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 (31 page)

“He lives all alone with that statue,” Trudi told Robert as they trailed the pharmacist, who was chanting verses from the Bible. A tunic sewn from a potato sack flapped around his suit. “The statue
sleeps on a cot. He covers it like a baby… up to the neck with a feather quilt.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw it—once.… When my father was buying cough medicine. I sneaked into the storage room. You want me to take you there?”

“No,” Robert said quickly, “no,” his eyes on the statue which bobbed up and down in the pharmacist’s trembling arms. Its skin was the color of vanilla pudding, while the crown of thorns and streaks of dried blood were the brown of beef liver.

“He doesn’t speak to anyone in his family.”

Robert looked down into Trudi’s wide face, tilted toward him, the blue eyes filled with excitement as she waited for him to ask,
Why
not? “Why not?” he asked.

“Because …” she whispered, “his daughter, see, she married a Protestant.… They live on the same block with him. But he won’t say a word to them. Not even to his grandchildren. Or to his wife. She moved in with the daughter.”

“Is that why he goes around with the statue?”

Trudi didn’t know the answer to his question, and Robert asked it again that evening when—as every evening since his arrival—they all went next door to the Blaus for dinner with his grandparents and his Aunt Margret.

“The pharmacist is a crazy man,” his grandmother said.

His grandfather hushed her by saying, “Be careful what you say aloud. You wouldn’t want him to hear.” His teeth made a funny clicking sound.

His grandmother shook her head and ladled too many Brussels sprouts on Trudi’s plate. “I’m not afraid to tell him right to his face.”

“What Herr Neumaier does is like praying the rosary,” Leo Montag told the boy. “Only more so. Some people think if you do a certain ritual—especially to do with suffering—your sins are forgiven.”

Frau Blau leaned over and planted a kiss on top of Robert’s head. Only a few months earlier Trudi had been glad that Frau Blau was not her grandmother, but she now felt so jealous that she pinched Robert’s arm. Instantly, Frau Blau took her by the shoulders and marched her into the living room, where she set up a
Katzentisch—
cat table—a small separate table where children who misbehaved had to eat alone.

But on the way home, Robert played hide-and-seek with her in the dusk, and they found a bee squirming in a spider’s web behind the Blaus’ house. While Trudi sent Robert to fetch his grandfather’s sewing scissors, she stood watch over the spider, which darted from a crevice in the wall and disappeared without touching the bee. When Robert returned with the scissors, he cautiously cut the bee free without destroying the net.

Saturday, while her father stoked the tall cylinder-shaped stove in the bathroom for the weekly bath, Trudi took her aunt into her room and showed her the funeral coat that had been made from Stefan’s jacket.

Helene ran one finger down the sleeve and said she’d tell Stefan because he’d be glad to know. “Someday you’ll have to visit us.”

“When?”

“Any time your father wants to bring you.… You know what you can do before that? Talk to your uncle on the telephone.”

“In America?”

Her aunt nodded. “Frau Abramowitz said she’d let me use her phone.”

The Abramowitzs were one of the few families in Burgdorf who owned a phone. It had to do with being upper class. Usually the people who had phones also had maids and hired seamstresses who came to their houses several days each month to sew new clothes or make alterations. Employers competed with one another in feeding those seamstresses the most delicious meals—a practice that had little to do with generosity but rather with the expectation that the seamstresses would gossip to their other employers about how well they had been treated.

While some people with phones didn’t let their neighbors use them, the Abramowitzs were always glad to take messages for you or invite you into their living room to make calls. Trudi had heard the phone ring when she’d been at their house, and she’d listened to Frau Abramowitz answer it, but she’d never used it herself.

“I don’t know how,” she told her aunt.

“I’ll show you.” Her aunt glanced around the room. “This used to be my room when I was a girl. Stefan’s sister, Margret, was my best friend, and her bedroom was right across the way. We passed notes to each other from our windows.… You want the first bath?”

Trudi nodded.

“Raise your arms.” Her aunt lifted the hem of Trudi’s dress and pulled it over her head. Her fingers undid the button that fastened Trudi’s undershirt to her billowy cotton pants.

