Authors: Ursula Hegi
When—all that week—Ingrid didn’t mention the kiss either, Trudi suddenly wondered if she had imagined it. By now, it felt as gaudy and unreal as the carnival. Perhaps Klaus had just bent down and touched her lips with his by accident. But no—his tongue in her mouth had definitely been part two of a kiss. Even if part one—the touching of the lips—had been accidental, she could think of no reason why his tongue could have filled her mouth, other than that he had intended to kiss her.
Although the beer garden had been crowded that night, none of
the people in Burgdorf said anything about the kiss to her. She waited, but even without confirmation she knew that she was a woman who had been kissed and that—at least in that one moment prior to the kiss—she must have evoked lust in the young dentist.
The end of that summer one of Trudi’s molars began to ache. She tried to keep her tongue from darting back because its left side was rubbing itself sore against the edges of the tooth. The more she decided to ignore the pain, the more she thought about it. Her tongue probed the surface of the molar until she no longer was sure if she imagined a small hollow or if it really was there. What if she had only talked herself into a toothache to find a reason to have Klaus touch her again? He would know it the moment he’d examine her.
His visits to the pay-library had become rare, but Trudi would find out about him from her father, who saw Klaus every Monday evening at the chess club. Though she wouldn’t come right out and question him about Klaus, she might ask—in passing—who’d been at the club. At times she wondered if someone had told her father about that kiss at the carnival, because he’d look at her as if hesitant to stoke her feelings for Klaus with new information; and yet, he’d give her what she wanted, waiting however until she’d bring up the chess club as if he hoped that, somehow, she would forget about the young dentist.
From her father she learned that Klaus was thinking of hiring an assistant, and that he’d sprained his ankle when his bicycle had overturned in the ditch. If she saw him on the street or in church, they’d nod to one another or exchange a few polite words. Afterwards she’d go over those words in her mind, trying to find significance in his inflections and pauses, imagining what she could have said.
Perhaps he was even shyer than she.
Perhaps he’d been waiting for her to mention the kiss.
Perhaps he was devastated that she acted as though nothing had changed between them.
She daydreamed about him nearly all the time: his image had attached itself to her eyes, a silvery sheen through which she had to view everything else. He interfered with her days, fastened himself to her dreams. Sometimes she wished she could scrape him from her eyes. Too often she succumbed to the promise of his kiss and let herself imagine a continuation of that dance, spinning into marriage, his arms around her and a red-haired infant.
Once, she found herself free of her infatuation for nearly two hours after spotting him from the window as he headed toward his office where, just before he opened the door, he reached back to pull the fabric of his trousers from the crack between his buttocks. Delighted with the absence of those intense feelings, she thought they were gone for good, but as with anything you let go of abruptly, they left a void, and soon her infatuation rushed back into that void, familiar and heavy.
When her tooth continued to hurt, leaving a sweet, crumbling sensation deep inside her mouth—as much a taste as it was a smell—she briefly considered going to her old dentist, Dr. Beck. But if this toothache was real, it was too valuable to waste on Dr. Beck.
The raw side of her tongue chafed against her molar the Tuesday she saw Alexander and Eva in the open market with a long-limbed, blond girl, tall enough to pass for fifteen if it hadn’t been for the scraped shins of a child. She turned out to be Alexander’s eleven-year-old niece, Jutta, who had just moved into his apartment building with her widowed mother. Jutta’s eyes were curious when she was introduced to Trudi—not the kind of curious that irritated Trudi—but rather a way of seeing, a total absorbing without judgment. When Jutta looked at you, it felt as though you were held and stored by the eye of a camera—except there was nothing impartial about her glance: she had a wildness about her, a passion that made Trudi want to pull her aside and find out everything about her.
Eva grasped Trudi’s shoulder. “Alexander and I—we got engaged yesterday,” she said, her thin face radiant.
“Congratulations. Both of you.” Trudi managed to smile though she was annoyed—not only because she hadn’t been invited—but because she hadn’t found out about the engagement till now. Usually she knew about things before they happened and relished choosing the best time to tell others.
“It was a small family celebration,” Alexander said as if to appease her.
“How about your studies, Eva?” Trudi mumbled without glancing up.
