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 (89 page)

The pastor’s housekeeper darted across the cellar, shoved his fingers aside, and yanked at the pin so hard that a piece of fabric came off with it. Her eyes wild, she scanned the cellar and ran to the corner where the life-size nativity set was stored. Without hesitating, she shoved the pin beneath Maria’s long plaster skirt.

They all stared at the statue.

“Don’t look at it,” she hissed.

Ingrid began to flap her white cloth.

Her mother was reciting the Lord’s Prayer:
“Water unser, der Du bist im Himmel…”

“They’re here!”

Herr Baum whimpered.

…geheiligt werde Dein Name…”

“I don’t hear any—”

“Sshh—”

… zu uns komme Dein Reich…”

The priest’s chins trembled.

… Dein Wille geschehe…”

The altar cloth billowed in Ingrid’s hands as four American soldiers charged in. “No German soldiers here,” Ingrid cried. “No German soldiers …”

“No—German—soldiers,” the priest echoed the foreign words.

The taxidermist joined in. “No—German—soldiers. No—”

… wie im Himmel so auf Erden …”

“We surrender,” Ingrid cried, forgetting any aspirations of martyrdom.

“Surrender … surrender …” other voices echoed.

The people of Burgdorf told each other they were glad the Americans—Amis, they called them—were the ones who occupied their region, not the Russians. Although several civilians had been killed while resisting their occupiers, all that was in the past now, and the Americans were organizing
Schulspeisung
—meals in school. Children who arrived for class, some barefoot, all hungry, were each given a tin container and a spoon to keep. Between ten and eleven on school mornings, they’d line up and proceed toward the smell of the hot soup that simmered in tall kettles. The recipe changed frequently: pea soup, mixed vegetable soup, beef broth with rice, cream soup, lentil soup.

The children’s favorite was
Kakaosuppe
—cocoa soup: sweet and brown, it filled more than their bellies, saturating them with memories of chocolate they’d tasted long ago. Some days, if they could no longer tolerate their hunger and soup time seemed too far away, the children would bang their spoons against their tin containers. One of them would start, a hesitant clang that immediately drew a chorus, steady and mounting until the voices of the teachers were drowned. Some teachers would take their soup portion home with them to share with their families, grateful for what the Amis were doing.

American soldiers were stationed in houses throughout Burgdorf. Despite warnings not to trust any German, some of them became friendly with the townspeople and showed them photos of their wives and children. The
Rathaus
and the former Hitler-Jugend quarters became offices for the American military, and the pianist’s mansion—where Fräulein Birnsteig had committed suicide in January after learning that her adopted son had died in a KZ—was turned into an officers’ club.
Hakenkreuz
flags and SS emblems disappeared from the graceful rooms, and on Saturday nights a dance band played American music.

Although the townspeople approved when some of the more industrious boys ran errands for the soldiers or shined their shoes, bringing home packs of chewing gum and narrow bars of American chocolate, they scorned the young girls who dared to go dancing with the soldiers or were seen taking drives with them.

Klara Brocker was one of those girls. At nineteen, she was the prettiest she would ever be—small and cheerful and neat—the kind of briefly held beauty that never fully flourishes but becomes contained, lacquered by its very tidiness. The Ami who was assigned to her house gave her a crate of peaches that annulled years of hunger in her flat belly. He brought her nylon stockings and paid for her new permanent. A blond man with a small birthmark on his temple, he was so much taller than Klara that she could fit her head below his chin when they danced.

One day Klara Brocker’s American stopped by the pay-library because he’d heard that the Montags had relatives in America. While he and Leo talked, piecing together fragments of German and English, Trudi—who’d resumed her work in the library—stayed on the wooden ladder and busied herself by rearranging books on one of the top shelves. When the American said he’d like to come by with a
young friend who’d grown up in New Hampshire, only an hour from Lake Winnipesaukee, where Stefan and Helene Blau lived, Trudi let herself imagine becoming friends with this young soldier and visiting him too once she went to America. He’d pick her up from the ocean liner, drive her to New Hampshire, where her Aunt Helene would welcome both of them to a big family dinner.…

The young soldier, who came to the pay-library a few days later, turned out to be not nearly as tall as Klara Brocker’s Ami, and when he came back to the ladder to introduce himself to Trudi, she looked down into his lonely boy-face and shocked herself with the thought that it wouldn’t be all that difficult to get him into bed. It would serve Max right.

Immediately, she felt unfaithful. The young soldier was saying something to her, but she couldn’t answer because she was back in the mist—only this mist was not beautiful, but gray and thick and suffocating, and it had grown thicker with each day that Max hadn’t returned to her. Once the mist lifted, she told herself, she’d be able to see Max. He would be much nearer than she’d expected.

That night, she felt so angry at Max for not coming back that she reached for herself, trying to bring herself to that warm yellow-orange blossom, but what she found herself spinning toward was the terror in the barn, and she stopped before she could trap herself in the old hate.

W
HEN THE MEN OF
B
URGDORF CAME HOME, THEY WERE SILENT, BUR
-dened by secrets they couldn’t let themselves think about. Many of them had lice and diarrhea. Their faces were ashen and rough with beard stubble. Eyes ashamed or defiant, they’d come into the pay-library with the excuse to ask when Leo Montag expected to get a tobacco shipment.

