Authors: Ursula Hegi
In this small town that was encumbered by centuries of tradition, women without husbands did not fit in: they were objects of pity or gossip. But the war changed all that. Without men, the barriers between the married and unmarried woman blurred: suddenly they were more alike than different. No longer did respect come to them because of their husbands’ positions, but because of their own abilities.
It was something the old widows had figured out long ago. They were the ones who truly governed the town but were wise enough to keep this a secret. They defined the boundaries of the community with an invisible chain of their linked hands as they filtered their advice to their children and told ancient fairy tales to their grandchildren as if they’d never been told before.
They felt suspicious of the few men who had stayed in Burgdorf and they gossiped about them—like Emil Hesping, a skilled athlete, who managed the gymnasts’ club and claimed to be unfit for military service because of weak lungs, and Herbert Braunmeier, who insisted that no one else could possibly take care of his dairy farm. Selfish, the old women said, but they coddled those men who’d been wounded in the war, like Leo Montag, the first soldier to return; they knitted woolen vests for him and brought him canned plums from their meager reserves to make up for his injury.
Two months after the battle of Tannenberg, in October 1914, Leo Montag had limped into Burgdorf, a steel disk in place of his left kneecap, wearing a long seal coat that used to belong to one of the Russian prisoners. It was on that silver-gray fur coat—spread on the floor between the shelves of the hastily closed pay-library—that Trudi Montag was conceived the afternoon of her father’s arrival. He had only been away from home for a few months, but he clung to his wife as though he’d been gone for years. Gertrud’s face, which often looked feverish when she got excited, was almost transparent in its
loveliness, and she laughed and cried as she held him. People in Burgdorf said about her that she absorbed the joys and pains of others as if they were her own.
It wasn’t like her, most agreed, to refuse her child. And it wasn’t like her to run away from home. But a few would claim to have sensed that seed of craziness in Gertrud long before it flourished: they spoke of that summer when she was four and had stopped talking for an entire year, and they reminded each other of her first communion, when she’d refused to open her lips to receive the sacred host, making the other children wait at the altar railing until the pastor had finally agreed to absolve her from sins that had attached themselves to her in the hours since her last confession.
It was three days after Trudi’s birth that Gertrud Montag fled from her bedroom and from the cries of the infant that caused her breasts to sting with unspilled milk. Blood from her hollowed womb had blossomed through the front of her batiste nightgown by the time Herr Pastor Schüler found her behind St. Martin’s Church, her arms spread across the door of the sacristy as if to keep him from entering. Without thinking, he crossed himself as though compelled to imitate the contour of her body. While he tried to loosen her hands from the door and pull her into the sacristy to protect her shame, one of the altar boys ran to summon Trudi’s father, who quickly hobbled the two blocks from the pay-library, where the people of Burgdorf continued to borrow those trashy romances and detective novels that Herr Pastor Schüler preached against in his Sunday sermons.
Leo Montag carried his wife home, wrapped in one of the altar cloths. Her blood seeped into the ancient lace, and although the pastor’s housekeeper would soak the cloth in salt water, the stains would merely fade into rose-colored clouds. Soon Gertrud was back at the sacristy door—properly dressed—was the priest’s first thought when he discovered her in her wool dress and her husband’s gray cardigan, even though the air was moist and much hotter than he liked it. Already he felt the itch of his sweat on his chest and beneath his private parts, a sweat he detested yet was unable to restrain with anything except medicated foot powder that left bone-colored rings on his garments and a chalky trace of dust on the tops of his shoes.
The pastor—whose round face made you expect a heavy person when you initially met him—stood at a safe distance from Gertrud Montag, his slight body bent toward her. Pigeons picked at the
ground around his feet and scattered when he reached into his pocket to disentangle his handkerchief from his rosary. He blotted his neck.
“Why are you here?” he inquired.
She raised her eyes to trace the path of a white stork that glided on lazy wings across the open market and headed for the roof of the
Rathaus
—town hall—its long amber legs trailing across the clay tiles before it landed next to the chimney. From the open windows of the bakery, a block away, drifted the yeast scent of warm bread. Two dachshunds yipped at the hooves of the ragman’s horse.
