by Ursula Hegi
On Ash Wednesday Trudi gave Matthias a white shirt she’d sewn for him from fabric her aunt had sent, and he played the piano for her. All through Lent he played for her and her father, even on Passion Sunday, when each statue in the church was covered with faded cloths that had been brought up from the church basement; he played for them after the service on Good Friday, the one day of the year when you could not receive communion and when the church was stripped and left vacant like a tomb, symbolizing that Christ was dead. On Easter Sunday, Fräulein Birnsteig visited the boy’s parents and told them she’d chosen Matthias as her student.
For a while, that honor caused the other children in school to leave him alone, but soon they were back to teasing and torturing him. Still, it no longer bothered Matthias as much as before. He thrived on the music lessons and on Trudi’s stories of him becoming a famous concert pianist. She’d paint his future with stories of him traveling all over the world, adored by audiences.
The silence of the war was in direct contradiction to her storytelling. It was much closer to the silence of the church—fostering belief instead of knowledge, smothering mystery, muffling truth. Now that Trudi found herself dealing as much in silences as in incidents, she discovered new ways to tell her stories. You had to know your listeners before you decided what it was safe to let them know, or you could endanger others, yourself.
She recalled what her father had told her years ago about war—that the sound level of the entire country drops to a lower level. And in that stillness, the music became more important to her than ever before. She would listen to Matthias or play her father’s records when she worked in the pay-library, letting herself be swirled into the fury, the passion, the tranquillity. Notes were to music what words were to her stories, and by linking the words, she could spin the power of the composer into that of the storyteller, make it hers.
In St. Martin’s Church, the women prayed for their sons and nephews, and when they saw Helmut Eberhardt part his lips to receive communion, they added an extra prayer for his mother. They remembered him as an altar boy—that pious face, those perfectly folded hands—and they marveled how close virtue and evil could be.
After mass, Helmut Eberhardt would insist on lingering in front of the church with everyone, smiling through a grimace of anger when people returned his hearty greetings with curt nods. He’d keep one hand firmly on the plump arm of his wife, who looked as if she wanted to flee. Most of the time Hilde wouldn’t even last through mass but would faint as she used to as a girl, only sooner now as if seeking oblivion, and she’d have to sit on the front steps of the church, her face in her hands, waiting for her husband.
When she went to the stores, she found it far easier to endure the food rationing than the contempt that many of the people had for her husband. It felt like walking into a constant, gritty wind, and she could barely raise her eyes. When she delivered children, the families of her patients were usually polite to her but seldom welcoming. She worried about those women who—lured by government incentives—endangered their lives by having pregnancies too close together. In addition to the coveted cross of honor, the reduction of the marriage loan, and tax advantages, families now received monthly allocations of Kindergeld—child money—starting with the third and fourth child, and doubling for each child after that.
Hilde didn’t know how to explain to the people in town—not even to herself—why she continued to love her husband. Her love for him had been part of her since she was twelve and he, five years younger than she, still a child. Even then she had always imagined being with him once they both grew up. Although he’d betrayed his mother, she didn’t know how to stop her love. Her body yearned as much for him as the first night he’d touched her, and she still felt pride at having been chosen by him.
At times, when Helmut Eberhardt used one of his mother’s belongings—a favorite cup, say, or a tablecloth she had embroidered—he felt her thinking about him, loving him, even from a distance, wherever she was. He didn’t want to think of her and her cumbersome love; yet, he had not found release from that love, and would not find it—not even when he would march east and crouch in the frozen dirt of regions he’d never seen before.
Her cumbersome love would always be with him, expanding more beneath his helmet with each war-soaked year, crushing his thoughts and infecting his dreams until he’d think his head would burst. And it would be with tremendous relief that he’d feel an enemy bullet enter his throat and rescue him from her love.
