Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  “They came for Eva. They were satisfied.”

  “Tell your uncle I want to talk with him.”

  “He’s not well.”

  “I need to find out what happened to Eva.”

  “He won’t even speak to me.”

  Fräulein Birnsteig, though Jewish, had been protected so far because of her fame, but her mansion had been appropriated as a vacation villa for SS officers. She’d lost her housekeeper and her car, but had been allowed to keep her bedroom and the music room where, frequently, she was summoned to play the piano for officers and their guests. Even her practice sessions were no longer her own: officers would wander in, lean against the piano to watch her or, worse yet, continue conversations while she’d play.

  It was to this music room that Trudi and her father came for Matthias Berger’s recital. The audience was much smaller than at the spring concerts, and the windows were closed to the brisk October air. More than half of the guests wore uniforms, and next to the piano the red flag with the Hakenkreuz was prominently displayed. There were no candles as in the earlier years, but harsh light bulbs that made the pianist’s once so elegant neck look pasty, wrinkled. When the concert began with “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,” Trudi couldn’t bear to sing along, and as she glanced up at her father, he was moving his lips without sound.

  She wondered how it made Fräulein Birnsteig feel, playing the national anthem. Did others, too, notice the hesitancy with which she sought out the keys? She no longer looked glamorous, but thin and ill—this woman who believed in her dreams, who had canceled tours because of dreams, who had hired a beggar woman because in a dream she was her sister. Where is the beggar woman now? Trudi wanted to ask Frälein Birnsteig. And what have you done with your dreams? Did you dream this too—the flag and the uniforms and the camps? And if so, what did you do to adjust your life to this?

  But then, mercifully, the anthem was over, and Matthias stalked to the piano, his face chalk white, his eyes on the ground. But as soon as he sat down on the piano bench, his shoulders filled out, and his back aligned into a lovely, strong curve. In his tuxedo he looked like the man he would become, not a thirteen-year-old boy. As he touched the keys, a wonderful confidence came over him. His head followed the motion of his hands. From where she sat, Trudi could see the transformation in his features, the green hue of his pupils, and she remembered that first time he’d come into her house. Music, even then, had been a way out of pain for him. She wished she had something like that, something that could sweep her away from the grieving that sat with her all too often. She’d grieved over Konrad, the priest Adolf, and now Eva, and each one tilted her right back to her oldest grief—the loss of her mother.

  Trudi felt herself drawn into Matthias’ music, but when she closed her eyes, the music became that of Fräulein Birnsteig and spun her through the images of that second-grade spring concert: the sound of boots on marble tiles; high white bellies of pregnant girls; babies crying—Trudi sat up straight, her eyes wide. The boots, they were here now. On these marble floors. And so was that fear she’d felt as a girl. The bellies, she thought as the music pumped through her, what about the bellies? She didn’t want to know; yet, she felt the future sucking at her, trying to prove itself to her through those boots, vowing that the bellies and the babies, too, were waiting in that vortex of time.

  Her father bent down, brought his face close to hers. “What is it, Trudi?” he whispered.

  She shook her head, tried to reassure him with a smile. At intermission she was the first one out of the music room before the applause had stopped. But Frau Buttgereit caught up with her in the octagonal entrance hall, where a table with refreshments was set up, and pressed a glass of wine into Trudi’s hand. The gold cross of honor for German mothers was pinned to her lapel.

  “Are you enjoying the concert?” she asked and stepped closer to Trudi as others crowded around the table.

  “I would enjoy it even more if we could do without the flag and the anthem.”

  “Sshh.” Frau Buttgereit shifted her weight from one veined leg to the other and glanced around nervously. “Did you hear about all the teaching jobs in Düsseldorf? If Monika were still here, she could apply.”

  Trudi wanted to get away, but she was wedged between chests and backs and the table.

  “They’re pulling out more of the male teachers for the front.”

