Authors: Ursula Hegi
When they identify bare trees according to bark and formation of branches, Franz says, “They’re all alike in winter.”
“Not if you know what to check for,” Wolfgang says.
Franz kicks at a punky branch, and it flies into dust.
“Franz,” their teacher says, “has swallow nests in his barn.” She motions to the swallows that flit in high arcs above, then dip against the surface of the river. “Maybe he’ll tell us how they get their food.”
“They screech and open their beaks,” Franz says, “as soon as their parents bring them mosquitoes or flies, and every spring our nests are full of young ones.”
“Will you show us in the spring?” she asks.
He nods eagerly.
“We’ll make an excursion to your barn,” she says.
And that’s when Franz remembers what he learned about bark at the Sternburg farm, which used to be a fortress. By the moat, she chose a birch, an oak, a chestnut, and a poplar. Assigned several boys to each tree. Showed them how to press paper against a section of bark and, pencil at an angle, rub the lead across the paper till the pattern of the bark stood out. Then the work in the classroom:
sketching the details of the bark, writing an essay to describe the bark. His project was the best. Franz could tell by the way his teacher nodded when he showed it to her.
Suddenly he wants her to know that he remembers. “Bark only seems the same from one day to the next.”
“You’re right,” she says. “It’s because we only notice seasonal changes.”
“Except the changing is happening every second,” he says.
*
Jochen Weskopp has fallen behind. That’s how he must be on his way to school, the teacher thinks, dawdling. Still, that’s what he needs: he gets as much from his quiet observation as from any teacher. How to give him both? She waits for him by a stand of poplars.
“Feel how springy the ground is?” He raises himself on his toes, rocks back on his heels.
She bounces, lightly. “You’re right. Why do you think it is like that?”
“From all those layers of leaves.”
“Our future biologist.”
“I want to be a soldier.”
“You told me you want to be a biologist.”
“No. A hero,” he tells her, as if certain of her approval.
“How about afterward?”
“Afterward?”
“You can be a biologist then.”
He tips his child-face toward her. “Afterward I’ll be dead.”
“Don’t say that!”
Grown and dead, Jochen, his grave, and his mother on her knees—
Thekla shivers. How devastating it must be for parents to lose a son whose features have not matured into his man-face, who will forever evoke the infant.
Aus Kindern werden Soldaten
—children become soldiers.
“We don’t want another war,” she says abruptly. “You are too young, Jochen.”
*
By the river it’s all gray sky and gray water. A thin ice ledge rises from the water, and below that ledge, layers of sand and vegetation stick from the snow. Across the current lies a strip of sand and above it a strip of rounded tree silhouettes like paper cutouts.
The boys race for the old willow trees whose trunks have been flooded again and again, leaving rippled watermarks around their bark. As the boys climb, their bodies darken the bare limbs and rock the whippy branches that reach for their reflections in the current.
These willows had leaves when we were here with you, Fräulein Siderova. Remember that race you did with us? I came in third, and you braided a crown of wildflowers for the winner.
Suddenly Thekla is experiencing it all at once—the cold air that surrounds her and that long-ago sun coming through—and she feels warmer. She pushes up her sleeves, slips off her gloves. As a girl she climbed willows, and she still prefers nature over exercise equipment. Far more exciting to leap across a ditch than across a rope, to do chin-ups on a strong branch than on a steel rod. She has always been athletic. Started to walk when she was only eight months old. It made her more daring, knowing that about herself.
*
Eckart staggers, pushes his finger into his ear to stop the ache where the pain is squeezing the cotton wad.
Several boys mimic his staggering.
“Boys,” the teacher says. Usually one glance will do. The more the students love you, the less you need to remind them to behave.
“Eckart is drooling,” Andreas sings out.
“Stop it,” Eckart cries, sleeve to his mouth. Edge of scarf unraveling.
But a chant has already started: “Eckart drools like Gerda Heidenreich . . . Eckart drools like Gerda Heidenreich . . .”
