by Ursula Hegi
“Really sure?” His hand reached under my skirt and pressed against the dry patch of cotton panties between my legs. “You’re sure now you don’t wet your pants?”
“I told you.” Squirming away from him, I slid from the counter and ran toward the door.
“Wait.” His voice sounded as if he were afraid. “The story. I’ll tell you a—”
But I kept running. Down the sidewalk that shimmered white in the afternoon sun. Across the empty street. Around the corner. Past the elementary school where the Hansen bakery truck was parked. Kept running until I reached our building. In the kitchen Frau Brocker was ironing my plaid dress. Rolf sat at the table, drawing a black truck.
“Where’s Karin?” Fine beads of sweat coated Frau Brocker’s forehead as she moved the iron across the material. Her brown hair lay in new curls around her head, and she wore bright red lipstick.
“I don’t know.” I darted past her into my room and closed the door.
“Hanna?” she called after me, but I pretended not to hear.
I sat on my bed and looked out the window into the backyard with the chicken coop and the high iron rods over which the women from the apartments laid their carpets every Friday and beat them with long rattan paddles. The fence that closed off the backyard had several rows of chain links that didn’t match the lower section. Until two years ago, when I was first allowed out on my own, my father had drawn the fence higher each year; still, I’d managed to climb across it on my many trips to explore the neighborhood. It had started when, at age three, I’d been found sitting on Emma Müller’s bed two blocks away, playing with her dolls.
I didn’t play with dolls anymore. They were boring. I liked books; yet, people kept giving me dolls. Frau Brocker had lined them up on the shelf next to my bed, from the tallest one, Inge, to a finger-sized doll named Birgit.
Inge was made of celluloid and had blue glass eyes that closed when I tilted her back. Her eyelashes lay against her cheeks until I moved her whole body forward again and then her eyes clicked open, hard and glossy. When I pulled the eyelashes, the blue disappeared once more, and I wondered what the doll saw inside her head.
I carried her to the open window where the light was brighter. Such a stupid-looking doll—all stiff and pink. As I pushed my fingers against the eyes to test how far in they could go, they moved back from their sockets, then snapped right back. I pushed again to see how they were held in place. Then again, a little harder … Suddenly the eyes disappeared into the head. Just like that. I shook the doll, her face pointing toward the floor, but the eyes wouldn’t drop back into their sockets; they only rattled inside the celluloid head.
“Frau Brocker,” I shouted, then covered my mouth. I didn’t want her to see the doll, didn’t want anyone to see.
The door opened. I wanted to hide the doll, but I couldn’t move.
“What’s the matter?” My father came into my room.
The doll hung from my hand. I thought he’d get angry at me for breaking her eyes, but instead he lifted her from my hands as if she were a newborn kitten.
“How did it happen?”
I started to cry.
He brought one arm around my shoulders. “I’m sure it was an accident.”
“I don’t even like dolls.” I wiped the back of my hand across my eyes and nose. My stomach ached from letting him believe it was an accident.
“I think we can fix her. At least we can try. All right?”
My father had finished with his patients for the day and took most of that afternoon to restore the blue eyes to their proper location. With thin pliers, black thread, and tweezers he sat at our dining room table, fishing through the empty sockets for the eyeballs. I sat across from him and handed him instruments as he called out their names. The light above the table made his scalp look shiny where his reddish hair had thinned; yet, his beard was full and curly as if all the growing had happened in those hairs.
Around five o’clock large raindrops began falling rapidly, splattering the windows. On the wall between the two windows hung my mother’s painting of the Sternburg, the one she’d been working on the day she fell in love with my father. She’d painted the Sternburg many times since then, but in this picture the drawbridge was down, spanning the moat that circled the old farm. The light in the painting would change: on sunny days it looked almost transparent while in the evenings, when we turned on the lamps, it took on an amber sheen as if warmed by the light surrounding it.