“My what?” Eva bent until her face was in front of Trudi’s.
“Your studies. I was asking about your studies.”
Alexander lowered himself too as if not to miss one word.
Only the girl stood tall, watching the three of them with almost the
same amused expression as Pia’s that day she’d taught Trudi this trick.
“I’ll wait until after the wedding,” Eva said.
“But you still want to be a doctor.” It came out like a reminder, not a question.
“Some day. For now I’ll do some office work for my mother.”
After that meeting in the market, Trudi saw the girl Jutta nearly everywhere, as if she’d been there all along, roaming through Burgdorf with impatient strides, a dog-eared sketchbook under one arm. One blustery September evening Trudi followed her past the wheat and potato fields to the quarry hole at the south end of town. For the past months, cranes had scooped out the ground, loading gravel onto trucks that rumbled through the center of Burgdorf, but now all the equipment was gone. Trudi saw the girl on the opposite side of the wide hole, her dress blowing around her like a bell as she stood high in the branches of an unsteady birch that clung to the edge of the gouged earth by its roots. All at once—though her own feet were on solid ground—Trudi became the girl Jutta: she felt the tree swaying beneath her, felt a deep identification as their lives fused in an inexplicable way that would endure long beyond that day and shift itself to Jutta’s unborn daughter, whose birth was still more than a decade away.
Beads of cold rain began to slant to the earth, and from a distance a low thunder reeled closer. The roots of the tree were half exposed, and it struck Trudi as an omen that Jutta would never be entirely safe in Burgdorf. As the egg smell of lightning suffused the air, Trudi raised one hand to warn the girl, but the young face was turned toward the sky—not in surrender, but rather in a fearless greeting of the elements, as if Jutta were welcoming her equals—and Trudi decided against disturbing her solitude and dropped the cool back of her hand against that side of her face which was swollen hot from her tooth.
When she reached home, the wind had plastered wet, long leaves from the chestnut tree against the door. Her clothes were molded to her body, and Seehund sniffed her drenched shoes without getting up as she stepped across him. Lately, it had become harder for him to raise himself onto his old legs, and she had to hoist him up most mornings, steady him as she led him to the backdoor. Her father liked to save morsels from his meal for the dog. Since Seehund could no longer climb the steps, they’d moved his blanket next to the kitchen
stove, but he slept wherever the sun left a warm pool of light.
“You better get some dry clothes on,” her father said and heated the bathroom stove for hot water even though it was not Saturday, and she didn’t refuse the bath because she didn’t know how to tell him that seeing the girl by the quarry already made her aglow with something wild and splendid deep within.
Far into the night she awoke with a start and saw Jutta standing in the tree, rain shrouding her like a second skin. In the morning she found out from Emil Hesping that water was spouting from the bottom of the quarry hole, and when he took her and Frau Simon there in his car, Trudi stood beneath Jutta’s birch, watching the surface of the water rise and wishing the girl could see this with her. Yet, she had a feeling that Jutta already knew.
By the end of that week, the water had cleared, and some of the older children were swimming in it. The following Monday, at the chess club, Leo told Klaus Malter about Trudi’s toothache. When the young dentist stopped by the pay-library the next morning to take her to his office, she protested.
“It will go away.”
But he insisted with a warmth that bewildered her.
“I have to put these books back on the shelves and—”
“I can do that,” her father said.
Klaus Malter smiled as he situated her in his tilting metal-and-leather chair. “Another patient. I might survive after all in Burgdorf. Open up now.”
“It’s already better.” She was glad she was wearing her most recent Sunday dress, the green gabardine with the pointed lace collar that she’d rotated into weekday use only the month before when she’d finished sewing her newest outfit.
“At least let me take one look at your tooth.”
As he leaned forward to peer into her mouth, she felt the starched sleeve of his white jacket against her shoulder. A medicine smell clung to his hands and to the metal tools that probed her molar and gums. She wanted to close her lips, wanted to keep him from thinking that she longed for him to fill her mouth once more with his tongue, wanted to get it over—that moment when he’d send her home because there was nothing wrong with her tooth. If only she’d gone to Herr Doktor Beck instead.