In the bathroom, her aunt sat on the edge of the tub and made Trudi stand while she washed her hair and soaped her back with a sponge.

“Robert says in America children call grown-ups by their first names.”

Her aunt nodded. “That’s what my husband liked best when he first came to America.” She smiled. “I rather missed the formality.”

“Why?” Trudi sat down in the warm water and swished her legs back and forth.

“Maybe because I was older when I went to America and used to things being a certain way. Stefan was a boy when he immigrated.” She asked Trudi to lean back so she could rinse the soap from her scalp. “He didn’t come back for me until nearly twenty years later.”

“My father says you were his third bride.”

Again, her aunt smiled, but this time her smile looked sad. “They died young, his other wives. Stefan needed a mother for his children.”

“Maybe they didn’t die,” Trudi offered.

Her aunt looked at her closely.

“Maybe they only pretended.”

“Why would they do that?”

“So no one can lock them up.”

Her aunt lifted Trudi from the tub and dried her, carefully. “She is gone—your mother,” she said and carried Trudi into her bedroom.

“You know that, don’t you?”

Trudi didn’t answer.

Her aunt combed the tangles from Trudi’s hair and braided it for the night. “She really is gone,” she said as she bent to kiss her good night.

When Trudi was allowed to speak on the phone to Uncle Stefan in America, his voice was thin and crackled into her ear.

Seized by a sudden longing for this uncle she’d never met, she shouted, “I’m coming to visit you.”

“You don’t have to yell,” Frau Abramowitz whispered to her.

“That’s good,” her uncle was saying. “I’m glad. Bring your father too.”

Aunt Helene and Robert stayed for five weeks, and before they left, Trudi gave Robert her white lamb and an egg-shaped rock she’d found in the brook. For days after their departure, she kept looking for Robert, expecting to hear his quiet laugh. She’d never known what it was like to have a friend. To be alone again felt as though a part of her had vanished along with him. It was different than with grown-ups leaving. You knew they were not like you.

“When can we visit Robert?” she asked her father.

“It’s very far,” he said. “And too expensive.”

“But when?”

“Maybe once you’re older.…”

She’d lie in her bed and stare through her window at the dark window across the alley. At least Aunt Helene used to have a friend close by when she’d lived here. But now Margret’s old room was a storage space for bolts of cloth and dummies and sewing-machine parts. She felt impatient to start school, the place where, she believed, she would have friends like Robert. But school was still more than a year away, and the children in the neighborhood and those who came with their parents to borrow books or buy tobacco, shied away from Trudi as if afraid she’d touch them and make them look like her.

Except for Georg Weiler next door. But only because he was different from other children too. A boy who looked like a girl. Though he and Trudi had always been aware of each other, they didn’t become friends until the day he asked her why her head was so big.

To stop the sting of his question, she shot right back at him, “It’s smaller than yours.”

They sat on the brick steps outside their buildings, she in front of the pay-library, he in front of his parents’ grocery store. The low winter sun was in their eyes, and he was playing with his marbles, lining them up along the bottom step.

“It looks bigger,” he insisted.

“It’s regular size.” Her neck began to itch. “It’s the rest of me that’s small. That’s why it looks big.… But it isn’t.”

He had to think about that. His eyes pushed at her. They were the color of fine sand. “I bet you my best marble your head’s bigger than mine.”

“Let me see the marble.”

“Georg.…” Frau Weiler stuck her head from the store. Her scarf
had slipped back a little, and coils of gray trailed around her face as though she’d been out in the wind. The center part in her hair had been so long in the same place that it had widened, showing the scalp beneath. “Georg!”

Georg flinched.

“Get those marbles off the stairs. You don’t want customers tripping over them and breaking their necks and being crippled for the rest of their lives.”

Trudi took a deep breath. It was a lot to consider all at once, even though she was used to Frau Weiler’s predictions of gloom: if you walked in the woods, you could get a rash from the
Brennesseln;
if you didn’t chew your food properly, you’d end up with holes in your stomach before you were twenty; if you forgot to confess a mortal sin, you were sure to end up in hell.…

Georg scooped up his marbles.

