Stones From the River (23 page)

Quickly, she lowered herself beneath the water and swam toward the end of the jetty. Holding on to the rocks to keep from being sucked into the current, she pulled herself out to where she could see: there were four of them—Georg, Hans-Jürgen, Fritz Hansen, and Paul Weinhart—absorbed in a competition of making water farts. Each artillery of bubbles was greeted with hoots and laughter. They were showing off for each other, taking loud gulps of air and holding
their breaths as they tried to force the air through their intestines. When the bubbles broke through the surface, they leapt back in mock horror.

With an odd mix of fear and excitement, Trudi saw them the way they would never let any girl or adult see them, and she knew that by watching them without their knowledge she was taking something from them, something they’d never yield willingly to her. Those were the secrets she liked best—the ones that were stolen, the ones that made her tongue go light in her mouth at the thought of being caught, like that day in the bakery when Herr Hansen had sold
Brötchen
to Frau Buttgereit while hissing at her to keep her husband in her own bed; or that evening when she’d watched from the kitchen window as Frau Blau buried a small bundle next to her back steps; or that afternoon Frau Abramowitz had pressed her breasts against the arm of Trudi’s father when she’d asked him to get a book for her from one of the upper shelves in the library.

Only Trudi’s eyes and forehead were above water as she spied on the boys; she would raise her face long enough to take a deep breath, then submerge herself again. Seehund had settled down, and she was glad that the bushes protected him from being seen by the boys.

When Georg clambered into the willow, took off his swim trunk and draped it across a branch, she closed her eyes for a moment, not from embarrassment, but rather from compassion that—in his efforts to be like the other boys—he went further than they would have. The boys screamed with laughter and applauded. Georg grinned and waved both arms at them. Without his clothes he looked thin, defenseless, endangered even. His hair was trimmed so short you could see the bones of his skull.

Paul Weinhart cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. “There’s a naked boy here …”

Startled, Georg dropped his hands and covered his private parts.

Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier whistled.

“… and his name is Georg Weiler,” Paul continued.

“Shut your mouth!” Georg grabbed the braided rope and swung himself into the river. He dropped near Paul and started splashing him.

“A naked boy …” Fritz and Hans-Jürgen howled.

Georg tried to get out of the river and back to his swimsuit, which dangled high on that branch, but the other three blocked his way,
their arms like wings of a windmill, flinging gauzy sheets of water at him.

“Let me out!”

As Trudi heard the tears behind his voice, those images of Georg leaping naked into the river tumbled into a story, and she felt a familiar power building in her—the power that came from her choice to tell or not to tell this story. And she felt something else that she knew well—a connection as potent as love or hate to everyone whose story entered her and began to ripen into something that belonged to her.

Georg retreated from the boys toward the open river. Kicking water with his feet, he swam on his back toward the end of the jetty, as though he’d decided to get out on the other side of it. As the three boys took up the chase, Trudi ducked between the rocks, hoping Georg would stop or that the others would catch him before he’d see her.

But he bumped right into her. Alarmed, he swung around, stared at her, and as she stared back into his sand-colored eyes, she was aware of his father who’d drowned in these waters that surrounded their bodies. Georg shivered as though he’d just had the same thought, and it seemed almost possible to her that they could both preserve the silence of their encounter and turn away from one another as if it had never happened.

But the other boys swam up behind him.

“That’s why Georg took his pants off.”

“Georg loves Trudi.”

“Shut your trap!” Fists up, Georg threw himself against the other boys.

“Georg loves the
Zwerg”
.

She pushed herself away from the rocks and beneath the water, darting away from them. A frog. She was a frog. But her legs were mere hindrances, and her arms felt too short to move the masses of water that pressed against her. A hand caught her right ankle and yanked her up. Hans-Jürgen.

She coughed and spit water. “Let go.”

Seehund ran along the bank, barking, but as soon as his paws touched that damp line where the river darkened the sand, he leapt back, yelped, and advanced again as if fighting with himself to overcome his ancient fear of water.

Fritz Hansen grabbed Trudi by a strap of her swimsuit.

