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

  In the American camp where her son had stayed—so Frau Braunmeier reported to the taxidermist—prisoners had been forced into hard labor, restoring demolished streets. Every day, two or more of the underfed prisoners had collapsed. Quite a few died. For a while her son was allowed to work in the camp kitchen, but after he was caught eating potato peels from the trash heap, he was assigned to the latrine crew.

  “The Amis acted like each one of our men was Hitler,” Frau Braunmeier whispered to the priest’s housekeeper. “My son says it brought out the worst in them. And to think they believe they’re better than the Germans.”

  Those stories made the people of Burgdorf wary of the American soldiers who lived in their midst, those men who were kind to them on occasion, who let the small children ride on their shoulders. It was evident that the Amis were much tougher with the men, interrogating them and demanding proof that they had not participated in what the Amis called Kriegsverbrechen—war crimes.

  Even men who had not fought were questioned, including Herr Pastor Beier, who was exhausted from trading absolution for dreadful war confessions. Irate at being summoned to the Rathaus— though it was only across the street from the rectory, where his housekeeper was complicating his life enough with glances that made him feel he’d failed her in some significant way—he had to wait nearly an hour before a young American officer, whose knees quite likely had never pressed the hard wood of a church pew, inquired what the priest’s position had been during the war.

  “I lived for my parish.” Hands folded on his raised belly, Herr Pastor Beier recited the statement that he’d worked out more carefully than any sermon. He had written it the morning after the Americans had come to Burgdorf, and he’d since revised it daily. As he told the Ami officer about everything he’d done for his parishioners, his voice shook with conviction as it would in his very best sermons. “I know you people are attacking us because we stayed silent. What good would it have done? Look at all the priests who tried.” He paused dramatically. “They were arrested. Killed in KZs. I chose to be silent because I knew I’d be of greater help to my parish if I could stay here.”

  Though the pastor worried that his reputation might have been sullied by the questioning, he consoled himself after dark by spreading three Brötchen with Leberwurst and starting in on the Graupensuppe—barley soup—that Fräulein Teschner had cooked for the following day. As he ate, he imagined the car the bishop would surely provide for him now that the war was over. A car… the priest thought as he finished the rabbit stew and opened the last jar of canned cherries, a nice car … with blue upholstery if he were given the choice.…

  He dreamed about the car that night, and in his dream the car had soft blue upholstery, new, but the steering wheel was an egg, a huge egg still in its shell, and when he tapped it with the golden cross that his mother used to wear around her neck when he was a boy—carefully, of course, because he didn’t mean to break the shell but simply test how strong it was—it stayed intact while from within its oval shape came the ringing of a single bell. Though the priest didn’t know what to make of that dream, it seemed like a good omen, and he wasn’t at all surprised when he received a letter in the morning, informing him that the bishop was considering his request for transportation.

  Trudi had waited for Max Rudnick when the camps had emptied, thinking that surely now, if he had been imprisoned, he would return to her. And when he didn’t, she tried to accept that he must be dead. But if he were, his flesh would be decaying somewhere beneath the earth, and she couldn’t allow herself to envision him like that. It was less painful to think of him somewhere with Ruth Abramowitz, who had become his lover. He must have found her right away in Dresden, the night before the firebombing, and they’d taken one look at each other and fallen in love, even though Ruth’s front tooth was chipped and Max was blind without his glasses. Maybe his lenses had been broken, and he couldn’t see her chipped tooth. Without his glasses, so he’d told her, everything looked blurry, a merging of colors without distinct outlines. But then a man who could love a Zwerg woman could probably love any woman.…

  With the Abramowitzs’ treasures, which would afford them a rather cozy life, the two had driven in Max’s car to a small hotel in South Germany, where Ruth had once stayed as a child with her parents. She’d always wanted to return there, and as soon as she saw Max, she knew she’d go there with him. By now, the two of them were talking about names for the children they would have.

  Even though Trudi knew that the scenarios she imagined were as predictable and foolish as the plots in the romance novels she lent to her customers, she couldn’t cast off her jealousy. She’d picture the two in their hotel room, or in the apartment they’d found, always making love, always. The windows would be open, wide open, and a warm breeze would billow the lace curtains and nuzzle their nude bodies. Stop it, she’d tell herself, stop it. But instead she’d simply place Max and Ruth somewhere else, north of Dresden, say, in Hamburg or on the island Rügen, where they’d stroll by the water, arm in arm.

  She came to hate Ruth Abramowitz, felt herself capable of killing Max for deceiving her with Ruth. And still, still—she would have forgiven him if he’d returned to her. Now. She kept extending the deadline by which she’d accept him back into her life: at first it was the end of May, then it became the middle of June, and as she passed both dates, as well as the anniversary of her mother’s death, she granted him till July 23, her thirtieth birthday. Even if Max arrived the evening before her birthday, she promised herself, they would not celebrate it one hour before its time. Even if he begged her.

  “Look what happened when we celebrated your birthday early,” she’d tell him, “look what happened to us then. You disappeared and I was afraid you’d never come back.”

