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

  Sometimes, when Ingrid returned library books, Trudi would invite her into the living room behind the pay-library and make lemonade or rosehip tea. While Trudi would set out her mother’s flowered cups, saucers, and pastry plates on the freshly ironed tablecloth, Leo would walk to the bakery near the Protestant church—humoring Trudi’s boycott of Hansen’s bakery though she’d never told him her reasons—and buy Bienenstich or Schnecken for his daughter and her new friend.

  As Trudi came to know Ingrid better, she became fascinated by the torment that Ingrid inflicted upon herself. Haunted by the possibility of sin, Ingrid went to confession at least twice a week and tried so hard to be virtuous that she moved through her days like a tightrope walker about to plummet. Though her sins were trivial—like falling asleep without her good night prayer, or envying Irmtraud Boden for her satin dress, or resenting that her brother constantly got the biggest piece of cake—they devastated her. She’d feel greedy for wanting the simplest things.

  She had a way of fluttering her eyelashes—a habit that looked both helpless and controlled. A tortured soul with a beautiful body, Ingrid would have gladly traded places with Trudi because she felt ashamed of her body that tempted men. Just walking past them, she created sin in them—all of them, she said, even her father—and to be this instrument of sin was the worst fate she could think of.

  “You really would trade?” Trudi was incredulous.

  “In a minute,” Ingrid said without hesitation.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “And you are lucky.”

  “Should I thank you?” Trudi asked brusquely.

  “Now I offended you.”

  “Look at me—” Trudi spread her arms. “Look at me and tell me why I am lucky. Do you know what people say about me? That because I’m a Zwerg, my mother became crazy. They warn their children: don’t eat butter with a spoon or you’ll look like Trudi Montag.”

  Ingrid brought one hand to her mouth.

  Trudi’s words were coming so fast, her lips felt wet with spittle. “Don’t do this or that or you’ll look like Trudi Montag. Don’t kill frogs, don’t fall on your head, don’t ride your bicycle in the middle of the road.…”

  Ingrid stepped closer and laid one hand on her shoulder, but Trudi shook it off.

  “Not to my face—they don’t say anything like that to my face, but I hear. I listen.”

  Ingrid’s eyelids were like the wing beats of a frail bird. “I didn’t think you knew.”

  “I know lots more. And I’ll tell you something else. I’m not like this because something happened to me, but because it’s the way I’ve been—from the beginning.” Both fists on her hips, Trudi demanded, “Now tell me why I’m lucky.”

  “All I meant was that I admire you because you have more of a chance to go to heaven than anyone I know.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “It’s because of original sin,” Ingrid hurried to explain. “We’re all born with it. Doomed once we reach the age of reason.” Her gray eyes burned with conviction. “But you—Don’t you see?”

  Her voice rose, almost the way the voice of Trudi’s mother used to sound when she got too excited, and for an instant Trudi recalled her mother touching her that very first time beneath the house, felt the wiry arms seizing her, heard her mother’s hoarse sob, breathed the dank smell of the earth, and felt a total settling-in, a coming home and belonging. It was the most sensuous experience she’d ever had, a stilled yearning for something that had been given to her that one day and that she hadn’t remembered since. Until that moment with Ingrid. And yet, at the same time she was overcome by an intense sadness because—if the embrace of her mother still was the most significant touch in her life—what had she missed?

  “Your hardship here on earth is the biggest blessing,” Ingrid said with awe.

  Trudi blinked. “I could do without it.”

  “Don’t say that. I used to pray that I’d die before I turned seven.”

  “But why?”

  “Because seven is the age of reason. Before then, we don’t know enough to choose sin. It’s because the forbidden fruit was eaten.”

  “You really believe all that?”

  “That’s what the Pope says. And the Bible.”

  “I know, but—”

  “If you’d died before you turned seven, you would have gone straight to heaven.” Ingrid sighed deeply, and Trudi felt the breath pass above her. “You could be there by now.…”

  “No, thank you.”

