Stones From the River (27 page)

“I’m not surprised.” From the ladder, Trudi handed her the book. “There’s not a single missionary in here,” she warned and adjusted the waistband of the angora sweater her Aunt Helene had sent her.

Ingrid scrutinized the book jacket of a cowboy on a horse chasing an Indian on a horse. Actually, they were so close to each other that it was impossible to determine who was doing the chasing, except that in those books you knew it was always the cowboy in pursuit. The horses’ flanks were nearly touching, and they were racing so fast that—the moment after the moment of that picture—they would have collided.

“Do you have other books about missionaries then?” Ingrid’s brown hair was parted in the middle and hung down her back in one
shining braid. Around her neck she wore a delicate gold cross.

“In here? Well—I do have one book about an actress whose sister is a nun. In Brazil. Or India, I think.” In the romance section, Trudi showed Ingrid a book with the cover of a woman in a low-cut red gown raising her red lips toward the jaundiced face of a smug-looking man, while leaning into the curve of his arm.

Ingrid sighed. “The sister of the missionary?”

“Must be.”

“Thank you. I’ll take that with me.”

When Ingrid brought the book back, she told Trudi the nun was only mentioned once. “The actress was crying out to be saved.… But I’m afraid it was too late for her.”

“Have you ever considered that missionaries are arrogant?” Trudi challenged her.

“Why so?”

“Because they set about changing people whose own ways may be far better for them.”

“Oh, but there is only one way to salvation.” Ingrid took another look at the book jacket with the red-gowned woman. “This is the saddest book I’ve ever read,” she said and borrowed two other romances.

That spring of 1933 more than two hundred authors were pronounced decadent, traitorous, Marxist, or corrupt. All over Germany, people were ordered,
“Reinigt Eure Büchereien”
—“Clean your libraries”—and incited to hunt down books by banned authors like Bertolt Brecht, Sigmund Freud, Irmgard Keun, Stefan Zweig, Franz Werfel, Lion Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Mann, and every writer on the blacklist. As bookstores, libraries, and private homes were raided, you risked arrest if you didn’t relinquish those books. In school, children were encouraged to turn their parents in for owning forbidden literature.

Trudi and her father packed more than half of his personal collection into cardboard boxes and carried them upstairs to the sewing room.

“Remember how the old priest used to rant against the books in the pay-library?” Leo asked. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

Trudi nodded. “Now the trashy books are safe. I would gladly give up every one of them instead.”

They stacked the boxes against one wall, covered them with a plaid blanket and several pillows, and stood back to inspect the result.

“Not the best hiding place,” her father said.

“Why not keep them in the open?”

He frowned at her.

“Let’s do this—let’s fill the top of each carton with rental books and keep the boxes right in the library.”

“Of course.” He smiled. “What better place to store boxes with books than in a library?”

The night of May 10 bonfires burned all over Germany, especially in university towns, where students were organized to burn the works of many authors they normally would have studied. In Berlin alone—so Herr Abramowitz would report later—a pile of twenty thousand books sent flames sky high, while the music corps of the SA played national marches. In some cities, trucks heaped with books paraded through the streets, gathering spectators for the ritualistic burnings that would wash across old and young faces in blond flickers.

Sometimes, when Ingrid returned library books, Trudi would invite her into the living room behind the pay-library and make lemonade or rosehip tea. While Trudi would set out her mother’s flowered cups, saucers, and pastry plates on the freshly ironed tablecloth, Leo would walk to the bakery near the Protestant church—humoring Trudi’s boycott of Hansen’s bakery though she’d never told him her reasons—and buy
Bienenstich
or
Schnecken
for his daughter and her new friend.

As Trudi came to know Ingrid better, she became fascinated by the torment that Ingrid inflicted upon herself. Haunted by the possibility of sin, Ingrid went to confession at least twice a week and tried so hard to be virtuous that she moved through her days like a tightrope walker about to plummet. Though her sins were trivial—like falling asleep without her good night prayer, or envying Irmtraud Boden for her satin dress, or resenting that her brother constantly got the biggest piece of cake—they devastated her. She’d feel greedy for wanting the simplest things.