“Let go,” she hissed, surprised when the boys dropped their hands from her. As she tried to touch bottom with her feet, the river was too deep, and she felt it again—that strange foreboding she’d ignored on her way to the river, that leaf-brown whisper of the dike, the column of mist.…

The back of his bottom chalk white, Georg was scrambling up the tree for his swimsuit while the other boys fanned around Trudi, their arms and legs stirring the water to keep themselves suspended. Their faces floated at the same level with hers, and it felt odd to see straight into their eyes instead of having to look up.

“What are you doing here?” Fritz demanded.

“Swimming. Like you.”

“You were spying on us,” Hans-Jürgen said.

“I was not.” She felt furious at them. For finding her. For ruining her place. “I was here first.”

Seehund’s bark was at a high pitch. He was racing up and down the beach, his paws kicking up sand whenever he turned. Paul Weinhart dove and came up with a flat rock, which he flung at the dog. Seehund howled.

Trudi pushed Paul’s shoulder. “Leave him alone.”

“You make him shut up then.”

“Down,” she cried. “Down, Seehund.”

The dog stopped. Body quivering, he lowered his hind legs halfway as if ready to leap up again.

“Down, Seehund.”

He whimpered and lay down.

“Georg,” Paul yelled. “Trudi says she wants you to take your pants off again.”

“Liar,” she cried.

His back to the river, Georg struggled into his shirt, his pants and shoes.

“She wants all of us to take our pants off,” Hans-Jürgen declared.

Paul and Fritz laughed, high nervous laughs, as they grabbed Trudi’s arms and dragged her toward the beach. Gathering gray and brown pebbles in the shallow water, Hans-Jürgen pelted Seehund as he charged toward them.

“Go home, Seehund,” Trudi shouted. “Down—Home—”

But Seehund anchored his teeth in Fritz Hansen’s calf. The boys let go of Trudi and fell upon the dog with fists and rocks.

“Stop it,” she screamed, “stop,” and heard Georg’s voice too, “Don’t hurt him.”

Seehund kept fighting, but each time he was kicked or hit, his attempts became weaker.

“Go home,” she shouted, tears in her mouth. She wished he’d run from those feet that kicked him away from her, but he kept yelping, coming back, until Paul hurled a sharp rock at him and Seehund fell over and lay still. When he tried to get up, his hind legs wouldn’t straighten. Whimpering, he dragged himself toward Trudi, the whites of his eyes showing.

“Let her go.” The skin around Georg’s mouth was taut.

“So the
Zwerg
is all yours?” Fritz grinned.

“Don’t be stupid.” A slow, red burn stained Georg’s neck and rose to his face.

Paul’s hand shot out and pinched Trudi’s breast.

She cried out.

“Your turn,” he challenged Georg.

Georg’s face stiffened. His eyes were right on Trudi, glassy and frightened, without seeing her. He tried to laugh. “Who wants her?”

Although he looked as though he were about to run, he stayed with his friends, even when they dragged Trudi across the meadow and the dike. She screamed, trying to wrest her arms—those useless arms that were solid but not strong—from the boys, and once she broke away, embarrassed that her legs, those
Zwerg
legs, were moving in the old sideways waddle that she’d tried to unlearn. Feeling the pulse of hate in her temples, she ran from them, faster than she’d known she could run, until Fritz tripped her. Seehund stayed further and further behind. Soon she could no longer see him. Her bare feet and legs got scratched, and she didn’t know if she felt more horrified at the prospect of being rescued by others who’d see her body half naked in her swim suit, or at not being rescued before the boys got her to the Braunmeiers’ barn—because that’s where she realized they were heading. When she kept screaming, one of the hands—she couldn’t even tell who it belonged to—clamped across her mouth while she was tugged and pushed around the back of the barn and into the side door that faced away from the farmhouse.

