Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  “You …” Max sighed. “You’re as vast as the night sky … as mysterious as a veiled moon.…”

  She laughed in his arms, intrigued. “So that’s how you see me?”

  “Your energy…” he murmured, “it’s so great that sometimes I feel it will suck me up right there into the sky with you.”

  “There could be worse fates.”

  “Oh, yes.” He tickled her nose with his mustache, then kissed her fully. “Much worse. Like never having met you.”

  “Let me look at you.” She made him move till she could see his features in the half-light. Sometimes she thought he was becoming more handsome in front of her eyes, but of course that was impossible. He must have been like this the day she’d met him, and she simply hadn’t seen how extraordinary his face was. It looked extraordinary even when Max was troubled—as he had been for much of this last month, ever since he’d been drafted to work in the office of an ammunition factory. His bad eyesight had kept him out of the battle, but not out of working at a desk for the war industry, keeping records of inventories and of the foreign workers, who were heavily guarded to prevent acts of sabotage.

  Long barges rode the current, some of them lit, others nearly dark. Intermittently, one of their whistles would slice the night, resonant and sad.

  Max sat up. “Let’s go away, you and I.”

  “On a vacation?”

  “Leave for good. Where do you want to go?”

  “China,” she said without hesitation and knelt in the sand so that her face was at the same height as his.

  He laughed. “For real.”

  “China. One: I can travel there for almost free—”

  “So you’ve told me.”

  “And two: it’s far away from Germany.”

  “A good reason.” He wiped a few grains of sand from her temple. “But until we can afford China, we better think of a place that isn’t quite that far. I wish we could live in France. There’s a chapel I want to show you. In a village not far from Paris. Inside is a marble plate with an inscription that says the chapel was built during the First World War by French peasants, who promised God to build a chapel if the Germans didn’t win. Being German, I felt odd, reading the inscription. Now I hope there’ll be a second chapel for this war.”

  “I’d help them build it,” Trudi said.

  “You’d like Paris. When I was there in 1934, I saw a ballet dancer in front of Notre Dame.…” As he described her—the short red shift and black stockings—Trudi could see her, dancing as if she were on the most famous stage in the world. Hundreds of people stood watching her, and toward the end of her dance, she drew a man into the circle … a clown, who started off stumbling and awkward. But soon he was dancing with her as if she’d transformed him.

  “Things like that can only happen in Paris,” Max said.

  Trudi smiled to herself. “Oh—I think they can happen everywhere.”

  “We’ll live in Montmartre. I could paint there.”

  “And what will I do?”

  “Tell stories … have babies … dance with me …”

  She found herself reeling in the smell of the earth, the smell of the river. A child of her own … And yet, how could she risk bringing a child into life who might be inflicted with her size, her anguish? “About the babies? You mean that?”

  Max rubbed his face with both hands, then linked his fingers behind his head.

  “Do you?”

  “I— I don’t know why I said that.”

  She couldn’t breathe. “It doesn’t mean they’ll have bodies like mine.”

  “Trudi—”

  “A Zwerg can have regular-size babies.”

  “I don’t doubt that. It’s just that…”

  “What? What?”

  “I don’t know if I want children.”

  “Then why say that about babies?”

  “I don’t know,” he said miserably.

  She sat back on her heels, stared past him.

  “Please—don’t be like that, Trudi.”

  “Like what?” She spread her short arms. “This is me. The way I was born—like that. A Zwerg. Do you have any idea how much I hate that word? Zwerg… There—take a good look, Max Rudnick.”

  “You know I didn’t mean your body.”

  “Well, it is me.”

  “Part of you. And you use it well… as a shield, a weapon. It’s your way of fighting. Your strength and your weakness.”

  She shook her head, furious at him for being right.

  “You get angry when others dare to look at you. Yet, I’ve never known anyone who watches people as acutely as you.” Words charged from him as though he’d restrained them too long: “You—you misunderstand things. You take everything so—so seriously. When people laugh, you’re sure they must be laughing at you.…”

  The air was still around her. As if the world had stopped moving. This is the end, she thought. Our last time together. I will never see him again. And that’s good. If this is how he really feels about me—

  “You make it awfully hard for others to be close to you.”

  “Then why—the hell—do you bother?” She felt the heat in her eyes that would surely turn into tears if she didn’t get away from him.

  “Because—” He caught her by the wrist as she scrambled up. “—I happen to love you.”

  She yanked her arm from him. “One moment you say you love me, and the next moment you tell me that I misunderstand things and that I won’t let you be close.… Make up your mind. Which of them is it?”

  “All of them.” He crouched in front of her, naked, his eyes close to hers. “And not always at the same time. Trudi…” He laid his hands on her shoulders, shook her gently. “Trudi, what is it you want me to know? That you’re not different from anyone else inside? You’ve taught me that already.”

  The heat sprang from her eyes, doused her face.

  “Come here.” He drew her close. “Do you believe that I love you?”

