by Ursula Hegi
Leo Montag walked around the pay-library, dazed, as though he’d become a widower all over again, and Trudi began to wonder how much Frau Abramowitz’s unspoken love had braced him over the years. Late one evening he grew strangely restless: he rearranged his leftover books in the living room and sorted through old photos. Though she was tired, Trudi stayed up. Twice, she asked him if he wouldn’t rather go to sleep. It was after midnight when he limped down the cellar stairs and brought up the crate that Michel Abramowitz had entrusted to him nearly six years earlier. Wrapped inside Michel’s raincoat, they found linen napkins folded around the two silver candlesticks that used to stand on the Abramowitzs’ piano; one ring with diamonds and another with an oval aquamarine; the necklace with rubies that Michel had given Ilse on their twentieth wedding anniversary; eight sets of cufflinks and three bracelets; a collection of antique gold coins; and the carved mezuzah that used to hang on the Abramowitzs’ front-door post.
“We’ll have to get these things to Ruth,” Leo told Trudi.
“Don’t you think it would be better to keep them until after the war?”
“I no longer know what that means: after the war.”
“It will end. It must.”
“Ruth needs to know about her parents.” He’d been with Frau Abramowitz when she’d tried to call Ruth from the dentist’s phone to tell her about her father’s death. But no one had answered the phone in the clinic where Ruth worked. “Ilse sent her a letter about her father. She should have written back by now.”
“Maybe she’s no longer in Dresden,” Trudi said softly.
He closed the crate. “I’m taking this to her.”
“What makes you think you’ll find her? And where do you think you’ll get gasoline for the trip?”
“Herr Blau has enough stashed away.”
“He doesn’t even have a car.”
“You know how he is.” Leo grabbed his keys. “Always saving things in case he’ll need them. He’ll understand that I’m not asking lightly.”
“It’s late. You’re tired.”
The crate under his arm, he headed toward the door.
“And it’s way too far. You’ll drive all night.”
“Wouldn’t you want to know if I were dead or deported?”
“At least let me come along.”
“Someone has to be in the library.”
“I’ll put up a sign that we’re closed because of illness.” She made him set the crate down. “Let’s wrap these in a less conspicuous way. In case we’re stopped.”
While her father went to speak with Herr Blau, Trudi packed a suitcase, hiding the jewelry and coins inside rolled-up socks, the mezuzah in the folds of a suit jacket. They stashed the candlesticks beneath the spare tire. Four canisters of gas in their trunk, they silently drove out of Burgdorf. The only light upon the landscape came from the beams of their car. As they lifted gutted buildings and torn fences from the dark, and flitted across broken arbors and bridges that had been blown up, Leo ached for the country he used to love.
For brief spans, Trudi kept falling asleep, and Leo felt like the only survivor in an unreal landscape. Each time she awoke—her back and knees stiff—it was from half dreams of being deported in a cattle car. She felt ashamed that she could sleep at all, ashamed that her body protested those minor discomforts; they were nothing compared to what Frau Abramowitz and Eva must have suffered. And yet, as she’d doze off and wake up and doze off again, her own aches gave her a small measure of understanding about how the Nazis took you and stripped you of everything that made you unique, stripped you of all that gave you identity, until they had created an awful equality: they took away your families, your right to practice your education, possessions you’d worked for, all that was important to you—your music, your books, your art. And when you thought there was nothing else they could possibly deprive you of, they came for the basics that you took for granted—your food and your clothes; your privacy to go to the bathroom or wash yourself. They herded you into KZs—a flour sack between you and the hard floor—robbed you of your dignity, made all of you alike in an awful way. And as you survived each torment and endured the discomforts, the excrement, the terrible lack of privacy, and the hunger that became your predominant feeling—stronger even than your fear—it proved the judgment they’d already formed about you: that you were all like animals.
