by Hegi, Ursula
“Falling in love with your mother was the one reckless act your father committed in his life. …”
I’d never thought of my father as reckless, though it was a word he used when he cautioned my mother against driving so fast or swimming nude in the ocean. Every summer, when we rented a cottage on the island Wangerooge in the North Sea, my father refused to let me swim out with my mother.
“It’s too deep, Hanna,” he told me while my mother turned her back to the beach and the crowds that kept near the sandy crescents. Alone out there in the deep, she took off her bathing suit and swam, holding the straps in the crook of one elbow.
“You might lose it,” my father warned her, but she told him she liked the feel of the waves against her bare skin.
One day my father was proven right: the sea tore my mother’s red swimsuit from her arm, and though she tried to dive for it, she couldn’t find it in the green-clear water that stung her eyes. She stayed out there, swimming farther away whenever others came near her. She kept waving to me and my father, and we waved back.
“I bet she finally did it—lost her swimsuit,” my father said. Grabbing his beach towel, he held it up.
Way out there, my mother nodded, motioning him toward her.
My father shook his head, but then he laughed. His towel in one hand, he ran into the North Sea, and when I followed him, he called out to me, “Stay right there, Hanna. Only up to your knees.”
Waves slapped against my thighs as I watched him swim toward my mother. I stood on my toes, trying to see their heads when he reached her, but they disappeared between the waves and then bobbed up together on white crests. I walked to where the water covered my waist. For a long time my parents stayed out there, and sometimes their heads were so close they looked like one shape. When they walked out of the water, the towel which my mother clasped around her was so heavy with sea water that she had to hold it up with both hands. Her hair covered her shoulders as if molded from one sheet of brass.
“Next time all you get is a washcloth.” My father smiled at her.
She touched one finger to his lips. Drops of salt water glistened in his reddish beard, filling it with specks of light.
The clock on my bookshelf showed a quarter to ten. My parents wouldn’t be home for at least another hour. I tried to read another page of the romance novel though my eyelids felt heavy. The light from the lamp on my bedside table painted a yellow circle on the ceiling. It was quiet in our apartment, a silence that had a texture of its own, a different texture than when my parents were asleep and their breaths—even though I couldn’t hear them—took the starch out of the cloth of silence and made it smooth like a familiar blanket.
But when I was alone, the cloth of silence was always new, and it could be exciting, boring—even eerie. Most of the time I enjoyed it. I could stay up longer than I was allowed to; I could read Frau Brocker’s trashy novels; I could sit on my windowsill and write lists of suspicious persons. When my parents were home, the light in my room had to be out by nine, but I often read afterwards with a flashlight under my blanket. A few times my father had caught me, but the punishment—early bedtime the next evening—was well worth all the nights I wasn’t caught.
I hid the book under my pillow, switched off the light, and pulled my blanket higher. As I shut my eyes, I wondered what Brigitte Raudschuss would have done had she lost her bathing suit. But she probably wouldn’t have taken it off. She’d swim next to the shore. She’d listen to my father’s warning. She’d be cautious enough not to need any warnings.
Reckless—I rather liked that about my father, and from that night on, I found myself thinking of him in a different way. As I imagined him in other reckless acts, I discovered in him the touch of daring I’d only connected to my mother. Marrying a woman who was reckless must have been the ultimate reckless act, requiring a lifetime of balancing to keep both of them safe.
The Order of Punishment
Our tenant, Matthias Berger, who rented the third-floor apartment next to my mother’s studio, was given to sudden violent headaches that made his hands rise to his temples and his fingers press against the fair skin as if he were trying to squeeze out the pain and connect his palms in a prayer of absolution. I’d see the headache behind his eyes, a dark shape that sucked the green from his eyes.
