by Ursula Hegi
Trudi could understand why Jutta no longer went to church. At times she, too, had considered staying away, but she still liked the music, the rituals, and even the church smell that occasionally clung to people’s clothes when they came into the pay-library. Besides, Hanna was at mass every Sunday morning, and though her father would hold her hand as they’d walk down the church steps, the girl would squirm away from him and run toward Trudi while he’d follow her with one of his formal greetings. Already his red beard was muted by threads of gray. “It’s time to go home, Hanna,” he’d remind her, or: “Say good-bye now to Fräulein Montag.”
Once, when Hanna didn’t look in Trudi’s direction after mass, Trudi felt betrayed, though she told herself the child had simply forgotten. But it took several of Hanna’s visits before she got past that hurt. She hated being so defenseless, hated how she missed the girl on days she didn’t see her.
One rainy afternoon in July, while Jutta was painting, Trudi took Hanna into her mother’s earth nest. “I used to play here with my mother when I was a little girl like you.” She spread a towel for them to sit on.
Hanna pointed to the tiny tracks in the dust. “Tchoo-tchoo,” she said. “Tchoo-tchoo train.”
“Strawberry bugs,” Trudi looked around. “I don’t see any today. Strawberry bugs have little feet that make those tracks. And they smell like strawberries.”
Hanna picked up a dry twig and scratched her own tracks into the ground. Beads of moisture glistened on the delicate strands of a huge spider web, and the musty scent of earth was comforting. If only she could stay here with Hanna. Forever. Or go far away with her, live with her in a town where no one knew them and where she could raise her as her own. Because the way she felt about her had to be how a mother felt about her child. All at once she felt angry that Max had never come back to have children with her. And yet if he had returned and married her, what would have happened to their love then? Would it have worn thin, used up and bitter, like the love in so many marriages she saw?
“Berry berry bug …” Hanna was singing, poking at the earth.
Trudi stroked her silky hair. Two weeks from now, Hanna’s parents would take her away on a trip to Wangerooge, an island in the North Sea where they vacationed every summer. Trudi wished they’d leave Hanna with her. If Hanna were told that Trudi was her real mother, she would begin to love her like a daughter. She was only three, still young enough to forget her parents. Like, say, if they died. Both of them. If something happened to Klaus and Jutta—a train crash or some quick and fatal illness—she would bring Hanna up. She’d fix up a room for her with white lace curtains and pink—no, sun-yellow wallpaper. She’d sew dresses with ruffles for her, buy her that plush giraffe she’d seen in Mahler’s department store, take her to the playground, to Alfred Meier’s for pommes frites, read her stories at night and—
But what if Klaus Malter’s relatives stepped in? Came at her with their money and power and lawyers and demanded she hand Hanna over to them? How could she make them understand that Hanna had to live with her? That none of them could possibly love her this much?
For a love like that, you deserved something in return.
She saw herself running for a train, the child in her arms though she was quite heavy, fleeing from Klaus Malter’s relatives.… Thoughts and pictures spun through her, making her dizzy. Queasy. She scrambled up, anxious to bring Hanna back out into the light. It was raining harder than before. Inside the house she scrubbed their hands, their faces, talking fast: “Your mother will pick you up soon. Do you know what a fine artist your mother is? So beautiful… And your father, he’s a good dentist. You’re lucky, so lucky to have two parents.…” Afterwards she wouldn’t remember most of what she’d told Hanna, only that it was a list of her parents’ virtues.
Wind and rain scraped the branches of the chestnut tree against the windows of the pay-library while she waited for Jutta to appear, and when she finally arrived and the child turned her face toward Trudi for her customary good-bye kiss, she couldn’t bring herself to touch her and pretended not to see.
“I’m not feeling well,” she told Jutta. “Better not bring her over for a while.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?” The tall woman bent and laid her cool palm across Trudi’s forehead.
