by Ursula Hegi
It was like that with stories: she could see beneath their surface, know the undercurrents, the whirlpools that could take you down, the hidden clusters of rocks. Stories could blind you, rise around you in a myriad of colors. Every time Trudi took a story and let it stream through her mind from beginning to end, it grew fuller, richer, feeding on her visions of those people the story belonged to until it left its bed like the river she loved. And it was then that she’d have to tell the story to someone.
Georg was the ideal listener. Beneath the house, where Trudi’s mother used to hide, the two children would sit on rocks, their knees nearly touching as they filled the dank space around them with words. Even in the dark there’d be a glint to Georg’s hair as if he’d trapped the sun in his ringlets. If anyone could capture the sun, Trudi knew, it was Georg. As long as he felt lucky, treasures called out for him to pick them up—an empty snail house, a length of rope, the shiniest chestnut. He hoarded his collection in a box under his bed.
Once, he tried to teach Trudi how to make a bird out of mud. “The way Baby Jesus used to,” he said. Squatting next to the front stoop of the pay-library, he shaped a ball of mud in his hands until it had wings and a head. He held it toward the sky. “First it’ll open its wings,” he told Trudi, “and then it’ll fly into heaven.”
“It looks like a lump of mud.”
“That’s because it isn’t ready yet.”
“Maybe you forgot to do something.”
The bread wagon, which came once a week, rumbled past them, pulled by an old horse, and stopped at the end of the street. It was covered with heavy canvas. Several women with baskets over their arms crowded around it.
“Fly,” Georg shouted, and threw the bird into the air. It dropped in front of his feet, wide and flat. “It didn’t fly because we’re sinners,” he said.
“Maybe it’s the wrong kind of mud.”
“You think so?”
She nodded. “If we find the right kind of mud, we can do it.”
“I bet the unknown benefactor could get us the right kind.”
“The unknown benefactor can do anything.”
They both were intrigued by the unknown benefactor, whose identity was still a mystery to the people of Burgdorf and who—despite the poverty—continued to steal into people’s houses to leave his gifts like a thief who’d reversed the concept of thievery. The Burgdorf Post had published several articles about the unknown benefactor, each longer than the previous one, since the list of his contributions grew. A week after Georg’s father had vanished, the unknown benefactor surprised Georg with the gift he wanted most in the world—Lederhosen—leather pants with leather suspenders and a leather strip across the middle of the chest, displaying a stag carved from the white core of an antler. Of course, his mother wouldn’t let him wear the Lederhosen—“Once you’re older,” she said—but she conceded to let him keep them in his room, where he took them out at least once a day to touch the thick leather.
For Trudi’s fifth birthday, Georg gave her a small cardboard box with needle holes pricked into its lid, and when she opened it, she found a black-and-orange butterfly on a bed of leaves.
“It won’t fly away,” he said proudly. “Ever.”
“Why not?”
“It can’t. I rubbed all the dust off the wings.”
She touched the gauzy wings and felt limp with an odd sadness.
“You—you don’t like it?”
“Will it live without the dust?”
“I’ll catch you another one.”
She wanted to tell him that she’d rather watch butterflies in the air, but his mother came out of the store and pulled something from the pocket of her apron. It was a silver medal engraved with an angel.
“Your guardian angel, Trudi. Make sure you don’t lose it.”
“I won’t.”
“It’s blessed by the bishop.”
Georg was fascinated with finding ways of courting luck, letting it envelop him instead of clutching it, and he told Trudi that the moment you started doubting your luck it vanished. You always had to assume it was there. Yet, she could see that it was hard for Georg to feel lucky when his mother was nearby—he even moved differently, docile and careful. It was as though he had something locked up inside him that he couldn’t figure out.
Finding things was not the only kind of luck he taught her. Chimney sweeps also brought good luck, and he’d keep count of how many chimney sweeps he’d see in a week. Then there was the luck of not getting caught when you did something wrong. Trudi found out about that toward the end of summer, when the Eberhardts’ pear tree was heavy with fruit that ripened the color of the sun and were so soft you could cut them like butter. Frau Eberhardt, whose husband had just died from pneumonia, had given Georg and Trudi two pears the morning after his funeral when they’d walked past her white stucco house, but when they returned the following day, hoping for more of the sweet fruits, whose juice had run down their necks and into their collars, Frau Eberhardt didn’t come to the door.
Georg flipped a Pfennig to see who would have to knock. It was his turn. He rapped his knuckles against the glass pane of the door. They waited, knocked again, and then—without having to confer—ran toward the tree. Curls bouncing, Georg leapt up and grabbed one of the lower branches, yanking it down with his weight while Trudi’s fingers closed around a pear. It snapped off in her hand as Georg let go of the branch, but instead of looking at her pear, he darted away from her, through a bed of geraniums, past the lilac hedge, and into the street, where he kept running.
Trudi’s back felt as though the sun were searing through her dress. She didn’t want to look behind her, but she knew she had to. Slowly, she turned her head, then her body.
