Authors: Ursula Hegi
Rita was nearly four and the baby, Karin, was just learning to walk when Ingrid took the two in the streetcar to the Oberkassel bridge, a bottle of holy water in her purse. It was early in the morning, and her daughters wore the matching long-sleeved white dresses she’d knitted for them over the winter in preparation for this day. She carried the baby, and Rita held on to her hand as they climbed from the streetcar and walked toward the bridge that spanned the Rhein between Oberkassel and Düsseldorf.
The river was running high, and its sounds rushed across her children’s voices. Halfway across the bridge, Ingrid stopped. Pale light was shrinking the edges of the gray clouds, breaking through to link heaven and river in translucent steps. Rita saw it too: she laughed and pointed to the gap in the clouds. Ingrid lowered the baby, Karin, to the sidewalk, and transferred the fine chain with the golden cross from her own neck to Rita’s. Then she opened the holy water, blessed both children—
“Im Namen des Vaters und des Sohnes und des Heiligen Geistes”
—and lifted Rita toward the radiant steps. Suffused by such a warm and unfamiliar joy that she felt certain she was doing God’s will, Ingrid kissed Rita, whose forehead was still damp from holy water.
“Yes,” Ingrid told her, “yes, God is waiting for you … soon we’ll all be together again … don’t forget to prepare a place for me too …” and then Rita was weightless in her arms—an angel already, an angel—as she flew from her and up those steps, singing, singing high—and as Ingrid bent and reached for her baby girl—
This is what I was born to do.… Into your hands, your heart, O Heavenly Father
… whispering: “Oh, my sweet my sweet—” Karin’s body was heavier than Rita’s, far heavier; it resisted Ingrid’s arms, stayed on the ground as if God were rejecting her even though Ingrid strained, strained to raise her arms against the weight that held them down, weight that became hands, then bodies, pinning her, snatching her daughter from the grasp of God—
So near, my Lord, so near
—offering God instead the arched body of a woman—
far too old for redemption
—leaping toward the light… blocking the light… extinguishing the light—
“She was too late,” Ingrid’s mother told Trudi when she met her outside the locked room where Ingrid was kept in the Theresienheim. “The woman who tried to save my granddaughter—” Frau Baum was crying. “She was too late.”
The river had been so cold and fast that Rita had been dead by the time a barge had found her ten kilometers downstream. The woman and two men had been driving across the bridge to work when they’d seen Ingrid raise the older girl toward the railing, but they didn’t get to her in time to stop Rita’s fall into the Rhein. While the men held Ingrid and wrestled the baby from her arms, the woman climbed onto the railing and leapt.
“That woman—she could have died, too. She’s still in the hospital.” Frau Baum dried her eyes with a wadded handkerchief and rapped against the door till a tall, slender nun unlocked it. “Come.” Frau Baum nudged Trudi forward. “Maybe Ingrid will speak to you.”
Ingrid was lying on her back, eyes glazed, unseeing. Her features were flat, sunken, as if her flesh had disintegrated in the three days since she’d taken her daughters to the bridge. On a chair next to the bed, the nun was guiding the wooden beads of a rosary through her skilled fingers. Until the night before, Ingrid had been in jail, where she’d refused food and drink, and when the police had acknowledged that she was too ill to be kept there, the sisters had offered to guard her and nurse her back to health so that she could stand trial.
“Has she eaten?” Frau Baum asked the nun.
“Not yet. We’ve tried to feed her.”
As Trudi reached for Ingrid’s hands—those same hands that had brought death to Rita—they felt like wax that had melted into the white blanket. In contrast, the surviving child had been warm flesh and skin. Trudi had held Karin hours after Ingrid had been seized. When she’d arrived in the apartment above the bicycle shop, Karin had been sitting on her grandfather’s lap, playing with his mustache, giggling, and it had seemed terrible and miraculous that she could giggle and play.
“I wonder how much she remembers,” Trudi had said.
Herr Baum stroked his granddaughter’s neck. “Very little … and she won’t know what it means. Tomorrow she’ll remember less. And soon she will have forgotten. Children are like that.”
“Ingrid never forgot,” Trudi whispered.
