by Ursula Hegi
“The third letter says, ‘Dear Petrus, I went to a tavern and danced with a sailor.’ It’s signed ‘Maria.’” She waited for the laughter, but the only sound was an abrupt cough from Frau Weiler. It was quiet in the kitchen. Too quiet. Had she forgotten part of the joke? No—something was wrong. She had done something bad. It was hot in the house, hot and blue with tobacco smoke even though the windows were open.
Frau Immers chased a fly from the fruit compote. “I better check on that potato salad.”
“Let me help you,” Frau Blau offered.
“Herr Hesping—” one of the women said.
They all glanced toward the door, where Emil Hesping stood in a new suit, the kind of new that hasn’t been worn before. The front creases of his black trousers were pressed knife sharp, and his pearl cufflinks shimmered. He looked like a groom at his own wedding—except that everyone knew he was the kind of man who made jokes about others getting married and sinned against the sixth commandment even though his brother was a bishop.
He lifted Trudi up. Though he kept his lips in a smile, she could tell he had cried because his eyes were red. “Let me tell you a joke that’s proper for a little girl to tell. You too, Eva.” He took Eva’s hand. “You see, there’s this teacher who has a dog, Schatzi, and he doesn’t allow her to sleep on the sofa, but every day when he leaves for school, Schatzi jumps on the sofa and sleeps there all day. When the teacher comes home, she’s lying on the floor, but he knows. Guess how?”
Most of the women were busying themselves with lighting fresh cigarettes or pushing pots around on the flat surface of the stove; yet, they kept their movements slow and soundless so as not to miss a word.
“I don’t know how.” Eva Rosen looked at Trudi and made a face by wrinkling her nose. When Trudi grinned and wrinkled her nose too, Eva laughed.
“Ah—but the teacher knows,” Emil Hesping said, “because the sofa is still warm. And so he scolds Schatzi—teachers are very good at scolding, you’ll find that out once you start school. The next day, when he comes home, the sofa is warm again. He spanks the dog, and the following evening, when he checks the sofa, it is not warm. He figures he has finally trained Schatzi. But one day he arrives home just a few minutes earlier than usual, and guess what he sees? There’s Schatzi, standing on the sofa—” He pursed his mouth and made short puffs of breath that tickled Trudi’s chin. “There’s Schatzi, blowing air on the sofa to cool it down.”
A few of the women laughed politely. Trudi thought it was a boring joke. She could tell it bored Emil Hesping too because he winked at her. It was their secret that he liked the Virgin Maria joke much better. But then he winked at Frau Simon too, and something odd happened: Frau Simon’s neck grew longer, and her face turned as red as her hair.
When Eva slipped away, Trudi followed her. They wandered through the rooms where smoke shifted in hazy layers below the ceilings. People stopped talking as the girls came close to them; they stared at Trudi, told her again how brave she was. Her father leaned against the side of the piano, his face still, his eyes empty. Trudi remembered what Frau Blau had said about his eyes—exquisite—but they were ordinary, gray with blue specks, and they didn’t see her, not even when she climbed on the piano stool. When she hit the first piano key, it sounded louder than ever before.
Herr Hesping walked up to her father with two shot glasses and a bottle of Schnaps. He filled both glasses, handed one to her father, and clicked his glass against her father’s. They nodded to one another, their expressions grim, and—at the exact same moment—tossed the clear liquid down their throats.
Trudi’s father shuddered as if awakening from a long dream.
“There, now,” Emil Hesping said and clasped his shoulder. “There.”
They stood in their half embrace like dancers, waiting, their trim gymnasts’ bodies shrouded by their mourning suits, until Leo Montag held out his glass again.
Trudi struck all the raised black keys, then the white ones. Alexander Sturm stepped next to Eva and bent to listen when she said something to him. It was said that, when he’d taken over his father’s toy factory, Alexander had changed from a boy into a man overnight: his voice had turned deep, and his mustache had filled out, causing some jealousy among other boys whose sparse mustache hairs looked like accidental smudges.
