Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  “Yes, don’t say that, Renate.”

  “It’s important to keep up your hope.”

  “Be glad you’re not Jewish.”

  “If you were Jewish, I’d be much more worried about you.”

  “You’ll be grateful to have a change of underwear.”

  “And a cardigan.”

  “What I take won’t matter.” But she did not object when her neighbors packed for her.

  They knew of people who’d been taken away, and they had given much consideration—though they assured themselves it would never happen to them—to what they would bring in case they were arrested. Those nights when sleep evaded them because they’d heard of yet another disappearance, they would recite their lists to themselves, revise them, make sure most items served at least two purposes, and fret over what to leave behind. Because that was by far the hardest part—to decide what to leave behind.

  They had seen how the Nazis weakened the community by coming for people at all hours of the night, hauling them from their homes, punishing conspiracy, making examples out of those who tried to help others. Since laws no longer offered protection, they’d learned to look out for their own survival. And part of surviving was to remind themselves of the differences between themselves and those who had been taken away.

  At least they were not Jewish.

  At least they’d never said anything against the Führer—not openly, that is.

  At least they hadn’t refused to return Anton Immers’ crisp Heil Hitler when they’d walked into his store to have an order of Blutwurst—blood sausage—say, or Sülze—head cheese—weighed and packed in brown paper, and had found themselves face to face with the framed pictures of the Führer, the butcher, and the saint, the three sets of eyes boring through them and any other obstacle with the certainty of victory.

  The neighbor women were grateful that their own children were not like Helmut Eberhardt, and they pitied his mother—not only for being betrayed by her son, but also for not having other children who’d certainly offset that guilt they were sure she must feel for having failed at motherhood.

  They coaxed and hurried Renate Eberhardt into several layers of underwear and dresses, closing buttons and tying ribbons for her while she stood with her arms away from her body like an obedient child. Once, when they heard steps in the rooms above, they glanced at each other with alarm and then at her with pity.

  “It’s only his wife,” Frau Eberhardt said as though she could not bring herself to speak her son’s name.

  I hope Helmut dies, Trudi thought. I hope he dies. “Come with me,” she pleaded. “I’ll get you out of town. There are others who’ll be glad to help too.”

  Frau Eberhardt shook her head, and the neighbor women cleared the vase with wild flowers and the napkin rings from the table, arguing in whispers as they laid out on the wooden surface what she was to bring with her: flatware, a cup and bowl, slippers, a nightgown, five cakes of soap, stockings, two needles and thread, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a washcloth and a towel, a pencil and a notepad. They decided Renate’s raincoat could double as a bathrobe, and they stitched money and small pieces of jewelry into its hem.

  When they searched for a sleeping bag and couldn’t find one, Trudi opened the sewing machine, tears of rage blurring her vision as she stood there, her right foot pumping while the needle raced through the two blankets that she stitched together, and with each jab of the needle she wished it would go straight through Helmut’s heart. When the blanket bag was finished, the neighbor women rolled a pillow and the other items inside, securing everything with a leather belt that matched one of Renate’s dresses while serving as a carrying handle.

  “Let me make you some tea,” Trudi offered.

  But Renate Eberhardt walked away from her and out into her garden, her body oddly swollen in her extra skirts and dresses like that of a pregnant woman. Deep inside her was a bed for her son, a bed that had always been there, a bed that would always be there, but Helmut had made this bed with sheets of ice. Outside her body it was hot, humid, but inside that ice made her feel as though she would never be warm again. That immeasurable chill isolated her from the compassion of the three women who stood by her window; from the profuse scent of her lilac hedge and her lavish flowers; from the memory of her young husband’s feverish touch the evening before he’d died; from that anguish when she’d stepped to his open grave with grains of earth in her hand.

  All she felt was that cold and her love for her son, which would always be there, but frozen, and it was something she could do nothing about because it was of his making.

