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 (12 page)

“That’s a pretty bouquet, Hanna.”

My head snapped up.

Frau Weskopp was standing behind me. “Especially that violet.” Her lips closed into a tight line.

I felt as if the flowers bore tags with the names of the dead. “Thank you,” I managed to say.

“Where did you get them?”

“Home,” I said quickly before something within me made me confess.

That’s what she seemed to be waiting for—a confession. But I kept silent, though my heart was racing. The deep creases on her forehead pressed the flesh between them into puffy welts. Finally she turned away and walked down the path toward the exit.

I pushed the vase deeper into the earth. That’s where Joachim was. What was left of him. We’d never unhinge garden doors together and hide them around the corner. We’d never swim in the Rhein together or ride our bikes or play ball or—I caught my arms against my stomach, tight. Rocked myself back and forth. All at once I saw Joachim and myself, sitting on my wooden sled on top of the dike, our faces red from the cold.
“Hold on!” I shout out to him as I push off. Joachim sits in front of me. My feet are on the metal runners, my arms around my brother’s chest. I’m the one holding on; yet, I keep shouting, “Hold on, Joachim!”

My breath is a white lace scarf that touches his neck and reddish hair. Joachim is almost as tall as I. Sitting straight, I hold on to him as our sled hurtles down a slope that doesn’t end. But he is getting smaller in my arms. At first my hands barely meet in front of his jacket, but now I can cross my wrists, then my arms as if I were hugging myself. “Hold on, Joachim,” I shout once more, frozen tears on my face. My arms around myself, I know for the first time what it feels like to have lost him, to be without him not only this moment but millions of moments like this, linked and stretching into all my tomorrows. I see myself grown up, my newborn son in my arms, pouring a trickle of holy water over his head, forming the sign of the cross on his forehead, chest, and shoulders, whispering fragile words of insurance against purgatory:
“Im Namen des Vaters und des Sohnes und des Heiligen Geistes …”

But suddenly my brother is here again, solid in my arms, snow
coating his shoulders and swirling around us as the sled races down the white bank. The Rhein is frozen, and as we glide across it, huge turtles and tropical fish swim below the clear ice. On the other side of the river two riders gallop along the bank on blue horses
.

  
Through the Dance of Her Hands

T
he pastor’s sister, Hannelore Beier, was a woman in her thirties with crippled hands. Her fingers overlapped and drew themselves toward her palms, birdlike claws which she refused to hide. When she taught Sunday school, she moved them gracefully, those stiff extensions of herself, weaving the texture of her words into our hearts.

Her eyes looked tired when she quoted passages from the Bible, but she never stayed with the Bible for long. From her bag she’d bring out old books bound in green or red leather; the lines in her face dissolved and her slight body seemed to grow as she took the words of Goethe and Mann and Rilke from the pages of those books and made them breathe as if they were being written now—for us.

Her favorite writer was Rainer Maria Rilke. One winter morning, in the church basement, she read us his poem about the panther in the
Jardin des Plantes, Paris
, and her voice evoked the powerful animal pacing behind the bars of his cage, until to him it seemed as though there were a thousand bars and nothing beyond them. Outside it was snowing wet, thick flakes that fastened themselves like cat
tracks to the narrow windows of the church hall before they slid off, leaving watery trails on the glass. We pulled our chairs into a circle that included hers and we barely dared to breathe while she read. We knew what it was like to be that panther. We too felt locked into ourselves at times because we wanted to know everything in the world and were beginning to fear that this would never be possible.

Fräulein Beier copied the poems we liked on lined pages in green ink. Square and awkward, her letters slanted on the left, and when I read them I imagined her stiff fingers setting the tip of the fountain pen against the page, forming those words which opened us to people and places far beyond our town.

She had come to Burgdorf seven years before to keep house for her brother, the pastor of St. Martin’s. His old housekeeper, Fräulein Teschner, had turned into a tyrant, restricting his diet, his contact with parishioners of the opposite sex, and the hours he could spend away from the rectory. In despair, he’d called his sister, Hannelore, who was a social worker in Stuttgart. He found a better-paying job for Fräulein Teschner with a surgeon in Düsseldorf, and his sister moved into the rectory. She cooked his enormous meals, ironed his enormous clothes, typed his enormous sermons, and let him schedule his own consultations. She served coffee and gingerbread when he had meetings with young couples who planned to get married.

During Sunday mass she knelt in the front pew of St. Martin’s, her face raised to the marble altar, her eyes wide open. Black marble columns supported the arches of the ceiling where her voice rose with others in hymns that collected themselves in echoes and expanded the boundaries of the church. As her voice blazed past the walls, she let herself be lifted by the sounds that streamed through the organ’s silver pipes and transformed the silence of the
church into a celebration. Yet, when the music faded and the voices receded to murmured prayers, she was drawn back into her isolation.

Every Wednesday morning at seven Hannelore Beier rode her bicycle the two kilometers to the Burgdorf chapel, a white stone building set on a gentle hill near the Sternburg. She entered through the curved door, climbed the stairs to the bell tower, and grasped the rope.

The chapel was built six hundred years ago, and its slate roof was layered like the gray wing feathers of the pigeons that roosted on the tower and the ridge of the steep roof. Their droppings splattered the two benches in front of the chapel. When the pastor’s sister rang the bells, they drowned the guttural chorus of the birds, which rose in one swarm, settling in the row of poplars that broke the landscape and cast long shadows across the adjoining wheat fields.

