by Ursula Hegi
One of his neighbors recalled that Hans-Jürgen’s mother had told her his birth had been a difficult one, and that he’d rejected her breast for the first two days of his life.
His first-grade teacher, Sister Mathilde, was quoted as saying, “The murderer spent most of his school years in the corner, his back to the rest of the class.”
“Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier was incorrigible from the day he came to us,” his seventh-grade teacher confirmed.
For nine days the people of Burgdorf unburdened themselves of a litany of Hans-Jürgen’s wrongdoings, while his mother hid in her bedroom with the curtains drawn, and his father sat in the front row of the courtroom, bony shoulderblades rising against the back of his shabby Sunday suit, face grim and satisfied as if he’d always known his son would come to this.
Hans-Jürgen was tried not only for the murder but for every offense he’d ever committed, going back to the day of his birth. It was a cold, damp winter, and people were afraid—less of him than of what they’d buried deep within themselves—but now they could let their fears rise and blame them on him; they could gasp at the crimes of the five- or seven-year-old Hans-Jürgen and disregard the slaughter of war. Though he was locked up in jail each night, children were kept indoors; young women were warned that even a stroll to the fairgrounds could lead to death; and young men took to carrying knives or guns when they courted.
When one of his classmates came forward to reveal how Hans-Jürgen had burned a cat’s paws in second grade, Trudi considered testifying that Hans-Jürgen had killed a kitten one day when she’d been inside the barn with him and Eva. But she didn’t dare speak out because she knew that—once she stood on the witness stand—she wouldn’t be able to keep herself from telling the town about that other time in the Braunmeiers’ barn because, ever since Hans-Jürgen’s arrest, that secret had been swelling within her as if seeking a way into the open.
She told herself that the town didn’t need her to convict Hans-Jürgen: there were enough others, eager to list their grievances against the man with the luxuriant beard and wrathful eyes, who refused to speak a single word in his defense but watched his accusers as if to memorize each face into eternity.
Though newspapers all over the country wrote about the murder, they soon dropped coverage, but the local paper fanned panic by running interviews with nearly everyone who’d testified against Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier. They printed childhood photos of his fiancée and of her grave. She’d been buried in Neuss, where her family lived, but Kalle Husen, who’d been shot with her—a married man, imagine—had grown up in Burgdorf on the same block with the Bilders and the Weskopps. Despite the disgrace he’d brought upon his family, his wife, children, parents, and siblings had mumbled words of prayer around his open grave, the edges of their bodies blurred as if they’d fused into one massive shape. In a wider circle that encompassed the family and the grave, the people of Burgdorf had stood in their funeral clothes and whispered how terrible it had to be for the parents, this loss. How much could one family bear? Wasn’t it enough that two of the Husens’ older sons had been killed in the war? But at least they’d died heroes, while Kalle, whose death had exposed his adultery, had brought shame and grief to the family.
Beyond the fringe of that larger circle, a lanky man had stood by himself, hands folded in front of his expensive coat. To those who noticed him he seemed oddly familiar, though they couldn’t recall having met him before. Perhaps a distant relative who’d come for Kalle’s funeral, they figured, and forgot about him till they saw him once more, approaching the front door of the Husens’ house an hour after everyone else had arrived for the funeral feast.
It was Frau Bilder who called out his name, steadying herself with one hand on the door frame, and once she did, everyone, of course, knew who the man was.
“He’s changed so much,” people whispered.
“He’s gotten so thin.”
“It’s a miracle.”
“Why didn’t he let his family know where he was all those years?”
The people crowded around Rainer Bilder and his parents, told him they’d missed him, and took the news of his arrival into their neighborhoods. In the days to come, quite a few would claim to have known all along that the man by the gravesite had been the fat boy who’d vanished fifteen years earlier.
“I had a feeling it was Rainer.”
“It didn’t surprise me at all.”
“You see—people come back after all.”
“A miracle. It’s a miracle.”
“I used to worry that someone had kidnapped him.”
“Him? Who would want a boy that fat?”
“Now he’s quite famous, I hear.”
“And rich.”
“Rich, yes.”
“A journalist.”
“All kinds of awards.”
“He read about the murders in a newspaper.”
“He works for a newspaper.”
“No, no, a magazine.”
“In Hamburg.”
“Heidelberg.”
“I hear he’s married.”
“To a rich woman.”
“Children, too.”
“Who would have thought…”
“You think he’ll stay?”
But Rainer Bilder seemed far more interested in the murderer than in his own family. At least he spent more time with Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier than in the brick house where he’d grown up. He was the only journalist Hans-Jürgen allowed to interview him. In the visiting room of the jail, the two would sit across from each other at the gray table, hunched forward, talking rapidly and so low that Andreas Beil, the policeman who stood watch, could make out the pattern of their voices but not the words.
People who encountered Rainer Bilder on the street tried to help him with information he didn’t need. One night, when his brother Werner pushed at him with questions about the murderer, Rainer felt a sudden, inexplicable dread as he explained how he couldn’t reveal what he and Hans-Jürgen talked about; but he pacified his brother by promising to send him a copy of his article. That dread was still with Rainer when he fell asleep, but in the morning he had forgotten it, and he wouldn’t recall it until ten years later, when his brother would become Hans-Jürgen’s next victim.
