by Ursula Hegi
Yes. She leapt up. “What we need is a tunnel.”
Her father stared at the stone walls and shook his head. “Too thick.”
“Not if we get help.”
Gradually, as it began to seem possible that, indeed, they could build a tunnel, their tiredness turned into fresh energy. Not only would they have a safe passage for the woman and the child, but for others who would come here after that. Without saying the words aloud to each other, they knew they were ready to take that risk. They considered both neighbors, the Weilers and the Blaus. Though Frau Weiler was younger than the Blaus and eager to help with food and other supplies, she couldn’t be relied on because she’d never lie if questioned by the Gestapo.
Besides, Georg might come home on military leave and visit his mother. He’d been back once to marry Helga Stamm. After the wedding, he’d talked his mother into letting him take along his father’s old skis since he was stationed near Zakopane, the Polish ski resort. “He’ll probably gamble them away,” Frau Weiler had told Frau Buttgereit; yet, she’d found herself comforted as she’d pictured her son skiing down snow-covered mountain peaks instead of aiming a rifle at another human being.
It would be best to have the tunnel lead into the Blaus’ cellar, Trudi and her father agreed. Ever since he’d turned the young man away from his door, Herr Blau had changed. He would welcome the chance to help others. And his wife would keep quiet.
When Trudi finally went to sleep, she awoke soon after to a low, unfamiliar sound that came from above her ceiling, and for a moment she didn’t dare move because she was certain the Gestapo had found out about the woman and the boy. She had an image of herself locked up inside a cell and felt furious at the woman for endangering her. But it was far too quiet for the Gestapo to be in the house—only that steady sound from the floor above. Ashamed for thinking only about herself, she wrapped herself in her bathrobe, lit a candle, and went up the stairs to the sewing room.
Listening hard, she laid the side of her face against the cool paint of the door. She could feel the boy’s closeness. I’m not going to let them get you, she thought, I won’t. Eyes half closed to hear better, she stood motionless. The sound was slow, grating. Carefully, she opened the door and stepped next to the mattress. She set down the candle holder. The woman and the boy were fast asleep, and he was grinding his teeth. His dark head rested on his mother’s shoulder, and a deep frown made his features look far more grown-up than he was. Like a Zwerg man, Trudi thought, and clasped her hands in front of herself, her fingertips digging into the tender spots between the knuckles.
In the morning the water was frozen, and she had to break the ice in the porcelain basin on her dresser before she could wash. When she took breakfast upstairs to the sewing room, the boy was waiting for her on the other side of the door as if he’d stood there all night.
That first week, Erna Neimann slept much of the time, deeply, as though flinging herself into a bottomless lake. You’d find her asleep wherever you’d left her, while the boy would sit next to her, keeping vigil. Trudi took to spending more hours with him while her father did some of her duties in the pay-library, the connecting door to the hall locked to delay anyone who might try to enter that way. Trudi would tell fairy tales to the boy, comb his pale hair, build card towers for him, wash his face—always ready to rush him upstairs to the sewing room if someone came to the house.
When she found out that he didn’t know how to swim, she taught him the movements in dry air. “Like a frog,” she said. “Pretend you’re a frog. That’s how I learned to swim in the river.” She made him lie with his belly on a stool and showed him how to move his arms and legs.
There was something invigorating about having Konrad in the house, something unsettling, too, because he made Trudi think of the times she’d imagined having a family of her own, a family as shown in magazines and movies, with a husband and children—even though her own body did not belong in any of those pictures; she would never look like those smiling young mothers, would never have what they had. And yet, sometimes she felt an unspoken communication with a small child she might see in church or on the street. She’d feel drawn, deeply, into the child’s eyes, into a moment of recognition that choked her with love. I know you, something within her would chant, though her lips wouldn’t make a sound. I know you, and you will always remember me. She’d feel a connection beyond that moment which—for a while at least—would lull the random longing for a child of her own. And when Konrad looked at her, it was with eyes that seemed to understand all that.
It pleased her that he, too, benefited from the narrow platform next to the kitchen cabinets which her father had built for her years ago. She let Konrad sit on her two special chairs, the birch chair with the short legs in the living room, and the eating chair with its three wide steps leading up to an elevated seat that made it possible for him to rest his elbows on the table.
Once, Trudi saw Erna Neimann enter the bathroom and back out immediately, fanning her face. Instantly she knew why. Her father’s bad habit of lingering on the toilet with his cigarettes and newspaper had embarrassed her ever since she was a child, and she’d backed out of the bathroom many times just like that, waiting for the air to clear; yet, it made her feel defensive to see Frau Neimann do it. Still, the incident finally made her suggest to her father that, since others lived in the house now, it would be considerate to do his reading and smoking outside the bathroom. And when he said without hesitation, “Of course,” she realized that she had asked for others what she would have liked for herself. No more, she thought. If he starts it again, I’ll ask him to stop for me.
