Ursula Hegi The Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set: Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River, The Vision of Emma Blau. Children and Fire

by Hegi, Ursula

  Siegfried lay awake, dreading the dream that would certainly suck him into the familiar terror. Through the window a narrow shaft of dull light seeped from the moon and touched his forehead like a priest administering last rites. Shivering, he closed his eyes, but it was as though the moon had coated the lining of his eyelids with a mirror that reflected his dream.

  But one Saturday in May he came up the dike with the sun behind him, and as his body met his long shadow at the crest in a tight shape before disengaging itself, he recognized the landscape of his dream: the angle of the path as it rolled down the other side of the dike and through the meadow; the clump of poplars that rose above the wildflowers; the flat rock that lay embedded in the ground where the path led into the trail which traced the edge of the Rhein. And—just as he had known it would be—he felt drained of all fear. All he felt was a lightness, joy almost, as he stood there on the dike, watching the river, which was heavy with rain and melted snow from the mountains in the south. It ran high and fast, flooding the tips of the jetties and tossing its gray waves against the embankment. Parallel to the steps leading up the dike was a yellow strip of metal with arrows to indicate the levels of past floods.

  The dogs gathered themselves around his legs, and he let his hands glide over their smooth amber and black heads. From the river came the sound of a barge. Its rusting hull strained against the current. Canvas sheets fastened with ropes covered the cargo, and a lifeboat lay stored upside down on top of the canvas. The German flag—black, gold and red—fluttered from its stern. Eugenie, Bremen proclaimed the white letters on the side.

  Siegfried walked down to the wide stretch of grassland that was bordered by the dike and the river. It was dotted with buttercups and cornflowers and patches of heather that gave off the hazy scent of spring. Above the treeline across the river rose an airplane like a luminous bird, immense and weightless. A boat with two white sails crisscrossed from one bank of the river to the other.

  “That night the dream did not take hold of him,” Angelika Tegern told the pastor, and the pastor’s sister laid one of her crippled hands on the shoulder of the architect’s wife, trying to protect her from something too late to prevent. “He came home tired but calm. And between us it was almost the way it had been before the dreams. He woke rested the next morning, convinced he’d found a way to stop the dream. Perhaps if he had left it at that… But he wanted to go back. Needed to go back, though I asked him not to.”

  Sunday morning Siegfried took the dogs back to the meadow and let them run free. Wind rippled their thick fur as they chased each other in playful circles. When the sun moved from behind a cloud and warmed the moist air, Siegfried folded his suit jacket to make a pillow for himself to sit on, stretched out his legs, and leaned his back against the damp bark of a poplar. Out on the river, the hotel ship Zürich floated by, music drifting from its decks. White ribbons of water spurted from its stern and from an opening in its side. The sun was strong, comforting, and he half closed his eyes as the dogs settled down close to him. He stroked their sun warmed backs; when he stopped, they nuzzled his palms and he laughed and reached for them again.

  In the bright sunlight that made everything seem as if it were filtered through a stretched piece of gauze, he searched for sticks which he tossed for his dogs to fetch; their noses quivered as their eyes followed the wide arc of the sticks; yet, they waited until he nodded his consent before they darted after them, and when they brought them back, they laid them at his feet like offerings.

  The meadow was nearly two kilometers from the house, and he made it a habit to take his dogs there after work. He walked them along the top of the dike until he reached the path, and then he descended and crossed the meadow to the trail by the river. During June the swollen body of the Rhein receded. Beer stands opened along the river; hikers and bicyclers stopped for a quick glass or two before disappearing into the clumps of bushes along the path, buttoning their pants as they emerged.

  By July the Rhein was back in its normal bed, though the watermarks left by the flood still crusted the boulders of the jetties and the embankment. From a distance, the water was the color of dark moss, but when he walked closer, it became a shimmering blend of brown and green.

  Siegfried Tegern’s skin lost its bruised look as he came to trust nights that would carry him into mornings without the old dream of fear. He smiled when he walked his dogs through town. One day he tied them to the bicycle stand outside the town hall while he went inside to check on a deed. The dogs sat erect, snouts raised toward the bell tower, and howled, an eerie sound that entered the arched windows of the town hall and flooded the surrounding streets.