“It’s nothing.” Trudi backed away. “Nothing.”
“Hanna has done something to upset you.”
“Of course not.”
“I’m not feeling well,” she told her father when Jutta had left. “I’ve closed the library.”
“Where are you going?” he called after her as she started for the door.
“I need some air.”
“The storm is getting worse. Take a coat, at least.”
But she was already out in the rain. Instantly, her hair and clothes were wet. She had no idea where she wanted to go, only that she had to get away from the place where she’d come up against her own brokenness. She should have seen that brokenness when she’d cloaked her love for Hanna with silence. There was an edge of craziness to her love—that same edge of craziness she’d seen in Ingrid when she’d spoken about God; in her own mother when it came to her escapes; in the face of Herr Heidenreich when he used to praise his Führer. And, as with all of them, that edge of craziness also presented a haven where they belonged or felt peace. As she did with this love for Hanna.
With Hanna, she was at her best.
At her worst.
And she had to stop.
Ahead of her the earth rose, and she recognized the long, even curve of the dike. She nearly slipped as she climbed up, and when she stood on top, she couldn’t see the river, only the rain that slanted in a gray sheet. But she thought she could smell the river—the way she’d smelled it in her mother’s hair after she’d come home from one of her flights. As she made her way down the other side of the dike, she could already feel the loss of Hanna, then the loss of Max and her mother and Ingrid and Frau Simon. For an instant there in the meadow, she thought she could see the man-who-touches-his-heart, but it was only a stunted tree. It struck her that her life was filled with ghosts: some days she thought more often of the dead than the living. She saw Frau Abramowitz standing by her window in the dark, saw the outline of her body as the sky grew lighter around her, forcing itself into a halo that enveloped her. She saw Fienchen Blomberg inside the grocery store, Eva on her wedding day, both surrounded by rims of light, and she felt terrified of all the losses that lay ahead of her, especially the loss of her father.
Blades of wet grass, icy and sharp, stung her nose and cheeks as she fell. Curling her fingers, she tried to sink them into the ground, hold on to something solid that could ward off this soul-chilling loneliness, but all she gripped were weeds and grass. The earth beneath her was unyielding, indifferent. If her body hadn’t been in the way, the rain would have fallen on the soil that she obstructed. Suddenly she remembered the first blouse she’d sewn after meeting Pia: she could feel its soft texture, the particular shade of blue, like Pia’s trailer, and was suffused with a powerful longing for that blouse; yet, at the same moment she knew that the blouse stood for a part of her life that was irrevocably over.
She could hear the steady fury of the Rhein above the roar of the storm. Slowly, she stood up. Her hips were aching, her legs numb. Still—she headed toward the river, her soggy hem swinging against her calves. The water was an even deeper gray than the rain, but once her eyes adapted to the various shades of gray, she could make out rocks and bushes and tress and barges and even a swallow, a single swallow, fluttering toward a willow tree and coming so close to the trunk that it looked about to collide just before it veered off with shrill cries. A matter of timing. It made her think of how Eva had joked about Catholics timing their final confession five minutes before their death.
As she lowered herself to a log, she could see how the pattern of the water changed as it made its way past a rock that jutted from the river. She knew the rock well: in the early fl
oods of spring it lay submerged, hidden from your eyes though the river knew where it was and washed across it, but by midsummer it always was exposed. Still, the river did not stop at its base, wailing, blocking all the water coming after it. No, it continued to flow, parted, foamed, but then became whole again after it had passed the rock, leaving its impact on the rock, just as the impact of every hour she had lived was still with her, shaping her like the people who had fed her dreams—the earliest of them her uncle Stefan Blau, who’d journeyed to a distant continent. All at once she felt as if she were the river, swirling in an ever-changing design around the rock, separating and coming together again without letting herself get snagged into scummy pools. Over the years, she had learned more from the river than from any one person, and what she’d been taught had always come with passion—intense pain or joy. It was the nature of the river to be both turbulent and gentle; to be abundant at times and lean at others; to be greedy and to yield pleasure. And it would always be the nature of the river to remember the dead who lay buried beneath its surface.