The night before her young husband left for the Russian front, the midwife’s body told her that she was pregnant, but she waited to write the news to Helmut until she felt the movements of the child. She did not write him how often she remembered the dead child: it had been the second birth she’d assisted in, and what had happened horrified her so that she’d tried not to think about it at all but reminded herself that she should be grateful it had not been the first birth because that, surely, would have made her quit the profession before ever fully starting it.
But now she thought about the dead child all the time. The forty-year-old mother had sensed that her child had died within her, and her low, constant wail had shrouded Hilde Eberhardt as she labored to free the tiny corpse from the womb, forcing herself not to scream as the infant’s hair and skin came off in her hands. After she’d wrapped the lifeless shape in a sheet to conceal the naked face from the mother’s eyes, she’d scrubbed and scrubbed her hands, long after the dead skin had washed away.
That Christmas Eve, when Hilde Eberhardt’s belly had risen far enough from the bulk of her body so that everyone could acknowledge her pregnancy, she laid four wrapped gifts beneath the decorated tree in her mother-in-law’s house—that’s how she still thought of the house: a shirt for her absent husband the color of his eyes, a bonnet she’d crocheted for her unborn child, the softest of all cashmere shawls for her mother-in-law, and, since no one had thought to remember her with a gift, a porcelain figurine for herself.
It was a few weeks after Christmas that Hilde saw the first yellow stars. They were made of cheap imitation silk and had to be worn by all Jews who were older than six on the left sides of their coats. The stars had the word Jude on them in oddly shaped letters, and the fabric was quick to unravel if not sewn to the coats in tiny, tight stitches.
The stars, Hilde noticed, gave a different texture to the town because they marked the Jews as obviously as the brown uniforms identified the SA. You knew right away where someone belonged. Except that the stars changed something about the eyes of many Jewish people: they no longer settled on you when they encountered you, but looked beyond you, beyond everyone and everything as if testing the perimeters of an invisible fence. They were like rocks, those eyes—unmoving and rigid—and whenever Hilde tried to say something kind to make up for that terrible humiliation of having to wear the star, or lower her fee for assisting the birth of a Jewish child, those eyes would cloud with shame and fear. Yet, there were some like Eva Sturm who walked with clear eyes, her chin raised as if prepared to challenge the sky.
In the bleak winter streets, those yellow stars often were the only color, and yet, many people pretended not to see them. Some, though, would try to show their compassion by carrying bags for elderly Jews or offering them their seats in the streetcars. A few merchants like Frau Weiler would slip something extra into a Jew’s grocery order.
It stunned Hilde how many people were Jewish, people she’d never expected to be Jewish, people with blond hair and straight noses like hers. It was as though the Jewishness were something deep within, something that could be pulled out of anyone with a new law and made evident with a yellow star. She wondered what Helmut would do if she turned out to be a Jew. Of course it was silly to think that because, after all, she was not, but she couldn’t keep from imagining the loathing in his face as she stood in front of him, the hastily sewn star yellow on her chest above her swollen belly. She couldn’t allow herself to think of any of this before going to sleep
because she’d keep crying and, even if she slept, her dreams would be of being banished from her house.
Though Helmut Eberhardt was far away when Hilde lay in the Theresienheim and stretched out both arms to receive her son from the hands of Sister Agathe, who had extricated the large infant from the pull of Hilde’s womb, it would have pleased Helmut to know—so Hilde told Trudi Montag and Frau Weiler when they brought lentil soup and cherry preserves to her house—that the child was a boy just as he had assumed, and that she had honored his wish to name him Adolf. But it would have displeased him to find out that she called their son Adi. To Hilde, the child had nothing in common with the man who’d glared at her with his stern smile from the framed portrait until she’d stored it behind the dresser.
