by Ursula Hegi
He didn’t promise to take her with him, though she waited for him to say so, and when she stopped believing he ever would, she found comfort in the hope that the American occupation would last. He’d stay in Burgdorf, find work here or in Düsseldorf. Already his German had improved and she’d help him learn, practice with him.
The day she told him she was pregnant, he held her so tightly in his arms that she couldn’t see the expression on his face, and then he kissed her, kissed her entire body, even the indentations her garters had left on her thighs. She wanted to see his face, but all she saw was herself through his eyes—a stretch of thigh, an instep, a breast, an arched neck, a moist strand of brown hair … and when his unit transferred him the next day—to Bochum, one of the American soldiers told her, while another said he was almost sure it was Duisburg—she was left with those fragments of herself to gather around a center that held the child growing within her.
She braced herself against her mother’s silence and the disapproving stares of the townspeople. It was up to her to weave the story she would tell her son as soon as he started asking questions about his father.
But first there was the pain, the pain of being without her lover that took hold of her so fiercely she had trouble breathing, a pain that started deep inside her gut and spread into her limbs, her groin, a pain that racked her and tore her from deceptive moments of rest. It hurt so much she didn’t know how to stop it. And out of the pain grew the fear that it would always be like this. Nothing helped. Not the crying. Not the praying. Not the confessing of her sins. The one person who could have stopped the pain was out of her reach.
When, finally, she became angry enough to crumple the one photo she had of him and throw it out, she retrieved it less than an hour later and ironed its back to take out the creases; but they stayed, a fine web across his face as though he had suddenly and irrevocably aged. All at once she had a vision of him as an old man, still tall but slightly stooped, and of herself, older too, one hand linked through his arm. She touched her unlined skin, ran her fingertips along the smooth planes of her cheeks, and cried out with the loss of all those years she would not spend with him.
She hid the photo in a red leather box under her few pieces of costume jewelry. After her son was born, she kept searching his features for a resemblance to the American, but only saw herself: the brown eyes and hair; the small, eager face; the flat, well-shaped ears. To protect the child from her shame, she insisted on being called Frau Brocker instead of Fräulein, the title reserved for unmarried women. And the townspeople complied; they even began to think of her as Frau Brocker, but they wouldn’t forget that her child had come from sin.
Though the pain faded until it eventually ceased to be, the shame settled somewhere low in her belly, a familiar presence that claimed any food she ate before it could nourish her. Standing alone in the dim cellar after the potato man had left, she felt it stronger than she had in years. She looked at the wooden bin, at the cloud of fine dust that still floated above its open top, and she knew she was done with waiting, waiting for things that never happened.
She squatted in front of the bin. With both hands she shoved up the trap door, letting the old potatoes tumble out among dry specks that rose and swirled around the light bulb like fireflies, and as the potatoes rolled into dark corners, she caught the first new ones in her hands. They were firm, smooth.
“What are you doing?” Her son stood in the open cellar door. His brown hair hung over his eyebrows. His eyes were so serious. Too serious.
“Here!” She tossed one of the potatoes at him. “Catch!”
His hand snatched it from the air. “What—”
She laughed. “For dinner.”
He seemed startled.
“Here—another one.”
As Rolf caught the second one too, his lips moved into a slow smile. He kicked aside an old potato that had rolled up against his feet.
“I’ll boil them,” she said, “and you can run to the store and get a quarter pound of butter. No—half a pound. And parsley.” Already she could taste the new potatoes the way she would prepare them, and as her arms gathered as many as she could hold against herself, she felt the old hunger shrink into a small circle of desire.
Props for Faith
When our housekeeper told me she didn’t think the midwife was Renate’s real mother, I wondered if my best friend’s parents were gypsies, those dark-haired women and men who, every July, set up the carnival on the Burgdorf fairgrounds and, with brown, ring-covered hands, took the groschen I’d saved for rides on the ferris wheel and pink clouds of cotton candy. Gypsies. That would explain Renate’s dark, frizzy hair, her quick, black eyes. But gypsies moved rapidly, while my friend walked with a limp, her feet in patent-leather shoes, her fragile ankles hidden under white knee socks that never stayed up.
Besides—gypsies were known to steal babies.
Not give them away.
After swearing me to secrecy, Frau Brocker told me, “I figure her real parents were too poor to keep her. Too many other children already.” She’d just come back from her weekly visit to the beauty parlor and she smelled of hair spray. “Instead of paying the midwife, they must have given her the baby.”
The midwife was a blond, heavy widow whose husband had been killed during the war on the Russian front. She’d delivered me and most of the kids I knew. Her name was Hilde Eberhardt, and she lived with her older son, Adi, and Renate in a white stucco house two blocks from school. No one had seen her pregnant with Renate, not even Trudi Montag. Twelve years before the midwife had left town one Thursday, and the following day she had returned with a dark-haired infant girl, claiming it was hers. By then her son had lived half of his five years without a father.