All across town, the old women would mount their bicycles to arrive in time for eight o’clock mass. Their narrow skirts didn’t give them much room to move their legs, and so they pedaled slowly while their handbags swung from the handlebars. At the chapel they got off carefully, locked the bicycles, and smoothed their skirts with their palms. Handbags across their left arms, they entered the cool core of the chapel, stopped next to the holy water, then dipped their right forefingers and middle fingers into the basin, and touched their foreheads, bosoms, and shoulders in the familiar sign of the cross.

The side altar held a large statue of the Virgin Mother; there, the women lit candles, closed their eyes, and whispered prayers for the recovery of a relative, the fulfillment of a secret wish, or the relief from eternal punishment for someone who’d died. Their faith in the mercy and power of the Virgin Mary merged with the flames from many other candles, merged and ascended toward, perhaps, a benevolent presence.

Occasionally a man would come to the service or one of the younger women, but most Wednesday mornings the chapel was filled with old women. The rest of the week Herr Pastor Beier read mass at St. Martin’s, except for Wednesdays when he climbed on the motor scooter the bishop had assigned to him, and rode to the chapel. Ten minutes before eight he arrived at the side door, his breath in quick gasps, his face red, his black jacket stretched across his huge stomach. In the sacristy, which smelled of incense and damp stone, he struggled into the vestments his sister had laid out for him: first he put on the alb and watched the white linen cover the tops of his black shoes; then he knotted the cincture around his ample waist, kissed the stole before laying it around his neck, and slipped into the chasuble, a long brocade gown with the cross embroidered on the back.

Sometimes, while Herr Pastor Beier raised the sacred chalice, the women heard the scratching of talons against slate high above them, as if the Holy Spirit had chosen to descend upon their ceremony, and they turned their creased faces toward the vaults of the chapel where faint watermarks formed cloudlike designs.

Though they had wrinkles and gray hair, these women didn’t think of themselves as old; it was an unspoken fact that each of them carried within, a fact that didn’t need to be confirmed because there was always someone who could remember them as girls and recall a half-forgotten detail, someone who—beneath the fine web of lines—still saw the child’s face.

They did this for each other, the old women, pulling out the albums of class picnics, of trips to Kaiserswerth and Schloss Burg, pointing to their younger images in fading photographs and whispering to each other: “Remember?” And they continued to do so until they were in their eighties or nineties because, as long as there was someone who had known them as girls, someone who could recollect
the quick movements of their limbs, the graceful turn of their smooth necks—they could gaze into their mirrors and see their young reflections.

Most of these women were widows who’d lost their husbands to the war or old age. They lived with one of their children’s families and helped with the raising of their grandchildren, with the cooking, the cleaning. They pinched off brown stalks from the geraniums in their window boxes and ironed tablecloths. They knitted sweaters and had their hair set once a week at the beauty parlor. They took care of the family graves. They knew when to interfere and when to remain silent, though they didn’t always follow their instincts. They complained bitterly to one another about the size of their rooms, the lack of privacy; yet, they felt sorry for those among them who lived alone.

Most of these women had taken care of their aging parents: entangled between the needs of their parents and the needs of their children, they’d never considered doing otherwise. It had to do with continuity, with responsibility, with the tremendous impact the old had on the young, and as their children grew up and saw their parents take care of their grandparents, they took for granted that, some day, they too would follow that example.

Here in the chapel, while the unyielding wood of the pews pressed against their knees, callused from thousands of masses, the old women felt a timeless connection to one another, a connection that came from celebrating their first communion together and going to the same school even though they might have sat in different classrooms, a connection that came from knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, from understanding and being a part of each other’s stories and histories.

When they left the white chapel, their steps were almost lithe, and they blinked in the morning light. They drifted into circles of four or five, talking among themselves while
glancing occasionally at the sky which always changed so quickly: cloud formations moved swiftly with the wind across the sun, causing the temperature to drop or rise in seconds. Even where the sky stayed blue, it was marbled with faint streaks of white. During the summer the poplar seeds with their delicate tufts floated across the fields, clinging to the spears of wheat until the pigeons swooped upon them and carried them away for their nests.

The pastor’s sister walked from group to group, greeting the old women who looked upon her with pity. To them she seemed old because they had no early image of her. Flawed like an injured bird, she’d arrived in their town. She had no husband, no children, only her brother, a heavy man nearly twenty years older than she, who’d left home for the seminary by the time she was born and had seen her young only in photos. Her slight figure seemed to recede in the wren-colored dresses she chose for herself. A thin belt pulled the center of her together as if she were about to disappear.

The old women didn’t know the power of her voice, which made her entire body come alive when she shared the poems she loved with the children. They didn’t know the color in her laugh. They didn’t know that sometimes she closed her eyes and imagined herself lying in a summer field of golden-yellow wheat.
The long stalks hide her from anyone who might be looking for her. She breaks off a stalk, runs her fingertips across the end of the stiff spikes at the top of each kernel. She separates one kernel, strips the thin layer of skin that feels like a callus. Underneath is a soft core that tastes like wet flour
.

The young teacher moved to Burgdorf the summer the pastor’s sister turned forty. He arrived in the sweltering heat of early August, four weeks before school started, so he could get to know the town. A tall man with blond hair
and black eyebrows, he’d grown up in Switzerland, speaking French and German. His name was Lucien Cheronnet, and he had been hired to teach fourth grade at the Catholic school.

The pastor, who was president of the school board, found an apartment for Lucien Cheronnet on the third floor of the white house across from the rectory. His first night there, the young teacher found it impossible to sleep. The heat pressed against his limbs; when he got up from his bed and walked to the open bedroom window, a slight breeze lifted the lace curtain and cooled the sweat on his chest. In the slow light of the moon, the brick gables of the church glowed red as if they contained passions of their own.