoped within itself the plots of others that the fugitives had encountered on their desperate journeys. As Trudi listened to them, she was overcome by a sense of the unbelievable, as if it all were transpiring in a world far more outlandish than Pia’s island. Whatever had happened in her family and her town before Hitler and his brown gang had seized power—including the death of her mother and the disappearance of Georg Weiler’s father and the wedding of Klaus Malter, even her rape in the Braunmeiers’ barn—she could have imagined herself, spun forward into the texture of a much greater motif; but these new stories, carried to her by the people she harbored, she could have never invented: they stopped her, bludgeoned her with their finality, although their endings were obscure.

Twice, when the police searched the neighborhood while fugitives crouched in the tunnel, Trudi was shocked at how easy it was to lie to them: “No, we haven’t had any visitors for days.… My father and I—we talk with customers who come into the library, but we lead rather private lives.… Eva Sturm?” She’d tilt her face toward them, sideways, draw her neck into her shoulders, make herself smaller, harmless, helpful. “Of course, I know Eva Sturm … have known her all my life.… I was invited to her wedding, you know. It was a beautiful wedding. You should have—No, no, I haven’t seen her. Not in months.…” Her body would lean into a limp, slowing them for a few precious seconds as she’d offer to lead them through the house, and she’d hobble out of their way as they’d crush past her.

Her heart numb with a cold certainty that the tunnel was safe—had to be safe—she’d wait for them by the front door, her pulse steady, her expression polite as she’d hold the door for them on their
way out. Only then, after she’d turn the key inside the lock, would she start shaking. Holding on to the banister, she’d tell herself that it had to be far worse for Eva and the others in the tunnel, that she should rush to let them know they could come out again, but she’d have to lower herself to the steps and sit there before she’d be able to walk.

Emil Hesping and the bishop were coordinating a constantly changing number of hiding places from Köln north to the Dutch border. Since Emil had always traveled between the branches of the gymnasts’ club, people were used to his trips and didn’t get suspicious if they didn’t see him for days.

“It’s crucial,” he would remind Trudi, “not to have any of the groups know the identity of other groups. We also need to be careful what we say to the people we hide. Remember—they might be apprehended and forced to talk.”

“You don’t have to tell me again,” she’d say.

“It’s something I need to keep telling myself.”

Already, her gossip had taken on a new pattern: she would select her stories, conscious of preserving the safety of the people who relied on her, even though she’d feel restrained because there was so much she couldn’t tell—like about the woman crippled with arthritis whose husband had looked after her with such tenderness, unaware how amazed Trudi was by the kind of love that didn’t flinch from physical differences; or the young nurse from Berlin who’d stolen two spoons from the Montags before she’d been taken to a new place; or the young priest who despised his name, Adolf, and had given her a new respect for the clergy, not only because he’d hidden Jews in his church in Dresden, but also through his stories of other priests and ministers—some of them fearful souls, he admitted—who had spoken out against the oppression of the Jews and had been arrested or even killed.

Those stories swelled inside Trudi, forming a reservoir that she couldn’t draw on, though it deepened with each day of concern for everyone who’d left her house for an uncertain destination. She tried to tell herself that she’d be able to release those stories after the war, that she was only postponing them until then; and yet, part of her already sensed that those stories would never flourish, that—after the war—she would find very few who’d want to listen because the people of Burgdorf would be immersed in changing what had happened into a history they could sleep with,
eine heile Welt
—an intact world
they could offer to the next generation. Ironically, Anton Immers—one of the few who would admit that he’d believed in the Führer—would make the good people of Burgdorf uncomfortable with his regret that the regime was over and with his dreams of its revival in even greater glory.

More and more, Trudi began to see herself as an underground messenger, safeguarding her stories while reporting details from the British radio station about the military situation, which usually contradicted what the German stations were broadcasting. She often thought of Konrad and fought the dread that, wherever he might be, he was in danger. With the priest Adolf, she’d known from the moment she’d met him that he would survive the war: it was in his eyes, that survival, in the way he moved his rugged body. Arrested during mass, he’d managed to escape into the dense forest just before the transport had reached the gates of the KZ Buchenwald outside Weimar.

The night before the priest was to leave the pay-library, Trudi watched him shave. She’d propped one of her gold-framed mirrors next to the kitchen sink for him. It was one of those hot, hot June evenings when the air is damp and your skin feels sleek with sweat. As Adolf lathered his face with her father’s shaving soap, he showed her where one of the guards on the train had pushed a thumb into the soft spot behind his ear.

