Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

“I want to stay up here.”

  “You’re too young to be by yourself.”

  “You were running a business when you were my age.”

  “She’ll visit us every day,” Eva had said. “Right, Jutta? And she’ll eat with us.”

  When Jutta had agreed, her uncle had given in.

  Frau Simon remained inside her apartment most of the time, and if she stepped outdoors, she’d avoid walking past her old building, where, in the center of the display window, her pyramid-shaped mirror reflected the somber smile of the Führer and the garish red of the flag. She would take a detour around the far side of the church square to get to the pay-library, where, every Tuesday, she’d check out two romances and two American Westerns.

  “Have you gone to Frau Doktor Rosen about that headache?” Leo Montag asked her one mild afternoon, late that October of 1938, when she came in to return her weekly supply of books.

  Frau Simon nodded. “She gave me some pills.”

  He handed the books to Trudi, who marked them as returned. “And did you take the pills?” he asked.

  “I don’t much believe in pills. But it’s good of you to worry.”

  “Emil tells me you won’t see him.”

  “Not the way I look. Not until I—”

  “You are a very good-looking woman, Lotte.”

  One of her hands floated up to her hair.

  “And that cardigan looks lovely on you.”

  “Emil gave it to me for my birthday. A few years ago.” She told him to feel the white mohair sleeve. “Fifty percent mohair, fifty percent silk. I guess some people would say it’s not proper to accept gifts from a man you’re not married to.”

  “I wouldn’t fret about that,” Leo assured her.

  She smiled, the first smile anyone had seen on her since she’d been released from prison. “My grandmother used to tell me that a gentleman is not supposed to give a lady any gift that lies next to her skin—except for gloves.”

  Trudi laughed. “Why gloves?”

  Frau Simon had to think for a moment. “Only you would ask that. Maybe it has to do with shaking hands. I mean, when I shake a man’s hand, his skin touches mine, right? Therefore, gloves would be all right because they cover a place that’s … that’s—”

  “Available?” Trudi helped.

  “Available, right. And any skin covered by this sweater should not be available to any man other than a husband.”

  “It’s like saying the gift is like the man’s hands. Just think of all the places that cardigan touches you.”

  Frau Simon did a little dance with her shoulders, and for a moment she looked as lively as she used to.

  “Now you’ll have to marry Herr Hesping,” Trudi teased her.

  “Stop it, Trudi.”

  “We’ll have the wedding right here. I’ll bake a cake and—”

  “That man will never let a woman slip a ring on his finger. Maybe that’s what I like best about him.”

  “Laughing becomes you,” Leo said. “May I tell Emil that you’re looking well?”

  Frau Simon hesitated. “I’ll bring the books back next Tuesday at three. That is—if he wants to see for himself.”

  The second Thursday of November, Trudi woke up early—tired and agitated as though she hadn’t slept at all. She always felt more tired when winter set in as if her body needed time to adjust to the cold. Besides, her knees had been aching for nearly a week. Frau Doktor Rosen had told her the pain came from her hips.

  “Then why do I feel it in my knees?” Trudi had asked.

  The Frau Doktor, whose practice had diminished even more, had told her the joints in her hips were inflamed.

  “But that happens to old people. I’m only twenty-three.”

  “Some Zwerge have those problems when they’re quite young.”

  “But you don’t have any other patients who’re Zwerge.”

  “I’ve made it my business to read about them.”

  Trudi had stared at her. “Because of me?”

  “Because of you.”

  As Trudi shifted in her bed, trying to find a comfortable position to carry her into morning, she allowed herself to imagine the doctor surrounded by tall stacks of medical books, searching for information on Zwerge that would help her unlock Trudi’s joints and lengthen her bones until her body would be of normal height and free of pain. Yet, deep inside, she had already accepted that there really wasn’t anything that could be done. She thought of all the people who moaned about things they didn’t like in their lives—their work, their houses, their friends—and she was envious because they could change all that.

