Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  He glanced at her sharply. “That it does.”

  “I didn’t mean anything.”

  “And I didn’t hear anything.” He led her toward a shabby blue car. “Would you like the window open?” he asked after they sat inside.

  She nodded.

  He reached for a screwdriver on the back seat, leaned across her, and rotated it inside the hole where the handle for the window used to be. The glass creaked as it moved down. When they crossed the bridge to Oberkassel, a cone of birds swirled from the high girders as the long blast of a barge rose from the river.

  “I’d like to talk with you again,” he said.

  She stopped breathing. “Why?” she blurted, certain he was trying to prove she’d written the letters.

  He looked at her from the side. “Will you say yes if I give you a good reason?”

  She shook her head.

  “Two good reasons?”

  “I really can’t.”

  “Three good—”

  She had to laugh. “No,” she said. “Not even with seventeen good reasons.”

  The curtain in the Blaus’ living room moved when Max Rudnick parked his car in front of the pay-library, and Trudi climbed out before he could shut off the engine.

  “I’ll walk you to the door.”

  “You don’t have to.” Her burned tongue felt sore.

  He pointed to the tobacco sign in the window. “I need to stock up.”

  “We’re out of tobacco.”

  “Really now?”

  “We’ve been waiting for a delivery.”

  “Who is we?”

  “My father and I.”

  “I’ll come back then. For tobacco.”

  And he did come back—the following week—but Trudi recognized his blue car in time to dart upstairs, leaving her father to deal with him. From behind the lace curtains of the second-floor hall window, she watched the sidewalk, and it took nearly fifteen minutes before Max Rudnick came out and drove off.

  “What did he want?” she asked her father, who was taping the torn cover of a nurse-and-doctor novel.

  He didn’t look up. “Tobacco.”

  “Did he say anything?” She felt her ears go hot. “About me?”

  Her father thought for a moment, then shook his head. Humming softly to himself, he fastened another piece of tape across a tear.

  “Then what was he doing here all that time?”

  “Looking at books. He borrowed a Western.”

  She groaned. “Why did you let him?”

  “It’s the kind of business we’re in.”

  “Now he has a reason to come back.”

  Her father squinted at her. Smiled.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s nothing. Nothing.”

  In the days to come, she would keep checking the street, prepared to vanish again, and when Max Rudnick didn’t return the following week and the week after that, she felt relieved; yet, when the due date of the book passed, her relief gave way to a peculiar disappointment that found its expression in periodic calculations of his mounting library fine.

  I wish you could visit me, Ingrid wrote. The mountains are spectacular, but I miss Burgdorf. She lived with the schoolchildren, ate her meals with them, taught them everything from grammar to mathematics, gave them homework assignments, and made sure they washed properly before they went to bed. During her third night there, she’d been awakened by screams from the boys’ dorm. They’d had a pillow fight, and one of the pillows had hit a lamp, causing a flame to surge up and set the pillow case on fire. Thank God we put it out in time, Ingrid wrote. Most of the children are homesick. I’ve found out that boys get rough when they’re afraid, while girls cry.

  Though Ingrid didn’t complain directly in her letter about the Hitler-Jugend representative, Fräulein Wiedesprunt, who was in charge of the children’s home, it was evident that she found it difficult to deal with the fault-finding woman, who told her she preferred male teachers and enjoyed setting curfews for everyone, including Ingrid. There were certain hours she was not allowed out, certain places she was not allowed to go.

  The first weekend Ingrid was allowed to return to Burgdorf for a visit, she stopped at the pay-library before she saw her parents and told Trudi she dreaded her return to the home. “I thought I’d like teaching, but what’s happening there has little to do with school. They’ve even removed all the crucifixes from the classrooms.”

  “Here too.” Trudi took her into the living room, where they sat down on the velvet sofa. “I think it’s like that everywhere.”

