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 (21 page)

That summer afternoon my mother and I—wearing our wet swimsuits—climbed the stone steps that led to the terrace of the Kaisershafen Gasthaus. She smiled as we walked past the planters that overflowed with fuchsias, past the tables with their striped umbrellas, where people sat in their Sunday clothes, eating pastries and drinking coffee or lemonade. Everyone watched us. My mother’s back was straight, and her hair lay like a silk scarf on her shoulders, covering most of the freckles that spread across her back. Through the double glass doors we walked into the lobby where she asked the head waiter for the phone so she could call my father to pick us up. We left dark puddles on the carpet and on the upholstery of our car. My father’s face looked pale and helpless as he drove us home. “What you’re doing is dangerous,” he told both of us.

The second Wednesday of August Fräulein Mahler came to our house and invited me to go shopping with her. “So we can get to know each other better,” she said.

I wished I could find real reasons to dislike her, reasons that would convince my father to stop seeing her, but all I could think was that she was too friendly and kept giving me things. “I’ve already made plans,” I said. “With friends.”

For a moment she seemed disappointed, though I was sure it was only an act for my father’s benefit. She was about my father’s age, nearly twenty years older than my mother, and I couldn’t imagine her ever doing anything dangerous.

It was his day off, and he sat close to her on the sofa in our living room, taking small bites from a buttered slice of raisin bread she had baked for us. His cardigan was unbuttoned,
and he still wore his deerskin slippers. On the wall across from him hung my mother’s painting of the flooded meadow between the Rhein and the dike, the dark reflections of willows blurred in the silver-green waters.

“Can’t you change your plans, Hanna?” my father asked softly. New strands of gray wove through his reddish-brown beard, and the bald spot on top of his head had widened.

I wanted to shout that my mother had been dead less than four months, wanted him to remember her as he sat there so snug next to Fräulein Mahler with her turquoise dress and her gold teeth, but somehow—that moment—I couldn’t even remember my mother’s face.

Fräulein Mahler smiled at him. “Hanna and I will have many other times together.” She waved aside the flies that had come in through the open window, wrapped two pieces of her raisin bread in a napkin, and handed them to me. “In case you get hungry.” Her fingernails were perfect ovals the color of squashed cherries.

I said, “Thank you,” as always when she forced her presents on me, presents I never used. Well—never wasn’t quite true. I’d eaten some of her white chocolates, though I hadn’t enjoyed them, and I’d read two of her books before stacking them behind the hamper in back of my closet with her other stuff.

When Fräulein Mahler had started coming to our house, Frau Brocker and I had thought up several plots to get rid of her, from chasing her out the door with a broom to questioning her sanity by pretending we’d never seen her before; but then our housekeeper had begun to like her. “She’s good for your father, Hanna.”

As I pushed my bicycle out of the shed in our backyard, one of the dried blossoms from the lilac bush scratched against my forehead. Though the leaves had stayed green, the blossoms had shriveled into brown scepters. I ripped one of them off the bush and crumbled it between my
fingers; it looked like tobacco but felt like dry dirt. The day of my mother’s funeral the blossoms had been white and I’d dropped a bunch of the lilacs into her open grave.

Trudi Montag stood in front of the house across the street, talking with Frau Talmeister, who leaned out of her window, a cup of coffee in her hand. The sidewalk was a slippery mess with all the cherries that had fallen from the Talmeisters’ tree. Despite the heat, Trudi Montag wore a pink cardigan over her housedress, and her O-shaped legs were in ankle socks. Since my mother’s death I hadn’t wanted to be with any of my friends, not even with Trudi Montag in her pay-library.

Both women waved to me; I raised one hand, though I would have liked to pretend I hadn’t seen them. They were probably talking about my father and Fräulein Mahler, whose BMW was parked in our driveway entirely too often.

