by Ursula Hegi
Herr Stosick is running toward the teacher and her boys.
“How is Bruno?” she calls out to him.
Face red, he stops, bends forward, hands on his knees, his breath so jagged he can’t speak.
Has he found out about Bruno climbing from the window at night? And that she hasn’t reported it to him? And that she knows he’s still a member of the Hitler-Jugend? Is that why he’s kept Bruno from returning to school?
Is he going to tell her she has to move out of her apartment? She wants to cry at the unfairness of it. Already she misses her apartment. How unprofessional it would be of Herr Stosick to evict her in front of her students. She is teaching, and he should be at his school, doing his work. Instinctively, she steps between him and her boys, spreads her arms to contain them.
*
Gisela reaches down to rub Henrietta’s thick neck. Just a few years ago Bruno was still small enough to ride the dog, hold on to her collar, saying politely, “Please, carry me to my room.” But Henrietta wouldn’t budge, not till Bruno slid off her back, and then she’d shake her broad head, specks of drool flying from her speckled jowls. The dog is rubbing herself against Gisela’s left thigh, whimpering. “Enough,” Gisela says. Tail straight up, Henrietta trots toward the wardrobe, and for an instant Gisela feels embarrassed for the dog with her rump exposed like that. Henrietta sniffs the door, whimpers again.
*
“Where have you been?” Herr Stosick’s hair clings to his scalp, sweaty despite the cold.
“On a learning excursion. With my students.”
“Bruno?” He moves past her into the midst of her boys like a swimmer, arms separating them, his bulk the size of three boys. “Bruno!”
“Herr Stosick, please!”
“Bruno!” His voice hoarse like a foghorn.
*
“What is this, Henrietta?” Gisela makes loud steps, for her son to hear. “Someone left out all the chess books. I’ll put them back inside.” No need to spoil Bruno’s little game. There’ll be enough time to eat and get him back to school.
*
The boys scowl as Bruno’s father pushes them aside, then tighten into one circle around their teacher, solidify. She feels them shifting, three deep between her and Herr Stosick. It makes her uneasy though she knows they want to protect her. Even if they’re back to normal, she isn’t.
“We waited for Bruno,” she says. “We—”
“Bruno?” Now he’s circling her and the boys, herding them. “Where is he?”
They can taste their power, know they can shield one another from him. Even the new boy, Heinz, now belongs with them.
“Bruno is at home,” Andreas shouts.
“At home,” Heinz says, defiant.
*
Gisela taps the blond wood of the wardrobe. “I wonder where Bruno is?” she sings out. “Bruno . . . ?”
*
“We waited for Bruno before we moved our biology and art lessons outdoors,” the teacher tells Herr Stosick.
“Your principal didn’t know where you were! You and all these boys.”
These boys.
Pressing around her.
Shivering.
A seagull skims the surface of the Rhein with a husky cry and captures a fish.
Andreas nudges Heinz. “My Oma comes from Bavaria, too.”
Thekla angles her elbows to keep the boys away from her. “I have never asked Sister Josefine for permission to teach in nature.”
“In my school you would.”
She feels a sudden rage. Ten years to find this position, and I’m not letting you take it from me.
*
Gisela scratches her knuckles. Already, she can see herself telling Günther how she walked around the living room with loud steps, calling Bruno’s name; and though he’ll be annoyed at Bruno for making him late for lunch and possibly late for school, she’ll get him to laugh with her—the way only parents will at the quirks of their children—because they both know how Bruno can get with his hiding games, and it will be good to laugh together because, lately, there has not been enough of that in their house.
*
This is what she will do, Thekla decides: speak with Sister Josefine before Herr Stosick can. As soon as she gets her boys to school, she’ll ask the principal for a meeting, complain that Herr Stosick—no, she’ll refer to him as the principal of the Protestant school—intimidated the Catholic students. The impropriety of it! Maybe she won’t complain but rather consult Sister Josefine for advice on how to handle this impropriety. The sister likes giving advice. It’ll be one principal against another. One religion against another. If Thekla has to, she’ll incite the nuns into a bloody Holy War, wimples flying, rosaries in an uproar.
