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

  Leo Montag carried his wife home, wrapped in one of the altar cloths. Her blood seeped into the ancient lace, and although the pastor’s housekeeper would soak the cloth in salt water, the stains would merely fade into rose-colored clouds. Soon Gertrud was back at the sacristy door—properly dressed—was the priest’s first thought when he discovered her in her wool dress and her husband’s gray cardigan, even though the air was moist and much hotter than he liked it. Already he felt the itch of his sweat on his chest and beneath his private parts, a sweat he detested yet was unable to restrain with anything except medicated foot powder that left bone-colored rings on his garments and a chalky trace of dust on the tops of his shoes.

  The pastor—whose round face made you expect a heavy person when you initially met him—stood at a safe distance from Gertrud Montag, his slight body bent toward her. Pigeons picked at the ground around his feet and scattered when he reached into his pocket to disentangle his handkerchief from his rosary. He blotted his neck.

  “Why are you here?” he inquired.

  She raised her eyes to trace the path of a white stork that glided on lazy wings across the open market and headed for the roof of the Rathaus—town hall—its long amber legs trailing across the clay tiles before it landed next to the chimney. From the open windows of the bakery, a block away, drifted the yeast scent of warm bread. Two dachshunds yipped at the hooves of the ragman’s horse.

  “Why are you here?” the pastor asked again.

  But she wouldn’t reply, this tall woman with the blazing eyes that seared right through him, and because he didn’t know what else to do and liked to consider himself a merciful man, the Herr Pastor blessed Gertrud Montag, much in the same way he would administer last rites. And when that didn’t have any impact, he informed her that he absolved her from all her sins because, after all, that had appeased her once before, on the day of her first communion. While he kept peering over his shoulder, anxious for her kind and bewildered husband to appear, he even—without knowing—forgave her the one sin she would never forgive herself.

  Long after her breasts had stopped leaking milk, Gertrud Montag kept running away from home, but she did not always hide behind the church. Sometimes she’d settle herself in the lilac hedge in back of the Eberhardts’ house. Renate Eberhardt had the lushest garden in town: snapdragons, roses, geraniums, and daisies grew abundantly, huge splotches of color—not orderly as in most of the other gardens—and a magnificent pear tree produced golden-yellow fruits. She’d let Gertrud pick a bouquet of her flowers before leading her home, and she’d stay and settle her in bed, her cool fingers on Gertrud’s flushed forehead. Renate’s slender neck seemed too long to carry the heavy braids that she wore pinned around her head.

  Gertrud’s favorite hiding place was beneath the elevated section of her house which was set against a slight hill, level with the street in front where the entrance to the pay-library was, and raised in back on old pillars of wood and gray boulders. Near the opening hung the rack where Leo kept his bamboo rake and garden shovels. Beyond was a place where black bugs with hard-shelled bodies fused with the darkness, and lacy spider webs swung from rafters, rocked by a wind too distant for any human to feel. Leo would have to crawl in after his wife and drag her out, while she’d sing church hymns and dig her bare heels into the earth, leaving gouges in the ground. Afterwards, the muscles in her calves would be so tight that he’d have to massage them for her.

  At times he wouldn’t find her at all though he’d lock the library, where she used to work with him before Trudi’s birth, and ride his bicycle—his right leg pedaling, the injured one extended—through the streets surrounding the church, and from there all over town, down Romerstrasse, around the fairgrounds, up Barbarossa Strasse and toward the Rhein where, in the broad meadow between the dike and river, he and Gertrud used to fly kites as schoolchildren.

  Occasionally he’d come upon her, but usually she’d return on her own, her black hair snarled and smelling of the river, say, or of the wheat fields that surrounded their town. He’d take his comb from his shirt pocket and hold her gently with one arm, while pulling the teeth of the comb through the tangles. One Sunday he dug out a young chestnut tree from the woods near the flour mill and presented it to Gertrud as a gift, telling her—while he helped her plant it in front of the pay-library—that this tree would keep her home. But the following morning she was gone again, and two nuns brought her back.

