by Ursula Hegi
He wishes he were back home in the mountains, but his mother inherited the dead house, and his father is hoping to get hired at the post office, and now he must live in this flat village and go to school with mean boys.
She nods, encourages him.
“Go on,” says the boy next to him. Otto.
But already Andreas is snickering from the row behind him.
When Heinz pivots, coiled fury, and hisses at him, the teacher suddenly knows what to do. Don’t single him out for not knowing. Single him out by letting him teach us. By approaching High German as if it were a foreign language, she can motivate Heinz to translate words from his dialect into High German, which, after all, he must learn to succeed. Not just in school, but beyond. Once he can make himself understood, he won’t be so awkward, and her boys will include him.
Eager to try this, she says, “We all know there are different dialects in our Muttersprache—mother language.”
They nod, feeling smart: We all know...
“This makes our Muttersprache so much richer than if all of us talked the same. I don’t know how many dialects we have in Germany, but I’ll do some research and let you know. Any guesses?”
“Maybe twelve?” Jochen asks.
“Thirty. At least thirty,” Andreas states as if saying it aloud will make it so.
“Maybe a thousand?” Eckart tries.
Several are talking at once.
The young teacher gives her boys that glance of hers—loving and disappointed—and waits as their voices spin and hum, then lessen because wanting to please her wins out. All boys are men.
She touches the middle groove above her lip, that short indentation. Liebeszauber . . . Emil. No. He’d only get in the way of her teaching position. Still—he persists in her body. Damn. So much for being unaffected by love. What happened to skin only? Lust only? Most days she wavers between wanting to give him up and fantasizing about going to him at night, stunning him with her passion, leaving him before dawn.
She is afraid she may be starting to love him.
—Nein nein jetzt nicht. Weg damit—No no not now. Away with this—
“Next week,” she tells her boys, “we’ll celebrate that richness of our Muttersprache by learning words from other dialects. Each region of our country has its own dialect, formed by history and tradition. But each region also has Hochdeutsch—High German, which is the German we read in books and newspapers. This means that all of you already know two languages. Most of us grew up with the dialect of the Rheinland. We’re lucky to have a student who speaks the Bavarian dialect.”
They all stare at Heinz, who is pulling his neck into his shoulders.
“I’ll need your help with teaching us the Bavarian dialect, Heinz. Next Monday, we’ll learn some words from you. You’ll choose them and write them on the chalkboard, one by one, and then other students can take turns writing those word in Hochdeutsch.”
He is embarrassed. Mumbles.
But she pretends it’s agreement. “Thank you, Heinz.”
Wolfgang raises his hand. “Remember, my Opa lives in Berlin.”
“I remember.”
“He has a dialect, too.”
“Excellent. Next week, we’ll all bring in words from other dialects. Please, find out which dialects your family knows. We’ll start by learning from Heinz.”
Though Heinz is watching closely, no words from him.
You should see him, Fräulein Siderova, still cautious. But I’ll tutor him after school, get him to learn Hochdeutsch by showing him my respect for his dialect. If I can teach him what he needs to know, I can protect him, make a difference in his life. Gradually, he’ll be more at ease with the other boys. Thrive.
“I’m only allowed to speak Hochdeutsch,” Otto says.
“My family, too,” Bruno says.
“It’s like that in some families,” the teacher says. She wishes those two would become friends. Though Bruno comes from a better family than Otto, that can be overcome now with the new equality. What matters is that both boys are bright and thoughtful. They could learn so much from one another. She’ll figure out an assignment they’ll need to do together.
“My Oma is from the Schwarzwald,” Richard says. “I know lots of words in her dialect.”
“Good. You’ll be second.”
Heinz blinks, breathes carefully past his own smell but gets only classroom air—chalk and wool after it dries again. He wants to tell his teacher about being proud of who your ancestors were. “Ahnenpass . . . ,” he starts, but slowly, so she can understand him.
