Stones From the River (10 page)

The men would take the chess sets from the birch wardrobe, sit down at the long tables, and play, their silence punctuated only by
punched chess clocks and the clipped warning:
“Schach”
—“Check.” The white tablecloths would ripple, stirred by the rhythm of restless knees. Gradually, as it got warmer in the room, they’d take off their jackets and sit there in their suspenders.

Elated at having another child in the house, Trudi couldn’t wait to get up in the mornings. She showed Robert how to tie handkerchief diapers on the white toy lamb that Alexander Sturm had given her, and they took turns nursing it by pressing its fleecy nose against their nipples. Down by the brook, they balanced on a plank across the water. They picked the last daisies of summer and took them to the cemetery, where they set them into the pointed vase on the Montags’ family grave. When they searched for the grave with the hand of the woman sticking out, they couldn’t find it, and Trudi led Robert instead to the other grave that intrigued her, that of Herr Höffenauer, who’d been struck by lightning at his mother’s gravesite.

It had happened long before Trudi was born, and she told Robert the story she’d heard—along with a few embellishments that came to her as she went along. This teacher, Herr Höffenauer, had lived with his widowed mother long past the age when other men leave their mothers’ houses to start families of their own. He had taken care of her until he was old enough to have grandchildren, and after she’d died, he’d visited her grave each day after teaching school—standing right where she and Robert stood that very moment—until, one stormy afternoon, he’d been felled by lightning while peeling a fleck of moss from the face of his mother’s gravestone.

She took Robert to meet Frau Abramowitz, who served them pralines and rosehip tea. While Frau Abramowitz practiced her English with Robert, Trudi played with the silver spice box that used to belong to Herr Abramowitz’s grandmother, who’d been born in this house. She could smell the aromatic spices inside the box, which was shaped like a tower with filigreed balconies and a tiny silver banner on top. When they looked at pictures of pyramids in the travel brochures that lay on the table, Trudi pretended to herself that Frau Abramowitz would take her along on her next trip. People on the train would think she was her mother. All the children she knew had mothers. Lots of children didn’t have fathers, but that was because of the war.

“Let me see your handkerchief,” Frau Abramowitz insisted when
Trudi and Robert were about to leave. She had embroidered ten handkerchiefs for Trudi, and she liked to make sure she always carried one folded inside her pocket. Clean handkerchiefs were part of good manners—Trudi knew that because Frau Abramowitz had informed her the week after her mother’s funeral that she would teach her good manners from now on. “Children learn good manners from women,” she’d said.

Good manners meant not poking your finger into your nose and not interrupting grown-ups when they talked. Good manners meant offering your seat on the streetcar to grown-ups, bending to pick up things that grown-ups dropped, and opening doors for grown-ups. Already, Trudi had figured out that good manners could keep you real busy.

Good manners had a lot to do with grown-ups and with what children did or did not do around them. She’d been told all along by grown-ups that it wasn’t polite to stare at them, but how could you see people if you didn’t look at them? And about honesty … Grown-ups were always saying you had to be honest, but that only meant you could say good things about them and bad things about yourself. If you said bad things about them, you were rude, and if you said good things about yourself, you were bragging. She couldn’t wait to be a grown-up because grown-ups were always right—except for grownups who were maids or cooks or servants: they had to be obedient like children.

“Come back soon,” Frau Abramowitz called after them as they ran down her front steps.

In front of St. Martin’s Church, Herr Neumaier, the pharmacist, was honoring the death of Christ as he did every Friday afternoon between three and four. Over the years, quite a few members of the congregation had complained to Herr Pastor Schüler that the pharmacist’s ritual was excessive—a spectacle, they called it—and it had become a game for the children of Burgdorf to follow the thin-lipped pharmacist, whose fleshy cheeks grew even more distended as he staggered around the church square, cradling a bulky Jesus statue which he’d pried off a cross that had come from a demolished church in France.

“He lives all alone with that statue,” Trudi told Robert as they trailed the pharmacist, who was chanting verses from the Bible. A tunic sewn from a potato sack flapped around his suit. “The statue
sleeps on a cot. He covers it like a baby… up to the neck with a feather quilt.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw it—once.… When my father was buying cough medicine. I sneaked into the storage room. You want me to take you there?”

