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 (103 page)

Being part of his new country would never be quite as total for Stefan as when he first arrived and wanted to be American in every way possible. How he loved the lack of convention, the instant familiarity.
Here, respect had nothing to do with age but was earned with success. Class differences—that complicated ladder of human worth he’d grown up with—did not exist in America, he believed, and it would take him years to grasp the many subtle shadings of prejudice.

One day as he walked to work along West Street past vendors’ carts and people on bicycles and horses pulling delivery wagons, he felt protected from the raw wind in his American coat and bowler hat, and it struck him that no one could tell he was a foreigner. As long as he did not speak and reveal his accent, he blended in like everyone else. He breathed it in, that certainty of belonging, held it in his body with deep exhilaration.

From the head chef, Tibor Szilagi, a Hungarian with a slight limp and a contagious laugh, Stefan learned about passion for food and its preparation. He enjoyed the work, the effort of it, the results. Liked the scents of grilled meats and sautéed vegetables. His eagerness soon earned him the job of kitchen assistant, as well as an invitation to the poker games that the Hungarian organized in his apartment on Gansevoort Street in the early morning hours. Curtains drawn, a group of tired men—policemen just off duty and others from the restaurant business—would gather around the table that was covered with one of the embroidered linen cloths the Hungarian’s maiden aunts sent him for his birthdays. To revive his guests, Tibor would serve thick coffee with whiskey in porcelain cups, and when he’d push Stefan’s winnings toward him, he’d accuse him of being far too lucky.

“It’s because you don’t have the fever of gambling in your soul yet,” he told him one morning and winked at him.

“Not now. Not ever.”

“It’s a fine lover.”

“Not for me.”

“Always hot and never gets enough of you.” Tibor Szilagi crushed half a cinnamon stick, mixed the tiny splinters into a handful of tobacco, and began to roll his special cigarettes. “It’ll get you too.”

Stefan smiled and shook his head.

“At least use your money. Travel. There’s a lake you would like, I swear. I’ve only seen it once, but it reminded me of Germany.
Trees and mountains and so much water that you can never see all of the lake at one time.”

“Where is it?”

“New Hampshire. I took the train there my second summer in America. To a town with the same name as the lake. Winnipesaukee.”

But Stefan didn’t have time to travel. And he was far more interested in studying French recipes and checking the newspaper for yet another success story of immigrants. His new language was filling in around him, and he liked being able to read some sentences without looking up one single word.

“You should get some reporter to write up your story,” he told Tibor one evening in the kitchen. “It’s better than most I see in the paper.”

“And who would wish to know about me, please?”

“Lots of people.” Stefan liked hearing the story of how the Hungarian had come to America. Lame with polio since he was eight, he’d been unable to help on the family farm. His parents approved when he worked in the kitchens of married women, but when he was hired as cook in a bordello, his mother and her three unmarried sisters conspired to save his soul by hauling him to the priest for absolution and then bribing him with passage to America. After Tibor said farewell to his father, his mother and the aunts traveled with him on the train to Rijeka, where they hired a carriage and took him to the ship that would carry him south around the heel of Italy, west through the Strait of Gibraltar where monkeys lived in the crevices of high rocks, and then further west toward America.

“Lots of people would want to read about your miraculous recovery,” Stefan said. “How you hobbled up that gangway. And how, when you got here, you stepped off with just a shadow of a limp. And how it has been like that ever since.”

“And how this and how that…” Tibor Szilagi’s laugh got two of the waiters laughing.

“But it is true,” Stefan insisted.

The Hungarian removed a speck of cinnamon from his front teeth, inspected it, and flicked it off his thumb. “The limp might have gotten better anyhow.”

“No. It’s coming to America that did it.”

“Some fellows have to see meaning in everything.”

“Because there is.”

