Authors: Ursula Hegi
The men’s pews were on the left, the women’s on the right. Until you had your first communion, you could kneel on either side with a parent. That meant Trudi and Georg could still kneel in the same pew. The men’s side of the church was always emptier than the women’s—not only because some had not returned from the war—but because many of them spent the hour of mass in Die Traube, the old tavern with wooden ceilings that had stood for over five centuries. Die Traube—“this is where I pray,” the men would joke—was the closest bar to St. Martin’s and in full view of the church, ideal for those men who wanted to walk their wives and children to Sunday mass; meet with their friends for a few quick beers at their
Stammtisch
—their regular table; finish their final glass as the doors of
the church opened; and be there to pick up their families and walk home for the Sunday roast.
Of course, there’d always be a few husbands who’d have to order one more glass after the last, whose wives would stand in the church yard with expressions of brittle cheerfulness, pretending they liked nothing better than chatting with the priest after mass. Yet, as soon as their husbands arrived, they’d link their arms through theirs and drag the poor sinners home, hissing words of reproach through their church smiles.
That winter, the ice on the Rhein grew so thick that people would drive their cars across the river to Kaiserswerth and Düsseldorf. Herr Immers took his new truck on the ice despite predictions of disaster from his wife, and Herr Hesping borrowed his uncle’s horse-drawn sled and brought his friends and their children on wild sleigh rides on the river. When the ice finally thinned, it tore in flat chunks that tried to mount each other like packs of wild dogs while the water hurled them downstream.
With each day the river rose, and as it left its bed, it washed across the winter matted meadows, freed the roots of young trees from the slack earth, and climbed the stone steps toward the crest of the dike that protected the town from the river. There, the people of Burgdorf would gather at dawn, shrouded by the smoke from their cigarettes and pipes as they’d stare at the shifting masses of gray waters and measure how far their river had risen during the night.
When Trudi’s father carried her to the Rhein on his shoulders, the coat of the Russian soldier wrapped around both of them in such a way that, from a distance, they looked like one very tall man, she could smell the dank fields long before she saw the flood. Threads of cold rain stitched the earth to the gray sky. The lower trunks and branches of the half-submerged willows were darker than their crowns, up to a meter above the waves where the water had splashed. Last fall’s dead leaves and debris had caught in the limbs, forming swampy pockets that bobbed in the waves like discarded hair nets. Some of the thinner branches were snagged by the currents and drawn beneath the surface before they whipped up again, completing a never ending circle. Ducks roosted in the V-shaped cores of trees as if holding court; whenever they braved the rapid waters, they were
spun around madly or thrust in the opposite direction until, with great effort, they extricated themselves from the white crests and fluttered up again, seeking shelter in the willows.
Trudi counted twenty-three trees hurtling past her, two dead chickens, and four dead cats. She was good at remembering numbers. Though her mother had only taught her to count to twenty, she’d practiced counting the books in the pay-library, until she knew the names of the numbers all the way to one hundred. She counted eleven bushes that were carried by the waves, nineteen things she couldn’t identify, and one dead goat, its belly the bluish-white tint of sour milk. Bloated, its stiff legs extended, it floated among the debris.
She didn’t see the one human victim—Georg’s father—because he hadn’t been found. Two nights before, a group of men had straggled toward the river in the rain with a bottle of
Schnaps
after Potter’s bar had closed, and Franz Weiler—always docile until he drank—had entertained everyone by doing handstands on top of the dike.
“We didn’t even hear a splash,” the taxidermist kept telling Frau Weiler. “Franz simply disappeared.” When he tried to offer her his help, she sent him home.
Trudi heard several people tell her father that Frau Weiler insisted her husband must have slipped from the dike on his way to morning mass.
“Morning mass, my ass,” Herr Immers said.
“He ordered the last round for us at Potter’s,” the pharmacist said.
Frau Blau pointed out that the church was only two blocks from the Weilers’ and the river a good ten minutes’ walk beyond the church.
“Must be some new detour,” Herr Bilder said.
