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 (82 page)

The butcher and his daughter-in-law, still wearing their stiff aprons, were already in the cellar. The optician arrived soon after with his foreign worker from Greece, then the teacher who lived on the second floor with the Brocker girl, who’d recently started keeping house for her. Next came Jutta Malter and her husband’s mother, the professor, who often stayed with her for a few days.

The last one to enter was Alexander Sturm, his face pasty, far thinner than it used to be. In the half year since Eva’s arrest, Trudi had only seen him twice, and he hadn’t spoken to her beyond a brief greeting. He no longer attended mass. The seriousness that had marked him during his boyhood had reclaimed him as though his passion and resulting handsomeness had only been inspired by Eva. Those shining years of marriage had fallen from him without a trace, and despite his dashing mustache he looked quite ordinary again, middle-aged already as if the passage from boy to stolid man had happened overnight.

During those years of his marriage to Eva, Trudi had come to like Alexander, and his house had been a place she’d enjoyed visiting. But ever since Eva’s arrest, she—along with others—had speculated as to why he’d gone free, and since he didn’t attempt to explain himself, he’d lost his reputation for being a decent man.

He sat on the bare floor, where the briquettes used to be stacked, his back against the wall that was black with coal dust, as if he didn’t care about his clothes. High above him, the small windows had been covered with canvas to keep any light from seeping out. In the corner by the shelves leaned the cumbersome Jesus figure that Herr Neumaier used to carry around the church square, its knees angled and its arms linked above its head as if ready to resume its position on the cross. An immense wooden nail connected its palms, and liver-colored paint dripped from the crown. The new pharmacist had tried to donate the Jesus to the priest, who’d suggested she give it to the nuns,
but she’d been afraid to enter the Theresienheim and had finally dragged the statue down to the cellar, where its lonely vigil was interrupted whenever the sirens sounded their warning.

Trudi thought of her father and Ingrid in the cellar of the pay-library. Every time she was afraid of what she might find after the bombing, and every time she was surprised that her town had been spared once again. It was different in Düsseldorf: there she’d seen children playing in the rubble of destroyed houses, women digging for lost possessions.

The Brocker girl whimpered and hid her face in her palms. Jutta Malter glanced at her from the side, then at the professor, as if waiting for her to do something. All at once Trudi felt sorry for Klara Brocker—even if she had traded that worthless rosary for Ingrid’s jewelry box. Her father was fighting in the war, and her house had been one of the few crushed by stray bombs. She and her mother had moved into a small apartment on the fourth floor of the house that used to belong to Frau Simon.

“It won’t be much longer.” The professor reached across to stroke Klara Brocker’s hair. “Not much longer.”

In the half dark of the cellar, the girl shivered. “I’m fast on my bicycle.…”

The professor’s eyes were tired as she stroked Klara’s hair from her forehead and behind the small, pretty ears. Ever since her work had been taken from her, the professor had felt tired. She’d wake up tired, go to sleep tired.

“Real fast.…”

“I know.”

From nearby came the sounds of a low-flying plane, then an explosion. The ground trembled.

“It’s easy to lose your belief in humanity,” the butcher was saying.

Trudi wheeled toward him. “It took you this long? Only now that you are in danger?”

“I’m not interested in an argument with you, Fräulein Montag.” The butcher’s breath carried more than half a century of tobacco smoke. “If the world would just leave Germany alone. All we’re trying to do is restore the order in our own country.”

The teeth of the Brocker girl were clicking against each other. “I bet if I got on my bicycle—I bet if I got on my bicycle and kept pedaling, I’d get away.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” the butcher said.

“Please, leave her alone,” the professor said.

They all fell silent, listening through the thick walls. Trudi felt Alexander watching her, but when she looked his way, he turned his eyes from her as if afraid to let her see into his mind. She felt him straining to shield the secret of Eva’s capture from her. How does he bear it? she thought. She wanted to tell him that, ever since she’d been with Max, she’d understood Eva’s longing for him and the risk she’d taken in returning to him for that one night.

“It wasn’t just your doing,” she whispered to him.

Alexander leaned his head against the black wall and shut his eyes.

