Stones From the River Read online

  “She’d be close by,” he told the doctor. “Trudi and I can visit her.”

  “The sisters—” Frau Doktor Rosen hesitated and rubbed the white, raised scar between her nose and upper lip, the trace of her cleft palate. “The sisters,” she said gently, “mean well.… I’m sure they do a lot of good for the old people, but what your wife needs is a specialist, someone who knows about the human mind.”

  Gertrud was kept at the asylum for three weeks, and it was during her absence that the gift from the unknown benefactor arrived—a wooden phonograph and eight thick black records with music of Beethoven and Bach, which Leo discovered on the counter of the paylibrary one morning when he opened the green shutters. The unknown benefactor had bestowed gifts upon the people of Burgdorf for nearly twelve years now—clothing and baskets of food and envelopes with money that would appear inside locked houses at times of turmoil without notes or anything to link them to their giver, whose identity mystified the entire town. The unknown benefactor had to be one of their own, the people agreed, because the gifts were always just right—like the gleaming bicycle Frau Simon had found in her bedroom two days after her old bike had been stolen, or the box with new coats for the entire Buttgereit family after storms had spoiled the crops.

  Leo Montag set up the phonograph in the library, and Trudi nearly forgot about her mother when those first sounds filled the air with ecstasy and fury and passion. Standing completely still, she breathed in those reverberations and felt their force move through her, giving shape to emotions she hadn’t yet experienced, but dimly perceived waiting for her.

  When her mother was sent home with her dress buttoned to her neck and her wrist in a cast, her eyes were too dull to let through any images, and she moved as if wading through waist-high water. But the old women nodded their approval that Sunday when she knelt between Frau Blau and Trudi in church, wearing a blue hat fashioned by the town’s milliner, Frau Simon, her only exposed skin that of her face and of her folded hands. When Frau Blau opened the pages of the black prayer book for her, she dutifully moved her lips with the words that swelled from the congregation.

  With each day, her movements would become less restrained. Those were the best times for Trudi—after her mother’s eyes unclouded and before she started her fast pacing through the house again—those times when her father would close the library, let her mother out of the sewing room, and take the two of them to the Rhein. There Trudi would untie her shoes, hike up her skirt and, in the shallow end of the bay, wade back and forth, or hop on one leg, showing off for her parents, who’d sit on the jetty and wave to her while silver ribbons from their cigarettes fastened the sky to the river.

  “Promise you won’t send me to Grafenberg again,” Gertrud implored Leo one evening when he was frying white sausages and onions.

  He took her into a gentle embrace. “If I can,” he said. “If I can, Liebcben.”

  Trudi climbed on top of the wooden icebox to be near her parents and squatted on her heels between the sugar bowl and the egg warmers. Her father’s cardigan hung from the back of a kitchen chair as usual, and on the sill of the open window sat a fly, its wings iridescent, its front legs twitching and crossing like Frau Blau’s knitting needles. In the grass behind the grocery store, Georg Weiler was doing somersaults, his dress flopping over his head as if he wanted people to notice by his underwear that he was not a girl.

  Trudi’s mother was as tall as Trudi’s father. “Promise?” she said again, looking straight into his eyes.

  He tilted his forehead against hers. She wore her favorite dress, white with colorful embroidery of flowers that bordered the ends of the sleeves and neckline and continued in one long vine that curved from her throat to her waist. It was a dress—so Trudi had been told—that her mother had made two years before Trudi’s birth to wear to a costume ball. She’d gone as a princess with a crown and a scepter, while Trudi’s father had disguised himself as a pirate with an eye patch and a cardboard saber.

  “Promise?”

  He nodded.

  “You’ll be glad,” she said and laughed. Her hand—the one without the cast—darted between his legs.

  He leapt back. “Gertrud!” he said, but stared at Trudi as if she’d caught him at something forbidden.

