Stones From the River (77 page)

What the river was showing her now was that she could flow beyond the brokenness, redeem herself, and fuse once more. If that rock was her love for Hanna, she could let it stop her, block her—or she could acknowledge the rock and have respect for it, alter her course to move around it. She had to smile because, for a moment there, it looked as if the water were trying to crawl upstream, back across the surface of the rock in dozens of small hands, reaching against the stream, defying the current. And that was good. Over the years the rock would be transformed, just like the countless stones at the bottom of the riverbed, stones you couldn’t see; they affected the flow but didn’t impede its progress, its momentum, its destination. She could see how she had it in her to start out loving and become vindictive—as with Georg and Klaus and Eva, though with Eva she had ended up loving again—and how she needed to take a look at her love and make sure it was whole before she could offer it to anyone. Her love for her father was whole, but her love for Hanna was tainted. It had to heal before she could bring it to Hanna again.

If ever she could bring it to her again.

She shivered. There was something she needed to do, something she needed to give back that wasn’t hers. She saw Jutta standing in another rain high above the quarry hole, smelled the sulfur of lightning, saw the unearthed roots of the birch, and recalled her apprehension that Jutta would not be all that safe in Burgdorf. She moaned.
But I never thought of myself as a threat to you
.

It was after midnight when she reached home. Though her father had left on a light for her and had tacked a note to the banister, telling her the hot-water stove in the bathroom was stoked, she didn’t pause to dry or warm herself. In her drenched clothes she rushed up the stairs to her room and lifted Jutta’s painting of Hanna from the wall. She didn’t permit herself the comfort of gazing at it once more but carried it up the flight of steps to the sewing room, where she stored it behind the door. Tomorrow morning she would return it to Jutta and tell her it was something she should never have chosen. And if Jutta still wanted her to have one of her paintings, she would ask her to do the choosing of that gift for her.

T
O STAY AWAY FROM
H
ANNA—IT WAS EASIER THAN SHE’D IMAGINED BE
-cause when she’d see the child, even from a distance, she’d feel such a danger to herself that she wouldn’t want to be near her. Of course she missed her. Taking care of her father could only fill so much time. Besides, he got uneasy if she fussed over him and only withdrew more into his books. It seemed he was always freezing, even on the warmest of days, and he’d wear one or two woolen vests on top of his shirt, as well as his gray cardigan. If Emil were still alive, he’d get her father to talk, engage him in their old spirited discussions.

Trudi busied herself more in the pay-library. Although the novels continued to bore her, she savored the steady flow of people who came to her without any effort of her own—quite unlike those years in school when she’d tried so hard to bring others to her. Now they couldn’t stay away from her: she had a way of hooking them with rumors, of looking right through them with those fierce blue eyes of hers, of seeing one thing and fathoming the rest. And always, always she had new stories for them, stories that provided drama, not the melodrama of those novels in which feelings were only on full tilt—hate, love, fear, bliss—but subtle shadings of experience that
would reverberate in their hearts long after they would forget the endings of the trashy books that granted them an escape from their lives.

One of her new customers was a Jewish woman who checked out three mystery novels whenever she came to the library. Though a few Jews had returned to Burgdorf, Angelika Tegern was the only Jew to settle in town without having lived here before. A tall, lovely woman with a sad mouth, she was married to an architect. When the two bought land near the river and built a splendid stucco house with a solarium, the cost of it got Anton Immers going against the Jews once again: “It’s plain to see that their kind live in houses far more extravagant than honest people like us.…” When his daughter-in-law could no longer bear to listen to the old man and told him the Germans could never make good on what had happened to the Jews—“I’ll always feel guilty even though I didn’t participate”—the old butcher didn’t speak to her for weeks.

The first time Frau Tegern had come into the pay-library, Trudi had been intrigued because—aside from having the name Angelika—she looked the way Trudi had described herself in her reply to Max Rudnick’s ad. Though Frau Tegern kept to herself, Trudi gradually found out from her that her parents had died in KZs. When her father, a political prisoner, had been arrested in the late thirties, her mother had kept visiting him, even after the yellow star had to be worn. She’d refused to sew it on her coat, and she’d traveled freely, continuing her dangerous visits to her husband. But in 1945 she too had been deported and had died in Theresienstadt.

Once, when Angelika Tegern mentioned how the butcher made her uncomfortable, the way he watched her, Trudi assured her that Herr Immers looked at everyone with suspicion, even his old Nazi buddies.

“I’m going to tell you something about him,” she said and began the first of her lessons to Angelika, letting her know whom she could trust and whom to stay away from. “Not only is he a three-months baby, but he lies.”

“About what?”

“Well, essentially he’s truthful—the kind of pigheaded truth, you know?—but he lies about fighting in the First World War. He wasn’t fit to be a soldier, so he traded sausages for the taxidermist’s uniform and had himself photographed.… That briefcase he always carries with him—you’ve seen it, right?—is supposedly for gathering information
about people, but his daughter-in-law swears all he has in there are newspaper clippings of the Führer.”

Trudi noticed that Frau Tegern liked to check out new books: they felt special when you cracked them open for the first time, and the pages resisted your touch—there were just the stories then, letters printed on clean paper, unencumbered by the fates of the people who would read them and whose touch would manifest itself by, say, a crease or a smudged page. Trudi began saving new deliveries for Angelika Tegern, holding them for her behind the counter before she would lend them to anyone else. She knew her customers’ tastes and would recommend books of passion or crime or adventure to them, even to those who pretended not to read them, like Klara Brocker, who wore lipstick just to go to the butcher shop in the morning and claimed to borrow romances for her invalid mother, who lived with her and her illegitimate son in their cramped apartment on Barbarossa Strasse. It was said that the old woman’s stroke was the result of her shock over Klara’s pregnancy. Never mind that the boy who’d resulted from that pregnancy was three years old and had been thoroughly enjoyed by his grandmother prior to her illness. But now her left side was paralyzed, including half of her face, and she had to be fed with a spoon. Her mask of perpetual disapproval only confirmed that she must have suffered terribly from her daughter’s indiscretion.

