by Ursula Hegi
My mother and Veronika had met when both of them were students at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf. While my mother painted landscapes, Veronika drew charcoal sketches of people caught in one urgent, yet graceful motion that seemed to carry them forward as in a film. Her sketches reminded me of pictures I’d seen in one of my Oma’s book of Pompeii, victims captured in their last movement before they were killed by the eruption of Vesuvius. Hardened molds of ashes and rain had preserved the shapes of the bodies long after the flesh had disintegrated.
In my mother’s studio hung a photo of her and Veronika, taken when they were nineteen, my mother tall and blond and smiling, while Veronika, nearly a head shorter, gazed seriously into the lens, her skin translucent, her neck long and slim. Sometimes I stared into the mirror and wished I looked frail like Veronika. At thirteen, I was the second-tallest girl in my class. The boys in schools liked the girls who were pretty and frail. When Veronika was a girl, she must have had dozens of boyfriends. She’d married twice, the first time a sculptor whom she’d divorced, then an Italian musician from whom she’d separated a few years before. She’d left Rome and moved to Düsseldorf, where she rented an apartment with a loft that overlooked the Rhein, but the Italian still sent her expensive handbags and matching shoes for her birthdays.
Veronika was the only divorced person I knew. She and Matthias Berger were the only adults who let me call them by their first names. With others it was always Herr or Frau or Fräulein. I liked being with Veronika, even during those visits at the sanatorium when she couldn’t remember my name. Turning the rings on her elegant fingers, she’d sit there smiling at me, asking me who I was.
On days when she couldn’t speak at all, her head would jerk forward as though she were trying to make the words fall from her mouth, and I’d think of the thousands of unspoken words crowding inside her, wishing I could help her release them. I’d feel my neck and shoulders tighten, my lips moving as if, somehow, I could form those words for her.
The doctors knew how to set free all those words, and whenever Veronika was well enough to leave the hospital, she’d move back into her apartment. She was beginning to support herself with her drawings: two galleries in Düsseldorf exhibited them, and the Rheinische Post printed a full-page interview and photos of her work.
Once or twice a month she took a cab to Burgdorf and came to our house for dinner. Those evenings I wasn’t allowed to have seconds because my parents, as soon as we’d helped ourselves, would carry the food back to the kitchen, wrap it, and store it in the refrigerator.
I discovered the reason for my parents’ odd behavior one Sunday afternoon. Red and yellow leaves lay on the walk to our front door, glistening in the rain. From my bedroom window I watched a cab let Veronika off at the curb. She almost slipped on the leaves when she saw me waving to her. Quickly, I ran to the front door and opened it.
“Hanna.” She smiled at me and untied the belt of her white hooded trenchcoat. On her thin face were raindrops, and she wiped them off with one hand.
“I was waiting for you.”
She reached into her soft leather bag and handed me a flat package. “For you.” Her fingers were smudged with charcoal.
I took off the wrapping paper. Inside was a blue diary with a lock on the front. And a key. “It’s beautiful.” I unlocked it and turned the unlined pages.
My mother came from the living room and held Veronika’s face between her hands. “You look good,” she said. “Real good.”
Veronika laughed, a happy, embarrassed laugh. “So do you,” she said and gave my mother a hug.
I knew what my mother meant: when Veronika was well, her face was wide open and smooth, but when she was in the sanatorium, it drew itself into tight fragments and lines that made her entire head appear smaller.
I went ahead of them into the dining room. Earlier, I’d helped my mother set the table with the hand-painted china that had belonged to her grandmother. In the middle of the white tablecloth sat a silver tray with six pieces of pastry, each of them different, filled with whipped cream and fruit. My mother had let me pick them out at the bakery.
Before pouring coffee for Veronika and herself, my mother added some coffee to my milk, turning it a soft caramel color.
“Where’s Klaus?” Veronika asked.