Renate didn’t come to our school until the end of second grade, and we became best friends right away. Nearly two years earlier, she’d been taken to the Theresienheim with pneumonia. On the day she was to be released, she fell when she climbed out of bed, caved in on herself like a puppet whose strings had been cut. The nuns suspected polio and rushed her to St. Lukas hospital in Düsseldorf where the doctors confirmed the diagnosis and kept her for over a year, probing her legs with needles. Though she was eventually cured, her left leg was shorter than the other. Thinner. Both legs were pale with large pores.
Whenever Renate took me to her house, the midwife examined the soles of our shoes and followed us around with a mop, catching any speck of dust that dropped from our skirts and settled on her glossy parquet floor. Yet, when I got ready to leave, she’d say, “Come back, Hanna. Any time.”
Their yard, too, was orderly: a lush lawn without dandelions; window boxes with forget-me-nots and geraniums; a trimmed hedge of purple lilacs. The one imperfection was a pear tree that produced abundant blossoms but only yielded hard little pears with brown spots.
With his blond hair and blue eyes, Renate’s brother, Adi, didn’t look anything like Renate. His full name was Adolf, but no one called him that. Quite a few boys in the grades above us were called Adolf—a name that had been popular for babies born in the early war years—but we had no Adolfs in our class or in the younger grades. The name Adolf Hitler was never mentioned in our history classes. Our teachers dealt in detail with the old Greeks and Romans; we’d slowly wind our way up to Attila the Hun, to Henry the Eighth who had six wives, to Kaiser Wilhelm, to the First World War; from there we’d slide right back to the old Greeks and Romans.
In gym class Renate was always the last in line—awkward, hesitant, everything about her slow except for those dark eyes that seemed to move right through me. But I hardly thought about the polio or her leg until Sybille Immers, the butcher’s daughter, called Renate a gimp one day as we left school. I leapt at Sybille, who was taller and heavier than I, kicking her shins; she raked her fingernails across my face and tore at my hair. When Frau Buttgereit, our music teacher, pulled us apart, her green hat with the pheasant feather fell into a puddle.
I still can’t und
erstand what I did less than a week later when Renate didn’t want to come out and play.
“Why not?” I shouted, standing outside her bedroom window.
She leaned on the windowsill with both hands, “Because,” she shouted back.
“Because why?”
“Because Sybille is coming over.”
The scratches on my face still itched, and there she was, looking for a new best friend. Something hot and sad and mean rose inside me and, before I could stop myself, I yelled, “Even the gypsies didn’t want to keep a gimp like you!”
Her arms tight against her body, Renate stood motionless. Her face turned red, then ashen.
I stared at her, horrified by what I had said. My throat ached, and when I tried to talk, I couldn’t bring out one word.
“Hanna!” the side door slammed and the midwife ran toward me, her eyes filled with tears. “Don’t you ever come back here,” she shouted and raised one hand. “You hear me, Hanna?”
“But I didn’t mean it,” I cried out as I ran from her.
“I didn’t mean it,” I told Renate in school the next day, but she said she wasn’t allowed to play with me anymore and walked away.
Her limp seemed worse than ever before, and I felt as if I had caused it. If only I could take back the words. During recess, she stood alone in the school yard, eating an apple. My hands in the pockets of my pleated skirt, I leaned against the fence close by, feeling hollow despite the cheese sandwich I’d just eaten. If only she’d call me something real bad, something worse than gimp. Even if she said that my parents had found me at the dump, or that my mother should have thrown me away as a baby because I was too ugly to keep—I pushed my fists deeper into my pockets, jammed back my elbows into the diamond-shaped holes in the fence.
After school I waited for her outside the building. “Do you want to buy some licorice?”
She shook her head.
“I still have my allowance.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“We could ride bikes.”
“I have to go home.” She crossed the street.
I followed her on the opposite sidewalk. Mist hung low above the streets and garden walls, yet left the trees and houses untouched. Frau Weskopp passed us on her bicycle, her black coat flapping around her. I could tell she was on her way to the cemetery because a watering can dangled from her handlebar. When Renate reached her front door, she turned around as if she wanted to make sure I was close by before she slipped inside.
I left my books at our house and walked toward the river. The streets were damp; it had rained nearly every day that April. When I got close to the Tegerns’ house, the architect’s seven German shepherds threw themselves against the chain-link fence, barking. The skin above their gums were drawn back, and their teeth glistened. Though Renate and I always ran past the fence, I made myself stop on the sidewalk, close enough to smell the wet fur and see the strings of saliva on the dog’s tongues. I snarled back at them. The hair on their backs rose as they scrambled across each other, trying to climb up the fence, barking and howling at me.
“Cowards,” I hissed, wishing Renate could see me. I raised my hands, curled my fingers into claws. “Cowards.”
A curtain shifted in the window above the solarium and Frau Tegern knocked against the glass, motioning me away as if afraid for me or, perhaps, herself. I gave the dogs one final ferocious growl and turned my back to them.
Along the river the mist was thicker, and the water looked brown-green, darker than the meadow where a herd of sheep grazed. I heard the tearing of grass blades as their teeth closed around them. The shapes of poplars and willows were blurred. Above the water line the rocks were gray and damp, the upper ones splotched with a white crust.
