Stones From the River Page 14

  Eva’s seventh birthday was on a Monday, and her father arose from his invalid’s bed in the afternoon. He surprised Trudi by opening the door for her when she arrived with her official present—a harmonica in a velvet case. Though she hadn’t spoken to Herr Rosen before, he knew her name and told her that her father was a fine man. He worked hard for each breath, and his voice was as spongy as his body. When she followed his bulk into the dining room, he walked gingerly as if stepping on moss, making her feel that the floor beneath her feet was not nearly as steady as when she’d been in Eva’s house before. She felt conspicuous in the yellow party dress her father had bought her from the little girls’ rack at Mahler’s department store in Düsseldorf.

  Framed oil paintings of elegant women and somber men hung on the walls, and the chairs had carved armrests. Even though the leaded windows were closed—to keep cats out, Trudi figured—the rooms were saturated with light because the inside doors had panels of frosty glass, engraved with intricate flowers. The bird that Seehund had caught in the high grass nearly a year ago sat stuffed on a shelf in a nest, its beak tilted up, its ruby-red chest fluffed forever.

  While Eva’s mother drove to the Kaisershafen Gasthaus, Eva’s father dozed in the passenger seat, his face and hands honey brown from the sun. But once they arrived, he was the one to request a table on the terrace and to order lemonade and Erdbeertorte mit Sahne— strawberry tart with whipped cream—for everyone. His legs were so bloated that he had to sit with them apart, and his stomach rested on his knees like a sleeping child. One of Eva’s brothers had brought his guitar along, and they all sang the birthday song for her, “Hoch soll sie leben, drei mal hoch.…”—“High shall she live, three times high.…”

  Eva’s mother wore her pearls and a chic little cap. Below them the Rhein flowed in rich, green waves, and in the shimmering heat the trees across the river seemed to float above the ground. A stork flew past the terrace, heading in the direction of town, and a white excursion boat struggled against the current so slowly that it barely seemed to budge.

  While Eva and Trudi took turns on her harmonica, her brothers rolled cardboard coasters across the tablecloth. Herr Rosen’s face glowed with moisture, and when Frau Doktor Rosen looked at him, Trudi saw the same expression with which her father used to watch her mother—that look of concern and fear and pity—and she resolved to never let anyone look at her like that.

  On the drive home, Eva’s oldest brother got sick from drinking too much lemonade, and they stopped the car just in time for him to stagger out and vomit by the side of the road. In front of Eva’s house, two Buttgereit girls stood waiting, and the Frau Doktor grabbed her black doctor’s bag, turned the car around, and drove the girls to their farm.

  The timing for Eva’s second present couldn’t have been better because Trudi’s father had his chess club meeting that evening. As soon as it was dark, Trudi rolled two cigarettes in the pay-library and sneaked out to meet Eva behind the church. In the bushes outside the wall of the rectory, they took their first puffs, grimacing and coughing, and when they heard a door slam at a distance, they both tossed their cigarettes across the wall. All that night, Trudi lay awake, worried the rectory and church would burst into fire. She and Eva would burn in hell. But what if Catholics and Jews didn’t go to the same hell? As she promised Jesus to go to church every day for an entire year—if only he prevented the fire—she already saw herself entering the church and crossing herself with cold holy water.

  She was certain her prayers had been granted when the only light that came into her window was that of dawn. After breakfast she heard from Frau Blau that the Frau Doktor had stayed at the Buttgereits’ house all night to deliver their tenth child. “A boy, imagine,” Frau Blau said, and Trudi told her that—from the terrace of the Kaisershafen Gasthaus—she’d seen the stork who’d brought the baby.

  Across town, Frau Buttgereit raised herself on her elbows and, cautiously, peered at the infant who slept in the cradle by her bed. After nine daughters, she had no longer hoped for a son, and when the child, still covered with her blood, had been handed to her, he’d seemed like some other woman’s child—not only because his limbs were more delicate than those of her girls, but because she hadn’t felt the resignation that had begun with the birth of her third daughter and had increased with each daughter since.

  “An heir for the farm,” her husband declared when he bought a box of cigars from Leo Montag.