His broad hand moved down Karin’s back. “Here now,” he said, “here, girl.”
That’s when Trudi had reached out to lift Karin from his lap. How she wished she could have brought her along now, pressed her into Ingrid’s arms, and said, “This is your daughter. You can’t leave her like this.”
Frau Baum was bending across Ingrid, crying again. “Say something to her, Trudi.”
“Ingrid? It’s me, Trudi.… Please, look at me?”
But Ingrid was suspended on the bridge of nothingness, arrested in that moment when God had stunned her by redeeming and denouncing her in one fiery breath of omnipotence, scorching her soul, forsaking her body a shell that would wither and, in less than a week, lie beneath the earth with her older daughter, whose funeral had been held only that morning.
The town would close around Karin’s secret and protect her by letting her grow up with the lie that her mother’s brother, Holger, and his wife were her real parents. They were decent people, Holger and Erna Baum, serious about the responsibility they had taken on, well trained in the long practice of silence, and determined to do well by this child who’d come so close to being murdered by her own mother. Responsible, though not very imaginative people, they would teach Karin right from wrong, take her to church, and never mention the name Ingrid as though she hadn’t existed. They would destroy any
family photos that showed Ingrid or, if she stood to the side of a picture, cut her away like incriminating evidence.
And yet, Holger and Erna Baum—along with the town—would keep waiting for Ingrid’s flaw to manifest itself within Karin, an expectation they would see confirmed when, at thirteen, the girl would swell with her grandfather’s sin as though her drowned sister had found a way to return to her family through Karin’s womb and claim her right to grow up after all.
In the months after Ingrid’s death, Trudi stayed away from Ingrid’s surviving daughter. Still, it seemed, she saw Karin everywhere: being wheeled in her stroller by her grandmother; riding in a child’s seat on Erna’s bicycle; sitting in the display window and playing with shiny bicycle parts.… What kept her from approaching Karin was her struggle of wanting to tell the girl about her mother, whom she resembled more and more, and knowing that it would be harmful for Karin to find out that her mother had killed her sister and had tried to kill her, too.
At least she no longer had to be careful about endangering the lives of fugitives with her stories. The risk her stories posed to others—and to herself—was more subtle. When she was younger, she had used secrets as if they were currency, but she’d found out how secrets could use her instead by becoming stronger than she. It happened whenever she couldn’t stay away from a secret—drawn to it the way Georg Weiler was drawn to the bottle—though she sensed it would be better for her not to know. Once she had the knowledge, it became difficult not to use it.
And yet, in an odd way, if she chose to keep secrets, those secrets would become her children: she’d feel them under the same roof with her, listen to their whispers at dawn, be certain that they’d always be there for her.
As long as she didn’t misuse them.
When in 1948 everyone was allowed to exchange fifty
Marks
for a new currency, stores suddenly offered all kinds of things that hadn’t been available—including chocolate and perishables—as though, somehow, they’d been there all along. As people celebrated, it seemed as if the town had finally recovered. By then, the heap of blackened stones where once the synagogue had stood had been removed, and
two small restaurants had been built on one side of the lot: an Italian ice-cream parlor offered eleven flavors, including a purple-red raspberry that tasted sweet and sour all at once; and in Alfred Meier’s fish restaurant you could buy hot golden fillets of breaded fish in paper cones, along with fried potato sticks, called
pommes frites
, which you’d dip into mayonnaise.
Trudi had never eaten
pommes frites
, and the first time she tasted them she felt such greed that she ordered two more portions and ended up sick all night. For weeks, just the thought of the crisp potatoes made her gag, but eventually her greed won out and she went back, limiting herself, however, to one serving. Sometimes Monika Buttgereit would sit at a table with a book; between customers, Alfred Meier would join her, and as they talked, their voices would touch while their hands lay apart on the red-and-white checkered tablecloth.
The other side of the synagogue’s land had been paved by the town as a parking lot for the Theresienheim, which had been restored to its use as a convent and hospital. Walls into which swastikas had been carved had long since been patched and painted. Though no one said anything openly against Jews, Trudi still sensed remnants of that old prejudice against the few who had survived and chosen to live in Burgdorf.
