by Ursula Hegi
“Like a child.”
“Yes, like a child.”
“My son got there in time,” the butcher told his customers.
“A car for the parish would be helpful in preserving the honor of our young women,” the pastor urged the bishop in a letter.
That version of what had happened that evening by the river was just what Trudi wanted the town to believe, and she was amused when she heard that her father, supposedly, was in the habit of looking for her whenever she wasn’t home by nine.
“I’m usually asleep by nine,” he said when she told him.
“I guess they like to believe that someone’s looking after me.”
Trudi massaged the rumors by pretending to let seemingly innocent comments slip from her, which—in return—compelled others to confide in her about near indiscretions within their families. And so she piloted her story.…
Let them think that she’d never been with a man.
Let them feel sorry for her.
Let them believe that, by chance, she’d come across that one man by the river that one night.
Had the people of Burgdorf known what had really happened to Trudi by the river, they would have been furious at her for deceiving them—not because of her words but because the truth would have mocked their expectations of her. Over the years, those expectations had solidified and engendered pity because she would never have a man and children, superiority because any one of them had to be better off than she, and fear because she knew too much about them.
They didn’t have any idea that she’d known the naked man—as they came to speak of him—for over two years, and that she’d been his lover for ten months. They didn’t have any idea how, with one fingertip, he would trace her entire body—hips and ears and knees and throat and breasts and chin and back and wrists and toes—and how she’d quiver under his slow touch and discover her body through the gentle pressure of his hands.
Had a young woman of normal size offered the kind of flimsy lie about watching a stranger’s clothes on the jetty, no one would have believed her. At times it made Trudi furious that everyone in town was eager to embrace her fabrication, including Klaus Malter, who’d been sent home from the front with an infected shoulder wound and—after church one Sunday—asked her if she was all right as though she were marked from her encounter. His voice was concerned, and she came close to telling him that Max was a far better kisser than he.
In her anger, she let the story grow and found her vengeance in circulating it around town, keeping it alive, and it would become one of those stories that even people who hadn’t been born yet—like the next generation of Immers and Baums and Malters—would grow up with and continue to tell about Trudi Montag once she was an old woman. So much more happened than she would disclose to anyone, even to Hanna Malter, the child of Klaus and Jutta, whose birth was still three years away and whom she would love as though she were her own daughter. Even Hanna would never know that Trudi kept seeing the naked man after that night on the jetty, that they would meet further south, where the river was turbulent and the shadows of the poplars couldn’t touch the surface of the flat stone that was wide enough for both of them—far away from the eyes of the town where Trudi was the one who seized people’s secrets.
One night in June of 1944, Herr Abramowitz died in his sleep. The week after his funeral, his wife was arrested when, in one unforeseen and magnificent act of rage, she demolished the office of the Hitler-Jugend in Frau Simon’s former hat shop. The two uniformed youth leaders, who watched the slender old woman enter with her cane, were too stunned to move when she swung the cane around, scattering papers and files, smashing lamps and the pyramid-shaped mirror, which—at the instant of splintering—yielded to her images of everything that had ever happened in her marriage.
Her cane ripped through the membership maps with their tiny pin flags that covered the walls, knocked down framed photos of children singing around bonfires and marching in parades. Trying to dodge her cane, the youth leaders wrestled her to the floor and tied her wrists—but not before she’d broken one pair of eye glasses and left welts on their necks and faces.
In the days after Frau Abramowitz was sent away, the old women in town would tell each other stories of amazing strength that sometimes becomes available to women for brief periods of time: they would recall a mother who’d lifted a farm tractor from the chest of her trapped daughter; a wife who’d carried her wounded husband, twice her weight, two kilometers to the doctor.
In St. Martin’s Church, Herr Pastor Beier continued to offer prayers for the soldiers who’d died in the war, but he never mentioned the Jews who’d been deported or killed. Standing on the blood-red carpet that led up the marble stairs to the black marble altar, he’d raise both fleshy arms and beseech Christus to embrace the soldiers who’d sacrificed their lives for the Vaterland, just as He had sacrificed His life on the cross.
