Stones From the River (36 page)

His new son-in-law, Alexander, who’d gone far too quickly from a serious boy to a serious man, looked changed today, sultry and almost
beautiful. It was as though with Eva he’d regained some of those lost years, and he moved like a boy—not a businessman. A jaunty set to his hips, his neck, he danced with Eva. When his niece, Jutta, dropped an entire
Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte
on the lawn, he laughed and helped her scrape bits of cherries and whipped cream and chocolate cake from the grass.

“Let’s blame it on your foot,” he teased her.

“What’s wrong with her foot?” Klaus Malter asked. “I thought she was limping.”

“Nothing.” Jutta shrugged.

But her mother told Klaus that she had stepped on a rusty nail. “Barefoot. She was swimming in that awful quarry hole again,” she said, and Trudi recalled the night she’d seen Jutta by the quarry, the night before water had sprung from the bottom of the hole as if invoked by the girl.

Jutta’s mother was telling the dentist how Jutta had hobbled over to the Theresienheim, where Sister Agathe had pulled the nail from her foot.

“When did that happen?” he asked.

“Yesterday.” She sighed as if exhausted by her daughter. Her skin was waxen, her voice limp. “I keep telling her to be more careful.”

“Mother—”

“Make sure you keep your foot clean to avoid an infection,” Klaus Malter warned the girl.

“It doesn’t even hurt.”

“Infections can sneak up on you.”

“Listen to the doctor,” Jutta’s mother murmured.

“He is just a dentist.”

Instead of acting offended, Klaus surprised Trudi by smiling at the girl. “You’re right. Still—dentists know about infections.”

Jutta spun away. “The sister gave me something to bathe my foot.”

Klaus had brought Fräulein Raudschuss to the wedding. She stood close to him, her arm touching his with such familiarity that Trudi knew instantly they’d been sleeping together for some time. She tried to feel amused: after all, it was a challenge to estimate the progress of a romance by watching people’s bodies, the casual touching of arms or legs, how closely they sat together. She could tell—even with those who sat stiffly, afraid to betray their lust by touching out of habit. Not that Fräulein Raudschuss and Klaus Malter were trying to hide anything:
her hand stroked his cheek; he let his hand rest on the small of her back as they walked around; she fed him a piece of wedding cake from her fork.… And if that wasn’t enough to make Trudi feel hot with spite, they announced their upcoming engagement.

“It’s not fair.” Startled, Trudi realized that she’d thought aloud. She glanced around. But the only person who’d heard her was Eva’s father.

“What isn’t fair, Fräulein Montag?”

“To—to upstage Eva like that. It’s her wedding day.”

He nodded, solemnly. “It’s not fair,” he agreed, looking at her with such compassion that she wondered how much he observed from his balcony.

Alexander had claimed the largest apartment in his building for his bride and himself, and Eva set upon decorating the spacious rooms with teak furniture imported from Denmark and her collection of stuffed birds of all sizes, including an owl which her new husband had bought for her as a wedding present from Herr Heidenreich. But her favorite was still the gray bird with the crimson chest that Trudi’s dog had caught. It looked as animated as the day Herr Heidenreich had stuffed it and arranged it in a nest, far more animated than Seehund, who found it harder and harder to get up from the floor. His hind legs were covered with teethmarks, where he’d tried to chew out the ache, and when he stood up, you had to remember not to pat his back because he might collapse.

Often he moved with such difficulty that Trudi was afraid he might not survive the night. But he endured, all through that winter and into spring, which dragged on, a sodden extension of the long cold months, clustering around the old people’s aching joints, even affecting their memories: they’d raise their hands to their foreheads, straining to retrieve thoughts that had just become lost to them. Even the insides of their heads had grown soggy, jumbling their yesterdays with what had happened to them decades ago. They walked slower and relied on canes to support themselves.

Eva and her new husband seemed to be the only ones who were celebrating—as if in defiance of the laws that shrank the world of the Jews, forbidding them to marry Germans or to employ German household help under the age of forty. “Never mind that we’re German too,” Eva told her mother, who’d lost the maid who’d worked for
the family nearly ten years. So far, Frau Doktor Rosen hadn’t been able to find a replacement. Her medical practice had dwindled in the past two years since health insurance no longer covered patients who chose to go to Jewish physicians. Though some of her Aryan patients still slipped into her office after dark for consultations, a few conveniently forgot to pay her.