“No,” Robert said quickly, “no,” his eyes on the statue which bobbed up and down in the pharmacist’s trembling arms. Its skin was the color of vanilla pudding, while the crown of thorns and streaks of dried blood were the brown of beef liver.

“He doesn’t speak to anyone in his family.”

Robert looked down into Trudi’s wide face, tilted toward him, the blue eyes filled with excitement as she waited for him to ask,
Why
not? “Why not?” he asked.

“Because …” she whispered, “his daughter, see, she married a Protestant.… They live on the same block with him. But he won’t say a word to them. Not even to his grandchildren. Or to his wife. She moved in with the daughter.”

“Is that why he goes around with the statue?”

Trudi didn’t know the answer to his question, and Robert asked it again that evening when—as every evening since his arrival—they all went next door to the Blaus for dinner with his grandparents and his Aunt Margret.

“The pharmacist is a crazy man,” his grandmother said.

His grandfather hushed her by saying, “Be careful what you say aloud. You wouldn’t want him to hear.” His teeth made a funny clicking sound.

His grandmother shook her head and ladled too many Brussels sprouts on Trudi’s plate. “I’m not afraid to tell him right to his face.”

“What Herr Neumaier does is like praying the rosary,” Leo Montag told the boy. “Only more so. Some people think if you do a certain ritual—especially to do with suffering—your sins are forgiven.”

Frau Blau leaned over and planted a kiss on top of Robert’s head. Only a few months earlier Trudi had been glad that Frau Blau was not her grandmother, but she now felt so jealous that she pinched Robert’s arm. Instantly, Frau Blau took her by the shoulders and marched her into the living room, where she set up a
Katzentisch—
cat table—a small separate table where children who misbehaved had to eat alone.

But on the way home, Robert played hide-and-seek with her in the dusk, and they found a bee squirming in a spider’s web behind the Blaus’ house. While Trudi sent Robert to fetch his grandfather’s sewing scissors, she stood watch over the spider, which darted from a crevice in the wall and disappeared without touching the bee. When Robert returned with the scissors, he cautiously cut the bee free without destroying the net.

Saturday, while her father stoked the tall cylinder-shaped stove in the bathroom for the weekly bath, Trudi took her aunt into her room and showed her the funeral coat that had been made from Stefan’s jacket.

Helene ran one finger down the sleeve and said she’d tell Stefan because he’d be glad to know. “Someday you’ll have to visit us.”

“When?”

“Any time your father wants to bring you.… You know what you can do before that? Talk to your uncle on the telephone.”

“In America?”

Her aunt nodded. “Frau Abramowitz said she’d let me use her phone.”

The Abramowitzs were one of the few families in Burgdorf who owned a phone. It had to do with being upper class. Usually the people who had phones also had maids and hired seamstresses who came to their houses several days each month to sew new clothes or make alterations. Employers competed with one another in feeding those seamstresses the most delicious meals—a practice that had little to do with generosity but rather with the expectation that the seamstresses would gossip to their other employers about how well they had been treated.

While some people with phones didn’t let their neighbors use them, the Abramowitzs were always glad to take messages for you or invite you into their living room to make calls. Trudi had heard the phone ring when she’d been at their house, and she’d listened to Frau Abramowitz answer it, but she’d never used it herself.

“I don’t know how,” she told her aunt.

“I’ll show you.” Her aunt glanced around the room. “This used to be my room when I was a girl. Stefan’s sister, Margret, was my best friend, and her bedroom was right across the way. We passed notes to each other from our windows.… You want the first bath?”

Trudi nodded.

“Raise your arms.” Her aunt lifted the hem of Trudi’s dress and pulled it over her head. Her fingers undid the button that fastened Trudi’s undershirt to her billowy cotton pants.

In the bathroom, her aunt sat on the edge of the tub and made Trudi stand while she washed her hair and soaped her back with a sponge.

“Robert says in America children call grown-ups by their first names.”