  That evening he returned to the meadow and sat under the poplars while his dogs played in the knee-high grass. White fluff sifted from the branches of the poplars like angel’s hair: it settled on his shoulders, his sleeves, and sometimes he caught a downy tuft when the breeze bore it gently past his hands. It was almost the color of sheep’s wool but not nearly as heavy and dense; tangled within the soft clusters were dried pods and brittle twigs.

  Resting his back against one of the trunks, it occurred to him how fortunate he was to have rid himself of the fear. He remembered what it had been like before he discovered the meadow, but suddenly the meadow was just as it appeared in the dream; yet, this time he saw more: himself, standing by the poplars, arms angled as if fending off an attacker, and he saw his dogs, not playing, but advancing toward him, crouching as though preparing to leap. His old fear rose in one hot bolt, and two of the dogs jerked up their heads as if some scent in the air had caught their attention.

  And as the fear of his dreams seized upon him—that familiar sweat fear of death—stronger than ever before, it drew the dogs closer to him. Cautiously they sniffed, their broad noses nuzzling his legs, his hands, and when he stood up and pushed them away, they backed off, as though confused. The hair on their black and amber backs rose ever so slightly, and they panted, flecks of spittle on their tongues. One of them, the bravest one certainly, let out a slow growl from deep within its throat and heaved itself forward, teeth closing around the bottom of Siegfried’s trousers. Though he shouted his commands, the other dogs jumped at him too. He tried to ward them off with his feet and his elbows as they crowded around him, low, some leaping, until one of them drew a trace of blood from a small gash in his throat. And as he cried out in protest, the dogs thrust themselves into a frenzy of greed that blotted out all memory of commands obeyed.

  After the police shot the seven dogs, we asked ourselves if, by buying the dogs, Siegfried Tegern had brought on his death himself. We told each other he could have avoided it so easily. And yet, there were times—especially late at night when we were startled by the sounds of a restless dog—that we couldn’t feel all that sure anymore and almost believed his death had been waiting for him in that meadow all along.

  The Thread of His Grieving

  Once I was almost caught stealing flowers for my brother’s grave. I’d done it before, making sure to check the paths of the Burgdorf cemetery before I took flowers from other graves, but I never took more than one. I’d gather them in my hands until Joachim got a bigger bouquet than anyone else, and I’d try to feel the sadness I read about in our housekeeper’s romances.

  In those books there was always the single tear that slid down the heroine’s cheek without blemishing her complexion or dignity. I can still see myself at twelve, trying to squeeze out that one significant tear. But I simply wasn’t skilled at producing tears; I cried too seldom, and the few times I did, it was in wet, noisy gulps of frustration over something Rolf had said or done. Most of our battles were over his mother’s attention, which I had to reclaim every day and he took home with him at night.

  How I yearned for real tragedy. But the most tragic thing in my life—my brother’s death—had happened when I was two, and I couldn’t even remember his face, or touching him. He was just a sequence of letters on the family headstone below the names of my mothe
r’s parents; still, he was my only link to real tragedy, and I kept returning to the cemetery, trying to feel his loss.

  I badgered my parents with questions about his death, and I took their words and filled in the spaces until I could evoke the afternoon he’d died and watch it on an inner screen like a film I could rewind or stop at will. Since we had no photos of Joachim, his features kept changing for me, but he always had reddish hair like my father.

  My mother rocked my brother for three hours after he died. He was only nine days old. Sitting on a wooden chair inside the hospital room, she held him in her arms, rocking her upper body back and forth though her chair stayed motionless. It was as though the nuns’ prophecy about her pregnancy with me had suddenly caught up with her.

  At first my father tried to have her relinquish the dead infant to the nurse who spoke to my mother in soothing words. He felt powerless as she sat there, staring straight ahead, her body rigid, their child in her arms, rocking. Rocking. Finally, allowing his grief to match hers, my father knelt beside her, his arms around her and his son, his body a shadow of her rocking motion.

