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

  As Thekla hastens toward her parents’ house, her shoes squeak on the snow. Tuesday lunch is always rushed because of the faculty meeting. There is a thickness to the light, and on the front steps of the pay-library, the Montags’ dog is sleeping, his fur pale gray except for his head, a mask of dark gray.

  She feels someone watching her. Helmut Eberhardt. Standing in the doorway of the grocery store. At thirteen, he is already taller than the teacher. Not a single crease in his uniform. He joined the Hitler-Jugend last year, right after the Führer announced on the radio that he wanted to double the membership. When Helmut was an altar boy, Frau Brocker liked to say she just knew that he would become a priest, that he was an angel come to earth, so handsome, so helpful.

  “Heil Hitler,” Frau Brocker’s angel says to Thekla and raises his arm. Long sleeves, but most people know about the scar beneath the brown fabric.

  The teacher has seen the scar only once, after he competed in a Langstreckenlauf—long-distance run and raised his trophy, exposing the scarred length of silvery skin.

  “Heil Hitler,” she responds.

  At the Abramowitzes’ house across the street, the shutters are closed, the window boxes empty. Come summer, they’ll be filled with purple geraniums and snapdragons. She wonders if Frau Abramowitz still reads those trashy novels from the pay-library. As a child Thekla could feel that current—from Frau Abramowitz, not from Herr Montag—and now she suspects it has less to do with the books than with the man who lends the books.

  If he were to sell shoes, say, or bread, Frau Abramowitz and many other women in Burgdorf would be there, buying, just to be near him. In these women, he fosters a certain longing that evokes memories of other longings, the cool length of a thigh, say, or the sweet exhalation just after a kiss. When they come to his pay-library, he’ll recommend books just right for them, that day, that hour. They’ll touch his sleeve or pat his hand for as long as it’s still proper, tell him what a good father he is to the daughter who caused his wife to lean across the edge of sanity. Granted, that edge was frail before, but Gertrud Montag managed to step back from it until she gave birth to the girl with a large head and short limbs. Such heartache for one man, the women will say. A widower since the dwarf girl was four. His son stillborn. His wife dead soon after. One carved cross with a little roof on their grave.

  The women of Burgdorf don’t worry that Leo will take advantage of their longing. He respects that the longing is theirs alone, protects himself from its burden with that very respect. But he does it with such kindness that women don’t feel spurned and men can’t possibly feel jealous; it’s rather that the men learn from Leo and approach their women with puzzled courtesy.

  *

  “May I carry your satchel?” Helmut asks Fräulein Jansen. Always polite. The manners of a man. The urgency of a man.

  She’s used to that. “Thank you,” she says.

  Helmut shoulders her satchel, proud to be seen with her. As they set off, he squints at the mezuzah that hangs by the Abramowitzes’ door. Thekla feels a flicker of caution. It could be a trap. Why provoke the rough elements of the party? If the Führer were to ask her counsel—not that he would, but if—she’d tell him he’s achieved so much, he can let down on this heat against the Jews. Once he acknowledged to himself the value of the employment he’d created, she’d get him to focus on that, and it would only follow that he’d want to give up those crazy ideas about Jews. Not that she would use the word crazy. She’d be tactful.

  To distract Helmut from the mezuzah, she touches his shoulder. “Has your arm been healing?”

  He blushes hard. “I don’t feel it anymore.”

  He and several other boys in the Hitler-Jugend chafed their arms raw with a pillowcase they knotted, hard, and rubbed up and down their arms till they were bleeding. While their mothers were mortified by their violence toward their bodies, Thekla understood that this was what boys did. They competed to prove their men-courage in boy-ways; tested their bodies’ resilience to pain; and yet, they were childish in what they used, not weapons or stones but a pillowcase from home, warning off communists, wanting their courage noticed. Boys. She knows them better than their parents know them.

  Chapter 24

  WHEN THEKLA ENTERS her parents’ kitchen, Vati sits by the stove and Mutti has lunch ready from what she cooked at the Abramowitzes’ today, goulash and potatoes in two covered pots that she lifts from the pail.