  Maybe that’s where Max Rudnick was, at the front. Maybe already dead and buried. Stop it, Trudi told herself. He’d never be a soldier. His eyes were far too bad. Lately, just about anything made her think of Max: drinking tea, shelving books, weighing tobacco.…

  “Not that I’m against Monika working with the KLV,” Frau Buttgereit rushed to say. “It’s just that she’s so far away. We wish she lived closer to home. But at least she’s doing the work she studied for.”

  When they returned to the music room, Matthias played a duet with his mentor. Trudi could see how proud Fräulein Birnsteig was of him. I bet he’s the best student she ever had, Trudi thought, the very best. She was distracted by two SS officers who were walking along the side of the rows, talking. Why couldn’t they wait until after the concert? One of them had the nerve to come down her row, his black uniform blocking people’s view of the piano as he squeezed himself past their legs.

  In front of Trudi he stopped and said something.

  She couldn’t understand. “What?”

  “I said: Come with me.”

  Eva, she thought. They found out Eva stayed with us. In the rows ahead of her, no one turned around. People kept their eyes on the piano.

  “Get up, you.”

  “What’s this about?” Trudi’s father asked.

  Matthias stopped playing the piano. For an instant Fräulein Birnsteig continued the thin thread of her part, but then she, too, lifted her hands from the keys.

  “Keep playing,” the officer shouted. “And you—” He grabbed Trudi’s shoulder. “Out. Now.”

  Eva Eva Eva—

  “I’m coming along.” Her father raised himself from his seat.

  “You stay here.” The officer shoved him down and pulled Trudi past him to the end of the row.

  Matthias and Fräulein Birnsteig kept moving their fingers across the keys as if trying to pull some solace from the stark white and black. Trudi could still hear their music as she was taken outside to a car. Cold night air blew through the fabric of her wool dress. She shivered.

  Her father came rushing from the building with her coat.

  “Careful, old man.” One of the officers raised his arm.

  “At least let me give her this coat.”

  The coat wrapped around herself, she sat in the back of the car. Her father’s white hair slid past the window, then the massive stone posts where the driveway dipped into the road, then trees, and the long, unlit stretch of road between the mansion and the cemetery, where some of the old graves had been leveled to make room for new coffins. Despite all the war dead, the old people in town kept dying as they had in times of peace. Death had taken on such a different meaning, it seemed to Trudi, that perhaps the old should have been given some postponement, some reprieve. Yet, their burials kept happening right along with the war funerals. It came in proper time, their dying, but what had changed was that they were encumbered by the bewilderment that their sons had died before them. Out of sequence. Or their daughters, Trudi thought, picturing her father alone.

  The last time she’d been to the cemetery had been for the funeral of the priest-nun, Sister Adelheid. At the gravesite she felt spooked when she realized she was flanked by nuns, just as the sister had been whenever she’d left the convent. At least the sister with the heart-shaped face had done what she’d believed, even though it had meant punishment. But with that punishment had come an odd freedom, Trudi thought, not the resignation that suspended the lives of too many women.

  The car passed the burned-out synagogue and pulled up in front of the Theresienheim. One officer on eithe
r side, Trudi passed the Hakenkreuz flag in the lobby. Above the bench, where the Jesus picture with the blue robe used to be, now hung a picture of the Führer, his mouth set as if about to erupt into one of the screaming speeches that Trudi had heard on the radio. His eyes were watching her, the kind of eyes, Herr Hesping had said, that lured people in.

  “If they didn’t see those eyes and only heard the shouting,” he’d told her, “it would be easier to resist him.”

  It felt strange to be inside the Theresienheim without seeing a single nun. Trudi had heard that the sisters still had some rooms near the chapel, but she hadn’t been here since the building had been confiscated. Maybe this was where Eva had been taken, waiting to be transported. If Eva had told them anything, it must have been under torture. As Trudi wondered how much torture she herself could withstand, she felt grateful that no one was hiding at her house who might be betrayed by her.