Yet, no one contradicted Frau Weiler but—as it had been the habit of generations—upheld the façade which, above all, preserved a family’s respectability, no matter that beneath that façade all kinds of gossip festered. It was a complicity of silence that had served the town for centuries. Dressed in black and bearing proper words of condolence, the people assembled for the church service held in Franz Weiler’s memory: the men from his
Stammtisch;
the families who had bought their groceries from him and his wife for many years; a group of nuns from the Theresienheim who had their own chapel yet rarely missed a funeral service at St. Martin’s; and the bereaved wife, of course, with her possibly half-orphaned son, Georg, who wore a
black smock that had been hastily fashioned from one of her blouses.
He knelt next to Trudi and whispered to her during communion—which the two children were too young to receive—that his father was just taking a long swim. If any of the men from Franz Weiler’s
Stammtisch
had overheard the boy, they would have agreed with Georg: they already had speculated that, once in the river, Franz had kept on swimming to get away from his iron-haired wife.
When the people left the church, the man-who-touches-his-heart stood on the wet steps without a hat or umbrella. He was one of the few who always looked straight at Trudi.
See
, he seemed to say as his hands roamed up and down.
See what I can do
. Most grown-ups didn’t look right at Trudi: they acted as if she were invisible and said things they would never say around other children. She found if she stayed very quiet they often kept talking, disclosing far more about themselves than they realized—even those who had trained their features to remain constant. The feelings they tried to hide sprang into their voices, and she could discern fear, joy, impatience, rage. When they got cautious, a certain flatness moved into their speech, and their sentences shrank; but when they became excited, their words grew colorful and rushed from them.
If she didn’t remind people that she was there, she got to listen to all kinds of secrets. They fascinated her, those secrets, and she hoarded them, repeating them to herself before she went to sleep, feeling them stretch and grow into stories—like the one about Frau Buttgereit kneeling on lentils each morning when she prayed to St. Ottilia, the patroness of the blind, after whom she’d been named, imploring her to make sure her next child would not be another daughter. Trudi found it hard to believe that the gaunt woman, whose stomach always looked distended, had the reputation of once having been the most beautiful girl in Burgdorf.
Then there was the story about Herr Hesping, who’d bought a thousand blankets from one branch of the military and, within a week, had resold them to another branch for twice the price. He was often involved in some kind of deal that stretched the boundaries of the law without crossing them. If you asked him about a particular transaction, he’d overwhelm you with such a mass of facts and logic that you were glad once he stopped explaining. Some people said he had no values; others maintained that he did whatever he did out of contempt for the government.
• • •
The flood of 1920 that claimed Georg’s father was not the worst the town had seen: it only seeped through a few small fissures in the dike and trickled into the Braunmeiers’ pastures and peach orchard, as if to persuade the town that it was not only benign but also beneficial for the farmers; yet, instead it convinced the people to reinforce the mass of earth that protected them from the waters, which threatened the town nearly every spring.
The men talked about Franz Weiler as they labored on the dike in the nearly constant rain, and when the sun finally untangled itself from the clouds, they stopped their work and turned their faces toward the white light, which seemed more radiant after its long absence. Women left their stores and houses and came outside to sit in the sun on canvas chairs with their sewing. The teachers from the Protestant school and the nuns from the Catholic school brought the children outside for their lessons, instructing them how to identify leaves and insects even though the schedule might call for penmanship.
After the dike was rebuilt, it stood one meter higher and one meter wider than before, and if you looked at it from the direction of the town that summer after the flood, you’d notice the seam where the old part joined the new because the grass above it was the green of Easter candy.
Trudi would hold those pictures in her mind throughout the decades to come, and without even being near the river she would always know how it looked. She could close her eyes and picture the Rhein from the dike or close up from her favorite place on the jetty. She knew exactly how high the water could rise around the willows; knew the swift change of color—from moss green to molten black—and how the sun could shine on the surface so hard that it would blind you if you stared at the river; knew the pattern the current formed around the rocks in late summer, while early in spring they lay submerged.
It was like that with stories: she could see beneath their surface, know the undercurrents, the whirlpools that could take you down, the hidden clusters of rocks. Stories could blind you, rise around you in a myriad of colors. Every time Trudi took a story and let it stream through her mind from beginning to end, it grew fuller, richer, feeding on her visions of those people the story belonged to until it left its bed like the river she loved. And it was then that she’d have to tell the story to someone.
