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

  A woman’s hushed laugh and rose perfume.

  Trudi came out behind the coat tree, where the baker’s wife and Herr Buttgereit were kissing. They pulled apart so quickly that she felt an exhilarating sense of power because she was sure she’d seen something that they didn’t want anyone to know.

  Herr Buttgereit blinked at her. “You shouldn’t sneak around like that, little girl.”

  “Don’t get her all upset now,” Frau Hansen said. “We were looking for my glasses, Trudi. Did you see my glasses?”

  Trudi shook her head and backed away from them. By the kitchen door she stopped. The women were whispering about her mother: they agreed with one another that there had always been a little too much of everything about Gertrud Montag—not just that she laughed and cried too easily, but also that generosity. Frau Simon used the word “poise” for Trudi’s mother. An exuberant woman with beautiful ankles, Frau Simon had red hair that she piled into restless curls on top of her head. If anyone knew about poise, it was Frau Simon—after all, she talked about it constantly and made the most elegant hats in the region. Even women from Oberkassel and Krefeld came to her shop, which was on the first floor of the apartment house on Barbarossa Strasse that she’d bought with her own profits. People gossiped about her because she was divorced and liked to argue like a man, but they agreed that she had a natural eye for fashion and that—even though everyone knew Jews could talk you into buying anything—she refused to sell you a hat if it didn’t look right on you.

  Trudi could tell that the women treated Frau Simon differently: they envied her outspokenness; they tried to get her to flatter them; but they kept her outside their circle. They were like that with Frau Doktor Rosen too, bringing her their respect and illnesses that the nuns could not cure in the Theresienheim, but not their friendship.

  “Gertrud Montag always had poise,” Frau Simon said.

  Frau Buttgereit wondered aloud why, then, Gertrud had agreed to marry Leo Montag. Varicose veins bulged through her support stockings, and her belly was so big that she stood cradling it with her linked hands.

  “It’s his eyes.” Frau Blau sighed and took a long drag from her cigarette. “Leo Montag looks at you with those exquisite eyes of his, and you follow him anywhere.”

  Frau Simon laughed. “At your age?”

  “Any age.”

  “Leo is a saint for taking care of Gertrud those last five years,” Frau Weiler declared. “A saint, and don’t—”

  “I know a joke about a saint,” Trudi announced.

  The women’s faces spun toward her.

  “A joke.” Frau Weiler looked flustered. “This is not a proper occasion for telling jokes.” Her black scarf was still knotted around her frizzy hair that was parted in the center. No one in town could remember having seen all of her head uncovered because she always wore scarves that exposed only the front of her hair.

  “I’d like to hear the joke, Kindchen.” Frau Abramowitz knelt next to Trudi and kissed her forehead. The collar of her black jacket was made of foxes—little claws and heads that came together in two pointed fox snouts between her breasts.

  Trudi threw both arms around her neck and squeezed hard. The fox fur tickled her chin. She wished she could call Frau Abramowitz by her first name—Ilse, which was so much prettier than Abramowitz—but children had to call grown-ups by their last names and address them with Sie—the formal you. Only children were called by their first names and addressed with Du—the familiar you—by everyone. That was one good thing about being a child. Many grown-ups called each other by their last names all their lives, and if they agreed to switch to first names, they first had to link elbows while drinking beer or Schnaps to manifest the Du.

  “Go ahead, Trudi,” Frau Abramowitz said. “You tell us your joke.”

  “It’s about St. Petrus.” Trudi tried to remember the right sequence of the joke she’d overheard Emil Hesping tell her father last month when he’d come into the pay-library with the news that he’d been promoted to manage a second gymnasts’ club in Düsseldorf. It was larger than the one in Burgdorf and belonged to the same owner who’d talked with Emil about having him open other clubs as far away as Köln and Hamburg.

  “The joke starts with the Virgin Maria,” Trudi said. “She wants to go to earth for three weeks. St. Petrus makes her promise to write every week.… The first week she writes that she saw three churches and two museums. She signs her letter ‘Virgin Maria …’”

  Frau Doktor Rosen, who’d just walked into the kitchen, raised one elegant eyebrow. Eva was holding on to her mother’s belt, her dark eyes watchful. Trudi had seen her many times before—she looked like her mother, with those long wrists and black curls—but she’d never talked with her or stood this close to her. If she could have any wish right now, she’d want to be tall like Eva.

