Authors: Ursula Hegi
L
AMPLIGHT BEHIND
the bay window at Schlosserstrasse 78.
In the stairway the familiar mint smell that blots all other smells.
When Fräulein Siderova opens the door—bedsheets in her arms, used sheets in a bundle—Thekla’s childhood love for her teacher rushes at her so strongly that she doesn’t know how she survived without that love.
“I must tell you—”
But Fräulein Siderova turns from her, carries the sheets into the bathroom.
Grateful she didn’t close the door, Thekla runs after her, slips around her to open the hamper. Pulse in her throat so high she can’t say another word, she waits for Fräulein Siderova to look at her, but her teacher simply drops the sheets inside the hamper, gets fresh sheets from the shelves, and takes them to the spare room.
Lined up under the edge of the bed are two slippers. The mattress is bare.
Have you been expecting me?
Thekla feels disoriented.
Are you getting the bed ready for me? How do you know I can no longer live at the Stosicks’?
She could imagine living here with Fräulein Siderova, walk to school just as her teacher used to.
Selfish—
Selfish for not thinking about Bruno every second. Selfish for her relief that she no longer has to have that conversation with the Stosicks about Bruno climbing from his window at night. She forces herself to imagine him beneath the ground. But not yet. For now, he is still inside his house.
So light in my arms when I hold him at his christening celebration. I’m still at the university, and I have no idea that this long, skinny baby who doesn’t cry will be in my first group of students and that he’ll take his own life. Bruno—
How then do you reach into this with both hands, Fräulein Siderova, and change Bruno’s fate?
*
“How then—” Thekla breaks off.
How dare I ask this? You believed you could change fate. But what if it was predetermined that Bruno would kill himself when he was ten? And what if it was predetermined that you would set out geraniums for a butterfly? And what if it was predetermined that Almut and Michel would make a child?
Thekla picks up a pillow, shakes it, and inserts it in the pillowcase. Though Fräulein Siderova presses her lips together, she does not object. Together they unfold the bottom sheet and make the bed as they have made beds with others, though never together. Thekla steps around the slippers, large—
men’s slippers?
—not of good quality, one heel so worn it slants toward the other.
Once I tell you what happened to Bruno, tell you everything, Fräulein Siderova, will you send me away forever? Or will you say that I did all I could for our boys? Will you tell me to lie down on this ironed sheet, cover me, and tell me to sleep?
“I lost one of your boys,” Thekla whispers. “Bruno—he’s dead.”
Like a blind woman, Sonja Siderova reaches behind herself with both hands, pats the air till her fingers touch the mattress. Awkwardly, she lowers herself.
“I was keeping him safe.” Thekla is crying. “I followed him to the rallies at night to keep him safe and . . .”
Sonja has to concentrate, hard, because it’s coming at her without sequence: Frau Doktor Rosen rushing inside the Stosicks’ house and Bruno saying his father wants the Führer strung up and the boys climbing willows and Frau Stosick finding Bruno inside the chess wardrobe and Herr Stosick tracking Thekla to the Rhein and people outside the Stosicks’ house hoping against hope that Bruno is still alive—
“But why?” she moans.
—and Leo Montag leading Herr Stosick into the house and the boys counting barges and the police finding Bruno’s pledge to the Führer in his pocket and birds hanging like silver triangles in the sky and—
Sonja Siderova’s eyes are so desolate that Thekla fears one more detail will break her. “I’m so sorry. I feel terrible.”
“You?” Sonja cries. “Is that why you came here? To be comforted by me?”
“No—I came because I owed you . . . the telling.”
“Then tell me. Now.”
*
Thekla does: the awful pressure of Herr Stosick’s belly against hers and the police saying Bruno wore his uniform in the wardrobe and Gisela Stosick interrupting the teachers’ meeting—
But that’s before Bruno’s death, when his mother interrupts the meeting. It doesn’t have to be now. It can be before that. When Bruno runs up the stairs, brings me cake his mother has baked—
But she feels it slipping away, that illusion. “I should be at the
Stosicks’ house, helping . . . also if they have questions—But they wouldn’t want me there.”
