Authors: Ursula Hegi
“Don’t torture me. What did you find out about the Buttgereits?”
“They kept the asparagus in their bathtub after they cut it, and people would go to their house and buy it right out of that tub. Two years ago, Monika Buttgereit swore Helga Stamm to secrecy and told her how her family got the asparagus to taste so good.…” Trudi waited, letting her words settle, and just as Klaus opened his mouth to ask his next question, she whispered, “Pee.”
“What?”
“Pee. Everyone in the Buttgereit family pees into that bathtub.” Another meaningful pause. “That’s why their asparagus tastes like no other asparagus in the whole world.”
He shook himself like a wet dog. “I’m glad I’ve never eaten it.”
“Oh, you may have.” She smiled. “Some of the restaurants in Düsseldorf serve it. They still do.”
“I don’t want to know. Why doesn’t someone tell the restaurant owners?”
“Helga told Georg Weiler, and his mother told Frau Abramowitz and the fat priest.…” She shrugged. “In Burgdorf, word moves around fast, but—” She moved her solid hands as if rotating a large
ball. “—it usually stays right here, in town, as if held within some invisible borders.”
When the carnival returned to Burgdorf that July, Klaus invited Ingrid and Trudi to go with him. While Ingrid wore sensible shoes and her gray Sunday dress, Trudi had sewn herself a chiffon dress that matched the embroidered bolero jacket Frau Abramowitz had brought her from Spain for her eighteenth birthday. Although the high heels of her sandals kept sinking into the ground, forcing her to walk on her toes, she didn’t let that keep her from enjoying rides on the Ferris wheel and carousel, and when she and Klaus took turns at the shooting booth, she was the one to win a plush lion with a stiff mane, which she gave to Ingrid.
As each July since she’d met Pia, Trudi searched for the
Zwerg
woman’s blue trailer, and though she didn’t find it, she sat between Ingrid and Klaus in the circus tent, expecting Pia to lead the animals into the ring. Pia would know about her and Klaus the moment she’d look at her.
But the animal tamer was the same burly man with the same sure smile who’d come here for the past four summers, the same man who had stared at her when she’d asked him about Pia that summer after she’d met her.
“I don’t know of anyone like her,” he had said.
Trudi had raised one level hand to the top of her head. “About this tall.”
“No.”
“She was here … with the elephants and the lions and a parrot named Othello and—”
“It’s not work for a woman.” He straightened his shoulders, making his chest swell.
“Pia knew what to do.”
He started to walk away.
“Pia was magnificent,” Trudi shouted after him. “A lot better than you.”
He turned and stared at Trudi as if to appraise her. “Listen, little girl—” His voice had lost some of its gruffness. “We circus people are an odd sort. We don’t always stay with one outfit. Some of us find a place we like and—” He let out a surprising giggle and lifted his bulky
arms as if to release something. “—we stop there for a while until we get restless, until a new circus with new dreams comes along.”
Outside the circus tent Klaus picked a bouquet of clover blossoms and divided it equally between Ingrid and Trudi. In the crowded beer-garden tent, they ate crisp white sausages with spicy mustard and drank
Berliner Weisse
—beer mixed with a shot of raspberry syrup—while listening to the accordion band play waltzes and gaudy carnival music. Flies buzzed through the swirls of blue smoke and settled on forks and the rims of glasses. Where, the year before, the beer garden had been filled with balloons and streamers, it now was decorated with several huge, red flags displaying the black
Hakenkreuz—
swastika—inside a white circle. The same emblem was worn by quite a few customers on red armbands or on pins fastened to their collars.
When Klaus wanted to dance with Ingrid, she shook her head. “Ask Trudi,” she said, and his moment of hesitation—before he asked Trudi and led her to the dance floor—was so brief that, even years afterwards, she would wonder if she had imagined it.
Her legs felt clumsy, and her arms uncomfortable from stretching them up. Though her neck got stiff from looking into Klaus Malter’s face, she loved the dance, loved every moment of it. Klaus showed her how to move her feet, and between dances they returned to Ingrid, who looked heartbreakingly beautiful in her church dress and managed to discourage every man who wanted to dance with her. She had arranged the purple clover in an empty beer glass and set it next to her plush lion, but the waiter, who kept replenishing their
Berliner Weisse
, kept forgetting to bring the water she’d ordered for the flowers.