My father still had on the white jacket that he wore when he drilled people’s teeth. When Frau Brocker and Rolf came into the dining room to tell us they were leaving for the day, he interrupted his operation to praise Rolf’s picture of the black truck. Frau Brocker stopped by the window, frowning at the rain. Her hair was covered with a plastic scarf to protect her permanent.
I ran my fingers along the edge of the tablecloth and found the knife she’d hidden under the beige linen to ward off the lightning. After they left, my father bent back over the doll. From time to time he blinked. His breathing was slow, measured. When he finally pulled the blue eyes from one of the sockets, they were connected by two wire loops that formed the number eight, and I was disappointed to see that their backs were coated with a white substance that felt like hardened flour against my fingertips. My father glued the eyes into the sockets, holding them in slings of thread until the glue set; then he cautiously pulled out the threads and applied more glue around the seams where the glass joined the pink celluloid. Though he dabbed the corners with an old handkerchief, some of the glue hardened into tiny drops that looked like tears.
“Here.” He handed me the doll. “I think that’s the best we can do.”
The blue eyes stared at me and stayed open although the doll was lying on its back.
“She’s almost like new,” I tried to convince myself as I held the stiff doll in my arms. But she was not like new: she couldn’t close her eyes anymore, and inside her head the backs of her eyes were blind.
Around eight my father left to play chess at the Burgdorf chess club, which met at Herr Stosick’s house. When my mother tucked me in and sat on the edge of my bed, my stomach felt even worse from not telling her and my father how I’d broken the doll.
“Karin’s grandfather forgot how old I was,” I blurted out instead. “He thought I still wet my pants.”
She shook her head. “Why would he …?”
I tried to laugh away my uneasiness. “But then he checked, and now he knows I don’t.”
My mother sat very still. The skin around her nose became white as though all the color had drained to her neck. She laid one hand against my cheek and asked softly, “Are you all right?” And when I nodded, she gathered me into her arms and said, “Will you please tell me? Everything?”
I told her about pushing out the doll’s eyes and that I was sorry, but she wanted to know more about Karin’s grandfather touching my underpants. As I told her, she held me gently and said that what he’d done to me was wrong. “Very wrong.” Then she got up and put on her raincoat and walked to the bicycle shop.
I kept the light on and lay with my arms folded under my head, counting my breaths in the empty apartment. On the shelf next to my bed sat Inge, her blue eyes wide open, opaque drops of hardened glue in the corners of the sockets.
My mother didn’t tell me what she’d said to Karin’s grandfather when she came back into my room, but she asked me, “Will you promise to stay away from the bicycle shop?”
I thought of the bicycle parts reflecting the lights, thought of the cool glass counter and felt the sudden loss of a place I didn’t want to return to.
“It’s a filthy place,” my mother said.
Yet it was also warm and bright and magic.
“Promise to stay away from there?”
I nodded, suddenly relieved.
“Karin can play with you here. Anytime.” My mother bent to kiss my forehead. “I’m glad you told me what happened.”
My frien
dship with Karin Baum straggled on through that fall and winter. We played in the schoolyard or at our house, but not in the bicycle shop. And the following spring Renate became my new best friend.
Some things are too complex to name, to separate into safe units labeled good or bad, and it becomes simpler to discard them entirely. I think that’s what happened to my friendship with Karin, and it wasn’t until she carried her grandfather’s baby, that I came to understand the impact of losing her.
My first visit to the baby mansion was so awkward that I felt reluctant to return when my mother wrapped a box of pralines and a book for Karin a week later. But something happened that second Sunday afternoon in the visitors’ room, something I couldn’t even remember afterward except that Karin had laughed at something I’d said. Somehow that moment wiped out the embarrassment between us, and when my mother suggested the two of us take a walk through the rose garden, Karin and I left her in the visitors’ room and walked along the manicured paths.
The people in Burgdorf didn’t approve of my mother taking me to the baby mansion; they approved even less of me riding my bicycle there some days after school, as if unwed pregnancies were contagious. But the only thing that was contagious was our need to fill each other in on what had happened to us during those years we hadn’t been friends. Sure, we’d sat in the same classroom, and a few times we’d played pranks, unhinging garden doors all over Burgdorf, but that was not the same.
