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 (20 page)

“What do you want?” His voice made me jump.

I touched his sleeve. Pulled back my hand. “They’ve been searching for you all night.”

“Go away.” He sat up. Hunched his shoulders as if to hide himself in the hollow formed by his body.

I took a long breath, then another. “I—I was rotten. I shouldn’t have said—”

“Who told you about him?” The right side of his face was red and puckered where the bark had pressed into it.

“Trudi Montag.”

He groaned. “That means everyone knows.”

Two ducks bobbed around the submerged trunk of a willow. A brisk wind moved the smaller branches. I rubbed my arms.

“I hate her,” he said, “for not telling me. For having me.” He rested his head on his knees. His voice sounded hoarse. “What else do you know about him?”

“That he is an-American.”

“What?”

“He was stationed in Burgdorf for a while—in the house where you live.” I looked away from him. The sand was dark and wet above the water line. “I guess that’s when they—your mother and he—you know …”

“What else?”

A freighter passed by, raising waves that broke against the embankment.

“Hanna—what else?” Even then he was good at persisting with questions which pushed you into answers you didn’t want to give. It was a skill he would develop further in law school and court, a skill which would earn him a certain admiration from the people in Burgdorf where he would choose to set up his practice fifteen years later.

“Hanna—”

I twisted my left foot from side to side, worked it
through the top layer of pebbles and sand. “He was married.”

He started to cry then—long, raging sobs that made me want to bolt. I climbed into the willow next to him. He smelled like my wool coat after it got drenched in the rain. Cautiously I laid one hand on his shoulder and when he didn’t pull away, I rubbed back and forth across the trembling I felt through his windbreaker.

“Did he have other kids?”

“I don’t know.”

He wiped one sleeve across his face. Sniffled, “Then find out.”

“You could ask your mother.”

“No,” he said. “No.”

“Or my parents.”

He shook his head. “Ask Trudi Montag,” he said. “And then come back here.”

“Here? It’s cold. Besides—everyone’s worried about you. They’ve been searching for you all night.”

“Who?”

“My parents. Matthias Berger. The Talmeisters. Frau Weiler. Lots of people. Your mother …”

“If you tell her where I am—”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

“How do I know?”

That’s when I did it—pressed my lips against his, so hard I could feel his teeth beneath the softness. He sat very still, and I didn’t pull away. Eyes open, we stared at each other. His lips were dry, his mouth larger than mine. It seemed like a long time since I’d been afraid of him.

“How—” I swallowed and moved my head back. “How about after I find out more—will you come back with me then?”

He nodded. With one thumb he pushed a strand of hair from my face. “I think so,” he said.

• • •

Before I left, I promised him once more I wouldn’t tell anyone where he was hiding. It was a promise I kept despite the conviction that what I was doing was getting worse. If Rolf disappeared from the willow and never returned—I tried not to imagine him running along the river in the direction of Düsseldorf or floating away on one of the barges.

When I opened the door to Trudi Montag’s pay-library, she didn’t even ask me why I wasn’t in school. So filled was she with speculations about Rolfs disappearance, that I only had to prod her lightly.

“Maybe Rolf went to live with his father,” I suggested.

“Don’t be silly, Hanna. That man’s clear cross the ocean. In one of those skyscrapers. I think Rolf just got tired taking care of his grandmother. Living in that cramped apartment isn’t—”

I tried the name of the American city that sounded most familiar. “In New York?”

She looked up. Frowned. “No, Florida. Where they grow oranges in their backyards.” Since Trudi Montag had relatives in America, she considered herself the local authority on that country.

“Which city in Florida?”

“Let me think.… Wait—something with an M or a P.”

“Did he have other children?”

“Who knows?” Trudi Montag shrugged. “Some of the soldiers showed us pictures of their wives and kids. This one had a wife for sure. A model, he told me when he first came to town.” She described him to me as a tall man with blond hair and a small birthmark on one temple, but she didn’t remember the color of his eyes. “He liked to dance,” she said. “Both of them—Klara Brocker too. He’d rest his chin on top of her head—that’s how much taller he was.”

On my way back I stopped at Becker’s grocery store next door and bought two chocolate bars with hazelnuts for Rolf. He moved aside to let me climb into the heart of the willow with him, and while I told him what Trudi Montag had said, he ate the chocolate, chewing slowly the way he always did, even though he hadn’t eaten since the day before.

“Most models don’t want kids,” I said. “It ruins their figures.”

“How would you know?”

“Things I read … They don’t want to stretch their stomachs. So maybe you’re his only child. Maybe—are you going to look for him?”

He crumpled the silver foil into tight balls. “You go home now.”

“What about you?”

“In a while.”

“What if you change your mind?”

“I won’t.”

But I was afraid he might vanish again. I kept urging him to go first and was surprised when he finally agreed. As he crossed the meadow, he glanced back toward the willow and raised one hand. Then he climbed the dike.

The truth about the American Soldier became our secret, a secret that became as strong a bond between us as the kisses we exchanged. It was strange, Rolf said, to know his father might still be alive. But he didn’t have any idea how to go about finding him.

Though he told me about the photo in his mother’s jewelry box, I didn’t see it until one afternoon that August when Rolf and I climbed the four flights of shadowy stairs to his apartment on Barbarossastrasse 15. He’d just had his hair cut; except for a pale stripe of skin along his ears
and neck, he was tanned a smooth brown, and the sun had bleached the fine hairs on his cheeks.

His grandmother was asleep in the room she shared with Rolfs mother, her frail body covered by a worn nightgown. A feather comforter lay on the floor next to her bed. The right side of her face was pulled down toward her slack jaw from a stroke that had left the right side of her body paralyzed. Eleven times so far it had seemed as though she were ready to die, and Frau Brocker had sent Rolf to fetch the increasingly reluctant Herr Pastor Beier who knew, along with the whole town, that whenever he administered last rites to the old woman, she recovered within a few days as if cured by his final absolution.

