by Ursula Hegi
“My father says you were his third bride.”
Again, her aunt smiled, but this time her smile looked sad. “They died young, his other wives. Stefan needed a mother for his children.”
“Maybe they didn’t die,” Trudi offered.
Her aunt looked at her closely.
“Maybe they only pretended.”
“Why would they do that?”
“So no one can lock them up.”
Her aunt lifted Trudi from the tub and dried her, carefully. “She is gone—your mother,” she said and carried Trudi into her bedroom.
“You know that, don’t you?”
Trudi didn’t answer.
Her aunt combed the tangles from Trudi’s hair and braided it for the night. “She really is gone,” she said as she bent to kiss her good night.
When Trudi was allowed to speak on the phone to Uncle Stefan in America, his voice was thin and crackled into her ear.
Seized by a sudden longing for this uncle she’d never met, she shouted, “I’m coming to visit you.”
“You don’t have to yell,” Frau Abramowitz whispered to her.
“That’s good,” her uncle was saying. “I’m glad. Bring your father too.”
Aunt Helene and Robert stayed for five weeks, and before they left, Trudi gave Robert her white lamb and an egg-shaped rock she’d found in the brook. For days after their departure, she kept looking for Robert, expecting to hear his quiet laugh. She’d never known what it was like to have a friend. To be alone again felt as though a part of her had vanished along with him. It was different than with grown-ups leaving. You knew they were not like you.
“When can we visit Robert?” she asked her father.
“It’s very far,” he said. “And too expensive.”
“But when?”
“Maybe once you’re older.…”
She’d lie in her bed and stare through her window at the dark window across the alley. At least Aunt Helene used to have a friend close by when she’d lived here. But now Margret’s old room was a storage space for bolts of cloth and dummies and sewing-machine parts. She felt impatient to start school, the place where, she believed, she would have friends like Robert. But school was still more than a year away, and the children in the neighborhood and those who came with their parents to borrow books or buy tobacco, shied away from Trudi as if afraid she’d touch them and make them look like her.
Except for Georg Weiler next door. But only because he was different from other children too. A boy who looked like a girl. Though he and Trudi had always been aware of each other, they didn’t become friends until the day he asked her why her head was so big.
To stop the sting of his question, she shot right back at him, “It’s smaller than yours.”
They sat on the brick steps outside their buildings, she in front of the pay-library, he in front of his parents’ grocery store. The low winter sun was in their eyes, and he was playing with his marbles, lining them up along the bottom step.
“It looks bigger,” he insisted.
“It’s regular size.” Her neck began to itch. “It’s the rest of me that’s small. That’s why it looks big.… But it isn’t.”
He had to think about that. His eyes pushed at her. They were the color of fine sand. “I bet you my best marble your head’s bigger than mine.”
“Let me see the marble.”
“Georg.…” Frau Weiler stuck her head from the store. Her scarf had slipped back a little, and coils of gray trailed around her face as though she’d been out in the wind. The center part in her hair had been so long in the same place that it had widened, showing the scalp beneath. “Georg!”
Georg flinched.
“Get those marbles off the stairs. You don’t want customers tripping over them and breaking their necks and being crippled for the rest of their lives.”
Trudi took a deep breath. It was a lot to consider all at once, even though she was used to Frau Weiler’s predictions of gloom: if you walked in the woods, you could get a rash from the Brennesseln; if you didn’t chew your food properly, you’d end up with holes in your stomach before you were twenty; if you forgot to confess a mortal sin, you were sure to end up in hell.…
Georg scooped up his marbles.
His mother closed the door, but her voice stayed out there with the children: “… and then they’ll sue us and we’ll lose the store … everything I’ve worked for.…”
Georg held a red and yellow glass ball, the size of a cherry, toward the sun. It glinted. “What do I get if you lose?”
“I won’t lose.”
“Yes, you will.”
“Then you can have all my marbles.”