What the river was showing her now was that she could flow beyond the brokenness, redeem herself, and fuse once more. If that rock was her love for Hanna, she could let it stop her, block her—or she could acknowledge the rock and have respect for it, alter her course to move around it. She had to smile because, for a moment there, it looked as if the water were trying to crawl upstream, back across the surface of the rock in dozens of small hands, reaching against the stream, defying the current. And that was good. Over the years the rock would be transformed, just like the countless stones at the bottom of the riverbed, stones you couldn’t see; they affected the flow but didn’t impede its progress, its momentum, its destination. She could see how she had it in her to start out loving and become vindictive—as with Georg and Klaus and Eva, though with Eva she had ended up loving again—and how she needed to take a look at her love and make sure it was whole before she could offer it to anyone. Her love for her father was whole, but her love for Hanna was tainted. It had to heal before she could bring it to Hanna again.
If ever she could bring it to her again.
She shivered. There was something she needed to do, something she needed to give back that wasn’t hers. She saw Jutta standing in another rain high above the quarry hole, smelled the sulfur of lightning, saw the unearthed roots of the birch, and recalled her apprehension that Jutta would not be all that safe in Burgdorf. She moaned. But I never thought of myself as a threat to you.
It was after midnight when she reached home. Though her father had left on a light for her and had tacked a note to the banister, telling her the hot-water stove in the bathroom was stoked, she didn’t pause to dry or warm herself. In her drenched clothes she rushed up the stairs to her room and lifted Jutta’s painting of Hanna from the wall. She didn’t permit herself the comfort of gazing at it once more but carried it up the flight of steps to the sewing room, where she stored it behind the door. Tomorrow morning she would return it to Jutta and tell her it was something she should never have chosen. And if Jutta still wanted her to have one of her paintings, she would ask her to do the choosing of that gift for her.
twenty-one
1949-1952
TO STAY AWAY FROM HANNA—IT WAS EASIER THAN SHE’D IMAGINED BE-cause when she’d see the child, even from a distance, she’d feel such a danger to herself that she wouldn’t want to be near her. Of course she missed her. Taking care of her father could only fill so much time. Besides, he got uneasy if she fussed over him and only withdrew more into his books. It seemed he was always freezing, even on the warmest of days, and he’d wear one or two woolen vests on top of his shirt, as well as his gray cardigan. If Emil were still alive, he’d get her father to talk, engage him in their old spirited discussions.
Trudi busied herself more in the pay-library. Although the novels continued to bore her, she savored the steady flow of people who came to her without any effort of her own—quite unlike those years in school when she’d tried so hard to bring others to her. Now they couldn’t stay away from her: she had a way of hooking them with rumors, of looking right through them with those fierce blue eyes of hers, of seeing one thing and fathoming the rest. And always, always she had new stories for them, stories that provided drama, not the melodrama of those novels in which feelings were only on full tilt—hate, love, fear, bliss—but subtle shadings of experience that would reverberate in their hearts long after they would forget the endings of the trashy books that granted them an escape from their lives.
One of her new customers was a Jewish woman who checked out three mystery novels whenever she came to the library. Though a few Jews had returned to Burgdorf, Angelika Tegern was the only Jew to settle in town without having lived here before. A tall, lovely woman with a sad mouth, she was married to an architect. When the two bought land near the river and built a splendid stucco house with a solarium, the cost of it got Anton Immers going against the Jews once again: “It’s plain to see that their kind live in houses far more extravagant than honest people like us.…” When his daughter-in-law could no longer bear to listen to the old man and told him the Germans could never make good on what had happened to the Jews—“I’ll always feel guilty even though I didn’t participate”—the old butcher didn’t speak to her for weeks.
