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 (131 page)

In the morning, when they discovered that Tobias was not in his room, Stefan tried to shrug away his fear by saying he’d be back once he was hungry. But Helene could tell he was as worried as she.

He tried not to think of terrible things that could happen to children.
The boy’s eleven. Tall and fast. Eleven and a half. Too tall and too fast to be carried off by someone crazy and evil. Old enough to feed himself and keep warm. At least it isn’t winter
. But nights in April were still cold. He hoped that Tobias had spent the night in his room. Hoped that he had waited until early morning. Hoped that he’d made himself breakfast—a warm breakfast—before slipping away. But had he taken enough clothes? A blanket?

As Helene witnessed his concern, she felt a softening toward him. Still, she was too angry at him to show it.

“He’ll be back once he’s hungry,” he told her as they searched through Tobias’ room. Two blankets were missing. A pillow and winter coat. Even those creepy plants that ate bugs. “What if—” Stefan swallowed hard before he could say the thing he didn’t want to say aloud. “What if he hurts himself?”

She brought her forehead against his, closed her eyes. “I don’t believe so,” she finally whispered. “He chose to take things that will keep him comfortable.”

But his fear only increased while he and Helene helped the police search the building. He thought of his parents waking up and finding him gone one morning nearly three decades ago, and he knew if he’d understood their terror and loss back then, he could have never left Germany.

None of the tenants had seen Tobias. Danny Wilson checked the garage and every room in the cellar, even the large storage closet where his uncle kept the still. Though he went into the drying room where the air was thick and fuzzy with steam that rose from damp sheets and towels that lay draped across the heating rods, Danny did not look behind the shelves by the back wall where Tobias crouched. As tenants came in to fold their dry laundry into wicker baskets or hang up other things, Tobias got to listen to the story of his disappearance again and again. For a while, it was exciting to hear them speculate about the mystery of his escape. He found out that his father had not opened the restaurant—the first time ever, as far back as Tobias could remember.

He overheard Mrs. Braddock tell Mrs. Wilson that her husband wished he’d never mentioned the matter of the burning paper bag to Mr. Blau.

“He probably got rough with the boy.”

“He does have a temper.”

“Actually … that’s where he and the boy are alike.”

As long as Tobias heard their voices, he didn’t feel alone; but that night the steam took on the coldness of the floor and walls, wrapping him into a damp, heavy chill that seeped between his socks and ankles, wound itself around his neck. So used was he to being warm in this room where towels and sheets dried quickly, that now the cold felt foreign to him. Even his breath. He was a ghost walker inside his own tomb. He shivered. Crouched low. And finally slept. But just for a few hours. Each time he woke up, it was to the picture of himself crushing his miniatures. And as he felt them beneath his feet, he wished he could will himself to die, lie still and end those thoughts forever. Go to sleep and never wake up. Old Eskimos died like that: when their families moved on to new camps, they stayed behind, and death became theirs by wanting it. When his teacher had read them
the story of an old Eskimo, abandoned on the ice without food or a coat while his daughter and her family moved on, Tobias had felt furious at the daughter, ready to go after her and ask how she could leave her father and say he was worn out and useless. But now it came to him that the old man had chosen death and that his choice shouldn’t have anything to do with age.

Stop it, Agnes says. Stop it now
. His two blankets weighed on him—cold and heavy like wet snow—but when he kicked at them to free himself, they only got tangled around his legs. How long would it take to starve himself?
Maybe I’II be dead in a week if I stop eating. Stop it, she says
, and all at once he was hungry. He raised his face. Imagined
leaving the drying room and walking up the stairs to the apartment. He stands in the kitchen, feet cold on the tiles, and makes himself a jam sandwich
. No, two.
One with strawberry jam, the other with grape jelly. Saliva pools on his tongue as he cuts the bread into triangles the way he likes them. As he eats
—No, starving would take too long. Because whenever you ate something, you’d have to start all over with the starving.
Maybe I’ll freeze to death
. … A
train
—I
could throw myself in front of a train
. He’d seen that in a movie once, a woman in a railroad station, face pale, coat black. She stood immobile on the platform, arms along her sides, hands empty, while others rushed past her with bags and suitcases. As the train sped closer, she let herself fall forward in slow motion, hands calm and white against her coat.
Or I’ll drown myself in the lake
. It certainly was deep enough. But he was too good a swimmer for that. His body would keep coming back up.
At least until I get too tired to swim. My body is never found. They bury an empty coffin. My father stands at the open grave site in his black coat, snow on his shoulders, tears on his face. “If only I had known…” He’s crying, my father who is also the father of Agnes. Agnes whom I saved from my father, hid from my father, stronger with me tonight than any other time ever before. Crying, my father, he is crying. “Tobias, my son … I am so sorry.”

“And I am not,” Tobias said aloud. “I am not sorry. And I won’t come to your funeral.”

It soothed him, saying it aloud. Soothed him because already he sensed that this was much worse than saying, “I wish you dead,”
worse because it presumed that wish and reached beyond its deadly summons by knowing this about his father’s funeral: that he would not be there. And taking power from that promise to himself. Power for daring to do the worst possible—obliterating his father beyond death.

And he said it once again. Louder. “I won’t come to your funeral.”

Toward dawn of his second night in the drying room, Tobias packed up his plants and his blankets and his pillow, took the elevator to the sixth floor, went into the kitchen, and ate so quietly that his parents, who had not slept since they’d found him missing, did not know he was back until his stepmother found a cutting board and knife on the kitchen table, along with an open jar of strawberry jam, half a loaf of bread, three apple cores, and the rind from a large chunk of cheese. She rushed into Tobias’ room but did not wake him. When he emerged from his bed late that afternoon, his father was waiting for him in the living room with several pieces of wood—cherry and ash and maple—two kinds of glue, and a set of small tools for building whatever a man’s son might desire to build. Tobias thanked him. Politely. The way he’d been taught. But left his gifts on the bench by the tile stove. For that entire week, every morning he woke up, he felt dead—
Your severed head. Your bloody head
—until he latched on to the rage deep inside himself.

