by Ursula Hegi
Another gurney passes in the hallway. Then a man pushing a heavy floor-wax machine.
“—marzipan, John. Marzipan from Austria. Your favorite.”
“My favorite. Yes. What color were they … those bathrobes?”
“Plaid.”
“Plaid is not a color,” I tease him.
“Plaid,” he insists. Then adds, “Green and red.”
I adjust the picture of my grandparents: In their green-and-red-plaid bathrobes, they’re leaning forward now, closer yet to the screen, as if, indeed, that will bring them nearer to the moon, and while they witness the astronauts first uncertain steps, my father is keeping to what he’s mapped out, traveling toward who I am to become, not embryo yet, not fused yet to my mother, only to my father’s will as I drift toward him in the unknown, toward abrupt and brutal baptism in alien habitat.
My father is silent in the alert way of great thinkers as he lies connected like a moonwalker to his life-support system, and as I sit by his bed, reaching through my discomfort and fear to assure myself he is here, still here, I lay one palm against his cheek, linking him to me. I feel him listening inward, trying to understand this female heart of his, while my grandparents sit in front of the television, listening to foreign words as a white-padded figure bounces across the surface of an unfamiliar landscape, while—in their own language, their own symbols—they too cross the chasm between what they hear and what they see.
A Town Like Ours
Manfred and Kurt Rustemeier are twins who live in our parish. In a town as small as ours, twins are a rarity. We’ve only had one other set, the Friedman sisters, maiden ladies who both played the accordion and had to be relocated to Poland in 1941. That happened nine years after the Rustemeier twins were born. We celebrated the boys’ christening at the Catholic church, witnessed their first Kommunion, watched them play soccer in the empty lots among the rubble of war, and we were not surprised when they married local girls on the same Sunday in May of 1952. They were twenty that spring, the Rustemeier brothers, too young to have fought in the war, too old to have grown up without the memories that none of us like to talk about and that we do our best to shield our children from. What we teach them is to value the good in their lives. To look ahead, not back. To be industrious. Pious. And above all, to obey. It is our way of going on. Regardless of what the world has to say about the Vaterland.
The first children of the twins were born within one month of each other, first Kurt’s daughter, Helga, fair-skinned and wiry, then Manfred’s son, Johannes, marked with the moonface of the sad and innocent. While Helga’s movements were lively, the unfortunate boy turned his head sluggishly and regarded his surroundings through almond-shaped eyes. His damp lips would work themselves around sounds we couldn’t understand. He was late to crawl, late to stand up and walk. At times we felt ashamed of the secret relief that any parent among us—whose child was not afflicted like Johannes—must have felt. It’s because we’ve known the sorrow of having children like that taken from us. By the government or by God. How can anyone keep such a child safe?
Because we’ve seen how worries of that nature will tear at parents, we watched Manfred and his wife; but both Rustemeier families took care of the flawed boy and kept him alive. It didn’t seem to matter to them to which parents he belonged, because the Rustemeiers often were together though they lived two blocks apart. What the boy liked to do was pull himself up by gripping the hem of a curtain, not hard enough to tear it down, but enough to steady himself, as if he understood the difference. He’d do this not only at home but also in our houses when the Rustemeiers visited, and it saddened us to watch his father and his Uncle Kurt with him, the immense patience — tenderness, even—of these tall men as they’d take the boy by the arms, trying to teach him to walk as if they believed they could make him whole, listening to his babbling as though real words were hidden somewhere in that singsong.
Like other young men who had not been seized from us by the war, the Rustemeier twins worked in construction, rebuilding the ruins of our town, while their wives sewed curtains, embroidered tablecloths, traded recipes and dress patterns, and kept their children clean. It was easier by then to feed our children. Only a few years earlier, we all had known what it was like to go to sleep aching with hunger, and then to wake to the sirens and bombs. Without coal, there were nights so cold we were sure we would freeze to death, as others had in our neighborhoods. We waited in long lines for scant rations, survived on thin soups boiled from Kartoffelschalen— potato peels—and Rüben— turnips. It was a time of upheaval, and we finally deserved order.