  All night she was kept in a cell by herself. No one came to ask her questions. What kept the room from complete darkness were the moon outside the barred window and the slit of light beneath the locked door. She felt thirsty. At least I don’t like to smoke, she thought. If I smoked, this would be a lot worse. I’d want it so badly.… She rubbed her arms, crossing back and forth from the window, which was less than a minute’s run from her own backyard, to the only piece of furniture, a wardrobe. So this is what it must have been like for Frau Simon.… She found some comfort in picturing Konrad safe, willing him safe, out of the country, in Switzerland, perhaps, or England. He wouldn’t have to hide. He could go to school with other children, have a cat again. And then she thought of the Abramowitzs who, twice, had heard rumors that they were to be picked up; both times they’d readied themselves, though Trudi’s father had offered to hide them or drive them to a safe place. They’d refused to endanger him, and when he’d asked Herr Abramowitz if he wanted his wooden crate, Herr Abramowitz had said he’d rather leave it with him.

  A few times Trudi sat down on the linoleum floor, squeezing her thighs together to stop the urge to pee, but soon she’d be up again, pacing. Although they’d let her keep her coat, she was cold. And hungry. The uncertainty of why she’d been arrested grew until it reeled out of control like the walk of the Heidenreich daughter. The entire war was like that, reeling out of control, and for all she knew, Gerda Heidenreich might be dead, buried in a place where her watch without hands kept proper time.

  Last summer, when a group of Jews had been rounded up outside the taxidermist’s shop, Gerda, who’d been sitting on the front stoop, had been taken away in the truck along with them, despite her father’s cry, “My daughter isn’t Jewish.” From what he’d been able to find out, she’d been brought to a research clinic, supposedly to be studied with other retarded people.

  Herr Heidenreich—who went to every speech, every meeting, every parade—tried to convince his wife that their daughter would be returned to them, healed and more complete than she’d ever been before. His loyalty to the Führer was so absolute that he wouldn’t allow his wife to grieve. “They will find some treatment to help her, some operation or medicine …” he would tell the customers for whom he’d preserve a favorite cat, say, or a wild fox, endowing lifeless bodies with a vitality far more real than in nature.

  At dawn, when light from the single window turned Trudi’s cell deep blue and then gray, she found that the wardrobe was unlocked and empty, except for a plaster statue dressed in white, a plaster thorn embedded in her forehead—St. Rita, married against her will at twelve. Twice a mother, once a widow, she’d kept trying to enter the convent despite rules that only admitted virgins. She was the patron saint of desperate causes. Trudi wondered what St. Rita would do if she were confined in this cell.

  “Forgive me,” she whispered as she climbed into the wardrobe, “but this is a desperate cause.” Pulling up her wool dress, she squatted in the corner opposite the saint and peed, feeling the last warm part of herself gushing from her. “Forgive me,” she said again as she rocked herself on her heels to get rid of the last drip.

  Several times that morning she heard steps in the hallway, voices, and by afternoon she had convinced herself that the officers who’d locked her up had forgotten to let anyone know she was here. She thought of Sister Adelheid. “As long as you keep escaping, they never get you. Even if they think they do” Her stomach ached, and her mouth felt sore. What if her hunger became as terrible as the hunger the priest Adolf had described to her? What if she got to where—after everything else had been taken away, her dignity as well as her possessions—she’d be reduced to the tyranny of her belly?

  She thought of knocking against her door but was afraid of what might happen to her once that door opened. When it finally did, she was glad that the guard was a young woman.

  “Stand up!” Long keys hung on a ring from her belt.

  Trudi scrambled up, her back against the wall.

  “Name?” On her lapel, the woman wore a round button with the Hakenkreuz. Her close-fitting uniform and polished knee-high boots made her look both sexual and dangerous.

  “Trudi Montag.”

  “Age?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “Occupation?”

  “Librarian.”

  As the woman screamed questions at her, Trudi flinched and tried to answer them, even those that didn’t make sense.

  “Why were you at the concert?”

