by Ursula Hegi
“It’s beautiful … the painting,” I whispered, touching my mother’s sleeve, but she didn’t see me.
I don’t know why Herr Faber stopped visiting, but I remember thinking that, surely now, Matthias would be happier. I imagined him talking to me about the trip he was planning, and for a while we did just that, turning glossy pages of travel books as we pronounced names of foreign cities and mountains. Yet, I felt a new formality between us and didn’t know how to change things back to the way they had been.
Perhaps Matthias already knew what I wouldn’t understand until much later, that he wouldn’t see any of those cities and mountains which I would explore as an adult—not because they could never match the stories he had told me about them—but because to visit them would have broken the order of punishment he had chosen for himself.
We sat at his table one late afternoon, turning the pages of a book with photos of Ireland, when someone knocked. Matthias glanced at me, then jumped up to open the door. The man who came in was tall and had wide hands that carried a bottle of red wine.
“I want to spend some time with my friend now, Hanna,” Matthias said without looking at me.
I turned a page of the Ireland book, then another. “What’s your name?” I stared at the man.
“Hanna.” Matthias laid one hand on my shoulder. “You can come back tomorrow.”
I darted one last glance at the man, a warning, I hoped, but I don’t think it changed anything. Within the next few weeks, the man took up a pattern of seeing Matthias on Mondays and Thursdays, leaving the mark of his visits on Matthias’s body as if Matthias felt so flawed that he had to search for someone to confirm it.
Floating in My Mother’s Palm
My mother liked to swim during thunderstorms. Ignoring our housekeeper’s warnings, she’d set out for the old quarry hole at the end of our street, her bathing suit under a loose shift, her legs bare. She’d fold her shift and hang it across a branch of one of the birches that crowded each other along the edge of the quarry. While the summer air cooled off with rain, the water in the quarry hole seemed to heat up around her, mysterious bubbles like quicksilver stirred by the movement of her long arms and legs.
At home Frau Brocker would hide a sharp knife under the tablecloth to cut the lightning before it could strike the quarry or our house. While thunder cracked across the sky, she’d sit with her hands folded, whispering prayers of fear to the Virgin Mary.
She carried so many fears that my mother didn’t have: fear of the dark, of moths, storms, and deep water, fears I too felt immune to, fears that led Frau Brocker into superstitious rituals which my mother asked me to respect.
“It’s her way,” she said. “She needs to do those things.”
My mother swims in churning water, her face damp from cool drops that descend upon her as if magnetized by the quarry hole. Wet now, her long blond hair looks dark. Her legs kick the water into frothing swirls which she leaves behind. She dives—a long smooth shape—arching her back underwater before her head and shoulders emerge above the surface like a reed springing back into place.
My mother was taller than most of the other women in Burgdorf, and she wore her blond hair loose across her shoulders instead of taming it into a permanent or bun. She walked the way she swam—with long, easy movements.
I grew up watching her paint. Her easel used to stand in our living room, and I played around her feet while she worked. But when I was five, she hired Frau Brocker to take care of me and our apartment, while she claimed a cluster of rooms on the third floor and hired Siegfried Tegern to design a studio for her. He brought two carpenters who tore down the walls and replaced most of the facade with a sheet of glass.
For weeks after they were finished, a fine plaster dust continued to drift through the staircase, settling in my throat until I felt as if I were swallowing through a layer of cotton. I wasn’t even allowed inside my mother’s studio unless I knocked at the door. Hands behind my back, I’d stalk around, looking at the canvases stacked against the walls, breathing in the familiar, lost scent of oil paint.
At first people stopped on the sidewalk, staring up; they hadn’t seen a window that size, except in department stores. Perhaps they believed that, by secluding herself in a place above them, my mother considered herself better than they. Or maybe their uneasiness came from the fear that my mother would expose too much of them. The window was up so high that none of them could look through it. Even from the upper floors of the houses across the street, it was impossible to see my mother inside her studio.
