Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

  She came to hate Ruth Abramowitz, felt herself capable of killing Max for deceiving her with Ruth. And still, still—she would have forgiven him if he’d returned to her. Now. She kept extending the deadline by which she’d accept him back into her life: at first it was the end of May, then it became the middle of June, and as she passed both dates, as well as the anniversary of her mother’s death, she granted him till July 23, her thirtieth birthday. Even if Max arrived the evening before her birthday, she promised herself, they would not celebrate it one hour before its time. Even if he begged her.

  “Look what happened when we celebrated your birthday early,” she’d tell him, “look what happened to us then. You disappeared and I was afraid you’d never come back.”

  “There’s not a single day I didn’t think about you, Trudi.”

  Her thirtieth birthday would be the glitziest birthday she’d ever had—more spectacular than the fireworks her father had taken her to on her fourth birthday, more dazzling than Pia’s circus coming to town, more festive than the dinner party her father had given for Konrad and his mother the night of their departure. And for Eva, she thought, and for Eva, feeling guilty that she’d even let herself think of her birthday. She was selfish. Selfish and greedy. Eva would never have another birthday. Neither would Ruth’s parents. Or the priest Adolf. If any of them were alive, they would have written or come home by now. And Ruth, she was probably dead too, burned and shattered in Dresden. Along with thousands of others, including Max who, more likely than not, had not found her in the brief time before the city had been decimated.

  That first year after the war was the hardest for the people of Burgdorf. There was little food or coal. Some people froze. Milk still had a bluish sheen and was thinned down so much you could look through it. If you could no longer pay your debts, the Gerichtsvollzieber—bailiff—would enter your home to paste the cuckoo—a sticker indicating a lien—on the back of your furniture. You’d still have some time to pay your debts, but if you couldn’t, the entire neighborhood would watch as your piano, say, or your chest of drawers was carried from your house.

  The shame of it.

  Though nearly everyone was struggling, it hurt your pride if your family went hungry. In the face of such poverty, it became even more important to keep things clean. Poverty like that made you think of the unknown benefactor, whose memory caused you—at your poorest ever—to take up the habit of leaving anonymous gifts on the front steps of those who were more in need than you.

  Yet, even during the leanest of times, the people came to Trudi for her stories, stories she told them about others in their small town that was infected by silence. When they looked down at her, they could feel superior—an attitude most had been infused with since the day of their birth. They could glance at her stunted body, the broad features, and even the most hideous among them could feel superior. Next to Trudi Montag, they could reinvent themselves, could obliterate whatever doubts were theirs alone at night, and—with a trace of benevolence even—accept her stories as something due them.

  Trudi’s gift lay in knowing. Knowing the words that named the thoughts inside people’s minds, the words that masked the fears and secrets inside their hearts. To force their secrets to the surface like water farts and let them rip through the silence. They called her a snoop, a meddler. But even though she was more inconvenient to them than ever before, they kept coming back—to borrow books, they liked to believe—yet, what they really came for, even those who feared Trudi Montag, were the stories she told them about their neighbors and relatives. What they brought Trudi in return were stories of their own lives, which they yielded to her questions or, unknowingly, to her ears as she overheard them talk to each other between the stacks; and they didn’t even miss what she had taken from them until the words they’d bartered in return for her tales had ripened into new stories that disclosed far more about them than they knew themselves.

  To flip his luck, Georg Weiler played cards two evenings a week. Although Helga protested that he drank too much, he was quick to charm her, asking her if she wasn’t glad her husband was home from the war, unharmed. “What are two measly evenings,” he’d ask, “compared to years of battle?” And he’d lean over the bed where his twin daughters slept side by side and kiss their hair.

  How could Helga possibly stay angry with a man who was a tender father like that? Most fathers she knew, including her own, gave scant attention to their children, especially if they were girls. But Georg would bounce the twins on his knees or let them chase him through the apartment until they’d scream with delight; he’d sing to them so beautifully that Helga would open her windows for the entire town to hear how happy her husband was with his family.

  When Georg lost his job at the farm for coming in late three mornings, Helga was pregnant again, but he managed to find employment within a month, just as he had promised. Though driving a taxi took him away from home more, Helga was glad for him because he looked so proud behind a steering wheel. Besides, the twins adored their father, as did every child in the neighborhood: he was never too tired to squat on the sidewalk and play with them, to show them how to win marbles or spin a top.

  “I told you I’d be driving a car soon,” he called out to Trudi when he dropped off a passenger at the train station, where she stood by the ticket counter with Matthias Berger.

  “And there I thought you were talking about your own car,” she snapped. Shaking her head, she turned to Matthias, who looked at her, startled. “That Georg Weiler …” she said. “When you take away the bragging, he’s just a coward.”

  Matthias was on his way to enter the seminary in Kaiserslautern, even though Trudi had tried to persuade him to stay out and study music instead. Ever since Fräulein Birnsteig’s suicide, he’d spent far more time in St. Martin’s Church than in the pay-library, praying for the soul of the pianist. It was Leo who’d figured out that Matthias had found a new mentor, Herr Pastor Beier, who’d pounced on the boy’s hesitant questions about what it was like to be a priest with such enthusiasm that Matthias had been propelled into applying to the seminary though he was only sixteen.

