Authors: Ursula Hegi
*
But Gisela Stosick is already retreating, closing the door quietly. The rain has let up, and the sky is getting lighter. As she rushes home, she tells herself Bruno must have sneaked out the back of the school to avoid the embarrassment of his mother waiting for him. Her independent boy who used to walk home by himself. She must talk with Günther, remind him how happy it made Bruno to see her once he got home, how he’d tell her and his father about his morning while they ate lunch. She misses how it used to be.
She has no doubts about protecting her son from Hitler’s propaganda, but she’s not all that sure, anymore, if keeping him out of the Hitler-Jugend is best for him. It makes him even more different than other boys. He’s bright and shy, the target of bullies. Some of her friends think she’s foolish. They say the regime will spin itself out.
The instant she enters her house through the side door, she hears something falling in the living room.
“Bruno?”
He must have arrived home before her. Again, she calls his name. Opens the door to the living room partway. No one there. And it was more like a bumping sound than a fall, really.
In the kitchen, she mashes boiled potatoes and apples,
Himmel und Erde—
heaven and earth, a good winter dish, potatoes from the Weinharts’ delivery last fall and apples she and Bruno picked at the little orchard in Krefeld. She stores them in her cellar on
shelves lined with newspapers, and they’re a bit puckered by now; still, they taste fresh whenever she stirs them together,
Himmel und Erde,
mingling the flavors of what was grown close to heaven and in the earth.
*
“My students already memorize one poem each week,” Thekla says. “Poems appropriate to the seasons . . . poems about loss or celebration . . . and they write their own, about a person or a pet they love. I plan to expand on that by leading my boys into a discussion of poems about their mothers.”
Sister Mäuschen nods, pleased.
So far, Thekla feels, she’s been navigating through the meeting quite well. She says, “That discussion is bound to generate goodwill because my students will tell their parents and their group leaders. Scholastically it’ll inspire them to talk about their own
Mutter
.”
“It’s our responsibility as teachers,” Sister Josefine says, “to respect that creative urge in each child, to do all we can to let it unfold. Are there any other suggestions?” She glances around, at her sisters and teachers.
Most don’t care for the government and are appropriately discreet; but a few are outdoing one another with how they’ll incorporate the Führer and his poetry into their lesson plans.
To impress her principal, Fräulein Talmeister talks about
turnen
—exercising with the children. Everyone knows Sister Josefine supports the government’s rigorous training that wipes out laziness in the souls of the young. “Physical exercise,” Fräulein Tal-meister starts, “used to be perceived as being just for the individual . . . the strengthening of the body, the habit of discipline. But I’ve realized that this is selfish.” She fusses with the sailor collar of her striped blouse. “The Führer teaches us that exercise is our duty for our country.”
Exercising for the Führer. Really.
Thekla wants to laugh but keeps
her face impassive. She can stay outside all of that. But just then she remembers the rally when, just for an instant, she felt part of it. Like touching a flame but getting burned instead and feeling tricked. Though she shook herself free from that spell and returned to who she believed she was, she felt agitated for days. But if she has to, she’ll tell her students that the Führer wants them to exercise more. If that makes their lives easier while the regime lasts.
But bad poetry? Never.
“The body is a temple of the Holy Spirit,” Sister Mäuschen says enthusiastically. “We must prepare our students to be able-bodied citizens and soldiers who’ll sacrifice for the Vaterland.”
*
But Sister Josefine is not about to speak of children as soldiers. She brings the discussion back to what matters, the teaching.
“During my art lesson,” Thekla says, “my students will learn how to make bookmarks from their poems and the flowers they picked. We’ll wrap each bookmark in tissue paper and weigh it down with books. After a day or two, we’ll use a clear sealer. I still have a bookmark I made here as a girl.”
Sudden winds bend the treetops outside the window. Then it is calm again, with the sky almost white and the trees black sticks against that white sky. She wonders how Bruno is.