“Ah, Stefan …”

From the Hungarian, Stefan learned to decode their employer’s moods as well as his favorite sayings. The Frenchman considered English a crude language and spoke it as seldom as possible, antagonizing the delivery men by pretending to understand less than he could.
“C’est comme pisser dans un violon”
—“It’s like pissing into a violin”—meant that whatever you were about to do would make no difference. Though extravagant by nature, the Frenchman would occasionally search for evidence of waste, stalking through the kitchen with its copper pots and painted serving platters, through the dining room with its marble fireplaces and stained-glass windows; yet, that same evening he might send you home with half a bottle of wine or a ticket to the opera. He’d urge you to buy American stocks—railroad and mining and telephone—while warning you not to make big plans based on shaky optimism:
“Ne batissez pas des châteaux en Suede”
—“Don’t go building castles in Sweden.”

He liked to remind Stefan that he could afford to rent a better place, but Stefan was content in his room on Cornelia Street. It was small and on the top floor of the same boarding house where—during his first few months in the city—he had paid fifty-five cents a week to sleep on the chairs and sofas in the parlor with three men from Italy. At least this room was his alone, even if the windows were painted shut and he had to share the water closet down the hall with the Austrian family who lived in the room next to his. The building was better maintained than most on the block that had paint peeling from their doors and water standing in their cellars.

By keeping his rent low, he could invest most of his wages and poker winnings, except for the money he used to send presents to his family. He also mailed letters to his sister’s best friend, Helene Montag, who lived next door to his family and had started to write to him. Occasionally their letters crossed, a current of words—more than they had ever spoken to one another. While his family wrote to him about events that happened in Burgdorf—weddings
and births and funerals—Helene’s letters kept the texture of his hometown alive for him: high-water marks that the Rhein left on the inner slope of the dike; early frost that turned the hill by the chapel silver gray; willows arching with the weight of first leaves.

As Stefan worked next to the chefs at the wooden counters, he volunteered for chores that carried greater responsibility. He began to smoke. Grew a mustache that met his thick sideburns and made him look more like a man. He had enormous energy. Thrived on hard work. By the time the new century began, he was nineteen and wore one of the starched white jackets that set the chefs apart. It was what he had wanted, and he felt as proud of his achievement as he did of the wanting. Because it was the wanting, he knew, that had brought him across the ocean. To this city. To being a chef. Pastries were his specialty: delicate concoctions of layered dough with creams and fruits and chocolate curls. Though his German accent would always tinge his English, he developed a flawless pronunciation of French words that related to food.

One July evening, as the Hungarian poured cognac over medallions of veal, a slender flame licked his wrist.
“Az istenit,”
he cursed and dropped the bottle on the stove where it shattered. The cognac ignited as it raced across the hot surface into a pan of sizzling beignets and from there through a basket with stained aprons and towels. After the fire leapt up the exhaust shaft, it twined itself through the dining room and an adjoining store, killing five women and four men, among them Tibor Szilagi who died while Stefan carried him into the street. Stefan knew the moment of his friend’s death because the body felt suddenly limp and heavier. It seemed that without breath—breath that usually smelled of cinnamon and tobacco—Tibor’s flesh could no longer sustain itself. The smell of burned hair and of burned flesh blotted out all else, blotted out all cinnamon, all tobacco, blotted out the starch-smell of table linen and flowers and cognac and freshly ground pepper; and what was most horrid about that smell of fire and flesh was how familiar it was, evoking the smell of chicken being grilled—
or pork rather? don’t think about it don’t
—just when the heat gets high enough to release its smell.

The clamor of fire bells burst through the smell, the screams,
through night that was brighter and hotter than noon as horse-drawn fire engines pulled up, brakes screeching. When Stefan hoisted the Hungarian’s weight higher, rocking him up, up in his arms, he felt Tibor’s face dry and hot against the side of his neck, felt it slide and, for the instant of that motion, let himself hope his friend was still alive, though he knew it was Tibor’s skin coming off against his neck.