Trudi shivered. To her left, her father’s profile rode the night, framed by the dark window on the driver’s side. His lips were closed, and he looked serious, determined. She thought of the priest Adolf, who used to live in Dresden, and she longed for the certainty that he was safe like Konrad. Maybe they’d drive past the church where he’d been arrested. Though she didn’t remember the name of his church, she felt certain she’d know it once she saw it. Adolf had promised to write her after the war if he was still alive. Don’t you dare forget, she beseeched him, willing him to read her thoughts. Don’t you dare or I’ll think you’re dead.
It wasn’t right that Adolf and other priests who’d spoken out against the Nazis were hunted or imprisoned or killed, while the fat priest was free—secure and well fed in his rectory—restricted only by the virtuous complaints of his housekeeper, Fräulein Teschner. Trudi’s eyes closed. Far away, she felt the fat priest turning in his bed, dreaming of the car the bishop would surely give him after the war.
“It took us all of the following night to drive back,” she would tell Max after she’d return from Dresden. They’d be in his room in Kaiserswerth. Outside, on the windowsill, a pigeon would land on the clay pot with its one dried-out geranium and peck at the dirt.
“We found the address of the clinic, but Ruth no longer worked there. She hadn’t shown up for her shift two months earlier, and when her supervisor had stopped by her apartment, no one had answered. We went there, my father and I, knocked at the door of the owner, who lived on the first floor, but he kept telling us to go away, that Ruth had moved. He looked afraid.”
“He probably was.”
She would tell Max how they’d driven through Dresden all that day, just on the chance of seeing Ruth, how urgent it had felt all at once to let Ruth know how her mother had taught Trudi good manners—“She was a kind and generous and loving woman, your mother”—and how reluctant her father had been to leave there without bringing Ruth her family’s possessions.
“If you want,” Max would offer, “we can take a trip there after the war. See if we can find Ruth. I have an aunt not far from there, in Leipzig. We could visit her.”
The day of his ninth wedding anniversary, Alexander Sturm returned to Burgdorf without leave. For more than a year he’d been fighting, flinging his body into battle with the fury of obliterating himself, but it was as though he’d been cursed: while soldiers all around him had died or been maimed, he hadn’t even earned a simple scar.
In his uniform, he walked from the train station to his apartment building, asked Jutta for his keys, avoided her eyes that had witnessed his cowardice, and stalled her questions by promising to talk with her soon. When he unlocked the door to his apartment, his rooms were the way he’d left them: his niece had obviously hired someone to clean them regularly. He stripped off his uniform, bathed without hurry, washed his cropped hair, and dressed in his good blue suit, which felt as though it must have been tailored for a heavier man. The jacket was too spacious, and without his suspenders the trousers would not have stayed up. It was late afternoon when he mounted the stairs to the attic.
While, only a few blocks away, Trudi was checking out two romances to Klara Brocker—supposedly for Klara’s mother again—Alexander Sturm stood in the middle of his attic.
“I should have come with you and your parents,” he said aloud.
Only silence confronted him.
“I used to believe I’d go with you into exile, death even… I’m ready for that now.”
Through the closed window, he could see the cherry tree across the street and, behind it, the burned upper hal
f of the Talmeisters’ house and the first floor where the family still lived.
“Even if you are in the worst of places, I would rather be with you than here by myself. Even if you are dead, it would be better to be dead with you.”
He stepped up to the window. The sun was plunging behind the tile roofs of his town. Pigeons and sparrows picked at the fallen cherries that stained the sidewalk, and for a moment, as Alexander stared at the mess of red pulp and white kernels, it became Eva’s flesh, merging with a pile of flesh and bones. His body heaved, yearned to become part of that pile. Dry moans hiccuped from his throat. He crawled behind the crates.
“Don’t you see?” he whispered. “I never meant to break my promise.” He remembered Jutta pulling him to his feet after the Gestapo had left him behind, remembered her strong arms as she’d led him down the stairs to his apartment, where she’d wrapped blanket after blanket around him because his body wouldn’t stop shaking.