  “There’s not a single day I didn’t think about you, Trudi.”

  Her thirtieth birthday would be the glitziest birthday she’d ever had—more spectacular than the fireworks her father had taken her to on her fourth birthday, more dazzling than Pia’s circus coming to town, more festive than the dinner party her father had given for Konrad and his mother the night of their departure. And for Eva, she thought, and for Eva, feeling guilty that she’d even let herself think of her birthday. She was selfish. Selfish and greedy. Eva would never have another birthday. Neither would Ruth’s parents. Or the priest Adolf. If any of them were alive, they would have written or come home by now. And Ruth, she was probably dead too, burned and shattered in Dresden. Along with thousands of others, including Max who, more likely than not, had not found her in the brief time before the city had been decimated.

  That first year after the war was the hardest for the people of Burgdorf. There was little food or coal. Some people froze. Milk still had a bluish sheen and was thinned down so much you could look through it. If you could no longer pay your debts, the Gerichtsvollzieber—bailiff—would enter your home to paste the cuckoo—a sticker indicating a lien—on the back of your furniture. You’d still have some time to pay your debts, but if you couldn’t, the entire neighborhood would watch as your piano, say, or your chest of drawers was carried from your house.

  The shame of it.

  Though nearly everyone was struggling, it hurt your pride if your family went hungry. In the face of such poverty, it became even more important to keep things clean. Poverty like that made you think of the unknown benefactor, whose memory caused you—at your poorest ever—to take up the habit of leaving anonymous gifts on the front steps of those who were more in need than you.

  Yet, even during the leanest of times, the people came to Trudi for her stories, stories she told them about others in their small town that was infected by silence. When they looked down at her, they could feel superior—an attitude most had been infused with since the day of their birth. They could glance at her stunted body, the broad features, and even the most hideous among them could feel superior. Next to Trudi Montag, they could reinvent themselves, could obliterate whatever doubts were
theirs alone at night, and—with a trace of benevolence even—accept her stories as something due them.

  Trudi’s gift lay in knowing. Knowing the words that named the thoughts inside people’s minds, the words that masked the fears and secrets inside their hearts. To force their secrets to the surface like water farts and let them rip through the silence. They called her a snoop, a meddler. But even though she was more inconvenient to them than ever before, they kept coming back—to borrow books, they liked to believe—yet, what they really came for, even those who feared Trudi Montag, were the stories she told them about their neighbors and relatives. What they brought Trudi in return were stories of their own lives, which they yielded to her questions or, unknowingly, to her ears as she overheard them talk to each other between the stacks; and they didn’t even miss what she had taken from them until the words they’d bartered in return for her tales had ripened into new stories that disclosed far more about them than they knew themselves.

  To flip his luck, Georg Weiler played cards two evenings a week. Although Helga protested that he drank too much, he was quick to charm her, asking her if she wasn’t glad her husband was home from the war, unharmed. “What are two measly evenings,” he’d ask, “compared to years of battle?” And he’d lean over the bed where his twin daughters slept side by side and kiss their hair.

  How could Helga possibly stay angry with a man who was a tender father like that? Most fathers she knew, including her own, gave scant attention to their children, especially if they were girls. But Georg would bounce the twins on his knees or let them chase him through the apartment until they’d scream with delight; he’d sing to them so beautifully that Helga would open her windows for the entire town to hear how happy her husband was with his family.

  When Georg lost his job at the farm for coming in late three mornings, Helga was pregnant again, but he managed to find employment within a month, just as he had promised. Though driving a taxi took him away from home more, Helga was glad for him because he looked so proud behind a steering wheel. Besides, the twins adored their father, as did every child in the neighborhood: he was never too tired to squat on the sidewalk and play with them, to show them how to win marbles or spin a top.

  “I told you I’d be driving a car soon,” he called out to Trudi when he dropped off a passenger at the train station, where she stood by the ticket counter with Matthias Berger.

  “And there I thought you were talking about your own car,” she snapped. Shaking her head, she turned to Matthias, who looked at her, startled. “That Georg Weiler …” she said. “When you take away the bragging, he’s just a coward.”

  Matthias was on his way to enter the seminary in Kaiserslautern, even though Trudi had tried to persuade him to stay out and study music instead. Ever since Fräulein Birnsteig’s suicide, he’d spent far more time in St. Martin’s Church than in the pay-library, praying for the soul of the pianist. It was Leo who’d figured out that Matthias had found a new mentor, Herr Pastor Beier, who’d pounced on the boy’s hesitant questions about what it was like to be a priest with such enthusiasm that Matthias had been propelled into applying to the seminary though he was only sixteen.

  “Your talent…” Trudi urged him once again, “it’ll be wasted there.”

  But playing the piano only made him sad. Somehow Trudi felt she’d failed him. If she hadn’t kept him from entering her house during those years of hiding fugitives, he might have stronger ties to Burgdorf. Of his relatives, only a grandmother was left, too frail to see him off at the station. Trudi supposed that she and her father were probably the closest he had to a family. It hadn’t been until after the Americans had arrived that she’d felt safe telling Matthias why she’d had to send him away from her door.

