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 (99 page)

“Herr Immers said he was naked.”

“Herr Immers is right. You see, the man wanted to swim and didn’t have his bathing suit.”

“My mother swims without a bathing suit. When she’s out in the ocean. Or the river. Then she takes it off. My father says she’ll lose it some day.”

“He would say that.”

“Did the man swim?”

“He was a good swimmer.”

“Why didn’t you marry him?”

“Because he didn’t come back.”

“Maybe he’s on his way.”

“Oh, Hanna.” She was back to her endless days of waiting, of willing Max to come back to her.
“Tell me what you saw this time, Max.”

“I’ll paint it for you.” “Tell me now.…”
The flush of yellow-orange petals spreading across white walls of cities and into the sky. “He was a painter.”

“Like my mother?”

Trudi nodded.

“Do you miss him?”

All at once she was crying, crying in front of this child who slid down the ladder and wrapped her arms around her and kept saying, “You got me now.”

“And I’ll always have him too. You see—You see, Hanna, he had to go to another country.… He is a builder of cities, of houses so beautiful you can hardly imagine them.…” She cried as she evoked Max for Hanna, building light from memory and grief, the kind of light you find in shadowy spaces—not the pretty glimmer that passes quickly, but light that carries its own flip side of darkness, of oddness, ugliness even—like the flash of strawberry red against a woman’s white fingers.

But Hanna’s father was shocked by the story that his daughter brought home, and he was standing outside the pay-library the following morning when Trudi unlocked the door. With a clipped greeting, he stalked past her in his starched white jacket.

“Hanna is too young for stories like that.”

Trudi closed the door and followed him to the counter. “Stories like what?”

“About that man by the river. We all know you’d never seen him before.”

“Do we now?”

His eyes flicked from her and down to his hands.

She remembered how much she had wanted to touch those hands long ago. And she remembered the dress she’d worn the night she’d danced with him, the sleeveless chiffon with the Spanish bolero jacket that Frau Abramowitz had given her. She remembered walking on her toes in those absurd high heels, and she thought how much more comfortable she felt now in her flat canvas shoes and wash-softened housedress.

“And what if I had known him, Klaus Malter, what then? Would that change anything? What if I had known him for months? Or years? What if he was the kind of man who, after he kissed me, did not pretend it had never happened?”

As the dentist’s face turned red, a brighter shade of red than his beard, she knew that he, too, had never forgotten that kiss, had always remembered it and felt uneasy about it, and in that moment of victory, she thought how both their lives might have been easier if they’d talked about that night. Perhaps then, rather than this victory, she could have had his friendship.

“What if this man actually loved me?” she whispered.

“I— I can’t answer that.”

“I’m not asking you to answer it. I want you to imagine it.”

He flushed an even deeper red. “Hanna is only five. She is better off not hearing things like that.”

“Hanna came to me with questions—rumors—about a man without clothes by the river, about some danger I was in. All I did was tell her enough to stop her from worrying.”

“Even so—I don’t want her coming here and bothering you.”

“Your daughter does not bother me.”

“My wife and I—It’s one thing we don’t agree on, Hanna coming here.”

“But what about Hanna? Doesn’t it count what she wants?”

He was silent.

“Think of all I haven’t told her—like what really happened to her great-uncle and Eva.”

“Alexander died. That’s all Hanna needs to know.”

“She already knows more than that—And it’s not from me. She heard in the bakery that he jumped from the attic window.”

“And what did you say?”

“That she heard right.”

Klaus groaned.

“Your daughter says you told her Eva died from tuberculosis.”

“It’s something a child can understand.”

“That doesn’t make it true. Still—it’s in your family. Right now she believes Alexander killed himself because his wife died from tuberculosis. I haven’t told her otherwise. Even though I don’t like it. But if she asks me questions about myself, I’ll tell her the truth.”

The old women thought it was a good idea when the dentist hired Klara Brocker to look after his daughter and his apartment, since his wife was too absorbed with her painting and with hoarding her grief over her son’s death as though no one else had ever lost a child.