After the flames had been extinguished and the bodies taken away, Stefan peeled off what was left of his white jacket and staggered home. His hands were blistered, and all hair was gone from his arms. Though his room was warm and stuffy, he was shivering as he crawled between the sheets in his scorched clothes. He slept, only to wake sobbing from dreams in which he was enveloped by fire and the familiar stench of burning flesh, dreams that got jumbled with memories of being small and soiling the kitchen floor with cow manure he’d dragged home on the bottom of his shoes, and his father—“How often do I have to tell you to wipe your feet?”—carrying him to the barrel of rainwater out back and then being inside that barrel—
headfirst and cold and not breathing because how could you?
—and afterwards the fever, hands like wicks of candles and yearning to cool them in the barrel that’s no longer there.

When Stefan finally got up, a sticky, clear-yellow fluid was seeping from his arms and hands. It hurt to wash himself, to chew a piece of rye bread, to think of the Hungarian on whose sofa he’d often dozed after a poker game. He wished he could open his window. As he stared at the ashen wall of cinder blocks across the alley, even the light that leaked into the alley was ashen.
Ash. Used up by fire
. All at once Stefan was taken by such a powerful longing that his throat felt raw, a longing for air and clear light and his parents and the Hungarian’s laugh and his hometown and family’s dog, Spitz, and the French restaurant—but most of all for himself as a boy. And it was then that he remembered Tibor Szilagi telling him about the lake that reminded him of Germany.

The smooth skin on Stefan’s arms felt stretched as he rowed a wooden boat out on Lake Winnipesaukee, and as the oars spooned
the water and left swirls that trailed behind him, he thought of the whirlpools in the Rhein where it flowed past the meadows of Burgdorf. From the boat, the stone gables of the church looked like St. Martin’s where he’d gone to mass every Sunday as a boy, but beyond the outline of this town rose mountains, unfamiliar and stark. Tibor had been right: this lake was too large to see all at once. Wherever Stefan looked, his eyes came up against land: peninsulas and islands and the curving shoreline—the promise of water around each turn.

He glanced back toward the dock where he’d rented his boat and toward the vacant clapboard house next to it. On the other side of the dock grew a cornfield, and all at once, within the shimmer of summer air, he saw the farm where he’d played as a boy, the
Sternburg
—star fortress—a castle for centuries until it was turned into a farm. With his friends Michel Abramowitz and Kurt Heidenreich he’d swung from the chains beneath its drawbridge, played hiding games in the stone tower. In that instant, as the water between him and the shore became the moat of his childhood, he saw the house he would build in the cornfield,
a tall apartment house with pillars and a flat roof… a substantial but graceful building with a courtyard … rooms with high ceilings … windows that gleamed in the light
.… He could even see the reflection of his house and understood how water retains the memory of all that is reflected in its surface, takes it and holds it in its depth, and that the deeper the water, the more it can retain, including your vision, and mirror it back to you.
Wasserburg
, he decided to call the house. Water fortress. And he would build it with bricks the way they built houses in Germany, not of wood like so many American buildings. Deep within his chest something settled—solid and calm—and he knew he would not return to New York.

As he rowed back toward shore, he could already see
marble fireplaces as wide as the ones in the Frenchman’s restaurant, fulllength beveled mirrors, a carpeted elevator with a brass gate that pulls apart like an accordion…
. Raising his face into the moist wind, he felt the breath of the lake on his skin as it rushed past him like fire.
Not here, fire. Fire wouldn’t live this close to water
. He shook himself.
Saw wrought-iron wall sconces in the hallways of
his house, tiled windowsills wide enough for flowerpots
. It didn’t occur to him to wonder where the money would come from—all he felt was a wild confidence that, in time, he would build this house just as he saw it now. Because he wanted it. Had he known how the
Wasserburg
would seduce and corrupt him and his family, Stefan Blau would have taken the train back to New York that day, but to detect rot is often impossible in its early stages: it starts beneath lush surfaces, spreading its sweet-nasty pulp, tainting memories and convictions. It entangles. Justifies. But what Stefan saw that summer afternoon was only the splendor of the
Wasserburg
as it would be the day he would finish its construction.