Leo Montag walked around the pay-library, dazed, as though he’d become a widower all over again, and Trudi began to wonder how much Frau Abramowitz’s unspoken love had braced him over the years. Late one evening he grew strangely restless: he rearranged his leftover books in the living room and sorted through old photos. Though she was tired, Trudi stayed up. Twice, she asked him if he wouldn’t rather go to sleep. It was after midnight when he limped down the cellar stairs and brought up the crate that Michel Abramowitz had entrusted to him nearly six years earlier. Wrapped inside Michel’s raincoat, they found linen napkins folded around the two silver candlesticks that used to stand on the Abramowitzs’ piano; one ring with diamonds and another with an oval aquamarine; the necklace with rubies that Michel had given Ilse on their twentieth wedding anniversary; eight sets of cufflinks and three bracelets; a collection of antique gold coins; and the carved mezuzah that used to hang on the Abramowitzs’ front-door post.
“We’ll have to get these things to Ruth,” Leo told Trudi.
“Don’t you think it would be better to keep them until after the war?”
“I no longer know what that means: after the war.”
“It will end. It must.”
“Ruth needs to know about her parents.” He’d been with Frau Abramowitz when she’d tried to call Ruth from the dentist’s phone to tell her about her father’s death. But no one had answered the phone in the clinic where Ruth worked. “Ilse sent her a letter about her father. She should have written back by now.”
“Maybe she’s no longer in Dresden,” Trudi said softly.
He closed the crate. “I’m taking this to her.”
“What makes you think you’ll find her? And where do you think you’ll get gasoline for the trip?”
“Herr Blau has enough stashed away.”
“He doesn’t even have a car.”
“You know how he is.” Leo grabbed his keys. “Always saving things in case he’ll need them. He’ll understand that I’m not asking lightly.”
“It’s late. You’re tired.”
The crate under his arm, he headed toward the door.
“And it’s way too far. You’ll drive all night.”
“Wouldn’t you want to know if I were dead or deported?”
“At least let me come along.”
“Someone has to be in the library.”
“I’ll put up a sign that we’re closed because of illness.” She made him set the crate down. “Let’s wrap these in a less conspicuous way. In case we’re stopped.”
While her father went to speak with Herr Blau, Trudi packed a suitcase, hiding the jewelry and coins inside rolled-up socks, the mezuzah in the folds of a suit jacket. They stashed the candlesticks beneath the spare tire. Four canisters of gas in their trunk, they silently drove out of Burgdorf. The only light upon the landscape came from the beams of their car. As they lifted gutted buildings and torn fences from the dark, and flitted across broken arbors and bridges that had been blown up, Leo ached for the country he used to love.
For brief spans, Trudi kept falling asleep, and Leo felt like
the only survivor in an unreal landscape. Each time she awoke—her back and knees stiff—it was from half dreams of being deported in a cattle car. She felt ashamed that she could sleep at all, ashamed that her body protested those minor discomforts; they were nothing compared to what Frau Abramowitz and Eva must have suffered. And yet, as she’d doze off and wake up and doze off again, her own aches gave her a small measure of understanding about how the Nazis took you and stripped you of everything that made you unique, stripped you of all that gave you identity, until they had created an awful equality: they took away your families, your right to practice your education, possessions you’d worked for, all that was important to you—your music, your books, your art. And when you thought there was nothing else they could possibly deprive you of, they came for the basics that you took for granted—your food and your clothes; your privacy to go to the bathroom or wash yourself. They herded you into KZs—a flour sack between you and the hard floor—robbed you of your dignity, made all of you alike in an awful way. And as you survived each torment and endured the discomforts, the excrement, the terrible lack of privacy, and the hunger that became your predominant feeling—stronger even than your fear—it proved the judgment they’d already formed about you: that you were all like animals.
