by Ursula Hegi
*
Occasionally, a new edition of the Echtermeyer was published, but Sonja Siderova continued to teach from the one her parents had bought when they reached Burgdorf the week after her eighth birthday. At home in Russia, higher education had been limited to ten percent of all Jewish children, and Sonja’s parents—like many Russian parents who wanted the best education for their children—settled in Germany, where many professors and teachers were Jews and more than a quarter of all Jewish students went on to secondary school. In Germany, the Siderovas felt welcome. They had no idea that the more they’d blend in, the more resentful the townspeople would become of their success and their house and their work and their children’s good grades.
Sonja’s Echtermeyer had water stains on the linen binding from falling into the Rhein when her father had rowed his wife and children across the fast-moving river one July afternoon to celebrate their arrival in Burgdorf. Skillful at navigating the rented boat past the long freighters, he let them pass before he cut through the current, but the boat wobbled as it reached shore, jammed into the sand, causing Sonja to drop her heavy book of poems into the water. Although the thin pages would dry overnight, the binding would retain the dampness so that, after it had fully dried, the river was still there, brownish ripples against the linen.
“Quite lovely, actually,” Sonja’s mother said. “Like watermarks on expensive Italian paper.”
During their second year in Burgdorf, the Siderova family converted to Catholicism. Some of the parishioners liked to say the Siderovas were frommer als der Papst—more pious than the pope. They had eight rosaries, two religious paintings, and a framed photo of the pope; they never missed a Sunday mass, where they prayed with obvious devotion; they liked the rituals and took them on as their own. What the parishioners and the priest didn’t know was that the Siderovas distrusted the ritual of confession. They seemed so devout as they knelt in the dim confessional. But all they fed the priest were made-up sins because they suspected all priests disturbed the garden of secrets by tearing at the roots.
*
One morning Fräulein Siderova arrived in her classroom with a stack of books in her arms, and atop the stack a red geranium in a clay pot that she set on the windowsill, red reflected in the glass. Then she had her girls recite the multiplication tables. Whenever they stumbled, she corrected them, gently, made them repeat so that they’d remember from now on.
Suddenly, one of the girls laughed, then another. They were pointing to the window where a butterfly flapped its wings against the outside of the glass as if trying to get to the red geranium. A yellow butterfly. Fluttering away. But coming back.
“What do we know that the butterfly doesn’t know?” Fräulein Siderova asked, switching from multiplication to philosophy in an instant.
“That the window is closed.”
“The butterfly doesn’t know that it can’t get through.”
Thekla’s heart was beating, fast, because that’s what it felt like with her Vati. If she could find a way to reach him . . . She raised her hand. “Missing someone is like that . . . missing how he might be.”
“Oh ja . . .” Fräulein Siderova saw inside Thekla’s soul, recognized the hoping and the waiting, the maybe and the never again.
The butterfly was beating its wings against the glass.
“That butterfly will never get to the flowers,” Gisela said.
“Because it’s God’s will,” Marianne said. “And that makes it fate.”
“Actually, what we have here,” Fräulein Siderova said, “is a truth. Butterflies cannot fly through glass. Truth?”
“Truth,” her girls agreed.
“But within that truth—for us, as humans—there is choice. If you watch closely, you can reach into fate with both arms and affect the outcome.”
*
“When I was your age,” Thekla tells her boys, “my teacher altered fate for one butterfly.” She describes how Fräulein Siderova brought the potted geranium to school, how one butterfly kept returning to the window.
“But then Fräulein Siderova opened the window. She lifted her clay pot with the geranium, set it outside on the brick ledge so the butterfly could reach it. It was part of her teaching . . . that we can alter fate.”
Thekla hopes the story of the butterfly will make her boys think. She finds Fräulein Siderova’s philosophy more appealing than the church’s doctrine that God knows your every thought, that without God’s plan no sparrow falls from a tree. Or is it the sky? A barn? So much of religion is like politics—coercion and superstitious nonsense. At the university, Thekla read Darwin’s Die Entstehung der Arten, and she has been teaching her boys about evolution without naming it that. To her, evolution makes for a more sophisticated God.
