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 (144 page)

Danny didn’t answer. Wouldn’t answer when Tobias kept at him with questions. And started to pack, though he’d planned to spend the night. While Tobias stayed behind with the heaviness of wanting more, feeling lost in the house he’d furnished over the years with Danny in mind, choosing the upholstery for his sofa and chairs because Danny liked that deep shade of green, the white lamps because they were similar to the ones Danny had.

At the train station he caught up with Danny. “Why don’t we just go back to my place?”

Danny rubbed his forehead. “I got some stuff to take care of.”

“Like what?”

Danny shrugged.

“Can’t it wait?”

“Not really.”

“But you were going to stay,” Tobias said, hating the whining in his voice.

Danny turned his head toward the direction from where his train was to come.

Resolutely, Tobias added, “Then I’ll come along.”

“Now?”

“Because this is important to me.”

“Well… this weekend won’t be that good for me. Why don’t you visit some other time soon?”

Visit.
When Tobias stepped from the railroad station, frozen leaves clogged the gutters. He kicked them, broke them into clumps. Took sharp breaths to rid himself of the sadness in his throat.
Visit.
He drew up his shoulders. Zipped his leather jacket to his chin. Promised himself to ignore Danny for a while. To stay away from him. Maybe for good. But then Danny called, of course, as he usually did after an argument, and when Tobias took the train to New Hampshire a few weeks later, Danny was excited to see him and gave him expensive ice skates he’d bought for him from last summer’s dog track money.

That evening, as they skated away from the
Wasserburg
in their long woolen coats, the moon was pale. Snow capped the mountains across the lake, and beyond those mountains, clouds that were lighter than the sky feathered upward, nearly transparent, as weightless as Tobias felt next to Danny while they raced across the ice.

“Higher,” Emma shouted and felt
Opa’s
palms against her back as he pushed the swing. Stretching her sturdy legs, she flew. “Higher.”

He laughed. “You’re a bossy little girl. I like that.”

Flying, still flying, she dropped her head back until she saw
Opa
standing upside down, wind blowing his gray suit jacket to one side. “Higher!”

Red and yellow leaves tumbled across the ground and from branches that were almost bare. In one pile of leaves, a squirrel was playing, its movements as noisy as those of a much larger animal, a dog, say, or even a bear. Otherwise, the garden above the garage was empty since Caleb and the other children in the building were at school. Because she was the youngest, Emma had
Opa
all to herself. She liked it best when they were the only ones here, when she could soar above the sandbox and the stone bench like the seagulls that rode the wind above the lake, their wings graceful, their cries shrill.

“Aren’t you hungry?”
Opa
shouted as she came flying back toward him. “What do you want
Opa
to cook for you?”

“A hot dog. With mustard.”

“So American.”

“And chocolate mousse.”

“At least you have good taste when it comes to dessert.” He walked to the front of the swing, and as he caught the ropes to slow her down, he saw Tobias on this same swing.
Did I ever catch the ropes for him? Hold him steady? Let him soar?
His sadness at his distance from Tobias had grown sharper ever since Emma had positioned herself in his life. Tobias’ visits were rare, and though Stefan wished he’d see him more often, he found it hard to be near his son. Because of the anger in his shoulders. An anger that had been there forever, it seemed. Tobias moved like a man who felt wronged in the world and had learned to be cautious because others were sure to misunderstand him. When he walked, he had to turn his entire body to keep the anger contained in his shoulders because, if he didn’t, it would surely swell and spill into his arms, his fists.

“Can I have two hot dogs?” Emma asked.

“With mustard, I know. Hold still,” Stefan told her. “You’re all tangled.”

On the way to his restaurant, yellow leaves drifted toward them, and she caught two, dry and light; but when she rubbed them between her fingers, they got sticky and came apart, making her hand
smell green. Like cut grass, only stronger. On the path ahead lay a white stone. Leaves rustled beneath her feet as she ran to pick it up. Smooth, it was smooth, the stone, and it fit into her palm.

Opa
bent across it, ran one thumb along its surface. “See? It has a line of gold right down the center.”

“Real gold?”

“It’s a treasure.”

“You can keep it.”

“Thank you, Emma.” He looked so pleased when he dropped it into his pocket, and she knew that, once they got to his restaurant, he’d lay it into the basket on the shelf with the St. Joseph where he kept all the treats—stones and feathers and shells—that she found for him. Whenever she wanted, he let her play with the Joseph statue, but he always put it back on the shelf because it had given him the land for the
Wasserburg
and his restaurant.

Slipping her fingers into
Opa’s,
she noticed how much prettier the stone was than she’d first thought. It often was like that—seeing something with him made it better. Especially when they went through the house together, checking on repairs that needed to be made, visiting tenants who were always glad to see her, climbing the ladder to the platform above the elevator while the breath-song of the house billowed around her, opening
Opa’s
wooden toolbox to see if he’d left one of his treats for her inside—licorice or crayons or a compass on a key ring.

She liked it when he let her help him with his lists. “Will you remind me to get prices for carpeting?” he’d ask. “Will you remind me to have the laundry room painted?” She prided herself on keeping his lists in her mind, ready to recite them for him. “I wouldn’t remember half of this without you,” he’d say.