Here, surrounded by light, she painted the town which fascinated and confined her, always more brilliant in color than in reality, as if she wanted to force it into the shape of the vision she carried within.
Lightning divides the sky like a new scar, and my mother raises her face toward the cool drops that fall faster now, harder. She can dance in the water without her feet touching the ground. She does this by twirling her arms in such a way that her body propels itself around. One early summer evening, when I’m nine, she shows me how. My father is at a dentists’ convention in Bremen, and Frau Brocker has left for the day. My mother and I walk to the quarry hole, shed the dresses we wear above our bathing suits, and run into the water as raindrops strike our bare shoulders. The water is warmer than the air, and I feel giddy and daring as I race my mother toward the middle.
When my mother was a girl, trucks would come to the quarry empty and leave filled with gravel which huge cranes dredged from the hole that grew wider and deeper with each month. But one day water bubbled up from the bottom, and gradually the hole filled with water as if trying to replenish itself with the core it had been robbed of. It didn’t take long for the children in Burgdorf to discover the quarry as a swimming hole. They leapt off the edges; some tied ropes to the sturdier trees, swung themselves over the water, and dropped with shrieks.
Luminous bubbles form around my arms, my legs, and when we reach a place too deep for us to stand, my mother teaches me how to dance. She twirls around, and I try to imitate her movements.
At first I’m clumsy, slow, but soon I find that I, too, can dance in the storm, alone, without holding onto her. When we leave the quarry hole, the brilliant lights have stopped flashing across the sky, and the only sound is that of our sandals slapping against the sidewalk. Though we don’t talk about this, neither of us will mention our swim to my father.
One fall the pastor’s sister, Hannelore Beier, came to visit my mother and asked if she could look at her paintings. Her crippled, birdlike hands flew toward each canvas in admiration and then they’d halt as if she had to catch them before they could take off on their own. I liked watching those hands which had a peculiar grace of their own. She was our Sunday school teacher, a slight woman who seemed colorless and tired until she read poems to us; then her voice would swell and her hands would draw us into words that were filled with magic and passion, words that held radiance the way my mother’s paintings could.
The pastor’s sister convinced my mother to exhibit her work at the church fair, and helped her stack the paintings in back of our car. They made eight trips and hung her pictures in the church hall, a dim room in the basement of St. Martin’s where Sunday school was usually held and where the bright reds and yellows of my mother’s paintings looked even brighter. Though the pastor’s sister set up extra lights, they only emphasized the shadows in the corners.
The day of the fair the pastor’s sister carried in a soft chair from the rectory; my mother sat at one end of the hall, her blond hair brushed back from her forehead, wearing her purple dress. Neighbors who’d wondered for years what my mother was painting came and stared at the pictures. “But the colors aren’t right,” they whispered to each other and the pastor’s sister raised her hands as if to quiet them. I wanted to kick their shins, trip them on their way to the stairs, but my mother smiled as if this was just what she had hoped to achieve in her work.
I’m five when my mother teaches m
e to swim. She ties my red ball into her shopping net; the sisal feels rough against my fingers when it is dry, but once we take the ball into the quarry hole, the fibers become wet, sleek. Big boys dive from the rocks at the other end of the quarry. Their shouts echo, and when their bodies hit the surface, columns of silver splash across the sky. I hold on to the net. One of my mother’s hands supports my belly.
Sometimes my mother was far away from me though she was in the same room, as if she were still painting inside her mind, guiding her brush across an imaginary canvas. Although I knew that, soon, I’d have her with me again in those intermittent flashes of intensity which she directed toward me, it wasn’t enough.
