by Ursula Hegi
She finally found the courage to ask him. “Why me?” She came right out with it.
“What do you mean?” They were sitting at his table, and he was peeling an orange that one of his private students had given him.
“Why did you pick me, Max?”
Separating the cool sections, he arranged them on a white saucer. “Open your mouth,” he said and fed one of them to her. “Because I like you.”
After not eating an orange in years, the pleasure of tasting the sweet, juicy flesh brought tears to her eyes. “But how did it start for you?”
“I guess I was intrigued by you.…” He ate carefully, dabbing the juice from the corners of his mouth with one finger and sucking it as if not to lose one precious drop. “Here.” He fed Trudi another slice. “I guess I was curious about you.”
“Why?”
“Oh, that sense of mystery you have about you. I didn’t know we’d become lovers the day we met. It happened gradually.”
That evening he took her dancing for the first time, not to the Kaisershafen Gasthaus high above the Rhein, where she had imagined dancing with him, but in a cellar bar in Düsseldorf, where a saxophonist in a red vest played haunting variations of the same melody.
Max leaned his face close to hers. “I didn’t know you were such a good dancer.”
She smiled. “I’ve been told I have talent.”
“I’ve been told that I am beautiful,” he said, quoting what she’d written in the Angelika letter.
She stiffened. “Keep moving your feet.”
“When?” she asked, her voice high, dry. “When did you know?”
“The week after we met, when I came into the library and you weren’t there. Your father was entering some books in the card file.…”
A frozen caricature of a dancing woman, she felt her feet shift to the left, to the right. Her hand was a wet stone in his palm. She stared straight ahead at the buttons of his suit jacket.
“I recognized your handwriting. I didn’t even want to check out a book, but I did, just to get a look at another card.”
“But then why did you come back?”
“I almost didn’t, remember? I stayed away for eight months.”
“Almost nine.”
“That was a quite an overdue fine I’d accumulated.… I guess what brought me back was wanting to find out why you’d done it—brought that note to my table.”
“Your ad said you were curious.”
“Your letter said you were tall.”
She flinched.
“I’m sorry, Trudi.”
She wanted to run from him, slam the door of the bar, storm up the stairs to the street. “At least you told the truth.”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“I’m the one who needs to apologize.”
“I didn’t know how angry I still am.”
She looked up. “I have felt terrible about hurting you. Ashamed. Many times—I wish I could undo that.”
“Then we wouldn’t have met.”
“Why didn’t you tell me right away?”
“You would have fled from me.”
“And now?”
“Now you won’t.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because what we have now is strong enough to withstand that.… And it’s not that I’m sure, rather that I’m hoping.”
“We’re still dancing.”
“Would you rather sit down?”
“No.” She shook her head. “That day in the restaurant—it all started as a hoax.” She felt scared and relieved as she told him about reading the ads, about choosing his ad without any intent of meeting him, and then deciding to watch him. “I felt so furious. Humiliated.”
“Why?” He stroked her hair, from the crown to where it ended in a thick line below her ears.
“Because you never saw me.”
“Have you considered that you might have had something to do with that?”
“It was as if I didn’t exist. That’s when I decided to hurt you.”
“I saw you,” he said gently. “I saw a short, blond woman with extraordinary eyes. But I was waiting for a tall woman with auburn hair. And I kept looking for her.”
All at once she didn’t know what to say.
“I’m glad it’s out.” He drew her closer. “It’s hung between us.”
“Like your wife,” she said, and instantly remembered her vow not to bring up his wife again if they both survived the bombing.
“Like the woman I used to be married to. Maybe now you understand why I didn’t tell you right away.”
“You still are married to her.”
“Not in my heart.”
“But by law.”
“It bothers you a lot?”
“Whenever I think of her.”
“Don’t think of her then.”
“But I do.”
“She doesn’t want me back. I don’t want her back. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“It’s not that simple.”
When they made love in his room, that night, it didn’t take any effort to ban the savage fantasies that usually snared her. This is Max, her body sang to her, this is now.… And when she soared with him, it was as though she were leaving everything she knew behind—her country, language, customs. She’d heard women talk about giving birth like this—that flash of hesitation before you get to the moment when you can no longer reverse the process.
Now that he knew the secret of Angelika, she could tell him about her shame at returning to fantasies she didn’t want. “But not tonight,” she said. “Tonight I didn’t need them.”
He didn’t ask what those fantasies were like. “And you may not need them again,” he said. “But if you do, it’s all right. Lots of people go away inside their heads when they make love.”
“And where do you go, Max?”
“You already know.” He motioned toward his walls.
“Are you telling me you climb the walls?”
He laughed. “My watercolors. I—I’ll get embarrassed explaining this to you, but I think of them as orgasm pictures. That’s what I see when … you know?”
She took in the lavish colors that spun into marvelous structures and soared toward the sky. “There’s so much light and joy in those pictures. No darkness at all.… Can I ask you something?”
“If any of them are ours?”
