Stones From the River Read online

  Quickly she cut, filled with a sudden rage at him for endangering their friendship.

  “Shorter,” he said when he looked into his mother’s hand mirror. His hair still covered his ears, and he kept urging Trudi, “Shorter,” whenever she stopped, until he no longer looked like Georg, but like other boys who taunted her, and she readied herself to start pretending that she’d never liked him and kept snipping, snipping, till his ears and forehead were exposed and only a few pale tufts rose from his skull. He grasped her hands, jumping up and down with her on the polished floor, but she couldn’t bring herself to laugh with him.

  Leo Montag was about to close the pay-library when Hedwig Weiler dragged her son and Trudi in the door.

  “Your daughter did this,” she whispered. The lines in her cheeks looked deeper, and her lips trembled.

  Quietly, Leo Montag inspected the boy, the sullen and fearful eyes, the proud tilt to the neck. “Like a little man,” he said. “Georg, you look good.”

  “Your daughter had no permission—” Frau Weiler started.

  But he shook his head. “Hedwig,” he said gently, “Hedwig,” turning his gaze on the angular woman in the black dress until—for an instant—she felt he understood everything that troubled her. It was a gaze a woman could rest herself in, a gaze that respected and sheltered her. And as he recognized that overwhelming sadness in her eyes, Leo thought of what people in town said about Frau Weiler—that she was a bitter woman who’d pulled down her husband and made her son resort to luck—but since he’d always seen deeper than most others, beyond façades to the many nuances of shade and light, Leo knew that Hedwig Weiler was not only terrified of God and of what the neighbors might say about her, but that she also yearned to be considered generous.

  “Hedwig, it was time,” he said, giving her that chance to be generous, as he recalled for her the day his father had taken him to the barber. “It’s a big day in the life of a boy, Hedwig, an important day. Most remember it forever. I was three, and I can still feel that draft on my neck.”

  She looked down at her son’s shorn head and raised one hand to touch it carefully.

  “Doesn’t he still have those Lederhosen?” Leo asked.

  Georg’s face shot up. His eyes leapt from his mother to Herr Montag to his mother.

  “From the unknown benefactor.” She nodded. “But they’re probably too small by now.”

  “You’ll be surprised, Hedwig, how much they adjust.”

  “He’s grown a lot.”

  “One pair I had as a boy—I must have worn it for years.…”

  Though Trudi was no longer allowed in the apartment above the grocery store, Georg became adept at sneaking out when his mother was busy with customers, and the two children would play between the shelves in the pay-library or sneak away from the neighborhood with chocolate cigarettes that Georg had stolen from his mother’s store. They’d pretend to smoke, blowing imaginary puffs into the sky; chase pigeons across the church square and through the wheat and potato fields that surrounded the town; tease the geese behind the taxidermist’s shop and run away when the huge birds waddled toward them, hissing through their hard bills. Georg was much faster on days he was allowed to wear his Lederhosen, but they never looked quite right because his smocks would be tucked inside.

  In Trudi’s room, they’d fit fairy-tale blocks into pictures or stack them on the windowsill until they toppled onto the painted floor boards. Georg was always trying to make bets with her—like how many birds would fly by her window, or how many worms they’d find by the brook.

  Sometimes they climbed the circular stone steps to the tower of the Catholic church, where Trudi felt taller than anyone she knew, and when she watched her town from high above and imagined herself through the roofs and chimneys into the houses of the people, it no longer mattered that her body was stunted.

  There, in the tower, Georg told her he wanted to die at age thirty-three. “The age Jesus was when he died on the cross.”

  “Thirty-three is very old.”

  “Maybe we can die together.”

  “All right.”

  Sometimes she’d try to scare Georg by telling him stories of skeletons and the ghosts of hanged people. If she succeeded so much that not only Georg but she, too, wanted to race down the circular stone steps, she switched to tales of water fairies that swam in the Rhein, of stars with bright tails that flared through the night, until she could actually see them, those stars and water fairies. It was something she would return to even as an adult—telling stories to keep fear away.

