Stones From the River (49 page)

Trudi noticed a spot of blood, and her first thought was that Frau Blomberg must have spit a communion wafer into her handkerchief. Those old superstitions … She shook her head. Besides, Frau Blomberg wasn’t even Catholic.

“I used to make plum cake for Fienchen on her birthdays, one sheet of cake for her, the other for my husband and me. Remember how she loved to eat hot plum cake, Trudi?”

Trudi nodded, but what she remembered was Fienchen as a six-year-old, her face bloodied from stones the boys had thrown at her.

“It’s better for her, being with my sister in Amsterdam. They’re after the Jews there too, but I don’t think it’s as bad as here.”

The month after her husband had died from a burst appendix, Frau Blomberg and Fienchen had applied for visas to Holland, together with her sister’s family, whose professional skills—she a nurse and he an accountant—turned out to be far more desirable to the Dutch than those of a widow whose secretarial training had been broken off when, at sixteen, she’d become a housewife and mother.

The night before their departure, Frau Blomberg’s sister had offered to smuggle Fienchen out of the country as one of her own children. She had six, four of them girls, and they all pretended to be asleep in a tangle of arms and legs when they crossed the border. It was one of the stories Trudi knew she could never tell. She’d even cautioned Frau Blomberg when she’d first heard about the escape from her.

“I get so jealous of my sister, being a mother to Fienchen, watching her change,” Frau Blomberg was saying. “I only had the one.…”

“You’ll always be her mother.” Trudi reached behind the counter and picked up two new mystery novels which hadn’t been covered with cellophane yet. “These came in yesterday,” she said. “How would you like to be the first one to read them?”

Frau Blomberg picked up both books, her eyes skimming across
the gaudy jackets and down the summary on the inside flap. “I was only going to borrow one.”

“I’d love to know what you think of them, so I’d be glad to let you have both for the price of one. You see,” Trudi continued hurriedly as Frau Blomberg looked about to object, “usually my father likes to read books ahead of time, to recommend them to certain customers, you know, but he’s been preparing for a chess tournament. I’m sure he’d appreciate it if you could do this for him.”

She stood in the open door, watching Frau Blomberg walk away with both books, when Max Rudnick drove up. Before she could retreat, he leapt from his car, pointing at the sky. “Look,” he shouted. “Look.”

Above them, a huge formation of birds flew toward the river in one solid V-shape, but all at once its direction changed and—in that moment of change—became a dark cluster in the sky; yet, almost instantly, from that cluster the V-shape realigned itself as if imprinted on some ancient memory and headed toward the fairgrounds.

“How much do I owe?”

“For what?” She stared at Max Rudnick.

“In fines.” He pulled the overdue book from the pocket of his raincoat.

“By now it would cost less to replace it.” Trudi waved aside his offer to pay as he followed her inside. “Besides, you bought me that tea, remember?”

“But that was my pleasure.” He said it with such sincerity that she wanted to bolt.

Her father came in from the hallway and greeted Max Rudnick.

“I have work to do.” She grasped four books from the counter and retreated to the back of the library even though they didn’t belong there. She heard his voice, then her father’s, but not loud enough to understand their words. A fine business I’m running here, she thought, two books for the price of one, no overdue fines.… If people hear about this, they’ll all want the same deals, and we may as well close up.

When she finally came to the front again, Herr Rudnick was paying for a pouch of tobacco.

He pushed his thumb against the bridge of his glasses. “How would you like to go for a walk with me?”

“I—there’s too much I have to do here.” She felt her father’s eyes on her. He was watching her with an amused smile, and she resisted the temptation to make a face at him.

Without trying to persuade her to go on that walk, Max Rudnick left, and he didn’t ask her again when he returned to buy tobacco the following week and the week after that. He no longer made an effort to draw her into talking with him, but instead spoke easily with her father.

“I no longer know my own daughter,” Leo Montag said one afternoon after Max Rudnick had left.

“Why?”

“Because you don’t ask this man any questions. You’ve never let anyone leave here without asking your questions.”

“I’m not interested in his life.”

Her father smiled. “Now that is the one answer I didn’t figure on.”

Her entire head felt hot. “What do you mean?”

“Oh—I’m not sure myself.”

“I wish he wouldn’t come in here.”

“And why is that?”

“I—He is pushy. Nosy.”

“He regards you highly.”

“He just pretends.” But she had to ask. “What makes you believe that?”

“It comes through.”

“How so?”

“In the way he looks at you.”

“You read too many of your trashy books.”

“That’s true.”

“Has he said anything?”

“About what?”

“Me, of course.”

“He must have.”

“Like what?”

“Oh—” Her father gave her a deliberately vague smile. “What I know about him is that he rents a room in Kaiserswerth and that he supports himself by giving private lessons.”

“What else did you find out?”

“And here you thought you had no interest in his life.…”

•   •   •

The next time Max Rudnick came to the pay-library, he followed Trudi between the stacks of shelves when she made her escape and watched her rearrange a shelf of war novels that didn’t need any rearranging.

“Will you come for dinner with me on Sunday?”

“No,” she said, angry at herself for feeling delighted at his invitation.

He was leaning above her, one arm stretched against a support bracket. “Why not?”

“You don’t have to.”

“Why would I even think I had to?”

“Because …” She lined up the spines of the books by running one thumb along them. “Because you’re feeling sorry for me.”

“Sorry for you? Why?”

“You want me to say it aloud?”

“I don’t understand.”

“All right then. Because I’m a
Zwerg.”

“What I see is a spirited young woman.”

“Sure.”

“A spirited and bright young woman who—”

“Who is a
Zwerg.”

“Who is a
Zwerg”
he said quietly.

It stung her, hearing the word from him. “See?” she demanded.