Frau Brocker used to bring Rolf and me to the river when we were small. While she smoked one of her Gauloises, Rolf and I searched for scraps of paper and dry leaves, packing them into the crevices between the stones before setting a match to them.
I sat on a boulder and dug my sneakers into the heaps of pebbles around me. Maybe if I gave Renate a present … I could let her have my radio. Or any of the dolls in my room. I didn’t play with them anyhow. But neither did Renate. I picked up a pebble, tried to flit it across the waves; it sank without rising once. Perhaps we could switch bicycles. She liked mine better than hers. It had even been touched by holy water at the pastor’s last blessing of the vehicles and didn’t have any rust on it.
If I were Renate, the thing I’d want most in the world—it was so simple—her leg, of course, her left leg, to have it grow and fill out like the other one. I thought of my Oma’s healer—not even a saint—who’d touched her leg and dissolved a blood clot in the artery below her knee. Oma had told me it was as much her belief in the healing as the healing itself that had saved her leg from having to be amputated. Miracles happened that way. Even without saints. As long as you believed in them. I bent to search for a flat, round pebble and found a white one with amber veins. After spitting on it for luck, I skipped it across the water. It sprang up in wide arcs four, five … a total of eight times.
That evening I looked around our cellar for an empty bottle. Our housekeeper stored things there which she said she might use some day: cardboard boxes with old magazines and brochures, empty bottles and jars, a four-liter pot with a hole in the bottom, a stained lampshade, even the tin tub I’d been bathed in until I was two. Most of the bottles were too large, but finally I found an empty vinegar bottle behind the washing machine.
I soaked off the label, rinsed the inside, and hid it in my room until Wednesday morning when St. Martin’s Church was empty because mass was held at the chapel. The bottle in my knapsack, I sneaked into the side door of the church early before school. In the morning light the blond wood of the pews gleamed as if someone had rubbed it with oil. The stale scent of incense made it hard to breathe. Though I knew Herr Pastor Beier was at the chapel two kilometers away, I kept glancing toward the purple curtains of the confessional.
Marble steps with a red runner led to the altar, which was built of solid black marble. Centered between two silver bowls with tulips stood five candles thicker than Renate’s legs. From The Last Supper mural above the altar, the dark eyes of Jesus and the apostles traced my movements. I’d heard enough stories about church robbers to know the wrath of God could strike at any moment and leave me dead on the floor. As I walked toward the back of the church to the basin of holy water, the white veins in the marble floor reached for my feet like the nets of a fisherman.
Quickly I submerged my vinegar bottle in the cold water. Silver bubbles rose to the surface as the bottle filled—much too slowly. On the wide balcony above me, I felt the silent weight of the organ pipes.
“You want to come to my house?” I whispered to Renate as I followed her out of school that afternoon.
She shook her head and kept walking, tilting to the left with each step, her white knee socks bunched around her ankles.
“It’s about a surprise.”
She glanced at me sideways. “What is it?”
“I can’t tell.” My knapsack over one arm, I continued walking next to her. “I have to show it to you.”
“Why?”
“Because. It’s a secret.”
“What if I don’t want it?”
“You will. I swear.”
She stopped. “Is it a harmonica?”
“Better.”
“Better than a kitten?”
“Much better.”
“Better than—”
“The best thing that could happen to you,” I promised.
She still had some doubt in her eyes as we took the steps down to our cellar. I thought of the nights my mother and grandmother had hidden there with neighbors while the wail of sirens pierced the dark. The war had ended a year before Renate and I were born. Several kids in our school had lost their fathers at the Russian front. Adults never mentioned the war unless we asked about it, and then they fled into vague sentence
s about a dark period for Germany. “Nobody wants to relive those years,” they’d say gravely. My mother was the only one who answered some of our questions and told us about the terror of air raids, the hunger and cold everyone had suffered.
“Sit over there.” I pointed to the crates next to the apple shelves. Every fall my father and I filled those crates with apples we’d picked at an orchard in Krefeld. Afterward we’d wrap the apples in newspaper and lay them on the shelves. It was my job to rotate them every two weeks, sorting out the rotten ones, so the others would last through the winter.
Renate sat on the crate closest to the door. The wall at the far end of the cellar was still black, right up to the two high windows that were blind with layers of coal dust and cobwebs. Until the oil furnace had been installed two years before, I used to help my father stack coal briquets to within a hand’s width of the window.
I picked up the other crate and moved it in front of Renate. “You have to take off your left shoe and sock.”
“Why?” She straightened her shoulders.
“Because. It’s part of it. You’ll see.” I took the bottle from my knapsack.
Renate pulled her bare foot from the cement floor. “It’s cold.”
I sat down on the crate across from her. “Let me have your leg.” When she hesitated, I whispered, “I’ve figured out a way to make it all right—your leg, I mean—heal it.”
She swallowed hard. “How?”
“It’ll be like your other leg.”
She drew her lower lip between her teeth, but then she raised her left leg and, carefully, laid her bare foot on my knees. It was a pale foot, a thin foot with toenails longer than mine, a foot that felt warm and sweaty as I put one hand around it to keep her from yanking it back.