Authors: Ursula Hegi
“If you break Lent, you get a tapeworm,” Andreas says.
“That is not true,” Richard says.
“It’s a superstition,” the teacher says.
Andreas shakes his head. “But it’s what my father says.”
“Another way of approaching Lent,” she says, “is that you don’t have to give up anything.”
Some frown at her; others lean forward.
“Instead you are learning how to wait for what you want, and that’s a good skill to have. Just remind yourself that you can have everything—only not right away. And that you’ll enjoy it more on Easter Sunday because you’ve waited for it.”
“Why is Easter on a different date every year?” Richard asks.
“It has to do with the moon. Easter is on the first Sunday after the first full moon after March twenty-first. Yes, Otto?”
“So the people who make the calendar start with Easter? And then they count back forty days to the first day of Lent?”
“Yes, and that’s
Aschermittwoch
—Ash Wednesday.”
“This year
Aschermittwoch
was early,” Eckart says. “That’s why Easter will be early, too.”
“And Palm Sunday, when Jesus made his triumphant entry into Jerusalem,” Walter says, excited to be talking about Jesus. “After Palm Sunday, the priests burn the palms and store the ashes for tracing the cross on our foreheads.”
*
“Next week,” the teacher says, “each of you will write an essay about the life of his namesake saint. When you research your saints, ask questions. Don’t expect to find out everything at once. Ask your parents, the priest, the sisters. Take notes. Especially if you think you already know, ask.” It’s what Herr Abramowitz used to tell her. “I learned that from a . . . family friend,” she adds. “An educated man who always encouraged me to ask questions.”
She gathers her notes, stops to salute when her students leave, a rush toward the door, toward home where their mothers or grandmothers are waiting for them with lunch.
Sobbing—
It makes her think of her little brother, sobbing before his first communion, terrified of touching the wafer with his teeth. “It’s a sin if you chew it. Herr Pastor Schüler said never ever let your teeth touch it.”
And she, calming Dietrich. “When he puts it on your tongue, you pull it in without letting it touch your teeth.”
“But I’ll choke.”
“Just push it with your tongue to the roof of your mouth.” Showing him. Opening her mouth wide and wiggling her tongue. “Like this. Afterward you swallow it a bit at a time.” How she adored Dietrich back then.
He was so superstitious. Believed if he prayed for one hour without blinking, he’d have an apparition of the Blessed Mother, who’d
bring him a cat that wouldn’t make him sick. He kept praying. But cats thickened his breath, made him cough. Elmar got sick from cats, too. But Thekla didn’t. Dietrich also believed that going into the synagogue or the Protestant church was a mortal sin. That’s why Thekla didn’t tell him when Herr Abramowitz took her inside the synagogue where the air was soft and cool. The day after the synagogue, she and Dietrich found a cat. The cat was drinking. Drinking steadily in the hot sun. Crouched by the blade of a fallen shovel, it was drinking from the water in that blade, its reflection surrounded by Dietrich’s reflection.
Sobbing—
Not Dietrich, no—
Someone in her classroom. She thought it was empty.
Bruno. Still at his desk. Sobbing, a quiet sobbing. When she takes his hands, he resists, stiffly. He has his father’s dainty hands. But on him they’re in proportion to his body. Cold, his hands. So cold.
She opens them. On his palms, half-moon impressions of his fingernails. “What’s wrong, Bruno?”
His lips are as pale as his face. He’s shaking.
“I’ll go with you to the nurse’s office,” she says.
He tries to speak.
“Bruno. Please tell me?”
He looks devastated, skin stretched, ears flat, as if standing in a strong wind.
“Did something happen?” Fear rises in her, and she takes his face between her hands. Her fingertips meet in back of his neck. His shorn hair feels like three-day beard fuzz where it ends above his soft winter-skin.
“I can’t live without the Führer,” he sobs.
“Oh, Bruno . . .” Why does he have to be so dramatic? “Sshhh . . . I’ll talk to your parents about how important it is for you to be in the Hitler-Jugend.”
But he only cries harder.
“Bruno? Listen to me.”
“If you tell—”
“I’ll be careful.”
“—
Vati
will nail my window shut and I’ll never get out.”