  And so my mother sat there for hours, her arms around my brother, encircled by my father’s arms. From time to time the doctor entered the room, and my father told him, “Not yet.” By now he felt the soothing rocking himself, felt the thread of his grieving woven into that of my mother’s.

  The muted light of the winter afternoon gave way to dusk that stripped the white from the walls and made all sounds in the street seem to come from far away. My father laid one finger against the cheek of his child. Only a few hours earlier his son was still breathing, a sound as if he were blowing bubbles from a place deep within his narrow chest. His face was flushed, but slowly it turned ashen. Though his cheeks stayed red for a while, they soon faded until his skin became translucent and his lips took on a bluish tinge. And his rattly breathing—it made the room seem small and opened up a wish in my father, the wish for it to end, the wish to spare Joachim the struggle as his lungs filled with fluid.

  Gradually my mother’s body lost some of the rigidity that first made her cling to the child while others tried to take him from her. My father knew she’d be able to let go—not yet, though—but with each moment it seemed more possible. He knew this child, knew the way his hands had formed fists, then released themselves into curled fingers as he nursed. He knew the way his son’s eyes had resisted closing when he fell asleep as if he sensed how brief his life would be and felt reluctant to miss one single moment.

  And what my father had to do now was know his son in this new, silent form. Remember his changed face, longer somehow and solemn, his still hands. Remember him like this to carry himself and my mother through mourning.

  The day I almost got caught stealing flowers for Joachim, I took the vase with the sharp point at its bottom from behind our headstone and walked over to the nearest faucet. All of the graves were covered with flowers and bushes. Impatiens and geraniums, fuchsias and rhododendrons, lilies and roses thickened the air with a lavish scent that slowed down the wing beats of the birds that lived in the cemetery. Noisy and secure, hundreds of them perched on headstones and nested in the lush hedges as if they knew that this was a safe place where cats and children wouldn’t chase them. Often I heard them long before I reached the gate, long before the familiar scent reached for me.

  On several graves were lanterns with short, thick candles. Headstones listed the names of people in the order in which they’d died, most of them old, some of them children who had died too young. Like Joachim. Whose name was the last on our headstone.

  Frau Weskopp stood at the faucet in her black coat, holding her watering can beneath the spout. It was easy to tell who the widows were: they spent many hours at the cemetery, tending the family graves; they wore black for many years; they arrived on their bicycles with watering cans hanging from their handlebars; they wore thick nylons and shoes with stocky heels; they carried rolled-up umbrellas in case it rained; they sat on benches with other widows, talking while gazing over the rows of graves.

  Frau Weskopp turned off the faucet and stepped aside. Deep lines ran across her cheeks and forehead. She had the face of someone who knew how to grieve. “Visiting your brother?” she asked.

  I nodded and filled our vase with water.

  She glanced up toward the scattered clouds. “Better not stay too long. We may get a storm this afternoon.”

  At least three times she had told me how lucky my brother was that Herr Pastor Beier had christened him so soon after he was born. “Otherwise he’d be in purgatory.”

  Her husband and both sons had fought on the Russian front and had died the same year. Their names were engraved not only on the headstone but also in the last column of the tall war monument at the entrance to the cemetery.

  As I knelt on my brother’s grave and wedged the sharp point of the vase into the dirt, I imagined my mother holding Joachim, imagined her as I had so often, my father holding both of them, rocking, my brother wrapped in a white blanket that covered him from his feet to his shoulders, his head lying securely in the bend of my mother’s left arm, her right hand resting on his chest.

  I got my eyes to fill with tears by letting them go out of focus and staring straight ahead until they burned, but when I tried to blink out a tear, my eyes dried right away.

  Except for the birds, it was quiet in the cemetery. I sat back on my heels and wiped my hands on my skirt. On my thumb was a cut; I pressed against it, but even that didn’t bring on tears. The cut was from stealing garden doors. Stealing wasn’t actually the right word. Late the night before, I’d sneaked out to meet Rolf Brocker and Karin Baum. The three of us had started out behind Anton Immers’s house, and whenever we got to a garden door, we’d lift it from its hinges and drag it around the next corner, where we’d leave it leaning against a tree or fence. Some of those gates were heavy; one of them fell on Karin’s foot and another cut my thumb, but the three of us managed to carry them. This morning people all over Burgdorf had been searching for their garden doors.