And so we talked for hours—in the visiting room, the rose garden, and the nursery where Karin worked. We talked about friends and school and boys and parents. But not about her baby. And certainly not about her grandfather, although I thought about the old man whenever I tried not to look at Karin’s belly.
She was assigned to work each afternoon in the dormitory of the one-year-olds, a long, airy room with rows of cribs. When school closed for summer vacation, I asked Karin if I could help her with the babies, and she got permission from Frau Doktor Korten, who ran the baby mansion, for me to help two afternoons a week. The doctor had small hands and a gentle voice, but she was so heavy and tall that she could fill a door frame with her bulk. Her gray hair was parted down the middle like Karin’s, but pulled back into a low braided knot. When she walked into the nursery—a white smock over her flowered silk dress—most of the children raised their arms toward her.
Two sixteen-year old girls, Anita and Grete, worked with us. We fed the babies, took off their diapers and shirts, gave them baths in high sinks shaped like miniature tubs. We laughed when they splashed us and when we sprinkled powder on their bottoms and bellies.
Anita was at the baby mansion for the second time. She’d given up her first child for adoption. One afternoon, when Anita told us she was going to keep this baby, Karin surprised me by saying she was keeping hers too. Until then she hadn’t said a word about it.
“Hanna is going to help me care for the baby after school.” She reached for my hand and held it against her belly.
I felt the baby move under my palm like a sleeper stretching after a long rest.
For the first time we talked about names for her child. She liked Adelheid for a girl and Siegfried for a boy, though I tried to tell her that Martina and Joachim were better names. If my brother, Joachim, had lived, he’d be eleven years old.
A few of the babies had something wrong with them: Andrea was blind, and Franz only had a thumb and little finger on his left hand. Renate told me that marrying a cousin could get you a baby with two heads or a clubfoot. Her mother, the midwife, had helped bring all kinds of deformed babies into the world. “A grandfather,” Renate told me, “is even a closer relative than a cousin.” She probably said this because she was upset at me for spending so much time with Karin; yet, I couldn’t help imagining the baby behind the wall of Karin’s belly, waiting backstage like an actor with a frightful mask.
But when the child was born in September, she wasn’t ugly or deformed. She had fine black hair and blue-gray eyes and thin fingers that gripped my thumb the afternoon I was allowed to hold her. She was two days old, and I felt a jolt of love that stunned me into silence as I stood with her in the newborn nursery. I carried her to the French doors and lifted her close to the glass so she could see the rose garden and the fountain. I pictured myself taking her for walks in a wicker carriage. Now that Karin’s grandfather didn’t live above the bicycle shop anymore, I’d be allowed back into the apartment. Karin and I would play with her, give her baths, sing to her.
But Karin’s parents wouldn’t let her bring the baby home. They talked about adoption. At first Karin cried and refused to leave the mansion, but one evening, after a long talk with Frau Doktor Korten, she let her father pick her up. When I visited Karin, I felt strange walking through the bicycle shop. It had been leased to a young man without a mustache, but the same old smell of tires and machine oil hung about the apartment and opened an odd sensation in my stomach.
Karin sat on her bed, a stack of closed books and magazines on her blanket. Her hair was stringy. “They wouldn’t even let me name her.” She started to cry.
“They can’t do that.” I sat on the edge of her bed. “If you don’t sign the adoption papers, they can’t give her to anyone.”
“But then she’ll have to stay there.”
“We’ll visit her. And after a while—maybe your parents will change their minds.”
“They won’t.” She shook her head. “I know they won’t.”
Right then I decided to name the baby Martina even if she got adopted and her new parents chose a different name for her, and the next afternoon I rode my bike to the baby mansion and offered to help in the newborn nursery on weekends.
