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

  Sister Elisabeth talked about the apostle Thomas, who had doubted that Jesus had appeared to the other apostles until he could touch his wounds. “The mere act of doubting is sin,” she said, emphasizing her words with a thump of her cane, and went on to tell the class how Thomas had redeemed himself by becoming a martyr in India.

  To show the sister that she was sorry about doubting, Trudi stayed inside during recess to water the plants and clean the chalkboard. When Sister Elisabeth gave her a holy card of St. Agnes, the patron saint of girls, Trudi felt that sacred flutter inside that she sometimes got when she watched a procession or thought of Jesus dying for her sins. At home, she added the holy card to her collection of holy cards and practiced first communion in front of her mother’s gold-framed mirror. As she opened her mouth as far as she could, she wished Eva could go to first communion with her. They’d both wear white dresses and wreaths of white satin roses in their hair. Too bad Eva was a Jew. Jews couldn’t have communion. Trudi stuck out her tongue—keeping it flat and straight. If you didn’t keep it flat, the communion wafer could fall off. You were not allowed to touch it with your teeth. And if you spit your communion wafer into your handkerchief, it turned to blood.

  While Trudi dreaded confession—the relinquishing of her own secrets—many of her classmates came to crave the rewards of confession. Once they got beyond the fear of kneeling in the somber confessional, they looked forward to the Saturday absolutions that turned their souls white and glowing. Like actors trained to produce tears on stage, they learned to awaken remorse. But their new souls would lose some of the purity by Sunday afternoon, after having shimmered through nine-o’clock mass. Within the next days, those souls would become slightly worn, and by the end of the week they’d be stained. The children imagined their souls to be somewhere below their hearts, cloud-shaped, elongated forms inside the rib cage. The pressure of ribs left imprints on souls, that’s how soft and pliable they were. And sins left long smudges like coal dust.

  Sins and secrets—for Trudi they often were the same. Sins made the best secrets. They swelled and breathed until a priest slaughtered them with words of absolution. The blood of the lamb, blood of the sins, died for your sins. Your mother’s sins.

  Perhaps the Braunmeiers’ cat never knew how dangerous she could be to Hans-Jürgen, because he kept returning to school every day, long after his bruises had healed and been replaced by signs of new schoolyard fights.

  In spring, soon after the French occupied the Rheinland, he arrived in church with his right arm in a sling. His father had caught him with matches in the barn, and this—the danger to the building and livestock—was far worse to his father than what Hans-Jürgen had used the matches for: to burn the fleshy pads on the paws of a tomcat. Perhaps some of the scratches on the boy’s face and neck had been caused by the tomcat, who must have fought him, but the arm had been broken when his father had flung him to the ground and stamped out the flames from the match that had fallen from his son’s hand. Yet, looking at Hans-Jürgen’s rigid face, you’d swear that the fire had not died but had settled in his eyes instead, where it would continue to flare.

  Trudi knew that fire only too well, knew it from inside herself. Sometimes she would love fiercely. Sometimes she’d feel a bolt of hate tear through her. She’d feel mean. Kind. Afraid. Like that Wednesday when the second graders were about to play Völkerball—nation ball—a game that had become increasingly popular since the French occupation.

  Sister Elisabeth chose the team captains: for the French team Eva Rosen, and for the German team Hilde Sommer, whose fainting spells during mass had earned her the compassion of the nuns. The sister never let any of the boys be captains. Boys were unmanageable, she said, a quiver of dread in her voice, and made them sit at their desks with their hands on the wooden surface to keep them from digging in their pants for a slingshot or something even more menacing. Girls, the sister believed, were not nearly as endangered by mysterious urges.

  Eva and Hilde stood in front of the other children, and whenever they called a name, a girl or boy would get in line behind them. Trudi willed Eva to pick her for her team, even though the French would start out in the middle of the field, dodging balls that were aimed at them from the German team until they’d all been hit. Then, the teams would switch positions, and you’d start all over again.

  But Eva kept staring right past Trudi while the lines behind the captains were getting longer until everyone had been chosen. Except for Trudi.

