by Ursula Hegi
“He ordered the last round for us at Potter’s,” the pharmacist said.
Frau Blau pointed out that the church was only two blocks from the Weilers’ and the river a good ten minutes’ walk beyond the church.
“Must be some new detour,” Herr Bilder said.
Yet, no one contradicted Frau Weiler but—as it had been the habit of generations—upheld the façade which, above all, preserved a family’s respectability, no matter that beneath that façade all kinds of gossip festered. It was a complicity of silence that had served the town for centuries. Dressed in black and bearing proper words of condolence, the people assembled for the church service held in Franz Weiler’s memory: the men from his Stammtisch; the families who had bought their groceries from him and his wife for many years; a group of nuns from the Theresienheim who had their own chapel yet rarely missed a funeral service at St. Martin’s; and the bereaved wife, of course, with her possibly half-orphaned son, Georg, who wore a black smock that had been hastily fashioned from one of her blouses.
He knelt next to Trudi and whispered to her during communion—which the two children were too young to receive—that his father was just taking a long swim. If any of the men from Franz Weiler’s Stammtisch had overheard the boy, they would have agreed with Georg: they already had speculated that, once in the river, Franz had kept on swimming to get away from his iron-haired wife.
When the people left the church, the man-who-touches-his-heart stood on the wet steps without a hat or umbrella. He was one of the few who always looked straight at Trudi. See, he seemed to say as his hands roamed up and down. See what I can do. Most grown-ups didn’t look right at Trudi: they acted as if she were invisible and said things they would never say around other children. She found if she stayed very quiet they often kept talking, disclosing far more about themselves than they realized—even those who had trained their features to remain constant. The feelings they tried to hide sprang into their voices, and she could discern fear, joy, impatience, rage. When they got cautious, a certain flatness moved into their speech, and their sentences shrank; but when they became excited, their words grew colorful and rushed from them.
If she didn’t remind people that she was there, she got to listen to all kinds of secrets. They fascinated her, those secrets, and she hoarded them, repeating them to herself before she went to sleep, feeling them stretch and grow into stories—like the one about Frau Buttgereit kneeling on lentils each morning when she prayed to St. Ottilia, the patroness of the blind, after whom she’d been named, imploring her to make sure her next child would not be another daughter. Trudi found it hard to believe that the gaunt woman, whose stomach always looked distended, had the reputation of once having been the most beautiful girl in Burgdorf.
Then there was the story about Herr Hesping, who’d bought a thousand blankets from one branch of the military and, within a week, had resold them to another branch for twice the price. He was often involved in some kind of deal that stretched the boundaries of the law without crossing them. If you asked him about a particular transaction, he’d overwhelm you with such a mass of facts and logic that you were glad once he stopped explaining. Some people said he had no values; others maintained that he did whatever he did out of contempt for the government.
• • •
The flood of 1920 that claimed Georg’s father was not the worst the town had seen: it only seeped through a few small fissures in the dike and trickled into the Braunmeiers’ pastures and peach orchard, as if to persuade the town that it was not only benign but also beneficial for the farmers; yet, instead it convinced the people to reinforce the mass of earth that protected them from the waters, which threatened the town nearly every spring.
The men talked about Franz Weiler as they labored on the dike in the nearly constant rain, and when the sun finally untangled itself from the clouds, they stopped their work and turned their faces toward the white light, which seemed more radiant after its long absence. Women left their stores and houses and came outside to sit in the sun on canvas chairs with their sewing. The teachers from the Protestant school and the nuns from the Catholic school brought the children outside for their lessons, instructing them how to identify leaves and insects even though the schedule might call for penmanship.
After the dike was rebuilt, it stood one meter higher and one meter wider than before, and if you looked at it from the direction of the town that summer after the flood, you’d notice the seam where the old part joined the new because the grass above it was the green of Easter candy.