Georg was the ideal listener. Beneath the house, where Trudi’s mother used to hide, the two children would sit on rocks, their knees nearly touching as they filled the dank space around them with words. Even in the dark there’d be a glint to Georg’s hair as if he’d trapped the sun in his ringlets. If anyone could capture the sun, Trudi knew, it was Georg. As long as he felt lucky, treasures called out for him to pick them up—an empty snail house, a length of rope, the shiniest chestnut. He hoarded his collection in a box under his bed.
Once, he tried to teach Trudi how to make a bird out of mud. “The way Baby Jesus used to,” he said. Squatting next to the front stoop of the pay-library, he shaped a ball of mud in his hands until it had wings and a head. He held it toward the sky. “First it’ll open its wings,” he told Trudi, “and then it’ll fly into heaven.”
“It looks like a lump of mud.”
“That’s because it isn’t ready yet.”
“Maybe you forgot to do something.”
The bread wagon, which came once a week, rumbled past them, pulled by an old horse, and stopped at the end of the street. It was covered with heavy canvas. Several women with baskets over their arms crowded around it.
“Fly,” Georg shouted, and threw the bird into the air. It dropped in front of his feet, wide and flat. “It didn’t fly because we’re sinners,” he said.
“Maybe it’s the wrong kind of mud.”
“You think so?”
She nodded. “If we find the right kind of mud, we can do it.”
“I bet the unknown benefactor could get us the right kind.”
“The unknown benefactor can do anything.”
They both were intrigued by the unknown benefactor, whose identity was still a mystery to the people of Burgdorf and who—despite the poverty—continued to steal into people’s houses to leave his gifts like a thief who’d reversed the concept of thievery. The
Burgdorf Post
had published several articles about the unknown benefactor, each longer than the previous one, since the list of his contributions grew. A week after Georg’s father had vanished, the unknown benefactor surprised Georg with the gift he wanted most in the world—
Lederhosen
—leather pants with leather suspenders and a leather strip across the middle of the chest, displaying a stag carved from the white
core of an antler. Of course, his mother wouldn’t let him wear the
Lederhosen
—“Once you’re older,” she said—but she conceded to let him keep them in his room, where he took them out at least once a day to touch the thick leather.
For Trudi’s fifth birthday, Georg gave her a small cardboard box with needle holes pricked into its lid, and when she opened it, she found a black-and-orange butterfly on a bed of leaves.
“It won’t fly away,” he said proudly. “Ever.”
“Why not?”
“It can’t. I rubbed all the dust off the wings.”
She touched the gauzy wings and felt limp with an odd sadness.
“You—you don’t like it?”
“Will it live without the dust?”
“I’ll catch you another one.”
She wanted to tell him that she’d rather watch butterflies in the air, but his mother came out of the store and pulled something from the pocket of her apron. It was a silver medal engraved with an angel.
“Your guardian angel, Trudi. Make sure you don’t lose it.”
“I won’t.”
“It’s blessed by the bishop.”
Georg was fascinated with finding ways of courting luck, letting it envelop him instead of clutching it, and he told Trudi that the moment you started doubting your luck it vanished. You always had to assume it was there. Yet, she could see that it was hard for Georg to feel lucky when his mother was nearby—he even moved differently, docile and careful. It was as though he had something locked up inside him that he couldn’t figure out.
Finding things was not the only kind of luck he taught her. Chimney sweeps also brought good luck, and he’d keep count of how many chimney sweeps he’d see in a week. Then there was the luck of not getting caught when you did something wrong. Trudi found out about that toward the end of summer, when the Eberhardts’ pear tree was heavy with fruit that ripened the color of the sun and were so soft you could cut them like butter. Frau Eberhardt, whose husband had just died from pneumonia, had given Georg and Trudi two pears the morning after his funeral when they’d walked past her white stucco house, but when they returned the following day, hoping for more of
the sweet fruits, whose juice had run down their necks and into their collars, Frau Eberhardt didn’t come to the door.