  She walked through clusters of brilliant-blue forget-me-nots to the pear tree and raised one hand to its trunk as if to caress it in a gesture of farewell or, perhaps, to let it support her—she wasn’t sure which—just that the bark felt rough against her palm, though not rough all over but only in angular patches that were flecked with gray and amber like rocks that have withstood the elements for several human lifetimes. Along the trunk, the stubs of pruned limbs thrust themselves outward—smooth wounds across which the bark had not healed but had merely raised itself like proud flesh.

  Above her, the green canopy of branches, leaves, and unripe pears shut out the sky. She drew the rich scent of green into her lungs and smiled as she saw herself lifting her small son into that canopy. He squeals with delight. When she tells him that this is the color green, Helmut rubs leaves across his face and neck. She kisses him. Tosses him into the air. He smells of those leaves and his skin is flushed, damp with warm child-sweat. For months he will point to grass and spinach and peas and pine needles and say they smell green. Though she tries to teach him that green is a color, not a smell, she soon agrees that, indeed, green is as much a scent as it is a color, and they both continue to think of green that way.

  Afterwards, the old women in town would be convinced it was that very day that the Eberhardts’ pear tree withered—not died altogether, understand, but shrank into itself and stopped producing those lush yellow pears. They talked amongst themselves, describing what they’d heard from Trudi Montag: how Renate Eberhardt had stood beneath that tree, first touching the trunk, then raising both hands into the branches while smiling and moving her lips as if talking to someone sitting in the branches.

  It was that smile the old women kept returning to, shaking their heads as they tried to puzzle out if the smile was a sign of impending sainthood or delirium, and they were not at all surprised when, at harvest time, brown spots marred the dull green peel of the pears. If you were to cut off the skin, the spots beneath would plug the white flesh like tiny corks. Though the tree would display its usual dazzle of fragrant blossoms the following spring, the pears would come in small and hard.

  But that would happen later—after Renate Eberhardt was taken away; after her son and his wife moved into the front bedroom; after Helmut trimmed the bushes and trees, turned the flower beds into lawns, confined the forget-me-nots and geraniums in tidy window boxes, and pruned the lofty hedge of lilacs waist high so that people could see into his garden from every angle to admire the order and see that he had nothing to hide; after Germany opened its predawn attack against Poland that first day of September 1939, pressing from all sides in a tightening ring of decimation.

  Wedged between two wars, the old women, who’d lost husbands and sons in the previous war, had seen those long-ago soldiers leave for battle in 1914 with music and laughter and flags. But no one flung blossoms at the new soldiers; it was as if the town had agreed to save the flowers for their burial rites. The old women crossed themselves as the men departed from Burgdorf in trains with their silent mask faces—many of them wearing helmets, some the medics’ white armbands with the red cross, their hands stretched from the open windows as the train pulled forward, as if to attach themselves forever to the fingertips of their wives and mothers.

  The old women were distressed by the tears of the young women, who did not remember the hope that had come with the last war, b
ut they understood the terrible embarrassment in the eyes of some young women who could hardly bear to look at their men. At the train station, gloomy accordion players pulled and squeezed the creases of their instruments, reminding the old women how their town, too, was being compressed, shedding its men of fighting age. And as they thought of how it would expand again once the men came back—those who would, that is—they braced themselves to endure the accordion motion of ebbing and flowing, as well as the grieving over those men who would be killed.

  When Alfred Meier, Fritz Hansen, and Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier were sent off to fight the war the same week in October, Monika Buttgereit wore a black hat to church—not nearly as beautiful as the hats she used to buy from Frau Simon. The bakery closed, and the delivery truck was parked on wooden blocks in the courtyard behind the Hansens’ house. The retired baker and his wife, alone in the rooms above the shop, found it increasingly impossible to take care of themselves, much less of their remaining son, who had no arms. Ulrich had to be fed and washed, and they were relieved when their neighbor, who was in the SS, persuaded them to send Ulrich to a home for the crippled, where there were others like him, incapable of looking after themselves.