  “And the praying, even though we aren’t allowed to pray in school, I used to say a short prayer before and after lessons.” The skin on Ingrid’s face looked red and dry. “The children—they really liked it, but once, when one of my classes was observed by Fräulein Wiedesprunt, a girl reminded me that we hadn’t prayed yet.”

  Trudi winced.

  “I said quickly, Oh, we’ll catch up on that later.’ But I was shaking … all that day I was shaking, Trudi.” Ingrid leapt up, paced to the window and back. Her thin fingers straightened the lace tablecloth on the round wicker table, lifted the stuffed squirrel from the shelf. “I felt like a coward for not praying.”

  “But you couldn’t pray. Not then.”

  Ingrid set the stuffed squirrel down again.

  “You did the right thing.”

  “Fräulein Wiedesprunt, she didn’t mention the praying, but she told me afterwards that when I raise my hand in the Heil Hitler it isn’t vigorous enough.”

  “Vigorous. It’s appalling that we have to do it at all.”

  “As a teacher you can’t get away with not doing it. Students might tell on you. If they don’t like you, they might even turn you in for something you didn’t do.”

  “I know of a teacher in Oberkassel who was demoted. Two others in Krefeld were fired.”

  “The students …” Ingrid nodded. “It gives them too much power. If they misunderstand something or are angry about their grades … It’s dangerous for teachers to be strict.”

  “But if you can’t demand work from them, they learn less.”

  “At least I don’t have to teach history. It’s too easy to make mistakes there.”

  “Like telling the truth?”

  While Jutta Malter immersed herself in studies at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, the old women—who had been skeptical about the reasons for the hasty wedding—kept scanning her belly, but it did not round out, though Jutta Malter seemed more grown-up, now that she was married to an older man. Not that she lost the spring in her step—it was rather a maturing of her entire body, an almost regal bearing though, at times, she could still look like a girl.

  “She is nearly half his age,” Trudi would point out whenever she retold the story of how Jutta had arrived at the dentist’s office late that fated June afternoon to have him replace a filling and had ended up replacing his fiancée. Sometimes it felt as if it had happened all in one afternoon: the wedding, the visit of the jilted bride’s father, and Jutta—reclining in the dentist’s chair, smelling the clean medicine scent on Klaus Malter’s hands, marveling at the tight curls of his red beard and wishing the drilling would go on forever.

  Early one morning, when Trudi returned from trading five books for half a loaf of bread and two eggs, which she would smuggle to Frau Simon, she saw Klaus and Jutta walk past the Rathaus, setting out for their daily Spaziergang—stroll. Pigeons rose from the shoulders of the Hitler statue, whose early gloss had soon been dulled by a greenish rust. If you looked closely, you could see that the Führer’s left ear was larger than the right one. A small child had noticed the flaw at the dedication ceremony and had pointed it out aloud, causing the pharmacist additional embarrassment.

  Arms linked, Jutta and Klaus were talking eagerly as if they hadn’t seen each other in weeks, and for a moment there—one generous moment—Trudi wished them well and released Klaus Malter.

  That November—only months after Klaus had helped his bri
de move her belongings down one flight of stairs in her Uncle Alexander’s house and had settled with her in the large apartment that her uncle had made available for the newlyweds on the second floor—his mother was arrested while teaching her philosophy seminar. One of her students called him, his voice muffled and urgent as if he were afraid of being apprehended any moment. He didn’t know where the Frau Professor had been taken, he said, but he knew she’d been warned by the administration before to modify her views. “I admired her,” he said as he hung up.

  Klaus Malter’s inquiries only brought him the information that his mother was in one of the prison camps; he demanded to see her, wrote letters and made phone calls to the police and the president of the university, and when he found out that there was nothing he could do, he became obsessed with the cold. It seeped into his veins as he kept thinking of his mother without warm clothes and blankets. He never worried about her starving or being tortured—only freezing to death, and he couldn’t bear being inside heated rooms.