The year each Rustemeier wife gave birth to her fourth child, Manfred and Kurt inherited a meadow from their Aunt Huber-tine, a meadow with cherry and apple trees, and with a swimming hole left by the Rhein centuries ago after one of its spring floods. Ever since they were small boys, the twins had played in that pond. A thin brook flowed through it, fanned out where it widened, and kept the water from getting too murky.
Behind the wooden shack, where their Aunt Hubertine used to store her canvas chairs and tools for her flower garden, stood a feeding trough where fat goldfish floated lazily. Years ago, the twins used to help her clean the trough. Now they taught their oldest children to care for the fish: first Helga would dart around the trough, catch their slippery bodies in a net, and set them into a washbasin; then Johannes, slow and methodical, would scoop out the scummy water with a pail. Together they’d scrub the sides and bottom of the trough and splash one another when they’d refill it with water from the pond.
Those two children were usually side by side, playing in the high grass, wearing crowns of daisies and cornflowers that Helga wove for both of them. She would tie Johannes’s shoelaces when they came undone, remind him to wash his hands and face before eating. He adored it when she let him ride on back of her bicycle, his hefty arms around her middle, mouth wide to the sky in his nonsense chant, feet out at both sides because Helga had taught him to keep them away from the whirling spokes.
By the time all the Rustemeier children were in school — even Johannes, who was allowed to sit in the back of the classroom, where he dabbed spittle on his chalkboard with one thumb, painting damp and mysterious figures that vanished into the dull-gray slate as they dried—the twins had saved enough money to start building two houses. Many Sundays and weekday evenings the families worked on Aunt Hubertine’s land, clearing and dividing it after much deliberation. To make certain their plots were equal, the twins measured them five times before they shook hands on the final allocation.
Hard workers, both of them, they set upon excavating and building the foundation walls from cinder blocks, helping one another by working on one house and then completing equal labor on the other, accomplishing far more together than they could have alone. And all along their wives brought food and assisted with some of the lighter work. The children would be playing by the rosebush that grew behind the trough, an immense bush with blossoms the size of cabbages, and we’d sometimes see the scarlet petals in their hair.
If the weather was warm enough, they’d swim in the pond. There, in the soft, greenish water, the moonfaced boy was more agile than his siblings and cousins. While on ground even the youngest children left him behind, Johannes glided and flipped through the water as though it were his natural element. Hot summer Sundays after mass, the twins and their wives would join their children in the water, and we’d hear laughter and singing from the pond. Often we’d come closer, on foot or by bicycle, to watch the contentment and prosperity of the twins with admiration and foreboding and the hope that maybe together the two families would be strong enough to thrive despite the sad-eyed boy.
As we’d look through the backyard of one of the houses, we’d notice the cinder-block walls of the other house growing, the same size, the same shape, and we’d watch the twins, their thick hair falling toward their eyebrows when they’d bend across the picnic their wives had prepared, or when they’d roll their Zigaretten
after eating. In the evenings they’d pass our houses on the way home, the wives carrying bunches of roses that they’d arrange in painted vases and replace before the petals could stain their tablecloths.
It seemed to us then that the twins looked even more alike than before: both wore brown, squared-off beards and walked with the confident stride of men who take pride in ownership. The Amerikaner, who don’t want to understand that we suffered too, have tried to teach us that any kind of pride is suspect in Deutschland; but it felt right to us when we saw that familiar pride in the twins, proof that it could never be totally squelched, and that—before long—pride would be there again, for all of us, in its purest form.
