by Ursula Hegi
“He doesn’t speak to anyone in his family.”
Robert looked down into Trudi’s wide face, tilted toward him, the blue eyes filled with excitement as she waited for him to ask, Why not? “Why not?” he asked.
“Because …” she whispered, “his daughter, see, she married a Protestant.… They live on the same block with him. But he won’t say a word to them. Not even to his grandchildren. Or to his wife. She moved in with the daughter.”
“Is that why he goes around with the statue?”
Trudi didn’t know the answer to his question, and Robert asked it again that evening when—as every evening since his arrival—they all went next door to the Blaus for dinner with his grandparents and his Aunt Margret.
“The pharmacist is a crazy man,” his grandmother said.
His grandfather hushed her by saying, “Be careful what you say aloud. You wouldn’t want him to hear.” His teeth made a funny clicking sound.
His grandmother shook her head and ladled too many Brussels sprouts on Trudi’s plate. “I’m not afraid to tell him right to his face.”
“What Herr Neumaier does is like praying the rosary,” Leo Montag told the boy. “Only more so. Some people think if you do a certain ritual—especially to do with suffering—your sins are forgiven.”
Frau Blau leaned over and planted a kiss on top of Robert’s head. Only a few months earlier Trudi had been glad that Frau Blau was not her grandmother, but she now felt so jealous that she pinched Robert’s arm. Instantly, Frau Blau took her by the shoulders and marched her into the living room, where she set up a Katzentisch— cat table—a small separate table where children who misbehaved had to eat alone.
But on the way home, Robert played hide-and-seek with her in the dusk, and they found a bee squirming in a spider’s web behind the Blaus’ house. While Trudi sent Robert to fetch his grandfather’s sewing scissors, she stood watch over the spider, which darted from a crevice in the wall and disappeared without touching the bee. When Robert returned with the scissors, he cautiously cut the bee free without destroying the net.
Saturday, while her father stoked the tall cylinder-shaped stove in the bathroom for the weekly bath, Trudi took her aunt into her room and showed her the funeral coat that had been made from Stefan’s jacket.
Helene ran one finger down the sleeve and said she’d tell Stefan because he’d be glad to know. “Someday you’ll have to visit us.”
“When?”
“Any time your father wants to bring you.… You know what you can do before that? Talk to your uncle on the telephone.”
“In America?”
Her aunt nodded. “Frau Abramowitz said she’d let me use her phone.”
The Abramowitzs were one of the few families in Burgdorf who owned a phone. It had to do with being upper class. Usually the people who had phones also had maids and hired seamstresses who came to their houses several days each month to sew new clothes or make alterations. Employers competed with one another in feeding those seamstresses the most delicious meals—a practice that had little to do with generosity but rather with the expectation that the seamstresses would gossip to their other employers about how well they had been treated.
While some people with phones didn’t let their neighbors use them, the Abramowitzs were always glad to take messages for you or invite you into their living room to make calls. Trudi had heard the phone ring when she’d been at their house, and she’d listened to Frau Abramowitz answer it, but she’d never used it herself.
“I don’t know how,” she told her aunt.
“I’ll show you.” Her aunt glanced around the room. “This used to be my room when I was a girl. Stefan’s sister, Margret, was my best friend, and her bedroom was right across the way. We passed notes to each other from our windows.… You want the first bath?”
Trudi nodded.
“Raise your arms.” Her aunt lifted the hem of Trudi’s dress and pulled it over her head. Her fingers undid the button that fastened Trudi’s undershirt to her billowy cotton pants.
In the bathroom, her aunt sat on the edge of the tub and made Trudi stand while she washed her hair and soaped her back with a sponge.
“Robert says in America children call grown-ups by their first names.”
Her aunt nodded. “That’s what my husband liked best when he first came to America.” She smiled. “I rather missed the formality.”
“Why?” Trudi sat down in the warm water and swished her legs back and forth.
“Maybe because I was older when I went to America and used to things being a certain way. Stefan was a boy when he immigrated.” She asked Trudi to lean back so she could rinse the soap from her scalp. “He didn’t come back for me until nearly twenty years later.”
“My father says you were his third bride.”
Again, her aunt smiled, but this time her smile looked sad. “They died young, his other wives. Stefan needed a mother for his children.”
“Maybe they didn’t die,” Trudi offered.
Her aunt looked at her closely.
“Maybe they only pretended.”
“Why would they do that?”
“So no one can lock them up.”
Her aunt lifted Trudi from the tub and dried her, carefully. “She is gone—your mother,” she said and carried Trudi into her bedroom.
“You know that, don’t you?”
Trudi didn’t answer.
Her aunt combed the tangles from Trudi’s hair and braided it for the night. “She really is gone,” she said as she bent to kiss her good night.
When Trudi was allowed to speak on the phone to Uncle Stefan in America, his voice was thin and crackled into her ear.
Seized by a sudden longing for this uncle she’d never met, she shouted, “I’m coming to visit you.”
“You don’t have to yell,” Frau Abramowitz whispered to her.
“That’s good,” her uncle was saying. “I’m glad. Bring your father too.”
