by Ursula Hegi
Fräulein Beier copied the poems we liked on lined pages in green ink. Square and awkward, her letters slanted on the left, and when I read them I imagined her stiff fingers setting the tip of the fountain pen against the page, forming those words which opened us to people and places far beyond our town.
She had come to Burgdorf seven years before to keep house for her brother, the pastor of St. Martin’s. His old housekeeper, Fräulein Teschner, had turned into a tyrant, restricting his diet, his contact with parishioners of the opposite sex, and the hours he could spend away from the rectory. In despair, he’d called his sister, Hannelore, who was a social worker in Stuttgart. He found a better-paying job for Fräulein Teschner with a surgeon in Düsseldorf, and his sister moved into the rectory. She cooked his enormous meals, ironed his enormous clothes, typed his enormous sermons, and let him schedule his own consultations. She served coffee and gingerbread when he had meetings with young couples who planned to get married.
During Sunday mass she knelt in the front pew of St. Martin’s, her face raised to the marble altar, her eyes wide open. Black marble columns supported the arches of the ceiling where her voice rose with others in hymns that collected themselves in echoes and expanded the boundaries of the church. As her voice blazed past the walls, she let herself be lifted by the sounds that streamed through the organ’s silver pipes and transformed the silence of the church into a celebration. Yet, when the music faded and the voices receded to murmured prayers, she was drawn back into her isolation.
Every Wednesday morning at seven Hannelore Beier rode her bicycle the two kilometers to the Burgdorf chapel, a white stone building set on a gentle hill near the Sternburg. She entered through the curved door, climbed the stairs to the bell tower, and grasped the rope.
The chapel was built six hundred years ago, and its slate roof was layered like the gray wing feathers of the pigeons that roosted on the tower and the ridge of the steep roof. Their droppings splattered the two benches in front of the chapel. When the pastor’s sister rang the bells, they drowned the guttural chorus of the birds, which rose in one swarm, settling in the row of poplars that broke the landscape and cast long shadows across the adjoining wheat fields.
All across town, the old women would mount their bicycles to arrive in time for eight o’clock mass. Their narrow skirts didn’t give them much room to move their legs, and so they pedaled slowly while their handbags swung from the handlebars. At the chapel they got off carefully, locked the bicycles, and smoothed their skirts with their palms. Handbags across their left arms, they entered the cool core of the chapel, stopped next to the holy water, then dipped their right forefingers and middle fingers into the basin, and touched their foreheads, bosoms, and shoulders in the familiar sign of the cross.
The side altar held a large statue of the Virgin Mother; there, the women lit candles, closed their eyes, and whispered prayers for the recovery of a relative, the fulfillment of a secret wish, or the relief from eternal punishment for someone who’d died. Their faith in the mercy and power of the Virgin Mary merged with the flames from many other candles, merged and ascended toward, perhaps, a benevolent presence.
Occasionally a man would come to the service or one of the younger women, but most Wednesday mornings the chapel was filled with old women. The rest of the week Herr Pastor Beier read mass at St. Martin’s, except for Wednesdays when he climbed on the motor scooter the bishop had assigned to him, and rode to the chapel. Ten minutes before eight he arrived at the side door, his breath in quick gasps, his face red, his black jacket stretched across his huge stomach. In the sacristy, which smelled of incense and damp stone, he struggled into the vestments his sister had laid out for him: first he put on the alb and watched the white linen cover the tops of his black shoes; then he knotted the cincture around his ample waist, kissed the stole before laying it around his neck, and slipped into the chasuble, a long brocade gown with the cross embroidered on the back.
Sometimes, while Herr Pastor Beier raised the sacred chalice, the women heard the scratching of talons against slate high above them, as if the Holy Spirit had chosen to descend upon their ceremony, and they turned their creased faces toward the vaults of the chapel where faint watermarks formed cloudlike designs.
Though they had wrinkles and gray hair, these women didn’t think of themselves as old; it was an unspoken fact that each of them carried within, a fact that didn’t need to be confirmed because there was always someone who could remember them as girls and recall a half-forgotten detail, someone who—beneath the fine web of lines—still saw the child’s face.
They did this for each other, the old women, pulling out the albums of class picnics, of trips to Kaiserswerth and Schloss Burg, pointing to their younger images in fading photographs and whispering to each other: “Remember?” And they continued to do so until they were in their eighties or nineties because, as long as there was someone who had known them as girls, someone who could recollect the quick movements of their limbs, the graceful turn of their smooth necks—they could gaze into their mirrors and see their young reflections.
Most of these women were widows who’d lost their husbands to the war or old age. They lived with one of their children’s families and helped with the raising of their grandchildren, with the cooking, the cleaning. They pinched off brown stalks from the geraniums in their window boxes and ironed tablecloths. They knitted sweaters and had their hair set once a week at the beauty parlor. They took care of the family graves. They knew when to interfere and when to remain silent, though they didn’t always follow their instincts. They complained bitterly to one another about the size of their rooms, the lack of privacy; yet, they felt sorry for those among them who lived alone.
