Authors: Ursula Hegi
“To help us identify families that are not supportive of the Führer,” Sister Mäuschen said.
The school nurse, Sister Agathe, quickly shook her head. The students liked her because she gave them licorice and told them riddles.
Nearly everyone in that meeting looked at the principal, Sister Josefine, who was passionate about learning, who advocated that all children were born with the impulse to create things that were not there before—pictures and stories and songs—and that out of that impulse came wanting to learn more. Sister Josefine had finesse, and she used that finesse to procure whatever her school needed: radios and teachers and books and repairs. For herself, she craved poverty. Spartan self-discipline. She was accustomed to obedience—the obedience of others—because she’d grown up on an estate with horses and tutors and servants.
For the sake of her school, she’d offer up any student or teacher who might cause conflict. Nuns whispered that Sister Josefine tangoed with the government, wrapped it into her virgin-nun dance. Still, they had faith she’d calculate just how much they must let the government lead so they wouldn’t risk losing their convent and their school.
But Sister Josefine said nothing to contradict Sister Mäuschen.
*
If Thekla could advise the Führer what to change—just one change if he were to ask her, one single change—she would remind him of his promise to strengthen the German family, get him to understand that children denouncing their parents weakened the family.
While her boys pray, Thekla decides she must warn Bruno’s parents,
not only about what he revealed in class, but also about him climbing from his window to go to rallies. Tonight. Tonight she will tell his parents.
Last fall, when Thekla’s mother told her the Stosicks’ rental was vacant, Thekla went to see it: parquet floors, tall windows, a bathtub deeper than that of the Abramowitz family, for whom her mother worked as the housekeeper.
When Herr Stosick quoted her the rent, Thekla confessed she’d estimated it to be twice that much.
“An honor to have you live here,” he said. “A colleague, after all.”
Gisela Stosick nodded. As usual, she was all of one color—sandy dress, sandy scarf, sandy hair—except for her shoes, top-stitched leather in two shades of blue. Gisela liked flamboyant shoes.
“It’ll be good for our Bruno,” she told Thekla, “to get to know his teacher.”
Thekla was astonished how welcoming Gisela was. As girls they’d been classmates and in the same youth group, but once Gisela had married, she’d set herself above her unmarried friends.
*
How to talk to the Stosicks without betraying Bruno’s trust? If they weren’t so strict, he wouldn’t need to come to Thekla with his secrets. Like joining the Hitler-Jugend last December, as soon as he could after his tenth birthday. For him it was different than for her other boys, who felt like adults once they joined, important. Bruno had been a little adult all his life,
altklug
—old-wise, competing with his mind; but once he belonged to the Hitler-Jugend, he got to compete with his body, and discovered the joy of exertion as he leapt and ran, trained for distance and speed, proved himself as part of this sprawling team that included and absorbed him.
But within two weeks, his parents found out and forbade him to belong.
Now they won’t let him out of the house alone. It mortifies Bruno when his mother walks him to and from school as if he were a little boy.
Early this morning the teacher heard him crying downstairs; then his father’s voice, firm; his father’s steps, heavy, in the bathroom. Herr Stosick takes up more space than his wife and son together. The click of the dog’s toenails on the kitchen floor, then scratching at the back door. Soon, the dog’s dance with the door, throwing herself at it, wailing, scratching, until someone let Henrietta out. Some mornings Thekla used to hear laughter downstairs. But not lately. Bruno has been sullen. Agitated.
So many losses for him.
The comradery of the Hitler-Jugend.
His best friend, Markus Bachmann. Markus, who murmured instructions to himself whenever he sketched because he already envisioned the finished piece. Who hiccuped when he laughed. Who was always rushing himself, though he was one of the brightest boys in Thekla’s class. Markus had two best friends, Otto and Bruno, but Bruno had only Markus as a friend. And now he’s too alone in her classroom.
