by Ursula Hegi
“Why were you at the concert?”
“I like music.”
“Were you meeting someone?”
“No.”
“Was this meeting for the purpose of exchanging information?” The woman looked confident, the kind of confident that comes from wearing a uniform that gives you an authority you’ve never had before.
“I was there for the music.”
Trudi kept waiting for Eva’s name to come up, but the questions were all about the concert, where she’d sat, what she’d talked about, whom she’d talked with, and while the woman was shouting at her to answer, she imagined herself traveling through China for one-quarter fare, going four times as far with her money as a regular-size woman like this guard. Finally she realized her arrest had nothing to do with Eva or with hiding other fugitives. Someone had overheard her remark to Frau Buttgereit.
But the grim expression of the guard gave her no reason to celebrate her relief. “So you admit making that statement about the flag?”
“I—” Trudi sighed and lowered her eyes. If the guard sensed that she was not totally intimidated by her, she’d make things worse. “It was thoughtless of me to phrase it like that. It really was. You see—what I meant was that the flag was in the way, making it difficult for someone my size to see the piano.”
“And our national anthem?”
“I have always preferred it at the end of a concert, rather than the beginning.” When she leaned her head back and shot an appealing glance upward, she could tell the guard wasn’t convinced. “I agree—it is unfortunate the way I expressed it.”
“More than unfortunate.” In the guard’s eyes, Trudi recognized that old flash of curiosity she’d encountered from others all her life. “It undermines our country.”
Late that evening, Trudi was given a bowl of pea soup and one slice of Schwarzbrot—black bread—and in the morning she was taken to the second floor and locked in a room with three other women, all much older than she. She’d only met one of them before, Frau Hecht, a Jewish seamstress whose husband had fought in Poland and become the town’s first war casualty. The other two had been brought here from outlying towns.
Frau Hecht was ill. Her skin felt hot to the touch, and whenever she coughed, her entire body trembled. The others kept her covered up with their own blankets and saved some of their water ration for her. They begged the guard who brought the food and wasn’t old enough to grow hair on his face to get one of the sisters to bring medicine for Frau Hecht.
But he shook his head as if afraid of listening to them. “Nuns are not allowed to talk to prisoners.”
While Frau Hecht slept most of that day, mumbling fevered words, the other women were frantic, speculating where they might be sent. They worried about what had happened to their suitcases and lamented about what they’d had to leave behind. Upon their arrival at the Theresienheim, their luggage had been seized, and they were still waiting to have it returned.
That night, when the women slept in their clothes—two to each narrow bed—the young guard brought Sister Agathe. “Five minutes,” he whispered and locked her inside the room with them.
The sister drew in her breath when she saw Trudi. “You—I didn’t know you were here, Fräulein Montag.”
“It’s my third night.”
“Where’s the patient?”
Trudi motioned to Frau Hecht next to her in bed. “She’s burning up.”
After the nun unbuttoned Frau Hecht’s blouse, soiled and reeking from having been worn too many days and nights, she inserted a thermometer beneath her left arm. Her fingers found the pulse. “This is not good,” she said after a silence.
“Is she dying?” one woman asked from the next bed.
“Of course not,” the other woman said.
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Well, she might hear you.”
From deep within the folds of her habit the nun produced a small bottle. She made Frau Hecht swallow two pills and pressed the bottle into Trudi’s hand. “Give her two of these every four hours.”
The door opened a gap. “Quick.” The man-boy voice said, “Quick now.”
“Please, tell my father—” Trudi whispered, but the nun rushed out without a glance back.
In the morning, when an older guard led them to the bathroom, Trudi was afraid the young man had been caught, but that evening he was back, carrying their food.
Trudi wondered what it was like for him, following orders, yet risking arrest for one act of kindness. “Thank you,” she whispered to him.
His eyes skipped away from her with the beat of fear, and he set the lines of his mouth, hard. “No talking,” he snapped.
She lowered her eyes. I’m sorry, she wanted to say, but even that would frighten him, implicate him. They both had to pretend nothing had happened that night.
During the brief periods away from the room, while waiting in line outside the bathroom door, Trudi found out about other prisoners. She’d stand close enough to whisper but not close enough to be reprimanded by a guard. She spoke with a young Jewish woman, a sales clerk, who’d been caught in a train station after she’d bought her ticket. A retired locksmith, whose spectacles were bent and had one lens missing, told her about the feather comforter he’d brought in his luggage; he was furious that it had been taken away from him, considering how he’d abandoned a lot of other belongings he could have brought instead.
“They would have taken those too,” Trudi reminded him.
“It’s not fair.”
“Of course not.”
Another man, a Jewish professor, had been arrested while stealing eggs. Two years earlier he’d left Heidelberg, and he’d been hiding ever since, sleeping in barns and forests, traveling on a bicycle though its tires had long since worn out and he’d had to tie rags around its metal rims.
“I won’t be here for long,” he assured Trudi. “It’s not in my nature to stay anywhere more than a week.”
She didn’t point out to him that it was no longer his choice. “If you ever need help—” she started.
“That’s kind of you, my dear. But you’re hardly in a position to help.”
