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 (5 page)

She shared the cellar with five other tenants; each of them had one section. In the dim light she found the keyhole while Herr Weinhart waited next to her. He smelled of new, clean sweat. Gray light, filtered through cobwebs and coal dust, kept the cellar just short of total darkness and deepened the corner shadows. She’d hidden here with her mother during air raids, safe—it turned out—while other buildings in town had been hit by bombs that made them look like broken teeth with blackened edges.

Her hand reached for the chain that hung from the ceiling bulb, and she stepped aside to let Herr Weinhart walk past. He stood before the rising clouds of dust as the potatoes rumbled into the open bin, then he shook the corners of the sack, and folded the burlap into a square. Though he didn’t resemble the American, his movements were the same, the long limbs and broad span of his shoulders.

“I guess that’s all,” he said and turned to leave.

She wanted to touch his cheek lightly, to run one finger along his throat.

“Are you coming up too?”

She crossed her arms. “In a while. You go ahead.” Her face hot, she listened to the sound of his footsteps moving away from her on the cellar stairs. The peculiar, dark odor of mold, cobwebs and dampness pressed against her. She pushed back her shoulders, shook her head.

The walls were lined with shelves, heavy with jars that sealed within them the flavor and smell of fruits and vegetables she’d canned last summer. On the third shelf stood jars with hazy contents, left over from her mother:
APPLE-SAUCE
1948,
BEANS
1950,
STRAWBERRY MARMALADE
1949. Behind them stood two dusty bottles, the years 1924 and 1923 barely legible on the faded labels. They bore a different handwriting, the Old German script of her grandmother, who died before Klara was born.

Whenever she thought of throwing these bottles out, she felt an odd sense of resistance, as if they connected her to a simpler past. She held one of them against the light. The liquid was cloudy, thick. Hard to imagine the ripe cherries or strawberries whose juices had been squeezed into the neck of this bottle. The cork was crumbling and musty. It had smelled like that during the war. “I should throw these bottles out,” her mother had said more than once. “They’re probably pure poison by now.” But she’d only moved them further back to make room for the blankets she kept in the cellar for air raids.

Cautiously Klara returned the bottle to the shelf. None of the jars bore dates between 1942 and 1945. Anyone lucky enough to have food had eaten it. Except for the eighteen jars of peaches she and her mother had canned. A week after the American had been stationed in their building, he’d carried a crate of peaches up four flights of stairs to their apartment. He set the crate on their kitchen table
and, while she and her mother watched, pried open the top to reveal golden-pink peaches, layers and layers of them. Her mouth suddenly dry, she ran her fingers across their fuzzy skins.

He laughed. “Here. Eat.” He held one of the peaches out to her. His teeth were white, and his short hair exposed a small, leaf-shaped birthmark on his forehead. On his left hand he wore a ring.

When Klara bit into the peach, juice dribbled down her chin, and she wiped it with the back of her left hand. At first she chewed slowly, embarrassed that he was watching her, but as the hunger rose from her belly to meet the food, she assuaged it by taking another bite. She couldn’t remember ever tasting anything so sweet, so good, and after the American left, she and her mother stood next to the table, eating peaches until their stomachs felt taut and the fronts of their dresses were damp with juice. Even after they gave some of the peaches to Herr Flemern, the tailor who lived on the first floor, and ate all the peaches they desired for an entire week, they had enough left to fill eighteen glass jars which they saved on the windowsill in the kitchen for special occasions. Amber half suns, the peaches floated in their own juice, emitting a golden glow that warmed the apartment.

Most of the peaches were still there when the American left three months later, but Klara wasn’t able to swallow them. Though her mother ate some, the remaining jars sat on the windowsill until Rolf was old enough to take solid food and eat them mashed, his one legacy from his father.

The relentless hunger of those years—occasionally Klara still felt it, even after a large meal. She felt it now as she looked at the shabby leather suitcase next to the cellar door. During the war it used to stand behind the sofa in the living room, packed with clothing and food. That was before the American had arrived. Whenever the sirens sounded off, she’d grab the suitcase with one hand, her mother’s arm
with the other, and they’d rush down the stairs into the cellar, often without slippers, just wearing their nightgowns, and sit on layers of blankets that couldn’t block the chill of the cement floor. Though she was in her late teens and taller than her mother, Klara let herself be folded into her mother’s arms.

Eyes wide open in the dark, she thought of her father, who was fighting on the Russian front. His regiment had a goat, and when he sent photos, they’d be of him and several other men in uniforms, one of them always sitting on the goat. It seemed like a different war, not the kind where you hid from bombs, but where you could sit on a goat and laugh into a camera.

Sometimes she faded into sleep, rocking in her mother’s arms, and whenever she woke up, her mother smiled although the corners of her mouth trembled. “Don’t be afraid,” she’d whisper.

Klara wasn’t afraid the first time the American soldier took her into his arms right next to the potato bin, his wide shoulders shielding the frail glow of the ceiling bulb. That evening, and other evenings like it, the cement floor didn’t feel cold at all through the blankets on which they lay.

At first she believed he’d take her with him after the war to his faraway country where the sky was always blue, where coconuts and oranges grew on trees, where winter never came and the ocean was warm. And because the wife he’d left there was a shadowy figure in Klara’s mind, she assumed that, for him too, she had ceased to be real. Certainly he’d been apart from her for too long. Certainly it was Klara’s touch, now, that mattered.

He didn’t promise to take her with him, though she waited for him to say so, and when she stopped believing he ever would, she found comfort in the hope that the American occupation would last. He’d stay in Burgdorf, find work here or in Düsseldorf. Already his German had improved and she’d help him learn, practice with him.