When Franz and Walter raise their hands, she’s ready for their questions.
Chapter 10
WHEN IS FRÄULEIN Siderova coming back?” Franz asks.
“Never,” Walter says.
“Yes, she is,” Richard insists.
“She’s a Jude,” Andreas says. “That’s why she can’t come back.”
Thekla flinches. During her first month of teaching, she was afraid Fräulein Siderova would come back, and she felt ashamed at her relief that the school couldn’t restore the position to a Jewish teacher.
“I lost my teacher in fourth grade, just like you,” she tells her boys. “She went to America with her new husband, to help him bring up his three children. Their mothers had died during childbirth.”
Suddenly her boys are solemn. Nearly every family has a mother or aunt or sister in the cemetery from giving birth. Giving death. They know that’s how women can die. Or lose all sanity if their babies changed into dwarfs like Trudi Montag. If you dropped babies, their heads got big, but not their bodies. You, too, could change into a dwarf, stop growing altogether if you didn’t clean your ears or if you didn’t say your prayers or if you ate butter with a spoon or if you lied to your parents or if you broke your sister’s doll. And once you were a dwarf, you were a dwarf forever.
*
“Let me show you where in America my teacher lives now.” Thekla Jansen picks up the pointer, moves it to America on the map of the world. “After she left, we met our new teacher.”
“Our Fräulein Siderova.”
Thekla nods. “She was my Fräulein Siderova, too.”
“But when is she coming back to us?” Eckart Holthusen wants to know.
Do they wish they had you here instead, Fräulein Siderova? Do they think I betrayed you? Because I did. No, I didn’t. Because what else could I have done?
Her boys are waiting.
“Soon we liked Fräulein Siderova as much as Fräulein Montag, who married and went to America. I was at her wedding.”
“In America?”
“No no, the wedding was in Burgdorf. She invited our whole class.”
“Will you invite us to your wedding?” Otto can see Fräulein Jansen in her wedding gown, white lace and a veil and white flowers. . . .
Franz giggles.
But the others want her the way she is. There’s something girl-wild about her, and yet she doesn’t look down on boys like regular girls. On her, they can practice how to treat girls.
Two of their mothers—Frau Weskopp and Frau Beil—have told the teacher their sons have become more polite. Some of her boys she understands better than their parents do. Because she listens to them, encourages them. Already, she can picture them as men. She’ll encounter them in church or at the pharmacy or on the street. Some will visit her on Sunday afternoons with flowers, say, or on certain occasions, like Christmas, perhaps Mother’s Day. They’ll come to her with stories about their work and their own children, tell her how lovely she is. Men. But for her always boys.
She smiles mysteriously. “You don’t want me to get married.”
But Otto is still thinking of her in that white gown. “Why not?”
“Because as a teacher I can help more children than i
f I were a mother. And if I got married, I’d have to stop being your teacher. I couldn’t do that, could I?”
They shake their heads. They’d be devastated if she were to let one man displace them. Boys. They all have crushes on her.
*
Last Saturday, when Thekla danced with Emil Hesping through the blue-warm haze of tobacco smoke in Potter’s bar, her palm was against his chest, and his white shirt felt so insubstantial that she wanted her hand on that muscle without the shirt. That’s how the wanting always started for her, with that rough, immediate pull. Skin, breath, voice—coming at her all at once.
“I think more than ever the Nazis framed that crazy Dutch communist,” he said.
“Not so loud,” she warned.
“They set the Reichstag on fire and lured the poor Dutchman in there so that they could blame communist terrorists . . . seize KPD buildings and weapons, get emergency powers.”
“Enough—”
“You’re too careful.” Emil spun her past a whirl of uniforms and suits, past brown shirts and armbands. “They want to convince us that the communists were stockpiling weapons for a revolution.”
