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 (58 page)

“He must have borrowed someone else’s dog,” her father said.

She nodded. “His own dog probably died.” Right away she wished she hadn’t said that. Even here, she thought, we can’t get away from thinking about Seehund. “Or maybe,” she offered quickly, “it’s his dog but hasn’t been properly trained yet.”

Her father let out a deep breath when—with his fifth attempt—the man finally cleared the glass wall and walked away, his back stiff, depending on the dog who had betrayed him.

The people of Burgdorf went to parades and speeches—some, like the taxidermist, because they genuinely believed in their leaders; others, like Herr Blau, because not to go would call attention to yourself. Most practiced the silence they were familiar with, a silence nurtured by fear and complicity that would grow beyond anything they could imagine, mushrooming into the decades after the war which, some began to fear, was about to happen.

To justify this silence, they tried to find the good in their government or fled into the mazes of their own lives, turning away from the community. They knew how not to ask questions; they had been prepared for it by government and church. Over the years, they had forgotten that early urge to question. For some, their one act of resistance was that—whenever they could avoid it—they didn’t raise their arm in the
Heil Hitler
greeting. But others, like Herr Immers and Herr Weskopp, used that greeting whenever they could, often as a challenge to test those they encountered.

At his son’s engagement party to Irmtraud Boden that May of 1936, Anton Immers entertained his guests with stories of the First World War, as though he’d really been a soldier, and by midnight—when the beer kegs were empty and the butcher had opened five bottles of expensive wine—his few remaining guests, all members of his
Stammtisch
—began to recall that they’d seen him in battle, performing incredible feats of courage.

“I’ll show you the picture of me in uniform,” he said.

“We’ve seen it, Anton,” they assured him.

But he insisted on leading them to the butcher shop, and the unsteady procession staggered to Alexander Sturm’s building. When the
butcher set down his briefcase and unlocked his shop, he pointed to the framed enlargement of the photo that Herr Abramowitz had taken of him in Kurt Heidenreich’s uniform, and the men toasted him with an emotional
“Heil Hitler”

Herr Immers bowed to them. “The one regret I have … that I didn’t hire a real photographer.”

“It’s a good likeness, Anton,” Herr Buttgereit consoled him.

“A good …” Herr Neumaier frowned as if trying to remember what he’d been about to say.

“Exactly like you, Anton,” Herr Weskopp confirmed.

The photo hung between two other pictures—a close-up of Adolf Hitler, showing him from the shoulders up while giving a speech, and St. Adrian, the patron saint of butchers and soldiers. To show proper respect, of course, the Führer had been positioned several centimeters above the butcher and the saint.

“But it was taken by a Jew.… I’ll always know that.” Herr Immers turned and peered into the dark beyond the display window as if looking for new evidence to place in the leather briefcase that he’d started to carry with him wherever he went, even to chess club meetings. No one had seen the briefcase open, but people said that, inside, the butcher carried lists of people who’d said something against the Führer. Even his new daughter-in-law, Irmtraud, who’d resented the old man’s abrupt manner ever since she’d come to work in his shop as a fourteen-year-old, didn’t have a better explanation for what the butcher carried with him.

“… good likeness,” the pharmacist was saying.

“And that other Jew,” the butcher said, “she’d kick me out of here if she could.”

“What other Jew?” Herr Weskopp asked.

“The Frau Doktor’s daughter. Acting like she belongs here.… Planting lilacs in the backyard. Airs.…But I got myself a ten-year lease. With her husband. Before he married her.”

One Friday noon, when Trudi closed the pay-library and got herself on the way to the Buttgereits’ house to find out more about some rumors concerning the fat priest, she passed the crazy nun, Sister Adelheid, raking the paths between the flower beds inside the fenced cloister garden of the Theresienheim. Trudi greeted her and walked on, trying to decide what gossip she would trade with Frau Buttgereit
to obligate her to tell about the priest. According to the taxidermist’s wife, the fat priest’s housekeeper had complained about him to Frau Buttgereit.

“Wait, you,” the nun called. Her heart-shaped face was smudged.