  “An heir for the farm,” he announced when he distributed the cigars to the men at his Stammtisch.

  Sometimes Trudi and Eva brought milk cans along on their walks to the river, swinging them by their handles as they walked past the wheat fields to fetch milk or eggs at the Braunmeiers’ farm on their way home.

  Frau Braunmeier would wait on them, the youngest child propped on her hip as her chapped hands counted their money. She’d come from a poor Protestant family in Krefeld, Trudi had heard, and she’d converted to Catholicism in order to marry into the Braunmeier money; yet, the irony was that her husband made her live with him in deeper poverty than she’d ever known. While the barn was huge and well maintained, the family lived in drafty rooms filled with shabby furniture, wore mended clothes, and subsisted on their farm products that were no longer fit for sale—milk about to curdle, bruised peaches, eggs that had lost their freshness.

  One afternoon, when Trudi and Eva entered the gate of the Braunmeiers’ farm, Hans-Jürgen jumped from behind the clotheslines where threadbare bed sheets were hung to dry. Wind rippled the sheets and flattened the leaves of the gooseberry bushes; it fanned Hans-Jürgen’s curls from his forehead as he blocked the girls’ way to the house.

  “We have new kittens. You want to see?” His eyes glittered. “They’re in the barn.”

  Eva reached for her throat. Trudi hesitated. Everyone knew that children were not allowed inside the barn, but she’d sneaked in once before while her father had bought eggs from Frau Braunmeier. Hans-Jürgen and two of his friends had crouched in the hay loft and hissed at her to go away, but she’d stayed, just to get back at them for not wanting her there.

  “You can’t make me leave,” she’d said, her heart pulsing so hard in her ears that she could barely hear her own words, and the only thing that had kept her from running away had been the knowledge that—if she told on him—his mother would punish him for being inside the barn.

  But this time Hans-Jürgen was asking her to stay. He even wanted to show her his kittens. “Come on,” he urged her and rolled his eyes, imitating her fish mouth from school, until she had to laugh and walked with him to the arched barn door, Eva and Seehund close behind her.

  “Your dog has to stay outside.” Deftly, he tied Seehund to a stake next to the long trough. “Down, boy,” he said and patted Seehund’s rear. His eyes darted toward the house. “No one is allowed in the barn,” he said in an important voice

  “I want to go home,” Eva said, her back and neck even straighter than usual.

  “Goose.” He opened the barn door.

  It was almost like a church inside—as quiet and as hollow and as big. And since it was forbidden to be there, it was even more exciting. Trudi pulled Eva along by her hand as she followed Hans-Jürgen past the row of cow rumps toward the back of the barn. Behind a wooden partition lay a fat gray cat in a nest of clean straw, encircled by a litter of kittens.

  Trudi squatted down and stroked the cat’s back. Eva stepped closer, her expression a mix of curiosity and caution.

  “You want to hold a kitten?” Hans-Jürgen offered.

  Eva nodded.

  “Here.” He reached for a striped kitten, but the cat snarled. One rapid paw darted out and scratched his wrist. He cried out and turned his face from the girls. With one foot he pushed the cat aside and snatched something fuzzy from where she’d lain, before she could spread herself across the remaining small shapes again, her eyes like embers.

  Trudi wanted to console the cat, but she was afraid of frightening her eve
n more. “Put the kitten back,” she said.

  He hid it against the front of his faded shirt. “What kitten?”

  “The kitten you took,” Eva said.

  “It’s not even a kitten,” he said. “It’s a mole. A blind mole, see?” He held it toward Trudi, snatching it away before she could get it, and it was then that Trudi saw a rage in him that she recognized, a rage that she, too, had felt at times, the rage to destroy, and she shuddered.

  “Put it back,” she ordered though she knew it was too late.

  He laughed. “And now—now it’s a bird. See?”

