by Ursula Hegi
By the time I was twelve, Trudi Montag had inherited the pay-library. Though she was in her early forties, she was less than one meter twenty tall. Her shoulders were broad, her head too large. I have pictured her as a girl, growing until she was ten or eleven. Perhaps something at the top of her head had closed her off where her mother had dropped her, while inside her body the growing continued. Where could it go except spread outward? Into her face, her shoulders, her hips. Sideways. Into her legs, her fingers, stretching her skin until it was tight.
She knew everything. As soon as it happened. Before it happened. She had the dubious gift of guessing what went on behind closed doors. These insights she embroidered into stories which she circulated around town. Bearer of news—good and bad—she walked through the streets of Burgdorf on O-shaped legs, wearing cardigans that never quite closed over the wide bosom of her striped house-dresses, moving with the assurance one usually sees in women who are truly beautiful. To each encounter she brought her friendly curiosity; yet, when people saw her advancing toward them, they expected the worst; even good news barely made up for that first sense of dread they’d felt at the sight of her.
On the surface Burgdorf was a town of great virtues while underneath all kinds of transgressions were hushed up. It was a town of pretend where many adults, after tremendous failings, would fabricate proper lives, and the town would pretend along with them, protecting that shallow veneer of respectability. Herr Pastor Beier, who listened to the confessions of countless sins, could be counted on to whitewash them all through absolution, but Trudi Montag would not let the town forget any of its flaws.
Every day at noon, as soon as the bells from St. Martin’s rang, she closed her library for two hours, ate a slab of black bread with Dutch cheese and sliced tomatoes, and set out to carry the morning’s gossip through town. Taking up most of the sidewalk, she took strategic sweeps past those places that enriched and distributed her supply of information: Becker’s grocery store, the midwife’s house, Frau Talmeister’s window, Anton Immers’s butcher shop, the Hansen bakery truck.… Like an ancient trader, she bartered until she had extracted a piece of new gossip from her listeners.
Our housekeeper, Frau Brocker, was one of Trudi’s reluctant messengers; she liked to pretend she’d known about something all along. It irritated her to be fed a generous amount of local news; yet, she would have complained had Trudi Montag excluded her. My mother, who considered gossip cheap, said it was the one side of Frau Brocker she didn’t like.
In her pay-library Trudi Montag told me that my mother had stopped going to church after my brother, Joachim, had died, that our housekeeper’s son, Rolf, was illegitimate, and that my great-uncle Alexander had leapt from the attic window of the four-story house he had built, the house that my mother had inherited and where we still lived in a large apartment on the first floor. As a young man Alexander had lost his wife to tuberculosis, and he’d never remarried or had children. Though Trudi Montag hadn’t actually witnessed his fall, she’d seen the spot on the sidewalk where he’d landed, and she’d talked with Frau Talmeister who’d seen it happen from her window across the street.
“He wore his best suit,” Trudi Montag said, “and a white carnation in his lapel. He opened his arms as if to fly.” Her words painted him for me, the unsmiling man I’d seen only in faded sepia photos, his sandy hair cut close to his skull, standing rigidly in formal clothes as he stared into the camera. He climbs out of the attic window. Stands on the flat section of tiles four stories above the street. The air feels cool against his face, and he smoothes his Kaiser Wilhelm mustache. Spreading his arms in the prelude to an embrace, he leaps out of those posed photographs.
“We would have told you eventually,” my father said when I asked him about my great-uncle’s suicide. “Once you’re older. It happened long before you were born. Trudi Montag had no business telling you. I wish you’d stay away from her and those trashy books.”
In front of the pay-library stood an old chestnut tree that carried huge blossom candles in the spring. I’d flatten myself against its trunk, scanning the street to make sure my father wouldn’t see me before I entered. The kitchen behind the library led into a living room with a huge gold fish tank and a blue velvet sofa. If I sat next to Trudi Montag on the sofa, I’d find myself sliding toward her along the slope created by her weight. Instead of pictures, she had mirrors on her living room walls, small mirrors of all shapes in ornate frames.
When I was her only customer, she sometimes brewed rosehip tea, and we’d sip the hot, sweet liquid. I’d lean my head against the velvet and listen to her stories about her Aunt Helene who’d left town to move to America and marry a man whose first two wives had died in childbirth, about the Romans who’d marched through Burgdorf nearly 2000 years ago, about old Anton Immers who sacrificed his violet plants to ensure survival of the fittest, about the midwife who—twelve years ago—had suddenly appeared with an infant though no one had seen her pregnant, about Napoleon who had stayed in our town, about Frau Buttgereit’s kidney stones which were the size of robins’ eggs, about the knights who once lived in the Sternburg, a small castle with a baroque tower near the chapel.
My mother had painted the Sternburg many times. It used to be a fortress with a drawbridge, but hundreds of years ago it was turned into a farm with wheat fields and meadows where white cows grazed in the sun. The moat was still there, filled with scummy water. Bright green moss had eaten into the trunks of the poplars that bordered the dirt road around the moat. It was a good place to catch green and yellow caterpillars.
