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 (116 page)

“She made all this up?”

“I haven’t lived here long enough to know for sure. But it’s what they say about her. She likes to pretend the
Wasserburg
is hers.”

“There’s no harm in letting her pretend … nothing she can take away from you.”

On his chest, he felt the hand of this third wife whose strong fingers he’d seen pluck wilted blossoms from their stems, smooth the earth around plants, brush the hair of another wife’s child from a fevered forehead. “Lenchen?”

“Ja”
.

He covered her hand with his and thought he felt his heart beat through both their hands, through sinews and bones and flesh. Ever since she’d arrived here, he’d had more memories of Burgdorf … memories of a forgotten side of himself. Coming to America had been so abrupt, and he’d wanted so much to fit in that he’d shed everything German. Now he was surprised how much of it was still there for him.
Because of her
.

“Thank you, Lenchen.”

“Warum
—why?” She gazed out over the lake. Moon had spilled itself across its black depth, and as the wind mottled the sheen, it looked as if a river of silver were flowing toward her.

“For coming here,” he said.

In the dark she nodded.

“For marrying me,” he said.

With her free hand she reached down into the moon and cooled her throat, her forehead.

When Helene noticed that Greta was squinting a lot, she took her to Dr. Miles who prescribed glasses for her. The morning the optician fitted the glasses on Greta, shapes and colors hurled themselves at her from a world that had been blurry till now. It was a transformation that stunned her and filled her with reverence. Even just on the walk home with her stepmother, she saw the foam riding on the crests of waves where before there had just been gray and white, saw two chipmunks chasing along a fallen log that was covered with moss and dried leaves.

“We need to get home,” her stepmother said.

But Greta squatted to pick up a black feather. The feather had one tiny speck of red, one speck so tiny and yet so brilliant that Greta thought she might need fewer words from now on.

At the apartment, her little brother was crying, although Gladys was pacing back and forth with him, trying to calm him. His temples were pale and bluish.

“Let me,” Helene offered and took Tobias from the maid. “You go and get some lunch for Greta.”

Greta slipped her hand into Gladys’. “I’ll let you look through my glasses,” she said.

As Helene rocked the scrawny boy in her arms, her chest damp from his snot and tears, she felt certain his skin had to remember the touch of his real mother, the only touch that could possibly console him. Filled with pity for him, she rested her lips against his
left temple. After being so content with Greta, she felt an abundance of patience and love that she wanted to give to this boy who was breathing noisily through his mouth as if even something as simple as taking in air was burdensome for him. In between breaths, he wailed. She rubbed his hard belly, rocked him against her shoulder as she walked with him. From the living room into the kitchen into the dining room while he wailed, and then that same circle again while he continued to wail.

After years of enjoying her work as a teacher, she had not expected to feel so inadequate as a mother, at least with Tobias who’d either struggle away or cling to her. Sometimes Mrs. Wilson offered to help with the children. Although Helene appreciated her work in the building, she didn’t trust her with the children because Mrs. Wilson envied her the children so obviously. Whenever Helene tried to turn Tobias over to one of the maids who came to the apartment every day for a few hours, the boy would cry even louder, except with Birdie, who had a special affection for him. The oldest of the maids at twenty-four, Birdie Robichaud had a new hair color every month and sang to the children in her nasal voice. But Birdie was not always available. And you couldn’t ask Birdie to take the children to the beach—not even on the hottest day—because she refused to go near water, terrified to see one of the children go under and not come up again, the way she’d seen her sister drown after falling off the earth right next to her while reaching for a yellow flower.

Tobias was hiccuping in Helene’s arms, and when she turned him over to pat his back, she heard a thud against one of the windows that faced the lake. A bird had flown into the bare glass, leaving specks of feather and blood before plummeting. Four other birds had died like that since Helene had arrived, and all because of Stefan’s first wife whose idea it had been to let the light and sky in. Her light and sky were exactly what killed the birds because all they saw was their reflection. Birds didn’t understand about barriers of glass that could kill them. No more, Helene resolved. Tomorrow she’d talk to the seamstress about covering the windows with sheer curtains and drapes. Mrs. Teichman worked for several families in the building. Skillful and energetic, she’d arrive at Helene’s door
every Wednesday morning with her flowered suitcase full of patterns, pins, threads, interfacing, buttons, fashion books, and a clean, folded bedsheet that she’d lay over the carpet in the dining room. Curtains would warn the birds. Curtains would make the apartment feel less drafty. Curtains would feel more like home.

Tobias’ cries were not quite as loud as before. Helene hummed to him—
“Schlafe mein Prinzchen, scblaf ein
…”—hummed the German bedtime song her mother used to sing to her and Leo until Tobias was finally falling asleep, and as she tightened her arms around him to accommodate the weight of sleep, she wished she had another woman to talk to.
Someone like Margret
. But she couldn’t imagine writing to Margret about her troubles with Tobias because that would mean admitting that not all was going well in her marriage. Better to send letters to her and to Leo about how the children were growing, about what they’d done together as a family—blueberry picking on Belknap Mountain; excursions on the mail boat that stopped at many of the islands; a train ride to Concord to buy furniture that replaced the wicker of the first wife.

