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 (36 page)

As Eva stood up to leave, Trudi saw herself alone again, steeped in
that familiar isolation. “My father almost got killed once,” she said quickly to hold Eva there.

“By a cat?”

“No, a Russian bullet. It was aimed right for his heart.” She paused deliberately, knowing that stories took on a new power once you gave them words. They had to start inside your soul, where you could keep them for a long time, but to make them soar, you had to choose words for them and watch the faces of others as they listened. “But the other soldier …” she said, drawing in the current of Eva’s curiosity as she once had with Georg, longing for her to stay. Willing her to stay. “The other soldier tripped—they all were in a muddy field, see?—and the bullet went into my father’s knee instead.”

Eva leaned close. “What happened to the Russian soldier?”

“He was captured, and my father got to keep his coat.” Grasping Eva’s hand, she pulled her up the front steps and into the entrance hall, where the long seal coat hung from one of the wooden hooks. From the window at the end of the hall, light spilled across the Persian carpet runner and filtered through the intricate weave of the wicker chair.

“Touch the coat,” Trudi urged. “It’s made from the fur of seals.” She had pieced together her own version of how her father had been injured in the war and come into the possession of the coat—to her those two had to be ultimately connected—but before she could captivate Eva with any of this, Eva’s mother came out of the pay-library with several books.

That night, Trudi closed her window and lay awake till late, listening for cats and thinking of how she would tell the rest of the story to Eva. She smiled to herself, imagining Eva’s face as she listened.
“The Russian soldier was the tallest man my father had ever seen, and they became friends. Well—not real friends like
—
”
She wanted to say,
“you and me”
but even in her fantasy couldn’t risk presuming that much.
“He tried to give my father his coat. As a gift. To make up for shooting him. But my father traded him some of his food rations. And one pair of boots
…” Anticipating Eva’s questions about size of feet, she decided to add,
“You see, my father’s feet have always been large. They were the same size as the Russian’s.”

But the next morning, when she ran to school, ready to tell her story, Eva turned away as soon as she saw her and started talking to
Helga Stamm, who was the plainest girl in class with those thick arms and colorless lips that made her look as though she were made of dough. Trudi, her heart beating madly, dashed past them into the classroom and pulled her slate from her satchel. Low in her back she felt an ache that stayed with her all that day.

On the way home, she heard children laughing behind her. Certain that they were making fun of her body, she walked faster, her face hot, hating her short legs and how they curved—outward at the knees, then tapering again at her ankles as though outlining the shape of a large cuckoo’s egg. She pretended she wanted to be alone. Even if they asked her to play now, she wouldn’t stop. Not for them.

She hadn’t been home more than an hour when Eva appeared outside the pay-library, calling for her to come out and play.

“Bring Seehund,” she shouted when Trudi stuck her head from the window of her room. “I have something for you.”

Trudi wanted to duck back and hide beneath her bed, wanted to dump a bucket of dirty water on Eva’s head, wanted to run downstairs and play with Eva. Slowly, she walked down the steps, counting them—
eins, zwei, drei, vier
… Her face grew hot.
Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben. Sieben Zwerge
. She stopped. The week before, she had asked the priest if there was a patron saint for
Zwerge
, and he’d peered at her with his kind eyes as if startled.

“I don’t believe so, my child.”

“But everyone has a patron saint.”

The priest nodded, sadly. “Barbers, widows, epileptics, merchants …” He reached into his left sleeve and scratched his thin arm in long, even sweeps.

Trudi thought of Frau Simon, who wore a blessed medal of St. Antonius—the patron saint of everything that’s been lost—along with a Jewish amulet on a fine silver necklace.

“… beggars, dentists, orphans,” the priest recited, “servants, librarians—”

“Even animals,” Trudi said. She had a holy card of the patron saint of animals, St. Antonius. He was a hermit who’d lived inside a tomb in a cemetery. She waited for the priest to produce a patron saint especially for
Zwerge
. Surely, a saint like that would make her grow.