The door opened again, and Georg’s mother appeared with two cups of steaming cocoa, her eyes as sorrowful as ever. “Don’t drink it too fast. You’ll burn your tongues.”
“Danke, Frau Weiler.”
“Danke, Mutter”
“And don’t you spill any on your clothes.” She headed back into the store.
The cocoa was hot and sweet. A rash wind blew leaves across the sidewalk, their dry edges whispering against stone. Trudi caught a leaf from the chestnut tree, and as she tried to uncurl it, it crumbled in her hands. She wished Robert were here instead of Georg. With his mother’s last letter, he’d enclosed a picture he’d drawn of himself playing the piano.
“Even your shoes don’t look like boys’ shoes,” she told Georg.
“And you—you’re just a girl.”
“That’s why I wear a dress.”
He glared at her.
She glared right back. “And long hair,” she said.
“Get a string,” he ordered.
“What for?”
“To measure our heads.”
“You get it.”
“My mother won’t let me out again.” He tilted his head and directed a sudden smile at her. “Please, Trudi?”
She hesitated.
“Please please please, Trudi?”
She knew how to defend herself against his bullying, but not his charm. Dashing into the pay-library, she emerged with an end of string that had been tied around a recent delivery of romances.
“You first,” he said.
Her head held high, she walked over to the entrance of the grocery store and climbed on the step above him. Still, her nose didn’t even reach his shoulders. A dog barked from the direction of the market place. Wind slipped between her collar and her skin, cold and sudden, and rattled the wooden shutters outside the pay-library.
Bringing the string around her forehead, Georg measured carefully and marked it with a knot; when she wound the string around his head above his ears, it was a finger’s width longer.
She laughed aloud when she showed him. “I knew it,” she said, feeling that her head was at its perfect size.
“Yours,” he said, handing her his marble.
“You’re not mad?”
He beamed at her. “I’ll win it back.”
As he had predicted, Georg won back his glass marble; in addition, Trudi lost five of her clay marbles to him. From then on, they played nearly every day. Georg was lucky when it came to rolling the tiny balls into the hole he’d scooped into the damp soil between the two sets of steps, but he was just as generous in letting Trudi borrow marbles from him if she lost all of hers. To keep playing was far more important to him than winning. He could always win things. Trudi no longer teased him about his hair and his dainty smocks that buttoned in back. She was glad to see him when he stood outside her window and hollered for her to come out and play.
The morning after December 6, they shared sweets that St. Nikolaus had left for them in the shoes they’d set outside their bedroom doors overnight, and the last week of December they licked fresh snow from pine cones that looked as though they’d been dipped into sugar icing. They built a snowman with a carrot nose and coal eyes that smudged their mittens. Trudi’s father gave them an old hat for the snowman and let them borrow the kitchen br
oom, which they stuck into his arm, bristles up.
They wore their boots and mittens to church on Epiphany, when the priest and altar boys took down the manger that had been set up on the side altar, Jesus as big as a real baby, Maria and Joseph as tall as real parents. Both children liked church: the extravagant smell of incense and the splendid garments of the priest, the stained-glass windows and the mural of Christ’s Last Supper above the altar, but most of all the choir with its voices that drifted toward heaven. They even enjoyed the moments of silence, which were far more meaningful than any other kind of silence when they knelt in a pew, half hidden by the blond wood, feeling the pulse of the community around them.
You could tell a lot about people, they discovered, by the way they occupied pews, how much space they took and how close they knelt to the altar. There were those who liked to get to church early to watch everyone arrive, and others who knelt with their faces buried in their hands and never looked up. The proud and the humble—all of them dressed in their best clothes. In church, you could tell quickly how well people were doing: you’d notice new ailments as well as new hats; you’d sense new friendships and new animosities.