  Trudi looked right at Eva. “The second letter,” she told her, “says, ‘Dear St. Petrus, I took a trip on a train and rode on a ferry boat.’ She signs the letter again with ‘Virgin Maria.’ But the third letter—” She paused, hoping she’d get the joke just right so that Eva would laugh as her father and Emil Hesping had laughed. That’s how she’d known it was a good joke, even though she hadn’t understood what was so funny.

  “The third letter says, ‘Dear Petrus, I went to a tavern and danced with a sailor.’ It’s signed ‘Maria.’” She waited for the laughter, but the only sound was an abrupt cough from Frau Weiler. It was quiet in the kitchen. Too quiet. Had she forgotten part of the joke? No—something was wrong. She had done something bad. It was hot in the house, hot and blue with tobacco smoke even though the windows were open.

  Frau Immers chased a fly from the fruit compote. “I better check on that potato salad.”

  “Let me help you,” Frau Blau offered.

  “Herr Hesping—” one of the women said.

  They all glanced toward the door, where Emil Hesping stood in a new suit, the kind of new that hasn’t been worn before. The front creases of his black trousers were pressed knife sharp, and his pearl cufflinks shimmered. He looked like a groom at his own wedding—except that everyone knew he was the kind of man who made jokes about others getting married and sinned against the sixth commandment even though his brother was a bishop.

  He lifted Trudi up. Though he kept his lips in a smile, she could tell he had cried because his eyes were red. “Let me tell you a joke that’s proper for a little girl to tell. You too, Eva.” He took Eva’s hand. “You see, there’s this teacher who has a dog, Schatzi, and he doesn’t allow her to sleep on the sofa, but every day when he leaves for school, Schatzi jumps on the sofa and sleeps there all day. When the teacher comes home, she’s lying on the floor, but he knows. Guess how?”

  Most of the women were busying themselves with lighting fresh cigarettes or pushing pots around on the flat surface of the stove; yet, they kept their movements slow and soundless so as not to miss a word.

  “I don’t know how.” Eva Rosen looked at Trudi and made a face by wrinkling her nose. When Trudi grinned and wrinkled her nose too, Eva laughed.

  “Ah—but the teacher knows,” Emil Hesping said, “because the sofa is still warm. And so he scolds Schatzi—teachers are very good at scolding, you’ll find that out once you start school. The next day, when he comes home, the sofa is warm again. He spanks the dog, and the following evening, when he checks the sofa, it is not warm. He figures he has finally trained Schatzi. But one day he arrives home just a few minutes earlier than usual, and guess what he sees? There’s Schatzi, standing on the sofa—” He pursed his mouth and made short puffs of breath that tickled Trudi’s chin. “There’s Schatzi, blowing air on the sofa to cool it down.”

  A few of the women laughed politely. Trudi thought it was a boring joke. She could tell it bored Emil Hesping too because he winked at her. It was their secret that he liked the Virgin Maria joke much better. But then he winked at Frau Simon too, and something odd happened: Frau Simon’s neck grew longer, and her face turned as red
as her hair.

  When Eva slipped away, Trudi followed her. They wandered through the rooms where smoke shifted in hazy layers below the ceilings. People stopped talking as the girls came close to them; they stared at Trudi, told her again how brave she was. Her father leaned against the side of the piano, his face still, his eyes empty. Trudi remembered what Frau Blau had said about his eyes—exquisite—but they were ordinary, gray with blue specks, and they didn’t see her, not even when she climbed on the piano stool. When she hit the first piano key, it sounded louder than ever before.

  Herr Hesping walked up to her father with two shot glasses and a bottle of Schnaps. He filled both glasses, handed one to her father, and clicked his glass against her father’s. They nodded to one another, their expressions grim, and—at the exact same moment—tossed the clear liquid down their throats.

  Trudi’s father shuddered as if awakening from a long dream.

