Stones From the River (31 page)

He found his wife in the pay-library across the street, talking with Leo and Trudi Montag. “The passports—” he said. “Did you move them?”

She turned her face to the side.

“Where are they?”

“I knew you’d get angry.”

“Ilse. When—?”

“Twelve days ago. The police—”

“They came to the house?”

She nodded, her face drawn.

“Michel—” Leo Montag tried.

But Herr Abramowitz raised his pipe to silence him. “What did they say?” he asked his wife.

She didn’t look at him. “They didn’t give me a reason.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was afraid you’d go after them and that they’d keep you.”

“Our passports.” He slumped against the wooden counter, his lips half open so that Trudi could see the edges of his upper teeth, two rows crowded inside his mouth. “You handed them our passports.”

“Michel—they took them.”

Impulsively, Trudi reached for Frau Abramowitz’s hand. Her gentle friend, who had traveled all over the world, now could no longer leave the country.

“Do you have any idea where this leaves us?” Herr Abramowitz asked.

“We’ll get them back in time.”

“In time for what?”

Ilse Abramowitz’s eyes darted from Trudi to Leo as if apologizing for the argument.

“Deine Anpassungsfähigkeit
—Your ability to adapt,” her husband said, “is far more dangerous to you than any of them will ever be. You’ll keep adapting and adapting until nothing is left.”

Although Trudi agreed with him, she wished he would stop.
Anpassungsfähigkeit
She remembered Frau Abramowitz whispering to her, “It’s important never to lose your dignity.” To Frau Abramowitz, it meant a loss of dignity if she rebelled against authority, while to Trudi just rage carried its own dignity. For her it came far more natural to rage against circumstances than to fit herself to them. Sometimes it harmed her, that willfulness, but she wouldn’t have exchanged it for Frau Abramowitz’s acceptance of oppression.

One Thursday in December, during recess, the fat boy, Rainer Bilder, who’d been tormented and ridiculed by other children for as long as anyone could recall, vanished from school as if to negate his body mass. Though he was only thirteen, no one made much of an effort to look for him, as though he were merely a repulsive growth that had attached itself to the community, whose youths were becoming trimmer
and more organized with each day. Some of the boy’s neighbors wondered if he’d been abducted. Most concluded that Rainer was happier wherever he’d chosen to live. Even his parents seemed relieved that he was gone. It made Trudi wonder if people would feel like that about her, too, if she disappeared.

Though she hadn’t known Rainer well, she felt his absence everywhere in the weeks to come—huge gaps where his body had once displaced the air, gaps that had a sadness stored in them. Soon, it was like that for everyone in Burgdorf: if you walked into one of those gaps, sadness would pack itself around your body, invoking other long-forgotten sorrows—the death of a loved one, say, or the loss of something you’d dared believe was yours forever—making your body expand with that sorrow until it filled the gap that the fat boy had vacated. You tried to bypass those gaps as they sighed to you with the yearning of a restless ghost, but more often than not you’d be drawn in despite your caution.

That sadness spread throughout Burgdorf like a malady, exacerbating old ailments, tinging even the political speeches and parades with a grainy melancholy that settled upon everyone like sand, muffling the Horst Wessel song,
“Wenn das Judenblut vom Messer spritzt…”—
“When the Jew blood spurts from the knife”—slowing down the once so enthusiastic marchers, whose legs no longer kicked up as high as they used to in the practiced goosestep, but were slightly out of pace with one another as though the gears of a finely tuned mechanism had gone awry.

It was only then that the police distributed Rainer Bilder’s picture and description to departments in other towns and cities. The boy’s parents placed ads in the paper, offering rewards for information about their dear son’s whereabouts. In church, Herr Pastor Beier shortened his prayers for the
Vaterland
and beseeched God and St. Antonius—patron saint of travelers and lost things—for Rainer’s safe return. People would find themselves glancing from their windows, scanning the end of the street for the familiar bulk of the boy.

One afternoon a stiffness spread low in Trudi’s back, making it impossible for her to bend or walk up the stairs. Her father called Frau Doktor Rosen, who recommended bed rest and warm applications.

“Don’t even use a pillow,” she said. “Lie flat. Completely flat.”

She helped Leo to carry Trudi up the stairs and settled her in her
bed, a rubber bottle filled with hot water beneath her back. There Trudi stayed while the women in the neighborhood brought her meals and gossip and advice. They told her about a cousin, say, or a grandfather who’d suffered from a sore back, and they clucked their tongues as they fluffed up her feather comforter and helped her with the bedpan. No one had heard from Rainer, they said.

Trudi read two of her father’s hidden books, by Alfred Döblin and Lion Feuchtwanger. As long as she didn’t move, she was without pain, but whenever she tried to sit up, her back tightened up on her. It made her feel old, older than her father, who limped up the stairs, the outline of the steel disk in his knee showing through the material of his trousers, older than Frau Blau, who came to her bedside, the scent of floor wax on her hands, carrying a tray with pigeon stew, potato soup, and Christmas
Stollen
.

Sitting on the edge of Trudi’s bed, knitting egg warmers to match the tea warmer she was going to send to Stefan and Helene in America, she’d tell Trudi about those of her friends who were invalids and had to depend on their grown children for care. “… not that they aren’t lucky to have family to live with, but it’s difficult when you can’t be useful.… Then you don’t have the right to make your wishes known.”

“I’m sure I’ll be out of bed long before I’m an old woman.”

“It’s no joke, girl. And if you’re having troubles like that already, who knows what it’ll be like when you’re my age.… Since it’s not likely that you’ll—” She stopped herself.

“That I’ll what?”

“Nothing.” Frau Blau dusted the top of the night table with a corner of her apron. “Nothing.”

“Marry?” Trudi demanded. “Have children?”