  Holding the kitten by its tail, he whirled. Eva wailed, a long keening sound that echoed through the barn, while Trudi tried to hang on his arm. But he kept whirling, faster, the striped kitten flapping at the end of his outstretched arm, faster even, his face oddly illuminated like the faces of saints while they’re performing miracles. His fist opened and, while he kept whirling as though unable to stop himself, the kitten soared in a high arc toward the farthest wall, where its tiny body made an amazingly loud thud before it plummeted to the ground.

  Eva stopped screaming and stood very still, both hands clasped across her mouth, but Trudi ran toward the kitten. Despite her horror, she already could feel the words she would use to describe to Sister Elisabeth and to her father how limp and sticky the kitten felt in her hands. She would tell them about the blood that seeped from its mouth, about its eyes that were dull as if covered by a bride’s veil. And she would remember those eyes, just as she would remember the rapid shadow of panic that passed across Hans-Jürgen’s face the following morning when he was called to the front of the class for twenty lashes with Sister Elisabeth’s wooden ruler. His back to her, he stood in the corner for one hour, and she felt certain that, even if she were sent to the other corner, he would not acknowledge her.

  That Sunday, Herr Pastor Schüler spoke with Herr Braunmeier after church, and Monday morning Hans-Jürgen arrived in school with new bruises on his face and arms. His eyes were sullen, but once, when Trudi caught him glancing at her, she saw the flicker of revenge in his pupils. Though her hair started hurting, she forced herself to keep her eyes steady on his until he was the one to look away.

  “Keep your window open tonight,” she hissed as she passed his desk on her way out of class.

  He stood up, his shoulders and face above her, and she could see into the dark cavities of his nostrils. His hands rose along his sides as if to seize her and swing her around like that kitten.

  “Hans-Jürgen!” Sister Elisabeth said sternly. Though she wasn’t old, she walked with a cane.

  Hans-Jürgen grabbed his satchel and ran from the room.

  “What did you tell him?” Eva wanted to know when she appeared at the pay-library with a bone for Seehund.

  “To keep his window open. So the mother cat can come into his room and lie on his throat.”

  Eva shivered. “And he will die a terrible death.”

  “He will fight for each breath.”

  “But the mother cat won’t get off him.”

  “Not even when he screams.”

  Their eyes fused as if in a promise, and they each let out a deep breath.

  “Not even then.”

  In preparation for first communion, Sister Elisabeth gave each child a rosary and demonstrated how you started the rosary by blessing yourself with the cross at the end of the little tail. Then you said the Apostles’ Creed, one Our Father, three Hail Marys, one Our Father, and—at the very end—Hail Holy Queen.

  “Your rosary has five decades with ten Hail Marys and one Our Father,” Sister Elisabeth explained. “On these rosaries, each decade is a separate color so you can pray for the conversion of continents: black, of course, is for Africa; yellow for Asia; red for Russia; green for South America; and blue for Australia.”

  “Can blue be for the Arctic?” Hans-Jürgen Braunmeier asked.

  “The Arctic doesn’t count. Only penguins live there.”

  Hilde Sommer raised her hand. “Why can’t we pray for penguins?” The strong, heavy girl was new in town and had fainted twice, so far, in church from the scent of incense.

  The sister squeezed her lips shut, as usual when she got impatient, and when she opened them, she informed Hilde that, although there was nothing wrong with praying occasionally for animals, you only did so after you’d done all your praying for people. “Animals don’t have souls. Except maybe the donkey and ox who were in little Jesus’ manger.”

  “The sheep, too,” Paul Weinhart reminded her. His parents had lots of sheep on their farm.

  Sister Elisabeth nodded, a pained expression on her face as if already sorry she had ever mentioned animals at all. Her facial hair was colorless but thick above her upper lip.

  Trudi raised her hand, and when the sister called on her, she said, “If the red is for a continent, it can’t be for Russia.”

  The sister’s expression of discontent deepened.

  “My father was there in the war. It’s on the same continent with Germany.”

  Sister Elisabeth talked about the apostle Thomas, who had doubted that Jesus had appeared to the other apostles until he could touch his wounds. “The mere act of doubting is sin,” she said, emphasizing her words with a thump of her cane, and went on to tell the class how Thomas had redeemed himself by becoming a martyr in India.

