by Ursula Hegi
“You do what you need to do.” Max resumed his hammering.
When he didn’t hear anything for two weeks, he figured his colleague must have decided against informing on him. But one morning the principal blocked his way to his classroom and handed him a letter of introduction to an industrialist in Düsseldorf who wanted a tutor for his children.
“You were lucky. I’d suggest you practice greater caution in the future.”
Max Rudnick was not allowed to say good-bye to his students or enter the classroom to collect his personal belongings from his desk. They’d already been packed into a paper bag, which felt ridiculously light as he carried it out of the brick building where he had taught for six years.
fourteen
1942
TRUDI FOUND THE WOMAN HIDING IN HER MOTHER’S EARTH NEST ONE chilly April afternoon when she carried the Persian hallway rug outside. She thought she must have imagined it—that flash of movement when she walked past the opening below the back of the house—and she kept walking and hoisted the rug across the metal rod and raised the rattan paddle. Her hair covered with an old scarf, she beat the rug, hard, while dust blossomed in thick plumes into the air. All at once she felt as though she were being watched. She turned toward the house, expecting to see her father’s face in the kitchen window, but instead she noticed it again—that motion beneath the elevated part of the house—as though her mother had returned.
Trudi stood still, absolutely still. Her neck felt cold. Wielding the rattan paddle, she approached the boulders and aged timbers where her mother used to hide. She heard the breath before her eyes adjusted, not her own breath but one—no, more than one, much faster than hers.
She stopped next to the rack with the garden tools and gripped the handle of a shovel. “Who is there?” she called out, finding the sound of her voice reassuring. “Who is there?”
Silence. Then something shifted—like fabric being dragged across the ground. Her eyes made out two figures, one large, one small, crouched in the corner.
“He is just a child. Please.” A high and urgent whisper as a child, a boy, was pushed toward Trudi. Behind him emerged a woman’s face and graceful hands with red-lacquered nails, locked on the boy’s shoulders as if in a death grip, holding him between herself and Trudi. “He is just a child.”
For an instant there, standing within the half-dark and the smell of old earth, Trudi felt her own mother’s hands on her shoulders, that taut grasp. People die if you don’t love them enough. She saw the glitter in her mother’s eyes, felt the secret kernels of sin beneath her mother’s skin, heard that wild, wild laugh.
“Don’t be afraid,” Trudi said, as much to herself as to the boy.
The woman jerked him back against herself, locking both arms across his chest as if to dare Trudi to take him from her. Her red hat slipped down her blond hair and dangled on the back of her neck, held by a coated rubber band that cut across her throat like a badly healed scar.
The boy watched Trudi quietly, his eyes nearly at the same level with hers.
“Don’t tell anyone we’re here,” the woman said.
“I won’t.”
“We’ll leave. As soon as it’s night.”
“You can stay inside our house.”
“It’s not safe.”
“Safer than out here.”
“How do I know—” The woman stopped. She shuddered, and her arms tightened around the boy, whose eyes hadn’t left Trudi’s face once.
“I want to help.” Trudi felt the woman’s fear for her life, for the child’s life, and when she reached forward and touched the boy’s shoulder, her arms grew weak as though she’d been the one who’d carried his weight in her arms as they’d fled.
It was partly from the woman’s jumbled words, but mostly from her anguished silences, that Trudi was able to assemble what had happened. They’d lost their house in Stuttgart eight months earlier when they’d been herded into one of the already crowded jüdische Hauser—Jewish houses—along with other families. During her first week there the woman had woken up each morning, thinking: This is as bad as it will ever get. But soon she realized that she was capable of withstanding far more than she’d ever imagined possible as long as she had her husband and child.
As others were shoved into the jüdische Häuser, the cold and hunger and constant bickering over the shrinking space grew worse. But even then she reminded herself that at least they were not taken away in cattle cars to unknown destinations, limited to bringing what they could fit into one suitcase. And she knew exactly why: There was a difference between her and those Jews who had been taken, a way of being in the world that did not allow for that kind of ultimate defeat. Not that she could escape the indignities altogether—that would have been unrealistic for someone like her who’d been trained as a biologist—but there were limits to the horrors she would let herself imagine, and that ability, she reasoned, kept her rational, that and her determination to survive, even if it meant taking a step away from whoever happened to be the next victim, and refusing to identify. The ones who suffered most, she’d observed, were those who panicked and saw no way out.
Her husband was like that. But she was able to keep him safe until one evening when he didn’t return as usual with scavenged bits of coal. She waited for him through the night and all of the following day and the night after that until early morning. Then she woke her son, made him leave his cat in the cellar, and set out for the hotel where her husband’s uncle had lived ever since he’d lost his villa. If only she had the money to stay in a hotel without worrying about food rations. She wanted to spit in the old man’s face when he invited her and Konrad to have breakfast with him—“Before you go on your way,” that’s how he said it—but she stayed, though she couldn’t bear to eat, and made her son finish his milk and eat her boiled egg too. Though convinced that she’d never see her husband again, she left a message for him with the uncle and accepted his gift of a leather suitcase before she returned to the jüdische Haus.