“I like to combine all subjects within the process of learning,” Thekla continues. “Biology and music and literature and mathematics. All at once. So that the connections between the subjects become as significant as the subjects themselves.”
I wish I could tell them that this is your philosophy, Fräulein Siderova, but that would be foolish. It’s best for our students that I continue your way of teaching.
“That unity in teaching,” Sister Mäuschen says, “is exactly what the Führer wants from us as educators.”
Thekla opens her lips, stunned. How dare Sister twist what she
said to validate the Führer’s ideas about education? His grammar in
Mein Kampf
is atrocious, a poor example for students. No excuse that he wrote it in prison.
Sister Mäuschen is waiting.
Thekla wonders if saying nothing means she’s expected to say yes to everything from now on.
Shouldn’t you be safe going along with the nuns, your conscience and all taken care of? No. I didn’t start any of this. Once the regime wears itself down, I’ll get back to my own moral compass, to who I was before. And I’ll lobby for you to come back and teach, Fräulein Siderova. As soon as you enter my—
As soon as you enter our classroom, you notice what I’ve changed to advance our boys, and what I’ve kept unchanged to honor you.
“The position is yours again,” I tell you.
“I can’t take this from you.”
But I insist. “You’re not taking anything from me. It has always been yours.”
“But what about you, Thekla? What will you do?”
“I’ve been offered another position . . . as assistant principal.”
“Where?”
In Oberkassel—No. Neuss? Why not here in Burgdorf, at this school where I can look after you? “Right here in Burgdorf,” I tell you.
You tell me I’m gracious. “Very gracious,” you say.
W
HEN THEY GET READY
to leave the schoolhouse, Monika Buttgereit buttons her plaid coat. As usual, she’s wearing too many colors.
Vulgar.
Her family’s house is like that, too, shelves and tables crammed with every item they own.
“Now she has taken in a boarder,” she whispers to Thekla.
“Who?”
“Fräulein Siderova.”
“I doubt that.”
“It’s a fact. I heard about it from Trudi Montag.”
Thekla pauses. Any gossip coming through Trudi Montag is reliable. She feels oddly hurt. If she’d known Fräulein Siderova was open to boarders, she would have asked to rent from her years ago.
Fräulein Buttgereit’s eyes are bright, curious. “She can no longer afford a
Putzfrau—
cleaning woman.”
Putzfrau?
For an instant Thekla thinks it’s her mother Monika Buttgereit is talking about. But her mother is not a
Putzfrau.
She’s a housekeeper. Even though she does clean the Abramowitzes’ house. But that’s just part of her job. She also cooks and irons and—
With both hands, Monika Buttgereit lifts her elaborate hat concoction and lowers it on her hair. Feathers and pom-poms.
A boarder . . . Maybe the artist who painted Fräulein Siderova’s oil portrait aboard that ship to Jerusalem is now living with her—still is her lover—and she’s only saying he’s a boarder to make it look proper.
After the ship returned, he couldn’t forget you and searched for you, Fräulein Siderova. How would he have found you? By asking for the passenger list? How long ago would that have been, Fräulein Siderova? Perhaps he saw you get on a train in Düsseldorf? Not on a train, no. He didn’t see you for many years, but a few months ago the two of you met again at a gallery opening. In Düsseldorf. Where you recognized the other painting he’d done of you—yes, that’s how: he did two paintings and kept one, and when you turned, he was standing behind you and you didn’t have to speak because you knew you would always be together from now on—
*
As Thekla hastens toward her parents’ house, her shoes squeak on the snow. Tuesday lunch is always rushed because of the faculty meeting. There is a thickness to the light, and on the front steps of the pay-library, the Montags’ dog is sleeping, his fur pale gray except for his head, a mask of dark gray.
She feels someone watching her. Helmut Eberhardt. Standing in the doorway of the grocery store. At thirteen, he is already taller than the teacher. Not a single crease in his uniform. He joined the Hitler-Jugend last year, right after the Führer announced on the radio that he wanted to double the membership. When Helmut was an altar boy, Frau Brocker liked to say she just knew that he
would become a priest, that he was an angel come to earth, so handsome, so helpful.