  But Ingrid went on to talk about the Virgin Maria who’d been free from original sin from the moment she was conceived. “Maria is the only human ever born that way.”

  Trudi felt tempted to tell her old Virgin Maria joke, but she didn’t think Ingrid would appreciate it. “I don’t know anyone as worried about sin as you. Not even the little priest.”

  Like many in town, Trudi referred to the priests according to their sizes: old Herr Pastor Schüler was the little priest, while the assistant pastor, Friedrich Beier, was the fat priest. Trudi liked the little priest much better, even if he had powder on his shoes and took forever to absolve you. Once, he had assigned her two rosaries for sins she hadn’t committed, as though the transgressions of the previous sinner still crowded him in the stale chamber of the dark confessional. The fat priest would never make mistakes like that, but then he was not nearly as kind as the little priest. The fat priest got things done. The fat priest would not forget a sermon or your sins, and his raised eyes bored into whatever came into their path—except food: then those eyes would lose their focus and he’d sigh with contentment.

  “Look.” Ingrid pointed toward the Venetian mirror that used to belong to Trudi’s mother. A spider was crawling along the top edge of the golden frame. “That’s what’s so hard about original sin,” she said as the spider disappeared behind the mirror. “From now on, I’ll see that spider whenever I look at the mirror.… Even when I just think of the mirror, I’ll see the spider.”

  Trudi smiled. She would be good for Ingrid. She’d get her to shed some of this awful shame. Ingrid would be so glad that she was her friend. They’d pick raspberries and red currants by the river, go to a concert at Fräulein Birnsteig’s mansion, take their sleds to the dike, sit in a movie theater in Düsseldorf, take a trip to the Mosel and stay in a youth hostel.…

  But Ingrid was still staring at the mirror. “The spider will long be gone,” she said, “and yet it will always be there. It’s like that with original sin.”

  “But don’t you see—” Trudi said. “You can choose another mirror.” She motioned to the opposite wall, where a small, round mirror hung in an even more ornate frame. She’d bought it one afternoon in Düsseldorf when she’d been caught by a jagged longing for her mother, and when she’d hung it across from the Venetian mirror, she’d felt an odd peace as if two mirrors would be more effective at holding the reflection of her mother inside the house.

  That night, Trudi awoke long before dawn and finally stopped trying to force herself back into sleep; instead, she let herself imagine trading places with Ingrid. She kept her own features, her own hair, but her body became tall and slender like Ingrid’s, and her head narrowed. Her arms and legs lengthened, and she watched herself stride down Schreberstrasse, taking long steps, a white blouse tucked into the waistband of her slim skirt, a shiny leather belt around her waist. Wind cooled her forehead and blew through her hair, and she smiled to herself as she made a left turn on Barbarossa Strasse. She wandered past the rectory and the open market where farmers sold their vegetables and fruits, and wherever she went, people stared at her, but not the way they usually did; she saw the lust Ingrid had spoken of in the eyes of some men; envy in the eyes of some girls and women; and the joy of simply looking at her in the eyes of others.

  I could live with this. I could learn.

  But then she glanced over her shoulder and saw Ingrid following, close, her body solid and short and wide, wobbling from side to side on c
urved legs like some horrible windup toy, and she wanted to run from her, keep her from demanding that she trade back their bodies. Yet Ingrid’s broad face was suffused with tranquillity, and the fear that used to thrive in her eyes had given way to a gentle fatigue as if she’d struggled for a long time to arrive at this.

  eight

  1933

  WITH EACH INSTANCE THAT TRUDI IMAGINED HERSELF INTO INGRID’S body, she became more aware of people’s responses to Ingrid. It made her uneasy when Ingrid’s father chuckled and tried to pinch his daughter’s buttocks while telling her to put on a decent skirt, even though the one she wore was as modest as all her clothes. And it confused her to see how Klaus Malter, the young dentist with the shy eyes and red beard, who had set up his new practice half a block from the pay-library, looked at Ingrid. She could tell he liked Ingrid, and it startled her when she found herself returning his feelings as though, indeed, she had become Ingrid.