  Outside on the washline, frost has stiffened the laundry, and Vati’s white shirt moves as one solid piece in the wind, the sleeves no longer flapping, no longer promising movement. If only she could shake it till his soul flew out and slipped back into his body.

  “Vati? Are you hungry?”

  Food is one of the few pleasures left to him, and she coaxes him until he blinks as if surfacing. His eyes fasten on Mutti, suddenly lucid, as she arranges the potatoes and meat on the platter she used for serving pigeons, a small center with a large rim to make the birds seem bigger.

  But all the pigeons have been eaten or are with Elmar now.

  Last summer he borrowed the potato truck from his employer, lured the pigeons into cages, and transferred them to Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse, where he built a coop in the alley between his bedroom and the neighbor’s house, so that he could watch the pigeons from his bed. But they kept flying back to their old coop until Mutti trained them to return to Elmar by refusing them food and water. She’d flap a tablecloth to chase them away, and when they’d arrive at Elmar’s coop—with that indignant expression only pigeons have—he’d feed and water them, fuss over them.

  *

  As always, Mutti gets Vati started with lunch. “I’ve left a surprise in your room,” she tells Thekla, who’s eating quickly.

  “I have to get back to work. Those faculty meetings don’t leave me enough time to eat.”

  “At least look,” Mutti says when they’ve cleared their plates, though Vati is still chewing, slowly. He’s tidy when it comes to food.

  “You’ll be glad.” Mutti stands up. “Come.”

  In Thekla’s old room blossoms of mold—a thousand nuances of gray with amber and purple and white and green and red—have formed a fuzzy border beneath the frieze of Noah and his ark, a continuous band of the ark and Noah’s wife and children and the animals—in pairs—walking up a plank to the ark; and then the ark again and the same long queue waiting to be saved. She still likes the gray more than the queue of animals, because it keeps changing in size and shape and color although, periodically, her mother scrubs it off.

  On Thekla’s bed is a small package, wrapped in the old flag, black, red, and gold.

  “We’re not supposed to keep that flag,” Thekla says quickly.

  “You know I don’t waste things,” her mother says. “Besides, I’m keeping it for when it comes back.”

  “It’s not wise to tell people that.”

  “I’m telling you. Not people.”

  Thekla hesitates. Aesthetically the old flag is warmer, more pleasing than the new flag.

  “What is it?” Mutti asks.

  “The Abramowitzes’ mezuzah—”

  “Yes?”

  “It would be safer to take it inside.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Just for now.”

  “I’ll mention it to them.”

  “I must get back to school.”

  “Open your present, Thekla.”

  “Can we do it tomorrow?”

  Mutti nods.

  In the kitchen, Vati is eating alone. Sundays they sit with him till he’s finished, but weekdays she and Mutti rush back to work while he finishes for himself.

  Thekla touches his sleeve. “I’ll be back soon.”

  He moves his dry lips around what may become words, images, tunnels, deeper yet—But already the passage is slamming shut.

  Because I don’t love you enough?

  1908

  Chapter 25

  THE AUGUST OF 1908, when Wilhelm Jansen took
his young family to the Nordstrand peninsula as every summer, Thekla felt shy being away from home. While the little boys would scramble against their Oma, who smelled like a kitten, breath of milk, Thekla leaned into her father, who instinctively curved one arm around her.

  He let her come along to the barn to get the cot and set it up between the two beds in his mother’s room. Every summer his mother insisted he and his family sleep in her room while she moved into the narrow bedroom that used to be his. Every visit Wilhelm objected, though it pleased him that she’d want him to have the big room with the two beds.

  When the little boys awoke before dawn, they climbed from the bed and across the cot where their sister was still asleep. In the other bed, their parents were spooning, Mutti’s lips against one wing of Vati’s shoulders, just as they slept in their bed at home.

  *

  Holding hands, the two boys searched for their Oma. In the kitchen, she was wrapping herself into a large shawl, and there was a blue dress beneath, bare feet.