Trudi would hold those pictures in her mind throughout the decades to come, and without even being near the river she would always know how it looked. She could close her eyes and picture the Rhein from the dike or close up from her favorite place on the jetty. She knew exactly how high the water could rise around the willows; knew the swift change of color—from moss green to molten black—and how the sun could shine on the surface so hard that it would blind you if you stared at the river; knew the pattern the current formed around the rocks in late summer, while early in spring they lay submerged.
It was like that with stories: she could see beneath their surface, know the undercurrents, the whirlpools that could take you down, the hidden clusters of rocks. Stories could blind you, rise around you in a myriad of colors. Every time Trudi took a story and let it stream through her mind from beginning to end, it grew fuller, richer, feeding on her visions of those people the story belonged to until it left its bed like the river she loved. And it was then that she’d have to tell the story to someone.
Georg was the ideal listener. Beneath the house, where Trudi’s mother used to hide, the two children would sit on rocks, their knees nearly touching as they filled the dank space around them with words. Even in the dark there’d be a glint to Georg’s hair as if he’d trapped the sun in his ringlets. If anyone could capture the sun, Trudi knew, it was Georg. As long as he felt lucky, treasures called out for him to pick them up—an empty snail house, a length of rope, the shiniest chestnut. He hoarded his collection in a box under his bed.
Once, he tried to teach Trudi how to make a bird out of mud. “The way Baby Jesus used to,” he said. Squatting next to the front stoop of the pay-library, he shaped a ball of mud in his hands until it had wings and a head. He held it toward the sky. “First it’ll open its wings,” he told Trudi, “and then it’ll fly into heaven.”
“It looks like a lump of mud.”
“That’s because it isn’t ready yet.”
“Maybe you forgot to do something.”
The bread wagon, which came once a week, rumbled past them, pulled by an old horse, and stopped at the end of the street. It was covered with heavy canvas. Several women with baskets over their arms crowded around it.
“Fly,” Georg shouted, and threw the bird into the air. It dropped in front of his feet, wide and flat. “It didn’t fly because we’re sinners,” he said.
“Maybe it’s the wrong kind of mud.”
“You think so?”
She nodded. “If we find the right kind of mud, we can do it.”
“I bet the unknown benefactor could get us the right kind.”
“The unknown benefactor can do anything.”
They both were intrigued by the unknown benefactor, whose identity was still a mystery to the people of Burgdorf and who—despite the poverty—continued to steal into people’s houses to leave his gifts like a thief who’d reversed the concept of thievery. The Burgdorf Post had published several articles about the unknown benefactor, each longer than the previous one, since the list of his contributions grew. A week after Georg’s father had vanished, the unknown benefactor surprised Georg with the gift he wanted most in the world—Lederhosen—leather pants with leather suspenders and a leather strip across the middle of the chest, displaying a stag carved from the white core of an antler. Of course, his mother wouldn’t let him wear the Lederhosen—“Once you’re older,” she said—but she conceded to let him keep th
em in his room, where he took them out at least once a day to touch the thick leather.
For Trudi’s fifth birthday, Georg gave her a small cardboard box with needle holes pricked into its lid, and when she opened it, she found a black-and-orange butterfly on a bed of leaves.
“It won’t fly away,” he said proudly. “Ever.”
“Why not?”
“It can’t. I rubbed all the dust off the wings.”
She touched the gauzy wings and felt limp with an odd sadness.
“You—you don’t like it?”
“Will it live without the dust?”
“I’ll catch you another one.”
She wanted to tell him that she’d rather watch butterflies in the air, but his mother came out of the store and pulled something from the pocket of her apron. It was a silver medal engraved with an angel.
“Your guardian angel, Trudi. Make sure you don’t lose it.”
“I won’t.”
“It’s blessed by the bishop.”
Georg was fascinated with finding ways of courting luck, letting it envelop him instead of clutching it, and he told Trudi that the moment you started doubting your luck it vanished. You always had to assume it was there. Yet, she could see that it was hard for Georg to feel lucky when his mother was nearby—he even moved differently, docile and careful. It was as though he had something locked up inside him that he couldn’t figure out.