Nights she helped with the construction of a tunnel that would connect the two cellars. The wall of the Blaus’ house was only a little over a meter away, but it took more than a week to dislodge the massive stones that had come from the river and dig a passage through the earth, deep enough so that it would not cause the ground above to collapse. Emil Hesping and Leo Montag did most of the digging, while Trudi and old Frau Blau carried the excess earth outside and distributed it in the brook. Even Konrad and his mother helped, though they did not leave the house: they carried pails of earth to the top of the cellar stairs, where Trudi and Frau Blau would pick them up.
Although the old tailor couldn’t keep his hands from shaking, he insisted on doing his share of the digging. He was determined to make up for his failure of not sheltering the young man, but he was so slow that he got in the way.
“I bet Anton Immers would love to know what we’re up to,” he said one night in the cellar while trying to move an enormous stone, which Emil Hesping would take away in his car.
“No need to advertise it.” Herr Hesping crouched and lifted the stone.
Frau Blau said she thought she’d heard years ago that Herr Immers’ grandmother was Jewish. “If so,” she said, “it would make sense why he’s like that.… He’d be afraid of it, that part of himself.… Maybe that’s why he can hate the Jews so.”
“That man would deny his grandmother in a minute,” her husband said.
“Even if his grandmother was Jewish,” Trudi said, “he’s probably convinced himself that she wasn’t. You know how he is.” Until now, she’d never thought of the butcher as afraid. She’d only seen his loathing for the Jews, his malice, but now she wondered if all of that was just fear and, perhaps, contempt for himself.
Recently, he’d hung up a flower shelf in the shop beneath the portraits of himself, the Führer, and the saint, and he was always fussing with the potted violets on that shelf, making you wait for your order and listen to his opinions while he watered the plants or snipped their dead stems and leaves. She pitied the prisoner from Cracow who had to help him in the shop. For some time now, prisoners of war had been arriving in town, some Greek and French, but mostly Eastern Europeans, who were assigned to farms and businesses for menial labor. Pressed into service, they had a place to stay, but no place they could run to without being hunted, and so they worked alongside
the families. The Heidenreichs had a quiet, burly Frenchman from Avignon living with them who, the taxidermist suspected, understood German though he pretended not to. And Herr Buttgereit had warned the Polish prisoner who worked the fields with him to stay away from his daughters and reminded him that it was criminal for Poles to have sex relations with Germans.
“Herr Immers,” Frau Blau said, “tells everyone who comes into his store that, if Germany loses the war, everyone’s going to die … that there’ll be no future.”
Emil Hesping laughed, and his thick eyebrows touched above his nose. “There’ll be even less of a future if the Nazis win the war,” he said with absolute assurance, and shoveled harder.
There was something dangerous in his laugh, something that gave Trudi the feeling that, to him, building the tunnel was an adventure, a way of getting back at the Führer. It made her wish her father hadn’t asked for his help. But Herr Hesping knew how to get fugitives out of the country; he was the one with connections, among them his brother, the bishop, who’d often disapproved of Emil’s schemes and now found himself united with him in the same quest.
She watched him dig, his movements fast, his face and bald head smudged with earth.
“I’ve been wanting to ask you something for some time now,” he whispered to her when he caught her looking at him.
She glanced around, startled. Her father was loosening mortar from an egg-shaped rock, and the others weren’t close enough to hear. “What?”
“That day of your mother’s funeral…”
She felt the gravel under her mother’s skin, saw the motorcycle tilt—
“Why did you play the piano, Trudi?”
She didn’t remember playing the piano, and when she told him, he said, “I wanted to make sure I remembered it correctly.”
“Well, I didn’t.” She looked at him, puzzled, and when he said nothing else, she picked up a pail and filled it with dirt.
When Leo Montag and Emil Hesping tried to do the heavy lifting and digging for old Herr Blau, he objected, and the two put in a secret shift one night after the Blaus had gone to sleep. If Herr Blau noticed the progress on the tunnel the following night, he didn’t mention it, perhaps because he was preoccupied with ideas for decorating his cellar. He talked about hanging up pictures to brighten the space for his Jewish visitors, as he called them, and he dragged bolts of fabric downstairs, intent on covering long pillows that would double as mattresses if laid side by side.
When Leo pointed out that the cellar had to look like a cellar, and that any touches of comfort like that would give it away as a hiding place, Herr Blau was disappointed.
“There’s so much else you can do with the fabric,” Emil Hesping comforted him. “They’ll need clothes. Blankets.”
Sometimes, while hauling pails of earth to the brook, Trudi would think of Max Rudnick and wonder where he was. She felt sure he’d want to help with the tunnel if she asked him. Not that she would—still, she had a feeling she could trust him. He hadn’t come to the library in weeks, and she hoped nothing had happened to him. Not that she missed him, she reminded herself.
Working with the others on the tunnel—dirty, sweaty, and aching—she felt more of a sense of belonging to a community than she ever had before. When finished, the passage would allow people to escape from one house to the other in moments. The openings in the wall would be well hidden: on the Blaus’ side, an old armoire was to be pushed in front of the gap, while the Montags had already emptied their potato bin to make it light enough for one person to pull in front of their entrance. If the police searched one house, the fugitives would enter the other house through the tunnel and pull the façade back into place. It would be a problem if both houses were searched at the same time: the tunnel was so short and low that, at most, two people could hide inside, and then only for a short while. But mostly the fugitives would live on the first floors of the houses, close enough to the cellar stairs to rush down if anyone knocked at the door.