Rainer would leave Burgdorf long before his interview was published, but he would keep his promise and mail a copy of the magazine to his brother, who would pass it along to the rest of his family and all through Burgdorf. “When Love Becomes Lethal” would be the title, and Hans-Jürgen would be portrayed as a lonely and troubled boy—barely tolerated by his town—who had grown into an even lonelier man. Nearly everyone would be incensed by Rainer’s shameless sympathy for the murderer.
“He is blaming the town, not Hans-Jürgen.”
“I wish he’d stayed away.”
“The suffering he’s causing his parents … all over again.”
“As if the first time hadn’t been enough.”
“There are many ways of losing a son.”
“And to think that we welcomed him back.”
By then, the judge had committed Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier to the asylum in Grafenberg, which was already overcrowded, mostly with soldiers who’d come back from the war deranged, but also with some Jews who’d been left mute or incoherent after surviving the KZs. Though the people of Burgdorf complained that Hans-Jürgen’s sentence was too lenient, most were relieved to have him locked up.
Months after the trial, Trudi woke up one night, unable to breathe, as if that old snot were clogging her nose and mouth, drying on her skin. How many more times do I have to go back there? Afraid to get sucked into the dream again, she threw off her covers and crouched on the edge of her bed.
“You are crazy. Like your mother.…” Hans-Jürgen’s face swam above her, young as he’d looked that hot summer day when she’d told him no woman would ever love him and that his love would make a woman turn to another man. “Crazy Zwerg” he’d called her, and now he was in the asylu
m with her mother, behind walls crowned with shards, inside green rooms that smelled of candles and cinnamon. Her mother was in danger with him there. Trudi strained for breath, and as she sucked it in long gulps, she knew Hans-Jürgen would escape from the asylum and kill others—always lovers, always in their cars. She saw grainy newspaper photos of blood-splattered cars; photos of victims shot in their chests and bellies and necks while embracing; photos of Hans-Jürgen, older, still wearing a beard; and photos of a balding man, identified as his psychiatrist, who said in an interview it was likely Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier was reenacting the murder of his fiancée.
“It was not a curse,” Trudi whispered in the dark of her room. But the face laughed—“A stupid curse. Your stupid curse”—as if she’d planted the jealousy in him, destroying not only him but also those he had killed.
“No. You were like that long before I ever said anything to you. Look what you did to me … to the cat. I was only getting back at you—” She turned on the light and the face dissolved, but what she couldn’t dissolve was her remorse at having hurt Hans-Jürgen with such purpose. It terrified her to consider how something she’d said so many years ago might have swayed what he’d done to his fiancée. “No—” she cried, “you would have killed her anyhow. It has nothing to do with what I said.” But if you thought about it, really thought about it, it might keep you from saying anything at all, except the kindest of words.
That winter, she noticed the bare trees against the landscape more than ever before. It seemed that, all at once, they’d taken on a beauty of their own, exposing their many intricate lines. Fine details in the color and formation of branches—once hidden beneath lush plumes of leaves—now stood out against the sky, clear and achingly beautiful. Sometimes, late afternoons, she’d situate herself so that she could watch the sunset through the stark branches.
While most people saw the winter trees as barren and were impatient for the first leaves, Trudi began to value trees most when they totally revealed themselves to her, when she could know every spine, every branch. People often revealed themselves like that to her—without realizing they were doing it. And she took what they gave her, held it close the way you would hold a lover. The rest—those leaves and blossoms—were gaudy and temporary. At times she wished she could shed herself down to her spine, to her bones, expose the essence of herself the way she could know the essence of those trees, know them and see them and be known. She’d come close to that with Max. And she could imagine revealing even more about herself with the child Hanna.
The longer she knew Hanna, the more she fantasized about bringing her up. She was sure that, if Hanna could express her choice, she’d want to live with her. And so she whispered to her the words that she’d only let herself think with other children.
“I know you.…”
“You will always remember me.…”
And the words that she’d never taken to another child: “I should have been your mother.”
Hanna would nod as though she agreed, and sometimes she’d raise one dimpled hand toward Trudi’s face and grasp whatever fistful of flesh and skin she could reach, as if to claim Trudi for herself.
Once, when a new customer asked if Hanna was her child—“She has your coloring”—Trudi was stunned, but then she kissed Hanna’s forehead and said, “Yes. Thank you, yes, she’s mine. Thank you.”
It bothered Trudi that her father was so guarded with the child. His eyes troubled, he’d watch her when she’d bring Hanna into the kitchen or living room where he’d be reading, and once when she asked him why he minded having the child around, he said, “She is not yours, Trudi.”
She stared at him. “Don’t you think I know that?” But what she thought was: She should have been.
Still, from then on, she was careful not to kiss or hug Hanna in her father’s presence and to make sure he couldn’t hear any of the words that linked her to the girl. What she had with Hanna was deeper than anything she’d felt with other children, even Konrad, and she was certain it would always be there.
