Stones From the River (63 page)

“That cairn—” Max had asked when he’d first seen the pile of rocks at the end of the jetty, “Does it mean anything?”

She saw herself at thirteen, hurling stones into the river and coming back here, more than five years later, after seeing Klaus Malter with Brigitte Raudschuss—
one stone for loving him, one for hating him, one for her longing, one for her rage, one for her shame at loving him without him loving her back
.…

She felt a story stirring within herself, and she spun it for Max, for herself. “The cairn is hundreds of years old.” She began her tale about a water fairy, a tale of betrayal and love and shame even though she didn’t know the details yet. “Each stone means one life, and those longago people, who survived the revenge of the water fairy, swore to always remember her with this cairn.

“Those stones are restored after each flood, though no one knows who keeps up the ritual. Some say she’s still there, in these waters, keeping vigil over the cairn, waiting to add other stones for other lives.”

“What happened to her? Why was she so vengeful?”

“She wasn’t always that way.” Trudi spoke slowly, giving words to the images as they rose within her. “People used to watch her swim in the river, admiring her—uniqueness, her grace. You see, from the
waist up, she was shaped like a woman, but instead of legs, she had the tail of a fish. It was silver and green and flashed when the sun touched it. Men fell in love with her beauty and wanted to possess her, and one morning four of them—” All at once she couldn’t go on.

Max took her hands.

“They—they lured her to shore. Right here. With promises. Promises of being her friends. And then they carried her off… into a church, and tried to split her into being like a woman. But she escaped.” Now the words were rushing from her. “She escaped from them and dragged herself back to the river, bleeding. It took her many months to heal, and after she was strong again, she brought the river into their houses and took her revenge. She drowned one of the men in his bed, another in his cellar.

“She killed every one of them,” Trudi whispered, “every single one. And always—afterwards—she would bring a stone from the bottom of the river.” She pointed to the cairn.

“To remember the dead,” Max said.

“The living, too.”

“There are more than four stones.”

“Because when she was done, she came after their families too, after every person who had loved them.” The story was frightening Trudi. She remembered hiding with Georg in the tower of the church, scaring him and herself with ghost stories, and then scattering their fear with stories of comets and water fairies.
Water fairies
. But now even her story about the water fairy was grim, and she couldn’t think of a new story that would undo her fear.

“She went too far,” Trudi said, “and with each stone she added she felt heavier inside. Colder.” She glanced out over the river and thought how she’d undermined the boys who’d hurt her. Now the war had become her instrument of revenge—at least for two of them: Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier was reported missing in Russia, and Fritz Hansen had returned six months ago without a jaw. It had been shot off. Already, he’d had two surgeries and would need seven more, she’d heard from his mother, before his jaw would be restored as much as possible. He wore gauze from his neck up, and saliva ran down the front of it, making it look soiled even if it had just been changed.

“What if the water fairy were to toss those stones into the river?” Max asked.

“Why?”

“To release centuries of hate.”

“But once the stones are gone, she might forget.”

He looked at her steadily. “Right,” he said. “She might forgive.”

The identity of the unknown benefactor was discovered one night in May when—instead of following his pattern of leaving gifts—he attempted to take something away. What he stole was the Hitler monument in front of the
Rathaus
, the greenish statue with the flawed ear and crusts of pigeon droppings. The unknown benefactor was apprehended in the process of loading the short statue into a wheelbarrow, his open tool box next to him. From what the people of Burgdorf would hear afterwards, he was shot right there while trying to joke about taking the Führer for a stroll because it had to get boring standing in one place for so many years.

Not that the police figured out immediately that the thief was the unknown benefactor—that came when they searched his apartment and found a worn ledger, the kind a bookkeeper might have used decades ago, with detailed entries dating back over thirty years, listing people’s shoe and clothing sizes, ages of children, illnesses, hobbies, needs, and secret wishes. Columns with check marks and dates documented all the gifts he’d mysteriously smuggled into houses—bicycles and baskets of food and books and toys and money and coats—including roller skates for a boy by the name of Andreas Beil, who had since grown up to become one of the policemen who’d shot the unknown benefactor.