I met Matthias the day he moved into our house; his piano got stuck where our staircase bent between the second and third floors, and the movers threatened to leave it there after struggling with it for half an hour. On the landing above the piano stood Matthias, a blond man with solid shoulders, tugging at one of the piano legs as if he believed it would make a difference. And it did—the bulky instrument moved slowly, leaving deep scars in the plaster wall as the movers wedged their bodies against it and Matthias pulled. His glasses were plain, but even on the dim staircase his eyes were a splendid greeen with gold flecks.
The next afternoon I found him on the stairs with a knife, spreading white paste into the gashes his piano had torn into the wall. He looked at me with those splendid eyes and continued patching the holes. Except for the scraping of the knife against plaster, it was silent around us. Downstairs in our apartment, Frau Brocker was canning beans and their fart smell drifted past us. Once, a door opened on the second floor, then closed with a thud. I sat three steps above Matthias, watching his long hands, his face, and it was as if we were talking, finding out things about each other though neither of us said a word, and somehow I knew he was filled with a light he would only let very few people see.
When he closed the jar of paste, he smiled at me. “I’m Matthias,” he said, and his voice was warm and low, just as I had imagined it.
“I’m Hanna.”
“Hanna,” he said as if trying out the name, matching it against me, as I sat on the stairs above him, at the same level with his gold-flecked eyes. “Do you like lemonade, Hanna?”
Matthias asked me to call him by his first name. He made lemonade for me that afternoon and opened a box of chocolate-covered hazelnuts.
“Don’t you want any?” I asked after I’d finished about half of them and felt a sweet-queasy sensation that would turn into a stomachache if I didn’t stop.
“I never eat them,” he said.
He was an orderly in the Theresienheim, the hospital run by the sisters on Römerstrasse where, twelve years before, Sister Ingeborg had pronounced me dead. When I told Matthias, he said he knew Sister Ingeborg—she’d hired him to work in the old people’s wing where, as the one male employee, it was his job to turn over those old people in their beds who were too heavy for the nuns.
In her pay-library Trudi Montag whispered to me that his other job was to bathe the old men. “To keep the nuns from going blind,” she said and laughed. “I heard he was in a seminary in Kaiserslautern until two years ago.” She handed me two romance novels that belonged on a shelf too high for her to reach. “To become a priest.”
I reached up and jammed the books among equally colorful jackets. “Why did he leave?”
“Maybe he got kicked out.”
“Or maybe he just didn’t want to stay.”
Yet, I still had to ask him. The only priest I knew was Herr Pastor Beier, who celebrated mass every Sunday and heard confessions on Saturday. The day of my first communion he had told me and the other children as we knelt there—the girls in white dresses, the boys in blue suits—that this was the happiest day of our lives. I’d clutched the lace handkerchief my mother had wrapped around the stem of my communion candle, waiting for that promised happiness to take hold of me, but all I’d felt was a curious sense of letdown.
“Did you want to become a priest?” I asked Matthias.
“Who told you this?” He sat at his piano, playing a rapid sequence of notes I had never heard.
“Trudi Montag. She heard it—”
“—from someone else who heard it from someone else…” He smiled. His hands kept gliding across the ivory keys. Then he closed his eyes as if trying to
remember or—perhaps—forget something. Softly, like someone who’d been in pain for a long time, he said, “It became apparent that I wasn’t chosen.”
Above his window hung a wooden crucifix. Nails were hammered through Jesus’s palms. His right foot rested above the left so that one nail could connect both feet to the cross. Ribs showed above the carved lines of the cloth he wore tied around his waist. The wood on top of his outstretched arms and in the hollows between his ribs looked lighter where dust had dulled the dark sheen of the wood.
Though Matthias was in his late twenties, his rooms held the smell of old skin, as though he had carried it home from the Theresienheim in his hair and on the soles of his shoes. I’d recognize his steps on the hallway stairs and wait a few minutes before rushing upstairs to knock on his door.
He always seemed glad to see me. His apartment was half dark as if the sun hurt his eyes—so different from my mother’s studio next door, one huge room flooded with light. Once she’d invited Matthias to see her work, and he’d stood for a long time in front of one of her pictures of the Rhein, gazing at the streaks of sun that broke the waves into layers brighter than the sky.