Two Jewish families have left Burgdorf so far. The Gutbergs last December on a flight to London. A few weeks later Markus’s family on a ship to America. So unsettling, Thekla thinks, that heat against the Jews, people saying that their greed caused inflation and unemployment, that they came from nowhere and were taking over everything. On the radio it often was: communists and Jews, as if they were the same. Even at St. Martin’s Church, some parishioners make unkind remarks about Jews. Of course, Thekla never agrees, talks about something else, if she can.
*
When she followed Bruno to the rally, she could spot right away that it had been organized by people who understood about teaching,
how to respect children and inspire them. It was the way Thekla taught, instinctively.
Too many of her students had been raised with the rule that children should be seen but not heard. Of course it was intoxicating for them now to have a voice, to be told they were important, Germany’s future. Alone, none of these children had power; yet, being part of the marching columns gave them a mysterious power, all of them moving as one. That part made Thekla uneasy, and she wouldn’t mind saying that to Bruno’s parents.
But what she wouldn’t admit to them is how, from being critical one moment, she was sucked into the swirl of song and of fire, into the emotions of the mass, that passion and urgency, that longing for something beyond them, something great, till she could no longer separate herself, till those emotions became hers, too, that hand to her throat, that sigh, that upsweep of her arm. She felt repulsed. But she didn’t let herself show it. Because someone might be watching. Because it might be a trap. And because just before that moment of repulsion—for the duration of a single heartbeat—she had felt the children’s rapture as her own, felt their pride at being part of this ceremony that was as mystical as church and as lavish as opera with its pomp and music and processions.
*
It was like some crush, some moony devotion, when you lose all hold on yourself and can no longer be responsible.
Where am I? Where have I gone to? What if it will be like this from now on?
She didn’t want that feeling, just as she didn’t like falling in love.
Because of what you give up.
Loving was different. It was only the falling she minded. She wished she could love like a man, be skin only, lust only. Her friend, Emil, was good practice. With a man like Emil Hesping, you didn’t need to worry about breaking his heart. It was known in Burgdorf that he got away from any woman unlucky enough to fall for him. Still, women of all ages were drawn to his
genuine liking of them, to his curiosity about the minute details of their lives, to his energy that he focused so totally on each of them. With a man like Emil, a woman might be tempted to tame him so that he would adore her, only her. But not a single one could hold him for long—though he might return to her, for a while—not even the milliner, Frau Simon, so flamboyant with her laugh and her red hair.
Whenever Thekla danced with him, his touch was fast bliss throughout her body. Even when they linked arms on their walks. It was the strongest response she’d had to any man. More like an allergy. So far, she had not slept with Emil. Not because it might lessen his pursuit. And not because of the church. That, she had sorted out with her conscience when she was nineteen and had her first lover, dismissing chastity with its inherent guilt. Just as she dismissed the story of God creating the world in six days. And yet, she liked the rituals of mass and redemption. On the first Saturday of each month, she knelt in the half-dark of the confessional and revealed to the priest her so-called immoral thoughts and acts, counting on him to absolve her, bless her, restore her virginity in the eyes of God, a joke and a miracle.
She hadn’t slept with Emil because for her sex skidded into longing, into that moony falling that made her afraid of losing the beloved though she had no intention of marrying him, or anyone. Living with two brothers had shown her how much marriage took from women. For herself, she wanted Emil’s impermanence. Soon, she would leave him. Because of his reputation. Not with women. But with politics. Until the burning of the Reichstag, she, too, had made fun of Nazis—that they couldn’t add without counting fingers; that their Führer bit into carpets when he got furious—but ridiculing them was no longer safe.
*
When the rally ended, she waited for Bruno without letting him see her. She told herself it had just been pageantry that appealed to small-town minds conditioned by religion to narrow ranges of pleasure. It was probably of value to her teaching to have felt what an adventure it was for her boys to be one with this mass that marched and sang. Passion came into it. The sacred. The ancient. Pride. And now that was over. Until the next time. And she didn’t have to think about it till then.
