Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  Georg did not touch her. Hands jammed into his pockets like pieces of wood, he stood to the side, ready to flee, and once, when his eyes let themselves be trapped by Trudi’s, they were wild with anger at her—for letting herself get caught.

  “Frau Braunmeier …” A voice, so low-pitched it could only belong to Alexander Sturm, came from outside the front of the barn.

  Hans-Jürgen dashed from the side door with Paul and Fritz close behind him.

  “Ich möcht nur ein paar Eier kaufen… ”—“I just want to buy some eggs.…”

  Georg grabbed a cattle blanket and threw it across Trudi before he ran out.

  “Auch ein Pfund Butter”—“Also a pound of butter.”

  Trudi couldn’t understand the muffled reply of Frau Braunmeier. She imagined herself shouting for help, imagined Alexander bending over her and helping her up, taking her home on the back of his bicycle, but then she thought of her father walking her to school in his Sunday suit to talk to the sisters, felt herself pushed into that closed circle of girls, and she knew she could never tell—not him, not anyone.

  She waited until it was quiet outside again. Gripping the blanket around herself, she walked toward the door, feeling a curious absence of fear. It was over. She felt certain. They would not come back.

  When she stepped from the barn, she felt as if she were standing on broken glass, though the ground was hard dirt, packed down by the hooves of cattle. It felt dangerous to step out of the space she had come to know as intensely as her room. Being inside that barn had made her even more separate from others, and the only kinship she could feel was to those boys, who had become far more like her than anyone else because they, too, had been part of what had happened to her. She felt the wind on her face, drying the cold snot against her cheeks and lips, stretching her skin taut the way egg whites will when you get them on your hands while baking.

  Walking carefully as if crossing a desert of broken glass, Trudi thought of the shards that spiked the top edges of the walls which surrounded the Grafenberg asylum and understood why someone might wish to stay there. She saw herself within those walls with her mother, and she thought how comforting it would be to live there. Forever. Her legs ached, and her body felt monstrous beneath the blanket as she headed back toward the river, which now was a uniform leaden color that showed the pattern of ripples but no longer held those washes of light.

  She wanted to crawl into the river with the shame of having been touched like that, singled out. As she bent and reached beneath the bushes to retrieve the clothes she’d sewn so carefully, it occurred to her that to girls of normal height it didn’t mean a thing if a certain style made them look one or two centimeters taller. But she could change hemlines of skirts and jackets and, still, she would never be like other girls. Seehund grasped the side of her hand between his teeth, lightly, as if to console her, and she swung toward him and kicked him away—this witness to her shame. Beneath the cover of the blanket, she dressed herself hastily while Seehund limped around her, his seal-gray coat blotched with dry patches of blood.

  Again, his damp snout nudged her hand.

  Again, she kicked him away.

  He followed her to the tip of the jetty, where she knelt in the cool pocket of sand and howled her rage. Frightened, the dog squirmed close, pushing his head at her, and though she blamed herself for his injury, she couldn’t bear to touch him. She felt as hideous as Gerda Heidenreich, whose lips were always wet with saliva, as repulsive as the youngest Bilder boy, whose layers of fat nearly swallowed his eyes—the sum of all the freaks she had avoided.

  Her hands found a heavy stone crusted with sand. Orange-red, the sun glowed through the hazy sky, and the air was soaked with the smell of her sweat as she raised the stone high above her head and hurled it into the Rhein. Georg. She reached for another stone. Holding it in both hands, she leapt up and flung it into the waves. Paul. Another stone. Hans-Jürgen. Fritz. The stones broke the skin of the river and sank to the bottom. Georg. Fritz. More stones, from the jetty now, some of them glistening with water that had splashed across them. Her eyes ached, and she squinted against the sun. Near the opposite bank of the river a dark cloud of swallows skimmed across the surface of the water. The rocks became weightier. Hans-Jürgen. Paul. Sharper. Georg. Georg.

  seven

  1929-1933

  SOME DAYS SHE COULDN’T EAT. HER MOUTH WOULD FEEL DRY, SWOLLEN, and if her father urged her to take at least one bite of the food she’d prepared for him, it would sit on her tongue, heavy and revolting. The only craving she had was for sweets, and she’d feel ill after eating them.

  At night, she found it difficult to sleep, and she’d get up before dawn, sit in the living room with a blanket wrapped around herself, and read books from her father’s personal collection. She rarely left the house. Her tailored clothes felt stiff, phony, and she hid her body behind the loose fabrics of housedresses, camouflaged herself with cardigans. When her father surprised her with a sewing machine for her fourteenth birthday, she set it up in her room but didn’t use it.

  She couldn’t bear to touch her dog. His eyes would follow her with sad devotion, and occasionally he’d raise his head as if about to nudge her, but he’d learned it was wiser to wait for her to come to him than to startle her with his touch. Though she hadn’t hurt him since that morning by the river, he dimly sensed that she was capable of a tremendous act of violence, punishing that part of herself that had been marred, punishing him for being her witness.