Trudi Montag sewed a batiste nightshirt for Adolf Eberhardt and attended his christening, but when one of the altar boys handed the holy-water basin to Herr Pastor Beier, who sprinkled drops over the screaming infant’s head, a deviation of light in the stained-glass window made it appear that the fair-haired altar boy who stood next to the pastor in his long smock was Helmut Eberhardt. His even features taunted her. Trudi’s back felt cold, rigid. She looked around, but no one else seemed to have noticed, and as the altar boy took one step back, his face became the boy’s face once more and he was no longer Helmut.
Still, that incident spooked Trudi enough so that, after the ceremony, when the midwife extended the baby to her, she stepped back and shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” Hilde said. “About your eyelashes.”
Trudi squinted up at the blond woman.
“It’s not that I tried to trick you. I—I really thought it would make them grow.”
“Oh, that.” Trudi saw herself with Frau Abramowitz’s nail scissors, cutting the ends of her eyelashes. “It happened so long ago.”
“If you hadn’t cut yours so quickly, I would have cut mine. I’ve always wondered if that’s why… you know, not liking me, I mean, and now, not wanting to hold Adi…”
“Oh no,” Trudi said. “It’s just that I don’t feel well today.” And it was not that she was lying. It was rather that Adolf, who smelled of powder and breast milk and who gurgled softly at her, resembled his father so much that by touching him, Trudi was afraid, she might summon that old dread that had come upon her at age five when she’d let Renate Eberhardt place her newborn in her arms and had offered to keep him because she’d known he would devastate his mother.
Trudi was fearful of that old dread revisiting itself in Helmut’s son, and though she usually wanted to know everything, she believed that moment, outside St. Martin’s Church, that it would be better not to know. And yet, she would catch herself watching the boy, Adi, whenever she’d see him from then on, half expecting that premonition of evil to manifest itself.
The month after Adi was born, when the blood of birth had dried up between the midwife’s thighs, she pulled every piece of furniture away from the walls of the white stucco house and scrubbed all surfaces, up and down and sideways. She washed the ceilings, waxed the parquet floor to a harsh gloss, rinsed the windows with vinegar until you’d swear you could put your hand through them, and fertilized the pear tree with pigeon droppings; but the fruits would be forever lost to her and to Adolf, one of a whole generation of boys named after the Führer.
While her husband was in the war, Hilde lived with her son in the upstairs rooms, keeping the downstairs prepared for her mother-in-law’s return. She stored the cashmere shawl inside the linen closet for Renate, and she would not take it out until after the war when—a widow for some years—she would find herself pregnant with a child she felt certain was a girl, and she would start wearing the shawl as if it were an embrace, planning to give it to her daughter, whom she would name Renate. “It belonged to your grandmother,” she would say.
The one time Helmut visited home on leave, late in the spring of 1941, he was so moved when he took his son into his arms that he didn’t protest his wife’s foolishness. If Hilde had convinced herself that the downstairs was too big for her and little Adolf, Helmut had no objections to her living upstairs. Until he returned. Besides—he was a man now and had experienced enough to know that women without husbands acted in ways that were not rational. You saw it with widows. With spinsters. It only followed that the wives of soldiers would get to be that way too after living without their husbands for so long. In a way it was proof of their chastity.
He couldn’t help thinking how pleased the Führer would be if he could see little Adolf, with his blond hair and sky-blue eyes, and when he tried to think of someone who could take the boy’s picture, he wished he’d kept Herr Abramowitz’s cameras instead of stepping on them. From what he’d heard, the Abramowitzs were still trying to leave the country. Helmut was all for that. “Let’s get the Jews out of here,” he’d told the taxidermist, and Herr Heidenreich had nodded and said, “All of them.” Apparently the Abramowitzs had applied to get into Argentina where their son lived, and they’d been approved, had paid their fees and bribes, but the day before their departure, their permit had been canceled by the Argentineans. Now they were starting the whole process of application over again.