Aunt Helene and Robert stayed for five weeks, and before they left, Trudi gave Robert her white lamb and an egg-shaped rock she’d found in the brook. For days after their departure, she kept looking for Robert, expecting to hear his quiet laugh. She’d never known what it was like to have a friend. To be alone again felt as though a part of her had vanished along with him. It was different than with grown-ups leaving. You knew they were not like you.
“When can we visit Robert?” she asked her father.
“It’s very far,” he said. “And too expensive.”
“But when?”
“Maybe once you’re older.…”
She’d lie in her bed and stare through her window at the dark window across the alley. At least Aunt Helene used to have a friend close by when she’d lived here. But now Margret’s old room was a storage space for bolts of cloth and dummies and sewing-machine parts. She felt impatient to start school, the place where, she believed, she would have friends like Robert. But school was still more than a year away, and the children in the neighborhood and those who came with their parents to borrow books or buy tobacco, shied away from Trudi as if afraid she’d touch them and make them look like her.
Except for Georg Weiler next door. But only because he was different from other children too. A boy who looked like a girl. Though he and Trudi had always been aware of each other, they didn’t become friends until the day he asked her why her head was so big.
To stop the sting of his question, she shot right back at him, “It’s smaller than yours.”
They sat on the brick steps outside their buildings, she in front of the pay-library, he in front of his parents’ grocery store. The low winter sun was in their eyes, and he was playing with his marbles, lining them up along the bottom step.
“It looks bigger,” he insisted.
“It’s regular size.” Her neck began to itch. “It’s the rest of me that’s small. That’s why it looks big.… But it isn’t.”
He had to think about that. His eyes pushed at her
. They were the color of fine sand. “I bet you my best marble your head’s bigger than mine.”
“Let me see the marble.”
“Georg.…” Frau Weiler stuck her head from the store. Her scarf had slipped back a little, and coils of gray trailed around her face as though she’d been out in the wind. The center part in her hair had been so long in the same place that it had widened, showing the scalp beneath. “Georg!”
Georg flinched.
“Get those marbles off the stairs. You don’t want customers tripping over them and breaking their necks and being crippled for the rest of their lives.”
Trudi took a deep breath. It was a lot to consider all at once, even though she was used to Frau Weiler’s predictions of gloom: if you walked in the woods, you could get a rash from the Brennesseln; if you didn’t chew your food properly, you’d end up with holes in your stomach before you were twenty; if you forgot to confess a mortal sin, you were sure to end up in hell.…
Georg scooped up his marbles.
His mother closed the door, but her voice stayed out there with the children: “… and then they’ll sue us and we’ll lose the store … everything I’ve worked for.…”
Georg held a red and yellow glass ball, the size of a cherry, toward the sun. It glinted. “What do I get if you lose?”
“I won’t lose.”
“Yes, you will.”
“Then you can have all my marbles.”
The door opened again, and Georg’s mother appeared with two cups of steaming cocoa, her eyes as sorrowful as ever. “Don’t drink it too fast. You’ll burn your tongues.”
“Danke, Frau Weiler.”
“Danke, Mutter”
“And don’t you spill any on your clothes.” She headed back into the store.
The cocoa was hot and sweet. A rash wind blew leaves across the sidewalk, their dry edges whispering against stone. Trudi caught a leaf from the chestnut tree, and as she tried to uncurl it, it crumbled in her hands. She wished Robert were here instead of Georg. With his mother’s last letter, he’d enclosed a picture he’d drawn of himself playing the piano.
“Even your shoes don’t look like boys’ shoes,” she told Georg.
“And you—you’re just a girl.”
“That’s why I wear a dress.”
He glared at her.
She glared right back. “And long hair,” she said.
“Get a string,” he ordered.
“What for?”
“To measure our heads.”
“You get it.”
“My mother won’t let me out again.” He tilted his head and directed a sudden smile at her. “Please, Trudi?”
She hesitated.
“Please please please, Trudi?”
She knew how to defend herself against his bullying, but not his charm. Dashing into the pay-library, she emerged with an end of string that had been tied around a recent delivery of romances.
“You first,” he said.
Her head held high, she walked over to the entrance of the grocery store and climbed on the step above him. Still, her nose didn’t even reach his shoulders. A dog barked from the direction of the market place. Wind slipped between her collar and her skin, cold and sudden, and rattled the wooden shutters outside the pay-library.
Bringing the string around her forehead, Georg measured carefully and marked it with a knot; when she wound the string around his head above his ears, it was a finger’s width longer.
She laughed aloud when she showed him. “I knew it,” she said, feeling that her head was at its perfect size.
“Yours,” he said, handing her his marble.
“You’re not mad?”
He beamed at her. “I’ll win it back.”
As he had predicted, Georg won back his glass marble; in addition, Trudi lost five of her clay marbles to him. From then on, they played nearly every day. Georg was lucky when it came to rolling the tiny balls into the hole he’d scooped into the damp soil between the two sets of steps, but he was just as generous in letting Trudi borrow marbles from him if she lost all of hers. To keep playing was far more important to him than winning. He could always win things. Trudi no longer teased him about his hair and his dainty smocks that buttoned in back. She was glad to see him when he stood outside her window and hollered for her to come out and play.