The men’s pews were on the left, the women’s on the right. Until you had your first communion, you could kneel on either side with a parent. That meant Trudi and Georg could still kneel in the same pew. The men’s side of the church was always emptier than the women’s—not only because some had not returned from the war—but because many of them spent the hour of mass in Die Traube, the old tavern with wooden ceilings that had stood for over five centuries. Die Traube—“this is where I pray,” the men would joke—was the closest bar to St. Martin’s and in full view of the church, ideal for those men who wanted to walk their wives and children to Sunday mass; meet with their friends for a few quick beers at their Stammtisch—their regular table; finish their final glass as the doors of the church opened; and be there to pick up their families and walk home for the Sunday roast.
Of course, there’d always be a few husbands who’d have to order one more glass after the last, whose wives would stand in the church yard with expressions of brittle cheerfulness, pretending they liked nothing better than chatting with the priest after mass. Yet, as soon as their husbands arrived, they’d link their arms through theirs and drag the poor sinners home, hissing words of reproach through their church smiles.
That winter, the ice on the Rhein grew so thick that people would drive their cars across the river to Kaiserswerth and Düsseldorf. Herr Immers took his new truck on the ice despite predictions of disaster from his wife, and Herr Hesping borrowed his uncle’s horse-drawn sled and brought his friends and their children on wild sleigh rides on the river. When the ice finally thinned, it tore in flat chunks that tried to mount each other like packs of wild dogs while the water hurled them downstream.
With each day the river rose, and as it left its bed, it washed across the winter matted meadows, freed the roots of young trees from the slack earth, and climbed the stone steps toward the crest of the dike that protected the town from the river. There, the people of Burgdorf would gather at dawn, shrouded by the smoke from their cigarettes and pipes as they’d stare at the shifting masses of gray waters and measure how far their river had risen during the night.
When Trudi’s father carried her to the Rhein on his shoulders, the coat of the Russian soldier wrapped around both of them in such a way that, from a distance, they looked like one very tall man, she could smell the dank fields long before she saw the flood. Threads of cold rain stitched the earth to the gray sky. The lower trunks and branches of the half-submerged willows were darker than their crowns, up to a meter above the waves where the water had splashed. Last fall’s dead leaves and debris had caught in the limbs, forming swampy pockets that bobbed in the waves like discarded hair nets. Some of the thinner branches were snagged by the currents and drawn beneath the surface before they whipped up again, completing a never ending circle. Ducks roosted in the V-shaped cores of trees as if holding court; whenever they braved the rapid waters, they were spun around madly or thrust in the opposite direction until, with great effort, they extricated themselves from the white crests and fluttered up again, seeking shelter in the willows.
Trudi counted twenty-three trees hurtling past her, two dead chickens, and four dead cats. She was good at remembering numbers. Though her mother had only taught her to count to twenty, she’d practiced counting the books in the pay-library, until she knew the names of the numbers all the way to one hundred. She counted eleven bushes that were carried by the waves, nineteen things she couldn’t identify, and one dead goat, its belly the bluish-white tint of sour milk. Bloated, its stiff legs extended, it floated among the debris.
She didn’t see the one human victim—Georg’s father—because he hadn’t been found. Two nights before, a group of men had straggled toward the river in the rain with a bottle of Schnaps after Potter’s bar had closed, and Franz Weiler—always docile until he drank—had entertained everyone by doing handstands on top of the dike.
“We didn’t even hear a splash,” the taxidermist kept telling Frau Weiler. “Franz simply disappeared.” When he tried to offer her his help, she sent him home.
Trudi heard several people tell her father that Frau Weiler insisted her husband must have slipped from the dike on his way to morning mass.
“Morning mass, my ass,” Herr Immers said.
“He ordered the last round for us at Potter’s,” the pharmacist said.
Frau Blau pointed out that the church was only two blocks from the Weilers’ and the river a good ten minutes’ walk beyond the church.
“Must be some new detour,” Herr Bilder said.