She nodded.
He pointed to one above the table, another one by the window. “My best ones.”
“Orgasms or paintings?” She smiled.
“I can’t separate them.”
“And the others?”
“Before you… Here, I want to show you something else.” He climbed out of bed and returned with a charcoal sketch. “I did it this morning. It’s my Russian grandmother, who brought me up.”
“She has a wonderful face.… Those lines around her mouth—there’s real kindness. Something childlike too.”
“This is how I remember her. Ever since she died, I’ve tried drawing her from photos, but the sketches never looked right.” He ran one thumb across the paper, softening the edge of his grandmother’s chin. “But when I woke up today, I’d been dreaming about her, and I could still see her—just like this.”
“How old was she when she died?”
“Almost eighty. She was born in 1863. In Smolensk. When she was two, she rode to the cemetery on top of her mother’s coffin. It was her first memory. She talked about it more and more as an old woman.”
Trudi saw her own mother’s open coffin, her wrists crossed, and that lily—though it had not been there until her father had taken Herr Abramowitz to the cemetery chapel with his camera. “My mother died young,” she whispered.
“How old were you?”
“Just before my fourth birthday.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She had a lover. Before I was born.”
Max curved his arm around her.
“He had a motorcycle. My father
was in the war then.” She told him about the earth nest beneath the house and the asylum, about the stork’s sugar and her brother’s funeral.
And as he listened to her, totally absorbed, asking questions only when she paused, and then taking her further with those questions, she knew she’d found what she had been longing for—someone who wanted her stories, someone to whom she could tell everything, someone with whom she did not have to be selective about what to keep quiet. It was a link she’d had for brief intervals in her childhood, to Robert and Georg and then to Eva, and she hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it until now.
That spring, Max’s car was confiscated for the war effort, but the watchmaker from whom Max rented his room let him borrow his rowboat and bicycle. As the evenings grew warmer, Max would bring the bicycle in the boat across the Rhein and ride it to the Braunmeiers’ jetty, where Trudi would meet him. Each time they made love on the jetty, Trudi felt herself reclaiming the place a little more.
“That cairn—” Max had asked when he’d first seen the pile of rocks at the end of the jetty, “Does it mean anything?”
She saw herself at thirteen, hurling stones into the river and coming back here, more than five years later, after seeing Klaus Malter with Brigitte Raudschuss—one stone for loving him, one for hating him, one for her longing, one for her rage, one for her shame at loving him without him loving her back.…
She felt a story stirring within herself, and she spun it for Max, for herself. “The cairn is hundreds of years old.” She began her tale about a water fairy, a tale of betrayal and love and shame even though she didn’t know the details yet. “Each stone means one life, and those longago people, who survived the revenge of the water fairy, swore to always remember her with this cairn.
“Those stones are restored after each flood, though no one knows who keeps up the ritual. Some say she’s still there, in these waters, keeping vigil over the cairn, waiting to add other stones for other lives.”
“What happened to her? Why was she so vengeful?”
“She wasn’t always that way.” Trudi spoke slowly, giving words to the images as they rose within her. “People used to watch her swim in the river, admiring her—uniqueness, her grace. You see, from the waist up, she was shaped like a woman, but instead of legs, she had the tail of a fish. It was silver and green and flashed when the sun touched it. Men fell in love with her beauty and wanted to possess her, and one morning four of them—” All at once she couldn’t go on.
Max took her hands.
“They—they lured her to shore. Right here. With promises. Promises of being her friends. And then they carried her off… into a church, and tried to split her into being like a woman. But she escaped.” Now the words were rushing from her. “She escaped from them and dragged herself back to the river, bleeding. It took her many months to heal, and after she was strong again, she brought the river into their houses and took her revenge. She drowned one of the men in his bed, another in his cellar.
“She killed every one of them,” Trudi whispered, “every single one. And always—afterwards—she would bring a stone from the bottom of the river.” She pointed to the cairn.
“To remember the dead,” Max said.
“The living, too.”
“There are more than four stones.”
“Because when she was done, she came after their families too, after every person who had loved them.” The story was frightening Trudi. She remembered hiding with Georg in the tower of the church, scaring him and herself with ghost stories, and then scattering their fear with stories of comets and water fairies. Water fairies. But now even her story about the water fairy was grim, and she couldn’t think of a new story that would undo her fear.
“She went too far,” Trudi said, “and with each stone she added she felt heavier inside. Colder.” She glanced out over the river and thought how she’d undermined the boys who’d hurt her. Now the war had become her instrument of revenge—at least for two of them: Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier was reported missing in Russia, and Fritz Hansen had returned six months ago without a jaw. It had been shot off. Already, he’d had two surgeries and would need seven more, she’d heard from his mother, before his jaw would be restored as much as possible. He wore gauze from his neck up, and saliva ran down the front of it, making it look soiled even if it had just been changed.
“What if the water fairy were to toss those stones into the river?” Max asked.
“Why?”
