by Ursula Hegi
three
1919-1920
SHE DECIDED TO STRETCH HERSELF BY LOOPING HER LEGS OVER THE iron carpet rod out back, where Frau Blau beat the dust out of her rugs every Friday; but hanging upside down made her head so hot and heavy that she had to stop. Instead, she dragged the kitchen table into the open door frame to the living room, climbed up, and hung by her fingers from the molding till her arms and shoulders ached. Gradually she was able to endure it for longer spells. Some nights she had dreams in which she grew, and she’d feel an acute happiness in those dreams that would evaporate within moments after waking to her unchanged body.
One afternoon, when she was hanging from the door frame, her father walked from the pay-library into the kitchen to make himself a cup of Russian tea. He didn’t notice her until he’d poured a bit of the strong essence that he brewed each morning, and had diluted it with hot water to suit his taste. The cup in his hands, he turned to leave.
That’s when he saw her. “What are you doing?” He set his cup on the floor.
“Growing.”
That sudden look of pain—like when his knee would buckle under him—settled around his mouth. “You don’t need to do this.” His voice sounded hoarse, and she suddenly knew the Frau Doktor had told him about her visit.
“I’ll stop once I’m tall.”
“Not everyone needs to be tall.”
“I do.”
He opened his lips as if to tell her to get back on the floor, but instead he stood watching her and stroked his face. “Be careful, Trudi.”
She sensed that his warning didn’t have anything to do with the kind of careful that keeps you from getting injured, but that it implied a far deeper danger. “I won’t fall. See?” She swung her legs. “See what I can do?”
He caught her by the waist, lifted her down.
“No.” She squirmed from his arms and stomped one foot on the floor. “No.”
“Come,” he said. “I need your help outside.” He asked her to carry his teacup into the backyard, where he raked the dry dirt. As his long arms drew the rake toward his body, he kept stepping backward toward the grassy area that ran all the way down to the brook. His hair had been cropped at the barbershop the day before, and the tight, pale curls clung to his scalp like the fur of Trudi’s toy lamb.
“It’s not the falling,” he said. “We all have to do some of that.”
Her eyes followed the bamboo teeth of the rake as they caught clumps of debris and left fine, even ridges of earth.
“You are perfect the way you are,” he said as if to convince himself.
She swallowed, hard, and clenched her fingers around her father’s cup. He had never lied to her before.
From that day on, she made sure to hang from the door frame of her upstairs bedroom and to get down whenever she heard her father’s steps. Already, her arms were getting stronger, and she took pride in carrying heavier stacks of books from the counter to the shelves when she helped her father arrange them back into place. Soon her legs would be long enough to pedal her own bicycle when she rode with her father to the cemetery or the river, instead of sitting between his outstretched arms on the leather seat—shaped exactly like his seat, only smaller—that he’d bolted to the front of his bicycle.
She liked to help him dry the dishes after he’d washed them in the two metal tubs: one filled with hot water that he’d heated on the kitchen stove, the other with cold water for rinsing off the soap. Afterwards he’d settle her on his knees and read to her from the special books that he didn’t lend out to customers, books by Stefan Zweig and Heinrich Mann and Arthur Schnitzler, which he kept in the living room on shelves with glass fronts. Even if Trudi didn’t understand much of what her father read to her, she listened closely and turned the pages for him.
Some of those books were bound in leather and felt precious to the touch. It bothered Trudi when her father took them into the bathroom. He’d always stay too long, smoking and reading, and if she had to use the toilet after he’d get out, she’d hold her pee because the air in there would be hazy with the stench of cigarettes and shit.
Every evening she tried to stay up as late as her father would let her, coaxing him into reading her another story after he told her it was time for bed, or climbing on his knees to snatch the comb he carried in his shirt pocket and press it into his fingers so he’d comb her hair. She was afraid of the empty sewing room on the floor above her bedroom because, with each night, it grew larger, its emptiness threatening to absorb the entire house. Only her mother’s presence could have stopped that emptiness from expanding. Even as an old woman Trudi would be haunted by images of herself as a small girl returning to that door behind which her mother used to be confined, receiving no answer when she knocked. She’d see her father pull her away, gently, trying to console her with reasons that he didn’t seem to believe himself: “Your mother has found a more peaceful place.” And she’d see herself lift the Abramowitzs’ mirror from its hook in the sewing room and carry it into the living room on the day she would finally understand that she would not see her mother again.
But when she was four, Trudi hadn’t arrived at that recognition—not even when her father and Herr Hesping, who stopped by nearly every day for tobacco on his way to the gymnasts’ club in Düsseldorf, carried the velvet sofa down two flights of stairs and positioned it by the back window in the living room; not even when Frau Blau helped her father empty her mother’s wardrobe and gave everything to the church for the poor, except two silk scarves and one pair of suede gloves, which Trudi managed to hide beneath her skirt; not even when, after mass, she found a carved cross on her mother’s grave that seemed to have grown from the rich earth since the previous Sunday.