The morning after December 6, they shared sweets that St. Nikolaus had left for them in the shoes they’d set outside their bedroom doors overnight, and the last week of December they licked fresh snow from pine cones that looked as though they’d been dipped into sugar icing. They built a snowman with a carrot nose and coal eyes that smudged their mittens. Trudi’s father gave them an old hat for the snowman and let them borrow the kitchen broom, which they stuck into his arm, bristles up.
They wore their boots and mittens to church on Epiphany, when the priest and altar boys took down the manger that had been set up on the side altar, Jesus as big as a real baby, Maria and Joseph as tall as real parents. Both children liked church: the extravagant smell of incense and the splendid garments of the priest, the stained-glass windows and the mural of Christ’s Last Supper above the altar, but most of all the choir with its voices that drifted toward heaven. They even enjoyed the moments of silence, which were far more meaningful than any other kind of silence when they knelt in a pew, half hidden by the blond wood, feeling the pulse of the community around them.
You could tell a lot about people, they discovered, by the way they occupied pews, how much space they took and how close they knelt to the altar. There were those who liked to get to church early to watch everyone arrive, and others who knelt with their faces buried in their hands and never looked up. The proud and the humble—all of them dressed in their best clothes. In church, you could tell quickly how well people were doing: you’d notice new ailments as well as new hats; you’d sense new friendships and new animosities.
The men’s pews were on the left, the women’s on the right. Until you had your first communion, you could kneel on either side with a parent. That meant Trudi and Georg could still kneel in the same pew. The men’s side of the church was always emptier than the women’s—not only because some had not returned from the war—but because many of them spent the hour of mass in Die Traube, the old tavern with wooden ceilings that had stood for over five centuries. Die Traube—“this is where I pray,” the men would joke—was the closest bar to St. Martin’s and in full view of the church, ideal for those men who wanted to walk their wives and children to Sunday mass; meet with their friends for a few quick beers at their Stammtisch—their regular table; finish their final glass as the doors of the church opened; and be there to pick up their families and walk home for the Sunday roast.
Of course, there’d always be a few husbands who’d have to order one more glass after the last, whose wives would stand in the church yard with expressions of brittle cheerfulness, pretending they liked nothing better than chatting with the priest after mass. Yet, as soon as their husbands arrived, they’d link their arms through theirs and drag the poor sinners home, hissing words of reproach through their church smiles.
That winter, the ice on the Rhein grew so thick that people would drive their cars across the river to Kaiserswerth and Düsseldorf. Herr Immers took his new truck on the ice despite predictions of disaster from his wife, and Herr Hesping borrowed his uncle’s horse-drawn sled and brought his friends and their children on wild sleigh rides on the river. When the ice finally thinned, it tore in flat chunks that tried to mount each other like packs of wild dogs while the water hurled them downstream.
With each day the river rose, and as it left its bed, it washed across the winter matted meadows, freed the roots of young trees from the slack earth, and climbed the stone steps toward the crest of the dike that protected the town from the river. There, the people of Burgdorf would gather at dawn, shrouded by the smoke from their cigarettes and pipes as they’d stare at the shifting masses of gray waters and measure how far th
eir river had risen during the night.
When Trudi’s father carried her to the Rhein on his shoulders, the coat of the Russian soldier wrapped around both of them in such a way that, from a distance, they looked like one very tall man, she could smell the dank fields long before she saw the flood. Threads of cold rain stitched the earth to the gray sky. The lower trunks and branches of the half-submerged willows were darker than their crowns, up to a meter above the waves where the water had splashed. Last fall’s dead leaves and debris had caught in the limbs, forming swampy pockets that bobbed in the waves like discarded hair nets. Some of the thinner branches were snagged by the currents and drawn beneath the surface before they whipped up again, completing a never ending circle. Ducks roosted in the V-shaped cores of trees as if holding court; whenever they braved the rapid waters, they were spun around madly or thrust in the opposite direction until, with great effort, they extricated themselves from the white crests and fluttered up again, seeking shelter in the willows.
Trudi counted twenty-three trees hurtling past her, two dead chickens, and four dead cats. She was good at remembering numbers. Though her mother had only taught her to count to twenty, she’d practiced counting the books in the pay-library, until she knew the names of the numbers all the way to one hundred. She counted eleven bushes that were carried by the waves, nineteen things she couldn’t identify, and one dead goat, its belly the bluish-white tint of sour milk. Bloated, its stiff legs extended, it floated among the debris.
She didn’t see the one human victim—Georg’s father—because he hadn’t been found. Two nights before, a group of men had straggled toward the river in the rain with a bottle of Schnaps after Potter’s bar had closed, and Franz Weiler—always docile until he drank—had entertained everyone by doing handstands on top of the dike.
“We didn’t even hear a splash,” the taxidermist kept telling Frau Weiler. “Franz simply disappeared.” When he tried to offer her his help, she sent him home.
Trudi heard several people tell her father that Frau Weiler insisted her husband must have slipped from the dike on his way to morning mass.
“Morning mass, my ass,” Herr Immers said.