It was close to midnight when Eva Rosen and Alexander Sturm entered the beer-garden tent, arms linked, faces flushed with an excitement that didn’t seem to have anything to do with drinking. Trudi had seen Eva excited, but Alexander, who’d been too serious even as a boy, had grown even more formal with his formidable Kaiser Wilhelm mustache. A man who chose his words carefully, he didn’t allow himself time for frivolities. He took pride in his toy factory, his apartment building, and gave far too much significance to what others thought of him. Yet, as Trudi watched him dance with Eva, he seemed changed as if some closed chamber in him had finally opened. Already, wonderful silver strands had begun to soften the starkness of Eva’s black hair, a contrast to her girl face that made her look both
young and sophisticated. Alexander’s hair was a much lighter shade than hers, sandy almost. Trudi felt something new between the two, a connection, a secret that compelled her to watch them closely.
Trudi hadn’t spoken with Eva for nearly a year, but when Eva stopped at her table to say
“Guten Abend”
—“Good evening”—it felt to Trudi as if they were continuing their last conversation. Eva talked with such ease about Trudi’s father and Seehund, about her classes at the
Gymnasium
in Düsseldorf and her plans to enter medical school that, for a moment, Trudi wanted to take her by the hand and lead her outside beneath the stars.
“Do you think your father will ever get well again?”
she would say and:
“Is the red on your chest still like a flower?”
and, most importantly:
“I’m sorry I told”
But Klaus was asking Alexander how the construction on his apartment house was progressing, and when Alexander only said, “Quite well, thank you,” Eva explained that the building was nearly completed, and that Alexander’s widowed sister, who was moving back into town, would live with her daughter, Jutta, on the third floor. “She’s had problems with her health and needs help bringing up the girl, who’s quite impetuous, from what I hear. I’m rather intrigued.”
“Reckless,” Alexander said.
“What?”
“More like reckless. You said: impetuous.”
“A blond girl, tall?” Trudi asked.
Alexander nodded.
“Didn’t she visit three summers ago?”
“Yes. When her father was still alive,” Eva said. “Alexander says even then the girl was always getting into accidents. The day she arrived with her parents, she broke her left arm, and still, she went on to climb trees and managed to break the other arm.”
“Only it was the right arm she broke first,” Alexander said.
Eva shrugged. “Eventually both arms.”
Alexander seemed about to correct her once more, but instead he turned toward Klaus Malter and told him he already had several tenants signed up for the stores. “The butcher, the optician, and the pharmacist for sure. Possibly the hardware store. We’re still negotiating.” But the cherry tree on the sidewalk across the street, he said,
was a problem because the carpenters kept dragging red pulp from the fallen cherries into the house on the bottom of their shoes, staining the floors.
When Klaus suggested he’d keep water pails by the front door and ask them to rinse their soles before entering, Alexander nodded thoughtfully and thanked him for his advice before he took Eva to their own table.
The waiter poured more of the red
Berliner Weisse
, and Ingrid whispered to Trudi when the foam left a white stripe on Klaus Malter’s beard. When he insisted on knowing what they were saying, Ingrid refused and Trudi reached up to wipe the foam from his face. His beard was dense, yet soft, and she blushed and pulled her fingers away; but he caught her hand, and all she could think of was how glad she was that she’d been using lotion so faithfully.
“What were you whispering?”
“That Alexander is a stuffy man,” she lied.
“Strange to think that he makes toys,” Klaus said.
When the band played the last round, Trudi thought the tent was whirling around her as the young dentist led her in a waltz. He laughed aloud and she laughed with him, and it no longer mattered how hard it was to keep her neck and arms at that angle, and his lips were wet as he drew her closer and lowered his face toward hers, whirling her around all along, and his tongue tasted of sweet berries and beer, and it was only after they were back at the table and the accordionists were playing the national anthem,
“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles …,”
that she realized she had just received her first kiss.
