Stones From the River Read online

  One of the boys, Fritz Hansen from the bakery, whispered to Trudi that the nuns never slept.

  “Why not?”

  “They don’t have to. They pray all night long.”

  Trudi began to watch Sister Mathilde’s beautiful face for signs of tiredness, but all she saw in her eyes was the mystery of religious life. That’s what Frau Blau had called it—the mystery of religious life. It came from being Christ’s bride and living in a convent with his other brides.

  Trudi loved quickly, rashly—Sister Mathilde, whose voice would tremble with emotion when she spoke of the martyrs; Eva Rosen, who sat next to Trudi in class, her spine so straight that she was always held up as an example for good posture; Herr Pastor Schüler, who would hear Trudi’s first confession and tell her not to forget that she was God’s child—loved quickly, rashly, as she had once loved Georg, as though there were no air between her and the other person.

  There was always only one beloved—although that could change from one day to the next—and she would watch that person with her chaste, jealous love. It would devastate her when the Herr Pastor would visit her class and forget to smile especially at her, or when Sister Mathilde would frown at her for not sitting still, or when Eva Rosen would hold hands with Bettina Buttgereit on the way home from school.

  Unlike most of the other girls who walked home with their best friends, Trudi had never held hands with another child. When school let out, she’d saunter home, usually on the opposite sidewalk from Georg, who was in her class but avoided looking at her directly. Inside her head, she’d repeat letters she’d learned that day, connecting the loops that formed them into words. She stopped wherever other kids played hopscotch or ball, wishing they’d understand that, inside, she was just like them. How she wanted to join in their games, but they didn’t invite her—not even if she asked—and after a few months she ceased trying. She’d stand at a distance, watching the other children, keeping her wide face impassive as if she didn’t care about any of this. She could feel their loathing. Could feel that they didn’t want to touch her. But when they called her names—Zwerg—dwarf, and Zwergenbein—dwarf leg—names they knew would sting, she’d grab fistfuls of dirt to fling at their taunting faces. She’d fling names at them too—Schweinesau—pig sow, and Arschloch—asshole—vile names that earned her the reputation of having a dirty mouth and resulted in warnings from the nuns to control her temper, vile names that made her afraid that her soul was becoming as hideous as her body.

  Even during recess the girls wouldn’t let her play; they’d form circles, running and chanting: “Ringel Ringel Rose…” while she’d stand outside their circle, feeling a fury gather itself within her, a fury that would drive bright tears to her eyes and make her want to hurt those girls.

  Usually, she could force down those tears, but one afternoon she came home crying. Her father met her by the door, his hands covered with white flecks from painting the cross on her mother’s grave. With his gentle questions, Trudi’s crying only became worse until she saw a reflection of her pain in his eyes, as certain as if he’d been the one to be excluded.

  The next morning he braided her hair, pinned it into coils above her ears, and fastened her silver necklace with the cross. He put on his Sunday suit jacket over his knitted vest and limped next to her to school, where he talked with Sister Mathilde in the hallway next to the statue of St. Christopherus, the ugly giant who had carried the Christ Child across the river. The child was small, yet it carried the entire world. Turquoise plaster waves coiled around the bare feet of St. Christopherus, whose name meant Christ-bearer. Bowed under the immeasurable weight of the child, the giant looked about to collapse. According to the sisters, the child had become heavier and heavier though he was small, was always small, as if sentenced to an eternity as a Zwerg. And yet, in his eyes Trudi could already recognize the man, a crown of thorns tearing into his forehead as he staggered under the burden of the cross, as surely as the giant had staggered under his burden.

  Sister Mathilde was late entering the classroom, a flutter of black skirts and sleeves. As she adjusted her starched linen wimple, her lips were set into a prim line that warned the children not to test her patience. At recess she took Trudi’s hand into hers as if they were best friends and led her into the schoolyard, where she announced to the cluster of girls that Trudi had to be included in the games. Trudi wanted to shrink from the reluctant eyes, from that stiffness in the circle as it parted under the sister’s watchful eyes. Obedient hands drew Trudi into their game. And she hated them. Hated them because they didn’t want her. Hated them because she wanted them to like her. Hated them because she sensed that it would not get easier.

