by Ursula Hegi
“Tell me.” He caught her hand in his and pulled her up so that she stood taller than he.
“Tell you what?”
“What will happen to me.”
As the sand-colored eyes probed hers, she felt herself reeling into her childhood, when she had believed everyone knew what was inside the hearts of others: she saw herself with Georg in the church tower, felt the snapping of the scissors as she cut through his curls, smelled the flowers in Frau Eberhardt’s garden, heard the music drifting from Fräulein Birnsteig’s mansion and the wailing of babies and boot falls; but then the music changed, and it was Matthias, playing the piano at his recital, and the boots were there, along with the dread she’d felt at the first concert.
“Tell me.”
“You were my first friend—” Her voice clogged as her old love for Georg swelled within her. She took that love as solidly as if she’d touched it with both hands, extended it toward the boy. If only she could pass on to him her own tempered suffering. If only she could offer up her old wish for revenge in return for his release. What she longed for was to span those years between the boy and the man he had become, span them with the story of a friendship that had endured after she and Georg had started school, a wise and somber story with the truth to heal the wounds it uncovered. She heard the voice of her town—“It’s not good to dwell on the things that were terrible….” “Nobody wants to relive those years.…” “We have to go forward.…” More than ever, she understood the people’s need to protect one another with silence. How tempting it would be to give Georg eine heile Welt—an intact world—and leave out anything that might hurt him. But if she did, she would perpetuate the silence that she’d fought all along.
Still—she could begin with their friendship. And what was true was that she used to have a friend named Georg, that they’d played in her mother’s earth nest and walked in the All Saints’ Day procession, smoked stolen chocolate cigarettes and floated boats made from leaves and birch bark, built a snowman with a carrot nose and chased sparrows and pigeons across the fields, knelt in church together and—
It was too much for her to bear, the knowledge of his death.
“Tell me.”
For an instant—as sudden as it vanished—the man’s bloated drinking face flickered across the boy’s fine features. No. This was Georg, her generous friend Georg, who knew how to lure the sun from the sky and snare it inside his red-and-yellow glass marble; Georg who always invented new bets with her—how many widows or pigeons they’d count on their walk, how many baby carriages would pass by the grocery store in one hour.… Luck. For Georg, luck and miracles had been the same. He’d believed he could create his own miracle—shape a bird from earth and water, yield it to the sky.
“You were my first friend.…” She felt stunned by the fear of losing him, the grief of losing him. And yet, there was something exquisite in forgoing her revenge. It was not the first time that she’d turned to her storytelling to banish fear, and as Georg drew the words from her, moments of their lives came together in one swirl of a never-ending story that moved back and forth through layers of time—a story filled with magic and truth, corruption and redemption, sadness and joy, love and betrayal—connecting her to Georg as she braided in her own loves and losses, and told him about Konrad and his mother hiding in the tunnel, the unknown benefactor leaving Lederhosen for Georg, Klaus Malter drilling on her tooth, Ingrid taking her daughters to the bridge, Frau Doktor Rosen reading books about Zwerge, Max Rudnick sketching his Russian grandmother, Frau Abramowitz tearing the Hitler-Jugend office apart.…
It was a story that would continue beyond herself, beyond Georg. In sorting it out, she felt deep compassion for him and everyone who inhabited her story. And as what had happened began to merge with what could have happened, the texture of her story became richer, more colorful. She had Max return to Burgdorf on a barge that belonged to Georg’s father, who, all along, had been traveling the river that had taken him away. She let Georg measure Seehund’s head and run with him to the Rathaus, where a group of townspeople raised axes to the Hitler statue and chopped it into fragments. In the Braunmeiers’ barn, Eva showed Georg how to hide without sneezing, while the butcher and pharmacist searched for them in vain. Opening his window wide, Eva’s father wrapped himself into the coat of the Russian soldier and lay down on his bed, welcoming rain and cold and cats and other dangers. Trudi’s mother stepped from the gates of the Grafenberg asylum with Sister Adelheid, their eyes clear and calm, carrying their own altar between them. To welcome their daughter, Ruth, back, Herr and Frau Abramowitz held a huge celebration at their house.… And throughout all, Trudi wove the assurance for Georg and herself that—once someone had been in your life—you could keep that person there despite the agony of loss, as long as you had faith that you could bring the sum of all your hours together in one shining moment.
Georg picked up a bird’s nest from the ground, turned it in his fingers. This was when she’d loved him most—with the long hair and girl-clothes—before he’d changed, before she’d helped him change by cutting his hair. And yet, how could she not do it for him again if he asked? She felt the old joy of being near him, and it seemed possible that his luck would save him from the death that was waiting for him. Yet, already she knew that wasn’t so. She heard their young voices in the church tower when Georg had told her he wanted to die the same age as Jesus.
“Thirty-three is very old”
“Maybe we can die together.”
Aloud, she said: “But we’re both already older than thirty-three.”
The boy nodded. Though he stood absolutely still as she spoke, wind shifted his curls, his smock. She knew that the words already belonged to him though they might still change, and that the story might lead both of them to the ending she feared. And yet, just because a story was a certain way didn’t mean it would always be like that: stories took their old shape with them and fused it with the new shape. She didn’t understand yet how all the tangles of their lives would sort themselves out in her story, but she supposed that it would be like raking: not every bit of earth would be untangled at once. Her father had raked the earth behind the pay-library every week, and what she’d learned from him was that raking had to do with patience. But the ground of the mill’s hollow rooms was rough, uneven with cracked bricks and last year’s stiff weeds, gnarled roots of fallen trees, and the silver skeletons of tiny birds.…
She saw herself lifting her father’s bamboo rake from the rack beneath the back of the pay-library, and as she pulled the bamboo teeth through the earth, she kept stepping back, drawing the rake toward herself, knowing that, gradually, all of the soil would show the smooth ribbed pattern. But until then—as in her story for Georg—there were clumps left over, and she had to pull the rake though them again and again, distributing the earth while discarding debris. It was as though every story she had ever told had brought her to this moment, to this story that would tell itself through her: it would be the best story she’d ever told, better even than the story she and Pia had woven between them that day at the circus. And as she thought of all the people who had loved her stories—her father, Hanna, Max, Eva, Konrad, Robert, and earliest of all her mother—she felt the strength of their arms as surely as if they were pulling the rake with her through the earth. The final design wouldn’t happen all at once: there would be the rearrangement of it all, a fine combing through; there would be perseverance and a reverence for the task; there would be assurance that, indeed, a design would emerge.
Georg’s eyes were grave as he waited for her to continue her story. It was the brief span of evening when all things are etched lucidly into the sky, just before they yield their separateness and blur into the night. Trudi stretched herself. What she could offer Georg was far more than what had happened—a certain sequence that would lead him to the core of the story, a story that would hold an entire world. It had to do with what to tell first—though it hadn’t happened first—and what to end t
he story with. It had to do with what to enhance and what to relinquish. And what to embrace.
About the Author
Ursula Hegi lived the first eighteen years of her life in Germany. She is the author of Intrusions, Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories, Floating in My Mother’s Palm, and Salt Dancers. Her first book of nonfiction, Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America, will be published in July 1997.
Ursula Hegi is the recipient of about thirty grants and awards, including an NEA Fellowship and five awards from the PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards. She was nominated for a PEN Faulkner award for Stones from the River and received the Governor’s Writer’s Award for Stones from the River and Floating in My Mother’s Palm. She has served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and she has written over a hundred reviews for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.
Ursula Hegi lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest.