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 (41 page)

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.

“She remembers the waterfall,” Pia announced. “And a splendid waterfall it is on our island. Cool in the summer, warm in the winter.” She whisked three golden loops from the empty air, and as she held them out, the parrot shrieked and flew through them as if they formed a tunnel, landing back on Trudi’s wrist.

“And the tunnel,” Trudi spoke up, drawn into the gaudy luster of the moment. “I remember a tunnel… made of jewels.”

“It led from your house to mine, yes.” In the eyes of the animal tamer was a mischievous glint that urged Trudi to go on.

Between them they wove the story of an island so glorious that everyone in the audience would have followed them there without questions, and all along the parrot flew between them like a weaver’s shuttle, coming to linger on Trudi’s wrist between its stunts. Once, as it shook its feathers, it tickled Trudi’s face, and she stopped the urge to sneeze by touching the roof of her mouth with her tongue the way Eva had shown her. If only Eva could see her here with Pia. But Eva was now a student at the
Gymnasium
in Düsseldorf, and though she’d stop to greet Trudi if they saw each other on the street, it was not like being friends with her.

Before Pia led Trudi back to her seat, she reached into the empty air, extracted an immense wrinkled paper rose, and presented it to Trudi with a kiss on the cheek.

While the clowns and acrobats entertained the audience, Trudi barely looked at them. She kept waiting for the animal tamer to return, but Pia appeared only once more—at the end when all the performers ran into the arena and bowed to lengthy applause. Surrounded by others of normal size, she didn’t look nearly as impressive.

When the tent had emptied, Trudi went looking for Pia, the paper rose in her hand. She didn’t have any idea what she would say; yet, she had to speak with her. Pia would be able to look at her and see
beyond her body. The people in town only saw her body and dismissed her as not being one of them.

One of the acrobats pointed Trudi past the merry-go-round and the fortune-teller’s tent to a blue trailer that sat in a patch of clover and buttercups. A laundry line with lacy underwear and stockings hung between its side window and a birch tree. Glossy paint covered the wooden sides, even the stairs that led up to the door. For a moment Trudi was afraid to knock, but then she imagined her mother simply walking up those steps and raising her hand. The anniversary of her mother’s death was only two days away. Strange how it took her time to remember the date of her mother’s birth—somewhere the middle of March—yet, the day she had died, July 9, was engraved in her mind. She dreaded that date because not one year had passed when she hadn’t relived that last hour of watching her mother die in the asylum, where they locked up people who took off their clothes for the angels. And it was unsettling to consider that the date of her own death already existed, that it passed each year without her knowing and—this was perhaps the worst—that it would never be as important to anyone as the death date of her mother was to her.

She pushed her shoulders back and knocked. Pia was in a silk embroidered dressing gown and didn’t look surprised to see her.

“There must be others,” Trudi blurted.

Pia stepped aside to let her enter. The inside of the trailer was the same cornflower blue as the outside: blue pillows, blue cabinets, a blue-fringed tablecloth.

“I have never met anyone like me.” Trudi said it slowly. And then she said it again. “I have never met anyone like me.”

“Oh, but they’re everywhere.” The
Zwerg
woman rolled a fat cigarette with nimble fingers and lit it. “In various places. All of them alone. In my travels, I never have to look for them. They find me.” Her eyes were at the same level with Trudi’s. “They want to know, just like you, about others.”

“That island…?”

“For all of us. Yours to dream your way to.”

“Why can’t we all be in one place?”

“We are. It’s called earth.”

“Not that. You know.”

“Would it be any better?”

“I wouldn’t be the only one then.”

“You’re not.”

“In this town I am.”

Pia nodded, gravely, and picked a shred of tobacco from her tongue. Her lavish hair fell to her shoulders. “When I get that feeling of being the only one, I imagine hundreds of people like me … all over the world, all feeling isolated, and then I feel linked to them.” She pointed to a low stuffed chair. “Sit, if you like.”

When Trudi sat down, her feet touched the floor instead of dangling high above it. She smiled to herself with the promise that in this world of high streetcar seats and store counters, of tall benches and chairs, she would from now on have furniture that was right for her inside her house. While other children had grown into their parents’ furniture, things had remained too big for her; yet, she’d kept adjusting, scaling chairs, reaching up to the counter to prepare food, moving a wooden stool around to climb on whenever she needed to reach something. No more, she thought, no more.

“Tell me your name.” Pia puffed on her cigarette.