Slow patterns of muted light and shadows wove through the dust motes, and the highest rafters were hazy, enveloped by a viscous layer of air. Two metal pails were propped upside down on a table to dry.
She hadn’t been in the barn since that day Hans-Jürgen had killed the kitten, and that vast, lofty space still reminded her of a church. At the same time there was the scent of the cows, a forever kind of warm scent that, somehow, made what happened so much worse, and what happened was warm and in some ways cold—the cold of the huge space, the warmth of cowering in one small space that was ablaze with the heat of her fear and the heat of their breaths and the heat of the cows, though nothing, nothing could touch that ice-cold space deep inside her, the space they couldn’t reach, the space that could freeze them to death because she finally knew that praying would not make her grow, knew that the
Zwerg
had closed around who she really was, knew herself in a deep and distant way as she was and had been and would be, while a lifetime of images passed through her soul; and the worst thing was not that the boys tore off her swimsuit and fingered her breasts—that was terrible enough, but they would have done that to other girls too; no, the worst thing was their curiosity, those hands that explored her difference, those voices that laughed at the way her neck grew thick from her torso, at the short span of her legs as they pulled them apart—not to plant themselves in her, no—but to see how far her thighs could be spread, and what made all of this even worse was that, even here, she inspired their curiosity, not their desire, and yet, and yet, through her rage, she felt a dreadful longing to be liked by them, to have them see beyond her body inside her where she knew she was like every other girl.

Georg did not touch her. Hands jammed into his pockets like pieces of wood, he stood to the side, ready to flee, and once, when his eyes let themselves be trapped by Trudi’s, they were wild with anger at her—for letting herself get caught.

“Frau Braunmeier …” A voice, so low-pitched it could only belong to Alexander Sturm, came from outside the front of the barn.

Hans-Jürgen dashed from the side door with Paul and Fritz close behind him.

“Ich möcht nur ein paar Eier kaufen
…
”
—“I just want to buy some eggs.…”

Georg grabbed a cattle blanket and threw it across Trudi before he ran out.

“Auch ein Pfund Butter”
—“Also a pound of butter.”

Trudi couldn’t understand the muffled reply of Frau Braunmeier. She imagined herself shouting for help, imagined Alexander bending
over her and helping her up, taking her home on the back of his bicycle, but then she thought of her father walking her to school in his Sunday suit to talk to the sisters, felt herself pushed into that closed circle of girls, and she knew she could never tell—not him, not anyone.

She waited until it was quiet outside again. Gripping the blanket around herself, she walked toward the door, feeling a curious absence of fear. It was over. She felt certain. They would not come back.

When she stepped from the barn, she felt as if she were standing on broken glass, though the ground was hard dirt, packed down by the hooves of cattle. It felt dangerous to step out of the space she had come to know as intensely as her room. Being inside that barn had made her even more separate from others, and the only kinship she could feel was to those boys, who had become far more like her than anyone else because they, too, had been part of what had happened to her. She felt the wind on her face, drying the cold snot against her cheeks and lips, stretching her skin taut the way egg whites will when you get them on your hands while baking.

Walking carefully as if crossing a desert of broken glass, Trudi thought of the shards that spiked the top edges of the walls which surrounded the Grafenberg asylum and understood why someone might wish to stay there. She saw herself within those walls with her mother, and she thought how comforting it would be to live there. Forever. Her legs ached, and her body felt monstrous beneath the blanket as she headed back toward the river, which now was a uniform leaden color that showed the pattern of ripples but no longer held those washes of light.

She wanted to crawl into the river with the shame of having been touched like that, singled out. As she bent and reached beneath the bushes to retrieve the clothes she’d sewn so carefully, it occurred to her that to girls of normal height it didn’t mean a thing if a certain style made them look one or two centimeters taller. But she could change hemlines of skirts and jackets and, still, she would never be like other girls. Seehund grasped the side of her hand between his teeth, lightly, as if to console her, and she swung toward him and kicked him away—this witness to her shame. Beneath the cover of the blanket, she dressed herself hastily while Seehund limped around her, his seal-gray coat blotched with dry patches of blood.

Again, his damp snout nudged her hand.

Again, she kicked him away.

He followed her to the tip of the jetty, where she knelt in the cool pocket of sand and howled her rage. Frightened, the dog squirmed close, pushing his head at her, and though she blamed herself for his injury, she couldn’t bear to touch him. She felt as hideous as Gerda Heidenreich, whose lips were always wet with saliva, as repulsive as the youngest Bilder boy, whose layers of fat nearly swallowed his eyes—the sum of all the freaks she had avoided.