“Let’s go for a walk in the garden,” Frau Doktor Korten suggested. As she moved along the paths, soft ripples went through her body and made the flowers in her dress shiver. She told me I’d helped Karin a lot while she’d been there, but that it would be better for me if I didn’t come back. “And for the baby,” she said. “You’ve become too attached.” Beneath her skirt her thighs made a soft, slapping sound.
“Martina can sleep in my room,” I said to my parents at dinner. “Frau Brocker is here all day anyhow, and I’ll take care of the baby after school.”
“I know you love her a lot,” my mother said, “but it wouldn’t be good for her if she stayed in Burgdorf—for her or for Karin. She’d only be reminded of her all the time.”
My father laid one hand on my arm. “Try to understand. You’re too young to take on that kind of responsibility.”
“But Karin could visit her here. She’d help—I know she would.”
My mother shook her head.
“If you adopted her … I mean, if Joachim hadn’t died—”
“But he did, Hanna,” my father said softly.
They both assured me that Martina would find a family of her own who really wanted her, that it would be better for her to live away from here, but I didn’t want to listen: all I knew was how unfair it was that Martina should be punished for who her father was. Though my parents didn’t say so, I knew it was all about that. Martina had been banned from Karin’s life, just as I had been banned from the bicycle shop. And all because of Karin’s grandfather—not because either of us had done anything wrong.
When Karin came back to school, the other kids didn’t quite know what to say to her, especially Renate. I tried to do things with them together, but since they didn’t like each other, I split my time between them, riding bikes with Renate or sitting in Karin’s room above the bicycle shop. Karin seemed so much older than the other kids, and when I was with her, I felt almost grown up. She was thin again and the ends of her hair touched her shoulders. Her parents hadn’t taken her back to the baby mansion—not even once—and she wasn’t allowed to ride her bicycle there.
“They’d find out,” she said when I tried to talk her into riding out there with me one Saturday morning. “And I promised not to.”
Martina was two months old when Karin�
��s parents convinced her to sign the adoption papers. When she told me the next day in school, it struck me that, lately, entire days had gone by without my thinking of Martina, and I felt as if I’d been the one to abandon her.
“Maybe it is better for her,” Karin said, “getting two parents who love her.” But those words didn’t sound like her own, and the skin around her eyes looked puffy.
I left her standing in the tiled hallway and ran out to the bicycle rack. The November sun stood low in the sky as I rode my bike to the baby mansion. I had to do something, but I didn’t know what. When I tried to picture myself riding back, Martina in one arm, I couldn’t see beyond that. My parents certainly wouldn’t let me bring her home, and I couldn’t just hide her in our basement. Some of the puddles along the way had glazed over with skins of ice that tore under my bicycle tires.
In back of the mansion the rosebushes had been pruned and the fountain turned off. I leaned my bike against a hedge and walked up the steps to the flagstone terrace. The French doors of the newborn nursery were locked. Martina’s crib stood close to the glass panes: she lay on her back, awake; her black hair had grown fuller and looked as if someone had recently brushed it. A clean sheet covered her legs. Though her features hadn’t changed, she seemed larger, stronger than the infant I’d held in my arms. She raised her right arm as if tracing an invisible sketch in the air, and I pressed my palms against the cool window squares, wishing I could feel the same love for her that I’d felt in the beginning, but all I could have was an odd sense of peace.
The Woman Who Would Not Speak
Manfred Weiler’s father hung himself when Manfred was six years old. A few hours after he held Manfred out of the window of their third-floor apartment, he tied a length of rope to the cast-iron lamp in the kitchen and—while the rest of Burgdorf celebrated the passing of the old year, 1952—slipped the rope around his neck and stepped off a chair, though he didn’t mean to.
One winter morning, years after his death, when Manfred and I were sitting in the same algebra class, I looked at him from the side and it was as if I could see his father’s vicelike palms around his temples, holding him suspended above the night. I imagined those hands closing around my head, imagined the endless drop from the third floor to the packed dirt of the backyard, felt a cold surprise that made my spine and feet heavy, stiff, and felt the sudden rush of icy night air moving upward through my body.