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 (137 page)

And yet to say that felt dangerous. Suspect. Even to herself. Because what was stronger than her pain at being eased out was her horror at the violence committed against the Jews and the unavoidable certainty that there had to be people—ordinary people, too—who were making this happen. How could they live with that knowledge? But in trying to understand, she always kept coming back to her own family in Burgdorf, to people she loved over there. How to connect them with those reports? And yet, what felt terribly familiar in all this was that attitude of superiority she knew from having grown up there, from seeing it bloom so quickly against anyone who was considered to be different. Still—how could it have turned into something so monumental?

When Germany had declared war on Poland, she’d been terrified, and her consolation had been that at least Leo was too old to fight, and that Leo’s child was a daughter, not a son. Because it was Trudi’s generation that was fighting the war. The Weilers’ son. The Hansens’ son. Both Weskopp sons. To imagine sending a son off to war. It had to be worse than seeing a husband go.

And then it had happened to her.

First Tobias.

Then Robert.

How to sleep through a night when your sons were in a war? How to not think of soldiers buried or returning broken like Axel Lambert?

Robert, who fought in North Africa, would be the first to return in February of 1944, a bullet in his left thigh. The month after he had surgery and moved back in with his parents, he opened a one-room veterinary clinic next to the hardware store. Though he didn’t have much time for his music, Pearl coaxed him until he agreed to play the piano at Nate Bloom’s seventieth birthday that spring, an elegant event to which she’d invited friends from Boston, the town, and the building. The guest of honor was Nate’s son, who had never visited his father before.

After weeks of bartering and buying on the black market, Pearl managed to pull together the kind of abundant celebration she used to give before the war.

When Robert arrived late after examining the Morrells’ lame horse in the north end of town, Miss Garland was the first to greet him by the Blooms’ door. “It’s lovely to see you, Robert dear.” Her delicate fingers grasped the edge of his hand.

“You too, Miss Garland,” he replied, “you too,” feeling flustered and obligated to say something else that would take the hunger from her eyes. Ever since high school when he’d stopped visiting her, she’d looked at him as though she carried a balance sheet of things she had done for him and things he had failed to do for her. He wished he hadn’t agreed to be here, that he had lingered with the horse. He felt dirty. Tired. And above all heavy. On the way home he’d stopped at the bakery, and he could still taste the
uglies, those wonderful clumps of multicolored dough, their glaze milky and half-transparent with a hint of vanilla.

Miss Garland was nodding at him while thin coils of hair bounced around her face. “You should see all the food she’s serving. Roasts and fish and ham. Four kinds of cake. And the wines …”

“I’ll take a look.” Awkwardly, he freed himself from her and walked into the music room that was filled with people. The velour hangings that had draped these walls when he was a boy had been replaced several times over the years with different materials, the latest of them a green satin, and against that deep green stood his brother, alone, eyes amused while he observed everyone, face flushed as if he’d been out in the wind.

Robert pulled him into a big, clumsy hug. “When did you get back?”

“Just a few hours ago.”

“How long can you stay?”

“I don’t know yet. Couple of days … maybe. I’m on my way to Officer Training School”

“I’m so glad you’re here. Did you get all settled upstairs?”

“Downstairs, actually. Danny’s putting me up.”

Robert blushed. “Your old room’s still ready and— Why am I doing this? It’s just that I want to get you away from everyone else, find out what’s been happening to you. But I sound like my mother, trying to convince you to stay with us.”

“At least you don’t try to pretend that some day I’ll bring home a nice girl and start making grandchildren.”

“God, no.”

“Which leaves the burden of procreation to you since Greta’s never going to get her priest away from the church. Carrying on the family name and all that.”

Another blush. “Don’t even start on that. There’s no one …”

“You got any time for me tomorrow?”

“Breakfast?”

“Sure. How early do I have to get up?”

“Seven?”

“Good.” Tobias stroked his chin, still tender from the stubble on
Danny’s face. Already he was thinking about getting away from the party and to Danny’s apartment. When he’d come back to the States, he’d taken the first train to Winnipesaukee and had found Danny in the garage as though he’d been there all along, waiting. They hadn’t touched until they were inside Danny’s bedroom, where the windows were set so high into the foundation wall that the light that came through them only skimmed the air above their bodies. When Danny got a cramp in his left leg, Tobias leaned forward and took hold of Danny’s big toe. With his other hand, he massaged Danny’s calf for him until the cramp subsided.

“Usually I just hop around until it stops by itself,” Danny said, hands linked behind his head as he watched Tobias’ dark, intense face.

“This is a better way. Try it. Sit up and grab your big toe—just do it, try it, come on—and pull it toward you … like this, right. And then hold on till the cramp goes away.”

“Where’d you learn that?”

“My stepmother. I guess her father used to get cramps like that.”

“One of those old German customs?”

Abruptly, Tobias let go of Danny’s leg. He looked tired as though all energy had drained from him, leaving him empty.