*
As Gisela lays her hand on the doorknob, she can feel her son inside the wardrobe, smiling, waiting. She wouldn’t have done that at his age. Not in the dark. Except for that one summer night she strayed from the bonfire she’d built with her youth group, drifted toward a glow that shimmered through the night and competed with the flames. It wasn’t like her to wander off, but the stars were so near it didn’t occur to her she was by herself. It was only natural to climb up to that platform high in a tree, toward the Milky Way, which spread above her and above the spires of the trees as if cut into the night; and as she lay on the wooden planks, she was no longer tethered to earth, only to those stars in their wide band that brought the sky closer to her. She wishes Bruno could have seen how, within that whitish light, every possible color existed—yellow and red and green and blue—in uncounted variations. When she heard her friends’ voices yelling her name, she didn’t answer because she didn’t want this to end, this whiteness in the sky and she, only she, part of it. As she breathed slowly to make this last, it occurred to her that she didn’t have to go back, that she could let herself be sucked into that whiteness. Her friends walked on, and their shouts grew muffled, into echoes of shouts that could not touch her, echoes of echoes.
*
Herr Stosick is peering into the faces of the boys as if expecting to recognize his son.
“Please, Herr Stosick—” The young teacher keeps her voice polite. “I’m sure you’ll find Bruno at home.”
She wants him to go away, let her complete this afternoon with her boys, keep them warm and focused. She’ll have a race back to school. Already, she can picture Wolfgang leaning forward, the first to sprint.
“How did you lose him?” Herr Stosick demands.
“He didn’t come with us,” Thekla says.
“What?”
“Gisela kept him home.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“He wasn’t feeling well. His face and hands were cold. She must have taken him to Frau Doktor Rosen.”
That’s when he starts away from her toward the dike.
*
Gisela smiles to herself as she imagines Bruno raising his face toward the scent of the Himmel und Erde she’s prepared the way he likes it, no salt, so that the sweetness of the apples overwhelms the potatoes. Her Bruno adores—Her hands are itching. Fingertips to knuckles. She rubs them, hard. Her Bruno adores sweets, and it’s for him that she will boil down the first raspberries next summer into syrup that he’ll dribble on his rice pudding to make it last.
*
The boys keep in one tight formation around their teacher until she manages to break from them and rush after Bruno’s father. Then they huddle, think of staying behind, to climb on the jetties, aim pebbles for the current that rushes past them toward the left, and determine who can skip the farthest.
Fräulein Jansen has shown them the Rhein on the map of the world, no more than a squiggle; but on the map of Germany, they’ve followed their river past Duisburg and Xanten to the Dutch border, studying its geology and history. “It doesn’t stop at the border, of course,” Fräulein said as she drew the rest of the Rhein on the chalkboard, adding Dutch towns along its banks, Rijnwaarden and Zevenaar and Rotterdam, until the Rhe
in spilled itself into the Nordsee.
Here, by the river, they won’t have to be careful not to break windows or hit people and animals who might stray. But staying behind would mean letting Fräulein chase after Bruno’s father alone. She’s theirs to protect. That’s why the boys keep up with her. Easy. Because it’s at the slow pace of Bruno’s father. While he steps around horse droppings, the boys leap across. He has to slow down as he climbs the dike with the vast sky above him. It would take no effort to pass him, trip him, close around him once he’s on the ground.
In the stubbly fields hang the tattered clothes of leftover scarecrows. At the Braunmeiers’ farm, the boys try to pester the white goat by clapping their hands, but the goat perches on its favorite tree stump in the middle of the meadow like a statue, like the king of all the cows that clump together at a distance.