  Georg was not allowed to play with Protestant children or with the Jewish children who went to the Catholic school since it stood across from the synagogue. The Protestant school and church were on Romerstrasse, far from the center of town, where the tower of St. Martin’s Church pointed at the clouds. Georg and Trudi wondered what it looked like inside the Protestant church, which was lower and wider, without a bell tower and steeples—much more like a house than a church. But going inside a Protestant church was a sin. Georg said the devil could catch you if you opened the door, and even if you got away from the devil, Herr Pastor Schüler would know by simply looking at you.

  Since Trudi was Georg’s only friend, he was glad to help her with the errands she had taken over after her mother’s death, making daily rounds to Anton Immers’ butcher shop, to the open market where farmers sold fruits and vegetables, to Hansen’s bakery for Brötchen or Schwarzbrot, to the Braunmeiers’ farm for eggs and milk, which she’d carry home in a one-liter metal pail, and occasionally to the Buttgereits’ house near the north end of town for white asparagus. The Buttgereits had nine daughters, and sold the most delicious asparagus in town. People would come from as far away as Düsseldorf to buy it. White and tender, it had a delicate taste that no one else in town who grew asparagus had been able to duplicate, and which the Buttgereits kept a family secret.

  When Trudi was finally allowed to take piano lessons from the butcher’s wife—a trade her father had worked out for library books—Georg came along and patiently sat in the Immers’ kitchen, listening to the abrupt sounds and pauses that came from the next room as he watched the butcher’s mother-in-law, a shrunken woman with bad hearing, who lived with the family and usually sat in her rocking chair by the stove, silent except when she slurped her saliva with great sighs.

  It infuriated Trudi that the jarring sounds she produced on the ivory keys didn’t match the music that had filled her with such awe ever since she was an infant. She couldn’t reproduce it even when she practiced for hours, and she dreaded that pinched look that would come over Frau Immers whenever she’d hit a wrong key. But she was determined to be as good a player as Robert before she’d visit him in America. She knew it would be some time before she and her father would take their trip because the pay-library barely brought in enough earnings for food and wood.

  Once, when Herr Abramowitz bought a new camera, he took a photo of Trudi and Georg down by the brook. They had built a dam from stones, and their clothes and faces were smeared with mud. Though Trudi stood on a boulder with her chin held up, it was evident that she was much shorter than Georg. Her torso was wider than his, and her hips had already begun to spread as if some giant’s hand hovered above her, trying to press her into the ground, causing that slow, deep buried pain in her hips and back that would afflict her throughout her life.

  As a young woman, Trudi would come across that picture in an old praline box that held her other childhood photos, some of them of her as an infant, and she’d wonder how her mother had known right away that she was different. In the early photos, the differences were so slight—almost imperceptible. Perhaps her mother had seen something else in her—that wicked part Trudi hated and nurtured in order to survive.

  Ever since the river had taken her husband, Georg’s mother had kept the grocery store open by herself. Standing behind the U-shaped counter, which separated the line of waiting customers from the wide shelves that were stacked
with boxes, cans, and bags, she fetched the items that people read to her from their grocery lists. On a piece of brown paper, she’d figure the sum of their purchases and wipe her fingers on her white apron, which would be smudged by the end of the day. When children brought their Pfennige to buy licorice or candy, she’d fix her protruding eyes on them and ask if they had their parents’ permission. If they hadn’t, but wanted the sweets, they had to buy the sin of lying along with the pleasure.

