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 (107 page)

“Look,
Vati,”
Greta said and pointed to the reflection of the half moon that swayed on the water like a slab of frost. It was an image that would come to her in later years—the moon, just like that, on the water—usually before she perceived something about people that most others could not see, and it was like that now though she was too young to frame it with words.

Stefan’s second daughter was born in the early morning hours. When he knelt next to Sara’s bed, her eyes were tranquil, and he knew God had honored his bargain. Sara agreed to call the child Agnes, another name that was the same in German as in English, though she told him it made her wonder if, eventually, he wanted to return to Germany.

“Only for a visit.” He pressed his lips to her wrist, and as he tasted the cooled sweat of her labor, he felt her waiting for him to see the uniqueness of their daughter; but to him Agnes looked like a tiny, old woman. Black tufts of hair like spider silk. Face heart shaped—wide temples, pointy chin. A band of freckles across the bridge of her nose like a minus sign. When he picked her up she began to cry, and he quickly handed her back to Sara. “A visit with you and our daughters,” he said.

“That’s good.” Her long eyelids closed.
“Our
daughters …”

On the wall behind the bed was the pattern of roses his first wife had chosen, and as he watched Sara sleep, he felt unfaithful because he saw Elizabeth’s fingers flattening the paper against the wall, saw translucent fingernails so short that her hands looked like those of a child.

At church his tenor climbed above the other voices, and if you listened closely, you could make out his lavish accent in the higher notes. He relinquished ten percent of his income to the priest
though it slowed the completion of the
Wasserburg
and meant delaying the installation of the elevator and the arrival of the South German carpenter from Wolfeboro, who would set up his workshop in the basement of the restaurant and carve arched doors for each apartment. Instead of ordering new fire escapes from Boston, Stefan bought used ones when the local hospital was renovated. His workmen attached the sets of metal steps to each end of his building, where they hung ten feet above the sidewalk and sank down only if weight was applied from above.

His contributions to the church also postponed the return of the loan to Elizabeth’s parents; but they urged him not to worry whenever he brought it up—not just once, but on three separate occasions, so he would remind himself in later years—when he arrived at their house on Sundays with Sara and his daughters. Though Lelia and Hardy Flynn made a fuss over Agnes and welcomed Sara, it was evident that their real delight was in Greta. Sara could understand that: after all, her own parents were closer to Agnes than to Greta, and that was only natural—the ancient tug of blood—while she, however, felt linked equally to both children because Greta had been in her life longer than the daughter who’d grown from within her own body.

But what troubled her was that Stefan did not seem interested in Agnes. One morning while she was nursing the baby, she said to him, “Maybe you’re not close to Agnes because she never shared your evenings. The way you did with Greta.”

He closed his starched collar, put on his cuff links. “What do you mean?” he asked and reached for his waistcoat, ready to take the stairs down to his restaurant. In his mind he was already measuring ingredients for the
potage à l’oignon gratiné
—onion soup—and the
rognons à la dijonnaise
—veal kidneys—he would serve tonight.

Sara bent across Agnes and adjusted the white-and-yellow blanket that Stefan’s mother had knitted for the baby in Germany. “Maybe it’s because the two of you lived alone.”

When he looked at her, her lips were pressed together, her
Schlafzimmeraugen
anxious as if it were crucial that he find the reason that very moment, find it and remedy it and move on from
there. And because he felt a sudden tenderness and pity for her, he did not contradict her. One of the baby’s feet, impossibly tiny, poked from the blanket. Squatting by Sara’s chair, he laid one side of his face against her belly—already pushing at him with a new child—and rubbed one thumb across his daughter’s velvety arch. “Agnes is still so … young,” he said carefully. “Once we get used to each other … You’ll see.” It was kinder than telling Sara how Greta still evoked Elizabeth for him. Simpler than telling her how he had somehow expected this second daughter to be the girl he had seen from the boat. It made him uneasy, this vision of a time he hadn’t lived, and he never invoked and nurtured it; yet, it rooted itself in his mind as potent as memory, influencing his decisions, shaping his future.

It pleased Sara when—that June as soon as the lake began to warm—Stefan taught Agnes to swim. From the dock she watched as he walked into the water with their daughter, grimacing and shivering before he carefully lowered her. Agnes took to the lake instantly, kicking her legs and arms, cooing and laughing.

He held on to her. “This one will never be afraid of water,” he called out to Sara, but what he really thought was:
This one won’t drown
. In the cemetery on the hill were already too many graves of children who had drowned. Wedged between rocks on the Robichauds’ family plot was a glass case containing a white-and-pink china doll that used to belong to a daughter who’d fallen into the lake when she’d scrambled down the bank to get some flowers.
Not my daughter
.

