Ursula Hegi The Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set: Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River, The Vision of Emma Blau. Children and Fire (124 page)

“Did you go to your mother’s funeral? I did. I was just born. Actually, I was seven days old and …”

Danny groaned.

“… and Greta’s grandma says I had a tiny black coat. And tiny black shoes. Did you go to your mother’s funeral?”

“You always ask that many questions?”

“Yes.”

Danny flinched as the light in the stained-glass lanterns at the bottom of the front steps came on. “I went. All right? This morning.”

“You get to stay here now.”

“Till I find something better.” Danny glanced up when he heard Tobias cry. “Stop it,” he said as tears ran down the boy’s heart-shaped face—
such an ugly child
—down the pointy chin, and into the collar of his little tweed jacket. “Hey now, what are you? Two years old?”

Tobias hiccuped and leaned against one of the cold, black railings that ran from the lanterns to the front door.

“I didn’t hear your answer, Mr. Tobias Blau.”

Tobias liked it when Danny called him that. “Seven. Okay? Seven.”

“You got to act your age. Go away now. Hop hop.” Danny leapt up and stalked past the fountain, around the corner of the house, and into the open garage.

But Tobias raced after him, eyes still blurry. Through the wide door. Beneath the boxy black heaters that hung suspended from the ceiling.
What if they fall and squash me?
Beneath the silver blades of exhaust fans that Mr. Wilson had installed up there for sucking
car fumes from the garage.
Blades sharp enough to cut your head off
. Sniffling loudly, he tried to draw his tears back in.

“What are you snorting for?” Danny stopped in the last stall that was set up for washing automobiles. Its floor sloped in the shape of a V toward the drain. Hoses hung coiled next to the window, and a truck tire was fastened to the wall to protect the front fenders of cars while they were cleaned.

“I don’t snort.”

“I’ll live here for a while. But only if you stop snorting.”

“I told you I don’t—”

“Forgive me, your highness. I’ll stay then if my aunt doesn’t try to bless me or pray over me while I’m sleeping.” Danny broke the lump of chalk and passed the smaller part to Tobias. “Here.”

It still felt warm from his palm. And it had a face, the tip of wings—“It’s not chalk. It’s Mrs. Wilson’s Angel of Mercy!”

“Half of
Mrs. Wilson’s angel.”

Tobias wiped his thumb across the rosy smudges from Mrs. Wilson’s lipstick kisses. “She’ll be mad.”

“She wants to be my mommy. So she never gets mad at me. Because then I can say, ‘I don’t want you as my mommy.’ Get it?”

“Do you hate her?”

Danny picked up a sponge, tossed it into an enamel basin. “This is how it is: she wants to be my mommy; he wants to go back to Florida. That’s all they talk about… and fight about.”

“I hate my new mother.” But as soon as Tobias said it, it didn’t feel true. Rather like something he wanted to impress Danny with.

“She’s not new,” Danny corrected him. “You’ve had her for years.”

“But she’s not my
real
mother. And that makes her new. Like my real mother is my old mother, and this mother here is—”

“Okay. Okay. You don’t have to keep saying it over. You hate her all the time?”

Tobias thought for an instant. “When she makes me drink milk.”

“And that must be about twenty-four hours a day.”

“Danny?”

“What now?”

“Will you still be alive when I’m grown up?”

“Jesus—”

“Will you?”

“I guess so.”

“I just want to make sure.”

“You’re a very strange child.”

Danny taught him how to draw, first with the upper half of the Angel of Mercy, and later with oils he would buy from the salary he earned for assisting his uncle and aunt. In the garage, he’d save bugs for Tobias’ flesh-eating plants and store them inside an old canning jar that he kept on the workbench. One Sunday afternoon in March, Danny showed Tobias how to build a miniature car from wooden matches. It quieted Tobias to set those matches together and glue them, to file down the points where they connected and make them smooth.

Usually words were his comfort, his weapon. If other children in the building excluded him from play, he’d call them bad names. Just as he was called bad names in school. “Hun.” “Spy.” His father had forbidden him to use those names because they were bad names for Germans. Now Tobias called the other kids “Stinkyface.” “Stupid.”

Often the front page of the newspaper had headlines about Germans, fighting dirty, gassing Americans in France—Americans like men of Winnipesaukee who were overseas to win this war so that there would be no other wars ever again. Though Tobias’ stepmother wouldn’t let him read those articles, he knew from other kids about Germans who set fires, Germans who hid time bombs in railroad stations. Worst of all were German spies because they put germs inside horses. Even inside houseflies. Those had to be real tiny germs, Tobias figured.

When he got German measles, Dr. Miles said they were called Liberty Measles now. Even though they were still the same measles. A week later, some girls smeared a rotten banana into Greta’s hair, making her smell like glue. Tobias’ father went to see the girls’ parents and came home mad, saying they were not planning to do anything about it. His father was mad a lot. Because of money worries. “People don’t like buying from Germans right now,” Tobias’ stepmother
had said. “And some of your father’s suppliers are not giving him the service they used to give him.”

She was trying hard not to speak German at all, and though she sometimes forgot, she’d correct herself quickly. Whenever Tobias’ little brother called her
“Mutti,”
she’d say to him, “Mother, Robert. Mother.”

She refused to let Tobias go with Danny to see
The Kaiser, The Beast of Berlin
at the Royal Theater where the curtain and seats and carpet were all royal blue. The first moving picture Tobias had ever seen was
Romeo and Juliet
, and it remained his favorite because Francis X. Bushman who played Romeo had friendly eyes and the most beautiful smile Tobias had ever seen. A smile like Danny’s. If you could make him smile.