Yet, no one contradicted Frau Weiler but—as it had been the habit of generations—upheld the façade which, above all, preserved a family’s respectability, no matter that beneath that façade all kinds of gossip festered. It was a complicity of silence that had served the town for centuries. Dressed in black and bearing proper words of condolence, the people assembled for the church service held in Franz Weiler’s memory: the men from his Stammtisch; the families who had bought their groceries from him and his wife for many years; a group of nuns from the Theresienheim who had their own chapel yet rarely missed a funeral service at St. Martin’s; and the bereaved wife, of course, with her possibly half-orphaned son, Georg, who wore a black smock that had been hastily fashioned from one of her blouses.
He knelt next to Trudi and whispered to her during communion—which the two children were too young to receive—that his father was just taking a long swim. If any of the men from Franz Weiler’s Stammtisch had overheard the boy, they would have agreed with Georg: they already had speculated that, once in the river, Franz had kept on swimming to get away from his iron-haired wife.
When the people left the church, the man-who-touches-his-heart stood on the wet steps without a hat or umbrella. He was one of the few who always looked straight at Trudi. See, he seemed to say as his hands roamed up and down. See what I can do. Most grown-ups didn’t look right at Trudi: they acted as if she were invisible and said things they would never say around other children. She found if she stayed very quiet they often kept talking, disclosing far more about themselves than they realized—even those who had trained their features to remain constant. The feelings they tried to hide sprang into their voices, and she could discern fear, joy, impatience, rage. When they got cautious, a certain flatness moved into their speech, and their sentences shrank; but when they became excited, their words grew colorful and rushed from them.
If she didn’t remind people that she was there, she got to listen to all kinds of secrets. They fascinated her, those secrets, and she hoarded them, repeating them to herself before she went to sleep, feeling them stretch and grow into stories—like the one about Frau Buttgereit kneeling on lentils each morning when she prayed to St. Ottilia, the patroness of the blind, after whom she’d been named, imploring her to make sure her next child
would not be another daughter. Trudi found it hard to believe that the gaunt woman, whose stomach always looked distended, had the reputation of once having been the most beautiful girl in Burgdorf.
Then there was the story about Herr Hesping, who’d bought a thousand blankets from one branch of the military and, within a week, had resold them to another branch for twice the price. He was often involved in some kind of deal that stretched the boundaries of the law without crossing them. If you asked him about a particular transaction, he’d overwhelm you with such a mass of facts and logic that you were glad once he stopped explaining. Some people said he had no values; others maintained that he did whatever he did out of contempt for the government.
• • •
The flood of 1920 that claimed Georg’s father was not the worst the town had seen: it only seeped through a few small fissures in the dike and trickled into the Braunmeiers’ pastures and peach orchard, as if to persuade the town that it was not only benign but also beneficial for the farmers; yet, instead it convinced the people to reinforce the mass of earth that protected them from the waters, which threatened the town nearly every spring.
The men talked about Franz Weiler as they labored on the dike in the nearly constant rain, and when the sun finally untangled itself from the clouds, they stopped their work and turned their faces toward the white light, which seemed more radiant after its long absence. Women left their stores and houses and came outside to sit in the sun on canvas chairs with their sewing. The teachers from the Protestant school and the nuns from the Catholic school brought the children outside for their lessons, instructing them how to identify leaves and insects even though the schedule might call for penmanship.
After the dike was rebuilt, it stood one meter higher and one meter wider than before, and if you looked at it from the direction of the town that summer after the flood, you’d notice the seam where the old part joined the new because the grass above it was the green of Easter candy.
Trudi would hold those pictures in her mind throughout the decades to come, and without even being near the river she would always know how it looked. She could close her eyes and picture the Rhein from the dike or close up from her favorite place on the jetty. She knew exactly how high the water could rise around the willows; knew the swift change of color—from moss green to molten black—and how the sun could shine on the surface so hard that it would blind you if you stared at the river; knew the pattern the current formed around the rocks in late summer, while early in spring they lay submerged.