  “Your turn,” Eva reminded Hilde.

  “I don’t want her on my team.”

  “But you have to.”

  “You take her.”

  “It’s your turn to pick.”

  When Hilde said something to Georg Weiler behind her, he started to laugh. Georg was a fast runner and usually got picked right away. He was wearing his Lederhosen and a regular boy’s shirt.

  “We always lose if she’s on our side,” Fritz Hansen shouted.

  “Children!” The heavy sister brought her palms together in two sharp raps. “Stop this. Right now.”

  “I don’t want to play.” Trudi pretended to tie her shoelaces so that the others couldn’t see she was crying.

  “You have to play, Trudi.” The sister’s voice was stern. She took Trudi’s arm and led her to the end of Hilde’s line.

  Trudi’s legs felt shorter than ever before, and as she followed the rules of the game—trying to pelt members of the French team, and running from the ball when the French team became the attacker—she felt the other children moving around her in one fluid mass, felt their oneness as though she belonged to a separate species. Inside her bones was a pulling as though her growing were struggling to come through. It often felt like that, especially in her back and legs; still, those aches were nothing compared to the shame she felt.

  After school, she hid behind the gym until all the children were gone. From the Theresienheim came the smell of stale water, and a goat bleated from the direction of the bicycle shop. She reached into her pocket and counted the money her father had given her to buy a loaf of bread on the way home—fifteen banknotes, each for one million Mark. The bills used to be for one thousand Mark each, but the Reichsbank had printed the new amount diagonally across the original. She could still remember when bread used to cost a few Pfennige. But every day things were getting more expensive: in just a month, a pound of chicken had gone from six million to ten million Mark. To ride the streetcar you had to pay seven million Mark.

  Herr Abramowitz, who’d become a member of the Communist Party, sometimes talked with Trudi’s father about the poverty that spread with each devaluation of the money. People were afraid. Many had lost their jobs and were scrambling to do work they felt contempt for, like selling sewing machines from door to door or hiring on as day laborers. They felt humiliated when the court claimed their furniture against unpaid bills and the bailiff pasted the evidence of their failure, the Kuckuck—cuckoo, on the back of a cupboard or desk. And when they saw food behind the windows of stores and restaurants without being able to buy it, they became only more jealous of Jews like Herr Abramowitz and Fräulein Birnsteig, who were successful and could afford whatever they wanted. Some people had chosen suicide over the disgrace of being poor. Nearly all agreed that the Versailles Friedensvertrag was degrading and starving them all. They longed for the life they had known before the war, a life of order which—when they thought of it—seemed etched by sunlight.

  Many people had lost their savings and pensions. And Trudi had heard Herr Hesping say that all of them would be giving up even more. As she walked toward Hansen’s bakery, she pondered what she’d be willing to give up if she could be tall. Definitely an arm. Perhaps even a leg, since she would still have one long leg. An arm would be easier to do without. What if she had to give up both—an arm and a leg? It would be impossible to walk with crutches if you didn’t have both arms. Unless—and she tried to picture this—unless the leg and the arm you gave up were on opposite si
des.

  She raised her right knee and hopped forward on her left leg, imagining herself with a crutch in her right hand. Though it was hard to keep her balance, she managed to propel herself toward the street corner on one leg until she stumbled. Still—as she sat on the ground, she knew she would give up both. If her guardian angel came up to her this moment and guaranteed that she’d be tall in exchange for one arm and one leg, she was ready to let her guardian angel saw both off right here.

  She got up and hopped on her left foot, then the right, extending the opposite arm like a wing. Suddenly she had to smile. At least then Sister Elisabeth would no longer make her participate in stupid ball games. But maybe giving up a leg and an arm wasn’t necessary. She stopped and stood still. Maybe it would be enough to give up two fingers like the baker, who’d lost them in Russia during the war. If you lost something that you’d once had—a limb, say, or one eye—people didn’t treat you like a freak: they remembered you the way you had been. But if you were born without arms or sight, you were a freak. If your body didn’t look like the bodies of others, you were a freak. And if you lived in a freak’s body long enough, though you didn’t feel like a freak inside—what could you do then to make sure your body wouldn’t turn all of you into a freak?

