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 (178 page)

“A wise woman.”

“What’s her name?”

“She said the secret is always inside us, but we won’t remember it till we die. If we knew the secret, we’d be blinded by it.”

“What’s your wise woman’s name?”

“You . . .” He laughed aloud. “. . . are jealous!”

“I don’t believe in being jealous.”

“Not believing isn’t enough to keep it away.” He grazed her lips with his. “Duck lips.”

“Your reputation for flattery is unsurpassed.”

“That bad?”

“That bad.”

“Child lips then?” Emil. Against her. Hard. “Think of the timing! One week before the elections. How convenient. And Hitler had the audacity to claim the fire was a signal from God.”

*

They danced past Maria Bertels, who was sitting with two brownshirts, coarse, boisterous, definitely not the kind of men Thekla would go out with. What was Maria doing with them?

She glanced away when Thekla waved to her. Probably because she was still at Henkel’s in Düsseldorf, waiting for a teaching job. It cut through Thekla, that familiar uneasiness—having while others didn’t. At the university, she and Maria used to belong to the hiking club, and after they’d graduated, they continued to hike with others from the club, dancing at the
Karneval,
sharing frugal dinners, complaining that there were no teaching positions because of the peace treaty and reparation costs.

Until last spring, they’d been friends, as long as Thekla, too, was working any dismal job just to keep
Leib und Seele zusammen—
body and soul together: clerk in an optician’s shop, at a lumberyard,
in a pharmacy, when she could have done so much more with her education. The humiliation of losing even those jobs. And always that doubt:
If I’m not a teacher, then who am I?
Private lessons barely paid, but Fräulein Siderova said they would make Thekla feel like a teacher. And they did. Just as the visits to Fräulein Siderova’s classroom made Thekla feel like a teacher. For that hour. That half day. Making it excruciating to return to work that was not teaching. Many of her classmates were still in jobs like Maria’s and hadn’t taught at all.

*

Thekla longed for a friendship with a woman. Like the friendship of Sonja Siderova and Ilse Abramowitz. Every Sunday, the two women took long walks by the Rhein, as had been their custom for decades. From a distance, they were like sisters, tall and swift as they leaned their bodies into the wind and talked. Always talked.

They must know everything about one another.

But they revealed nothing. Especially not what happened to Ilse Abramowitz’s first child. The people of Burgdorf said the child must have been born dead or had died right after birth. Yet, there was no marker for a child on the Abramowitzes’ family plot. That’s why the old widows, who rode their bicycles to the cemetery to tend their families’ graves, suspected that Ilse Abramowitz had started bleeding on the train, that the trembling of steel wheels against steel rails must have initiated the trembling of her womb. What the widows knew for sure were these facts: One morning in the fall of 1899, a very pregnant Frau Abramowitz had climbed aboard the 8:42 train, accompanied by Sonja Siderova; but two days later, when the two returned, Ilse Abramowitz’s belly was flat, absolutely flat—without that gentle swelling most women retain for weeks after giving birth—and Sonja Siderova had to support her elbow as though she were an invalid. For weeks Ilse
Abramowitz cried, wouldn’t look people in the face, but since she didn’t speak of any miscarriage, it would have been ill-mannered to ask.

After that first pregnancy, it took her four years to conceive again, long enough for people to speculate that she’d never have children; but then she had two in a row, first her daughter, Ruth, and the following summer her son, Albert, and when she’d go for her walks with Fräulein Siderova, one would be pushing the wicker carriage, the other the stroller.

*

Maybe, Thekla thought, she could form a friendship like theirs with Gisela. As girls, they’d played together. And Gisela likes it that her son’s teacher lives upstairs. Maybe they—

“Four thousand arrests!” Emil. Still going on about the communists and intellectuals who were arrested that night. “That list was ready before. The arrests happened so quickly. Think of who benefited.”

Him, she’d make wait. There was something delicious in waiting for what you could have now, prolonging your anticipation. Delicious. If waiting was what
you
chose—not what the priest chose for you.

Emil reeled her against his body. “That mass obedience . . . I’ve seen it at the sports club, the attitude that they’ve given up rights for the greater good. They feel justified in demanding we all make the same sacrifice, and—”

“Not so loud.”

“—they get indignant when we don’t. It reminds them of what they’ve given up.”

“Tonight you’ll sleep alone again,” she murmured.

*

Emil tilted his head to hear better, felt her palm against his chest as she pressed herself away from him, danced away from him, lithe, graceful, danced for herself, Thekla, not with him, eyes hooded, no smile, danced for herself only, nothing flowing around her, not even her hair, cap of black locks, dress sculpted to her so that her body beneath the fabric was all he saw as she danced, not seeing him in that dance where he couldn’t retrieve her into his arms as she came up against him because she retreated again, and he nothing but a body she needed across from her so she could do this in public, because to sway like that alone would be indecent, and tonight he was that body—it could be anyone for her—tomorrow some other man, dancing with her but not reaching her, aching to kiss those long eyelids, those upturned lips—duck lips, child lips—parted as if to ask something of him that he could never give her because she wouldn’t tell him what it was; and yet, yet, this dancing for herself only made her more seductive, inviting without welcoming him, and as he danced across from her, he found—for an instant—his reflection in her pupils, black pupils with those golden-brown rims, but his image couldn’t enter her, just flitted on the surface—he for himself, not for her—which would never be enough for him. While for her it was. As she danced. Swayed.

W
HEN ALMUT JANSEN
was hired to keep house for a stonecutter, she couldn’t bring Thekla along, and it stunned her how deeply she missed this baby she hadn’t wanted till recently. The practical solution was to let her mother-in-law bring Thekla with her to work at the St. Margaret Home and settle her in the nursery.

