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 (101 page)
Authors: Ursula Hegi
It was too much for her to bear, the knowledge of his death.
“Tell me.”
For an instant—as sudden as it vanished—the man’s bloated drinking face flickered across the boy’s fine features.
No
. This was Georg, her generous friend Georg, who knew how to lure the sun from the sky and snare it inside his red-and-yellow glass marble; Georg who always invented new bets with her—how many widows or pigeons they’d count on their walk, how many baby carriages would pass by the grocery store in one hour.…
Luck
. For Georg, luck and miracles
had been the same. He’d believed he could create his own miracle—shape a bird from earth and water, yield it to the sky.
“You were my first friend.…” She felt stunned by the fear of losing him, the grief of losing him. And yet, there was something exquisite in forgoing her revenge. It was not the first time that she’d turned to her storytelling to banish fear, and as Georg drew the words from her, moments of their lives came together in one swirl of a never-ending story that moved back and forth through layers of time—a story filled with magic and truth, corruption and redemption, sadness and joy, love and betrayal—connecting her to Georg as she braided in her own loves and losses, and told him about Konrad and his mother hiding in the tunnel, the unknown benefactor leaving
Lederhosen
for Georg, Klaus Malter drilling on her tooth, Ingrid taking her daughters to the bridge, Frau Doktor Rosen reading books about
Zwerge
, Max Rudnick sketching his Russian grandmother, Frau Abramowitz tearing the Hitler-Jugend office apart.…
It was a story that would continue beyond herself, beyond Georg. In sorting it out, she felt deep compassion for him and everyone who inhabited her story. And as what had happened began to merge with what could have happened, the texture of her story became richer, more colorful. She had Max return to Burgdorf on a barge that belonged to Georg’s father, who, all along, had been traveling the river that had taken him away. She let Georg measure Seehund’s head and run with him to the
Rathaus
, where a group of townspeople raised axes to the Hitler statue and chopped it into fragments. In the Braunmeiers’ barn, Eva showed Georg how to hide without sneezing, while the butcher and pharmacist searched for them in vain. Opening his window wide, Eva’s father wrapped himself into the coat of the Russian soldier and lay down on his bed, welcoming rain and cold and cats and other dangers. Trudi’s mother stepped from the gates of the Grafenberg asylum with Sister Adelheid, their eyes clear and calm, carrying their own altar between them. To welcome their daughter, Ruth, back, Herr and Frau Abramowitz held a huge celebration at their house.… And throughout all, Trudi wove the assurance for Georg and herself that—once someone had been in your life—you could keep that person there despite the agony of loss, as long as you had faith that you could bring the sum of all your hours together in one shining moment.
Georg picked up a bird’s nest from the ground, turned it in his fingers. This was when she’d loved him most—with the long hair and girl-clothes—before he’d changed, before she’d helped him change by cutting his hair. And yet, how could she not do it for him again if he asked? She felt the old joy of being near him, and it seemed possible that his luck would save him from the death that was waiting for him. Yet, already she knew that wasn’t so. She heard their young voices in the church tower when Georg had told her he wanted to die the same age as Jesus.
“Thirty-three is very old”
“Maybe we can die together.”
Aloud, she said: “But we’re both already older than thirty-three.”
The boy nodded. Though he stood absolutely still as she spoke, wind shifted his curls, his smock. She knew that the words already belonged to him though they might still change, and that the story might lead both of them to the ending she feared. And yet, just because a story was a certain way didn’t mean it would always be like that: stories took their old shape with them and fused it with the new shape. She didn’t understand yet how all the tangles of their lives would sort themselves out in her story, but she supposed that it would be like raking: not every bit of earth would be untangled at once. Her father had raked the earth behind the pay-library every week, and what she’d learned from him was that raking had to do with patience. But the ground of the mill’s hollow rooms was rough, uneven with cracked bricks and last year’s stiff weeds, gnarled roots of fallen trees, and the silver skeletons of tiny birds.…
She saw herself lifting her father’s bamboo rake from the rack beneath the back of the pay-library, and as she pulled the bamboo teeth through the earth, she kept stepping back, drawing the rake toward herself, knowing that, gradually, all of the soil would show the smooth ribbed pattern. But until then—as in her story for Georg—there were clumps left over, and she had to pull the rake though them again and again, distributing the earth while discarding debris. It was as though every story she had ever told had brought her to this moment, to this story that would tell itself through her: it would be the best story she’d ever told, better even than the story she and Pia had woven between them that day at the circus. And as she thought of all the people who had loved her stories—her father, Hanna, Max, Eva,
Konrad, Robert, and earliest of all her mother—she felt the strength of their arms as surely as if they were pulling the rake with her through the earth. The final design wouldn’t happen all at once: there would be the rearrangement of it all, a fine combing through; there would be perseverance and a reverence for the task; there would be assurance that, indeed, a design would emerge.
Georg’s eyes were grave as he waited for her to continue her story. It was the brief span of evening when all things are etched lucidly into the sky, just before they yield their separateness and blur into the night. Trudi stretched herself. What she could offer Georg was far more than what had happened—a certain sequence that would lead him to the core of the story, a story that would hold an entire world. It had to do with what to tell first—though it hadn’t happened first—and what to end the story with. It had to do with what to enhance and what to relinquish. And what to embrace.
Ursula Hegi lived the first eighteen years of her life in Germany. She is the author of
Intrusions, Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories, Floating in My Mother’s Palm
, and
Salt Dancers
. Her first book of nonfiction,
Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America
, will be published in July 1997.
Ursula Hegi is the recipient of about thirty grants and awards, including an NEA Fellowship and five awards from the PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards. She was nominated for a PEN Faulkner award for
Stones from the River
and received the Governor’s Writer’s Award for
Stones from the River
and
Floating in My Mother’s Palm
. She has served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and she has written over a hundred reviews for
The New York Times
, the
Los Angeles Times
, and
The Washington Post
.
Ursula Hegi lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest.
O
THER
B
OOKS BY
U
RSULA
H
EGI
T
EARING THE
S
ILENCE
S
ALT
D
ANCERS
S
TONES FROM THE
R
IVER
F
LOATING IN
M
Y
MOTHER’S
P
ALM
U
NEARNED
P
LEASURES AND
O
THER
S
TORIES
I
NTRUSIONS
Ursula Hegi
For my grandmother
Gertrud Maas
For their valuable insights and suggestions I thank Olivia Caulliez, Martha Copithorne, Gordon Gagliano, Mark Gompertz, Deb Harper, Gail Hochman, Kathryn Hunt, Lesa Luders, Marianne Merola, Carl Phillips, Rod Stackelberg, Sally Winkle, and Barbara Wright. I thank Eastern Washington University for grant support. In my research, I learned much from the works of Frederick Lewis Allen and Adair D. Mulligan.
The Vision of Emma Blau