  I brushed the dirt from my bare knees and walked to where our lane intersected with the main path. No one was there. The air was moist, warm. A bouquet of daisies stood next to the headstone of Trudi Montag’s father. I pulled a daisy from the blue jar and walked to the next grave. A rose … a snapdragon … a carnation … The vase on the Weskopp’s grave was filled with violets, and I took one of them, deep purple with black markings along the tips of the petals. By now Joachim’s bouquet had flowers of just about every color, and I carried it back to his grave. Sitting on the edge of the stone, I arranged the flowers so that the tallest ones were in the center.

  “That’s a pretty bouquet, Hanna.”

  My head snapped up.

  Frau Weskopp was standing behind me. “Especially that violet.” Her lips closed into a tight line.

  I felt as if the flowers bore tags with the names of the dead. “Thank you,” I managed to say.

  “Where did you get them?”

  “Home,” I said quickly before something within me made me confess.

  That’s what she seemed to be waiting for—a confession. But I kept silent, though my heart was racing. The deep creases on her forehead pressed the flesh between them into puffy welts. Finally she turned away and walked down the path toward the exit.

  I pushed the vase deeper into the earth. That’s where Joachim was. What was left of him. We’d never unhinge garden doors together and hide them around the corner. We’d never swim in the Rhein together or ride our bikes or play ball or—I caught my arms against my stomach, tight. Rocked myself back and forth. All at once I saw Joachim and myself, sitting on my wooden sled on top of the dike, our faces red from the cold. “Hold on!” I shout out to him as I push off. Joachim sits in front of me. My feet are on the metal runners, my arms around my brother’s chest. I’m the one holding on; yet, I keep shouting, “Hold on, Joachim!”

  My breath is a white lace scarf that touches hi
s neck and reddish hair. Joachim is almost as tall as I. Sitting straight, I hold on to him as our sled hurtles down a slope that doesn’t end. But he is getting smaller in my arms. At first my hands barely meet in front of his jacket, but now I can cross my wrists, then my arms as if I were hugging myself. “Hold on, Joachim,” I shout once more, frozen tears on my face. My arms around myself, I know for the first time what it feels like to have lost him, to be without him not only this moment but millions of moments like this, linked and stretching into all my tomorrows. I see myself grown up, my newborn son in my arms, pouring a trickle of holy water over his head, forming the sign of the cross on his forehead, chest, and shoulders, whispering fragile words of insurance against purgatory: “Im Namen des Vaters und des Sohnes und des Heiligen Geistes …”

  But suddenly my brother is here again, solid in my arms, snow coating his shoulders and swirling around us as the sled races down the white bank. The Rhein is frozen, and as we glide across it, huge turtles and tropical fish swim below the clear ice. On the other side of the river two riders gallop along the bank on blue horses.

  Through the Dance of Her Hands

  The pastor’s sister, Hannelore Beier, was a woman in her thirties with crippled hands. Her fingers overlapped and drew themselves toward her palms, birdlike claws which she refused to hide. When she taught Sunday school, she moved them gracefully, those stiff extensions of herself, weaving the texture of her words into our hearts.

  Her eyes looked tired when she quoted passages from the Bible, but she never stayed with the Bible for long. From her bag she’d bring out old books bound in green or red leather; the lines in her face dissolved and her slight body seemed to grow as she took the words of Goethe and Mann and Rilke from the pages of those books and made them breathe as if they were being written now—for us.

  Her favorite writer was Rainer Maria Rilke. One winter morning, in the church basement, she read us his poem about the panther in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, and her voice evoked the powerful animal pacing behind the bars of his cage, until to him it seemed as though there were a thousand bars and nothing beyond them. Outside it was snowing wet, thick flakes that fastened themselves like cat tracks to the narrow windows of the church hall before they slid off, leaving watery trails on the glass. We pulled our chairs into a circle that included hers and we barely dared to breathe while she read. We knew what it was like to be that panther. We too felt locked into ourselves at times because we wanted to know everything in the world and were beginning to fear that this would never be possible.