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 (189 page)

Gently, the teacher touches his wrist. “Of course you can miss someone like that.”

He raises his face to her. “I know that.”

Otto plans to write about his best friend ever, Markus, who lives on a cliff next to an amusement park in America where he’ll take Otto when he goes to visit. He and Markus will ride the carousel together, count the skyscrapers across the Hudson River, which flows past the house where Markus’s family lives with his Tante Trina.

*

Clouds move in front of the sun, and right away it gets chilly. To warm her boys, the teacher gets them to stomp their cold feet and flap their arms, pretending to be birds.

“I’m a swallow,” she cries, her back to the dike.

“I’m an eagle.”

“I’m a wild goose.”

Wolfgang, the most athletic of Fräulein Jansen’s boys, leaps the highest. “I’m a stork.” Elaborate legwork—rising and stretching, the illusion of endless legs.

The boys laugh as fresh air streams through their lungs and they feel the strength that comes with it, the conviction that they can do anything.
Through the skin first.

“Storks carry babies.”

“
Ja
, Wolfgang. Babies.”

“Not this stork!”

Spreading their arms, they hop and stomp and dance. They like the flatness of the land as they leap above it, only trees and the dike rising from that flatness, only one little figure scurrying along the crest of the dike, then down toward the river, slipping once, scrambling up again.

G
ISELA STOSICK SEARCHES
her house once again after her husband has gone to look for their son. She searches Bruno’s room. Nothing. Then his teacher’s apartment because Bruno likes to visit her. The teacher invites him inside, but she comes downstairs when she has something to say.
This is not snooping
. Gisela unlocks the door. Her hands are itching.
I have a reason to be here. The right to be here.
The teacher’s rooms are tidy but comfortable. Tidy in the way you’d keep your home when you’re expecting visitors.
Not me. She’s not expecting me.
Inside, no evidence of Bruno. Or of the secrets her son brings here. Of that she is certain: that he no longer brings his secrets to her but to his teacher. With her fingertips, Gisela traces the carvings on a dark panel. It feels very old. Valuable. She picks up a pillow, strokes the embroidery. Obviously the stitching of the teacher’s mother, who has used the full thickness of each thread, bright colors that rise from the cloth in bold patterns. No flowers or tiny animals for Almut Jansen.
All at once Gisela feels envious. This stitching is far more intricate than that on the tablecloth she bought from Almut Jansen at the Christmas market.
Only the best for Almut’s daughter. Who takes it. Who knows how to make herself the favorite. Especially with Bruno. It has been such a mistake to rent to her.
When Gisela returns to her own living room, she finds chess books and chess clocks and boxes with chess pieces stacked against the wall behind the door. How odd. The club meets tonight, but usually the first members to arrive get everything from the birch wardrobe. Sometimes Günther starts setting up before the others get there, but he wouldn’t leave this mess on the floor. Besides, he wasn’t home long enough. Bruno must have done this. So he could hide inside the wardrobe. He and his hiding games.

*

By the river, the boys are hopping and stomping and dancing and some clowning around so their teacher will notice them. She, too, is leaping, laughing, her scarf rising with her, levitating above her for a second or two whenever she lands.

“I’m an ostrich. Look at me, Fräulein.”

“Me, look at me. I’m bigger than an ostrich.”

The teacher is facing her boys and the river, her back to the figure that scurries toward them, getting bigger, legs and arms pumping, suit jacket flapping around the belly.

Already, she’s feeling warmer, and she can tell her boys are, too, because their faces are flushed, their voices enthusiastic as they call out the names of birds and mimic their flights. Like Fräulein Siderova, she has used this day to its best, has won sight and insight for her boys, has woven botany and linguistics and fairy tales, linking her students, once again, to the beauty of their
Heimat—
homeland. The learning excursion she took as a girl with Fräulein Siderova is blurring with today’s—laughter and blossoms and birds and pine pitch and the new green of leaves.

Andreas is waving to someone behind her.

“It’s Bruno’s
Vater,
” Walter says.

