Stones From the River (5 page)

One of his hands floating above a chess piece as he contemplated the next move, Leo would listen to the men, and even when he wouldn’t say much, the men would feel restored when they’d leave.
Leo revealed himself to very few people—not because he was shy or wished to hide, but because he didn’t know the desire to have others understand him. Still, the men wanted to find out from him what had happened in Burgdorf after they’d been sent off with flowers and music in 1914—celebrated heroes before they’d ever encountered the enemy—as though the real story could only come to them from another man.

Hidden on the footstool behind the counter of the pay-library, enveloped in the lavish scent of tobaccos, Trudi would soak in the words that her father chose to tell the men about the town during their absence. His arc of vision was higher than hers, wider, and though he spoke of events that she, too, had witnessed, they took on a richer texture and became richer still if—afterwards, alone—she fused them with her own observations.

Although Leo Montag liked to eat, his body was extremely thin, and his skin so colorless that he usually looked as if he were recovering from a prolonged illness. The women in the neighborhood were always urging him to drink milk or eat meat. Yet, he was surprisingly strong and agile. As a gymnast, he’d won numerous trophies—gleaming statues of men whose muscles, unlike his, distended their bronze or silver plated skin, their bodies in various positions of flight that made them look as though, any moment, they might soar from the shelf in the pay-library where he kept them polished. People who borrowed books would find it more difficult with each year to connect those magnificent shapes to the man who limped behind the counter and bent over his ledger to sign out their books.

Early one morning in October, when Leo was frying apple pancakes, Gertrud swooped Trudi from her bed and carried her, propped on her hip, into the world of muted light and spider lace and strawberry bugs. Licks of frost had turned the grass blades silvery, but beneath the house the ground was still soft and molded itself to Gertrud’s feet. There was a greater urgency to her touch, a tightness to her hands that almost pinched and, for the first time, made Trudi afraid of her.

“People die if you don’t love them enough,” her mother whispered to Trudi, her long body curved against the ground as if she’d already established her burying place.

“You won’t die,” Trudi said.

Her mother’s eyes glistened in the dim light.

“I love you enough,” Trudi said.

Her mother pushed her skirt aside and exposed her left knee. “Here,” she said and guided Trudi’s hand across her kneecap. “Feel this.”

Trudi shook her head, confused. Her father was the one with the bad knee. Sometimes you could see the edges of the steel plate through the fabric of his trousers.

“Harder.” Her mother pressed Trudi’s hand against her knee.

Deep below the warm skin she did feel something—like uncooked kernels of rice—shifting under her fingers. She glanced up into her mother’s eyes; they revealed such anguish that she thought she should look away, but she couldn’t.

“It’s gravel,” her mother whispered. “From when I fell… Emil Hesping’s motorcycle …”

Trudi’s eyes stayed on her mother’s face, taking in the story beneath the anguish, though her mother gave her only few words, but those words she said made the other words, which she would never bring herself to say aloud, leap into her eyes. One hand on her mother’s knee, Trudi felt the secret shaping itself into images that passed through her skin, images filled with color and movement and wind—yes, wind. She saw her mother on the back of a motorcycle, her arms spanning the middle of Herr Hesping. Her mother was younger than Trudi had ever known her, and she wore a yellow summer dress with short sleeves. Dust billowed behind the motorcycle as it raced down Schlosserstrasse toward the Rhein, and her mother held on tighter as the front wheel disengaged from the ground for an instant and the motorcycle darted up the dike, then down the other side. Hair whipped her face, and when Emil Hesping stopped the motorcycle beneath a stand of poplars, the wide leather seat still held the warm imprint of her thighs. He let his palm rest on that imprint for a moment, and she felt a sudden heat between her thighs as though he were touching her skin. When he embraced her, she had to close her eyes against the sun and against the fear that had been with her since the day her husband had left for the Russian front—the fear that Leo would not return alive.

“We skidded … on the way back … the other side of the dike.” Trudi saw Emil Hesping get up, awkwardly, from the rough road, brush the dust from his arms, and stagger past the fallen motorcycle
to where her mother had been flung. Her face was scratched. Blood rose around the fragments of gravel embedded in her knee and streamed down her calf into her white sandal.

“The same knee.” Her mother laughed that wild laugh. “The same knee as your father’s. It happened to him, too. That day.” She snatched Trudi into her arms and settled her in the curve of her waist and belly like a much younger child. “Because of me,” she chanted and rocked her daughter as if to make up for all the days she hadn’t rocked her as an infant, “because of me he got hurt.…”

“Gertrud?” Leo Montag’s shadow sloped into the opening between the beams. Between his boots, sun glinted on the frozen grass. “Gertrud?” he called. “Trudi?”

Before Trudi could answer, her mother laid one finger against Trudi’s lips. Her breath felt warm against Trudi’s face. Carefully, the girl skimmed her fingers across her mother’s knee. It was smooth; the skin had closed across the tiny wounds like the surface of the river after you toss stones into the waves. Only you knew they were there.

Unless you told.

T
HAT DAY
T
RUDI’S FATHER DID NOT OPEN THE PAY-LIBRARY
. I
NSTEAD, HE
borrowed the Abramowitzs’ Mercedes. Its back had windows and looked so much like a coach that you almost expected to see horses harnessed to it, but the front of the car was open, with tufted seats and a steering wheel on a long, angled shaft. While Frau Abramowitz read Trudi the fairy tale of the devil with the three golden hairs and fed her
Brötchen
with Dutch cheese, Leo Montag settled his wife in the closed compartment of the car with a blanket and two pillows from their bed, which she would pluck apart, filling the compartment with feathers that would cling to her green coat and hat like snowflakes by the time they’d reach Grafenberg, where she was to stay for nearly seven weeks.