  “One day I saw a boy inside your window,” he’d said. “A small boy.”

  “That must have been Konrad. He and his mother were hiding with us.”

  “He ducked when he saw me.…” He laughed, an embarrassed laugh that made his green eyes go dark. “I remember thinking that you and your father must have found another boy to play the piano for you.”

  “Oh, Matthias.”

  “I was younger then.”

  “It would have endangered you, knowing about them.”

  The sound of the approaching train burst into the station, and the front line of waiting people slanted back from the edge of the platform as if singed by a hot wind.

  Matthias reached for his suitcases.

  “Promise to visit us.”

  “I will. And I’ll write.”

  “You have your ticket?”

  “In my pocket.”

  To keep herself from crying, she tried to make him laugh. “Did you know that I wanted to be a priest when I was a little girl?” She told him about the candles and the Latin chants, the apple crate which had become her altar, and the sacrament—circles of rye.

  “I’m not surprised,” he said. “I’ve always thought you’re one of the most courageous people I know. You do exactly what you want.”

  “But that’s just stubbornness.”

  “To me it’s courage.”

  Although the green Hitler statue had long since been removed by the Americans, people would stare at the spot where it had stood whenever they’d pass the Rathaus, remembering the unknown benefactor who had lost his life there.

  Inside the gates of the cemetery, the town erected a marble monument with three tall columns that listed the names of the soldiers who had died for the Vaterland. Still, on days when the light fell just so and memory offered a brief lull, you could almost convince yourself that the war had never happened. You’d grasp at the good moments and tell yourself all was well, and if you didn’t look too closely for too long, you could deceive yourself, along with all the others who had been broken in some way, altered. And then just when it felt that your life was back to the way it had been, something would happen to remind you of your brokenness: a father might fracture his child’s arm while punishing her; a dog might get run over by a tractor; a young man might choke on a fish bone; an American officer might come to your door.

  As the Americans carried on their investigations, teachers who’d been members of the Partei lost their jobs. There were trials, convictions. Some were prosecuted unjustly, others went free even though they were guilty. Several teachers who feared upcoming interrogations fled overnight with their families, abandoning their homes. One threw himself in front of a train. Others swore they’d only joined the Partei out of fear for their lives or because they’d been forced to in order to enter their profession or be promoted. Their behavior during the war years had been exemplary, they insisted. Once they’d been in the Partei, of course, they’d been afraid not to comply because they would have been sent to a KZ.

  “Undercover freedom fighters,” Klara Brocker’s American would say to her after another day of questioning. And he’d take her down to the cellar where he’d thrust into her on the blankets he’d spread across the cement floor by the potato bin. “Did you know—my German Fräulein—” His narrow face would move above hers, his hair much lighter than his eyebrows. “—that your entire country—was filled—with undercover—freedom fighters?”

  Not only the teachers were investigated. People all over town were afraid of being turned in to the Americans by their neighbors or children, of hearing knocks at their doors and being picked up, of not finding work or losing the jobs they had. It struck Trudi as an ironic and just parallel to what the Jews had suffered for so many years, and she didn’t feel any sympathy when people like Frau Heidenreich and her friends elaborated on their own suffering. Hadn’t they become the real victims? Hadn’t they endured separation within their families? Panic when the bombs had fallen? Many of them lamented the years without their children. While the Jews were treated like royalty, ordinary people like them were still persecuted, questioned about their political beliefs, although they’d had no idea what had really been going on in the KZs till after the war, and then they�
�d been shocked, no—horrified.

  It became a scramble to get letters of recommendation from those who had not joined the Partei, people who had resisted the Nazis, though at the time it had seemed to everyone else like foolishness. But now it was good to know people like that, better yet if they owed you a favor.

  The pay-library had never been so busy. People tugged at Trudi and her father, begging them to write letters that would testify to their impeccable character and prove they’d always opposed the Partei. And as they brought tales that proclaimed their innocence, tales they hoped Trudi would distribute, she felt used: as a storyteller, she knew the border between truth and lies, and she would circulate their tales with introductions like “This is what he would like people to believe.…” And then she’d speculate about what had really happened. If it was within her conscience, she wrote the letters, but she refused to back up versions of a fabricated truth, especially if they were connected to gifts. In those months after the war, she had more enemies and friends than ever before.

  Frau Blau was less selective than Trudi about the letters she wrote. “If we can help each other,” she’d say, “we may as well. Times are difficult enough.”

  Two Protestant families in Burgdorf, who, it turned out, had also hidden Jews, felt more like Trudi and refused to whitewash anyone who had sympathized with the Nazis. One family lived next to the taxidermist. When he asked these neighbors to vouch for him in a letter, they turned him away.

  “I can’t,” Trudi told him when he came to her.

  “You hid Jews. I never turned you in.”

  “You didn’t even know I had people here.”

  “I knew. I saw them … coming late at night. Leaving with Herr Hesping. But—I didn’t want trouble for you and your father.”