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 (54 page)

Leo finally had to take her aside. “You’re taking unnecessary risks, Hedwig.”

“We can’t just be silent.”

“No, but we don’t have to put ourselves in danger.”

“You share my views. I know you do.”

“Yes, and I’ll talk about them with people I can trust. Like you.”

“My customers won’t report me.”

“Don’t be so certain. Last week Herr Weskopp turned in one of his colleagues at the bank. His wife’s in your store often enough.”

“But she’s not like him.”

“Who knows what she tells him? Besides, you won’t have any customers left if you keep talking like that. People are afraid, Hedwig.”

“With good reason too.”

“Listening to you is dangerous. Emil Hesping has two friends in the police who’re always getting denunciations at the station. They have to follow up on all of them, even those they know are mean-spirited or vindictive.”

She gave him an impatient laugh. “So what do we do, Leo? Just sit here, afraid of what anyone might say about us? Wait for it to get worse?”

“It will get worse. Much worse. Maybe all we can do is what you did with Fienchen—keep vigil right here. And if you’re in jail, you won’t do any good to anyone.”

Occasionally the people who came to the pay-library brought Trudi bits of gossip about Klaus: he had spent four days on his uncle’s estate
in Bremen; he was about to buy a second chair so that one patient could recuperate while he tended to the next one; he’d had an ear infection, which Frau Doktor Rosen had treated with yellow pills big enough to get stuck in an elephant’s throat; he’d gone dancing with a teacher from Oberkassel.

Strategically placed questions to Frau Simon and the pharmacist led Trudi to the information that the teacher’s name was Brigitte Raudschuss, and that she was nearly twenty-nine, the same age as Klaus. The following week Klaus and the teacher were seen together on three separate occasions—one of them on the white excursion boat that floated between Burgdorf and Düsseldorf. Frau Weiler heard that Fräulein Raudschuss was from a good family, and Herr Immers confirmed that her father was a wealthy lawyer and her mother a baroness.

She sounded like the kind of woman Klaus would be proud to introduce to his family.
“She’s perfect for my son”
Klaus Malter’s mother would tell her cousins on the phone, and at the family reunion they’d all be waiting impatiently to meet her.
“What lovely manners,”
they’d whisper to one another, while Fräulein Raudschuss would lift her elbow, just so, to bring dainty bites to her lips.… Still—if she was all that remarkable, why hadn’t this Fräulein Raudschuss caught herself a husband by now?

The Sunday Trudi finally saw Brigitte Raudschuss, she felt as though all the guts in her body dropped down into her legs, leaving her head curiously light. She was standing with the choir on the church balcony, between Herr Heidenreich and the polished organ pipes that pulled her reflection sideways like a funhouse mirror, and she steadied herself with one hand against the cold metal when the teacher entered through the arched door below her, tall and slender, one gloved hand on the pin-striped cloth of Klaus Malter’s suit jacket as if she owned him.

Trudi wished Fräulein Raudschuss would faint or, even better, start foaming at the mouth, embarrassing herself irreversibly, but the teacher kept walking at Klaus Malter’s side, her moss-colored fall dress rustling with each deliberate step as if, already, she were practicing her wedding-day walk toward the altar. Ten rows from the front, she turned her face to smile at Klaus, lifted her gloved hand from his sleeve, and slid into a honey-colored pew on the women’s
side of church, while he found a place on the men’s side next to Judge Spiecker.

A dainty ivory hat with moss-colored silk leaves hid most of her hair, but Trudi could tell from above that her features had that sharp, anxious look that settles on some women who long to get married and worry about getting too old to attract a husband. The two older Buttgereit daughters, Sabine and Monika, had that look, and even the flamboyant hats that Monika Buttgereit ordered from Frau Simon—hats so bright they hurt your eyes—did not conceal that look.

It gave Trudi a spiteful pleasure to think that Brigitte Raudschuss was getting to the age where her father’s status would no longer matter. Soon, she would be too old to be anchored in her role as daughter—like other women without husbands whose connection to their fathers no longer carried the same value, isolating them within their families and community. Old maids—strange, how their otherness was not physical as with herself, or the crippled Hansen boy, or even the Heidenreich daughter, who’d recently been sent to live in an institution, but how it came upon them at a certain age, turning them into outcasts even though, up to then, they had belonged to the community.