  That afternoon, Eva did not come to the pay-library, and the next morning in school she wouldn’t look at Trudi once. The first person Trudi told about Eva’s birthmark was Helga Stamm, who’d received the dreaded Blaue Brief—blue letter—from school, warning her that she might have to stay back.

  “Like a red cabbage,” Trudi whispered, “all over Eva’s chest. Even her mother can’t do anything about it, and she’s a doctor.”

  She took Irmtraud Boden and Hilde Sommer aside and told them how the mark on Eva’s chest had started out tinier than the pit of a cherry, and how it still kept growing although the Frau Doktor had rubbed every possible medicine on it.

  “Soon,” Trudi said to Fritz Hansen, “everyone will know because the red will creep up Eva’s neck and down her arms. Once it covers her fingers, everyone she touches will turn red, too.”

  They bent close to her whispered words as if they were her friends, and though she couldn’t hold them beyond the story, she understood that she could always lure them back with new secrets.

  In the hallway, Paul Weinhart tried to pull up the front of Eva’s sweater, but she ran back into the classroom; the following day, two of the girls asked if they could see her chest. Her face as crimson as the birthmark, Eva spun away from them, and when her eyes fastened on Trudi, they were dark and startled as if, finally, she knew what it was like to be betrayed by your best friend.

  It was not until the end of the week, during recess, that several girls pinned Eva’s arms against the school fence and unbuttoned her blouse to expose the birthmark. When they were summoned to the principal’s office, where Frau Doktor Rosen, who had seen many of them through mumps and measles, met them, the girls mumbled that they’d only wanted to tickle Eva.

  Eva stayed home from school the following Monday and Tuesday, and Trudi had a dream that Eva had turned into an invalid like her father. Eva lay next to him in a canvas chair. Both had their eyes closed. Except that Eva had no blanket covering her. The top of her dress was open, and the flower on her chest had sprouted vines that surrounded her like the hedge of thorns that grew around the sleeping princess, Dornröschen, on Trudi’s fairy-tale puzzle blocks. Eva’s expression was peaceful as if in a hundred year sleep, and the vines fastened her to the veranda, protecting her from the world beyond.

  Yet, Wednesday afternoon Eva stood outside Trudi’s window with a new leash for Seehund, hollering for her to come outside and play. Watching her from behind the lace curtains, Trudi felt the love and hate inside her fusing into something heavy and unyielding.

  “Trudi,” her father shouted from the hallway outside the pay-library, “Eva is here.”

  She couldn’t answer.

  “Trudi.” His limp paused at the bottom of the stairs.

  She felt nothing, except for that cold burden. A scant breeze shifted through the curtain and cooled her face. As she stepped from the window, she caught the white lace between her fingers, and all at once she felt a yearning to know someone shaped like her, someone whose torso would be solid, whose legs would be short and sturdy, whose arms would not span further than hers, someone who would look at her with recognition—not with curiosity or contempt.

  six

  1923-1929

  IT WAS FROM FRAU SIMON THAT TRUDI HEARD ABOUT THE ZWERG MAN in Düsseldorf. Frau Simon had seen him in the audience at the Opernhaus, where she held a subscription. “About as tall as you, Trudi, and so—so elegant. You should have seen him. Wearing a night-blue tuxedo, almost black … and a beautiful top hat to match.” Frau Simon’s freckled hands whisked through the air to recreate the design of the top hat.

  From that day on it became Trudi’s goal to find that Zwerg man, and she begged her father to take her to Düsseldorf. She talked him into buying tickets for the opera and sat through Der Bettelstudent—The Student Prince, with the opera glasses that Frau Simon had lent her, scanning the audience. During the intermission, her father stood in line to buy her sugar-coated almonds while she pushed her way through groups of people—past hips and waists and bellies and hands—expecting to come face to face with the Zwerg man. But she did not find him, and when she ate those almonds during the second half of the performance, her stomach cramped with the sick-sweet memory of the stork’s sugar.