Sometimes Trudi Montag brought out her antique collection of cut-out dolls that were made of glossy cardboard, and we pinched costumes onto the paper dolls by bending tabs around their hips or shoulders. They had elaborate hats and ball gowns and old-fashioned bathing suits. Within seconds we could change a doll’s appearance as the paper body disappeared behind a layer of colorful clothes that looked out of style and romantic.
“I had my romantic episode,” Trudi told me one afternoon as she fastened a pink ball gown to the shoulders of a blond paper doll. “Fifteen years ago. He was a little older than I, with black hair and a mustache. I met him on the jetty near the Braunmeiers’ farm. It was a summer evening, still light.” She gazed past me, a soft expression on her round face as if she saw herself on the jetty, wearing the linen dress that made her look taller. “I could have married,” she said, and I didn’t dare ask her why she hadn’t, because I’d heard a different story from Frau Brocker. According to her, Trudi Montag could have gotten herself raped or killed. But not married.
She used to walk to the Rhein some evenings and sit by the water, watching the current go by, waiting for something she couldn’t define. She’d watch the swallows flit across the water like mosquitoes, almost touching the surface before rising again, and wish she were as lithe as they.
If she wasn’t home by nine, her father would drive out to the Braunmeier’s farm, climb the dike, and shout her name. But that evening her father was late. The opposite bank of the Rhein was already shrouded in dusk. Trees and shrubs were taking on shapes that looked denser than during the day; freighters moved slowly like spirits lulled by fog. Only a short while ago she’d been able to make out their names—Brabo 4, Antwerpen, Birseck, Antigone, Mann-heim, Valleria—but now the fading light only gave her their profiles, some of their hulls low in the water, others without cargo.
A three-quarter moon moved out from behind a cloud, and it looked as if the main part of the river flowed north while, near the embankment, it seemed to work its way south. Where the two currents merged, a silver line shimmered under the moon, shifted, and adjusted itself, over and over.
“What are you doing here?” A tall man dropped his bicycle against the rocks and walked out to her as if they’d agreed to meet there. His face was lean, his skin tanned. He wore his dark hair longer than the men in town. Without waiting for her answer, he asked, “Can you swim here?”
She nodded, s
taying seated and straightening her spine so she’d look taller. As he sat down on a rock across from her, she was certain he was the most appealing man she’d ever seen, and it suddenly came to her that it was he she’d been waiting for all those times she had come to the river alone, driven by a familiar longing that hadn’t made sense to her.
“Do you swim?” he asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Not if you stay close to shore.” She wanted to ask where he came from, where he would go after he left her.
“Will you swim with me?” His voice was soft.
“I don’t have a swimsuit.”
“Neither do I. Would anyone mind?”
“No one is here.”
He smiled at her. “You are.”
She glanced down at the skirt that hid her wide thighs and hips. A gentle breeze rose from the river and lifted her pale hair from her shoulders, cooling the back of her neck. Along the sides of the jetty the river touched the rocks in calm bands while, at the tip, the water was restless, as if it were boiling, moving in countless directions at once.
“I like your hair,” he said. “And your voice though you haven’t said much.”
“Not yet.”
He nodded as though he were promising her many long talks and looked into her eyes until, for the first time in her life, she felt beautiful. She saw herself dancing with him on the white excursion boat that floated on the Rhein every Friday and Saturday night during the summer, with lanterns strung along its sides, music tinting the banks along the way any color you wanted. She’d heard that music many times, and it had followed her into her dreams, the color of fuchsias.
“Will you swim with me?” he asked again.
She smiled, knowing he had meant to ask, Will you dance with me? “Soon,” she said. “Soon.”
The man raised one hand and, like a sleepwalker wiping aside the remnants of a dream, pulled the suspenders away from his shoulders. “Will you watch my clothes and bike for me?”
“Yes,” she said, feeling light and tall and limber.
His chest was tanned and smooth. She didn’t look away when he took off his belt but acted as if she’d seen naked men before, and kept looking at him until, from a distance, she heard her father calling her name.
“Don’t,” she whispered as the man flew into his clothes and leapt on his bike. “Don’t—”
“She was there, on the jetty, in plain view with a naked man,” our housekeeper told me. We sat at our kitchen table, eating thick slices of her warm peach pie with whipped cream.
“She was only watching his clothes for him.”
“You really believe that, Hanna?”
I nodded.
“If her father hadn’t come in time to chase him off—”
“He wasn’t like that, the man,” I said quickly. “He—”
She laughed. Squinted at me. “And what kind of man would you say he was?”
“Someone who—who saw her … and that she was special.”
“I think—” She stopped as my mother’s steps approached.
My mother’s hands were smudged with paint. She wore one of my father’s old shirts which she kept in her studio upstairs. The smoke from her cigarette coiled itself around her wrist. “Trudi’s father,” she said, giving Frau Brocker an amused look, “would have done a much wiser thing if he’d let his daughter make her own choices that evening.”
But Frau Brocker shook her head as she cut a piece of pie for my mother. “God knows what would have happened to her then,” she said.
