Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  The waiter poured more of the red Berliner Weisse, and Ingrid whispered to Trudi when the foam left a white stripe on Klaus Malter’s beard. When he insisted on knowing what they were saying, Ingrid refused and Trudi reached up to wipe the foam from his face. His beard was dense, yet soft, and she blushed and pulled her fingers away; but he caught her hand, and all she could think of was how glad she was that she’d been using lotion so faithfully.

  “What were you whispering?”

  “That Alexander is a stuffy man,” she lied.

  “Strange to think that he makes toys,” Klaus said.

  When the band played the last round, Trudi thought the tent was whirling around her as the young dentist led her in a waltz. He laughed aloud and she laughed with him, and it no longer mattered how hard it was to keep her neck and arms at that angle, and his lips were wet as he drew her closer and lowered his face toward hers, whirling her around all along, and his tongue tasted of sweet berries and beer, and it was only after they were back at the table and the accordionists were playing the national anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles …,” that she realized she had just received her first kiss.

  “Stop” she wanted to shout at him, “stop, we have to do this over. I didn’t even know what was happening” but the musicians were packing up their instruments, and Klaus didn’t look any different than he had before, even though he had taken her across a border she’d never expected to cross: she had joined the legion of women who had been kissed.

  Klaus Malter took both Trudi and Ingrid home as he had before, walking between them, his arms linked through theirs, and he dropped Trudi off first and said she was a fabulous dancer. Her house was dark and silent, but the moon scattered enough light for her to find her way into the living room, where she explored her face in the gold-framed mirrors. Each reflection gave her a face that was leaner, paler—as though she’d lived through uncountable experiences since she’d left the house earlier that day. It was the face Klaus had looked at when they’d danced, the face he’d bent toward and kissed.

  She tilted her head, smiling with the assurance she’d seen in Pia’s smile, and thought of Pia’s magic island with its waterfall and jewels and orchids, the island she had helped to create—a place to go to in her thoughts, hers as long as she remembered it was there for her.

  “Trudi Malter,” she whispered to herself. “No, Gertrud Malter …” But the name Gertrud—the full version of her name, the adult version—carried that tinge of her mother’s craziness.

  “Trudi Malter,” she practiced again. Klaus Malter was ten years older than she—a perfect age gap, since she was far more mature than other eighteen-year-olds.

  “Frau Malter,” she said aloud, trying to ignore Pia’s voice deep inside her head: “Some are Zwerge. Others not.”

  She shook her head, hard.

  “Some are Zwerge. Others not.”

  But Pia’s baby was not a Zwerg.

  “A grown grown-up” Pia had called him.

  Klaus was tall. Their babies would be tall like him. They would sleep in a wicker carriage in the pay-library while she’d work. She’d play records for them, rock them in her arms. Klaus would kiss her in the mornings before he’d walk across the street to open his office, and he’d come home for his noontime meals. All her customers would have their teeth fixed by him. He’d accompany her to church, and Sunday afternoons he’d walk with her everywhere in town, proud to be seen with her, his love for her so evident in his eyes that no one could help noticing. For their wedding—

  She laughed aloud, reminding herself that the marriage would have to come before those babies. For their wedding she would sew a white satin gown with a train and wear the highest heels she could buy. “Trudi must have grown” people would say when they’d see her sweep into church. After the wedding she’d dye the gown a deep blue to match her eyes and wear it for special occasions, to the Opernhaus in Düsseldorf, say, or to a fancy restaurant.

  But when Klaus came to the pay-library two days later and played chess with Leo, he didn’t mention the kiss, not even when Trudi walked him to the door. He crouched to stroke Seehund’s back—as if to restrain his hands from touching her, Trudi thought as she looked down at the crown of his hair, where it grew in a cowlick.

  “It’s good to see you,” she said.

  “What have you and Ingrid been doing?” he asked without glancing up at her.

  As the dog arched his neck, pushing himself closer against Klaus Malter’s hands without any shame, Trudi felt envious.

  “I haven’t seen Ingrid since the carnival,” she said, stressing the word carnival to jolt his memory.

  He scanned the street as if waiting for a prospective patient and stood up. “I must get back to my office.”

