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 (179 page)

T
HE TAXIDERMIST ALWAYS
gets dachshunds, and he—”

“He stuffs his dead ones.”

“If you ask him, he lets you pet them.”

“And then he—”

Fräulein Jansen’s students are giggling like six-year-olds.

“And then he buys a new one, a live one, and—”

“And . . . and he introduces the live one to the stuffed ones.”

“No.”

“It’s true.”

“Once he gave me a glass eye.”

“When I was your age,” the teacher says, “the taxidermist gave glass eyes to the children of Burgdorf on St. Martin’s Day, not sweets or apples like other merchants when we came to his shop with our paper lanterns. Those eyes . . .” She rolls her eyes, makes the boys laugh. “Actually, I liked getting those eyes.”

“Did you use them as marbles?” Andreas asks.

“Oh yes.”

“Because that’s what my father did with them.”

“We have three of those eyes,” Eckart Holthusen says. “They’re painted over in back of the glass.”

The teacher nods. Taps her left ear to remind him.

Eckart winces. Pulls his finger from his ear and hides both hands on his knees.

Slack manners, she thinks. Everyone in the Holthusen family has slack manners. Eckart’s mother. His grandmother. Two women raising one boy. Whenever his mother cleans St. Martin’s Church, the sharp odor of her sweat hangs in the vestibule for hours after. The parishioners know to stay away when she lifts her broom to get at the cobwebs above the confessionals, say, or the ceilings of the side altars. Keeping the church clean but not herself. That stickiness of body secretions. Armpits. Ears. And worse. Some parishioners say it’s because she carries her mother’s sin. Being born out of wedlock will mark a family for generations, so that even grandchildren will feel dirty by the way others treat them.

*

Eckart wishes he could lay his head on the desk and shut his eyes. Last night he awoke crying again, his ear tight and hot. His
Mutti
got him up, took him into the kitchen, where she filled a spoon with cooking oil and held it above the stove. When it was warm, she soaked a shred of
Watte
—cotton in the oil. He knew what came next, cocked his head to the right so that his left ear was up and
Mutti
could stick in the
Watte
. Some drops trickled deeper than the
Watte
could go, making him shiver and swallow as they warmed up the pain, shrinking its edges.

He slept, then, while
Mutti
sat by his bed. But this morning the cotton was little and so deep inside his ear that his mother couldn’t pull it out with her fingernails or her tweezer, and she said she’d take him to Frau Doktor Rosen today after school.

*

“Bruno’s family never gets the same kind of dog,” Franz says.

“Because they’re so ugly that there is no same kind.” Wolfgang tap-taps one finger against Bruno’s back.

Bruno jerks away from him, draws into himself as far as he can, elbows tight against his sides.

“Wolfgang,” the teacher warns.

But he persists, one finger tap-tapping down Bruno’s spine. Maybe tomorrow he’ll tie Bruno’s shoelaces together again. So easy to get him flustered.

“Stop it!” The veins in Bruno’s skinny neck stick out.

“Your last dog was fuzzy with a tail like a pig,” Eckart joins in.

“It will make you so happy to know my last dog got trampled dead.”

“Not happy,” Eckart protests.

“By the ragman’s horse. But the day after, a spotted dog came to our door, and I named her Henrietta.”

“Henrietta was lucky to find Bruno,” the teacher says. “Right, boys?” But her eyes are on Wolfgang.

Wolfgang nods, folds his hands on his desk. Once, in the barbershop, he heard his uncle say that the Stosicks got only ugly dogs—the kind that come from two mismatched breeds getting stuck to each other—and Wolfgang pictured a dog with two heads and two tails, one set at each end, so that it could run in both directions.

*

During recess, several boys breathe against the ice-flowers and ice-stems, nudging one another aside, melting larger circles that remind them of something Fräulein has told them: once a hole opens in how you’ve been looking at the world, everything else pushes through. Beyond their breaths, dormant wisteria vines twist around the window. In the school yard, the fruit trees are bare.

All grown and bare now, the teacher thinks, as she steps behind the boys and rests her hands on Richard’s bony shoulders. Such a heavy head on a slight neck. Such a burden . . . She wishes she could do more for Richard. Some people still cross the street to avoid an illegitimate child or the woman who’s borne that child.

Around the fruit trees the ground is still frozen, and a timid sun casts its peculiar light on the hoarfrost, illuminating and devouring at once. When Fräulein Siderova planted these trees with her students one long-ago May—one pear, one apple, one plum—they were knee-high on Thekla.

Y
OUR BIRTHDAY,”
Thekla Jansen says to her students, “is the anniversary of the day you were born. And don’t we look forward to those anniversaries?”

“To getting a present,” says Andreas, who wants to be a policeman.

“Every day has an anniversary attached to it,” she says, “but the ones we remember are those that transformed us.” Just then a reckless thought comes at her—
When you shake out the night, this is what falls out
—

Just as it came at her last April when she saw the Führer at a huge rally in Düsseldorf. He didn’t know how to speak properly, how to walk properly, how to comb his hair, and she felt embarrassed for him as he shouted about restoring jobs and national honor, about a better and splendid Germany. The mob applauded, shouted. Did people really believe that he wanted what was best for Germany? That history would prove he was on the good side? When the Führer was a boy—Thekla was sure of that—no one taught him how
to conduct himself. If Fräulein Siderova had been his teacher, he would have learned to stand tall but not rigidly, to pace his voice along with his breath instead of letting it flare into hysteria.