“Now who would say anything like that?”

“Look at me—” Trudi raised herself on her elbows and stared at the old woman. “Look at me. I’m no longer a child. I—I’ve been kissed.”

“You’re always making up stories.” Frau Blau began to pack up her knitting. “Better rest.”

“It’s not a story,” Trudi called after her.

Just when she became afraid that she would always be stiff and immobile, the heaviness in her back vanished for one entire hour. The
following day it lifted for nearly three hours, and by the end of a week, it was gone completely and she was able to resume her walks. She found that the pockets of sadness left by Rainer Bilder had begun to deflate during her illness, and even if she happened to step into one of them, her sorrow was only fleeting.

R
AINER
B
ILDER WAS QUICKLY FORGOTTEN WHEN
G
ÜNTHER
S
TOSICK’S
ten-year-old son took the lyrics
“Für die Fahne wollen wir sterben…”
—“For the flag we want to die …”—to a dreadful conclusion. A bookish and obedient boy, who had learned to play chess at the age of two—a year younger even than his father—Bruno Stosick had won his first trophy in a tournament before he’d been old enough to attend school. By the time he was eight, he’d already beaten every one of the men in the club.

No one questioned that the boy was destined to become one of Europe’s great chess champions, and the town showed its pride by granting him the kind of respect reserved for adults. Yet, his parents treated him like the child he was, and when Bruno entered the Hitler-Jugend the week after his tenth birthday, he did so secretly, knowing his parents had nothing but contempt for the Nazis. He was called a
Pimpf
and had to prove himself by running sixty meters in twelve seconds, jumping 2.75 meters, and memorizing the promise of eternal duty, love, and loyalty to the
Führer
and the flag:
“Ich verspreche in der Hitler-Jugend allzeit meine Pflicht in Liebe und Treue zum Führer und unserer Fahne.”

For Bruno this meant an escape from the narrow life of his childhood—from books and chessboards and polite family dinners—an initiation into something grown-up and significant. Infatuated with the mysterious force of the songs and drums and flags, the future chess champion of Europe would climb from his window at night to attend meetings and march in parades. Upon his return he—who’d never cleaned one single item of his clothing—would brush off his uniform, wrap it lovingly into a clean towel, and hide it behind the potato bin in the cellar.

While two of his classmates, who were reluctant to join the Hitler-Jugend, were assigned extra multiplication tables and an essay titled “Why I Love My
Vaterland”
Bruno learned how to build a magnificent
Lagerfeuer
—bonfire—by the Rhein where, eyes blazing along with the flames, he recited the promise he had memorized alone in his room.

Bruno was in love—fervently and irreversibly—in love with Adolf Hitler and his youth group leaders and the other boys; and, like many great and tragic lovers in history, Bruno would not survive the separation from his love. When his parents found out that he’d joined, they not only pulled him out of the Hitler-Jugend despite threats from his leaders, but also supervised every moment of his day, walking him to school as though he were a little boy, picking him up, letting him leave the house only when one of them was with him.

When Bruno hanged himself in the birch wardrobe, where his father kept the club’s chess sets and ledgers of games dating back four generations, he wore his uniform and, on his collar, a pin with the emblem of the red, white, and black flag to which he had sworn eternal love, as if to validate the song
“Für die Fahne wollen wir sterben
…”

The morning after his son’s death, Herr Stosick felt an unfamiliar draft against his scalp when he awoke, and as he brought his hand to his head, he touched bare skin.

His wife stared at him. “Günther,” she whispered and pointed to his pillow, which looked as though it had become a nest of brown caterpillars.

As Günther Stosick picked up a tuft of his thick hair, he let himself hope for one moment, one deranged moment, that he could strike a trade with God—his son for his hair—because, certainly, to lose both at once was too much for any man to bear.

•   •   •

At the boy’s funeral, Ingrid leaned down to Trudi and whispered that, while she couldn’t see dying for a flag, she could certainly imagine dying for her faith. “It would be a privilege,” she sighed, her eyes taking on a faraway look of ecstasy as though she could see herself being tortured for Jesus.

“Maybe for Bruno that was his faith,” Trudi said.

“You know there can only be one faith.”

Trudi shook her head, impatient with her friend’s intolerance. Hands folded, she stood between her father and Ingrid in the crowd of mourners—most of them Protestants—that encircled the narrow grave which had been hacked into the frozen ground. The cemetery felt more like the home of the dead in winter than any other time of the year: without the distraction of all the flowers and blooming shrubs, the headstones were stark and far more noticeable; it even smelled more like a cemetery, with that odor of damp earth and rotting leaves.

Trudi shivered. The waste of it, she thought, the waste of a country that would incite children to die for it. She thought of all the things Bruno Stosick would never do—ride a motorcycle or kiss a girl or learn a profession.… How she ached for the boy’s parents, who stood alone as if the town held them responsible for their son’s death. After the coffin had disappeared into the hole, she followed her father to where they stood. Frau Stosick’s face was hidden behind the black veil that draped from her hat, and she kept her black gloves on, but Herr Stosick’s hands were bare and feverish, and he held both of Trudi’s hands until she felt his anguish seep through her skin.

When she left the cemetery with Ingrid, who tried to talk with her, she barely listened and gave brief, distracted answers.

“Klaus Malter …” Ingrid was saying, “he asked me to go dancing with him.”

Trudi felt a sudden jolt of hate. How could Ingrid betray her like that? “I hope you’ll enjoy yourself,” she said, keeping her face impassive.

“But I’m not going.”

Trudi stared up at her. “Why not?”

“Because—I liked it better when the three of us did things together.”

“Is that what you told him?”

“Yes.”

“And he—what did he say?”

“I—” Ingrid’s eyelashes fluttered as if she were winking. “I don’t remember.”