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 (45 page)

Yet, beneath the stories that poured through her and numbed her was her pain and the fear of her own rage. All that spring and summer she stayed inside the house, eating and sleeping very little, moving about the pay-library like an invalid, dodging her father’s concerned questions—all through that fall and winter until the early spring when the flood loosened her rage.

The flood began with rain one April night. It rained the next day
and the day after that, keeping most of the regulars away from the pay-library, even the wife of the taxidermist, who kept coming back for the same books. Both Trudi and her father had explained to Frau Heidenreich that it would be far less expensive for her to buy the books she reread, but she enjoyed leafing through the books on the shelves. She’d always bring her daughter, Gerda, and the big girl would sit on the floor and play with a fancy pocket watch that no longer had hands.

For weeks it kept raining, and the river kept rising. Although the people of Burgdorf filled potato sacks with sand and raised the dike with them, the water poured into the streets and gushed down cellar stairs. Trudi helped her father carry the books from the pay-library upstairs into the sewing room and stack them against the walls. The flood covered the two lowest shelves throughout the library, soaked the legs of the wicker table, and stained the underside of the sofa, even though Trudi’s father, with the help of Herr Abramowitz, had lifted its legs onto bricks. They wound the ends of the long drapes around the curtain rods, creating an odd rococo effect that made the living room look far more elegant than before.

The third week of the flood the rain ceased, but the surface of the gray waters kept rising. It was a Sunday, and since the pews of St. Martin’s Church were half under water, the people took boats to the chapel which stood on a hill near the Sternburg. It looked as if all the pigeons of Burgdorf had sought sanctuary on top of the bell tower, and it was impossible to see the slate roof tiles among the swarms of gray and iridescent birds.

As the Rhein kept rising in Burgdorf and other towns along its banks, Trudi felt as though the river were coming after her, urging her to take revenge on Georg, Hans-Jürgen, Fritz, and Paul—the only people in the entire world who shared with her the secret of what had happened. Gradually her movements took on her old energy, and she forced herself to leave the house at least once a day. She was amazed how the boys averted their eyes when they encountered her, how they flinched when she scorched them with the fury of her gaze. Their shame, she discovered, gave her power over them. And as the weight of what had happened kept gathering within her—dark and turbulent, threatening to obliterate her—she knew she had to release it.

Hans-Jürgen would be the first one, she decided.

She didn’t know what she would do to him until she saw him hand in hand with a blond girl. From the way he looked at the girl, Trudi could tell he adored her. His first love, she thought, how sweet, how very sweet. She felt calmer than she had in many months as she settled into a patient wait for a chance to encounter him alone.

One morning in July, when Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier was getting ready to set up a stand in the open market with products from his family’s farm, he saw it coming toward him, the short, rounded girl-shape that kept fastening itself to his dreams, evoking fear and that strange lust he despised in himself, unsettling him for hours after waking up. Quickly, he bent over an open crate, whistling as he pretended to busy himself.

When he was certain she’d passed his stand, he cautiously turned his head, but she stood right behind him, her moon face set into bitter lines, her skin the color of new frost as if to negate the heat it had sent to his fingers not too long ago. He wiped his hands against the sides of his trousers.

She stood there, not saying anything, forcing him to look at her as if taking pleasure in the discomfort he had with her body.

To his horror, he felt his flesh rise for her, and he hated her for that. “What
do
you want?” he blurted.

“I know something.”

“So?”

“About you.”

“I have work to do.”

“Go ahead.”

He slammed the supports of the wooden stand into position, lifted the crates to display fruits and cheese, marked slate markers with prices. And throughout all this she stood there, stubby arms crossed in front of her flowered housedress, simply stood there, making him want to bolt, even though it would mean the wrath of his father.

“So then—what is it you know?” he finally asked.

“That she does not love you.”

His neck itched—hot and sudden. “Who?”

She lowered her eyes, murmured something he couldn’t hear.

“Who?” As he crouched to bring his eyes down to hers, he thought she smiled, but it passed so quickly that he figured he’d imagined it.

“You know who.”

