Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  She lowered her eyes. I’m sorry, she wanted to say, but even that would frighten him, implicate him. They both had to pretend nothing had happened that night.

  During the brief periods away from the room, while waiting in line outside the bathroom door, Trudi found out about other prisoners. She’d stand close enough to whisper but not close enough to be reprimanded by a guard. She spoke with a young Jewish woman, a sales clerk, who’d been caught in a train station after she’d bought her ticket. A retired locksmith, whose spectacles were bent and had one lens missing, told her about the feather comforter he’d brought in his luggage; he was furious that it had been taken away from him, considering how he’d abandoned a lot of other belongings he could have brought instead.

  “They would have taken those too,” Trudi reminded him.

  “It’s not fair.”

  “Of course not.”

  Another man, a Jewish professor, had been arrested while stealing eggs. Two years earlier he’d left Heidelberg, and he’d been hiding ever since, sleeping in barns and forests, traveling on a bicycle though its tires had long since worn out and he’d had to tie rags around its metal rims.

  “I won’t be here for long,” he assured Trudi. “It’s not in my nature to stay anywhere more than a week.”

  She didn’t point out to him that it was no longer his choice. “If you ever need help—” she started.

  “That’s kind of you, my dear. But you’re hardly in a position to help.”

  She was glad for him when, the morning after their conversation, she heard he had managed to escape from the Theresienheim. Nearly everyone she saw that day whispered about him excitedly, even two of the guards, but the stones conflicted: the professor had climbed onto the roof and let himself down with a rope he’d made from bed sheets; the professor had walked right out of the front door, wearing a stolen uniform; the professor had bitten his way out.…

  Trudi wasn’t quite sure what it meant, biting your way out, but that was the version she liked best and circulated with her own stories because it embodied what she was beginning to feel herself capable of. But in the meantime she was not doing anything except waiting. She worried about her father, hoped that he wasn’t risking his safety for her.

  Frau Hecht was still sick though her fever had come down. She told Trudi that Sister Agathe had visited her once before. “To bring me a boiled egg … Imagine. She’s like that, the sister, taking things to prisoners when she can, even though it puts her in danger. One widow—she’s gone now—lost her shoes when she was arrested, and the sister found her a pair, black leather, only a little too big.…”

  When the two other women in their room were taken away within a day of each other, they offered no resistance. Eyes dazed, they retreated into decades of good manners, mumbling polite words of good-bye to Trudi and Frau Hecht.

  One of Trudi’s new roommates, a gypsy woman, had deep gashes down her back from crawling under barbed wire into a meadow, where she’d hidden for three weeks in a clump of bushes, drinking milk directly from the udders of cows until the farmer had spotted her one dawn.

  Many of the prisoners were Jewish, but there were others like Trudi who’d said the wrong thing or, worse yet, had been caught hiding fugitives. The end of her third week in the Theresienheim, she was brought downstairs late one afternoon and led into the office that used to belong to the mother superior.

  “The little girl from the hat shop.” The man who sat behind the desk brought his bone fingers together as if in prayer—though without his palms touching—and drummed his fingertips against each other. “You didn’t keep your mouth shut?”

  Though she’d only seen him once, that day he’d arrested Frau Simon, she recognized him immediately. His face had lost more of its flesh, pushing his eyes further into their sockets, and he looked even more tired, more aloof.

  She wanted to tell him again that she was not a little girl, but she remained silent because four years had passed and she understood more about things that could happen to you, understood hunger and fear and his authority to send her to her death. Her wool dress was matted beneath her arms, making her feel dirty.

  He said: “The rules that used to temper curiosity no longer exist.”

  She waited, confused.

  “Do you understand what I say?”

  “No.”

  “You should. Don’t you know what can happen to someone like you in our country?”

  The Buttgereit boy …the man-who-touches-his-heart… the Heidenreich daughter… No, she was not like them.