“To release centuries of hate.”
“But once the stones are gone, she might forget.”
He looked at her steadily. “Right,” he said. “She might forgive.”
The identity of the unknown benefactor was discovered one night in May when—instead of following his pattern of leaving gifts—he attempted to take something away. What he stole was the Hitler monument in front of the Rathaus, the greenish statue with the flawed ear and crusts of pigeon droppings. The unknown benefactor was apprehended in the process of loading the short statue into a wheelbarrow, his open tool box next to him. From what the people of Burgdorf would hear afterwards, he was shot right there while trying to joke about taking the Führer for a stroll because it had to get boring standing in one place for so many years.
Not that the police figured out immediately that the thief was the unknown benefactor—that came when they searched his apartment and found a worn ledger, the kind a bookkeeper might have used decades ago, with detailed entries dating back over thirty years, listing people’s shoe and clothing sizes, ages of children, illnesses, hobbies, needs, and secret wishes. Columns with check marks and dates documented all the gifts he’d mysteriously smuggled into houses—bicycles and baskets of food and books and toys and money and coats—including roller skates for a boy by the name of Andreas Beil, who had since grown up to become one of the policemen who’d shot the unknown benefactor.
“My God,” Andreas Beil groaned when he discovered his name in the ledger. “All those years I’ve wanted to thank him.”
“Why did Emil risk his life for such a useless stunt?” Leo Montag grieved.
Trudi shook her head, dazed.
The entire town was dazed. Where had Emil Hesping obtained the money for all those gifts? How had he found out about their secret wishes? Why hadn’t they ever suspected him?
“Even I didn’t know.” Leo stroked the polished wood of the phonograph that the unknown benefactor had smuggled into the pay-library the first time Gertrud had been sent to the asylum. “You’re too young to remember this … but Emil was rather fond of your mother.”
The feeling of gravel beneath skin. A motorcycle tilting, tilting— Trudi glanced up at her father. How much did he know?
“Some might say he adored her.”
Gray spring light pressed against the front window, somber and ancient, challenging any bright color with its sameness. Trudi saw a chimney sweep pass by. Georg used to believe chimney sweeps brought you good luck. But Emil Hesping had not been lucky. Or perhaps he had been, living the mystery of the unknown benefactor for so long.
“… but Gertrud, she didn’t want him around those last years. Now they’re both dead.” Her father’s voice carried a strange longing.
“I worry about that ledger,” Trudi said. “What if he kept track of the hiding places, the people—”
“Not Emil. He wouldn’t. Remember how he cautioned us against writing down any of the names or what we were doing? He wanted us to forget whatever it was we’d just done. There was no past, no future. That’s why the gifts are different… something he could envision doing again. Those lists meant that there was a future he could believe in.”
When Andreas Beil managed to get the body released, Emil’s brother arrived for the burial and prayed over the grave. The bishop looked the way Emil would have with hair—same posture, same dense eyebrows, even the same laugh. Though it offended Pastor Beier, the bishop turned down the invitation to spend the night at the rectory and stayed with the Mo
ntags instead.
After Trudi had gone to sleep, Leo and the bishop sat at the kitchen table, between them a bottle of cognac, which the bishop had brought in his black suitcase.
“Emil valued his friendship with you,” the bishop said.
“If only he’d spoken with me,” Leo said. “We could have laughed about his plan, imagined carting that statue off together. It would have been as if we’d done it, and then I would have talked him out of it.”
“Maybe something gave…. Maybe—” The bishop shook his head. “I was afraid it was getting too much for Emil. I just didn’t know it would happen this soon.”
“Are you saying he let himself get caught?”
“I don’t believe he mapped it out like that. It’s more like … even as a boy, when school got too much for him, Emil would take crazy risks.”
In the alley between the library and the grocery store, two cats screeched, and as Leo stood up to close the window, a surge of lilac scent made him dizzy, and he steadied his hand on the windowsill.
“Like once,” the bishop was saying, “Emil must have been ten, a year older than I, and afraid of getting the Blaue Brief—blue letter—and having to repeat fourth grade. Behind our house was this barn, and he climbed onto its roof and balanced along the top until he fell off. He broke his leg and two ribs. Another time he threw eggs at a church window.… I used to admire and fear Emil at the same time. Back then, we were not very alike at all. But now …” He turned his face aside.
Leo waited. Finally he said. “You have the same kind of courage.”
“Really?” The bishop looked grateful. “I always thought of myself as rather timid. In comparison to Emil, that is.”
“My daughter and I—” Leo sat back down. “We still want to help.”
“It’s too dangerous. Your connection to Emil… They’ll be watching you. We need to be careful. I get so tired of being careful.… Sometimes I wish I could come out with what I think about the Nazis, use my influence—”
Leo shook his head.
“I know.” The bishop refilled their glasses. “I’ve seen too many others pulled out of high positions. The only one I know of who’s spoken up without harm to himself is the bishop from Münster. It’s a mystery to me.”