Her father was looking at the cross, his eyes like the bottom of the brook that ran behind their house. The cross had a slender roof above Christ’s crown of thorns, and beneath his feet were two panels with raised letters: one panel displayed her mother’s name and two dates—her year of birth, 1885, and the year of the funeral, 1919—the other was for her brother, his death the same date as his birth. Her brother’s name was Horst, and until she saw the cross, Trudi hadn’t even known that her parents had named him.
She hoped her father had managed to christen her brother before he’d died. If not, her brother was a pagan baby. Next to the holy water basin in church stood a collection box where you could leave money for pagan babies. Painted on the front of the box was a picture of Jesus with children sitting on his lap. Trudi worried how the money could get to the babies if they were already in limbo.
Pagan babies, she knew, could live right in your town or in Africa or in China. As long as they weren’t christened, the priest said, they were pagan babies. Protestant babies were pagan babies, even though their skin was white. Jewish babies were like Protestant babies, except that Jews prayed in a synagogue and didn’t believe in Jesus. Protestants believed in Jesus but they didn’t believe the right things. Ever since her brother’s funeral, it seemed, she’d heard about other babies who’d died. Nearly every family had a dead baby. The Buttgereits had three dead babies. They were in heaven with the Baby Jesus now.
Only Catholics could go to heaven, Frau Buttgereit had told Trudi. But not if they had sinned. Sins took you into purgatory, which was half way between heaven and hell. Heaven was where angels in white gowns floated around the Baby Jesus, and hell was where Lucifer tortured pagans and Catholics who had died without confessing their mortal sins. Lucifer used to be an angel before he fell from the sky and became the devil. Purgatory was hot, but not as hot as hell. You had to stay in purgatory until you had suffered for your sins or until people on earth—Catholic people, that is—had prayed enough for your soul to release you from purgatory. Like Frau Weiler, who prayed eight Hail Marys every night to get her mother released from purgatory. In twelve more years her mother, who had died as a very old woman, would rise to heaven. Her stepfather, Frau Weiler said, was in hell anyhow—no reason to waste good prayers on
him.
• • •
Two months after Gertrud Montag’s funeral, Leo’s sister, Helene, arrived from America with her son, Robert, who was Trudi’s age. They had taken an ocean liner from New York to Bremen, and the afternoon they reached Burgdorf by train it was raining so hard that—with their drenched clothes and hair—they looked exactly as Trudi had imagined travelers who’d crossed vast bodies of water.
Though Robert was far taller and heavier than she, his features looked so much like hers that—within minutes of his arrival—she dragged him in front of her mother’s mirror and made him sit on his heels so that his shoulders were at the same level with hers. Somberly, both children stared at their reflections: the solid Montag chins and foreheads, the silver-blond hair—though his was plastered to his temples—and for a moment Trudi actually believed that they were the same height. But then Robert straightened his body, and the buttons of his jacket appeared in the mirror.
Trudi stepped back. “Most of my growing is supposed to happen next winter,” she announced, and when Robert nodded as if not one bit surprised, she added, “It’s supposed to start the week after Christmas.”
Robert had brought her gifts from America: a red wooden fish on wheels, a silver egg cup, china dishes for her dolls. He spoke English as well as German and taught her how to count to ten in English, while she taught him the words to her favorite song, “Alle Vögel sind schon da.…”—“All the birds are already here.…” He was quick to find any song on the piano, and she’d watch, mesmerized, as his round fingers bounced across the black and white keys, linking notes into melodies. In America, he told her, he had a piano teacher who came to his apartment every Tuesday and Friday.
“I want to have lessons too,” Trudi informed her father.
“Maybe once I can afford them.”
Where Robert was thoughtful and accommodating, Trudi was bold and quickly established herself as the leader. He followed her everywhere—beneath the house, where they caught strawberry bugs and played with the boxes in which the books were delivered; to the fairgrounds and the bakery; to the taxidermist’s shop, where Herr Heidenreich was so glad to see them that he gave them each a glass eye and let them stroke the glossy fur of the cocker spaniel he was stuffing; to the post office, where they waited in line by the sliding window to buy stamps for the letters Robert’s mother sent to America.
At forty, Helene Blau still blushed easily and walked with the awkward movements of the young girl who had grown too quickly and had never become accustomed to her height and the wide span of her shoulders; yet, oddly, it was just that awkwardness which now made her seem younger than other women her age. She was as brilliant and inquisitive as she had been as a girl, and since her brother, Leo, was one of the few people she didn’t feel shy with, she sat with him in the library or the brown living room—which felt dark even in daylight—and the two of them talked for hours about their children and about those paths in their lives which they had to walk alone.
Leo was able to ask her the question that had tortured him ever since his wife’s death—if Gertrud would have been happier living in the city, where she had been born.
“She would have told you,” Helene said.
“Maybe I should have taken her back to the city anyhow.”
“You were good for her.”
“You think so?”
His sister nodded. “Gertrud was—unusual.” She saw the tightening in his shoulders and continued gently, “I loved that in her—even when both of you were still children.”