  She was undone by her hunger to caress Elmar and Dietrich, but she hesitated because touch would surely unleash the longing that felled her every summer after they left. Already, she had lost too many children. She had made a terrible mistake when she’d urged Wilhelm and Almut to leave Nordstrand, to get away from the gossip. It was only after they’d left that she realized how she must have hoped that they’d stay near her, that they’d be moved by her selfless gesture, that they’d remind her how she had withstood worse gossip. Yes, there were visits—Burgdorf at Christmas; Nordstrand in August—but they were not nearly enough for Lotte.

  “Go back to bed,” she said to her grandsons.

  But already, and against all caution, she was enfolding them in her shawl, carrying them up the dike behind the house and down on the sea side, toward the moon. They curved themselves against her like any small mammals sharing warmth and breath—hers and each other’s indistinguishable, warmth and breath and touch—and she wept silently because her arms were plenty to hold them both.

  *

  The little boys felt snug with their Oma in the dawn that was still almost black, but not all black, rather the kind of black that’s tinged with blue when you know the blue will win; and the only bright light was that of the full moon till the shadow of earth began to slide across the moon, blackening it, and their Oma said it was an eclipse and showed them to watch for the sun rising on their other side, opposite of the black moon, and the boys watched hard, though the sun wasn’t there yet, only the sky spreading rose-red flashes beyond the horizon, wide and muted flashes; suddenly, then, a tiny white flare, igniting into a red pinpoint, red and then the size of an apple, growing fast and becoming sun, rising from the sea into a half circle, a three-quarter circle above the edge of water and sky.

  “Elmar,” she said, “Dietrich,” tasting the sounds of their names as the sun separated from the sea.

  From his Oma’s arms, Dietrich could see the path that came from the sun across the water and lay on the tidal flats, golden, and he knew he wanted to live here. Become a priest. Or maybe a monkey trainer at the Zirkus. He slipped his fingers into his pocket. Curled them around the carved monkey the man from the Zirkus had given him when he’d come to the farm to eat with them.

  “When is the Zirkus?” Dietrich asked, and when Oma said she had free tickets for tomorrow afternoon, he felt aglow with anticipation of real monkeys and tightrope walkers and clowns.

  Oma pointed to the path on the water. It was as wide as the sun climbing into the sky. “Next summer,” she said, “that path will be here for you again.”

  *

  Wilhelm Jansen was proud of his daughter—how articulate she was, how polite—and he liked being a father, liked being seen walking with his daughter to the bakery to buy Brötchen—rolls for his entire family: his wife and his children and his mother. Before his sons were born, he’d fretted he might love Thekla less once he had children of his own; but that hadn’t happened because it was from her, after all, that he had learned how to be a father, and his love for her continued though she had the best of everything while her brothers were poor. With three children, Wilhelm had less for each, but it was important to him to provide for them equally, and to have Thekla understand that, although the lawyer Abramowitz gave her far more.

  Inside the bakery, smells of marzipan and yeast. Thekla pulled him to the glass display: Florentines, and chocolate tarts, and his wife’s favorite, Bienenstich—bee sting, those layers of cake and custard and glazed almonds.

  “Let’s get Bienenstich for this afternoon,” he said casually, as if this were something he did every Sunday for his family.

  That bliss in his daughter’s face. She drew in her lower lip as if already tasting it.

  “It’ll be a surprise from you and me.” Already he could imagine other Sundays like this. From now on he’d be returning for more frequent visits to Nordstrand.

  Whispering . . . the baker and one of the customers.

  Thekla could make out the word Kuckuck—cuckoo. If you forgot to close your window, Kuckucks stole shiny things from your windowsill, wedding rings or baby spoons. In school she’d learned a song about the Kuckuck in the forest. She sang, “Kuckuck, Kuckuck ruft’s aus dem Wald—”

  But Vati’s hand closed around her wrist, and he pulled her from the bakery.

  Without buying Bienenstich? Oh—

  “Don’t listen to them.” Breath high in Vati’s voice.

  To keep his voice from flying away?

  “You are mine!” Breath higher yet in Vati’s voice. “Just like your brothers.”