  “I like music.”

  “Were you meeting someone?”

  “No.”

  “Was this meeting for the purpose of exchanging information?” The woman looked confident, the kind of confident that comes from wearing a uniform that gives you an authority you’ve never had before.

  “I was there for the music.”

  Trudi kept waiting for Eva’s name to come up, but the questions were all about the concert, where she’d sat, what she’d talked about, whom she’d talked with, and while the woman was shouting at her to answer, she imagined herself traveling through China for one-quarter fare, going four times as far with her money as a regular-size woman like this guard. Finally she realized her arrest had nothing to do with Eva or with hiding other fugitives. Someone had overheard her remark to Frau Buttgereit.

  But the grim expression of the guard gave her no reason to celebrate her relief. “So you admit making that statement about the flag?”

  “I—” Trudi sighed and lowered her eyes. If the guard sensed that she was not totally intimidated by her, she’d make things worse. “It was thoughtless of me to phrase it like that. It really was. You see—what I meant was that the flag was in the way, making it difficult for someone my size to see the piano.”

  “And our national anthem?”

  “I have always preferred it at the end of a concert, rather than the beginning.” When she leaned her head back and shot an appealing glance upward, she could tell the guard wasn’t convinced. “I agree—it is unfortunate the way I expressed it.”

  “More than unfortunate.” In the guard’s eyes, Trudi recognized that old flash of curiosity she’d encountered from others all her life. “It undermines our country.”

  Late that evening, Trudi was given a bowl of pea soup and one slice of Schwarzbrot—black bread—and in the morning she was taken to the second floor and locked in a room with three other women, all much older than she. She’d only met one of them before, Frau Hecht, a Jewish seamstress whose husband had fought in Poland and become the town’s first war casualty. The other two had been brought here from outlying towns.

  Frau Hecht was ill. Her skin felt hot to the touch, and whenever she coughed, her entire body trembled. The others kept her covered up with their own blankets and saved some of their water ration for her. They begged the guard who brought the food and wasn’t old enough to grow hair on his face to get one of the sisters to bring medicine for Frau Hecht.

  But he shook his head as if afraid of listening to them. “Nuns are not allowed to talk to prisoners.”

  While Fr
au Hecht slept most of that day, mumbling fevered words, the other women were frantic, speculating where they might be sent. They worried about what had happened to their suitcases and lamented about what they’d had to leave behind. Upon their arrival at the Theresienheim, their luggage had been seized, and they were still waiting to have it returned.

  That night, when the women slept in their clothes—two to each narrow bed—the young guard brought Sister Agathe. “Five minutes,” he whispered and locked her inside the room with them.

  The sister drew in her breath when she saw Trudi. “You—I didn’t know you were here, Fräulein Montag.”

  “It’s my third night.”

  “Where’s the patient?”

  Trudi motioned to Frau Hecht next to her in bed. “She’s burning up.”

  After the nun unbuttoned Frau Hecht’s blouse, soiled and reeking from having been worn too many days and nights, she inserted a thermometer beneath her left arm. Her fingers found the pulse. “This is not good,” she said after a silence.

  “Is she dying?” one woman asked from the next bed.

  “Of course not,” the other woman said.

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Well, she might hear you.”

  From deep within the folds of her habit the nun produced a small bottle. She made Frau Hecht swallow two pills and pressed the bottle into Trudi’s hand. “Give her two of these every four hours.”

  The door opened a gap. “Quick.” The man-boy voice said, “Quick now.”

  “Please, tell my father—” Trudi whispered, but the nun rushed out without a glance back.

  In the morning, when an older guard led them to the bathroom, Trudi was afraid the young man had been caught, but that evening he was back, carrying their food.

  Trudi wondered what it was like for him, following orders, yet risking arrest for one act of kindness. “Thank you,” she whispered to him.

  His eyes skipped away from her with the beat of fear, and he set the lines of his mouth, hard. “No talking,” he snapped.