And for an instant, there, just before Eckart starts to hate Gerda, he’s stunned by compassion for her: Gerda, whose neck is slick with drool, whose face and body twitch.
Laughter.
Little-boy-bawdy laughter.
While the teacher is remembering how Frau Abramowitz smiled at Gerda. It makes the teacher’s belly cramp as it did when she was fifteen and, late one afternoon, picked up her mother from work and found Frau Abramowitz with the Montags’ newborn dwarf girl in her arms, singing to her. Smiling.
*
“. . . drools like Gerda Heidenreich . . .”
Eckart stumbles into sky that’s suddenly upside down, skins his palms on mud flecked with granules of leftover snow.
“Stop it, boys. Now.” The teacher has stopped it before, this pattern of one child being singled out, bullied.
“Gerda Heidenreich drools from her lips.”
“From where else would she drool?”
“From her
Arschloch
—asshole.”
They’re startled by their audacity.
Giddy because their teacher is not able to break them up.
Between Eckart’s palms is a glazed puddle, amber leaves suspended beneath delicate ice that crackles, splinters, as he raises himself on his knees.
“Boys!” Thekla maneuvers herself between him and the boys.
But they don’t budge. Their sudden scorn is so palpable that, any moment now, they may turn on her, no longer individual boys she can guide but a pack. Her palms are wet, and it comes to her how, with the government, too, she believed she could manage it,
yet once unleashed, it was overtaking her, all of them. Across the river, people are no more than dots, unable to help even if they were to recognize the danger. And what Thekla knows instinctively is this:
If you step back, you are lost. The urge of the pack will escalate.
J
UST THEN, OTTO
separates himself from the knot of boys, comes toward his teacher, crouches next to Eckart. She’s afraid the others will assail him, too. But the consistency of the pack has been altered and is breaking up into separate boys who disperse to kick roots or point at the barges that lie low in the current.
After arising from a dream that still mortifies them, a dream so ancient, so entrancing, they don’t dare look at one another.
We could have feasted on her. Now that she has seen us like this, nothing can be as before.
As Otto brushes debris from Eckart’s patched coat, the teacher thinks of talking with him about Bruno. He’d watch out for Bruno—to please her, quite likely—but it would be good for both if a friendship were to come out of it. Tomorrow, she thinks and pulls all her boys into her gaze, steady, steady, until they are still.
“Tell me what you see,” she demands and points to a barge that’s slowly heading upstream near the bank.
The boys eye her with caution.
She waits out their silence.
“This one is empty,” Richard finally says. “That’s why it’s in the shallow part of the river.”
“A good observation,” she praises him. “Please, tell us how you know.”
“It sits high in the water. That means it’s on the way to get loaded up again.”
“Excellent.”
“Barges that are loaded,” Andreas volunteers, “are deep in the water. That’s why they need to be where it’s deep.”
“Very good.” She feels herself gaining control by encouraging them to teach one another. “What else can you tell us—all of you?”
“Deep water is in the middle of the river,” Franz says.
“And to keep those channels open,” the teacher adds, “a special barge dredges the bottom from time to time.”
“But when they’re empty like this barge, they don’t need to be in the middle,” Richard says.
Franz nods. “They can float close to the bank where it’s shallow.”
“Just think how your parents must have stood here and figured this out when they were your age.”
“Our grandparents, too.”
*
Across the river the ferry is docking, bright yellow. Everything else is gray and white, including the seagulls.
“A story from you, Fräulein,” Otto says.
She usually has new stories for them on their learning excursions, and they know how much she enjoys the telling.
“A scary story,” Andreas says. “Please?”
I could really scare you. The stories I could tell you . . . The scariest story came from the Bible. Abraham, the worst of all fathers, listening to the voice of God. How could that fit in with listening to your conscience,
if your conscience was the voice of God? More likely Abraham was just another lunatic, seeking his logic in God. Because how else could he justify his readiness to kill his child? My father would have been too weak to listen to God. He wouldn’t have lifted his hands from his knees—
Which father?