Most of these women had taken care of their aging parents: entangled between the needs of their parents and the needs of their children, they’d never considered doing otherwise. It had to do with continuity, with responsibility, with the tremendous impact the old had on the young, and as their children grew up and saw their parents take care of their grandparents, they took for granted that, some day, they too would follow that example.
Here in the chapel, while the unyielding wood of the pews pressed against their knees, callused from thousands of masses, the old women felt a timeless connection to one another, a connection that came from celebrating their first communion together and going to the same school even though they might have sat in different classrooms, a connection that came from knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, from understanding and being a part of each other’s stories and histories.
When they left the white chapel, their steps were almost lithe, and they blinked in the morning light. They drifted into circles of four or five, talking among themselves while glancing occasionally at the sky which always changed so quickly: cloud formations moved swiftly with the wind across the sun, causing the temperature to drop or rise in seconds. Even where the sky stayed blue, it was marbled with faint streaks of white. During the summer the poplar seeds with their delicate tufts floated across the fields, clinging to the spears of wheat until the pigeons swooped upon them and carried them away for their nests.
The pastor’s sister walked from group to group, greeting the old women who looked upon her with pity. To them she seemed old because they had no early image of her. Flawed like an injured bird, she’d arrived in their town. She had no husband, no children, only her brother, a heavy man nearly twenty years older than she, who’d left home for the seminary by the time she was born and had seen her young only in photos. Her slight figure seemed to recede in the wren-colored dresses she chose for herself. A thin belt pulled the center of her together as if she were about to disappear.
The old women didn’t know the power of her voice, which made her entire body come alive when she shared the poems she loved with the children. They didn’t know the color in her laugh. They didn’t know that sometimes she closed her eyes and imagined herself lying in a summer field of golden-yellow wheat. The lo
ng stalks hide her from anyone who might be looking for her. She breaks off a stalk, runs her fingertips across the end of the stiff spikes at the top of each kernel. She separates one kernel, strips the thin layer of skin that feels like a callus. Underneath is a soft core that tastes like wet flour.
The young teacher moved to Burgdorf the summer the pastor’s sister turned forty. He arrived in the sweltering heat of early August, four weeks before school started, so he could get to know the town. A tall man with blond hair and black eyebrows, he’d grown up in Switzerland, speaking French and German. His name was Lucien Cheronnet, and he had been hired to teach fourth grade at the Catholic school.
The pastor, who was president of the school board, found an apartment for Lucien Cheronnet on the third floor of the white house across from the rectory. His first night there, the young teacher found it impossible to sleep. The heat pressed against his limbs; when he got up from his bed and walked to the open bedroom window, a slight breeze lifted the lace curtain and cooled the sweat on his chest. In the slow light of the moon, the brick gables of the church glowed red as if they contained passions of their own.
That Sunday the pastor invited him to dinner at the rectory with the other members of the school board. While the pastor’s sister served them, the young teacher watched her hands fly across the white linen and polished silver with a beauty he’d never believed existed. They were like young birds, those hands, poised to fly off independently, and he wanted to reach out for them, hold them briefly in the cup of his palms before releasing them.
We would have kept her secret had we found her making love with the young teacher down by the river late that summer, but the old women said it was a scandal. They felt angry, betrayed, as if, somehow, the pastor’s sister had proven them wrong. Lucien Cheronnet lost his job before starting it, and he called a taxi to take him and Hannelore Beier to the train station in Düsseldorf.
“I wish you’d stay,” Herr Pastor Beier told his sister the morning of her departure. He sat across the table from her, his two soft-boiled eggs still covered with knitted egg warmers.
She ate silently.
“I wish I could have acted differently,” he said, “but the school board—” He opened his arms in a helpless sweep. “If I can help …”
The following Wednesday the bells of the chapel did not ring, and when the old women arrived—some of them late or with a button left undone—they found that the pastor’s sister had not come. By the time Sunday mass arrived, it was evident that she’d left, and we stared at the empty space in the pew where she used to kneel.
Our new Sunday school teacher, Frau Wilhelmi, read to us about Moses and his mother, who’d saved the infant’s life by hiding him in a woven basket which she’d smeared with pitch and slime, then set afloat among the reeds and water lilies that grew in the shallow water along the river’s edge. But we gazed out of the narrow windows of the church basement and beyond, imagining the pastor’s sister and the young teacher. They’re on a train that passes through golden wheat fields and through forests where sunlight turns the crowns of the trees bright yellow-green and filters into the lower, darker branches. Hannelore Beier has an open book on her knees and as she reads poems to the young teacher, she paints the words for him through the dance of her hands. Lucien Cheronnet captures her hands in his, lightly, the way one might hold a newly hatched robin, and brings them to his lips.
Their train speeds through cities and crosses rivers until it reaches Paris. They leave the station, their arms around each other, and walk to the Jardin des Plantes where the panther paces the length of his cage. The young teacher nods as Hannelore Beier reaches into the cage, and strokes the animal’s magnificent neck. The panther arches his back. A curtain lifts from his pupils as the pastor’s sister slides aside the bolt that has kept him in captivity. His eyes like sudden, green flames, he recognizes a world beyond the bars of his cage.
