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 (108 page)

The morning Sara’s belly rose and hardened, Stefan held her, kissing her forehead again and again until Sara’s mother and Dr. Miles sent him away; and when he stood waiting outside the bedroom door, her mother called out to him to take Greta for a walk to the bakery. After he pulled Greta’s moccasin boots over her ribbed wool stockings, he walked with her along the icy path by the lake to the bakery, where his father-in-law, a slight-shouldered man with broad hips—body shaped like a pine tree, Sara was fond of saying—fed them gingerbread cookies, hot from the oven, and wrapped a loaf of rye for them to take home. On the way they stopped at St. Paul’s where Stefan lit a dozen candles by the side altar.

For three days after Tobias’ birth, Sara looked radiant, smiling when she held him up and watched his legs uncurl like petals of a tropical plant. The boy had been born with his knees tucked up high, but with every day the muscles in his legs seemed to ease more, and it looked to Stefan as if his son were growing rapidly while he watched him.

As long as Sara held him, Tobias seemed content; but if Stefan touched him, his bright, curious eyes became guarded and his scrawny body grew rigid. With his wisps of black hair and heart-shaped face he could have been Agnes’ twin: all that stood between those two was time—fourteen months since Agnes had left the shelter of Sara’s womb; fourteen months during which Agnes had lived
and died and been buried and Tobias had been born. He even had that same line of copper freckles high across his nose, and by the time he would be a young man, these freckles would have darkened so much that he’d look as if his eyebrows were touching, but once he was in his seventies—when his niece, Emma, would beg him to lift the curse that encumbered the house and their family—his freckles would have paled and merged into a smudge that would make some people want to step up to him and wipe it off with spit the way their grandmother, say, or a favorite aunt might have done.

On the fourth day of Tobias’ life, a sudden fever pushed Sara into the pillows that turned damp as she pitched her body from side to side. Dreams of birds fell at her,
tiny and naked birds that drop from their nests and crash to the ground, bone-white and flat, so flat and still in their human nakedness against the brown earth, half-formed and cold so cold
—“I’m not letting you die.” Stefan, it was Stefan’s voice, pulling at her, pulling her back from where Agnes waited while he sponged her body with melted snow. Cold. So. Cold
and those beaks, those shallow beaks like baby-girl features, while others fall into her dream naked and cold so
— And then he was carrying her. Carrying her to the window. Telling her about the journey they’d take to Germany come May.
May? How can it be May?
The roofs of her town were white with new snow
but the birds are of all colors now, not naked but huge with feathers of all colors all colors and cries as extravagant as their feathers
.

“Now they have feathers,” she said slowly, “feathers …”

But her husband was crying.

She pressed one palm against the side of his face till he stopped. “How do you say bird in German?”

“Vogel
. Why?”

“And little bird?”

“Vögelchen.”

She raised her other hand toward the ice flowers that bloomed on the glass panes; and while Stefan told her about the barges that hauled cargo up and down the Rhein, she climbed into his voice,
bringing with her the naked birds and also the birds with feathers
, while he drew word-pictures for her of chestnut trees with candle
blossoms, of an ancient town he called Kaiserswerth across the river from his hometown.

As he stroked Sara’s arms, her flushed face, Stefan suddenly could no longer recall the features of his first wife; there was only Sara now, and he wondered how he could have ever
not
recognized her fully. For the two hours before her death she was lucid, and he tried to explain to her that he would take Elizabeth’s name off the deeds and put hers on instead, but all Sara wanted from him was to circle back with her over Agnes’ brief life—that inquisitive way she had of raising her head; how she loved to swim; the way her hair clung to her temples when she slept; the surprised look she got when waking up as if she’d expected to find herself somewhere else. … It moved Sara how much Stefan had noticed about their daughter, and as they circled over every movement and sound of hers they could recall, their words became more hurried, while—outside their locked bedroom door—Greta was pressing herself against the painted wood, absorbing those words into her memory, shivering because she could feel the shape of the something she’d known about long before her sister’s birth, the something that already had taken Agnes and was now here for Sara. Even her father wasn’t powerful enough to stall it any longer.

In the months after Sara’s burial, Stefan would hike up to the cemetery early every morning while Greta and Tobias and their new nursemaid were still asleep. Standing in front of the grave, he would try to keep his gaze above ground, to not let himself imagine his two wives lying on their backs the way they had in their coffins, side by side with Agnes between them. Because if he let himself see them like that,
Sara and Elizabeth turn to each other, murmur across the child beneath the dark earth, there, palms touching palms as if they were lovers
.