Trudi stopped, letting her hand rest on the lower bar of the locked gate. Two huge plum trees poured their shadows across the sidewalk, leaving her and the sister in one stream of sun that fell on them like light in holy pictures.

“What is your name?” the sister asked, one foot tapping the ground.

“Trudi Montag.”

“I have seen you before. I am Sister Adelheid.”

“I know.”

“Do you also know that
der liebe Gott
—the dear God—has called you?” She pointed at Trudi, who tried to see if the sister really had the stigmata on her palms, but the nun’s hands were covered with soil.
“Der liebe Gott
wants you to be one of us. He has asked me to tell you.”

“I— I don’t think so. But thank you.”

On the clothes lines next to the building hung three rows of black habits, too wet to be stirred by the wind.

“Come. I want to show you something.”

“Where?”

“In my cell.”

Trudi had a vision of the sister kneeling in front of a wooden crate covered with white lace, raising circles of bread toward the ceiling. “I have to go,” she said, though she didn’t like leaving without at least some new information about the sister or about the convent wing that was closed to anyone except the nuns. She’d been inside the lobby and in the other wing of the Theresienheim, where the nuns took care of the ill and elderly, and where Sister Agathe had given her medicine for her cough last winter.

“When will you come back?”

Trudi hesitated. Maybe the gossip about the priest could wait. She asked what she would have never dared ask one of the other nuns. “What is it like inside the cloister?”

“Picky and petty and always the same.” The sister laughed and clapped her hands. “No, no, no—that is disrespectful.”

“But true?”

“True.”

“Is it also true that even the priests are not allowed in there?”

Sister Adelheid nodded. “No priests. No death. Sisters who get ready to die have to leave.”

“Where do they go?”

“Down the hall.”

“To the hospital?”

“The priest brings them their death.”

“You mean the last rites?”

“Yes, that. The priest can’t come into the cloister. Only one priest—” From the schoolyard next door came the sounds of playing children, and the sister lowered her voice. “Only one priest can go everywhere.”

“Who?”

Two widows pedaled their bicycles from the direction of the cemetery, black scarves tied around their hair, watering cans bobbing from the handlebars.

The sister beamed and straightened her back, adding to her substantial height. “I am a priest.”

“I see.”

“And it is my calling to tell you about your calling.”

“It’s not for me.”

“You will understand once you have seen my cell.”

“Do you still have communion wafers?”

“You’ll see. Come.”

“But I’m not a sister.”

“I give you special consent.”

“The gate is locked.”

Sister Adelheid shook the latch and frowned. “Climb across then,” she said impatiently.

“I—My legs … I’m not tall enough.”

“Then come through the lobby. Tell them—tell them you are visiting one of the old people. I am an old person. Look at my wrinkles. You are visiting me. So it becomes true. Not a sin, not a lie, no hell. You see? Go inside, then walk out through the backdoor into the garden. The others—they are always spying on me so that I—” She peered around as if suddenly aware she might be watched.

“My mother used to be locked up.”

“Did she escape?”

It was the most logical of questions. Trudi nodded. “Many times.”

“Good.” The sister smiled. “Good. You must learn from your mother.”

“Sister!” From the backdoor of the Theresienheim sailed the imposing figure of Sister Ingeborg, the supervisor of nurses. “Sister Adelheid!”

The nun who was a priest knelt down. Her palms gripped the metal rods of the gate, and as she brought her face as close to Trudi’s as possible, her breath was sweet like that of a small child. “As long as you keep escaping,” she whispered, “they never get you. Even if they think they do.”

By the time the German troops marched into Austria in March of 1938 and the Anschluss was celebrated by jubilant crowds in the streets of Vienna, Leo Montag had turned more of the pay-library over to Trudi. Confident that his daughter could deal with the customers, he’d reduced his work to his favorite part—choosing the books they would borrow.

He’d moved a stuffed armchair next to the counter, and there he’d sit, wearing one of the many vests that the women of Burgdorf knitted for him, surrounded by stacks of books, the wooden phonograph from the unknown benefactor, and his classical records. Whenever a woman customer approached him, he’d take off the reading glasses that obscured his eyes. Though he looked older than he was and his limp slowed him down, the power of his gaze had escalated. Even in church the women felt his eyes, causing a sweet, unsettling heat to rise from their loins to their necks, and they would try to regain their composure by formulating the words of chagrin they would trade to the priest in return for the bliss of absolution.

