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 (147 page)

Half dozing in his leather chair, Stefan watched Emma count her Halloween candy and print the words she’d learned in school that day: DOG, LOG, BOG … “Don’t forget FOG,” he said and heard the voice of the Hungarian, “… too much fog out there.”
Only Tibor didn’t say it right—
but who am I to tell him, an immigrant myself?
—said fock instead of fog while the others in the kitchen were laughing and yelling that they wanted some of that fock if there was too much fock out there for the Hungarian, teasing him even months later that it was very focky outside or asking him, “Hey, Tibor, have you had a good fock lately?”

Stefan tried to laugh, but his face felt numb.
Ghosts. Some burned dead. Along with Tibor who led me to New Hampshire, who still comes to me. The slant of his back as he limps toward a stove. Specks of cinnamon and tobacco in the lining of his pockets …
As the numbness spread into Stefan’s skull, he was back on the Dutch freighter, bending across the injured seagull,
its frail cry rising from Stefan’s own throat, the wound in its back becoming Stefan’s, a wound so deep it pierces his chest—now, as one day I too will have to die alone? Now?—and as the membrane across the seagull’s eye dims Stefan’s sight of his living room, he feels the flutter of small fingers on his arm, Emma’s, as she ties his shadow to his chair.

“Opa?
There now …
Opa?
Wake up? I said wake up!”

He heard Emma breathe—
in out in out in out in
—and suddenly, suffocated by the splendor of the
Wasserburg,
by the costly weight of every single tile and brick and timber pressing down on him, he understood that the vision he’d seen from the rowboat that longago day had contaminated something within him. He wanted to warn Emma, but when he raised his eyelids once more—
now? alone? as one day I too
—she was standing by his chair, one hand plucking at the long-burned stubble on his wrist, the other covering her mouth, and as he recalled that she, too, had been part of his vision, he felt terrified for her.

The morning of his funeral she awoke with red imprints of her fingernails on her palms from clutching her sorrow inside her fists all night.
She’ll be the death of you. Emma will be the death of you. And still climbing back on his knees.
Once she opened her fists, her sorrow was everywhere, in her father’s eyes, in the drinking water, in her
Oma’s
steps one floor above her.

Slow, Helene’s movements were slow as she dressed. Now and
again she’d find herself stopped altogether and would need to remind herself to do whatever was next:
attach your stockings to your garters; button the cuffs of your dress; buckle your belt; brush your hair; put on the emeralds.
She felt tired as she opened her jewelry box, reached for the necklace Stefan had given her on their tenth anniversary. During the night she’d read some of the letters she’d written to him but had never mailed, and as she’d looked at the familiar slant of her writing and tried to recall the passion she’d felt for him, it was as though she were reading the words of someone she didn’t know very well. What surprised her was that he—at a time not so long ago—had been able to draw words from her that struck her as far too dramatic now, reminding her of stories she’d read of bundled love letters discovered in some ancient trunk. But then she opened the very first letter she’d kept from her husband—
That love is a hollow ache, a constant part of me that makes it difficult for me to be near you
…—and was right back to the day she’d written those words, right back to the old sorrow that fused with her sorrow over his death. Other letters.
You’ve drawn back with such a cruelty that confuses me, that contradicts what I believed we would have between us.
It was hard to continue reading. I
fall asleep and wake with the awareness of your indifference.
And yet, as she held the letters, she preferred that old sorrow to the caution that had set in afterwards.

Four decades she had been married to him, though people back home had predicted she’d be an old maid forever. Even Agathe Lange who’d been about to become a nun. “I’m so pleased it’s your wedding. I never thought you—”

Silly bride of Christ.

Silly pious bride of Christ.

I did better than you.

Got myself a bridegroom in the flesh—not on the cross.

And I did not hate you that day of my wedding.

Then why now?
She wanted to smash Agathe Lange’s pious face.
Sister Agathe, pardon me.
Smash the silly pious face of the silly pious bride of Christ. Smash Stefan’s face for betraying her with his absence of passion.
Stop it. Make yourself do whatever is next. The
necklace. Put it on.
As she fastened it around her neck, it suddenly stood for everything Stefan had given her—opulent and uncomfortable—and she resolved to wear it from this day forward. To keep Stefan and her rage present for herself, she would continue to dress in black like the widows she had known as a girl in Burgdorf. Against the black of her clothes, those green stones would look so remarkable that within weeks of her husband’s funeral, the people of Winnipesaukee would remember her as having always worn that necklace; and they would come to think of her as the Widow Blau who wore her grief in public, who made others speechless with her grief; and they would tell one another she was the most beautiful old woman they had ever seen.

