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 (17 page)

She was assigned to work each afternoon in the dormitory of the one-year-olds, a long, airy room with rows of cribs. When school closed for summer vacation, I asked Karin if I could help her with the babies, and she got permission from Frau Doktor Korten, who ran the baby mansion, for me to help two afternoons a week. The doctor had small hands and a gentle voice, but she was so heavy
and tall that she could fill a door frame with her bulk. Her gray hair was parted down the middle like Karin’s, but pulled back into a low braided knot. When she walked into the nursery—a white smock over her flowered silk dress—most of the children raised their arms toward her.

Two sixteen-year old girls, Anita and Grete, worked with us. We fed the babies, took off their diapers and shirts, gave them baths in high sinks shaped like miniature tubs. We laughed when they splashed us and when we sprinkled powder on their bottoms and bellies.

Anita was at the baby mansion for the second time. She’d given up her first child for adoption. One afternoon, when Anita told us she was going to keep this baby, Karin surprised me by saying she was keeping hers too. Until then she hadn’t said a word about it.

“Hanna is going to help me care for the baby after school.” She reached for my hand and held it against her belly.

I felt the baby move under my palm like a sleeper stretching after a long rest.

For the first time we talked about names for her child. She liked Adelheid for a girl and Siegfried for a boy, though I tried to tell her that Martina and Joachim were better names. If my brother, Joachim, had lived, he’d be eleven years old.

A few of the babies had something wrong with them: Andrea was blind, and Franz only had a thumb and little finger on his left hand. Renate told me that marrying a cousin could get you a baby with two heads or a clubfoot. Her mother, the midwife, had helped bring all kinds of deformed babies into the world. “A grandfather,” Renate told me, “is even a closer relative than a cousin.” She probably said this because she was upset at me for spending so much time with Karin; yet, I couldn’t help imagining the baby behind the wall of Karin’s belly, waiting backstage like an actor with a frightful mask.

But when the child was born in September, she wasn’t ugly or deformed. She had fine black hair and blue-gray eyes and thin fingers that gripped my thumb the afternoon I was allowed to hold her. She was two days old, and I felt a jolt of love that stunned me into silence as I stood with her in the newborn nursery. I carried her to the French doors and lifted her close to the glass so she could see the rose garden and the fountain. I pictured myself taking her for walks in a wicker carriage. Now that Karin’s grandfather didn’t live above the bicycle shop anymore, I’d be allowed back into the apartment. Karin and I would play with her, give her baths, sing to her.

But Karin’s parents wouldn’t let her bring the baby home. They talked about adoption. At first Karin cried and refused to leave the mansion, but one evening, after a long talk with Frau Doktor Korten, she let her father pick her up. When I visited Karin, I felt strange walking through the bicycle shop. It had been leased to a young man without a mustache, but the same old smell of tires and machine oil hung about the apartment and opened an odd sensation in my stomach.

Karin sat on her bed, a stack of closed books and magazines on her blanket. Her hair was stringy. “They wouldn’t even let me name her.” She started to cry.

“They can’t do that.” I sat on the edge of her bed. “If you don’t sign the adoption papers, they can’t give her to anyone.”

“But then she’ll have to stay there.”

“We’ll visit her. And after a while—maybe your parents will change their minds.”

“They won’t.” She shook her head. “I know they won’t.”

Right then I decided to name the baby Martina even if she got adopted and her new parents chose a different name for her, and the next afternoon I rode my bike to the baby mansion and offered to help in the newborn nursery on weekends.

“Let’s go for a walk in the garden,” Frau Doktor Korten suggested. As she moved along the paths, soft ripples went through her body and made the flowers in her dress shiver. She told me I’d helped Karin a lot while she’d been there, but that it would be better for me if I didn’t come back. “And for the baby,” she said. “You’ve become too attached.” Beneath her skirt her thighs made a soft, slapping sound.

“Martina can sleep in my room,” I said to my parents at dinner. “Frau Brocker is here all day anyhow, and I’ll take care of the baby after school.”

“I know you love her a lot,” my mother said, “but it wouldn’t be good for her if she stayed in Burgdorf—for her or for Karin. She’d only be reminded of her all the time.”

My father laid one hand on my arm. “Try to understand. You’re too young to take on that kind of responsibility.”

“But Karin could visit her here. She’d help—I know she would.”

My mother shook her head.

“If you adopted her … I mean, if Joachim hadn’t died—”

“But he did, Hanna,” my father said softly.

They both assured me that Martina would find a family of her own who really wanted her, that it would be better for her to live away from here, but I didn’t want to listen: all I knew was how unfair it was that Martina should be punished for who her father was. Though my parents didn’t say so, I knew it was all about that. Martina had been banned from Karin’s life, just as I had been banned from the bicycle shop. And all because of Karin’s grandfather—not because either of us had done anything wrong.

When Karin came back to school, the other kids didn’t quite know what to say to her, especially Renate. I tried to do things with them together, but since they didn’t like each other, I split my time between them, riding bikes with Renate or sitting in Karin’s room above the bicycle shop.
Karin seemed so much older than the other kids, and when I was with her, I felt almost grown up. She was thin again and the ends of her hair touched her shoulders. Her parents hadn’t taken her back to the baby mansion—not even once—and she wasn’t allowed to ride her bicycle there.

“They’d find out,” she said when I tried to talk her into riding out there with me one Saturday morning. “And I promised not to.”

Martina was two months old when Karin’s parents convinced her to sign the adoption papers. When she told me the next day in school, it struck me that, lately, entire days had gone by without my thinking of Martina, and I felt as if I’d been the one to abandon her.

“Maybe it is better for her,” Karin said, “getting two parents who love her.” But those words didn’t sound like her own, and the skin around her eyes looked puffy.

