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

  But the next morning, when she ran to school, ready to tell her story, Eva turned away as soon as she saw her and started talking to Helga Stamm, who was the plainest girl in class with those thick arms and colorless lips that made her look as though she were made of dough. Trudi, her heart beating madly, dashed past them into the classroom and pulled her slate from her satchel. Low in her back she felt an ache that stayed with her all that day.

  On the way home, she heard children laughing behind her. Certain that they were making fun of her body, she walked faster, her face hot, hating her short legs and how they curved—outward at the knees, then tapering again at her ankles as though outlining the shape of a large cuckoo’s egg. She pretended she wanted to be alone. Even if they asked her to play now, she wouldn’t stop. Not for them.

  She hadn’t been home more than an hour when Eva appeared outside the pay-library, calling for her to come out and play.

  “Bring Seehund,” she shouted when Trudi stuck her head from the window of her room. “I have something for you.”

  Trudi wanted to duck back and hide beneath her bed, wanted to dump a bucket of dirty water on Eva’s head, wanted to run downstairs and play with Eva. Slowly, she walked down the steps, counting them—eins, zwei, drei, vier… Her face grew hot. Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben. Sieben Zwerge. She stopped. The week before, she had asked the priest if there was a patron saint for Zwerge, and he’d peered at her with his kind eyes as if startled.

  “I don’t believe so, my child.”

  “But everyone has a patron saint.”

  The priest nodded, sadly. “Barbers, widows, epileptics, merchants …” He reached into his left sleeve and scratched his thin arm in long, even sweeps.

  Trudi thought of Frau Simon, who wore a blessed medal of St. Antonius—the patron saint of everything that’s been lost—along with a Jewish amulet on a fine silver necklace.

  “… beggars, dentists, orphans,” the priest recited, “servants, librarians—”

  “Even animals,” Trudi said. She had a holy card of the patron saint of animals, St. Antonius. He was a hermit who’d lived inside a tomb in a cemetery. She waited for the priest to produce a patron saint especially for Zwerge. Surely, a saint like that would make her grow.

  “Perhaps St. Giles …” The priest reached into his other sleeve.

  She clapped her hands. “I knew you’d find one.”

  “He’s the patron saint of cripples.”

  “I’m not a cripple,” she cried.

  “I know, dear child…” He stroked her hair. “But St. Giles is the closest I can think of. He was fed the milk of a deer and—”

  “Trudi…” Eva was shouting outside.

  “I’m not a cripple,” Trudi whispered and walked down the last steps. Seehund was already waiting for her to open the door.

  “Just imagine—” Eva said as though it were still the day before and they hadn’t stopped talking “—if that bullet had killed your father, you wouldn’t have been born.” She handed Trudi a lantern flower from her garden, its thin stem arching gracefully under the weight of the orange blossom.

  “Then the stork would have brought me somewhere else.”

  “The stork?” Eva laughed. “Storks don’t have anything to do with getting born.”

  “They do.”

  “My mother is a doctor and she knows. She says babies come out of mothers. They grow inside, and when they get too big, they crawl out.”

  Trudi shook her head.

  “It’s so,” Eva insisted and lifted Seehund’s ears, trying to make them stand up straight, but he flicked them the way he did when he chased away flies.

  “He wants to go for a walk,” Trudi said.

  Eva held the leash and Trudi carried the flower as they walked the dog to the end of Schreberstrasse and back. When Trudi suggested taking Seehund to the river, Eva glanced down the street as if trying to make sure none of the other children saw her with Trudi. “Let’s stay here today,” she said.

  When they returned to the pay-library, Trudi sat down on the front steps and Seehund laid his head on her knees. Eva stood in front of her as if waiting for her to say something, but Trudi plucked silently at the stem of the lantern flower.

  “Mothers have a baby pouch inside their tummy,” Eva blurted, “and fathers put seeds for babies there, and then the baby starts to grow.”

  It was the silliest thing Trudi had ever heard; and yet, she had a sudden image of her dead brother still inside her mother, buried with her, always to stay within her—a privileged place of residence—as both of them decomposed beneath the earth. She found herself wondering if the pebbles would last and saw herself opening the coffin and finding it empty except for a fistful of tiny gray stones.