Hilde, who had restored Adolf Hitler’s portrait to its old place of honor above the dresser for Helmut’s visit, did not mention his mother in his presence and was careful not to call the child Adi. She felt bewildered by her contentment when her husband departed again. Her first night without him, she took down the Führer’s portrait and stored it in its proper place behind the dresser, picturing herself living in the house with her mother-in-law and her son. That’s what it was like in many houses—women of two generations looking after the children.
As Burgdorf was turning into a town without men, Emil Hesping, who still managed several gymnasts’ clubs, was forced to close two of them, and he tried to keep the rest open by offering half-price memberships to women.
Gradually, Burgdorf also became a town without children. Ingrid Baum and Monika Buttgereit were two of the teachers who were sent to small villages with busloads of children whose parents had voluntarily registered them for the KLV—the Kinderlandverschickung—a program organized by the Hitler-Jugend to evacuate children who lived near cities that might be bombed.
It was Ingrid’s first real teaching job. Ever since earning her degree, she had given private lessons to children who were hard of hearing. Teaching jobs were so scarce that others who had graduated with her worked in offices and stores, and she considered herself blessed to teach at all. After hearing rumors that teachers were being stationed in Poland, she had been relieved to be sent to the Black Forest instead. She would have preferred to teach at a regular school since the teachers in the KLV were treated like soldiers, but she knew she had to go wherever she was assigned.
The day Trudi helped Ingrid to get ready for her journey, the red jewelry box she’d given her stood no longer on the windowsill.
“Have you already packed it?”
Ingrid hesitated. “I traded it. For a rosary.”
“But I bought it for you”
“The rosary was blessed by the Pope.”
“The box was blessed by the Pope too.”
Ingrid grew pale.
“It could have been,” Trudi said.
“Was it?”
“By the Pope and five bishops.”
“You’re not telling the truth.”
“And twenty-seven cardinals.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t lie.”
“Then it’s your fault if I go to hell for sinning.”
“I will pray for you.”
“I don’t want you to pray for me.”
“I often pray for you.”
“On the rosary you traded for my jewelry box?”
“When I pray, I sometimes can feel the presence of your guardian angel. She’s pure and bright—”
“Oh, Ingrid.”
“—much brighter than my own guardian angel. Often she goes away. Because I’m too sin
ful. And then everything goes dark.”
“If I made up a list of people who are sinful, Ingrid, you wouldn’t be on it.”
“How can you know?”
“I know, believe me. What I don’t know is who has my jewelry box.”
“I didn’t mean to make you angry.” Trudi waited.
“Klara Brocker.”
“Klara Brocker?” Trudi felt a sudden dislike for the tidy Brocker girl, who wore cheap jewelry and had worked as a maid for the taxidermist’s family ever since she’d finished school the year before. At least once a week, Klara slipped into the library to borrow the latest romances—for her mother, she said—as her eyes skimmed the jacket picture with polite greed.
Trudi could imagine her coveting the red leather box with that greed, scheming to offer Ingrid a worthless rosary in return. It felt as though the girl had stolen the red box directly from her to hoard her garish brooches and earrings, her flashy bracelets and rings, and Trudi found it difficult to be civil to her even after Ingrid left with the KLV to teach in the Black Forest.
After six years of polite engagement to the elegant and accomplished Fräulein Raudschuss, the dentist, Klaus Malter, fell in love one hot June afternoon of 1941—fell in love recklessly and irreversibly—shocking the town two months before his long-scheduled wedding day. His bride had her gown hanging in her closet, and every detail of the dinner had been planned, right up to the lemon and parsley fans that would decorate the cheese trays. Three years earlier, she had decided on the color of the damask napkins and tablecloth—a cool ivory—but only seven months before the scheduled ceremony she had followed an impulse that surprised her, and had ordered everything in a lavish pink that reminded her of sea roses—seen through a sheen of water when you lie beneath them. It was a color she’d never forgotten since that morning when she was two and had leaned forward to pick one of the perfectly round roses that floated in the pond behind the Swiss hotel where her family vacationed every August.