  To tire her, Leo decided to take her on longer walks than their daily Spaziergänge when he closed the pay-library at noon, but she’d rush ahead of him while he’d struggle with the double burden of his stiff leg and the baby carriage. He gathered clumps of camomile and, from the blossoms, brewed tea which he hoped would calm her—this woman he’d known since they both were children, this woman who was one day older than he. He’d always liked it that they were the same age, even if that was unusual for married couples. Most husbands he knew were quite a few years older than their wives, and he couldn’t imagine being married to someone he hadn’t grown up with.

  At night, he’d try to wrap his limbs around Gertrud to keep her safe, but she’d laugh in his arms, an odd, wild laugh that made his groin numb with coldness, and though she’d fit the skin of her body against his length, his genitals shrank from her and he could only hold her like a sister.

  Before their daughter’s birth, Gertrud had gone about her work in the house and pay-library joyfully, but now she moved abruptly and loudly. She’d forget what she had come to buy when she did the marketing, and she’d spill ashes when she’d clean out the kitchen stove or the green tile stove that was set into the wall between the living room and dining room.

  One early morning in September, when Leo woke before her and watched her tranquil face, she looked just as she used to, and he felt convinced that she would return to her old ways, that she was ready to be a mother to their child. Pulling back the weightless feather comforter, he got up and dressed in his good suit though it was a weekday. He fetched his daughter from Frau Abramowitz across the street where she’d stayed—the night before it had been with Frau Blau next door—but instead of settling her in the crib inside the nursery, out of her mother’s sight as usual, he sat with her on Gertrud’s edge of the bed.

  Trudi was the first infant he’d held, and to him she didn’t seem any different from the infants he’d glanced at over the years from a cautious distance. As he peered into her sage eyes, he marveled that, between him and his wife, two long and angular people, the child was like a pebble—round and solid. She had his light coloring, his strong chin and high forehead. Her tongue nudged at her upper lip as if trying to grasp some nourishment, forming a tiny, luminous bubble of spit. He let her suck on his little finger, amazed at the fierce tug of her tongue and gums. Lace curtains billowed in the open window, and in the morning light, the smooth brown woodwork glowed the color of honey. When he felt the high curve of Trudi’s palate against his fingernail, he gently turned his finger sideways so as not to scratch her.

  “Look at her, Gertrud,” he said when his wife opened her eyes and sat up, startled. “Just look at her. Please.”

  But his wife, after whom he’d named the child as they had planned during her pregnancy, squeezed her eyes shut and twisted her face aside.

  The pay-library was in its third generation of existence, providing an income for the Montag family even during the lean years of war because the people carried in coal and food and clothing in trade for the brightly colored books that brought a different kind of adventure into their bleak homes than the adventure they were living—the gray adventure of war, of poverty, of fear.

  You could also buy tobacco in the pay-library. Wooden cigar boxes and glass bins that contained nine sorts of tobacco were set up on one end of the long counter, next to the ledger where Leo Montag recorded the books in the library, a separate page for each title. The length of each column below a title, listing the names of borrowers, would show how popular a book was.


  The side walls of the Montags’ house were less than an arm’s length from the walls of the adjoining buildings—the Weilers’ on the left, the Blaus’ on the right. Herr Blau was a retired tailor, and Frau Weiler ran the grocery store. The façades of the three narrow houses were white stucco with a row of bricks set below the windows and above the high doors, and the foundations were built from great, smooth stones that had come from the bed of the Rhein. Most of the other shops and businesses in Burgdorf were also on the streets closest to the church square: Hansen’s bakery and the beauty parlor, the hardware store and the milliner’s shop, two taverns and the open market.

  The Weilers had one son, Georg, who’d been conceived the night before his father had left for the Eastern front. Of an age to have grandchildren by the time she’d birthed Georg, Frau Weiler had a wide face with sad, protruding eyes, and often sounded frantic as if worried she wouldn’t get all her work done. She’d never forgiven her son for not having been born a girl, and she was still trying to correct that error by dressing him in smocks and refusing to cut his hair.