  When she opened the library, the bakery truck stopped outside, and Alfred Meier came running in to tell her that, during the night, windows of Jewish businesses and synagogues in Düsseldorf had been smashed. He’d been out making deliveries since dawn, and he’d heard that buildings had been set on fire, and that a whole block of apartments next to a Jewish jewelry store had burned down.

  As the day progressed, other customers reported hearing from friends and family in Krefeld and Oberkassel and Köln. Trudi didn’t even try to work in the library: she kept circling through Burgdorf, letting people know what she had found out, while picking up news of destruction in other cities and towns. In Burgdorf only two businesses had been damaged—a yarn shop and a restaurant, both owned by Jews. It looked as if someone had tried to set fire to the synagogue, because in back of the building the stucco beneath one window was blackened.

  “Maybe it won’t happen here,” Frau Abramowitz told Leo Montag while her husband buttoned his camel hair coat and left for an emergency meeting at the synagogue.

  But Leo recalled what his wife had said to him the year before their wedding—that things in Burgdorf happened slower and later than in most other places—and he kept troubled watch over his friends. That night, very few people in the neighborhood slept well, but when in the morning only a few broken windows were discovered in town—though the demolition was said to continue in Düsseldorf and Oberkassel—Leo hoped that Frau Abramowitz had been right.

  Friday afternoon Trudi gift-wrapped a set of china cups that she and her father would take to Helmut Eberhardt’s wedding the following day. His mother had come over to invite them in person, and they’d only accepted because they didn’t want to disappoint her. Helmut was marrying Hilde Sommer, who had finished her training as a midwife and shared his passion for order. According to the pharmacist, she was pregnant, well on her way to a kinderreiche Familie, but Trudi found it impossible to confirm that rumor even when she got close to her, because Hilde was a heavy woman to begin with. Well, at least if she was pregnant, Helmut wouldn’t be able to divorce her for Unfruchtbarkeit—barrenness—or Nachwuchsverweigerung—refusal to have offspring. Both were considered direct opposition to the government and had become valid causes for divorce.

  Late Friday night, less than twelve hours before Helmut’s wedding to the blond midwife at St. Martin’s Church, he and two other SA men dragged Herr Abramowitz from his bedroom, and when the tall lawyer tried to protest, his pipe collection and cameras were trampled in front of him, and he was dragged across the fragments, screaming as they cut his feet and ankles.

  Frau Abramowitz clung to Helmut Eberhardt’s arm, begging him to leave her husband alone. And because she couldn’t think of anything else, she cried out, “I know your mother well. You come from a fine family.”

  “Stay back,” he warned her.

  She heard them in the street—the smashing of glass, their heels on the sidewalk, car doors slamming. An engine started. Then silence. Tears clogging her breath, she tried to phone her daughter in Oberkassel, but she could no longer remember Ruth’s number, though she dialed it nearly every day, and she had to look it up. Her hand shook so badly that her finger slipped from the dial, and she had to try several times before she reached her daughter.

  When Ruth—against the advice of her husband—offered to drive to Burgdorf, Frau Abramowitz refused. �
��Don’t come here. It’s not safe.”

  “Then it’s not safe for you either,” Ruth argued.

  “They didn’t take me this time.”

  “Mother—Mother, I love you.”

  “I love you too, Ruthie.”

  “Let me send a taxi for you.”

  “I have to be here. For your father when he comes back.”

  There was a long pause on the phone.

  “He will come back,” Frau Abramowitz said.

  “Of course he will.”

  “He is a lawyer, after all. He’ll make them understand it’s a mistake.”

  She hung up the phone after promising to call Ruth the moment she heard anything. Her beige sweater pulled over her nightgown, she dashed across the street, barely avoiding the broken glass on her sidewalk, but before she could bang at the Montags’ door, Trudi opened it.

  “What happened?” She grasped Frau Abramowitz’s hands.

  “Michel…” The older woman began to cry. “They came for Michel—took him away.”

  “Come inside. Please …”

  “I can’t.” She kept looking toward the door. “He may come back any moment.”

