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 (190 page)

When the boys pass the slaughterhouse and head into the heart of their village, their formation disperses and tightens—with their rivalry, with their bonding against one enemy: Bruno’s father—a precursor to what they will experience in the next war, when they’ll belong to units that will move as one, every man obliged to do his
share of what must be done. Because not to would saddle your comrade with what’s yours to finish.

*

The itching races from Gisela’s wrists up her arms. She rotates them against the sides of her dress, pictures herself telling Günther how she can feel Bruno on the other side of the door, holding his breath so she won’t hear him, eager to jump out and shout the instant she yanks the door open—“I thought you’d never find me,
Mutti
!”—but she won’t tell Günther about the crazy thoughts that overtake her the instant she pulls at the door—jammed, it’s jammed—pulls again though something primeval and terrible is jabbering inside her
don’t look don’t lookdon’tlookdon’t—

W
HEN HIS YOUNGEST
son was nine, Wilhelm Jansen was sent away to fight in the Great War. But after just a few months he was brought back to his family—on a stretcher on a train—though his skin was unbroken except for one nick on his chin where he’d cut himself eating goat cheese from the blade of his knife. From then on, the dark waves were there nearly all the time.

Frau Doktor Rosen said something was broken inside the toymaker’s mind.

Herr Pastor Schüler said it was his soul.

Until the trenches of war, Wilhelm had managed to put together the broken pieces of himself, heroically, again and again; but in the trenches, all those pieces collided and flew apart.

*

Other soldiers, too, returned early, broken from the battlefields and the blinding rush toward oblivion. They’d lie on their beds all day. Or you’d see them on chairs by their windows. War had decimated the threshold between them and the shadows. Yet, you couldn’t tell they were injured. That’s why they were worse off than soldiers whose injuries were evident—the loss of an arm, say, or of a leg—because you could acknowledge those soldiers’ loss and heroism by carving a wooden limb, say, or a crutch; or by helping with chores they could no longer do.

This brokenness was more crippling than blindness or scarred lungs from the nerve gas that had overtaken many as they ran from it. Escape was your first impulse when that green, stinking cloud fanned toward you, and you’d forget what you’d been taught in training, to stop and piss on your handkerchief or sleeve and press the wet fabric over your face to counteract the gas.

The only injuries worse than the brokenness were the injuries of soldiers who were kept out of sight in faraway infirmaries because their wounds made them too grotesque to live among others.

*

Some men would stop by the pay-library because Leo Montag understood what it was like to have fought in the Great War and come home damaged. The circle of steel where his kneecap used to be brought him closer to the men, as if an angel in high flight—that’s what he’d looked like before the war as a gymnast levitating above the parallel bars—had crashed to earth. His limp was proof that he was here to stay, to listen.

In Leo Montag’s eyes, men could see the places that had shaped their own souls. They had no idea that quite a few of the women in town would have traded their men for Leo, who was gentle and tragic and more manly, somehow, than the most able-bodied men who could still carry great weights and run without limping.

*

To his neighbors, Wilhelm Jansen seemed shut away inside a sadness deeper than caves. They didn’t understand the swiftness of bliss beneath his inertia, bliss when he made love to his wife or peered at the faces of his children. For a while, he returned to the toy factory. Children no longer wanted lambs or fairy-tale blocks—they wanted to play with soldiers. But the soldiers he carved, bright yellow or green uniforms, were not at all like soldiers in the real war where the only bright color was that of blood before it dulled.

Alexander Sturm believed in providing the wounded with a place where they could do work that satisfied them, and though Wilhelm missed days, he kept him on because Wilhelm was the most gifted carver he’d ever hired, and because they both recognized that making toys was serious business. He hired two other toymakers who’d come back early from battle, lungs damaged by gas; he set up a bed and reminded them to take turns resting. Together, the three men completed the tasks of one.

Wilhelm’s sons helped by bringing their earnings—given to them in food or coins—to their mother. From an early age, they were good workers, eager for the smallest jobs, and the old women of Burgdorf approved of their industriousness. But they did not approve of how the Jansen girl was pampered. It set her above her brothers, the women gossiped, and it was wrong of Almut Jansen to let the daughter have the best, the first, not used by anyone before her. Girls’ things, they couldn’t be passed down to her brothers once she outgrew them, except for boots and one cornflower-blue sweater that Elmar, and then Dietrich, had worn down to the skin of their elbows, and that Almut had darned countless times until there were no more threads left to anchor her weave of darning.

*

Whenever Wilhelm’s hours outside the shadows grew longer than the hours inside, he dared hope that, in time, he’d forget the passage to there altogether. Easier, then, to study his hands than the faces of his children, who would grow up with the fear that they’d inherit his craziness, especially his youngest son, Dietrich, moody and athletic, who would become a priest, while Elmar, pious and delicate, the son his teachers predicted would become a priest, would work for the potato man, Herr Weinhart, making deliveries though he’d hate the cloud of old potato dust that would billow around him whenever he’d empty sacks of new potatoes into the tops of his customers’ bins.

