by Ursula Hegi
“At least Erwin is alive,” she told Leo Montag when he picked her up from the train station. “At least he’s alive.”
That Sunday he drove her and her children to church, where several men from the chess club knelt with pious faces as every Sunday, occupying the pews with an attitude of ownership, content with the familiar rituals: the opulent scent of the Weihrauch—incense—the angelic sounds from the choir, the flat communion wafers, the chalice with the blood of Christus.
Leo squinted at the faint pink clouds in the altar cloth with the lace edging, recognizing the markings of blood that had never washed out entirely after he’d carried his wife from the church. How long had Gertrud been dead? Twenty-three years, he thought, and the cloth is still there.
He glanced toward the women’s side of the church, where the judge’s wife knelt in prayer, her high belly pushing against the front of the honey-colored pew as if trying to prove that flesh was stronger than wood. Or stone, Leo thought. Or the knife of sorrow. Some day her husband would have been dead for years. And she would find that you survive what you never thought you could possibly survive.
When he brought Frau Spiecker to mass a month later, he carried her infant daughter, his godchild Heide, in his arms. By then, mass was held in the chapel. Since the war had continued to shrink the congregation, Herr Pastor Beier had decided to move the services there. Though the chapel was two kilometers from the rectory, it was small enough to heat, and after contemplating his choice of discomforts, the fat priest had selected travel over cold, figuring his housekeeper would manage to arrange rides for him—with the taxidermist, say, or the dentist’s wife, who should feel honored at doing this for him. But it turned out that, frequently, he had to ride his bicycle after all, and he needed half the mass to settle his breath.
Those bicycle Sundays, as he came to think of them, his sermons were always shorter. He pointed this out to the bishop when he wrote him a letter, asking for a car that would make it possible for him to serve his parishioners more effectively. In his letter he emphasized his visits to the sick and elderly, but omitted the dinner invitations which he still managed to secure despite dwindling food supplies.
Leo never felt the division within the town as acutely as he did in the chapel. Once, the parish had felt like something whole, one body of people connected in one belief and many shared values—even if Leo had not always agreed—but now that belief had become tainted by those who used it to proclaim their superiority, who justified the crimes against the Jews by saying they deserved punishment because they’d killed Christus.
The blood of Christus. When the fat priest raised the chalice, Leo couldn’t help but think of centuries of savagery that had been committed for the blood of Christus. Catholic voodoo, he thought as the priest brought the chalice to his lips to drink the sacred blood, as the good people of Burgdorf stuck out their tongues to consume the body of Christus.
Trudi was making Bratkartoffeln—fried potatoes—on the tile stove when her father mentioned that Max Rudnick would stop by that afternoon.
She turned her face away to hide her blush and jiggled the pan by its handle to keep the potatoes from burning. “Why?” she asked.
“He came by this morning when you were at the bakery, and I told him you’d be here this afternoon.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Why not?”
She flipped over the crisp potato slices.
Her father stepped next to the stove and raised his hands above the pan to warm them. “He says he wants to talk with you.”
When Max Rudnick entered the pay-library late that afternoon, Trudi was surprised how glad she was to see him; yet, she found it impossible to show that because all she could think of was the way she’d deceived him. That nasty note she’d brought to his table … She felt her shame as though it had happened the day before and knew she didn’t want to hurt anyone again with that kind of deliberation.
With all that turmoil going on within her, she couldn’t figure how to say no when he invited her to have dinner with him the following day.
“At six then,” he called out to her when he left the pay-library. “I’ll pick you up at six tomorrow.”
As she got ready for bed, she agonized over ways to cancel their plans. All at once she remembered the one Goddamn beautiful night—as Eva had called it—that she’d dreamed up for herself and Max. She cringed. Of course Max had never considered anything like that with her. Their meal would end with him exposing her as Angelika and walking out, leaving her sitting right there with the unpaid bill. She’d have to call her father to pick her up, ask him to bring enough money. Some nerve Max Rudnick had. Tomorrow, when he arrived, she’d come right out and tell him she wasn’t interested in eating dinner with him.…
But in the morning she awoke tingling with anticipation. Only eleven hours until she would see him. Was he thinking of her that moment? She felt silly, afraid, happy. Her energy was boundless as she worked in the library. She pictured herself sitting across from Max at the table, saw him bending over her in her bedroom, and she surfaced to her customers’ questions in a daze. Although she couldn’t wait for it to be six o’clock, she wanted to prolong this sweet suspense that tinged her day and made her feel graceful on her feet, even somewhat taller, as though, miraculously, her body had finally obeyed her old prayers.
The first time Max Rudnick kissed her, Trudi felt the secret of Angelika between them, but she kissed him back, passionately, greedily because she felt she was stealing this kiss. Once he knew the truth about the letters, he would no longer want to see her, much less kiss her. And yet, she found herself smiling through that kiss because it occurred to her that it had been just about a decade since Klaus Malter had kissed her and because she promised herself that it would not be another decade before she’d kiss another man.