“I didn’t know anyone else saw the river like this,” he finally said.
That evening, when my mother tucked me in, I asked if she liked Matthias.
She nodded, but then she said something that puzzled me. “He has made some difficult choices.”
Matthias’s apartment had the same amount of space as my mother’s studio, but it was divided into three cramped rooms. Most of his living room was taken up by his piano, which he played for me, his long fingers gliding through Mozart’s piano concertos and Schumann’s etudes. He collected books of photographs from countries all over the world. In his apartment I saw the fjords of Norway, the great wall of China, the beaches of Bermuda, and the glaciers of the Italian Alps. On his walls he had Japanese charcoal drawings of birds and flowers. He talked about wanting to take a train south through Austria and into Italy, about flying to Japan or Africa.
“I can’t imagine staying in Burgdorf forever,” he said and ran his hands across the globe he’d set on top of the piano. “With all there is to see …”
He often walked as though he were tired, his limbs moving as though it cost him enormous effort—except when his friend Herr Faber came over with a bottle of wine or a box of chocolate-covered hazelnuts. Then his motions became hurried and he’d usher me out the door, glancing at his friend as if worried he might resent my being there.
Herr Faber was a violinist with the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra. He didn’t like kids. I didn’t know what he liked, because he looked so glum with his dark eyebrows and mustache. I wondered why Matthias kept inviting him; he always seemed unhappy after Herr Faber left. Sometimes, he’d have a bruise on one cheek or his arm; once, his right eye was swollen shut.
“It’s nothing,” he’d whisper when I asked. “I was careless.”
But I knew his injuries had something to do with his friend, though I couldn’t imagine Matthias fighting. I thought about telling my father so that he could forbid Herr Faber to come into our house, but I didn’t ask for his help because I was afraid he might not let me see Matthias anymore.
One Saturday afternoon in July, after Herr Faber and Matthias had sent me away, I climbed the stairs to the attic. Lying flat on the dusty floor, I pressed one ear against the boards. From the rooms below, the sound of men’s voices floated up, but the words did not separate themselves enough to distinguish; they drifted through like one huge blanket that settled around me, weighing me down. Herr Faber’s voice was louder.
“Why do you let him come back?” I’d asked Matthias once when his left eye was swollen shut.
He’d winced as if I were the one who’d hurt him. “He’s my friend, Hanna.” He’d lifted his fingers to his forehead, and I’d seen the headache taking shape behind his eyes, dark and sudden.
I wondered if my mother could hear them in her studio, but the stairwell divided the two apartments. I pictured Herr Faber leaving and getting run over by a streetcar like Monika Klein, who’d been killed two years before when she and I were in the fourth grade. The wheels of the streetcar would cut across Herr Faber’s chest or maybe his throat. Either way—he’d stop breathing. For a while Matthias would be sad, but I’d visit him, bring him travel books from the church library, and make us lemonade.
I got up and brushed off my wrinkled skirt. Walking over to the front window, I unlatched it and pushed it open. Sunlight streamed in, magnifying the motes of dust that circled me like a second skin. A pigeon with a straw in its beak flew off and landed in the cherry tree in front of the Talmeisters’ house across the street. As usual, Frau Talmeister leaned from her living-room window, supported by a wide pillow. Propped on the sill next to her lay her eight-month-old son, Helmut. She fed him with a spoon, barely looking at him as if afraid she might miss something going on in the street. Our housekeeper had told me the only thing that kept Frau Talmeister from nursing the baby in the window was her fear of being arrested for indecent exposure.
For a moment there, something odd happened to me: from where I stood in the attic, I saw the side part in Frau Talmeister’s curled hair, the white material of her blouse stretching across her shoulders; I also felt the metal spoon in her hand as she fed her son, felt his mouth opening and the skin on his throat shifting, tasted the bland oatmeal as he swallowed.