  Not right away, Trudi thought, but what she said was, “I’ll watch for him from the window. Stay with us tonight.”

  “They made such a mess, breaking things … without any reason.”

  Trudi’s father came hobbling down the stairs in his bathrobe. “Frau Abramowitz,” he said, “Ilse,” his voice helpless with grief, and opened his arms, embracing her as Frau Abramowitz must have imagined it many times, only under much different circumstances.

  She briefly leaned into his embrace, then stepped away. “I must go home.”

  “You can stay here,” Leo offered.

  “Michel might phone.”

  “I’ll go with you then.”

  “You will?”

  “Of course. Let me get some clothes on.” He started toward the stairs.

  Though Trudi wanted to come along too, she sensed that her father, alone, would be able to comfort Frau Abramowitz far more than if she were with them. From the open door she watched the two, Frau Abramowitz in her thin nightgown, her father oddly formal in his Sunday suit as if the occasion deserved no less, their arms linked in such a way that they seemed to hold one another up—not unlike old couples who have decades of practice in adjusting their pace to one another. Carefully, they stepped across the shards. Trudi thought she heard the key turn after the Abramowitzs’ front door closed behind them, as though they belonged inside that house together.

  She wrapped the coat of the Russian soldier around herself and climbed onto the counter of the pay-library. From there, she could see through the window. The light in the Abramowitzs’ living room was off, and Frau Abramowitz stood framed by the splinters that stuck from the window frame like translucent petals of an outlandish flower. The outline of her pale sweater filled the gap where the glass had been, unmoving, as if she had always been there, a guardian, until it became impossible for Trudi to remember a time when that window had not been filled with her shape.

  The taller outline of Trudi’s father saturated the space around Frau Abramowitz like a cloak. That entire night the two of them stood in the dark window above the littered street, waiting for Michel Abramowitz; and whenever Trudi dozed off on the counter, she was soon awakened by some faraway screams and shattering glass, and she’d see the contour of Frau Abramowitz in that window and, behind it, her father’s as though the two of them had not moved at all, as though every word spoken had passed between them like this.

  When the dense texture of night wore thin and cries of roosters swirled above the roofs, Trudi spotted something crawling across the intersection of Schreberstrasse and Barbarossa Strasse, an injured dog, perhaps, or some ancient beast dragging itself toward the dawn of mankind, the doom of mankind. It was a shape that embodied the ugliness of the night, and Trudi wondered how long it had been crawling toward them. Perhaps it had been there for a long time and only dawn had revealed it. But just then Frau Abramowitz loosened herself from the window and flew from the house—Trudi’s father close behind her in his uneven gait—toward whatever it was that was crawling toward them.

  Hoisting the seal coat to her knees, Trudi raced after them, and when she caught up, she saw Herr Abramowitz, his neck and face bloodied, his pajamas ripped. He could not stand, not even when Leo Montag tried to support him, and they had to spread the seal coat on the ground, roll him onto the rugged hide, and carry him—Frau Abramowitz and Trudi on one side, Leo on the other—up Schreberstrasse and through the arched door of his house. Trudi’s arms were aching as they used to when she’d hung from the door frame, and her father’s breath was coming in hard gasps. Only Frau Abramowitz’s breath was even, because carrying her husband took far less strength than waiting for him.

  When they laid Michel Abramowitz down on the sofa in his living room and washed him, careful not to touch his bruises, they found that his nose and several ribs had been broken. All along the inside of his left arm were cigarette burns, and his back was swollen with raw welts. He had lost quite a few teeth, all from the outer row, and his wife could see the second row—a quirk of nature, she used to think—as if he’d grown that extra set of teeth for this night.

  His voice was hoarse, and they had to bend close to hear him when he forbade them to take him to the Theresienheim or the hospital in Düsseldorf. “I’m safer at home,” he insisted in a murmur and asked his wife to bring him the Watte—cotton—that she used for earaches and taking off nail polish.

  She looked confused but left the room to get it.