Trudi shivered. To her left, her father’s profile rode the night, framed by the dark window on the driver’s side. His lips were closed, and he looked serious, determined. She thought of the priest Adolf, who used to live in Dresden, and she longed for the certainty that he was safe like Konrad. Maybe they’d drive past the church where he’d been arrested. Though she didn’t remember the name of his church, she felt certain she’d know it once she saw it. Adolf had promised to write her after the war if he was still alive. Don’t you dare forget, she beseeched him, willing him to read her thoughts. Don’t you dare or I’ll think you’re dead.
It wasn’t right that Adolf and other priests who’d spoken out against the Nazis were hunted or imprisoned or killed, while the fat priest was free—secure and well fed in his rectory—restricted only by the virtuous complaints of his housekeeper, Fräulein Teschner. Trudi’s eyes closed. Far away, she felt the fat priest turning in his bed, dreaming of the car the bishop would surely give him after the war.
“It took us all of the following night to drive back,” she would tell Max after she’d return from Dresden. They’d be in his room in Kaiserswerth. Outside, on the windowsill, a pigeon would land on the clay pot with its one dried-out geranium and peck at the dirt.
“We found the address of the clinic, but Ruth no longer worked there. She hadn’t shown up for her shift two months earlier, and when her supervisor had stopped by her apartment, no one had answered. We went there, my father and I, knocked at the door of the owner, who lived on the first floor, but he kept telling us to go away, that Ruth had moved. He looked afraid.”
“He probably was.”
She would tell Max how they’d driven through Dresden all that day, just on the chance of seeing Ruth, how urgent it had felt all at once to let Ruth know how her mother had taught Trudi good manners—“She was a kind and generous and loving woman, your mother”—and how reluctant her father had been to leave there without bringing Ruth her family’s possessions.
“If you want,” Max would offer, “we can take a trip there after the war. See if we can find Ruth. I have an aunt not far from there, in Leipzig. We could visit her.”
The day of his ninth wedding anniversary, Alexander Sturm returned to Burgdorf without leave. For more than a year he’d been fighting, flinging his body into battle with the fury of obliterating himself, but it was as though he’d been cursed: while soldiers all around him had died or been maimed, he hadn’t even earned a simple scar.
In his uniform, he walked from the train station to his apartment building, asked Jutta for his keys, avoided her eyes that had witnessed his cowardice, and stalled her questions by promising to talk with her soon. When he unlocked the door to his apartment, his rooms were the way he’d left them: his niece had obviously hired someone to clean them regularly. He stripped off his uniform, bathed without hurry, washed his cropped hair, and dressed in his good blue suit, which felt as though it must have been tailored for a heavier man. The jacket was too spacious, and without his suspenders the trousers would not have stayed up. It was late afternoon when he mounted the stairs to the attic.
While, only a few blocks away, Trudi was checking out two romances to Klara Brocker—supposedly for Klara’s mother again—Alexander Sturm stood in the middle of his attic.
“I should have come with you and your parents,” he said aloud.
Only silence confronted him.
“I used to believe I’d go with you into exile, death even… I’m ready for that now.”
Through the closed window, he could see the cherry tree across the street and, behind it, the burned upper half of the Talmeisters’ house and the first floor where the family still lived.
“Even if you are in the worst of places, I would rather be with you than here by myself. Even if you are dead, it would be better to be dead with you.”
He stepped up to the window. The sun was plunging behind the tile roofs of his town. Pigeons and sparrows picked at the fallen cherries that stained the sidewalk, and for a moment, as Alexander stared at the mess of red pulp and white kernels, it became Eva’s flesh, merging with a pile of flesh and bones. His body heaved, yearned to become part of that pile. Dry moans hiccuped from his throat. He crawled behind the crates.