“Go away.”

“Don’t you want to find out why?”

He shook his head, unable to pry his eyes from hers.

“I’ll go then,” she said and walked from him.

He told himself he’d be better off not to ask. Whatever she had to say to him would be worse than not knowing. “Why?” he shouted after her.

But she had reached the other side of the market and Barbarossa Strasse, where the constant shade from the canopy of oaks threatened to take her from him.

He ran, grasped her by the elbow.

She shook him off and whirled toward him.

“Why?” he hissed.

“Because,” she said as if totally sure, “no girl, no woman will ever love you.”

He laughed, a harsh laugh that hurt his throat. “You are crazy. Like your mother. Crazy
Zwerg”

The skin around her nostrils trembled but her voice remained even. “Crazy enough to know things. No woman will ever love you, Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier.”

His face, his entire body was burning hot, and he found it hard to breathe. “You—You think you can put a stupid curse on me?”

“Sshh—” She raised one hand. “I’m not finished. No woman will ever love you back. And your love will make a woman turn to another man.”

That night she slept—deeply and without remembering her dreams—and when she awoke, the sun was in her face and it was late morning and she understood that revenge did not always have to come through her directly.

Without mercy or haste, she began to spread stories about Fritz Hansen and Paul Weinhart, stories that were unlike her other stories and—she sensed—should have been left untold because they carried mere shards of truth, violating not only the core of the stories but also her own code of truth. Still—they gave her tremendous satisfaction as the position of those boys was weakened within the community.
But what about Georg?
—a voice within her persisted.
What about Georg?

To the surprise of everyone, except Trudi, Paul Weinhart’s uncle changed his mind about letting his nephew serve his apprenticeship in
his jewelry store. Instead, after helping his father on the farm in the early hours of day, Paul worked for the potato man, delivering heavy sacks of potatoes all over town, including to the pay-library. And when Fritz Hansen took over his parents’ bakery, many of the old customers began to buy their bread and pastries from the competition though it was owned by Protestants. Old Herr Hansen had to resort to buying a truck that wove through the streets and brought the bakery to the people’s doors. Against a white background, large blue letters proclaimed:
Hansen Bäckerei
. The driver was Alfred Meier, who’d slow down whenever he’d pass the Buttgereits’ house, pining for at least a glimpse of Monika Buttgereit, who was only allowed to speak to him in her mother’s presence right after mass.

All of the books in the Montags’ pay-library were covered with cellophane that grew dull and scratched over the years; yet, despite that protection, the books’ paper jackets developed tears. You could tell if Trudi or her father had repaired them: Leo Montag’s sections of tape were meticulously trimmed and ran along the insides of the book jackets, leaving no more than faint scars, while Trudi’s tapes crisscrossed not only the titles and names of authors, but also the swooning heroines, brave soldiers, dedicated doctors, and American cowboys. Since the tape yellowed sooner than the covers, the faces of the characters often looked jaundiced, contradicting the titles which proclaimed blossoming love or triumphant victories.

As the people came to Trudi with their stories, she cherished the mystery of silence just before a secret was revealed. And the bigger the secret, the denser was the silence surrounding it. Timing was extremely important—to choose the best moment to tear the silence. If it happened too soon, the silence that nurtured the growth of a secret closed around it like a cocoon. And if she waited too long, most of the secret had already drained away.

Yet, some things, Trudi had to admit to herself, better remained secrets—like the identity of the unknown benefactor, whose presence still manifested itself in isolated bursts of generosity: there might not be anything for months, but then three or four gifts would be found inside people’s houses within a single week. The secret of that identity gave the town of Burgdorf a fairy-tale quality, a shared and unspoken conviction that the unknown benefactor would shield the people
from anything that could be worse than their daily troubles.

Behind the counter of the library stood one of the wide stools that Trudi’s father had built for her and on which she’d stand to sell you tobacco, operate the cash register, or record the books you borrowed. Frequently only the top of her light blond hair would be visible above the counter. She was in the process of making a card file for the books, transferring the titles from her father’s brittle ledger onto long beige cards, which she filed alphabetically in a wooden box. But she kept her father’s system of entering a customer’s name beneath the title of each borrowed book.

