by Ursula Hegi
That night Trudi kept waking from the same urgent dream of being at the flour mill with her father and Georg. Each time she yielded to sleep, the dream—it warned her about something she was supposed to remember, of that she was sure even while dreaming—snagged her again, and the last time it woke her, around five, she got up and stood by her window. But she couldn’t separate her memories of the mill from the dream images; the harder she tried, the more elusive the dream became until, by the end of the day when she locked the pay-library, she was only left with the sense of urgency and danger she’d felt in her dream.
Instead of cooking her evening meal, she climbed on her bicycle and rode out to the mill, which had never been rebuilt. When she reached the woods that ringed the gutted building, mist rose from the swamps, and it was so quiet she thought she heard the sky breathing. Then, with a start, she realized it was her own breath.
Though the arches were shattered, she could still see the elegant sweep of the bricks as she had in her dream. Here, she and Georg Weiler had played tag, their voices spiraling above the red tile roof and the forest. She felt it again, the foreboding that had been with her that day more than three decades ago—except that now she stood surrounded by that very destruction: trees thrust their blighted crowns toward the torn roof; crumbling stairs ascended into emptiness; a blackened beam, half burned and thinned out in places, spanned the gap between the chimney and the nearest wall. But she couldn’t smell fire, only the sweet dampness of decaying wood.
A dried thistle hindered the growth of a clump of camomile, and as she pulled it out, she saw Georg and herself, laughing, gathering bouquets of purple thistles, which they’d taken home to make thistle soup with sand and water from their brook. And her father—she saw her father’s face as it had been that day and knew he’d been young like this in her dream—her father had taken a spoon and, with obvious delight, had dipped it into their soup.
And now her father was dead.
It hit her so strongly, that she crouched right where she was and brought her arms around her middle. The scent of camomile enveloped her, and as she looked down, the tiny flowers were right in front of her, their yellow centers ringed by white petals. The closer she looked, the more she saw, and the more she forgot herself and her pain and became part of something she couldn’t define as if, by getting closer to a smaller world, she had found a larger world. How many times had she longed for a world where she could travel free or almost free, a world where she knew she belonged? How often had she imagined living on the island of the little people? Yet, all she needed was here, already here. Pia had been right—this was where she belonged. Despite the silence of war. Because of the silence. Working with Emil Hesping and the fugitives had taught her what it was like to belong, that you could initiate it, build it, be it.
She stood up and walked over to a tree stump by the chimney. Sitting down, she leaned her back against the bricks and crumbling mortar. Her left knee felt stiff, and as she pulled her foot close and rubbed her leg, gently, from her ankle to her knee until it felt supple, she could no longer imagine herself with any kind of different body. A new body would take years to get used to. No more hanging from door frames, she promised herself, forgiving her younger self for the way she’d mistreated her body. Shards glinted among moss and weeds that sprouted from the rubble—beauty pressing through debris. Yet, the feeling of death persisted all around her, and suddenly she knew it came from her dream. Georg, she thought, Georg, and felt the danger once more, saw her father’s face, young and solemn, and understood she had dreamed Georg’s death. And as she strained to see further—it would come from his own hands, his death, and his wife would do nothing to stop him—he was standing there before her, a boy who looks like a girl like a girl like a girl, in his dainty blue smock that covered his knees, blond ringlets down to his shoulders. “Look.” He held out a black and orange butterfly to her. “I bet you this one can still fly. I didn’t rub any dust from the wings. Look.” He tossed the butterfly into the air, watched it disappear. His face was tilted up as it used to be when he’d waited outside her window for her to come out and play, and he looked the way he had before he’d become like other boys, before that day in the barn, before he’d fought in the war, before the drinking, before the beating of his wife and children, before absolution had become a sham—while she stood there inside her body of thirty-six years, severed from him by time, reunited to him by time.
“Tell me.” He caught her hand in his and pulled her up so that she stood taller than he.
“Tell you what?”
“What will happen to me.”
As the sand-colored eyes probed hers, she felt herself reeling into her childhood, when she had believed everyone knew what was inside the hearts of others: she saw herself with Georg in the church tower, felt the snapping of the scissors as she cut through his curls, smelled the flowers in Frau Eberhardt’s garden, heard the music drifting from Fräulein Birnsteig’s mansion and the wailing of babies and boot falls; but then the music changed, and it was Matthias, playing the piano at his recital, and the boots were there, along with the dread she’d felt at the first concert.
“Tell me.”
“You were my first friend—” Her voice clogged as her old love for Georg swelled within her. She took that love as solidly as if she’d touched it with both hands, extended it toward the boy. If only she could pass on to him her own tempered suffering. If only she could offer up her old wish for revenge in return for his release. What she longed for was to span those years between the boy and the man he had become, span them with the story of a friendship that had endured after she and Georg had started school, a wise and somber story with the truth to heal the wounds it uncovered. She heard the voice of her town—“It’s not good to dwell on the things that were terrible….” “Nobody wants to relive those years.…” “We have to go forward.…” More than ever, she understood the people’s need to protect one another with silence. How tempting it would be to give Georg eine heile Welt—an intact world—and leave out anything that might hurt him. But if she did, she would perpetuate the silence that she’d fought all along.