“Perhaps St. Giles …” The priest reached into his other sleeve.

She clapped her hands. “I knew you’d find one.”

“He’s the patron saint of cripples.”

“I’m not a cripple,” she cried.

“I know, dear child…” He stroked her hair. “But St. Giles is the closest I can think of. He was fed the milk of a deer and—”

“Trudi…” Eva was shouting outside.

“I’m not a cripple,” Trudi whispered and walked down the last steps. Seehund was already waiting for her to open the door.

“Just imagine—” Eva said as though it were still the day before and they hadn’t stopped talking “—if that bullet had killed your father, you wouldn’t have been born.” She handed Trudi a lantern flower from her garden, its thin stem arching gracefully under the weight of the orange blossom.

“Then the stork would have brought me somewhere else.”

“The stork?” Eva laughed. “Storks don’t have anything to do with getting born.”

“They do.”

“My mother is a doctor and she knows. She says babies come out of mothers. They grow inside, and when they get too big, they crawl out.”

Trudi shook her head.

“It’s so,” Eva insisted and lifted Seehund’s ears, trying to make them stand up straight, but he flicked them the way he did when he chased away flies.

“He wants to go for a walk,” Trudi said.

Eva held the leash and Trudi carried the flower as they walked the dog to the end of Schreberstrasse and back. When Trudi suggested taking Seehund to the river, Eva glanced down the street as if trying to make sure none of the other children saw her with Trudi. “Let’s stay here today,” she said.

When they returned to the pay-library, Trudi sat down on the front steps and Seehund laid his head on her knees. Eva stood in front of her as if waiting for her to say something, but Trudi plucked silently at the stem of the lantern flower.

“Mothers have a baby pouch inside their tummy,” Eva blurted, “and fathers put seeds for babies there, and then the baby starts to grow.”

It was the silliest thing Trudi had ever heard; and yet, she had a sudden image of her dead brother still inside her mother, buried with her, always to stay within her—a privileged place of residence—as both of
them decomposed beneath the earth. She found herself wondering if the pebbles would last and saw herself opening the coffin and finding it empty except for a fistful of tiny gray stones.

“It’s true,” Eva said.

“Flowers and vegetables grow from seeds,” Trudi explained to her, “not babies.”

“After the man kisses the woman, he puts the seed inside her.”

“Where?”

Eva shrugged and curled Seehund’s ears around her fingers.

“See, you don’t know.” Trudi laughed at her. “It’s just a story your mother is telling you because she thinks you’re too little to understand.”

“I’m not.”

“I know what happens. I even know how to stop babies from coming.”

Eva stared at her, sudden doubts at her own certainty in her eyes.

“I once stopped a baby from coming. It’s a secret.” Trudi stopped. Though she soaked up other people’s secrets, she liked to guard her own because she knew how much power they could give to others.

Eva looped one arm around Trudi’s shoulders. “I won’t tell.”

“Promise?” Trudi had heard whispers about women who had ways to keep babies from coming. Like Frau Simon, who’d never had a baby. Keeping babies from being born was a sin.

“I promise.” Eva’s mouth stood half open as though she’d forgotten to breathe.

“Not even your mother.”

“Promise.”

Trudi said it as quickly as she could: “I made the baby die before it could get here because I ate the stork’s sugar and the baby came too soon to be alive and we had a funeral.”

Eva let out a long breath. “Which baby?”

All at once Trudi couldn’t speak.

“Which baby?”

“My—my brother.”

“Did you get punished?”

“No one knows about it.”

“I won’t tell.” Eva rubbed her knuckles up and down her high, narrow forehead. “Will you do it again?”

Trudi had to think hard. “I don’t want to,” she finally said.

“I know how you can tell if you’re going to have a baby.”

“How?”