It was snowing real snow when Trudi was finally allowed to visit her mother. She’d been in the Grafenberg forest before—it was a popular hiking area—but she’d only seen the high walls of the asylum from a distance. This time, though, she and her father walked up to the wall, close enough to see the shards of glass in the mortar along the top edge. Sharp and pointed, they could tear up your hands if you tried to escape. Trudi dug her hands deeply into the fur muff that
matched the rabbit trim around her bonnet and on the collar of her coat. She wondered if anyone had climbed across this wall. Maybe the Kaiser had climbed across a wall like this in his fancy uniform when he’d escaped from Germany. But what if countries had even higher walls around them?

A few days earlier her father had told her that the Kaiser had resigned and fled the country. “He’s in Holland,” her father had said. “Now we’ll have peace.” Trudi had seen pictures of the Kaiser: his mouth looked vain beneath the fancy mustache, and he wore a shiny helmet with a stiff, glittering bird—the size of a pigeon—on top, its wings spread to keep from toppling off.

A guard dressed like a soldier opened the gate. His neck bulged, and his fingers were stained from tobacco. In his glance Trudi recognized that flash of curiosity she’d encountered before in strangers, but today it made her feel prickly, that curiosity, made her feel that she should be inside these walls where they locked up people who were different. In the eyes of the guard—she knew for certain—she was different, and it was a knowledge that would torment her from that day forward and fuel her longing to grow and take revenge on those who spurned her.

As the guard motioned toward the largest of the buildings, Trudi hesitated, but her father took her by the shoulders, and the guard shut the gate immediately behind them as if to keep them there. She had wanted to bring her mother’s birthday presents—a thick bathrobe and fur boots—but her father hadn’t let her though the birthday was only two days away.

“It’s dangerous,” he’d said. “We’ll celebrate when she comes home.”

His family had a history of disasters from celebrating special occasions too early: his Aunt Mechthild had drowned in the Rhein when her grandfather’s birthday picnic was held one day early; a cousin, Willi, had been injured in a train crash after celebrating his parents’ silver anniversary a week early; and his sister, Helene, had broken her arm when she opened a confirmation gift three days too soon.

In the lobby, which smelled of cinnamon and candles, Trudi’s father wiped her nose and unbuttoned her coat. A friendly nurse with loud shoes led them down a corridor and through a smaller set of gates that also locked behind them. Trudi’s mother stood waiting in a room with white chairs, all lined up along the walls. Her elbows angled
as if she were carrying something fragile in her empty hands, she walked toward them, her eyes faded, and all at once Trudi no longer minded being inside these gates; she had missed her mother so fiercely that any place would be good, as long as she could be with both parents. Her mother smelled like the lobby. In front of Trudi she dropped to her knees and brought both palms against Trudi’s cheeks as if to memorize the shape of her face.

A few other families were visiting patients, and Leo Montag led his wife and daughter into a corner, where he arranged three chairs in a triangle that separated them from the others in the room. Only then did he embrace his wife and touch her forehead with his lips. Her hair was braided in a way Trudi had not seen on her before—starting at her temples in tight coils that puckered her skin as though someone who didn’t know her well had braided it for her.

Her mother wore those braids the following week when she was permitted to return home, and she smiled her weary hospital smile when Trudi untied the ribbons and brushed her hair until it crackled and floated on her shoulders like angels’ hair. Though it wasn’t silver like the angels’ hair you drape over the branches of your Christmas tree, its dark mass took in strands of light with each brush stroke. At first, her mother slept much of each day as if gathering reservoirs of strength for any movement she might have to make, but by Christmas, when Leo lit the beeswax candles on the pine tree in the living room, she looked much more like the mother Trudi remembered.

They ate carp in beer sauce and the white veal sausage that the butcher made only from mid-December till Christmas. When Trudi sang two songs and recited one poem, her mother kept applauding until Trudi felt so flustered that she trapped her mother’s hands between hers to make them stop.

They opened their gifts which were arranged on the round wicker table, beginning with the package from America: Aunt Helene had sent silver napkin rings with matching spoons and a
Hampelmann—
jumping jack. When Trudi opened her largest present from her parents—a porcelain baby doll with bright red lips—her mother pulled Trudi onto her knees.

“Wouldn’t you like a real baby, a little brother or sister?” she asked, beaming as if she were already seeing a child who was perfect.

“No,” Trudi said.

“A baby brother or sister who—”

“No!”

“Gertrud—” Trudi’s father started.

“Storks adore sugar.” Her mother’s voice was joyful. “And they bring babies to houses where people leave sugar cubes for them on the windowsill. That’s how the storks know where to take the babies.”

Trudi dug her chin into her collarbone, wondering if storks ever made mistakes. Like with her. Slipping from her mother’s knees, she ran past the stand with the potted ferns and the stuffed squirrel to the front door of the house. Her forehead against the cold glass panel, she stared into the fine whirls of snow. In the middle of the street stood the man-who-touches-his-heart. He raised his right index finger to his heart, his left index finger to his nose, and touched both at the same instant. Smiling as if satisfied that he’d accomplished that, he dropped his hands and raised them again, reversing the ritual: left to his nose, right to his heart. Before the war he used to be a biology teacher, but being a soldier had turned something within him. It was said that the man-who-touches-his-heart had seen his whole battalion die. Now he lived with various relatives, staying with one for a while before being sent on to the next.

But what if you had no relatives? Trudi shivered. Maybe the stork had been on his way to drop her off in a country where everyone had short arms and legs. Maybe she’d been brought by a cuckoo instead of a stork. Cuckoos left their eggs in the nests of other birds, letting them do all the work of sitting on the eggs. But when the young cuckoos broke through the shells, they were pushed from the nest. So far, her parents had kept her, even if she was the wrong baby. But what would happen if the stork brought them the right baby?