I left her standing in the tiled hallway and ran out to the bicycle rack. The November sun stood low in the sky as I rode my bike to the baby mansion. I had to do something, but I didn’t know what. When I tried to picture myself riding back, Martina in one arm, I couldn’t see beyond that. My parents certainly wouldn’t let me bring her home, and I couldn’t just hide her in our basement. Some of the puddles along the way had glazed over with skins of ice that tore under my bicycle tires.

In back of the mansion the rosebushes had been pruned and the fountain turned off. I leaned my bike against a hedge and walked up the steps to the flagstone terrace. The French doors of the newborn nursery were locked. Martina’s crib stood close to the glass panes: she lay on her back, awake; her black hair had grown fuller and looked as if someone had recently brushed it. A clean sheet covered her legs. Though her features hadn’t changed, she seemed larger, stronger than the infant I’d held in my arms. She raised her right arm as if tracing an invisible sketch in the
air, and I pressed my palms against the cool window squares, wishing I could feel the same love for her that I’d felt in the beginning, but all I could have was an odd sense of peace.

  
The Woman Who Would Not Speak

M
anfred Weiler’s father hung himself when Manfred was six years old. A few hours after he held Manfred out of the window of their third-floor apartment, he tied a length of rope to the cast-iron lamp in the kitchen and—while the rest of Burgdorf celebrated the passing of the old year, 1952—slipped the rope around his neck and stepped off a chair, though he didn’t mean to.

One winter morning, years after his death, when Manfred and I were sitting in the same algebra class, I looked at him from the side and it was as if I could see his father’s vicelike palms around his temples, holding him suspended above the night. I imagined those hands closing around my head, imagined the endless drop from the third floor to the packed dirt of the backyard, felt a cold surprise that made my spine and feet heavy, stiff, and felt the sudden rush of icy night air moving upward through my body.

But Manfred’s father did not drop him.

He held him out of the kitchen window long enough to force his wife, Helga, to tell him where she’d hidden the
grocery money, and then he pulled Manfred back into the kitchen and—gently—laid him on the floor.

The Weilers rented a small apartment on the third floor in the other arm of our L-shaped building. In the backyard Manfred and I learned to ride our tricycles. We fought. Played with his dachshund puppy, Ola, which his father had won in a poker game. Escaped together across the fence my father had raised to keep us safe, and ran to the playground of the Catholic school, which we were too young to attend.

When Manfred’s father was sober, he gave us candy sticks and told us all about luck. “You have to believe in it if you want it to work.” He’d pull us along on our tricycles by tying a frayed length of manila rope to our handlebars. He’d step into the loop and—the rope tight against his belly—he’d run while we screeched with laughter. Sometimes, when he had money and the bell of the Hansen bakery truck rang from the street, he bought us
Schnecken
, and we’d uncoil the glazed pastry ribbons so we could loosen the raisins with our tongues and eat them first.

Manfred’s father had a chicken coop in the backyard, and whenever he slaughtered a chicken, he gave the feet to Manfred and me. We’d chase his older sisters down the stairs and around the yard, pulling the tendons that hung out like pieces of string and made the claws open and close.

One warm day in spring we let out one of the new chicks. Its legs were gawky, its feathers the color of lemon. Careful so it wouldn’t get away from us, we played with it on the ground. It kept drawing its head back like an old man hunching up his shoulders against the wind. Though the sun was out, the earth was still moist from the night’s rain, and whenever the chick staggered and fell, particles of dirt clung to its feathers.

It was Manfred’s idea to give it a bath in one of the
puddles, but I was the one who held it submerged in the shallow water. While it tried to squirm from my hands, Manfred rubbed at the dirty spots. A few times it shrieked, but as its feathers plastered themselves against its body, the chick turned silent, skinny.

“It’s stopped moving.” I lifted it from the puddle.

Manfred splashed some water on its head. “Come on you. Wake up.”

Gauzy skin over the hills of its eyes, the chick lay in my palms. My stomach cramped as I tried to push the chick into Manfred’s hands.

“You killed it!” He took a step back. “You’ll be in trouble.”

“I did not!”

“My father—” He started to cry.

“We—we can bury it.”

He sniffled, ran the end of his sleeve under his nose. “Where?”

The chick felt limp, wet. “Over there.” With my chin I motioned toward the white lilac bush outside my parents’ bedroom window. “No one will find it under there.”

The ground was soft enough to dig a shallow grave with our hands among the lilac shoots. We lowered the chick into the hole, covered it with dirt, and tried to flatten the mound with our hands.

“You better stomp it down.” Manfred’s face was streaked with dirt and tears.

“Not me. You do it.”

Perhaps I only imagined the fine crunch of bones below his feet as he stepped on the small grave, but I felt certain I heard something as his soles left deep prints in the earth.

Though his father found out about the dead chick from Manfred’s sister Margit, who’d watched us from their kitchen window, he didn’t punish Manfred. Instead he sat with both of us on the back steps and made us promise not to open the door to the chicken coop again. He didn’t even
yell at us. It was one of those times when his eyes were clear and the sleeves of his shirt buttoned. He told us his luck was starting to come back—that he could feel it. I remember loving him for a brief time that day while we sat on the stone steps, loving him for his free laugh and the promise of luck and the excitement in his voice and the way the sun slanted on his blond hair and caught itself in his eyes.

And yet—many nights his shouts and the sounds of things breaking drifted across the yard. When we heard the cries of Manfred and his sisters, my mother turned on the light above our back door. Arms crossed, she stood by the window. The skin around her nostrils turned white, and she looked as if she were about to storm out of the apartment, through the dark backyard, and up the stairs to the Weiler’s apartment.