Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  A ladder equipped with wheels allowed her to reach books on even the highest shelves, making her feel taller than anyone who wandered into the library. She liked the view of the tops of people’s heads—a welcome change from having to stare up into their faces. It was for that same reason that she’d occasionally still climb into the tower of the church, high above the rest of the town. There she’d sit, watching miniature people dart between houses and through the open market.

  If her father was in the pay-library while she was on the ladder, she’d stay up there if a customer entered, but if her father was resting or away at a chess tournament, she’d scramble down, her O-shaped legs finding the next tread with amazing surety.

  Years of restricted movements had drained her father’s body of its vitality, and he had settled into his limp as though it had been sculpted for him. Since he could rely on Trudi to open the pay-library, he slept longer most mornings; and at midday, when the bells from St. Martin’s sounded across town and stores closed for two hours, he’d rest with one of the new books on the velvet sofa in the living room, a blanket across his legs, and read, the bony contours of his face transformed by an expression of bliss.

  Seehund would lie on the floor next to the sofa, his nose on the worn leather of the shoes that Leo had taken off. It was as though he were aging along with Leo, both of them dozing more hours than they stayed awake. While Leo’s hair was turning white, the dog’s fur had blurred to a softer hue of seal gray. Often, Leo would pull his comb from his shirt pocket and untangle a fur ball from the dog’s coat or, almost absentmindedly, run it through the thicker layers of hair around Seehund’s neck. The dog had taken to sleeping at the foot of Leo’s bed, though his blanket remained on the floor of Trudi’s room. Sometimes he’d take one of his hind legs between his jaws and pinch it as if to allay a deep-seated ache.

  Trudi still took him on her walks along the Rhein though she hadn’t returned to the Braunmeiers’ jetty, a place too terrible to even think about. Usually, she’d stay on the dike and hike south toward Düsseldorf for two kilometers. Her back felt better on the days she walked, more limber. If she stayed indoors for too long, the lower part of her back had a tendency to get stiff and heavy. Along the way, she’d slow down to wait for Seehund, until she’d reach a path that spilled at an odd angle through the meadow and down to the river. It slanted past a clump of four poplars and an immense flat rock that lay embedded in the earth just where the path met the trail that hugged the embankment. The rock’s dark surface would get so warm that, even in the late fall, you could stretch out on it and feel your entire back warmed while the cool air moved across your face and body, as if you were held suspended between two seasons.

  That meadow was so far from town that no one else was ever there. The river was rough and greedy—not ashamed to demand its rightful share: it strained against the embankment, swallowed rocks, and gushed through the tiniest crevices. Though it offered no sheltered bays, Trudi would ride its turbulent waves, dart beneath them in her frog-swim, her heart beating fast as she became the river, claiming what was hers. As the river, she washed through the houses of people without being seen, got into their beds, their souls, as she flushed out their stories and fed on their worries about what she knew and what she might tell. Whenever she became the river, the people matched her power only as a group. Because the river could take on the town, the entire country.

  She thought of what people said behind her back—that she hadn’t cried at her own mother’s funeral—while to her face they said: “You’re lucky to have such pretty hair.” They didn’t have any idea what she was like: they saw her body, used her size to warn their children, looked at her with disgust. But it was just that disgust of theirs which fused her to them with an odd sense of belonging. That disgust—it nourished her, horrified her. She would have done anything to be loved by them, and since she could not have their acceptance, she seized their secrets and bared them as she had bared Eva’s birthmark.

  • • •

  She began to sew for herself again, taking pleasure in altering patterns to suit her. As her tolerance for food returned, she could see how relieved her father was. When she’d call him into the kitchen where she’d set the table for the hot midday meal, he’d tell her about the new books and make a list of those customers he knew would like them. His women customers would feel privileged when he’d pull a new book from beneath the counter and whisper, “I’ve been saving this one for you. It just came in.” Their eyes rapt, they’d listen as he gave them just enough of the plot to captivate them without revealing the ending.

