Ursula Hegi the Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set

by Ursula Hegi

  Ironically, both parents were gaunt, despite a joint passion for food that had sustained their marriage through a quarter of a century. This passion gave them something to talk about to each other and to everyone they encountered. Where, say, a hypochondriac would welcome you with revelations of new ailments, or a traveler with descriptions of exotic places, Rainer’s parents were sure to greet you with details of every single thing they’d consumed the day before. These accounts of elaborate meals would be accompanied by delicate clicks of the tongue and rapturous sighs. The family’s six older children were lean-bodied like their parents, but Rainer was grotesquely fat, as though his parents’ excesses had visited themselves upon him.

  Trudi, too, felt uncomfortable with Rainer’s freak body, but not nearly as much as with Helmut, who was a freak on the inside, yet—some of the old women claimed—looked like “an angel come back to earth.” Now the angel was watching her from the end of the counter, his even features without expression, and she found herself thinking of Lucifer, the angel who’d been banished from heaven and—in the act of falling—had seized far greater control than any of the faithful angels.

  She’d seen Helmut the week before, the day of the Judenboykott— Jew boycott—when he’d brought coffee to the SA men who were posted in front of Jewish stores, threatening customers who wanted to enter. The first time Trudi had come across Helmut in his uniform had been during the Fackelparade—torch parade—that the Nationalsozialisten had held last January to celebrate their victory. In the dark, ghosts of flames had pulsed across the strangely pious and enraptured faces of uniformed girls and boys as they’d marched with their songs amidst a sea of red, white, and black flags, swept forward by the current of music. “Für die Fahne wollen wir sterben…,” they’d sung. “For the flag we want to die.” The only other place Trudi had seen that beatific expression on Helmut’s face was in church when he’d been about to receive communion.

  Frau Eberhardt took two romances from her handbag and laid them on the counter. “These are overdue.” She opened her wallet. “By two days, I believe.”

  “Don’t let it worry you.” Leo waved aside her attempts to pay. “You’ve brought others back early. It evens out.”

  His eyes followed her as she left with her son, and when the door closed behind them, he limped to the window and stood watching the two until he could no longer see them.

  “A bad one,” Trudi said.

  Leo nodded. “Aus Kindern werden Soldaten—children become soldiers.… He’ll make a proper soldier. It’s their kind of courage.”

  “What kind of a soldier were you?”

  “A reluctant one. The kind they were glad to send home.”

  “Herr Immers would have liked to take your place.”

  “By now he believes he really fought the war.”

  The day before, when Trudi had been in the butcher shop, Herr Immers had told her, “Wir leben in einer grossen Zeit”—“We live in a significant time.” He liked to chat with customers while his son, Anton, and Irmtraud Boden—who’d gone to school with Trudi and was sweet on Anton, weighed and wrapped meats and cold cuts. Behind the marble counter, the traditional black, red, and gold flag had been replaced by the new flag of the Nationalsozialisten. Ever since the Fackelparade, more and more houses had been displaying that flag.

  “Herr Immers will be glad when the next war comes along,” Leo said.

  “What are you saying?”

  He squinted at Trudi as if trying to gauge if she was strong enough to hear his answer. “People have been whispering more.… You know we’re heading for a war when that kind of silence begins to happen. The sound level of the town, the entire country, drops to a lower level… even the river, the birds.…”

  “Maybe you’re just losing your hearing.” She tried to joke away the apprehension she’d felt the past few months and which her father was confirming with his words. When he didn’t answer, she said, “I hope you’re wrong.”

  “So do I,” he said gravely. “But I worry about the German attraction for one strong leader, one father figure who makes you obey, who is strong enough to make you obey.… Who tells you: This is the right thing to do. I worry about the belief that our strength is a military strength.” He walked to the first row of shelves and picked up books without looking at them. “Most people seem to think that life has been getting better: less unemployment, more excitement for our youth.… Those groups with their marches and songs and bonfires.”