  He’d roam the streets of Burgdorf, refusing to wear his coat or a knitted vest, blaming himself for not having resisted years ago. Like countless others, he’d simply grown more cautious—afraid to say the wrong thing, afraid to listen to forbidden radio stations that would tell you what was happening in the world. It was always possible that you might be picked up: at your place of work, in the streetcar, in a restaurant, in your own house. He had thought it was enough not to participate in the Partei, to stay away from marches and speeches. Now he wondered how much damage he’d done with his silence. Maybe if he’d officially protested when the boys had stoned little Fienchen Blomberg outside the Weiler’s grocery store seven years before … Or if he’d fought the treatment that the Abramowitzs and his other Jewish patients had suffered …

  Oh, he’d felt terrible for all of them, had slipped a couple of banknotes to some of them—but what, really, had he done to prevent this avalanche of violence that had started small at one point, small enough to stop, surely, before it had become this frenzied mass that was still gathering momentum and, in its path, was sweeping his mother along?

  He’d walk in his shirt even during sleet and rain, shivering hard, only stopping to stare at the naked branches, at the bleak sky. And his young wife let him—that’s what the old woman clicked their tongues about. She’d even walk in the icy wind with him, not wearing a coat herself. It only proved that she was still a child. A proper wife would have coaxed her husband into warm layers of clothing, soothed his unrest with mulled wine.

  Klaus was called to military duty a month after his mother’s arrest, and when Jutta saw him off at the train, she promised to keep searching for his mother. As she left the station, she found Trudi Montag waiting for her outside the arched entrance, the collar of her wool coat turned up against the wind. Jutta raised one sleeve to dry her eyes, and Trudi handed her a folded handkerchief. Without saying a word, Trudi walked with her, and Jutta curbed her stride to match the Zwerg woman’s pace.

  When Herr Blau awoke to steady pounding against the door, his first thought was that the Gestapo had come for him. Fingers trembling, he reached for the water glass on his night table and fumbled his false teeth into his mouth. As he crept out of bed and down the dark stairs with a candle, he prepared what he would say if questioned—that he had never listened to anything anyone had said against the Führer and the Partei, that he was an old man and couldn’t remember who had said what, and—

  The pounding came from the back door. His hand on the railing, Herr Blau stopped. The police usually came to the front door, terrorizing not only the people they arrested but everyone else in the neighborhood. He peered from the kitchen window and saw a man standing on the stoop.

  “Sshh.” He opened the window a crack, and the pounding stopped. “Sshh. You’re waking everyone up.”

  “Please—” The young man’s eyes sat in hungry sockets. “Let me in, please.” Two of the points on his yellow star were frayed.

  Herr Blau trembled as if he were the one standing out there in the wintry night. “I don’t even know you.”

  “They took my sister. They’ll take me too if—”

  “There must be people you can ask … family or friends.…”

  “They’re all gone.”

  “Go away. You—you must go away.”

  The man did not answer.

  “I don’t know you,” Herr Blau said, his bowels twisting with sudden nausea.

  The man blinked. His fingers closing around the straps of a rucksack, he turned and walked down the back slope toward the brook. With one stiff leap he reached the other bank and was blotted by the night.

  When Herr Blau climbed back into bed, his feet felt frozen, and he took care not to press himself against his sleeping wife, though he longed to be wrapped into the warmth of her body. Lying near the edge of the bed, he closed his eyes and tried to return to sleep, but he kept seeing the man. He reminded himself that he’d never done anything against the Jews, even when others had humiliated them. He had not approved when Jews had lost their jobs and houses, and he’d always felt concerned about those who’d disappeared, hoping they’d found a better place to live. If he were Jewish, he had told his wife many times, he would have had the good sense to leave Germany long ago.

  It wasn’t good for his nerves to hear about arrests or transports to those camps where Jews were taken to work. That’s what the camps were for, work, even if some people whispered about horrors that he couldn’t allow himself to think about.… People like him had to suffer too: there wasn’t enough food, not enough coal to heat even part of his house. People were afraid of freezing to death while they slept. They’d all heard rumors of old people who hadn’t woken up.