Still—she could begin with their friendship. And what was true was that she used to have a friend named Georg, that they’d played in her mother’s earth nest and walked in the All Saints’ Day procession, smoked stolen chocolate cigarettes and floated boats made from leaves and birch bark, built a snowman with a carrot nose and chased sparrows and pigeons across the fields, knelt in church together and—
It was too much for her to bear, the knowledge of his death.
“Tell me.”
For an instant—as sudden as it vanished—the man’s bloated drinking face flickered across the boy’s fine features. No. This was Georg, her generous friend Georg, who knew how to lure the sun from the sky and snare it inside his red-and-yellow glass marble; Georg who always invented new bets with her—how many widows or pigeons they’d count on their walk, how many baby carriages would pass by the grocery store in one hour.… Luck. For Georg, luck and miracles had been the same. He’d believed he could create his own miracle—shape a bird from earth and water, yield it to the sky.
“You were my first friend.…” She felt stunned by the fear of losing him, the grief of losing him. And yet, there was something exquisite in forgoing her revenge. It was not the first time that she’d turned to her storytelling to banish fear, and as Georg drew the words from her, moments of their lives came together in one swirl of a never-ending story that moved back and forth through layers of time—a story filled with magic and truth, corruption and redemption, sadness and joy, love and betrayal—connecting her to Georg as she braided in her own loves and losses, and told him about Konrad and his mother hiding in the tunnel, the unknown benefactor leaving Lederhosen for Georg, Klaus Malter drilling on her tooth, Ingrid taking her daughters to the bridge, Frau Doktor Rosen reading books about Zwerge, Max Rudnick sketching his Russian grandmother, Frau Abramowitz tearing the Hitler-J
ugend office apart.…
It was a story that would continue beyond herself, beyond Georg. In sorting it out, she felt deep compassion for him and everyone who inhabited her story. And as what had happened began to merge with what could have happened, the texture of her story became richer, more colorful. She had Max return to Burgdorf on a barge that belonged to Georg’s father, who, all along, had been traveling the river that had taken him away. She let Georg measure Seehund’s head and run with him to the Rathaus, where a group of townspeople raised axes to the Hitler statue and chopped it into fragments. In the Braunmeiers’ barn, Eva showed Georg how to hide without sneezing, while the butcher and pharmacist searched for them in vain. Opening his window wide, Eva’s father wrapped himself into the coat of the Russian soldier and lay down on his bed, welcoming rain and cold and cats and other dangers. Trudi’s mother stepped from the gates of the Grafenberg asylum with Sister Adelheid, their eyes clear and calm, carrying their own altar between them. To welcome their daughter, Ruth, back, Herr and Frau Abramowitz held a huge celebration at their house.… And throughout all, Trudi wove the assurance for Georg and herself that—once someone had been in your life—you could keep that person there despite the agony of loss, as long as you had faith that you could bring the sum of all your hours together in one shining moment.
Georg picked up a bird’s nest from the ground, turned it in his fingers. This was when she’d loved him most—with the long hair and girl-clothes—before he’d changed, before she’d helped him change by cutting his hair. And yet, how could she not do it for him again if he asked? She felt the old joy of being near him, and it seemed possible that his luck would save him from the death that was waiting for him. Yet, already she knew that wasn’t so. She heard their young voices in the church tower when Georg had told her he wanted to die the same age as Jesus.
“Thirty-three is very old”
“Maybe we can die together.”
Aloud, she said: “But we’re both already older than thirty-three.”
The boy nodded. Though he stood absolutely still as she spoke, wind shifted his curls, his smock. She knew that the words already belonged to him though they might still change, and that the story might lead both of them to the ending she feared. And yet, just because a story was a certain way didn’t mean it would always be like that: stories took their old shape with them and fused it with the new shape. She didn’t understand yet how all the tangles of their lives would sort themselves out in her story, but she supposed that it would be like raking: not every bit of earth would be untangled at once. Her father had raked the earth behind the pay-library every week, and what she’d learned from him was that raking had to do with patience. But the ground of the mill’s hollow rooms was rough, uneven with cracked bricks and last year’s stiff weeds, gnarled roots of fallen trees, and the silver skeletons of tiny birds.…
She saw herself lifting her father’s bamboo rake from the rack beneath the back of the pay-library, and as she pulled the bamboo teeth through the earth, she kept stepping back, drawing the rake toward herself, knowing that, gradually, all of the soil would show the smooth ribbed pattern. But until then—as in her story for Georg—there were clumps left over, and she had to pull the rake though them again and again, distributing the earth while discarding debris. It was as though every story she had ever told had brought her to this moment, to this story that would tell itself through her: it would be the best story she’d ever told, better even than the story she and Pia had woven between them that day at the circus. And as she thought of all the people who had loved her stories—her father, Hanna, Max, Eva, Konrad, Robert, and earliest of all her mother—she felt the strength of their arms as surely as if they were pulling the rake with her through the earth. The final design wouldn’t happen all at once: there would be the rearrangement of it all, a fine combing through; there would be perseverance and a reverence for the task; there would be assurance that, indeed, a design would emerge.
