Authors: Ursula Hegi
After sitting with us for a few minutes, my mother stood up. “I’ll be back in a while,” she said and left the room before I could stop her.
Karin pulled off a shred of skin next to her left thumbnail. “So—” she said, examining her thumb, “how’s school?”
“All right.” My neck felt stiff from the effort of not staring at her belly. “How’s—you know … living here?”
She shrugged and hid with me in the embarrassed silence that folded around us until I felt as though my body, too, were swollen. Voices drifted in from the lobby. A young girl’s laugh. The sound of a door. A few times Karin reached up as if to twist a strand of hair but touched her shoulder instead.
When my mother finally returned, Karin seemed as relieved as I felt. “Let us know if you need anything,” my mother offered.
“Thank you, Frau Malter,” Karin said.
Before starting our car in the parking lot, my mother sat with her eyes closed. The collar of her cotton shirt was turned up, catching strands of blond hair between the blue material and her skin.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I should have known. …” She opened her eyes. Lit a cigarette. One hand on the steering wheel, she maneuvered the car out of the lot. She drove fast. Too fast. “I should have talked to her parents that day,” she said, “not just to the old man.”
All at once I remembered the white coating on the back of my doll’s eyes, the makeshift surgery on the dining room table, and I was seized by the loss of a friendship that had ended the year Karin and I were seven.
Until then, the bicycle shop had been a magic place for me, filled with the fairy tales Karin’s grandfather had told me, warm and bright even in winter, strangely familiar with its faint smell of machine oil and black rubber that drifted up the stairs and wove itself into the apartment above, through the kitchen, and even into Karin’s room.
Karin was my best friend before Renate came to our school. We sat next to each other in Frau Behrmeier’s second-grade class. Her grandfather knew all the fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm book:
Rapunzel, Hänsel und Gretel, Rumpelstilzchen
… He told those stories in a voice that could drop from the roar of a dragon to the whisper of a princess.
An old man with wide shoulders, he had a squat build that seemed to grow closer to the floor each year. He lived above the shop with Karin and her parents. In the back pocket of his overalls he carried a rag for polishing the bikes on display. Oil stains spread across the backs of his hands like birthmarks, but the bicycles were spotless and gleamed under the many light bulbs he’d rigged from the ceiling.
He liked to stroke my hair and lift me on top of the glass counter between the cash register and the display of bicycle chains. The dark smell of oil and rubber clung to his olive skin and gray mustache.
Once he took Karin and me on a ferry trip to Kaisers-werth and from there on an excursion boat to the Altstadt, the old section of Düsseldorf. At an outdoor cafe with round tables, he ordered
Früchtebecher
for us—layers of banana ice cream with pineapple chunks and whipped cream—and Berliner Weisse—beer with raspberry syrup foaming in a goblet—for himself. Whenever flies tried to land on the checkered tablecloth, he swatted them away with his broad hands. A maple tree on the sidewalk was shedding some of its double-winged seeds, and we caught them as they twirled down like propellers and stuck them to our upper lips like his mustache.
One Monday afternoon, when I came looking for Karin at the shop, her grandfather told me her mother had taken her to Mahler’s department store in Düsseldorf.
“Shopping,” he said.
“Can I stay?”
He pulled a rag from his pocket and wiped his hands. “Here,” he said and lifted me onto the counter next to a flowerpot shaped like a duck. It was filled with real ferns and red plastic daisies.
“Will you tell me a story?”
“How old are you now, Hanna?”
I smiled at him. “You know.”
“Come on. Tell me. How old are you?”
“Seven. Remember? You gave me a bicycle bell on my last birthday.”
“Seven.” He nodded as if not one bit surprised. In the ridges of his cheeks and across his neck lay a film of dust.
“A big girl like you … doesn’t wet her pants anymore, does she?”
My neck felt hot. “Only babies wet their pants.”
He brought his face close to mine and peered into my eyes. “You’re sure?” His breath was moist against my face. Hair sprouted from his ears and nose.
“I don’t. I never do.”
On the wall behind him hung shiny bike parts and black tires. Two air pumps were propped against the lower part of the wall.