Sonja Siderova averts her face.
“When Bruno was crying in school, he must have been planning to kill himself. . . . I should have seen how agitated he was when he said his father wanted the Führer strung up by his balls.”
Now Sonja is crying, too. “Bruno didn’t know what he was doing.”
“I think he knew.”
“Children don’t always understand the danger of their words.”
“He was hoping someone would turn his father in.”
“No.” Sonja Siderova rubs the bridge of her nose. “He probably just wanted his father out of the way so he could go to his meetings. He never pictured the Gestapo coming to his house and hauling his father away.”
“I think he wanted them to take him away. Maybe just for an hour, or a few minutes. But it destroyed him. Oh, God. I should have—” Thekla’s head is clogged with Bruno’s smell, not the clean sweat smell of her athletic students, but the child-smell of chalk and sleep.
Sleep forever.
No—Not yet.
I can go back to before your christening, Bruno, long before, when your mother is still a girl, hiding on that platform high in a tree, perhaps dreaming herself a son while we search for her. We won’t find her until the sky pales around the stars and fades their outlines.
But Bruno’s death pushes itself past the christening and the platform.
“Oh God . . . Bruno—”
I should have carried you home from the rally, snatched you into my arms and run with you from the pomp and the lies and the bonfire.
“What have I been teaching these children? You would have discouraged the boys from joining the Hitler-Jugend. You could see that the parades and uniforms were to get them enthusiastic about being heroes.”
“It’s what’s done to soldiers everywhere. Except they’re starting very young here. Child soldiers.”
“Jochen Weskopp wants to be a soldier. A hero.”
“Children absorb what they are taught. And if the teaching is corrupt—”
“That’s why Remarque is banned. Because he wrote about students influenced to romanticize war by—”
“By their teachers, yes. Instead they ended up terrified in the ditches, minds and bodies injured by bullets and nerve gas.”
“And Jochen is eight whole years younger than those students. He says after he’s a soldier he’ll be dead. No fear. No doubt.”
“The absence of doubt will turn humans into beasts.”
Thekla flinches. How quickly her boys formed a pack.
“You may survive all this, even I . . . but some of our boys already have half their lives behind them. They’ll be dead or wounded before they’re twenty.
Kanonenfutter
—cannon fodder.”
“What can we do?”
“You’ll teach. You’ll keep our boys alive.”
“I wasn’t able to keep Bruno alive.”
What happens if you’re no longer who you believed you were? What do you do with the knowledge of that? And what if who you’re becoming goes against what you believed about yourself until you won’t remember who you were before?
“His parents weren’t able to keep him alive. I wasn’t able to keep him alive. No one—”
“But he came to me.”
*
“
Bitte noch etwas Suppe
—please, some more soup.” A man’s voice. From the kitchen.
Sonja Siderova stands up. “No one in this town was able to keep Bruno alive. Listen to me—” Her wide mouth trembles. “What
you can do is show our students other directions . . . especially those students you can’t keep from joining.”
Thekla follows her to the door, down the hallway past the photos of Fräulein Siderova surrounded by her students, one for each year she has taught. Twenty-nine.
At her kitchen table, a man—not refined—sits with his elbows next to an empty bowl, faint rims of dirt under his fingernails. When Sonja Siderova introduces him as her boarder, Thekla remembers what Fräulein Buttgereit told her.
Not for me then, the bed, the room. How foolish of me. But where will I sleep tonight?
He’s a night-watchman at a bank, Fräulein Siderova says. Definitely not the artist Thekla would have liked to imagine living with her teacher, who will soon paint another portrait of her on another ship, to safety, perhaps.
After the boarder eats his second bowl of soup, he stands up, a stocky man who takes small steps toward the coatrack. How fast could he run if someone were to rob the bank? When he pulls his woolen hat over his forehead, he looks like a bank robber. A slow bank robber. That kind of observation would make Emil laugh. She’ll have to tell Emil—
How can I think of laughing when Bruno is dead?