She persuaded him to take down the photos of his dead wife, and—for the duration of her visit—he placed them between the pages of the wildflower book that he kept by his bed. When she found him a washwoman, who came to the house one day a week and boiled laundry in the cellar, Trudi and Robert watched while the woman built a fire beneath the huge kettle, which was set into bricks, and stirred the soapy liquid with a wooden paddle.
Helene urged Leo to rejoin the chess club he’d belonged to ever since he’d been a boy but hadn’t returned to since Gertrud’s illness. The second Monday evening of her visit he dressed in his good suit and left for the Stosicks’ house where, for four generations, the chess players of Burgdorf had met and collected hundreds of chess books that contained all the great moves of history. Though Leo was still one of the strongest players in town, the game didn’t give him the same thrill of competition as gymnastics once had: in chess he was competing against himself, rather than an opponent.
The men would take the chess sets from the birch wardrobe, sit down at the long tables, and play, their silence punctuated only by punched chess clocks and the clipped warning: “Schach”—“Check.” The white tablecloths would ripple, stirred by the rhythm of restless knees. Gradually, as it got warmer in the room, they’d take off their jackets and sit there in their suspenders.
Elated at having another child in the house, Trudi couldn’t wait to get up in the mornings. She showed Robert how to tie handkerchief diapers on the white toy lamb that Alexander Sturm had given her, and they took turns nursing it by pressing its fleecy nose against their nipples. Down by the brook, they balanced on a plank across the water. They picked the last daisies of summer and took them to the cemetery, where they set them into the pointed vase on the Montags’ family grave. When they searched for the grave with the hand of the woman sticking out, they couldn’t find it, and Trudi led Robert instead to the other grave that intrigued her, that of Herr Höffenauer, who’d been struck by lightning at his mother’s gravesite.
It had happened long before Trudi was born, and she told Robert the story she’d heard—along with a few embellishments that came to her as she went along. This teacher, Herr Höffenauer, had lived with his widowed mother long past the age when other men leave their mothers’ houses to start families of their own. He had taken care of her until he was old enough to have grandchildren, and after she’d died, he’d visited her grave each day after teaching school—standing right where she and Robert stood that very moment—until, one stormy afternoon, he’d been felled by lightning while peeling a fleck of moss from the face of his mother’s gravestone.
She took Robert to meet Frau Abramowitz, who served them pralines and rosehip tea. While Frau Abramowitz practiced her English with Robert, Trudi played with the silver spice box that used to belong to Herr Abramowitz’s grandmother, who’d been born in this house. She could smell the aromatic spices inside the box, which was shaped like a tower with filigreed balconies and a tiny silver banner on top. When they looked at pictures of pyramids in the travel brochures that lay on the table, Trudi pretended to herself that Frau Abramowitz would take her along on her next trip. People on the train would think she was her mother. All the children she knew had mothers. Lots of children didn’t have fathers, but that was because of the war.
“Let me see your handkerchief,” Frau Abramowitz insisted when Trudi and Robert were about to leave. She had embroidered ten handkerchiefs for Trudi, and she liked to make sure she always carried one folded inside her pocket. Clean handkerchiefs were part of good manners—Trudi knew that because Frau Abramowitz had informed her the week after her mother’s funeral that she would teach her good manners from now on. “Children learn good manners from women,” she’d said.
Good manners meant not poking your finger into your nose and not interrupting grown-ups when they talked. Good manners meant offering your seat on the streetcar to grown-ups, bending to pick up things that grown-ups dropped, and opening doors for grown-ups. Already, Trudi had figured out that good manners could keep you real busy.
Good manners had a lot to do with grown-ups and with what children did or did not do around them. She’d been told all along by grown-ups that it wasn’t polite to stare at them, but how could you see people if you didn’t look at them? And about honesty … Grown-ups were always saying you had to be honest, but that only meant you could say good things about them and bad things about yourself. If you said bad things about them, you
were rude, and if you said good things about yourself, you were bragging. She couldn’t wait to be a grown-up because grown-ups were always right—except for grownups who were maids or cooks or servants: they had to be obedient like children.
“Come back soon,” Frau Abramowitz called after them as they ran down her front steps.
In front of St. Martin’s Church, Herr Neumaier, the pharmacist, was honoring the death of Christ as he did every Friday afternoon between three and four. Over the years, quite a few members of the congregation had complained to Herr Pastor Schüler that the pharmacist’s ritual was excessive—a spectacle, they called it—and it had become a game for the children of Burgdorf to follow the thin-lipped pharmacist, whose fleshy cheeks grew even more distended as he staggered around the church square, cradling a bulky Jesus statue which he’d pried off a cross that had come from a demolished church in France.
“He lives all alone with that statue,” Trudi told Robert as they trailed the pharmacist, who was chanting verses from the Bible. A tunic sewn from a potato sack flapped around his suit. “The statue sleeps on a cot. He covers it like a baby… up to the neck with a feather quilt.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw it—once.… When my father was buying cough medicine. I sneaked into the storage room. You want me to take you there?”
“No,” Robert said quickly, “no,” his eyes on the statue which bobbed up and down in the pharmacist’s trembling arms. Its skin was the color of vanilla pudding, while the crown of thorns and streaks of dried blood were the brown of beef liver.