“I didn’t mean anything by German. I meant custom. One of those old customs. I could have said French. Or Italian.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll get us some food.”

“Okay.” Tobias propped a pillow behind his back and sat against the solid white headboard. Every piece of furniture in the room was painted white, making the room look larger and brighter than when Danny’s aunt and uncle used to live here. Their religious clutter had been replaced by pictures of greyhounds in white frames, a long mirror without a frame, and several plain white lamps to make up for the lack of daylight.

From the kitchen, Danny carried a large tray with sliced apples and cheese and bread. He opened two beers. “Grab a beer,” he joked. “Pull it toward you and hold on till it’s empty.”

Tobias had to laugh. “Very good. Just pretend you’re reaching for a beer the next time you have a cramp.”

“Unless you’re here. Then you can massage it.”

“You can always show one of your other … friends how to do it.”

“Open your mouth.” Danny fed him a slice of cheese. “There’s more.” A slice of apple. A piece of bread.

“I can’t eat that quickly.”

“Not if you keep talking.”

“Don’t you see others? Didn’t you and Stewart Robichaud—”

“What do you want me to do? Wait around till you show up?”

“I mean—”

“Hey.” Danny raised one hand to stop him.

But Tobias took hold of what courage he could find and said it. Said: “What I mean is that I don’t feel like looking for anyone else.” And saw Danny flinch. Though he closed his eyes, Tobias could still hear him.

“Don’t push at me to do the same, Mr. Tobias Blau.”

“Look, the birthday boy wants us to come over,” Robert said, and they headed toward Nate Bloom, who sat propped in his wheelchair, dressed in a tuxedo, a mohair shawl across his emaciated legs.

“Congratulations.” Robert bent to shake Nate’s hand.

Nate asked the usual: “Still healing cows?”

And Robert replied with his usual: “Cows and alligators.”

“Promise to keep both away from me.” Nate winked and introduced Robert to his son, Ira, a tall man with beautiful, even teeth, who worked as a lawyer in Boston and had brought his fiancée, a woman as tall as he. Her hair was so black, it looked night-blue.

“Yvonne is a window decorator,” Pearl said. “For Powell’s store in Boston.”

Robert nodded and quickly looked down from the woman’s eyes, only to notice her silver sandals that showed off her delicate ankles.

Nate and his son were talking with Stanley Poggs, Nate’s business manager, about the renovation of a first-floor apartment, where it would be easier to maneuver his wheelchair. But its completion kept getting delayed because of war shortages. Two years ago, when Nate had lost the use of his legs in a car accident, Stanley
Poggs had moved into the Blooms’ guest room to care for business matters and accompany Pearl to concerts and other social events. People in the building gossiped because Stanley was handsome and only in his mid-forties, younger than Pearl, who didn’t seem bothered by the rumors that her husband was grooming Stanley as his replacement.

“In business and in bed,” people would whisper.

“Play the piano, Robert. Please,” Pearl urged.

When he sat down at her white piano, he heard her say, “He’s such a brilliant musician,” and he wished he’d never agreed to this.

As he struck the first notes of Mozart’s piano concerto No. 23, the woman with the night-blue hair took the chair closest to him and sat erect. She had always been enchanted by music because it unfolded something within her that was usually closed to everyone—including herself. Music released her from the constant loneliness that waited beneath her polite smile, the kind of loneliness that tightens your skin until you can no longer sleep. She knew how to dodge that loneliness for hours, days even, by surrounding herself with people who admired her beauty; but then there were those other times when she felt careless and had to force herself to do things slowly, properly, in order to offset that wish to hurl out, mess up, destroy.

Some days tearing a single piece of paper would do. Would return her to who she really was. Tearing it quickly would infuse her with lightness; tearing it slowly would make the paper scream. The slower you tore it, the more resistance you felt. It depended on what you needed to bring yourself back. Sometimes she had to tear several pages, some fast, some screamingly slow. But there were days she needed more, needed to bring that devastation closer to her skin. Like holding her hand over the flame of a candle, rapturous with that pain of being there in that instant, only, and breathing in the intensity that she looked for in others but found too seldom, the intensity that she now felt in this man as he leaned across the piano.

The bulk of Robert’s torso strained the material of his tuxedo, and he rolled his head as if in a trance. He doesn’t look like the kind of man who would wear a tuxedo, the woman thought. Lowslung
pants perhaps and a wrinkled shirt—but not a tuxedo. It only emphasized his massive frame as he hunched over the keyboard, almost crawled across it, crawled into it—a spider, a troll, an angel—as close as any human and piano could possibly get, while his right foot pumped furiously, and his immense bottom lifted in staccato intervals as though he were raising himself up by his fingertips. She gazed at his face, which was all wrong for his body—still the face of a boy—and past him at her own reflection in the mirrored front of the cabinet that displayed Pearl’s collection of crystal and, at the same time, Robert’s reflection—superimposed on the glass, on her, as if he were meant to envelop her.