  “Your talent…” Trudi urged him once again, “it’ll be wasted there.”

  But playing the piano only made him sad. Somehow Trudi felt she’d failed him. If she hadn’t kept him from entering her house during those years of hiding fugitives, he might have stronger ties to Burgdorf. Of his relatives, only a grandmother was left, too frail to see him off at the station. Trudi supposed that she and her father were probably the closest he had to a family. It hadn’t been until after the Americans had arrived that she’d felt safe telling Matthias why she’d had to send him away from her door.

  “One day I saw a boy inside your window,” he’d said. “A small boy.”

  “That must have been Konrad. He and his mother were hiding with us.”

  “He ducked when he saw me.…” He laughed, an embarrassed laugh that made his green eyes go dark. “I remember thinking that you and your father must have found another boy to play the piano for you.”

  “Oh, Matthias.”

  “I was younger then.”

  “It would have endangered you, knowing about them.”

  The sound of the approaching train burst into the station, and the front line of waiting people slanted back from the edge of the platform as if singed by a hot wind.

  Matthias reached for his suitcases.

  “Promise to visit us.”

  “I will. And I’ll write.”

  “You have your ticket?”

  “In my pocket.”

  To keep herself from crying, she tried to make him laugh. “Did you know that I wanted to be a priest when I was a little girl?” She told him about the candles and the Latin chants, the apple crate which had become her altar, and the sacrament—circles of rye.

  “I’m not surprised,” he said. “I’ve always thought you’re one of the most courageous people I know. You do exactly what you want.”
/>   “But that’s just stubbornness.”

  “To me it’s courage.”

  Although the green Hitler statue had long since been removed by the Americans, people would stare at the spot where it had stood whenever they’d pass the Rathaus, remembering the unknown benefactor who had lost his life there.

  Inside the gates of the cemetery, the town erected a marble monument with three tall columns that listed the names of the soldiers who had died for the Vaterland. Still, on days when the light fell just so and memory offered a brief lull, you could almost convince yourself that the war had never happened. You’d grasp at the good moments and tell yourself all was well, and if you didn’t look too closely for too long, you could deceive yourself, along with all the others who had been broken in some way, altered. And then just when it felt that your life was back to the way it had been, something would happen to remind you of your brokenness: a father might fracture his child’s arm while punishing her; a dog might get run over by a tractor; a young man might choke on a fish bone; an American officer might come to your door.

  As the Americans carried on their investigations, teachers who’d been members of the Partei lost their jobs. There were trials, convictions. Some were prosecuted unjustly, others went free even though they were guilty. Several teachers who feared upcoming interrogations fled overnight with their families, abandoning their homes. One threw himself in front of a train. Others swore they’d only joined the Partei out of fear for their lives or because they’d been forced to in order to enter their profession or be promoted. Their behavior during the war years had been exemplary, they insisted. Once they’d been in the Partei, of course, they’d been afraid not to comply because they would have been sent to a KZ.

  “Undercover freedom fighters,” Klara Brocker’s American would say to her after another day of questioning. And he’d take her down to the cellar where he’d thrust into her on the blankets he’d spread across the cement floor by the potato bin. “Did you know—my German Fräulein—” His narrow face would move above hers, his hair much lighter than his eyebrows. “—that your entire country—was filled—with undercover—freedom fighters?”

  Not only the teachers were investigated. People all over town were afraid of being turned in to the Americans by their neighbors or children, of hearing knocks at their doors and being picked up, of not finding work or losing the jobs they had. It struck Trudi as an ironic and just parallel to what the Jews had suffered for so many years, and she didn’t feel any sympathy when people like Frau Heidenreich and her friends elaborated on their own suffering. Hadn’t they become the real victims? Hadn’t they endured separation within their families? Panic when the bombs had fallen? Many of them lamented the years without their children. While the Jews were treated like royalty, ordinary people like them were still persecuted, questioned about their political beliefs, although they’d had no idea what had really been going on in the KZs till after the war, and then they’d been shocked, no—horrified.

  It became a scramble to get letters of recommendation from those who had not joined the Partei, people who had resisted the Nazis, though at the time it had seemed to everyone else like foolishness. But now it was good to know people like that, better yet if they owed you a favor.

  The pay-library had never been so busy. People tugged at Trudi and her father, begging them to write letters that would testify to their impeccable character and prove they’d always opposed the Partei. And as they brought tales that proclaimed their innocence, tales they hoped Trudi would distribute, she felt used: as a storyteller, she knew the border between truth and lies, and she would circulate their tales with introductions like “This is what he would like people to believe.…” And then she’d speculate about what had really happened. If it was within her conscience, she wrote the letters, but she refused to back up versions of a fabricated truth, especially if they were connected to gifts. In those months after the war, she had more enemies and friends than ever before.