One evening, after two of the older kids in the building teased Tobias into kissing a little American flag—“prove you’re not a spy prove it prove it”—Tobias had the dream for the first time. He was surrounded by mist, a mist so hot and thick that everything was white except for the red hanging above him, a calf’s head, severed, an ancient and mysterious image that bled down on him till he woke, hands against his mouth to keep from screaming. It was a dream that was to come back, but he never told anyone—not even Danny—because he was ashamed of it.

Besides, he knew how to quiet himself. He would spend hours alone in his room with matches, glue, paint, and sandpaper that he got from Danny, and he’d build miniature animals.
Always two of one kind. Meaning each of them was half of that one
. Dogs. Cows. Swallows. Horses. For his swallows he used only one third of a match for the wingspan, sanded the ends, glued on the red tip of a match for a beak, and painted them with Danny’s smallest brush. To make sure each animal had another, he’d finish the second animal before he’d let himself start another kind. His own ark. Zebras. Goats. Ducks like the ones he watched down by the lake, their thick bodies a cluster of nine half matches.

Robert was three when he found his own language in the piano. With a persistence that was rare for him, he badgered his parents for lessons, and whenever they’d tell him to wait until he was five,
a quick rage would flare in him, a rage that he’d push right back because it was bad. Cookies smoothed it out, that rage. Pudding. Bread warm from the oven.

His pudgy fingers looked as though they couldn’t possibly span the ivory keys, yet miraculously they did, leaping with a certainty that amazed Stefan and distressed Helene. To spare her son the discouragement that had bowed her father—
that sweat of despair—
she tried to distract him from the piano; but he returned to it every day, tapping at the white and black ivory keys while sitting atop the piano bench on four volumes of the German encyclopedia she’d brought from Burgdorf, and she usually had to lift him from there and carry him to his room for his nap.

No longer awkward or afraid of blushing, Helene moved through the rooms of her luxurious apartment, certain of herself in her role as Robert’s mother. She liked to think of him as her summer child—warm and filled with light. The American children had been born in November and December. Robert had his father’s nose and mouth, but he was fair-haired and his eyes were mild where Stefan’s were determined. “A replica with weaker colors,” Tobias would say many years later when Robert would enter veterinary college, but Helene thought Robert looked more and more like the boy who had grown up next door to her in Burgdorf, and she treated him as if he had the young Stefan’s daring and exuberance—traits no one else saw in the patient and affectionate boy.

One morning when she really let herself listen to the sounds he evoked and found that they were delicate and powerful, she cried because she felt proud of him and sad for her father who’d never known what it was like to have that gift. Would he have treasured it in his grandson? Resented his grandson? From then on the organist from the Lutheran church came to the apartment on Tuesdays and Fridays. A slender man of seventy, Mr. Howard appeared old from the front, but his profile was young and didn’t show his wrinkles.

Tobias said Mr. Howard looked like an angel because you could see the light coming through his sculpted white hair. He’d wait for him by the door and then sit on the floor next to the piano, watching him as he taught his little brother about music, asking him
questions about the moving pictures Mr. Howard loved to go to at the Royal Theater. The latest movie he’d seen there was
Tarzan of the Apes
.

“I’m sure you’ll like it,” he told Tobias, “because it has lots of apes.”

Now and then he saved his sweets for Mr. Howard, who accepted those gifts with a formal bow and the promise that he’d enjoy them for dessert that evening.

The end of 1918, soon after the armistice was signed, letters from Burgdorf began to arrive once again. When Leo wrote that Gertrud was pregnant, Helene felt alarmed that he seemed so pleased: “a brother or sister for our Trudi. Gertrud has become more stable. Those stays in Grafenberg helped. …”

In a letter that arrived a scant week later, he was dismayed because Gertrud refused to speak to him or anyone else, and he blamed himself for burdening her with another pregnancy. “Because she’s afraid the new child will be a
Zwerg
too … While I wouldn’t mind raising half a dozen children like our Trudi.”

But Stefan’s mother wrote that the women of Burgdorf were not eager to raise another child for Gertrud Montag. Granted, with the first child she hadn’t known how wretched she’d be as a mother, but to have another child meant relying on your neighbors too much. Not that they wouldn’t be there for Gertrud’s next child too. They would do their duty, just as they did their duty to God and to their government. But especially now—with their men back from the war or, worse yet, fallen and buried on foreign battlefields—they had no room in their lives for anyone beyond their own families.

Beneath Leo’s signature on his next letter, Gertrud added five lines. Now she seemed excited about the pregnancy. She had her own logic why this baby would be all right: “It’s God’s way to make up to us for Trudi.” Already she was planning how the new child, a boy of course with a normal-length body—“We’ll name him Horst”—would safeguard the future of her
Zwerg
girl long after she and Leo would be buried.

There was a second postscript. Leo’s. “I didn’t contradict her. Still, I assured her our Trudi will safeguard her own future.”

It would be Horst, born too soon to breathe for himself, who would be buried before any of them. His funeral was the week after Easter, the same week that Irene and Homer Wilson—following the proper interval of mourning for Danny’s mother—gave an adoption party for Danny. After all the years of waiting to be his mother, Mrs. Wilson was not about to let herself be cheated out of a celebration, though most of the tenants thought it was foolish to adopt a man old enough to start a family of his own. Danny, who had grown up with her detailed plans for his adoption party—to be held in the lobby of the
Wasserburg
like the Blaus’ parties, with so much food that every guest would have some to take home afterwards—didn’t care enough to deny his aunt that ritual.