  “You become an experiment… a medical experiment for the almighty profession,” he said, and told her of operations performed on twins, on people afflicted with otherness. “Because the rules that used to temper curiosity no longer exist… Some people might even tell you that a Zwerg has no right to live.”

  She felt her back seize up on her. Bracing herself against the familiar heaviness at the base of her spine, she asked, “And you? Is that what you believe?”

  He looked at her, evenly, and she read in his eyes what she’d known four years before—that he didn’t believe in anything or anyone.

  She kept her expression impassive to match his. It still chafed at her—to hear the word Zwerg said aloud—but if she’d learned anything, it was how to be the Zwerg, to play the Zwerg. Funny almost, the way it gave you a strange power to let others look down on you, to let them bask in their illusion that they were better than you. That illusion was a gift—hers to grant, simply by being—a gift that turned some of them ugly and others defenseless and, therefore, useful.

  A muscle jumped beneath his left eye, quivered, and jumped again. He raised one hand halfway but dropped it before it could reach his face. “What is it like, being a Zwerg?”

  She knew it was a game for him, a distraction from his indifference, because it didn’t matter to him what happened to her. For that to matter, she’d have to figure out exactly what it would take to yank him out of his apathy. The secret, she thought, the secret of not caring about anything, as she remembered her first impression of him years ago.

  She lifted her face toward him. “Being a Zwerg means carrying your deepest secret inside out—there for everyone to see.” She thought of an article she’d once read in the Burgdorf Post about an infant in Egypt who’d died hours after being born with her organs connected to the outside of her skin. “Like this man I knew who was born with his heart attached to the outside of his chest. People could see it pump. And because it was so obvious, they thought they knew all about him. He had to cover his heart with gauze to keep it from getting infected, to protect it from dust and heat and snow.…”

  The Gestapo officer’s eyes were on her, filled with a cold curiosity; his fingers had returned to their drumming.

  She tried to feel out what would pull him into her story. She’d often sensed what people wanted to hear, but this was the first time it totally determined the story. And my life, she thought. “This man … you see, he had his suit jackets tailored in such a way that they were large in his shoulders and hung down his chest, but still, the swelling pushed out the fabric, moved it with each heartbeat. In his dreams, his chest was smooth, his heart safely anchored within his body. And when he prayed—”

  “Praying is for fools.”

  “Praying is for fools,” she agreed. “That’s what he finally realized too.”

  “What does any of this have to do with being a Zwerg?”

  “Everything.” Her legs trembled, but she didn’t dare sit down. “Everything,” she said, forcing herself to expose what she hadn’t yielded to anyone before: “You see, when I dream, I’m often tall. I—I used to try stretching my body by hanging from door frames.…”

  The thin fingers stopped their drumming as she described how her arms had gone numb while she’d hung from the door frame, how she’d tightened scarves around her head to keep it from getting larger. From time to time her voice would clog, but she’d go on, even though it meant turning her
self inside out like the infant with the organs fused to her surface, delivering herself, risking death, risking life.

  Though he would look toward the door as if wishing he could dismiss her, his eyes were always drawn back to her. “Go on,” he’d order whenever her voice faltered.

  “I used to sew clothes that would make me look one or two centimeters taller. I used to believe praying would make me grow.…”

  “Go on.”

  She felt a sudden rush of power, the power to stay alive. She’d kept others alive with her stories when they’d come close to being found. This time it was for herself. “The man whose heart beat outside his body, you see, when he was a boy, other children wouldn’t let him play. They called him names, laughed at him.…” It was the right story. It had to be. She could see the boy standing outside the circle of other children, longing to be part of it, hating the others for not including him, and she let her words take the officer into that schoolyard when the boy’s parents complained to the teachers and the other children were forced to let him play.

  “Go on.”

  She felt drained, purged, as he followed her through the boy’s school years and into a beer garden, where he danced for the first time, his arms extended to keep the girl he loved from colliding with his heart. “They felt stiff, his arms, they ached, but he didn’t dare bring her any closer.…”

  “Go on.”