When the boys pass the slaughterhouse and head into the heart of their village, their formation disperses and tightens—with their rivalry, with their bonding against one enemy: Bruno’s father—a precursor to what they will experience in the next war, when they’ll belong to units that will move as one, every man obliged to do his share of what must be done. Because not to would saddle your comrade with what’s yours to finish.
*
The itching races from Gisela’s wrists up her arms. She rotates them against the sides of her dress, pictures herself telling Günther how she can feel Bruno on the other side of the door, holding his breath so she won’t hear him, eager to jump out and shout the instant she yanks the door open—“I thought you’d never find me, Mutti!”—but she won’t tell Günther about the crazy thoughts that overtake her the instant she pulls at the door—jammed, it’s jammed—pulls again though something primeval and terrible is jabbering inside her don’t look don’t lookdon’tlookdon’t—
1914
Chapter 29
WHEN HIS YOUNGEST son was nine, Wilhelm Jansen was sent away to fight in the Great War. But after just a few months he was brought back to his family—on a stretcher on a train—though his skin was unbroken except for one nick on his chin where he’d cut himself eating goat cheese from the blade of his knife. From then on, the dark waves were there nearly all the time.
Frau Doktor Rosen said something was broken inside the toymaker’s mind.
Herr Pastor Schüler said it was his soul.
Until the trenches of war, Wilhelm had managed to put together the broken pieces of himself, heroically, again and again; but in the trenches, all those pieces collided and flew apart.
*
Other soldiers, too, returned early, broken from the battlefields and the blinding rush toward oblivion. They’d lie on their beds all day. Or you’d see them on chairs by their windows. War had decimated the threshold between them and the shadows. Yet, you couldn’t tell they were injured. That’s why they were worse off than soldiers whose injuries were evident—the loss of an arm, say, or of a leg—because you could acknowledge those soldiers’ loss and heroism by carving a wooden limb, say, or a crutch; or by helping with chores they could no longer do.
This brokenness was more crippling than blindness or scarred lungs from the nerve gas that had overtaken many as they ran from it. Escape was your first impulse when that green, stinking cloud fanned toward you, and you’d forget what you’d been taught in training, to stop and piss on your handkerchief or sleeve and press the wet fabric over your face to counteract the gas.
The only injuries worse than the brokenness were the injuries of soldiers who were kept out of sight in faraway infirmaries because their wounds made them too grotesque to live among others.
*
Some men would stop by the pay-library because Leo Montag understood what it was like to have fought in the Great War and come home damaged. The circle of steel where his kneecap used to be brought him closer to the men, as if an angel in high flight—that’s what he’d looked like before the war as a gymnast levitating above the parallel bars—had crashed to earth. His limp was proof that he was here to stay, to listen.
In Leo Montag’s eyes, men could see the places that had shaped their own souls. They had no idea that quite a few of the women in town would have traded their men for Leo, who was gentle and tragic and more manly, somehow, than the most able-bodied men who could still carry great weights and run without limping.
*
To his neighbors, Wilhelm Jansen seemed shut away inside a sadness deeper than caves. They didn’t understand the swiftness of bliss beneath his inertia, bliss when he made love to his wife or peered at the faces of his children. For a while, he returned to the toy factory. Children no longer wanted lambs or fairy-tale blocks—they wanted to play with soldiers. But the soldiers he carved, bright yellow or green uniforms, were not at all like soldiers in the real war where the only bright color was that of blood before it dulled.
Alexander Sturm believed in providing the wounded with a place where they could do work that satisfied them, and though Wilhelm missed days, he kept him on because Wilhelm was the most gifted carver he’d ever hired, and because they both recognized that making toys was serious business. He hired two other toymakers who’d come back early from battle, lungs damaged by gas; he set up a bed and reminded them to take turns resting. Together, the three men completed the tasks of one.