*

Impatiently, Gisela walks toward the wardrobe where Bruno must be hiding, tilting his head in the dark, listening for her steps. She doesn’t have time for this. But when she pictures that little mischievous smile of his, she stops herself.
Let him play. It’s good for him. He doesn’t play nearly enough.
If only she’d been able to give him brothers and sisters. From the day he could walk, he loved to hide from her. But only if she was nearby, playing her piano, say, or ironing, so he could count on her to find him. As he is counting on her to find him now. Far too grown-up in other ways. The clicking of the dog’s toenails next to her.

*

Herr Stosick is running toward the teacher and her boys.

“How is Bruno?” she calls out to him.

Face red, he stops, bends forward, hands on his knees, his breath so jagged he can’t speak.

Has he found out about Bruno climbing from the window at night? And that she hasn’t reported it to him? And that she knows he’s still a member of the Hitler-Jugend? Is that why he’s kept Bruno from returning to school?

Is he going to tell her she has to move out of her apartment? She wants to cry at the unfairness of it. Already she misses her apartment. How unprofessional it would be of Herr Stosick to evict her in front of her students. She is teaching, and he should be at his school, doing his work. Instinctively, she steps between him and her boys, spreads her arms to contain them.

*

Gisela reaches down to rub Henrietta’s thick neck. Just a few years ago Bruno was still small enough to ride the dog, hold on to her
collar, saying politely, “Please, carry me to my room.” But Henrietta wouldn’t budge, not till Bruno slid off her back, and then she’d shake her broad head, specks of drool flying from her speckled jowls. The dog is rubbing herself against Gisela’s left thigh, whimpering. “Enough,” Gisela says. Tail straight up, Henrietta trots toward the wardrobe, and for an instant Gisela feels embarrassed for the dog with her rump exposed like that. Henrietta sniffs the door, whimpers again.

*

“Where have you been?” Herr Stosick’s hair clings to his scalp, sweaty despite the cold.

“On a learning excursion. With my students.”

“Bruno?” He moves past her into the midst of her boys like a swimmer, arms separating them, his bulk the size of three boys. “Bruno!”

“Herr Stosick, please!”

“Bruno!” His voice hoarse like a foghorn.

*

“What is this, Henrietta?” Gisela makes loud steps, for her son to hear. “Someone left out all the chess books. I’ll put them back inside.” No need to spoil Bruno’s little game. There’ll be enough time to eat and get him back to school.

*

The boys scowl as Bruno’s father pushes them aside, then tighten into one circle around their teacher, solidify. She feels them shifting, three deep between her and Herr Stosick. It makes her uneasy though she knows they want to protect her. Even if they’re back to normal, she isn’t.

“We waited for Bruno,” she says. “We—”

“Bruno?” Now he’s circling her and the boys, herding them. “Where is he?”

They can taste their power, know they can shield one another from him. Even the new boy, Heinz, now belongs with them.

“Bruno is at home,” Andreas shouts.

“At home,” Heinz says, defiant.

*

Gisela taps the blond wood of the wardrobe. “I wonder where Bruno is?” she sings out. “Bruno . . . ?”

*

“We waited for Bruno before we moved our biology and art lessons outdoors,” the teacher tells Herr Stosick.

“Your principal didn’t know where you were! You and all these boys.”

These boys.

Pressing around her.

Shivering.

A seagull skims the surface of the Rhein with a husky cry and captures a fish.

Andreas nudges Heinz. “My
Oma
comes from Bavaria, too.”

Thekla angles her elbows to keep the boys away from her. “I have never asked Sister Josefine for permission to teach in nature.”

“In my school you would.”

She feels a sudden rage.
Ten years to find this position, and I’m not letting you take it from me.

*

Gisela scratches her knuckles. Already, she can see herself telling Günther how she walked around the living room with loud steps, calling Bruno’s name; and though he’ll be annoyed at Bruno for
making him late for lunch and possibly late for school, she’ll get him to laugh with her—the way only parents will at the quirks of their children—because they both know how Bruno can get with his hiding games, and it will be good to laugh together because, lately, there has not been enough of that in their house.

