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 (146 page)

After consulting with Robert and Stefan’s American children, Helene arranged for the sale of the restaurant to two sisters from Maine. When Stefan wanted them to have guidelines for operating the
Cadeau du Lac,
Helene took his words, translated them inside her head into English before she set them down on the lined page, and then gave the words back to him in German, reading aloud, pausing to ask now and again, “Is that what you wanted?” as she transformed them on their passage between the two languages. It pleased him, her careful attention to his wishes. But he was furious when he found out that the new owners had changed the restaurant’s name to Homestead, abandoned the French menu to solid American fare, God forbid—pot roasts and steaks and fried chicken—and refurbished the airy porch into a gift shop where you could buy trifles like scented soaps wrapped in gingham, embroidered finger towels, and fancy jams with gingham-bordered labels.

Every afternoon Helene took Stefan for a walk around the block. Since the
Wasserburg
contained all he wanted, he didn’t like to go further than that. She’d feel sad for him because as a boy he had loved to roam, had wanted his freedom so much that he’d left a continent; but now he was content to sit with her on the bench at
the end of the dock while waves bobbed the planks beneath them. His eyes would travel the magnificent lines of the house he’d built, its long windows with their leaded panes, the blue tiles in the brick facade, the graceful steps leading to the polished oak door. Periodically Helene would notice his brief spans of disorientation. Both doctors had told her these would happen with little strokes.

Stefan was a tender old man, a thoughtful and even funny old man who could be alert but then retreat into memories, into sensations, wanting to be touched, to be held. During these final months, he finally offered Helene the passion she had longed for as a young woman. Nights he would roll on his side, facing her, nestling his head on her shoulder, fondling her nipples, her genitals as well as his own, curious about their bodies as if he’d forgotten all previous experience.

Sometimes she let him. But usually she would distract him.

She liked it whenever they talked till dawn, isolated within their native language from the rest of their adopted country, and as they spoke of their childhood, the lines of immigration shifted once again, a fluid border, spilling the two of them across distance and time to Burgdorf, which kept reasserting itself as home despite the horrors of history, claiming them with memories of a time before the horrors.
The river. The dike. The church tower. The fairgrounds. The pay-library.

Though Helene had been aware of Stefan since childhood, she was stunned to find how much he had noticed about her:
the candle with the white silk ribbon she carries in her first communion procession; that green dress with the heart-shaped buttons she wears on his sister’s eleventh birthday; the attic in her house and watching her act.

While Stefan would forget things that had happened the day before, details of his childhood would swell into that void, invoking those memories for Helene too.
The wooden barrel for catching rain outside his parents’ house. The clear taste of new rain from the dipping cup. And the day when he comes home with manure on his shoes, and his father, angry
—as angry as Tobias? Is that where his anger comes from?—
dumps Stefan into the rain barrel, dumps him upside down. A fever, that’s what he gets, hands hot, so hot, that he
cries for the cold water of the barrel, wants to put his hands into that very same cold water….

And then he’d be lucid again, noticing his surroundings, forming links between the now and before. Like one afternoon when it was too blustery to sit on the dock and she took him inside the restaurant. While they drank hot chocolate, he glared at the decor and the gift shop where his best tables used to be, whispered loudly that the new owners suffered from
Geschmacksverirrung,
a term that carried no direct translation but meant that their taste had gone hopelessly astray.

On the way up to their apartment, he fretted about the elevator. “It doesn’t sound right.”

“It sounds the way it always does.”

He smoothed down his tie where it disappeared into his suit jacket, always neat, wearing a suit even on days he didn’t feel well. “People could crash if the elevator fails.”

“If you want, we’ll have Danny check it.”

He got even more agitated when they found wasps in the apartment, five wasps that swirled upward from the kitchen counter and toward the fan above the stove. He grabbed a newspaper, folded it. But as he swung it at the wasps, he stumbled and fell. Ashamed that he couldn’t take care of something that simple, he felt the sum of all he hadn’t been able to do.
Like keeping Elizabeth alive. Sara.

“Here.” Helene crouched to help him raise himself up.

As he looked at the wide face of his third wife, he felt a sudden fear of death—
hers… her death?
But there was something not right about that fear. He yanked himself back into the kitchen where Helene’s hands were pulling him up, yanked himself back to what he knew: that this wife was healthy, strong; however, just then, he felt it again, that fear, as though it were a separate person standing there in the kitchen, and he knew his wife felt that fear too, except that she felt it about him—
my death?
—and it was then that Stefan knew he was the one who would die, knew it in the way you touch your own arm in the dark and know it’s yours, in the way you know that light flitting over the lake’s surface comes from above, not below.

So that’s how it is.

But before he was going to die, he had to let his wife know what he wanted to happen with the
Wasserburg.
Heavily, he leaned against her. “Lenchen—”

“Let me get you to a chair. Hold on.”