  To Trudi, those books seemed as flat as her mother’s paper dolls: even though you could alter their appearance by folding the tabs of elaborate gowns across their shoulders, they stayed flat, and their smiles remained as constant as the happy endings in the books. She was far more interested in the stories that unfolded around her in Burgdorf, stories that breathed and grew and took on their own shapes and momentum, like when the Buttgereits’ second daughter, Monika, was forbidden to become engaged to Alfred Meier until after her older sister had found a suitor; or when Frau Weiler, right there in her store, saw the assistant pastor—that towering young man who’d moved into the rectory and ate three times as much as the aging pastor and his housekeeper together—deposit a bar of chocolate in the pocket of his cassock as if he had every right to do so; or when Emil Hesping’s cousin, a champion swimmer, made a bet that he could swim across the Rhein six times and drowned in a whirlpool during his final crossing; or when Alexander Sturm began the construction of an L-shaped apartment house, the largest building in Burgdorf, with two entrances, three floors, four stores, and eighteen apartments; or when Helmut Eberhardt and one of the other altar boys were questioned, but not punished, by the sisters for trying to push the fat boy, Rainer Bilder, in front of the ragman’s wagon.

  Some stories kept growing inside Trudi, finding their own passages, like moles tunneling through the earth. Others she tested and pushed to see how far they’d give, what fit in and what didn’t, and what she brought to those stories was her curiosity and what she intuitively knew about people. As she gleaned things about their lives, she wove them into their stories. As an old woman she would see a magazine article about a cave; it had photos and a diagram of the many veins you could travel in exploring that cave. Some of those veins led into other veins; some ended; some sprouted a net of other paths. With the stories of people she’d known since her childhood it was like that: one incident in their lives might come to an ending, but others would lead into new veins, and what was fascinating was to look at the whole of it and discern a pattern, a way of being, that had shaped those passages.

  In observing the world around her, Trudi would see one thing and deduce the rest. It was not only what happened to people, but what could have happened. She could encounter people on the street and then, in her head, follow them home and know what they would be doing and thinking—as with Georg Weiler who, by the time he was seventeen, had grown into one of the handsomest boys she’d ever seen, yet was frightened of pretty girls. Homely girls, he figured, were not as demanding. Easily dazzled by his smile, they were grateful that he paid attention to them. For them, he wouldn’t have to change or improve himself. They gave him a feeling of accomplishment that he hadn’t known before.

  Helga Stamm was the fourth in a sequence of these girls. Her thick ankles and plain face made Georg feel certain that she had to be pleased with the way he was—superior to her in looks and intelligence. Trudi was sure he didn’t know the quiet, deep-rooted strength below Helga’s placid surface. It pleased Trudi, that strength, because she sensed that she wouldn’t have to do anything herself to complete her own cycle of revenge. All she had to do was wait for the day when Georg would come up against Helga’s strength.

  His mother had wanted him to work in the store, but he’d moved to Düsseldorf and become an apprentice in a huge grocery store, where everything was already weighed and packaged, and where
people took the items they wanted from shelves and carried them to one of the three cash registers. Most people in Burgdorf couldn’t imagine that kind of grocery store. “It sounds like a train station,” they said and watched Georg for signs of change when he returned to Burgdorf to visit Helga. His mother prayed for him every night—not just the regular prayers she’d allocated him since birth, but also the ten Hail Marys that she used to offer God for her mother’s release from purgatory. According to her calculations, she’d prayed her mother into heaven the third week of May in 1932, and she had celebrated her mother’s freedom by inviting both priests for Sunday dinner.

  The books in the pay-library were predictable, alike, and Trudi was amazed that anyone would keep reading them, even after her father explained to her one afternoon, while shelving books, that people found assurance in the happy endings, in knowing ahead of time what would happen to their heroes and heroines.

  “Their own lives are so uncertain,” he said. “With the books, they can forget about themselves for a while … crawl between the pages.”

  “Like you?”

  He smiled his slow, steady smile. “I could say that I have to study what I lend.”