Wilhelm’s sons helped by bringing their earnings—given to them in food or coins—to their mother. From an early age, they were good workers, eager for the smallest jobs, and the old women of Burgdorf approved of their industriousness. But they did not approve of how the Jansen girl was pampered. It set her above her brothers, the women gossiped, and it was wrong of Almut Jansen to let the daughter have the best, the first, not used by anyone before her. Girls’ things, they couldn’t be passed down to her brothers once she outgrew them, except for boots and one cornflower-blue sweater that Elmar, and then Dietrich, had worn down to the skin of their elbows, and that Almut had darned countless times until there were no more threads left to anchor her weave of darning.
*
Whenever Wilhelm’s hours outside the shadows grew longer than the hours inside, he dared hope that, in time, he’d forget the passage to there altogether. Easier, then, to study his hands than the faces of his children, who would grow up with the fear that they’d inherit his craziness, especially his youngest son, Dietrich, moody and athletic, who would become a priest, while Elmar, pious and delicate, the son his teachers predicted would become a priest, would work for the potato man, Herr Weinhart, making deliveries though he’d hate the cloud of old potato dust that would billow around him whenever he’d empty sacks of new potatoes into the tops of his customers’ bins.
Tuesday, February 27, 1934
Chapter 30
THE SHRIEKING COMES at the boys as they turn the corner to Bruno’s street, a shrieking that’s as much sound as motion as it whirls toward them like sand and becomes Bruno’s mother whirling toward them, all of one color, the color of sand—hair lips clothes—and already Bruno’s father is running into the sand, staggering as if bracing against a fierce wind.
Shrieking. The sand. Shrieking at Bruno’s father. “. . . he did it!”
“What are you—”
“. . . then I found him! Oh God!”
The shrieking irritates the boys the way sand will when it gets into your eyes, your nostrils, and already their irritation is shifting to Bruno. They’ll get him for this. Get him for wrecking their learning excursion. They could still be by the river climbing willows and watching the yellow ferry cross to their side. They could be getting ready for a race, leaning forward, ready to sprint, and then their legs flashing. Of course Wolfgang would win, but they’d raise him high into the air, only pretend to drop him, making the teacher laugh, even Eckart.
*
Bruno’s mother is the sand shrieking: “Dead . . . he’s dead!”
Fräulein Jansen covers her lips with both hands.
“No!” Bruno’s father howls.
They draw closer, th
e boys, listen to the sand shrieking till they can picture Bruno with the top button of his uniform open so the rope fits around his neck, can hear Bruno shrieking while the rope cuts off his breath—
But it’s still his mother doing all the shrieking: “. . . if I had opened the living room door all the way, I would have seen the chess books and sets on the floor. I would have been early enough to stop him . . .”
The teacher wants to shield her boys from hearing, wants to shield herself, and she spans her arms, pulls her boys close, as many as she can touch, even if it’s just with the ends of her fingers.
“. . . the sound I heard when I came back from looking for him at school must have been Bruno in the chess wardrobe, getting the rope ready to . . .”
They crowd against the teacher, the boys, oddly excited because Bruno’s death makes them different, makes them important. Only this morning they fretted about the anniversary of the Reichstag fire; but now they know someone their age who has died, who has done it to himself, the dying.
“. . . while I was at his school, he must have removed the books and chess sets to make room for himself in there so . . .”
If only I’d walked Bruno home, the teacher thinks. If only I’d handed him over to his mother.
First to arrive is the bakery truck. Then the police. Then Trudi Montag from the pay-library. How did she get here so quickly on her short legs? the boys wonder. She’s always kind to them, but they’ve been warned to keep family matters from her because she can tell just by looking at you —but how can that be?—what you don’t want her to know. Once she has your secret, she makes it bigger by carrying it from door to door, bartering it for other secrets.
*
All rain has ceased, but the air is drenched with the memory of water. Only one ribbon of snow lies along the edge of Bruno’s sidewalk, a ribbon the boys are not allowed to cross. While Bruno is on the other side of that ribbon. Inside his house. Inside the wardrobe.