  He didn’t have to remind Trudi how monotonous things had been for the youth until the Partei had come into power. Now there were excursions, vigorous music, and uniforms. The people had been craving order, and many welcomed the Nationalsozialisten because they offered exactly that—order. Their goals sounded easy and promised to restore the pride that had been humiliated by the Versailles Friedensvertrag.

  “Our young people—” Leo said, “they’re easily swayed by all those speeches.… Their souls have been starved for so long that they’re seduced by the promises, the instant camaraderie. Someone’s constantly there to inspire them, to persuade them.…” He shook his head. “Little soldiers—the girls too—with their alarming pride in that vulgar flag. I’m so glad you’re not part of all that.”

  “They wouldn’t want me.”

  He flinched as though she’d cut herself intentionally in front of him.

  “Besides, it’s not for me.”

  “Because you know what you’re about. You have courage and strength … intelligence … but most of them—they haven’t developed stands of their own. That’s why they take to the new ways. They’ll only hear what they want to absorb. Bonfires—” He rubbed his chin. “Bonfires and new highways are not going to solve our problems. And they won’t be enough for that fellow Hitler.”

  Trudi had seen Herr Hitler a few months ago. At a rally in Düsseldorf, soon after he’d become Reichskanzler—Chancellor. He was not nearly as tall as she’d expected from newspaper photos, and he looked straight at her when he talked, not excluding her like the assistant pastor, Friedrich Beier, who spoke above her head as if she were too insignificant to be included. Whenever she opened her lips and stuck out her tongue to receive the holy communion, she half expected him to bypass her. Herr Hitler’s mouth moved independently of his eyes. There was something wrong with his face: the features didn’t work together. But he looked directly at her—at everyone in the swollen crowd—like a magician performing some amazing trick of singling out everyone at once, and it was that gaze—filled with an immeasurable greed—that held all of them while his high-pitched voice spun silken ropes around them.

  She fought the excitement of his gaze and voice because what he wanted from her was only too familiar—belief without doubts—something she’d resisted since first grade.

  She fought him by reminding herself what her father had said to Emil Hesping—that they lived in a country where believing had taken the place of knowing.

  She fought him until her entire body felt cold.

  It was impossible to get out of the mob that cheered his words, and only after the speech could she push her way to the back. From the second-floor window of a nearly deserted store, she watched while the dark-haired man with the funny, postage-stamp square of a mustache—this man who didn’t look anything like the Aryan ideal he had just spoken of—shook the hands of uniformed men and tilted his bashful smile at young women. When he lifted a little blond girl high into the air, Trudi had a sudden image of him, alone in his bedroom, attempting to read something he had written on lined paper, but his eyes kept skittering off the page as if—without the pitch of his own voice—his own message had no power to hold him. Yet, the greed she’d felt in him, that greed which had sucked all those people into his influence, was still in the room with him, and she was seized by a deep fear for the world.

  Both Herr Heidenreich and Herr Neumaier had shaken Herr Hitler’s hand that day. The hand was moist, the pharmacist had reported when he’d bought tobacco the foll
owing morning, and the eyes were a very light blue. At the chess club, he and the taxidermist had actually argued about the precise shade of blue. For days the pharmacist hadn’t washed his right hand. “The sweat of our Führer,” he’d sighed.

  Trudi glanced at her father. “Maybe Herr Hitler won’t be around very long.”

  “Maybe,” he said without conviction.

  For a while, they worked silently side by side, setting books back on the shelves.

  Outside, the ragman’s new used truck rumbled past, slowly, while Herr Benotti sang out: “Eisen, Lumpen, Papier…” He’d bought the truck from a florist in Düsseldorf and had painted it glossy white like an ambulance.

  “Remember—” Leo touched Trudi’s shoulder lightly with one of the romances Frau Eberhardt had returned. “People like recommendations … books they might like.”

  “They come to you for that.”

  “They won’t always.”

  “Don’t say that.” She felt the panic in her voice.

  “With you, all they get are questions. You probe at them instead of giving them plots.”