  She wished she could travel like Frau Abramowitz and her husband, Michel—except she would never come back to Burgdorf. The Abramowitzs were always planning trips, the most recent of them to China, and their dining room table was usually covered with brochures and schedules. Frau Abramowitz had ordered an extra Chinese train schedule for Trudi; it was written in odd symbols that looked more like pictures than letters.

  “If you ever go to China,” Frau Abramowitz had said, “you’ll be able to travel the trains for almost free. They don’t go by age, but by height. If you’re below one meter, you don’t pay anything, but of course you’re too tall for that.”

  Too tall. No one had ever told her that she was too tall for anything. “I’m one meter eighteen.”

  “Then you’ll only pay one-quarter of the total fare. That’s if you’re between one meter and one meter twenty-nine.”

  What sustained Trudi was her work in the pay-library. There, wrapped in the impassioned music that spun from the gramophone, she could almost forget those boys while she bartered information, invading the lives of her customers with her questions, feeding them rations of gossip to lure them into sharing their secrets.

  Yet she never bartered her own secrets. In the earth nest beneath the house, her mother had initiated her into the power of secrets. By taking Trudi’s hand and pressing it against her knee, she’d transfused her with the addiction to the unspoken stories that lay beneath people’s skins.

  Trudi would reveal to Frau Simon what Judge Spiecker had told her the last time he’d come in to borrow mystery novels, while Frau Simon, in turn, would confide in Trudi what Herr Immers had said about Herr Buttgereit. She was discovering when to stay silent, when to let an interminable pause fill itself with the discomfort of the other person and hastily whispered information, while she—always the talker believing in words—listened, reeling in new material.

  Yet, beneath the stories that poured through her and numbed her was her pain and the fear of her own rage. All that spring and summer she stayed inside the house, eating and sleeping very little, moving about the pay-library like an invalid, dodging her father’s concerned questions—all through that fall and winter until the early spring when the flood loosened her rage.

  The flood began with rain one April night. It rained the next day and the day after that, keeping most of the regulars away from the pay-library, even the wife of the taxidermist, who kept coming back for the same books. Both Trudi and her father had explained to Frau Heidenreich that
it would be far less expensive for her to buy the books she reread, but she enjoyed leafing through the books on the shelves. She’d always bring her daughter, Gerda, and the big girl would sit on the floor and play with a fancy pocket watch that no longer had hands.

  For weeks it kept raining, and the river kept rising. Although the people of Burgdorf filled potato sacks with sand and raised the dike with them, the water poured into the streets and gushed down cellar stairs. Trudi helped her father carry the books from the pay-library upstairs into the sewing room and stack them against the walls. The flood covered the two lowest shelves throughout the library, soaked the legs of the wicker table, and stained the underside of the sofa, even though Trudi’s father, with the help of Herr Abramowitz, had lifted its legs onto bricks. They wound the ends of the long drapes around the curtain rods, creating an odd rococo effect that made the living room look far more elegant than before.

  The third week of the flood the rain ceased, but the surface of the gray waters kept rising. It was a Sunday, and since the pews of St. Martin’s Church were half under water, the people took boats to the chapel which stood on a hill near the Sternburg. It looked as if all the pigeons of Burgdorf had sought sanctuary on top of the bell tower, and it was impossible to see the slate roof tiles among the swarms of gray and iridescent birds.

  As the Rhein kept rising in Burgdorf and other towns along its banks, Trudi felt as though the river were coming after her, urging her to take revenge on Georg, Hans-Jürgen, Fritz, and Paul—the only people in the entire world who shared with her the secret of what had happened. Gradually her movements took on her old energy, and she forced herself to leave the house at least once a day. She was amazed how the boys averted their eyes when they encountered her, how they flinched when she scorched them with the fury of her gaze. Their shame, she discovered, gave her power over them. And as the weight of what had happened kept gathering within her—dark and turbulent, threatening to obliterate her—she knew she had to release it.

  Hans-Jürgen would be the first one, she decided.

  She didn’t know what she would do to him until she saw him hand in hand with a blond girl. From the way he looked at the girl, Trudi could tell he adored her. His first love, she thought, how sweet, how very sweet. She felt calmer than she had in many months as she settled into a patient wait for a chance to encounter him alone.

  One morning in July, when Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier was getting ready to set up a stand in the open market with products from his family’s farm, he saw it coming toward him, the short, rounded girl-shape that kept fastening itself to his dreams, evoking fear and that strange lust he despised in himself, unsettling him for hours after waking up. Quickly, he bent over an open crate, whistling as he pretended to busy himself.

  When he was certain she’d passed his stand, he cautiously turned his head, but she stood right behind him, her moon face set into bitter lines, her skin the color of new frost as if to negate the heat it had sent to his fingers not too long ago. He wiped his hands against the sides of his trousers.

  She stood there, not saying anything, forcing him to look at her as if taking pleasure in the discomfort he had with her body.