T
HE SHRIEKING COMES
at the boys as they turn the corner to Bruno’s street, a shrieking that’s as much sound as motion as it whirls toward them like sand and becomes Bruno’s mother whirling toward them, all of one color, the color of sand—hair lips clothes—and already Bruno’s father is running into the sand, staggering as if bracing against a fierce wind.

Shrieking. The sand. Shrieking at Bruno’s father. “. . . he did it!”

“What are you—”

“. . . then I found him! Oh God!”

The shrieking irritates the boys the way sand will when it gets into your eyes, your nostrils, and already their irritation is shifting to Bruno. They’ll get him for this. Get him for wrecking their learning excursion. They could still be by the river climbing willows and watching the yellow ferry cross to their side. They could be getting ready for a race, leaning forward, ready to sprint, and then their
legs flashing. Of course Wolfgang would win, but they’d raise him high into the air, only pretend to drop him, making the teacher laugh, even Eckart.

*

Bruno’s mother is the sand shrieking: “Dead . . . he’s dead!”

Fräulein Jansen covers her lips with both hands.

“No!” Bruno’s father howls.

They draw closer, the boys, listen to the sand shrieking till they can picture Bruno with the top button of his uniform open so the rope fits around his neck, can hear Bruno shrieking while the rope cuts off his breath—

But it’s still his mother doing all the shrieking: “. . . if I had opened the living room door all the way, I would have seen the chess books and sets on the floor. I would have been early enough to stop him . . .”

The teacher wants to shield her boys from hearing, wants to shield herself, and she spans her arms, pulls her boys close, as many as she can touch, even if it’s just with the ends of her fingers.

“. . . the sound I heard when I came back from looking for him at school must have been Bruno in the chess wardrobe, getting the rope ready to . . .”

They crowd against the teacher, the boys, oddly excited because Bruno’s death makes them different, makes them important. Only this morning they fretted about the anniversary of the Reichstag fire; but now they know someone their age who has died, who has done it to himself, the dying.

“. . . while I was at his school, he must have removed the books and chess sets to make room for himself in there so . . .”

If only I’d walked Bruno home, the teacher thinks. If only I’d handed him over to his mother.

First to arrive is the bakery truck. Then the police. Then Trudi Montag from the pay-library. How did she get here so quickly
on her short legs? the boys wonder. She’s always kind to them, but they’ve been warned to keep family matters from her because she can tell just by looking at you
—but how can that be?—
what you don’t want her to know. Once she has your secret, she makes it bigger by carrying it from door to door, bartering it for other secrets.

*

All rain has ceased, but the air is drenched with the memory of water. Only one ribbon of snow lies along the edge of Bruno’s sidewalk, a ribbon the boys are not allowed to cross. While Bruno is on the other side of that ribbon. Inside his house. Inside the wardrobe.

But the police can cross.

And Bruno’s parents.

But only Bruno’s mother crosses, her fingers scratching up and down her arms. Scratching.

Bruno’s father does not cross into his house. Bruno’s father is howling.
Feigling
—coward, the boys think.

Because they would go inside. And look. And remember. Death has been glorious in poems about heroes, but this death here is different because Bruno is no hero, and Bruno’s father is a
Feigling.

*

The wingbeats of pigeons as they land above on the windowsill of the teacher’s apartment. Her face is wet from crying. She’ll miss the sound of Bruno’s voice in the mornings, his visits to her. She can’t live here anymore. The Stosicks wouldn’t want her to. She hates herself for that selfishness. Her loss is nothing compared to that of his parents. Still—

And what if Sister Josefine dismisses her for not asking permission?

Did you ever ask permission, Fräulein Siderova, before you took us on a learning excursion?

Here she’s doing it again, worrying about herself when it is all about Bruno’s death.

“It’s always about you,” Dietrich used to say. She thought it was because of his envy. Having while he and Elmar didn’t: books and clothes and education and a good bicycle. Dietrich had facial hair early on, an amazing mustache when he was just seventeen and entered the seminary. “You’re doing it again,” he would tell Thekla if he were here. “Hogging. Hogging even grief.” Dietrich must be hell on his parishioners, especially in the confessional. For his first post as assistant pastor, he finessed an assignment to Nordstrand though he wasn’t supposed to ask, just obey his superiors and go where he was sent.
It’s always about you, Dietrich.

*

Herr Stosick is still howling. To leave that greedy self of hers—greedy, Frau Abramowitz called her—and to make him stop this disgusting wet noise, Thekla steps toward him, touches his arm; but he startles her by flinging himself against her, howling, so massive and dense that his body feels like one block drumming against her, one block that cannot delegate different tasks to arms and legs because it’s moving as one, all belly, strong belly, muscles pounding against her, against her breasts, disturbing her, arousing her—

I’ve never been with a heavy man. Never expected that this mass of flesh in my arms would arouse me.
She struggles to free herself from this odd embrace, but he holds on as though he had a right to her, and she suddenly knows he’s been getting part of her rent from Herr Abramowitz, knows it in a way so apparent it’s impossible not to know once you consider it. Her mother must have heard from Herr Abramowitz about the apartment, and they must have arranged it all before Thekla went to look at it.