“Really sure?” His hand reached under my skirt and pressed against the dry patch of cotton panties between my legs. “You’re sure now you don’t wet your pants?”
“I told you.” Squirming away from him, I slid from the counter and ran toward the door.
“Wait.” His voice sounded as if he were afraid. “The story. I’ll tell you a—”
But I kept running. Down the sidewalk that shimmered white in the afternoon sun. Across the empty street. Around the corner. Past the elementary school where the Hansen bakery truck was parked. Kept running until I reached our building. In the kitchen Frau Brocker was ironing my plaid dress. Rolf sat at the table, drawing a black truck.
“Where’s Karin?” Fine beads of sweat coated Frau Brocker’s forehead as she moved the iron across the material. Her brown hair lay in new curls around her head, and she wore bright red lipstick.
“I don’t know.” I darted past her into my room and closed the door.
“Hanna?” she called after me, but I pretended not to hear.
I sat on my bed and looked out the window into the backyard with the chicken coop and the high iron rods over which the women from the apartments laid their carpets
every Friday and beat them with long rattan paddles. The fence that closed off the backyard had several rows of chain links that didn’t match the lower section. Until two years ago, when I was first allowed out on my own, my father had drawn the fence higher each year; still, I’d managed to climb across it on my many trips to explore the neighborhood. It had started when, at age three, I’d been found sitting on Emma Müller’s bed two blocks away, playing with her dolls.
I didn’t play with dolls anymore. They were boring. I liked books; yet, people kept giving me dolls. Frau Brocker had lined them up on the shelf next to my bed, from the tallest one, Inge, to a finger-sized doll named Birgit.
Inge was made of celluloid and had blue glass eyes that closed when I tilted her back. Her eyelashes lay against her cheeks until I moved her whole body forward again and then her eyes clicked open, hard and glossy. When I pulled the eyelashes, the blue disappeared once more, and I wondered what the doll saw inside her head.
I carried her to the open window where the light was brighter. Such a stupid-looking doll—all stiff and pink. As I pushed my fingers against the eyes to test how far in they could go, they moved back from their sockets, then snapped right back. I pushed again to see how they were held in place. Then again, a little harder … Suddenly the eyes disappeared into the head. Just like that. I shook the doll, her face pointing toward the floor, but the eyes wouldn’t drop back into their sockets; they only rattled inside the celluloid head.
“Frau Brocker,” I shouted, then covered my mouth. I didn’t want her to see the doll, didn’t want anyone to see.
The door opened. I wanted to hide the doll, but I couldn’t move.
“What’s the matter?” My father came into my room.
The doll hung from my hand. I thought he’d get angry
at me for breaking her eyes, but instead he lifted her from my hands as if she were a newborn kitten.
“How did it happen?”
I started to cry.
He brought one arm around my shoulders. “I’m sure it was an accident.”
“I don’t even like dolls.” I wiped the back of my hand across my eyes and nose. My stomach ached from letting him believe it was an accident.
“I think we can fix her. At least we can try. All right?”
My father had finished with his patients for the day and took most of that afternoon to restore the blue eyes to their proper location. With thin pliers, black thread, and tweezers he sat at our dining room table, fishing through the empty sockets for the eyeballs. I sat across from him and handed him instruments as he called out their names. The light above the table made his scalp look shiny where his reddish hair had thinned; yet, his beard was full and curly as if all the growing had happened in those hairs.
Around five o’clock large raindrops began falling rapidly, splattering the windows. On the wall between the two windows hung my mother’s painting of the Sternburg, the one she’d been working on the day she fell in love with my father. She’d painted the Sternburg many times since then, but in this picture the drawbridge was down, spanning the moat that circled the old farm. The light in the painting would change: on sunny days it looked almost transparent while in the evenings, when we turned on the lamps, it took on an amber sheen as if warmed by the light surrounding it.
My father still had on the white jacket that he wore when he drilled people’s teeth. When Frau Brocker and Rolf came into the dining room to tell us they were leaving for the day, he interrupted his operation to praise Rolf’s picture of the black truck. Frau Brocker stopped by the window,
frowning at the rain. Her hair was covered with a plastic scarf to protect her permanent.