But the door stood open. One broken cup on the front steps was the only sign of struggle. All of the occupants had been taken away, validating the woman’s beliefs about her survival as she scooped what she could use for herself and her son into the uncle’s suitcase and a rucksack that used to belong to one of the other residents, a musician from Wildbad. With her nail scissors, she separated the cheap yellow fabric of the Judenstern from her coat and burned it in the sink, together with her identification papers; but a faint outline of the star remained visible—much like the contour of a picture after it has been taken from a wall—and she rubbed a pumice stone across the wide lapel until it was no longer visible.
Her son’s cat was still in the cellar, and he cried and refused to leave the house until she allowed him to bring the cat along in his satchel. The knowledge that they might be arrested any moment—on the street, in the railroad station, on the train—set her face into a rigid smile that would frighten her son into a silence so constant that she wouldn’t even have to remind him not to answer anyone’s questions.
They took the train from Stuttgart to Frankfurt, where her brother-in-law lived, but when they rang his doorbell, he was afraid to take them in. She remembered a cousin, a distant cousin, who lived near Düsseldorf in a small town called Burgdorf. On the train, she was asked for her papers and travel orders, a question she had dreaded, but the official accepted her fixed smile and explanation that her papers had been stolen.
The cousin had disappeared from Burgdorf, and she found the hiding space beneath the pay-library when she got water from the brook because the boy was thirsty. But she’d slipped on the muddy bank and her hem was still dirty.
“See?” she said and raised the hem toward Trudi as if that one detail—the dirt-crusted fabric—proved that she had told the truth about everything else.
“I saw white cows,” the boy suddenly said. “I didn’t know there were white cows.”
“Where did you see them?” Trudi asked so
ftly.
“From the train. Many of them, all white. Have you ever seen white cows?”
“Yes, at the Sternburg. It’s a farm now, but hundreds of years ago knights lived there. It still has a drawbridge.”
“Like a castle?”
“With a beautiful round tower.”
“And knights?”
“Not anymore. Just farmers.”
“Will you take me there?”
Trudi hesitated. “If it ever becomes safe.”
He nodded as though he’d anticipated her answer.
Trudi looked at his mother. “I’ll come for you tonight and bring you into the house.” She got the clean Persian carpet and spread it on the ground. “You can sit on this till then.”
The woman’s eyes probed into hers. “Promise you won’t tell the police.”
“I promise.”
“If you do, I’ll—”
“I promise.”
“Who else lives with you?”
“Only my father. He’ll want to help. Are you hungry?”
The woman nodded and let out a small sob as if humiliated by her hunger.
Trudi was back within minutes to bring them what was left of her meager rations of bread and of milk so thin it looked blue. Blauer Heinrich—blue Henry—people called the watered-down milk they’d come to associate with the war, and when the boy drank, he swallowed so hard that Trudi could hear him.
As soon as it was dark, she led the woman and the boy into the house, where she had closed the drapes and set the kitchen table with two soup plates and spoons. When her father took the woman’s suitcase from her and welcomed her, that fighting stance left her body, and she slumped down in a chair as if, for the first time in months, she knew that others were looking out for her and that she no longer had to do it alone. Leo pressed one of his wife’s flowered porcelain cups into the woman’s hands. She drank the tea slowly and told them her name, Erna Neimann, and the boy’s, Konrad.
Trudi heated the pea soup she’d made the day before, stretching it with water and a cubed potato to have enough for the four of them. “It’s best if only two place settings are out at a time,” she told Frau Neimann as she urged her and the boy to eat first. “In case the house is searched.” She and her father waited to eat until they’d refilled the soup plates of their guests.
“I had a cat,” Konrad said when he was finished. “She was on the train with us.” His face took on an old look. “On the first train that is. I carried her in my satchel.” He slid from his chair and opened the satchel for Trudi and her father to inspect. It was empty except for a folded dingy towel. “She slept in here,” he explained, “until—”
“She kept making noise. Remember?” his mother said to him. “She was drawing attention to us. How could we hide, having her with us?”
“She was a good cat.”
His mother gripped her lower lip with her teeth. “She was, but the noise—”
“She was learning to be quiet.”
“It takes a long time for animals to learn something. We didn’t have that time.”
But Konrad didn’t look at his mother. His eyes were on Trudi. “My mother says she gave my cat away. In the railroad station. While I was in the bathroom.” He closed his satchel. “I don’t know if it is true.”
His mother flinched and glanced at Trudi’s father as if to enlist his help. “I gave the cat to a little girl.…A girl with a warm, expensive coat who has a good home for her.”
He nodded, his face sad as though he not only accepted the loss of the cat but also his mother’s lie.
Trudi felt the lie in the kitchen with them and knew that the mother was the kind of person who would twist the neck of a cat and drop it into a trash can, if that could protect her son and herself, and who would then lie about it. Trudi loved her for that. She would have done the same to protect the boy if he’d been hers. “Your mother is keeping you safe,” she said.
“But I know that,” the boy said as if surprised she needed to tell him.
