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 (77 page)

The widow Weskopp, who hadn’t yet finished the year of wearing mourning clothes for her husband and youngest son, would stay in black from this day forward, the only color in her life except for the violets which she grew on every windowsill in her house as if to balance the harsh black of her garments.

When Trudi returned from the funeral of the Weskopp son, Eva stood waiting for her in the kitchen.

“I’m going home,” she said, her voice clipped.

“You know it’s not wise.”

“I also know I can’t go on like this. Sometimes I forget that you’re my friend.… All I see is my jailer.”

“Eva—”

“People can die. You’ve seen how quickly it happens. The Weskopp boy—”

“He was in the war.”

“Alexander might be sent off to war any day.”

“It’s not his life I’m worried about.”

“One short night, Trudi. One Goddamn beautiful night. Is that too much to want?”

“To want? Of course not, but—”

“If I can have one night with Alexander, I know I’ll be able to deal with the hiding again.”

“It’s not worth it, Eva.”

“How can you say that?”

“At least talk to my father.”

“There’s nothing he can say that will keep me here.”

She left through the kitchen door after the streets were dark and empty, promising to return before dawn, and Trudi set her alarm clock. When she woke up, the sky was still black, and she felt that slow buried ache in her hips. She washed, dressed, and went downstairs into the kitchen. They’d had no fugitives for a week, and with Eva gone, the house felt like a shell, a useless prop that a strong wind might blow away. She pictured Eva embracing her husband good-bye, rushing from the apartment building, careful not to be seen, cutting through the market and past the church square. Any moment now her knock would come on the backdoor. Trudi would pull her inside, search her face for traces of that one Goddamn beautiful night.

But outside it was silent.

Now, if she had one Goddamn beautiful night in her lifetime coming to her, Trudi pondered, and the choice with whom to spend that night… She found an immediate certainty within her: Max Rudnick. Not even Klaus Malter? No, Max Rudnick. But probably Max Rudnick hadn’t even considered a night with her. She wondered where he was, that night, that moment. It had been fifteen months since she’d met him, six months since she’d seen him.

“Stay out of danger,” she whispered.

The sky was changing from black to a deep purple blue, then to a medium blue, and finally to the flat light blue of a cloudless morning. And when the knock on the kitchen door came, it was not Eva, but Frau Weiler, the scarf around her frizzy hair half undone.

Nearly incoherent with the news that she’d become a grandmother during the night, she dropped herself on the nearest chair. “Twin girls, Trudi. You have to see them. Oh—” She clasped her hands by her throat. “Eva Sturm—have you heard about Eva Sturm?”

“What happened?” Trudi gripped her arm.

“I was there when they were born.” Frau Weiler sucked her false teeth into place. “Helga let me help. They’re both—”

“Eva—what happened to her? How did it—”

“She was arrested. They searched the apartment, then the whole building, and found her in the attic.”

“Where is she?”

“No one knows.”

“Oh God, I was afraid of that.… Who told you?”

“Jutta Malter. She was there when they took Eva.”

“And Alexander?”

“They didn’t take him.”

“He’s still there?” Trudi started for the door.

“Locked inside his apartment, I hear.”

A
LEXANDER DID NOT ANSWER THE DOOR THAT DAY OR THE DAYS AFTER
. Outside his windows hung the voices of women like souls of stuffed birds. Some he identified by sound: Trudi Montag, his niece, the butcher’s daughter-in-law. Others blended into a chorus, faded out, returned. He sat on the Danish sofa, and whenever he dozed off, he made sure it was while sitting: at least he could do that for Eva—not take comfort in lying down though his limbs yearned for rest. Stop it, he’d admonish his body when it complained, this is not about you. This is about Eva.

Sometimes he staggered to the bathroom.

Sometimes he ate and drank, disgusted that his body could force him into those functions.

Trudi Montag came back.

Others.

Knocking.

Knocking and calling his name.