“Why are you here?” the pastor asked again.
But she wouldn’t reply, this tall woman with the blazing eyes that seared right through him, and because he didn’t know what else to do and liked to consider himself a merciful man, the Herr Pastor blessed Gertrud Montag, much in the same way he would administer last rites. And when that didn’t have any impact, he informed her that he absolved her from all her sins because, after all, that had appeased her once before, on the day of her first communion. While he kept peering over his shoulder, anxious for her kind and bewildered husband to appear, he even—without knowing—forgave her the one sin she would never forgive herself.
Long after her breasts had stopped leaking milk, Gertrud Montag kept running away from home, but she did not always hide behind the church. Sometimes she’d settle herself in the lilac hedge in back of the Eberhardts’ house. Renate Eberhardt had the lushest garden in town: snapdragons, roses, geraniums, and daisies grew abundantly, huge splotches of color—not orderly as in most of the other gardens—and a magnificent pear tree produced golden-yellow fruits. She’d let Gertrud pick a bouquet of her flowers before leading her home, and she’d stay and settle her in bed, her cool fingers on Gertrud’s flushed forehead. Renate’s slender neck seemed too long to carry the heavy braids that she wore pinned around her head.
Gertrud’s favorite hiding place was beneath the elevated section of her house which was set against a slight hill, level with the street in front where the entrance to the pay-library was, and raised in back on old pillars of wood and gray boulders. Near the opening hung the rack where Leo kept his bamboo rake and garden shovels. Beyond was a place where black bugs with hard-shelled bodies fused with the darkness, and lacy spider webs swung from rafters, rocked by a wind
too distant for any human to feel. Leo would have to crawl in after his wife and drag her out, while she’d sing church hymns and dig her bare heels into the earth, leaving gouges in the ground. Afterwards, the muscles in her calves would be so tight that he’d have to massage them for her.
At times he wouldn’t find her at all though he’d lock the library, where she used to work with him before Trudi’s birth, and ride his bicycle—his right leg pedaling, the injured one extended—through the streets surrounding the church, and from there all over town, down Romerstrasse, around the fairgrounds, up Barbarossa Strasse and toward the Rhein where, in the broad meadow between the dike and river, he and Gertrud used to fly kites as schoolchildren.
Occasionally he’d come upon her, but usually she’d return on her own, her black hair snarled and smelling of the river, say, or of the wheat fields that surrounded their town. He’d take his comb from his shirt pocket and hold her gently with one arm, while pulling the teeth of the comb through the tangles. One Sunday he dug out a young chestnut tree from the woods near the flour mill and presented it to Gertrud as a gift, telling her—while he helped her plant it in front of the pay-library—that this tree would keep her home. But the following morning she was gone again, and two nuns brought her back.
To tire her, Leo decided to take her on longer walks than their daily
Spaziergänge
when he closed the pay-library at noon, but she’d rush ahead of him while he’d struggle with the double burden of his stiff leg and the baby carriage. He gathered clumps of camomile and, from the blossoms, brewed tea which he hoped would calm her—this woman he’d known since they both were children, this woman who was one day older than he. He’d always liked it that they were the same age, even if that was unusual for married couples. Most husbands he knew were quite a few years older than their wives, and he couldn’t imagine being married to someone he hadn’t grown up with.
At night, he’d try to wrap his limbs around Gertrud to keep her safe, but she’d laugh in his arms, an odd, wild laugh that made his groin numb with coldness, and though she’d fit the skin of her body against his length, his genitals shrank from her and he could only hold her like a sister.
Before their daughter’s birth, Gertrud had gone about her work in the house and pay-library joyfully, but now she moved abruptly and loudly. She’d forget what she had come to buy when she did the marketing,
and she’d spill ashes when she’d clean out the kitchen stove or the green tile stove that was set into the wall between the living room and dining room.