  “It’s true,” Eva said.

  “Flowers and vegetables grow from seeds,” Trudi explained to her, “not babies.”

  “After the man kisses the woman, he puts the seed inside her.”

  “Where?”

  Eva shrugged and curled Seehund’s ears around her fingers.

  “See, you don’t know.” Trudi laughed at her. “It’s just a story your mother is telling you because she thinks you’re too little to understand.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I know what happens. I even know how to stop babies from coming.”

  Eva stared at her, sudden doubts at her own certainty in her eyes.

  “I once stopped a baby from coming. It’s a secret.” Trudi stopped. Though she soaked up other people’s secrets, she liked to guard her own because she knew how much power they could give to others.

  Eva looped one arm around Trudi’s shoulders. “I won’t tell.”

  “Promise?” Trudi had heard whispers about women who had ways to keep babies from coming. Like Frau Simon, who’d never had a baby. Keeping babies from being born was a sin.

  “I promise.” Eva’s mouth stood half open as though she’d forgotten to breathe.

  “Not even your mother.”

  “Promise.”

  Trudi said it as quickly as she could: “I made the baby die before it could get here because I ate the stork’s sugar and the baby came too soon to be alive and we had a funeral.”

  Eva let out a long breath. “Which baby?”

  All at once Trudi couldn’t speak.

  “Which baby?”

  “My—my brother.”

  “Did you get punished?”

  “No one knows about it.”

  “I won’t tell.” Eva rubbed her knuckles up and down her high, narrow forehead. “Will you do it again?”

  Trudi had to think hard. “I don’t want to,” she finally said.

  “I know how you can tell if you’re going to have a baby.”

  “How?”

  Eva pressed one finger against Trudi’s skirt where it covered the bone triangle. “Once you get hair there,” she said, “you have to keep watching it. If it grows toward your belly button, you’ll have a baby.”

  Though it stung Trudi to be ignored by Eva in school, she tried to understand. If Eva let on that she was her friend, the other children would exclude Eva too, as certainly as if her body had shrunk overnight. In her love, Trudi wanted to be like Eva—yet, she sensed that, in the eyes of the town, it would be the opposite: Eva would be treated like an outcast. It made her feel dangerous to the people she loved. Afraid of tainting Eva, she kept her love a secret, though sometimes it seemed to her that everyone had to notice because those feelings burned so strongly within her that they seared through her skin in fiery splotches.

  And so, knowing the powers of contamination, she let Eva betray her, over and over again. If she were Eva, she probably would do the same. In a way she already did: ever since she’d started school, she’d turned from people who used to fascinate her, people whose otherness was even more evident than hers—like the third Heidenreich girl, Gerda, who drooled over herself and whose head ticked from side to side even though her father kept taking her to countless
doctors as far away as Berlin; or Ulrich Hansen, the baker’s oldest son, who’d been born without arms and had to be fed by his parents although he was twelve years old; and, of course, the-man-who-touches-his-heart. It made her ache to look at any of them, made her afraid of having to join their ranks if she dared to be kind to them, made her feel cruel as she shunned them.

  She lured Eva back with the pictures of the dead woman on her father’s walls. One afternoon, while her father had four customers in the pay-library, she sneaked Eva into her father’s bedroom. Eva, who’d only seen the photo of one dead baby before, stood as far away from those pictures as she could, while the sun glinted through the tree pattern of the lace curtains and left lace shadows on the many faces of the dead bride.

  She lured Eva back with her stories—stories about her father, who’d been a celebrated athlete and had won many trophies before his knee had been injured; stories about her cousin, who lived in a magnificent mansion in America; stories about the people in Burgdorf. Sometimes she even spied on Eva and her family and, through her stories, gave her back what she’d seen. Her stories grew and changed as she tested them to see how far they gave, how much Eva believed, what fit in and what didn’t, but all of them started from a core of what she knew and sensed about people. And it was not even that she made up anything, but rather that she listened closely to herself.

  five

  1921-1923

  SOMETIMES TRUDI AND EVA PLAYED WITH SEEHUND BY THE BROOK IN back of the pay-library, but he’d run from them, yelping, if they’d splash him with water. And whenever they dragged him into the brook to teach him how to swim, he escaped as soon as they let go of his collar. Soon he learned to stay at a safe distance from Trudi if she went near water.