If the Gestapo returned, they would break his door down and he’d welcome them. No reason to get up for anyone else. His mouth felt dry and salty—not the fresh salt taste of the sweat beneath his wife’s
breasts—but a nasty salt taste, old and used up. One evening he sat on the sofa when the sirens wailed, heard his tenants rush to the shelter he’d established in the cellar. Some banged on his door, shouted for him to follow them.

Except for a few stray bombs that planes had dropped on their way back from attacking much larger targets, Burgdorf had remained almost intact. Strange to think how afraid he’d been of bombs. He used to open his windows during bombing raids to keep them from vibrating until they broke, and then he’d dash down the stairs to his shelter. But now he remained sitting on his sofa and longed for the kind of sky he’d once seen in Köln during a bombing—a sky bright with shapes not unlike Christmas trees, sinking toward the city, casting their eerie glow over everything. He longed for his windows to shatter, letting in gusts of heat and smoke that would make it impossible to breathe. He longed for suffocation, for obliteration, for a sky brushed with fire. Without moving, he sat, praying to be buried in the rubble of his building. And then it was morning and his house stood around him and he sat on the sofa and his wife was gone. Normal.

She kept coming back, his wife’s
Zwerg
friend, fists fluttering against his door, his caged heart. Soon it felt as though she were out there all the time, and he’d find himself listening for her wingbeat even in the void of night when all else was silent. The muscles in his thighs and buttocks felt flattened out. Against his skin, the clothes he’d worn when they’d taken Eva away were stiff and rank. He’d stumbled into them—trousers and a white shirt—when he’d heard the car stop outside the building.

Lucky I was awake, lucky, lucky
.… He’d tossed Eva’s clothes onto the bed. “Get dressed.” Through the gap in the drapes he’d watched them get out of the car. Two of them, their suits blotted by the dark, balancing ghostly balloons of faces.

Before they reached the front door of the building, he had Eva by the wrist and was out of the apartment door with her—
lucky, lucky—
clicking it shut and up the stairs to the second floor, where he made her wait, each pulse of her wrist a shock through his entire body, until they’d broken into his apartment, giving him and Eva time to race up the rest of the stairs.

It was too new, the attic—not enough trunks and furniture and boxes stored yet to allow for shadows to grow into cluttered corners. It was an attic you could almost see all at once—not like his grand-parents’
attic, where each step had meant a discovery, a distraction. Quickly, he pulled Eva behind the crates of leftover building supplies: clay tiles for the roof; thin strips of wood for the parquet floors; rolls of wallpaper; cans of paint.

It took a lifetime for them to make their way to the attic—he heard them on the second floor in his niece Jutta’s apartment, in the rooms on the third floor, their voices rising through the boards where he crouched with his wife, his wife—but then they were on the attic stairs.

He saw himself sitting in the police station, handcuffed in a cell, crowded into a train with Eva. If it weren’t for her—Suddenly he hated her. “I love you,” he whispered hoarsely. His fingers ached as they pressed into her arm.

“I love you, too.” Her face was a painting, one-dimensional, still. She stood up. Slipped his fingers from her arm like a useless bracelet.

His back and neck felt drenched with sweat.

“Stay there.” She was already walking toward the attic door as it flew open.

Afterwards, though not for long, Alexander would try to tell himself that his legs failed him when he tried to stand up as they took Eva away, stand up to join her as she must have believed he would—even during her last gesture of heroism—because that was what they had promised one another.

“I thought you’d like to be there,” Matthias said as he handed Trudi two cream-colored envelopes, one addressed to her, the other to her father.

“What is it?”

“An invitation.” He’d come to the pay-library but had waited between the stacks of books until Frau Bilder had checked out five war novels and maneuvered her bulk out of the door.

Trudi opened the envelope and read the announcement for his piano recital. “Oh, Matthias,” she said. “I’m so pleased for you. Of course we’ll be there. Thank you.”

He flushed with pride. “I even have a tuxedo.”