But Trudi couldn’t understand how Jutta could delegate her daughter to the care of this tidy woman with her plucked eyebrows and tight permanent. Once before, Klara Brocker had found a way to get something that had been intended for someone else, and her new role in Hanna’s life was harder to bear for Trudi than the trade of Ingrid’s jewelry box.

Hanna, who’d lived the first five years of her life with her mother painting right next to her, and the freedom to sneak out and wander about town, resented the new housekeeper. Not only was she watched constantly and dragged to church at least once a day for prayers, but she also lost her mother, who retreated to the third floor where she painted all day. Herr Tegern had designed a studio for her in the rooms where she’d lived as girl, and from the one huge window—in the falling pattern of her uncle—Jutta could see across town.

Rolf Brocker always arrived with his mother. A chubby boy with delicately shaped ears, he fought with Hanna over her toys and told her that his father had been killed in the war. Though she knew other children whose fathers had died as soldiers, they were older than Rolf and she. Now, when she went to the pay-library, she was usually with the housekeeper and her son. But Trudi knew how to distract Klara Brocker: she’d offer to watch the children and urge her to take her time finding the right books.

Even after her mother became far too ill to read, Klara Brocker continued to get books for the old woman. She’d come into the pay-library with the two children, shake her head, and say to Trudi, “I don’t know why my mother would read this trash.” But there’d be a greed in her eyes as she’d touch the romance novels which, aside from French cigarettes, Gauloises, were her one extravagance.

And Trudi would play along. “Your mother… she might like this,” she’d recommend, wondering what Klara would pretend once her mother died. Perhaps she’d stay away from the pay-library for a month, say, or even half a year, but one day, Trudi knew, she’d come in and wordlessly check out several romances.

A few days after the children started first grade, Trudi heard rumors that Sybille Immers had tripped Hanna on the playground, and that Hanna had punched Sybille’s arm. When both mothers were summoned by the principal, who wanted to assign each girl three rosaries as punishment, Jutta said she would encourage her daughter to defend herself any time she was attacked. While Trudi applauded her decision, the town only saw it as one other way the dentist’s wife set herself apart.

Much of the time, Leo Montag was in pain, and the new doctor in town, Frau Doktor Korten, stopped by daily to give him an injection. For a few hours, then, it would cease—that heaviness which grew from a pulse in Leo’s left knee and pumped throughout his frail body—but soon it would return, press its way from the same place as if the disk of steel had contaminated his flesh and transformed it all into steel.

A few months earlier, on the coldest day of winter, the stocky young doctor had arrived from Bremen and had bought the pianist’s mansion—which had stood empty since the war—with plans to turn it into a women’s clinic, though people told her it was too far from the center of town. She didn’t mind treating men, too, it seemed, because she’d drive wherever she was called. When she warned Leo that his ribs showed and urged him to eat more, he told her how heavy he felt. To move this burdensome body of steel took more stamina than he had, and he stayed in his bedroom, where Trudi brought him meals that he seldom finished, and where he drifted between sleep and his books that were stacked along the wall next to his bed.

Sometimes, to take the worry from his daughter’s eyes, he’d let her
help him down the stairs and settle him on Emil’s sofa while she sat and read to him; but he was far more comfortable in his room, surrounded by Gertrud’s photos. Over the decades, they had faded so much that her features were unrecognizable to anyone but himself—at most images of a ghost woman, nuances of pearly gray—yet what he saw was her black, tangled hair, the feverish pink of her face.

The night the dike broke, Leo thought he heard Gertrud laugh outside his window. The Rhein had been frozen solid all winter, and when the ice thinned, the river spilled across the bank, covering the charred remains of a shepherd’s fire between the rocks, and swelling across the meadows. As in other years, the townspeople had tried to reinforce the dike with sand-filled bags and shovelfuls of earth. Yet, their river broke through the barricades, yanking trees and bushes out by their roots as if they were weeds. It flowed into streets and houses, across beds and tables. From the taxidermist’s shop the flood liberated the family’s stuffed dachshund and a dusty squirrel.