He throws his arms around her middle and his entire body is drumming against her, his belly and muscles, his face in the dip between her breasts as if he wanted to burrow into her, hide, and she will remember his face, there, so cold she feels it through her dress—remember just a few hours later when his father will cling to her, howling, his body, too, drumming against her.
W
E’LL BE THE
first school in the district to announce our plans for celebrating the Führer’s birthday,” Sister Mäuschen is saying when Thekla rushes into the faculty meeting.
“I’m sorry I’m late.” She raises her right arm, still shaken from what just happened with Bruno. “Heil Hitler.”
The sisters and teachers around the library table raise their right arms. “Heil Hitler.”
“One of my students had a problem and needed—”
“Sit down, please.” Sister Josefine leans toward Sister Mäuschen. “But his birthday is still two months away.”
“May I please remind you of the Führer’s last birthday?” asks Sister Mäuschen, usually so shy she nibbles her words before anyone can hear. But whenever she mentions the Führer, her voice fills out. “That’s when Dr. Goebbels told us how destiny chose the Führer from the masses because of his purity and his brilliance. God gave him this honorary post in history so the whole world can celebrate
him.” Sister Mäuschen swallows. Tucks her chapped hands into her sleeves, relapsing into the obedient little mouse. She used to be a spirited child, so stubborn about not liking shoes that she’d bury them whenever her mother made her wear them.
“Every one of our students should memorize the Führer’s poem about his mother.
‘
Mutter
’
is the title.” As Sister Mäuschen recites it, her voice deepens into that of a man rhapsodizing about his mother’s beloved devoted eyes:
wenn ihre lieben treuen Augen nicht mehr wie einst ins Leben sehn;
about his mother’s feet, which have grown tired and don’t want to carry her anymore while she walks:
wenn ihre müd’ gewordnen Füsse sie nicht mehr tragen woll’n beim Gehn—
Do his mother’s eyes go first? Thekla wonders. Or her feet?
Across the table from her, the school nurse, Sister Agathe, is doing her best not to laugh by pressing her thumbs into the corners of her mouth to keep it level. Her little face, tucked inside her wimple and veil, is bright pink.
“. . . ending with the harsh hour,” Sister Mäuschen continues, “when his mother’s mouth no longer asks him for anything:
die Stunde kommt, die bittre Stunde, da dich ihr Mund nach nichts mehr frägt.
*
A bad poet, Thekla thinks. He failed as a painter. Tried to write opera, wanting to be another Wagner. And now these congested rhymes that would have never made it into the Echtermeyer collection. In art, sentimentality is not only insincere but unforgivable.
Why doesn’t Sister Josefine say anything? She knows good poetry. Is she afraid of Sister Mäuschen? What would Sister Mäuschen say if she knew Thekla still has Fräulein Siderova’s Echtermeyer? Last fall, when the list of banned books kept growing, Thekla thought it unwise to keep the poetry collection on her school desk. She carried
it home, planning to bring it to Fräulein Siderova. A reason to visit. But she was afraid she’d intrude. Yet, the longer she waited, the more she imagined conversations with her teacher.
Better make a book cover for the Echtermeyer from butcher paper or conceal it inside the linen book jacket her mother embroidered. By now the black list has almost three thousand titles. Vera Inber’s works are on that list. Lion Feuchtwanger’s. Heinrich Mann’s. Stefan Zweig’s. Kurt Tucholsky’s. But there are enough other German poets whose books are not banned. Goethe is magnificent
and
a safe choice. So is Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Theodor Storm, too. And definitely Friedrich von Schiller.
I can do this as long as they let me teach.
Stretching into this—
I can do this
—Thekla looks straight at Sister Mäuschen. “I appreciate your focus on Mother’s Day,” she says, “because I’ve already considered my lesson plan.” She has not thought of a lesson plan, much less of the Führer’s birthday, but then the word
consider
can be intended to mean the possibility of thought.
“So what is it you are considering?” Fräulein Buttgereit asks her, mouth set in the familiar lines of disappointment that square her chin. Her parents won’t let her get engaged to the driver of the bakery truck, Alfred Meyer, who’s courted her for years without having one moment alone with her.
