by Ursula Hegi
two
1918-1919
THAT DAY TRUDI’S FATHER DID NOT OPEN THE PAY-LIBRARY. INSTEAD, HE borrowed the Abramowitzs’ Mercedes. Its back had windows and looked so much like a coach that you almost expected to see horses harnessed to it, but the front of the car was open, with tufted seats and a steering wheel on a long, angled shaft. While Frau Abramowitz read Trudi the fairy tale of the devil with the three golden hairs and fed her Brötchen with Dutch cheese, Leo Montag settled his wife in the closed compartment of the car with a blanket and two pillows from their bed, which she would pluck apart, filling the compartment with feathers that would cling to her green coat and hat like snowflakes by the time they’d reach Grafenberg, where she was to stay for nearly seven weeks.
It was snowing real snow when Trudi was finally allowed to visit her mother. She’d been in the Grafenberg forest before—it was a popular hiking area—but she’d only seen the high walls of the asylum from a distance. This time, though, she and her father walked up to the wall, close enough to see the shards of glass in the mortar along the top edge. Sharp and pointed, they could tear up your hands if you tried to escape. Trudi dug her hands deeply into the fur muff that matched the rabbit trim around her bonnet and on the collar of her coat. She wondered if anyone had climbed across this wall. Maybe the Kaiser had climbed across a wall like this in his fancy uniform when he’d escaped from Germany. But what if countries had even higher walls around them?
A few days earlier her father had told her that the Kaiser had resigned and fled the country. “He’s in Holland,” her father had said. “Now we’ll have peace.” Trudi had seen pictures of the Kaiser: his mouth looked vain beneath the fancy mustache, and he wore a shiny helmet with a stiff, glittering bird—the size of a pigeon—on top, its wings spread to keep from toppling off.
A guard dressed like a soldier opened the gate. His neck bulged, and his fingers were stained from tobacco. In his glance Trudi recognized that flash of curiosity she’d encountered before in strangers, but today it made her feel prickly, that curiosity, made her feel that she should be inside these walls where they locked up people who were different. In the eyes of the guard—she knew for certain—she was different, and it was a knowledge that would torment her from that day forward and fuel her longing to grow and take revenge on those who spurned her.
As the guard motioned toward the largest of the buildings, Trudi hesitated, but her father took her by the shoulders, and the guard shut the gate immediately behind them as if to keep them there. She had wanted to bring her mother’s birthday presents—a thick bathrobe and fur boots—but her father hadn’t let her though the birthday was only two days away.
“It’s dangerous,” he’d said. “We’ll celebrate when she comes home.”
His family had a history of disasters from celebrating special occasions too early: his Aunt Mechthild had drowned in the Rhein when her grandfather’s birthday picnic was held one day early; a cousin, Willi, had been injured in a train crash after celebrating his parents’ silver anniversary a week early; and his sister, Helene, had broken her arm when she opened a confirmation gift three days too soon.
In the lobby, which smelled of cinnamon and candles, Trudi’s father wiped her nose and unbuttoned her coat. A friendly nurse with loud shoes led them down a corridor and through a smaller set of gates that also locked behind them. Trudi’s mother stood waiting in a room with white chairs, all lined up along the walls. Her elbows angled as if she were carrying something fragile in her empty hands, she walked toward them, her eyes faded, and all at once Trudi no longer minded being inside these gates; she had missed her mother so fiercely that any place would be good, as long as she could be with both parents. Her mother smelled like the lobby. In front of Trudi she dropped to her knees and brought both palms against Trudi’s cheeks as if to memorize the shape of her face.
A few other families were visiting patients, and Leo Montag led his wife and daughter into a corner, where he arranged three chairs in a triangle that separated them from the others in the room. Only then did he embrace his wife and touch her forehead with his lips. Her hair was braided in a way Trudi had not seen on her before—starting at her temples in tight coils that puckered her skin as though someone who didn’t know her well had braided it for her.
