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 (176 page)

It enraged the midwife when people whispered, “The toymaker has a
Kuckuck
—cuckoo in his nest.”
Kuckucks
were lazy, and because they didn’t like to sit on their eggs, they laid them in the nests of other birds, tricking those birds into raising them.

She’d been the center of gossip for so much of her life that she’d taught herself it was none of her concern what others said about her. But this was different: this gossip was hurting her son and his new family. That’s why Lotte Jansen turned on anyone who—under the guise of compassion—urged her to confide. “My daughter-in-law is hardworking and kind,” she’d say. “It is an honor to have her in my family.”

On Nordstrand, gossip would always be part of her daughter-in-law’s life. Here, marriage led not to acceptance but to the loss of pity. Over the last quarter century, nineteen pregnant St. Margaret Girls had snagged—so it was said—local fellows into marriage and instant fatherhood, depriving local girls of potential husbands. But despite marriage, the status of St. Margaret brides remained below that of brides who’d waited till they were properly wed before spreading their legs, and birthed only children who were legitimately conceived.

That stigma of illegitimate birth haunted the St. Margaret mothers and their children, their grandchildren even, so that in a store or church someone might say, “
Ach ja,
your grandmother was a St. Margaret Girl.”

W
E PLANT
STIEFMÜTTERCHEN
—pansies on my
Oma
’s grave every anniversary of her death,” says Walter. Crooked teeth but the part in his hair always straight.

“The anniversary of when my cat died,” says Wolfgang.

“Please.” Fräulein Jansen raises both hands. “Can we please talk about anniversaries of celebrations?”

“My sister’s wedding,” Andreas Beil offers and flattens the cowlick that juts out above his left ear. Like a tusk, his sister teases him, calls him
Rhinozeros
.

“The anniversary of when my aunt became a nun,” says Franz.

“My aunt is a nun, too,” says Walter, who likes to draw pictures of Jesus.

“My aunt eats lunch with us every Sunday,” says Franz.

“But my aunt stayed with us when my
Oma
was sick,” says Walter.

“My uncle is a priest in Oberkassel,” Jochen says.

As Thekla steps toward the boys, away from the chill of the window,
she can see how exhilarated they are to pull her closer with their words, with the proof of their devotion.
All boys are men. And all men are boys. If you treat them all like ten-year-olds, you’ll get their adoration, but you don’t have to acknowledge their power. Because for that power to display itself, it needs your acknowledgment of it, too.

*

But Bruno looks away from her, the skin below his eyes smudged from lack of sleep. She must speak to his parents tonight, make them understand how the uniform would help him to be accepted by his classmates. It does, whenever he smuggles it to school and wears it in the classroom. But that has become complicated now that his mother picks him up for lunch and walks him back to school.

Just last week in the school yard, his first day of no longer wearing his uniform, several boys surrounded him, shoving, yelling.

“Your father will live in hell!”

“Not so!” Bruno cried.

“For all eternity!”

“Protestants don’t get to live in heaven!”

“Not so!”

His parents will want to listen to Thekla because it has been a concern before, boys heckling Bruno that his father will go to hell. Herr Stosick is the principal of the Protestant school, but Bruno has to go to Catholic school because his mother would have been excommunicated for marrying a Protestant if they hadn’t both promised the priest—long before there was a wedding and a Bruno—to raise all future children as Catholics. Except there was only the one, Bruno, after three stillbirths.

*

“I see a bonding among boys who wear the uniform,” Thekla will say to his parents, “stronger than resentments or class differences.”

“All that pride and power?” Günther Stosick may ask.

“And what’s wrong with pride?” she’ll ask him right back. “Haven’t we done for long enough without it?”

“We were more human without it.” He’ll fold his hands in front of his belly. He’s not flabby but thickset and strong, with a belly that starts high.

Thekla cannot fathom how Gisela can be attracted to his body. To his mind, yes, he’s brilliant; and to his eyes, a gorgeous deep brown. But that belly . . .

“It’s about respect for our children,” she’ll tell both Stosicks. “About a future for our children. The Hitler-Jugend offers them adventure. Equality. It’s impossible for a schoolchild to avoid all involvement in youth activities. What harm can it do, letting Bruno go to some meetings? We had songs and bonfires, too.”

She just hopes that ugly dog of theirs will be asleep. If not, Henrietta will jam herself against Thekla’s thighs again, nudge her to stroke that thick neck, that mottled black fur so short it feels like skin. With the Stosicks right there, Thekla will pet Henrietta. But whenever she’s alone with the dog, Thekla keeps some piece of furniture between herself and Henrietta.

“The uniform made such a difference for Richard,” she’ll tell the Stosicks. “Until then, the boys were merciless with him.”

No. That would be inviting the Stosicks to tell her Richard’s situation is hardly comparable because he’s illegitimate. They may get offended because his mother is one of those widows. Every town has them. Women whose husbands died in the Great War and who resorted to prostitution.

Thekla must be diplomatic with the Stosicks, or she’ll lose her apartment. She was lucky to find a place she can afford without needing the Führer’s help. Not that his help is available to her. Still, he should grant unmarried teachers the same loan he grants to newlyweds, one thousand marks, almost a year’s income. He rewards only married couples. For the birth of each child, he reduces the loan by
a quarter, motivating women to push one child after another from their bodies. After four children for the
Vaterland,
the families owe nothing. So unjust to the teachers who devote themselves to the children of those families.