  “People would not let this man forget about his heart. They’d look at him with pity, with interest. But that’s where they made their mistake—by assuming that, just because they saw the swelling on his chest, they knew what it was like for him to live with his heart outside his body. And that… that is where the secret lies.”

  “He let them assume.”

  She nodded.

  “He did not correct them.” She shook her head.

  He watched her for several long minutes. “Of course,” he said. “Of course.”

  Outside it was getting dusky, leveling the angles of the gaunt face, filling its hollows with the ghosts of perished flesh. Suddenly, and with absolute conviction, Trudi knew that, come spring, he would no longer be alive, and that his death would meet him through his own hands. She stared at those hands as they dipped a pen into ink and scribbled words on a sheet of paper.

  “I don’t want to see you back here.”

  Her eyes snapped from his hands to his face. “What?” she asked.

  “I said I don’t want to see you back here.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Watch that mouth of yours. Salute the flag, sing when you must, and don’t complain. About any of it.”

  As his huge signature crawled across the bottom of the page like a prehistoric insect, Trudi saw herself curled inside the narrow tunnel between the two cellars. Eva’s mosquito netting swayed above her, and the earth held the damp, furtive scent of places that are only accessible to those willing to burrow down that far. My mother would have loved that space, she thought with a sense of wonder. Another earth nest. Odd that I haven’t thought of it till now.

  It was the coldest winter she would look back on even as an old woman. The river was frozen solid, a wide, empty surface without the familiar barges, mirroring the emptiness of the town. There was little to diminish the relentless cold. Trudi hadn’t been able to get warm since that evening she’d been released from the Theresienheim and had dashed through backyards and across the brook to her house, flinging herself at the kitchen door and into her father’s arms. Even when he stoked the tall stove in the bathroom for her and she lay in the steaming water, she still felt cold.

  Fuel was scarce that winter, and for one hour each day she’d heat the green tile stove because it needed fewer coals than the kitchen stove. On its small surface she’d cook the scant midday meal in the living room. Even Matthias, who’d stop by to play the piano for her, could not warm her with his music.

  She’d only been away a few weeks, but her father looked years older. It was as though he lived almost entirely through his eyes now. Though he’d rarely missed a chess club meeting in decades, he stopped going to the club the night several of the members—who cheered each new atrocity the Nazis committed—celebrated the arrest of Leo’s friend, the judge Erwin Spiecker, who’d fought in the First World War with him.

  From what the judge’s wife told Leo, the arrest had happened half an hour after Erwin had walked out of his courtroom in Düsseldorf with two lawyers and had mentioned that, if things kept going like that with the military, Germany wouldn’t win the war. He was taken to Berlin to be executed—treason, they said—and his wife, who was pregnant with their eighth child, kept waiting for permission to visit him in prison.

  “I got out,” Trudi tried to console her, “and his comment wasn’t worse than mine.”

  “It’s still a miracle to me how you managed that,” Frau Spiecker said.

  When she finally was allowed to see her husband, she rode on a train all night. In Berlin, she had to wait for hours in an unheated hallway before she was taken to see him. He reeked—his entire body reeked—and he wrenched himself immediately from her embrace. He, who’d always kept himself fanatically clean to combat the foul smell that emanated from his body, was so mortified that he insisted she stay at the opposite end of the room.

  Four times Judge Spiecker’s execution was postponed, and four times Frau Spiecker left her children with neighbors in Burgdorf and, carrying a package with soap and cigarettes and mystery novels that Leo Montag sent along for Erwin, made the long journey to Berlin, prepared to—once again—say her final good-bye to her husband. But the last time he was no longer there when she arrived: he’d been transferred, she was told, to a prison camp south of Berlin, where no one could visit him.

  “At least Erwin is alive,” she told Leo Montag when he picked her up from the train station. “At least he’s alive.”

