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 (22 page)
Authors: Ursula Hegi
Also by Ursula Hegi
INTRUSIONS
UNEARNED PLEASURES
AND OTHER STORIES
FLOATING IN MY MOTHER’S PALM
SALT DANCERS
TEARING THE SILENCE:
ON BEING GERMAN IN AMERICA
Ursula Hegi
for Gordon
Acknowledgments
I’m deeply grateful for the generous help and support I received while writing this novel. My godmother, Kate Capelle, had the courage to answer questions I couldn’t ask as a child while growing up in the silence of post-World War II Germany. In her late eighties,
Tante
Kate broke the silence by documenting her memories of the war years on tape for me. Author Ilse-Margret Vogel, who became active in the resistance before immigrating to the U.S., lent me photo albums of her childhood and offered valuable insights on what it was like to live in Germany between the two wars. Historian Rod Stackelberg trusted me with journals he wrote as a boy in Germany. Together with Germanist Sally Winkle, he guided me in my research and read the manuscript for historical accuracy. Author Sue Wheeler, whose wisdom and love for literature keep challenging me to reach further in my writing, has read drafts of nearly everything I’ve written since we met in graduate school. My agent, Gail Hochman, helped me with my research of Jewish traditions. Gordon Gagliano welcomed the essence of Trudi into our house and advised me in all matters Catholic and architectural. The women in my women’s group have given me their loving support during eight years of sharing and celebrating our histories. The Northwest Institute for Advanced Study awarded me a faculty research grant during the summer of 1992.
Vielen herzlichen Dank
.
A
S A CHILD
T
RUDI
M
ONTAG THOUGHT EVERYONE KNEW WHAT WENT
on inside others. That was before she understood the power of being different. The agony of being different. And the sin of ranting against an ineffective God. But before that—for years and years before that—she prayed to grow.
Every night she would fall asleep with the prayer that, while she slept, her body would stretch itself, grow to the size of that of other girls her age in Burgdorf—not even the taller ones like Eva Rosen, who would become her best friend in school for a brief time—but into a body with normal-length arms and legs and with a small, well-shaped head. To help God along, Trudi would hang from door frames by her fingers until they were numb, convinced she could feel her bones lengthening; many nights she’d tie her mother’s silk scarves around her head—one encircling her forehead, the other knotted beneath her chin—to keep her head from expanding.
How she prayed. And every morning, when her arms were still stubby and her legs wouldn’t reach the floor as she’d swing them from her mattress, she’d tell herself that she hadn’t prayed hard enough or that it wasn’t the right time yet, and so she’d keep praying, wishing,
believing that anything you prayed for this hard surely would be granted if only you were patient.
Patience and obedience—they were almost inseparable, and the training for them began with the first step you took: you learned about obedience to your parents and all other adults, then about obedience to your church, your teachers, your government. Acts of disobedience were punished efficiently, swiftly: a slap on your knuckles with a ruler; three rosaries; confinement.
As an adult Trudi would scorn the patient fools who knelt in church, waiting. But as a girl, she’d go to mass every Sunday and sing in the choir; during the week she’d sometimes slip into the church on her way home from school, taking comfort in the holy scent of incense as she whispered her prayers to the painted plaster saints that lined the sides of St. Martin’s Church: St. Petrus next to the confessional, his eyebrows perpetually raised in an expression of shock as if he’d overheard every sin the people of Burgdorf had whispered to generations of weary priests; St. Agnes with her mournful eyes rolled up and her fingers clasped to her bosom as if rehearsing to withstand countless other attacks on her purity; St. Stefan with a pile of chocolate-colored rocks hiding his feet—except for one pasty toe—his bleeding arms extended as though inviting his enemies to hurl even larger stones at him and ensure his eternal salvation.
To all of them Trudi prayed, and her body grew, but—as though her prayers had been twisted in some horrible joke—her body did not stretch itself upward as she’d presumed it would, yet had failed to specify in every single prayer, but expanded into a solid width that would eventually make her forearms as massive as those of Herr Immers, who owned the butcher shop, and her jaw as formidable as that of Frau Weiler, who ran the grocery store next door.
By then Trudi had come up against that moment when she knew that praying for something did not make it happen, that this was it: that there was no God-magic; that she was as tall as she would ever be; that she would die some day; and that anything that would happen to her until that day of her death would be up to her to resolve. She knew all this with a stunning clarity that chilled her to the core that April Sunday in 1929 in the Braunmeiers’ barn, when the circle of boys closed around her—those boys who spread her legs, who spread her soul until it felt as if that dried snot on her face would always be there, tightening her skin like spilled egg whites—and she
saw herself as a very old woman and, simultaneously, as an infant, as if her past and future were at opposite ends of a taut rubber band that someone had let go of for just an instant, causing her entire life—every minute she had lived and would live—to coil in on itself and touch where she was that moment in the barn, and she knew that she’d be able to see that way again: she watched herself pull her mother from the earth nest beneath the house; dismantle a section of the stone wall in the cellar and dig a secret dirt tunnel to the Blaus’ house; stroke her lover’s back with both hands, and feel the fine oval of hairs at the base of his spine as the night sky swirled around them; recoil from the heat of the flames that spurted from the broken windows of the synagogue and showered the school and the Theresienheim with sparks the color of the fabric star,
Judenstern
, that her friend, Eva Rosen, would have to wear on her coat.
For months after Trudi Montag’s birth, her mother wouldn’t touch her at all. From snatches of gossip the girl would later conjecture that her mother had taken one glance at her and had covered her face as if to shut out the image of the infant’s short limbs and slightly enlarged head. It didn’t help that Frau Weiler, upon peering into the wicker carriage, had inquired:
“Hat das Kind denn einen Wasserkopf?”—
“Does the child have water on the brain?”
Trudi’s eyes seemed older than those of other infants, as if they held the experiences of someone who’d already lived a long time. The women in the neighborhood took turns keeping her alive and clean. They were the ones who brushed her silver-blond hair into one wispy curl on top of her head and secured it with a dab of pine honey, who boiled goat’s milk and fed it to her in a bottle, who whispered as they compared her shape to that of their own children, who sat next to the bed of Trudi’s mother and guarded her restless sleep whenever she was carried home after running away from her house on Schreberstrasse.
It was the summer of 1915, and the town belonged to the women. With their husbands fighting on the Eastern front for the past year, they had relearned to open even the most difficult snaps on their salmon-colored corsets; they had become accustomed to making decisions—like which repairs to do themselves and which to leave until after the war; they continued to sweep their sidewalks and to remind their children to practice the piano; they persuaded Herr Pastor
Schüler to invite an old chess champion from Köln to give their children lessons for one entire week after school; they banned the trick images of their husbands’ faces below the earth when they watered the plants on their families’ graves. At times, when they forgot their hunger and their revulsion to turnips, which had become their major nourishment, it seemed odd that, all around them, a celebration of life persisted as if there were no war: the blossoms of the cherry and apple trees, the singing of the birds, the laughter of their children.