Stones From the River Read online

  “Please, Trudi—”

  It seemed ironic that her womb would shed blood every month, that she shared that experience with other young women when the rest of their lives were so unlike.

  “Trudi!”

  Reluctantly, she opened her eyes. He was bending over her, lips parted as though he’d forgotten to breathe. His teeth were exceptionally white and even. She found herself wondering who his dentist was.

  “How are you feeling, Trudi?”

  Already she could see the measured man he would settle into, a man who would look with amazement at his younger self. The older Klaus Malter would never kiss a Zwerg woman or whirl her around in an endless dance. The older Klaus Malter would find himself a wife who’d fit into his competent life.

  “I was afraid you’d passed out on me.”

  “Maybe the women in your family pass out.” She laughed to keep him from noticing her sudden anger. “Obviously, I am not refined enough for that.” Stop it, she told herself, he doesn’t even know you’ve been to his family reunion and back. Yet, her anger boiled, red hot. Even if he had said, “Listen … that night when I kissed you—I don’t quite know what happened there. I hope I didn’t offend you” she would have tried to understand; but to say nothing made him like all the others who believed that, just because she was small, everything connected to her was smaller—smaller joys, smaller pains, smaller dreams—invalidating her, invalidating that kiss.

  He handed her a glass of water. “Why don’t you rinse your mouth.”

  She swished the water around her mouth, wishing she had the courage to spit it right up into his cowardly face.

  “In here.” He held a metal basin below her chin, catching the foamy liquid. With a white cloth, he carefully dried her chin. “Maybe you’d like to rest a minute before I finish your tooth?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She reclined her head and opened her mouth.

  His face was puzzled but his hands were as capable as before when he scraped the last decay from her molar and packed the hole with something cold and metallic tasting.

  “Let me know if it keeps bothering you.” He walked her to the door, and as she crossed the street he stood outside his office, watching her as though undecided if he should escort her home.

  On the opposite sidewalk, Gerda Heidenreich wavered toward Trudi like a lost star spinning out of control. Her pocket watch without hands dangled on a shoelace around her neck, and the front of her pink dress was darkened by spit that seeped from the corners of her mouth. Her facial muscles were constantly in motion as if reacting to a swiftly changing world that only she could see. When she recognized Trudi, her lips pulled into a vast smile, and she gripped Trudi’s arm, claiming her for the community of freaks.

  Trudi felt Klaus Malter’s eyes and curved her shoulders against his pity. “Go away.” She shook herself free from the young woman. “Sshh—go!”

  The face above her puckered.

  “Stop it, you,” Trudi warned. “Stop it. Now.”

  Silent tears spilled from Gerda’s eyes, steadying her features so that—for an instant—there was the fleeting promise of a loveliness that could have been hers.

  Feeling something hateful and cruel rise within herself, Trudi backed away. “I am not like you,” she hissed, “you hear me?” She left Gerda standing on the sidewalk as she ran toward the pay-library.

  Her father was dozing, his head resting on the counter next to the chessboard, the black bishop in his slack fist. She snatched the golden mirrors from the living-room walls and hauled them up the stairs to her room. Door locked, she stripped off her dress and slip and corset, positioning the mirrors against her pillows so that they reflected most of her body. Pale, solid flesh swelled from her arms and hips as if pushing away from her skeleton. The hooks of her corset had left crimson marks that ran down the front of her torso like a new scar, and the indentations of her garters branded her bulky thighs.

  “Remember this,” she whispered to herself, her jaw aching, “remember this the next time you want Klaus. This is what he would see.”

  Her breasts felt cold, and she covered them with her hands. Against her will, a tingling began in her nipples and, almost instantly, in her groin though she hadn’t touched herself there. The very first time her fingers had evoked that forbidden bliss by coincidence while bathing, she’d felt stunned, overwhelmed by what she thought she surely must have invented. And what she had invented had to be a sin. Anything that felt this fabulous surely had to be a sin.

  But it was not what she wanted now. Not now. And yet, she pushed the merciless faces of the mirrors aside and lay on her bed. “I don’t need Klaus for that.… I don’t need anyone.” Her hands—they knew what to do, and she wished she could keep from crying the drooling woman’s soundless tears while images of Klaus became one with the boys in the barn, invoking the familiar terror that she needed to feed her sin. That part she despised, but she didn’t know how to get to the bliss without it, and so she sucked in that terror with each breath, sucked it in again and again, and fought the boys as they did to her—now, now—what they had not wanted to do to her in the barn, until the fat priest shouted from the pulpit and a large bird fell so high from the sky as if shot from a tower.

  The Nazi time came upon Burgdorf like a Dieb auf Schleichwegen— a thief on sneaky paths—Herr Blau would say after the war. To him and many others in town, the men in the doe-brown shirts were unsympathisch, ridiculous even, but surely not dangerous. Who really paid much attention to the frequent speeches that were delivered—always in loud, slow voices—from podiums draped with Hakenkreuz flags? So what if their flags were in every public building?