“In the weeks leading up to
Muttertag
,” Thekla answers, “my students and I will collect early spring flowers and—”
“My goal, all along,” Fräulein Buttgereit interrupts, “has been to impress on my students how the Führer loves them.”
Pathetic, Thekla thinks. That’s why boys like Bruno think they can’t live without him. “My goal,” she says, “is to make the theme of the German
Mutter
the focus of all subjects: history, geography, art . . . including botany and handwriting.”
*
She’s making up details as she talks, before any of the other teachers can. If she has to, she can be more patriotic than any of them. She knows what they say about her—that she’s ambitious—but if they’d waited ten years for a teaching job, they’d be ambitious, too.
Still, no one is more ambitious than Sister Josefine. Especially when it comes to self-denial. Austerity has been seductive for the sister, the Spartan training of her body rewarding her with ascetic zeal. And yet, her healthy teeth betray her privileged upbringing. Winning, people say about her, she is good at winning. Riding in competitions as a young woman. As girls, Thekla and her classmates whispered that Sister Josefine lost her hymen bouncing on a horse. Already they could tell that nuns had more power than married women.
“Each student,” Thekla says to Sister Mäuschen, “will compose a poem for his
Mutter
and copy it in his best handwriting, and—”
“Excellent idea, Fräulein Jansen.”
But Sister Josefine watches quietly, gauging what’s real and what’s politics for the new teacher, who’s intelligent but self-indulgent. That silk scarf of hers . . . tied so low that her clavicle shows.
Vain
. But at least in good taste.
“—and he’ll decorate the poem with pressed flowers from our botany lesson,” Thekla Jansen continues and thinks of pressing flowers with Fräulein Siderova.
Remember that hike to the flour mill, Fräulein? You took us across fields toward the faraway sun that burned through the mist yellow-white as we collected flowers to press for our bookmarks.
Teichrosen
glistened on the pond’s flatness, and around its bank
Löwenzähnchen
—snapdragons and
Hahnenfuss—
buttercups crowded each other. In the grass the blue of forget-me-nots. Birds gaudy in elderberry trees, in apple trees, twitter and bloom everywhere. Meadows. And then the brick arches of the flour mill. Purple thistles. An anthill. Under the umbrella leaves of the
Holunder
we settled down with you. That fox we saw—sleek and red and low; then another, smaller;
another yet. And bees, diving into petals and emerging covered with yellow dust.
Always, that solace in nature. That’s what Thekla wants for her boys, too. Suddenly she has an idea. This afternoon she’ll take them to the Rhein for their lessons, even if the rain picks up again. They’ll be excited, eager to be outdoors. Already, she can feel that sensation of walking in the rain, face tilted up, clothes molded to her. But that was summer rain. She smiles to herself.
Sister Mäuschen smiles back as if waiting to hear more.
*
Gisela Stosick has stood outside the school for ten minutes, shivering in the damp wind while students spilled from the double door, greeting her,
“Guten Tag,
Frau Stosick,” as they headed home. Her feet are cold despite her new ankle boots, embossed leather the color of cognac. It makes her sad that most of these students don’t own boots, just shoes, worn shoes. Her son has two pairs of shoes and two pairs of boots. Good quality and waterproofed. Not every child is that lucky.
If she had more children, she wouldn’t be able to buy Bruno new boots whenever he needed them. She and Günther certainly wanted more. “God’s will,” Herr Pastor Schüler consoled her, while she dreamed of strangling God. Three times she imagined yanking God from his throne in his heaven, once for each child pulled dead from her womb. Until she had Bruno and it would have been foolish to provoke God.
When Gisela goes inside the school to find Bruno, his classroom is empty. Briefly, she lays one flat hand against the top of the desk—smooth from centuries of children’s hands—where she sat as a girl, right behind Thekla Jansen, who used to be Fräulein Siderova’s favorite. Knowing all the answers. Volunteering to clean the chalkboard.
Thekla will know where Bruno is.
Gisela goes to find her in the teachers’ lounge, knocks at the door, knocks again, and opens it halfway. “I’m sorry to interrupt. I’m searching for Bruno. Oh—Heil Hitler.”
“Heil Hitler,” Sister Mäuschen says.
“Bruno went home,” Thekla Jansen says. “He stayed behind for a little while after the other boys left, but then he went home, too.”