  “You should have named him something else,” Eva said one fall afternoon after they’d given up on trying to submerge Seehund. “A seal is supposed to love water.”

  “We’ll call him Earth Snail,” Trudi suggested.

  Eva laughed. “Turtle Breath.”

  Both arms stretched wide, Trudi whirled around. “Turtle Breath,” she chanted. “Earth Snail.…” Her right foot banged into the end of the wooden planks that spanned the narrow arm of the brook soon after it forked. She cried out.

  “Pinch your earlobe,” Eva yelled.

  Clutching her toe in one hand, Trudi hopped back and forth on the other foot.

  “Just try it,” Eva ordered. “It stops the pain.”

  When Trudi pinched her earlobe, it stung. Miraculously, her toe stopped hurting. “How come it works?” She plopped down on the grass next to Eva.

  “It just does. I’ll show you something else.” Eva brought her face up against Trudi’s. Her breath smelled of raspberry pudding as she opened her lips—so wide that Trudi could see deep inside her mouth. Its roof was curved like the ceiling in St. Martin’s Church, and the dark gap in back was separated by a pink icicle. When Eva’s tongue stretched up, it hid the gap but exposed bluish veins beneath her tongue and a taut membrane that connected it to the bottom of her mouth. “Try it.” Eva’s voice was muffled. The tip of her tongue danced against the roof of her mouth. “Move it so it tickles.”

  Trudi tried. “It feels silly.”

  Eva closed her mouth but right away yawned as if she needed to move her lips. “Remember to do this if you’re ever hiding and have to sneeze and don’t dare to because someone may capture you.”

  “Who would capture me?”

  “You never know. It’s an old Indian trick. Indians do it when they don’t want their enemies to find them.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My father. He read it in a book from your library. I know all kinds of other remedies.”

  “Can any of them—” Trudi felt her hands go sweaty. That morning, when she’d told Sister Mathilde she wanted to become a teacher, the sister had said it wasn’t a good choice because children wouldn’t have respect for a teacher who was shorter than they. She rubbed her palms against her skirt before she dared to ask Eva, “Can any of those remedies make you grow?”

  Slowly, Eva pulled at a clump of grass until it came out by its roots. She tossed it into the brook, where it swirled in slow loops as it drifted away.

  “I don’t know of any remedies.” Eva’s voice was soft. “You’ll grow on your own.”

  “Sister Mathilde—she says I can’t be a teacher.”

  “My mother says people can be anything they want to be.”

  “What do you want to be?”

  “A doctor. I’ll be a doctor and you’ll be a teacher.”

  “Teachers have to be tall.”

  “Teachers have to be smart. You’re the smartest girl in class.”

  “I know,” Trudi said without enthusiasm. She would gladly give up being smart if she could be tall. “I don’t want to look different.”

  “Look.” Eva unbuttoned her cardigan and blouse. “I’m different too.” She pulled up her undershirt. A dark red birthmark, shaped like an irregular flower, spread across her thin chest. Its petals blossomed across her nipples and toward her waist in a paler shade of red than the center, as if they’d faded under a strong sun.

  Air and sound and scent spun through Trudi as she raised one hand and brought it close to Eva’s flower, spun through her, spun her, as though she were spinning in a world that would always and always spin through her. Her ears hummed and her arms tingled and it took impossible effort not to lay her palm against Eva’s chest until Eva nodded, but when she finally did, the skin of the flower was the same warmth as her own hand and it felt as though she were touching herself.

  Eva swallowed, twice, and Trudi felt her heart beating beneath the flower. With her free hand, she traced the outline of the petals, wishing she could trade her difference for Eva’s.