Ever since the wedding, Trudi had become more a part of Eva’s life again. Eva was no longer attending the university and would stop at the pay-library—not to get books but to talk with Trudi or coax her into letting her father take care of customers by himself while she’d take a walk with her. She’d tell Trudi about all the exciting things she and Alexander were doing—eating out and going to dances and giving parties—but not about her rage at the atrocities that happened all around her.

Trudi was invited to two of Eva’s parties, a small dinner that included Eva’s parents, who hardly said anything all evening, and a fabulous costume ball, where people arrived dressed as gypsies with gaudy jewelry and scarves, Chinamen with yellow jackets and pointed hats, Indians with feather headbands, and fairy godmothers with magic wands. Trudi disguised herself as a little Dutch girl with wooden clogs and a starched white kerchief that Frau Blau had arranged in a triangle on top of her head, and her father went as a gambler, wearing the old eye patch from his pirate costume and his golden tie with the silver stripes that Trudi had given him many years ago.

Somehow, Eva had gotten hold of a nun’s habit, going too far, most of her guests—and especially people who had not been invited but heard about her brazenness—would agree afterwards, especially considering the way she danced with her husband, who was dressed as a sheik. For all the layers of cloth between the two—her black habit and the white sheet he’d wrapped around himself—they could have been naked, rubbing against one another like that. But then, people said, it was known that Jews had huge appetites when it came to pleasures of the flesh. Marriage had changed Alexander, the people agreed. But maybe that wasn’t all that surprising, considering the influence. He used to be so dignified, a decent man, the kind of decent that’s glad to help you out but wants everyone to know about the good deed. Not that he was no longer a decent man—although that quality did come under doubt that night of the costume ball. Even when he stopped dancing with his wife and opened another bottle of cognac at the opposite
side of the room from her, it felt as though the two of them were still touching.

In April, Seehund began to lose control of his bowels. Trudi would feel his shame when she’d come downstairs in the mornings to light the kitchen stove and find him lying in his stench, dried feces crusting his fur. Pinching her nostrils to keep from gagging, she’d hoist the dog up and half carry him outside, where she’d settle him down while she’d return to the kitchen to clean the floor and warm a pail of water for cleansing him.

Some mornings, frost still laced the air and shimmered in the sun, tiny particles of ice, reminding her of how Seehund had enjoyed his first winter. She wished she could bring him a huge bowl of snow and let him lick it, but the snow had melted, and only membranes of ice shrouded the puddles. One day, while washing his haunches, she knew he wouldn’t live another winter. She grasped his leather collar and tried to take him to one of the frozen puddles—a poor substitute for snow, but perhaps the closest he would come to it. When he hung back as if reluctant to trust her, that long-ago love for him broke through, and she cried and stroked his fur. He nuzzled against her neck.

“Come,” she said, and he followed her to the puddle.

With her bare hands, she broke the flimsy ice and held out a long sliver to him, letting him lick it as if, somehow, it could replace what she hadn’t been able to give him since that day by the river when he’d absorbed her humiliation. Each impaired step he’d taken since had reminded her that she, too, was damaged. He licked at the ice until the heat of his tongue had melted it, and then he kept licking her hands and wrists, his raspy tongue far more alive than the rest of his body.

That afternoon, he dragged himself away.

When he hadn’t returned by dusk, Trudi grew restless. She dusted every piece of furniture in the living room, then took all the rugs to the low carpet rod behind the house and, with her long rattan paddle, beat them until they did not even have one puff of dust left in them. Her father was silent while they ate their dinner of potatoes with pickled herring and beets, but twice he stepped outside to call Seehund’s name.

Trudi left the dishes in the sink and lit two lanterns. Throughout the evening, as they searched for the dog, she felt a revival of the sadness
that the fat boy, Rainer Bilder, had made the town’s legacy, and whenever she looked up at her father, she could tell that he, too, felt that sadness which was inflating to contain the loss of her mother.