It worried Trudi that life had become even more difficult for unmarried women since Hitler had come into power and had declared that the family was the most essential unit of the nation. Only the interest of the nation was more important than that of the family. The word
family
had worked its way into most political speeches. It had become a sacred word, a powerful word. And of course you were not a family if you were unmarried, because the individual was the least-important unit of the nation. Trudi doubted that she and her father were considered a family. You were only a family if you married, preferably young, and were on your way to become
kinderreich—
child rich. To strengthen your family and encourage you to reproduce, the government gave you incentives, interest-free loans of up to one thousand marks—about what the pay-library brought in over five months. For each child you set into Germany, your loan was to be reduced by one quarter, and after four children it would become a gift. And there was an even greater reward: honor.

When the organ music began, Trudi’s voice rose with the other voices in the choir. As always, Herr Heidenreich sang with his head
tossed back, his chest heaving, and the pharmacist’s fleshy cheeks trembled while the corners of his thin lips strained toward his chin. The priest and four altar boys, led by Helmut Eberhardt, had barely positioned themselves in front of the marble altar when Hilde Sommer brought one pudgy hand to her throat, swayed, and crashed into a faint that brought four men running from their side of the church to carry her outside. The priest had to nudge Helmut, who had spun around at the commotion and was staring at Hilde as if wanting to carry her off all by himself. Just the week before, Trudi had spotted him outside Hilde’s house as if waiting to see her walk past the window.

Of course she’d told Hilde when she’d come into the library for one of the doctor-and-nurse novels she liked, expecting her to laugh and say something like,
“Such a little boy”
but Hilde—who was five years older than Helmut and outweighed him by at least fifty pounds—had seemed pleased.

Soon after Hilde was carried from the church, the girl Jutta rushed in, hair tangled, shoulders rising and falling beneath her unbuttoned coat as though she’d run all the way from her Uncle Alexander’s house. Hastily forming a lopsided sign of the cross, she pressed herself into the pew next to Fräulein Raudschuss, who pulled her arms against her body as if greatly inconvenienced and appraised the girl through a polite, sour smile.

Trudi could tell Fräulein Raudschuss was the kind of woman who gave great significance to what people wore to church: she’d time her own arrival late enough to be seen by those already there, yet early enough to size up everyone else; she’d dismiss a girl like Jutta as insignificant while being impressed by someone like the pharmacist, who was always formally dressed and wore a suit with a vest and hat even to picnics.

I know you, Fräulein Raudschuss
, she thought, suddenly in awe of her own gift.
I know all about you.
She was glad she was ten years younger than the lawyer’s daughter. Since she had been different from the beginning, no one in Burgdorf would scorn her for not getting married. Even if it turned out to be her choice to stay alone, it would be what everyone expected of her in this town, which judged harshly whenever a woman would not conform to its codes of behavior. In a strange way, she had more freedom than other women: the freedom
to make her own decisions, to provide for herself with her work at the library, to listen to her own counsel.

Her difference was good for something after all.

It made her smile, made her sing louder. For most women, Trudi knew, it was not a preference to stay unmarried. Some did not find a suitor, while others didn’t dare marry a man from another religion or a lower class. To marry into a class above yours was desirable but seldom possible. In some families the oldest daughter had to be married before the next one could encourage a suitor, resulting, as with the Buttgereit family, in nine unmarried daughters, whose gradual aging removed one after the other from the wedding market while the parents fretted over finding a husband for their oldest, Sabine, whose disposition and features were equally piercing.

Actually, if Klaus liked women with sharp features, he could marry Sabine Buttgereit and free Monika and the other daughters for marriage. Trudi grinned to herself. Now, that would be a good deed, something worthwhile. No need to go out of town for a sharp-featured old maid.