  It was in church that the children of Burgdorf learned all about sin. Sin was lying or taking something that didn’t belong to you. Sin was talking back to adults or refusing to obey. Sin was touching yourself between the legs or letting someone else touch you there. Even thinking about that was sin and so was rubbing the washcloth there for too long. Some people had sins attached to them like second skins, even the sins of their parents. Like Anton Immers, the butcher, who was older than many of their fathers, but everyone in town knew that he’d been born three months after his parents’ wedding. A three-month baby. That meant sin. Or like Helga Stamm, who was Trudi’s age but a bastard because her mother hadn’t married at all. That skin of sin—the town wouldn’t let the people take it off entirely even though everyone pretended it was not there. The town knew. Except for those sins that penetrated the skin and remained secrets—then the town didn’t exactly know what had happened except that whatever had happened had changed that person. Like the bits of gravel under the skin of Gertrud Montag’s left knee. They had stayed there, a reminder to her but to no one else unless she gripped your hand and guided your fingertips across the raised bumps below her skin, saying, “There, feel this?”

  And then, of course, there were the sins that would take you straight to hell if you didn’t confess before you died, sins that could get your picture in the paper, like murder or burglary. The most obvious distinction between sins was that some made you go straight to hell while others kept you waiting in purgatory. It made sense to go to confession as often as you could, even if you couldn’t remember sinning.

  “There are things,” Trudi’s father told her long before she was old enough for confession, “that the church calls sins, but they are part of being human. And those we need to embrace. The most important thing—” He paused. “—is to be kind.”

  In his eyes she saw a gentleness and wisdom that made her wrap her arms around his waist. “Promise you won’t die?”

  “I’ll be here for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Long enough for you to get tired listening to me.”

  Though Georg’s hair was short now, and he wore his tunics tucked into his Lederhosen, other children still treated him as if he looked like a girl, but Trudi sensed that, gradually, their memories of him would be replaced by his new image. At times she hated him for being able to change. If only it were that easy for her—a haircut, a new way of moving.… The more he shed his difference, the further he seemed away from her. With an aching clarity she understood the nature of their friendship—it had worked only because each of them had found no other friends.

  Georg felt confused when Trudi—to accustom herself to his loss—found excuses not to play with him. He pursued her, stole money from his mother’s purse to win her back. One day he badgered his mother to invite Trudi to the blessing of the vehicles. Frau Weiler propped both children on her bicycle, Trudi on the metal seat above her rear wheel, Georg on the child’s seat that was mounted on the handlebars, and pedaled to the fairgrounds to get her bicycle sprinkled with holy water.

  While they waited for the Herr Pastor, two of Frau Weiler’s customers arrived on their bicycles and lifted Trudi up, held her like a small child though she was far too old for that. No one lifted Georg up, and he was four weeks younger than she. Trudi felt poisonous: she wanted to spit, to scratch, and had to remember her good manners to keep herself from doing so.

  “What pretty hair,” the women said and laughed when she wriggled from their arms.

  Georg stood with his elbow touching Trudi’s shoulder while the pastor, surrounded by six altar boys with incense and silver buckets, scattered drops of holy water on bicycles, trucks, farm machines, and a few cars. Trudi had told Herr Abramowitz to bring his car in the hope that he would let her ride with him, but he’d laughed with his many teeth and said Catholic water rusted Jewish cars.

  Georg brought Trudi a gold-veined rock he’d found at the fairgrounds, a speckled tail feather from a pigeon, chocolate beetles wrapped in shiny red paper with black dots from his mother’s store. But his chocolate only evoked for her the sweet bile of loss from her brother’s funeral. Once the other boys let Georg play, it felt to Trudi that everything he’d done with her had been just filling in days while he’d been waiting for them.

  She’d watch him from behind the lace curtain of her room when he’d chase after a ball or play hide-and-seek with other boys. If her throat closed off, hot and sour, she’d run downstairs and ask her father to play one of the records the unknown benefactor had left, and as she’d listen to Beethoven’s Eroica swell from the wooden phonograph—a miracle that it could be contained inside a place that small—she’d find it possible to swallow again.

  One cloudy spring afternoon, she followed Georg to the Rhein, where he and Paul Weinhart, who walked funny, with his toes pointing sideways, tried to trap polliwogs inside canning jars. They squatted by the edge of the river beneath the hanging branches of an ancient willow, their backs to her, Paul’s neck so thick that his shoulders seemed to slope right from his head.