  “What’s wrong?” Leo asked when Trudi stormed past him and up the stairs.

  But she didn’t answer. In her bedroom, she pulled out the pattern and fabric for a new dress and began to pin and cut out the striped material, allowing for added centimeters on the side seams while shortening the bodice and skirt. Even if she was condemned to see the world from the angle of a child’s height, the range of that vision was no longer enough for her desires. By the time she fed the second sleeve through the sewing machine, it was getting dark outside, but she kept standing by the machine, balanced on her left foot while her right foot pumped the wide pedal, and her reckless fingers rushed the fabric toward the rapid needle.

  She felt afraid of her passions, afraid of her mother’s passions revisiting themselves in her, afraid of losing her dignity by bursting into Klaus Malter’s office and throwing her arms around him. She laughed bitterly. Throwing her arms around what? His waist? His belly? She’d have to get him to sit down before she could imagine the rest of that futile fantasy. Now, if she were tall like Ingrid, she could walk up to him and, lightly, raise one hand to his cheek.… An embrace from her own height would be obscene.

  When—all that week—Ingrid didn’t mention the kiss either, Trudi suddenly wondered if she had imagined it. By now, it felt as gaudy and unreal as the carnival. Perhaps Klaus had just bent down and touched her lips with his by accident. But no—his tongue in her mouth had definitely been part two of a kiss. Even if part one—the touching of the lips—had been accidental, she could think of no reason why his tongue could have filled her mouth, other than that he had intended to kiss her.

  Although the beer garden had been crowded that night, none of the people in Burgdorf said anything about the kiss to her. She waited, but even without confirmation she knew that she was a woman who had been kissed and that—at least in that one moment prior to the kiss—she must have evoked lust in the young dentist.

  The end of that summer one of Trudi’s molars began to ache. She tried to keep her tongue from darting back because its left side was rubbing itself sore against the edges of the tooth. The more she decided to ignore the pain, the more she thought about it. Her tongue probed the surface of the molar until she no longer was sure if she imagined a small hollow or if it really was there. What if she had only talked herself into a toothache to find a reason to have Klaus touch her again? He would know it the moment he’d examine her.

  His visits to the pay-library had become rare, but Trudi would find out about him from her father, who saw Klaus every Monday evening at the chess club. Though she wouldn’t come right out and question him about Klaus, she might ask—in passing—who’d been at the club. At times she wondered if someone had told her father about that kiss at the carnival, because he’d look at her as if hesitant to stoke her feelings for Klaus with new information; and yet, he’d give her what she wanted, waiting however until she’d bring up the chess club as if he hoped that, somehow, she would forget about the young dentist.

  From her father she learned that Klaus was thinking of hiring an assistant, and that he’d sprained his ankle when his bicycle had overturned in the ditch. If she saw him on the street or in church, they’d nod to one another or exchange a few po
lite words. Afterwards she’d go over those words in her mind, trying to find significance in his inflections and pauses, imagining what she could have said.

  Perhaps he was even shyer than she.

  Perhaps he’d been waiting for her to mention the kiss.

  Perhaps he was devastated that she acted as though nothing had changed between them.

  She daydreamed about him nearly all the time: his image had attached itself to her eyes, a silvery sheen through which she had to view everything else. He interfered with her days, fastened himself to her dreams. Sometimes she wished she could scrape him from her eyes. Too often she succumbed to the promise of his kiss and let herself imagine a continuation of that dance, spinning into marriage, his arms around her and a red-haired infant.

  Once, she found herself free of her infatuation for nearly two hours after spotting him from the window as he headed toward his office where, just before he opened the door, he reached back to pull the fabric of his trousers from the crack between his buttocks. Delighted with the absence of those intense feelings, she thought they were gone for good, but as with anything you let go of abruptly, they left a void, and soon her infatuation rushed back into that void, familiar and heavy.

  When her tooth continued to hurt, leaving a sweet, crumbling sensation deep inside her mouth—as much a taste as it was a smell—she briefly considered going to her old dentist, Dr. Beck. But if this toothache was real, it was too valuable to waste on Dr. Beck.

