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 (9 page)

“Why do you let him come back?” I’d asked Matthias once when his left eye was swollen shut.

He’d winced as if I were the one who’d hurt him. “He’s my friend, Hanna.” He’d lifted his fingers to his forehead, and I’d seen the headache taking shape behind his eyes, dark and sudden.

I wondered if my mother could hear them in her studio, but the stairwell divided the two apartments. I pictured Herr Faber leaving and getting run over by a streetcar like Monika Klein, who’d been killed two years before when
she and I were in the fourth grade. The wheels of the streetcar would cut across Herr Faber’s chest or maybe his throat. Either way—he’d stop breathing. For a while Matthias would be sad, but I’d visit him, bring him travel books from the church library, and make us lemonade.

I got up and brushed off my wrinkled skirt. Walking over to the front window, I unlatched it and pushed it open. Sunlight streamed in, magnifying the motes of dust that circled me like a second skin. A pigeon with a straw in its beak flew off and landed in the cherry tree in front of the Talmeisters’ house across the street. As usual, Frau Talmeister leaned from her living-room window, supported by a wide pillow. Propped on the sill next to her lay her eight-month-old son, Helmut. She fed him with a spoon, barely looking at him as if afraid she might miss something going on in the street. Our housekeeper had told me the only thing that kept Frau Talmeister from nursing the baby in the window was her fear of being arrested for indecent exposure.

For a moment there, something odd happened to me: from where I stood in the attic, I saw the side part in Frau Talmeister’s curled hair, the white material of her blouse stretching across her shoulders; I also felt the metal spoon in her hand as she fed her son, felt his mouth opening and the skin on his throat shifting, tasted the bland oatmeal as he swallowed.

From St. Martin’s Church came the swelling sound of the bells. Five o’clock. I stretched out my right arm and touched the level section of roof outside the window. The tiles felt warm against my palms. I thought of my great-uncle Alexander who had leapt from this window before I was born. A few months before I’d had a dream of him flying, arms stretched out, never touching the ground. When I told Matthias about it, he listened carefully.

“He may have been happy those few moments,” he said
and smiled at me until I felt I would drown in his gold-flecked eyes, eyes more alive than the rest of him.

“Do you think he believed he was flying?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe that’s what he needed to believe.”

At the time I only nodded; now I wished I could ask Matthias what he’d meant by that, but he was with Herr Faber and wouldn’t let me in if I knocked on his door. I had tried that once, and when he’d finally answered, he’d worn his sweater inside-out. He’d blinked at me. “You have to go home, Hanna.”

I closed the attic window tight and went back to listen through the floorboards, but the voices from below had stopped. Sitting on the wooden trunk that was filled with my great-uncle’s brittle silk ties and stiff woolens, I wished I were at the river with my mother. We’d skip flat pebbles across the surface, count the times they touched the water and raised themselves in perfect arcs. She often got eight, even twelve skips, before the pebbles sank. One of my pebbles had made it eleven times, the most ever for me.

In the corner stood the wicker baby carriage my mother had used to take me for walks. It was in some of my baby photos, white and new, but now the wicker was yellow and its crevices were embedded with old dirt like a farmer’s fingernails. The spokes of the wheels had rusted, and when I pushed the carriage back and forth, it squeaked.

A young couple, the Wienens, used to live in the apartment below until they had a baby and needed a larger place. Matthias had heard about it from Frau Wienen’s father who lived in the Theresienheim, and he’d come to our house to ask if he could rent the apartment. Until then he’d shared a small walk-up on Lindenstrasse with another man. My mother, who had inherited the building from her uncle Alexander, didn’t have to advertise vacancies. Apartments were so scarce that she’d receive dozens of inquiries
if someone was planning to move out, and if someone died people would phone about the apartment before the funeral had even taken place.

Through Matthias’s eyes, I’d begun to see our house and the backyard in a different way, had come to see its limitations. Built flush to the sidewalk, the building, which my great-uncle had built in the shape of an L, blocked the sunlight from the backyard. When I was little, I had played there with Manfred Weiler, who lived in the other arm of the L. We’d ridden our tricycles on the hard-packed dirt, bumping into the fence to see how far the chain links would bounce us back. Surrounded by too many windows, we had no privacy, just as, according to Matthias, there couldn’t be any privacy when you shared a connecting wall between buildings. It didn’t matter how thick they were; it didn’t matter that they were built of cinder blocks and bricks and mortar—to him they were no more than a sham.

“What a difference it would make,” he told me once, “to live in a house that stands by itself, to know that on the other side of my bedroom wall are trees and grass.”

From below came the sound of a door closing. My fingers tightened on the handlebar of the baby carriage. Maybe Herr Faber had heard the squeaking wheels. Maybe he was coming up here to yell at me or worse. But the steps on the stairs moved away from me, growing fainter until I only heard the pulse of my blood inside my ears. I pictured Herr Faber’s hand brushing against the wall where Matthias had filled the scars his piano had left, scars you couldn’t see if you didn’t know where they were, but if your fingers happened to move across them, they felt smoother than the texture of the wall.

I wanted to run down to Matthias’s apartment, talk with him, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at him, afraid he would carry new bruises. Instead I stood outside my mother’s studio, wondering if I should interrupt her. Finally I
knocked and she opened the door for me, one of my father’s old shirts over her dress.

“Hanna,” she said but looked at me as if trying to remember who I was. She got like that when she painted, forgetting everyone and everything around her except the work and the movement of colors from her heart to the canvas.

“Can I watch?”

“Of course.” She smiled and turned her back to me.