Georg’s eyes were grave as he waited for her to continue her story. It was the brief span of evening when all things are etched lucidly into the sky, just before they yield their separateness and blur into the night. Trudi stretched herself. What she could offer Georg was far more than what had happened—a certain sequence that would lead him to the core of the story, a story that would hold an entire world. It had to do with what to tell first—though it hadn’t happened first—and what to end the story with. It had to do with what to enhance and what to relinquish. And what to embrace.
About the Author
Ursula Hegi lived the first eighteen years of her life in Germany. She is the author of Intrusions, Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories, Floating in My Mother’s Palm, and Salt Dancers. Her first book of nonfiction, Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America, will be published in July 1997.
Ursula Hegi is the recipient of about thirty grants and awards, including an NEA Fellowship and five awards from the PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards. She was nominated for a PEN Faulkner award for Stones from the River and received the Governor’s Writer’s Award for Stones from the River and Floating in My Mother’s Palm. She has served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and she has written over a hundred reviews for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.
Ursula Hegi lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest.
OTHER BOOKS BY URSULA HEGI
TEARING THE SILENCE
SALT DANCERS
STONES FROM THE RIVER
FLOATING IN MY MOTHER’S PALM
UNEARNED PLEASURES AND OTHER STORIES
INTRUSIONS
The Vision of Emma Blau
Ursula Hegi
For my grandmother
Gertrud Maas
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter One: 1894–1909
Chapter Two: 1909–1911
Chapter Three: 1911
Chapter Four: 1911–1914
Chapter Five: 1915–1919
Chapter Six: 1920–1924
Chapter Seven: 1925–1944
Chapter Eight: 1944
Chapter Nine: 1945–1953
Chapter Ten: 1953–1956
Chapter Eleven: 1957–1968
Chapter Twelve: 1969–1980
Chapter Thirteen: 1980–1986
Chapter Fourteen: 1987–1990
For their valuable insights and suggestions I thank Olivia Caulliez, Martha Copithorne, Gordon Gagliano, Mark Gompertz, Deb Harper, Gail Hochman, Kathryn Hunt, Lesa Luders, Marianne Merola, Carl Phillips, Rod Stackelberg, Sally Winkle, and Barbara Wright. I thank Eastern Washington University for grant support. In my research, I learned much from the works of Frederick Lewis Allen and Adair D. Mulligan.
The Vision of Emma Blau
1894–1909
It didn’t look like the kind of house that would carry a curse. Built by a German immigrant of brick and dark timber, the Wasserburg was six stories tall with six apartments on each floor. In the small New Hampshire town that carried the name of the lake it bordered, the U-shaped building took up an entire block and stood high above the clapboard houses and the shoreline. It was the kind of structure you might expect to see in New York—with marble bathrooms and stained-glass inserts in the tall windows—and it was too flamboyant, the townspeople said, too conspicuous for this part of New England where dusk set early upon the vast lake that was flecked with hundreds of islands and that the Indians had named Winnipesaukee—Smile of the Great Spirit.
When Emma Blau was a child, her grandfather’s Wasserburg—water fortress—was still splendid with carpet runners in the hallways, the design and colors of peacock feathers. Often Emma would pretend she walked on the tail feathers of an immense peacock who sweeps himself with her into the air. She soars above the sand-colored trim at the roofline and the glazed blue tiles set into the facade; above the courtyard with its brick walks and the bird-bath fountain; above the elevated garden with its swing set and flower beds whe
re her German grandmother Helene is planting snapdragons and geraniums and camomile and pansies—Stiefmütterchen—an affectionate term for little stepmother, a role Helene had taken on for the children of her husband’s dead wives.
Ever since Emma’s grandfather had brought her to the secret place where the house breathed, Emma had returned there alone, though it was a forbidden place where children might fall and get mangled by the green machines and wires that spun dust motes in the half-light. She’d steal the key to the roof door from behind the pewter cups in her grandparents’ china cabinet, ride the elevator to the top floor, and slip into the brick structure that sat like an immense smokestack on the flat roof. As she’d climb the wooden ladder to the platform above the elevator, the breath of the house would raise the fine hairs on her arms with a whoosh, and she’d laugh with delight. Steady puffs of warm breath emanated from a wheel that turned to the left. Wound around this wheel was a chain—similar to the one on Emma’s bicycle—that ran up to an oval loop and connected to moving rods that clicked and hummed in an always changing song. Whenever the elevator stopped, she’d feel a shudder rise from the shaft as if the building were stirring itself awake.
Emma knew the house from within and from above: she had crawled into its guts, played behind the boiler in the vaulted furnace room, climbed out of the second-floor window onto the curved balcony above the entrance, and balanced on the edge of the roof far above the town. Sometimes she felt she was the center of the house, breathing its breath-song, while other times the house was at the center of her like a pulse that warmed her as she held it safe within her body.