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 (14 page)

I
n the spring of 1958 Eva Starmen and Werner Bilder were killed while making love in his car behind the gym of the Catholic school. Someone shot them: Werner twice in the back of his neck, Eva several times into her chest and abdomen.

“He must have sneaked up on them,” Frau Brocker said when she described the deaths to me and Renate. “Probably shot the man from behind while the woman had to watch.” She shuddered, her eyes glistening and dark as if she could see the scene of the murder. “It was a crime of passion.”

Frau Brocker knew all about passion: she had an illegitimate son because she’d danced with an American soldier at the end of the war.

During that summer, two more couples were killed the same way. Renate and I didn’t know them, but we saved the pictures the Burgdorf newspaper had published, first showing the live victims, then the cars in which they had been killed. According to the articles, the police suspected
Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier, an escaped murderer, whose parents owned the dairy farm near the Rhein. As a boy, Hans-Jürgen had swung kittens by their tails, spinning them as fast as he could before releasing them to smash against the walls of the barn and slide off, stunned piles of bones and skin. This information came from one of his old classmates who, according to the newspaper, had witnessed Hans-Jürgen burning a tomcat’s front paws when he was seven years old.

One day after school Renate and I spotted his father in the pay-library, checking out westerns. With his thin shoulder blades and tired eyes, he didn’t look like the father of a murderer, but Trudi Montag assured us that he was not as blameless as he seemed. “Things go on in that family—” Her voice drew itself into a hush. “I’d be ashamed to tell you.” But she refused to say more.

We bought strands of licorice at Becker’s grocery store next door and ate them as we walked to the end of Schre-berstrasse where a huge willow stood above the narrow brook. Grabbing a fistful of thin branches, Renate swung herself across the creek. When her feet reached the other side, she stumbled on her short leg and let go of the branches. I caught them as they swung back to me, pushed myself off, and flew across the brook. I dropped down next to her, and we sat cross-legged on the tufts of grass that covered both banks of the brook.

“You think Trudi Montag knows more about the murderer?” The gums around Renate’s front teeth looked black from the licorice. She picked up a stick and fished a leaf out of the water. In the damp air her black hair was even frizzier than usual.

I shook my head. “She would tell,” I said. “She always does.”

By the time we’d walked back to my house, we’d convinced ourselves that Trudi Montag, indeed, didn’t know
anything beyond what the newspaper had written about the murders and the torturing of the cats.

When Renate and I pressed Frau Brocker for more details about Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier, she told us, “About ten years ago he killed his financée. And the man she was with. In a car. You two were little kids when it happened. Too young to remember. His parents were the ones who called the police.” She rubbed Nivea Creme on her hands, massaging it into her fingers and slender wrists. “His ear-lobes are attached,” she said, “and you know you can’t trust people with attached earlobes.”

I reached up and flopped my earlobes back and forth. My thumbs fit into the V-shaped gaps between the bottom of my earlobes and the sides of my head. Renate was touching her earlobes too. When Frau Brocker had first shared her theory about ears and trustworthiness with me, I’d counted the kids in my class with attached earlobes. Nearly half of them, including the principal, had ear-lobes that were connected in a smooth line to the sides of their heads.

“Tell us about Hans-Jürgen’s trial,” Renate asked, though we’d heard all about it just a few days ago.

“It lasted nine days.” Frau Brocker had arrived early at the courthouse every morning to join the line of people waiting to get in. “The day he was committed to the asylum in Grafenberg,” she said, “I was sitting in the first row.”

Grafenberg was a half hour’s drive from where we lived. It was known for two things: a spectacular forest and the insane asylum where Trudi Montag’s mother had died. The sprawling buildings lay encircled by a high wall with curved glass splinters embedded in the mortar; yet, Hans-Jürgen had escaped from there last February, quite likely shredding his clothes and hands as he climbed the wall and hoisted himself over the top. For a few days his photo had
appeared in the paper, but soon it had been replaced by politics and sports, and I’d forgotten all about him.