  He gripped the lapels of Leo’s Sunday suit. “I’ll go into the river before I let those Schweine get me again.”

  “Michel—”

  “I mean it, Leo. Promise you’ll look after Ilse if that happens. There’s nothing that can make me go through this again if—” He let go of Leo as his wife returned with the Watte, and he tore off two pieces, rolled them into wads, and quickly inserted them in his nostrils. Tears ran down his mangled face.

  Leo steadied him by the shoulders. “It’s a promise.”

  “What is he doing?” Frau Abramowitz cried out.

  “Trying to reshape his nose,” Leo said.

  “Let me get Frau Doktor Rosen,” Trudi said.

  Michel Abramowitz groaned. “I don’t want to put her in danger.”

  “Let her decide.”

  “I have decided for her. She would come. You know her.”

  Frau Abramowitz dampened her handkerchief with spittle and wiped the blood from his nostrils.

  “Stop it, Ilse.” He averted his face. “I’m not a child.”

  “What if it sets crooked?”

  “Then you divorce me.” He winced at his attempt at humor. “Get yourself a husband with a nice straight nose.”

  “And a nice disposition.” She slipped an embroidered pillow behind his head. “I’ll start looking.”

  He circled her hip with one arm. “I bet you will.”

  Her face flushed, Frau Abramowitz looked at Leo and Trudi. “Thank you for your help,” she said, her voice oddly formal. “Michel needs to rest now.”

  “Let us know what we can do,” Trudi offered.

  “Lock the door behind us,” Leo reminded Frau Abramowitz.

  Throughout the morning, Michel Abramowitz rested on the sofa, dropping into brief, fitful periods of sleep from which he woke moaning, while his wife sat on the floor next to him, her photo albums spread around herself, staring at the images that had emerged through the eyes of her husband’s cameras. But now the cameras were broken: she knew because she had stepped across the shards, and it seemed like a trick that the photos were not broken. She remembered the endless arranging Michel had done, posing her and the children just so, telling them to smile as he prepared to fix their images for the future. But when all was added up, you could never do that: you could never take three or four people, say, and arrange them in such a w
ay that they would remain like that forever. They were only like that for the moment of the photo, and it seemed a mockery that—all these years later—the pictures still held those images as if they could be true.

  From the Catholic church came the ringing of the bells, celebrating the marriage of Helmut Eberhardt and Hilde Sommer. Frau Abramowitz stepped up to the broken window. The air was cold, laced with frost. She felt a deep compassion for Renate Eberhardt, whose body had carried Helmut toward the moment of his birth, Frau Eberhardt who—while Michel had crawled home with his wounds—must have already been up, preparing for her son’s wedding reception, which was to be held at her house. Frau Abramowitz wondered if Helmut’s mother knew what her son had done during the night, and she pitied the midwife, whose body would lie beneath Helmut’s in the nights to come. A thought came to her that had insisted on settling with her for some time now, a thought that would anger Michel if she ever told him: given a choice, she would rather be the one who was persecuted than the one who did the persecuting. Both had a terrible price to pay, but she would rather endure humiliation and fear than grow numb to what it was to be human.

  To Leo Montag’s surprise, Trudi insisted on attending the Eberhardt wedding with him, and he understood why when he saw her step up to Helmut’s mother before the ceremony and motion to her to bend down so that she could whisper into her ear. At least Trudi could have waited to tell her what her son had done until after the wedding, he thought as a look of desolation passed across Frau Eberhardt’s face. It was a look that stayed on her face throughout the wedding mass and the reception, even though she tried to force a smile to her lips, a look that caused her new daughter-in-law to come up to her twice, asking if there was anything she could do. But Renate Eberhardt only looked at the young blond woman and shook her head.

  Around noon, the Abramowitzs’ daughter, Ruth, arrived on the streetcar despite her husband’s misgivings, a large shawl around her head as if to disguise herself. She cried when she embraced her parents, and she cried again when she picked up the open albums and stacked them back on the shelves, assuming the SA had strewn them about the floor.