  To his horror, he felt his flesh rise for her, and he hated her for that. “What do you want?” he blurted.

  “I know something.”

  “So?”

  “About you.”

  “I have work to do.”

  “Go ahead.”

  He slammed the supports of the wooden stand into position, lifted the crates to display fruits and cheese, marked slate markers with prices. And throughout all this she stood there, stubby arms crossed in front of her flowered housedress, simply stood there, making him want to bolt, even though it would mean the wrath of his father.

  “So then—what is it you know?” he finally asked.

  “That she does not love you.”

  His neck itched—hot and sudden. “Who?”

  She lowered her eyes, murmured something he couldn’t hear.

  “Who?” As he crouched to bring his eyes down to hers, he thought she smiled, but it passed so quickly that he figured he’d imagined it.

  “You know who.”

  “Go away.”

  “Don’t you want to find out why?”

  He shook his head, unable to pry his eyes from hers.

  “I’ll go then,” she said and walked from him.

  He told himself he’d be better off not to ask. Whatever she had to say to him would be worse than not knowing. “Why?” he shouted after her.

  But she had reached the other side of the market and Barbarossa Strasse, where the constant shade from the canopy of oaks threatened to take her from him.

  He ran, grasped her by the elbow.

  She shook him off and whirled toward him.

  “Why?” he hissed.

  “Because,” she said as if totally sure, “no girl, no woman will ever love you.”

  He laughed, a harsh laugh that hurt his throat. “You are crazy. Like your mother. Crazy Zwerg”

  The skin around her nostrils trembled but her voice remained even. “Crazy enough to know things. No woman will ever love you, Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier.”

  His face, his entire body was burning hot, and he found it hard to breathe. “You—You think you can put a stupid curse on me?”

  “Sshh—” She raised one hand. “I’m not finished. No woman will ever love you back. And your love will make a woman turn to another man.”

  That night she slept—deeply and without remembering her dreams—and when she awoke, the sun was in her face and it was late morning and she understood that revenge did not always have to come through her directly.

  Without mercy or haste, she began to spread stories about Fritz Hansen and Paul Weinhart, stories that were unlike her other stories and—she sensed—should have been left untold because they carried mere shards of truth, violating not only the core of the stories but also her own code of truth. Still—they gave her tremendous satisfaction as the position of those boys was weakened within the community. But what about Georg?—a voice within her persisted. What about Georg?

  To the surprise of everyone, except Trudi, Paul Weinhart’s uncle changed his mind about letting his nephew serve his apprenticeship in his jewelry store. Instead, after helping his father on the farm in the early hours of day, Paul worked for the potato man, delivering heavy sacks of potatoes all over town, including to the pay-library. And when Fritz Hansen took over his parents’ bakery, many of the old customers began to buy their bread and pastries from the competition though it was owned by Protestants. Old Herr Hansen had to resort to buying a truck that wove through the streets and brought the bakery to the people’s doors. Against a white background, large blue letters proclaimed: Hansen Bäckerei. The driver was Alfred Meier, who’d slow down whenever he’d pass the Buttgereits’ house, pining for at least a glimpse of Monika Buttgereit, who was only allowed to speak to him in her mother’s presence right after mass.

  All of the books in the Montags’ pay-library were covered with cellophane that grew dull and scratched over the years; yet, despite that protection, the books’ paper jackets developed tears. You could tell if Trudi or her father had repaired them: Leo Montag’s sections of tape were meticulously trimmed and ran along the insides of the book jackets, leaving no more than faint scars, while Trudi’s tapes crisscrossed not only the titles and names of authors, but also the swooning heroines, brave soldiers, dedicated doctors, and American cowboys. Since the tape yellowed sooner than the covers, the faces of the characters often looked jaundiced, contradicting the titles which proclaimed blossoming love or triumphant victories.

  As the people came to Trudi with their stories, she cherished the mystery of silence just before a secret was revealed. And the bigger the secret, the denser was the silence surrounding it. Timing was extremely important—to choose the best moment to tear the silence. If it happened too soon, the silence that nurtured the growth of a secret closed aro
und it like a cocoon. And if she waited too long, most of the secret had already drained away.

  Yet, some things, Trudi had to admit to herself, better remained secrets—like the identity of the unknown benefactor, whose presence still manifested itself in isolated bursts of generosity: there might not be anything for months, but then three or four gifts would be found inside people’s houses within a single week. The secret of that identity gave the town of Burgdorf a fairy-tale quality, a shared and unspoken conviction that the unknown benefactor would shield the people from anything that could be worse than their daily troubles.

  Behind the counter of the library stood one of the wide stools that Trudi’s father had built for her and on which she’d stand to sell you tobacco, operate the cash register, or record the books you borrowed. Frequently only the top of her light blond hair would be visible above the counter. She was in the process of making a card file for the books, transferring the titles from her father’s brittle ledger onto long beige cards, which she filed alphabetically in a wooden box. But she kept her father’s system of entering a customer’s name beneath the title of each borrowed book.