Stones From the River (14 page)

And then, of course, there were the sins that would take you straight to hell if you didn’t confess before you died, sins that could get your picture in the paper, like murder or burglary. The most obvious distinction between sins was that some made you go straight to hell while others kept you waiting in purgatory. It made sense to go to confession as often as you could, even if you couldn’t remember sinning.

“There are things,” Trudi’s father told her long before she was old enough for confession, “that the church calls sins, but they are part of being human. And those we need to embrace. The most important thing—” He paused. “—is to be kind.”

In his eyes she saw a gentleness and wisdom that made her wrap her arms around his waist. “Promise you won’t die?”

“I’ll be here for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Long enough for you to get tired listening to me.”

Though Georg’s hair was short now, and he wore his tunics tucked into his
Lederhosen
, other children still treated him as if he looked like a girl, but Trudi sensed that, gradually, their memories of him would be replaced by his new image. At times she hated him for being able to change. If only it were that easy for her—a haircut, a new way of moving.… The more he shed his difference, the further he seemed away from her. With an aching clarity she understood the nature of their friendship—it had worked only because each of them had found no other friends.

Georg felt confused when Trudi—to accustom herself to his loss—found excuses not to play with him. He pursued her, stole money from his mother’s purse to win her back. One day he badgered his mother to invite Trudi to the blessing of the vehicles. Frau Weiler propped both children on her bicycle, Trudi on the metal seat above
her rear wheel, Georg on the child’s seat that was mounted on the handlebars, and pedaled to the fairgrounds to get her bicycle sprinkled with holy water.

While they waited for the Herr Pastor, two of Frau Weiler’s customers arrived on their bicycles and lifted Trudi up, held her like a small child though she was far too old for that. No one lifted Georg up, and he was four weeks younger than she. Trudi felt poisonous: she wanted to spit, to scratch, and had to remember her good manners to keep herself from doing so.

“What pretty hair,” the women said and laughed when she wriggled from their arms.

Georg stood with his elbow touching Trudi’s shoulder while the pastor, surrounded by six altar boys with incense and silver buckets, scattered drops of holy water on bicycles, trucks, farm machines, and a few cars. Trudi had told Herr Abramowitz to bring his car in the hope that he would let her ride with him, but he’d laughed with his many teeth and said Catholic water rusted Jewish cars.

Georg brought Trudi a gold-veined rock he’d found at the fairgrounds, a speckled tail feather from a pigeon, chocolate beetles wrapped in shiny red paper with black dots from his mother’s store. But his chocolate only evoked for her the sweet bile of loss from her brother’s funeral. Once the other boys let Georg play, it felt to Trudi that everything he’d done with her had been just filling in days while he’d been waiting for them.

She’d watch him from behind the lace curtain of her room when he’d chase after a ball or play hide-and-seek with other boys. If her throat closed off, hot and sour, she’d run downstairs and ask her father to play one of the records the unknown benefactor had left, and as she’d listen to Beethoven’s
Eroica
swell from the wooden phonograph—a miracle that it could be contained inside a place that small—she’d find it possible to swallow again.

One cloudy spring afternoon, she followed Georg to the Rhein, where he and Paul Weinhart, who walked funny, with his toes pointing sideways, tried to trap polliwogs inside canning jars. They squatted by the edge of the river beneath the hanging branches of an ancient willow, their backs to her, Paul’s neck so thick that his shoulders seemed to slope right from his head.

Trudi crouched behind a tangle of blackberry bushes, fearing and
yet wishing they’d call out her name and ask her to catch polliwogs with them. She knew how to. Her father had shown her. But the boys didn’t call for her. She willed them to drop the canning jars, step into the shards, cut their feet. Her face felt hot as she saw their blood smeared across the pebbles, saw them getting scolded for taking canning jars. “Not something to waste,” Georg’s mother would say, and Paul Weinhart’s mother would smack him, twice, across the jaw. Ah—she shivered with rage.

Georg and Paul didn’t catch any polliwogs, and that was good. After they headed back toward town, Trudi stepped out from behind the blackberry bushes and dipped her arms into the cold river. A braided length of rope that some of the older boys had tied to the longest branch hung out over the shallow part of the water. Here, the Rhein bent, forming an elbow-shaped beach that was bypassed by the unruly waves. The long jetty that thrust itself into the stream upriver from the bay offered further protection from the current. On hot summer days, the people of Burgdorf liked to swim here: families with picnics would spread blankets on the sand, and the older children would climb into the tree, grab the rope by one of its many knots, swing themselves out over the water, and drop into the river.

Trudi propped her hands on her hips. Some day, she thought, she would try it, too, and she’d fly farther than any of them. But first she had to learn how to swim. Like a polliwog, she thought. No—a grown frog with four legs. She’d watched frogs dart through the water, had envied their light, rapid strokes. If she could imitate them, she’d be able to swim. Already she could see herself: she’d bring her legs together straight, pull them close to her body, then angle them out to the sides in a wide arc, and bring them together again. Hands folded as if praying, she would extend her arms in front of her, turn her palms outward, and push the water aside. Like Moses parting the Red Sea.

She looked around. The path winding along the river was empty. So was the meadow that led toward the dike. Quickly, she yanked off her pinafore and dress with the sailor collar, her stockings and shoes, the white cotton underpants that were buttoned to her undershirt. In the brisk water that still carried the memory of winter, she practiced her swimming as she had imagined. It was amazingly simple—as long as she held that picture of the frog inside her mind. Frogs were at home
beneath the surface of the water, and that’s where she swam, too, emerging only for deep gulps of air.

Early the following morning she left the house before her father was awake and walked to the river. All that spring she returned there nearly every morning when no one else was near. Staying close to the jetty, she’d streak through the shallow water like a frog, dive to the brown sediment of mud and let it billow around her, wishing her body matched its color so she could let it camouflage her. Here, the river belonged to her. In the water she felt graceful, weightless even, and when she moved her arms and legs, they felt long.

Her first day of school, Trudi brought a leather satchel, a
Schultüte—
that huge, glossy cardboard cone filled with crayons, erasers, sweets, pencils, oranges, and nuts that is given to all children when they start school. She also brought along years of longing to be like others. Overjoyed to finally be surrounded by other children, she also felt far more aware of her difference. It was not just the size of her body and the badly fitting clothes designed for three-year-olds that marked her an outsider but also her fierce wish to be included.

“Pushiness,” the principal, Sister Josefine, called it when she talked about Trudi to the other teachers. “They don’t want to include her, and she only tries harder.”

“Pushiness,” her teacher, Sister Mathilde, warned Trudi, “will make your life difficult.” Her pretty, milk-white hands cupped Trudi’s cheeks. “Look at the other girls. They don’t barge right in with the answers. They wait until I call on them.”

Trudi did look at the other girls, and what she saw made her uneasy—they kept silent even if they knew the answers, while the boys raised their hands, demanding to be heard. She felt as impatient with those girls as with women like Frau Buttgereit, even Frau Abramowitz, who were always suffering silently and saw it as a sign of virtue if you didn’t complain. Once she’d heard Herr Abramowitz scold his wife, “You’re like one of them, Ilse. Life is to live now.”

The sister’s desk stood below a large wooden crucifix, and the children sat in rows of double desks, their backs toward the one picture in the classroom, a painting of a praying Virgin Maria above the coat hooks.

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.