Stones From the River (72 page)

Packages from America had begun to arrive again since the end of the war: Aunt Helene had adopted Trudi’s entire neighborhood, sending crates with dry milk, dry eggs, rice, and flour not only for her relatives but also for their friends. In her apartment house she’d organized people to help, filling the lists she’d asked Trudi to send to her, but as Trudi wrote those lists, which contained many basics—food, clothing, soap—they only reminded her of the lists people used to make for their final journeys to KZs. This past Christmas, eight packages had arrived from America, each of the gifts beautifully wrapped, including a huge red blouse for the midwife, who’d been in the pay-library the last time a package with staples had arrived and who’d sighed, “I wish I had family in America.”

“But they don’t even know me,” the midwife exclaimed as she buttoned the red blouse. “It fits, and they don’t even know me.”

“Now they do,” Trudi said, and stirred dry milk into a cup of water for Adi.

In spring, Robert, who was already the father of a one-year-old, Caleb, started to send his son’s outgrown clothes. Some of them were hardly worn, and Trudi took them to Ingrid, who’d entered her seventh month of pregnancy, and to Jutta, who was a few weeks further along.

The day Jutta had found out about her pregnancy, she’d surprised Trudi by confiding that she’d been trying to have a child ever since her wedding and had come to believe that she was barren. There was a part of Trudi—the nasty, greedy part—that could have easily said,
Hey, you who have everything, the man I once wanted, the child I would have liked to give birth to.… It is easy for you to look down on me
. Only Jutta did not look down on her. And that’s why Trudi decided to honor her confidence by not turning it into gossip. It felt good
to deal with a secret mercifully, especially if it belonged to someone else who wasn’t accepted by the town. People said Jutta set herself apart from them with her painting; and her husband’s family—except for his mother—had never taken to her as they had to Brigitte Raudschuss. Jutta was too tall, too young, too independent. She smoked too much, was not refined enough, didn’t try to flatter the old aunts at the family reunions.

Of all the unborn children in Burgdorf, the child of Jutta Malter was the one whose progress fascinated Trudi the most. To follow the changes in Jutta’s body, she often took walks past Alexander Sturm’s apartment house, hoping to see Jutta. While Jutta walked with her belly out as if glorying in her pregnancy, Klara Brocker was ashamed to be seen by anyone. Though she concealed her body in loose coats and dresses, her belly pushed from her tidy frame with the life that her American soldier—who’d given her so many other gifts—had planted in her before he’d let himself be transferred from her reach. All Klara had left of him were eleven canning jars with peaches and the contempt of the townspeople, who used to shake their heads when they’d seen her in nylon stockings. And the child, of course; she had the child who was distorting her body and parading her sin.

The judge’s widow was bigger than Jutta, Klara, or Ingrid, perhaps because her body had expanded so many times already. The midwife took care of the pregnant women, except for Jutta, who’d chosen to go to Sister Agathe, unaware that the sister was suffering a crisis of conscience. All Jutta remembered was how skillful and gentle the sister used to be when she’d performed medical procedures, and how she’d never blamed her for not being careful enough.

But now the sister had become hesitant. She barely ate and declined the other nuns’ advice to rest. Her body sweated easily, drenching her undergarments and habit. Throughout the winter and into spring, her flesh had grown nearly translucent as though she wanted to see into her own womb, which was no place for babies, like the distended wombs of women all over Burgdorf.

When Herr Pastor Beier was brought in to speak with her, Sister Agathe asked to meet with him in the cloister garden, where she confessed that she’d helped the Nazis during the war.

“But that’s impossible.”

“Oh yes. By trying to bring comfort to the prisoners. I wanted to make their lives more bearable and took them medicine and food
whenever I could. Now I wish I’d urged them to run instead, to escape.”

“You did what you believed was right at the time.”

“But it wasn’t.”

“You did the best you could.”

“The best for myself… Don’t you see? It made me feel better when I could ease their suffering.”