  “It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

  Eva yanked down her undershirt so hard it dislodged Trudi’s hands. Her long fingers jammed the buttons back through their holes. “You’ll grow, but I’ll always have this.” She leapt up. “And when I have babies, they’ll drink red milk from me.” She dashed across the planks to the other side of the river and down the hill that led toward the fairgrounds.

  When Trudi ran after her, Seehund raced toward the brook, barked, but recoiled a couple of times before he stalked across the planks like a very old dog. As soon as he was on the other side, he caught up with Trudi, then Eva, circling between the two girls like a sheepdog pulling in his flock.

  Trudi wanted to keep running, wanted to keep hearing that conviction in Eva’s voice: You’ll grow. “You really mean it?” she shouted, her legs feeling long and light as if they’d already begun to stretch.

  “What?” Eva stopped. One of her braids had come undone and hung in waves down one side of her face.

  “About growing!”

  “Yes,” Eva shouted back and flung herself into the high grass. “Yes yes yes.” Her head disappeared, and she stuck her feet high into the air—above the clover and daisies and cornflowers—her legs pumping the air as though she were riding a bicycle.

  Trudi threw herself down next to Eva, her breath fast and dry, but Eva’s legs kept flying through the air as if she were trying to get away from wherever she was. Trudi broke off a handful of purple clover and began to braid the stems.

  “What are you doing?” Eva dropped her legs and lay motionless.

  “Making a crown for you.”

  Seehund nudged Trudi’s shoulder, then dashed off again. Careful not to snap any of the stems, she wove more of the purple flowers into a crown for Eva. The air was moist and still, very still. As Trudi set the crown into Eva’s sweaty hair, she wished she could take Eva to the sewing room and keep her there, lock her up, her friend forever.

  They stood up, and when Seehund ran toward them, a bird—a gray bird with a ruby chest—swerved from the grass near him. Like a lopsided top, it reeled and whirred, one wing spread, as it fluttered into the dog’s path. Playfully, he stopped the mad flight with one paw and, befor
e Trudi could come to the bird’s aid, closed his jaws on it.

  “Make him stop,” Eva cried.

  With both hands, Trudi pried Seehund’s teeth apart. A startling trace of something ancient and rotting rose with his breath. As he let go of the bird, Eva scooped it up in her hands. Its chest was rising and falling rapidly, and one wing hung at a crooked angle.

  Eva carried the bird home in the basket that Seehund had come in. Her mother would set the wing in her office, and Eva would keep the bird in the basket for two days and two nights before she’d find it dead. She would be inconsolable until her father would phone Herr Heidenreich. At his shop, the tall taxidermist would cradle the bird in his hands and promise Eva to give it a new soul. To convince her of his magic, he’d let her hold the lifelike bodies of other birds he’d preserved, inspiring in Eva a fascination with stuffed birds that would continue into her adult years.

  But the night after Seehund hurt the bird which, quite likely, had already been injured, Trudi didn’t let him into the house. Tied with a length of clothesline to one of the pillars of wood outside the earth nest where Trudi’s mother used to hide, the dog spent the night outdoors. Alone in her room, Trudi kept seeing the flower on Eva’s chest, kept seeing it through the layers of clothing, lit from within Eva’s body.

  In school, Trudi and Eva learned that the Jews had killed Jesus. That was true because the sisters said so; but Trudi didn’t know if what Fritz Hansen said was also true—that Jews killed Christians and drank their blood and offered them as sacrifices to the devil who was their God. Jews like that seemed far away and foreign—not at all like Eva and the Frau Doktor; or Frau Simon; or the Abramowitz family; or Fräulein Birnsteig, the concert pianist who, it was rumored, was a genius. The Jews in Burgdorf were different kinds of Jews, not the kind who killed Jesus—or anyone, for that matter.

  They might beat you up, but not kill you. Trudi had already learned that belonging to one religion meant getting beaten up by kids of other religions. Mostly, though, the Catholic kids would be the ones to chase the Jewish or Protestant kids. There were lots of other reasons for getting beaten up: if you were a girl or if—in any way—you didn’t look like others.