The day after the tunnel was completed, Leo Montag was fixing sugar-and-margarine bread for the boy in the kitchen, when Frau Neimann pulled Trudi into the hall. Her pretty hands were rough, chapped, and only a few flecks of polish still clung to her fingernails.
“He hates me,” she whispered urgently.
“Who?”
“Konrad. Because of the cat.”
“Oh no. He just misses his cat.”
“Has he said anything to you, Fräulein Montag?” Frau Neimann was watching her with such intensity that Trudi could only shake her head. “He’s the only one I have left. I can’t bear him hating me.”
“Konrad doesn’t hate you.”
“Are you sure? He talks more with you than with me.”
Trudi felt mortified by her sudden satisfaction that the boy preferred her to his mother. “I’m sure he can see that you feel terrible about the cat.”
For a moment, the woman’s eyes looked almost amused. Then she smiled. But beneath that smile lay something else, the possibility of an enormous coldness. “It’s not the cat I care about,” she murmured.
Trudi didn’t know what to answer. “Your hands,” she finally said, “we need to do something about your hands.”
“My hands?”
“Wait here.” She rushed up the stairs and into her room, grimacing to herself as she grasped her last bottle of hand lotion. “You can tell so much by a woman’s hands,” Frau Simon had taught her. Sometimes Trudi had done without shampoo, using soap on her hair so that she could afford the lotion. If she applied it sparingly, this bottle would last her a few months.
Before she could change her mind, she took it downstairs. “For you,” she said.
Frau Neimann eagerly accepted the gift, then hesitated. “Only if you have more for yourself.” She extended the bottle halfway toward Trudi.
“You keep it.”
“We could share it.”
“While you’re here. But then it’s yours to take along.”
Erna Neimann’s face turned bone white, and she leaned against the wall.
“What is it?” Trudi took hold of her elbow.
“You’re thinking of sending us away. That’s why you’re giving me this.”
“No. No. You can stay. As long as we can keep you safe here. But that may change. You know that.”
Frau Neimann nodded. “I know.”
It confused Trudi that despite the suffering all around her, some parts of life were going on in a normal way and that she could enjoy them—like the scents from the new grass and the blossoms of the lilac bushes, the warmth of the spring sun on her arms, the playful dips of the swallows as they swooped down to the brook. Somehow, this spring was infusing her with new strength and hope, a deceptive hope, she reminded herself, and yet it soothed her, took her back to the river where, in the shallows below the weeping willows, the water had taken on a peculiar shade of opaque green as though it had soaked up the color of the new leaves, a green that suggested tranquillity, reverence almost. On the opposite bank, sheep grazed in the meadow.
She wished she could take Konrad to the river, but since that would have endangered him, she painted the Rhein for him with words that let him see how, beyond the sheltered bay, the river kept flowing, steady and clear, though there certainly were rocks in the riverbed that created some turbulence. With her stories, she took the boy to the meadows and the fairgrounds and the Sternhof, let him fill his chest with the spring air, and found that, in the telling, all those places became even more real for her. She relished the power of the stories to keep the outdoor world alive for the boy and, like a magician, replaced the sheep with white cows and positioned a parrot in the tower of the Rathaus, just for Konrad.
She didn’t tell the boy about the caricatures of Jews in the newspaper; about the pastor in Neuss who’d been sent to the KZ for harboring Jews; about a bank clerk only four blocks away who’d been forced to take off her clothes and then had been beaten with rifle butts for giving two hard-boiled eggs to h
er Jewish neighbor who’d been about to be deported. She didn’t tell the boy how often she woke up at night, paralyzed by what could happen to her and her father if they were caught, and how she’d get stuck trying to decide what would be the worst possible fate.
The boy would ask her about those white cows whenever she’d return from one of her walks, and she’d tell him there’d been eight on the other side of the river, the same number as the first day she’d mentioned them because to take any of them away might have terrified him.
Konrad had been told to stay away from the windows so that no one could see him from outside, but one morning Trudi found him behind the lace curtain of the dining room, his face pressed against the glass.
“What are you doing?” Quickly, she pulled him away and scanned the street. It was empty.
“Waiting. For my cat.”
She took him into the living room and sat with him on the velvet sofa, wishing she could get a cat for him. But eventually Konrad would have to leave for another hiding place, and a cat would only mean one more loss.
“If you swear not to go near the window again, I’ll tell you a story about a cat.”
He nodded.
“A very special cat.”
“I swear.” He drew closer.
She laid one arm around his shoulders. Both their feet dangled about the same distance above the floor. She liked that. “It’s about a cat and the father of my school friend Eva.…Her father, you see, he was ill. No one knew what was wrong with him, but he was too weak to get up, so weak he couldn’t lift a teacup if it was half full.…” She pretended to pick up a cup and let her wrist go limp. “Her father also was deadly afraid. Of cats. He believed cats choke people by sleeping on their throats. That’s why he kept his windows closed every single night.”
“Even in summer?” Konrad asked, just as Trudi had asked Eva nearly twenty years before.