  Since Ingrid barely nodded to Klaus when he greeted her, he began to ask her and Trudi out together. Trudi was the one who’d talk with him, who’d answer his questions about Ingrid, and he took to stopping at the pay-library to visit when he didn’t have patients. Wearing his starched white jacket, he’d sit on the edge of the counter and peer through the window, ready to run across the street if a patient approached his door. His beard was full and curly, his hair cropped close to his head. Often, Leo Montag would set up one of his chessboards, and the two men would play a few slow moves before one of them would be interrupted. A game between them could easily span a week. Though Klaus had joined the local chess club, he still belonged to a club in Düsseldorf, where he’d grown up and where his mother taught philosophy at the university.

  Leo had introduced Klaus to Herr Stosick, the principal of the Protestant school, at whose house the chess club met every Monday night. Herr Stosick was known for decisive, brilliant moves. “Don’t let your hands betray your mind, Günther,” his father had advised when he’d taught him to play chess at age three. To keep himself from rash moves, Günther Stosick had developed a habit that still served him well as an adult—that of rooting both hands in his thick brown hair when he sat at a chessboard, forcing himself to weigh each option beyond his instinct, though he usually returned to that first instinct.

  The club had been founded in 1812 by a man who had left his family for chess. His name was Karl Tannenschneider, and the men in the club talked about him as though he were still a member.

  “He left his wife and children for chess,” they’d say with reverence and envy.

  “He left everything for chess.”

  While Leo liked to ponder his moves in silence, Klaus enjoyed talking with Trudi while he played chess. “I don’t have enough patients,” he confided to her one afternoon. “People keep going to Dr. Beck.”

  “They’re used to him—even if they come out hurting worse than when they went in.”

  “There’s no need for that.”

  “I always dread going to him.”

  “With all the modern inventions in dentistry, it’s almost painless now.”

  “I wish someone would tell Herr Doktor Beck. No one likes him much. He’s not friendly like you.”

  Klaus grinned. “Maybe people don’t want a friendly dentist. Maybe they want a dentist they can be afraid of.” He raised his hands, curling them into claws, and the fine reddish hair on their backs and on the lower joints of his fingers gleamed like thin copper wires.

  Trudi crossed her arms to keep herself from touching those beautiful hands. “I’ll tell everyone you’re real scary,” she promised. “Just wait—soon your office will be full.” She imagined herself asking In grid, “Do you think Klaus Malter is handsome?” Ingrid would frown and say something like, “Just average looking” or—and this would be worse—“He is awfully handsome”

  Klaus rolled a cigarette. “Can I offer you one?”

  She shook her head. “I like the smell, but not the taste. Probably from almost burning the church down when I was seven.”

  “How did you do that?”

  Her father glanced up from the chessboard.

  “Eva Rosen and I, we smoked our first cigarettes behind the rectory and threw them across the wall when we heard a noise. I didn’t sleep all night.”

  “That could have cost you fifty years of rosaries,” Klaus said.

  “At least.”

  “Or life in the convent,” her father said. “I guess I’m lucky I don’t know everything you’ve done.”

  The boys in the barn—The room tilted. “Lucky, yes.” She pointed to the chessboard. “Whose move?”

  “Mine.” Klaus advanced his black knight. “Thank God for large families. The Buttgereits have been sending their daughters—two last week, two next Friday, three of them the week after.… How many of them are there?”

  “Nine. But in that family daughters don’t matter much. I remember when the boy was born.… I saw a stork that day.”

  “I used to believe in storks, too.”

  “The Buttgereits, see, they had given up on ever having a son after all those girls—I feel sorry for those daughters, I tell you—and when they finally had the boy, Herr Buttgereit kept parading him around as if he were their only child, talking about him inheriting the farm before he could even walk.”

  “I haven’t met the boy yet.”

  “You won’t. He lives away from home. A special school near Bonn. When he was three, he fell off the hay wagon and hurt his spine. After that, his back grew crooked. He can’t walk straight.”

  Leo tapped against the chessboard. “Your turn.”

