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 (62 page)

Hoisting the seal coat to her knees, Trudi raced after them, and when she caught up, she saw Herr Abramowitz, his neck and face bloodied, his pajamas ripped. He could not stand, not even when Leo Montag tried to support him, and they had to spread the seal coat on the ground, roll him onto the rugged hide, and carry him—Frau Abramowitz and Trudi on one side, Leo on the other—up Schreberstrasse and through the arched door of his house. Trudi’s arms were aching as they used to when she’d hung from the door frame, and her father’s breath was coming in hard gasps. Only Frau Abramowitz’s breath was even, because carrying her husband took far less strength than waiting for him.

When they laid Michel Abramowitz down on the sofa in his living room and washed him, careful not to touch his bruises, they found that his nose and several ribs had been broken. All along the inside of his left arm were cigarette burns, and his back was swollen with raw welts. He had lost quite a few teeth, all from the outer row, and his
wife could see the second row—a quirk of nature, she used to think—as if he’d grown that extra set of teeth for this night.

His voice was hoarse, and they had to bend close to hear him when he forbade them to take him to the Theresienheim or the hospital in Düsseldorf. “I’m safer at home,” he insisted in a murmur and asked his wife to bring him the
Watte
—cotton—that she used for earaches and taking off nail polish.

She looked confused but left the room to get it.

He gripped the lapels of Leo’s Sunday suit. “I’ll go into the river before I let those
Schweine
get me again.”

“Michel—”

“I mean it, Leo. Promise you’ll look after Ilse if that happens. There’s nothing that can make me go through this again if—” He let go of Leo as his wife returned with the
Watte
, and he tore off two pieces, rolled them into wads, and quickly inserted them in his nostrils. Tears ran down his mangled face.

Leo steadied him by the shoulders. “It’s a promise.”

“What is he doing?” Frau Abramowitz cried out.

“Trying to reshape his nose,” Leo said.

“Let me get Frau Doktor Rosen,” Trudi said.

Michel Abramowitz groaned. “I don’t want to put her in danger.”

“Let her decide.”

“I have decided for her. She would come. You know her.”

Frau Abramowitz dampened her handkerchief with spittle and wiped the blood from his nostrils.

“Stop it, Ilse.” He averted his face. “I’m not a child.”

“What if it sets crooked?”

“Then you divorce me.” He winced at his attempt at humor. “Get yourself a husband with a nice straight nose.”

“And
a nice disposition.” She slipped an embroidered pillow behind his head. “I’ll start looking.”

He circled her hip with one arm. “I bet you will.”

Her face flushed, Frau Abramowitz looked at Leo and Trudi. “Thank you for your help,” she said, her voice oddly formal. “Michel needs to rest now.”

“Let us know what we can do,” Trudi offered.

“Lock the door behind us,” Leo reminded Frau Abramowitz.

Throughout the morning, Michel Abramowitz rested on the sofa, dropping into brief, fitful periods of sleep from which he woke moaning,
while his wife sat on the floor next to him, her photo albums spread around herself, staring at the images that had emerged through the eyes of her husband’s cameras. But now the cameras were broken: she knew because she had stepped across the shards, and it seemed like a trick that the photos were not broken. She remembered the endless arranging Michel had done, posing her and the children just so, telling them to smile as he prepared to fix their images for the future. But when all was added up, you could never do that: you could never take three or four people, say, and arrange them in such a way that they would remain like that forever. They were only like that for the moment of the photo, and it seemed a mockery that—all these years later—the pictures still held those images as if they could be true.

From the Catholic church came the ringing of the bells, celebrating the marriage of Helmut Eberhardt and Hilde Sommer. Frau Abramowitz stepped up to the broken window. The air was cold, laced with frost. She felt a deep compassion for Renate Eberhardt, whose body had carried Helmut toward the moment of his birth, Frau Eberhardt who—while Michel had crawled home with his wounds—must have already been up, preparing for her son’s wedding reception, which was to be held at her house. Frau Abramowitz wondered if Helmut’s mother knew what her son had done during the night, and she pitied the midwife, whose body would lie beneath Helmut’s in the nights to come. A thought came to her that had insisted on settling with her for some time now, a thought that would anger Michel if she ever told him: given a choice, she would rather be the one who was persecuted than the one who did the persecuting. Both had a terrible price to pay, but she would rather endure humiliation and fear than grow numb to what it was to be human.

To Leo Montag’s surprise, Trudi insisted on attending the Eberhardt wedding with him, and he understood why when he saw her step up to Helmut’s mother before the ceremony and motion to her to bend down so that she could whisper into her ear. At least Trudi could have waited to tell her what her son had done until after the wedding, he thought as a look of desolation passed across Frau Eberhardt’s face. It was a look that stayed on her face throughout the wedding mass and the reception, even though she tried to force a smile to her lips, a look that caused her new daughter-in-law to come up to her twice, asking if there was anything she could do. But Renate Eberhardt only
looked at the young blond woman and shook her head.

Around noon, the Abramowitzs’ daughter, Ruth, arrived on the streetcar despite her husband’s misgivings, a large shawl around her head as if to disguise herself. She cried when she embraced her parents, and she cried again when she picked up the open albums and stacked them back on the shelves, assuming the SA had strewn them about the floor.

She told her father she was sure her brother would do whatever he could to help.

Her father nodded. “Albert is trying to get us out. He knows we’re ready.”

“And you, Ruth?” her mother asked. “What will you do?”

“If Fritz were Jewish too, we’d come with you, but he’s so well respected—I don’t think anyone would dare go after his wife.”

“I hope you are right,” her father said without conviction.

“We’re careful.” She touched the edge of her chipped front tooth, a habit that made her look like the girl she’d been when she’d jumped from the moving streetcar. “I— I keep out of sight. I mean, Fritz thinks it’s better if I don’t work in the office for a while.”