“Heil Hitler,” Frau Brocker’s angel says to Thekla and raises his arm. Long sleeves, but most people know about the scar beneath the brown fabric.
The teacher has seen the scar only once, after he competed in a
Langstreckenlauf—
long-distance run and raised his trophy, exposing the scarred length of silvery skin.
“Heil Hitler,” she responds.
At the Abramowitzes’ house across the street, the shutters are closed, the window boxes empty. Come summer, they’ll be filled with purple geraniums and snapdragons. She wonders if Frau Abramowitz still reads those trashy novels from the pay-library. As a child Thekla could feel that current—from Frau Abramowitz, not from Herr Montag—and now she suspects it has less to do with the books than with the man who lends the books.
If he were to sell shoes, say, or bread, Frau Abramowitz and many other women in Burgdorf would be there, buying, just to be near him. In these women, he fosters a certain longing that evokes memories of other longings, the cool length of a thigh, say, or the sweet exhalation just after a kiss. When they come to his pay-library, he’ll recommend books just right for them, that day, that hour. They’ll touch his sleeve or pat his hand for as long as it’s still proper, tell him what a good father he is to the daughter who caused his wife to lean across the edge of sanity. Granted, that edge was frail before, but Gertrud Montag managed to step back from it until she gave birth to the girl with a large head and short limbs. Such heartache for one man, the women will say. A widower since the dwarf girl was four. His son stillborn. His wife dead soon after. One carved cross with a little roof on their grave.
The women of Burgdorf don’t worry that Leo will take advantage of their longing. He respects that the longing is theirs alone,
protects himself from its burden with that very respect. But he does it with such kindness that women don’t feel spurned and men can’t possibly feel jealous; it’s rather that the men learn from Leo and approach their women with puzzled courtesy.
*
“May I carry your satchel?” Helmut asks Fräulein Jansen. Always polite. The manners of a man. The urgency of a man.
She’s used to that. “Thank you,” she says.
Helmut shoulders her satchel, proud to be seen with her. As they set off, he squints at the mezuzah that hangs by the Abramowitzes’ door. Thekla feels a flicker of caution. It could be a trap. Why provoke the rough elements of the party? If the Führer were to ask her counsel—not that he would, but if—she’d tell him he’s achieved so much, he can let down on this heat against the Jews. Once he acknowledged to himself the value of the employment he’d created, she’d get him to focus on that, and it would only follow that he’d want to give up those crazy ideas about Jews. Not that she would use the word
crazy.
She’d be tactful.
To distract Helmut from the mezuzah, she touches his shoulder. “Has your arm been healing?”
He blushes hard. “I don’t feel it anymore.”
He and several other boys in the Hitler-Jugend chafed their arms raw with a pillowcase they knotted, hard, and rubbed up and down their arms till they were bleeding. While their mothers were mortified by their violence toward their bodies, Thekla understood that this was what boys did. They competed to prove their men-courage in boy-ways; tested their bodies’ resilience to pain; and yet, they were childish in what they used, not weapons or stones but a pillowcase from home, warning off communists, wanting their courage noticed.
Boys
. She knows them better than their parents know them.
W
HEN THEKLA ENTERS
her parents’ kitchen,
Vati
sits by the stove and
Mutti
has lunch ready from what she cooked at the Abramowitzes’ today, goulash and potatoes in two covered pots that she lifts from the pail.
Outside on the washline, frost has stiffened the laundry, and
Vati’s
white shirt moves as one solid piece in the wind, the sleeves no longer flapping, no longer promising movement. If only she could shake it till his soul flew out and slipped back into his body.
“
Vati
? Are you hungry?”
Food is one of the few pleasures left to him, and she coaxes him until he blinks as if surfacing. His eyes fasten on
Mutti
, suddenly lucid, as she arranges the potatoes and meat on the platter she used for serving pigeons, a small center with a large rim to make the birds seem bigger.