She knew the brokenness would manifest itself again, as it had in Ingrid, in the judge, in Fritz Hansen, in countless others. And it didn’t take long. That November, Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier killed his fiancée. He found her half naked in the car of the man who had asked her to dance the previous Saturday at Die Traube, where she and Hans-Jürgen had been celebrating his thirty-third birthday. Without glancing at Hans-Jürgen, she’d stood up and followed the man to the dance floor. For five days and five nights Hans-Jürgen stalked his fiancée and the man as they acted out every last one of his jealous fantasies as if he were the one who’d put them up to their fornication.
After he shot both of them, he went home to the farm and sat at the kitchen table, quiet and immensely tired, the gun on the tablecloth between his limp hands. His parents called the police, and his trial drew more people than Easter mass. Lined up on the steps of the courthouse, they waited for the chance of a seat inside, where the judge listened to testimonies of Hans-Jürgen’s classmates, neighbors, and an amazing number of people who had, in some way, come into the path of his rage.
One of his neighbors recalled that Hans-Jürgen’s mother had told her his birth had been a difficult one, and that he’d rejected her breast for the first two days of his life.
His first-grade teacher, Sister Mathilde, was quoted as saying, “The murderer spent most of his school years in the corner, his back to the rest of the class.”
“Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier was incorrigible from the day he came to us,” his seventh-grade teacher confirmed.
For nine days the people of Burgdorf unburdened themselves of a litany of Hans-Jürgen’s wrongdoings, while his mother hid in her bedroom with the curtains drawn, and his father sat in the front row of the courtroom, bony shoulderblades rising against the back of his shabby Sunday suit, face grim and satisfied as if he’d always known his son would come to this.
Hans-Jürgen was tried not only for the murder but for every offense he’d ever committed, going back to the day of his birth. It was a cold, damp winter, and people were afraid—less of him than of what they’d buried deep within themselves—but now they could let their fears rise and blame them on him; they could gasp at the crimes of the five- or seven-year-old Hans-Jürgen and disregard the slaughter of war. Though he was locked up in jail each night, children were kept indoors; young women were warned that even a stroll to the fairgrounds could lead to death; and young men took to carrying knives or guns when they courted.
When one of his classmates came forward to reveal how Hans-Jürgen had burned a cat’s paws in second grade, Trudi considered testifying that Hans-Jürgen had killed a kitten one day when she’d been inside the barn with him and Eva. But she didn’t dare speak out because she knew that—once she stood on the witness stand—she wouldn’t be able to keep herself from telling the town about that other time in the Braunmeiers’ barn because, ever since Hans-Jürgen’s arrest, that secret had been swelling within her as if seeking a way into the open.
She told herself that the town didn’t need her to convict Hans-Jürgen: there were enough others, eager to list their grievances against the man with the luxuriant beard and wrathful eyes, who refused to speak a single word in his defense but watched his accusers as if to memorize each face into eternity.
Though newspapers all over the country wrote about the murder,
they soon dropped coverage, but the local paper fanned panic by running interviews with nearly everyone who’d testified against Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier. They printed childhood photos of his fiancée and of her grave. She’d been buried in Neuss, where her family lived, but Kalle Husen, who’d been shot with her—a married man, imagine—had grown up in Burgdorf on the same block with the Bilders and the Weskopps. Despite the disgrace he’d brought upon his family, his wife, children, parents, and siblings had mumbled words of prayer around his open grave, the edges of their bodies blurred as if they’d fused into one massive shape. In a wider circle that encompassed the family and the grave, the people of Burgdorf had stood in their funeral clothes and whispered how terrible it had to be for the parents, this loss. How much could one family bear? Wasn’t it enough that two of the Husens’ older sons had been killed in the war? But at least they’d died heroes, while Kalle, whose death had exposed his adultery, had brought shame and grief to the family.
Beyond the fringe of that larger circle, a lanky man had stood by himself, hands folded in front of his expensive coat. To those who noticed him he seemed oddly familiar, though they couldn’t recall having met him before. Perhaps a distant relative who’d come for Kalle’s funeral, they figured, and forgot about him till they saw him once more, approaching the front door of the Husens’ house an hour after everyone else had arrived for the funeral feast.