Stones From the River (2 page)

By then Trudi had come up against that moment when she knew that praying for something did not make it happen, that this was it: that there was no God-magic; that she was as tall as she would ever be; that she would die some day; and that anything that would happen to her until that day of her death would be up to her to resolve. She knew all this with a stunning clarity that chilled her to the core that April Sunday in 1929 in the Braunmeiers’ barn, when the circle of boys closed around her—those boys who spread her legs, who spread her soul until it felt as if that dried snot on her face would always be there, tightening her skin like spilled egg whites—and she
saw herself as a very old woman and, simultaneously, as an infant, as if her past and future were at opposite ends of a taut rubber band that someone had let go of for just an instant, causing her entire life—every minute she had lived and would live—to coil in on itself and touch where she was that moment in the barn, and she knew that she’d be able to see that way again: she watched herself pull her mother from the earth nest beneath the house; dismantle a section of the stone wall in the cellar and dig a secret dirt tunnel to the Blaus’ house; stroke her lover’s back with both hands, and feel the fine oval of hairs at the base of his spine as the night sky swirled around them; recoil from the heat of the flames that spurted from the broken windows of the synagogue and showered the school and the Theresienheim with sparks the color of the fabric star,
Judenstern
, that her friend, Eva Rosen, would have to wear on her coat.

For months after Trudi Montag’s birth, her mother wouldn’t touch her at all. From snatches of gossip the girl would later conjecture that her mother had taken one glance at her and had covered her face as if to shut out the image of the infant’s short limbs and slightly enlarged head. It didn’t help that Frau Weiler, upon peering into the wicker carriage, had inquired:
“Hat das Kind denn einen Wasserkopf?”—
“Does the child have water on the brain?”

Trudi’s eyes seemed older than those of other infants, as if they held the experiences of someone who’d already lived a long time. The women in the neighborhood took turns keeping her alive and clean. They were the ones who brushed her silver-blond hair into one wispy curl on top of her head and secured it with a dab of pine honey, who boiled goat’s milk and fed it to her in a bottle, who whispered as they compared her shape to that of their own children, who sat next to the bed of Trudi’s mother and guarded her restless sleep whenever she was carried home after running away from her house on Schreberstrasse.

It was the summer of 1915, and the town belonged to the women. With their husbands fighting on the Eastern front for the past year, they had relearned to open even the most difficult snaps on their salmon-colored corsets; they had become accustomed to making decisions—like which repairs to do themselves and which to leave until after the war; they continued to sweep their sidewalks and to remind their children to practice the piano; they persuaded Herr Pastor
Schüler to invite an old chess champion from Köln to give their children lessons for one entire week after school; they banned the trick images of their husbands’ faces below the earth when they watered the plants on their families’ graves. At times, when they forgot their hunger and their revulsion to turnips, which had become their major nourishment, it seemed odd that, all around them, a celebration of life persisted as if there were no war: the blossoms of the cherry and apple trees, the singing of the birds, the laughter of their children.

In this small town that was encumbered by centuries of tradition, women without husbands did not fit in: they were objects of pity or gossip. But the war changed all that. Without men, the barriers between the married and unmarried woman blurred: suddenly they were more alike than different. No longer did respect come to them because of their husbands’ positions, but because of their own abilities.

It was something the old widows had figured out long ago. They were the ones who truly governed the town but were wise enough to keep this a secret. They defined the boundaries of the community with an invisible chain of their linked hands as they filtered their advice to their children and told ancient fairy tales to their grandchildren as if they’d never been told before.

They felt suspicious of the few men who had stayed in Burgdorf and they gossiped about them—like Emil Hesping, a skilled athlete, who managed the gymnasts’ club and claimed to be unfit for military service because of weak lungs, and Herbert Braunmeier, who insisted that no one else could possibly take care of his dairy farm. Selfish, the old women said, but they coddled those men who’d been wounded in the war, like Leo Montag, the first soldier to return; they knitted woolen vests for him and brought him canned plums from their meager reserves to make up for his injury.

