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 (113 page)

Ruth Abramowitz’s pinafore was silvery with spiderwebs, and her father wiped them off with his handkerchief. “Hold still,
Schätzchen.”
When she darted from him, he laughed. “Always running, this one,” he told Stefan. “Running and dancing.”

“I saw her and your boy the day I arrived,” Stefan said. “Skipping rope. Running. Just the way you say.”

“Check.” Günther advanced his white bishop.

“You’re getting too good for me,” Leo said, realizing he was about to lose a rook.

The townspeople wanted Stefan to taste everything. “Strawberry
tarts the way you used to like them as a boy.” “I bet you don’t get head cheese like this in America.” “I made fresh blood sausage just for you.” He and Helene both tasted. Tasted from silver forks that his mother had stored beneath the earth and dug up for this celebration. Tasted until all those flavors merged inside their mouths.

As they washed them down with Mosel wine, Helene felt as light and fast as the swirl of children; and in that moment of joy she wanted to pull Stefan into that dance where he, too, could be light and fast; but she didn’t because there was something oddly formal about him, and when he finally asked her to dance, holding her in his arms for the first time ever, his body felt so unyielding that all lightness left her. Together, they were rigid and clumsy as they moved across the lawn to the music, and she felt relieved when Emil Hesping tugged at her sleeve and requested his dance with the bride. Then there were others, and gradually she felt it again, that lightness. “You have to dance with every man,” Gertrud had told her. And she did, danced more than she had in five years, and it amused her that men who’d never flirted with her before now acted as though she were breaking their hearts by leaving the country.

“I know you’ll recover,” she told Emil, who had a reputation with women.

To Kurt Heidenreich, the taxidermist, she said, “You’ve hidden your feelings too well.”

And she didn’t even blush—not once—that’s what she and Kurt’s sister, Anita, laughed about most when they sat down together.

One of her former students, Agathe Lange, who was getting ready to enter the convent the following Monday, came to her table to give her a rosary carved by Trappist monks. “You are a brave woman, Fräulein Montag—I mean, Frau Blau. I would never get on a ship to go to America.”

“Then how would you get there?” asked Frau Simon, who had recently scandalized the town by divorcing a perfectly decent husband. “Walk on water?” When she raised one elegant shoe—dyed robin’s-egg blue to match her new hat and purse—as if she were about to step onto water, several men gaped at her strong, slender ankles.

“It is bad luck to make fun of religion.”

“Oh, but I wasn’t making fun. It was a practical suggestion. Considering …”

Agathe Lange studied the milliner with practiced patience, the kind that comes from many years of kneeling in hard pews. “Considering?”

Frau Simon laughed, eyes bright as always when she managed to draw someone into her banter. “Considering how in your religion things like that are done.”

“One of many miracles.” Agathe Lange turned to Helene. “I will pray for—”

“I saved you some of my asparagus.” Ottilia Buttgereit extended her platter to Helene.

“That’s very kind.”

“I bet you don’t get asparagus like mine in America. Mr. Buttgereit and I, we want to grow enough next year to start selling it. People keep asking us if they can buy any, and I think we’re getting ready to do it.”

“I will pray for you every morning.” Agathe Lange finished her sentence and added, “Until you get there safely.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m so pleased it’s your wedding. I never thought you—” She clasped her fingers across her mouth.

“Don’t worry,” Helene said. “You’re not the only one.”

The townspeople kept telling her how unlike her it was to make such a big decision in a hurry—insisting as if to convince her they were right about her and that, therefore, she must be acting against her own nature—and she smiled politely, feeling no need to explain herself to them.

But Stefan’s father was eager to explain to everyone, “Of course there is a rush. There has to be a rush because my grandchildren are in America, and Stefan has to get back to them.” His powerful upper body was stooped from decades of sewing. He fanned out the photos on the tablecloth between two ashtrays. “That’s Tobias, the youngest, just seven months old. And Greta here—see?” He pointed to another picture, tufts of gray in the hollows between his knuckles. “She’ll be five in November.”

“Don’t forget to tell them that Greta speaks German.” Stefan’s mother stubbed out her cigarette.

“Already, two languages.” Stefan’s father nodded.

“And she’s just a bit of a girl,” Ingeborg Weinhart said.

Stefan’s mother motioned for Stefan to come closer. “Keep your eyes on that Gertrud Hagen. She’s been messing up my flowers.”

To Stefan it was shocking how his mother had aged. Though still in her forties, she looked far older—
her neck so thin now, her hair so sparse
—and what he kept coming back to was that now, a few months away from turning thirty, he was as old as she had been that day he’d left home. And he thought about being a parent and about loss and about grief. A few days ago, when he had first entered her kitchen and embraced her, she’d cried his name and begun to tremble till he was trembling too, and as they’d held on to each other, he’d felt as if he and his mother were the same age, and as if it were his duty to console her about the son who had only now run off to America. Time was letting him understand her in that grief as if it were happening now; and it was like that for her too: whenever she looked at him—there in her kitchen and now on his wedding day—her tears would well up as if that old sorrow were too immense to be contained within the body of one woman and she were passing it on to him. I
know
, he wanted to tell her,
I know
. He’d heard people say the worst loss you could suffer was that of a child. And perhaps that was so. Still, for him losing two wives had cut far deeper than losing Agnes.