It happened one morning when he saw his stepmother read to his little brother who looked so satisfied as he prattled about, that Tobias suddenly felt his rage at his own mother for not even staying alive long enough to read him some stupid story. He glared at Robert who was holding the silly lamb he’d gotten in Germany where Tobias had not been allowed to go. His father would have never made Robert destroy the lamb.

When his stepmother left for a few minutes to stir the lentil soup, he snatched the lamb and ran from the apartment, followed by Robert who chased him down the steps and into the fourth-floor utility room. Identical to the utility rooms on each floor, it had a trap door in the wall for throwing garbage down. Holding the toy
out of Robert’s reach, Tobias climbed on top of the trash can and from there on the sink, his breath coming in and out through his mouth. As Robert kept leaping for his lamb, the small room magnified his screams.

“Give it to me,” he wailed.

“Catch!” Tobias tossed the lamb into the air and caught it himself. The fleece was almost entirely worn off its head, and its stuffing was lumpy. “Catch!” But on his third toss, the lamb fell past his outstretched hands and landed on the floor where Robert threw himself across it, defending it with his body.

Tobias leapt from the sink and stood above his brother. “Give it back.”

Robert scrambled up and scooted against the wall, the lamb between his chest and the wall.

“Give it back, you!”

“But it’s mine.”

Tobias jabbed his fingertips into the soft flesh of his brother’s back, wanting to hurt, to decimate—
your severed bloody head
. “Ticklish…” He whooped with laughter. Grabbed hold of the lamb’s front legs. “You’re ticklish. I know you are.”

To protect his lamb, Robert yanked the trapdoor open. But the instant he thrust the lamb inside, a look of terror settled on his face. Shoving Tobias aside, he darted from the utility room, past two alcoves with fire extinguishers, and into the elevator where Tobias caught up with him, as intent on retrieving the lamb before it got burned as on keeping Robert from telling on him.

“We can save it,” Tobias shouted, “we can save it.”

But Robert didn’t answer. A wildness in his eyes that Tobias had never seen, he stared at the brass arrow that traced their descent in a semicircle, ready to pounce from the elevator door.

In the furnace room, the lamb had dropped into the Dumpster with the refuse that Mr. Wilson shoveled into the trash burner every day, and as additional trash tumbled from the chute above, the lamb settled amidst chicken bones and coffee grounds, peach pits and stained butcher paper.

Robert tried to shinny up the side of the dumpster. “Boost me up,” he yelled.

But Tobias had stayed on top of the six stone steps that led into the cavernous furnace room, and when Robert called out to him again, he slid out and slammed the door. It was not that he meant to lock his brother in when he turned the key—he only did it to have time. Time to think. While his heart pounded with the thrill of taking revenge. On his fat little brother. His father. Punishing him through Robert, who was racing up the stairs, hurling himself against the door.

But his weight didn’t force it open. At the far end of the room, beyond the trash burner, dim light filtered down an air shaft through the grated opening above. He tried not to cry as he inched down the steps. In front of him loomed the immense boiler, its round door latched tightly. On its back he found several red-and-white cards, each with the
Wasserburg’s
address, a date, and a signature:
Stan Erkins, Boiler Inspector, City of Winnipesaukee
.

The big water tank rested high against the side of the boiler. Eighteen feet above him floated the ceiling and pipes, countless pipes that crisscrossed the ceiling and walls like the veins on the leaves of his brother’s hungry plants. Any moment now they would close around him, trap him, swallow him the way he’d seen them swallow the spiders and mosquitos that Tobias caught for them. Tobias who’d locked him in here. His steps, they sounded hollow. And his feet—his feet were right on the large metal lid that was set into the cement floor. He knew what was beneath there. One day when Mr. Wilson had removed the cover, he’d seen the sheen of filthy water far below. All at once he was afraid he might want to lift the lid and let himself fall. Just as he’d dropped his lamb through the chute. Only deeper. To the center of the earth. Already he could taste the putrid water, cold and slimy, and then the taste of rice.
Dead people turn into rice, Robert dear
. Trudi—she wouldn’t be afraid. Trudi wasn’t afraid of anyone, not even of the big boys in school who laughed at her and imitated how she walked. With her father’s last letter, she’d sent him a picture she’d drawn of herself and her friend, Eva, playing with her new dog, who was black and gray, not white like his lamb who reminded him of Trudi with its pale hair and short legs.

If he had a dog, he’d teach it to listen only to him, and then he’d
tell it to bite Tobias. Carefully he straightened. As he backed away from the lid, something stiff prodded his shoulder. Screaming, he whirled around. Stared at the shrouded figure that leaned against the wall by the boiler. Though he was used to seeing the leftover Virgin Mary from the nativity whenever he came here with Mr. Wilson, it was different to be locked up with her and her bashed-in face. The hand that had touched him was extended in a blessing. Wrinkles of grime blurred the folds of her gown, and dust clotted the injury on her face as if her blood had dried around it. The baby Jesus, wrapped in the statue’s arms like a small mummy, had a dirty hole where his nose had been.

Robert was his own echo as he flew up the stairs, tears blotching his sight. They didn’t sound like his, those howls that rose from his chest and brought Homer Wilson running from the back corner of the garage, where he’d been washing Nate Bloom’s silver Model T.

“Hold it… hold it there.” He swooped Robert up into his wet arms. “How’d you get in here?”