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

  She kept coming back, his wife’s Zwerg friend, fists fluttering against his door, his caged heart. Soon it felt as though she were out there all the time, and he’d find himself listening for her wingbeat even in the void of night when all else was silent. The muscles in his thighs and buttocks felt flattened out. Against his skin, the clothes he’d worn when they’d taken Eva away were stiff and rank. He’d stumbled into them—trousers and a white shirt—when he’d heard the car stop outside the building.

  Lucky I was awake, lucky, lucky.… He’d tossed Eva’s clothes onto the bed. “Get dressed.” Through the gap in the drapes he’d watched them get out of the car. Two of them, their suits blotted by the dark, balancing ghostly balloons of faces.

  Before they reached the front door of the building, he had Eva by the wrist and was out of the apartment door with her—lucky, lucky— clicking it shut and up the stairs to the second floor, where he made her wait, each pulse of her wrist a shock through his entire body, until they’d broken into his apartment, giving him and Eva time to race up the rest of the stairs.

  It was too new, the attic—not enough trunks and furniture and boxes stored yet to allow for shadows to grow into cluttered corners. It was an attic you could almost see all at once—not like his grand-parents’ attic, where each step had meant a discovery, a distraction. Quickly, he pulled Eva behind the crates of leftover building supplies: clay tiles for the roof; thin strips of wood for the parquet floors; rolls of wallpaper; cans of paint.

  It took a lifetime for them to make their way to the attic—he heard them on the second floor in his niece Jutta’s apartment, in the rooms on the third floor, their voices rising through the boards where he crouched with his wife, his wife—but then they were on the attic stairs.

  He saw himself sitting in the police station, handcuffed in a cell, crowded into a train with Eva. If it weren’t for her—Suddenly he hated her. “I love you,” he whispered hoarsely. His fingers ached as they pressed into her arm.

  “I love you, too.” Her face was a painting, one-dimensional, still. She stood up. Slipped his fingers from her arm like a useless bracelet.

  His back and neck felt drenched with sweat.

  “Stay there.” She was already walking toward the attic door as it flew open.

  Afterwards, though not for long, Alexander would try to tell himself that his legs failed him when he tried to stand up as they took Eva away, stand up to join her as she must have believed he would—even during her last gesture of heroism—because that was what they had promised one another.

  “I thought you’d like to be there,” Matthias said as he handed Trudi two cream-colored envelopes, one addressed to her, the other to her father.

  “What is it?”

  “An invitation.” He’d come to the pay-library but had waited between the stacks of books until Frau Bilder had checked out five war novels and maneuvered her bulk out of the door.

  Trudi opened the envelope and read the announcement for his piano recital. “Oh, Matthias,” she said. “I’m so pleased for you. Of course we’ll be there. Thank you.”

  He flushed with pride. “I even have a tuxedo.”

  “You’ll look all grown up then.”

  “The unknown benefactor left it in our kitchen.”

  “How about that? When?”

  “Just this morning.”

  “And it fits?”

  “The jacket. The pants are too long, but my grandmother is turning over the hem.”

  “He’s been at it again, the unknown benefactor. I heard that Frau Immers—you know she gets that awful rash on her scalp—found two bottles of the medical shampoo she hasn’t been able to buy. Right in her chicken coop.… Listen, can you stay and visit? My father is in the living room.”

  Matthias hesitated.

  “I know he’d be glad to see you.”

  “Are you sure it’s all right to go in?”

  She thought of the times she’d sent him away from her door when she’d been hiding fugitives. “Just go on through.” She motioned him toward the open door that led to the hallway. No need to keep that door locked any longer. Her house had been empty for two weeks since that night Eva hadn’t returned.

  Emil Hesping was refusing to bring them anyone else. “Let’s wait a while,” he’d said. “You have some recovering to do. And we don’t know what she’ll tell them.”

  “Not Eva,” she’d said.

  And he’d shaken his bald head but hadn’t said anything that she hadn’t already imagined about torture.