Eva pressed one finger against Trudi’s skirt where it covered the bone triangle. “Once you get hair there,” she said, “you have to keep watching it. If it grows toward your belly button, you’ll have a baby.”

Though it stung Trudi to be ignored by Eva in school, she tried to understand. If Eva let on that she was her friend, the other children would exclude Eva too, as certainly as if her body had shrunk overnight. In her love, Trudi wanted to be like Eva—yet, she sensed that, in the eyes of the town, it would be the opposite: Eva would be treated like an outcast. It made her feel dangerous to the people she loved. Afraid of tainting Eva, she kept her love a secret, though sometimes it seemed to her that everyone had to notice because those feelings burned so strongly within her that they seared through her skin in fiery splotches.

And so, knowing the powers of contamination, she let Eva betray her, over and over again. If she were Eva, she probably would do the same. In a way she already did: ever since she’d started school, she’d turned from people who used to fascinate her, people whose otherness was even more evident than hers—like the third Heidenreich girl, Gerda, who drooled over herself and whose head ticked from side to side even though her father kept taking her to countless doctors as far away as Berlin; or Ulrich Hansen, the baker’s oldest son, who’d been born without arms and had to be fed by his parents although he was twelve years old; and, of course, the-man-who-touches-his-heart. It made her ache to look at any of them, made her afraid of having to join their ranks if she dared to be kind to them, made her feel cruel as she shunned them.

She lured Eva back with the pictures of the dead woman on her father’s walls. One afternoon, while her father had four customers in the pay-library, she sneaked Eva into her father’s bedroom. Eva, who’d only seen the photo of one dead baby before, stood as far away from those pictures as she could, while the sun glinted through the tree pattern of the lace curtains and left lace shadows on the many faces of the dead bride.

She lured Eva back with her stories—stories about her father, who’d been a celebrated athlete and had won many trophies before his knee had been injured; stories about her cousin, who lived in a magnificent
mansion in America; stories about the people in Burgdorf. Sometimes she even spied on Eva and her family and, through her stories, gave her back what she’d seen. Her stories grew and changed as she tested them to see how far they gave, how much Eva believed, what fit in and what didn’t, but all of them started from a core of what she knew and sensed about people. And it was not even that she made up anything, but rather that she listened closely to herself.

S
OMETIMES
T
RUDI AND
E
VA PLAYED WITH
S
EEHUND BY THE BROOK IN
back of the pay-library, but he’d run from them, yelping, if they’d splash him with water. And whenever they dragged him into the brook to teach him how to swim, he escaped as soon as they let go of his collar. Soon he learned to stay at a safe distance from Trudi if she went near water.

“You should have named him something else,” Eva said one fall afternoon after they’d given up on trying to submerge Seehund. “A seal is supposed to love water.”

“We’ll call him Earth Snail,” Trudi suggested.

Eva laughed. “Turtle Breath.”

Both arms stretched wide, Trudi whirled around. “Turtle Breath,” she chanted. “Earth Snail.…” Her right foot banged into the end of the wooden planks that spanned the narrow arm of the brook soon after it forked. She cried out.

“Pinch your earlobe,” Eva yelled.

Clutching her toe in one hand, Trudi hopped back and forth on the other foot.

“Just try it,” Eva ordered. “It stops the pain.”

When Trudi pinched her earlobe, it stung. Miraculously, her toe stopped hurting. “How come it works?” She plopped down on the grass next to Eva.

“It just does. I’ll show you something else.” Eva brought her face up against Trudi’s. Her breath smelled of raspberry pudding as she opened her lips—so wide that Trudi could see deep inside her mouth. Its roof was curved like the ceiling in St. Martin’s Church, and the dark gap in back was separated by a pink icicle. When Eva’s tongue stretched up, it hid the gap but exposed bluish veins beneath her tongue and a taut membrane that connected it to the bottom of her mouth. “Try it.” Eva’s voice was muffled. The tip of her tongue danced against the roof of her mouth. “Move it so it tickles.”