Among the qualities—aside from pride—that we value here are these: to pull pleasure out of the ordinary; to get along with one another. Because, surely, to get along and keep getting along with a reasonable degree of happiness is one of the greatest virtues. And when we looked at the Rustemeiers, who were more like one family than two, they seemed to have all that despite the burden of Johannes, and even more—they reminded us of who we really are, hardworking and high-principled people, who make the best of what we have, even if the world wants us to believe otherwise.
That’s why it felt like a betrayal when—as the twins got ready to lay the joists for the second floors—the Rustemeier families stopped speaking to one another. In a town like ours, where most of us have been born and will die, and where our children and grandchildren will live and be buried, God willing, we know each other’s stories and Geheimnisse— secrets. So we found out quickly that the feud had begun between the Rustemeier wives over something trivial—a rip in a skirt pattern. Manfred’s wife, Brigitte, a feisty woman with long features and a reputation for making the smoothest gravies, claimed the rip was new, while Kurt’s wife, Petra, who sang with the voice of an angel in the church choir but wore glasses so thick you could hardly see her eyes, insisted the rip had been there when she’d borrowed the pattern from Brigitte.
When this couldn’t be resolved, the wives began to accuse one another of things they had compromised on before—like whose name had been listed first on the wreath they’d chosen together for Aunt Hubertine’s funeral —and each wife declared the other was lying, until the husbands were drawn into their quarrel. Once they started, they both came to believe that they’d given in when dividing the land, that the other had gotten the better parcel.
Of course none of the Rustemeiers mentioned the boy, Johannes, in their arguments, though all of us felt confirmed in our worries that he was the cause of all this. Instead, the wives were bickering about who had married which brother. Brigitte—always one to take pleasure in giving to others—was convincing herself that she’d taken second best when she’d married Manfred; from there it escalated to Petra—known to be a peacemaker in town—believing that her sister-in-law had all along favored Kurt. There were questions. Suspicions. Manfred stopped talking to Kurt, figuring he must have encouraged Brigitte’s affections.
After that, family gatherings simply became impossible. And yet the men still needed each other’s help in building their houses. Of course they couldn’t ask for it. A matter of honor. That fall, as they labored on setting the cinder-block walls of their second floors by themselves, their resentment seeped through our town, souring our dreams and spoiling fresh milk.
Though we didn’t really believe a reconciliation was possible, we brought the Rustemeier families together at our weddings and christenings; we mentioned to one of the wives how much the other wife admired her flower beds, say, and we told the other how well her sister-in-law spoke of her Graupensuppe— barley soup—or Herringsalat; the priest visited both families after mass one Sunday, careful not to accept invitations to the midday meal from either in order to not offend the other; two of the nuns met with each wife in private and spoke of the heavenly rewards that forgiveness brings. But there is only so much any of us can say aloud, and then it is better to retreat to the good of the silence again.
Once summer arrived, it was regulated by written schedules, delivered through the Briefträger— postman—which family was permitted to swim in the pond at what times. The other Rustemeier children obeyed their parents’ orders to stay away from their cousins, but Johannes would throw himself into the water he loved so much, howling when his father pulled him back. Despite repeated whippings with a wooden spoon—a discipline that has proven to be beneficial for most of our children—the boy didn’t understand why he couldn’t be in the pond while his cousins were swimming. Finally, his father erected a waist-high fence between the two buildings and extended the boards into the pond, where they jutted above the surface, slanting down until they dropped off after a few meters.
By tying a rope around Johannes’s middle and fastening it to the cherry tree on his side of the fence, Manfred could let his son swim in his half of the pond; but Johannes, who was accustomed to doing most of his swimming under water, would butt into the fence and rise, a confused expression on his broad face. Whenever he’d attempt to scramble across the fence—because to stay away from his cousin Helga was unthinkable—his parents would shout at him from wherever they were working in the house, and he would flinch at their voices. Eventually Helga stayed away from the pond altogether. We’d find her watching Johannes from a distance, and the separation seemed as hard for her as for him. Sometimes she’d ride her bicycle alone, a pinched look around her mouth, as if she weren’t eating enough.