At the end of the street, the Hansen bakery truck pulled away from the curb, and I pushed back against my bike pedals to slow down. Manfred Weiler’s mother walked toward me carrying two loaves of
Schwarzbrot
, looking down as if counting the cracks in the sidewalk. In the years since her husband had hung himself, she hadn’t come to our door, though she still lived in our building. Her son, Manfred, dropped off the rent check on the first of each month. He’d become one of those boys who stood in groups at street corners, watching girls’ legs and whistling dirty. When we were six, we had dared each other to steal an egg from his father’s chicken coop. With a sharp stone we’d jabbed a hole into the shell and taken turns sucking it out, lying to each other about how delicious it was.

I rode my bike to the Rhein and dropped it next to the boulder I used as a lookout. The air was hazy and tinged with the scent of grass and wildflowers—bright red poppies and blue cornflowers—that grew in the meadow between the dike and the river. Streaks of sunlight broke the
white-crested waves into layers the color of slate. I ripped Fräulein Mahler’s raisin bread into shreds and tossed them into the water, satisfied at the thought of fat gray fish crowding below and feeding on them.

The river was calmer than during the spring when I sometimes came here to watch the floods that swirled against the dike, covering the lower trunks of the trees, making them look less sturdy than on land. The worst flood my mother had ever seen had happened when she was a girl: the Rhein had flooded nearly a hundred towns, killing five people, eighteen cows, and seven horses in Burgdorf alone. It had torn out trees and created a deep basin near the embankment; after the floods had receded, the basin remained filled with water and became a swimming hole.

When I was smaller, I used to ride my sled down the dike in the winter; my mother would run alongside, laughing, catching me whenever I fell off, and then pull the sled with me on it back up the dike. Her hair would be tangled, her face red from the wind.

My stomach felt withered and cold. Clasping my arms around my knees, I held my legs close and rocked myself back and forth. From the river sounded the blast of a freighter’s whistle, deep and sorrowful like the bellows of the cattle that often drifted from the Braunmeiers’ farm when dusk set in.

A flat-nosed barge pulled its heavy load upstream. Long and narrow, it had two cabins, one in front and one in back. They were painted white, their roofs and smokestacks red. Between them stretched a clothesline with laundry that whipped the wind like an exhibit of odd flags: a child’s yellow dress, white bedsheets, a blue towel.

I wished I could live on one of those barges with the river people. Float far away and never come back. I scratched my shoulders where the last sunburn had peeled, leaving shiny patches of new skin. At the river’s edge, next to the weathered bench, two women had spread a blanket. One
of them held a baby whom she nursed by covering her breasts with a towel and holding the baby’s head beneath. The other woman had a small son who tottered around on unsteady legs, tore clumps of camomile from the meadow, and presented them to his mother, their dirty roots swinging against his chest.

Yesterday I had walked upriver for almost three kilometers, way past the meadow where the architect Siegfried Tegern used to take his seven dogs. I’d let the current carry me back to where I’d started. But today I didn’t feel like walking. I picked at the blue nubs of nylon on my old bathing suit, pulling until they hung by one last transparent thread.

In the middle of the Rhein, two barges strained upstream, connected by a long cable. Puffs of steam blew from the stack of the first barge. Where the smoke came out, it looked smudged, but the wind blew it toward the sky, fraying it until it became white and, further up, almost translucent. I could see where the steel cable from the stern of the first freighter entered the water and where it came out again, fastened to the bow of the second ship. I imagined myself swimming out there, holding on to the cable, and letting the barges pull me upriver. I’d get a closer glimpse of the people who lived on them. As long as I stayed away from the hulls, the suction around them couldn’t pull me under. Then I’d be able to drift back here without having to walk.

Waves splashed around me as I swam out to where the barges approached. The swift water felt good against my body. I felt strong. Nothing could happen to me. Floating in the current with me, my mother had told me about whirlpools and what I should do if I got caught in one. She told me of people who’d drowned fighting the downward spiral, trying to break out of its sides—something that was impossible. The only way to survive a whirlpool, she said, was to go down with it as deeply as possible and then,
where it weakened at the bottom, swim out. I knew I could even save someone caught in a whirlpool.

I waited for the freighters at a safe distance, treading water with my legs. After the stern of the first barge passed me, I swam out to find a good spot where I could grasp the cable. I reached for it about one meter before it dipped underwater.