  Trudi crouched behind a tangle of blackberry bushes, fearing and yet wishing they’d call out her name and ask her to catch polliwogs with them. She knew how to. Her father had shown her. But the boys didn’t call for her. She willed them to drop the canning jars, step into the shards, cut their feet. Her face felt hot as she saw their blood smeared across the pebbles, saw them getting scolded for taking canning jars. “Not something to waste,” Georg’s mother would say, and Paul Weinhart’s mother would smack him, twice, across the jaw. Ah—she shivered with rage.

  Georg and Paul didn’t catch any polliwogs, and that was good. After they headed back toward town, Trudi stepped out from behind the blackberry bushes and dipped her arms into the cold river. A braided length of rope that some of the older boys had tied to the longest branch hung out over the shallow part of the water. Here, the Rhein bent, forming an elbow-shaped beach that was bypassed by the unruly waves. The long jetty that thrust itself into the stream upriver from the bay offered further protection from the current. On hot summer days, the people of Burgdorf liked to swim here: families with picnics would spread blankets on the sand, and the older children would climb into the tree, grab the rope by one of its many knots, swing themselves out over the water, and drop into the river.

  Trudi propped her hands on her hips. Some day, she thought, she would try it, too, and she’d fly farther than any of them. But first she had to learn how to swim. Like a polliwog, she thought. No—a grown frog with four legs. She’d watched frogs dart through the water, had envied their light, rapid strokes. If she could imitate them, she’d be able to swim. Already she could see herself: she’d bring her legs together straight, pull them close to her body, then angle them out to the sides in a wide arc, and bring them together again. Hands folded as if praying, she would extend her arms in front of her, turn her palms outward, and push the water aside. Like Moses parting the Red Sea.

  She looked around. The path winding along the river was empty. So was the meadow that led toward the dike. Quickly, she yanked off her pinafore and dress with the sailor collar, her stockings and shoes, the white cotton underpants that were buttoned to her undershirt. In the brisk water that still carried the memory of winter, she practiced her swimming as she had imagined. It was amazingly simple—as long as she held that picture of the frog inside her mind. Frogs were at home beneath the surface of the water, and that’s where she swam, too, emerging only for deep gulps of air.

  Early the fo
llowing morning she left the house before her father was awake and walked to the river. All that spring she returned there nearly every morning when no one else was near. Staying close to the jetty, she’d streak through the shallow water like a frog, dive to the brown sediment of mud and let it billow around her, wishing her body matched its color so she could let it camouflage her. Here, the river belonged to her. In the water she felt graceful, weightless even, and when she moved her arms and legs, they felt long.

  Her first day of school, Trudi brought a leather satchel, a Schultüte— that huge, glossy cardboard cone filled with crayons, erasers, sweets, pencils, oranges, and nuts that is given to all children when they start school. She also brought along years of longing to be like others. Overjoyed to finally be surrounded by other children, she also felt far more aware of her difference. It was not just the size of her body and the badly fitting clothes designed for three-year-olds that marked her an outsider but also her fierce wish to be included.

  “Pushiness,” the principal, Sister Josefine, called it when she talked about Trudi to the other teachers. “They don’t want to include her, and she only tries harder.”

  “Pushiness,” her teacher, Sister Mathilde, warned Trudi, “will make your life difficult.” Her pretty, milk-white hands cupped Trudi’s cheeks. “Look at the other girls. They don’t barge right in with the answers. They wait until I call on them.”

  Trudi did look at the other girls, and what she saw made her uneasy—they kept silent even if they knew the answers, while the boys raised their hands, demanding to be heard. She felt as impatient with those girls as with women like Frau Buttgereit, even Frau Abramowitz, who were always suffering silently and saw it as a sign of virtue if you didn’t complain. Once she’d heard Herr Abramowitz scold his wife, “You’re like one of them, Ilse. Life is to live now.”

  The sister’s desk stood below a large wooden crucifix, and the children sat in rows of double desks, their backs toward the one picture in the classroom, a painting of a praying Virgin Maria above the coat hooks.