Though the twins were diligent workers, the construction progressed as slowly as we predicted. It was as though, because their hearts were no longer connected, each of their bodies forgot what the other looked like. Both had always been large men with wide shoulders and wrists, but now there was a bulk to Kurt’s body, a soft bulk that weakened him and hampered his movements. And when Manfred shaved his beard and mustache, it narrowed the shape of his face, emphasizing his chin, which had receded over the years.
We’d encounter the families in church, the twins on the men’s side, pews apart, their wives on the women’s side, each so aware if the other was wearing a new hat or new winter coat, and we’d bet that, soon, she too would be wearing something new.
Even the most tenacious among us were astonished by the twins’ persistent complaints—always delivered by the Briefträger, of course: Manfred objected when Kurt planted his tomatoes early; Kurt wrote back that Manfred’s family never watered the rosebush, which would have been dead long ago if he didn’t care for it; Manfred was indignant when Kurt did not immediately repair the section of fence that had been damaged by a fallen tree on Kurt’s side of the property. A total of eight letters were exchanged concerning the ownership of cherries that dropped from Manfred’s tree onto Kurt’s property.
It became unsettling to even see the twins from a distance. Because, to witness discontent, none of us has to go that far: it rages in our neighborhoods, inside our bedrooms. And what made it so hard to mediate was that the feud had been inevitable. Though its seed had lain dormant ever since the unfortunate boy’s birth, it had ripened and finally burst through in that one trivial disagreement, negating all the accomplishments and celebrations the Rustemeier families had shared.
As the houses grew along with the children—Johannes faster than any of his siblings and cousins—the twins painted the stucco white and laid roof tiles that were made of red clay. But inside the houses were different: Manfred and Brigitte’s woodwork was stained the color of honey, while Kurt and Petra’s was chestnut-brown; Brigitte hung lace curtains and plants in her windows, while Petra preferred damask drapes; Brigitte covered her lamps with flowered fabric, while Petra bought simple white lampshades; Brigitte’s wallpaper was striped, while Petra’s had a border of intertwined leaves.
Just when it seemed that both families had grown accustomed to the distance that came with their feud, when someone would step from the front door, say, and not even furtively glance to note if anyone was outside the house next door, and when we too had woven that di
scontent into the cloth of our community along with the uneasy satisfaction that we’d been right all along, a sequence of events happened to change all that.
It began with a simple letter, something as insignificant as that skirt pattern—perhaps because it needed something equally small, a tool of sorts, to undo the tangle of so many misunderstandings. In this letter Manfred informed his twin brother that the fence obviously needed to be painted. To avoid buying clashing shades of green, he proposed he’d get enough paint for both sides, leave Kurt’s share next to his mailbox, and have Kurt reimburse him by mail.
Five weeks after Manfred finished his side of the fence, we had one of those hot white July Sunday afternoons that take most of us out of our houses, waiting for a breeze to cool the air. Later, Kurt’s wife would tell us that he took a nap after coming home from mass and eating three helpings of Schmorfleisch und Kartoffeln—pot roast and potatoes—and that he woke up with his mouth dry. She knew this not only because the meat was a bit salty, but also because he emptied two glasses of water before he walked out to finally paint the rest of the fence.
While Kurt was blending the fresh green into Manfred’s dried paint along the ridge, the moonfaced boy was playing on the other side with an armful of twigs. At thirteen, Johannes had reached his man-size, with a wide chest and solid legs and arms. Tied around his waist was the long rope that connected him safely to the cherry tree. Kneeling in the dirt, he crept backward as he arranged his twigs in one crooked line. Whenever he noticed another twig somewhere, he’d scuttle over on his knees, grasp it, and—mindless of the twigs he might drop in that effort—crawl back to his crooked line. From time to time he squinted into the sun, a pleased expression on his dirt-streaked face.