  “Pope Leo …” Trudi’s mother sang out. “How many popes named Leo did we have?” She swirled and grasped Trudi. “Holy man … Leo, Leo holy man.…”

  Trudi clutched the fabric at her mother’s shoulder as they spun around the kitchen.

  “… holy man. From now on we shall declare your father Pope Leo the Seventeenth who can’t get—”

  “Gertrud!” He caught her mother by the elbows to stop her from dancing and pulled Trudi from her arms. “Your mother needs her rest,” he said.

  Outside, Georg had stopped his somersaults and was peering toward their window, his head raised as if to hear better. Blond ringlets touched his round collar.

  “Holier than any holy man …” Trudi’s mother sang. “Blessed art thou among popes, and blessed be the fruit of—”

  “The child,” he said. “Don’t—With the child here.”

  In the weeks to come, Gertrud’s body took on a quicksilver swiftness that made her dash from room to room, chattering incessantly or singing hymns four times as fast as the organist at St. Martin’s could play them. After the cast was removed from her wrist, she decided to redecorate the house. Though Leo didn’t care for the wallpaper she chose for the living room—spidery white ferns against a brown background—he was so relieved by her interest in creating a special space inside the house, that he helped her to hang the wallpaper. He built her a wooden stand that held two clay pots with ferns and the stuffed squirrel his grandfather had shot as a boy, but before he was finished painting the woodwork white to make the living room look brighter, Gertrud took to hiding beneath the house again as if he had failed to duplicate the one place where she still felt safe.

  Leo would find her, take her upstairs, and—as usual—lock the door of the sewing room from the outside; only now the key was tied with a frayed shoelace to the door handle so that, even if she managed to push it out, it could not drop to the floor.

  If Trudi stayed with her inside this room, Gertrud would cease her agitated pacing between the door and the window, which was too small to let even a child squeeze through. Instead she’d show Trudi how to dress the paper dolls. Frau Simon had given her a satin hatbox, and she kept the dolls in there, always disrobing them before closing the lid as if getting them ready for bed. She sang “Hänschen klein…” for Trudi and “Fuchs du hast die Gans gestohlen …” and she taught her how to count to twenty on her fingers and toes, and how to clap her hands in rhythm with “Backe backe Kuchen…” Often, she’d lift Trudi to the window, open it, and show her how far you could see—all the way across Schreberstrasse and past the church tower, toward the Braunmeiers’ wheat fields and dairy farm, to the dike that kept the town safe if the Rhein spilled beyond its boundaries in the spring.

  Trudi was never afraid of her mother, not even when she scratched words into the walls, always the same word: Gefangene—prisoner—as if leaving an urgent message for a mysterious rescuer. She’d use hairpins, the end of a spoon, her fingernails even. Gefangene: it tore through the pansy wallpaper into the plaster and caused pale dust to trickle down the wall. Gefangene: it was a word you could learn even if you were far too young to write, a word you felt in your heart by tracing the letters with your fingertips.

  Trudi was three when the men of Burgdorf returned from the war. A few of them—like Herr Abramowitz, who had two rows of teeth and was too outspoken with his left-wing politics, people said—had come back wounded like her father. Many more—including Herr Sturm, who owned the toy factory and was one of the richest men in town—had been sent home in wooden boxes that brought the people of Burgdorf together at the cemetery, where carefully tended flowers on family graves were uprooted in order to break the earth for new coffins.

 
; Most of the men reached the town in orderly formations, which quickly disbanded. It was a season of small revolutions: trucks would appear with rifles and pistols which were distributed among ordinary men, who carried those weapons even in the harsh light of day as though the war had caused extra limbs to sprout from their bodies.

  Children, who had taken the absence of their fathers for granted, had to reacquaint themselves with their authority and tenderness, and women had to relinquish the responsibility they’d taken on during the war years—some with relief, many with reluctance. When they stood waiting in line to buy their daily food supplies at the bakery and the butcher shop and the grocery store, they no longer talked to one another about their accomplishments and fears, but about what their husbands or fathers liked for dinner.