His mother closed the door, but her voice stayed out there with the children: “… and then they’ll sue us and we’ll lose the store … everything I’ve worked for.…”

Georg held a red and yellow glass ball, the size of a cherry, toward the sun. It glinted. “What do I get if you lose?”

“I won’t lose.”

“Yes, you will.”

“Then you can have all my marbles.”

The door opened again, and Georg’s mother appeared with two cups of steaming cocoa, her eyes as sorrowful as ever. “Don’t drink it too fast. You’ll burn your tongues.”

“Danke
, Frau Weiler.”

“Danke, Mutter”

“And don’t you spill any on your clothes.” She headed back into the store.

The cocoa was hot and sweet. A rash wind blew leaves across the sidewalk, their dry edges whispering against stone. Trudi caught a leaf from the chestnut tree, and as she tried to uncurl it, it crumbled in her hands. She wished Robert were here instead of Georg. With his mother’s last letter, he’d enclosed a picture he’d drawn of himself playing the piano.

“Even your shoes don’t look like boys’ shoes,” she told Georg.

“And you—you’re just a girl.”

“That’s why I wear a dress.”

He glared at her.

She glared right back. “And long hair,” she said.

“Get a string,” he ordered.

“What for?”

“To measure our heads.”

“You get it.”

“My mother won’t let me out again.” He tilted his head and directed a sudden smile at her. “Please, Trudi?”

She hesitated.

“Please please please, Trudi?”

She knew how to defend herself against his bullying, but not his charm. Dashing into the pay-library, she emerged with an end of string that had been tied around a recent delivery of romances.

“You first,” he said.

Her head held high, she walked over to the entrance of the grocery store and climbed on the step above him. Still, her nose didn’t even reach his shoulders. A dog barked from the direction of the market place. Wind slipped between her collar and her skin, cold and sudden, and rattled the wooden shutters outside the pay-library.

Bringing the string around her forehead, Georg measured carefully and marked it with a knot; when she wound the string around his head above his ears, it was a finger’s width longer.

She laughed aloud when she showed him. “I knew it,” she said, feeling that her head was at its perfect size.

“Yours,” he said, handing her his marble.

“You’re not mad?”

He beamed at her. “I’ll win it back.”

As he had predicted, Georg won back his glass marble; in addition, Trudi lost five of her clay marbles to him. From then on, they played nearly every day. Georg was lucky when it came to rolling the tiny balls into the hole he’d scooped into the damp soil between the two sets of steps, but he was just as generous in letting Trudi borrow marbles from him if she lost all of hers. To keep playing was far more important to him than winning. He could always win things. Trudi no longer teased him about his hair and his dainty smocks that buttoned in back. She was glad to see him when he stood outside her window and hollered for her to come out and play.

The morning after December 6, they shared sweets that St. Nikolaus had left for them in the shoes they’d set outside their bedroom doors overnight, and the last week of December they licked fresh snow from pine cones that looked as though they’d been dipped into sugar icing. They built a snowman with a carrot nose and coal eyes that smudged their mittens. Trudi’s father gave them an old hat for the snowman and let them borrow the kitchen broom, which they stuck into his arm, bristles up.

They wore their boots and mittens to church on Epiphany, when the priest and altar boys took down the manger that had been set up on the side altar, Jesus as big as a real baby, Maria and Joseph as tall as real parents. Both children liked church: the extravagant smell of incense and the splendid garments of the priest, the stained-glass windows and the mural of Christ’s Last Supper above the altar, but most of all the choir with its voices that drifted toward heaven. They even enjoyed the moments of silence, which were far more meaningful than any other kind of silence when they knelt in a pew, half hidden by the blond wood, feeling the pulse of the community around them.

You could tell a lot about people, they discovered, by the way they occupied pews, how much space they took and how close they knelt to the altar. There were those who liked to get to church early to watch everyone arrive, and others who knelt with their faces buried in their hands and never looked up. The proud and the humble—all of them dressed in their best clothes. In church, you could tell quickly how well people were doing: you’d notice new ailments as well as new hats; you’d sense new friendships and new animosities.