  It was always harder for the old. Always.

  Toward dawn he finally slept, and when he awoke, he thought of the hunger in the man’s eyes and saw himself reaching into the bread box to take out a wedge of rye bread for him. “Take this” he could have said. He could have given him a blanket, an egg, his coat.

  His wife no longer lay next to him, and he went downstairs in his bathrobe and squinted through the back window, but the frozen slope behind the house was empty, and no one stood by the brook.

  “What are you looking for?” his wife asked and set a cup of Zichorienkaffee—chicory coffee—and a small bowl of hot oatmeal on the table for him.

  “Nothing.”

  “Eat then.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You’re not feeling ill?” She laid one palm against his forehead.

  He moved his head aside and walked out of the house. By the brook, he scanned the ground for footprints. There were quite a few, but all of them were old, frozen crusts of earth, impossible to discern whom they belonged to. Perhaps the man had already been captured. He was hardly a man yet, rather a boy. Seventeen perhaps? Maybe even younger. But taller than Stefan, who’d been small for his age, thirteen, when he’d left home one night, nearly half a century ago. How many people had helped Stefan along the way before he’d reached America? And he hadn’t even been hunted.

  It would have been easy enough to hide the boy upstairs in Stefan’s old room. And even if he had been discovered—whatever might have happened to all of them couldn’t feel any worse than what Herr Blau was experiencing as the week wore on. He felt the loss of his son in a sharp and acute way—more so than ever before—as if somehow, by turning the young man from his door, he had jeopardized his son’s safety. It didn’t make sense because Stefan was a grown man who’d recently turned sixty, an old man, some would say. Again and again, he saw himself finding the note that Stefan had left behind, and felt that familiar despair at having failed his son.

  Not that the note accused him of that—no, it had merely said that Stefan was on his way to America and not to worry about him. For an entire year before that, the boy had pleaded with his parents to let him go to America and make his fortune.

  “Fortunes don’t happen that way. Besides, you’re too
young,” Herr Blau had kept telling him, hoping to stall him until he’d forgotten that dream and fastened on something else. Children were that way—all enthused about something one day and forgetting it the next. But Stefan had not forgotten, and the people of Burgdorf had tried to comfort his stunned parents by telling them there was nothing they could have done to hold their son.

  Herr Blau took the brittle note from the box of family papers and unfolded it in his hands, remembering how inadequate he’d felt when his son had finally come home for a visit—twice a widower, but wealthy, as he’d dreamed. Stefan had only stayed one week and had taken Leo Montag’s sister, Helene, with him as his third wife.

  To deny help to someone in need, Herr Blau discovered, was far more devastating than to fear for his own safety. He wished there were someone he could talk to about what had happened, someone who wouldn’t turn him in but could put those thoughts to rest. Maybe Leo Montag would understand. Herr Blau wasn’t sure what he would say to Leo, but when he walked over to the pay-library one morning after he’d seen Trudi leave with her shopping net, he found the words.

  “If you ever know of someone who needs help—” He leaned across the counter with a whisper. “Someone who maybe has to hide … I want to help too.”

  Leo studied him silently, then nodded. “That’s good of you.”

  “Clothes, and food … and I’d keep quiet.”

  “It may not always be safe.”

  “That’s what’s wrong with everyone.” The old man’s voice burst from its cautious whisper. “Safe, safe. Is that all people can think of?”

  “I’ll remember that.” Leo Montag laid one hand on the old man’s wrist.

  Herr Blau didn’t cry until then, when he felt the warmth of the hand, and he started to tell Leo about the young man he’d sent away from his door.

  “Not here.” Leo walked around the counter to lock the door and led Herr Blau into the living room.

  “I think about him.” Herr Blau sat in the wicker chair, sobbing. “I think about him all the time.” He rubbed his blackened thumbnail.