The second time Max Rudnick kissed her was right after the first kiss, and then there were several other kisses that would make her mouth feel fuller, delicately swollen. She became accustomed to his melodic voice, though she couldn’t always make out what he said right away, but his hands would follow the swift words as if to preserve them in his palms until, all at once, she’d understand what he’d said. And even if she didn’t—Max Rudnick was a patient man who didn’t mind repeating his words.
When he held her in his arms, it felt as though he’d never been away, though he told her he’d been back in Köln to nurse his Russian grandmother through her last months of illness and to settle her estate. There hadn’t been much, but she’d left everything to him. It helped since the industrialist and his family had fled to Switzerland, and he had only found two new students to tutor.
He listened with compassion when she told him about her arrest. Before long, she began to find the ordinary in him beautiful: the curved shoulders now looked willowy, and the wave of black hair on his collar was not too long but rather followed the fine contour of his ears. She could not imagine why she would have thought of his mustache as timid when, in reality, its many hues of silken, bleached hairs only brought out the sensitive line of his upper lip. And as her love transformed what she saw—gradually, so that each encounter became a new discovery—she wondered if it was like that for him, too. Perhaps he only noticed her mass of silver-blond hair. Perhaps his eyesight was so bad that he barely saw her at all. She knew he liked the sound of her voice—he’d told her that—and she was certain he enjoyed their conversations. Ever since he’d said that she had spirited eyes, she’d found herself studying them in the mirror as though they belonged to another woman.
She didn’t want to believe that he was only drawn to her because she was different, but their first disagreement was about just that. They were standing beneath the marquee of a movie theater in Düsseldorf, waiting for the cold rain to let up so they could run for his car. The film they’d seen had been romantic kitsch, a love story set in alpine meadows, complete with yodeling, Lederhosen, blond braids, and St. Bernards that carried casks of Schnaps
around their furry necks and rescued blond heroes trapped on glaciers.
Peering into the rain, Max told her he admired her strength, her difference.
“Inside I’m just like others,” she said.
“How can you possibly be like anyone else inside?”
“Why not?” she snapped back.
“Because your life has shaped you, has made you unique.”
“Just because I’m different on the outside—”
“But that’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Yes, you are.”
“What I’m saying is the opposite, really. Each one of us is different. Even those who are alike on the outside are totally unique on the inside.” The dark street was deserted. “You take two old men, let’s say, brothers, same height, same color hair—or no hair—who’ve lived in the same town all their lives.… As far as I’m concerned, they’re not at all alike.”
“Yes, but the two of them will look at me and use their sameness as a barrier to separate themselves from me. They’ll believe I don’t have anything in common with them.”
“Then they’re stupid old men.”
“And there are thousands like them, men and women, who assume that with me everything is smaller—what I feel, what I think.…”
He brought his hand around the back of her head and bent down. In the light above the door of the theater, his glasses were fogged.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said as he kissed her, but then she saw the sadness and earth in his eyes, far too deep to be concerned about surfaces, and understood he wanted her as she was.
And yet, when he took her by the hand and ran with her across the wet pavement to the narrow hotel across the street, when he booked a room for them and dried her hair with a towel as soon as they got inside, she was terrified to take off her clothes and have him look at her with the same loathing she’d seen in her own eyes that day she’d run from Klaus Malter’s office and her mirrors had thrown back her disjointed reflection, pale flesh swelling from the golden frames.
But Max was kissing her, gazing at her with affection. It was cold in the room. Rain drummed on the tile roof, against the window, and she closed her eyes, ready to let happen whatever would happen, because to dread it, to wait for it, was worse. Then his hands were on her breasts, and she got confused for a moment, thinking they belonged to Klaus Malter because they’d been his in those old fantasies, and she quickly opened her eyes and kept them open, reminding herself: this is Max, this is Max—And when he cried out under his rapid breath and ceased moving, poised above her like a comet the instant before its bright descent, she felt left behind. Her body felt warm and pliant, almost wonderful, but she was not moved by the tremors that she’d evoked for herself so many times.
He sighed, kissed her nose, her forehead, her left ear, settled against her side, one arm warm beneath her head, knees curved against her ankles. As she turned toward the length of his body, he murmured something. His arm twitched.
“Why me?” she whispered.
But he was already asleep.
She’d never slept in the same bed with anyone. It felt strange, crowded, exciting—as though her body had sprouted an extra torso and head, limbs of normal size that would disentangle from her in a few hours. But not yet. Not yet. It made her think how children who had siblings often slept in the same bed. She wondered if her parents would have had other children if she hadn’t been a Zwerg. Just before she fell asleep, she remembered asking Frau Blau if her mother would have stayed sane if she hadn’t given birth to a Zwerg child, and how important it had been to her what Frau Blau had told her: “Your mother was odd long before you were born. Don’t misunderstand me, Trudi, I liked her. She was a dear, dear woman. But whatever was troubling her was there since she was a girl.”