As torrents of rain added to the floods, the water rose. Families carried their belonging to the upper floors. Some moved in with neighbors in apartments above them. Mass was held in the chapel on the hill. From his bedroom, Leo Montag could watch the boats in the streets. He thought this flood was turning Burgdorf into more of a community than it had been since the war: suddenly, people were all fighting the same enemy, their river, an enemy that was easily defined and outside themselves. For some, the flood even became something festive: they’d point to a sparrow, to a titmouse or pigeon; they’d marvel that the sea gulls had followed the Rhein into town.

After the river had retreated, Frau Weskopp reported a grave robbery. She was hysterical when she arrived at the police station on her bicycle, but when Andreas Beil checked her family grave, it turned out that the flood—as with other graves—had simply leveled the earth above the middle coffin, leaving a shallow depression.

That same day, Trudi cooked her father a surprise dinner for his sixty-seventh birthday: a roasted chicken she’d traded for library books, new potatoes and fresh peas, a strawberry cake and wine. While preparing the meal, she managed to stop fretting about him for a while because she imagined how much he would enjoy the food. After Frau Doktor Korten stopped by to give him his injection, Trudi led her father to the table, set with candles and her mother’s best linen tablecloth, which she’d ironed until you couldn’t detect a single
crease. His eyes shimmered as he watched the candles, but he hardly ate. When Trudi helped him back upstairs, he felt so light she thought she could have carried him, and he fell asleep while she read to him from his birthday present, a book by Bertolt Brecht that he hadn’t been able to replace so far.

He died the afternoon of the following day. She knew it before she raced up to his room, knew it by looking at the branches of the chestnut tree outside the window of the library and recalling what her father had told her about uprooting that tree from its earth by the flour mill and planting it here to keep her mother home. It hadn’t worked for her mother, and now—when the tree had grown taller than their house, providing shade and, come autumn, glossy chestnuts that burst from their prickly shells—it hadn’t worked for her father either. He too, had gotten away, leaving his body for her to find.

Frau Weiler and other neighbor women moved into her life, her house, making burial arrangements that seemed incredibly complicated to her though, in past years, she’d helped make them for other families. Dazed, she drifted from one room to another, refusing food when it was held out to her, staring past people who stood in her path and wanted to talk to her about her father’s tenderness, his thoughtfulness.

Matthias Berger arrived on the train for the funeral, and Klaus Malter asked if he could drive Trudi to the cemetery, his voice hushed as if he were afraid to wake her father. More people came to Leo Montag’s burial than to anyone else’s in years. The widows of Burgdorf carried flowers to his grave as if they were grieving for their own husbands, and when Trudi looked beyond her own tears, she saw immeasurable sorrow as though her father really had left behind all those widows.

At the gravesite, Herr Stosick—heavy and bald—stood behind her as if prepared to brace her should she faint. All the men from the chess club were there, even though her father hadn’t attended in a long time. Ingrid’s daughter, her braids in even plaits down the front of her dress, stood next to her grandfather, whose shadow would forever lie across the ceiling of Ingrid’s room. If only she could say to Karin,
“I knew your mother when she was a young girl
… If only she could impart to Karin all she had loved about Ingrid. She thought of her father, who had lived with such grace, and how fortunate she was to have her memories of him. How she wished Karin could remember
her mother like that. She saw herself hiding in the church the day the Americans had arrived, saw Ingrid as she bent to lay her first daughter into her arms.
“I’ll be there”
she silently promised the girl,
“I’ll be there when you’re old enough to ask about your mother”

Angelika Tegern brought a bouquet of white lilies to the gravesite, and Frau Weskopp carried two clay pots with violets, one for Leo Montag, the other for Helmut Eberhardt because the midwife—who was so meticulous when it came to her house—had neglected to take care of her husband’s grave ever since her daughter had become ill with polio. Now Frau Weskopp and the other widows tended the grave—not out of loyalty to Helmut, but because they couldn’t let the grave of a soldier look disorderly.

The midwife was convinced her husband’s spirit was punishing her with Renate’s illness because she’d named the child after his mother. To combat his fury, she would invoke the older Renate. It seemed most of her prayers were directed to her, rather than to Jesus or the saints. Whenever the midwife visited her daughter in St. Lukas Hospital, she’d bring her mother-in-law’s shawl and wrap her daughter in the soft folds, trusting that, at least for then, both of them were safe.