  “Thank you, Herr Montag.” Klaus paused to assess his position, then castled on the king’s side and turned back to Trudi, waiting for her to continue.

  She made her voice go soft to bring him closer. “Frau Doktor Rosen told his parents that he will never be strong enough to be a farmer, and that he won’t live much beyond twenty.”

  “That’s awful.” Klaus Malter slid off the counter and crouched next to her. “How old is he now?”

  She felt the warmth of his body, his breath. “Almost eleven. I think. Yes, that’s right.” Flustered, she took a step away from him. “Everyone says he’s very intelligen.… That’s why they sent him to this school. Paid for by the asparagus money, I guess.”

  He leaned toward her. “The what?”

  Pia, she thought, some advice you’ve given me there. What do I do now? “The money the Buttgereits used to earn selling asparagus,” she explained. “Until we found out, we all bought it from them. Now only the restaurant people from Düsseldorf come for it. It was the most delicious asparagus, tender and—”

  “Found out what?”

  “I thought you didn’t like gossip?”

  “I don’t.”

  “This is gossip. Last week you told me the one thing you despise about small towns is gossip.”

  “Don’t torture me. What did you find out about the Buttgereits?”

  “They kept the asparagus in their bathtub after they cut it, and people would go to their house and buy it right out of that tub. Two years ago, Monika Buttgereit swore Helga Stamm to secrecy and told her how her family got the asparagus to taste so good.…” Trudi waited, letting her words settle, and just as Klaus opened his mouth to ask his next question, she whispered, “Pee.”

  “What?”

  “Pee. Everyone in the Buttgereit family pees into that bathtub.” Another meaningful pause. “That’s why their asparagus tastes like no other asparagus in the whole world.”

  He shook himself like a wet dog. “I’m glad I’ve never eaten it.”

  “Oh, you may have.” She smiled. “Some of the restaurants in Düsseldorf serve it. They still do.”

  “I don’t want to know. Why doesn’t someone tell the restaurant owners?”

  “Helga told Georg Weiler, and his mother told Frau Abramowitz and the fat priest.…” She shrugged. “In Burgdorf, word moves around fast, but—” She moved her solid hands a
s if rotating a large ball. “—it usually stays right here, in town, as if held within some invisible borders.”

  When the carnival returned to Burgdorf that July, Klaus invited Ingrid and Trudi to go with him. While Ingrid wore sensible shoes and her gray Sunday dress, Trudi had sewn herself a chiffon dress that matched the embroidered bolero jacket Frau Abramowitz had brought her from Spain for her eighteenth birthday. Although the high heels of her sandals kept sinking into the ground, forcing her to walk on her toes, she didn’t let that keep her from enjoying rides on the Ferris wheel and carousel, and when she and Klaus took turns at the shooting booth, she was the one to win a plush lion with a stiff mane, which she gave to Ingrid.

  As each July since she’d met Pia, Trudi searched for the Zwerg woman’s blue trailer, and though she didn’t find it, she sat between Ingrid and Klaus in the circus tent, expecting Pia to lead the animals into the ring. Pia would know about her and Klaus the moment she’d look at her.

  But the animal tamer was the same burly man with the same sure smile who’d come here for the past four summers, the same man who had stared at her when she’d asked him about Pia that summer after she’d met her.

  “I don’t know of anyone like her,” he had said.

  Trudi had raised one level hand to the top of her head. “About this tall.”

  “No.”

  “She was here … with the elephants and the lions and a parrot named Othello and—”

  “It’s not work for a woman.” He straightened his shoulders, making his chest swell.

  “Pia knew what to do.”

  He started to walk away.

  “Pia was magnificent,” Trudi shouted after him. “A lot better than you.”

  He turned and stared at Trudi as if to appraise her. “Listen, little girl—” His voice had lost some of its gruffness. “We circus people are an odd sort. We don’t always stay with one outfit. Some of us find a place we like and—” He let out a surprising giggle and lifted his bulky arms as if to release something. “—we stop there for a while until we get restless, until a new circus with new dreams comes along.”