But even though Agnes learned to swim quickly, she never got old enough to walk. And it was not the lake that claimed her that November, when her mother was in her last month of pregnancy. For over an hour that afternoon Sara had been expecting her daughter to wake crying, wanting to be picked up and fed as Agnes did after every nap, anxious to have it all that very instant she opened her eyes—the holding and the feeding—as if she already sensed that there would never be enough for her. And what Sara would not forgive herself later was how she had savored that quiet time, how she had wanted it to last—
though not a lifetime, not
that
—while she’d sat by the window. She had pulled a chair into the path of the low November sun, letting it warm her breasts and shoulders. Stefan was downstairs in the restaurant, Greta with her Grandmother Flynn shopping for Christmas presents in Concord, and for these few rare hours the apartment was Sara’s alone. Twice, she raised herself up, awkward with the bulk of the new child, and wandered down the hall to the open door of the girls’ bedroom, smiling as she watched Agnes sleeping on her belly as usual, one side of her tiny face pressed against the crib sheet, lips puckered as if in anticipation of being fed. Like a young, hungry bird.
Little bird
. It made her think of how Stefan called Greta his little frog—
Fröscbken
—and she reminded herself to ask him what little bird meant in German.
Little frog and little bird
. Humming to herself, she returned to her chair and closed her eyes, letting the sunlight paint the insides of her eyelids the color of pumpkins. It was the third time Sara stood in the doorway of the bedroom that she knew—knew all at once and with undeniable conviction—that her daughter was dead, had been dead each time she had checked in on her in the hope she’d stay silent a bit longer, and she didn’t have to step into the room because she could feel the death—
beaks and claws and feathers
—pecking at her womb where the new child shifted with sudden violence to remind her of its claim on her.

Dr. Miles could give her no reasons. Not even after he had taken the small body to the hospital for an autopsy. When he released Agnes to be buried, he tried to comfort Sara by telling her of other infants who’d suddenly stopped breathing without anything obstructing the passage of their breath.

“Your wife did nothing wrong,” he assured Stefan.

Sara’s parents arranged the details of the funeral while Stefan stayed with Sara day and night, feeling inarticulate because his own grief felt paltry in the face of her magnificent despair. The day of the service, Lelia Flynn made sure Greta was dressed properly in black, her face clean. “Don’t cry,” she said. While Hardy Flynn reminded Greta to mind her manners, to say hello and thank you, the girl kept her lips closed and stretched her tongue into the high curve of her mouth, trapping the sad words and tears.

At the cemetery a hole had been hacked into the frozen earth next to Elizabeth, and earth-covered rocks were piled up next to the gravestone. Along the sides of some older graves, mounds of rocks were overgrown with lichen as if, when the grave diggers had opened the earth for death, they’d only returned the soil once the coffin was inside, and what had stayed outside were the leftover rocks, looking almost like another grave, though less orderly.

As Sara felt Greta’s hand slip into hers, she envied Elizabeth who would get to lie with Agnes beneath the earth as though they had traded children—
the wrong mother with the wrong child
. Shadows of clouds raced across the granite stone, across the graves and the plateau, toward the islands where the crowns of trees blurred as if painted onto one huge, multicolored surface, while—in the lower rows—their trunks stood separate. Straight and separate. And recognizable.
The wrong mother with the wrong child
. Sara tightened her fingers around Greta’s.
Look after Agnes
, she implored Elizabeth.
Guide her through wherever she needs to go… I’ll do the same for your child. In life
.

Wind ruffled the blond fuzz on Father Albin’s pink cheeks. After he raised his strong arms to make the final sign of the cross over the coffin, he turned to Stefan and Sara. “It is God’s will to have little Agnes with him and the angels.”

“God’s will?” Sara whispered, her lips gray. She felt her mother’s touch on her shoulder, felt her sisters and brothers right behind her.

“You are more blessed than other women,” the priest said, “because you have been graced with another child ready to come into God’s world.” Though the priest’s hoarse words carried the proper sum of compassion, it was still the voice of a man who had not lost a child, a man who could not possibly grasp that kind of loss.

Blessed
— The word filled Sara’s head—
blessed blessed
—made it hard to breathe, made her drop Greta’s hand and glance around wildly for a paring knife, a scythe even—
blessed blessed blessed—
anything she could use to slash the priest’s fleshy throat, his pious throat, before he could say more, but then Lelia Flynn’s slender shadow darkened the priest’s chest as she stepped between him and Sara, who felt the pulse of her words though she could not hear
them because her head was swarming with the
blessed blessed bless—

The townswomen worried that Sara Blau’s grief would mar the soon-to-be-born child. Once it lived outside her body, they could help care for it, of course, wean it from the poison of sorrow that now was its sole sustenance. Till then they did what they could to pull Sara’s will back to the living by bringing her their pies and their gossip; by stitching the softest clothes for her new child; by praying their efforts would lessen Sara’s pain, although—from their own sorrows—they knew only time could diminish them, and even then never fully.