Spreading her arms as far as she could, Trudi drew her forefingers from opposite ends of the keyboard toward the middle, drowning the voices around her in an exhilarating crescendo that made her forget everything until Frau Abramowitz lifted her from the wooden stool and carried her to her house across the street. “It’s important never to lose your dignity,” Frau Abramowitz told her.
High in the air like that, Trudi managed to graze her hand across the narrow box that hung at the right post of the Abramowitzs’ front door, just as she’d seen Herr Abramowitz do it. Carved into the wooden box were tiny flowers and symbols. From her father she knew that the box was called a mezuzah and that, inside, was a scroll with a prayer, called the shema. “It means God protects the house,” he had said.
Frau Abramowitz opened the arched door and let Trudi down on the Persian carpet that covered the parquet floor in her entrance hall. The shutters of the living room stood open but the damask drapes were too heavy to sway in the breeze. Trudi could see the snapdragons and purple geraniums in the window boxes. Frau Abramowitz even kept a vegetable garden, though she could afford to buy whatever she wanted, and she was always giving red cabbage or beans or kohlrabi to the neighbors.
She had a piano too, a white baby grand. The lid was closed, and on top of it stood two silver candlesticks and rows of small silver frames with pictures of her children at various ages. On the piano bench lay a doctor-and-nurse novel, the most recent book Frau Abramowitz had borrowed from the pay-library against the trade of her Venetian mirror. From her locked glass cabinet, she brought out an album with her husband’s photos of elephants and palaces. Trudi was allowed to turn the pages, and as Frau Abramowitz told her about all the exotic travels, her voice went so soft that Trudi had to stop swallowing in order to hear her.
When Trudi got sleepy, Frau Abramowitz spread a shawl over her and rocked her in her arms, feeling much closer to this girl with the short, thick body than to the children who had come from her own womb. Capable and self-sufficient and quick to debate any issue—“That’s how we learn to think, by questioning,” their father had told them—Ruth and Albert had acted embarrassed early on by their mother’s affection. Though her body still screamed to embrace them, they had forgotten how much they’d loved to feel her arms around them when they were small. They had chosen to go to boarding schools in Bonn and Köln, and when they visited, they were more at ease with their father, who was preoccupied with his law office and radical politics. He considered himself a Communist and had joined the Independent Social Democrats. When he made his children sit still for yet another family photo to document the sequence of their development, they didn’t object as they would to their mother’s kisses, because they felt comfortable with his distance behind the camera.
Through half-closed lids Trudi watched the early-afternoon light flit across the roses in the crystal vase and Herr Abramowitz’s pipe rack; it made the honey-colored wood on the lower halves of the walls gleam, and revealed the tiny creases in the dear face above her; it carried the shrill cry of a rooster and the voices of departing guests across the street.
Frau Abramowitz kept holding Trudi long after she had fallen asleep. She promised herself to teach Trudi proper manners now that the girl no longer had a mother. There wasn’t even a grandmother in the house. It was too much to handle for a man alone. Not that Leo Montag wouldn’t be the most tender of fathers.… Or husband, she thought. Or husband. And her face grew hot.
The week after the funeral it was Trudi’s fourth birthday, and her father took her on the streetcar to Oberkassel, where, next to the Rhein bridge that led to Düsseldorf, fireworks drenched the sky and the river in every possible color.
Music from trumpets and drums played fast and loud. Like thousands of others, Trudi’s father spread a blanket on the grass. When the air grew cool, he took off his woolen vest and slipped it over Trudi’s head so that it hung from her shoulders, longer than her dress, drowning her in the wonderful scent of tobacco and books as he lifted her toward the sky, toward those red and green and yellow showers of stars that shot up and spilled high above—miraculously without dropping on her—and even though her father had told her the fireworks were in celebration of the new Opernhaus, Trudi felt certain that all these people were celebrating her birthday with her, and she felt a slow sadness settling on her because no birthday could possibly be quite like this again.