  What Trudi knew of Eva’s arrest had come from Jutta, who’d followed the Gestapo into the attic after they’d torn her rooms apart, searching for Eva. They’d found her standing in the middle of the attic, not even trying to hide.

  “She walked toward them,” Jutta had said when Trudi had come to see her.

  “And Alexander?”

  “They only took Eva.”

  Trudi looked at Jutta, hard. She felt Jutta was holding something back, but she couldn’t tell what it was. “Did they search for him?”

  “They came for Eva. They were satisfied.”

  “Tell your uncle I want to talk with him.”

  “He’s not well.”

  “I need to find out what happened to Eva.”

  “He won’t even speak to me.”

  Fräulein Birnsteig, though Jewish, had been protected so far because of her fame, but her mansion had been appropriated as a vacation villa for SS officers. She’d lost her housekeeper and her car, but had been allowed to keep her bedroom and the music room where, frequently, she was summoned to play the piano for officers and their guests. Even her practice sessions were no longer her own: officers would wander in, lean against the piano to watch her or, worse yet, continue conversations while she’d play.

  It was to this music room that Trudi and her father came for Matthias Berger’s recital. The audience was much smaller than at the spring concerts, and the windows were closed to the brisk October air. More than half of the guests wore uniforms, and next to the piano the red flag with the Hakenkreuz was prominently displayed. There were no candles as in the earlier years, but harsh light bulbs that made the pianist’s once so elegant neck look pasty, wrinkled. When the concert began with “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,” Trudi couldn’t bear to sing along, and as she glanced up at her father, he was moving his lips without sound.

  She wondered how it made Fräulein Birnsteig feel, playing the national anthem. Did others, too, notice the hesitancy with which she sought out the keys? She no longer looked glamorous, but thin and ill—this woman who believed in her dreams, who had canceled tours because of dreams, who had hired a beggar woman because in a dream she was her sister. Where is the beggar woman now? Trudi wanted to ask Frälein Birnsteig. And what have you done with your dreams? Did you dream this too—the flag and the uniforms and the camps? And if so, what did you do to adjust your life to this?

  But then, mercifully, the anthem was over, and Matthias stalked to the piano, his face chalk white, his eyes on the ground. But as soon as he sat down on the piano bench, his shoulders filled out, and his back aligned into a lovely, strong curve. In his tuxedo he looked like the man he would become, not a thirteen-year-old boy. As he touched the keys, a wonderful confidence came over him. His head followed the motion of his hands. From where she sat, Trudi could see the transformation in his features, the green hue of his pupils, and she remembered that first time he’d come into her house. Music, even then, had been a way out of pain for him. She wished she had something like that, something that could sweep her away from the grieving that sat with her all too often. She’d grieved over Konrad, the priest Adolf, and now Eva, and each one tilted her right back to her oldest grief—the loss of her mother.

  Trudi felt herself drawn into Matthias’ music, but when she closed her eyes, the music became that of Fräulein Birnsteig and spun her through the images of that second-grade spring concert: the sound of boots on marble tiles; high white b
ellies of pregnant girls; babies crying—Trudi sat up straight, her eyes wide. The boots, they were here now. On these marble floors. And so was that fear she’d felt as a girl. The bellies, she thought as the music pumped through her, what about the bellies? She didn’t want to know; yet, she felt the future sucking at her, trying to prove itself to her through those boots, vowing that the bellies and the babies, too, were waiting in that vortex of time.

  Her father bent down, brought his face close to hers. “What is it, Trudi?” he whispered.

  She shook her head, tried to reassure him with a smile. At intermission she was the first one out of the music room before the applause had stopped. But Frau Buttgereit caught up with her in the octagonal entrance hall, where a table with refreshments was set up, and pressed a glass of wine into Trudi’s hand. The gold cross of honor for German mothers was pinned to her lapel.

  “Are you enjoying the concert?” she asked and stepped closer to Trudi as others crowded around the table.

  “I would enjoy it even more if we could do without the flag and the anthem.”