Finding things was not the only kind of luck he taught her. Chimney sweeps also brought good luck, and he’d keep count of how many chimney sweeps he’d see in a week. Then there was the luck of not getting caught when you did something wrong. Trudi found out about that toward the end of summer, when the Eberhardts’ pear tree was heavy with fruit that ripened the color of the sun and were so soft you could cut them like butter. Frau Eberhardt, whose husband had just died from pneumonia, had given Georg and Trudi two pears the morning after his funeral when they’d walked past her white stucco house, but when they returned the following day, hoping for more of the sweet fruits, whose juice had run down their necks and into their collars, Frau Eberhardt didn’t come to the door.
Georg flipped a Pfennig to see who would have to knock. It was his turn. He rapped his knuckles against the glass pane of the door. They waited, knocked again, and then—without having to confer—ran toward the tree. Curls bouncing, Georg leapt up and grabbed one of the lower branches, yanking it down with his weight while Trudi’s fingers closed around a pear. It snapped off in her hand as Georg let go of the branch, but instead of looking at her pear, he darted away from her, through a bed of geraniums, past the lilac hedge, and into the street, where he kept running.
Trudi’s back felt as though the sun were searing through her dress. She didn’t want to look behind her, but she knew she had to. Slowly, she turned her head, then her body.
Frau Eberhardt stood two steps away, her belly growing from her mourning dress like a half pear. Her eyes were sad, and her thick hair hung in two coils across her breasts as if she’d been interrupted before braiding and pinning them around her head.
Trudi tried to flee but couldn’t lift her feet.
Slowly, Frau Eberhardt reached up into the branches of the tree and picked another pear. “Here.” She gave it to Trudi. “You must like them a lot.”
Trudi nodded, the pears so heavy that she thought her hands might snap from her wrists and topple into the grass with her fingers still curled around the fruit like those lion’s claws on the legs of Frau Blau’s table.
“I’ll remember to save some for you from now on.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh—but I know that.” Frau Eberhardt smiled at her.
Georg sat waiting for her behind their houses, where the brook forked. With a willow twig, he was drawing spirals in the muddy bank. Instead of telling Trudi that he was sorry for running off, he fixed an accusing stare on her. “You should have come with me.”
“I didn’t see her.”
“What did she do to you?”
Trudi handed him both pears.
“Lucky you.” There was real respect in his voice. He chose the smaller of the pears and gave the other one back to her. After twisting off the stem, he bit into the end of the pear and sucked hard to keep the juice from spilling. He was half finished before he noticed that Trudi wasn’t eating. “You have to eat yours.”
“I don’t want it.”
“You have to.”
“Why?”
“Because if you don’t—” he motioned toward her with his damp chin—“it means you think it’s all my fault.”
She didn’t answer.
“You have to. So we’re even. If you—” He stopped and his eyes flickered as though he’d just startled himself. “If I what?”
He scrutinized her like an animal caught in a dark space too tight to turn around. “If you want to be my friend.”
Something small and hard shifted low inside her belly.
“And you have to say that you’re not angry at me.”
“I am not angry at you.”
“Prove it, then.”
When she took a bite, her teeth ached as though any kind of coating between her nerves and the fruit had dissolved. She chewed, slowly, fighting a gagging sensation as she swallowed the sweet pulp to make room for the next bite.
Two weeks later Frau Eberhardt walked into the pay-library, carrying a new baby and a flawless pear for Trudi. When Trudi asked if she could hold the baby, who was sucking on the corner of a washcloth, Frau Eberhardt made her climb onto the counter and sit before she carefully positioned the baby in Trudi’s arms, keeping her own arms around both children. The baby’s name was Helmut, and as soon as Trudi touched his skin, she felt a chill that came from a place so deep within him that she no longer wanted to hold him; yet, she was unwilling to return him to Frau Eberhardt because, all at once, she knew that he had the power to destroy his mother. She would feel it again in the years to come whenever she’d get near Helmut—that danger—though he was one of the most beautiful children in town, with his wheat-colored hair and eyes of sky. That sense of dread would be with her even after he’d become an altar boy and would be considered more devout than any other boy his age in town, the most likely, people would say, to study for the priesthood.
