by Ursula Hegi
But now the sister had become hesitant. She barely ate and declined the other nuns’ advice to rest. Her body sweated easily, drenching her undergarments and habit. Throughout the winter and into spring, her flesh had grown nearly translucent as though she wanted to see into her own womb, which was no place for babies, like the distended wombs of women all over Burgdorf.
When Herr Pastor Beier was brought in to speak with her, Sister Agathe asked to meet with him in the cloister garden, where she confessed that she’d helped the Nazis during the war.
“But that’s impossible.”
“Oh yes. By trying to bring comfort to the prisoners. I wanted to make their lives more bearable and took them medicine and food whenever I could. Now I wish I’d urged them to run instead, to escape.”
“You did what you believed was right at the time.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“You did the best you could.”
“The best for myself… Don’t you see? It made me feel better when I could ease their suffering.”
“We couldn’t know how it would all end.” The priest stared down on his hands, plump white hands with square nails, hands that still looked the way they had when he’d entered the seminary. All at once he was choked with the loss of everything he’d believed in then. “I…” He raised one of those hands to his forehead. “I’ve questioned some of my decisions since.”
“That’s good,” the nun murmured.
He raised his eyes, startled.
“I handed the prisoners over to the Nazis … that terrible obedience. I wanted to make their last days here as comfortable as possible, to have them leave with dignity.… Yet, looking at all that happened, I was only one more tool, an accomplice.”
“Don’t say that.” The priest’s round face looked distraught. “That would make all of us accomplices.”
“But we are. Don’t you see?”
To lay her hands on the taut belly of the dentist’s wife troubled Sister Agathe, and she was terrified when, one morning in May, she felt no life. Convinced that her touch had brought on the unborn child’s death, she called her supervisor, Sister Ingeborg, who confirmed that the child was dead. Sister Agathe tried to soothe Jutta and felt devastated when the young woman climbed from the white-shrouded table and stormed out of the Theresienheim. From that day on, the sister took to her bed; and even when she would find out the following day that Jutta Malter had ridden in back of the bakery truck to the midwife’s house, where she’d given birth to a girl—alive and healthy—Sister Agathe would refuse to harm anyone else with her care.
The pastor had never held that many christenings in such a short time: there was the Malter girl, Hanna; Georg Weiler’s son, Manfred; old Anton Immers’ granddaughter, Sybille; the children of the two widows—a son, Heinz, for the judge’s widow, a second daughter, Karin, for Ingrid Hebel; and then, of course, Klara Brocker’s illegitimate son, Rolf. The Klein family followed with a daughter, the Müller family with a son, and two other unmarried women with children whose fathers were American soldiers.
Then, as if by mystery, another child appeared. Afterwards the people would say that it all started when the midwife—after tending to the last of her pregnant patients and waxing her floors—left Burgdorf one Thursday with her son, Adi. When she returned to her stucco house the following afternoon, she carried an infant in her arms.
“Whose is it?” people asked.
“Where did you get it?”
But the midwife only said, “This is my daughter, Renate.”
The townspeople approved that Hilde Eberhardt named the infant girl after her mother-in-law as if to make amends for her husband who, everyone knew, would have never let her use the name Renate. Though the girl was dark and foreign-looking—not at all like her blond mother and grandmother—she reminded the people anew of the gap that the older Renate Eberhardt’s absence had left in their midst, and they welcomed the child as one of their own.
They were ready for this child and asked fewer questions than usual, though this didn’t stop them from making guesses about Renate’s parents. Some wondered if she’d been adopted from gypsies. Renate had that look, that intense darkness. Still—not too many gypsies had survived the KZs. Others figured that the midwife was her real mother and that the bulk of her body had made it possible for her to conceal her pregnancy. She could have birthed the child alone, propping her back against pillows and reaching between her massive thighs. When even Trudi Montag couldn’t find out from where the midwife’s child had come, the town resigned itself to this being one of the secrets it would never know.
Hilde Eberhardt liked to wrap the infant in the cashmere shawl she’d bought for her mother-in-law. “This shawl belongs to your grandmother,” she would tell Renate while she’d rock her. Adi, who was already five, would watch her silently—his light features so much like his father’s that sometimes she had to look away—and he’d stretch out one fair hand and touch Renate’s face. At least he was unlike his father in nature, rather shy and kind, taking after her. If only she’d insisted on giving him a different name. Even though he’d been called Adi all his life, she could not forget that his full name was Adolf, a name that no one gave to newborn boys any longer.
Gradually, the pattern of days in Burgdorf returned to normal. People resumed their Spaziergänge, a habit many of them had discontinued during the war. An ailment like Frau Buttgereit’s enormous kidney stones—which would have seemed trivial compared to the crises of war—now could evoke sympathy. Life was normal again, enough so that women could talk about a new pattern for a dress, say, or have their hair set once a week at the beauty parlor.