*

Ever since Thekla was three, she has known she was a teacher. Knowing began the afternoon she found a chestnut by the flour mill and gave it to her father, Wilhelm, who was ill again, sitting by the stove in his black suit, eyes pale and winter-still, hands like fallen twigs on his knees. He didn’t look at her. Only at the tiny blond hairs between his knuckles. She lifted his left hand, turned it palm up. It was warm. Because that side of him was near the stove.
Mutti
said it was the side where his heart pumped.

Thekla set the chestnut into
Vati
’s palm, took hold of his thumb, and rubbed it across the glossy-brown shell. When his fingers began to quiver, she felt the teaching that lived inside her:
This is what I am, what I want to do.

His eyes flickered, let her in just long enough to follow him down a shaft toward a blink of lucidity—
so that is where Vati lives when he goes away like this
—follow him deeper yet, down, down so fast it was like falling, and suddenly mist and glitter and color bursting open in his memory—
because of the chestnut and the skin
—and as she felt him reaching for that mist and glitter and color, she became Wilhelm,
was Wilhelm climbing a tree and tossing green apples to his friends . . . was Wilhelm sledding down a hill with a dog chasing him . . . was Wilhelm falling, an infant, Wilhelm—
But already the passage was slamming shut
—because I don’t love you enough?—
and he was lost to her. But not forever. Because now Thekla understood it was touch that opened him up—
chestnut and skin brought together by the teacher. By the teacher’s way of teaching. Mine—
and that once she knew how to bring him back so he’d be like other fathers, she could love him, too, the way she loved
Mutti
.

O
TTO’S PULSE
is in his throat, fast like some nights when he has the teacher under the blanket with him, her hand with his hand there, nasty and beneath the warmth and—“Did you want to say something, Otto?” his teacher is asking.

He covers his throat to hide his pulse but feels it in his palm, his wrist, nasty, and confession isn’t till Saturday.

“Otto?”

What if she can tell by looking at him what he does with her at night?

His belly feels warm, heavy. His belly and his legs. Sins get heavier with each hour you can’t confess them.

She nods at him. Waits.

“The anniversary of . . . of my own birthday?”

“Another good example,” she praises him. She likes this thoughtful boy who is drawn to the passion of learning. A few of her boys are all brain. While others are all body: Andreas, Wolfgang. But Otto is both.

“You are both,” Fräulein Siderova told Thekla when she was a student in this very classroom. “Brain and body. I was so much like you when I was a girl.”

“I want to be a teacher, too,” Thekla said.

“You will be an amazing teacher,” her teacher encouraged her. “A natural and inventive teacher.”

*

Fräulein Siderova always had one favorite student—allowed herself only the one—and when she’d part from that girl at the end of the school year, she’d still invite her to her house, so that, over the years, there were favorites of all ages whom she taught to prepare a formal tea party, to arrange her table with linens and flowers, with Russian porcelain so thin that light shimmered through the hand-painted violets, the kind of porcelain—the girls felt certain—their mothers and aunts would have locked away from them.

The first with new fashions, Fräulein Siderova would ask her young guests, “How do I look now?”

When she had her reddish-brown hair cut in a bob before other women in the village dared to wear it that style, she asked Michel Abramowitz, the husband of her best friend, Ilse, to take her photo. Michel was not just a lawyer but also an amateur photographer who took pictures of the townspeople in his unique style that considered the background as much as the individual, who was always off to one side, never in the middle.

The photo with the short bob exposed a tiny birthmark on Fräulein Siderova’s jaw near her earlobe where her hair used to cover it.

“Like a smudge from a kiss,” her girls sighed.

“A kiss from her lover . . .”

They whispered about her oil portrait above her credenza. So romantic, the girls said when she told them it was painted by an
artist she’d met aboard a ship on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. So romantic, how she watched him there from her painting.

*

The old women in town said that during those times when there was an abundance of dying, there was also an abundance of poetry. “As if there ever could be too much poetry,” they would say.

Some of the people Sonja Siderova read to were grandparents or parents of her students, even some of her students once they became women and the high fever of childbirth took them. And because she was not frightened of death, she stilled the fear of the dying who had faith in her power to transform their fear by holding it inside her soul, however briefly, before she let it dissipate.

Glass bowls the townspeople gave her, vases that she kept empty to let the light pass through. If needed, they’d fetch her from school to read to their dying, poems that they’d liked as children and that took them back to being children:
playing on the jetties with the froth of river near their ankles . . . or running through forest into that green-white flicker of sun . . . or sledding down the dike through whirls of snowflakes against their cheeks.
Sometimes the dying were afraid of what had been unfinished with a parent, say, or a child, a sibling. In their eyes—especially in the eyes of those who figured they had no secrets—Fräulein Siderova saw their secrets, but she never revealed them because she believed that you held claim to your own secrets.

During her absences from school, her friend, Frau Abramowitz, would often arrive and sketch with the students. She, too, had studied to be a teacher, but she couldn’t work as a teacher because she was a married woman now. If she wasn’t available, it was assumed that Fräulein Siderova’s most accomplished student—like Thekla Jansen in 1912 and Trudi Montag in 1925—would lead her class in memorizing one of the poems she marked for just those absences in her Echtermeyer collection.

*

Occasionally, a new edition of the Echtermeyer was published, but Sonja Siderova continued to teach from the one her parents had bought when they reached Burgdorf the week after her eighth birthday. At home in Russia, higher education had been limited to ten percent of all Jewish children, and Sonja’s parents—like many Russian parents who wanted the best education for their children—settled in Germany, where many professors and teachers were Jews and more than a quarter of all Jewish students went on to secondary school. In Germany, the Siderovas felt welcome. They had no idea that the more they’d blend in, the more resentful the townspeople would become of their success and their house and their work and their children’s good grades.