“You shouldn’t have waited so long,” he said. “This is pretty serious.”
She tried to swallow.
“Keep it open,” he reminded her as he started to drill. His hands were steady, his eyes alert. His beard was as dense and curly as the triangle of hair that grew low on her body where her thighs fused with her torso. His skin was fairer than hers—as if he hadn’t been in the sun all summer—and a faint spray of freckles made his nose look darker than the rest of his dear face.
She barely felt the drill as she pictured herself telling her customers what a fine dentist Klaus was—words that would carry far more influence now that she’d become one of his patients.
“He has gentle hands”
she would say.
“He doesn’t have hairs sprouting from his nose like Dr. Beck.”
Glad that she’d come to his office after all, she watched his face, his frown of concentration; yet, at the same time, she felt sad knowing that, soon, she would no longer be with him. And all along he kept drilling deeper, a low rumbling that made her jaw, her head, her entire body vibrate.
If only that drilling would last so that she could stay here, free to look into his eyes and feel the skin of his hands on her face. If only she were beautiful. If only she’d attended the
Gymnasium
and gone on to study medicine or law—anything that would have spanned the gap between their classes and brought her the acceptance of his family. He had told her about his annual family reunions at the Kaisershafen Gasthaus, about his mother who was a brilliant professor, about his refined aunts and successful uncles, about relatives who traveled to those reunions from as far away as München and Bremen.… As Trudi imagined herself entering the restaurant with Klaus, wearing a pale gray silk suit with pearl buttons, she had to squeeze her eyes shut at the display of loathing in his relatives’ faces.
Abruptly, the quiver of the drill ceased. “Trudi? Did I hurt you?”
She felt as though her body lay sprawled out on the chair, there for him to inspect, squat and ugly like a bug flattened by a magnifying glass. Her tongue found the hole he’d drilled into her molar—a hole big enough for one’s entire world to disappear—and she swallowed the taste of copper and charred bone and wished she could swallow herself and vanish into that abyss.
“Trudi!” His hand shook her shoulder.
It would serve him right if she died right here in his chair. The scandal of it! Surely, he’d never have another patient after that.
“God knows how far he drilled into Trudi Montag”
people would say at her funeral. Those who had been Klaus Malter’s patients would cross themselves and light candles of gratitude to St. Appolonia, the patron saint of dentists, who’d leapt into a fire after her teeth had been yanked out during her torture. Klaus would have to leave town—no, the country, because newspapers as far away as Berlin and München would carry headlines:
Red-haired dentist kills patient.… Dentist does away with young woman after kissing her
.… But maybe St. Appolonia wasn’t the right saint to pray to. She’d be the one to protect the dentist, not the patients. Who was the patron saint of patients? St. Margaret, who’d been tortured, imprisoned, swallowed by the devil disguised as a dragon? No, St. Margaret was only the patron saint of pregnant women—one saint Trudi would not need, judging from the way Klaus had evaded her ever since that kiss.
“Please, Trudi—”
It seemed ironic that her womb would shed blood every month, that she shared that experience with other young women when the rest of their lives were so unlike.
“Trudi!”
Reluctantly, she opened her eyes. He was bending over her, lips parted as though he’d forgotten to breathe. His teeth were exceptionally white and even. She found herself wondering who his dentist was.
“How are you feeling, Trudi?”
Already she could see the measured man he would settle into, a man who would look with amazement at his younger self. The older Klaus Malter would never kiss a
Zwerg
woman or whirl her around in an endless dance. The older Klaus Malter would find himself a wife who’d fit into his competent life.
“I was afraid you’d passed out on me.”
“Maybe the women in
your
family pass out.” She laughed to keep him from noticing her sudden anger. “Obviously, I am not refined enough for that.” Stop it, she told herself, he doesn’t even know you’ve been to his family reunion and back. Yet, her anger boiled, red hot. Even if he had said,
“Listen … that night when I kissed you—I don’t quite know what happened there. I hope I didn’t offend you”
she would have tried to understand; but to say nothing made him like
all the others who believed that, just because she was small, everything connected to her was smaller—smaller joys, smaller pains, smaller dreams—invalidating her, invalidating that kiss.