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 (86 page)

“Trudi…”

She waited until she could no longer see Max. “Here,” she called, and walked toward the voice.

Her father was halfway down the path from the dike to the river.

“A postcard.” He was out of breath. “From Zürich. No words—just a drawing. Of a cat and a train.”

“Thank God.” She grabbed his hands. “Konrad—They’re safe.”

“Trudi!” Someone came running from the direction where Max’s bicycle had disappeared.

Max, she thought, but the shape was shorter, wider.

“Trudi—Are you all right, Trudi?” It was the butcher’s son, Anton, who was home on leave. “I tried to catch the man, but he got away on his bicycle. Was he bothering you?”

“No,” Trudi said, “No. What man?”

“The one without clothes. I was fishing and heard someone call your name and then I saw him on the jetty with you and—”

“Oh, that man.”

Anton stared at her.

“He was just asking me to watch his clothes. You see—” She felt her father’s eyes on her face. “He wanted to take a swim and worried about someone stealing his clothes. So he asked me if I could watch them.”

“And you believed him?”

She raised her face toward the butcher’s son and nodded like an obedient child. “It’s such a warm evening. I could see how someone might want to swim.”

“He took his clothes off in front of you?”

“I wasn’t looking.”

“Don’t you see what kind of danger you were in? We should call the police.” He seemed ready to run into town and bring out a search party.

“Anton—” She reached up and laid her hand on his arm. “I’m sure he just wanted to swim.”

“What else did he say?”

She glanced at her father, then back at the young Anton Immers. “Let me think,” she said, stalling him.
Konrad is safe in Switzerland
, something within her sang,
Konrad is safe
.

“Did he ask you to take off your clothes?”

She made her voice go indignant. “I only swim when I have my bathing suit. All he asked me was if the river was dangerous, and I said it wasn’t. Not if you stay close to shore.”

“Are you sure he didn’t touch you?”

“He was interested in swimming.”

“Sometimes men will try to—”

“I told him to watch out for whirlpools and to stay away from the barges.”

“That’s not all he should stay away from.”

“He was only here a few minutes. He didn’t even have time to go into the water.”

“Then why did he run off like that?”

“He didn’t say.” She wished she’d thought of a better answer.

Her father stepped between her and Anton Immers. “Thank you for your concern. I’ll take care of this matter now. No need for you to—”

“But make your daughter understand the danger she was in.”

Trudi felt furious. She wanted to shout at him that she had just made love, that she would move to Paris, where she’d never have to look at another Immers face again.

“Herr Montag, that man could have raped your daughter.”

“I will speak with my daughter,” her father assured Anton Immers. “Come now,” he said to her, “time to get you home.”

They didn’t talk until they reached the dike. “Tomorrow everyone will be gossiping about this,” she moaned.

“At least it’s a pretty good story,” her father said. “I’m sure Anton believed it.… You are all right?”

“Of course.” She waited for him to ask her about Max, ready to answer with the truth.

“I’m so glad for Konrad and his mother,” he said.

“It gives me hope. For all of us.”

He glanced at her from the side. “And about your friend Herr Rudnick … Tell him he doesn’t have to hide from me.”

The coat of the Russian soldier still hung on the coat tree in the hallway that connected the pay-library and the Montags’ living quarters, and Trudi would keep it there as if—the old women in Burgdorf became fond of saying—she expected a man to come home to her. There had been that one incident by the river, after all, which had caused all of them to reassess this
Zwerg
woman, who usually gossiped about
them
.

No doubt her inexperience with men had led her to be less than properly cautious with this stranger who’d presented himself to her late one August evening by the river and had asked her—so the rumor went—to watch his clothes for him while he swam.

“The nerve …” people said and agreed that the man’s boldness was nothing compared to Trudi Montag’s naïveté.

“When it comes to men, Trudi Montag is like a child,” people said, shaking their heads.

The naked man was a foreigner, some of the people suspected, while others insisted he was one of the Jews hiding out. What they concluded was two things: that he was not one of them, and that Trudi Montag could have gotten herself raped or killed. Fortunately—so the story passed through town—Trudi’s father and young Anton Immers had arrived at the river in time to chase the naked man away.