“Don’t you see?” he whispered. “I never meant to break my promise.” He remembered Jutta pulling him to his feet after the Gestapo had left him behind, remembered her strong arms as she’d led him down the stairs to his apartment, where she’d wrapped blanket after blanket around him because his body wouldn’t stop shaking.
“I was too late, Eva. A few minutes more—and I would have been able to get up. I wanted to come with you. You have to believe me.”
The sky outside the attic window was streaked with mauve, and in that kindest of lights—where time can shift and restore itself—Alexander Sturm was given his moment of grace. Trembling with awe, he watched Eva walk toward him in a blue evening gown, her hair braided into a crown. “You still mean it? About coming with me?” she asked, and he leapt up, his legs obeying him, “Yes,” he said, “yes,” and she held out one hand and he felt it, felt it, no ghost hand this; it was real, warm as his own flesh. “You are not dead then,” he said, and she laughed, “No. No, of course not” and all the anguish and shame he’d suffered for so long spun away and, still, still, he was allowed to keep the wisdom that had come from his torment as he stepped into her arms. Her skin smelled of summer and was wonderfully soft under his hands, and it occurred to him that, certainly, this was as much happiness as one human could bear, almost too much for one single heart to contain without bursting. He embraced his wife tightly, his face against her hair, and when he held her away from himself—his hands on her shoulders so he could see her eyes—she looked at him without reproach. “People will tell stories about how you followed me” she said and he could feel the approval of the town that he’d missed so bitterly flow toward him. She fastened a white carnation to his lapel. “Where did you get the flower?” he asked because he hadn’t seen it until then, and she kissed him and said, “They are waiting for us.” He meant to ask who was waiting for them, but already she was telling him to open the window, and he felt the exhilaration he’d known the day of his wedding, the certainty that he and Eva would always be together. “Always … Only I didn’t know it would be like this,” he told her, giddy with gratitude that he’d been granted this reprieve, this absolution. It made him feel chosen, confident that he must be quite extraordinary to be allowed to relive this most crucial event of his life. Never before had he felt so free of fear. It occurred to him that perhaps that other time in the attic—crawling around with the Gestapo men taunting him, some hero some hero some hero you got here, kicking him, some h
ero some hero—had only been a shadow-dream summoned by his fear of what might have happened. “Come,” Eva said, and as they both climbed out and stood up on the flat part of the roof outside the window, it struck him that they were dressed for a celebration, she in her evening gown, he in his good suit. “But it is a celebration,” Eva said as though she’d skimmed his thoughts, and he said, “A celebration, yes.” Up here, the air was cooler than in the street, clearer. Laced with the scent of wildflowers from the meadows and carefully tended blossoms from nearby window boxes, it wove itself around his neck, through his Kaiser Wilhelm mustache. Eva spread her arms, and in that moment as he stepped into her embrace, Alexander was granted a glimpse of Jutta’s daughter, who would be conceived in his house and grow up with stories about the love between her Great Uncle Alexander and his wife, Eva. He wanted to tell Eva about the girl, but the summer air rushed through his body, became his flesh, his voice—
It was not until the morning of Alexander’s funeral, when the priest sprinkled holy water into the grave, that Trudi would recall Alexander’s voice outside the Braunmeiers’ barn. All those years, she thought, I’d almost forgotten that part of it.
“Your uncle,” she told Jutta Malter at the apartment house where Alexander’s funeral feast was held, “once did something very important for me.”
Jutta bent, bringing her face down to Trudi’s. “He never told me.” Her hair lay blond and loose on the shoulders of her black dress.
“That’s because he didn’t know.”
“What was it?”
Trudi shook her head. “He—He rescued me.”
Jutta waited but didn’t press. “He would have been glad to know that.”
“Now I wish I’d told him.”
Deep circles smudged the crescents beneath Jutta’s eyes. She had fought Herr Pastor Beier for two days over his refusal to allow her uncle to be buried in the Catholic section of the cemetery.
“But he is a suicide,” the pastor had insisted.
“There’s nothing to prove that.”