  The Blaus’ children were already grown: Margret and her family rented an apartment near the chapel, and Stefan Blau, who’d run away to America as a young boy, had returned to Burgdorf only once, in 1911, to take Leo Montag’s sister, Helene, with him as his third bride and mother to the children of his first two wives, who’d died in childbirth. Recently, Leo had been wishing that his sister still lived with him and Gertrud. She’d know how to get Gertrud to accept their child. But Helene was thousands of kilometers away and had three stepchildren and a child of her own now.

  While the Montags’ pay-library, kitchen, and living room with its piano took up the main floor of their house, the bedrooms were on the floor above. On the third floor was a sewing room with pansy wallpaper and a narrow window; it was there that Leo Montag would lock up his wife to keep her safe after she began to take off her clothes for the angels. The first time it had happened right at Sunday mass. Leo, who sat between two of the older men, was aware of the priest up in the pulpit, preaching, but he wasn’t listening to the words because he was noticing how the light—even though it was raining outside—blazed through the stained-glass windows in blue and purple and gold stars as though the sun were shining. He hadn’t even realized that Gertrud had her dress unbuttoned until the priest stopped in the middle of a sentence, raising one scrawny arm toward the women’s side of the church, causing everyone to stare at Gertrud for that interminable moment before Frau Eberhardt, who knelt in the pew behind Gertrud, threw her coat across Gertrud’s shoulders.

  The next time Gertrud hadn’t been caught that early: she’d slipped out while the iceman was delivering a block of ice. After Leo had paid, he’d watched the horse-drawn ice wagon pull away, and it was only then that he’d seen Gertrud strolling toward the end of Schreberstrasse, naked, her head high. He’d grabbed the red-and-white-checkered tablecloth from the kitchen table and had run after her.

  From then on—every morning before he’d open the pay-library—he’d squeeze a glass of the carrot juice Gertrud loved, slice an apple for her, and struggle to get her upstairs to the sewing room, where he’d lock her in. To please her, he hung up a small, gold-framed mirror that she’d admired in the Abramowitzs’ living room. They had brought it back from their trip to Venice, along with enough photographs to fill an entire album, as always when they traveled to places as far away as China and Venezuela. In trade for this mirror, Leo had offered Frau Abramowitz five years of all the books she wanted to borrow.

  “I’d rather just give it to you,” she’d said. Her countless delicate wrinkles, which had been there since she was a young woman, were not visible until you looked closely—like the texture of a silky fabric that has been crushed and then ironed out, leaving the surface smooth except for the deeper, finer wrinkles.

  “But I want you to have something in return.”

  “Two years of books are more than enough.”

  “Five. At least five.”

  “I guess I’ll see more in those books than I’ll ever see in that mirror,” she had conceded.

  Leo bought Gertrud a porcelain chamber pot with roses painted along the rim and eight shiny cardboard sheets of paper dolls with their lavish clothes. Reluctant to let her use the scissors, he cut out the dolls and showed Gertrud how to fit the gowns, coats, and hats to their wafer-thin bodies by bending paper tabs around their shoulders and waists.

  He brought her a blue velvet sofa that Emil Hesping had won in a chess game, but he didn’t tell Gertrud where the sofa had come from. Though Emil had been his friend since first grade, Gertrud no longer tolerated him inside the house. She’d leave the pay-library if Emil came in to buy his tobacco.

  “It’s not your doing,” Emil would assure Leo, who’d try to apologize for his wife’s behavior. Emil was the brother of a bishop but did not go to church. Though only in his early thirties, he’d been bald for ten years; yet, he looked younger than other men his age because the pink skin of his face simply continued beyond his forehead and down the back of his head. He laughed a lot, and when he did, the only hair on his face—a nearly solid line of black eyebrows—would join above his nose.