  “You could say that.”

  “I wish you’d read them, too.”

  “I do. I read a few pages, skip to the middle, the last page, and then I know enough.” She smiled back at him, delighted with this banter that was familiar, yet rare. “If I want to read happy endings, I’ll go back to fairy tales. At least they have some meaning.”

  “About endings.… Unless we do them well, we have to keep repeating them.”

  Four gray-brown birds, a bit of red on their throats, landed in the chestnut tree outside the front window. One of them had an injury that protruded from the side of its head, a swollen mass of tissue that balanced the eye at its crest like a strange telescope. As Trudi wondered if the bird was in constant pain, it flew off, the other birds close behind. Almost immediately the door to the library swung open, letting in gusts of wind as Frau Eberhardt came in, wearing her new beige suit with the fitted skirt that revealed the round knobs of her garters. Trudi couldn’t think of anyone in town who was as well liked as Frau Eberhardt.

  “No, you’re not,” Frau Eberhardt was telling her son, Helmut, who followed her, his beautiful face sulky, a bandage on his left arm half covered by the sleeve of his doe-brown shirt. “Today you’re staying right next to me.”

  “I’m not a baby.” He closed the door.

  “That’s right. Babies have more sense than you.” She tucked a few strands of hair beneath her hat, her movements as agitated as her voice.

  The boy stalked to the end of the counter and leaned against it, staring at the floorboards as if he’d like nothing better than to hurt someone. In church he always looked so pure in his altar boy’s smock, his eyes never wavering from the altar as he executed each step of the ritual without a single mistake.

  “He’s proud of this.” Frau Eberhardt pointed to her son’s arm and turned to Leo Montag. “Helmut is actually proud of this.”

  His eyes full of compassion, Leo took one slow step toward her, and though he didn’t touch her, her features calmed. “What happened, Frau Eberhardt?” he asked.

  With that old sense of uneasiness that was hers whenever Helmut was near, Trudi listened, interrupting with brief questions as Renate Eberhardt told how her son had initiated and won a test of courage that had left him and five other boys in his youth group with bleeding arms. They’d taken one of her good pillow cases and twisted the fabric into a stiff knot which they’d rubbed along their naked arms, hard, from the wrist to the shoulder, grating it up and down their skin until the raw flesh had been exposed.

  “… and the one who had the most terrible injury was the hero for the day.” Frau Eberhardt glanced toward her son, who was pretending he hadn’t heard a word.

  “Hurting yourself like that…” Trudi shook her head. “Why would anyone do that?”

  “It has nothing to do with courage,” Leo said softly. “Right, Helmut? Just as what you did to Rainer Bilder has nothing to do with courage.”

  Helmut’s perfect chin rose. “That fat pig,” he said. Almost thirteen, he was nearly as tall as his mother, and quite likely—Trudi concluded—stronger and faster than any of them.

  “I like Rainer.” Leo’s voice carried an edge of warning. “He is a kind, unfortunate boy who deserves—”

  “He’s got tits like a girl, that’s how fat he is!”

  “Stop it, Helmut,” his mother said. “I say, stop it now and apologize to Herr Montag.”

  Helmut’s face turned red, clashing with the brown shirt of the Hitler-Jugend. “I am sorry, Herr Montag,” he mumbled and bowed in Leo’s direction.

  A few years from now he won’t listen to her at all, Trudi thought. Or to any of us. Once he knows his strength, there’s nothing his mother can do to make him obey. He won’t listen to her out of respect—not that one. The only reason he’s here right now is because he doesn’t know his strength.

  Trudi was glad her father had spoken out for Rainer Bilder. A shy boy with a body so immense that it embarrassed you to look at him, he was frequently taunted and beaten by the other boys in school, who unified against him. Some of the adults in town, who would have ordered other children to stop fighting, didn’t interfere when Rainer was tormented, as if they justified that he brought on the beatings with his difference. His parents, who watched with bewilderment as their youngest son expanded in front of their eyes, felt so disgraced by him that they’d long since stopped complaining to the principal when Rainer lumbered home with bruises on his face and limbs.