Helene felt the presence of those wives when Stefan followed her that night to her bedroom above the pay-library where she had imagined him countless times, and she wondered if he, too, sensed Elizabeth and Sara here with them. And then she knew that he did because he spoke about them and about some deeds he should have changed over to Sara’s name from Elizabeth’s, blamed himself for not doing it soon enough as if that delay had taken her life.

“The day we get back,” he promised Helene, “I’ll make sure your name will be on the deeds.” He hung his suspenders over her chair. “I want the house and restaurant to be yours as much as
mine.” In the path of moon that slanted through her window, he unbuttoned his shirt. “If you like—” His voice was careful. Tender.

“Yes?”

“If you like, we can wait. With … with me approaching you as a husband. Until we know each other better.”

“But I’ve known you all your life.”

Still, as he came to her in this room of her childhood, just an arm’s length from the house where he’d lived as a boy, the fantasies that had served her so well—
always happening to someone else to someone else
—no longer worked for her. They did not remove her, take her. Because this was
not
happening to someone she had made up inside her head. And, strangely, that’s why it made this here—
thishere
—feel less real. Her fantasies she could split from her life; and they always lasted as long as she wanted them to. But
thishere
was not nearly as exciting as her own touch.
Thishere
was over in minutes, concluded before it was consummated as if Stefan didn’t need her to be part of it. What he did was raise himself away from her before he gave himself fully to his lust, and as his breath reached its height without her, he spilled himself atop her belly, and she felt further from him than she had all those years he’d lived on another continent. Yet what could she possibly say to him? He was the one with the experience, a married man, twice married he was and now the third time, while she was new at
thishere
. And she could not even leave
thishere
behind, could not pretend
thishere
had happened to another woman in a church or an attic because morning did come, and the man next to her in the narrow bed—
your husband in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
—got up without acknowledging the skin between them, the night between them.

He poured water into the basin, washed his face, slipped the loops of his mustache trainer across his ears, and adjusted its mesh triangles to cover his mustache. While it dried, he got dressed. Then he went downstairs and waited for her to make his breakfast. He smiled at her as he ate and talked to her brother as though nothing had changed,
nothing
, while she kept her anger and confusion from him, kept her back to the table and busied herself by the stove,
pouring more coffee for both men, getting up again to add water to the many vases with yesterday’s flowers.

A few times Leo glanced at her, but he knew not to break through with words when she was separate and silent like that, and it made her even angrier that Stefan didn’t know her well enough to notice that something was not right. The rest of that day she barely saw him. He was out, purchasing materials for a tile stove he planned to build in their apartment, while she and Stefan’s sister took the train to the Mahler department store in Düsseldorf, where they bought toys and clothing for his children. When Helene tried on a green loden coat with leather buttons and asked Margret if she thought it was stylish enough for America, she wondered all at once how Margret’s husband was with her at night and what Margret would think if she knew how it was between her and Stefan.

Though Stefan was attentive, he kept himself so busy in the following days that Helene wondered if he was avoiding her, but she told herself,
it’s just for now, till we leave here. Once we’re in America, it will be better
. Nights with him did nothing to make her feel more confident about being a wife, but at least she felt secure about becoming a mother to his children. She knew she was good with children, had years and years of proof of schoolchildren gravitating toward her, liking her, respecting her.

On Helene’s fourth day as a married woman, Stefan’s mother led her through her house that was crammed full of belongings she should have thrown out decades ago. Yet everything was spotless because she cleaned each morning after mass.

“Whatever you like,” she said, “you just pick it out.”

Though Helene tried to object, Stefan’s mother gathered lace doilies and tablecloths, pillowcases and scarves, a picture that Stefan had drawn as a boy of the family’s dog, Spitz, long since dead. Helene was still trying to adjust to the changed relationship with this woman who’d always been her neighbor and now was family and expected her to call her
Mutter
—mother. Since they had only fifteen years between them, she used to think of Stefan’s mother as belonging to her own generation, while her new father-in-law,
though just nine years older than his wife, seemed an entire generation ahead.

In the attic Stefan’s mother held up a carved dollhouse with tiny blue dishes. “My grandmother played with this as a girl in Holland. She gave it to me the day of my first communion. Now you take it for Greta.”

“Don’t you want to save it for Margret?”

“Five years married and no children yet? You tell me.” Frau Blau raised a corner of her apron and dabbed at the sweat on her powdered face.

“There’s still time,” Helene said, though she knew Margret didn’t want children and was afraid to tell her mother. Easier to pretend she couldn’t have them and go to the midwife who knew how to keep you childless by fitting half an apricot pit deep inside you. If you came to her already pregnant, she’d boil shreds of birch bark with tea leaves, wrap the cooled concoction into cheesecloth, and pack that up inside you till you bled. But if you didn’t bleed, your child would be liable to carry the sign of the tea leaves somewhere on its body—out of sight, if you were lucky—a birthmark in the shape of a few dark and tiny leaves, and then all you could do was pray that your child would never find out it was marked with the sign of the unwanted.