From St. Martin’s Church came the swelling sound of the bells. Five o’clock. I stretched out my right arm and touched the level section of roof outside the window. The tiles felt warm against my palms. I thought of my great-uncle Alexander who had leapt from this window before I was born. A few months before I’d had a dream of him flying, arms stretched out, never touching the ground. When I told Matthias about it, he listened carefully.
“He may have been happy those few moments,” he said and smiled at me until I felt I would drown in his gold-flecked eyes, eyes more alive than the rest of him.
“Do you think he believed he was flying?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe that’s what he needed to believe.”
At the time I only nodded; now I wished I could ask Matthias what he’d meant by that, but he was with Herr Faber and wouldn’t let me in if I knocked on his door. I had tried that once, and when he’d finally answered, he’d worn his sweater inside-out. He’d blinked at me. “You have to go home, Hanna.”
I closed the attic window tight and went back to listen through the floorboards, but the voices from below had stopped. Sitting on the wooden trunk that was filled with my great-uncle’s brittle silk ties and stiff woolens, I wished I were at the river with my mother. We’d skip flat pebbles across the surface, count the times they touched the water and raised themselves in perfect arcs. She often got eight, even twelve skips, before the pebbles sank. One of my pebbles had made it eleven times, the most ever for me.
In the corner stood the wicker baby carriage my mother had used to take me for walks. It was in some of my baby photos, white and new, but now the wicker was yellow and its crevices were embedded with old dirt like a farmer’s fingernails. The spokes of the wheels had rusted, and when I pushed the carriage back and forth, it squeaked.
A young couple, the Wienens, used to live in the apartment below until they had a baby and needed a larger place. Matthias had heard about it from Frau Wienen’s father who lived in the Theresienheim, and he’d come to our house to ask if he could rent the apartment. Until then he’d shared a small walk-up on Lindenstrasse with another man. My mother, who had inherited the building from her uncle Alexander, didn’t have to advertise vacancies. Apartments were so scarce that she’d receive dozens of inquiries if someone was planning to move out, and if someone died people would phone about the apartment before the funeral had even taken place.
Through Matthias’s eyes, I’d begun to see our house and the backyard in a different way, had come to see its limitations. Built flush to the sidewalk,
the building, which my great-uncle had built in the shape of an L, blocked the sunlight from the backyard. When I was little, I had played there with Manfred Weiler, who lived in the other arm of the L. We’d ridden our tricycles on the hard-packed dirt, bumping into the fence to see how far the chain links would bounce us back. Surrounded by too many windows, we had no privacy, just as, according to Matthias, there couldn’t be any privacy when you shared a connecting wall between buildings. It didn’t matter how thick they were; it didn’t matter that they were built of cinder blocks and bricks and mortar—to him they were no more than a sham.
“What a difference it would make,” he told me once, “to live in a house that stands by itself, to know that on the other side of my bedroom wall are trees and grass.”
From below came the sound of a door closing. My fingers tightened on the handlebar of the baby carriage. Maybe Herr Faber had heard the squeaking wheels. Maybe he was coming up here to yell at me or worse. But the steps on the stairs moved away from me, growing fainter until I only heard the pulse of my blood inside my ears. I pictured Herr Faber’s hand brushing against the wall where Matthias had filled the scars his piano had left, scars you couldn’t see if you didn’t know where they were, but if your fingers happened to move across them, they felt smoother than the texture of the wall.
I wanted to run down to Matthias’s apartment, talk with him, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at him, afraid he would carry new bruises. Instead I stood outside my mother’s studio, wondering if I should interrupt her. Finally I knocked and she opened the door for me, one of my father’s old shirts over her dress.
“Hanna,” she said but looked at me as if trying to remember who I was. She got like that when she painted, forgetting everyone and everything around her except the work and the movement of colors from her heart to the canvas.
“Can I watch?”