“You’re talking about documenting our ancestors,” she says to him. Just to him.
Heinz nods. She has understood.
*
Thekla Jansen has been working on her Ahnenpass—ancestor report for three months now, ever since last November when Sister Mäuschen urged the faculty to have the Ahnenpass ready, though it’s not an official requirement. Not yet. To protect the gray booklet from smudges and creases, Thekla covered it with cellophane and keeps it in her napkin holder with the documents that verify the births, weddings, and deaths of four generations.
When she read her parents’ marriage certificate, she was shocked that their wedding was four months before her birth. But it wasn’t like she was unehelich—illegitimate. Only that her parents had married sooner than planned. Many families had to rush weddings. Still, if her mother knew she’d found out, she would be mortified. That’s why Thekla didn’t mention it to her.
However, she had to ask about the error on her birth certificate that made her three months older than she was. “It should be January fifth, 1900,” she said. “Not October fifth, 1899.”
Her mother studied the certificate. “Someone must have made a mistake.”
“It puts me into a different century!”
“I didn’t think of it like that.”
Thekla didn’t speak.
“It would be easy,” her mother said, “to get it reissued . . . if you’d been born here in Burgdorf. But with Nordstrand nearly six hundred kilometers away, it would take time for your request to get there. And for them to send you the corrected birth certificate.”
“I want to be done with this.” All Thekla was waiting for were two more originals, the wedding certificate of her parents and the birth certificate of her paternal great-grandmother. Once they arrived, she’d complete her Ahnenpass and take it to the town hall for seals and signatures.
“Remember how slow they were in Nordstrand, getting you the death certificates of your father’s brother and sisters?”
Thekla shivered. “Those dead children . . . birth dates spread over four years but their day of death the same.”
“When we lived on Nordstrand, I often walked with your Oma by the sea at dawn.”
“What if I just used the date that’s already on my birth certificate?”
Mutti didn’t answer. So many freckles on her cheeks that she looked sun-brown in winter. Raising one hand, she touched Thekla’s chin. “Sometimes I want to tell you . . .”
“Tell me what?”
Mutti dropped her hand. Tugged it beneath her apron. “Maybe you can give your students the assignment to search their family trees. How many of them can recite the names of their eight great-grandparents?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your father, he knew the names of his great-grandparents.”
Your father. . . Thekla wondered how much her students knew about her father. Some probably had never seen him because he’d barely been outdoors in years. But people talked. Maybe some parents said, “Your teacher’s father, he is crazy.”
“He used to be interested in genealogy,” Thekla’s mother continued, “but once he came back from the war, his mind was . . . broken.”
Moments like this Thekla felt the legacy of his craziness waiting for her, though she told herself that he hadn’t been born with it, that it had first come into him when the wave took his siblings, and that it hadn’t caught him
fully till the Great War.
Chapter 16
TO RECITE SOMETHING,” she tells her boys, “will plant it inside your mind: poetry, multiplication, history dates.” That’s how Fräulein Siderova taught when Thekla was her student, and when they sang Heinrich Heine’s “Loreley,” the girls could feel the sadness the poet described, haunting him over a fairy tale from ancient times:
Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten,
dass ich so traurig bin;
ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten,
das geht mir nicht aus dem Sinn.
Fräulein Siderova told them that more than twenty composers had set Heine’s poem to music. But long before Heine, Brentano and Keats had already written about the enchantress who—from a cliff in the Rhein near St. Goarshausen—lured sailors to crash their ships on the rocks.
*
Thekla feels frustrated that Heine’s poems are now forbidden. If only she could teach them to her boys, they’d recognize his descriptions of their Rhein, of the sun at dusk. She’d tell them how he grew up near Burgdorf more than a hundred years ago, and she’d lead them into writing descriptions of their village and let them discover—within their own words—how poetry was possible for every one of them.