Trudi wondered if Max had heard the explosion too and hoped he was safe. Last night, when they’d parted, she’d refused to kiss him. If we survive this, she thought, I won’t even mention his wife again. Maybe he, too, was thinking about her right now. It had happened before: he’d tell her he’d been thinking about her, and when they’d compare times, it would turn out to have been at the very same moment.

“But I couldn’t leave on my bicycle,” the Brocker girl said, “I couldn’t. Not with my mother the way she is.” Her frantic eyes skipped from face to face as she told how, the last time they’d rushed to the nearest shelter, her mother had stumbled and fallen, bloodying her face and hands. “She’s all alone,” Klara cried and leapt up.

The optician blocked the door.

“I’m sure your mother feels better knowing that you’re safe,” the professor said.

“There’s nothing we can do for our parents now,” Trudi told Klara.

“Here.” Klara’s employer took her by the hands and pulled her down beside her. “It’s always worse for the children.”

“I’m not a child.”

“I wasn’t talking about you.” She told Klara how, in school, her students no longer concentrated on her lessons because they lived with the fear that soon the bombs would start falling again. Often, in the middle of a class, they’d hear the sirens, grab their satchels, and run down into the school cellar. The teachers would try to soften the children’s fear, but it was impossible to calm all of them. And when they came out again and the school stood intact, they were relieved. “The worst part,” the teacher said, “is their worry about their parents.”

“With good reason.” Herr Immers took out a knife and a wedge of smoked ham and began to slice it. “People get buried under their own
houses.” He passed the slices of ham around. “Remember that time when the only damage in town was those blue bricks above the windows of the
Rathaus?
Knocked out on the sidewalk like bad teeth.… But the following week, they made up for it, right? Demolished the flour mill. We’re lucky it’s so far from the center of town.”

“My father and I,” Trudi said, “we drove out there. The roof is gone and the arches have caved in.”

“We’ll rebuild it after the war,” the optician said.

“I don’t think so,” Trudi said softly.

“Why not?” Jutta Malter asked.

“I don’t know. I just have a feeling we won’t.”

At the signal that it was safe to leave the cellar, Trudi got ready to rush up the stairs to make sure her father and Ingrid were all right.

“Wait.”

She turned.

Alexander still sat by the coal wall, his forearms resting on his bent knees, palms turned upward like chalices.

She let the others pass her. “What is it?”

“What—” Alexander took a long breath. “What was it like for her, those last days with you?”

She stepped close to him and peered down into his face, waiting for him to tell her what had happened that night. And to find that out, she was willing to stay, to answer his questions first. “Eva missed you. That was the hardest part of hiding for her.”

“What did she say about me?”

“That people didn’t really know you.… She was afraid you might be sent off to war, and she said if she could have one Goddamn beautiful night with you—that’s what she called it, Alexander, one Goddamn beautiful night—she’d be able to endure the hiding again.”

He drew his legs closer to his body, rested his forehead on his knees. His shoulders trembled.

Trudi laid her hand on his sandy hair. “She was certain you’d go with her if she were caught.…”

“Every night I pray that I won’t wake up in the morning.” His voice was deep, urgent. “This morning I was praying that a bomb would hit the house.”

“Let’s hope your prayers won’t get answered when you’ll take all of us with you.”

He looked up, startled. “Don’t be so angry. I only thought of myself.”

“Right.”

“Of my death,” he corrected her. “Maybe I ought to go into the army.… End it that way.”

“Fight for them?”

“Fight anyone. Till I get killed.”

“I want to know about Eva. What happened after she came to you?”

“I— I keep looking at those birds she collected.… Last week I bought her a stuffed nightingale.”

“Last week?”

“For when she comes back. A present. Remember the owl I gave her?”

“For your wedding, yes.”

“And that bird with the red chest that your dog killed.”

“It lived for a few days. Eva’s mother set its wing.”

“We should have gone with Eva’s parents. She wanted to. But she stayed because I didn’t want to leave.”

“After she came to you, Alexander—what happened that night?”

“Do you think someone tipped off the Gestapo?”