“For an instant there, I thought I’d die. That transport, it taught me about hunger. I didn’t know hunger like that could exist. I felt ashamed of it.” His voice was rapid, barely more than a whisper. “Beneath the hunger was a constant greed—like a wild dog that could be turned loose any moment. I was as afraid of that greed as of the guards, afraid of what it might make me do.…”

He stared into the mirror and raised the shaving blade. “That hunger—it brought out the worst in some of us, the best in others. On the train I saw a father grab food away from his daughter.… I saw an old man trampled as others fought over one raw potato. Not everyone was like that, of course. Many sacrificed and shared what little they had. I was dizzy and cold and weak with hunger—that was my entire focus.… I longed for my connection to God, tried to remember the joy I’d found in playing the organ in our church, but everything was reduced to my belly. It was my God, my one companion.…

“After I escaped—” He shook his head and started again, and what
he told Trudi took away forever any doubts she might have still held on to, doubts that those rumors of people dying by the hundreds in camps were far too horrible to be true. She saw the priest crouched in the woods outside high loops of barbed wire, saw him stumble away from a vast grave—naked bodies shoved into the gouged earth, twisted in indecent embraces. He made his way through the woods to Weimar, where his favorite poets, Goethe and Schiller, had lived and written, and he hid between the tall monuments in the cemetery near the crypt where the two poets rested in splendid recognition.

“Those nights in the cemetery.…” The priest scraped the foam down his left cheek. “I thought I’d go insane. I could not understand how some people’s graves could be marked while others were obliterated without evidence. It felt more horrible than any other injustice I’d ever known of. I couldn’t fathom it. I tried to, and the trying was crazy making.…”

Gradually he’d moved west, aided by people he said he’d never forget. During his flight he’d met other fugitives but only one woman who’d actually escaped from inside a KZ, Dachau, smuggled out by a guard. The woman, who had shared a hiding place behind the false wall of a closet with the priest for eight days, had told him about the camp—the filth, the hunger, the open sores—but what had been the worst for her had been the washroom where, together with others, she’d had to strip, stand under the icy water, and get doused with disinfectants that made her eyes sting, while guards laughed or pushed them around.

All at once Trudi wanted to stop the information coming to her, wanted to block the remembering of what the priest had already told her, but knew that his words were carved into her soul as surely as any moment she had lived. “What happened to the woman?” she asked hoarsely, her forehead covered with sweat.

“They couldn’t take away her spirit, though every day others went insane in the camp. Every day. For her, that washroom became her salvation because that’s where the guard who would eventually help her to escape saw her.…” The priest winced as he cut his chin. “The guard didn’t expect to fall in love with her.” Blood ran down the white foam, spreading into a pink blotch.

Trudi ran into the bathroom and brought him a few pieces of toilet paper. “Here.”

He pressed them against the cut. “She used him. Pretended.”

“I would have done the same.”

“The guard had it all figured out. False papers for her so that they could marry. Imagine that.… He’d keep doing his death work and she’d be at home, cooking his meals, keeping his uniforms clean, having his babies for the
Vaterland.”

“How did she get out?”

“She agreed to marry him, and he smuggled her out. Under layers of trash. He took her to this room he’d rented for the two of them above a bakery in München. At first he kept locking her in, but she made him believe that she would never want to go anywhere without him.”

“And that’s when he gave her a key.”

“Yes.”

“My father had to keep my mother locked up.”

The priest looked at Trudi. He’d stopped the bleeding by sticking a small triangle of paper to his cut.

“He had to. She—she wasn’t well. She died when I was four.”

“How terrible for you.”

“It happened a long time ago. Besides, compared to what you and many others have to suffer—”

“Ah, but we can’t do that—compare our pain. It minimizes what happens to us, distorts it. We need to say, yes, this is what happened to me, and this is what I’ll do with it.” He rinsed his chin. “You know what I’m going to do as soon as I can?”

She shook her head.

“Change my name. Legally.”

She felt disappointed by his answer. It seemed petty, considering all he could be doing. “You don’t have to tell people that your name is Adolf. You didn’t have to tell me. You could have made up another name.”

“But don’t you see?” He bent close to her. His face smelled of her father’s soap. “Right now there isn’t anything I can do legally without getting caught again, but that’s what I tell myself when I get worn down, that I’ll change my name. I despise that name. Of course there are things far more important that I want to do—like stop the transports, the camps—”

“The war,” Trudi said.

“Yes, but I know I can’t stop them, and so I need to fasten on one thing that’s within my power to do.” His eyes burned with conviction. “By saying that name aloud, I keep my rage, my determination.…”

She wished he would stay longer, but he’d only be there for a few more hours because Herr Hesping had already arranged a new place for him. She and her father were just one station on his way toward shedding his name.

When the oldest Weskopp son died on the Russian front that fall, the widow Weskopp, who had suffered silently, screamed and kept screaming. When the neighbor women came running, they found her standing in the room that her two sons used to share, staring at the framed butterfly collection—dusty shapes, once vibrantly colorful, impaled on stick pins—that hung on the wall between the two beds. You could hear her screams all over town. They couldn’t have lasted very long, but they seemed to be there all day. And even during the night people would wake up and think they heard those screams, which gave voice to the pain that the town had endured—far more penetrating and unsettling than the sirens that warned when planes crossed Burgdorf on their way to drop bombs on Düsseldorf or Köln.