• • •
Nothing much did happen to Trudi Montag, at least not in the conventional sense of things that happened to women of her generation in our town. No wedding in St. Martin’s Church. No husband to come home to her every evening. No children to cling to her hands for a few brief years. Yet, she’d had her romantic episode by the river and the courage to cherish that encounter and let it nurture her through the years while, within her, the stories of other people’s lives ripened and took shape.
One summer, when I returned to Burgdorf as an adult, I found a glistening red pebble by the river in the crevice between two wet rocks. In my hand it dried and turned brown, ordinary. Yet, I knew the promise to shine had been there all along. Rubbing my thumb across its drab surface, I thought of Trudi Montag: I remembered sitting next to her on the blue velvet sofa, remembered the sweet taste of rose-hip tea, remembered a morning, not too long ago, when I’d bent to lift my son from his crib and—all at once—had been caught by a sense of dread as I saw Trudi Montag falling, falling from her mother’s arms in slow motion. For a moment I’d stood frozen before I’d dared to gather my son in my arms, although, by then, I knew that Trudi Montag’s deformity had nothing to do with a fall. She was a dwarf whose size had been used as a warning for many children: If you eat butter with a spoon you’ll look like Trudi Montag when you grow up… If you don’t wash your knees … If you don’t finish your red cabbage … If you pick up this baby it might end up just like Trudi Montag… Fragments of warnings, they had come together to form the essence of one woman.
I sat down on a rock and linked my arms around my knees. Across the Rhein, clumps of sheep grazed in a meadow, circled by a long-haired dog. The current flowed north, but a southern wind stirred across its surface, and as the sun caught the ripples here and there like lights dancing in a mirror, I saw Trudi Montag moving through her rooms—a short, heavy woman with white hair—seeking her reflection in the many small mirrors that covered her walls, mirrors in golden frames, none of them large enough to embrace all of her at once.
Oma
After my Oma’s right leg was amputated, she was fitted with a wooden leg which she wore when she left the building; inside her apartment she got around by resting her knee stump on a chair and sliding the chair across the floor. She was my father’s mother and had grown up in a family where good manners and proper clothes were esteemed above everything else. Early on she had rejected those values when she decided to study music and philosophy, wearing out-of-date clothing so she could afford books. She had more books than anyone I knew—leather-bound collections of poetry, thick volumes of philosophy, large books with prints of famous paintings, stacks of yellowed journals from her years of teaching philosophy at the university. Her hair, which had been red like my father’s when she was younger, had turned white and she wore it in a braid around her head.
One evening, while my father watched her make her awkward way from her kitchen to the living room, it came to him how much easier it would be for her if the chair were closer to the ground. He sawed two centimeters off the chair’s legs, wrapped the ends in layers of green felt, and fastened the material with electrical tape. It not only made it easier for Oma to slide the chair across the floor, it also eliminated the familiar scratching of wood against linoleum. She’d appear almost soundlessly, startling us who had grown accustomed to hearing the chair legs announce her arrival.
Though my parents had urged her several times to move in with us, she insisted on living alone in her Düsseldorf apartment. Many Saturday afternoons I visited her, and we’d listen to music that swelled through the rooms and roused feelings within me so powerful I couldn’t name them; yet, the best of our moments together were tinged with my sadness that, soon, I’d have to leave her again.
Two years after the amputation Oma felt a tingling in her good leg below the knee, a sensation that grew into a burning pain and woke her from nights of troubled sleep. The pain spread into her toes. Sores and blisters bred on her foot. And when the pain subsided, a numbness set in that made her leg turn cold and white. With her right leg my Oma had welcomed that numbness until it was too late to save it; but this time she knew it could mean the loss of her left leg and asked my parents to take her to St. Lukas Hospital.
Her doctor prescribed antibiotics and confined Oma to a narrow white room on the second floor with a view of the Hofgarten. But she was too ill to look out the w
indow and watch the swans and ducks in the pond or the children who rode their bicycles along the tree lined paths of the park. Some mornings, when my mother visited her, Oma lay covered with five blankets; yet, her body shivered. My father arrived in the late afternoons after treating his last dental patient and sat on the edge of her bed.
One rainy October day, when he closed his practice early to be with his mother, he laid one hand against her pale face. Her white hair had thinned so much that her scalp was beginning to show. Her fingers trembled on the layers of blankets. All his life he’d seen her strong, taking care of him and his two sisters after his father had died young from a burst appendix. Eyes burning, he bent to kiss her dry cheek. She looked away from him as if ashamed of her weakness.
Outside the window, trees stood gray and stark against the sky as they had that Thursday in 1941, nearly seventeen years before, when one of Oma’s students had called my father to tell him she’d been arrested during her philosophy class. She’d been warned twice but had refused to adapt her lectures to Third Reich views. Four months later, when she returned from the prison camp where she was held with other German intellectuals whose ideas were considered treacherous, she was forced to resign from the university.
When my father left Oma’s room, her doctor walked toward him in the corridor. The skin around his eyes was unlined, but where his face thickened around the jaw, it had settled into deep creases. “She’s putting up a good fight, your mother.”
“Do you see any improvement?”
“Some.” The doctor’s eyes were gray. Watery. “Still—we need to think about last rites.”
“No,” my father said. “No.
“She’s ill. Very ill.”
“It would frighten her.”