  Leo, who’d been a member of Emil’s gymnasts’ club until he’d been injured in the war, missed flying on the trapeze, swinging his body across double bars of smooth wood, and leaping across the solid leather body of the horse while his fingers barely touched the hide. And he missed the easy camaraderie of being near Emil. Earthbound with his aching knee, he felt in Emil the excitement of winning that he’d known as a member of the team. Emil Hesping could make you believe you still had it in you to win. He got you to smile, to laugh even. He got you to meet him at Die Traube for a beer or two when your wife no longer allowed him inside your house.

  One afternoon Emil stopped by the pay-library with an old class picture of the fifth grade, Leo standing next to him, while Gertrud knelt in the front row with the other girls. “Look what I found,” he said excitedly and pressed the photo into Gertrud’s hands. “Do you recognize us?”

  For a moment she stood holding the sepia picture, lips pulled back from her teeth as if she were about to snarl; then she dropped the photo at his feet and darted into the kitchen.

  When Leo followed her, she was opening and slamming the white cabinet doors so hard that her great-grandmother’s collection of flowered porcelain cups and saucers trembled on the shelf above the sink.

  “Emil used to be your friend too,” Leo reminded her.

  “He thinks he can take whatever he wants.”

  “He was bringing you something. Besides, he pays for his tobacco.”

  She stared at him, her eyes savage, stared at the gentle face and stiff collar of the man she’d loved since they’d both been eight years old, the man who often stood for everything she disliked about this town, where life happened slower than in the city where she had spent her first years.

  “We all pay, Leo.” She listened to her words and had to laugh. “We all pay.”

  While his daughter lay in her wicker carriage between the wooden counter and the shelves, Leo would wait on his customers or study intricate chess moves on the carved board that was always set up on the counter in various stages of a game against an imaginary opponent. Occasionally, one of the old men would stop by to play a game against Leo, and they’d talk about the men at the front. They’d reminisce about the Burgdorf chess club and make plans to resume the Monday-night meetings once the war was over.

  From time to time Leo would glance toward the ceiling to reassure himself that his wife was still in the sewing room. His eyes would narrow as if to penetrate the span of stone and lumber that lay between him and the third floor. He’d feel worried when he’d hear her agitated steps, but even more worried if he couldn’t hear anything because—at least once a week—Gertrud managed to escape. He couldn’t figure out how the only key to the locked door—a long key which he’d leave outside in the keyhole—ended up inside G
ertrud’s pocket when he finally caught her.

  One day, when he saw her darting down the hallway past the open door of the library, he grabbed Trudi from her carriage and, holding her pressed against his chest, limped around the side of the house to the back.

  “Gertrud?” He bent and peered into the dark gap. “Gertrud, are you there?”

  It took a few moments before he could make her out, cowering among the weeds and boulders, her face half hidden by her hair. Leo didn’t know why he did what he did next—didn’t even know he was doing it until he found himself holding his daughter in front of him, much like a priest extending the sacrament. Suspended in the beams of pearl-gray light, he kept Trudi there though his arms began to quiver with her weight, held her there between him and his wife for what seemed the span of an entire lifetime, her round infant hands stirring the layers of air like tropical fish, until his wife scuttled toward them with a sob and snatched the child from him with her smudged hands, enveloping the three of them with the musty smell of earth.

  Leo’s arms felt weightless—like wings almost—and as the lightness moved into his chest and throat, he wanted to fold his arms around his wife and child to keep himself anchored to the ground; yet, he stepped back, not far enough to startle Gertrud, but enough to grant her the seclusion to peel off their daughter’s tiny socks and dress and undershirt and diaper, to examine each part of the three-month-old body—toes, navel, neck, buttocks, fingers, ears—the way a new mother will when her child is handed to her at birth.

  To Leo, that day would symbolize his daughter’s birth, as though all the moments leading up to this had merely been a preparation for what he had expected a family to be, and he was struck by a boundless hope—even when Gertrud fumbled with her dress and pressed the child’s mouth to her dry breast. Although he would tell Trudi that it was impossible to remember something that far back in your childhood, the girl would retain that moment when her mother first touched her, and that sharp bliss she felt even though her belly remained hungry and her mother’s hands were rough, as if accustomed to moving aside great pockets of dirt.