One early morning in September, when Leo woke before her and watched her tranquil face, she looked just as she used to, and he felt convinced that she would return to her old ways, that she was ready to be a mother to their child. Pulling back the weightless feather comforter, he got up and dressed in his good suit though it was a weekday. He fetched his daughter from Frau Abramowitz across the street where she’d stayed—the night before it had been with Frau Blau next door—but instead of settling her in the crib inside the nursery, out of her mother’s sight as usual, he sat with her on Gertrud’s edge of the bed.
Trudi was the first infant he’d held, and to him she didn’t seem any different from the infants he’d glanced at over the years from a cautious distance. As he peered into her sage eyes, he marveled that, between him and his wife, two long and angular people, the child was like a pebble—round and solid. She had his light coloring, his strong chin and high forehead. Her tongue nudged at her upper lip as if trying to grasp some nourishment, forming a tiny, luminous bubble of spit. He let her suck on his little finger, amazed at the fierce tug of her tongue and gums. Lace curtains billowed in the open window, and in the morning light, the smooth brown woodwork glowed the color of honey. When he felt the high curve of Trudi’s palate against his fingernail, he gently turned his finger sideways so as not to scratch her.
“Look at her, Gertrud,” he said when his wife opened her eyes and sat up, startled. “Just look at her. Please.”
But his wife, after whom he’d named the child as they had planned during her pregnancy, squeezed her eyes shut and twisted her face aside.
The pay-library was in its third generation of existence, providing an income for the Montag family even during the lean years of war because the people carried in coal and food and clothing in trade for the brightly colored books that brought a different kind of adventure into their bleak homes than the adventure they were living—the gray adventure of war, of poverty, of fear.
You could also buy tobacco in the pay-library. Wooden cigar boxes and glass bins that contained nine sorts of tobacco were set up on one
end of the long counter, next to the ledger where Leo Montag recorded the books in the library, a separate page for each title. The length of each column below a title, listing the names of borrowers, would show how popular a book was.
The side walls of the Montags’ house were less than an arm’s length from the walls of the adjoining buildings—the Weilers’ on the left, the Blaus’ on the right. Herr Blau was a retired tailor, and Frau Weiler ran the grocery store. The façades of the three narrow houses were white stucco with a row of bricks set below the windows and above the high doors, and the foundations were built from great, smooth stones that had come from the bed of the Rhein. Most of the other shops and businesses in Burgdorf were also on the streets closest to the church square: Hansen’s bakery and the beauty parlor, the hardware store and the milliner’s shop, two taverns and the open market.
The Weilers had one son, Georg, who’d been conceived the night before his father had left for the Eastern front. Of an age to have grandchildren by the time she’d birthed Georg, Frau Weiler had a wide face with sad, protruding eyes, and often sounded frantic as if worried she wouldn’t get all her work done. She’d never forgiven her son for not having been born a girl, and she was still trying to correct that error by dressing him in smocks and refusing to cut his hair.
The Blaus’ children were already grown: Margret and her family rented an apartment near the chapel, and Stefan Blau, who’d run away to America as a young boy, had returned to Burgdorf only once, in 1911, to take Leo Montag’s sister, Helene, with him as his third bride and mother to the children of his first two wives, who’d died in childbirth. Recently, Leo had been wishing that his sister still lived with him and Gertrud. She’d know how to get Gertrud to accept their child. But Helene was thousands of kilometers away and had three stepchildren and a child of her own now.
While the Montags’ pay-library, kitchen, and living room with its piano took up the main floor of their house, the bedrooms were on the floor above. On the third floor was a sewing room with pansy wallpaper and a narrow window; it was there that Leo Montag would lock up his wife to keep her safe after she began to take off her clothes for the angels. The first time it had happened right at Sunday mass. Leo, who sat between two of the older men, was aware of the priest up in the pulpit, preaching, but he wasn’t listening to the words because he was noticing how the light—even though it was raining
outside—blazed through the stained-glass windows in blue and purple and gold stars as though the sun were shining. He hadn’t even realized that Gertrud had her dress unbuttoned until the priest stopped in the middle of a sentence, raising one scrawny arm toward the women’s side of the church, causing everyone to stare at Gertrud for that interminable moment before Frau Eberhardt, who knelt in the pew behind Gertrud, threw her coat across Gertrud’s shoulders.