by Ursula Hegi
Just then, the cart of the ragman turned around the corner, and Ruth Abramowitz ran toward it, followed by Albert. Shaking his bell, the ragman called out, “Lumpen, Eisen, Papier—Rags, iron, paper.” His shirt glinted white in the sun.
“She’s a thin wire,” Stefan said.
“Gertrud?”
He nodded.
“What’s a thin wire?”
“Something my grandfather used to say about people who were stretched so tight they could snap any moment.”
As I could too, Helene thought, wanting him to fit both palms beneath her breasts and rub his thumbs up her nipples. As I could too.
“I can’t believe how much shorter the distances here are,” he said. “I’d forgotten what it’s like to walk through streets where the houses share connecting walls or are just a meter apart.”
“It must feel foreign to you. After all these years.”
“In the town where I live buildings are surrounded by open spaces.”
She saw his American town, hundreds of huge, ornate houses like the apartment house he’d described in his letters, each building set apart from the next by orderly squares of forests and meadows. There, wind and air move freely between the buildings, cooling her neck, her ankles.… “Could you imagine yourself living here in Burgdorf again?” she asked.
“But I’m an American now,” he said, tilting his face up to study her kind eyes, the high forehead, the firm curve of her chin. Yes, she would be good to his children. But she was so unlike the articulate woman he knew through her letters. She was stiff and awkward—the way he suddenly remembered her from his childhood—and he felt saddened, sensing that if she agreed to marry him, he would forfeit that part of her that had been linked to him all those years with written words. “How about you?” he asked gently. “Would you ever leave here?”
“Oh yes,” she said before she could lose the boldness to give him the response she’d kept prepared for him since she was a girl. At twenty-nine, he was still a young man who could easily find himself a bride five or ten years younger, as was the tradition, while as a woman of thirty-one she was considered beyond the age of being asked to marry. And yet, by being here, Stefan made real her secret knowledge that one day he would return for her. She wanted him to go away, wanted him to press himself against her, back her into the hallway and against a wall.
He reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out an envelope with photos of his children. “They’re with their American grandparents while I’m away. Tobias in the apartment above the bakery, Greta in the banker’s house.”
As Helene touched the photos, she surprised herself with an odd yearning for these children as if they were her own and had already been separated from her far too long, and by the end of that week, when she would wear the white lace gown that Stefan’s father would sew for her in his tailor shop, she’d feel oddly removed from the festivities because she was already picturing herself with Stefan’s children, far away in America.
Years later, whenever she would think about her wedding, she’d remember most of all her impatience to be done with it because she had already lived that day so many times in her fantasies. All the details matched—the groom, the sun on her veil, the scent of fresh grass, the tables with white cloths behind the pay-library. While Herr Pastor Schüler blessed her union with Stefan, and while Michel Abramowitz was taking the wedding photos, she saw the ritual as if set in a frame—already defined, already completed—hers to review from a distance of decades if she chose to.
Yet, as always, her good manners saw her through: she thanked Margret and her husband for setting up all the tables, and she comforted Stefan’s mother who was irritated with Gertrud for taking apart her white-and-pink flower bouquets and mixing them with clumps of cornflowers and camomile she’d pulled from the Rhein meadow at dawn.
When Helene followed Gertrud to the pay-library, she found her crying behind the last shelf of romance novels. “Thank you for the wildflowers,” she whispered to her. “I’m so glad you remembered how much I like them.”
Gertrud hiccuped with tears and embraced Helene, face hot and damp. “I’m afraid of her.”
“Frau Blau? It’s just that she’s fussed all day over those flowers. She’s really quite friendly once you—”
“Not Frau Blau. This one here.” Gertrud laid one palm against her flat belly. Her lips pulled away from her teeth. “The girl who’s coming into me here.”
“Are you— You and Leo?” Helene asked though she didn’t think her brother and Gertrud had slept together.
“Not yet and it’s your wedding and you have to dance.” Gertrud laughed shrilly and pressed her index finger against Helene’s lips.
All at once Helene felt afraid for her. Gertrud was so physical. So passionate. Not at all like Leo. She’d seen the way he held Gertrud, lightly. Had witnessed the faint brush of his lips against Gertrud’s cheek. Some in town gossiped about Leo being more comfortable with the touch of men. They saw his easy camaraderie with men and didn’t know him well enough to understand that this was not because he desired men, but rather because touching them in competition or play was less complicated than touching a woman who might then want more of him.
“You have to dance with every man,” Gertrud sang out and bolted from the back door.
“Wait—”
But Gertrud was already flying toward the tables, black curls springing loose from her knot, the sleeves of her yellow dress flapping around her arms, the tips of her shoes leaving imprints in the fine, orderly ridges of earth that Leo had raked behind the pay-library. As Helene followed her, people kept stopping her to compliment her on her new husband, her new life in America, her new children. Even more people than in her wedding fantasies were here: neighbors, friends from church, colleagues from school—though not Axel Lambert—and several of her students. It was summer as in her fantasies, and though her gown wasn’t as elaborate as the one she’d pictured herself in—not enough time to prepare, after all—it didn’t matter to her.