With Heine they would identify, much more so than last week with old Walther von der Vogelweide, one of the earliest poets listed in the Echtermeyer, who did his writing more than seven centuries ago, too early to offend this government. When Thekla assigned her boys an essay based on his work, she gave it the title “My Daily Life Seven Hundred Years Ago,” and encouraged the boys to be precise in what they imagined.
A lot of her favorite writers are now on the list of un-German writers: Bertolt Brecht and Anna Seghers and Franz Werfel and Erich Kästner . . .
All of Heine’s books are banned, not only because he was Jewish but because some of his poems criticized Germany. You can think those things but not say them aloud. Or, worse yet, write them down for everyone to read. That’s why she taught her boys Brentano’s version of the Loreley legend. They were excited about the gold of the Nibelungen, hidden deep in the Rhein below Loreley’s cliff. Rhein maidens watched over it, but Alberich stole the gold and forced the Nibelungen tribe to forge it into a ring that would give him power over the world. Gold and caves and dragons fascinated her boys. Something disguised as a treasure even more so.
Some say that Heinrich Heine dirtied his nest and then moved away, to Paris, where he wrote another poem about being unable to sleep when he thinks of Germany at night:
Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht,
Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht . . .
Heinrich Heine, cursing the false Vaterland where only dishonor and disgrace flourished. Jeopardizing himself and—beyond his death—anyone who reads his poems, or wants to teach them.
*
Thekla dreads her conversation with the Stosicks tonight. They’ll probably blame her for encouraging Bruno when he joined the Hitler-Jugend. Of course she knows the Nazis are crass and common. But she also knows they’re temporary, and that she can wait them out. She can’t say this to Bruno’s parents. They’re so critical of the Führer that they may quote her. Don’t they see that nothing will ever totally match their ideals? Why not use what they can for their son?
Bruno wants to belong, to win awards. For his sake, she must find one thing she and his parents can agree on. Maybe she’ll emphasize the Hitler-Jugend as a stepping-stone to the best secondary schools and apprenticeships. “Everything is just for now,” she’ll say, “and if we keep waiting for something we totally approve of, we’ll miss the next stepping-stone.”
But she’ll have to be diplomatic: Günther Stosick is a principal; she only a first-year teacher. She’ll remind him of the shame that used to fill the space where pride once lived, and how—as teachers—they have a responsibility to restore that pride in their students. “Knowledge without pride is fragile,” she may say.
“We were more human without it.”
She’s getting agitated just thinking of what he may say. But all at once she feels relieved. Because it’s Tuesday. And that means she can’t speak with them tonight.
*
Every Tuesday the members of the Burgdorf Chess Club meet in the Stosicks’ living room: they get out the chess sets and chess clocks and books from the birch wardrobe, set up four long tables, and cover them with starched white tablecloths. Usually, they play past midnight.
So far, Bruno has won against every man, including brilliant strategists like his father and Leo Montag. The boy plays without effort, it seems to the members, though that is of course unthinkable because what would that say about their game?
A boy like that can make you fear that at fifty-one, say, or forty-three, you are too old to learn more about chess.
A boy like that can make you wish you’d spoken out against allowing children in the club.
Already, Bruno is competing on a national level, and it’s obvious that, in a few years, he’ll bring honor to his chess club and all of Burgdorf by representing Germany in international tournaments.
A few weeks ago his father showed Thekla the first chess ledgers, dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century and documenting every game by the members of the club. “These early entries are in the handwriting of the founder,” he said with reverence.
Gisela rolled her eyes.
“Must you?” he asked, but he seemed amused.
“Obviously, the members, including my dear husband, worship this idiot of a founder. And you know why? Because that man abandoned his eight children and his wife for the greatest passion of all . . . chess.” As Gisela drew out the word chess into several syllables, she looked about ten years old.