“My God,” Andreas Beil groaned when he discovered his name in the ledger. “All those years I’ve wanted to thank him.”

“Why did Emil risk his life for such a useless stunt?” Leo Montag grieved.

Trudi shook her head, dazed.

The entire town was dazed. Where had Emil Hesping obtained the money for all those gifts? How had he found out about their secret wishes? Why hadn’t they ever suspected him?

“Even I didn’t know.” Leo stroked the polished wood of the phonograph that the unknown benefactor had smuggled into the pay-library the first time Gertrud had been sent to the asylum. “You’re too young to remember this … but Emil was rather fond of your mother.”

The feeling of gravel beneath skin. A motorcycle tilting, tilting—
Trudi glanced up at her father. How much did he know?

“Some might say he adored her.”

Gray spring light pressed against the front window, somber and ancient, challenging any bright color with its sameness. Trudi saw a chimney sweep pass by. Georg used to believe chimney sweeps brought you good luck. But Emil Hesping had not been lucky. Or perhaps he had been, living the mystery of the unknown benefactor for so long.

“… but Gertrud, she didn’t want him around those last years. Now they’re both dead.” Her father’s voice carried a strange longing.

“I worry about that ledger,” Trudi said. “What if he kept track of the hiding places, the people—”

“Not Emil. He wouldn’t. Remember how he cautioned us against writing down any of the names or what we were doing? He wanted us to forget whatever it was we’d just done. There was no past, no future. That’s why the gifts are different… something he could envision doing again. Those lists meant that there was a future he could believe in.”

When Andreas Beil managed to get the body released, Emil’s brother arrived for the burial and prayed over the grave. The bishop looked the way Emil would have with hair—same posture, same dense eyebrows, even the same laugh. Though it offended Pastor Beier, the bishop turned down the invitation to spend the night at the rectory and stayed with the Montags instead.

After Trudi had gone to sleep, Leo and the bishop sat at the kitchen table, between them a bottle of cognac, which the bishop had brought in his black suitcase.

“Emil valued his friendship with you,” the bishop said.

“If only he’d spoken with me,” Leo said. “We could have laughed about his plan, imagined carting that statue off together. It would have been as if we’d done it, and then I would have talked him out of it.”

“Maybe something gave…. Maybe—” The bishop shook his head. “I was afraid it was getting too much for Emil. I just didn’t know it would happen this soon.”

“Are you saying he let himself get caught?”

“I don’t believe he mapped it out like that. It’s more like … even as a boy, when school got too much for him, Emil would take crazy risks.”

In the alley between the library and the grocery store, two cats screeched, and as Leo stood up to close the window, a surge of lilac scent made him dizzy, and he steadied his hand on the windowsill.

“Like once,” the bishop was saying, “Emil must have been ten, a year older than I, and afraid of getting the
Blaue Brief
—blue letter—and having to repeat fourth grade. Behind our house was this barn, and he climbed onto its roof and balanced along the top until he fell off. He broke his leg and two ribs. Another time he threw eggs at a church window.… I used to admire and fear Emil at the same time. Back then, we were not very alike at all. But now …” He turned his face aside.

Leo waited. Finally he said. “You have the same kind of courage.”

“Really?” The bishop looked grateful. “I always thought of myself as rather timid. In comparison to Emil, that is.”

“My daughter and I—” Leo sat back down. “We still want to help.”

“It’s too dangerous. Your connection to Emil… They’ll be watching you. We need to be careful. I get so tired of being careful.… Sometimes I wish I could come out with what I think about the Nazis, use my influence—”

Leo shook his head.

“I know.” The bishop refilled their glasses. “I’ve seen too many others pulled out of high positions. The only one I know of who’s spoken up without harm to himself is the bishop from Münster. It’s a mystery to me.”

“You’ve done a lot of good, working in the background.”

“In furious silence.”

“The change in policy—” Leo said, “killing the Jews instead of trying to push them out of the country.… Emil used to argue that it did not arise from the war situation but was intended all along.”