“He already had his clothes off,” Frau Weiler said.

“And Trudi just stayed there.” Herr Blau clicked his teeth.

“Any other woman would have run for her life,” the oldest Buttgereit daughter said.

“It’s because she had no idea what danger she was in,” the pastor’s housekeeper explained to Herr Pastor Beier.

“Like a child.”

“Yes, like a child.”

“My son got there in time,” the butcher told his customers.

“A car for the parish would be helpful in preserving the honor of our young women,” the pastor urged the bishop in a letter.

That version of what had happened that evening by the river was just what Trudi wanted the town to believe, and she was amused when she heard that her father, supposedly, was in the habit of looking for her whenever she wasn’t home by nine.

“I’m usually asleep by nine,” he said when she told him.

“I guess they like to believe that someone’s looking after me.”

Trudi massaged the rumors by pretending to let seemingly innocent comments slip from her, which—in return—compelled others to confide in her about near indiscretions within their families. And so she piloted her story.…

Let them think that she’d never been with a man.

Let them feel sorry for her.

Let them believe that, by chance, she’d come across that
one
man by the river that
one
night.

Had the people of Burgdorf known what had really happened to Trudi by the river, they would have been furious at her for deceiving them—not because of her words but because the truth would have
mocked their expectations of her. Over the years, those expectations had solidified and engendered pity because she would never have a man and children, superiority because any one of them had to be better off than she, and fear because she knew too much about them.

They didn’t have any idea that she’d known the naked man—as they came to speak of him—for over two years, and that she’d been his lover for ten months. They didn’t have any idea how, with one fingertip, he would trace her entire body—hips and ears and knees and throat and breasts and chin and back and wrists and toes—and how she’d quiver under his slow touch and discover her body through the gentle pressure of his hands.

Had a young woman of normal size offered the kind of flimsy lie about watching a stranger’s clothes on the jetty, no one would have believed her. At times it made Trudi furious that everyone in town was eager to embrace her fabrication, including Klaus Malter, who’d been sent home from the front with an infected shoulder wound and—after church one Sunday—asked her if she was all right as though she were marked from her encounter. His voice was concerned, and she came close to telling him that Max was a far better kisser than he.

In her anger, she let the story grow and found her vengeance in circulating it around town, keeping it alive, and it would become one of those stories that even people who hadn’t been born yet—like the next generation of Immers and Baums and Malters—would grow up with and continue to tell about Trudi Montag once she was an old woman. So much more happened than she would disclose to anyone, even to Hanna Malter, the child of Klaus and Jutta, whose birth was still three years away and whom she would love as though she were her own daughter. Even Hanna would never know that Trudi kept seeing the naked man after that night on the jetty, that they would meet further south, where the river was turbulent and the shadows of the poplars couldn’t touch the surface of the flat stone that was wide enough for both of them—far away from the eyes of the town where Trudi was the one who seized people’s secrets.

One night in June of 1944, Herr Abramowitz died in his sleep. The week after his funeral, his wife was arrested when, in one unforeseen and magnificent act of rage, she demolished the office of the Hitler-Jugend in Frau Simon’s former hat shop. The two uniformed youth leaders, who watched the slender old woman enter with her cane,
were too stunned to move when she swung the cane around, scattering papers and files, smashing lamps and the pyramid-shaped mirror, which—at the instant of splintering—yielded to her images of everything that had ever happened in her marriage.

Her cane ripped through the membership maps with their tiny pin flags that covered the walls, knocked down framed photos of children singing around bonfires and marching in parades. Trying to dodge her cane, the youth leaders wrestled her to the floor and tied her wrists—but not before she’d broken one pair of eye glasses and left welts on their necks and faces.

In the days after Frau Abramowitz was sent away, the old women in town would tell each other stories of amazing strength that sometimes becomes available to women for brief periods of time: they would recall a mother who’d lifted a farm tractor from the chest of her trapped daughter; a wife who’d carried her wounded husband, twice her weight, two kilometers to the doctor.