Her father’s comment also made her more selective in her letters to Matthias. The correspondence meant a lot to her, but lately he’d teased her about not writing enough about herself. “I’m always glad to hear about Hanna,” he wrote, “but what about you? What is happening in your life?”
Hanna is happening in my life. But of course she couldn’t write that to him, and so her letters became shorter, summaries of what her father was doing. His doctor had told her grape sugar would be good for building his strength, but it was difficult to get since the pharmacy sold out whenever a delivery arrived. From the taxidermist she’d heard that leek-and-oxtail soup was the best remedy for weakness, but when he’d sent his wife to the library with a pot of soup, Leo had only eaten a few spoonfuls. Whenever Trudi tried to help her father, he seemed embarrassed, and she’d learned that he was most at peace when he was left to himself.
Looking at his lined face made her think how her mother had stayed young for her. While her father was aging, her mother would always be thirty-five. Once, in the bathroom of a restaurant, Trudi had seen an elderly woman studying her reflection—the carefully coiffured hair, her mask of makeup—with such panic and concentration as though it took enormous effort to keep her face together, to not let it slip. That tightness. Once she must have been beautiful. It had to be harder for a beautiful woman to age than for someone like herself, who’d never been beautiful. Everyone had something to battle—something that could either destroy you or strengthen you—and what she had battled was maybe not all that bad. At least by now she was used to her body, even if she might never get used to the word Zwerg. It would be easier for her to age than for this woman. Amazing—how something could actually be easier for her than for others.
It came to her that, though she still had quite a few years to go, she was on her way to becoming part of a community, that of the old women who held the real power. How comforting that she would not have to go it alone, that finally there would be a circle to enfold her readily because, as old women, they too would have come to terms with their own changes and be less unforgiving of otherness because it would have claimed them too.
All that December Trudi spent more time with Hanna because Jutta was recovering from the birth and death of her son. Joachim had died during his second week of life, and from what Trudi had heard, Jutta had rocked the dead infant in her arms, refusing to yield him to Klaus or to the doctor for hours.
When, at the funeral, Frau Weskopp, who’d worn widow’s black for over six years, had tried to comfort Jutta—“Little Joachim is lucky he was christened so that he won’t be in purgatory”—Jutta had turned her rage on the old woman, shouting at her to worry about her Nazi sons, who were frying in hell.
Outbursts like that against one of their own didn’t make the townspeople any fonder of the dentist’s young wife, who spurned their traditions and now—when the death of a son could have earned her their compassion—became only more reclusive and stopped attending church.
Though Klaus Malter continued to take Hanna to mass, this wasn’t enough for Herr Pastor Beier, who felt cheated by Jutta because he’d buried her uncle, the suicide, in order to keep her in church. He felt the dentist’s wife had cheated him out of her promise, and when he followed his impulse—to ride his motor scooter to her house and arrive unannounced the way she had forced her way into his study—she opened the door, wearing a black dress and over it a man’s shirt with red and green paint smears along the front and sleeves as if to deny that she was a woman in mourning. She was smoking, fast, and her daughter was clinging to her leg, peering at the priest with curious eyes.
“Yes?” Jutta said. “Yes?” as if the priest’s reason for being here could be stated with one word, too.
“We have missed you in church.”
She stood in his way without asking him inside, her lips as pale as her face, blond hair limp on her shoulders.
“I’d be glad to hear your confession,
” the priest said, and she laughed, once, as if amused by the thought of confession. “I know it’s terrible for both parents when a child dies,” he continued, “but worse for the mother … like having part of her die.”
“What do you know?” she accused him. “What can you possibly know?”
“Is your wife getting proper care?” the priest asked the dentist when he stopped by his office on the way back to the rectory. “She does not look well.”
Klaus Matter, who had made a sizable contribution toward the replacement of the stained-glass windows above the altar, which had been shattered during the war, assured the priest that Jutta was doing as well as any woman after losing a child.
“I will pray for your wife,” the priest offered.
And he did. As soon as he’d parked his scooter behind the rectory, he entered the church, where, as usual, several old women knelt in the light that fell through the modern windows in the colors he had chosen—red, white, and black. Soon, he’d have enough funds to commission wood carvings of the fourteen stations of the cross and mount them along the side walls, beneath the old windows, which some day he hoped to replace too.
Making the sign of the cross, the fat priest lowered himself to his knees in front of the altar and fastened his eyes on the Last Supper mural. The bread in Christus’ hands was golden brown, as though it had just been baked. Stomach rumbling, the priest asked Christus to guide Jutta Malter back to church, to show her his mercy by forgiving her arrogance. Above him, the painted saints were feasting, and behind him, he could feel the comforting presence of the plaster saints—St. Stefan and St. Agnes and St. Petrus—and of the confessional where people left their sins for him to swallow. And he could smell fresh bread—no, flowers—though it was winter and the altar vases were empty; but centuries of church flowers had left their scents in the stone walls.