  “There, now,” Emil Hesping said and clasped his shoulder. “There.”

  They stood in their half embrace like dancers, waiting, their trim gymnasts’ bodies shrouded by their mourning suits, until Leo Montag held out his glass again.

  Trudi struck all the raised black keys, then the white ones. Alexander Sturm stepped next to Eva and bent to listen when she said something to him. It was said that, when he’d taken over his father’s toy factory, Alexander had changed from a boy into a man overnight: his voice had turned deep, and his mustache had filled out, causing some jealousy among other boys whose sparse mustache hairs looked like accidental smudges.

  Spreading her arms as far as she could, Trudi drew her forefingers from opposite ends of the keyboard toward the middle, drowning the voices around her in an exhilarating crescendo that made her forget everything until Frau Abramowitz lifted her from the wooden stool and carried her to her house across the street. “It’s important never to lose your dignity,” Frau Abramowitz told her.

  High in the air like that, Trudi managed to graze her hand across the narrow box that hung at the right post of the Abramowitzs’ front door, just as she’d seen Herr Abramowitz do it. Carved into the wooden box were tiny flowers and symbols. From her father she knew that the box was called a mezuzah and that, inside, was a scroll with a prayer, called the shema. “It means God protects the house,” he had said.

  Frau Abramowitz opened the arched door and let Trudi down on the Persian carpet that covered the parquet floor in her entrance hall. The shutters of the living room stood open but the damask drapes were too heavy to sway in the breeze. Trudi could see the snapdragons and purple geraniums in the window boxes. Frau Abramowitz even kept a vegetable garden, though she could afford to buy whatever she wanted, and she was always giving red cabbage or beans or kohlrabi to the neighbors.

  She had a piano too, a white baby grand. The lid was closed, and on top of it stood two silver candlesticks and rows of small silver frames with pictures of her children at various ages. On the piano bench lay a doctor-and-nurse novel, the most recent book Frau Abramowitz had borrowed from the pay-library against the trade of her Venetian mirror. From her locked glass cabinet, she brought out an album with her husband’s photos of elephants and palaces. Trudi was allowed to turn the pages, and as Frau Abramowitz told her about all the exotic travels, her voice went so soft that Trudi had to stop swallowing in order to hear her.

  When Trudi got sleepy, Frau Abramowitz spread a shawl over her and rocked her in her arms, feeling much closer to this girl with the short, thick body than to the children who had come from her own womb. Capable and self-sufficient and quick to debate any issue—“That’s how we learn to think, by questioning,” their father had told them—Ruth and Albert had acted embarrassed early on by their mother’s affection. Though her body still screamed to embrace them, they had forgotten how much they’d loved to feel her arms around them when they were small. They had chosen to go to boarding schools in Bonn and Köln, and when they visited, they were more at ease with their father, who was preoccupied with his law office and radical politics. He considered himself a Communist and had joined the Independent Social Democrats. When he made his children sit still for yet another family photo to document the sequence of their development, they didn’t object as they would to their mother’s kisses, because they felt comfortable with his distance behind the camera.

  Through half-closed lids Trudi watched the early-afternoon light flit across the roses in the crystal vase and Herr Abramowitz’s pipe rack; it made the honey-colored wood on the lower halves of the walls gleam, and revealed the tiny creases in the dear face above her; it carried the shrill cry of a rooster and the voices of departing guests across the street.

  Frau Abramowitz kept holding Trudi long after she had fallen asleep. She promised herself to teach Trudi proper manners now that the girl no longer had a mother. There wasn’t even a grandmother in the house. It was too much to handle for a man alone. Not that Leo Montag wouldn’t be the most tender of fathers.… Or husband, she thought. Or husband. And her face grew hot.