  The raw side of her tongue chafed against her molar the Tuesday she saw Alexander and Eva in the open market with a long-limbed, blond girl, tall enough to pass for fifteen if it hadn’t been for the scraped shins of a child. She turned out to be Alexander’s eleven-year-old niece, Jutta, who had just moved into his apartment building with her widowed mother. Jutta’s eyes were curious when she was introduced to Trudi—not the kind of curious that irritated Trudi—but rather a way of seeing, a total absorbing without judgment. When Jutta looked at you, it felt as though you were held and stored by the eye of a camera—except there was nothing impartial about her glance: she had a wildness about her, a passion that made Trudi want to pull her aside and find out everything about her.

  Eva grasped Trudi’s shoulder. “Alexander and I—we got engaged yesterday,” she said, her thin face radiant.

  “Congratulations. Both of you.” Trudi managed to smile though she was annoyed—not only because she hadn’t been invited—but because she hadn’t found out about the engagement till now. Usually she knew about things before they happened and relished choosing the best time to tell others.

  “It was a small family celebration,” Alexander said as if to appease her.

  “How about your studies, Eva?” Trudi mumbled without glancing up.

  “My what?” Eva bent until her face was in front of Trudi’s.

  “Your studies. I was asking about your studies.”

  Alexander lowered himself too as if not to miss one word.

  Only the girl stood tall, watching the three of them with almost the same amused expression as Pia’s that day she’d taught Trudi this trick.

  “I’ll wait until after the wedding,” Eva said.

  “But you still want to be a doctor.” It came out like a reminder, not a question.

  “Some day. For now I’ll do some office work for my mother.”

  After that meeting in the market, Trudi saw the girl Jutta nearly everywhere, as if she’d been there all along, roaming through Burgdorf with impatient strides, a dog-eared sketchbook under one arm. One blustery September evening Trudi followed her past the wheat and potato fields to the quarry hole at the south end of town. For the past months, cranes had scooped out the ground, loading gravel onto trucks that rumbled through the center of Burgdorf, but now all the equipment was gone. Trudi saw the girl on the opposite side of the wide hole, her dress blowing around her like a bell as she stood high in the branches of an unsteady birch that clung to the edge of the gouged earth by its roots. All at once—though her own feet were on solid ground—Trudi became the girl Jutta: she felt the tree swaying beneath her, felt a deep identification as their lives fused in an inexplicable way that would endure long beyond that day and shift itself to Jutta’s unborn daughter, whose birth was still more than a decade away.

  Beads of cold rain began to slant to the earth, and from a distance a low thunder reeled closer. The roots of the tree were half exposed, and it struck Trudi as an omen that Jutta would never be entirely safe in Burgdorf. As the egg smell of lightning suffused the air, Trudi raised one hand to warn the girl, but the young face was turned toward the sky—not in surrender, but rather in a fearless greeting of the elements, as if Jutta were welcoming her equals—and Trudi decided against disturbing her solitude and dropped the cool back of her hand against that side of her face which was swollen hot from her tooth.

  When she reached home, the wind had plastered wet, long leaves from the chestnut tree against the door. Her clothes were molded to her body, and Seehund sniffed her drenched shoes without getting up as she stepped across him. Lately, it had become harder for him to raise himself onto his old legs, and she had to hoist him up most mornings, steady him as she led him to the backdoor. Her father liked to save morsels from his meal for the dog. Since Seehund could no longer climb the steps, they’d moved his blanket next to the kitchen stove, but he slept wherever the sun left a warm pool of light.

  “You better get some dry clothes on,” her father said and heated the bathroom stove for hot water even though it was not Saturday, and she didn’t refuse the bath because she didn’t know how to tell him that seeing the girl by the quarry already made her aglow with something wild and splendid deep within.

  Far into the night she awoke with a start and saw Jutta standing in the tree, rain shrouding her like a second skin. In the morning she found out from Emil Hesping that water was spouting from the bottom of the quarry hole, and when he took her and Frau Simon there in his car, Trudi stood beneath Jutta’s birch, watching the surface of the water rise and wishing the girl could see this with her. Yet, she had a feeling that Jutta already knew.