“We couldn’t know how it would all end.” The priest stared down on his hands, plump white hands with square nails, hands that still looked the way they had when he’d entered the seminary. All at once he was choked with the loss of everything he’d believed in then. “I…” He raised one of those hands to his forehead. “I’ve questioned some of my decisions since.”

“That’s good,” the nun murmured.

He raised his eyes, startled.

“I handed the prisoners over to the Nazis … that terrible obedience. I wanted to make their last days here as comfortable as possible, to have them leave with dignity.… Yet, looking at all that happened, I was only one more tool, an accomplice.”

“Don’t say that.” The priest’s round face looked distraught. “That would make all of us accomplices.”

“But we are. Don’t you see?”

To lay her hands on the taut belly of the dentist’s wife troubled Sister Agathe, and she was terrified when, one morning in May, she felt no life. Convinced that her touch had brought on the unborn child’s death, she called her supervisor, Sister Ingeborg, who confirmed that the child was dead. Sister Agathe tried to soothe Jutta and felt devastated when the young woman climbed from the white-shrouded table and stormed out of the Theresienheim. From that day on, the sister took to her bed; and even when she would find out the following day that Jutta Malter had ridden in back of the bakery truck to the midwife’s house, where she’d given birth to a girl—alive and healthy—Sister Agathe would refuse to harm anyone else with her care.

The pastor had never held that many christenings in such a short time: there was the Malter girl, Hanna; Georg Weiler’s son, Manfred; old Anton Immers’ granddaughter, Sybille; the children of the two widows—a son, Heinz, for the judge’s widow, a second daughter,
Karin, for Ingrid Hebel; and then, of course, Klara Brocker’s illegitimate son, Rolf. The Klein family followed with a daughter, the Müller family with a son, and two other unmarried women with children whose fathers were American soldiers.

Then, as if by mystery, another child appeared. Afterwards the people would say that it all started when the midwife—after tending to the last of her pregnant patients and waxing her floors—left Burgdorf one Thursday with her son, Adi. When she returned to her stucco house the following afternoon, she carried an infant in her arms.

“Whose is it?” people asked.

“Where did you get it?”

But the midwife only said, “This is my daughter, Renate.”

The townspeople approved that Hilde Eberhardt named the infant girl after her mother-in-law as if to make amends for her husband who, everyone knew, would have never let her use the name Renate. Though the girl was dark and foreign-looking—not at all like her blond mother and grandmother—she reminded the people anew of the gap that the older Renate Eberhardt’s absence had left in their midst, and they welcomed the child as one of their own.

They were ready for this child and asked fewer questions than usual, though this didn’t stop them from making guesses about Renate’s parents. Some wondered if she’d been adopted from gypsies. Renate had that look, that intense darkness. Still—not too many gypsies had survived the KZs. Others figured that the midwife was her real mother and that the bulk of her body had made it possible for her to conceal her pregnancy. She could have birthed the child alone, propping her back against pillows and reaching between her massive thighs. When even Trudi Montag couldn’t find out from where the midwife’s child had come, the town resigned itself to this being one of the secrets it would never know.

Hilde Eberhardt liked to wrap the infant in the cashmere shawl she’d bought for her mother-in-law. “This shawl belongs to your grandmother,” she would tell Renate while she’d rock her. Adi, who was already five, would watch her silently—his light features so much like his father’s that sometimes she had to look away—and he’d stretch out one fair hand and touch Renate’s face. At least he was unlike his father in nature, rather shy and kind, taking after her. If only
she’d insisted on giving him a different name. Even though he’d been called Adi all his life, she could not forget that his full name was Adolf, a name that no one gave to newborn boys any longer.

Gradually, the pattern of days in Burgdorf returned to normal. People resumed their
Spaziergänge
, a habit many of them had discontinued during the war. An ailment like Frau Buttgereit’s enormous kidney stones—which would have seemed trivial compared to the crises of war—now could evoke sympathy. Life was normal again, enough so that women could talk about a new pattern for a dress, say, or have their hair set once a week at the beauty parlor.