“And you?” the bishop asked. “What do you believe?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve never been as sure about things as your brother. But in my darkest moments I agree with him.”

“So do I.” The bishop hesitated. “There’ll be rumors … so you better hear this from me.”

“What is it?”

One of the flies that stuck to the amber fly strip above the table still twitched its legs.

“I had a phone call from the owner of the gymnasts’ club. It turns
out that, all those years Emil worked for him, he’s been embezzling funds.”

Leo’s chin jerked up. “The gifts.”

“What gifts?”

“The unknown benefactor.”

The bishop frowned.

“That’s how Emil must have bought the gifts.” Leo told the bishop about the unknown benefactor, about three decades of gifts that had graced the lives of many people in Burgdorf. “Emil was the closest this town ever had to a hero.… And we didn’t even know who he was.”

“Ah yes,” the bishop murmured and raised one hand as if in benediction, but halfway up he halted, a smile on his lips. “And we didn’t even know.…”

Over the next weeks, Trudi and her father would marvel at long-ago incidents when, in Emil’s company, they’d mentioned that the Braunmeiers had lost a calf to the storm, say, or that the Brocker girl had been looking at a rabbit muff in a store window, or that Herr Buttgereit couldn’t afford coats for his family.

“We helped him.”

“He knew how to listen.”

Soon, they could no longer understand how they could possibly have missed all along that Emil Hesping had been the unknown benefactor. And so it was all over town.

“Remember when the pastor’s housekeeper broke the handle of her shopping basket in the market? By the time she got back, a new basket with two cabbages was already on her doorstep.”

“Remember when Frau Simon’s bicycle was stolen and she found a new one right in her bedroom?”

“Remember when the Weiler boy got those
Lederhosen?”

“Remember when the midwife—?”

“Remember when—?”

“Remember—?”

The people of Burgdorf liked to see themselves as accomplices of the unknown benefactor, and they cherished whatever small part they might have played in carrying information to him.

“I was the one who told him when Holger Baum lost his wallet.”

“He heard about Frau Blomberg’s broken ankle from me.”

“If it hadn’t been for me, he would have never found out about the Bilders’ sick dog.”

The people brought flowers to Emil’s grave: tulips and forget-me-nots and lilacs; some whispered silent apologies about having ever considered him selfish or immoral. When they passed the Hitler statue, which had been bolted as well as chained to an iron base, they would cast sideways glances at the splatters of blood that had dried brown against the silver-white pigeon droppings on the Führer’s chest. Even Herr Pastor Beier, who’d never shown much regard for Herr Hesping, now wished he’d reported his need for a car to him, rather than to the bishop, and based a long sermon on the words that it is better to give than to receive.

She arrived before Max and sat down on a rock wide enough for both of them. Within minutes the blue of the sky changed to gray, and a whitish mist began to roll in from the Rhein. It covered the end of the jetty, then whirled across the countryside as if summoned by a paintbrush, shrouding rocks, shrubs, and willows until Trudi, too, was surrounded. The quality of the mist—thick and white—made her eyes ache with its brightness, but as she adjusted to it, she felt invisible. She rather liked that sense of protection: she knew her surroundings well though she couldn’t see them, but others wouldn’t know where she was. It made her wish the mist had been there for the last decade, keeping all of them safe.

The mist had a dense texture—denser, it seemed, than her flesh. If only Max were already with her: they could make love in this mist. Low in her belly she felt the warm heaviness as if he’d already touched her. To hell with all the hiding … If it were up to her, she’d walk into the center of Burgdorf, right now, holding hands with Max, and make love in the church square with the mist shrouding them from curious and shocked eyes. She smiled to herself, but instantly felt frivolous, considering that there was a war and that people were so hungry and poor that someone had even stolen the collection box for pagan babies from church. The last one of the geese behind the taxidermist’s shop had disappeared—into someone’s pot, no doubt—though everyone knew that Herr Heidenreich, who prayed for his daughter’s return every day, was saving that goose for her homecoming meal. While Trudi and her father kept trading library books for food, nearly
everyone she knew had sold some belongings in order not to starve.