At the edge of the crowd, a child was trying to leave. Thekla couldn’t make out who it was, only that people were making space for someone short who was moving against the thrust of the crowd. But it wasn’t a child, Thekla finally saw. It was Trudi Montag from the Burgdorf pay-library. Thekla wanted to follow her, get out of there with her; but just then a cheer soared from the masses as the Führer reached into the sea of bodies and plucked a little girl from her mother’s arms—there must have been hundreds of children thrust at him by adults—and lifted her higher yet, a girl with blond braids, too high. Some felt an odd sense of alarm, and they’d think it was because he might drop the girl, because he was that awkward, but when he lowered her into her mother’s arms and picked another child, they shook off that warning.

*

When you shake out the night—

Thekla Jansen sets one index finger against her lips to keep herself from saying it aloud to her boys:
When you shake out the night, this is what falls out.

And to think that some say the Führer is Germany’s savior.

Messages change. Right and wrong can trade places, fall out of fashion.

As a student teacher she was assigned to a school in Neuss, where children—as was the custom, and to teach them to obey—were punished with a quick slap on the cheek for whispering in class, say, or with a ruler on their fingers if they didn’t sit still. When Thekla was a child, she, too, was punished like that. Sister Elisabeth used to grasp the shell of a student’s ear between her fingers, twist it, and Thekla dreaded that ear-twist more than a slap or the ruler.

But one morning, when Thekla was the one to snap her ruler
across the knuckles of a small boy, she suddenly knew it was wrong, knew it in her bones and in her gut. Punishment wasn’t effective in guiding a child toward learning. Far more effective to bind a child to you with devotion so that it longed to follow your teaching. From that day forward, she decided, she would teach according to her own moral compass.

And that’s becoming more important now.

She knows how to adapt, even to the fear that has been pulling the people together ever since the Reichstag burned. No longer the splintering of many groups. No longer the humiliation of Versailles. Instead: unity, a half-remembered pride. What matters to her is that her boys are thriving. The rest she’ll wait out.

But Emil doesn’t grasp the complexity.

“It’s not about enthusiasm for the Nazis, only enthusiasm for what they can do for my students,” she told him two weekends ago, when they were riding their bicycles to Düsseldorf to eat in the Altstadt.

“And how do you separate that?”

He was in an argumentative mood, told her his gymnasts’ club had lost two more athletes to the SA sports club. Already his official membership was low because Jews were excluded from sports clubs.

“But I let them train before dawn,” he told her.

“I don’t want to know that.” She pedaled faster, swerved ahead of him.

“You would do the same,” he shouted after her.

*

A truck rumbles past the schoolhouse, the pigeons scatter, and in that flicker of motion and light, the students raise their heads, sniffing blood though there is no blood, not yet, only this truck with animals in back, heading for the slaughterhouse. Used to be only carts that delivered animals there, but more trucks now, modern and fast.

Their rabbits and chickens people kill in their backyards where the ground soaks up blood. But pigs and cattle get hauled to the slaughterhouse, eyes rolling white in their sockets, seeking you inside your nightmares with squealing that sounds human.

Enough—

Corn for the pigeons, Thekla reminds herself. They’re like beggars, always hungry, scavenging. If she were to hold one in her hands, it would squirm—dirty and warm, scrawny, not sleek and pampered like the pigeons her
Vater
used to raise in the coop on the flat part of their roof. Suddenly she misses them.

*

As a child, she used to climb the stairs to the roof early in the morning, whenever
Vati
was at the asylum in Grafenberg. A few kernels on her shoulders, she’d wait for the tamest birds, Aphrodite and Zeus, wait for the luscious quiver of wings against her throat and ears, that guttural echo from deep within their feather-breasts. Only then would she toss corn to the other pigeons.

Evenings she’d sweep the wooden floorboards of their coop and refill their drinking water while they’d preen and strut for her. The year she was seven,
Vati
told her the legends of the gods who inspired the names for his pigeons.

Athena . . . Poseidon . . . Eris . . .

That was when he still climbed from his darkness for a month, say, or a few days, and those hands of his could build anything: the pigeon coop, a cupboard, planters. Wednesday evenings he’d let Thekla stay up late—not her little brothers, just Thekla—and walk with her to the Burgdorf
Tauben Klub
—pigeon club, where he was president for almost three months.

Artemis . . . Hebe . . . Eros . . .

Some of them eaten. Pigeon soup
Mutti
cooked when there was nothing else. Pigeon stew. Insignificant, the meat, once you separated
it from feather and bone. But the best racers
Vati
saved for breeding.

Hestia . . . Apollo . . . Dionysus . . .

Thekla’s first poem was about a Racing Homer, Athena. Frau Abramowitz wrote it down for her because she was five, could tell the poem, not write it. Athena flew out of her father’s head. That’s where babies came from. Athena flew across the Rhein, carrying an olive tree for her Uncle Poseidon. A wolf caught Athena. But she flew away and hid in a house with three beds. One small, one medium, one big. Athena slept in every bed. Then she ate the pudding. The End.

*

Thekla smiles to herself. That poem . . . it came from everywhere, from legends and fairy tales and superstitions, and from what surrounded her. All equally real. She enjoys that age when everything is still equally real for children, that age before they believe grownups who’ll tell them what’s real and what’s not. If Thekla were given a choice, she’d ask to teach first graders, because for them it’s still all real.

“Fräulein?” Heinz says and then adds something she can’t make out because it’s in his Bavarian dialect.

But she’s pleased he’s speaking at all. Only two weeks ago his family moved here, and he’s been quiet in her classroom, as if
Hochdeutsch
—High German were a foreign language for him.

How would you get him to engage, Fräulein Siderova? Be patient? Nudge him with encouragement? He seems to understand much of what I say but can’t express himself
.