Late in the evening, after Trudi and her father had settled their guests on a mattress in the sewing room, they went into the cellar to see if they could arrange a better hiding space. They moved the potato bin and the shelves, rigged up an old blanket to isolate one corner of the cellar from the rest, but whatever they did only made it look more conspicuous.
“Anyone could find them here,” Trudi said.
“It’s worthless without a second exit.”
“A trap.”
“We need to figure a way for them to escape if the police come into the house.”
“The sewing room has to be enough for now.”
“For now.”
By midnight, they’d examined every nook of the cellar for possibilities and had relocated boxes and coals and the old laundry kettle without establishing a secure hiding place. Exhausted, Leo Montag dropped onto the wooden trunk that still contained the box Herr Abramowitz had hidden there more than three years earlier.
Trudi sat on the cellar stairs and rested her elbows on her knees. “From your house to mine..” Pia, she thought, feeling more of a connection to the animal tamer than she’d felt in a long time. She saw the two of them standing in the circus arena, their eyes at the same height, spinning the tale of the magical island… a tunnel made of jewels” “It led from your house to mine, yes.”
Yes. She leapt up. “What we need is a tunnel.”
Her father stared at the stone walls and shook his head. “Too thick.”
“Not if we get help.”
Gradually, as it began to seem possible that, indeed, they could build a tunnel, their tiredness turned into fresh energy. Not only would they have a safe passage for the woman and the child, but for others who would come here after that. Without saying the words aloud to each other, they knew they were ready to take that risk. They considered both neighbors, the Weilers and the Blaus. Though Frau Weiler was younger than the Blaus and eager to help with food and other supplies, she couldn’t be relied on because she’d never lie if questioned by the Gestapo.
Besides, Georg might come home on military leave and visit his mother. He’d been back once to marry Helga Stamm. After the wedding, he’d talked his mother into letting him take along his father’s old skis since he was stationed near Zakopane, the Polish ski resort. “He’ll probably gamble them away,” Frau Weiler had told Frau Buttgereit; yet, she’d found herself comforted as she’d pictured her son skiing down snow-covered mountain peaks instead of aiming a rifle at another human being.
It would be best to have the tunnel lead into the Blaus’ cellar, Trudi and her father agreed. Ever since he’d turned the young man away from his door, Herr Blau had changed. He would welcome the chance to help others. And his wife would keep quiet.
When Trudi finally went to sleep, she awoke soon after to a low, unfamiliar sound that came from above her ceiling, and for a moment she didn’t dare move because she was certain the Gestapo had found out about the woman and the boy. She had an image of herself locked up inside a cell and felt furious at the woman for endangering her. But it was far too quiet for the Gestapo to be in the house—only that steady sound from the floor above. Ashamed for thinking only about herself, she wrapped herself in her bathrobe, lit a candle, and went up the stairs to the sewing room.
Listening hard, she laid the side of her face against the cool paint of the door. She could feel the boy’s closeness. I’m not going to let them get you, she thought, I won’t. Eyes half closed to hear better, she stood motionless. The sound was slow, grating. Carefully, she opened the door and stepped next to the mattress. She set down the candle holder. The woman and the boy were fast asleep, and he was grinding his teeth. His dark head rested on his mother’s shoulder, and a deep frown made his features look far more grown-up than he was. Like a Zwerg man, Trudi thought, and clasped her hands in front of herself, her fingertips digging into the tender spots between the knuckles.
In the morning the water was frozen, and she had t
o break the ice in the porcelain basin on her dresser before she could wash. When she took breakfast upstairs to the sewing room, the boy was waiting for her on the other side of the door as if he’d stood there all night.
That first week, Erna Neimann slept much of the time, deeply, as though flinging herself into a bottomless lake. You’d find her asleep wherever you’d left her, while the boy would sit next to her, keeping vigil. Trudi took to spending more hours with him while her father did some of her duties in the pay-library, the connecting door to the hall locked to delay anyone who might try to enter that way. Trudi would tell fairy tales to the boy, comb his pale hair, build card towers for him, wash his face—always ready to rush him upstairs to the sewing room if someone came to the house.
When she found out that he didn’t know how to swim, she taught him the movements in dry air. “Like a frog,” she said. “Pretend you’re a frog. That’s how I learned to swim in the river.” She made him lie with his belly on a stool and showed him how to move his arms and legs.
There was something invigorating about having Konrad in the house, something unsettling, too, because he made Trudi think of the times she’d imagined having a family of her own, a family as shown in magazines and movies, with a husband and children—even though her own body did not belong in any of those pictures; she would never look like those smiling young mothers, would never have what they had. And yet, sometimes she felt an unspoken communication with a small child she might see in church or on the street. She’d feel drawn, deeply, into the child’s eyes, into a moment of recognition that choked her with love. I know you, something within her would chant, though her lips wouldn’t make a sound. I know you, and you will always remember me. She’d feel a connection beyond that moment which—for a while at least—would lull the random longing for a child of her own. And when Konrad looked at her, it was with eyes that seemed to understand all that.