  By the end of that week, the water had cleared, and some of the older children were swimming in it. The following Monday, at the chess club, Leo told Klaus Malter about Trudi’s toothache. When the young dentist stopped by the pay-library the next morning to take her to his office, she protested.

  “It will go away.”

  But he insisted with a warmth that bewildered her.

  “I have to put these books back on the shelves and—”

  “I can do that,” her father said.

  Klaus Malter smiled as he situated her in his tilting metal-and-leather chair. “Another patient. I might survive after all in Burgdorf. Open up now.”

  “It’s already better.” She was glad she was wearing her most recent Sunday dress, the green gabardine with the pointed lace collar that she’d rotated into weekday use only the month before when she’d finished sewing her newest outfit.

  “At least let me take one look at your tooth.”

  As he leaned forward to peer into her mouth, she felt the starched sleeve of his white jacket against her shoulder. A medicine smell clung to his hands and to the metal tools that probed her molar and gums. She wanted to close her lips, wanted to keep him from thinking that she longed for him to fill her mouth once more with his tongue, wanted to get it over—that moment when he’d send her home because there was nothing wrong with her tooth. If only she’d gone to Herr Doktor Beck instead.

  “You shouldn’t have waited so long,” he said. “This is pretty serious.”

  She tried to swallow.

  “Keep it open,” he reminded her as he started to drill. His hands were steady, his eyes alert. His beard was as dense and curly as the triangle of hair that grew low on her body where her thighs fused with her torso. His skin was fairer than hers—as if he hadn’t been in the sun all summer—and a faint spray of freckles made his nose look darker than the rest o
f his dear face.

  She barely felt the drill as she pictured herself telling her customers what a fine dentist Klaus was—words that would carry far more influence now that she’d become one of his patients. “He has gentle hands” she would say. “He doesn’t have hairs sprouting from his nose like Dr. Beck.”

  Glad that she’d come to his office after all, she watched his face, his frown of concentration; yet, at the same time, she felt sad knowing that, soon, she would no longer be with him. And all along he kept drilling deeper, a low rumbling that made her jaw, her head, her entire body vibrate.

  If only that drilling would last so that she could stay here, free to look into his eyes and feel the skin of his hands on her face. If only she were beautiful. If only she’d attended the Gymnasium and gone on to study medicine or law—anything that would have spanned the gap between their classes and brought her the acceptance of his family. He had told her about his annual family reunions at the Kaisershafen Gasthaus, about his mother who was a brilliant professor, about his refined aunts and successful uncles, about relatives who traveled to those reunions from as far away as München and Bremen.… As Trudi imagined herself entering the restaurant with Klaus, wearing a pale gray silk suit with pearl buttons, she had to squeeze her eyes shut at the display of loathing in his relatives’ faces.

  Abruptly, the quiver of the drill ceased. “Trudi? Did I hurt you?”

  She felt as though her body lay sprawled out on the chair, there for him to inspect, squat and ugly like a bug flattened by a magnifying glass. Her tongue found the hole he’d drilled into her molar—a hole big enough for one’s entire world to disappear—and she swallowed the taste of copper and charred bone and wished she could swallow herself and vanish into that abyss.

  “Trudi!” His hand shook her shoulder.

  It would serve him right if she died right here in his chair. The scandal of it! Surely, he’d never have another patient after that. “God knows how far he drilled into Trudi Montag” people would say at her funeral. Those who had been Klaus Malter’s patients would cross themselves and light candles of gratitude to St. Appolonia, the patron saint of dentists, who’d leapt into a fire after her teeth had been yanked out during her torture. Klaus would have to leave town—no, the country, because newspapers as far away as Berlin and München would carry headlines: Red-haired dentist kills patient.… Dentist does away with young woman after kissing her.… But maybe St. Appolonia wasn’t the right saint to pray to. She’d be the one to protect the dentist, not the patients. Who was the patron saint of patients? St. Margaret, who’d been tortured, imprisoned, swallowed by the devil disguised as a dragon? No, St. Margaret was only the patron saint of pregnant women—one saint Trudi would not need, judging from the way Klaus had evaded her ever since that kiss.