  With the men back home, the town felt as though its borders had been pulled in overnight; streets seemed narrower, rooms more cramped; boots, waiting to be polished by daughters or wives, took up space next to the kitchen stove; the two taverns—Potter’s and Die Traube—were full again; voices sounded louder and even the church bells had a deeper ring to them.

  Herr Abramowitz reopened his law office, dusted off his expensive camera equipment, and purchased a used 1908 Mercedes with a roof rack and white tires. On Sundays, he’d take his wife and two children on rides into the countryside, where he’d pose them against lakes and forests and hills for countless pictures.

  When Anton Immers traded twenty pounds of sausage for the uniform of one of the returning officers—Kurt Heidenreich, a cheerful and generous man who was a taxidermist by trade—he asked Herr Abramowitz to photograph him in the uniform. Though the lawyer didn’t care for the butcher’s superior attitude, he never turned down a request for a photo because he took pride in seeing himself as the neighborhood photographer and chronicler. Holding his aching back as straight as he could, the butcher—who had felt disgraced ever since he’d been turned away when he’d tried to enlist—stared past the camera with an expression of triumph as if he could see battlefields too distant for anyone else to discern. Six years before the war, a cow had rolled over on him while he’d slaughtered her, breaking his back, and though he refused to speak of the accident, you could tell by the way he walked—slightly bent to his left—that he was in constant pain.

  Herr Immers framed an enlargement of the photo, and whenever he looked at it in his shop, where it hung next to the patron saint of butchers—St. Adrian, the pagan soldier who’d become a Christian and had been tortured to death—he could imagine that, indeed, he had fought in the war, not as a common soldier, of course, but as a highly decorated officer. With the passage of years he would come to believe that fabrication, and it would be unwise for his wife and customers to remind him otherwise. Eventually, the entire town would pretend along with the butcher, even the taxidermist who’d traded him the uniform, and the next generation would be fed that illusion as history.

  It was like that with many other events, and it took courage for the few, who would preserve the texture of the truth, not to let its fibers slip beneath the web of silence and collusion which people—often with the best of intentions—spun to sustain and protect one another.

  Trudi’s father, who had been back so much longer than the other men, was nudged into an informal leadership as the returning soldiers looked toward him to reintroduce them to the life they had left. His quiet acceptance drew them to the pay-library, where they’d buy portions of tobacco so small that they’d have an excuse to return the following day. Many of them couldn’t fathom how Germany could have lost this war against the world, and they kept speculating about conspiracies and malicious forces that had brought about the shame of their defeat. Wearing stiff lines of exhaustion like masks, they walked with the tired sway of somnambulists because they’d forgotten how to sleep through an entire night without listening for the enemy. They didn’t have to tell Leo about their dreams of splintered bones and empty eye sockets because he knew all about those dreams that hunt you out of your shallow pockets of sleep into foul memories, even if you’ve only been a soldier for a few months.

  One of his hands floating above a chess piece as he contemplated the next move, Leo would listen to the men, and even when he wouldn’t say much, the men would feel restored when they’d leave. Leo revealed himself to very few people—not because he was shy or wished to hide, but because he didn’t know the desire to have others understand him. Still, the men wanted to find out from him what had happened in Burgdorf after they’d been sent off with flowers and music in 1914—celebrated heroes before they’d ever encountered the enemy—as though the real story could only come to them from another man.

  Hidden on the footstool behind the counter of the pay-library, enveloped in the lavish scent of tobaccos, Trudi would soak in the words that her father chose to tell the men about the town during their absence. His arc of vision was higher than hers, wider, and though he spoke of events that she, too, had witnessed, they took on a richer texture and became richer still if—afterwards, alone—she fused them with her own observations.