Frau Eberhardt stood two steps away, her belly growing from her mourning dress like a half pear. Her eyes were sad, and her thick hair hung in two coils across her breasts as if she’d been interrupted before braiding and pinning them around her head.
Trudi tried to flee but couldn’t lift her feet.
Slowly, Frau Eberhardt reached up into the branches of the tree and picked another pear. “Here.” She gave it to Trudi. “You must like them a lot.”
Trudi nodded, the pears so heavy that she thought her hands might snap from her wrists and topple into the grass with her fingers still curled around the fruit like those lion’s claws on the legs of Frau Blau’s table.
“I’ll remember to save some for you from now on.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh—but I know that.” Frau Eberhardt smiled at her.
Georg sat waiting for her behind their houses, where the brook forked. With a willow twig, he was drawing spirals in the muddy bank. Instead of telling Trudi that he was sorry for running off, he fixed an accusing stare on her. “You should have come with me.”
“I didn’t see her.”
“What did she do to you?”
Trudi handed him both pears.
“Lucky you.” There was real respect in his voice. He chose the smaller of the pears and gave the other one back to her. After twisting off the stem, he bit into the end of the pear and sucked hard to keep the juice from spilling. He was half finished before he noticed that Trudi wasn’t eating. “You have to eat yours.”
“I don’t want it.”
“You have to.”
“Why?”
“Because if you don’t—” he motioned toward her with his damp chin—“it means you think it’s all my fault.”
She didn’t answer.
“You have to. So we’re even. If you—” He stopped and his eyes flickered as though he’d just startled himself. “If I what?”
He scrutinized her like an animal caught in a dark space too tight to turn around. “If you want to be my friend.”
Something small and hard shifted low inside her belly.
“And you have to say that you’re not angry at me.”
“I am not angry at you.”
“Prove it, then.”
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When she took a bite, her teeth ached as though any kind of coating between her nerves and the fruit had dissolved. She chewed, slowly, fighting a gagging sensation as she swallowed the sweet pulp to make room for the next bite.
Two weeks later Frau Eberhardt walked into the pay-library, carrying a new baby and a flawless pear for Trudi. When Trudi asked if she could hold the baby, who was sucking on the corner of a washcloth, Frau Eberhardt made her climb onto the counter and sit before she carefully positioned the baby in Trudi’s arms, keeping her own arms around both children. The baby’s name was Helmut, and as soon as Trudi touched his skin, she felt a chill that came from a place so deep within him that she no longer wanted to hold him; yet, she was unwilling to return him to Frau Eberhardt because, all at once, she knew that he had the power to destroy his mother. She would feel it again in the years to come whenever she’d get near Helmut—that danger—though he was one of the most beautiful children in town, with his wheat-colored hair and eyes of sky. That sense of dread would be with her even after he’d become an altar boy and would be considered more devout than any other boy his age in town, the most likely, people would say, to study for the priesthood.
“This is how you rock him,” Frau Eberhardt said. Her black-sleeved arms holding Trudi and the infant, she swayed from side to side as if the three of them were connected.
Staring into Helmut’s eyes, Trudi felt old, far older than any of the old people who lived in the Theresienheim, and she drew on all the courage she could find within herself. “If you want to,” she offered gravely, “I will keep him.”
Frau Eberhardt laughed and swung her son against herself. Tiny strands of hair sprang from the crown of her braids in a semicircle of light. “You’ll have your own baby some day,” she said.
four
1920-1921
WHILE TRUDI WAS LETTING GO OF THE IDEA THAT HER MOTHER WAS still alive, Georg—though without enthusiasm—kept expecting his father to swim back into Burgdorf or, perhaps, arrive on one of the barges that went up and down the Rhein. His parents had married late in life, and his mother had been forty-six when he was born. Franz Weiler had left the supervision of his store, his son, and his life to his wife, Hedwig.
Occasionally he’d given Georg an absent smile as though mildly surprised that this boy lived with him in the same apartment, which was overcrowded with heavy furniture. To Georg, it felt as though his father had shrunk into the shadow of his mother, and he rarely thought about him as a separate person.
Yet, late most nights, after the lights had been extinguished, Franz Weiler would get up, dress in the dark, and leave for Potter’s tavern, excursions which no one in the family mentioned. His wife, who didn’t permit alcohol in the house, had never seen Franz after he’d tipped down a few of the clear Schnaps that rose behind his eyes and coated the muscles in his arms, transforming him into a different man, the kind of man who’d swirl his partner across the dance floor. But that was exactly what Hedwig was afraid of—the kind of passion that came from drink, the kind of passion that had sent her stepfather into her room many nights when she was a girl. To her, drink meant a rough hand clasped across her mouth and the weight of sin on her body, a weight that thousands of rosaries still hadn’t negated.
Every morning she took her son to early mass and prayed for his soul because the souls of men—she had resolved long ago—were even darker than the souls of the women they contaminated. Though she tried to trade her prayers for happiness and absolution, she felt neither happy nor absolved, and even the coveted honor of cleaning St. Martin’s on alternate Wednesdays left her feeling cheated by the world.