She was glad for him when, the morning after their conversation, she heard he had managed to escape from the Theresienheim. Nearly everyone she saw that day whispered about him excitedly, even two of the guards, but the stones conflicted: the professor had climbed onto the roof and let himself down with a rope he’d made from bed sheets; the professor had walked right out of the front door, wearing a stolen uniform; the professor had bitten his way out.…
Trudi wasn’t quite sure what it meant, biting your way out, but that was the version she liked best and circulated with her own stories because it embodied what she was beginning to feel herself capable of. But in the meantime she was not doing anything except waiting. She worried about her father, hoped that he wasn’t risking his safety for her.
Frau Hecht was still sick though her fever had come down. She told Trudi that Sister Agathe had visited her once before. “To bring me a boiled egg … Imagine. She’s like that, the sister, taking things to prisoners when she can, even though it puts her in danger. One widow—she’s gone now—lost her shoes when she was arrested, and the sister found her a pair, black leather, only a little too big.…”
When the two other women in their room were taken away within a day of each other, they offered no resistance. Eyes dazed, they retreated into decades of good manners, mumbling polite words of good-bye to Trudi and Frau Hecht.
One of Trudi’s new roommates, a gypsy woman, had deep gashes down her back from crawling under barbed wire into a meadow, where she’d hidden for three weeks in a clump of bushes, drinking milk directly from the udders of cows until the farmer had spotted her one dawn.
Many of the prisoners were Jewish, but there were others like Trudi who’d said the wrong thing or, worse yet, had been caught hiding fugitives. The end of her third week in the Theresienheim, she was brought downstairs late
one afternoon and led into the office that used to belong to the mother superior.
“The little girl from the hat shop.” The man who sat behind the desk brought his bone fingers together as if in prayer—though without his palms touching—and drummed his fingertips against each other. “You didn’t keep your mouth shut?”
Though she’d only seen him once, that day he’d arrested Frau Simon, she recognized him immediately. His face had lost more of its flesh, pushing his eyes further into their sockets, and he looked even more tired, more aloof.
She wanted to tell him again that she was not a little girl, but she remained silent because four years had passed and she understood more about things that could happen to you, understood hunger and fear and his authority to send her to her death. Her wool dress was matted beneath her arms, making her feel dirty.
He said: “The rules that used to temper curiosity no longer exist.”
She waited, confused.
“Do you understand what I say?”
“No.”
“You should. Don’t you know what can happen to someone like you in our country?”
The Buttgereit boy …the man-who-touches-his-heart… the Heidenreich daughter… No, she was not like them.
“You become an experiment… a medical experiment for the almighty profession,” he said, and told her of operations performed on twins, on people afflicted with otherness. “Because the rules that used to temper curiosity no longer exist… Some people might even tell you that a Zwerg has no right to live.”
She felt her back seize up on her. Bracing herself against the familiar heaviness at the base of her spine, she asked, “And you? Is that what you believe?”
He looked at her, evenly, and she read in his eyes what she’d known four years before—that he didn’t believe in anything or anyone.
She kept her expression impassive to match his. It still chafed at her—to hear the word Zwerg said aloud—but if she’d learned anything, it was how to be the Zwerg, to play the Zwerg. Funny almost, the way it gave you a strange power to let others look down on you, to let them bask in their illusion that they were better than you. That illusion was a gift—hers to grant, simply by being—a gift that turned some of them ugly and others defenseless and, therefore, useful.
A muscle jumped beneath his left eye, quivered, and jumped again. He raised one hand halfway but dropped it before it could reach his face. “What is it like, being a Zwerg?”
She knew it was a game for him, a distraction from his indifference, because it didn’t matter to him what happened to her. For that to matter, she’d have to figure out exactly what it would take to yank him out of his apathy. The secret, she thought, the secret of not caring about anything, as she remembered her first impression of him years ago.
She lifted her face toward him. “Being a Zwerg means carrying your deepest secret inside out—there for everyone to see.” She thought of an article she’d once read in the Burgdorf Post about an infant in Egypt who’d died hours after being born with her organs connected to the outside of her skin. “Like this man I knew who was born with his heart attached to the outside of his chest. People could see it pump. And because it was so obvious, they thought they knew all about him. He had to cover his heart with gauze to keep it from getting infected, to protect it from dust and heat and snow.…”
The Gestapo officer’s eyes were on her, filled with a cold curiosity; his fingers had returned to their drumming.
She tried to feel out what would pull him into her story. She’d often sensed what people wanted to hear, but this was the first time it totally determined the story. And my life, she thought. “This man … you see, he had his suit jackets tailored in such a way that they were large in his shoulders and hung down his chest, but still, the swelling pushed out the fabric, moved it with each heartbeat. In his dreams, his chest was smooth, his heart safely anchored within his body. And when he prayed—”
“Praying is for fools.”
“Praying is for fools,” she agreed. “That’s what he finally realized too.”
“What does any of this have to do with being a Zwerg?”