Two months after the battle of Tannenberg, in October 1914, Leo Montag had limped into Burgdorf, a steel disk in place of his left kneecap, wearing a long seal coat that used to belong to one of the Russian prisoners. It was on that silver-gray fur coat—spread on the floor between the shelves of the hastily closed pay-library—that Trudi Montag was conceived the afternoon of her father’s arrival. He had only been away from home for a few months, but he clung to his wife as though he’d been gone for years. Gertrud’s face, which often looked feverish when she got excited, was almost transparent in its
loveliness, and she laughed and cried as she held him. People in Burgdorf said about her that she absorbed the joys and pains of others as if they were her own.

It wasn’t like her, most agreed, to refuse her child. And it wasn’t like her to run away from home. But a few would claim to have sensed that seed of craziness in Gertrud long before it flourished: they spoke of that summer when she was four and had stopped talking for an entire year, and they reminded each other of her first communion, when she’d refused to open her lips to receive the sacred host, making the other children wait at the altar railing until the pastor had finally agreed to absolve her from sins that had attached themselves to her in the hours since her last confession.

It was three days after Trudi’s birth that Gertrud Montag fled from her bedroom and from the cries of the infant that caused her breasts to sting with unspilled milk. Blood from her hollowed womb had blossomed through the front of her batiste nightgown by the time Herr Pastor Schüler found her behind St. Martin’s Church, her arms spread across the door of the sacristy as if to keep him from entering. Without thinking, he crossed himself as though compelled to imitate the contour of her body. While he tried to loosen her hands from the door and pull her into the sacristy to protect her shame, one of the altar boys ran to summon Trudi’s father, who quickly hobbled the two blocks from the pay-library, where the people of Burgdorf continued to borrow those trashy romances and detective novels that Herr Pastor Schüler preached against in his Sunday sermons.

Leo Montag carried his wife home, wrapped in one of the altar cloths. Her blood seeped into the ancient lace, and although the pastor’s housekeeper would soak the cloth in salt water, the stains would merely fade into rose-colored clouds. Soon Gertrud was back at the sacristy door—properly dressed—was the priest’s first thought when he discovered her in her wool dress and her husband’s gray cardigan, even though the air was moist and much hotter than he liked it. Already he felt the itch of his sweat on his chest and beneath his private parts, a sweat he detested yet was unable to restrain with anything except medicated foot powder that left bone-colored rings on his garments and a chalky trace of dust on the tops of his shoes.

The pastor—whose round face made you expect a heavy person when you initially met him—stood at a safe distance from Gertrud Montag, his slight body bent toward her. Pigeons picked at the
ground around his feet and scattered when he reached into his pocket to disentangle his handkerchief from his rosary. He blotted his neck.

“Why are you here?” he inquired.

She raised her eyes to trace the path of a white stork that glided on lazy wings across the open market and headed for the roof of the
Rathaus
—town hall—its long amber legs trailing across the clay tiles before it landed next to the chimney. From the open windows of the bakery, a block away, drifted the yeast scent of warm bread. Two dachshunds yipped at the hooves of the ragman’s horse.

“Why are you here?” the pastor asked again.

But she wouldn’t reply, this tall woman with the blazing eyes that seared right through him, and because he didn’t know what else to do and liked to consider himself a merciful man, the Herr Pastor blessed Gertrud Montag, much in the same way he would administer last rites. And when that didn’t have any impact, he informed her that he absolved her from all her sins because, after all, that had appeased her once before, on the day of her first communion. While he kept peering over his shoulder, anxious for her kind and bewildered husband to appear, he even—without knowing—forgave her the one sin she would never forgive herself.

Long after her breasts had stopped leaking milk, Gertrud Montag kept running away from home, but she did not always hide behind the church. Sometimes she’d settle herself in the lilac hedge in back of the Eberhardts’ house. Renate Eberhardt had the lushest garden in town: snapdragons, roses, geraniums, and daisies grew abundantly, huge splotches of color—not orderly as in most of the other gardens—and a magnificent pear tree produced golden-yellow fruits. She’d let Gertrud pick a bouquet of her flowers before leading her home, and she’d stay and settle her in bed, her cool fingers on Gertrud’s flushed forehead. Renate’s slender neck seemed too long to carry the heavy braids that she wore pinned around her head.