I closed the door and followed her to the window. On her easel stood a new picture of the Sternburg, the old castle she’d painted many times. For the baroque tower she’d chosen a deep blue. With her brush she set silver clouds of mosquitoes on the canvas. They floated above the moat where leaves drifted, weightless shapes in bright colors. I wished she would lay her brush aside, sit down with me.

“It’s beautiful … the painting,” I whispered, touching my mother’s sleeve, but she didn’t see me.

I don’t know why Herr Faber stopped visiting, but I remember thinking that, surely now, Matthias would be happier. I imagined him talking to me about the trip he was planning, and for a while we did just that, turning glossy pages of travel books as we pronounced names of foreign cities and mountains. Yet, I felt a new formality between us and didn’t know how to change things back to the way they had been.

Perhaps Matthias already knew what I wouldn’t understand until much later, that he wouldn’t see any of those cities and mountains which I would explore as an adult—not because they could never match the stories he had told me about them—but because to visit them would have broken the order of punishment he had chosen for himself.

We sat at his table one late afternoon, turning the pages of a book with photos of Ireland, when someone knocked. Matthias glanced at me, then jumped up to open the door. The man who came in was tall and had wide hands that carried a bottle of red wine.

“I want to spend some time with my friend now, Hanna,” Matthias said without looking at me.

I turned a page of the Ireland book, then another. “What’s your name?” I stared at the man.

“Hanna.” Matthias laid one hand on my shoulder. “You can come back tomorrow.”

I darted one last glance at the man, a warning, I hoped, but I don’t think it changed anything. Within the next few weeks, the man took up a pattern of seeing Matthias on Mondays and Thursdays, leaving the mark of his visits on Matthias’s body as if Matthias felt so flawed that he had to search for someone to confirm it.

  
Floating in My Mother’s Palm

M
y mother liked to swim during thunderstorms. Ignoring our housekeeper’s warnings, she’d set out for the old quarry hole at the end of our street, her bathing suit under a loose shift, her legs bare. She’d fold her shift and hang it across a branch of one of the birches that crowded each other along the edge of the quarry. While the summer air cooled off with rain, the water in the quarry hole seemed to heat up around her, mysterious bubbles like quicksilver stirred by the movement of her long arms and legs.

At home Frau Brocker would hide a sharp knife under the tablecloth to cut the lightning before it could strike the quarry or our house. While thunder cracked across the sky, she’d sit with her hands folded, whispering prayers of fear to the Virgin Mary.

She carried so many fears that my mother didn’t have: fear of the dark, of moths, storms, and deep water, fears I too felt immune to, fears that led Frau Brocker into superstitious rituals which my mother asked me to respect.

“It’s her way,” she said. “She needs to do those things.”

My mother swims in churning water, her face damp from cool drops that descend upon her as if magnetized by the quarry hole. Wet now, her long blond hair looks dark. Her legs kick the water into frothing swirls which she leaves behind. She dives—a long smooth shape—arching her back underwater before her head and shoulders emerge above the surface like a reed springing back into place
.

My mother was taller than most of the other women in Burgdorf, and she wore her blond hair loose across her shoulders instead of taming it into a permanent or bun. She walked the way she swam—with long, easy movements.

I grew up watching her paint. Her easel used to stand in our living room, and I played around her feet while she worked. But when I was five, she hired Frau Brocker to take care of me and our apartment, while she claimed a cluster of rooms on the third floor and hired Siegfried Tegern to design a studio for her. He brought two carpenters who tore down the walls and replaced most of the facade with a sheet of glass.

For weeks after they were finished, a fine plaster dust continued to drift through the staircase, settling in my throat until I felt as if I were swallowing through a layer of cotton. I wasn’t even allowed inside my mother’s studio unless I knocked at the door. Hands behind my back, I’d stalk around, looking at the canvases stacked against the walls, breathing in the familiar, lost scent of oil paint.

At first people stopped on the sidewalk, staring up; they hadn’t seen a window that size, except in department stores. Perhaps they believed that, by secluding herself in a place above them, my mother considered herself better than they. Or maybe their uneasiness came from the fear that my mother would expose too much of them. The window was up so high that none of them could look through
it. Even from the upper floors of the houses across the street, it was impossible to see my mother inside her studio.

Here, surrounded by light, she painted the town which fascinated and confined her, always more brilliant in color than in reality, as if she wanted to force it into the shape of the vision she carried within.

Lightning divides the sky like a new scar, and my mother raises her face toward the cool drops that fall faster now, harder. She can dance in the water without her feet touching the ground. She does this by twirling her arms in such a way that her body propels itself around. One early summer evening, when I’m nine, she shows me how. My father is at a dentists’ convention in Bremen, and Frau Brocker has left for the day. My mother and I walk to the quarry hole, shed the dresses we wear above our bathing suits, and run into the water as raindrops strike our bare shoulders. The water is warmer than the air, and I feel giddy and daring as I race my mother toward the middle
.

When my mother was a girl, trucks would come to the quarry empty and leave filled with gravel which huge cranes dredged from the hole that grew wider and deeper with each month. But one day water bubbled up from the bottom, and gradually the hole filled with water as if trying to replenish itself with the core it had been robbed of. It didn’t take long for the children in Burgdorf to discover the quarry as a swimming hole. They leapt off the edges; some tied ropes to the sturdier trees, swung themselves over the water, and dropped with shrieks.

Luminous bubbles form around my arms, my legs, and when we reach a place too deep for us to stand, my mother teaches me how to dance. She twirls around, and I try to imitate her movements
.

At first I’m clumsy, slow, but soon I find that I, too, can dance in the storm, alone, without holding onto her. When we leave the quarry hole, the brilliant lights have stopped flashing across the sky, and the only sound is that of our sandals slapping against the sidewalk. Though we don’t talk about this, neither of us will mention our swim to my father
.