The pain was incredible as the skin was torn off my palms. It felt as if the force of the barges straining against the river would tear out my arms. My hands slipped to where the fraying cable disappeared in the current, and I was thrust beneath it. I fought to get away, but the cable cut across my stomach and pulled my head underwater. Somewhere I’d heard your entire life flashes in front of you before you die. Oddly calm, I found myself waiting for that moment, one compact time capsule. But all I felt was a dark pressure against my ears, my mouth, a pressure that would surely fill me, soothe me, replace me if I let it. For an instant I considered giving in—it would be so easy—but then I thought of my mother on that empty stretch of highway, driving too fast, too close to the concrete divider. Something within me protested, and I fought once more against the cable.

But it only cut deeper into my stomach, my arms. My lungs hurt as though they were about to burst. I pushed down and away, arms and legs kicking, freeing myself from the cable, then up, up. I stretched for air. Was blinded by yellow dots. My eyes ached. A deep, hollow sound, then voices, all at once, loud and angry. And the barge, the second barge—blurred at first—was less than ten meters from me, advancing. Aboard two men and a woman shouted. Waved me away.

As fast as I could, I swam toward the embankment and pulled myself out of the river. I crawled on my hands and knees, fell onto the hard pebbles. My hands were bleeding, palms raw with steel splinters, blackened by tar. My bathing
suit was ripped. Bleeding welts had sprung up on my thighs and stomach.

It took months for the skin on my body to heal, and for the splinters, which the doctor could not remove, to work their way to the surface of my palms.

In the evenings my father spread ointment on my hands, and I tried not to flinch at its cold sting. “If only you didn’t have to take such risks…,” he’d say as he wrapped fresh lengths of gauze around my outstretched hands. It sounded as if he were talking to my mother.

I was still picking at those splinters in November when my father took Fräulein Mahler to the family reunion at the Kaisershafen Gasthaus. She wore a brown silk dress and smiled with her expensive teeth as she admired my great-aunt Augusta’s opal ring. Uncle Viktor showed her the silver Venice emblem on his cane, and Aunt Bettina invited her to visit for a weekend in Köln. My father looked so pleased that I couldn’t bear to watch.

I walked out through the double glass doors and onto the empty terrace. Tables and umbrellas had been stored away for the winter. The huge planters were empty, the wide stone steps covered with a delicate pattern of frost. Already the light was changing to a hazy shade of gray, and in the turrets above me most of the small windows were lit. One hand on the iron railing, I walked down the stairs to where the smoke-colored waves tossed themselves against the embankment. I sat on a step, and as I traced the swirls of frost with one finger, I had a sudden image of my mother, climbing the stairs in the red swimsuit she’d lost in the North Sea, smiling to herself as she walked into the lobby, past the bewildered head waiter, and flung open the door to the dining room where the relatives were gathered.

My father and Fräulein Mahler married the following February, less than a year after my mother’s accident. By
then I was in boarding school—a request I’d made which my father had approved after much hesitation. Fräulein Mahler had surprised me by trying to talk me into living at home with her and my father. When he picked me up from school the day before the wedding, he drove silently, and I figured he was worried about how I might behave during the ceremony, but then I realized it was something else when he reached over to me and said, “It doesn’t mean that I’ll ever forget her.” His hand felt warm and light on my arm.

In St. Martin’s Church I knelt between Renate and Rolf in the first of the birch pews. A red carpet partially covered the marble steps that led to the altar where Herr Pastor Beier stood one level above my father and Fräulein Mahler. The three stained-glass windows behind the marble altar filtered the winter light through their intricate pattern of red, white, and black crosses.

As my father exchanged vows with Fräulein Mahler, I reached for a black prayer book and held it closed in my hands. Against the smooth leather binding, I felt the scars on my palms. Perhaps I needed to believe in something that day, something just for myself, because I emerged from the church convinced that the scars on my hands would guard me like magic against making mistakes in the future. But of course it didn’t work that way, and it only occurred to me much later that the summer I was fourteen I had saved a life—not the life of a stranger as I had imagined—but the life I had taken for granted and which, in the years to come, I would take for granted again.