The outside walls of houses were scrubbed, and new Gardinen— lace curtains—were sewn, first for windows that faced the street, so that the façades of houses presented a good impression. In her daughter’s room, the midwife hung wallpaper and Gardinen with the lacy pattern of dolls holding hands. Window boxes were lusher than ever before. Near the Burgdorf cemetery, people restored their Scbrebergarten, those tidy vegetable and flower plots where they could cause something to grow. The chestnut tree in front of the pay-library flourished, and the shadows of its leaves became longer. Where some of the ruins had been, modern apartments were built, boxy brick structures with nearly flat roofs and large windows; the rubble was carried off to a dump, which was established along the road to the abandoned flour mill.
Normal meant that the white excursion boats floated again on a regular schedule—not the intermittent journeys of the past years. Weekend nights music would drift from the Rhein, and if Trudi stood on the dike, she’d see couples dancing on the boats while lanterns bobbed around them like red and blue moons. She’d battle that all too familiar yearning for Max that had become part of her as much as breathing. If he had returned, she could be dancing there with him.
Children stopped by the pharmacy and asked for Pröbcben—samples—of skin cream or lipstick or cough drops that the sales representatives left with Fräulein Horten. The ragman built an addition on his house. Chess-club meetings resumed at the house of Herr Stosick, whose reputation had been reinstated to such a degree that people now came to him for letters. Members of the club attended tournaments in Köln and Bielefeld and brought home a respectable number of trophies as well as stories of losing their way in those cities they’d known so well before the war. But now entire building blocks had been demolished, making every street seem unfamiliar.
When the priest was finally assigned transportation—a motor scooter the same shade of blue as the car upholstery he’d dreamed of—people would see him practice behind the rectory and around the church square, his lips pressed together in what might have been concentration or disappointment, his legs extended sideways to balance his massive body.
During Sunday mass, men would sit around their Stammtiscb in Die Traube again and walk their families home from St. Martin’s Church after the priest had blessed them with the final: “…in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sa
ncti”
“Back to normal,” people would say.
“Back to normal,” they would remind one another.
But Trudi knew that beneath that sheen of normalcy the town was a freak. She could see the ugliness, the twistedness, made even more evident by the tidiness, the surface beauty. All the town’s energy went into this frenzy to rebuild, to restore order, to pretty itself up as if nothing had changed in the war.
Some people still claimed they couldn’t comprehend how the KZs could have happened, and it was never clear to Trudi how many had known, and how many had been afraid to believe the horrors.
“Until my death … I won’t be able to understand that.”
“We weren’t told what was going on.”
“If I’d known, I wouldn’t have wanted to continue living.”
“Someone told me in ‘44, and I didn’t believe it, but then I later found out it was the truth.”
“Don’t forget—Hitler was an Austrian, not a German.”
Most didn’t like to think back on Hitler, and if they spoke about him at all, it would be to tell you they hadn’t liked what had gone on. Their allegiance to one powerful leader now became their excuse: since they had not made decisions but merely obeyed orders, they were not to blame. They took it as a challenge when the Burgdorf Post reported that other countries claimed Germany would never recover again, that it would always be in poverty. They agreed with one another that it wouldn’t serve any of Germany’s enemies to leave her sitting in the middle of Europe like a dead country. After all, they were industrious, and though they had few materials, they knew how to work. Hadn’t they always known how to work? Certainly the world must know that about the Germans by now. And even if sometimes the damage they faced seemed so absolute that it seemed nothing could ever be fixed, they didn’t consider giving up. As they felt the eyes of the world on their efforts, they strived even harder to gain respect, admiration.
All over Germany, women helped with the reconstruction. They carried stones and built walls; worked in dust and dirt without complaint; created miracles out of the faith that there would be better years ahead. Evenings, the women opened the seams of old clothing, turned them inside out, and sewed the fabric into something that almost felt new: short pants for boys, pleated skirts for girls, shirts with stiff collars for men, dresses with belts for themselves. No longer were they shabby as during the last years of war, but normal. Almost normal.
twenty
1946-1949
NONE OF THE BUTTGEREIT SISTERS HAD MARRIED. MONIKA, THE SEC-ond oldest, was now the music teacher in the Catholic school; two helped with the care of the children of their married cousins; one entered a convent in Koblenz; Bettina was never seen again after she’d been taken away on that train; two found work in the wool factory in Neuss; one became a court stenographer; and the oldest, Sabine, stayed with her parents, determined to nurse them with grim obligation into old age.
Monika Buttgereit and the driver of the bakery truck, Alfred Meier, had resumed their courtship as soon as he’d come home from the front. Though he’d introduced Sabine to two of his friends, hoping she’d marry and clear the path for him and Monika, both men had gone out with her only once. Herr Meier was about to forsake hope that he and Monika could ever be man and wife, when Sabine began to spit up blood. Her parents said her lungs were weak, and while the entire town waited for her to die, speculating on the passion that would erupt once the music teacher and the driver of the bakery truck could get married, the chaste courtship continued. Smoldering fires of what could have been manifested themselves in more extravagant hats for Monika and a murderous look in Herr Meier’s eyes whenever he’d glance at Monika’s oldest sister.
Yet, when Sabine died late that summer, Alfred and Monika did not set a wedding date. Because it’s too soon after the death, people would rationalize. But gradually they came to understand that the two were not about to alter the courtship they’d become familiar with. They still met once a week, and sometimes they included Monika’s parents on their outings, tucking napkins into their collars as if they were small children.