As she followed Bruno through the dark streets, she felt a terrible foreboding because he looked so small, almost indistinguishable from the walls that seemed to slant toward him as if to collapse.
She called out his name.
Startled, he turned.
“I don’t want you out alone at night,” she whispered. “I was at the rally and—”
He got so happy that he cried, going on about how he loved the Führer and the rally and his uniform.
“Sshhh . . .” She glanced around, brought her index finger to his lips to calm him. “You’re tired.”
“Now I know what it’s like to live.” He could be so pompous.
“Oh, Bruno. I want you to promise me something.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to wake me up if you plan to climb from your window again.”
“But—”
“So that I can go with you. As long as one adult is with you . . .” She didn’t know how to end her sentence. Couldn’t promise him that his parents, in time, would let him belong.
Still, he promised to wake her.
W
HEN THE PRAYER
ends in Fräulein Jansen’s classroom, the only sound is that of pigeons scratching at the frozen dirt in the flower box that the boys and their teacher built last May and attached to the brick ledge outside their window. They planted flowers to attract butterflies:
Gänseblümchen
—daisies and
Lavendel
and
Ringelblumen
—marigold.
Thekla used to buy corn for the street pigeons whenever she could afford it, but now, with her teacher’s salary, she can every week. Can afford to buy decent food for herself and give money to
Mutti,
who does Thekla’s laundry. Across her dresser, she has spread the table runner
Mutti
embroidered for her. Almut Jansen’s embroidery is treasured in Burgdorf, and she sells it at the Christmas market. She also barters it for groceries from Weiler’s store, books from the pay-library, and medical advice from Frau Doktor Rosen.
Franz raises his hand. “How many kilometers to Berlin, Fräulein?”
What her boys need from her right now is a lesson in geography—not the lesson about Lent she’s supposed to teach. She’s always willing to abandon her curriculum, teach instead what her boys want to find out that very moment, and it’s then that she feels her connection to them most deeply.
“Identifying our students’ enthusiasm is half of our teaching,” her favorite teacher used to say. Fräulein Siderova taught every day as if it were her first, with that readiness for wonder and discovery. That’s how Thekla wants her boys to experience learning—through touch and memory. Once the knowledge is inside them, she can deepen it, let it support future knowledge.
“Who can tell us how many kilometers to Berlin?” she asks. Granted, this will be geography via fear, but it’ll calm her boys and teach them to remember where Berlin is.
“Is it over three hundred?”
“Over two hundred?”
A storm of hands, up, more enthusiasm than she can expect during her lesson on Lent. To lecture about Lent may be appropriate when there is plenty of food; but with such poverty in the country, it would be cruel to influence children to give up anything else. She’s seen devastating poverty when she’s visited some of her boys’ families; and yet, their mothers will offer her food they cannot spare. “I just ate,” Thekla will lie, even if she feels hungry, her saliva slick in her throat. She understands the shame of being poor, not letting on that your furniture is being repossessed, pretending you don’t witness your neighbors’ disgrace.
Pretending—
*
She loves them all: the boys with crossed eyes and the boys with crooked teeth; the brainy boys and the beautiful boys; the boys from good families and the boys with
Rotznasen
—runny noses—who’ve been born into families where something as basic as wiping your nose is not done for you when you’re little, and you never
learn how to do it for yourself. Like the Führer. This is where he came from, and the uniform can’t cover that. His skin may be clean and dry, but he’ll always have that
Rotznase
. It’s a way of living, a way of having been brought into life.
At least my boys are thriving in school, Thekla reminds herself. At least they’re not as thin anymore. They’ve become more playful, mischievous, chasing each other with chalkboard erasers . . . gluing her chair to the floor . . . and she’ll play along by pretending to be exasperated.
She smiles at Franz, whose
Vater,
after three years of unemployment, is working at the bakery, though only in the dawn hours; at Eckart, whose
Mutter
is finally back at her job cleaning St. Martin’s Church; at Otto, whose father repairs sewing machines in Düsseldorf.