“A chess tournament,” my mother said. “In Köln. He went with Günther Stosick and two others from the chess club.” She held out the pastry tray to Veronika. “You get first choice today.”
Veronika lifted a piece to her plate. I ate slowly, savoring the whipped cream against the roof of my mouth as I tried to think how to start my diary; the first entry had to be significant; it couldn’t be just anything. Their heads close together, Veronika and my mother talked and laughed, one voice soft, the other clear and just a bit louder.
When the phone rang in the kitchen, my mother got up to answer it. I separated my last layer of pastry with my fork. Suddenly I heard a choking sound. Veronika—her lower lip sucked in, her cheeks hollow, she took ragged breaths as she stared at the pastry tray.
“Veronika?”
She blinked, her eyes large, frightened.
“Would you like another piece?” I didn’t know what else to say.
She didn’t answer.
What if she had forgotten again how to speak? “Here,” I said, “let me get one for you.”
As I reached for a piece with chocolate shavings, Veronika’s left hand shot out and her thin fingers dug themselves into my wrist. With her other hand she grasped the pastry I was about to give her, opened her mouth wide, and rammed all of it in at once. Whipped cream covered her chin; cherry filling ran down her neck and onto her lace collar. I couldn’t look away as she shoved the other two pastries and the half-eaten piece from my mother’s plate into her mouth, swallowing so hard that the skin on her neck stretched.
When she was finished, her mouth pushed into a smile. I tried to pull free of her, but she wouldn’t let go of my wrist. As we stared at each other, her pupils seemed to expand until the fear was gone and, strangely, in those dark centers I saw myself—taller and older—as if protected forever in her sketches. She had never drawn me; yet, a whole sequence of images emerged as clearly as if she were flipping the pages of her sketchbook. Knowing how she saw me, how she would draw me, took away my uneasiness and made me feel safe and close to her.
We sat like this for a while. When my mother walked back into the dining room, her blue eyes turned dark, but not angry.
“Veronika?” Gently, she pried the fingers from my wrist. “Are you all right, Hanna?”
I nodded and hugged my burning wrist.
She laid her hands on Veronika’s shoulders. Brought her face close. “Hanna is all right.”
Veronika kept smiling.
“Hanna is all right. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.” Veronika nodded.
My mother reached across the table, touched my cheek lightly. “Please, would you wait in your room?”
“But why—”
“I’ll be there,” she whispered. “As soon as I can. I promise.”
I didn’t turn on the light in my room. Standing by the window, I leaned my forehead against the cool glass, trying to evoke the images I’d seen in Veronika’s eyes, but they wouldn’t come back to me. Most of the trees along our street were already bare, their dark branches reaching toward the sky which gradually turned a deeper shade of gray. I kept seeing Veronika’s face as she’d shoved those pastries into her mouth. Why had she looked so frightened? And why had she caught my wrist? Something important had happened between us, but I didn’t know what it was.
After nearly an hour, a cab pulled up outside. Our front door opened, then closed. My mother helped Veronika into the backseat, then spoke to the driver and handed him something. She stood in the rain until the cab drove off.
When she came into my room, she put one arm around me and drew me close. “Do you want to tell me what happened?
I nodded, and afte
r I’d told her, she looked at my wrist, which really didn’t hurt anymore.
“Veronika loves you,” she said. “Very much. She’d never want to do anything that could harm you. You see—she believed she was saving your life. Ever since she was a child, she has seen things that don’t happen. Sometimes, when food is left on the table, she thinks she sees poison fall on it.”
“Poison?”
“She believes she’s the only one who can’t die from the poison. That’s why she ate all the pastries and wouldn’t let you have any.”
I wondered what the poison looked like to Veronika, if it was a fine powder or a liquid.
“Sometimes she flushes food down the toilet so nobody else can eat it. If the phone—”
“Is that why you always get everything off the table so quickly?”
My mother nodded. “I wish this hadn’t happened, Hanna.”
As she held me, I felt as if nothing bad could ever happen to either of us, and for the first time I understood the meaning of frail.