  • • •

  That Sunday her father pressed a basket covered with a towel into her arms. “Don’t drop it,” he cautioned her.

  When she pulled the towel aside, a tiny dog peered right at her. He was black except for dark gray markings that covered his face like a mask. She lifted him out, held him against her cheek. His body felt lost inside folds of extra skin. His snout was damp, and he wiggled in her arms.

  “You have to feed him twice a day till he’s grown.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “You decide. He’s your dog.”

  She set him down on the wooden floor and squatted next to him. After sniffing her feet—which made her laugh—he darted toward her father, turned back again, and explored the floor in widening loops that all led back to her.

  “I don’t know what to name him.”

  “It’s good to wait. You’ll know soon.”

  “How?”

  “He’ll let you know.”

  The dog was only black for several weeks—then his fur began to change to silver gray, diluting the black as if there were only a limited amount of pigment as his entire body stretched. Yet, the gray mask kept its deep color, even while the rest of him turned seal gray like the coat of the Russian soldier. That’s why Trudi finally named him Seehund—seal. Sea dog. Herr Abramowitz took a photo of her and Seehund, surrounded by her dolls. Sometimes, when her father spread lard on a wedge of bread for her, she’d dip her finger into the lard and let Seehund lick it off.

  While she was in school, the dog slept on an old pillow behind the counter of the pay-library, and when she came home, breathless from running because she couldn’t wait to see him, he’d leap at her, throwing his puppy weight against her sturdy legs. She’d drop her leather satchel and pull him up into her arms. No one had ever loved her with such exuberance: her mother’s love had been uneven, and her father’s love, though constant, was tinged with a tender sadness. But Seehund hurled his love at her, his entire body. It was a love she recognized—she’d felt it within herself but had never been able to demonstrate it with such abandon. With Seehund she could. She could wrap her arms around him and feel his fur against her face, run through the tall weeds by the brook and know he’d follow her, feed him and watch him wag his entire rear end in appreciation. And if she felt gloomy, he’d take the flat edge of her hand into his mouth and pinch it gently until she’d stroke his head with her other hand.

  When Seehund was four months old, she taught him to walk on a leash so that she could take him all over town. People would stop and admire him. They’d smile at her when they’d pet him. One Saturday, when she sat with her dog on the front steps, memorizing train schedules from the booklet of timetables that Frau Abramowitz had given her, Eva and her mother walked toward the pay-library. While Frau Doktor Rosen went inside to choose a new supply of American Westerns for her husband, Eva asked if she could play with the dog.

  Trudi nodded. “He likes it when you stroke his back.” She wished she had a green dress like Eva’s, made of thin fabric that flutters around your legs when you walk.

  Gently, Eva rubbed Seehund’s fur, starting between his ears, all the way down to his tail. He shook himself like a duck and both girls laughed.

  “Are you going on a trip?” Eva pointed to the timetables.
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  “I’m just reading where the trains go and where they stop.”

  “Why?”

  “So I know.”

  “Can I walk your dog?”

  Trudi hesitated, then handed Eva the leather strap, and the two girls walked to the end of Schreberstrasse and back, Eva more than a full head taller than Trudi, with long ankles and wrists. “I like dogs.” She crouched to touch the ends of Seehund’s whiskers. A golden heart hung from the thin gold chain around her neck. “But cats—” Her eyes grew alarmed and she looked around as if to make sure no cats were near. “Cats,” she whispered, “they find your warm spot and choke you.”

  “What’s a warm spot?” Trudi whispered back.

  “They come into your room at night and lie on your throat because it’s warm. And soft.” Fine curls eluded Eva’s braids and clung to her forehead as if painted to her skin with black ink. “My father says cats will choke you if they have a chance. One night he forgot to close his bedroom window and guess what happened?”