Alfred was saving his money to open a small fish restaurant like the one he’d seen as a boy near the ocean, where crisp chunks of fish were served hot in greasy paper cones. He worked overtime at the bakery and took to playing cards with Georg Weiler, who’d moved with his wife and children into the smallest apartment in Alexander Sturm’s building. Alfred wished he could laugh as easily as Georg, who would have never waited years for a woman, who was lucky more often than not because he believed in his luck, who’d buy pastries from him whenever he had money left and feed any child who happened to be playing on the sidewalk. And yet, he could feel something buried inside Georg, something terribly familiar, yet impossible to name that no soldier wanted to remember. He’d felt it within himself, had seen it in the eyes of other men. It made him feel dirty, made him spill himself inside whores instead of soiling a good woman like Monika. With Georg it burst through when he drank too much and his face turned into a bloated mask. He’d need Alfred’s help to get home from Potter’s bar. After hoisting Georg up the flights of stairs to the third floor, Alfred would leave quickly because good women with reproachful eyes made him uneasy.
It was no secret in town that Helga Weiler had every reason to be reproachful when her husband was drunk, because he’d rage at her and the children until—the baby in one arm, both girls clutching her free hand—she’d bolt down the steps, coats over their nightclothes, and across the backyard to the other wing of the L-shaped building, where she’d knock on the Malters’ door. There it was safe, even if Jutta Malter would have to be persuaded not to charge up the stairs to confront Georg.
Freak lightning struck Burgdorf one Tuesday in October of 1946, killing twelve milk cows on the Weinharts’ farm. It had rained for nearly a week, and the cows stood huddled in a vast puddle next to the oak tree when it was split by a lightning bolt. Immediately they were electrocuted.
To Trudi, the accident only mirrored the crippled state of her community. Though the war had ended a year and a half before, she could still feel its presence in the vengeance of nature, in the dreadful suffering of individuals, and in sudden acts of personal violence—all made worse by the silence that she tried to keep from folding around her town. She could see its presence in the painful limp of an amputee; in the living gauze on the throat of the baker’s son; in the wail of the soldier who’d shot his wife ten months after coming home.…
People would assure one another that things were normal again, but you could feel great sorrows everywhere, left by those who’d died or were missing or had gone to prison, and what you’d need to do was let those sorrows surge across you, stun you; because if you didn’t, those sorrows would hunt you, break through your skin, ugly and red like boils. If you fled from those sorrows, they could trip you, maim you.
Jutta Malter saw that brokenness as clearly as Trudi. What Trudi chronicled with words, Jutta chronicled with paint. Her obsession with painting had spiraled since the war as if she needed to recreate this town where her mother had brought her and had died, where her uncle had leapt from the attic window, and where her daughter anchored her in a way she’d never expected anyone to hold her. While Hanna would play on a soft blanket next to her easel, Jutta would paint bright, bright buildings that looked like paralyzed faces, yellow clouds that whipped across the red sky like flames, people without faces, whose bodies were angled gray lines against an overwhelmingly colorful background. And as she’d work, feverishly—honoring the covenant with her vision to show it all: the pain and the joy—her paintings would evoke that peculiar beauty that arises only from darkness.
Early afternoons, after she’d eat the midday meal with her husband and wait for him to return to his patients, she’d take Hanna out in the wicker baby carriage, pushing her with one paint-smudged hand while holding a cigarette in the other. Almost every time she’d pass the pay-library, Trudi Montag would come running out and as
k if she could hold the baby. Ever since she was a girl, Jutta had been fascinated with the Zwerg woman. Once she’d painted her, but she hadn’t shown Trudi the canvas because she was afraid to offend her. In the painting, part of the town showed through the gap between Trudi’s O-shaped legs, while the rest of Burgdorf fit into her wide body.
Trudi would lift Hanna from the carriage and bounce her gently in her arms. “If you want to paint for a while without interruptions,” she’d say, “Hanna will be fine here.” The first few times Jutta had objected, but Trudi had sensed the restlessness in her, that struggle between being a painter and being a mother.
“Afternoons it gets so quiet here. I’d be glad for the company.”
Soon Jutta came to look forward to those hours of solitary work. Without her daughter, she could roam the outskirts of town again, stride through the fields, prop her easel by the quarry hole or by the flour mill that still lay in ruins.
If you went to the pay-library for gossip, you’d discover that it was futile to expect any worthwhile rumors from Trudi Montag if she had Hanna with her. She’d check out your books, mark them in her card file, give you the correct change, but she’d be carrying the blond child around, cooing and murmuring to her without interest in what you might have to say. And Hanna would murmur right back to her, a sequence of bubble sounds that didn’t have meaning to anyone but Trudi. Even questions about the health of Leo Montag—who walked with a cane now and seemed weaker all the time—would only bring brief answers, and if you were to leave a wedge of pound cake for him, say, or a jar of pickles, Trudi would merely thank you without reporting how her father had liked the last delicacy you’d given him.