Until now. Headlines claimed the police were following new leads. The grainy pictures showed a man with a dark beard and blazing eyes who, Renate and I agreed, looked like Simon Peter, the most handsome apostle in
The Last Supper
mural above the altar of St. Martin’s Church.

We wondered where we would hide out if the police were looking for us. The basement of the elementary school was a good possibility—no one was allowed down there except the janitor who took care of the furnace. Perhaps Hans-Jürgen was even hiding in the barn at his parents’ farm. We thought of sneaking into the Braunmeiers’ barn to see if we could find him, but we figured the police had already searched the obvious places. Besides—his parents were the ones who’d turned him in before.

It occurred to me that the best disguise would be a nun’s habit: if Hans-Jürgen shaved off his beard, only a portion of his face would be exposed.

“He might be right in the Theresienheim,” I told Renate.

But she shook her head until her hair flew around her shoulders. “The other nuns would know,” she said with absolute certainty. “They would.”

Convinced Hans-Jürgen was somewhere close by, we sat on our windowsills at night, writing lists of suspicious persons—anyone who passed our houses after eight. Sometimes, from two blocks away, came the howling of Emma Müller’s chained poodle. Across the street from my bedroom window, the branches of the Talmeisters’ cherry tree bent under the weight of the fruit. They were too high to reach from the sidewalk, and when the wind tore them from the tree, they exploded where they hit the sidewalk. Sparrows and pigeons picked at the dark red pulp, but most of it blotched the sidewalk like the evidence of a massacre,
smeared lumps of red around bleached kernels that looked like bone fragments.

We kept adding to our list of hideouts, and the one that finally made the most sense was the abandoned flour mill with its crumbling brick arches and rotting floorboards. It had been destroyed during the war, and no one had bothered to restore it. Surrounded by woods and swamps, the huge cluster of rooms—some of them open to the sky—centered around a wide chimney.

To get to the old mill we had to ride our bicycles north, past the dump that was three kilometers from the middle of Burgdorf. In the moist air our skin felt clammy. Just before we reached the dump, the blacktop ended and our tires bounced along the narrow road with its slabs of broken pavement and rutted tire tracks. Renate’s legs were too thin to hold up her white knee socks, and they dribbled down in uneven rolls above her black patent leather shoes. Though she pumped the pedals as hard as she could, her polio leg never seemed to keep up with her strong leg.

We biked to the mill almost every day that summer, and each time we heard the birds before we saw them rise in a tattered veil above the mounds of garbage. To startle them, I’d ring my bicycle bell, which Karin Baum’s grandfather had given me long before my parents had forbidden me to go to his bicycle shop.

Sometimes we saw the town truck dump its load, and we pinched our nostrils as the stench mingled with the refuse already settling into decay. Some of the birds flew close enough to touch, had we wanted to. Depending on the direction of the wind, the smell followed us as we passed the dump and pedaled our bikes to the mill.

Tied under my bike seat was the coil of clothesline I’d taken from our basement. We searched the dense woods around the ancient brick structure, trying to avoid the
patches of nettles that stung our legs and the swampy areas that sucked our shoes down and filled them with mud.

Thistles with purple flowers grew along the walls. Though the cold vaults of the arched stone building we shouted, “Hans-Jürgen … Hans-Jürgen …” clutching long sticks which we would hide inside the chimney before leaving. Cellar stairs dropped off into gaping holes of darkness, a thick darkness that wrapped itself around the amber beams of our flashlight when we pointed them to the ground. Sometimes we thought we heard footsteps moving away from us. Our plan was to strike Hans-Jürgen’s head with our sticks before he had a chance to shoot us. He’d sink to the ground, a puzzled expression on his face as his eyes glazed over. For at least ten minutes he’d be unconscious—plenty of time to tie him up with the clothesline.

By the time school started in September, we had decided to become detectives when we grew up; we knew we had a special ability to imagine ourselves into the criminal mind. We kept our search for Hans-Jürgen secret from the other kids, especially from Rolf Brocker, who came to our apartment some days after school and then left with his mother around five. He’d only laugh at us, and then he’d tell Manfred Weiler. The two of them would steal our ideas, catch the murderer, and get all the publicity.