One day, when she seemed to have forgotten that I sat waiting for her in the corner of her studio, I imagined myself lighting a match and raising it to the painting she was working on. I could see the flames race across the canvas, spread to the pictures stacked against the wall, curl their edges, black—I hid my face in my hands. What was wrong with me? I loved my mother’s paintings, loved most of them better than the actual places. Yet, I would have set fire to her studio if it had meant she would belong to me from then on. What kept me from destroying her work, I believe, was the certainty that it would crush an integral part of her, a part that could not be healed.
As an adult I would return to Burgdorf and find a stack of my mother’s pictures which my father stored in the attic after her death. Two of her paintings I took back with me to hang inside my house. One is of the Rhein at Hochwasser, high water: floods swirl across the meadow between the river’s bed and the dike, uprooting unsteady trees and cleansing the winter’s debris from the meadows and clumps of trees. The other painting shows the quarry hole during a storm, the somber sky highlighted by streaks of silver that make the water look as if it were bubbling. If I look closely, I can almost see myself floating in my mother’s palm. Yet, when I shut my eyes, I find a different image of my mother releasing me as we dance in the storm and twirl in separate circles that cause the water to ripple from us in widening rings which merge in one ebbing bracelet of waves where the borders of the quarry meet the water, far from the center where my mother and I continue to spin our bodies in the radiant sheen of lightning.
Dogs of Fear
Siegfried Tegern’s seven dogs tore him apart one sweltering summer evening in a meadow between the Rhein and the dike. We’d become accustomed to seeing him walk through Burgdorf, gripping a leash that fanned into seven strands like a whip with so many tails; they coiled themselves into the collars of his dogs as they pulled ahead of him, controlled by his commands. He was an architect, a tall man with gray hair and smooth skin, who wore a suit even when he trained his dogs. He and his wife, Angelika, kept themselves separate from the people in Burgdorf. Newcomers to the town nine years before, they’d built a stucco house with a solarium near the Rhein.
“It was his dream that started it,” Angelika Tegern told Herr Pastor Beier after the police had shot her husband’s seven dogs. The pastor’s sister—since it was not told in the confessional but in the pastor’s living room—repeated the story to Frau Brocker, who rushed to the pay-library to be the first to bestow the news upon Trudi Montag. From then on it became knowledge we all shared, knowledge that made us bolt up in our beds late at night and grasp the sheets against our shoulders when, from a distance, the howling of a dog drifted through our open windows.
Sometimes we saw Angelika Tegern walk along the top of the dike as if retracing the steps her husband had taken, and when she came to that meadow she’d stop, standing motionless, her chin raised toward the gray shifting bands of waves as though, in the stretch of high grass between the dike and the river, she saw the seven dogs gathering around her husband in one last ritual dance.
“It was his dream,” Angelika Tegern told the pastor. “Not just one dream—they came rather frequently, all of them alike. In the dream Siegfried died. He could feel it each time, not the pain, but the sense of powerlessness. He’d wake, screaming, his hands flying to his face, his chest, as he wiped away the blood he believed he was covered with.”
Siegfried didn’t know why. Didn’t know how. Except that his death would be violent, and that he was unable to avert it. In the dream he stood in a meadow between the dike and the river. Not the meadow he saw when he climbed the dike near his house, but the meadow he’d never been to. The path, which ran from the dike to the river, was unfamiliar to him; yet, he could describe it in detail to his wife when he woke up shaking with the certainty of his death. The path angled to the left where four poplars leaned into each other although no other trees grew close to them; a flat rock lay embedded in the grass just before the path branched into the trail that ran parallel to the Rhein.
To protect himself, Siegfried Tegern bought a guard dog, a German shepherd that he walked every evening, staying away from the Rhein, though he and Angelika had chosen the land for their house because it was close to the river. When the dreams wouldn’t cease, he bought six more German shepherds within the next few months. Still, he’d wake up during the night, his body sweating with fear, and find his wife’s arms around him as she held him in his trembling until he’d reassured himself that he was safe. His skin took on the texture of creased paper; under his eyes it gathered itself into bruised pouches.