“Must you distort everything?”
“Distort? As a teacher you should be appalled at how they distort language.”
She pressed her forehead against his mouth to stop him from talking.
His lips and voice against her skin: about how Hitler claimed to have protected the German people not just from devious enemies and known dangers but also from dangers he couldn’t reveal for their own protection; about how the sheep of Germany were so grateful to Hitler that they were trading their freedom for that illusion.
“Don’t you ever question how involved the Führer was in the fire?” Emil asked.
“Enough,” she said.
“Whenever I think, now he has gone too far, now we’ll surely get rid of him, he steps up his audacity.”
“I’m not going to listen to this,” she said. It was enough that he went to secret meetings of the KPD, Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, though it was forbidden. She wished he were more discreet, like Herr Abramowitz, who also was a communist.
“When he talks about freedom, he means national freedom, not individual freedom. Don’t you see—”
“You’ll get us arrested.”
“I’m too fast for the braunen Halunken—brown goons.” Emil. Irreverent. Exciting. Dangerous.
He kissed her forehead, and when she pulled away, he laughed, and his black eyebrows drew together above the bridge of his wonderfully curved nose till they joined into one brow. She loved that contrast to his smooth, bald head. As a girl she’d thought men’s hair grew lower with age so that, once they were dreadfully old, it was all between their toes. All her life she’d seen Emil around town. He was twenty-five when she was ten and watched him at a competition, gliding on the trapeze above her like a sorcerer. And now that she was thirty-four, he was forty-nine and more limber than men her age.
“You can’t possibly believe the blind Dutchman did it.”
*
The Dutchman. Marinus. Marinus van der Lubbe. More like a boy than a man in newspaper photos, with his round face and wide lips and those dazed, dazed eyes, the rim of his cap so low on his forehead that shadows leaked below his eyes like those painted triangles below the eyes of a clown. Thekla usually fell for the sullen type, worked herself inside out to evoke a smile, a response.
Some said the Dutchman was bare-chested and ranting when they captured him inside the Reichstag. Half-naked, others said, wielding a torch, sweat beading on his chest. Yet, in the newspaper Marinus van der Lubbe was no longer bare-chested but subdued in a jacket buttoned high over his shirt. One photo showed him with the translator who was assigned to him.
“He was not blind,” Thekla told Emil.
“Blind enough to be incapable of burning down that huge mess of a building.”
“Fräulein Siderova said he was three quarters blind.”
“Fräulein Siderova still speaks to you?”
Thekla flinched.
“I’m sorry, Liebchen.”
“I’ve never taken anything from Fräulein Siderova. No matter what people say.”
Emil pulled her close.
Thekla has looked for Fräulein Siderova in the church choir, but she hasn’t been there since last spring. She’s seen her only once, at the Christmas mass, in a pew near the exit, not upstairs with the choir where she belonged, singing Handel’s Messiah with Trudi Montag and the taxidermist and Frau Weskopp and the pharmacist and the other members.
“The last time I was in Düsseldorf,” she said, “I bought another present for her. A small box made of blue glass. I do that whenever I see something she might like. If I can afford it, I buy it for her, and when I visit her—”
“What I adore about you . . .” He pulled her closer yet. “. . . is that impossibly high upper lip of yours, but especially that little groove above it.”
“Philtrum. That’s what the old Greeks called it.”
“Why must the Greeks always be old?”
“They considered it to be the most sensual part of the body. Their word for it was philtrum. Liebeszauber—love magic.”
“And is it?” With his thumb, he skimmed that sweet ridge between her nose and her upper lip, and felt her mouth quiver. How sensual she was. He adored that about her, that and her quick intelligence. She would make a good chess player.
*
“You would make a good chess player,” he said.
She felt his heat throughout her body, down to the hidden flesh behind her knees. She stumbled. Swayed. “I’m already a good chess player.”
“We should play, then.” He swayed with her.