It was after ten when they cleaned silver-white pigeon droppings from a bench in front of the chapel and sat down to rest. Pigeons, hundreds of pigeons, dozed on the slate roof, their whisper of talons like gravesite prayers, reminding Trudi of the pictures of the dead bride on her father’s wall and of the rumors that she was the cause of her mother’s craziness. For an instant she felt as though she were falling, falling, but her father spoke into the dark as if taking up her thoughts and pulled her into the safe and constant web of his acceptance.

He said, “She was not always like that.”

Across the meadow, a half-moon illuminated the onion-shaped tower of the Sternburg, and a high moving wind bent the leafless crests of the poplars.

“She was not always like that,” he said again, “and yet, it was always there … underneath somewhere. I don’t know why.”

From the Sternburg came a sound, and Trudi leapt up. “Seehund!” she shouted. “Here—Seehund.” But it was just the water in the moat, rocking against the pilings of the drawbridge.

“Maybe he found his way home,” her father said without conviction.

“Maybe.” She wondered how her father would endure it if they never found the dog.

“She was fine in our marriage.” He started walking back toward the center of town, and she kept up with him, their moon shadows side by side on the road, his nearly twice as long as hers.

“At first she was fine. And before that, too, when we were still in school.…” He shook his head and his shadow head on the road looked as though it were spinning. “I don’t know why she was that way. At first I used to think it was my fault.”

Trudi felt a deep sadness for her father and for the girl who had become her mother; yet it was a sadness that no longer carried blame for herself, a clear and separate sadness that swept through her body without residue.

“It’s nobody’s fault,” she whispered, and her father stopped abruptly and drew her against his coat.

They did not find the dog that night. The following day they kept the pay-library closed and continued their search. Shortly before
nightfall they came upon Seehund, lying beneath a clump of bushes on the far side of the fairgrounds, near where Pia’s trailer had stood that one summer. His fur was soft, and he lay half curled, the way he had as a much younger dog when he’d slept and played with the same abandon. A fine membrane veiled his open eyes as if the frost had drawn him into a final embrace.

Although Trudi would help her father to bury Seehund near the brook behind their house, she’d keep hearing him in the weeks to come, slurping water or eating, and she’d find herself walking carefully when she’d enter the kitchen, prepared to step around him as he sprawled on the floor. She’d ache for her father when he’d pull his comb from his shirt pocket and look around for the dog, or when he’d set aside a morsel of food for him on his plate and then shake his head as if remembering that Seehund was dead.

They began to notice dogs everywhere: the Buttgereits’ poodle, the taxidermist’s dachshund, the black dog of uncertain heritage that belonged to the Stosicks, the Weskopps’ German shepherd.… Those dogs had been there all along, but now they only emphasized the loss of Seehund.

To cheer her father up, Trudi decided to surprise him for his fifty-first birthday. She took money out of her savings account, told him to get all dressed up, and asked him to be ready to leave the house by one o’clock. She put on her best dress, blue velvet with a round neckline and half sleeves, and while she waited for her father, she printed a sign that the pay-library would be closed for the rest of the day. But what to give as a reason? Due to family matter? To illness? She finally decided to write
Herr Montag’s birthday
, figuring it might distract him from missing the dog if people congratulated him or brought him presents.

She had to smile when he came down the stairs in his good suit and the glitter tie. A taxi drove them to a fancy restaurant in Düsseldorf, where a pianist in a sea-green gown played arias from Wagner’s operas.

Trudi ordered champagne and her father’s favorite dinner,
Wiener Schnitzel
with fresh peas and parsley potatoes. Their table stood in the heated glass enclosure that jutted into the sidewalk. It was set with a thick white linen cloth, long-stemmed glasses, and a crystal vase with fresh roses.

At the next table, three young SA men were drinking
Schnaps
, and one table away from them sat the parents of the fat boy, eating with serious and silent tenacity. Ever since Rainer’s disappearance, their thin bodies had become bloated—not all at once, but bit by bit, as though they no longer had their son to absorb their indulgences.