In St. Martin’s Church, Herr Pastor Beier continued to offer prayers for the soldiers who’d died in the war, but he never mentioned the Jews who’d been deported or killed. Standing on the blood-red carpet that led up the marble stairs to the black marble altar, he’d raise both fleshy arms and beseech Christus to embrace the soldiers who’d sacrificed their lives for the
Vaterland
, just as He had sacrificed His life on the cross.

Leo Montag walked around the pay-library, dazed, as though he’d become a widower all over again, and Trudi began to wonder how much Frau Abramowitz’s unspoken love had braced him over the years. Late one evening he grew strangely restless: he rearranged his leftover books in the living room and sorted through old photos. Though she was tired, Trudi stayed up. Twice, she asked him if he wouldn’t rather go to sleep. It was after midnight when he limped down the cellar stairs and brought up the crate that Michel Abramowitz had entrusted to him nearly six years earlier. Wrapped inside Michel’s raincoat, they found linen napkins folded around the two silver candlesticks that used to stand on the Abramowitzs’ piano; one ring with diamonds and another with an oval aquamarine; the necklace with rubies that Michel had given Ilse on their twentieth wedding anniversary; eight sets of cufflinks and three bracelets; a collection of antique gold coins; and the carved mezuzah that used to hang on the Abramowitzs’ front-door post.

“We’ll have to get these things to Ruth,” Leo told Trudi.

“Don’t you think it would be better to keep them until after the war?”

“I no longer know what that means:
after the war.”

“It will end. It must.”

“Ruth needs to know about her parents.” He’d been with Frau Abramowitz when she’d tried to call Ruth from the dentist’s phone to tell her about her father’s death. But no one had answered the phone in the clinic where Ruth worked. “Ilse sent her a letter about her father. She should have written back by now.”

“Maybe she’s no longer in Dresden,” Trudi said softly.

He closed the crate. “I’m taking this to her.”

“What makes you think you’ll find her? And where do you think you’ll get gasoline for the trip?”

“Herr Blau has enough stashed away.”

“He doesn’t even have a car.”

“You know how he is.” Leo grabbed his keys. “Always saving things in case he’ll need them. He’ll understand that I’m not asking lightly.”

“It’s late. You’re tired.”

The crate under his arm, he headed toward the door.

“And it’s way too far. You’ll drive all night.”

“Wouldn’t you want to know if I were dead or deported?”

“At least let me come along.”

“Someone has to be in the library.”

“I’ll put up a sign that we’re closed because of illness.” She made him set the crate down. “Let’s wrap these in a less conspicuous way. In case we’re stopped.”

While her father went to speak with Herr Blau, Trudi packed a suitcase, hiding the jewelry and coins inside rolled-up socks, the mezuzah in the folds of a suit jacket. They stashed the candlesticks beneath the spare tire. Four canisters of gas in their trunk, they silently drove out of Burgdorf. The only light upon the landscape came from the beams of their car. As they lifted gutted buildings and torn fences from the dark, and flitted across broken arbors and bridges that had been blown up, Leo ached for the country he used to love.

For brief spans, Trudi kept falling asleep, and Leo felt like the only survivor in an unreal landscape. Each time she awoke—her back and
knees stiff—it was from half dreams of being deported in a cattle car. She felt ashamed that she could sleep at all, ashamed that her body protested those minor discomforts; they were nothing compared to what Frau Abramowitz and Eva must have suffered. And yet, as she’d doze off and wake up and doze off again, her own aches gave her a small measure of understanding about how the Nazis took you and stripped you of everything that made you unique, stripped you of all that gave you identity, until they had created an awful equality: they took away your families, your right to practice your education, possessions you’d worked for, all that was important to you—your music, your books, your art. And when you thought there was nothing else they could possibly deprive you of, they came for the basics that you took for granted—your food and your clothes; your privacy to go to the bathroom or wash yourself. They herded you into KZs—a flour sack between you and the hard floor—robbed you of your dignity, made all of you alike in an awful way. And as you survived each torment and endured the discomforts, the excrement, the terrible lack of privacy, and the hunger that became your predominant feeling—stronger even than your fear—it proved the judgment they’d already formed about you: that you were all like animals.