  Of course quite a few decent people, including Herr Heidenreich, were happy with Hitler. After all, the Führer was ending unemployment and improving the economy. He was helping the youth to find a new purpose and direction. Herr Heidenreich saw young people joining in group activities instead of slouching about. The positive change was obvious to him, even in the younger children of his customers, a respect for themselves and their town that hadn’t been there before.

  Frau Weiler saw a fresh enthusiasm in her son, Georg, and his friends. How much damage could the Nazis really do? she wondered. Like many others, she stilled her misgivings by saying, “At least let’s wait and see what happens.” Even those parents who felt a sense of danger, like Frau Eberhardt and Herr Stosick, decided to wait.

  When Emil Hesping warned about the Nazis, people thought he was only sore because quite a few of the young men in his gymnasts’ club had joined the SA club instead, wooed by speeches and bigger trophies.

  “Some days,” Trudi’s father told her, “I feel I’m on a train that’s hurtling itself toward an unknown destination.”

  It was a comment both he and Trudi would recall years later when their Jewish friends and customers would be taken away, but the day Leo said it, none of this had begun to happen. The people of Burgdorf were drawn in, gradually, almost imperceptibly. They didn’t know the destination; they only saw the beginning. Their days felt livelier. They had work. Bowls of food on their tables. The Nazis assured them it was far better to live under their regime; they reminded the people of the unemployment they’d suffered until Hitler had promised to give everyone work and they’d started building streets; they told the people that, had it not been for the Jews and their relentless drive for success, their own positions would be far more stable; they promised that German children would have better chances for advancement without the competition of the Jews; they preached a purification of the race, which would leave the German people stronger and more respected. Jews were described as a politiscbes Problem—a political problem.

  Many went along with Hitler’s ideas of reclaiming territories that rightfully belonged to them. Though they would have never voted to kill the Jews, they felt justified in expressing their resentment against Jews, in letting them know their place. They didn’t know that they were giving their power away, didn’t know that—b
y the time the Nazi regime would become bloated and monstrous with that power—it would be too dangerous for the people to reclaim that power.

  Frau Abramowitz was determined not to let herself be poisoned by the force of hate that stunned many Jews. “It’s important to keep forgiving,” she told her husband, Michel, when they received a typed, unsigned letter.

  “Verdammte Juden”—“Damned Jews”—it started, and accused them of greed, sodomy, bestiality, mercilessness, incest, and adultery. It was filled with absurd references to the Bible. “Jews are children of the devil. Jews are responsible for Communism and conspiracies. Jesus and the prophets were killed by the Jews. Jews are not God’s chosen people—the Christians are. Jews have always plotted against Christianity. Jews are born with the lust to murder in their hearts. Their persecution over the centuries only proves that they are justly being punished for what they did to Jesus. Jews have contaminated Germany.…” The letter ended by urging all Jews to leave the country.

  Frau Abramowitz didn’t want her husband to tell anyone about the letter and was mortified when he refused to let her burn it and decided to take it to the rabbi.

  “The things they say about us.… You’ll only call attention to us.”

  He refolded the page and stuck it into his vest pocket. “We can’t just ignore the danger.”

  “All this will go away. If we just stick it out.”

  It turned out that several Jews in town had received identical letters, written on the same typewriter, giving Frau Abramowitz some consolation of not having been singled out, while it alarmed her husband to the magnitude of that animosity. As she tried to lead her life as normally as possible, forcing pleasure from her garden and books and travel brochures, he increased his secret meetings with people who’d belonged to the Communist party before it had been forbidden.

  When one of his friends, who used to be in the party with him, had his passport confiscated, Michel decided to hide his family’s passports, but they were no longer in back of his sock drawer where he’d kept them with the birth certificates.

  He found his wife in the pay-library across the street, talking with Leo and Trudi Montag. “The passports—” he said. “Did you move them?”

  She turned her face to the side.

  “Where are they?”

  “I knew you’d get angry.”

  “Ilse. When—?”

  “Twelve days ago. The police—”

  “They came to the house?”

  She nodded, her face drawn.

  “Michel—” Leo Montag tried.

  But Herr Abramowitz raised his pipe to silence him. “What did they say?” he asked his wife.

  She didn’t look at him. “They didn’t give me a reason.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was afraid you’d go after them and that they’d keep you.”

  “Our passports.” He slumped against the wooden counter, his lips half open so that Trudi could see the edges of his upper teeth, two rows crowded inside his mouth. “You handed them our passports.”

  “Michel—they took them.”

  Impulsively, Trudi reached for Frau Abramowitz’s hand. Her gentle friend, who had traveled all over the world, now could no longer leave the country.

  “Do you have any idea where this leaves us?” Herr Abramowitz asked.

  “We’ll get them back in time.”

  “In time for what?”

  Ilse Abramowitz’s eyes darted from Trudi to Leo as if apologizing for the argument.

  “Deine Anpassungsfähigkeit—Your ability to adapt,” her husband said, “is far more dangerous to you than any of them will ever be. You’ll keep adapting and adapting until nothing is left.”