  “Sshh.” Frau Buttgereit shifted her weight from one veined leg to the other and glanced around nervously. “Did you hear about all the teaching jobs in Düsseldorf? If Monika were still here, she could apply.”

  Trudi wanted to get away, but she was wedged between chests and backs and the table.

  “They’re pulling out more of the male teachers for the front.”

  Maybe that’s where Max Rudnick was, at the front. Maybe already dead and buried. Stop it, Trudi told herself. He’d never be a soldier. His eyes were far too bad. Lately, just about anything made her think of Max: drinking tea, shelving books, weighing tobacco.…

  “Not that I’m against Monika working with the KLV,” Frau Buttgereit rushed to say. “It’s just that she’s so far away. We wish she lived closer to home. But at least she’s doing the work she studied for.”

  When they returned to the music room, Matthias played a duet with his mentor. Trudi could see how proud Fräulein Birnsteig was of him. I bet he’s the best student she ever had, Trudi thought, the very best. She was distracted by two SS officers who were walking along the side of the rows, talking. Why couldn’t they wait until after the concert? One of them had the nerve to come down her row, his black uniform blocking people’s view of the piano as he squeezed himself past their legs.

  In front of Trudi he stopped and said something.

  She couldn’t understand. “What?”

  “I said: Come with me.”

  Eva, she thought. They found out Eva stayed with us. In the rows ahead of her, no one turned around. People kept their eyes on the piano.

  “Get up, you.”

  “What’s this about?” Trudi’s father asked.

  Matthias stopped playing the piano. For an instant Fräulein Birnsteig continued the thin thread of her part, but then she, too, lifted her hands from the keys.

  “Keep playing,” the officer shouted. “And you—” He grabbed Trudi’s shoulder. “Out. Now.”

  Eva Eva Eva—

  “I’m coming along.” Her father raised himself from his seat.

  “You stay here.” The officer shoved him down and pulled Trudi past him to the end of the row.

  Matthias and Fräulein Birnsteig kept moving their fingers across the keys as if trying to pull some solace from the stark white and black. Trudi could still hear their music as she was taken outside to a car. Cold night air blew through the fabric of her wool dress. She shivered.

  Her father came rushing from the building with her coat.

  “Careful, old man.” One of the officers raised his arm.

  “At least let me give her this coat.”

  The coat wrapped around herself, she sat in the back of the car. Her father’s white hair slid past the window, then the massive stone posts where the driveway dipped into the road, then trees, and the long, unlit stretch of road between the mansion and the cemetery, where some of the old graves had been leveled to make room for new coffins. Despite all the war dead, the old people in town kept dying as they had in times of peace. Death had taken on such a different meaning, it seemed to Trudi, that perhaps the old should have been given some postponement, some reprieve. Yet, their burials kept happening right along with the war funerals. It came in proper time, their dying, but what had changed was that they were encumbered by the bewilderment that their sons had died before them. Out of sequence. Or their daughters, Trudi thought, picturing her father alone.

  The last time she’d been to the cemetery had been for the funeral of the priest-nun, Sister Adelheid. At the gravesite she felt spooked when she realized she was flanked by nuns, just as the sister had been whenever she’d left the convent. At least the sister with the heart-shaped face had done what she’d believed, even though it had meant punishment. But with that punishment had come an odd freedom, Trudi thought, not the resignation that suspended the lives of too many women.

  The car passed the burned-out synagogue and pulled up in front of the Theresienheim. One officer on either side, Trudi passed the Hakenkreuz flag in the lobby. Above the bench, where the Jesus picture with the blue robe used to be, now hung a picture of the Führer, his mouth set as if about to erupt into one of the screaming speeches that Trudi had heard on the radio. His eyes were watching her, the kind of eyes, Herr Hesping had said, that lured people in.

  “If they didn’t see those eyes and only heard the shouting,” he’d told her, “it would be easier to resist him.”