She had a way of fluttering her eyelashes—a habit that looked both helpless and controlled. A tortured soul with a beautiful body, Ingrid would have gladly traded places with Trudi because she felt ashamed of her body that tempted men. Just walking past them, she created sin
in them—all of them, she said, even her father—and to be this instrument of sin was the worst fate she could think of.

“You really would trade?” Trudi was incredulous.

“In a minute,” Ingrid said without hesitation.

“You’re crazy.”

“And you are lucky.”

“Should I thank you?” Trudi asked brusquely.

“Now I offended you.”

“Look at me—” Trudi spread her arms. “Look at me and tell me why I am lucky. Do you know what people say about me? That because I’m a
Zwerg
, my mother became crazy. They warn their children: don’t eat butter with a spoon or you’ll look like Trudi Montag.”

Ingrid brought one hand to her mouth.

Trudi’s words were coming so fast, her lips felt wet with spittle. “Don’t do this or that or you’ll look like Trudi Montag. Don’t kill frogs, don’t fall on your head, don’t ride your bicycle in the middle of the road.…”

Ingrid stepped closer and laid one hand on her shoulder, but Trudi shook it off.

“Not to my face—they don’t say anything like that to my face, but I hear. I listen.”

Ingrid’s eyelids were like the wing beats of a frail bird. “I didn’t think you knew.”

“I know lots more. And I’ll tell you something else. I’m not like this because something happened to me, but because it’s the way I’ve been—from the beginning.” Both fists on her hips, Trudi demanded, “Now tell me why I’m lucky.”

“All I meant was that I admire you because you have more of a chance to go to heaven than anyone I know.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“It’s because of original sin,” Ingrid hurried to explain. “We’re all born with it. Doomed once we reach the age of reason.” Her gray eyes burned with conviction. “But you—Don’t you see?”

Her voice rose, almost the way the voice of Trudi’s mother used to sound when she got too excited, and for an instant Trudi recalled her mother touching her that very first time beneath the house, felt the wiry arms seizing her, heard her mother’s hoarse sob, breathed the dank smell of the earth, and felt a total settling-in, a coming home and belonging. It was the most sensuous experience she’d ever had, a
stilled yearning for something that had been given to her that one day and that she hadn’t remembered since. Until that moment with Ingrid. And yet, at the same time she was overcome by an intense sadness because—if the embrace of her mother still was the most significant touch in her life—what had she missed?

“Your hardship here on earth is the biggest blessing,” Ingrid said with awe.

Trudi blinked. “I could do without it.”

“Don’t say that. I used to pray that I’d die before I turned seven.”

“But why?”

“Because seven is the age of reason. Before then, we don’t know enough to choose sin. It’s because the forbidden fruit was eaten.”

“You really believe all that?”

“That’s what the Pope says. And the Bible.”

“I know, but—”

“If you’d died before you turned seven, you would have gone straight to heaven.” Ingrid sighed deeply, and Trudi felt the breath pass above her. “You could be there by now.…”

“No, thank you.”

But Ingrid went on to talk about the Virgin Maria who’d been free from original sin from the moment she was conceived. “Maria is the only human ever born that way.”

Trudi felt tempted to tell her old Virgin Maria joke, but she didn’t think Ingrid would appreciate it. “I don’t know anyone as worried about sin as you. Not even the little priest.”

Like many in town, Trudi referred to the priests according to their sizes: old Herr Pastor Schüler was the little priest, while the assistant pastor, Friedrich Beier, was the fat priest. Trudi liked the little priest much better, even if he had powder on his shoes and took forever to absolve you. Once, he had assigned her two rosaries for sins she hadn’t committed, as though the transgressions of the previous sinner still crowded him in the stale chamber of the dark confessional. The fat priest would never make mistakes like that, but then he was not nearly as kind as the little priest. The fat priest got things done. The fat priest would not forget a sermon or your sins, and his raised eyes bored into whatever came into their path—except food: then those eyes would lose their focus and he’d sigh with contentment.