“Stop”
she wanted to shout at him,
“stop, we have to do this over. I didn’t even know what was happening”
but the musicians were packing up their instruments, and Klaus didn’t look any different than he had before, even though he had taken her across a border she’d never expected to cross: she had joined the legion of women who had been kissed.
Klaus Malter took both Trudi and Ingrid home as he had before, walking between them, his arms linked through theirs, and he dropped Trudi off first and said she was a fabulous dancer. Her house was dark and silent, but the moon scattered enough light for her to find her way into the living room, where she explored her face in the gold-framed mirrors. Each reflection gave her a face that was leaner,
paler—as though she’d lived through uncountable experiences since she’d left the house earlier that day. It was the face Klaus had looked at when they’d danced, the face he’d bent toward and kissed.
She tilted her head, smiling with the assurance she’d seen in Pia’s smile, and thought of Pia’s magic island with its waterfall and jewels and orchids, the island she had helped to create—a place to go to in her thoughts, hers as long as she remembered it was there for her.
“Trudi Malter,” she whispered to herself. “No, Gertrud Malter …” But the name Gertrud—the full version of her name, the adult version—carried that tinge of her mother’s craziness.
“Trudi Malter,” she practiced again. Klaus Malter was ten years older than she—a perfect age gap, since she was far more mature than other eighteen-year-olds.
“Frau Malter,” she said aloud, trying to ignore Pia’s voice deep inside her head:
“Some are Zwerge. Others not.”
She shook her head, hard.
“Some are Zwerge. Others not.”
But Pia’s baby was not a
Zwerg
.
“A grown grown-up”
Pia had called him.
Klaus was tall. Their babies would be tall like him. They would sleep in a wicker carriage in the pay-library while she’d work. She’d play records for them, rock them in her arms. Klaus would kiss her in the mornings before he’d walk across the street to open his office, and he’d come home for his noontime meals. All her customers would have their teeth fixed by him. He’d accompany her to church, and Sunday afternoons he’d walk with her everywhere in town, proud to be seen with her, his love for her so evident in his eyes that no one could help noticing. For their wedding—
She laughed aloud, reminding herself that the marriage would have to come before those babies. For their wedding she would sew a white satin gown with a train and wear the highest heels she could buy.
“Trudi must have grown”
people would say when they’d see her sweep into church. After the wedding she’d dye the gown a deep blue to match her eyes and wear it for special occasions, to the Opernhaus in Düsseldorf, say, or to a fancy restaurant.
But when Klaus came to the pay-library two days later and played chess with Leo, he didn’t mention the kiss, not even when Trudi walked him to the door. He crouched to stroke Seehund’s back—as if to restrain his hands from touching her, Trudi thought as she looked
down at the crown of his hair, where it grew in a cowlick.
“It’s good to see you,” she said.
“What have you and Ingrid been doing?” he asked without glancing up at her.
As the dog arched his neck, pushing himself closer against Klaus Malter’s hands without any shame, Trudi felt envious.
“I haven’t seen Ingrid since the carnival,” she said, stressing the word
carnival
to jolt his memory.
He scanned the street as if waiting for a prospective patient and stood up. “I must get back to my office.”
“What’s wrong?” Leo asked when Trudi stormed past him and up the stairs.
But she didn’t answer. In her bedroom, she pulled out the pattern and fabric for a new dress and began to pin and cut out the striped material, allowing for added centimeters on the side seams while shortening the bodice and skirt. Even if she was condemned to see the world from the angle of a child’s height, the range of that vision was no longer enough for her desires. By the time she fed the second sleeve through the sewing machine, it was getting dark outside, but she kept standing by the machine, balanced on her left foot while her right foot pumped the wide pedal, and her reckless fingers rushed the fabric toward the rapid needle.
She felt afraid of her passions, afraid of her mother’s passions revisiting themselves in her, afraid of losing her dignity by bursting into Klaus Malter’s office and throwing her arms around him. She laughed bitterly. Throwing her arms around what? His waist? His belly? She’d have to get him to sit down before she could imagine the rest of that futile fantasy. Now, if she were tall like Ingrid, she could walk up to him and, lightly, raise one hand to his cheek.… An embrace from her own height would be obscene.