From then on, whenever Veronika came to our house, I became my mother’s accomplice in whisking everything off the table as soon as we’d helped ourselves. I wished I could ask her about the poison, where she thought it came from, and why it couldn’t harm her, and as I held back questions I sensed I shouldn’t ask I imagined those plaster casts of people killed in Pompeii—but instead of ashes and rain, a fine shower of poison fell on them, corrupting their flesh but sustaining their form in one final absolution.
One evening, while my father showed Veronika some photos he’d taken of us on the island Wangerooge the previous summer, a chocolate cake disappeared from the table. Veronika’s Italian handbag bulged and wouldn’t close. After a few minutes she excused herself and went to the bathroom. We heard the toilet flush. Twice.
My parents glanced at each other. “It’s easier for her if she thinks we don’t know,” my father said to me.
Veronika went back to the hospital three days before Christmas. When my mother and I drove out to visit her, the front lawn was covered with snow. One of the attendants called her to the visitors’ room where a Christmas tree with candles and handmade ornaments had been set up. When Veronika unwrapped the presents we’d brought for her—a yellow angora sweater and a Mozart tape—her fingers moved slowly as if she had to figure out how to untie the ribbons. My mother reached across me and helped her take off the wrapping.
One of the attendants served us Lebkuchen and spicy tea. Around the Christmas tree sat other people in small groups, talking in hushed voices, and I could tell who the patients were because they were the ones opening presents.
Veronika did not speak and sat stiffly without leaning against the backrest of the sofa. Her face was small, the skin under her eyes pink and creased. Her long neck didn’t look strong enough to bear the weight of her head. When I touched her hand, her eyes filled with tears, but then she smiled and I knew that soon she’d be well again as she had all those other times.
In the years to come, Veronika would become famous, not just in our area of the Rheinland, but throughout Germany and most of Europe. Yet, once she was known, the media acted as though her success had happened overnight, and several collectors prided themselves on having discovered her. All of this mattered very little to Veronika; what counted for her was the reaction of those who were drawn to her sketches as if responding to some fleeting image they recognized within themselves.
Baby Mansion
When Karin Baum, who was in seventh grade with me, got so big that people could tell she was carrying a baby, it didn’t take her parents long to discover that her grandfather had made her pregnant. They closed the old man’s bicycle shop and sent him to live with his unmarried brother in München, while Karin was taken to the baby mansion, a white villa with a clay-tiled roof four kilometers from Burgdorf. It was a safe place where a family could store a daughter who was gaining weight around the middle, store her for a few months, and then take her back home, slender again as though nothing had changed.
During those months of preparing for birth, the pregnant girls took care of the babies who already lived at the mansion and waited for adoption or for their mothers to finally take them home. Most of these children were in limbo: their mothers had not decided for or against adoption—they’d simply left them there. And so they stayed, growing beyond the age where people wanted to adopt them, moving from the nursery to the room of the one-year-olds to the two-plus dormitory.
On Sunday afternoons some of the unwed mothers visited their children. They gave them bright toys, carried them through the rose garden behind the mansion, played with them on the lawn that surrounded the marble fountain. A few of them brought their boyfriends. Occasionally a girl’s parents came along. In the lobby of the baby mansion a table covered with a linen cloth was set up with refreshments. A pregnant girl poured coffee and offered the visitors leaf-shaped cookies from a silver platter.
It rained the first Sunday in June when my mother and I drove out to see Karin. It was my idea to visit her, but once we were there, I didn’t know what to say or where to look. In the three weeks since she’d left school she had grown even bigger; the pleats of her loose dress spread above her stomach as she led us into the visitors’ room. Her straight brown hair, which used to hang down her back, had been cut; it exposed her earlobes, and the center part made her look serious, older.
After sitting with us for a few minutes, my mother stood up. “I’ll be back in a while,” she said and left the room before I could stop her.