Convinced there was something lacking in him because his mother was not like other mothers, who smiled at their children, Georg tried to think of ways to make her smile too, but she’d only scold him for following her through the store in his attempts to help, or for talking too much. He’d never seen her embrace his father, and only rarely would she bend down and kiss Georg’s forehead when she put him to bed at night.
Once, she called him to the window, lifted him onto the stuffed wine-red chair, and pointed down into the street, where the oldest Meier boy, Alfred, and the second Buttgereit daughter, Monika, walked together, his arm circling her shoulders, hers slung around his waist. “It’s indecent,” she said. “Don’t you ever make a spectacle of yourself.”
Sometimes strangers who shopped at the store mistook Georg for his mother’s grandchild, and even as a man he would cringe when he’d recall her embarrassment and his wish to protect her when she explained that, no, this was her son. But it didn’t seem to bother his mother that the neighborhood boys teased him about looking like a girl. While other boys ran and played, he’d watch them, feeling clumsy, hampered by the floppy smocks she sewed for him in styles that she might have worn as a girl. Still, there were moments when he’d forget about himself and—elated to be outside in the sun—throw his arms into the air, jumping and laughing. But his mother, who’d feel troubled whenever she’d sense a seed of passion in him, would stick her gray head from the store and remind him to play quietly.
Slowly, Georg learned to look back into her sorrowful eyes that peered into his, inspecting him for flaws. To avoid her gaze would have brought on questions. The first sin he became proficient in was lying. It became a necessity. But he would never tell a lie to Trudi. Not even after he’d grow up and marry Helga Stamm and lie to her. He’d never tell a lie to his first friend, the one who accepted his difference so much easier than her own, though he would come to betray her in other ways.
Leo Montag liked the playful, generous boy, whose movements became so much freer when he was away from his mother, and he encouraged Georg to visit Trudi whenever he wanted to. He brought the boy along when he taught Trudi how to build boats from birch bark and leaves. They set them to sail in the moat that encircled the Stern-burg. It no longer was a castle with knights and a drawbridge, but the moat and baroque tower still made it seem like a castle—even if the dungeon had become a storage cellar for potatoes, and the armored horses had been replaced by sedate white cows that left steaming circles of dung all over the meadows. In back of the Sternburg, a felled oak trunk lay across the moat, and you could balance across it if you dared. But if you slipped, you’d drop into the murky water and come up shrieking, with green and yellow caterpillars in your hair—like Alexander Sturm, whose friends had challenged him to cross the moat blindfolded the night he’d turned seventeen.
Though Alexander hadn’t been injured, the story of his mishap kept Trudi and Georg from trying to get across the moat, but some evenings, when she couldn’t fall asleep right away, she’d see herself crossing it, her arms raised on either side of herself, her bare feet on the white bark.
Once, Leo took both children to a puppet show in Neuss; another time he borrowed the Abramowitzs’ car to buy a sack of flour from the mill on the north end of town. With its brick arches and tall windows, the building looked more like a mansion than a mill, and when the children played tag in the surrounding woods, they ran not only from one another but also from a vague premonition of ruins and decay, a premonition which Georg would forget entirely and Trudi would not recall until one June evening, thirty-two years later, when she’d return to the flour mill long after it would have been destroyed by bombs and lie abandoned in a thickening tangle of forest and swamp, while the rest of Burgdorf had already been rebuilt. She’d walk through the roofless building, pick a dried thistle from a clump of camomile, and see herself and Georg that day her father had taken them to the mill, pulling thistles from the ground by their roots and taking their prickly bouquets back to the pay-library, where they’d brought a pot and two spoons down to the brook and had mixed the purple heads of the thistles with water and sand. Thistle soup, they’d called their concoction when they’d offered it to her father, who’d pretended to slurp it with sounds of delight.
In November, Trudi came along when Georg and his mother walked in the All Saints’ Day proce
ssion. The procession started at St. Martin’s Church, went all around the church square and the adjacent streets, and wound past the Catholic school and the synagogue to the cemetery where the people of Burgdorf laid wreaths on their families’ graves and lit stubby white candles in glass lanterns.
Except for Trudi, Georg never invited any of his friends to come upstairs to the third floor with him, and even her visits ended the day she let him talk her into cutting his hair with his mother’s embroidery scissors. While he sat on a wooden stool in the kitchen, she perched on the edge of the table in the red wool dress and matching stockings that her aunt had sent her for Christmas, getting ready to guide the blades through Georg’s fine curls.
But something kept her from making that initial cut—the fear that, once Georg was more like other boys, she would lose him as a friend—and yet, she wanted him to be liked by others, wanted him to be happy. She held the scissors in one hand, a lock of hair in the other.
“Do it,” he said.
Four stuffed robins and one stuffed owl perched on top of the cupboard, their shiny, hard eyes watching her. It was cold in the kitchen, since Frau Weiler could only afford to heat the stove long enough to cook; yet, the skin on Georg’s neck was hot against Trudi’s fingers.
“Do it.”
The scissors screeched as they claimed one curl.
“Let me see.” He grasped it from her and stared at it, surprised to have this old enemy finally separate from his body. “Hurry up, Trudi.”