Guests had arrived with gifts and with food: cream of leek soup and cucumber salad, sheets of plum cake and roasts with gravy, liver sausage and herring salad, pickled beets and sliced peaches. Three dogs were sniffing the grass around the tables, tails twitching as they waited for scraps. While Frau Buttgereit turned her sightless gaze toward the sun, her daughter-in-law, Ottilia—much beloved by the older woman because, ironically, she’d been named after the patron saint of the blind and therefore seemed to offer a direct link to the saint—was arranging white stalks of asparagus on a platter, tender points meeting in the center, clouds of parsley in the gaps between them. Ottilia’s husband stood too close to the baker’s wife, who used to be the second-most-beautiful girl in school. The first-most-beautiful girl he had married eight years ago, never guessing how drastically childbirth would transform her. Each child, four living daughters and two stillborns so far, had either added to Ottilia Buttgereit’s body or taken away from it, but all in the wrong places—a rising of her belly so that she seemed perpetually pregnant; a drooping of her breasts and the corners of her mouth; a waning of her neck until it looked stringy—while her husband, with increasing fervor, sought to recapture her beauty in other women. “This one for sure will be a boy,” he would tell people each time Ottilia was pregnant, not knowing that she would have to give birth to nine daughters altogether before his one son would be born, and that this son would not live for long.
Leo was halfway into a chess game with nine-year-old Günther Stosick, a superb player despite his youth and shyness, who kept his eyes on the board, elbows on the table, fingers in his dense hair to keep himself from making rash moves. He seemed more grown up than the rest of the children, who played hide-and-seek in the dark space beneath the back of the pay-library, where massive stones from the riverbed formed the foundation as for most houses in Burgdorf. When the music started—one accordion and two fiddles—Günther didn’t even glance up, but the other children came running,
faces and clothes smudged, and danced with each other.
Ruth Abramowitz’s pinafore was silvery with spiderwebs, and her father wiped them off with his handkerchief. “Hold still, Schätzchen.” When she darted from him, he laughed. “Always running, this one,” he told Stefan. “Running and dancing.”
“I saw her and your boy the day I arrived,” Stefan said. “Skipping rope. Running. Just the way you say.”
“Check.” Günther advanced his white bishop.
“You’re getting too good for me,” Leo said, realizing he was about to lose a rook.
The townspeople wanted Stefan to taste everything. “Strawberry tarts the way you used to like them as a boy.” “I bet you don’t get head cheese like this in America.” “I made fresh blood sausage just for you.” He and Helene both tasted. Tasted from silver forks that his mother had stored beneath the earth and dug up for this celebration. Tasted until all those flavors merged inside their mouths.
As they washed them down with Mosel wine, Helene felt as light and fast as the swirl of children; and in that moment of joy she wanted to pull Stefan into that dance where he, too, could be light and fast; but she didn’t because there was something oddly formal about him, and when he finally asked her to dance, holding her in his arms for the first time ever, his body felt so unyielding that all lightness left her. Together, they were rigid and clumsy as they moved across the lawn to the music, and she felt relieved when Emil Hesping tugged at her sleeve and requested his dance with the bride. Then there were others, and gradually she felt it again, that lightness. “You have to dance with every man,” Gertrud had told her. And she did, danced more than she had in five years, and it amused her that men who’d never flirted with her before now acted as though she were breaking their hearts by leaving the country.
“I know you’ll recover,” she told Emil, who had a reputation with women.
To Kurt Heidenreich, the taxidermist, she said, “You’ve hidden your feelings too well.”
And she didn’t even blush—not once—that’s what she and Kurt’s sister, Anita, laughed about most when they sat down together.
One of her former students, Agathe Lange, who was getting ready to enter the convent the following Monday, came to her table to give her a rosary carved by Trappist monks. “You are a brave woman, Fräulein Montag—I mean, Frau Blau. I would never get on a ship to go to America.”
“Then how would you get there?” asked Frau Simon, who had recently scandalized the town by divorcing a perfectly decent husband. “Walk on water?” When she raised one elegant shoe—dyed robin’s-egg blue to match her new hat and purse—as if she were about to step onto water, several men gaped at her strong, slender ankles.
“It is bad luck to make fun of religion.”
“Oh, but I wasn’t making fun. It was a practical suggestion. Considering …”
Agathe Lange studied the milliner with practiced patience, the kind that comes from many years of kneeling in hard pews. “Considering?”
Frau Simon laughed, eyes bright as always when she managed to draw someone into her banter. “Considering how in your religion things like that are done.”
“One of many miracles.” Agathe Lange turned to Helene. “I will pray for—”
“I saved you some of my asparagus.” Ottilia Buttgereit extended her platter to Helene.
“That’s very kind.”
“I bet you don’t get asparagus like mine in America. Mr. Buttgereit and I, we want to grow enough next year to start selling it. People keep asking us if they can buy any, and I think we’re getting ready to do it.”
“I will pray for you every morning.” Agathe Lange finished her sentence and added, “Until you get there safely.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m so pleased it’s your wedding. I never thought you—” She clasped her fingers across her mouth.
“Don’t worry,” Helene said. “You’re not the only one.”