Of Weaker Stock
One of the regulars at Trudi Montag’s pay-library was Anton Immers, the retired butcher, who liked to read nurse-and-doctor novels. Perhaps descriptions of operating rooms recalled for him the days when he’d drawn a knife swiftly through pulsing flesh. His granddaughter, Sybille Immers, was in my class, the only girl taller than I.
One Saturday afternoon as he shuffled out of the pay-library with two novels under his arm, Trudi Montag whispered to me that he was a three-months baby.
“What do you mean?” It was hard to imagine the old man as an infant.
“Child—” She shook her head as if exasperated by my naïveté. “His parents were married three months before he was born.”
“You mean—they did it before they got married?”
Trudi Montag nodded. Smiled.
“How do you know?”
“I looked it up in the town registry,” she said, and I wondered what else she’d found in the ancient town records that were kept in the basement of the Rathaus, the town hall with a bell tower and arched windows whose curved tops were inlaid with blue bricks.
Anton Immers bred violets on the windowsill and shelves of the room he occupied on the second floor of his son’s house. His daughter-in-law, Irmtraud, complained about the smell of the plant food which the old man concocted from secret ingredients. The mixture, which stood in a pail next to her washing machine, smelled suspiciously close to cow dung and rotting fish, yet became odorless as soon as he worked it into the soil.
His violets ranged from deep purple to pale pink. Their blossoms were huge, their leaves a lush green. Anton Immers had passed on the butcher shop to his son, Anton, just as he had passed on his name and his house, but he still kept financial control of the family; his daughter-in-law had to come to him for extra expenses, enduring the humiliation of having him refuse her money to repair her outmoded sewing machine and buy material for the matching winter coats she wanted to sew for herself and her daughter, Sybille.
Every morning he dressed in a dark suit and watered his hundreds of plants while listening to Wagner records. His coarse hands, which had slaughtered cattle and pigs, tenderly nipped off dying leaves and blossoms, and transplanted seedlings into clay pots filled with rich soil. The flowers’ perfection gave him more pleasure than anything else had ever given him. Other people in Burgdorf, who grew violets and spent more time on their plants than he, didn’t have nearly the same success. They suspected the fertilizer had little to do with the profuse growth of the retired butcher’s plants. They suspected Anton Immers’s violets grew so well because they were afraid.
If a plant failed to thrive, he’d set it on the ledge outside his window where he’d let it shrivel in the cold air while the elite plants had to witness its slow death. During the summer, a night in the shop’s meat locker would bring the same results. In winter, when he brought in the plant, he sometimes had to brush snow from its brittle leaves before he placed it on the table next to his bed as an example to the others. There it would stay for weeks, turning brown and dry, until he decided it was time to annihilate the next plant. Carefully he’d choose the weakest one, feeling the other plants recoil.
“This can happen to you too if you don’t grow,” the butcher’s father murmured to his plants in the mornings when he rotated them a quarter turn so that each part of their foliage received equal amounts of light. “This can happen to you too.”
As a young man, Anton Immers had broken his back while slaughtering a cow; though it had healed eventually, he’d been left with a constant ache in the lower region of his spine, more like stiffness than anything else. But he hadn’t retired from the butcher shop until five years earlier when he turned seventy-seven. Since then he’d been growing violets and winning the annual competition at St. Martin’s Church for the best violets. The winner’s plants decorated the nativity scene in the wing of the church all through December until Epiphany on January 6. Surrounded by Anton Immers’s prime violets knelt life-size, carved statues of the Virgin Mother and Saint Josef; between them the Christ Child lay in his m
anger on real straw, raising one hand in divine benediction. Rows of candles, which the people of Burgdorf would light for their prayers, separated the Holy Family from the pews.
“It’s not right,” the old women, whose flowers used to win the award, told Herr Pastor Beier. “It’s not right to let a plant killer display his violets in the nativity scene.”
• • •
In the small brick house that used to be his, Anton Immers kept to his room except for meals, listening to Wagner’s Niebelungenring and Lohengrin, his view restricted to what he could see through the panes of his window that faced Schlosserstrasse. Across the street was Potter’s, a long, narrow bar with tables in the back. Some of the men, who got there as soon as it opened, had gone to school and been in the war with Anton Immers. He’d watch them enter the dim bar and, late in the afternoon, stumble out, blinking in the fading light.
One of them, Kurt Heidenreich, arrived every morning at nine-forty on his bicycle in beige trousers and a gray cardigan. It pained Anton Immers to watch a man two years younger take five minutes to dismount from his bicycle; yet, at the same time he felt a familiar sense of superiority as Kurt Heidenreich locked his bike, wobbled to the bolted door, and tried the handle. Muttering to himself, he’d step back from the door, head tilted, and stand on the sidewalk, staring at the bar. After a few minutes he’d move forward again, rattling the door handle. This happened every day until Herr Potter, who owned the bar, opened at ten.