Distracted by the surge of confessions about impure thoughts that involved the proprietor of the pay-library, the fat priest had been watching Leo Montag for some time while he’d preached his Sunday sermon from the pulpit, flustered when he’d forgotten what he had been about to preach. He had started to write out his entire sermons and had waited for Leo Montag’s confession, but Leo only entered through the purple drapes of the confessional three times a year and would emerge afterwards, shaking his head, baffled by the priest’s repeated, “And are you sure, my son, there is nothing else you should ask God’s forgiveness for?”

Herr Pastor Beier wished he could ask the old pastor about Leo Montag’s confessions, but his predecessor had died in the Theresien-heim the previous year, his poor, scaly shell so dried out that it had barely added any weight to the polished coffin. Besides, no priest should ever reveal what he’d learned in the confessional, even if—so the pastor had memorized as a seminarian—the sinner had committed murder. “It is one of the greatest burdens you may have to carry as a servant of God,” the bishop had told him. Still, he would have liked to know, because Leo Montag’s successes evoked his old, long-confessed fantasies of the flesh, driving him from his ironed sheets with prayers of shame that would bring him to his knees by his bedside. Often, he’d flee his bedroom and roam the dark halls of the rectory until he’d find himself at the kitchen table, blotting temptation with raspberry pudding and sardines, pigeon stew and marble pound cake, cheese
Brötchen
and ripe pears, white sausages and cold venison—causing the housekeeper he had inherited from the little priest to set her lips just so when, in the morning, she’d discover that the food she had prepared in advance had vanished again.

Her raincoat buttoned up, and a covered basket over one arm, Fräulein Teschner would depart for the stores and open market, stand in line—no easy feat with her varicose veins—and wait with grim satisfaction for Frau Weiler or one of the other merchants to comment, “He must be at it again.”

Although the pastor’s favorite foods were not always readily available, Fräulein Teschner knew enough parishioners who welcomed the chance to deprive themselves by giving her some delicacy for the priest—much in the way they’d add an extra rosary to their daily prayers—to balance out their sins and ensure their climb on the ladder of eternal salvation. She knew how to time her visits to their houses to coincide with entries from the pastor’s diary and rumors of recent transgressions.

On days like this, when she served his midday meal late—through no fault of her own, of course—he would taste her resentment and triumph in the rich sauces and sweet puddings, and he’d rush to compliment her, profusely, on even the taste of boiled potatoes. He’d feel ashamed for not appreciating her enough, for all the times he’d let himself hope that she’d decide to work for some other pastor, far away. To fire her was unthinkable—not after everything she’d done for him.

•   •   •

“Do you think Leo Montag has any idea what he is doing to those women?” Frau Blau asked Frau Abramowitz one afternoon when they saw the optician’s wife enter the pay-library with a radiant smile and half a plum cake.

Her face flushed, Frau Abramowitz shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

The old woman chuckled. “He is too good at it not to know what he’s doing.”

“They come to him because they find they can talk to him … about themselves, their husbands and children—in a way they can to no one else.”

“That too.” Frau Blau winked.

“Leo is considerate … a wonderful listener.”

“That too. Have you ever noticed how he strokes his face?”

“Oh, stop it, Flora.”

“No, really. His hands … he’s always at it, caressing his own face. That’s why he doesn’t need a woman to do that for him.”

“It’s only a habit. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“He’s a very sensuous man—our Herr Montag.”

Once, when Trudi left the pay-library with the small metal pail to buy a liter of milk, she returned and found the oldest Buttgereit daughter trying to embrace Leo.

“But I want to,” Sabine Buttgereit said, her thin arms straining to keep her hold on Leo. She wore her church dress with the pearl buttons though it was the middle of the week, and her smile was frightened, determined.

Leo held her as much as he pushed her away, his eyes gentle on her agitated face. “With Gertrud gone,” he said, “I haven’t been able to become interested in another woman.”