“I’ve wondered.”

“She kept after me to get the butcher out of our building, but he has a ten-year lease.… I have to honor the contracts I sign.”

“Ah yes, honor.”

He drew up his shoulders. “I don’t think the butcher turned her in. He didn’t know Eva and I were arguing about his lease.”

“They came to your house,” Trudi prompted him, “and then you—?”

“We ran up the stairs. Into the attic. Hid there.”

She could smell his fear of telling her too much. His eyes were guarded, and the words he gave her were insufficient by themselves. Yet it was his effort at shielding the truth that gave it away to her, evoking that night in the attic as if she’d been there herself. She inhaled the scent of the stored clay tiles and parquet wood as Alexander and Eva crouched behind the crates of building supplies. She heard steps approach on the stairs, felt the gush of air as the attic door burst open.

Sweat covered Alexander’s temples. “We had enough time to say that we loved each other.…”

Trudi felt his confusion at the hate that had urged him into saying
those words of love, understood his relief as Eva freed her arm from his hand and stepped forward.

“My legs—I couldn’t move my legs.… Oh God.”

“They didn’t see you?”

“Oh God.”

“They didn’t look for you?”

He blinked, his eyes terror wide, and she heard the laughter as the Gestapo came around the crates and jabbed him with their feet.

“Some hero,” one of them said.

“Some hero you got here.” The other laughed as he turned toward Eva.

“You came for me. You found me,” Eva said, her back as straight as ever.

Trudi grasped Alexander’s hands. They were cold, damp. “What did you do then? Tell me!”

He snatched his hands from her and buried his face in them, trying to hide from her the spectacle of being forced to crawl around the attic on his hands and knees, two guns aimed at his head. But she could feel the rough wooden boards against his palms, could see Eva’s ankles as he was forced to crawl past her.

“They left me there,” he whispered. “On the floor.” His voice had lost its tension, and his eyes looked spent as though he felt relieved at having told.

When they climbed from the cellar, the air smelled burned. In the heat, they could barely breathe. A yellow haze was lifting, revealing shapes of other buildings and roofs, and Alexander pointed across the street where the Talmeisters’ house had been hit; yet, on the sidewalk the cherry tree stood intact, its leafless branches framing ambergray clouds of smoke that rose from the heaps of stones and drifted across adjoining roofs.

Drawing the heat of war into her lungs, Trudi ran toward the pay-library, shouting her father’s name. In her immediate neighborhood, the houses were still intact. Only three windows had been shattered in the library, and one section of roof above the grocery store had been torn off.

“All this can be repaired again,” her father said.

“All this can be repaired again,” Ingrid repeated after him, her body still wrapped in the blanket.

But Trudi shook her head, trying to combat the horror at all the
lives that had been destroyed, including that of Alexander Sturm, who, though he walked and could point to a tree, had died as certainly as the Weskopp sons, who rotted beneath the earth.

Ever since Max had told her about his wife, she’d felt cautious around him. She wondered what he saw in her. Sometimes she was afraid that he only wanted to get even with her for humiliating him with the note, and that he would leave her once she loved him.

She finally found the courage to ask him. “Why me?” She came right out with it.

“What do you mean?” They were sitting at his table, and he was peeling an orange that one of his private students had given him.

“Why did you pick me, Max?”

Separating the cool sections, he arranged them on a white saucer. “Open your mouth,” he said and fed one of them to her. “Because I like you.”

After not eating an orange in years, the pleasure of tasting the sweet, juicy flesh brought tears to her eyes. “But how did it start for you?”

“I guess I was intrigued by you.…” He ate carefully, dabbing the juice from the corners of his mouth with one finger and sucking it as if not to lose one precious drop. “Here.” He fed Trudi another slice. “I guess I was curious about you.”

“Why?”

“Oh, that sense of mystery you have about you. I didn’t know we’d become lovers the day we met. It happened gradually.”

That evening he took her dancing for the first time, not to the Kaisershafen Gasthaus high above the Rhein, where she had imagined dancing with him, but in a cellar bar in Düsseldorf, where a saxophonist in a red vest played haunting variations of the same melody.