The day she told him she was pregnant, he held her so tightly in his arms that she couldn’t see the expression on his face, and then he kissed her, kissed her entire body, even the indentations her garters had left on her thighs. She wanted to see his face, but all she saw was herself through his eyes—a stretch of thigh, an instep, a breast, an arched neck, a moist strand of brown hair … and when his unit transferred him the next day—to Bochum, one of the American soldiers told her, while another said he was almost sure it was Duisburg—she was left with those fragments of herself to gather around a center that held the child growing within her.

She braced herself against her mother’s silence and the disapproving stares of the townspeople. It was up to her to weave the story she would tell her son as soon as he started asking questions about his father.

But first there was the pain, the pain of being without her lover that took hold of her so fiercely she had trouble breathing, a pain that started deep inside her gut and spread into her limbs, her groin, a pain that racked her and tore her from deceptive moments of rest. It hurt so much she didn’t know how to stop it. And out of the pain grew the fear that it would always be like this. Nothing helped. Not the crying. Not the praying. Not the confessing of her sins. The one person who could have stopped the pain was out of her reach.

When, finally, she became angry enough to crumple the one photo she had of him and throw it out, she retrieved it less than an hour later and ironed its back to take out the creases; but they stayed, a fine web across his face as though he had suddenly and irrevocably aged. All at once she had a vision of him as an old man, still tall but slightly stooped, and of herself, older too, one hand linked through his arm. She touched her unlined skin, ran her fingertips along the smooth planes of her cheeks, and cried out
with the loss of all those years she would not spend with him.

She hid the photo in a red leather box under her few pieces of costume jewelry. After her son was born, she kept searching his features for a resemblance to the American, but only saw herself: the brown eyes and hair; the small, eager face; the flat, well-shaped ears. To protect the child from her shame, she insisted on being called Frau Brocker instead of Fräulein, the title reserved for unmarried women. And the townspeople complied; they even began to think of her as Frau Brocker, but they wouldn’t forget that her child had come from sin.

Though the pain faded until it eventually ceased to be, the shame settled somewhere low in her belly, a familiar presence that claimed any food she ate before it could nourish her. Standing alone in the dim cellar after the potato man had left, she felt it stronger than she had in years. She looked at the wooden bin, at the cloud of fine dust that still floated above its open top, and she knew she was done with waiting, waiting for things that never happened.

She squatted in front of the bin. With both hands she shoved up the trap door, letting the old potatoes tumble out among dry specks that rose and swirled around the light bulb like fireflies, and as the potatoes rolled into dark corners, she caught the first new ones in her hands. They were firm, smooth.

“What are you doing?” Her son stood in the open cellar door. His brown hair hung over his eyebrows. His eyes were so serious. Too serious.

“Here!” She tossed one of the potatoes at him. “Catch!”

His hand snatched it from the air. “What—”

She laughed. “For dinner.”

He seemed startled.

“Here—another one.”

As Rolf caught the second one too, his lips moved into a
slow smile. He kicked aside an old potato that had rolled up against his feet.

“I’ll boil them,” she said, “and you can run to the store and get a quarter pound of butter. No—half a pound. And parsley.” Already she could taste the new potatoes the way she would prepare them, and as her arms gathered as many as she could hold against herself, she felt the old hunger shrink into a small circle of desire.

  
Props for Faith

W
hen our housekeeper told me she didn’t think the midwife was Renate’s real mother, I wondered if my best friend’s parents were gypsies, those dark-haired women and men who, every July, set up the carnival on the Burgdorf fairgrounds and, with brown, ring-covered hands, took the groschen I’d saved for rides on the ferris wheel and pink clouds of cotton candy.
Gypsies
. That would explain Renate’s dark, frizzy hair, her quick, black eyes. But gypsies moved rapidly, while my friend walked with a limp, her feet in patent-leather shoes, her fragile ankles hidden under white knee socks that never stayed up.

Besides—gypsies were known to steal babies.

Not give them away.

After swearing me to secrecy, Frau Brocker told me, “I figure her real parents were too poor to keep her. Too many other children already.” She’d just come back from her weekly visit to the beauty parlor and she smelled of hair spray. “Instead of paying the midwife, they must have given her the baby.”

The midwife was a blond, heavy widow whose husband had been killed during the war on the Russian front. She’d
delivered me and most of the kids I knew. Her name was Hilde Eberhardt, and she lived with her older son, Adi, and Renate in a white stucco house two blocks from school. No one had seen her pregnant with Renate, not even Trudi Montag. Twelve years before the midwife had left town one Thursday, and the following day she had returned with a dark-haired infant girl, claiming it was hers. By then her son had lived half of his five years without a father.

Renate didn’t come to our school until the end of second grade, and we became best friends right away. Nearly two years earlier, she’d been taken to the Theresienheim with pneumonia. On the day she was to be released, she fell when she climbed out of bed, caved in on herself like a puppet whose strings had been cut. The nuns suspected polio and rushed her to St. Lukas hospital in Düsseldorf where the doctors confirmed the diagnosis and kept her for over a year, probing her legs with needles. Though she was eventually cured, her left leg was shorter than the other. Thinner. Both legs were pale with large pores.

Whenever Renate took me to her house, the midwife examined the soles of our shoes and followed us around with a mop, catching any speck of dust that dropped from our skirts and settled on her glossy parquet floor. Yet, when I got ready to leave, she’d say, “Come back, Hanna. Any time.”

Their yard, too, was orderly: a lush lawn without dandelions; window boxes with forget-me-nots and geraniums; a trimmed hedge of purple lilacs. The one imperfection was a pear tree that produced abundant blossoms but only yielded hard little pears with brown spots.