“I see,” her father said gravely.

“Only until things are back to normal,” she said quickly.

Everyone in the neighborhood was shocked at what had happened to Michel Abramowitz. Frau Weiler prepared a basket of delicacies for them. “They are honorable, dear people,” she said.

“Those who did it,” Frau Blau said, “they’ll find their own vengeance. They’ll never have any luck.”

“How could they do this to him?” Herr Meier asked when he parked the bakery truck in front of the Abramowitzs’ house. “They shouldn’t be allowed to,” he said and insisted on leaving four glazed buns and a dozen
Brötcben.

Herr Kaminsky, whose upholstery shop had been overlooked during that night of destruction, said he knew some people among the SA—their wives were customers of his—who were nice, who did not commit any crimes.

But Anton Immers and some of his friends said it was about time the Jews were shown reality, and when they heard that the mansion of the concert pianist, Fräulein Birnsteig, had not been damaged at all, Herr Immers figured it had to be because it was too far from the center of town.

The attack on Michel Abramowitz was only the beginning of the violence in Burgdorf, and during the following night—three nights after the first breaking of windows in the city—Burgdorf caught up with a fury. Surely, Trudi thought, the people could no longer pretend they didn’t know what was happening as the stores of their Jewish neighbors were plundered and burned, as Jews were yanked from their beds at night and taken away. Windows that had been forgotten in the initial attack were broken by groups of roaming youths, who were lured by the fires and turbulence.

It became a show—“Look, they’re getting another Jew”—a theater of the macabre that sucked the entire town onto its bloody stage that night, a night that never was allowed to replenish itself in the folds of its darkness because as soon as the sky reached its deepest hue, it immediately began to pale as if impatient for day. The light, Trudi realized, came from the north, blooming across the sky in an uneven arc. And with it came the smell of smoke.

She rushed into her clothes, and when she ran outside, smoke curled around her, filling her lungs, enveloping her in a heat that turned November into the hottest month of the year.

“Wait for me!” Her father was close behind her.

They cut through their backyard and waded through the icy brook, ran along the back of the Theresienheim and down the strip of grass between the Theresienheim and the school. There, across the street, the synagogue was burning—fast and hot as dried pine cones—spewing yellow sparks into the night. Limbs of fire reached from inside the broken windows, linked, and embraced the large building, crushing its structure.

Someone started the Horst Wessel song, and several others blared along:
“Wenn das Judenblut vom Messer spritzt
…”—“When the Jew blood spurts from the knife …” A woman carrying a small child pointed toward the high flames, her smile excited. Two Hitler Youths waved their flags. Trudi looked at the faces of the people around her: most of them she’d known all her life. Maybe now, she thought, now in the blaze of this fire, they surely will have to see. But it was as if they’d come to take the horrible for granted, mistaking it for the ordinary. It made her wonder what would have happened if all of them had gone along with Frau Weiler four years earlier, ranting against the government. Could that have prevented any of this?

As she listened to the voices of the people, she could hear that some
were outraged, but what staggered her was what they were outraged by: the mess and the waste—not the injury to their Jewish neighbors. It shattered their
Ordnungsliebe
—their love for order—and in the days to come they would agree when Göhring and many other Germans expressed their indignation at the cost of the wreckage and demanded to know,
“Wer soll das bezahlen?”
—“Who shall pay for this?”

When the Jewish community was assessed a bill for the debt which arose from the devastation, and was forced to turn over valuables to the government, Leo Montag offered to hold things for his Jewish friends. He’d be glad to store them, he said, or sell them—whatever they needed most for him to do. While Frau Simon asked him to sell a ruby pin and her gold fountain pen, Frau Abramowitz insisted on obeying the law.

“At least my cameras were already broken,” her husband railed when he found their solid gold candle holders and five sets of his cufflinks missing. “Otherwise you would have handed them over, too.”

“I don’t want to provoke them any more than necessary,” she said.

That night, after Ilse was asleep, Michel took the mezuzah from his front door, lined a wooden crate with his old raincoat, and carefully packed the mezuzah along with the silver candlesticks that his parents had given Ilse on her wedding day for the Sabbath candles. After filling the box with other items he considered most precious, he carried it across the street. Outside, the air stank of smoke. Cold and heavy, it clung to his skin. Ever since that night of his arrest, he hadn’t felt clean, not even after he bathed.

“I want to show you where I’m going to keep this,” Leo Montag said. “In case something happens to us.”

Trudi held the lantern as the two men followed her down the stairs into the cellar. The light spread the shadow of their collars against their chins.

Next to the shelves with the preserves, her father hid the box beneath old clothes in a wooden trunk. “You can always get it without asking me,” he told Michel Abramowitz.

For weeks, the smoke hung above the town, getting into your lungs with each breath, making you cough; and after the rubble was cleaned up, you would still come across slivers of glass far from the areas of destruction as if they’d been carried there by the smoke. You
wouldn’t see them unless you’d step into one of them, say, or catch the reflection of a shard of sun in a bare tree limb while reaching up to hang out your laundry in the frosty winter air, making you feel as if you and your neighborhood, the world even, were held in the eye of a splintered mirror.

I
F THE RUMORS HAD BEEN ACCURATE AND THE MIDWIFE HAD, INDEED
, been pregnant the day of her marriage to the eighteen-year-old Helmut Eberhardt, hers would have been the longest pregnancy in the history of Burgdorf—perhaps even the entire world, the old women would speculate—because Hilde would not give birth until the spring of 1941, nearly two and a half years after her wedding day. Of course, there would be gossip that she’d had a miscarriage and had become pregnant again before her young husband had left for the Russian front, after extracting from her the promise to christen their first child Adolf.