He crouched, bringing his face to the same level with hers. “It bothers you, not me.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Give me a chance to convince you then.”

She shook her head.

“I’m asking you to have a meal with me—not to discuss the names of our grandchildren.”

He grinned at her until she was grinning back at him. If only that secret of Angelika didn’t exist between them.… Just eating dinner with him on Sunday wouldn’t do any damage. But as she imagined sitting across the table from him, she felt the urge to confess how sorry she was to have played such an ugly game with him.

“I can’t,” she said abruptly, and when he nodded without trying to convince her, she felt she’d lost something she hadn’t even begun to value.

After that discussion, she was sure Max Rudnick would buy his tobacco
elsewhere, but he kept returning to the pay-library and talked with her father if she pretended to be busy, carrying stacks of books from one shelf unit to another. She thought of several other gentle ways to refuse his invitations, but he did not ask her again, not even when she began to join him and her father in their conversations.

One afternoon he told her father why he’d left his teaching job in Köln. He’d had a clash with one of the other teachers, who’d walked past his house one late afternoon when he was building a chicken coop in back of the garden.

“Can I take a look?” His colleague had studied the construction.

“Come on in.”

“What are you building?”

Max Rudnick laid his hammer aside. “This will be a chicken coop. And that I build here is thanks to the Führer.”

His colleague stared at him, horrified, and quickly walked away. Max Rudnick had intended his comment as a joke because it had become the custom that, wherever something was built, private or government, a sign would be attached to the building:
Dass ich hier baue verdanke ich dem Führer
—That I build here is thanks to the Führer.

The following day, the teacher did not speak to him in the faculty lunchroom, but in the afternoon he returned, opened the gate to the garden without asking, and stood by the chicken coop, watching while Max Rudnick continued the construction.

“Listen,” the teacher finally said, “because of you I had a sleepless night.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You were ridiculing the Führer.” He stood with his hands clasped in front of his stomach as if waiting for Max Rudnick to correct him, but when Max didn’t speak up, he worked himself into a coughing fit. “I had to fight with myself,” he sputtered, “and I’m still fighting with myself if I should notify the police.… They—they should know about you.”

“You do what you need to do.” Max resumed his hammering.

When he didn’t hear anything for two weeks, he figured his colleague must have decided against informing on him. But one morning the principal blocked his way to his classroom and handed him a letter of introduction to an industrialist in Düsseldorf who wanted a tutor for his children.

“You were lucky. I’d suggest you practice greater caution in the future.”

Max Rudnick was not allowed to say good-bye to his students or enter the classroom to collect his personal belongings from his desk. They’d already been packed into a paper bag, which felt ridiculously light as he carried it out of the brick building where he had taught for six years.

T
RUDI FOUND THE WOMAN HIDING IN HER MOTHER’S EARTH NEST ONE
chilly April afternoon when she carried the Persian hallway rug outside. She thought she must have imagined it—that flash of movement when she walked past the opening below the back of the house—and she kept walking and hoisted the rug across the metal rod and raised the rattan paddle. Her hair covered with an old scarf, she beat the rug, hard, while dust blossomed in thick plumes into the air. All at once she felt as though she were being watched. She turned toward the house, expecting to see her father’s face in the kitchen window, but instead she noticed it again—that motion beneath the elevated part of the house—as though her mother had returned.

Trudi stood still, absolutely still. Her neck felt cold. Wielding the rattan paddle, she approached the boulders and aged timbers where her mother used to hide. She heard the breath before her eyes adjusted, not her own breath but one—no, more than one, much faster than hers.

She stopped next to the rack with the garden tools and gripped the handle of a shovel. “Who is there?” she called out, finding the sound of her voice reassuring. “Who is there?”

Silence. Then something shifted—like fabric being dragged across the ground. Her eyes made out two figures, one large, one small, crouched in the corner.

“He is just a child. Please.” A high and urgent whisper as a child, a boy, was pushed toward Trudi. Behind him emerged a woman’s face and graceful hands with red-lacquered nails, locked on the boy’s shoulders as if in a death grip, holding him between herself and Trudi. “He is just a child.”

For an instant there, standing within the half-dark and the smell of old earth, Trudi felt her own mother’s hands on her shoulders, that taut grasp.
People die if you don’t love them enough.
She saw the glitter in her mother’s eyes, felt the secret kernels of sin beneath her mother’s skin, heard that wild, wild laugh.

“Don’t be afraid,” Trudi said, as much to herself as to the boy.

The woman jerked him back against herself, locking both arms across his chest as if to dare Trudi to take him from her. Her red hat slipped down her blond hair and dangled on the back of her neck, held by a coated rubber band that cut across her throat like a badly healed scar.

The boy watched Trudi quietly, his eyes nearly at the same level with hers.

“Don’t tell anyone we’re here,” the woman said.

“I won’t.”

“We’ll leave. As soon as it’s night.”

“You can stay inside our house.”

“It’s not safe.”

“Safer than out here.”

“How do I know—” The woman stopped. She shuddered, and her arms tightened around the boy, whose eyes hadn’t left Trudi’s face once.

“I want to help.” Trudi felt the woman’s fear for her life, for the child’s life, and when she reached forward and touched the boy’s shoulder, her arms grew weak as though she’d been the one who’d carried his weight in her arms as they’d fled.

It was partly from the woman’s jumbled words, but mostly from her anguished silences, that Trudi was able to assemble what had happened. They’d lost their house in Stuttgart eight months earlier when they’d been herded into one of the already crowded
jüdische Hauser
—Jewish houses—along with other families. During her first
week there the woman had woken up each morning, thinking: This is as bad as it will ever get. But soon she realized that she was capable of withstanding far more than she’d ever imagined possible as long as she had her husband and child.