  She sniffled. Nodded. Said, “Yes.”

  He tightened his arms around her. “How can we think about babies in the middle of death? Sometimes I get so afraid that I won’t be alive by the end of the day. Working in that Goddamn factory—all I think of is running away.”

  She stroked his face.

  “Maybe after the war, Trudi. If we survive …”

  “We will,” she said fiercely.

  He rested his head on top of her hair. “Somehow I don’t have much faith in getting out of this alive.”

  “We both will.”

  “If we do—maybe we can talk about babies then.” She didn’t move.

  He brought one hand under her chin and tilted her face up. “Look at you. You’re all wet.” With his hands, he wiped off her tears. “So then—you’re glad you got me?”

  She had to grin. “Sometimes.”

  “Even if I don’t always know what I want?”

  “Even if.”

  All at once the muscles in his chest twitched. “Sshh—” He raised one hand.

  “What is it?”

  “I hear something.”

  They listened, hard.

  It was a voice, a man’s voice, calling her name. Twice.

  “My father.” She smoothed her skirt.

  Max grabbed his clothes, struggled into them, stepped into his shoes without tying the laces and was on the bicycle, pedaling away from her, before she heard her father’s voice again.

  “Trudi…”

  She waited until she could no longer see Max. “Here,” she called, and walked toward the voice.

  Her father was halfway down the path from the dike to the river.

  “A postcard.” He was out of breath. “From Zürich. No words—just a drawing. Of a cat and a train.”

  “Thank God.” She grabbed his hands. “Konrad—They’re safe.”

  “Trudi!” Someone came running from the direction where Max’s bicycle had disappeared.

  Max, she thought, but the shape was shor
ter, wider.

  “Trudi—Are you all right, Trudi?” It was the butcher’s son, Anton, who was home on leave. “I tried to catch the man, but he got away on his bicycle. Was he bothering you?”

  “No,” Trudi said, “No. What man?”

  “The one without clothes. I was fishing and heard someone call your name and then I saw him on the jetty with you and—”

  “Oh, that man.”

  Anton stared at her.

  “He was just asking me to watch his clothes. You see—” She felt her father’s eyes on her face. “He wanted to take a swim and worried about someone stealing his clothes. So he asked me if I could watch them.”

  “And you believed him?”

  She raised her face toward the butcher’s son and nodded like an obedient child. “It’s such a warm evening. I could see how someone might want to swim.”

  “He took his clothes off in front of you?”

  “I wasn’t looking.”

  “Don’t you see what kind of danger you were in? We should call the police.” He seemed ready to run into town and bring out a search party.

  “Anton—” She reached up and laid her hand on his arm. “I’m sure he just wanted to swim.”

  “What else did he say?”

  She glanced at her father, then back at the young Anton Immers. “Let me think,” she said, stalling him. Konrad is safe in Switzerland, something within her sang, Konrad is safe.

  “Did he ask you to take off your clothes?”

  She made her voice go indignant. “I only swim when I have my bathing suit. All he asked me was if the river was dangerous, and I said it wasn’t. Not if you stay close to shore.”

  “Are you sure he didn’t touch you?”

  “He was interested in swimming.”

  “Sometimes men will try to—”

  “I told him to watch out for whirlpools and to stay away from the barges.”

  “That’s not all he should stay away from.”

  “He was only here a few minutes. He didn’t even have time to go into the water.”

  “Then why did he run off like that?”

  “He didn’t say.” She wished she’d thought of a better answer.

  Her father stepped between her and Anton Immers. “Thank you for your concern. I’ll take care of this matter now. No need for you to—”

  “But make your daughter understand the danger she was in.”

  Trudi felt furious. She wanted to shout at him that she had just made love, that she would move to Paris, where she’d never have to look at another Immers face again.

  “Herr Montag, that man could have raped your daughter.”

  “I will speak with my daughter,” her father assured Anton Immers. “Come now,” he said to her, “time to get you home.”

  They didn’t talk until they reached the dike. “Tomorrow everyone will be gossiping about this,” she moaned.

  “At least it’s a pretty good story,” her father said. “I’m sure Anton believed it.… You are all right?”

  “Of course.” She waited for him to ask her about Max, ready to answer with the truth.

  “I’m so glad for Konrad and his mother,” he said.

  “It gives me hope. For all of us.”

  He glanced at her from the side. “And about your friend Herr Rudnick … Tell him he doesn’t have to hide from me.”

  The coat of the Russian soldier still hung on the coat tree in the hallway that connected the pay-library and the Montags’ living quarters, and Trudi would keep it there as if—the old women in Burgdorf became fond of saying—she expected a man to come home to her. There had been that one incident by the river, after all, which had caused all of them to reassess this Zwerg woman, who usually gossiped about them.

  No doubt her inexperience with men had led her to be less than properly cautious with this stranger who’d presented himself to her late one August evening by the river and had asked her—so the rumor went—to watch his clothes for him while he swam.