The following day her father covered the walls of his bedroom with the photos of the stranger from the coffin. Someone had stuck the long stem of a lily beneath the bride’s crossed wrists, and the white blossom lay against the curve of her chin. The flames of the three candles were milky—even whiter than the bride’s face. Trudi began to pray for her mother’s return. She didn’t have to pray for it as something separate from her other prayers because it was all connected to the size of her own body. Once that stretched itself, her mother would be well again. She was only staying away until then—so that no one would confine her to the Grafenberg asylum again. One day, Trudi knew, she would hear her mother’s familiar steps in the sewing room. She’d run up the stairs. The door would swing open, and her mother would stand by the window. She’d turn and look at her. “Well… Trudi, how tall you are,” she would say.
But until then, Trudi had to pass through each new day without her mother, had to fight the habit that made her want to run upstairs the moment she woke up. Not being able to reach her mother—it filled her with a bottomless panic that prayers couldn’t soothe, a panic that made her climb into her mother’s wardrobe simply to stop the yearning. Standing motionless among the hangers, she’d feel the silky fabric of the dresses against her face, smell the clear scent of the Rhein meadows in early summer, and feel suffused with joyful certainty that her mother would soon be back. When she’d leave the wardrobe, she’d smile at the pictures of the dead bride, who was the only one to share her secret that her mother was still alive.
“Well… Trudi, how tall you are”
There had to be some kind of pill to make people grow faster. Frau Doktor Rosen would know. One morning, Trudi slipped from the house while her father was busy with a customer, crossed Schreberstrasse, and cut through the church square to the doctor’s stone house. Unlike most buildings in Burgdorf, the house—which had been a cloister five hundred years ago—stood not close to neighboring buildings but lay surrounded by a sheltered garden and a low brick wall with a wrought-iron gate. On the second-floor veranda, the doctor’s husband rested in his canvas chair, his round face tipped toward the sky. Orange flowers, shaped like Chinese paper lanterns, grew next to the front steps.
The door was locked, but when Trudi pressed the recessed doorbell and kept knocking, Frau Doktor Rosen opened it.
“I want a pill so I can grow.”
The doctor’s hand drifted to the ornate silver pin that fastened the collar of her white jacket. “I see. Does your father know you’re here?”
Trudi shook her head.
“Why don’t you come inside.”
Trudi followed the doctor through the living room into her long office that faced the back of the garden where the goldfish pond and chicken coop were. Shelves with papers and cloudy bottles covered the walls all the way to the high ceiling.
“Sit over here.” The doctor pointed toward a leather chair and walked around her desk, where she sat down and busied herself rolling a cigarette, her elegant fingers so clumsy at getting the tobacco shreds inside the thin paper, that Trudi could have done it much faster. From watching her father, she’d learned how to. Sometimes he let her roll a whole box of cigarettes for customers who liked to buy theirs ready to smoke.
“You see,” the doctor started, “there is no pill for growing.…”
Eight pencils lay on her desk, and Trudi kept counting those pencils, over and over again, while the doctor’s gentle voice explained about people who were Zwerge—dwarfs—and said Trudi was one of them. Trudi kept counting inside her head—eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht. Eins, zwei, drei—She laughed and shook her head. Dwarfs belonged in fairy tales, along with dragons and elves and enchanted forests. She knew the story of Schneewittchen. She even had a puzzle of the seven Zwerge who had rescued Schneewittchen from the evil witch—eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben. Seven dwarfs. But eight pencils. Eins, zwei, drei, vier—She knew she didn’t look like Schneewittchen’s dwarfs. Zwerge were men, squat, little men with big bellies and funny, peaked hats like egg warmers.
“There is no girl Zwerg in Schneewittchen und die sieben Zwerge” she reminded Frau Doktor Rosen.
The doctor lit her cigarette and said that was quite true. She looked so sad that Trudi wanted to reassure her that whatever it was that had stopped growing inside her was just resting and would soon begin again, that it was just a matter of finding what would trigger it. But she didn’t know how to say those words aloud to the Frau Doktor because the numbers of the pencils and the numbers of the Zwerge kept getting mixed up inside her head, and she knew if she said anything, it would be a jumble of numbers.
three
1919-1920
SHE DECIDED TO STRETCH HERSELF BY LOOPING HER LEGS OVER THE iron carpet rod out back, where Frau Blau beat the dust out of her rugs every Friday; but hanging upside down made her head so hot and heavy that she had to stop. Instead, she dragged the kitchen table into the open door frame to the living room, climbed up, and hung by her fingers from the molding till her arms and shoulders ached. Gradually she was able to endure it for longer spells. Some nights she had dreams in which she grew, and she’d feel an acute happiness in those dreams that would evaporate within moments after waking to her unchanged body.
