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 (13 page)

That Sunday the pastor invited him to dinner at the rectory with the other members of the school board. While the pastor’s sister served them, the young teacher watched her hands fly across the white linen and polished silver with a beauty he’d never believed existed. They were like young birds, those hands, poised to fly off independently, and he wanted to reach out for them, hold them briefly in the cup of his palms before releasing them.

We would have kept her secret had we found her making love with the young teacher down by the river late that summer, but the old women said it was a scandal. They felt angry, betrayed, as if, somehow, the pastor’s sister had proven them wrong. Lucien Cheronnet lost his job before starting it, and he called a taxi to take him and Hannelore Beier to the train station in Düsseldorf.

“I wish you’d stay,” Herr Pastor Beier told his sister the morning of her departure. He sat across the table from her, his two soft-boiled eggs still covered with knitted egg warmers.

She ate silently.

“I wish I could have acted differently,” he said, “but the school board—” He opened his arms in a helpless sweep. “If I can help …”

The following Wednesday the bells of the chapel did not ring, and when the old women arrived—some of them late or with a button left undone—they found that the pastor’s sister had not come. By the time Sunday mass arrived, it was evident that she’d left, and we stared at the empty space in the pew where she used to kneel.

Our new Sunday school teacher, Frau Wilhelmi, read to us about Moses and his mother, who’d saved the infant’s life by hiding him in a woven basket which she’d smeared with pitch and slime, then set afloat among the reeds and water lilies that grew in the shallow water along the river’s edge. But we gazed out of the narrow windows of the church basement and beyond, imagining the pastor’s sister and the young teacher.
They’re on a train that passes through golden wheat fields and through forests where sunlight turns the crowns of the trees bright yellow-green and filters into the lower, darker branches. Hannelore Beier has an open book on her knees and as she reads poems to the young teacher, she paints the words for him through the dance of her hands. Lucien Cheronnet captures her hands in his, lightly, the way one might hold a newly hatched robin, and brings them to his lips
.

Their train speeds through cities and crosses rivers until it reaches Paris. They leave the station, their arms around each other, and walk to the Jardin des Plantes where the panther paces the length of his cage. The young teacher nods as Hannelore Beier reaches into the cage, and strokes the animal’s magnificent neck. The panther arches his back. A curtain lifts from his pupils as the pastor’s sister slides aside the bolt that has kept him in captivity. His eyes like sudden, green flames, he recognizes a world beyond the bars of his cage
.

  
Of Weaker Stock

O
ne of the regulars at Trudi Montag’s pay-library was Anton Immers, the retired butcher, who liked to read nurse-and-doctor novels. Perhaps descriptions of operating rooms recalled for him the days when he’d drawn a knife swiftly through pulsing flesh. His granddaughter, Sybille Immers, was in my class, the only girl taller than I.

One Saturday afternoon as he shuffled out of the pay-library with two novels under his arm, Trudi Montag whispered to me that he was a three-months baby.

“What do you mean?” It was hard to imagine the old man as an infant.

“Child—” She shook her head as if exasperated by my naïveté. “His parents were married three months before he was born.”

“You mean—they did it before they got married?”

Trudi Montag nodded. Smiled.

“How do you know?”

“I looked it up in the town registry,” she said, and I wondered what else she’d found in the ancient town records that were kept in the basement of the
Rathaus
, the
town hall with a bell tower and arched windows whose curved tops were inlaid with blue bricks.

Anton Immers bred violets on the windowsill and shelves of the room he occupied on the second floor of his son’s house. His daughter-in-law, Irmtraud, complained about the smell of the plant food which the old man concocted from secret ingredients. The mixture, which stood in a pail next to her washing machine, smelled suspiciously close to cow dung and rotting fish, yet became odorless as soon as he worked it into the soil.

His violets ranged from deep purple to pale pink. Their blossoms were huge, their leaves a lush green. Anton Immers had passed on the butcher shop to his son, Anton, just as he had passed on his name and his house, but he still kept financial control of the family; his daughter-in-law had to come to him for extra expenses, enduring the humiliation of having him refuse her money to repair her outmoded sewing machine and buy material for the matching winter coats she wanted to sew for herself and her daughter, Sybille.

Every morning he dressed in a dark suit and watered his hundreds of plants while listening to Wagner records. His coarse hands, which had slaughtered cattle and pigs, tenderly nipped off dying leaves and blossoms, and transplanted seedlings into clay pots filled with rich soil. The flowers’ perfection gave him more pleasure than anything else had ever given him. Other people in Burgdorf, who grew violets and spent more time on their plants than he, didn’t have nearly the same success. They suspected the fertilizer had little to do with the profuse growth of the retired butcher’s plants. They suspected Anton Immers’s violets grew so well because they were afraid.

If a plant failed to thrive, he’d set it on the ledge outside his window where he’d let it shrivel in the cold air while
the elite plants had to witness its slow death. During the summer, a night in the shop’s meat locker would bring the same results. In winter, when he brought in the plant, he sometimes had to brush snow from its brittle leaves before he placed it on the table next to his bed as an example to the others. There it would stay for weeks, turning brown and dry, until he decided it was time to annihilate the next plant. Carefully he’d choose the weakest one, feeling the other plants recoil.

“This can happen to you too if you don’t grow,” the butcher’s father murmured to his plants in the mornings when he rotated them a quarter turn so that each part of their foliage received equal amounts of light. “This can happen to you too.”