  “A cat got in?” Trudi could see the cat, an amber cat with white paws.

  “My father was dreaming.…” Eva nodded. “And in his dream, something heavy was pressing on him. When he could no longer breathe, he opened his eyes, and this cat, it was asleep, this cat, lying right across his throat—” She raised one hand and brushed across her throat as if to wipe away the shadow of that cat. “We always sleep with the windows closed.”

  “Even in summer?”

  “Even in summer.”

  “How about during the day? When your father lies in his chair on the balcony?”

  “He never sleeps during the day. He only looks that way. He’s not very strong.”

  “My mother wasn’t very strong.”

  “But my father is going to get better.”

  “My mother looks like a dead bride. Herr Abramowitz took pictures of her. In the coffin.”

  Eva shook herself. “Can I see?”

  “I don’t know. They hang in my father’s bedroom.”

  “I saw a picture of a dead baby once. Someone gave it to my mother because she took care of the baby before it died.”

  “Was the baby killed by a cat?” Trudi could feel a story of a cat, a cat who’d killed a baby.

  “Could be.”

  “What color was your father’s cat?”

  “No one told me.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “It leapt out of the window when my father screamed.”

  Trudi closed her eyes. The cat—a sleek, amber cat—leapt from Herr Rosen’s fleshy throat and through the bedroom window, landing on the grass below without a sound while Herr Rosen kept screaming. It darted behind the chicken coop and below the clotheslines, crossed the street in search of another open window, another throat. Trudi shivered though she liked cats and was fascinated by their agile movements, their unblinking stare that was much like her own.

  As Eva stood up to leave, Trudi saw herself alone again, steeped in that familiar isolation. “My father almost got killed once,” she said quickly to hold Eva there.

  “By a cat?”

  “No, a Russian bullet. It was aimed right for his heart.” She paused deliberately, knowing that stories took on a new power once you gave them words. They had to start inside your soul, where you could keep them for a long time, but to make them soar, you had to choose words for them and watch the faces of others as they listened. “But the other soldier …” she said, drawing in the current of Eva’s curiosity as she once had with Georg, longing for her to stay. Willing her to stay. “The other soldier tripped—they all were in a muddy field, see?—and the bullet went into my father’s knee instead.”

  Eva leaned close. “What happened to the Russian soldier?”

  “He was captured, and my father got to keep his coat.” Grasping Eva’s hand, she pulled her up the front steps and into the entrance hall, where the long seal coat hung from one of the wooden hooks. From the window at the end of the hall, light spilled across the Persian carpet runner and filtered through the intricate weave of the wicker chair.

  “Touch the coat,” Trudi urged. “It’s made from the fur of seals.” She had pieced together her own version of how her father had been injured in the war and come into the possession of the coat—to her those two had to be ultimately connected—but before she could captivate Eva with any of this, Eva’s mother came out of the pay-library with several books.

  That night, Trudi closed her window and lay awake till late, listening for cats and thinking of how she would tell the rest of the story to Eva. She smiled to herself, imagining Eva’s face as she listened. “The Russian soldier was the tallest man my father had ever seen, and they became friends. Well—not real friends like—” She wanted to say, “you and me” but even in her fantasy couldn’t risk presuming that much. “He tried to give my father his coat. As a gift. To make up for shooting him. But my father traded him some of his food rations. And one pair of boots…” Anticipating Eva’s questions about size of feet, she decided to add, “You see, my father’s feet have always been large. They were the same size as the Russian’s.”

  But the next morning, when she ran to school, ready to tell her story, Eva turned away as soon as she saw her and started talking to Helga Stamm, who was the plainest girl in class with those thick arms and colorless lips that made her look as though she were made of dough. Trudi, her heart beating madly, dashed past them into the classroom and pulled her slate from her satchel. Low in her back she felt an ache that stayed with her all that day.