It struck Trudi as fitting that her customers had a choice between her stories and the published stories printed in books with gaudy paper jackets, books that were safe because they didn’t implicate anyone in town. From time to time she’d remind herself to save stories about herself for Hanna—stories which, once the girl was older, she would understand. When she thought of herself with Hanna, it became easier to separate those images from much earlier ones—of herself as a child with
her
mother in the earth nest—and she’d think of the first stories she had ever told, stories that had begun with a purpose: to lure her mother into the light.

Now the purpose of her stories had changed. She spun them to discover their meaning. In the telling, she found, you reached a point where you could not go back, where—as the story changed—it transformed you, too. What mattered was to let each story flow through you. It was becoming impossible to revert to her old reasons for telling stories—to get even, to prod, or to soothe. But most people
didn’t know that. They were still afraid of her. They didn’t understand that now she told a story for the sake of the story, taking pleasure in how each formed within her. It still would begin by feeling drawn to secrets, but she could curb the urge to tell, let it settle into something that nurtured the fragments of life which fell into her way, until a story was ready to unveil itself.

At first Hanna didn’t know what it was she was missing, only that many mornings, upon waking, she’d be struck with a sudden sadness that made her want to crawl under her feather comforter and weep. Her mother would read to her, her father would let her play with his chess pieces, and she’d smile and hug them and wonder if this sadness perhaps meant what it was like to be a child. Not that it was with her all the time—no, she could go for days without it, but then it would find her again.

During her fourth year of life, her father kept raising the fence in the backyard because she roamed the neighborhood and was found inside people’s houses, where she’d climb in through a window, playing with a toy, say, or a set of
Schnaps
glasses. Sometimes she coaxed Manfred Weiler, who lived in the other wing of the apartment house, to escape with her, and they’d play on the swings of the Catholic school until one of the nuns would grip their arms and lead them home.

Though the fence grew, Hanna scaled it, following a vague yearning that sent her beyond her own world. And then one humid summer day, a few months after her fifth birthday, she saw the little woman in the open market with a basket, talking to a farmer who was weighing tomatoes for her, a yellow cardigan flopping around her yellow-and-blue housedress. And all at once Hanna knew why she’d been running away. Darting toward the little woman, she slipped her fingers into the wide palm and beamed at the round face that was so much closer to hers than the faces of other grown-ups. Inside, she felt a deep blue quiet, a slow blue swirl of quiet, the same blue as the flowers on the housedress and the eyes in front of her, blue eyes that blinked while the big hand tugged to get away from her.

But Hanna was not about to let go.

“Where is your mother?”

“At home. Painting.”

“Does she—”

“I climbed across the fence.”

“You shouldn’t do that.”

“I know.”

A stork flew across the roof of the bakery, and Hanna pointed toward it. They both followed its course until it landed on Potter’s bar.

“When I was younger than you,” said the little woman, “my mother made me leave sugar cubes on the windowsill.”

“Why?”

“So the stork would bring me a sister or brother. But I ate the sugar… And my brother died.”

“My brother died too.”

“I was at his funeral.”

“But he came from my mother’s belly. Not from a stork.”

“At least your brother was born alive. Mine died before he was born.”

“How?”

“I never got to touch him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Horst. It’s on our gravestone.”

“My brother was called Joachim. Did you see me at his funeral?”

“Yes.”

“Did I cry?”

“You were too little to understand.… I better take you home.”

“Can I visit you?”

“Those tomatoes—I have to pay for them. Let go of me.”

Hanna swatted at a fly that was about to land on her sweaty arm and transferred her grip to the handle of Trudi’s basket. “Now I would cry.”

The blue eyes alighted on her.

Nearby, the engine of a motor scooter kicked on and grew to a clamor as the fat priest drove past the open market, his bulk teetering on the small seat. He seemed in a good mood and waved at parishioners who greeted him. In the months since his sister, Hannelore, had arrived to take his housekeeper’s place, his sermons had become more uplifting. People said it hadn’t been easy for him to persuade Fräulein Teschner to leave for a better job, and they said his sister was lucky to be working for him. Who else would want a spinster with crippled hands? But Trudi wouldn’t let anyone say a word against
Hannelore Beier. Where once the pastor’s sister would have made her uncomfortable, she now had her own code of honor toward others who were regarded as freaks.

At the next wooden stand, a farmwoman was crossing out the chalk prices on the slate signs and writing new numbers beneath. Trudi chose eight white mushrooms and a small head of cauliflower. Hanna was still holding on to the basket when they reached her mother’s apartment house and wouldn’t let go until her mother said that, if it was all right with Trudi, she’d bring her over to the pay-library soon.

Trudi hesitated. It had been more than two years since Hanna had been inside her house. She made herself try it out—a picture of herself and Hanna—and it no longer felt dangerous: they were sitting at her kitchen table; between them stood the satin hatbox in which her mother used to keep her paper dolls, and she was showing the girl how to fold tabs over the shoulders and hips of the dolls. Hanna laughed as she dressed them in their long paper gowns, rich shades of purples and reds and greens, and gave them matching hats and parasols.