Her mother wore those braids the following week when she was permitted to return home, and she smiled her weary hospital smile when Trudi untied the ribbons and brushed her hair until it crackled and floated on her shoulders like angels’ hair. Though it wasn’t silver like the angels’ hair you drape over the branches of your Christmas tree, its dark mass took in strands of light with each brush stroke. At first, her mother slept much of each day as if gathering reservoirs of strength for any movement she might have to make, but by Christmas, when Leo lit the beeswax candles on the pine tree in the living room, she looked much more like the mother Trudi remembered.
They ate carp in beer sauce and the white veal sausage that the butcher made only from mid-December till Christmas. When Trudi sang two songs and recited one poem, her mother kept applauding until Trudi felt so flustered that she trapped her mother’s hands between hers to make them stop.
They opened their gifts which were arranged on the round wicker table, beginning with the package from America: Aunt Helene had sent silver napkin rings with matching spoons and a Hampelmann— jumping jack. When Trudi opened her largest present from her parents—a porcelain baby doll with bright red lips—her mother pulled Trudi onto her knees.
“Wouldn’t you like a real baby, a little brother or sister?” she asked, beaming as if she were already seeing a child who was perfect.
“No,” Trudi said.
“A baby brother or sister who—”
“No!”
“Gertrud—” Trudi’s father started.
“Storks adore sugar.” Her mother’s voice was joyful. “And they bring babies to houses where people leave sugar cubes for them on the windowsill. That’s how the storks know where to take the babies.”
Trudi dug her chin into her collarbone, wondering if storks ever made mistakes. Like with her. Slipping from her mother’s knees, she ran past the stand with the potted ferns and the stuffed squirrel to the front door of the house. Her forehead against the cold glass panel, she stared into the fine whirls of snow. In the middle of the street stood the man-who-touches-his-heart. He raised his right index finger to his heart, his left index finger to his nose, and touched both at the same instant. Smiling as if satisfied that he’d accomplished that, he dropped his hands and raised them again, reversing the ritual: left to his nose, right to his heart. Before the war he used to be a biology teacher, but being a soldier had turned something within him. It was said that the man-who-touches-his-heart had seen his whole battalion die. Now he lived with various relatives, staying with one for a while before being sent on to the next.
But what if you had no relatives? Trudi shivered. Maybe the stork had been on his way to drop her off in a country where everyone had short arms and legs. Maybe she’d been brought by a cuckoo instead of a stork. Cuckoos left their eggs in the nests of other birds, letting them do all the work of sitting on the eggs. But when the young cuckoos broke through the shells, they were pushed from the nest. So far, her parents had kept her, even if she was the wrong baby. But what would happen if the stork brought them the right baby?
She felt her father’s hand on her hair. “You haven’t opened all your presents, Trudi.”
When he carried her back into the living room, her mother was winding a red ribbon around and around her wrist. She laughed when she saw Trudi, and as she held out her arms for her, the ribbon sprang free and coiled at her feet like a blood-covered snake. That night, her mother did not talk about the baby again. She helped Trudi to fit together her new building-block puzzle. Each side of a block had a picture fragment of a fairy tale, and when you set them all on a flat surface and matched them, you could make six pictures, including Hansel und Gretel, Schneewittc
hen und die sieben Zwerge, Rumpelstilzchen, and Dornröschen, who’d slept a hundred years.
Her mother played “Stille Nacht” on the upright piano and Trudi sang along. Whenever her voice merged with her mother’s in one of the long notes, her body felt measureless and warm. But when her parents kissed her good night in her room and settled a wrapped warm water bottle by her feet, they laid the stiff baby doll next to her. After the house became silent and dark, Trudi pushed the doll under her bed, but she could sense the presence of its porcelain body through her mattress. The following evening, her mother folded Trudi’s fingers around two sugar cubes and lifted her to the wide windowsill in the kitchen, where she made her lay the sugar on a saucer for the stork.
As soon as she woke up the next morning, Trudi rushed to the window. Though it was closed, the saucer was empty. She pulled aside the lace curtain, but the only animal outside was the baker’s dog, who kept barking at the clothesline behind the house, where the frost had turned the laundry into stiff people shapes.
“The stork must have been here,” her mother sang, a flush to her cheeks.