One afternoon, when she was hanging from the door frame, her father walked from the pay-library into the kitchen to make himself a cup of Russian tea. He didn’t notice her until he’d poured a bit of the strong essence that he brewed each morning, and had diluted it with hot water to suit his taste. The cup in his hands, he turned to leave.
That’s when he saw her. “What are you doing?” He set his cup on the floor.
“Growing.”
That sudden look of pain—like when his knee would buckle under him—settled around his mouth. “You don’t need to do this.” His voice sounded hoarse, and she suddenly knew the Frau Doktor had told him about her visit.
“I’ll stop once I’m tall.”
“Not everyone needs to be tall.”
“I do.”
He opened his lips as if to tell her to get back on the floor, but instead he stood watching her and stroked his face. “Be careful, Trudi.”
She sensed that his warning didn’t have anything to do with the kind of careful that keeps you from getting injured, but that it implied a far deeper danger. “I won’t fall. See?” She swung her legs. “See what I can do?”
He caught her by the waist, lifted her down.
“No.” She squirmed from his arms and stomped one foot on the floor. “No.”
“Come,” he said. “I need your help outside.” He asked her to carry his teacup into the backyard, where he raked the dry dirt. As his long arms drew the rake toward his body, he kept stepping backward toward the grassy area that ran all the way down to the brook. His hair had been cropped at the barbershop the day before, and the tight, pale curls clung to his scalp like the fur of Trudi’s toy lamb.
“It’s not the falling,” he said. “We all have to do some of that.”
Her eyes followed the bamboo teeth of the rake as they caught clumps of debris and left fine, even ridges of earth.
“You are perfect the way you are,” he said as if to convince himself.
She swallowed, hard, and clenched her fingers aro
und her father’s cup. He had never lied to her before.
From that day on, she made sure to hang from the door frame of her upstairs bedroom and to get down whenever she heard her father’s steps. Already, her arms were getting stronger, and she took pride in carrying heavier stacks of books from the counter to the shelves when she helped her father arrange them back into place. Soon her legs would be long enough to pedal her own bicycle when she rode with her father to the cemetery or the river, instead of sitting between his outstretched arms on the leather seat—shaped exactly like his seat, only smaller—that he’d bolted to the front of his bicycle.
She liked to help him dry the dishes after he’d washed them in the two metal tubs: one filled with hot water that he’d heated on the kitchen stove, the other with cold water for rinsing off the soap. Afterwards he’d settle her on his knees and read to her from the special books that he didn’t lend out to customers, books by Stefan Zweig and Heinrich Mann and Arthur Schnitzler, which he kept in the living room on shelves with glass fronts. Even if Trudi didn’t understand much of what her father read to her, she listened closely and turned the pages for him.
Some of those books were bound in leather and felt precious to the touch. It bothered Trudi when her father took them into the bathroom. He’d always stay too long, smoking and reading, and if she had to use the toilet after he’d get out, she’d hold her pee because the air in there would be hazy with the stench of cigarettes and shit.
Every evening she tried to stay up as late as her father would let her, coaxing him into reading her another story after he told her it was time for bed, or climbing on his knees to snatch the comb he carried in his shirt pocket and press it into his fingers so he’d comb her hair. She was afraid of the empty sewing room on the floor above her bedroom because, with each night, it grew larger, its emptiness threatening to absorb the entire house. Only her mother’s presence could have stopped that emptiness from expanding. Even as an old woman Trudi would be haunted by images of herself as a small girl returning to that door behind which her mother used to be confined, receiving no answer when she knocked. She’d see her father pull her away, gently, trying to console her with reasons that he didn’t seem to believe himself: “Your mother has found a more peaceful place.” And she’d see herself lift the Abramowitzs’ mirror from its hook in the sewing room and carry it into the living room on the day she would finally understand that she would not see her mother again.