*
The boarder shrugs into his gray coat, leaves for his job, and Sonja Siderova washes his bowl, his spoon. When Thekla offers to dry, Sonja shakes her head.
“I’m going to take my bath now,” she says.
“I’ll get the tub ready for you.”
“I can do that for myself.”
“No need to.” Quickly, before Sonja Siderova can tell her to go home, Thekla heads for the bathroom and bends to put in the plug.
“You don’t have to do this.”
Thekla opens the faucets.
“I don’t want to keep you,” Sonja says, though just a moment ago, it seemed she might be ready to lift one foot and step across the curved rim into the water.
What Thekla needs is a question to hook her teacher in, a question that will allow her to stay here, and then she has it, has always had it, and it makes her sweat. Because it’s more than a hook. Because it’s a truth she doesn’t want but must have for herself. “Michel Abramowitz—Is he my father?”
S
ONJA SIDEROVA DOESN’T HESITATE.
“Yes, he is.”
Thekla is stunned. Can it really be that easy, finding out for sure?
His hands around an open book. The tracks of his comb in his thick hair.
“What if I had asked you about him last year?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or when I was a girl? Would you have told me then?”
“Not then.”
“Did you tell me to get back at me?” Instantly, Thekla feels ashamed.
Steam rises in the narrow bathroom, fills the lines in Sonja Siderova’s face until she looks like the teacher Thekla adored as a girl.
Thekla blinks.
“Get back at you for what?” Fräulein Siderova asks.
“For letting Sister Josefine give me your class.”
“Oh, Thekla.”
“That’s why you’re telling me I’m Jewish.” Saying it aloud sets off a fear that makes Thekla dizzy.
What will happen to me? No proof. No proof at all. Still, if he is my father—And he is. Is.
Sonja Siderova motions toward the bathroom door. “I can do the rest by myself.” She opens the top button of her blouse.
“One more question? Please?”
“I will take
my
bath now.” Sonja opens the next button. “I will take off
my
clothes and take
my
own bath.” She removes her silver-rimmed spectacles, folds them, and lays them on the ledge of the tub. Opens another button.
*
Thekla backs away. In the hallway she waits, forehead against the closed bathroom door. Staying feels improper. But she can’t bear leaving, now that she is finally near her teacher again. Briefly, it flies at her, the joy at that.
I’ll invite you to my classroom, Fräulein Siderova—
But her fantasy doesn’t move forward, and she can no longer hide inside plans and manners.
Soon, I’ll invite you to my—
Steam curls from beneath the door, beads on her watch. Splashing—Fräulein Siderova must be lowering herself into the tub.
“If you want more hot or cold water, you can turn the faucet with one foot.”
“I have bathed before.”
Thekla pictures her raising the washcloth to her neck. Washing behind her ears. Down her shoulders. She wonders what it would be like to come here again, bring the gifts she has collected. But it feels wrong—in this forever of losing Bruno—to hope for her teacher to love her again.
The christening, Bruno, I can go to when I get to hold you at your christening, your tiny face already
altklug—
old-wise above the white lace gown, prayers and champagne—
“You said you had one more question?” Sonja Siderova’s voice. From the other side of the door.
—holy water on your downy scalp, Bruno, every moment happening at once, back and forth, every moment you have lived—the rosewood chess set that’s yours alone, the punch of your chess clock, and
“Schachmatt—
Checkmate,” the battle cry of a brainy boy.
Thekla feels herself reeling with despair.
I thought I was good for you, Bruno. But I’m no longer who I believed I was.
The water is running again. Thekla imagines Sonja Siderova reaching up with her toes and maneuvering the faucets.
“I can’t hear what you’re saying, Thekla.”
“I . . . didn’t say anything.”
“You had a question.”
“Frau Abramowitz—is that why she disliked me so? Because of him?”
“Ilse did not dislike you.”
“Did he ever think of leaving her? To be with my mother?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“If he had married my mother, I would have grown up in his house.”