Her father glanced up from his newspaper, his face grave.
Trudi could tell he didn’t want the new baby either. But if they kept leaving sugar on the windowsill, the stork would certainly bring her a brother or sister who’d soon be taller than she. She took to climbing from her bed whenever she’d wake up in the middle of the night. On bare feet, she’d steal into the kitchen, push a chair against the wall below the window, and—if the sugar cubes which her mother had handed her in the evening were still there—she’d cram them into her mouth, scanning the night sky for the white shapes of storks while she chewed, hard, to keep a sibling from arriving and pushing her out of the house.
Storks. Though she hadn’t seen any of the tall birds in months, Trudi now looked for them everywhere: on chimneys, in trees, between clouds. She figured they couldn’t hide babies beneath their wings because, as soon as they’d spread their wings to fly, those babies would fall out. No, they’d carry the babies in slings attached to their long beaks or riding on their backs.
Sometimes, while sitting on the front step, prepared to chase off any stork with her mother’s rattan carpet beater, she’d hear the melodious voice of the Italian ragman. “Lumpen, Eisen, Papier…—Rags, iron, paper …” sang the ragman as his wooden cart rumbled through the streets of Burgdorf. He rang his bell as he chanted, “Lumpen, Eisen, Papier.…” In back of his cart stood a scale where he weighed old clothes and metal and paper before counting out coins from the leather pouch at his waist. “Lumpen, Eisen, Papier…” The ragman’s name was Herr Benotti. He was from Italy and always wore a white shirt, even when he unloaded his day’s gathering in the fenced yard behind his house on Lindenstrasse.
Every day Trudi’s mother talked about the new baby, and Trudi increased her vigil for storks. The morning after Easter her father told her the baby had died. “Your brother,” he said. Though Trudi hadn’t seen the baby—how could a baby die before it was here?—there was a funeral. Frau Blau brought her best linen cloths to cover the tables in the dining room and kitchen, and the neighbor women spread out a funeral feast: sheets of plum cake and deep bowls of potato salad; tureens with pea soup and barley soup; platters with blood sausage and head cheese; loaves of black bread and baskets of crisp Brötchen; cheese from Holland and Switzerland; and delicious white asparagus from the Buttgereits’ garden.
Frau Doktor Rosen urged Trudi’s mother to rest, but she flitted through the rooms, rearranging the daffodils from Frau Abramowitz’s flower beds, offering food to the guests, her beautiful eyes feverish, her skin nearly translucent. From whispered comments Trudi understood that her brother had arrived too early to be alive. Now she knew six dead people altogether. But the other five had died old, like Herr Talmeister, who used to spit on the sidewalk before he’d enter the pay-library.
She was sure her brother’s death had to do with the sugar she’d stolen; because of it the stork had punished the baby. It would follow her, that guilt, even as an adult, making a sick-sweet bile rise in her throat whenever she tasted sugar; and yet, the craving for it would return, a craving for the forbidden delicious taste on her tongue, followed by the shame she’d felt that day of the funeral feast, when she’d eaten three pieces of plum cake and two chocolate eggs from her Easter basket and—with one unexpected hiccup—had spewed purple-brown vomit over the front of her dress.
Her mother took her out the backdoor. Their feet flattened the thin ribs of earth that Trudi’s father had raked early that morning. He raked the yard once a week and had already finished it two days earlier, but this morning, when Trudi had woken up, he’d been out there again with his bamboo rake, snagging twigs and stones and pigeon droppings.
By the muddy edge of the brook, her mother squatted down, trapped the swift cold water in her fingers, and cleaned Trudi’s face and dress. “Look,” she said and peered into the brook as if trying to find something lost.
Slowly, beyond the surface of the current, another pattern emerged for Trudi—that of new leaves, their long reflections bobbing in one place while the water rushed through them, and amongst the leaves, the silver moon-shapes of two faces.
From that day on, her mother seemed distracted—even in her frantic behavior she seemed distracted, as if already drawn to something beyond the house and the town. No longer would she grasp Trudi to pull her against herself or lift her to the window; it was almost as if she were returning to that time after Trudi’s birth when she hadn’t wanted to touch her at all.