  It felt strange to be inside the Theresienheim without seeing a single nun. Trudi had heard that the sisters still had some rooms near the chapel, but she hadn’t been here since the building had been confiscated. Maybe this was where Eva had been taken, waiting to be transported. If Eva had told them anything, it must have been under torture. As Trudi wondered how much torture she herself could withstand, she felt grateful that no one was hiding at her house who might be betrayed by her.

  All night she was kept in a cell by herself. No one came to ask her questions. What kept the room from complete darkness were the moon outside the barred window and the slit of light beneath the locked door. She felt thirsty. At least I don’t like to smoke, she thought. If I smoked, this would be a lot worse. I’d want it so badly.… She rubbed her arms, crossing back and forth from the window, which was less than a minute’s run from her own backyard, to the only piece of furniture, a wardrobe. So this is what it must have been like for Frau Simon.… She found some comfort in picturing Konrad safe, willing him safe, out of the country, in Switzerland, perhaps, or England. He wouldn’t have to hide. He could go to school with other children, have a cat again. And then she thought of the Abramowitzs who, twice, had heard rumors that they were to be picked up; both times they’d readied themselves, though Trudi’s father had offered to hide them or drive them to a safe place. They’d refused to endanger him, and when he’d asked Herr Abramowitz if he wanted his wooden crate, Herr Abramowitz had said he’d rather leave it with him.

  A few times Trudi sat down on the linoleum floor, squeezing her thighs together to stop the urge to pee, but soon she’d be up again, pacing. Although they’d let her keep her coat, she was cold. And hungry. The uncertainty of why she’d been arrested grew until it reeled out of control like the walk of the Heidenreich daughter. The entire war was like that, reeling out of control, and for all she knew, Gerda Heidenreich might be dead, buried in a place where her watch without hands kept proper time.

  Last summer, when a group of Jews had been rounded up outside the taxidermist’s shop, Gerda, who’d been sitting on the front stoop, had been taken away in the truck along with them, despite her father’s cry, “My daughter isn’t Jewish.” From what he’d been able to find out, she’d been brought to a research clinic, supposedly to be studied with other retarded people.

  Herr Heidenreich—who went to every speech, every meeting, every parade—tried to convince his wife that their daughter would be returned to them, healed and mor
e complete than she’d ever been before. His loyalty to the Führer was so absolute that he wouldn’t allow his wife to grieve. “They will find some treatment to help her, some operation or medicine …” he would tell the customers for whom he’d preserve a favorite cat, say, or a wild fox, endowing lifeless bodies with a vitality far more real than in nature.

  At dawn, when light from the single window turned Trudi’s cell deep blue and then gray, she found that the wardrobe was unlocked and empty, except for a plaster statue dressed in white, a plaster thorn embedded in her forehead—St. Rita, married against her will at twelve. Twice a mother, once a widow, she’d kept trying to enter the convent despite rules that only admitted virgins. She was the patron saint of desperate causes. Trudi wondered what St. Rita would do if she were confined in this cell.

  “Forgive me,” she whispered as she climbed into the wardrobe, “but this is a desperate cause.” Pulling up her wool dress, she squatted in the corner opposite the saint and peed, feeling the last warm part of herself gushing from her. “Forgive me,” she said again as she rocked herself on her heels to get rid of the last drip.

  Several times that morning she heard steps in the hallway, voices, and by afternoon she had convinced herself that the officers who’d locked her up had forgotten to let anyone know she was here. She thought of Sister Adelheid. “As long as you keep escaping, they never get you. Even if they think they do” Her stomach ached, and her mouth felt sore. What if her hunger became as terrible as the hunger the priest Adolf had described to her? What if she got to where—after everything else had been taken away, her dignity as well as her possessions—she’d be reduced to the tyranny of her belly?

  She thought of knocking against her door but was afraid of what might happen to her once that door opened. When it finally did, she was glad that the guard was a young woman.

  “Stand up!” Long keys hung on a ring from her belt.

  Trudi scrambled up, her back against the wall.

  “Name?” On her lapel, the woman wore a round button with the Hakenkreuz. Her close-fitting uniform and polished knee-high boots made her look both sexual and dangerous.