The first time Frau Tegern had come into the pay-library, Trudi had been intrigued because—aside from having the name Angelika—she looked the way Trudi had described herself in her reply to Max Rudnick’s ad. Though Frau Tegern kept to herself, Trudi gradually found out from her that her parents had died in KZs. When her father, a political prisoner, had been arrested in the late thirties, her mother had kept visiting him, even after the yellow star had to be worn. She’d refused to sew it on her coat, and she’d traveled freely, continuing her dangerous visits to her husband. But in 1945 she too had been deported and had died in Theresienstadt.
Once, when Angelika Tegern mentioned how the butcher made her uncomfortable, the way he watched her, Trudi assured her that Herr Immers looked at everyone with suspicion, even his old Nazi buddies.
“I’m going to tell you something about him,” she said and began the first of her lessons to Angelika, letting her know whom she could trust and whom to stay away from. “Not only is he a three-months baby, but he lies.”
“About what?”
“Well, essentially he’s truthful—the kind of pigheaded truth, you know?—but he lies about fighting in the First World War. He wasn’t fit to be a soldier, so he traded sausages for the taxidermist’s uniform and had himself photographed.… That briefcase he always carries with him—you’ve seen it, right?—is supposedly for gathering information about people, but his daughter-in-law swears all he has in there are newspaper clippings of the Führer.”
Trudi noticed that Frau Tegern liked to check out new books: they felt special when you cracked them open for the first time, and the pages resisted your touch—there were just the stories then, letters printed on clean paper, unencumbered by the fates of the people who would read them and whose touch would manifest itself by, say, a crease or a smudged page. Trudi began saving new deliveries for Angelika Tegern, holding them for her behind the counter before she would lend them to anyone else. She knew her customers’ tastes and would recommend books of passion or crime or adventure to them, even to those who pretended not to read them, like Klara Brocker, who wore lipstick just to go to the butcher shop in the morning and claimed to borrow romances for her invalid mother, who lived with her and her illegitimate son in their cramped apartment on Barbarossa Strasse. It was said that the old woman’s stroke was the result of her shock over Klara’s pregnancy. Never mind that the boy who’d resulted from that pregnancy was three years old and had been thoroughly enjoyed by his grandmother prior to her illness. But now her left side was paralyzed, including half of her face, and she had to be fed with a spoon. Her mask of perpetual disapproval only confirmed that she must have suffered terribly from her daughter�
��s indiscretion.
It struck Trudi as fitting that her customers had a choice between her stories and the published stories printed in books with gaudy paper jackets, books that were safe because they didn’t implicate anyone in town. From time to time she’d remind herself to save stories about herself for Hanna—stories which, once the girl was older, she would understand. When she thought of herself with Hanna, it became easier to separate those images from much earlier ones—of herself as a child with her mother in the earth nest—and she’d think of the first stories she had ever told, stories that had begun with a purpose: to lure her mother into the light.
Now the purpose of her stories had changed. She spun them to discover their meaning. In the telling, she found, you reached a point where you could not go back, where—as the story changed—it transformed you, too. What mattered was to let each story flow through you. It was becoming impossible to revert to her old reasons for telling stories—to get even, to prod, or to soothe. But most people didn’t know that. They were still afraid of her. They didn’t understand that now she told a story for the sake of the story, taking pleasure in how each formed within her. It still would begin by feeling drawn to secrets, but she could curb the urge to tell, let it settle into something that nurtured the fragments of life which fell into her way, until a story was ready to unveil itself.
At first Hanna didn’t know what it was she was missing, only that many mornings, upon waking, she’d be struck with a sudden sadness that made her want to crawl under her feather comforter and weep. Her mother would read to her, her father would let her play with his chess pieces, and she’d smile and hug them and wonder if this sadness perhaps meant what it was like to be a child. Not that it was with her all the time—no, she could go for days without it, but then it would find her again.