It felt odd to Helene to be an immigrant in this country where no one could see her otherness by looking at her. How she wished she had the physical signs to mark her as a foreigner before strangers spoke to her because that would take the surprise from their faces when she answered, would make them approach her with the expectation of that otherness. From Stefan she knew that the town wasn’t much used to foreigners. Except for the Greek man who worked at the lumberyard and a group of Japanese laborers who stayed in apartments assigned to them by the hosiery factory, Winnipesaukee was made up of families who’d lived here for generations and hadn’t traveled far beyond their hometown. Although there were quite a few French Canadians, including the lamplighter and the two barbers, Helene didn’t think of them as being foreign since Canada was just a few hours away by train.

It was difficult for newcomers to fit in, though Stefan—despite the heartache he’d brought to the families of his dead wives—had been absorbed by the town, although his accent reminded all of them that he had come from a different place. About him they
could speak with pride, point to the ornate building that elevated the town’s reputation among neighboring communities. A building like that gave you cause and desire to look after your own property with even greater care than before; to replace your entrance door or shutters, say, with fancier versions of what you used to have; to paint your walls before they showed the slightest wear; to lay a path of bricks right to your front step to keep the mud off your floors.

For Helene, living in America was a constant shifting between discovery and loss. She liked how the houses were separated by gardens, not constructed side against side as in Germany. Liked the vastness of her new country, the dense forests, the mountaintops that held snow till late in the spring. But she didn’t like the taste of lamb—a bit wild, she thought. American shoes were flimsy, she decided, and though the town’s major industry was a shoe factory that shipped merchandise throughout the country, she ordered the shoes for her family from Germany, along with rosehip tea and delicacies like marzipan or the strawberry syrup she liked to pour over her puddings. Since American bread was fluffy and left your belly empty half an hour after eating, she baked her own solid-crust
Graubrot
. Through furniture, tablecloths, and paintings, she created Germany for herself in her husband’s house.

She tried to substitute what she missed: walking along the lake and watching the reflections of the house and trees and islands would remind her of the Rhein and the meadows along its banks and made her miss the Rhein somewhat less. She’d swim in the lake. Read by its shore. Row the children out in the wooden boat. Upon waking, she’d always look out over the lake first and orient herself to the weather by its ever-changing colors that depended so much on the sky. Some mornings, both sky and lake would be gray until a few slices of light would fall from behind the mountains across the bay. That light—broken by the shadows of clouds— would lie on the surface of the lake, pointing directly at her window, and if she’d move from one side to the other, the light would follow her like the eyes of saints in some paintings.

She was always comparing things, weighing for herself if she liked them better here or in Germany, marveling at luxuries she
hadn’t experienced before, while missing the familiar. She might turn a corner of a street in Winnipesaukee, say, and find herself in front of a tree or a doorway that evoked Burgdorf for her. Just as she might watch her husband as he dressed by the mirror—those fierce green eyes in his agile face; the planes of his short, compact body; the V shape of his dense chest hair where it thickened downward—and recall the longing she used to feel for him in Germany.

And because she missed the written words that had formed the intimate connection between her and Stefan for seventeen years—so much more satisfying to be with him on the page than in person—she began to write to him again, fervent notes in German that she would hide and never show him, letters in which she didn’t have to hold back with her love for him or with her anger, letters that—after her death—her granddaughter Emma would find in a red cake tin behind Helene’s shoes in the armoire. Assuming her grandfather had received every one of these letters, Emma would construct a history of passion and understanding between her grandparents, and resolve that this was the kind of love she wanted for herself.

But her letters to Germany, Helene sent off, and Stefan enjoyed it when she read to him Leo’s responses. It disappointed her that Margret only sent brief notes. But she’d known all along that Margret didn’t much like to write. Increasingly, she missed Margret, wished she could see her laugh when she told her that in America a woman old enough to have grandchildren was still called a girl. When she’d written her about that, Margret hadn’t even mentioned it in her short answer. Often Helene had dreams about her hometown right after getting mail, dreams that took her to the Rhein and Schreberstraße where she’d lived, dreams about Stefan’s parents or about some of the nuns from the Theresienheim, and when she’d wake up, she’d feel it even stronger than usual, that seesaw existence of not belonging to either country, of living two fragmentary lives—that of Helene Blau married to Stefan in America and that of Helene Montag still waiting for Stefan in Germany.

Nothing has changed
.

Everything has changed
.

It did not take her long to become impatient with herself: she did
not want to wrap her life around Stefan or his absences. Back at home she’d had her achievements as a teacher to balance that yearning for him; she’d had Leo and Margret and her neighbors and colleagues and friends; but here she only had his children who reminded her of him, and a language that got in the way of connecting to others. All her life she had thought of herself as intelligent, something that had been confirmed again and again by her parents, her teachers, and later her students; but in this new country she couldn’t even work as a teacher—at least not until the language would become as familiar as the one she’d grown up with. In this country she only had things because her husband provided them for her. But she refused to settle for that. It was enough to feel lacking as a mother and wife. About the language she could do something. Although Stefan spoke English with ease, she didn’t want him to become the voice to link her to his world. Determined to make this new language her own, she borrowed books from the library and struggled through them, even though she only absorbed every fourth or fifth word. But she finished them. For herself. And went back for others.