  Ironically, both parents were gaunt, despite a joint passion for food that had sustained their marriage through a quarter of a century. This passion gave them something to talk about to each other and to everyone they encountered. Where, say, a hypochondriac would welcome you with revelations of new ailments, or a traveler with descriptions of exotic places, Rainer’s parents were sure to greet you with details of every single thing they’d consumed the day before. These accounts of elaborate meals would be accompanied by delicate clicks of the tongue and rapturous sighs. The family’s six older children were lean-bodied like their parents, but Rainer was grotesquely fat, as though his parents’ excesses had visited themselves upon him.

  Trudi, too, felt uncomfortable with Rainer’s freak body, but not nearly as much as with Helmut, who was a freak on the inside, yet—some of the old women claimed—looked like “an angel come back to earth.” Now the angel was watching her from the end of the counter, his even features without expression, and she found herself thinking of Lucifer, the angel who’d been banished from heaven and—in the act of falling—had seized far greater control than any of the faithful angels.

  She’d seen Helmut the week before, the day of the Judenboykott— Jew boycott—when he’d brought coffee to the SA men who were posted in front of Jewish stores, threatening customers who wanted to enter. The first time Trudi had come across Helmut in his uniform had been during the Fackelparade—torch parade—that the Nationalsozialisten had held last January to celebrate their victory. In the dark, ghosts of flames had pulsed across the strangely pious and enraptured faces of uniformed girls and boys as they’d marched with their songs amidst a sea of red, white, and black flags, swept forward by the current of music. “Für die Fahne wollen wir sterben…,” they’d sung. “For the flag we want to die.” The only other place Trudi had seen that beatific expression on Helmut’s face was in church when he’d been about to receive communion.

  Frau Eberhardt took two romances from her handbag and laid them on the counter. “These are overdue.” She opened her wallet. “By two days, I believe.”

  “Don’t let it worry you.” Leo waved aside her attempts to pay. “You’ve brought others back early. It evens out.”

  His eyes followed her as she left with her son, and when the door closed behind them, he limped to the window and stood watching th
e two until he could no longer see them.

  “A bad one,” Trudi said.

  Leo nodded. “Aus Kindern werden Soldaten—children become soldiers.… He’ll make a proper soldier. It’s their kind of courage.”

  “What kind of a soldier were you?”

  “A reluctant one. The kind they were glad to send home.”

  “Herr Immers would have liked to take your place.”

  “By now he believes he really fought the war.”

  The day before, when Trudi had been in the butcher shop, Herr Immers had told her, “Wir leben in einer grossen Zeit”—“We live in a significant time.” He liked to chat with customers while his son, Anton, and Irmtraud Boden—who’d gone to school with Trudi and was sweet on Anton, weighed and wrapped meats and cold cuts. Behind the marble counter, the traditional black, red, and gold flag had been replaced by the new flag of the Nationalsozialisten. Ever since the Fackelparade, more and more houses had been displaying that flag.

  “Herr Immers will be glad when the next war comes along,” Leo said.

  “What are you saying?”

  He squinted at Trudi as if trying to gauge if she was strong enough to hear his answer. “People have been whispering more.… You know we’re heading for a war when that kind of silence begins to happen. The sound level of the town, the entire country, drops to a lower level… even the river, the birds.…”

  “Maybe you’re just losing your hearing.” She tried to joke away the apprehension she’d felt the past few months and which her father was confirming with his words. When he didn’t answer, she said, “I hope you’re wrong.”

  “So do I,” he said gravely. “But I worry about the German attraction for one strong leader, one father figure who makes you obey, who is strong enough to make you obey.… Who tells you: This is the right thing to do. I worry about the belief that our strength is a military strength.” He walked to the first row of shelves and picked up books without looking at them. “Most people seem to think that life has been getting better: less unemployment, more excitement for our youth.… Those groups with their marches and songs and bonfires.”