  On the way home, she heard children laughing behind her. Certain that they were making fun of her body, she walked faster, her face hot, hating her short legs and how they curved—outward at the knees, then tapering again at her ankles as though outlining the shape of a large cuckoo’s egg. She pretended she wanted to be alone. Even if they asked her to play now, she wouldn’t stop. Not for them.

  She hadn’t been home more than an hour when Eva appeared outside the pay-library, calling for her to come out and play.

  “Bring Seehund,” she shouted when Trudi stuck her head from the window of her room. “I have something for you.”

  Trudi wanted to duck back and hide beneath her bed, wanted to dump a bucket of dirty water on Eva’s head, wanted to run downstairs and play with Eva. Slowly, she walked down the steps, counting them—eins, zwei, drei, vier… Her face grew hot. Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben. Sieben Zwerge. She stopped. The week before, she had asked the priest if there was a patron saint for Zwerge, and he’d peered at her with his kind eyes as if startled.

  “I don’t believe so, my child.”

  “But everyone has a patron saint.”

  The priest nodded, sadly. “Barbers, widows, epileptics, merchants …” He reached into his left sleeve and scratched his thin arm in long, even sweeps.

  Trudi thought of Frau Simon, who wore a blessed medal of St. Antonius—the patron saint of everything that’s been lost—along with a Jewish amulet on a fine silver necklace.

  “… beggars, dentists, orphans,” the priest recited, “servants, librarians—”

  “Even animals,” Trudi said. She had a holy card of the patron saint of animals, St. Antonius. He was a hermit who’d lived inside a tomb in a cemetery. She waited for the priest to produce a patron saint especially for Zwerge. Surely, a saint like that would make her grow.

  “Perhaps St. Giles …” The priest reached into his other sleeve.

  She clapped her hands. “I knew you’d find one.”

  “He’s the patron saint of cripples.”

  “I’m not a cripple,” she cried.

  “I know, dear child…” He stroked her hair. “But St. Giles is the closest I can think of. He was fed the milk of a deer and—”

  “Trudi…” Eva was shouting outside.

  “I’m not a cripple,” Trudi whispered and walked down the last steps. Seehund was already waiting for her to open the door.

  “Just imagine—”
Eva said as though it were still the day before and they hadn’t stopped talking “—if that bullet had killed your father, you wouldn’t have been born.” She handed Trudi a lantern flower from her garden, its thin stem arching gracefully under the weight of the orange blossom.

  “Then the stork would have brought me somewhere else.”

  “The stork?” Eva laughed. “Storks don’t have anything to do with getting born.”

  “They do.”

  “My mother is a doctor and she knows. She says babies come out of mothers. They grow inside, and when they get too big, they crawl out.”

  Trudi shook her head.

  “It’s so,” Eva insisted and lifted Seehund’s ears, trying to make them stand up straight, but he flicked them the way he did when he chased away flies.

  “He wants to go for a walk,” Trudi said.

  Eva held the leash and Trudi carried the flower as they walked the dog to the end of Schreberstrasse and back. When Trudi suggested taking Seehund to the river, Eva glanced down the street as if trying to make sure none of the other children saw her with Trudi. “Let’s stay here today,” she said.

  When they returned to the pay-library, Trudi sat down on the front steps and Seehund laid his head on her knees. Eva stood in front of her as if waiting for her to say something, but Trudi plucked silently at the stem of the lantern flower.

  “Mothers have a baby pouch inside their tummy,” Eva blurted, “and fathers put seeds for babies there, and then the baby starts to grow.”

  It was the silliest thing Trudi had ever heard; and yet, she had a sudden image of her dead brother still inside her mother, buried with her, always to stay within her—a privileged place of residence—as both of them decomposed beneath the earth. She found herself wondering if the pebbles would last and saw herself opening the coffin and finding it empty except for a fistful of tiny gray stones.

  “It’s true,” Eva said.

  “Flowers and vegetables grow from seeds,” Trudi explained to her, “not babies.”