Karin pulled off a shred of skin next to her left thumbnail. “So—” she said, examining her thumb, “how’s school?”
“All right.” My neck felt stiff from the effort of not staring at her belly. “How’s—you know … living here?”
She shrugged and hid with me in the embarrassed silence that folded around us until I felt as though my body, too, were swollen. Voices drifted in from the lobby. A young girl’s laugh. The sound of a door. A few times Karin reached up as if to twist a strand of hair but touched her shoulder instead.
When my mother finally returned, Karin seemed as relieved as I felt. “Let us know if you need anything,” my mother offered.
“Thank you, Frau Malter,” Karin said.
Before starting our car in the parking lot, my mother sat with her eyes closed. The collar of her cotton shirt was turned up, catching strands of blond hair between the blue material and her skin.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I should have known. …” She opened her eyes. Lit a cigarette. One hand on the steering wheel, she maneuvered the car out of the lot. She drove fast. Too fast. “I should have talked to her parents that day,” she said, “not just to the old man.”
All at once I remembered the white coating on the back of my doll’s eyes, the makeshift surgery on the dining room table, and I was seized by the loss of a friendship that had ended the year Karin and I were seven.
Until then, the bicycle shop had been a magic place for me, filled with the fairy tales Karin’s grandfather had told me, warm and bright even in winter, strangely familiar with its faint smell of machine oil and black rubber that drifted up the stairs and wove itself into the apartment above, through the kitchen, and even into Karin’s room.
Karin was my best friend before Renate came to our school. We sat next to each other in Frau Behrmeier’s second-grade class. Her grandfather knew all the fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm book: Rapunzel, Hänsel und Gretel, Rumpelstilzchen… He told those stories in a voice that could drop from the roar of a dragon to the whisper of a princess.
An old man with wide shoulders, he had a squat build that seemed to grow closer to the floor each year. He lived above the shop with Karin and her parents. In the back pocket of his overalls he carried a rag for polishing the bikes on display. Oil stains spread across the backs of his hands like birthmarks, but the bicycles were spotless and gleamed under the many light bulbs he’d rigged from the ceiling. He liked
to stroke my hair and lift me on top of the glass counter between the cash register and the display of bicycle chains. The dark smell of oil and rubber clung to his olive skin and gray mustache.
Once he took Karin and me on a ferry trip to Kaisers-werth and from there on an excursion boat to the Altstadt, the old section of Düsseldorf. At an outdoor cafe with round tables, he ordered Früchtebecher for us—layers of banana ice cream with pineapple chunks and whipped cream—and Berliner Weisse—beer with raspberry syrup foaming in a goblet—for himself. Whenever flies tried to land on the checkered tablecloth, he swatted them away with his broad hands. A maple tree on the sidewalk was shedding some of its double-winged seeds, and we caught them as they twirled down like propellers and stuck them to our upper lips like his mustache.
One Monday afternoon, when I came looking for Karin at the shop, her grandfather told me her mother had taken her to Mahler’s department store in Düsseldorf.
“Shopping,” he said.
“Can I stay?”
He pulled a rag from his pocket and wiped his hands. “Here,” he said and lifted me onto the counter next to a flowerpot shaped like a duck. It was filled with real ferns and red plastic daisies.
“Will you tell me a story?”
“How old are you now, Hanna?”
I smiled at him. “You know.”
“Come on. Tell me. How old are you?”
“Seven. Remember? You gave me a bicycle bell on my last birthday.”
“Seven.” He nodded as if not one bit surprised. In the ridges of his cheeks and across his neck lay a film of dust. “A big girl like you … doesn’t wet her pants anymore, does she?”
My neck felt hot. “Only babies wet their pants.”
He brought his face close to mine and peered into my eyes. “You’re sure?” His breath was moist against my face. Hair sprouted from his ears and nose.
“I don’t. I never do.”
On the wall behind him hung shiny bike parts and black tires. Two air pumps were propped against the lower part of the wall.