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 (90 page)

“He’ll never forget,” Trudi said.

Georg found work at a farm near the cemetery, where he cleaned stables and cleared rocks from the fields. One day, when Trudi came out of the cemetery, where she’d watered the family grave, Georg was loading manure onto a wooden cart.

When he noticed her, a sudden shame came into his eyes. “Some day I’ll drive a car again,” he called out to her, his voice defiant as if he’d always owned a car.

She thought of the car he’d won and gambled away before going into the war. “You only had it for a few days.”

Though he grinned at her and raised his pitchfork as if in a greeting,
she still saw his shame: it connected him to her; it was better than nothing.

All of the Bilders’ sons, except for the fat boy, of course, who’d vanished about twelve years ago, returned to Burgdorf, beaten down by the war, but not crippled like some—their mother would tell her friends—not killed like most of the boys they’d grown up with, including the Weskopp brothers next door. It was out of pity for the widow Weskopp that Frau Bilder restrained her joy at having her sons back: she did not hold the elaborate feast she’d dreamed of whenever she’d been paralyzed by uncertainty during the war years and had found comfort in imagining the homecoming dinner, from soup to the last sprig of parsley, even the tablecloth that her grandmother had embroidered with a border of blue roses.

At times, it felt suffocating to Trudi to have the four from the barn back in town. The war hadn’t claimed a single one of them, though Hans-Jürgen had been presumed missing in Russia, and Fritz Hansen was almost like a dead man without his jaw. Despite five surgeries, Fritz still looked hideous. His parents had reopened the bakery with the help of Alfred Meier, who drove the bakery truck, but their own son worked only in the cellar, where the bread ovens were. Though Fritz wanted to wait on customers, his parents figured people wouldn’t buy from them if they had to look at their son’s mangled face and the gauze which, regardless how often Fritz replaced it, looked soggy and quivered with each breath like a small, white animal that had sucked itself to his throat.

Paul Weinhart had escaped miraculously when American tanks had advanced toward the trenches that he and nearly two hundred German soldiers had dug—rain-drenched ditches in which the men had squatted, dozing off from fatigue and hunger. Only Paul and four others managed to scramble up into trees and hide before the tanks pounded across the muddy ground and buried the Germans alive. And it was not an accident, because Paul watched as the tanks backed up and, beneath their heavy tracks, crushed all life below.

Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier had surfaced in an American prison camp. When his mother came to the grocery store, she told Frau Weiler that some of the Americans had taunted prisoners by withholding water even though the barracks were on a hill next to a clear brook. One twenty-year-old from Bavaria, crazed with thirst, had
crawled under the wire fence and rolled himself down that slope toward the brook. As he immersed his face in the stream, he was shot. Her son, Frau Braunmeier said, was certain that, even though there’d been enough food in the camp, the Americans had kept their prisoners close to starvation, with only two bowls of soup per day. “Their idea of punishment,” Hans-Jürgen told his parents. “They said it was only fair because the Jews got even less food in the KZs.”

Comments like that evoked indignation throughout town. Hadn’t they all been deprived of housing and food? They too had lost husbands and sons—not to the KZ, granted, but to the war and to prison. And for them it hadn’t stopped with the end of the war. At least the Jews had been released from the KZs.

In the American camp where her son had stayed—so Frau Braunmeier reported to the taxidermist—prisoners had been forced into hard labor, restoring demolished streets. Every day, two or more of the underfed prisoners had collapsed. Quite a few died. For a while her son was allowed to work in the camp kitchen, but after he was caught eating potato peels from the trash heap, he was assigned to the latrine crew.

“The Amis acted like each one of our men was Hitler,” Frau Braunmeier whispered to the priest’s housekeeper. “My son says it brought out the worst in them. And to think they believe they’re better than the Germans.”

Those stories made the people of Burgdorf wary of the American soldiers who lived in their midst, those men who were kind to them on occasion, who let the small children ride on their shoulders. It was evident that the Amis were much tougher with the men, interrogating them and demanding proof that they had not participated in what the Amis called
Kriegsverbrechen
—war crimes.