“Wichtig
—important.” From his knees to his feet to the chair.

“What is it?”

“Halte alles zusammen
—keep everything together.”

“Ich werde das Richtige tun
—I’ll do the right thing.”

And he knew she would. Knew he didn’t have to specify that, eventually, she would leave everything to his children. “Don’t sell it, Lenchen.”

Again she promised,
“Ich werde das Richtige tun.”

He nodded, relieved. His wife would do the right thing—just as she had done the right thing in raising the children of Elizabeth and Sara as though they were her own, never preferring Robert over them. Fair, she was, his wife. Fair even in allocating her love.

Sterne.
Stars. Their patterns and legends. More familiar to him now than in half a century. Because he was approaching them with the words in which he had first learned about them.
My mother’s words.
That’s why he could teach Emma about the
Sterne:
he did not have to translate them to her. With his own children the
Sterne
had eluded him because of the translation. And therefore had been lost to his children. But now that the
Sterne
had come near him once again, shifting the entire sky closer to earth, he marveled at their fabulous stubbornness, their wisdom, and took delight in revealing them to his granddaughter.

For her he set up the telescope that Helene had brought back from Germany when Robert had been Emma’s age.
What happened to all those years in between? Faded.
Even the wanting that used to drive him had faded, had become a recollection. How often had he deluded himself with the wanting that he trusted to get him what he set out for? What had he missed while rushing from one achievement to the next, convinced he was doing the best for his family? Instead it had been much more about the finest satisfaction he knew—the satisfaction that came from effort and success.

Oh, but he could still recognize that wanting in others, even in the son who disappointed him because he was too mild to ask for anything beyond the piano, but who was manifesting his silent wanting in the mass of his body. But there was nothing silent about Emma, his favorite, who’d been born with his furious wanting in her blood, and for now, her wanting was directed toward him and the
Wasserburg.

Mornings, as soon as she’d wake up, she’d insist on visiting him.

“You’re too heavy for
Opa,”
Helene would say when she’d catch Emma climbing on his knees.

“Let her,” he’d say. And though it sometimes made him dizzy to play
“Hoppe, hoppe Reiter…”
with her, he still did that too.
For her.

Even if his arms ached after letting her drop and pulling her up again.

Even if Helene fretted that Emma would hurt him. “She’ll be the death of you.”

But he’d laugh, not knowing that Emma would remember those words and carry them with her after his death.
“She’ll be the death of you.”
He found he didn’t need much—far less than he’d ever thought—as he moved deeper into the German language and took Emma with him, connecting her to all he’d left behind in Burgdorf as a boy. “Someday I’ll take you there,” he said.

“We’ll make a list of things to bring.”

“A list… ja.”

Here she was, six years old, and the spark between them was all that mattered. But it had taken him his entire life to get to her, and all they would ever have together were these brief years where their lives overlapped.
If you knew,
he wondered,
if you knew you’d only get that kind of love once—would you want it at the beginning of your life or the end?
Oh, but he wanted more for Emma.
Still, if six years were all you were given—what would I have chosen for her? The first six years or the last?

Opa
took a lot of short naps in his leather chair—her mother said he had little strokes—and sometimes Emma would watch him sleep
and dab her fingertips at the prickly red-and-silver hairs on the backs of his hands, gently, so she wouldn’t wake him. When she was with him—even while he was asleep like that—she’d feel quiet and pink inside, and as she’d breathe with him, for him, she’d feel the house all around her, breathing along, helping her to keep him alive. The house was as much a part of
Opa
as his heart, and often her love for both felt undistinguishable.

Some days she’d surprise him by slipping a treat for him into his toolbox—a picture she’d drawn of him or a Christmas ornament she’d snitched from Mr. Hedge’s tree—but
Opa
never got well enough to return with her to the elevator housing. Days when
Opa
was too sick to have her visit, she’d take solace in following her brother and telling him
Opa’s
stories of Burgdorf. Caleb would fill in the gaps that surrounded these stories with stories of his own that sometimes had little to do with what had actually happened, stories that Emma would eventually tell the son she would name after her grandfather. That’s how
Opa
swimming in the Rhein became the story of how he almost drowned and was saved by his sister, Margret. That’s how, at the wedding, every single one of
Oma’s
students, past and present, came to honor her. In Caleb’s stories
Opa
played the lead in all the plays in the Montags’ attic, and winters in Burgdorf were so harsh and sudden that the ferry would get trapped by slabs of ice in the middle of the Rhein and sit there for months.

With each new story, Caleb would carry a more detailed picture of Burgdorf, part true and part distorted, not unlike the way his grandfather, as a boy, had believed all of America to be occupied by tall buildings and buffaloes. It made Caleb grasp how—if you yearn for a place you’ve never been to—what you’ve heard about it will fuse with what you envision, engendering something far more real than you will find if you’re ever to come to that place. Then, of course, you will have to adjust how it first resided in your soul.