  “There are five basic plots in these books.” She counted them off on her fingers, delighted when she got her father to laugh aloud, although she still felt chilled by their talk. “One, true love overcomes all obstacles and becomes eternal love; two, cowboys and Indians smoke peace pipes together after they’ve fought over territories; three, beautiful nurses and brilliant doctors save incurable patients and then get married; four, war heroes conquer their enemies in spectacular battles; and five, villains are always punished.”

  In real life, she knew, it was not that easy to tell who the villains were, and even if you could identity them, they were not total villains. No one was entirely all of one thing. Cowards could be courageous in some matters, and love was not always declared and might not be pure love, but mixed in with hate and fear and a powerful wish for revenge—like what she felt for Georg Weiler, who went to great efforts not to glance in her direction, even if both of them stood in front of their houses.

  And Frau Abramowitz—Trudi was sure Frau Abramowitz had loved her father for nearly a decade now, just as sure as she was that her father had never noticed it and that Frau Abramowitz’s love would stay submerged beneath her good manners. A woman could never declare her love first, and then, of course, there was the matter of sin. For a married woman to love a man other than her husband was a sin. To lust after anyone was a sin.

  But in the books from the pay-library, men were always lusting after women, feeding the imagination of the people in Burgdorf as well as the feud between Leo Montag and the church, which had gone on for so long that it had become a tradition, manifesting itself in periodic sermons from the aging pastor, who had been getting thinner over the years as though—by scratching his scaly skin—he were wearing himself away, layer by itchy layer, until soon only his bones would be left. Already, he was coaching his assistant in carrying on this custom of admonishing his parishioners against passions of the flesh, which were described so tantalizingly in the pages of those books.

  Without fail, each sermon enhanced the rental business and brought customers who had never entered the pay-library before: young mothers, widows, schoolchildren, and men who pretended to have stopped by only for tobacco would linger between the shelves and emerge with one or two novels, which they’d check out furtively and carry wrapped in a scarf at the bottom of their shopping nets, say, or clasped inside their coats. During their next visit to the library they wouldn’t quite hurry so, and soon they’d forget to conceal the books before stepping outside.

  It amazed Trudi that passions of violence didn’t seem to bother the church. Novels about soldiers who killed their enemies in battle were never mentioned by Herr Pastor Schüler, and when he preached against nurse-and-doctor novels, it was not because of the gory operating-room scenes, but because of those moments of lust between the doctors and nurses.

  She still attended mass every Sunday, though the assistant pastor’s occasional prayers for the Vaterland—fatherland—felt uncomfortable. The hymns had become mere rituals for her, but she liked the way her voice fused with the voices of others when she sang in the choir. Besides—church was the best place to show off the stylish clothes she was sewing for herself. Whenever she completed a new outfit, she rotated one of her previous Sunday outfits to be worn during the week.

  Once, to collect money for the missionaries, the assistant pastor brought an American Western from the Montags’ pay-library to the pulpit—checked out by the pharmacist, Trudi soon figured out—and read the description of a Sioux Indian dancing for his gods. While the collection plate was passed from pew to pew, he spoke of pagans and the duty of missionaries to save them from certain hell by converting them to Catholicism.

  It was that sermon which brought Ingrid Baum to the pay-library. She was a student at the Ursulinen Gymnasium in Düsseldorf. A year younger than Trudi, she’d moved to Burgdorf a few months before Trudi’s mother had died. With her twin brother, Holger, and her parents, Ingrid had lived in the apartment above her father’s bicycle shop for most of her life, and yet the town treated the Baums as if they’d just arrived. It was like that with all newcomers and could only be erased with a generation’s span of residence.

  Ingrid had come to the pay-library, she said, to borrow that book about the missionaries that the Herr Pastor had talked about, and as Trudi wheeled her ladder toward the shelves with the Westerns and climbed up, Ingrid announced, “I want to become a missionary.” When she looked up at Trudi, planes of light lay on her even features as if she were someone in a religious painting who’d been told to stand just like that.