At ten, Gisela had been impish and swift at the piano, and she’d become the protégée of Frau Birnsteig, the concert pianist, who still invited the townspeople to her mansion every June to hear her play the piano for them—Debussy and Beethoven and Rachmaninoff—and to introduce her current protégée to this audience.
*
Better talk to the Stosicks tomorrow morning. She’ll wait till she hears the first steps downstairs, quick and light: Gisela. Maybe it would be best to speak with her alone, let her persuade Günther. Yes, Thekla decides, she’ll stay upstairs till she hears the front door, wait by her window till she sees the top of Günther Stosick’s hat, the herringbone pattern of his coat, as he heads in the direction of the Protestant school.
Then she’ll go down to the kitchen, where Gisela keeps her piano in the breakfast nook, windows on three sides. It’s the only place for it since the living room is for chess. But Gisela likes to play her piano here. She’ll ask Thekla to sit at her table, offer her coffee. Her hair will be sticking up, the way it gets from sleeping without a pillow.
On excursions with their youth group, Gisela would wake up with her hair stiff like that. Maybe they can talk about roasting potatoes in the fire, poking at them as they turned black with the embers. With the sharpened ends of bare branches, they’d impale the crisp skins to the soft centers and raise the potatoes, slowly, so they wouldn’t drop back into the flames. They’d blow on them, impatient to bite through the skins into the white insides. Black around their mouths, then, and they’d become the beast, scare one another by stretching their smudged lips and howling.
“Not all that different from what the children do now . . . hikes and songs and stories,” Thekla will say.
“I loved to stare into the flames,” Gisela may say.
“But one night you disappeared.”
Gisela will shake her head, smile. “Do you have to remind me of that?”
“When we couldn’t find you, the group leaders divided us into groups of five. We were forbidden to separate while we searched and yelled your name.”
“I never heard you shout.”
“We thought you’d been kidnapped. Raped. Killed.”
“Too many stories around the fire . . .”
“Instead
you were asleep on that platform,” Thekla will say, prompting Gisela to tell her part of the adventure again: how she had climbed up the rungs of the ladder to that observation platform where, the day before, the girls had taken a picnic of cheese Brötchen and apples and lemonade.
“But why climb up there middle of the night?” Thekla will ask. “You were scared of being alone.”
Quite likely, Gisela will say she doesn’t remember. It’s what she has said before.
But Thekla won’t believe her because she, too, has not forgotten the wide-swirling path of light in the sky that spanned north and south, weightless and imposing.
Chapter 17
RAIN AGAINST THE windows of the schoolhouse. Hard.
“Close your eyes, boys,” Fräulein Jansen says, “and listen to the rain. Imagine rain on the grasses and the fields....”
Some press their lids shut, twitchy folds.
Others let their lids slide down, smooth orbs.
“Think of the impossible green of wet treetops. . . .”
They raise their faces toward her, blind, expectant.
I wish you could see them, Fräulein Siderova.
“Listen closely: pluie.”
“Pluie?” asks Walter.
“Yes, pluie. The French word for rain. It’s also what rain sounds like, doesn’t it?”
“Pluie. . . ,” whispers Otto. He bets Markus knows the word. Markus had private lessons in French. And in art. Otto misses planning with him about how the two of them would learn the entire knowledge of the entire world and store it inside their minds: all languages, all art, all history. They’d go to university together, become teachers like Fräulein Jansen.
“Keep your eyes closed and listen. . . .” The teacher is listening to the rain, too, thinking how it was raining this hard seven weeks ago.
She remembers because of Marinus van der Lubbe. The Dutch queen, Wilhelmina Helena Pauline Maria, had appealed on his behalf to the old President von Hindenburg, asking him to commute her subject’s sentence to prison because at the time of his arrest the penalty for arson was not death—not yet. At dawn, on January 10, while the queen was still waiting for the answer to her appeal, the young Dutchman was taken from his solitary cell. Through the wet grass of the Leipzig prison yard, the executioner—white gloves, top hat—led Marinus to the guillotine.