“You’ll look all grown up then.”

“The unknown benefactor left it in our kitchen.”

“How about that? When?”

“Just this morning.”

“And it fits?”

“The jacket. The pants are too long, but my grandmother is turning over the hem.”

“He’s been at it again, the unknown benefactor. I heard that Frau Immers—you know she gets that awful rash on her scalp—found two bottles of the medical shampoo she hasn’t been able to buy. Right in her chicken coop.… Listen, can you stay and visit? My father is in the living room.”

Matthias hesitated.

“I know he’d be glad to see you.”

“Are you sure it’s all right to go in?”

She thought of the times she’d sent him away from her door when she’d been hiding fugitives. “Just go on through.” She motioned him toward the open door that led to the hallway. No need to keep that door locked any longer. Her house had been empty for two weeks since that night Eva hadn’t returned.

Emil Hesping was refusing to bring them anyone else. “Let’s wait a while,” he’d said. “You have some recovering to do. And we don’t know what she’ll tell them.”

“Not Eva,” she’d said.

And he’d shaken his bald head but hadn’t said anything that she hadn’t already imagined about torture.

What Trudi knew of Eva’s arrest had come from Jutta, who’d followed the Gestapo into the attic after they’d torn her rooms apart, searching for Eva. They’d found her standing in the middle of the attic, not even trying to hide.

“She walked toward them,” Jutta had said when Trudi had come to see her.

“And Alexander?”

“They only took Eva.”

Trudi looked at Jutta, hard. She felt Jutta was holding something back, but she couldn’t tell what it was. “Did they search for him?”

“They came for Eva. They were satisfied.”

“Tell your uncle I want to talk with him.”

“He’s not well.”

“I need to find out what happened to Eva.”

“He won’t even speak to me.”

Fräulein Birnsteig, though Jewish, had been protected so far because of her fame, but her mansion had been appropriated as a vacation
villa for SS officers. She’d lost her housekeeper and her car, but had been allowed to keep her bedroom and the music room where, frequently, she was summoned to play the piano for officers and their guests. Even her practice sessions were no longer her own: officers would wander in, lean against the piano to watch her or, worse yet, continue conversations while she’d play.

It was to this music room that Trudi and her father came for Matthias Berger’s recital. The audience was much smaller than at the spring concerts, and the windows were closed to the brisk October air. More than half of the guests wore uniforms, and next to the piano the red flag with the
Hakenkreuz
was prominently displayed. There were no candles as in the earlier years, but harsh light bulbs that made the pianist’s once so elegant neck look pasty, wrinkled. When the concert began with
“Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,”
Trudi couldn’t bear to sing along, and as she glanced up at her father, he was moving his lips without sound.

She wondered how it made Fräulein Birnsteig feel, playing the national anthem. Did others, too, notice the hesitancy with which she sought out the keys? She no longer looked glamorous, but thin and ill—this woman who believed in her dreams, who had canceled tours because of dreams, who had hired a beggar woman because in a dream she was her sister. Where is the beggar woman now? Trudi wanted to ask Frälein Birnsteig. And what have you done with your dreams? Did you dream this too—the flag and the uniforms and the camps? And if so, what did you do to adjust your life to this?

But then, mercifully, the anthem was over, and Matthias stalked to the piano, his face chalk white, his eyes on the ground. But as soon as he sat down on the piano bench, his shoulders filled out, and his back aligned into a lovely, strong curve. In his tuxedo he looked like the man he would become, not a thirteen-year-old boy. As he touched the keys, a wonderful confidence came over him. His head followed the motion of his hands. From where she sat, Trudi could see the transformation in his features, the green hue of his pupils, and she remembered that first time he’d come into her house. Music, even then, had been a way out of pain for him. She wished she had something like that, something that could sweep her away from the grieving that sat with her all too often. She’d grieved over Konrad, the priest Adolf, and now Eva, and each one tilted her right back to her oldest grief—the loss of her mother.