  To show the sister that she was sorry about doubting, Trudi stayed inside during recess to water the plants and clean the chalkboard. When Sister Elisabeth gave her a holy card of St. Agnes, the patron saint of girls, Trudi felt that sacred flutter inside that she sometimes got when she watched a procession or thought of Jesus dying for her sins. At home, she added the holy card to her collection of holy cards and practiced first communion in front of her mother’s gold-framed mirror. As she opened her mouth as far as she could, she wished Eva could go to first communion with her. They’d both wear white dresses and wreaths of white satin roses in their hair. Too bad Eva was a Jew. Jews couldn’t have communion. Trudi stuck out her tongue—keeping it flat and straight. If you didn’t keep it flat, the communion wafer could fall off. You were not allowed to touch it with your teeth. And if you spit your communion wafer into your handkerchief, it turned to blood.

  While Trudi dreaded confession—the relinquishing of her own secrets—many of her classmates came to crave the rewards of confession. Once they got beyond the fear of kneeling in the somber confessional, they looked forward to the Saturday absolutions that turned their souls white and glowing. Like actors trained to produce tears on stage, they learned to awaken remorse. But their new souls would lose some of the purity by Sunday afternoon, after having shimmered through nine-o’clock mass. Within the next days, those souls would become slightly worn, and by the end of the week they’d be stained. The children imagined their souls to be somewhere below their hearts, cloud-shaped, elongated forms inside the rib cage. The pressure of ribs left imprints on souls, that’s how soft and pliable they were. And sins left long smudges like coal dust.

  Sins and secrets—for Trudi they often were the same. Sins made the best secrets. They swelled and breathed until a priest slaughtered them with words of absolution. The blood of the lamb, blood of the sins, died for your sins. Your mother’s sins.

  Perhaps the Braunmeiers’ cat never knew how dangerous she could be to Hans-Jürgen, because he kept returning to school every day, long after his bruises had healed and been replaced by signs of new schoolyard fights.

  In spring, soon after the French occupied the Rheinland, he arrived in church with his right arm in a sling. His father had caught him with matches in the barn, and this—the danger to the building and livestock—was far worse to his father than what Hans-Jürgen had used the matches for: to burn the fleshy pads on the paws of a tomcat. Perhaps some of the scratches on the boy’s face and neck had been caused by the tomcat, who must have fought him, but the arm had been broken when his father had flung him to the ground and stamped out the flames from the
match that had fallen from his son’s hand. Yet, looking at Hans-Jürgen’s rigid face, you’d swear that the fire had not died but had settled in his eyes instead, where it would continue to flare.

  Trudi knew that fire only too well, knew it from inside herself. Sometimes she would love fiercely. Sometimes she’d feel a bolt of hate tear through her. She’d feel mean. Kind. Afraid. Like that Wednesday when the second graders were about to play Völkerball—nation ball—a game that had become increasingly popular since the French occupation.

  Sister Elisabeth chose the team captains: for the French team Eva Rosen, and for the German team Hilde Sommer, whose fainting spells during mass had earned her the compassion of the nuns. The sister never let any of the boys be captains. Boys were unmanageable, she said, a quiver of dread in her voice, and made them sit at their desks with their hands on the wooden surface to keep them from digging in their pants for a slingshot or something even more menacing. Girls, the sister believed, were not nearly as endangered by mysterious urges.

  Eva and Hilde stood in front of the other children, and whenever they called a name, a girl or boy would get in line behind them. Trudi willed Eva to pick her for her team, even though the French would start out in the middle of the field, dodging balls that were aimed at them from the German team until they’d all been hit. Then, the teams would switch positions, and you’d start all over again.

  But Eva kept staring right past Trudi while the lines behind the captains were getting longer until everyone had been chosen. Except for Trudi.

  “Your turn,” Eva reminded Hilde.

  “I don’t want her on my team.”

  “But you have to.”

  “You take her.”

  “It’s your turn to pick.”

  When Hilde said something to Georg Weiler behind her, he started to laugh. Georg was a fast runner and usually got picked right away. He was wearing his Lederhosen and a regular boy’s shirt.