‘Like she was always meant to be old,’ they would say.

Inside St. Paul’s church the air was clotted with prayers and incense and flowers that surrounded Stefan’s coffin. Father Creed had arrived on the train from Boston to say mass, and nearly everyone in town was there—merchants and teachers; tenants from the
Wasserburg;
people who’d eaten at Stefan’s
Cadeau du Lac.
At his grave, Helene stood between Greta and Robert, with Danny Wilson close behind her as if he were prepared to catch her if she fell. As she heard English spoken around her, she felt herself re-entering a wider world she used to be part of before she’d joined Stefan in the language of their childhood.

Tobias’ absence was so noticeable that it felt like a presence. When Greta had called him—angry with him for many months now because he hadn’t visited their father—she had told him about their father’s death as though he had caused it. “He’s dead and you were not here.”

“I am sorry.”

“Is that all?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Are you coming to the funeral at least?”

“I can’t. It’s a promise I made to myself when I was eleven.”

“This is not about you, Tobias.”

“I know.”

“And you’re no longer eleven and building matchstick animals.”

“Believe me, it’s hard for me not to come to his funeral.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I do want to be there for my family, but I need to do this for myself.”

“This is not about you.”

This is not about you.
But then, ironically, early this morning it had all turned and become about her—about her and Noah—when he’d come to her apartment for breakfast after staying at the rectory overnight. While she told him about her phone call to Tobias, he stood in the middle of her kitchen, shy and stubborn and looking at her so closely that her skin strained toward his. She did not ask him to sit down. Did not offer him coffee. Did not turn on her stove. When she took off her thick glasses, Noah brought both hands to her face and held her in his palms like the most valuable offering he’d made at any altar in his lifetime. Though she didn’t care if God sanctioned or condemned them, she felt certain he was their witness, evoked by the priest’s loyalty to this God as much as by her respect for the priest’s loyalty.

And somehow their witness did not hinder them, but rather filled them with sacred purpose. Their bodies had fought so long to uphold a wall to keep their flesh from touching, but now that they finally lay on her bed with daylight on their skin, touching became more than they had imagined in their loneliness. What was happening between them was totally right and totally wrong, was what it all had come to—those many hours of talking, of writing letters to each other—and God was here with them in this love, the kind of love that should have been celebrated in a church or at least a sacristy.

Her hands followed Noah’s bony limbs where they sprung from his body to where they tapered off in fingers and toes, traced the pattern of gray hair around his genitals, weighed his warm testicles in one palm. God was not her rival. God was the high priest who measured the union between them. She kept her eyes open when Noah Creed’s hands and mouth found all of her, and though she had known it would be like this, she had not known all of it, had not known how deeply it would resound in her, how her body would demand its own way as it surpassed reason and fantasy. The voice of her body rode her, pressed her back. It taught her to open
herself to Noah, to hold nothing from him or herself. Taught her to not feel embarrassed by her soft thighs and belly, by the coarse skin beneath her feet. And then he was ready too and she was whispering, “here, here,” though what she meant was now.
Now.

He expected both of them to be clumsier, less certain, but there was a grace about their coupling as if they had decades of holding and loving. As her hips rose to meet him once again, Noah understood what prayer could be because he became his own messenger to a God who certainly would understand, who had understood all along. Not in spite of God. But with Him. Because of Him this rapture. And praise.

“This is not about you,” Greta had told her brother, and at her father’s grave site she was still angry at him, unaware that Tobias had started out for the funeral that morning and driven as far as Concord before a ridge of nausea had slammed up in front of him, forcing him to the side of the highway. As he leaned his forehead against the steering wheel, he saw himself as a boy stepping on his miniature animals and knew that if he went to the funeral he would undo the vow that had kept him and Agnes alive. Sane.
Circling through my blood—someone like me; almost like me.
“Through your severed head,” he whispered to himself, summoning the steam-filled drying room and the bleeding head of the dream-calf that always instilled in him that odd mix of power and guilt and revenge. And of being damned by this image. “Your bloody head. And I won’t come to your funeral.”

Robert kept looking for his brother at the cemetery and later in the lobby of the
Wasserburg
where Pearl Bloom and several other women had set up tables and food. When he reached for a piece of chocolate, Yvonne caught his wrist before he could take off the silver foil.

She dropped it back into the glass dish. “Let’s have some vegetables and turkey.”

“We’ll die anyhow.” He picked up the piece of chocolate once more, unwrapped it, and slipped it into his mouth.

“I am sorry about your father.”

He nodded. Turned from her to help Pearl light the candles.

Yvonne adjusted the belt of her black chiffon dress. “We should sit with your mother and the children.”