  Frau Blau was less selective than Trudi about the letters she wrote. “If we can help each other,” she’d say, “we may as well. Times are difficult enough.”

  Two Protestant families in Burgdorf, who, it turned out, had also hidden Jews, felt more like Trudi and refused to whitewash anyone who had sympathized with the Nazis. One family lived next to the taxidermist. When he asked these neighbors to vouch for him in a letter, they turned him away.

  “I can’t,” Trudi told him when he came to her.

  “You hid Jews. I never turned you in.”

  “You didn’t even know I had people here.”

  “I knew. I saw them … coming late at night. Leaving with Herr Hesping. But—I didn’t want trouble for you and your father.”

  She stared at him, realizing he was speaking the truth. “That’s not enough.”

  “I lost my daughter too, Fräulein Montag.”

  “About that I’m sorry.… But I can’t help you.”

  He leaned across the counter, pushing two piles of books aside. His eyes were tortured. “Herr Hitler only wanted the best for us.”

  “And look what we got. Just look what we got, Herr Heidenreich.”

  “But he wanted the best. He did. If I can’t believe that—” He stopped abruptly. Shivered. “You have to admit, in the beginning he wanted the best.”

  Though Herr Stosick, whose hair had never grown back after his son’s death, did not ask for her support, Trudi went to his house one evening and volunteered to write a letter for him.

  “That’s kind of you, but I don’t think I need to impose on you.” He led her into the kitchen, where his wife was unraveling a moth-eaten cardigan, saving the intact yarn for socks she would knit.

  Herr Stosick pulled out a chair for Trudi and urged her to sit down. “I have reason to be grateful to Herr Neumaier for keeping the membership money he took from my wife. Thanks to him, I can prove that I didn’t join the Partei So few teachers have been allowed back into the schools again … none of the ones who were in the Partei. Such a dilemma. I probably would have ended up having to join, but I kept saying that I’d already paid my membership fee.”

  It sounded as if he’d regained some of his self-respect. “It’s my life, the teaching,” he said. “But I worry about the children. They don’t have the same kind of respect for their teachers as before the war. And we have no schoolbooks, no teaching materials. Most of us teach from memory.”

  One morning in October, when Trudi opened the library, Paul Weinhart’s elderly mother stood waiting outside, eyes swollen, fingers plucking the front of her tweed coat. “Paul—he has been arrested. The Amis took him in while he was delivering potatoes. You’ve known him since you were children, Trudi. Please—just write that he’s not the kind of person who’d harm anyone.…” She opened her handbag and thrust a pad of ivory stationery at Trudi. “Please?”

  Trudi could see Paul’s face as though he were standing in front of her. At thirty, he looked the way he had as a boy—only taller, broader—and his toes still pointed outward when he walked. “Did your son send you?”

  The old woman shook her head. “I haven’t seen him since they took him away … yesterday.”

  I don’t want your son to know any happiness. No happiness at all. But what Trudi said was: “I’m not the right person to ask.”

  “You are in a position to help him. The Amis will listen to you.”

  “I’m not the right person to ask, Frau Weinhart.”

  “You were in school together.”

  Trudi was silent.

  “Why can’t you then?”

  Trudi shook her head.

  “What is it?”

  “You are a good woman, Frau Weinhart.… I don’t want to hurt you. But I can’t write that letter,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “because I know that your son is the kind of person who would harm someone.”

  The Buttgereits who, along with many others, had been gehorsame Bürger—obedient citizens—now claimed they had opp
osed the Nazis. As proof they offered the fate of their third-youngest daughter, Bettina. “A war heroine,” they called her, and retold the story of how she’d run up to the saddest of all trains with the bread to help the starving and how she’d been captured, wrestled to the ground, taken away forever with the prisoners.

  “My daughter stood for what our family believed in,” her father would declare in Potter’s tavern, pounding his hand on the table, the same hand he used to raise in the Heil Hitler. “Any member of my family would have done what Bettina did. And don’t forget—” Here his eyes would grow moist. “—don’t forget that my only son died, a victim of the Nazis because he was a cripple.”

  His wife would tell you she had tried to be good to Jews whenever she could. “I spoke out for the Jews,” she’d inform you, “I did, as long as it didn’t put me in danger.” Yet, she still wore her golden Ehrenkreuz der deutschen Mutter—the cross of honor for the German mother—and didn’t seem to understand that wearing it implied support of Hitler. “It’s too valuable to throw out,” she’d protest. “Besides, I earned it.”

  Trudi found it harder to tolerate cowards like Herr and Frau Buttgereit than fanatics like the butcher, who took pride in having supported the Führer. At least old Anton Immers was honest. Wrong, but honest. But she was getting fed up with all those who vowed that—although they’d been in the Partei—they had resisted in their hearts.

  Hearts. “They either don’t have hearts,” she told Ingrid one Sunday when they took Rita to the playground, “or if they do, those hearts are hollow.”

  “My father’s heart is black.” Ingrid sat down on the bench, hands folded on her knees. “My father cuts up pictures. He keeps the faces, the bodies.”