“I was too late, Eva. A few minutes more—and I would have been able to get up. I wanted to come with you. You have to believe me.”
The sky outside the attic window was streaked with mauve, and in that kindest of lights—where time can shift and restore itself—Alexander Sturm was given his moment of grace. Trembling with awe, he watched Eva walk toward him in a blue evening gown, her hair braided into a crown. “You still mean it? About coming with me?” she asked, and he leapt up, his legs obeying him, “Yes,” he said, “yes,” and she held out one hand and he felt it, felt it, no ghost hand this; it was real, warm as his own flesh. “You are not dead then,” he said, and she laughed, “No. No, of course not” and all the anguish and shame he’d suffered for so long spun away and, still, still, he was allowed to keep the wisdom that had come from his torment as he stepped into her arms. Her skin smelled of summer and was wonderfully soft under his hands, and it occurred to him that, certainly, this was as much happiness as one human could bear, almost too much for one single heart to contain without bursting. He embraced his wife tightly, his face against her hair, and when he held her away from himself—his hands on her shoulders so he could see her eyes—she looked at him without reproach. “People will tell stories about how you followed me” she said and he could feel the approval of the town that he’d missed so bitterly flow toward him. She fastened a white carnation to his lapel. “Where did you get the flower?” he asked because he hadn’t seen it until then, and she kissed him and said, “They are waiting for us.” He meant to ask who was waiting for them, but already she was telling him to open the window, and he felt the exhilaration he’d known the day of his wedding, the certainty that he and Eva would always be together. “Always … Only I didn’t know it would be like this,” he told her, giddy with gratitude that he’d been granted this reprieve, this absolution. It made him feel chosen, confident that he must be quite extraordinary to be allowed to relive this most crucial event of his life. Never before had he felt so free of fear. It occurred to him that perhaps that other time in the attic—crawling around with the Gestapo men taunting him, some hero some hero some hero you got here, kicking him, some hero some hero—had only been a shadow-dream summoned by his fear of what might have happened. “Come,” Eva said, and as they both climbed out and stood up on the flat part of the roof outside the window, it struck him that they were dressed for a celebration, she in her evening gown, he in his good suit. “But it is a celebration,” Eva said as though she’d skimmed his thoughts, and he said, “A celebration, yes.” Up here, the air was cooler than in the street, clearer. Laced with the scent of wildflowers from the meadows and carefully tended blossoms from nearby window boxes, it wove itself around his neck, through his Kaiser Wilhelm mustache. Eva spread her arms, and in that moment as he stepped into her embrace, Alexander was granted a glimpse of Jutta’s daughter, who would be conceived in his house and grow up with stories about the love between her Great Uncle Alexander and his wife, Eva. He wanted to tell Eva about the girl, but the summer air rushed through his body, became his flesh, his voice—
It was not until the morning of Alexander’s funeral, when the priest sprinkled holy water into the grave, that Trudi would recall Alexander’s voice outside the Braunmeiers’ barn. All those years, she thought, I’d almost forgotten that part of it.
“Your uncle,” she told Jutta Malter at the apartment house where Alexander’s funeral feast was held, “once did something very important for me.”
Jutta bent, bringing her face down to Trudi’s. “He never told me.” Her hair lay blond and loose on the shoulders of her black dress.
“That’s because he didn’t know.”
“What was it?”
Trudi shook her head. “He—He rescued me.”
Jutta waited but didn’t press. “He would have been glad to know that.”
“Now I wish I’d told him.”
Deep circles smudged the crescents beneath Jutta’s eyes. She had fought Herr Pastor Beier for two days over his refusal to allow her uncle to be buried in the Catholic section of the cemetery.
“But he is a suicide,” the pastor had insisted.
“There’s nothing to prove that.”
“Frau Talmeister saw him jump.”
“Maybe he was inspecting the roof. He’d been away for a long time.”