Gertrud’s favorite hiding place was beneath the elevated section of her house which was set against a slight hill, level with the street in front where the entrance to the pay-library was, and raised in back on old pillars of wood and gray boulders. Near the opening hung the rack where Leo kept his bamboo rake and garden shovels. Beyond was a place where black bugs with hard-shelled bodies fused with the darkness, and lacy spider webs swung from rafters, rocked by a wind
too distant for any human to feel. Leo would have to crawl in after his wife and drag her out, while she’d sing church hymns and dig her bare heels into the earth, leaving gouges in the ground. Afterwards, the muscles in her calves would be so tight that he’d have to massage them for her.

At times he wouldn’t find her at all though he’d lock the library, where she used to work with him before Trudi’s birth, and ride his bicycle—his right leg pedaling, the injured one extended—through the streets surrounding the church, and from there all over town, down Romerstrasse, around the fairgrounds, up Barbarossa Strasse and toward the Rhein where, in the broad meadow between the dike and river, he and Gertrud used to fly kites as schoolchildren.

Occasionally he’d come upon her, but usually she’d return on her own, her black hair snarled and smelling of the river, say, or of the wheat fields that surrounded their town. He’d take his comb from his shirt pocket and hold her gently with one arm, while pulling the teeth of the comb through the tangles. One Sunday he dug out a young chestnut tree from the woods near the flour mill and presented it to Gertrud as a gift, telling her—while he helped her plant it in front of the pay-library—that this tree would keep her home. But the following morning she was gone again, and two nuns brought her back.

To tire her, Leo decided to take her on longer walks than their daily
Spaziergänge
when he closed the pay-library at noon, but she’d rush ahead of him while he’d struggle with the double burden of his stiff leg and the baby carriage. He gathered clumps of camomile and, from the blossoms, brewed tea which he hoped would calm her—this woman he’d known since they both were children, this woman who was one day older than he. He’d always liked it that they were the same age, even if that was unusual for married couples. Most husbands he knew were quite a few years older than their wives, and he couldn’t imagine being married to someone he hadn’t grown up with.

At night, he’d try to wrap his limbs around Gertrud to keep her safe, but she’d laugh in his arms, an odd, wild laugh that made his groin numb with coldness, and though she’d fit the skin of her body against his length, his genitals shrank from her and he could only hold her like a sister.

Before their daughter’s birth, Gertrud had gone about her work in the house and pay-library joyfully, but now she moved abruptly and loudly. She’d forget what she had come to buy when she did the marketing,
and she’d spill ashes when she’d clean out the kitchen stove or the green tile stove that was set into the wall between the living room and dining room.

One early morning in September, when Leo woke before her and watched her tranquil face, she looked just as she used to, and he felt convinced that she would return to her old ways, that she was ready to be a mother to their child. Pulling back the weightless feather comforter, he got up and dressed in his good suit though it was a weekday. He fetched his daughter from Frau Abramowitz across the street where she’d stayed—the night before it had been with Frau Blau next door—but instead of settling her in the crib inside the nursery, out of her mother’s sight as usual, he sat with her on Gertrud’s edge of the bed.

Trudi was the first infant he’d held, and to him she didn’t seem any different from the infants he’d glanced at over the years from a cautious distance. As he peered into her sage eyes, he marveled that, between him and his wife, two long and angular people, the child was like a pebble—round and solid. She had his light coloring, his strong chin and high forehead. Her tongue nudged at her upper lip as if trying to grasp some nourishment, forming a tiny, luminous bubble of spit. He let her suck on his little finger, amazed at the fierce tug of her tongue and gums. Lace curtains billowed in the open window, and in the morning light, the smooth brown woodwork glowed the color of honey. When he felt the high curve of Trudi’s palate against his fingernail, he gently turned his finger sideways so as not to scratch her.