“Look.” Ingrid pointed toward the Venetian mirror that used to
belong to Trudi’s mother. A spider was crawling along the top edge of the golden frame. “That’s what’s so hard about original sin,” she said as the spider disappeared behind the mirror. “From now on, I’ll see that spider whenever I look at the mirror.… Even when I just think of the mirror, I’ll see the spider.”

Trudi smiled. She would be good for Ingrid. She’d get her to shed some of this awful shame. Ingrid would be so glad that she was her friend. They’d pick raspberries and red currants by the river, go to a concert at Fräulein Birnsteig’s mansion, take their sleds to the dike, sit in a movie theater in Düsseldorf, take a trip to the Mosel and stay in a youth hostel.…

But Ingrid was still staring at the mirror. “The spider will long be gone,” she said, “and yet it will always be there. It’s like that with original sin.”

“But don’t you see—” Trudi said. “You can choose another mirror.” She motioned to the opposite wall, where a small, round mirror hung in an even more ornate frame. She’d bought it one afternoon in Düsseldorf when she’d been caught by a jagged longing for her mother, and when she’d hung it across from the Venetian mirror, she’d felt an odd peace as if two mirrors would be more effective at holding the reflection of her mother inside the house.

That night, Trudi awoke long before dawn and finally stopped trying to force herself back into sleep; instead, she let herself imagine trading places with Ingrid. She kept her own features, her own hair, but her body became tall and slender like Ingrid’s, and her head narrowed. Her arms and legs lengthened, and she watched herself stride down Schreberstrasse, taking long steps, a white blouse tucked into the waistband of her slim skirt, a shiny leather belt around her waist. Wind cooled her forehead and blew through her hair, and she smiled to herself as she made a left turn on Barbarossa Strasse. She wandered past the rectory and the open market where farmers sold their vegetables and fruits, and wherever she went, people stared at her, but not the way they usually did; she saw the lust Ingrid had spoken of in the eyes of some men; envy in the eyes of some girls and women; and the joy of simply looking at her in the eyes of others.

I
could live with this. I could learn
.

But then she glanced over her shoulder and saw Ingrid following, close, her body solid and short and wide, wobbling from side to side
on curved legs like some horrible windup toy, and she wanted to run from her, keep her from demanding that she trade back their bodies. Yet Ingrid’s broad face was suffused with tranquillity, and the fear that used to thrive in her eyes had given way to a gentle fatigue as if she’d struggled for a long time to arrive at this.

W
ITH EACH INSTANCE THAT
T
RUDI IMAGINED HERSELF INTO
I
NGRID’S
body, she became more aware of people’s responses to Ingrid. It made her uneasy when Ingrid’s father chuckled and tried to pinch his daughter’s buttocks while telling her to put on a decent skirt, even though the one she wore was as modest as all her clothes. And it confused her to see how Klaus Malter, the young dentist with the shy eyes and red beard, who had set up his new practice half a block from the pay-library, looked at Ingrid. She could tell he liked Ingrid, and it startled her when she found herself returning his feelings as though, indeed, she had become Ingrid.

Since Ingrid barely nodded to Klaus when he greeted her, he began to ask her and Trudi out together. Trudi was the one who’d talk with him, who’d answer his questions about Ingrid, and he took to stopping at the pay-library to visit when he didn’t have patients. Wearing his starched white jacket, he’d sit on the edge of the counter and peer through the window, ready to run across the street if a patient approached his door. His beard was full and curly, his hair cropped close to his head. Often, Leo Montag would set up one of his chessboards, and the two men would play a few slow moves before one of
them would be interrupted. A game between them could easily span a week. Though Klaus had joined the local chess club, he still belonged to a club in Düsseldorf, where he’d grown up and where his mother taught philosophy at the university.