  “The nerve …” people said and agreed that the man’s boldness was nothing compared to Trudi Montag’s naïveté.

  “When it comes to men, Trudi Montag is like a child,” people said, shaking their heads.

  The naked man was a foreigner, some of the people suspected, while others insisted he was one of the Jews hiding out. What they concluded was two things: that he was not one of them, and that Trudi Montag could have gotten herself raped or killed. Fortunately—so the story passed through town—Trudi’s father and young Anton Immers had arrived at the river in time to chase the naked man away.

  “He already had his clothes off,” Frau Weiler said.

  “And Trudi just stayed there.” Herr Blau clicked his teeth.

  “Any other woman would have run for her life,” the oldest Buttgereit daughter said.

  “It’s because she had no idea what danger she was in,” the pastor’s housekeeper explained to Herr Pastor Beier.

  “Like a child.”

  “Yes, like a child.”

  “My son got there in time,” the butcher told his customers.

  “A car for the parish would be helpful in preserving the honor of our young women,” the pastor urged the bishop in a letter.

  That version of what had happened that evening by the river was just what Trudi wanted the town to believe, and she was amused when she heard that her father, supposedly, was in the habit of looking for her whenever she wasn’t home by nine.

  “I’m usually asleep by nine,” he said when she told him.

  “I guess they like to believe that someone’s looking after me.”

  Trudi massaged the rumors by pretending to let seemingly innocent comments slip from her, which—in return—compelled others to confide in her about near indiscretions within their families. And so she piloted her story.…

  Let them think that she’d never been with a man.

  Let them feel sorry for her.

  Let them believe that, by chance, she’d come across that one man by the river that one night.

  Had the people of Burgdorf known what had really happened to Trudi by the river, they would have been furious at her for deceiving them—not because of her words but because the truth would have mocked their expectations of her. Over the years, those expectations had solidified and engendered pity because she would never have a man and children, superiority because any one of them had to be better off than she, and fear because she knew too much about them.

  They didn’t have any idea that she’d known the naked man—as they came to speak of him—for over two years, and that she’d been his lover for ten months. They didn’t have any idea how, with one fingertip, he would trace her entire body—hips and ears and knees and throat and breasts and chin and back and wrists and toes—and how she’d quiver under his slow touch and discover her body through the gentle pressure of his hands.

  Had a young woman of normal size offered the kind of flimsy lie about watching a stranger’s clothes on the jetty, no one would have believed her. At times it made Trudi furious that everyone in town was eager to embrace her fabrication, including Klaus Malter, who’d been sent home from the front with an infected shoulder wound and—after church one Sunday—asked her if she was all right as though she were marked from her encounter. His voice was concerned, and she came close to telling him that Max was a far better kisser than he.

  In her anger, she let the story grow and found her vengeance in circulating it around town, keeping it alive, and it would become one of those stories that even people who hadn’t been born yet—like the next generation of Immers and Baums and Malters—would grow up with and continue to tell about Trudi Montag once she was an old woman. So much more happened than she would disclose to anyone, even to Hanna Malter, the child of Klaus and Jutta, whose birth was still three years away and whom she would love as though she were her own daughter. Even Hanna would never know that Trudi kept seeing the naked man after that night on the jetty, that they would meet further south, w
here the river was turbulent and the shadows of the poplars couldn’t touch the surface of the flat stone that was wide enough for both of them—far away from the eyes of the town where Trudi was the one who seized people’s secrets.

  One night in June of 1944, Herr Abramowitz died in his sleep. The week after his funeral, his wife was arrested when, in one unforeseen and magnificent act of rage, she demolished the office of the Hitler-Jugend in Frau Simon’s former hat shop. The two uniformed youth leaders, who watched the slender old woman enter with her cane, were too stunned to move when she swung the cane around, scattering papers and files, smashing lamps and the pyramid-shaped mirror, which—at the instant of splintering—yielded to her images of everything that had ever happened in her marriage.

  Her cane ripped through the membership maps with their tiny pin flags that covered the walls, knocked down framed photos of children singing around bonfires and marching in parades. Trying to dodge her cane, the youth leaders wrestled her to the floor and tied her wrists—but not before she’d broken one pair of eye glasses and left welts on their necks and faces.

  In the days after Frau Abramowitz was sent away, the old women in town would tell each other stories of amazing strength that sometimes becomes available to women for brief periods of time: they would recall a mother who’d lifted a farm tractor from the chest of her trapped daughter; a wife who’d carried her wounded husband, twice her weight, two kilometers to the doctor.

  In St. Martin’s Church, Herr Pastor Beier continued to offer prayers for the soldiers who’d died in the war, but he never mentioned the Jews who’d been deported or killed. Standing on the blood-red carpet that led up the marble stairs to the black marble altar, he’d raise both fleshy arms and beseech Christus to embrace the soldiers who’d sacrificed their lives for the Vaterland, just as He had sacrificed His life on the cross.