Ursula Hegi The Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set: Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River, The Vision of Emma Blau. Children and Fire (182 page)

But she’ll have to be diplomatic: Günther Stosick is a principal; she only a first-year teacher. She’ll remind him of the shame that used to fill the space where pride once lived, and how—as teachers—they have a responsibility to restore that pride in their students. “Knowledge without pride is fragile,” she may say.

“We were more human without it.”

She’s getting agitated just thinking of what he may say. But all at once she feels relieved. Because it’s Tuesday. And that means she can’t speak with them tonight.

*

Every Tuesday the members of the Burgdorf Chess Club meet in the Stosicks’ living room: they get out the chess sets and chess clocks and books from the birch wardrobe, set up four long tables, and cover them with starched white tablecloths. Usually, they play past midnight.

So far, Bruno has won against every man, including brilliant strategists like his father and Leo Montag. The boy plays without effort, it seems to the members, though that is of course unthinkable because what would that say about their game?

A boy like that can make you fear that at fifty-one, say, or forty-three, you are too old to learn more about chess.

A boy like that can make you wish you’d spoken out against allowing children in the club.

Already, Bruno is competing on a national level, and it’s obvious that, in a few years, he’ll bring honor to his chess club and all of Burgdorf by representing Germany in international tournaments.

A few weeks ago his father showed Thekla the first chess ledgers, dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century and documenting every game by the members of the club. “These early entries are in the handwriting of the founder,” he said with reverence.

Gisela rolled her eyes.

“Must you?” he asked, but he seemed amused.

“Obviously, the members, including my dear husband, worship this idiot of a founder. And you know why? Because that man abandoned his eight children and his wife for the greatest passion of all . . . chess.” As Gisela drew out the word
chess
into several syllables, she looked about ten years old.

At ten, Gisela had been impish and swift at the piano, and she’d become the protégée of Frau Birnsteig, the concert pianist, who still invited the townspeople to her mansion every June to hear her play the piano for them—Debussy and Beethoven and Rachmaninoff—and to introduce her current protégée to this audience.

*

Better talk to the Stosicks tomorrow morning. She’ll wait till she hears the first steps downstairs, quick and light: Gisela. Maybe it would be best to speak with her alone, let her persuade Günther. Yes, Thekla decides, she’ll stay upstairs till she hears the front door, wait by her window till she sees the top of Günther Stosick’s hat, the herringbone pattern of his coat, as he heads in the direction of the Protestant school.

Then she’ll go down to the kitchen, where Gisela keeps her piano in the breakfast nook, windows on three sides. It’s the only place for it since the living room is for chess. But Gisela likes to play her piano here. She’ll ask Thekla to sit at her table, offer her coffee. Her hair will be sticking up, the way it gets from sleeping without a pillow.

On excursions with their youth group, Gisela would wake up with her hair stiff like that. Maybe they can talk about roasting potatoes in the fire, poking at them as they turned black with the embers. With the sharpened ends of bare branches, they’d impale the crisp skins to the soft centers and raise the potatoes, slowly, so they wouldn’t drop back into the flames. They’d blow on them, impatient to bite through the skins into the white insides. Black around their mouths, then, and they’d become the beast, scare one another by stretching their smudged lips and howling.

“Not all that different from what the children do now . . . hikes and songs and stories,” Thekla will say.

“I loved to stare into the flames,” Gisela may say.

“But one night you disappeared.”

Gisela will shake her head, smile. “Do you have to remind me of that?”

“When we couldn’t find you, the group leaders divided us into groups of five. We were forbidden to separate while we searched and yelled your name.”

“I never heard you shout.”

“We thought you’d been kidnapped. Raped. Killed.”

“Too many stories around the fire . . .”

“Instead you were asleep on that platform,” Thekla will say, prompting Gisela to tell her part of the adventure again: how she had climbed up the rungs of the ladder to that observation platform where, the day before, the girls had taken a picnic of cheese
Brötchen
and apples and lemonade.

“But why climb up there middle of the night?” Thekla will ask. “You were scared of being alone.”

Quite likely, Gisela will say she doesn’t remember. It’s what she has said before.

But Thekla won’t believe her because she, too, has not forgotten the wide-swirling path of light in the sky that spanned north and south, weightless and imposing.

R
AIN AGAINST THE
windows of the schoolhouse. Hard.

“Close your eyes, boys,” Fräulein Jansen says, “and listen to the rain. Imagine rain on the grasses and the fields....”

Some press their lids shut, twitchy folds.

Others let their lids slide down, smooth orbs.

“Think of the impossible green of wet treetops. . . .”

They raise their faces toward her, blind, expectant.

I wish you could see them, Fräulein Siderova.

“Listen closely:
pluie.
”

“Pluie?”
asks Walter.

“Yes,
pluie.
The French word for rain. It’s also what rain sounds like, doesn’t it?”

“Pluie
. . . ,”
whispers Otto. He bets Markus knows the word. Markus had private lessons in French. And in art. Otto misses planning with him about how the two of them would learn the
entire knowledge of the entire world and store it inside their minds: all languages, all art, all history. They’d go to university together, become teachers like Fräulein Jansen.

“Keep your eyes closed and listen. . . .” The teacher is listening to the rain, too, thinking how it was raining this hard seven weeks ago.

