Stones From the River (20 page)

She got up and hopped on her left foot, then the right, extending the opposite arm like a wing. Suddenly she had to smile. At least then Sister Elisabeth would no longer make her participate in stupid ball games. But maybe giving up a leg and an arm wasn’t necessary. She stopped and stood still. Maybe it would be enough to give up two fingers like the baker, who’d lost them in Russia during the war. If you
lost something that you’d once had—a limb, say, or one eye—people didn’t treat you like a freak: they remembered you the way you had been. But if you were born without arms or sight, you were a freak. If your body didn’t look like the bodies of others, you were a freak. And if you lived in a freak’s body long enough, though you didn’t feel like a freak inside—what could you do then to make sure your body wouldn’t turn all of you into a freak?

That afternoon, Eva did not come to the pay-library, and the next morning in school she wouldn’t look at Trudi once. The first person Trudi told about Eva’s birthmark was Helga Stamm, who’d received the dreaded
Blaue Brief—blue
letter—from school, warning her that she might have to stay back.

“Like a red cabbage,” Trudi whispered, “all over Eva’s chest. Even her mother can’t do anything about it, and she’s a doctor.”

She took Irmtraud Boden and Hilde Sommer aside and told them how the mark on Eva’s chest had started out tinier than the pit of a cherry, and how it still kept growing although the Frau Doktor had rubbed every possible medicine on it.

“Soon,” Trudi said to Fritz Hansen, “everyone will know because the red will creep up Eva’s neck and down her arms. Once it covers her fingers, everyone she touches will turn red, too.”

They bent close to her whispered words as if they were her friends, and though she couldn’t hold them beyond the story, she understood that she could always lure them back with new secrets.

In the hallway, Paul Weinhart tried to pull up the front of Eva’s sweater, but she ran back into the classroom; the following day, two of the girls asked if they could see her chest. Her face as crimson as the birthmark, Eva spun away from them, and when her eyes fastened on Trudi, they were dark and startled as if, finally, she knew what it was like to be betrayed by your best friend.

It was not until the end of the week, during recess, that several girls pinned Eva’s arms against the school fence and unbuttoned her blouse to expose the birthmark. When they were summoned to the principal’s office, where Frau Doktor Rosen, who had seen many of them through mumps and measles, met them, the girls mumbled that they’d only wanted to tickle Eva.

Eva stayed home from school the following Monday and Tuesday, and Trudi had a dream that Eva had turned into an invalid like her father.
Eva lay next to him in a canvas chair. Both had their eyes closed. Except that Eva had no blanket covering her. The top of her dress was open, and the flower on her chest had sprouted vines that surrounded her like the hedge of thorns that grew around the sleeping princess,
Dornröschen
, on Trudi’s fairy-tale puzzle blocks. Eva’s expression was peaceful as if in a hundred year sleep, and the vines fastened her to the veranda, protecting her from the world beyond.

Yet, Wednesday afternoon Eva stood outside Trudi’s window with a new leash for Seehund, hollering for her to come outside and play. Watching her from behind the lace curtains, Trudi felt the love and hate inside her fusing into something heavy and unyielding.

“Trudi,” her father shouted from the hallway outside the pay-library, “Eva is here.”

She couldn’t answer.

“Trudi.” His limp paused at the bottom of the stairs.

She felt nothing, except for that cold burden. A scant breeze shifted through the curtain and cooled her face. As she stepped from the window, she caught the white lace between her fingers, and all at once she felt a yearning to know someone shaped like her, someone whose torso would be solid, whose legs would be short and sturdy, whose arms would not span further than hers, someone who would look at her with recognition—not with curiosity or contempt.

I
T WAS FROM
F
RAU
S
IMON THAT
T
RUDI HEARD ABOUT THE
Z
WERG
MAN
in Düsseldorf. Frau Simon had seen him in the audience at the Opernhaus, where she held a subscription. “About as tall as you, Trudi, and so—so elegant. You should have seen him. Wearing a night-blue tuxedo, almost black … and a beautiful top hat to match.” Frau Simon’s freckled hands whisked through the air to recreate the design of the top hat.

From that day on it became Trudi’s goal to find that
Zwerg
man, and she begged her father to take her to Düsseldorf. She talked him into buying tickets for the opera and sat through
Der Bettelstudent—The Student Prince
, with the opera glasses that Frau Simon had lent her, scanning the audience. During the intermission, her father stood in line to buy her sugar-coated almonds while she pushed her way through groups of people—past hips and waists and bellies and hands—expecting to come face to face with the
Zwerg
man. But she did not find him, and when she ate those almonds during the second half of the performance, her stomach cramped with the sick-sweet memory of the stork’s sugar.

When Trudi played with Seehund or walked to school, she’d
embellish the few details she knew about the man—his size, his tuxedo, his top hat—into a story until she’d invented an entire life for him. It didn’t come together all at once, but rather in fragments that kept knocking about inside her head and attached themselves to the roots of her story until it sprouted a trunk, branches, a skyful of leaves. The
Zwerg
, she decided, was a famous painter—no, a musician like Fräulein Birnsteig, a composer even. That’s why he’d been at the opera.