Even men who had not fought were questioned, including Herr Pastor Beier, who was exhausted from trading absolution for dreadful war confessions. Irate at being summoned to the
Rathaus—
though it was only across the street from the rectory, where his housekeeper was complicating his life enough with glances that made him feel he’d failed her in some significant way—he had to wait nearly an hour before a young American officer, whose knees quite likely had never pressed the hard wood of a church pew, inquired what the priest’s position had been during the war.

“I lived for my parish.” Hands folded on his raised belly, Herr Pastor
Beier recited the statement that he’d worked out more carefully than any sermon. He had written it the morning after the Americans had come to Burgdorf, and he’d since revised it daily. As he told the Ami officer about everything he’d done for his parishioners, his voice shook with conviction as it would in his very best sermons. “I know you people are attacking us because we stayed silent. What good would it have done? Look at all the priests who tried.” He paused dramatically. “They were arrested. Killed in KZs. I chose to be silent because I knew I’d be of greater help to my parish if I could stay here.”

Though the pastor worried that his reputation might have been sullied by the questioning, he consoled himself after dark by spreading three
Brötchen
with
Leberwurst
and starting in on the
Graupensuppe
—barley soup—that Fräulein Teschner had cooked for the following day. As he ate, he imagined the car the bishop would surely provide for him now that the war was over. A car… the priest thought as he finished the rabbit stew and opened the last jar of canned cherries, a nice car … with blue upholstery if he were given the choice.…

He dreamed about the car that night, and in his dream the car had soft blue upholstery, new, but the steering wheel was an egg, a huge egg still in its shell, and when he tapped it with the golden cross that his mother used to wear around her neck when he was a boy—carefully, of course, because he didn’t mean to break the shell but simply test how strong it was—it stayed intact while from within its oval shape came the ringing of a single bell. Though the priest didn’t know what to make of that dream, it seemed like a good omen, and he wasn’t at all surprised when he received a letter in the morning, informing him that the bishop was considering his request for transportation.

Trudi had waited for Max Rudnick when the camps had emptied, thinking that surely now, if he had been imprisoned, he would return to her. And when he didn’t, she tried to accept that he must be dead. But if he were, his flesh would be decaying somewhere beneath the earth, and she couldn’t allow herself to envision him like that. It was less painful to think of him somewhere with Ruth Abramowitz, who had become his lover. He must have found her right away in Dresden, the night before the firebombing, and they’d taken one look at each
other and fallen in love, even though Ruth’s front tooth was chipped and Max was blind without his glasses. Maybe his lenses had been broken, and he couldn’t see her chipped tooth. Without his glasses, so he’d told her, everything looked blurry, a merging of colors without distinct outlines. But then a man who could love a
Zwerg
woman could probably love any woman.…

With the Abramowitzs’ treasures, which would afford them a rather cozy life, the two had driven in Max’s car to a small hotel in South Germany, where Ruth had once stayed as a child with her parents. She’d always wanted to return there, and as soon as she saw Max, she knew she’d go there with him. By now, the two of them were talking about names for the children they would have.

Even though Trudi knew that the scenarios she imagined were as predictable and foolish as the plots in the romance novels she lent to her customers, she couldn’t cast off her jealousy. She’d picture the two in their hotel room, or in the apartment they’d found, always making love, always. The windows would be open, wide open, and a warm breeze would billow the lace curtains and nuzzle their nude bodies. Stop it, she’d tell herself, stop it. But instead she’d simply place Max and Ruth somewhere else, north of Dresden, say, in Hamburg or on the island Rügen, where they’d stroll by the water, arm in arm.

She came to hate Ruth Abramowitz, felt herself capable of killing Max for deceiving her with Ruth. And still, still—she would have forgiven him if he’d returned to her. Now. She kept extending the deadline by which she’d accept him back into her life: at first it was the end of May, then it became the middle of June, and as she passed both dates, as well as the anniversary of her mother’s death, she granted him till July 23, her thirtieth birthday. Even if Max arrived the evening before her birthday, she promised herself, they would not celebrate it one hour before its time. Even if he begged her.