She remembers because of Marinus van der Lubbe. The Dutch queen, Wilhelmina Helena Pauline Maria, had appealed on his behalf to the old President von Hindenburg, asking him to commute her subject’s sentence to prison because at the time of his arrest the penalty for arson was not death—not yet. At dawn, on January 10, while the queen was still waiting for the answer to her appeal, the young Dutchman was taken from his solitary cell. Through the wet grass of the Leipzig prison yard, the executioner—white gloves, top hat—led Marinus to the guillotine.

At exactly twenty-eight minutes and fifty-five seconds past the hour of seven, his head dropped into a basket of sawdust.

Three days later, Marinus would have turned twenty-five.

Nearly seventy-five years later his verdict, guilty, would be revoked by the German federal prosecutor.

*

Sometimes, at dawn, Marinus inserts himself into the young teacher’s sleep-awareness. Like this morning, when she was still adrift in half-sleep, and the gentle weight of her feather quilt felt like that of a lover bending over her.
Emil?
But as she burrowed deeper into her bedding, the one with her was the Dutchman Marinus without the buttoned jacket he wore in newspaper photos, moon on his chest. The first night in her apartment she had dragged the bed to the window though it would block her way to the door, but she wanted the moon on her pillow, on her throat, her breasts. And in this moon,
now,
the mouth of the young Dutchman, sullen. His eyes no longer clown’s eyes because the shadow of his cap is gone.
Yet his black hair still in the shape of that cap, straight up from his forehead.
Marinus. Hands fast, hands gentle—

Thekla’s left foot slid across the sheet where her mother had darned it with embroidery thread that she split into single strands, her stitches so delicate you could find them only by touch, a silkier weave than the surrounding linen.
Don’t think—

Hands fast, hands gentle on her breasts her belly her thighs her buttocks—hands with rough skin, hands of a bricklayer—

How would Marinus’s life have gone if someone had taken him to Russia? “Here, this is where you want to be. So be here.” But before he could leave Holland, he’d had an accident. Five months in the hospital and an invalid’s pension. Enough to make it to Germany, but not to Russia.

Not yet, no, she was almost there, almost, hands of a bricklayer—

But the hands were her own, not rough, and Marinus’s head was cut off forever—

*

Struck by sorrow for him, Thekla sat up. Pulled the quilt around her shoulders. Through the open door, she could see the kitchen table and her napkin holder with her gray
Ahnenpass
booklet and the supporting documentation of her ancestors. Next to it were two stacks of clothes and linens, ironed and folded.
Mutti
must have been here yesterday evening while Thekla was out dancing with Emil. She had a key, always let herself in to pick up laundry and return it, clean.
Mutti
says Thekla is good at nesting. And that’s true. Thekla likes making a home with a few belongings that matter to her: a pottery jar with dried cornflowers; the basket where she stores gifts she’s bought for Fräulein Siderova: a blue glass egg, a beveled glass box for jewelry, a glass figure of a ballerina that would remind Fräulein Siderova of taking ballet lessons as a girl in Russia.

At least once a week
Mutti
stayed for a long bath. Thekla’s cylinder stove could heat more water than even her mother could want.
In the tub, she would hum to herself, turn the faucet with her toes to add more hot water whenever she wanted, gray-blond tendrils on her cheeks and shoulders. For so many years, she’d taken shallow baths in the basin she’d fill once a week in her kitchen with water she’d heat in all her pots. She’d tack a bedsheet across the kitchen and sponge herself clean behind that, humming, singing. The children would get to bathe in the water afterward. Then
Vati
. It was the only place where
Mutti
insisted on being first.

Thekla snaked one hand from the warmth of her bed to get a cigarette from her nightstand. Only then did she bring out her other hand and tap the cigarette against her wrist. The hiss of sulfur, then the familiar ease, that first blue drag through her body . . .
ja
. . . before she curled it down her throat, practiced, the smoke of her cigarette a shade duller than the frost on her window.

*

“Fräulein?”

She coughs, embarrassed.

“Pluie
. . .”

“Can we open our eyes?”

“If you like,” she says. “But keep thinking of raindrops striking a puddle, or a pail ... causing rings to form before they bounce off the surface, but not as high as where they come from.”

Her boys are nodding.

“. . . Pluie,”
Andreas says.

“Pluie
. . . Very good. Glistening rain, washing the roofs, the leaves . . . and a world within each raindrop—Would you like to know what the Italians call rain?” she asks.

“Ja.”

“Pioggia.”

“Pioggia,”
her boys call out.

I
T WAS RAINING
like that the afternoon Frau Abramowitz hoisted Thekla onto her desk in the living room and told her the most beautiful word in all languages was
rain. “Pioggia
in Italian. Now you say it.”

Thekla moved her lips around the Italian word like Frau Abramowitz did, heard the sound of herself saying,
“Pioggia,”
and the sounds of pots and dishes from the kitchen, where her mother was washing the dishes.

“That’s excellent,” Frau Abramowitz said. “Try it again, a bit softer.
Pioggia.”

“Pioggia?”

“Very good. Now in French:
pluie.
”

Above the desk hung the little mirror Frau Abramowitz had bought in Venice, shiny with gold around it

“Pluie . . . Pluie
—” Thekla tilted her head. “Like rain . . . on the roof.”

“Such a brilliant little girl.” Frau Abramowitz smiled at her. Fine wrinkles, so many that her skin looked all of one piece, not one wrinkle standing out.

“Thekla,”
Mutti
called.

Frau Abramowitz jerked her head aside.

Empty.
Thekla’s hand empty now.
Something wrong, I’ve done something wrong—what is it?—and the shame of that.