The rose hedges around their house were torn out and replaced by a high metal fence. Siegfried took time off from work to train his dogs in obedience. “They’ll protect both of us,” he told his wife. To give them added strength, he fed them chunks of beef lung once a week. Anton Immers saved them for him in the back room of his butcher shop, and Siegfried would boil them early on Saturday mornings when Angelika was still asleep. He’d open the windows to let out the gray steam that rose above the pink froth on the surface of the boiling water; yet, when Angelika came downstairs for her first cup of coffee, she’d feel herself enveloped by a sweet, dank smell as if something were about to rot. She tried to convince herself that the dogs were good for Siegfried, although they urinated on her rhododendrons, destroyed the beds of impatiens she’d planted around the patio, and circled the house that lay like a sanctuary within the fence her husband had built. When people walked by, the dogs barked and threw themselves against the chain links that vibrated in a metallic chant long after the sidewalk was empty.
Gradually, Siegfried’s control over them increased. When he led them along the sidewalks of our town, they’d walk ahead of him without becoming entangled. One Saturday morning we saw them in the open market; they sat quietly with Siegfried while he compared the prices on the slates the farmers had stuck in their crates of fruits and vegetables. Since it was late in the morning, most had crossed out the original amounts and scribbled lower prices underneath. Siegfried bought two pounds of peaches from Frau Braunmeier and one head of red cabbage from Herr Neumann. After he paid, he whispered something to his dogs, and they got up like one huge animal, one mass of fur and muscles.
“I don’t know when he decided to find the meadow from his dream,” Angelika Tegern told the pastor and his sister, who was already preserving the words in her mind, molding them into the story she would tell Frau Brocker. She would start out by talking about fear, the architect’s fear that did not stop after he purchased the dogs, the fear that even took hold of his wife and which the pastor’s sister could see in her face after his death, when she sat stiffly in the leather chair of the pastor’s living room. The arthritic hands of the pastor’s sister, which had drawn themselves toward her palms and looked like the claws of a large bird, would weave the words into a tapestry as bright and rich as the pictures the dentist’s wife painted of the town.
Angelika Tegern told the pastor: “He believed the dreams would stop if he went there. The dogs will be with me,’ he said, as if that made a difference, and when I told him he didn’t even know if the meadow was real, his answer was that it had to be.”
So convinced was he of its existence, that early every evening, he’d set out for longer wa
lks with his dogs, first searching the river north in the direction of Oberhausen, then south toward Düsseldorf. Water swirled white around the edges of the jetties as if someone had poured soap into it, and the current seemed to move in opposite directions. Like pesky insects, motorboats and kayaks flitted in and out between the freighters. Branches and debris drifted in the river. Once he saw the body of a yellow cat bobbing in the waves, back up and legs down. He couldn’t see its head.
He came to know the changing shoreline: sandy crescents, walls secured with mortar, pebbled stretches of beach, meadows that were lush and green after a heavy rain. In Düsseldorf the embankment was built in three segments: first a mound of boulders that rose two meters above the river’s surface; then a flat walkway; and above it a cemented slant of stones that stretched itself at least ten meters to the sidewalk and street. In Oberkassel a straight sandy beach was bordered by a wide meadow where, every fall, the biggest circus in the area set up its tents.
Some evenings he walked until it was too dark to see, and he’d come home too tired to hang up the leash he’d made, a leather loop with a metal ring to which seven leashes were fastened. Inside the fence, his dogs stumbled into one knot of limbs and snouts, dropping into sleep that was only interrupted by the involuntary twitching of some leg or tail as if a great beast were rehearsing the vaguely remembered details of an ancient hunt.
Siegfried lay awake, dreading the dream that would certainly suck him into the familiar terror. Through the window a narrow shaft of dull light seeped from the moon and touched his forehead like a priest administering last rites. Shivering, he closed his eyes, but it was as though the moon had coated the lining of his eyelids with a mirror that reflected his dream.