But practical is not necessarily good for the soul. Almut knew her mother-in-law would visit Thekla throughout the day in the nursery, just as she had her own son; but it chafed at Almut to imagine her daughter with those children in limbo, whose loneliness showed in their desperate eagerness whenever you walked toward them, and in their dispiritedness once they saw that you were not coming for them. The older these children got, the less likely they were to be adopted, and a few months before starting first grade, they were transferred to the orphanage in Husum.

Almut couldn’t bear to have Thekla think of herself as one of
these children without family; and when her former employer offered to hire her back, she asked Wilhelm about moving to Burgdorf. “I could bring Thekla with me to work.”

“But how about the man who—?”

“You said you didn’t want to know.”

“Going to Burgdorf makes it different . . . if that’s where he lives.”

“I have nothing left for him. Nothing.”

Wilhelm opened his lips. Closed them.

She told him that she was no longer drawn to the child’s father, that she knew too much about him. His habits. The hairs on his brush. His distance from his wife.

“He is married?” Wilhelm was startled. And immediately relieved.

“It has all gone to you now, that love,” she said, “to you and to Thekla. I’ll never touch him again.”

Wilhelm felt uneasy. But he also knew that the people of Nordstrand would never forget that Almut had married him while pregnant with another man’s child. Burgdorf she had left
before
anyone knew of her disgrace, and she could return there proudly, a married woman with her husband and child.

“They need toymakers in Burgdorf,” Almut told him. “There are so many of you here.”

He nodded. So many that it seemed he’d always be one of the new toymakers, no matter what his age, working on the crowded main floor instead of upstairs in the design studio where he longed to be.

“Go to Burgdorf,” his mother told him.

“You don’t want me to stay?”

“Here, they will always gossip.”

Almut stroked her mother-in-law’s arm from the wrist up to the elbow and back again, and she felt her shiver. “I wish you’d come with us.”

“Yes,” Wilhelm said. “We want you to come with us.”

“I know you do,” Lotte told them. “But—”

“They need midwives in Burgdorf, too,” he said.

“Midwives and toymakers . . . I can’t leave here.”

“But you’ll visit?” Thekla asked.

“Christmas. You’ll come to me in the summer.”

*

Wilhelm was accustomed to the sound of the sea at high tide and the absolute stillness at low tide, but in Burgdorf his wife taught him to listen to the murmur of the river that you could hear from anywhere in her village, at any hour, a constant murmur that touched upon her lifeblood. He could see that this village was as much a part of his wife as the shape of her face and her long neck. Here in the Rheinland everyone talked in her melodic dialect. Here, she could be joyful with their daughter, promenade her around town in a wicker carriage.

Alexander Sturm hired Wilhelm as a master carver. Though the toy factory had every tool a toymaker might desire, Wilhelm used only the tools he’d brought with him from Nordstrand, and he never had to replace a single tool because he kept them meticulously cleaned and oiled.

The factory made jumping-jacks and spinning tops and stuffed lambs and—the owner’s favorite—fairy-tale building blocks that fit into puzzles, six sides to each block, nine blocks to each puzzle, that Wilhelm Jansen carved with infinitesimal scenes from
“Aschenputtel”
—“Cinderella,” “Rapunzel,”
“Froschkönig”
—“Frog King,”
“Schneewitchen”—
“Snow White,” and other fairy tales. If you didn’t fit those blocks together as they were intended, they’d form strange tales that could make you laugh or cry out or ponder the twists in your own life.

*

Every noon, after the Abramowitzes had eaten, Almut would ladle the rest of the food she’d prepared in their kitchen into pots with
lids that she’d stack inside a pail because the pots were hot to the touch. It embarrassed Wilhelm when he walked home for his midday meal and came upon his wife carrying his meal in a pail.
Hog slop?
He felt petty. Reminded himself how eagerly she loved him at night. What an accomplished cook she was. How she anticipated his hungers and kept his clothes clean. How she noticed the chafing of his trousers against the insides of his thighs and sponged him with a tincture she boiled from chamomile. How she served meat more often than their neighbors because the lawyer Abramowitz could afford it. Still, whatever his wife served him came after the lawyer had eaten his fill.

As Wilhelm dreamed of toys he wanted to make, he tried to reassemble the stories of his own life the way they were given to him at birth, building blocks of one mother and one father and four children, and how those blocks—scattered underwater—were still unsettling the blocks of his own family. With Almut, he had believed he could fit these blocks together, make the picture whole, but his daughter’s likeness to the lawyer Abramowitz was disturbing the pattern, though Wilhelm fought knowing for sure, fought the inertia by reminding himself what mattered was his own devotion to the girl.
Thekla.
Always at him with her adoration, her curiosity, till he gave in to her, let her careen with him toward the tilted sea, where direction was no more than something to fall away from, where nothing but his daughter’s voice, her hands, could lure him back.
Thekla
. Her fierce tug on his fingers when she learned to walk.
Thekla
. Right at his elbow when he built a box for his tools, dismantling twelve cigar boxes that Leo Montag had saved for him at the pay-library and assembling them into one double-layered box that he sanded and lacquered with Chinese red. He let Thekla choose the color. After he nailed brass reinforcements on all corners, he didn’t have to carve his name into the front panel because no other toymaker in Burgdorf and the surrounding villages owned a toolbox that magnificent.

One morning, as he carved the blocks for
“Rumpelstilzchen,”
he had an image of his wife peeling potatoes in the lawyer’s kitchen, sunlight on her hands and on the long curlicue peels while she spun golden spirals like the miller’s daughter, who was forced to spin straw into pure gold.