I ran my fingers along the edge of the tablecloth and found the knife she’d hidden under the beige linen to ward off the lightning. After they left, my father bent back over the doll. From time to time he blinked. His breathing was slow, measured. When he finally pulled the blue eyes from one of the sockets, they were connected by two wire loops that formed the number eight, and I was disappointed to see that their backs were coated with a white substance that felt like hardened flour against my fingertips. My father glued the eyes into the sockets, holding them in slings of thread until the glue set; then he cautiously pulled out the threads and applied more glue around the seams where the glass joined the pink celluloid. Though he dabbed the corners with an old handkerchief, some of the glue hardened into tiny drops that looked like tears.
“Here.” He handed me the doll. “I think that’s the best we can do.”
The blue eyes stared at me and stayed open although the doll was lying on its back.
“She’s almost like new,” I tried to convince myself as I held the stiff doll in my arms. But she was not like new: she couldn’t close her eyes anymore, and inside her head the backs of her eyes were blind.
Around eight my father left to play chess at the Burgdorf chess club, which met at Herr Stosick’s house. When my mother tucked me in and sat on the edge of my bed, my stomach felt even worse from not telling her and my father how I’d broken the doll.
“Karin’s grandfather forgot how old I was,” I blurted out instead. “He thought I still wet my pants.”
She shook her head. “Why would he …?”
I tried to laugh away my uneasiness. “But then he checked, and now he knows I don’t.”
My mother sat very still. The skin around her nose became
white as though all the color had drained to her neck. She laid one hand against my cheek and asked softly, “Are you all right?” And when I nodded, she gathered me into her arms and said, “Will you please tell me? Everything?”
I told her about pushing out the doll’s eyes and that I was sorry, but she wanted to know more about Karin’s grandfather touching my underpants. As I told her, she held me gently and said that what he’d done to me was wrong. “Very wrong.” Then she got up and put on her raincoat and walked to the bicycle shop.
I kept the light on and lay with my arms folded under my head, counting my breaths in the empty apartment. On the shelf next to my bed sat Inge, her blue eyes wide open, opaque drops of hardened glue in the corners of the sockets.
My mother didn’t tell me what she’d said to Karin’s grandfather when she came back into my room, but she asked me, “Will you promise to stay away from the bicycle shop?”
I thought of the bicycle parts reflecting the lights, thought of the cool glass counter and felt the sudden loss of a place I didn’t want to return to.
“It’s a filthy place,” my mother said.
Yet it was also warm and bright and magic.
“Promise to stay away from there?”
I nodded, suddenly relieved.
“Karin can play with you here. Anytime.” My mother bent to kiss my forehead. “I’m glad you told me what happened.”
My friendship with Karin Baum straggled on through that fall and winter. We played in the schoolyard or at our house, but not in the bicycle shop. And the following spring Renate became my new best friend.
Some things are too complex to name, to separate into safe units labeled good or bad, and it becomes simpler to
discard them entirely. I think that’s what happened to my friendship with Karin, and it wasn’t until she carried her grandfather’s baby, that I came to understand the impact of losing her.
My first visit to the baby mansion was so awkward that I felt reluctant to return when my mother wrapped a box of pralines and a book for Karin a week later. But something happened that second Sunday afternoon in the visitors’ room, something I couldn’t even remember afterward except that Karin had laughed at something I’d said. Somehow that moment wiped out the embarrassment between us, and when my mother suggested the two of us take a walk through the rose garden, Karin and I left her in the visitors’ room and walked along the manicured paths.
The people in Burgdorf didn’t approve of my mother taking me to the baby mansion; they approved even less of me riding my bicycle there some days after school, as if unwed pregnancies were contagious. But the only thing that was contagious was our need to fill each other in on what had happened to us during those years we hadn’t been friends. Sure, we’d sat in the same classroom, and a few times we’d played pranks, unhinging garden doors all over Burgdorf, but that was not the same.
And so we talked for hours—in the visiting room, the rose garden, and the nursery where Karin worked. We talked about friends and school and boys and parents. But not about her baby. And certainly not about her grandfather, although I thought about the old man whenever I tried not to look at Karin’s belly.