—Nein nein jetzt nicht. Weg damit—
No no not now. Away with this—
“I have a ghost story,” Walter says and waits for the teacher to nod to him. “Once upon a time in old times, there was a decrepit old farmer who lived in Burgdorf. One night, one foggy, foggy night . . . he went out in his oxcart. It was foggy—”
“You already said it was foggy,” Richard interrupts.
“—very foggy. And the decrepit old farmer couldn’t see where he was going, and all at once a ghost was sitting next to him—”
“The ghost of his decrepit old teacher?” Thekla asks.
Her boys laugh aloud.
“We have someone in my family,” Franz says, “who turned into a cloud and flew away on a chicken and her name was Sabine and she was—”
“You can tell us after Walter finishes his story,” Thekla says.
“I’m done,” Walter says. “I want to hear Franz’s story.”
“First you have to say ‘the end.’”
“The end.”
“Sabine was my grandfather’s little sister,” Franz says, “and when she was five years old, her mother told her to play quietly in her room, but Sabine was disobedient and sneaked outside to search for her pet chicken, and the chicken turned into a cloud and flew off with Sabine, who also turned into a cloud, and they were never seen again. The end.”
*
“Tell us a story, Fräulein.”
“I have a story for you. A story in a poem.
‘Et wassen twee Künigeskinner . . .’”
Her boys tell her they can’t understand her.
“It’s not real German,” they say.
“Oh, but it is German . . . as it was spoken hundreds of years ago. Even today, our language is spoken in different dialects.” She smiles at Heinz, who rubs his knobby wrists. “And it’s good for us to know more than one dialect.”
She can see that he suddenly feels ahead of the other students, confident that he knows more than they do. Her exhilaration at his progress is what she believes love is: to bring her students forward and to release them once they’re ready. They weren’t hers to start out with.
“Listen now,” she says.
“Et wassen twee Künigeskinner,
De hadden enanner so lef—”
“That’s not German.”
“Fräulein!”
“Yes, it is. Our language is always changing, depending on the times we live in, the region we live in. It’s a song you already know. I’ll give you a hint.” She hums the song about the two
Königskinder
—royal children who loved each other but could not come together because the water between their castles was far too deep.
Heinz starts humming along.
You should see him, Fräulein Siderova, that smile of his—from reluctant to full force—there’s no in between for him. He’ll give his heart away with that smile.
Soon all her boys are humming and singing with her about the
Königskinder
who yearned to be together.
“Es waren zwei Königskinder,
Die hatten einander so lieb,
Sie konnten zusammen nicht kommen,
Das Wasser war viel zu tief.”
*
“So many ways of taking language to tell a story,” she tells her boys. “For centuries, poets have retold this story of the
Königskinder.
Artists have made sculptures of them, painted pictures.”
Like an itch, then, remembering the poem of the Führer. An insult. To teach bad poetry is to betray herself and the sacred work of teaching. She feels outraged at having to do this. But not yet. She doesn’t have to think about it till then.
She tells her boys the Greek legend of Hero and Leander, and they listen closely to how Ovid wrote about the young couple, and how the story passed through the ages to artists and writers all over the world who created their own versions of the ancient legend. Four hundred years ago it appeared in the German language. Much later—and yet still a hundred years ago—Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was writing about the
Königskinder.
“You, too, can make that story yours,” Thekla says. “Think about someone you yearn to be with but can’t—the reason doesn’t matter, just that you can’t. And then imagine how you’ll tell that story . . . in a drawing, or with words, or with music.”
“I’ll draw a picture,” Andreas says.
Franz wonders if he should write about Uncle Gustav, to whom his parents are no longer speaking.
Richard thinks about the father he never met and is forbidden to ask about. “Can you miss someone you don’t know?” he asks.
“Like people who were dead before we were born?” Eckart asks him.
“Not dead,” Richard snaps.