Sometimes the people of Winnipesaukee would raise their faces toward the hill because they’d hear Stefan, even from that distance. They’d never heard a man howl like that—a sound not quite human, they said. Some whispered that it was his howl that made the pines in the cemetery shed their needles that winter because his was
too formidable a grief to let anything living adhere to where it belonged. In their empathy for him and in their fretting that he might throw himself into the Brook-that-finishes-grieving, they grew closer to one another, closer yet than they had been in this village by the great lake; and oddly it all tied in with his tall, new house that became more theirs, now, as they talked about Stefan Blau more than ever before. About how, instead of statues, he’d placed fire extinguishers into the alcoves of the hallways as if to protect what was left of his family. About how he’d stopped giving Father Albin money. About how every dollar of profit from his restaurant went into his apartment building—the best of everything: Italian marble and Dutch tiles; stenciled beams and oriental rugs; German carvings and crystal chandeliers; balconies with flower boxes atop the ornate railings; a stone fountain with two tiers like something you might see in picture books of Venice.

He immersed himself in his restaurant, trying variations of his ratatouille and
salade niçoise
, testing new recipes like
poires au vin rouge
—pears in red wine. Sometimes his work could blunt his sorrow for a few hours, but then it would raise itself again, a savage beast that tore at his memories, a beast he could cage until late at night after he’d close the restaurant, a beast he’d take with him into the green boat and row far out on the lake to drown it. As the bow crushed flimsy layers of ice, sweat coated his chest, and he knew he would freeze to death if his boat were to tip over. Stripping off his clothes, he felt the cold, black air against his slick skin, but he kept rowing toward the faraway center of the vast lake and the dim mounds of the islands whose legends Sara used to collect. To row to the far end of the lake would take days, maybe even a week. He longed for the ache in his arms and shoulders to expand till it blotted out all else, longed to shatter and disperse into fragments no larger than those specks of stars above him, longed to get sucked into the sky and vanish—but whenever he’d look toward shore, the massive shape of the
Wasserburg
would summon him.

Though his rents were far more expensive than others in town, Stefan already had a waiting list of prospective tenants that spring of
1911 when he moved with Greta and Tobias into their seven rooms on the top floor of the
Wasserburg
, where high ceilings met the walls in graceful curves and the windows framed the lake and mountains. It all looked the way he and Elizabeth had planned it—only now it no longer meant anything to him. Since she had taken such delight in describing each detail to him when she’d been pregnant with Greta, he still thought of the apartment as hers and furnished it with the tufted sofas and painted fern baskets she’d wanted, left the windows without drapes. The birch furniture in the bedroom he kept, and he ordered a leather chair like the one he’d seen in the office of Elizabeth’s father.

Greta, who had been listless since Sara’s death, started humming and smiling in the new apartment. Fascinated by the haze of unfamiliar smells, she’d bring her nose against the cool tiles, dry plaster, and gleaming woodwork, inhaling deeply as those odors revealed the house to her. Often her face would be smudged, and it wouldn’t be until she was five and Dr. Miles would prescribe glasses for her, that she would discover colors beyond those that now made up her surroundings; but by then the habit of sniffing would be so ingrained that she’d continue to form many of her first impressions by scent.

Like the scent of her brother.

Who smelled like Agnes.

Powder and diapers and tears
.

And who lived with knowing about Agnes long before anyone would tell him about her. Because Greta had taken the white-and-yellow blanket that used to belong to Agnes. Had plopped it into her brother’s crib. And as Tobias slept within its folds,
sleeps and dreams, dreams and turns, he is living for himself and for Agnes. Someone like me; almost like me. Dreams and turns within the folds of the blanket. Dreams and cries. And remembers what he cannot possibly remember from his own experience but what, nevertheless, is imprinting itself on his soul. Deeper with each day. More permanent with each day: someone like me; almost like me
. So much like Agnes that even his father, when bending over his crib, would feel momentarily confused, thinking he was seeing
Agnes—
those tufts of hair, that minus sign of freckles, that urgent grasp, too urgent
—and then realize it was Tobias.
Me. Someone like me
.

The first tenant to move in was Miss Garland, just retired from the shoe factory that had calloused her hands and curved her spindly back slightly to the left. It was where work had been available the year she’d graduated from school, and she’d started there, certain she’d find something more interesting in six months. A year at most. But she hadn’t left. Not for half a century.

From the kitchen window of her old apartment, she had witnessed every step of the construction as the
Wasserburg
had grown to obstruct her view and the view of everyone else who lived in the clapboard houses behind it. While others had grumbled, she’d been mesmerized. Five years it had taken the house from start to finish, five years for her to imagine what it would be like to make her first withdrawal ever from her bank account that had grown astonishingly over decades of living frugally while making scant, weekly deposits from her pay. She hadn’t known what she was saving for until the
Wasserburg
had begun to rise outside her window like the manifestation of desires too glorious to admit to anyone. But then she had understood. And had gone to see Stefan Blau, shy around him—
because how could you have known so precisely what I want?
—as he wrote her name on the first line of a list that would grow during the years of construction.