  Trudi couldn’t help herself. She felt wicked. “You probably have kept all the holy cards the nuns ever gave you.”

  But Ingrid didn’t catch the sarcasm in her voice. “Yes,” she said. “I have a whole collection.”

  “I’m not surprised.” From the ladder, Trudi handed her the book. “There’s not a single missionary in here,” she warned and adjusted the waistband of the angora sweater her Aunt Helene had sent her.

  Ingrid scrutinized the book jacket of a cowboy on a horse chasing an Indian on a horse. Actually, they were so close to each other that it was impossible to determine who was doing the chasing, except that in those books you knew it was always the cowboy in pursuit. The horses’ flanks were nearly touching, and they were racing so fast that—the moment after the moment of that picture—they would have collided.

  “Do you have other books about missionaries then?” Ingrid’s brown hair was parted in the middle and hung down her back in one shining braid. Around her neck she wore a delicate gold cross.

  “In here? Well—I do have one book about an actress whose sister is a nun. In Brazil. Or India, I think.” In the romance section, Trudi showed Ingrid a book with the cover of a woman in a low-cut red gown raising her red lips toward the jaundiced face of a smug-looking man, while leaning into the curve of his arm.

  Ingrid sighed. “The sister of the missionary?”

  “Must be.”

  “Thank you. I’ll take that with me.”

  When Ingrid brought the book back, she told Trudi the nun was only mentioned once. “The actress was crying out to be saved.… But I’m afraid it was too late for her.”

  “Have you ever considered that missionaries are arrogant?” Trudi challenged her.

  “Why so?”

  “Because they set about changing people whose own ways may be far better for them.”

  “Oh, but there is only one way to salvation.” Ingrid took another look at the book jacket with the red-gowned woman. “This is the saddest book I’ve ever read,” she said and borrowed two other romances.

  That spring of 1933 more than two hundred authors were pronounced decadent, traitorous, Marxist, or corrupt. All over Germany, people were ordered, “Reinigt Eure Büchereien”—“Clean your libraries”—and incited to hunt down books by banned authors like Bertolt Brecht,
Sigmund Freud, Irmgard Keun, Stefan Zweig, Franz Werfel, Lion Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Mann, and every writer on the blacklist. As bookstores, libraries, and private homes were raided, you risked arrest if you didn’t relinquish those books. In school, children were encouraged to turn their parents in for owning forbidden literature.

  Trudi and her father packed more than half of his personal collection into cardboard boxes and carried them upstairs to the sewing room.

  “Remember how the old priest used to rant against the books in the pay-library?” Leo asked. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

  Trudi nodded. “Now the trashy books are safe. I would gladly give up every one of them instead.”

  They stacked the boxes against one wall, covered them with a plaid blanket and several pillows, and stood back to inspect the result.

  “Not the best hiding place,” her father said.

  “Why not keep them in the open?”

  He frowned at her.

  “Let’s do this—let’s fill the top of each carton with rental books and keep the boxes right in the library.”

  “Of course.” He smiled. “What better place to store boxes with books than in a library?”

  The night of May 10 bonfires burned all over Germany, especially in university towns, where students were organized to burn the works of many authors they normally would have studied. In Berlin alone—so Herr Abramowitz would report later—a pile of twenty thousand books sent flames sky high, while the music corps of the SA played national marches. In some cities, trucks heaped with books paraded through the streets, gathering spectators for the ritualistic burnings that would wash across old and young faces in blond flickers.

  Sometimes, when Ingrid returned library books, Trudi would invite her into the living room behind the pay-library and make lemonade or rosehip tea. While Trudi would set out her mother’s flowered cups, saucers, and pastry plates on the freshly ironed tablecloth, Leo would walk to the bakery near the Protestant church—humoring Trudi’s boycott of Hansen’s bakery though she’d never told him her reasons—and buy Bienenstich or Schnecken for his daughter and her new friend.