The outside walls of houses were scrubbed, and new
Gardinen—
lace curtains—were sewn, first for windows that faced the street, so that the façades of houses presented a good impression. In her daughter’s room, the midwife hung wallpaper and
Gardinen
with the lacy pattern of dolls holding hands. Window boxes were lusher than ever before. Near the Burgdorf cemetery, people restored their
Scbrebergarten
, those tidy vegetable and flower plots where they could cause something to grow. The chestnut tree in front of the pay-library flourished, and the shadows of its leaves became longer. Where some of the ruins had been, modern apartments were built, boxy brick structures with nearly flat roofs and large windows; the rubble was carried off to a dump, which was established along the road to the abandoned flour mill.

Normal meant that the white excursion boats floated again on a regular schedule—not the intermittent journeys of the past years. Weekend nights music would drift from the Rhein, and if Trudi stood on the dike, she’d see couples dancing on the boats while lanterns bobbed around them like red and blue moons. She’d battle that all too familiar yearning for Max that had become part of her as much as breathing. If he had returned, she could be dancing there with him.

Children stopped by the pharmacy and asked for
Pröbcben
—samples—of skin cream or lipstick or cough drops that the sales representatives left with Fräulein Horten. The ragman built an addition on his house. Chess-club meetings resumed at the house of Herr Stosick, whose reputation had been reinstated to such a degree that people now came to him for letters. Members of the club attended tournaments in Köln and Bielefeld and brought home a respectable number of trophies as well as stories of losing their way in those cities they’d
known so well before the war. But now entire building blocks had been demolished, making every street seem unfamiliar.

When the priest was finally assigned transportation—a motor scooter the same shade of blue as the car upholstery he’d dreamed of—people would see him practice behind the rectory and around the church square, his lips pressed together in what might have been concentration or disappointment, his legs extended sideways to balance his massive body.

During Sunday mass, men would sit around their
Stammtiscb
in Die Traube again and walk their families home from St. Martin’s Church after the priest had blessed them with the final:
“…in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti”

“Back to normal,” people would say.

“Back to normal,” they would remind one another.

But Trudi knew that beneath that sheen of normalcy the town was a freak. She could see the ugliness, the twistedness, made even more evident by the tidiness, the surface beauty. All the town’s energy went into this frenzy to rebuild, to restore order, to pretty itself up as if nothing had changed in the war.

Some people still claimed they couldn’t comprehend how the KZs could have happened, and it was never clear to Trudi how many had known, and how many had been afraid to believe the horrors.

“Until my death … I won’t be able to understand that.”

“We weren’t told what was going on.”

“If I’d known, I wouldn’t have wanted to continue living.”

“Someone told me in ‘44, and I didn’t believe it, but then I later found out it was the truth.”

“Don’t forget—Hitler was an Austrian, not a German.”

Most didn’t like to think back on Hitler, and if they spoke about him at all, it would be to tell you they hadn’t liked what had gone on. Their allegiance to one powerful leader now became their excuse: since they had not made decisions but merely obeyed orders, they were not to blame. They took it as a challenge when the
Burgdorf Post
reported that other countries claimed Germany would never recover again, that it would always be in poverty. They agreed with one another that it wouldn’t serve any of Germany’s enemies to leave her sitting in the middle of Europe like a dead country. After all, they were industrious, and though they had few materials, they knew how to work. Hadn’t they always known how to work? Certainly the world
must know that about the Germans by now. And even if sometimes the damage they faced seemed so absolute that it seemed nothing could ever be fixed, they didn’t consider giving up. As they felt the eyes of the world on their efforts, they strived even harder to gain respect, admiration.

All over Germany, women helped with the reconstruction. They carried stones and built walls; worked in dust and dirt without complaint; created miracles out of the faith that there would be better years ahead. Evenings, the women opened the seams of old clothing, turned them inside out, and sewed the fabric into something that almost felt new: short pants for boys, pleated skirts for girls, shirts with stiff collars for men, dresses with belts for themselves. No longer were they shabby as during the last years of war, but normal. Almost normal.