When Trudi did reach those tremors the next time she lay with Max Rudnick, she felt horrified because she’d used him to slip back to the barn and the boys and the old terror that brought her, brought her—
“Why are you crying?” he asked, stroking her hair.
She couldn’t answer.
“Nothing you can say will be worse than this silence.”
She shook her head.
“Did I hurt you?”
“Oh no,” she said, ashamed of the fantasies that had claimed her, ashamed of the passion that needed fear. She’d often felt hollow afterwards, but now it was even worse because she was betraying Max.
He folded himself around her, rocked her.
It amazed her how, after such a short time together, his body could feel so familiar to her. She liked being with him in the room that he rented above a clock shop in Kaiserswerth, even though it was chilly as if the walls stored the winter’s unrelenting cold. And what made it seem even colder was that the room was nearly empty: except for his bed, it held no soft surfaces, only the angles of two chairs and a table, a bookshelf and a wardrobe, a sink and a stove. Max had very few belongings, as though he were prepared to leave quickly, and the one surprise in these stark surroundings was his unframed watercolors, which he’d pinned to the walls, all of them of fabulous buildings that looked like exotic flowers as they swirled and opened toward the sky.
A few times she’d come close to letting her father know that something beautiful was happening between her and Max. Though he’d be asleep when she’d come home at dawn and wouldn’t ask her where she’d been, she had a feeling he understood about them and was glad for her. But already so much had gone on between her and Max that to say anything to her father now would involve confessing about not telling him from the beginning.
Her instinctive secrecy when it came to herself made Trudi keep silent about Max to everyone else. They’d only shun him for choosing her, just as they’d shunned Eva after the concert. Besides, loving without marriage was sin. Though enough people did it, you couldn’t admit it because then the town had to reject you.
“Some day,” Max said, “if you feel ready to tell me, will you let me know why you cried? Even if I don’t know the words to ask?”
She held his hand, lifted it to look at it closely. It wasn’t just his hand that was tanned. His entire body was that soft brown shade. It would be so easy to forget all restraint and hurl her love at him the way Seehund used to with his puppy weight, his entire body and heart.
“Will you?” he asked.
“I like seeing your skin against mine.…”
“Why is that?”
“Because I always know where I end and where you begin. Look.”
He reached behind himself for his glasses, and as he raised himself on his elbows, he, too, became intrigued by the contrast in their skin tones. “It’s beautiful, the way your skin glows … as if lit from inside by a thousand candles.”
Already she could see herself alone at home, looking at herself in her mother’s mirrors, finding the glow he was talking about as a thousand candles warmed her from within. She was amazed at the sense of comfort she felt at being within her body—being whole, healthy, beautiful. Like Pia, she thought. Pia must have felt like that.
“My light spirit,” Max murmured against her lips.
“My light spirit,” she would murmur to herself in her bed at home, her smile turned into her pillow.
seventeen
1943
“DO YOU HAVE ANY FAULTS, MAX?” SHE ASKED HIM ONE FEBRUARY night when she lay next to him in his narrow bed.
“What do you mean?” He ran one hand along the inside of her arm, lightly.
“You are too perfect, too kind.… It scares me. Makes me think I don’t see you right.”
“Well… If you promise not to tell—” He glanced around his room as if to make sure no one else would overhear his confession. Bringing his lips against Trudi’s ear, he whispered, “I’ve stolen.”
“What?”
“A pack of chocolate cigarettes. When I was eight.”
“I’m impressed.”
“You should be.”
“Is that all?”
“Sometimes I get furious, break things.”
“Like what?”
“Oh—toys, when I was a child. Once, I ripped my best friend’s kite apart when he made fun of the one I’d built.… I broke a car window a few years ago.”
“What happened?”
He hesitated.
“Tell me? Please?”
“I was traveling with—with a woman to Bremen. We were taking turns driving, and when I got out to walk around the car, you know, to the passenger side, she locked my door. We’d been joking around, and I guess she thought it was funny. She was sitting in there, laughing, and I warned her, I yelled, Open the door,’ but she dangled the key behind the windshield, and I picked up a rock. At first she laughed, but as I raised the rock, her expression changed, and I could see she was afraid. Afraid to let me in. But I couldn’t stop. Even though I knew something had gone too far and that I’d missed the moment when that had happened.”
“Did you hurt her?”
“No. I broke the window on the passenger side.”
“Did you see her again after that?”
“We—we were married.”
Trudi sat up, pulled her arms close to herself, so that no part of her touched him any longer. On the floor by his wardrobe stood her black shoes, the ones with the highest heels, which she kept in his room so she could reach the table and sink easily.
“Look at me,” he said. “I haven’t seen her in years.”
“You’re divorced then?”
“Not legally. But I will be, if we ever agree enough to sign papers.”
Her body felt stiff as if her heart had stopped beating.
“Come here.” He opened his arms to her. “Please, Trudi?”