  That Sunday he drove her and her children to church, where several men from the chess club knelt with pious faces as every Sunday, occupying the pews with an attitude of ownership, content with the familiar rituals: the opulent scent of the Weihrauch—incense—the angelic sounds from the choir, the flat communion wafers, the chalice with the blood of Christus.

  Leo squinted at the faint pink clouds in the altar cloth with the lace edging, recognizing the markings of blood that had never washed out entirely after he’d carried his wife from the church. How long had Gertrud been dead? Twenty-three years, he thought, and the cloth is still there.

  He glanced toward the women’s side of the church, where the judge’s wife knelt in prayer, her high belly pushing against the front of the honey-colored pew as if trying to prove that flesh was stronger than wood. Or stone, Leo thought. Or the knife of sorrow. Some day her husband would have been dead for years. And she would find that you survive what you never thought you could possibly survive.

  When he brought Frau Spiecker to mass a month later, he carried her infant daughter, his godchild Heide, in his arms. By then, mass was held in the chapel. Since the war had continued to shrink the congregation, Herr Pastor Beier had decided to move the services there. Though the chapel was two kilometers from the rectory, it was small enough to heat, and after contemplating his choice of discomforts, the fat priest had selected travel over cold, figuring his housekeeper would manage to arrange rides for him—with the taxidermist, say, or the dentist’s wife, who should feel honored at doing this for him. But it turned out that, frequently, he had to ride his bicycle after all, and he needed half the mass to settle his breath.

  Those bicycle Sundays, as he came to think of them, his sermons were always shorter. He pointed this out to the bishop when he wrote him a letter, asking for a car that would make it possible for him to serve his parishioners more effectively. In his letter he emphasized his visits to the sick and elderly, but omitted the dinner invitations which he still managed to secure despite dwindling food supplies.

  Leo never felt the division within the town as acutely as he did in the chapel. Once,
the parish had felt like something whole, one body of people connected in one belief and many shared values—even if Leo had not always agreed—but now that belief had become tainted by those who used it to proclaim their superiority, who justified the crimes against the Jews by saying they deserved punishment because they’d killed Christus.

  The blood of Christus. When the fat priest raised the chalice, Leo couldn’t help but think of centuries of savagery that had been committed for the blood of Christus. Catholic voodoo, he thought as the priest brought the chalice to his lips to drink the sacred blood, as the good people of Burgdorf stuck out their tongues to consume the body of Christus.

  Trudi was making Bratkartoffeln—fried potatoes—on the tile stove when her father mentioned that Max Rudnick would stop by that afternoon.

  She turned her face away to hide her blush and jiggled the pan by its handle to keep the potatoes from burning. “Why?” she asked.

  “He came by this morning when you were at the bakery, and I told him you’d be here this afternoon.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Why not?”

  She flipped over the crisp potato slices.

  Her father stepped next to the stove and raised his hands above the pan to warm them. “He says he wants to talk with you.”

  When Max Rudnick entered the pay-library late that afternoon, Trudi was surprised how glad she was to see him; yet, she found it impossible to show that because all she could think of was the way she’d deceived him. That nasty note she’d brought to his table … She felt her shame as though it had happened the day before and knew she didn’t want to hurt anyone again with that kind of deliberation.

  With all that turmoil going on within her, she couldn’t figure how to say no when he invited her to have dinner with him the following day.

  “At six then,” he called out to her when he left the pay-library. “I’ll pick you up at six tomorrow.”

  As she got ready for bed, she agonized over ways to cancel their plans. All at once she remembered the one Goddamn beautiful night—as Eva had called it—that she’d dreamed up for herself and Max. She cringed. Of course Max had never considered anything like that with her. Their meal would end with him exposing her as Angelika and walking out, leaving her sitting right there with the unpaid bill. She’d have to call her father to pick her up, ask him to bring enough money. Some nerve Max Rudnick had. Tomorrow, when he arrived, she’d come right out and tell him she wasn’t interested in eating dinner with him.…