  Three days before he was to leave for the war, Georg Weiler won a car in a daring game of Skat in a tavern, and he drove it from Düsseldorf to his old neighborhood in Burgdorf with the windows open though it rained. Laughing, he parked it in front of his mother’s store and coaxed her into taking a ride with him. Both hands holding on to her scarf, she sat in the passenger seat, and whenever they approached an intersection, she prayed to her name saint, Hedwig, whose miracles and peacemaking had saved many lives.

  The night before his departure, her son lost the car as well as a pair of new boots in another game of cards, and when she saw him off at the train station, his eyes were dulled with Schnaps, and he moved cautiously as if each step jolted him. Herr Weskopp, whose sons had already left for the war, was on the train with Georg, eager for battle and glory.

  All over Germany, old women kept going to train stations because the men did not leave all at once: they kept flowing out of their towns like lifeblood, train after train after train, while reports of victories and defeats spread throughout the country; they kept departing after an attack on the Führer failed that November in München.

  Trudi found out about the attack as she walked across the church square and Helmut Eberhardt came running toward her.

  “The Führer—” he gasped, tears in his blue eyes, “an attempt on our Führer’s life.”

  “Is he dead?” Trudi blurted.

  He stared at her. His lips opened.

  “Such terrible news,” Trudi said quickly, afraid he could tell she wished the attempt had been successful. Ever since Helmut’s mother had been taken away, Trudi hadn’t felt safe in Burgdorf, and after her encounter with him, she half expected to be picked up that day.

  When, within two weeks of the attack, the Führer proclaimed that Germany had only the choice between victory and defeat, Emil Hesping said that anything that was not a total victory was considered a defeat by Hitler.

  Leo Montag nodded. “To win this war would be the worst possible fate for the Germans.”

  One of the pleasures in Trudi’s life was to listen to the music of ten-year-old Matthias Berger—a boy rumored to like boys—who began to visit her to play her piano. Though she’d seen him in church and had heard the gossip about him, she’d hardly spoken to the boy before. His parents both worked in Düsseldorf, and his brothers were grown and lived away from home. That first winter of war, she’d found Matthias squatting by the brook behind her house, trying to rinse blood from a skinned elbow in the icy water. With the hem of her skirt, she washed his face and arms and hands, and it was only then that he started to sob.

  “Who did this to you?”

  “Some boys.”

  “Why?”

  He sobbed only harder. “I just want to be their friend.”

  All at once she could smell the warm animal scent of the Braunmeiers’ barn and felt herself reeling in the slow, hazy light that poured through high rafters. Those boys—“Hush,” she said and took Matthias into her arms.

  He shivered, and she felt his otherness as her own.

  “Hush now,” she said roughly.

  She took him by the hand and led him inside the house, where she positioned him next to the hot stove and warmed a cup of milk for him. To take that sadness from his face, she brought him into the pay-library and played the Eroica for him on the gramophone. He listened to it with his eyes closed, and then asked if he could play her piano. His head tilted as if hearing some inner imprint of that music, he touched the keys almost reverently as if to map out a path through a foreign country, and in the familiar sequence of notes Trudi heard her own pain and rage.

  Since then, Matthias had started to come to the pay-library at least once a week, bringing his own sheet music, playing Chopin and Beethoven. But sometimes his hands would fly up to his temples as his eyes went dark with one of his fierce headaches. Leo Montag would urge him to take a rest and sit him down by the chessboard. Patiently, he’d teach Matthias the moves, and each visit he’d make him memorize a new opening sequence.

  Trudi liked sharing delicacies from her Aunt Helene’s packages with the boy. Ever since the war had started, the parcels from America had arrived less frequently, with their cheeses, canned meats, chocolate bars, and lengths of fabric with matching spools of sewing thread. Quite a few had never been delivered. After two letters with money supposedly were lost in the mail, Trudi’s aunt began to roll the bills up, tightly, insert them into the hollow centers of the spools, and reaffix the round labels at the ends of the spools.