“A deserter. You know, don’t you, that two other soldiers, too cowardly to fight our war, were shot near the Sternburg while stealing vegetables.”
“Maybe they were the heroes. They refused to be part of—”
“I won’t listen to this.” The priest took a step away from her. “Frau Talmeister watched your uncle from her window.”
“If Frau Talmeister doesn’t have anything better to do than hang in her window all day, it doesn’t mean she knows what’s going on.”
“I wish I could help you—I truly do—but the rules of the church are clear when it comes to suicide.”
“It matters nothing to me where my uncle is buried. The only reason I’m here is because I know it would have mattered to him.”
They kept looping back through the same words, and when Jutta left, the pastor felt weak with hunger. It seemed that his hunger grew with each year, leaving him dissatisfied only minutes after a large meal. Yet, his body kept expanding, straining against the seams which his housekeeper grudgingly let out or reinforced with inserts.
All that night Jutta painted, unable to step back from the canvas that summoned from her the bright red shapes of two bodies whirling from a yellow sky like winged seeds.
Early the following morning, before mass and breakfast, she rang the doorbell of the rectory and walked right into the priest’s study though Fräulein Teschner tried to stop her.
“Herr Pastor Beier is still asleep.”
“Wake him then. Please.”
“Once I do, he’ll have to get ready for mass.”
“This won’t take long.”
Jutta stood in the middle of the study when the priest came in, his hair combed only in front. Apparently he hadn’t stopped to brush his teeth because his night breath preceded him.
“You keep my uncle out—you keep me out too.”
“Now… now, Frau Malter.” The priest laid one hand on her shoulder.
She dropped her shoulder, stepped back. “No. I won’t be back in church.”
It was the determination in her eyes—much more than her words—that convinced the priest she meant what she said. How could he let her soul slip from the graces of the church? Besides, his parish had shrunk and become so poor that he couldn’t afford to lose someone prosperous like the dentist’s wife, who, everyone knew, was her uncle’s only heir.
“Tell me …” He looked at the polished tips of his shoes, the only part of them that wasn’t obstructed by his belly. “So your uncle was in the habit of doing some of his own repairs?”
“Usually he hired people.”
“But first, first he would check out himself what needed to be done?”
“Seldom.”
“Still—” He peered into Jutta’s eyes. “This is a unique situation, returning after a long absence.… Tell me,” he prompted her, “were there problems with the roof?”
“No.”
The priest kept his impatience from his voice. “But if there were problems …” he said, blotting out Frau Talmeister’s description of Alexander Sturm standing on his roof for several minutes in his Sunday suit, arms spread—“Like the statue of an angel,” Frau Talmeister had told him—“If there were problems,” the priest said, “it could have been treacherous … that high up.”
• • •
Ingrid lived with her daughter, Rita, above the bicycle shop in the room that used to be hers as a girl, and every night she prayed for Rita’s salvation. Her new husband had returned to the war, and she felt guilty for not missing him.
At least once a week she’d bring Rita to the pay-library and let her crawl and play between the shelves where she and Trudi had held their very first conversation. They’d watch the little girl from the wooden counter where the glass bins stood empty. It had long since become impossible to get tobacco, and the customers who walked through the door came for books or gossip.
Since just about every able-bodied man between fifteen and sixty was being drafted, most teaching positions were filled by women. When Ingrid found work at a school in Düsseldorf, her mother offered to look after Rita. Ingrid’s class was huge, more like a holding tank for hungry children than a place where they might learn anything. Nearly sixty students filled the benches, squatted along the walls when they got too tired to stand, and sat on the windowsills, eyes dull in their thin faces.
Repeated bombings of Düsseldorf made the teaching even more difficult. Ingrid would have to interrupt her lessons to hurry the children into the huge cellar. There, she’d make them pray with her till the end of the air attack, and whenever she worried about her daughter’s safety, she’d remind herself that, if God chose to claim Rita this young, she’d go to heaven for sure.