In May, Frau Doktor Rosen recommended another stay in Grafenberg, and Gertrud Montag went willingly, but Trudi was inconsolable. Leo found that he could soothe Trudi with music, and he’d lift her on the counter of the pay-library, where she’d sit quietly next to the phonograph, one finger tracing the swirls of the rich wood as she’d listen to the records. It made him uneasy when his customers would praise him for bearing up well under the burden of his wife and child. “They’re no burden,” he’d say.
When Gertrud returned home, she was even more bewildered than before. If Trudi reached for her, she’d smile and, perhaps, bend to adjust Trudi’s collar or retie one of her shoelaces, though it was good and tight. She no longer had to be coaxed into the sewing room, but sought out that isolation and even took to sleeping on the velvet sofa, curled on only half of the space as though her body had shrunk.
Every morning, as soon as she was dressed, Trudi would dash up the stairs to be locked in with her mother: she’d pretend to make tea and place an imaginary cup into the slack hands; she’d dress the paper dolls and climb on the sofa to hold them up to the mirror so that each doll had a twin; she’d sit on her mother’s lap and stroke her face. But beneath all that, she fought the shame that her mother’s vision was forever tangled.
The last time Gertrud Montag went to the asylum, she hugged Trudi by the open door of her wardrobe, holding her close for so long that it seemed she would never release her. It was the beginning of July, two weeks before Trudi’s fourth birthday, and her mother was wearing a cotton dress printed with peach-colored roses. One of her travel bags was packed, but the suitcases and hatboxes were still stacked on top of the birch wardrobe—a sure sign that she wouldn’t be gone for long.
“When I get back,” she said, “things will be better between us.”
And Trudi—her face against her mother’s hip, breathing in the familiar clear scent of her skin and clothes—Trudi believed her.
That day, she stayed next door with Frau Blau, whose house always smelled of floor wax. While the old woman polished her keys and dusted her windowsills, Trudi followed her around. The tip of Frau Blau’s right forefinger was bent to the side, and Trudi felt convinced it was that way from too much dusting. Frau Blau had soft, powdered cheeks and a broken heart. People said her heart had broken in 1894 when her son, Stefan, had run away to America. It was a sorrow that lapped into two centuries, a sorrow that already had lasted—so
Trudi counted—twenty-five years.
Since the Blaus didn’t throw anything away, their house was crammed full with ancient toys and furniture, doilies and flower pots, gifts that their son shipped from America, and clothes that had belonged to their children and long-dead ancestors. Of Dutch descent, Frau Blau cleaned her house every single day. If her Saviour came to her at night, she told Trudi, she wanted him to find her house in order.
“You can help,” Frau Blau decided and showed Trudi how to dust the table legs, each ending in a lion’s claws gripping a ball. A cloth around her crooked forefinger, she guided it into every little crevice.
“You can do the next leg,” she said and extended the cloth.
Trudi hid her hands behind her back, terrified her finger would turn out like Frau Blau’s. She didn’t know if it would be worse to have a crooked finger or a thumb like that of Herr Blau who—during his many years at the sewing machine—had run a needle through his thumbnail, leaving a black crater-shaped puncture.
“Children have to obey,” Frau Blau reminded her.
Trudi stared at Frau Blau’s sturdy shoes. The cracks in the leather were magnified by layers of wax.
“Children have to obey!”
From the roof came the low, moaning call of pigeons. As Trudi felt Frau Blau waiting, she was glad she didn’t have a grandmother in her house, even if grandmothers baked and ironed and knitted and grew beautiful flowers. Most houses had grandmothers in them. Grandmothers made you finish what was on your plate and told you it was not polite to stare at grown-ups. Grandmothers made you say your prayers and wash behind your ears. Grandmothers could make you do whatever they wanted because they were old.
Frau Blau patted Trudi’s hair. “Is it because you miss your mother?”
“Because I don’t want my finger to look like yours,” Trudi blurted.
“Ach so.” Frau Blau chuckled and held her crooked finger up between herself and Trudi. “Is that what you think? That it’s from cleaning?”