“Everything.” Her legs trembled, but she didn’t dare sit down. “Everything,” she said, forcing herself to expose what she hadn’t yielded to anyone before: “You see, when I dream, I’m often tall. I—I used to try stretching my body by hanging from door frames.…”
The thin fingers stopped their drumming as she described how her arms had gone numb while she’d hung from the door frame, how she’d tightened scarves around her head to keep it from getting larger. From time to time her voice would clog, but she’d go on, even though it meant turning herself inside out like the infant with the organs fused to her surface, delivering herself, risking death, risking life.
Though he would look toward the door as if wishing he could dismiss her, his eyes were always drawn back to her. “Go on,” he’d order whenever her voice faltered.
“I used to sew clothes that would make me look one or two centimeters taller. I used to believe praying would make me grow.…”
“Go on.”
She felt a sudden rush of power, the power to stay alive. She’d kept others alive with her stories when they’d come close to being found. This time it was for herself. “The man whose heart beat outside his body, you see, when he was a boy, other children wouldn’t let him play. They called him names, laughed at him.…” It was the right story. It had to be. She could see the boy standing outside the circle of other children, longing to be part of it, hating the others for not including him, and she let her words take the officer into that schoolyard when the boy’s parents complained to the teachers and the other children were forced to let him play.
“Go on.”
She felt drained, purged, as he followed her through the boy’s school years and into a beer garden, where he danced for the first time, his arms extended to keep the girl he loved from colliding with his heart. “They felt stiff, his arms, they ached, but he didn’t dare bring her any closer.…”
“Go on.”
“People would not let this man forget about his heart. They’d look at him with pity, with interest. But that’s where they made their mistake—by assuming that, just because they saw the swelling on his chest, they knew what it was like for him to live with his heart outside his body. And that… that is where the secret lies.”
“He let them assume.”
She nodded.
“He did not correct them.” She shook her head.
He watched her for several long minutes. “Of course,” he said. “Of course.”
Outside it was getting dusky, leveling the angles of the gaunt face, filling its hollows with the ghosts of perished flesh. Suddenly, and with absolute conviction, Trudi knew that, come spring, he would no longer be alive, and that his death would meet him through his own hands. She stared at those hands as they dipped a pen into ink and scribbled words on a sheet of paper.
“I don’t want to see you back here.”
Her eyes snapped from his hands to his face. “What?” she asked.
“I said I don’t want to see you back here.”
“You won’t.”
“Watch that mouth of yours. Salute the flag, sing when you must, and don’t complain. About any of it.”
As his huge signature crawled across the bottom of the page like a prehistoric insect, Trudi saw herself curled inside the narrow tunnel between the two cellars. Eva’s mosquito netting swayed above her, and the earth held the damp, furtive scent of places that are only accessible to those willing to burrow down that far. My mother would have loved that space, she thought with a sense of wonder. Another earth nest. Odd that I haven’t thought of it till now.
It was the coldest winter she would look back on even as an old woman. The river was frozen solid, a wide, empty surface without the familiar barges, mirroring the emptiness of the town. There was little to diminish the relentless cold. Trudi hadn’t been able to get warm since th
at evening she’d been released from the Theresienheim and had dashed through backyards and across the brook to her house, flinging herself at the kitchen door and into her father’s arms. Even when he stoked the tall stove in the bathroom for her and she lay in the steaming water, she still felt cold.
Fuel was scarce that winter, and for one hour each day she’d heat the green tile stove because it needed fewer coals than the kitchen stove. On its small surface she’d cook the scant midday meal in the living room. Even Matthias, who’d stop by to play the piano for her, could not warm her with his music.
She’d only been away a few weeks, but her father looked years older. It was as though he lived almost entirely through his eyes now. Though he’d rarely missed a chess club meeting in decades, he stopped going to the club the night several of the members—who cheered each new atrocity the Nazis committed—celebrated the arrest of Leo’s friend, the judge Erwin Spiecker, who’d fought in the First World War with him.
From what the judge’s wife told Leo, the arrest had happened half an hour after Erwin had walked out of his courtroom in Düsseldorf with two lawyers and had mentioned that, if things kept going like that with the military, Germany wouldn’t win the war. He was taken to Berlin to be executed—treason, they said—and his wife, who was pregnant with their eighth child, kept waiting for permission to visit him in prison.
“I got out,” Trudi tried to console her, “and his comment wasn’t worse than mine.”
“It’s still a miracle to me how you managed that,” Frau Spiecker said.
When she finally was allowed to see her husband, she rode on a train all night. In Berlin, she had to wait for hours in an unheated hallway before she was taken to see him. He reeked—his entire body reeked—and he wrenched himself immediately from her embrace. He, who’d always kept himself fanatically clean to combat the foul smell that emanated from his body, was so mortified that he insisted she stay at the opposite end of the room.
Four times Judge Spiecker’s execution was postponed, and four times Frau Spiecker left her children with neighbors in Burgdorf and, carrying a package with soap and cigarettes and mystery novels that Leo Montag sent along for Erwin, made the long journey to Berlin, prepared to—once again—say her final good-bye to her husband. But the last time he was no longer there when she arrived: he’d been transferred, she was told, to a prison camp south of Berlin, where no one could visit him.