  Tuesday, February 27, 1934

  Chapter 26

  INSIDE ECKART’S LEFT EAR, the wad of cotton is cold, unyielding, but all around it, he feels the pain, hot and puffy, trying to shove out the cotton.

  “Watch your step, Eckart,” his teacher calls.

  Franz and Andreas imitate his stumbling, hop around, nudge each other.

  “Look at me, Fräulein.”

  “Look at me!”

  “Watch your step, Eckart,” they shout in their teacher’s voice. And giggle.

  The boys have been antsy ever since they came in from lunch and she told them to keep their coats buttoned to the collar, to wear their hats and their mittens, because she was taking them on a field trip. Impatient to start out, they didn’t like waiting for Bruno.

  Maybe Bruno is still feeling sick, the teacher thinks as they head up Römer Strasse and pass St. Martin’s. Maybe Gisela is taking him right now to Frau Doktor Rosen.

  *

  By the Rathaus, Wolfgang points to a huge nest, twigs and dry leaves, propped in the highest fork of the chestnut tree.

  “What kind of bird?” Richard asks.

  “Squirrels,” Wolfgang says. “I saw two of them build it last fall. One was arranging the nest. The other climbed higher and tore off a small branch. Then it hung upside down and gave the branch to the other squirrel, who added it to the nest.”

  “I’ve seen that,” Richard says.

  “We have a stuffed squirrel in our living room,” Andreas says.

  As they pass the slaughterhouse, some of the students mimic the squealing of hogs. The farm boys in Fräulein Jansen’s class have seen plenty of animals die, but the boys from educated families try not to think about what goes on inside the slaughterhouse, yet they can’t keep from picturing how those hogs and cows are killed—not killed right away but stunned first, hammer blows to their heads before their throats are slit. But they don’t know that for sure. They could ask Walter, whose father works in the slaughterhouse, and in whose family that job is ordinary, talked about at the dinner table; but they don’t dare ask and let real pictures of slaughter into their heads because those may be bloodier than what already haunts the boys’ imagination.

  They can’t admit this, of course, and so they swagger and laugh, alongside the farm boys, who feel invincible as they make the brainy boys squirm.

  “In there, they kill th
em in two seconds.”

  “They make the animals stand in a gutter—”

  “So the blood runs from there into a vat.”

  “For Blutwurst—blood sausage.”

  “Moo . . .”

  “And the animals stomp around to make the Wurst—”

  “Until they fall over . . . .”

  *

  On the river side of the dike, clumps of winter-dry grasses sway in the breeze. Fallen branches lie bleached from sun and rain. The boys find gnawed bones in a crevice of roots, a blackened fire pit that someone has built from stones. As they hunker and observe, they feel the learning seep into their bodies like breath, almost, or like soul, a shape they can’t describe but know is there, just as they know from their teacher that learning lives inside them with all they have learned before, ready to connect to more learning. During the cold weeks to come, inside their classroom, they’ll reach for those experiences, deepen them, remind one another of all they know about the world that surrounds them.

  When they identify bare trees according to bark and formation of branches, Franz says, “They’re all alike in winter.”

  “Not if you know what to check for,” Wolfgang says.

  Franz kicks at a punky branch, and it flies into dust.

  “Franz,” their teacher says, “has swallow nests in his barn.” She motions to the swallows that flit in high arcs above, then dip against the surface of the river. “Maybe he’ll tell us how they get their food.”

  “They screech and open their beaks,” Franz says, “as soon as their parents bring them mosquitoes or flies, and every spring our nests are full of young ones.”

  “Will you show us in the spring?” she asks.

  He nods eagerly.

  “We’ll make an excursion to your barn,” she says.

  And that’s when Franz remembers what he learned about bark at the Sternburg farm, which used to be a fortress. By the moat, she chose a birch, an oak, a chestnut, and a poplar. Assigned several boys to each tree. Showed them how to press paper against a section of bark and, pencil at an angle, rub the lead across the paper till the pattern of the bark stood out. Then the work in the classroom: sketching the details of the bark, writing an essay to describe the bark. His project was the best. Franz could tell by the way his teacher nodded when he showed it to her.