Her aunt nodded. “That’s what my husband liked best when he first came to America.” She smiled. “I rather missed the formality.”

“Why?” Trudi sat down in the warm water and swished her legs back and forth.

“Maybe because I was older when I went to America and used to things being a certain way. Stefan was a boy when he immigrated.” She asked Trudi to lean back so she could rinse the soap from her scalp. “He didn’t come back for me until nearly twenty years later.”

“My father says you were his third bride.”

Again, her aunt smiled, but this time her smile looked sad. “They died young, his other wives. Stefan needed a mother for his children.”

“Maybe they didn’t die,” Trudi offered.

Her aunt looked at her closely.

“Maybe they only pretended.”

“Why would they do that?”

“So no one can lock them up.”

Her aunt lifted Trudi from the tub and dried her, carefully. “She is gone—your mother,” she said and carried Trudi into her bedroom.

“You know that, don’t you?”

Trudi didn’t answer.

Her aunt combed the tangles from Trudi’s hair and braided it for the night. “She really is gone,” she said as she bent to kiss her good night.

When Trudi was allowed to speak on the phone to Uncle Stefan in America, his voice was thin and crackled into her ear.

Seized by a sudden longing for this uncle she’d never met, she shouted, “I’m coming to visit you.”

“You don’t have to yell,” Frau Abramowitz whispered to her.

“That’s good,” her uncle was saying. “I’m glad. Bring your father too.”

Aunt Helene and Robert stayed for five weeks, and before they left, Trudi gave Robert her white lamb and an egg-shaped rock she’d found in the brook. For days after their departure, she kept looking for Robert, expecting to hear his quiet laugh. She’d never known what it was like to have a friend. To be alone again felt as though a part of her had vanished along with him. It was different than with grown-ups leaving. You knew they were not like you.

“When can we visit Robert?” she asked her father.

“It’s very far,” he said. “And too expensive.”

“But when?”

“Maybe once you’re older.…”

She’d lie in her bed and stare through her window at the dark window across the alley. At least Aunt Helene used to have a friend close by when she’d lived here. But now Margret’s old room was a storage space for bolts of cloth and dummies and sewing-machine parts. She felt impatient to start school, the place where, she believed, she would have friends like Robert. But school was still more than a year away, and the children in the neighborhood and those who came with their parents to borrow books or buy tobacco, shied away from Trudi as if afraid she’d touch them and make them look like her.

Except for Georg Weiler next door. But only because he was different from other children too. A boy who looked like a girl. Though he and Trudi had always been aware of each other, they didn’t become friends until the day he asked her why her head was so big.

To stop the sting of his question, she shot right back at him, “It’s smaller than yours.”

They sat on the brick steps outside their buildings, she in front of the pay-library, he in front of his parents’ grocery store. The low winter sun was in their eyes, and he was playing with his marbles, lining them up along the bottom step.

“It looks bigger,” he insisted.

“It’s regular size.” Her neck began to itch. “It’s the rest of me that’s small. That’s why it looks big.… But it isn’t.”

He had to think about that. His eyes pushed at her. They were the color of fine sand. “I bet you my best marble your head’s bigger than mine.”

“Let me see the marble.”

“Georg.…” Frau Weiler stuck her head from the store. Her scarf
had slipped back a little, and coils of gray trailed around her face as though she’d been out in the wind. The center part in her hair had been so long in the same place that it had widened, showing the scalp beneath. “Georg!”

Georg flinched.

“Get those marbles off the stairs. You don’t want customers tripping over them and breaking their necks and being crippled for the rest of their lives.”

Trudi took a deep breath. It was a lot to consider all at once, even though she was used to Frau Weiler’s predictions of gloom: if you walked in the woods, you could get a rash from the
Brennesseln;
if you didn’t chew your food properly, you’d end up with holes in your stomach before you were twenty; if you forgot to confess a mortal sin, you were sure to end up in hell.…

Georg scooped up his marbles.

His mother closed the door, but her voice stayed out there with the children: “… and then they’ll sue us and we’ll lose the store … everything I’ve worked for.…”