And she knew she wanted to go home with him. Tonight.
He said, “So there is a name for it . . . philtrum. I was told it’s where my guardian angel pressed one finger before I was born. To make me forget the secret I knew from before birth.”
“Some babies are born without a philtrum,” she said, “the skin there flat. Does that mean your guardian angels don’t touch those babies with the secret? And that therefore, they’ll remember the secret?”
Emil thought of the third Heidenreich girl—a woman of twenty but forever a girl—Gerda, with her flat upper lip, her crazy lurch of a walk. Unsteady, mind and body. And yet, Gerda could pass for pretty when she sat without motion, without words, on the front steps of her father’s taxidermy shop.
“You don’t believe in angels,” Thekla said abruptly.
“Stories. I believe in stories.”
“So who told you that story?”
“A wise woman.”
“What’s her name?”
“She said the secret is always inside us, but we won’t remember it till we die. If we knew the secret, we’d be blinded by it.”
“What’s your wise woman’s name?”
“You . . .” He laughed aloud. “. . . are jealous!”
“I don’t believe in being jealous.”
“Not believing isn’t enough to keep it away.” He grazed her lips with his. “Duck lips.”
“Your reputation for flattery is unsurpassed.”
“That bad?”
“That bad.”
“Child lips then?” Emil. Against her. Hard. “Think of the timing! One week before the elections. How convenient. And Hitler had the audacity to claim the fire was a signal from God.”
*
They danced past Maria Bertels, who was sitting with two brownshirts, coarse, boisterous, definitely not the kind of men Thekla would go out with. What was Maria doing with them?
She glanced away when Thekla waved to her. Probably because she was still at Henkel’s in Düsseldorf, waiting for a teaching job. It cut through Thekla, that familiar uneasiness—having while others didn’t. At the university, she and Maria used to belong to the hiking club, and after they’d graduated, they continued to hike with others from the club, dancing at the Karneval, sharing f
rugal dinners, complaining that there were no teaching positions because of the peace treaty and reparation costs.
Until last spring, they’d been friends, as long as Thekla, too, was working any dismal job just to keep Leib und Seele zusammen—body and soul together: clerk in an optician’s shop, at a lumberyard, in a pharmacy, when she could have done so much more with her education. The humiliation of losing even those jobs. And always that doubt: If I’m not a teacher, then who am I? Private lessons barely paid, but Fräulein Siderova said they would make Thekla feel like a teacher. And they did. Just as the visits to Fräulein Siderova’s classroom made Thekla feel like a teacher. For that hour. That half day. Making it excruciating to return to work that was not teaching. Many of her classmates were still in jobs like Maria’s and hadn’t taught at all.
*
Thekla longed for a friendship with a woman. Like the friendship of Sonja Siderova and Ilse Abramowitz. Every Sunday, the two women took long walks by the Rhein, as had been their custom for decades. From a distance, they were like sisters, tall and swift as they leaned their bodies into the wind and talked. Always talked.
They must know everything about one another.
But they revealed nothing. Especially not what happened to Ilse Abramowitz’s first child. The people of Burgdorf said the child must have been born dead or had died right after birth. Yet, there was no marker for a child on the Abramowitzes’ family plot. That’s why the old widows, who rode their bicycles to the cemetery to tend their families’ graves, suspected that Ilse Abramowitz had started bleeding on the train, that the trembling of steel wheels against steel rails must have initiated the trembling of her womb. What the widows knew for sure were these facts: One morning in the fall of 1899, a very pregnant Frau Abramowitz had climbed aboard the 8:42 train, accompanied by Sonja Siderova; but two days later, when the two returned, Ilse Abramowitz’s belly was flat, absolutely flat—without that gentle swelling most women retain for weeks after giving birth—and Sonja Siderova had to support her elbow as though she were an invalid. For weeks Ilse Abramowitz cried, wouldn’t look people in the face, but since she didn’t speak of any miscarriage, it would have been ill-mannered to ask.