  When Trudi played with Seehund or walked to school, she’d embellish the few details she knew about the man—his size, his tuxedo, his top hat—into a story until she’d invented an entire life for him. It didn’t come together all at once, but rather in fragments that kept knocking about inside her head and attached themselves to the roots of her story until it sprouted a trunk, branches, a skyful of leaves. The Zwerg, she decided, was a famous painter—no, a musician like Fräulein Birnsteig, a composer even. That’s why he’d been at the opera.

  The composer lived in a villa in Düsseldorf, on the other side of the Oberkassel bridge, and he had two children who were Zwerge too. One was seven, a year younger than Trudi, the other a year older than she. The composer would like nothing better than to find a friend for his children. One Sunday he’d drive through Burgdorf and spot Trudi in front of the pay-library. He’d invite her for a ride in a car like Herr Abramowitz’s, ask her what her favorite food was, and—

  “Don’t ever take chocolate from strangers,” the sisters had warned all the children. There were mass murderers, the sisters said, who did terrible things to children, like stuff them into sausages and feed those sausages to unsuspecting people. There was even a song about a convicted murderer, which the children were forbidden to sing: “Warte, warte nur ein Weilchen…”—“Wait, wait just a little while …” It went on to say how, soon, he would come to you too and, with his “kleine Hackebeilchen”—little hatchet—make ground meat of you. After her initial shock that the world was not safe, Trudi had chanted the words of the gruesome song along with the other children—“… aus den Augen macht er Sülze…”—“… from the eyes he makes head cheese”; “aus dem Hintern macht er Speck…”—“from the rear end he makes bacon …”; and she’d shuddered with delicious fear.

  But certainly the Zwerg man was not anything like a mass murderer. He was rather like the unknown benefactor, anticipating what she would like before she could even tell him. Her father would meet him and talk with him about music and chess and politics. And then the Zwerg would take her and his children to the top of a mountain where snow lay year round, and they’d build a snowman with coal eyes and a carrot nose. They’d ride one long sled down the slope, and the Zwerg would tie the sled to the back of his car and pull them back up.

  Yes, following a Zwerg would be different.

  To not follow him would be unthinkable.

  • • •

  Trudi would not see another Zwerg until
she turned thirteen, and that Zwerg was the new animal tamer of the carnival that came to the Burgdorf fairgrounds every July. Dressed in a glittering white dress with black lapels that sprang from her neckline like pointed leaves, the animal tamer led the elephants into the arena, and when her quick whip snapped around their massive feet without touching them, they bowed their knees as if to pay homage to her.

  Her name was Pia. She had a mass of blue-black curls and a stocky body that moved with agility. While people laughed at the clowns and monkeys, they did not laugh at the Zwerg woman—they were awed by her skill and courage, and when she placed her head inside the lion’s wide-open mouth, it became so quiet in the circus tent that even the youngest children hushed, and in that long moment before she extricated her head from the dangerous cavern—that moment when the scent of animals and sawdust and sweat thickened and soaked into the canvas of the huge tent—one single breath connected everyone in the audience. As Pia ran into the center of the arena and curtsied, sweeping one hand with a graceful flourish to the floor and then high into the air, the people stood up and applauded.

  Trudi knew they didn’t applaud because Pia was a Zwerg, and she clapped her hands until they stung, wishing that people would notice her, too, for the things she could do—like adding numbers in her head or remembering nearly every train connection in Germany—not for being a Zwerg. But even though she dreaded the attention she received, she’d become so accustomed to it that she craved and expected it.

  As she sat back down in the first row, Trudi willed the animal tamer to look at her. She knew her braids looked pretty the way she had fastened them around the top of her head. Her new pink dress already felt tight again, but at least it was the right length. The washwoman, whom her father continued to employ despite rumors that she smuggled bleaching powders into people’s houses, was good at opening side seams and setting in matching pieces of fabric. Her father still bought children’s clothes for Trudi, frilly skirts and blouses and dresses, because adult clothes drowned her: waists were in the wrong place, and hems dragged. Men didn’t know much about things like that.