He’d laugh when she did somersaults on the peacock carpets in the hallways; sniffed the old linen blueprints; traced the golden flowers and birds on the flocked wallpaper in the lobby; tap-tapped her fingers against the shrouded Mary-and-Jesus statue in the furnace room.

Sometimes she’d get
Opa
to play the hiding game with her. She’d slip away from him and hide inside one of the tenants’ delivery cubicles, trying not to giggle while she’d listen to him search for her.
“Now where did Emma go? I just saw her a minute ago….” And when he’d pull her out, he’d look amazed that he’d found her. “Now tell me what you sat on,” he’d say. “A pound of butter? A head of lettuce?”

Her
Opa
loved the
Wasserburg.
And Emma knew she was the only person he loved as much as his building. Because he had seen both her and the
Wasserburg
the very same day—long before she was born. First he had built the
Wasserburg.
Then he had waited for her to get born. “Getting what you want,” he had taught her, “has to do with holding it in your mind so strongly that you keep returning to it—without thinking—so that you are always linked to it. That’s how I built this house. That’s how I came to America.”

And that’s how I came to be here.

That’s how.

“Blau-blau-blau-blau…” Frankie Morrell was making fish faces at Caleb, lips puffing outward each time he said “Blau.”

One of the other boys started doing it too. “Blau-blau—”

“Stop it.” Caleb grabbed his jacket from the rack in back of their classroom.

“What kind of name is Blau anyhow?”

“Blau-blau-blau—”

“It means—”

“Quiet, you boys,” their first grade teacher, Miss Heflin, called out to them. “Get your coats on. Hurry up or you’ll miss recess.” Her voice sounded friendly and impatient at the same time, the can-I-help-you-voice she used when she helped her parents in their grocery store after school and found the children gawking at the display of candies. “Hats
and
mittens,” she called after them as they ran out into the snow.

“Blau-blau—”

“It means blue.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Does so. In German.”

“That’s Nazi.”

Judy Magill laughed.

Nazi?
Caleb didn’t know what it meant, only felt its ugliness
when several of the children jumped around him, chanting, “Hazi tazi we got a Nazi. …” When he ran from them, they chased after him, around the granite building and to the edge of the schoolyard, feet crushing the frail ice that had sealed the puddles overnight—“Hazi tazi we got a Nazi hazi tazi…”—and they stopped by the dormant hedge of roses, obeying school rules to not leave the grounds until the final bell. “You’ll be in trouble,” they shouted after Caleb as he kept running, pressing his thighs together while dampness spread hot against his crotch, already cooling, smelly and heavy.
Hazi tazi?

Too ashamed to run home, he headed toward Weber’s Hardware and the lumberyard, past stone walls and the railroad station. On the other side of the tracks the snow was crusted, and upon it lay the shadows of bare birches, thin and black.
Hazi tazi?
He found a boulder, bare on top where the sun had heated it, though its base was still ringed by snow, and as he sat down, he pulled away from himself the way he often did and into a darkened movie theater—dark and warm and blue like the Royal—watching the screen where
this boy sits with his knees against his chest, shivering, this boy who can’t figure out what to do next.
All Caleb had to do was watch as the screen changed to a different day filled with sun while he and
Emma leap from the five wide steps that lead up to the front door. Leap again and again. And then swing by their arms from the wrought-iron railings that run up along both sides of the steps to the posts with stained-glass lanterns.
He wished he were fierce like Emma who got him to do things that were forbidden, like shinning from windows in the lobby or playing on the fire escape. Bossing him as if she were the older one. Looking out for him when tenants gave them candy, making sure he got as much as she did. A good climber, his sister. Not careful like he. Dreamer, his grandfather called him. Caleb didn’t mind. Liked knowing he could dream people and houses and clouds onto a movie screen and watch while dreaming, enter his world on the screen and be part of it while he made it up and embellished it. If that’s what it meant to be a dreamer, he was glad he was a dreamer.

Once in a while he’d get Emma to dream along with him, pick
out a house and imagine what it looked like inside and what the people who lived there were like. He called it the people game and loved playing it with his sister, but soon she’d be running off again. She was all body. Liked to jump. To touch things. To have things. Keep them and hoard them: feathers and rocks and coins. Caleb didn’t care about having things. Only cared about living inside his head and dreaming.
Till dreaming becomes seeing. Becomes the I-can-use-this. Use for what? Saving what he sees as if a camera inside his head were recording what happened outside of him, pulling it inside, making the inside-seeing and the outside-seeing one.
Much of the time the I-can-use-this was his friend, but sometimes he hated not being able to turn it off. Like when his mother watched his father eat. Or when the kids had shouted, “Hazi tazi…”

Wind blew through the wet fabric of his trousers, made his legs feel like ice.
The screen.
He brought himself back to the film, to the boy. And to help the boy, he put the boy’s father on the screen too,
who takes the boy’s hand. And after the father leads the boy home and draws a warm bath for him and promises not to tell anyone about the pee, the boy in the warm tub knows that the boy waiting in the snow is ready to get up from the rock and go home by himself.
But as he approached the
Wasserburg,
it was not his grandmother he encountered, but his mother who’d come looking for him because Miss Heflin had phoned her. When she ran toward him, he started crying, and she lifted him up, carried him into the building without getting angry at his mess and smell. She sat on the edge of the tub while he bathed and told her what had happened. And while he dried himself off, she called his grandmother.