The townspeople kept telling her how unlike her it was to make such a big decision in a hurry—insisting as if to convince her they were right about her and that, therefore, she must be acting against her own nature—and she smiled politely, feeling no need to explain herself to them.
But Stefan’s father was eager to explain to everyone, “Of course there is a rush. There has to be a rush because my grandchildren are in America, and Stefan has to get back to them.” His powerful upper body was stooped from decades of sewing. He fanned out the photos on the tablecloth between two ashtrays. “That’s Tobias, the youngest, just seven months old. And Greta here—see?” He pointed to another picture, tufts of gray in the hollows between his knuckles. “She’ll be five in November.”
“Don’t forget to tell them that Greta speaks German.” Stefan’s mother stubbed out her cigarette.
“Already, two languages.” Stefan’s father nodded.
“And she’s just a bit of a girl,” Ingeborg Weinhart said.
Stefan’s mother motioned for Stefan to come closer. “Keep your eyes on that Gertrud Hagen. She’s been messing up my flowers.”
To Stefan it was shocking how his mother had aged. Though still in her forties, she looked far older—her neck so thin now, her hair so sparse—and what he kept coming back to was that now, a few months away from turning thirty, he was as old as she had been that day he’d left home. And he thought about being a parent and about loss and about grief. A few days ago, when he had first entered her kitchen and embraced her, she’d cried his name and begun to tremble till he was trembling too, and as they’d held on to each other, he’d felt as if he and his mother were the same age, and as if it were his duty to console her about the son who had only now run off to America. Time was letting him understand her in that grief as if it were happening now; and it was like that for her too: whenever she looked at him—there in her kitchen and now on his wedding day—her tears would well up as if that old sorrow were too immense to be contained within the body of one woman and she were passing it on to him. I know, he wanted to tell her, I know. He’d heard people say the worst loss you could suffer was that of a child. And perhaps that was so. Still, for him losing two wives had cut far deeper than losing Agnes.
Helene felt the presence of those wives when Stefan followed her that night to her bedroom above the pay-library where she had imagined him countless times, and she wondered if he, too, sensed Elizabeth and Sara here with them. And then she knew that he did because he spoke about them and about some deeds he should have changed over to Sara’s name from Elizabeth’s, blamed himself for not doing it soon enough as if that delay had taken her life.
“The day we get back,” he promised Helene, “I’ll make sure your name will be on the deeds.” He hung his suspenders over her chair. “I want the house and restaurant to be yours as much as mine.” In the path of moon that slanted through her window, he unbuttoned his shirt. “If you like—” His voice was careful. Tender.
“Yes?”
“If you like, we can wait. With … with me approaching you as a husband. Until we know each other better.”
“But I’ve known you all your life.”
Still, as he came to her in this room of her childhood, just an arm’s length from the house where he’d lived as a boy, the fantasies that had served her so well—always happening to someone else to someone else—no longer worked for her. They did not remove her, take her. Because this was not happening to someone she had made up inside her head. And, strangely, that’s why it made this here—thishere—feel less real. Her fantasies she could split from her life; and they always lasted as long as she wanted them to. But thishere was not nearly as exciting as her own touch. Thishere was over in minutes, concluded before it was consummated as if Stefan didn’t need her to be part of it. What he did was raise himself away from her before he gave himself fully to his lust, and as his breath reached its height without her, he spilled himself atop her belly, and she felt further from him than she had all those years he’d lived on another continent.
Yet what could she possibly say to him? He was the one with the experience, a married man, twice married he was and now the third time, while she was new at thishere. And she could not even leave thishere behind, could not pretend thishere had happened to another woman in a church or an attic because morning did come, and the man next to her in the narrow bed—your husband in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit—got up without acknowledging the skin between them, the night between them.
He poured water into the basin, washed his face, slipped the loops of his mustache trainer across his ears, and adjusted its mesh triangles to cover his mustache. While it dried, he got dressed. Then he went downstairs and waited for her to make his breakfast. He smiled at her as he ate and talked to her brother as though nothing had changed, nothing, while she kept her anger and confusion from him, kept her back to the table and busied herself by the stove, pouring more coffee for both men, getting up again to add water to the many vases with yesterday’s flowers.
A few times Leo glanced at her, but he knew not to break through with words when she was separate and silent like that, and it made her even angrier that Stefan didn’t know her well enough to notice that something was not right. The rest of that day she barely saw him. He was out, purchasing materials for a tile stove he planned to build in their apartment, while she and Stefan’s sister took the train to the Mahler department store in Düsseldorf, where they bought toys and clothing for his children. When Helene tried on a green loden coat with leather buttons and asked Margret if she thought it was stylish enough for America, she wondered all at once how Margret’s husband was with her at night and what Margret would think if she knew how it was between her and Stefan.
Though Stefan was attentive, he kept himself so busy in the following days that Helene wondered if he was avoiding her, but she told herself, it’s just for now, till we leave here. Once we’re in America, it will be better. Nights with him did nothing to make her feel more confident about being a wife, but at least she felt secure about becoming a mother to his children. She knew she was good with children, had years and years of proof of schoolchildren gravitating toward her, liking her, respecting her.