A ladder equipped with wheels allowed her to reach books on even the highest shelves, making her feel taller than anyone who wandered into the library. She liked the view of the tops of people’s heads—a welcome change from having to stare up into their faces. It was for that same reason that she’d occasionally still climb into the tower of the church, high above the rest of the town. There she’d sit, watching miniature people dart between houses and through the open market.

If her father was in the pay-library while she was on the ladder, she’d stay up there if a customer entered, but if her father was resting or away at a chess tournament, she’d scramble down, her O-shaped legs finding the next tread with amazing surety.

Years of restricted movements had drained her father’s body of its vitality, and he had settled into his limp as though it had been sculpted for him. Since he could rely on Trudi to open the pay-library, he slept longer most mornings; and at midday, when the bells from St. Martin’s sounded across town and stores closed for two hours, he’d rest with one of the new books on the velvet sofa in the living room, a blanket across his legs, and read, the bony contours of his face transformed by an expression of bliss.

Seehund would lie on the floor next to the sofa, his nose on the worn leather of the shoes that Leo had taken off. It was as though he were aging along with Leo, both of them dozing more hours than they stayed awake. While Leo’s hair was turning white, the dog’s fur had blurred to a softer hue of seal gray. Often, Leo would pull his comb from his shirt pocket and untangle a fur ball from the dog’s coat or, almost absentmindedly, run it through the thicker layers of hair around Seehund’s neck. The dog had taken to sleeping at the foot of Leo’s bed, though his blanket remained on the floor of Trudi’s
room. Sometimes he’d take one of his hind legs between his jaws and pinch it as if to allay a deep-seated ache.

Trudi still took him on her walks along the Rhein though she hadn’t returned to the Braunmeiers’ jetty, a place too terrible to even think about. Usually, she’d stay on the dike and hike south toward Düsseldorf for two kilometers. Her back felt better on the days she walked, more limber. If she stayed indoors for too long, the lower part of her back had a tendency to get stiff and heavy. Along the way, she’d slow down to wait for Seehund, until she’d reach a path that spilled at an odd angle through the meadow and down to the river. It slanted past a clump of four poplars and an immense flat rock that lay embedded in the earth just where the path met the trail that hugged the embankment. The rock’s dark surface would get so warm that, even in the late fall, you could stretch out on it and feel your entire back warmed while the cool air moved across your face and body, as if you were held suspended between two seasons.

That meadow was so far from town that no one else was ever there. The river was rough and greedy—not ashamed to demand its rightful share: it strained against the embankment, swallowed rocks, and gushed through the tiniest crevices. Though it offered no sheltered bays, Trudi would ride its turbulent waves, dart beneath them in her frog-swim, her heart beating fast as she became the river, claiming what was hers. As the river, she washed through the houses of people without being seen, got into their beds, their souls, as she flushed out their stories and fed on their worries about what she knew and what she might tell. Whenever she became the river, the people matched her power only as a group. Because the river could take on the town, the entire country.

She thought of what people said behind her back—that she hadn’t cried at her own mother’s funeral—while to her face they said: “You’re lucky to have such pretty hair.” They didn’t have any idea what she was like: they saw her body, used her size to warn their children, looked at her with disgust. But it was just that disgust of theirs which fused her to them with an odd sense of belonging. That disgust—it nourished her, horrified her. She would have done anything to be loved by them, and since she could not have their acceptance, she seized their secrets and bared them as she had bared Eva’s birthmark.

•   •   •

She began to sew for herself again, taking pleasure in altering patterns to suit her. As her tolerance for food returned, she could see how relieved her father was. When she’d call him into the kitchen where she’d set the table for the hot midday meal, he’d tell her about the new books and make a list of those customers he knew would like them. His women customers would feel privileged when he’d pull a new book from beneath the counter and whisper, “I’ve been saving this one for you. It just came in.” Their eyes rapt, they’d listen as he gave them just enough of the plot to captivate them without revealing the ending.