  The week after the funeral it was Trudi’s fourth birthday, and her father took her on the streetcar to Oberkassel, where, next to the Rhein bridge that led to Düsseldorf, fireworks drenched the sky and the river in every possible color. Music from trumpets and drums played fast and loud. Like thousands of others, Trudi’s father spread a blanket on the grass. When the air grew cool, he took off his woolen vest and slipped it over Trudi’s head so that it hung from her shoulders, longer than her dress, drowning her in the wonderful scent of tobacco and books as he lifted her toward the sky, toward those red and green and yellow showers of stars that shot up and spilled high above—miraculously without dropping on her—and even though her father had told her the fireworks were in celebration of the new Opernhaus, Trudi felt certain that all these people were celebrating her birthday with her, and she felt a slow sadness settling on her because no birthday could possibly be quite like this again.

  The following day her father covered the walls of his bedroom with the photos of the stranger from the coffin. Someone had stuck the long stem of a lily beneath the bride’s crossed wrists, and the white blossom lay against the curve of her chin. The flames of the three candles were milky—even whiter than the bride’s face. Trudi began to pray for her mother’s return. She didn’t have to pray for it as something separate from her other prayers because it was all connected to the size of her own body. Once that stretched itself, her mother would be well again. She was only staying away until then—so that no one would confine her to the Grafenberg asylum again. One day, Trudi knew, she would hear her mother’s familiar steps in the sewing room. She’d run up the stairs. The door would swing open, and her mother would stand by the window. She’d turn and look at her. “Well… Trudi, how tall you are,” she would say.

  But until then, Trudi had to pass through each new day without her mother, had to fight the habit that made her want to run upstairs the moment she woke up. Not being able to reach her mother—it filled her with a bottomless panic that prayers couldn’t soothe, a panic that made her climb into her mother’s wardrobe simply to stop the yearning. Standing motionless among the hangers, she’d feel the silky fabric of the dresses against her face, smell the clear scent of the Rhein meadows in early summer, and feel suffused with joyful certainty that her mother would soon be back. When she’d leave the wardrobe, she’d smile at the pictures of the dead bride, who was the only one to share her secret that her mother was still alive.

  “Well… Trudi, how tall you are”

  There had to be some kind of pill to make people grow faster. Frau Doktor Rosen would know. One morning, Trudi slipped from the house while her father was busy with a customer, crossed Schreberstrasse, and cut through the church square to the doctor’s stone house. Unlike most buildings in Burgdorf, the house—which had been a cloister five hundred years ago—stood not close to neighboring buildings but lay surrounded by a sheltered garden and a low brick wall with a wrought-iron gate. On the second-floor veranda,
the doctor’s husband rested in his canvas chair, his round face tipped toward the sky. Orange flowers, shaped like Chinese paper lanterns, grew next to the front steps.

  The door was locked, but when Trudi pressed the recessed doorbell and kept knocking, Frau Doktor Rosen opened it.

  “I want a pill so I can grow.”

  The doctor’s hand drifted to the ornate silver pin that fastened the collar of her white jacket. “I see. Does your father know you’re here?”

  Trudi shook her head.

  “Why don’t you come inside.”

  Trudi followed the doctor through the living room into her long office that faced the back of the garden where the goldfish pond and chicken coop were. Shelves with papers and cloudy bottles covered the walls all the way to the high ceiling.

  “Sit over here.” The doctor pointed toward a leather chair and walked around her desk, where she sat down and busied herself rolling a cigarette, her elegant fingers so clumsy at getting the tobacco shreds inside the thin paper, that Trudi could have done it much faster. From watching her father, she’d learned how to. Sometimes he let her roll a whole box of cigarettes for customers who liked to buy theirs ready to smoke.

  “You see,” the doctor started, “there is no pill for growing.…”

  Eight pencils lay on her desk, and Trudi kept counting those pencils, over and over again, while the doctor’s gentle voice explained about people who were Zwerge—dwarfs—and said Trudi was one of them. Trudi kept counting inside her head—eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht. Eins, zwei, drei—She laughed and shook her head. Dwarfs belonged in fairy tales, along with dragons and elves and enchanted forests. She knew the story of Schneewittchen. She even had a puzzle of the seven Zwerge who had rescued Schneewittchen from the evil witch—eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben. Seven dwarfs. But eight pencils. Eins, zwei, drei, vier—She knew she didn’t look like Schneewittchen’s dwarfs. Zwerge were men, squat, little men with big bellies and funny, peaked hats like egg warmers.