“Look what happened when we celebrated your birthday early,” she’d tell him, “look what happened to us then. You disappeared and I was afraid you’d never come back.”

“There’s not a single day I didn’t think about you, Trudi.”

Her thirtieth birthday would be the glitziest birthday she’d ever had—more spectacular than the fireworks her father had taken her to on her fourth birthday, more dazzling than Pia’s circus coming to town, more festive than the dinner party her father had given for Konrad
and his mother the night of their departure. And for Eva, she thought, and for Eva, feeling guilty that she’d even let herself think of her birthday. She was selfish. Selfish and greedy. Eva would never have another birthday. Neither would Ruth’s parents. Or the priest Adolf. If any of them were alive, they would have written or come home by now. And Ruth, she was probably dead too, burned and shattered in Dresden. Along with thousands of others, including Max who, more likely than not, had not found her in the brief time before the city had been decimated.

That first year after the war was the hardest for the people of Burgdorf. There was little food or coal. Some people froze. Milk still had a bluish sheen and was thinned down so much you could look through it. If you could no longer pay your debts, the
Gerichtsvollzieber
—bailiff—would enter your home to paste the cuckoo—a sticker indicating a lien—on the back of your furniture. You’d still have some time to pay your debts, but if you couldn’t, the entire neighborhood would watch as your piano, say, or your chest of drawers was carried from your house.

The shame of it.

Though nearly everyone was struggling, it hurt your pride if your family went hungry. In the face of such poverty, it became even more important to keep things clean. Poverty like that made you think of the unknown benefactor, whose memory caused you—at your poorest ever—to take up the habit of leaving anonymous gifts on the front steps of those who were more in need than you.

Yet, even during the leanest of times, the people came to Trudi for her stories, stories she told them about others in their small town that was infected by silence. When they looked down at her, they could feel superior—an attitude most had been infused with since the day of their birth. They could glance at her stunted body, the broad features, and even the most hideous among them could feel superior. Next to Trudi Montag, they could reinvent themselves, could obliterate whatever doubts were theirs alone at night, and—with a trace of benevolence even—accept her stories as something due them.

Trudi’s gift lay in knowing. Knowing the words that named the thoughts inside people’s minds, the words that masked the fears and secrets inside their hearts. To force their secrets to the surface like
water farts and let them rip through the silence. They called her a snoop, a meddler. But even though she was more inconvenient to them than ever before, they kept coming back—to borrow books, they liked to believe—yet, what they really came for, even those who feared Trudi Montag, were the stories she told them about their neighbors and relatives. What they brought Trudi in return were stories of their own lives, which they yielded to her questions or, unknowingly, to her ears as she overheard them talk to each other between the stacks; and they didn’t even miss what she had taken from them until the words they’d bartered in return for her tales had ripened into new stories that disclosed far more about them than they knew themselves.

To flip his luck, Georg Weiler played cards two evenings a week. Although Helga protested that he drank too much, he was quick to charm her, asking her if she wasn’t glad her husband was home from the war, unharmed. “What are two measly evenings,” he’d ask, “compared to years of battle?” And he’d lean over the bed where his twin daughters slept side by side and kiss their hair.

How could Helga possibly stay angry with a man who was a tender father like that? Most fathers she knew, including her own, gave scant attention to their children, especially if they were girls. But Georg would bounce the twins on his knees or let them chase him through the apartment until they’d scream with delight; he’d sing to them so beautifully that Helga would open her windows for the entire town to hear how happy her husband was with his family.

When Georg lost his job at the farm for coming in late three mornings, Helga was pregnant again, but he managed to find employment within a month, just as he had promised. Though driving a taxi took him away from home more, Helga was glad for him because he looked so proud behind a steering wheel. Besides, the twins adored their father, as did every child in the neighborhood: he was never too tired to squat on the sidewalk and play with them, to show them how to win marbles or spin a top.