  Although Trudi agreed with him, she wished he would stop. Anpassungsfähigkeit She remembered Frau Abramowitz whispering to her, “It’s important never to lose your dignity.” To Frau Abramowitz, it meant a loss of dignity if she rebelled against authority, while to Trudi just rage carried its own dignity. For her it came far more natural to rage against circumstances than to fit herself to them. Sometimes it harmed her, that willfulness, but she wouldn’t have exchanged it for Frau Abramowitz’s acceptance of oppression.

  One Thursday in December, during recess, the fat boy, Rainer Bilder, who’d been tormented and ridiculed by other children for as long as anyone could recall, vanished from school as if to negate his body mass. Though he was only thirteen, no one made much of an effort to look for him, as though he were merely a repulsive growth that had attached itself to the community, whose youths were becoming trimmer and more organized with each day. Some of the boy’s neighbors wondered if he’d been abducted. Most concluded that Rainer was happier wherever he’d chosen to live. Even his parents seemed relieved that he was gone. It made Trudi wonder if people would feel like that about her, too, if she disappeared.

  Though she hadn’t known Rainer well, she felt his absence everywhere in the weeks to come—huge gaps where his body had once displaced the air, gaps that had a sadness stored in them. Soon, it was like that for everyone in Burgdorf: if you walked into one of those gaps, sadness would pack itself around your body, invoking other long-forgotten sorrows—the death of a loved one, say, or the loss of something you’d dared believe was yours forever—making your body expand with that sorrow until it filled the gap that the fat boy had vacated. You tried to bypass those gaps as they sighed to you with the yearning of a restless ghost, but more often than not you’d be drawn in despite your caution.

  That sadness spread throughout Burgdorf like a malady, exacerbating old ailments, tinging even the political speeches and parades with a grainy melancholy that settled upon everyone like sand, muffling the Horst Wessel song, “Wenn das Judenblut vom Messer spritzt…”—“When the Jew blood spurts from the knife”—slowing down the once so enthusiastic marchers, whose legs no longer kicked up as high as they used to in the practiced goosestep, but were slightly out of pace with one another as though the gears of a finely tuned mechanism had gone awry.

  It was only then that the police distributed Rainer Bilder’s picture and description to departments in other towns and cities. The boy’s parents placed ads in the paper, offering rewards for information about their dear son’s whereabouts. In church, Herr Pastor Beier shortened his prayers for the Vaterland and beseeched God and St. Antonius—patron saint of travelers and lost things—for Rainer’s safe return. People would find themselves glancing from their windows, scanning the end of the street for the familiar bulk of the boy.

  One afternoon a stiffness spread low in Trudi’s back, making it impossible for her to bend or walk up the stairs. Her father called Frau Doktor Rosen, who recommended bed rest and warm applications.

  “Don’t even use a pillow,” she said. “Lie flat. Completely flat.”

  She helped Leo to carry Trudi up the stairs and settled her in her bed, a rubber bottle filled with hot water beneath her back. There Trudi stayed while the women in the neighborhood brought her meals and gossip and advice. They told her about a cousin, say, or a grandfather who’d suffered from a sore back, and they clucked their tongues as they fluffed up her feather comforter and helped her with the bedpan. No one had heard from Rainer, they said.

  Trudi read two of her father’s hidden books, by Alfred Döblin and Lion Feuchtwanger. As long as she didn’t move, she was without pain, but whenever she tried to sit up, her back tightened up on her. It made her feel old, older than her father, who limped up the stairs, the outline of the steel disk in his knee showing through the material of his trousers, older than Frau Blau, who came to her bedside, the scent of floor wax on her hands, carrying a tray with pigeon stew, potato soup, and Christmas Stollen.

  Sitting on the edge of Trudi’s bed, knitting egg warmers to match the tea warmer she was going to send to Stefan and Helene in America, she’d tell Trudi about those of her friends who were invalids and had to depend on their grown children for care. “… not that they aren’t lucky to have family to li
ve with, but it’s difficult when you can’t be useful.… Then you don’t have the right to make your wishes known.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be out of bed long before I’m an old woman.”

  “It’s no joke, girl. And if you’re having troubles like that already, who knows what it’ll be like when you’re my age.… Since it’s not likely that you’ll—” She stopped herself.

  “That I’ll what?”

  “Nothing.” Frau Blau dusted the top of the night table with a corner of her apron. “Nothing.”

  “Marry?” Trudi demanded. “Have children?”

  “Now who would say anything like that?”

  “Look at me—” Trudi raised herself on her elbows and stared at the old woman. “Look at me. I’m no longer a child. I—I’ve been kissed.”

  “You’re always making up stories.” Frau Blau began to pack up her knitting. “Better rest.”

  “It’s not a story,” Trudi called after her.

  Just when she became afraid that she would always be stiff and immobile, the heaviness in her back vanished for one entire hour. The following day it lifted for nearly three hours, and by the end of a week, it was gone completely and she was able to resume her walks. She found that the pockets of sadness left by Rainer Bilder had begun to deflate during her illness, and even if she happened to step into one of them, her sorrow was only fleeting.