But Leo was no longer the leader he’d been for the soldiers who’d returned from the previous war; he’d grown tired, old, and he lived more and more in his books. Gradually, he’d begun to replenish his own collection, trading library books for works by authors who used to be banned. Trudi had taken over the raking of the yard, a task Leo had always enjoyed. His limp had worsened, and his left leg kept falling asleep. Already he’d slipped several times as he’d stood up on it, and Trudi was afraid he might break something. Mornings, before she’d open the green shutters of the pay-library, she’d settle him on the sofa that Emil had won in a poker game, his aching leg elevated on a pillow, a stack of books on a chair next to him.

Families welcomed their husbands and sons back without daring to ask questions about what they’d done in the war. Since they didn’t
want to believe that one of their own could have participated in the atrocities that the Americans claimed had happened, they focused on healing the wounds, finding crutches for the crippled, feeding the hungry. They cut SS and SA insignia from wartime photos, and when one of their men would wake from a nightmare, screaming so fiercely that even the neighbors would wake, there’d be a wife or a mother or a sister who’d bend over him, cradle his head, and murmur, “It’s all over now.”

But of course it was not all over.

For some, their own hell was just beginning. And Trudi was one of the few who made sure it did by prying at the words they’d buried beneath untold horrors.
And what did you do in the war?
she’d think when she’d look at them.
And you? And you?

Yet, what she shared with the returning soldiers and everyone else in town was a sense of wonder that you could simply go to bed at night and sleep, that you could lie down without half listening for the enemy or wondering when you’d have to leap up again.

As during the First World War, boundaries between unmarried and married women had dissolved as they’d sustained one another and found strength in performing tasks they’d been taught to believe only men could do. But now that the battle had ended, Trudi noticed that women who’d never married were outcasts once again—less likely than ever to find husbands, since there were many more women than men in town.

Wives whose husbands had died instantly seemed aged, as if flipped into the previous generation, a new crop of old women though they were not old in years. To look at these war widows made the women whose husbands had come back even more grateful, and they turned from the widows and toward their men. Children had to share their mothers with those awkward men they were supposed to call father, though some had been born after their fathers had left for the war, or had been too young to remember them. Though most widows were raising their children alone, some children had to become used to uncles—men who slept in their mothers’ beds.

Despite pleasant façades of togetherness, Trudi would notice the fracture within families, the numbing that many of the soldiers only found with alcohol, the shame in the eyes of some wives when they walked at the arms of their husbands. To her, the town had a smell of death—almost more so than during the war—and it didn’t surprise
her when three of the men killed themselves within a month after coming home, and when the wife of an SS officer started weeping one sunny morning at the breakfast table and didn’t stop until three that afternoon, when she took her husband’s razor to her wrists.

“Focus on the positive things in life,” people would tell Trudi when she’d walk through town with those stories.

“It’s not good to dwell on the things that were terrible.”

“Let’s never talk about that again.”

“Nobody wants to relive those years.”

“We have to go forward.”

Even people who’d always followed a code of personal values would become upset when confronted with the war years and would protect one another. “Our men have gone through enough.…”

They did not understand why Trudi Montag wanted to dig in the dirt, as they called it, didn’t understand that for her it had nothing to do with dirt but with the need to bring out the truth and never forget it. Not that she liked to remember any of it, but she understood that—whatever she knew about what had happened—would be with her from now on, and that no one could escape the responsibility of having lived in this time.

The people’s silence made Trudi think of her mother’s skin closing around her old sin, made her think of how the river, too, closed across everything in spring, even though, late in summer, it would reveal what it had hidden: the tips of the jetties, the rocks close to the bank, debris that had been tossed into the river. And she thought of how—even when the river ran high—she knew where the large stones lay and where the jetties ended because she had looked at the river for countless hours, just as she had looked at her community and knew its deepest currents.

It amazed her, the ability of people to forget their support of the Nazis, to deny what had gone on right here in their country, events which—ten years earlier—they would have never believed could happen. From Klara Brocker’s American soldier she heard that even in the town of Dachau, where people had breathed the smoke from burned bodies, some still insisted the death camp had merely been a work camp.

The townspeople worried and speculated about everyone who was still missing—everyone except the Jews, of course. Very few people
shared Trudi’s excitement when she found out that Eva’s parents were alive in Sweden. They’d sent her their address in case she ever heard from Eva.

As the prisoners of war drifted back into town, you could tell by their appearance where they’d been held: if they came from Russian prison camps, they were in rags and wore shoes stitched from wood and scraps of leather and fabric, while soldiers released from England had new uniforms—the rich brown of a Sunday roast—and proper-fitting shoes made of leather; those from Russia carried the shadow of famine beneath their eyes, while those from England looked well fed; those from Russia were timid, while those from England dared to talk of a future.

Georg Weiler arrived from a Russian prison camp, his fingernails chewed, his sun-colored hair without its luster. His laugh sounded flat, and when he spoke of the Russians, it was only to say that the prison camps had been their way of taking revenge for all the Russians who’d died in the war. Though Trudi felt compassion for him, she couldn’t bear to show it because his betrayal of her still leapt up between them whenever she saw him. It was from his mother that she found out about his ordeals. The prisoners had slept in an open field. In the mud, his mother said. Without adequate shelter, food, and medical care, quite a few of the men had died.

“But I was lucky,” Georg told his mother. “They didn’t break me.”

“I like seeing Georg with the twins,” Frau Weiler said to Trudi. “He is a wonderful father to those girls.…” She glanced around to make sure no one overheard her. “Except when he drinks. He’s always liked a
Schnaps
or two, but not like this.… I’m sure that’ll stop. It’s still close to the war. Once he gets all that behind him—”