Ever since Klaus had kissed her, Trudi had been trying to figure out what men looked for in women. The marriage ads in the newspaper were the best place to start. She’d skim across the women’s section to the briefer list of announcements from men who wanted to meet women for the purpose of possible matrimony. Many were searching for healthy Aryan women who were younger than they, women who possessed warm hearts or their own businesses, women who liked children and cooking and leisurely walks and opera. None of the men ever advertised for a
Zwerg
woman who knew people’s secrets. They usually described themselves as cultured or successful—sometimes both—gave their height to the last centimeter, but left out any reference to hair color, making Trudi deduce that, quite likely, they were going bald. Herr Hesping was the only man she knew who looked good without hair—probably because he’d been like that since he was a young man.

To see how closely those men resembled the way they had advertised themselves, Trudi had answered two of those ads and had arranged a meeting with both men—who of course did not know about each other—one Sunday afternoon at four in the same restaurant in Düsseldorf. She arrived before they did. Both looked older and
stodgier than she’d expected, and they ended up at tables next to one another, each with a maroon kerchief in the chest pocket of his suit jacket, the sign by which, according to her letter, she would recognize him. Although their eager, nervous eyes evaluated every woman in the restaurant, they didn’t even consider that she might be the one they were waiting for.

At first it all felt like a hoax to Trudi: their impatience, their discomfort seemed funny to her, and she felt a peculiar satisfaction when they fussed with their maroon kerchiefs to make sure they were still in place; but what persisted in her long after that encounter was an overwhelming hate, a hate so ugly that she was afraid it would make her ugly inside, too.

As the priest raised the blessed sacrament toward the dark-eyed apostles in the “Last Supper” mural above the marble altar, Jutta blew her nose and Fräulein Raudschuss shrank further into herself. Klaus Malter bowed his head, and Judge Spiecker buried his face in his hands. As Trudi watched them pray, she felt impatient with them and all the others who found such easy solace in church; and yet, at the same time, she envied them because—until that day in the barn—she too had known that solace.

The members of the choir filed down the stairs and toward the altar to receive communion, and when Trudi raised her face and opened her lips to receive the round white wafer, a sudden longing for a child of her own cast her neck, her thighs in cool sweat. Though she told herself that she did not want children, all she could think of was what she did not have and would never have. She could no longer name anything worthwhile about her life and knew that the rich lawyer’s daughter would get whatever she wanted.

That night, Trudi tried to evoke that old dream in which she grew. Though she had tried to temper her consuming wish to grow by reminding herself of how Pia accepted her size, she wanted that dream—just for now—wanted to feel her arms and legs stretching, her body growing agile, wanted that familiar bliss of the dream to blunt the edges of grief over her love for Klaus, which was turning into hate as other loves had before. But what she dreamed of instead was the jetty, the Braunmeiers’ jetty—only it no longer jutted into the current but arched high across the Rhein in one mass of earth and stones. Klaus was shouting her name from the other side of the river,
but she knew the arch would collapse if she stepped on it.

At daylight she awoke with the panic of Klaus being lost to her forever. She knew she had to return to the Braunmeiers’ jetty, and she was afraid; yet, she slipped on her clothes as if acting out the final phases of her dream and walked through the cold, vacant streets, past windows that were still obscured by wooden shutters, and as the houses gradually fell back behind her as if wiped from the surface of the town, she smelled the river, that profuse scent of water and trees. Fallen leaves crunched beneath the soles of her black lace-up shoes, and when she reached the summit of the dike, two freighters with red smoke stacks struggled against the current. The jetty was the way it had always been—flat and solid and surrounded on three sides by water. It didn’t look nearly as terrible as all those times she’d pictured it.

As she walked toward the jetty, it came to her that what Klaus had done was not all that different from what the boys had done. While they had violated her with their curiosity and contempt, Klaus’ violation lay in his silence, in his pretense that nothing had happened. Her feelings toward all of them were so jumbled and intertwined that it made sense to be here in this place she had avoided, and when she dropped to her knees in the circle of sand at the end of the jetty and raised a rock, she suddenly was thirteen again—only this time she did not hurl the rock into the river, but placed it in front of her knees like some offering to an unnamed power and murmured, “This one is for you, Klaus Malter.”