  Although Leo Montag liked to eat, his body was extremely thin, and his skin so colorless that he usually looked as if he were recovering from a prolonged illness. The women in the neighborhood were always urging him to drink milk or eat meat. Yet, he was surprisingly strong and agile. As a gymnast, he’d won numerous trophies—gleaming statues of men whose muscles, unlike his, distended their bronze or silver plated skin, their bodies in various positions of flight that made them look as though, any moment, they might soar from the shelf in the pay-library where he kept them polished. People who borrowed books would find it more difficult with each year to connect those magnificent shapes to the man who limped behind the counter and bent over his ledger to sign out their books.

  Early one morning in October, when Leo was frying apple pancakes, Gertrud swooped Trudi from her bed and carried her, propped on her hip, into the world of muted light and spider lace and strawberry bugs. Licks of frost had turned the grass blades silvery, but beneath the house the ground was still soft and molded itself to Gertrud’s feet. There was a greater urgency to her touch, a tightness to her hands that almost pinched and, for the first time, made Trudi afraid of her.

  “People die if you don’t love them enough,” her mother whispered to Trudi, her long body curved against the ground as if she’d already established her burying place.

  “You won’t die,” Trudi said.

  Her mother’s eyes glistened in the dim light.

  “I love you enough,” Trudi said.

  Her mother pushed her skirt aside and exposed her left knee. “Here,” she said and guided Trudi’s hand across her kneecap. “Feel this.”

  Trudi shook her head, confused. Her father was the one with the bad knee. Sometimes you could see the edges of the steel plate through the fabric of his trousers.

  “Harder.” Her mother pressed Trudi’s hand against her knee.

  Deep below the warm skin she did feel something—like uncooked kernels of rice—shifting under her fingers. She glanced up into her mother’s eyes; they revealed such anguish that she thought she should look away, but she couldn’t.

  “It’s gravel,” her mother whispered. “From when I fell… Emil Hesping’s motorcycle …”

  Trudi’s eyes stayed on her mother’s face, taking in the story beneath the anguish, though her mother gave her only few words, but those words she said made the other words, which she would never bring herself to say aloud, leap into her eyes. One hand on her mother’s knee, Trudi felt the secret shaping itself into images that passed through her skin, images filled with color and movement and wind—yes, wind. She saw her mother on the back of a motorcycle, her arms spanning the middle of Herr Hesping. Her mother was younger than Trudi had ever known her, and she wore a yellow summer dress with short sleeves. Dust billowed behind the motorcycle as it raced down Schlosserstrasse toward the Rhein, and her mother held on tighter as the front wheel disengaged from the ground f
or an instant and the motorcycle darted up the dike, then down the other side. Hair whipped her face, and when Emil Hesping stopped the motorcycle beneath a stand of poplars, the wide leather seat still held the warm imprint of her thighs. He let his palm rest on that imprint for a moment, and she felt a sudden heat between her thighs as though he were touching her skin. When he embraced her, she had to close her eyes against the sun and against the fear that had been with her since the day her husband had left for the Russian front—the fear that Leo would not return alive.

  “We skidded … on the way back … the other side of the dike.” Trudi saw Emil Hesping get up, awkwardly, from the rough road, brush the dust from his arms, and stagger past the fallen motorcycle to where her mother had been flung. Her face was scratched. Blood rose around the fragments of gravel embedded in her knee and streamed down her calf into her white sandal.

  “The same knee.” Her mother laughed that wild laugh. “The same knee as your father’s. It happened to him, too. That day.” She snatched Trudi into her arms and settled her in the curve of her waist and belly like a much younger child. “Because of me,” she chanted and rocked her daughter as if to make up for all the days she hadn’t rocked her as an infant, “because of me he got hurt.…”

  “Gertrud?” Leo Montag’s shadow sloped into the opening between the beams. Between his boots, sun glinted on the frozen grass. “Gertrud?” he called. “Trudi?”

  Before Trudi could answer, her mother laid one finger against Trudi’s lips. Her breath felt warm against Trudi’s face. Carefully, the girl skimmed her fingers across her mother’s knee. It was smooth; the skin had closed across the tiny wounds like the surface of the river after you toss stones into the waves. Only you knew they were there.

  Unless you told.