A blue pack of Gauloises lay on the windowsill. On the table stood a teapot, a cup, and an empty plate. Every noon Frau Brocker carried over some of the food she had cooked at our house, sat on the edge of her mother’s bed, and fed her with a spoon.

“Stay here,” Rolf whispered.

From the door frame I watched him walk toward his grandmother, pick up the comforter, and spread it gently across her. At the foot end of his mother’s bed he crouched and slipped a flat red leather box from under her mattress. He walked past me on tiptoes and I followed him into the kitchen, which smelled of medicine and bleached laundry. We sat at the table and Rolf smoothed out the linen tablecloth before he opened the box.

“Here.” He took a creased photo from beneath the glossy jumble of fake pearls, ornate pins, and rings with glass stones.

I held the picture in both hands. It felt soft, as if it had been touched many times. The man in the photo wore trousers with a belt and a white shirt. He had a narrow face, and his eyebrows were a darker shade of blond than his hair. Rolf leaned forward, looking at the man’s faded
features with such longing that I imagined his father reaching up toward the branches of an orange tree under a sun that was bright, white, a sun that soaked its rays into his shirt as he stood in that one luminous moment before breaking off an orange, forever reaching, forever there.

  
Saving a Life

T
he summer of 1960 I was fourteen and I wanted to save someone’s life. It was the only thing I was sure I could do. About everything else I felt uncertain: my legs were too long, my face was too round, my hair was too straight… Although the woman who wanted to marry my father—Fräulein Mahler—told me I was beautiful, I knew she only said it so I wouldn’t try to talk my father out of marrying her. She’d inherited the Mahler department store in Düsseldorf, and whenever she visited us, she gave me books or records or white chocolates in silver foil. When she smiled, I could see the gold crowns my father had put on her back teeth. She was older than my father’s other female patients who’d brought cakes and casseroles to our house after my mother had died in April.

My mother had been a good swimmer. I had that from her. I’d passed each test with the highest marks, including the life-saving test and had dreams of proving myself as a saver of lives. It would be better if the drowning person were a man twice my weight.
He struggles. He’s heavy and balding like Herr Stosick, who plays chess with my father on Monday nights, and I stun him by knocking my fist against his
temple. Keeping his chin above water with one arm, I drag him to safety. Sometimes it takes over an hour to get him to shore while people watch from the dike and admire my courage. Other times I save him in less than ten minutes. During the TV interview I speak firmly and smile without showing my gums. In front of the bathroom mirror I practice different versions of that dazzling, yet modest smile I’ll flash when the mayor hands me the medal. I make sure they film me in my new swimsuit
.

But the people who swam in the Rhein were cautious and stayed close to the pebbled embankment. Adults waded in up to their waists, and children held on to inner tubes. Here, the river was wide and flowed evenly; it ran straight without obstructions, and the next bend was half a kilometer downstream. Along the river stretched the town of Burgdorf, both ends clinging to its bank like tentacles that thinned out against the boundaries of adjoining towns.

Whenever the sun became so hot that it made me dizzy, I left my watching post on the flat boulders at the end of the jetty and swam out into the river; floating on my back without moving my arms or legs, I let the current carry me. Sometimes I pretended my mother was next to me: the slapping of the waves became the sound of her arms parting the water. But then I’d remember the car accident and feel everything happen all over again: the call from the police; rushing with my father to the hospital; arriving too late. It was one of the few times I’d seen my father cry. In the corridor of the hospital he’d gathered me into his arms, my damp face pressed against his jacket. His arms and shoulders trembled as he cried with me until my terror became contained within his sorrow.

He said the river was too dangerous. He asked me not to swim there. Just as he had asked my mother not to smoke or drive so fast. Renate and Rolf swam in the town pool; they said the Rhein was too dirty. I found it boring to paddle in water that didn’t carry me forward; yet, I could never stay in the river as long as I wanted because it was
impossible to swim against the current, which ran at eight kilometers an hour. Whatever distance I drifted, I had to walk back. Frau Brocker knew I swam in the Rhein, but she was good at keeping secrets. She had never told my father about all the times my mother and I used to swim while it rained. On summer days when dark clouds moved across the sky, my mother would clean the paint from her hands and leave her studio; we’d pull on our swimsuits and loose dresses over them, then head for the river or the quarry.

My mother swam with smooth strokes. She didn’t like wearing a bathing camp. Her blond hair looked darker when it was wet, straighter, and it trailed behind her. When I grew confident swimming in the quarry, she took me to the river, where we rode the current together. I let my ball with the sisal net keep me above water. By the time I was seven, I didn’t need it any longer.

One Sunday afternoon, only a year ago, we’d floated for hours, talking and laughing; sometimes we were silent and let the sun warm our faces. It was the kind of silence that fills you with light and makes you believe you can do anything you want. We drifted until we got to my father’s favorite restaurant, the Kaisershafen Gasthaus, which overlooked the Rhein. High above us, in the turrets, the many small windows glistened like mirrors. Every November we had my father’s family reunion here: uncles in expensive suits with vests; aunts who wore silk dresses in dark colors; cousins who went to private schools and talked about dances and tennis matches; Great-aunt Augusta with her opal ring and varicose veins; Great-uncle Viktor with his cane that was covered with silver emblems of places he’d never been to.

Except for Oma, none of the relatives liked my mother. I’m not sure why—perhaps because she wore bright colors and had gone to art school. She was taller than the other women; yet, during those reunions she felt small to me,
and I stayed near her. She smoked more than usual, inhaling quickly, lighting a new cigarette as soon as the last one was finished.