As a young man, Anton Immers had broken his back while slaughtering a cow; though it had healed eventually, he’d been left with a constant ache in the lower region of his spine, more like stiffness than anything else. But he hadn’t retired from the butcher shop until five years earlier when he turned seventy-seven. Since then he’d been growing violets and winning the annual competition at St. Martin’s Church for the best violets. The winner’s plants decorated the nativity scene in the wing of the church all through December until Epiphany on January 6. Surrounded by Anton Immers’s prime violets knelt life-size, carved statues of the Virgin Mother and Saint Josef; between them the Christ Child lay in his manger on real straw, raising one hand in divine benediction. Rows of candles, which the people of Burgdorf would light for their prayers, separated the Holy Family from the pews.

“It’s not right,” the old women, whose flowers used to win the award, told Herr Pastor Beier. “It’s not right to let a plant killer display his violets in the nativity scene.”

• • •

In the small brick house that used to be his, Anton Immers kept to his room except for meals, listening to Wagner’s
Niebelungenring
and
Lohengrin
, his view restricted to what he could see through the panes of his window that faced Schlosserstrasse. Across the street was Potter’s, a long, narrow bar with tables in the back. Some of the men, who got there as soon as it opened, had gone to school and been in the war with Anton Immers. He’d watch them enter the dim bar and, late in the afternoon, stumble out, blinking in the fading light.

One of them, Kurt Heidenreich, arrived every morning at nine-forty on his bicycle in beige trousers and a gray cardigan. It pained Anton Immers to watch a man two years younger take five minutes to dismount from his bicycle; yet, at the same time he felt a familiar sense of superiority as Kurt Heidenreich locked his bike, wobbled to the bolted door, and tried the handle. Muttering to himself, he’d step back from the door, head tilted, and stand on the sidewalk, staring at the bar. After a few minutes he’d move forward again, rattling the door handle. This happened every day until Herr Potter, who owned the bar, opened at ten.

On Tuesdays the bar was closed; yet, Kurt Heidenreich would be there as always, awkwardly getting off his bicycle and repeating his ritual. Until ten-thirty he’d stand in front of the locked door, shaking his head and mumbling. Finally he’d mount his bike once more and pedal the five blocks to his daughter’s house where he had a large room with a washbasin and a radio.

What a fool, Anton Immers thought as he watched him, what a fool. He straightened the lapel of his suit jacket. Kurt Heidenreich had been one of the popular boys in school. But he turned out to be of weaker stock. Like some of the violets.

• • •

One Wednesday morning in summer Anton Immers woke to the sound of the chapel bells as usual, and knew if he glanced outside, he’d see the old women on their bicycles heading for mass. But there was another sound—something scratching against the side of his house. When he climbed out of bed and peered through the window, Albert Zimmermann, the painter, was standing on a ladder that leaned against the house, a bucket of paint in one hand.

“What’s going on?” He stuck out his gray head.

“Good morning, Herr Immers. Your son hired me to paint the trim.”

“News to me.”

He watched every brush stroke. At first the painter tried to talk with him, but soon he became irritated as the old man found fault with almost everything he did.

“Close your window, please, so I can paint the trim,” the painter finally said.

“Be careful you don’t get any on the glass,” Anton Immers warned before he retreated inside. His face pressed against the pane, he slid it up and down as his eyes followed the motion of the paintbrush.

The painter thought it was funny the way the wrinkled face crushed itself against the glass like elephant skin as if to block his view of the room, but when the butcher mouthed words and jabbed fingers in the direction of spots he had missed, the painter aimed his brush toward the window. Anton Immers’s mouth opened in a howl, but by then the painter was too agitated to stop himself and painted across it—the old face behind the glass—painted it over with Eggshell #23, square by square, until all he could see was the sheen of the off-white paint. He heard the wailing from inside the house, heard the old man’s fists pounding against the glass, and steadied his ladder against the wall.

When Irmtraud Immers dragged her husband’s father from the blind window that wouldn’t yield his reflection
any longer, she pulled back his wrists so he couldn’t heave his fists through the glass and held him until he crumpled in her arms. She helped him to his bed and lowered him onto the mattress. The room was filtered with an opaque light that made the blossoms of the violets look heavy and cast a damp pallor on the old man’s features.

The daughter-in-law shivered at the sudden image of his coffin being lowered into the dark earth, at the pastor sprinkling holy water and making the sign of the cross above the final mound of earth. “Rest now,” she whispered to the old man who stared past her, his breathing fast and shallow. “Rest.” But already she was glancing around the room, choosing the wall where she would set up her modern sewing machine and a long table on which she’d cut heavy blue wool for her and her daughter’s coats.

In the kitchen she filled a metal pail with soapy water and, without saying a word, brought it out to the painter who stood at the base of his ladder, a flustered expression on his face.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I don’t know why … I really am.”

He climbed back up the ladder with the pail and washed the paint from the window. As the room emerged through the white smears, he first noticed the dresser with the record player and, above it, a framed portrait of the old man in uniform. And then he saw Anton Immers lying on the bed in his suit, surrounded by hundreds of plants, like someone laid out for his funeral.

But Anton Immers did not die until early that December, his body smaller somehow, shrunken, and when the painter entered St. Martin’s Church for the service and saw the coffin among rows of violets which the old women of Burgdorf had brought, he felt a shock of recognition. It was only a week after Frau Weskopp had won first prize for her violets and the right to exhibit them in the nativity scene. Anton Immers had refused to enter the competition. Some
of the people in town thought that the brief time without light last summer had drained him of his strength, but the old women suspected that his violets had ranked him inferior and—in a bizarre reversal of his own ritual—had let him shrivel to death.

  
A Crime of Passion