  On Ash Wednesday Trudi gave Matthias a white shirt she’d sewn for him from fabric her aunt had sent, and he played the piano for her. All through Lent he played for her and her father, even on Passion Sunday, when each statue in the church was covered with faded cloths that had been brought up from the church basement; he played for them after the service on Good Friday, the one day of the year when you could not receive communion and when the church was stripped and left vacant like a tomb, symbolizing that Christ was dead. On Easter Sunday, Fräulein Birnsteig visited the boy’s parents and told them she’d chosen Matthias as her student.

  For a while, that honor caused the other children in school to leave him alone, but soon they were back to teasing and torturing him. Still, it no longer bothered Matthias as much as before. He thrived on the music lessons and on Trudi’s stories of him becoming a famous concert pianist. She’d paint his future with stories of him traveling all over the world, adored by audiences.

  The silence of the war was in direct contradiction to her storytelling. It was much closer to the silence of the church—fostering belief instead of knowledge, smothering mystery, muffling truth. Now that Trudi found herself dealing as much in silences as in incidents, she discovered new ways to tell her stories. You had to know your listeners before you decided what it was safe to let them know, or you could endanger others, yourself.

  She recalled what her father had told her years ago about war—that the sound level of the entire country drops to a lower level. And in that stillness, the music became more important to her than ever before. She would listen to Matthias or play her father’s records when she worked in the pay-library, letting herself be swirled into the fury, the passion, the tranquillity. Notes were to music what words were to her stories, and by linking the words, she could spin the power of the composer into that of the storyteller, make it hers.

  In St. Martin’s Church, the women prayed for their sons and nephews, and when they saw Helmut Eberhardt part his lips to receive communion, they added an extra prayer for his mother. They remembered him as an altar boy—that pious face, those perfectly folded hands—and they marveled how close virtue and evil could be.

  After mass, Helmut Eberhardt would insist on lingering in front of the church with everyone, smiling through a
grimace of anger when people returned his hearty greetings with curt nods. He’d keep one hand firmly on the plump arm of his wife, who looked as if she wanted to flee. Most of the time Hilde wouldn’t even last through mass but would faint as she used to as a girl, only sooner now as if seeking oblivion, and she’d have to sit on the front steps of the church, her face in her hands, waiting for her husband.

  When she went to the stores, she found it far easier to endure the food rationing than the contempt that many of the people had for her husband. It felt like walking into a constant, gritty wind, and she could barely raise her eyes. When she delivered children, the families of her patients were usually polite to her but seldom welcoming. She worried about those women who—lured by government incentives—endangered their lives by having pregnancies too close together. In addition to the coveted cross of honor, the reduction of the marriage loan, and tax advantages, families now received monthly allocations of Kindergeld—child money—starting with the third and fourth child, and doubling for each child after that.

  Hilde didn’t know how to explain to the people in town—not even to herself—why she continued to love her husband. Her love for him had been part of her since she was twelve and he, five years younger than she, still a child. Even then she had always imagined being with him once they both grew up. Although he’d betrayed his mother, she didn’t know how to stop her love. Her body yearned as much for him as the first night he’d touched her, and she still felt pride at having been chosen by him.

  At times, when Helmut Eberhardt used one of his mother’s belongings—a favorite cup, say, or a tablecloth she had embroidered—he felt her thinking about him, loving him, even from a distance, wherever she was. He didn’t want to think of her and her cumbersome love; yet, he had not found release from that love, and would not find it—not even when he would march east and crouch in the frozen dirt of regions he’d never seen before.

  Her cumbersome love would always be with him, expanding more beneath his helmet with each war-soaked year, crushing his thoughts and infecting his dreams until he’d think his head would burst. And it would be with tremendous relief that he’d feel an enemy bullet enter his throat and rescue him from her love.