The composer lived in a villa in Düsseldorf, on the other side of the Oberkassel bridge, and he had two children who were
Zwerge
too. One was seven, a year younger than Trudi, the other a year older than she. The composer would like nothing better than to find a friend for his children. One Sunday he’d drive through Burgdorf and spot Trudi in front of the pay-library. He’d invite her for a ride in a car like Herr Abramowitz’s, ask her what her favorite food was, and—

“Don’t ever take chocolate from strangers,” the sisters had warned all the children. There were mass murderers, the sisters said, who did terrible things to children, like stuff them into sausages and feed those sausages to unsuspecting people. There was even a song about a convicted murderer, which the children were forbidden to sing:
“Warte, warte nur ein Weilchen
…”—“Wait, wait just a little while …” It went on to say how, soon, he would come to you too and, with his
“kleine Hackebeilchen”
—little hatchet—make ground meat of you. After her initial shock that the world was not safe, Trudi had chanted the words of the gruesome song along with the other children—
“… aus den Augen macht er Sülze
…”—“… from the eyes he makes head cheese”;
“aus dem Hintern macht er Speck
…”—“from the rear end he makes bacon …”; and she’d shuddered with delicious fear.

But certainly the
Zwerg
man was not anything like a mass murderer. He was rather like the unknown benefactor, anticipating what she would like before she could even tell him. Her father would meet him and talk with him about music and chess and politics. And then the
Zwerg
would take her and his children to the top of a mountain where snow lay year round, and they’d build a snowman with coal eyes and a carrot nose. They’d ride one long sled down the slope, and the
Zwerg
would tie the sled to the back of his car and pull them back up.

Yes, following a
Zwerg
would be different.

To not follow him would be unthinkable.

•   •   •

Trudi would not see another
Zwerg
until she turned thirteen, and that
Zwerg
was the new animal tamer of the carnival that came to the Burgdorf fairgrounds every July. Dressed in a glittering white dress with black lapels that sprang from her neckline like pointed leaves, the animal tamer led the elephants into the arena, and when her quick whip snapped around their massive feet without touching them, they bowed their knees as if to pay homage to her.

Her name was Pia. She had a mass of blue-black curls and a stocky body that moved with agility. While people laughed at the clowns and monkeys, they did not laugh at the
Zwerg
woman—they were awed by her skill and courage, and when she placed her head inside the lion’s wide-open mouth, it became so quiet in the circus tent that even the youngest children hushed, and in that long moment before she extricated her head from the dangerous cavern—that moment when the scent of animals and sawdust and sweat thickened and soaked into the canvas of the huge tent—one single breath connected everyone in the audience. As Pia ran into the center of the arena and curtsied, sweeping one hand with a graceful flourish to the floor and then high into the air, the people stood up and applauded.

Trudi knew they didn’t applaud because Pia was a
Zwerg
, and she clapped her hands until they stung, wishing that people would notice her, too, for the things she could do—like adding numbers in her head or remembering nearly every train connection in Germany—not for being a
Zwerg
. But even though she dreaded the attention she received, she’d become so accustomed to it that she craved and expected it.

As she sat back down in the first row, Trudi willed the animal tamer to look at her. She knew her braids looked pretty the way she had fastened them around the top of her head. Her new pink dress already felt tight again, but at least it was the right length. The washwoman, whom her father continued to employ despite rumors that she smuggled bleaching powders into people’s houses, was good at opening side seams and setting in matching pieces of fabric. Her father still bought children’s clothes for Trudi, frilly skirts and blouses and dresses, because adult clothes drowned her: waists were in the wrong place, and hems dragged. Men didn’t know much about things like that.

If her mother still lived, Trudi was sure, she would have clothes that
fit her just right—like that white glitter dress that looked as though it had been designed for Pia. Trudi wondered if Pia, too, had tried to force her body to stretch, but Pia was no taller than she. Despite everything Trudi had done, her limbs had stopped growing entirely by the time she was eleven. Pursuing the limits of her body with a magnificent hatred, she’d not only hung by her fingers from door frames but also from tree limbs, and occasionally she had fallen, causing bruises and scrapes. Often her arms and shoulders had ached for days, and she’d consoled herself with the promise that, once her body was fully grown, she’d move to a distant town where no one would know that she used to be a
Zwerg
. There, she’d imagine, it would be easier to confess to theft or murder than to having been a
Zwerg
.

A fat clown on a tiny bicycle wobbled into the arena, shrieking while a parrot with glorious tail feathers clung to his back like a vulture. After riding wildly around the animal tamer, who watched the spectacle with an amused frown, the clown threw himself into the sawdust at her feet as though begging her to rescue him.

Pia snapped her fingers, and the parrot fluttered up from the clown’s back and settled on her wrist. “I need a volunteer from the audience,” she announced with a confident smile.

Instead of raising her arm like others, Trudi slid from her seat and stepped forward, the ruffles of her dress scratching her elbows.

For a moment Pia looked startled, and her black eyes skipped past Trudi and back as if snared by her own reflection. But then she laughed with delight. “Come.” She extended her free hand, and Trudi held herself straight as she walked toward Pia. “It looks like we have a volunteer. From the magic island which I call home. The island of the little people, where everyone is our height.…” She waved her hand from Trudi to herself. “Where figs and oranges and orchids fill every garden, where birds like Othello”—she whispered to the parrot, and it settled on Trudi’s wrist—“are as common as your ducks.”

Trudi held her wrist steady. The claws of the bird were cool like the rind of an orange.

The clown squealed, grabbed his bicycle under one arm, and left the ring with a sequence of cartwheels.

“It is an island very few people know of.” The animal tamer fastened her gaze on Trudi. Her face was ageless—unlined, yet ancient—and beautiful with its painted mouth and broad cheekbones. “Do you remember our island?”

Trudi’s neck felt stiff as she nodded.

“And what do you remember best, my lovely friend?”

Trudi was afraid to look past her at the familiar faces in the audience, faces that certainly had to be filled with ridicule, but when she did, they were watching her with admiration. She stroked one finger across the back of the parrot and took a long breath. “The waterfall,” she said.