“This is how you rock him,” Frau Eberhardt said. Her black-sleeved arms holding Trudi and the infant, she swayed from side to side as if the three of them were connected.
Staring into Helmut’s eyes, Trudi felt old, far older than any of the old people who lived in the Theresienheim, and she drew on all the courage she could find within herself. “If you want to,” she offered gravely, “I will keep him.”
Frau Eberhardt laughed and swung her son against herself. Tiny strands of hair sprang from the crown of her braids in a semicircle of light. “You’ll have your own baby some day,” she said.
four
1920-1921
WHILE TRUDI WAS LETTING GO OF THE IDEA THAT HER MOTHER WAS still alive, Georg—though without enthusiasm—kept expecting his father to swim back into Burgdorf or, perhaps, arrive on one of the barges that went up and down the Rhein. His parents had married late in life, and his mother had been forty-six when he was born. Franz Weiler had left the supervision of his store, his son, and his life to his wife, Hedwig.
Occasionally he’d given Georg an absent smile as though mildly surprised that this boy lived with him in the same apartment, which was overcrowded with heavy furniture. To Georg, it felt as though his father had shrunk into the shadow of his mother, and he rarely thought about him as a separate person.
Yet, late most nights, after the lights had been extinguished, Franz Weiler would get up, dress in the dark, and leave for Potter’s tavern, excursions which no one in the family mentioned. His wife, who didn’t permit alcohol in the house, had never seen Franz after he’d tipped down a few of the clear Schnaps that rose behind his eyes and coated the muscles in his arms, transforming him into a different man, t
he kind of man who’d swirl his partner across the dance floor. But that was exactly what Hedwig was afraid of—the kind of passion that came from drink, the kind of passion that had sent her stepfather into her room many nights when she was a girl. To her, drink meant a rough hand clasped across her mouth and the weight of sin on her body, a weight that thousands of rosaries still hadn’t negated.
Every morning she took her son to early mass and prayed for his soul because the souls of men—she had resolved long ago—were even darker than the souls of the women they contaminated. Though she tried to trade her prayers for happiness and absolution, she felt neither happy nor absolved, and even the coveted honor of cleaning St. Martin’s on alternate Wednesdays left her feeling cheated by the world.
Convinced there was something lacking in him because his mother was not like other mothers, who smiled at their children, Georg tried to think of ways to make her smile too, but she’d only scold him for following her through the store in his attempts to help, or for talking too much. He’d never seen her embrace his father, and only rarely would she bend down and kiss Georg’s forehead when she put him to bed at night.
Once, she called him to the window, lifted him onto the stuffed wine-red chair, and pointed down into the street, where the oldest Meier boy, Alfred, and the second Buttgereit daughter, Monika, walked together, his arm circling her shoulders, hers slung around his waist. “It’s indecent,” she said. “Don’t you ever make a spectacle of yourself.”
Sometimes strangers who shopped at the store mistook Georg for his mother’s grandchild, and even as a man he would cringe when he’d recall her embarrassment and his wish to protect her when she explained that, no, this was her son. But it didn’t seem to bother his mother that the neighborhood boys teased him about looking like a girl. While other boys ran and played, he’d watch them, feeling clumsy, hampered by the floppy smocks she sewed for him in styles that she might have worn as a girl. Still, there were moments when he’d forget about himself and—elated to be outside in the sun—throw his arms into the air, jumping and laughing. But his mother, who’d feel troubled whenever she’d sense a seed of passion in him, would stick her gray head from the store and remind him to play quietly.