*

This is what she will do, Thekla decides: speak with Sister Josefine before Herr Stosick can. As soon as she gets her boys to school, she’ll ask the principal for a meeting, complain that Herr Stosick—no, she’ll refer to him as the principal of the Protestant school—intimidated the Catholic students. The impropriety of it! Maybe she won’t complain but rather consult Sister Josefine for advice on how to handle this impropriety. The sister likes giving advice. It’ll be one principal against another. One religion against another. If Thekla has to, she’ll incite the nuns into a bloody Holy War, wimples flying, rosaries in an uproar.

*

As Gisela lays her hand on the doorknob, she can feel her son inside the wardrobe, smiling, waiting. She wouldn’t have done that at his age. Not in the dark. Except for that one summer night she strayed from the bonfire she’d built with her youth group, drifted toward a glow that shimmered through the night and competed with the flames. It wasn’t like her to wander off, but the stars were so near it didn’t occur to her she was by herself. It was only natural to climb up to that platform high in a tree, toward the Milky Way, which spread above her and above the spires of the trees as if cut into the night; and as she lay on the wooden planks, she was no longer tethered to earth, only to those stars in their wide band that brought the sky closer to her. She wishes Bruno could have seen how, within that whitish light, every possible color existed—yellow and red and green and blue—in uncounted variations. When she heard her friends’
voices yelling her name, she didn’t answer because she didn’t want this to end, this whiteness in the sky and she, only she, part of it. As she breathed slowly to make this last, it occurred to her that she didn’t have to go back, that she could let herself be sucked into that whiteness. Her friends walked on, and their shouts grew muffled, into echoes of shouts that could not touch her, echoes of echoes.

*

Herr Stosick is peering into the faces of the boys as if expecting to recognize his son.

“Please, Herr Stosick—” The young teacher keeps her voice polite. “I’m sure you’ll find Bruno at home.”

She wants him to go away, let her complete this afternoon with her boys, keep them warm and focused. She’ll have a race back to school. Already, she can picture Wolfgang leaning forward, the first to sprint.

“How did you lose him?” Herr Stosick demands.

“He didn’t come with us,” Thekla says.

“What?”

“Gisela kept him home.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“He wasn’t feeling well. His face and hands were cold. She must have taken him to Frau Doktor Rosen.”

That’s when he starts away from her toward the dike.

*

Gisela smiles to herself as she imagines Bruno raising his face toward the scent of the
Himmel und Erde
she’s prepared the way he likes it, no salt, so that the sweetness of the apples overwhelms the potatoes. Her Bruno adores—Her hands are itching. Fingertips to knuckles. She rubs them, hard. Her Bruno adores sweets, and it’s for him that she will boil down the first raspberries next summer into syrup that he’ll dribble on his rice pudding to make it last.

*

The boys keep in one tight formation around their teacher until she manages to break from them and rush after Bruno’s father. Then they huddle, think of staying behind, to climb on the jetties, aim pebbles for the current that rushes past them toward the left, and determine who can skip the farthest.

Fräulein Jansen has shown them the Rhein on the map of the world, no more than a squiggle; but on the map of Germany, they’ve followed their river past Duisburg and Xanten to the Dutch border, studying its geology and history. “It doesn’t stop at the border, of course,” Fräulein said as she drew the rest of the Rhein on the chalkboard, adding Dutch towns along its banks, Rijnwaarden and Zevenaar and Rotterdam, until the Rhein spilled itself into the Nordsee.

Here, by the river, they won’t have to be careful not to break windows or hit people and animals who might stray. But staying behind would mean letting Fräulein chase after Bruno’s father alone. She’s theirs to protect. That’s why the boys keep up with her. Easy. Because it’s at the slow pace of Bruno’s father. While he steps around horse droppings, the boys leap across. He has to slow down as he climbs the dike with the vast sky above him. It would take no effort to pass him, trip him, close around him once he’s on the ground.

In the stubbly fields hang the tattered clothes of leftover scarecrows. At the Braunmeiers’ farm, the boys try to pester the white goat by clapping their hands, but the goat perches on its favorite tree stump in the middle of the meadow like a statue, like the king of all the cows that clump together at a distance.