On weekends we rode our bikes to the old mill, and during the week we planned our detective work. In Renate’s room we developed a secret language we’d sing out aloud in case Hans-Jürgen caught one of us. Vowels stayed the same, but consonants were doubled with an
o
in the middle.
Murderer
became
mom u ror dod e ror e ror
. The captured one—I always pictured Renate in this position, her back against Hans-Jürgen, his forearm across her throat—would chant the code loud enough for me to hear and rush for help.

We’d close her door so her brother, Adi, couldn’t hear us practice our language. Wind stirred her lace curtains with the pattern of dolls holding hands. Above her bed hung a framed poster of Burgdorf taken from an airplane: the major streets seemed to form the pattern of a many-pointed star, its center at St. Martin’s Church, as if someone had designed all the paths to lead there.

Some afternoons Renate and I plotted our strategy in the basement while sitting on crates next to the apple shelves. When it was warm outside, we played with marbles in the backyard, our right index fingers black where we’d lined them up against the ground to push marbles into the hole.

The backyard was bordered by our L-shaped building and a fence. Together they formed a square that could only be entered through one of the house’s two entrances. The first floor, except for the section where we lived, contained stores: Neumaier’s pharmacy, the optician, the hardware store, and Anton Immers’s butcher shop. Above them were eighteen apartments. In one of them lived Manfred Weiler with his mother and two big sisters. Sometimes he watched us from his kitchen window. That fall, his old dachshund, Ola, had a false pregnancy and chose our marble hole to lie in. Her belly hot and taut, she growled and snapped at us each time we tried to move her.

“Hans-Jürgen … Hans-Jürgen …”

Our voices echoed through the empty rooms. Piles of brick and dirt lay in the corners. Renate walked close to me, clutching our coil of rope. It was a cloudy Saturday afternoon, and the air felt cool and damp. Our bare arms brushed, and we jumped apart, alarmed. Green shards from bottles glinted where our flashlights struck them. Weeds and moss trailed from gaps in the walls.

“Hans-Jürgen … Hans-Jürgen …”

In some of the rooms trees had forced their way through
the floor. They were stunted, except for one oak whose limbs pushed themelves beyond the old roof line of the mill. Sometimes a ray of wind trapped itself in the tangle of branches and thrust its way out, startling us and showering us with leaves.

The last Tuesday of November Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier was caught inside a movie theater in Düsseldorf, watching a Romy Schneider film. In the newspaper Renate and I read that, until four days before his arrest, he’d been hiding out at the mill. Though I wanted to tell my parents how close we’d come to finding the murderer, I knew it would be a mistake. They’d confine me to my room or forbid me to leave the street. They wouldn’t understand that Renate and I had the special ability to imagine ourselves into the criminal mind.

Whenever I remember Renate and me searching through the empty building, I hear the sound of our voices as we call Hans-Jürgen’s name.
He stands close by, half hidden by a crumbling archway. In the oak tree across the wall, wind rushes under the branches like a quick beam of light, and a swarm of leaves blows across the wall in a straight path. Hans-Jürgen lifts his face and one of the brittle shapes pushes against his cheek, twirls, then sinks down by his feet. He blinks. His hands are empty and scarred from his escape across the Grafenberg wall. He leans forward, head tilted as if listening. Any moment he might step toward us in response to our call
.

  
Veronika

F
rail
, my mother said when she talked about her college friend Veronika.
Frail
—a word that meant black hair cropped short, long hands with many rings, soft flowing dresses. Whenever Veronika stayed at the sanatorium in Oberkassel, my mother and I would visit her on Sunday afternoons. A guard would open the gate, and we’d drive down a lane bordered by lilacs until we reached the building. If the weather was warm, we sat with Veronika in wicker chairs on the lawn and one of the attendants, young men in white trousers and shirts, served us lemonade in thick glasses. The front of the sanatorium was an old villa with turrets and a stained-glass window above the carved door, but its back was a concrete addition with recessed windows too small for anyone to squeeze through.