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 (6 page)

With his blond hair and blue eyes, Renate’s brother, Adi, didn’t look anything like Renate. His full name was Adolf, but no one called him that. Quite a few boys in the grades above us were called Adolf—a name that had been popular for babies born in the early war years—but we had no Adolfs in our class or in the younger grades. The name
Adolf Hitler was never mentioned in our history classes. Our teachers dealt in detail with the old Greeks and Romans; we’d slowly wind our way up to Attila the Hun, to Henry the Eighth who had six wives, to Kaiser Wilhelm, to the First World War; from there we’d slide right back to the old Greeks and Romans.

In gym class Renate was always the last in line—awkward, hesitant, everything about her slow except for those dark eyes that seemed to move right through me. But I hardly thought about the polio or her leg until Sybille Immers, the butcher’s daughter, called Renate a gimp one day as we left school. I leapt at Sybille, who was taller and heavier than I, kicking her shins; she raked her fingernails across my face and tore at my hair. When Frau Buttgereit, our music teacher, pulled us apart, her green hat with the pheasant feather fell into a puddle.

I still can’t understand what I did less than a week later when Renate didn’t want to come out and play.

“Why not?” I shouted, standing outside her bedroom window.

She leaned on the windowsill with both hands, “Because,” she shouted back.

“Because why?”

“Because Sybille is coming over.”

The scratches on my face still itched, and there she was, looking for a new best friend. Something hot and sad and mean rose inside me and, before I could stop myself, I yelled, “Even the gypsies didn’t want to keep a gimp like you!”

Her arms tight against her body, Renate stood motionless. Her face turned red, then ashen.

I stared at her, horrified by what I had said. My throat ached, and when I tried to talk, I couldn’t bring out one word.

“Hanna!” the side door slammed and the midwife ran toward me, her eyes filled with tears. “Don’t you ever come back here,” she shouted and raised one hand. “You hear me, Hanna?”

“But I didn’t mean it,” I cried out as I ran from her.

“I didn’t mean it,” I told Renate in school the next day, but she said she wasn’t allowed to play with me anymore and walked away.

Her limp seemed worse than ever before, and I felt as if I had caused it. If only I could take back the words. During recess, she stood alone in the school yard, eating an apple. My hands in the pockets of my pleated skirt, I leaned against the fence close by, feeling hollow despite the cheese sandwich I’d just eaten. If only she’d call me something real bad, something worse than gimp. Even if she said that my parents had found me at the dump, or that my mother should have thrown me away as a baby because I was too ugly to keep—I pushed my fists deeper into my pockets, jammed back my elbows into the diamond-shaped holes in the fence.

After school I waited for her outside the building. “Do you want to buy some licorice?”

She shook her head.

“I still have my allowance.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“We could ride bikes.”

“I have to go home.” She crossed the street.

I followed her on the opposite sidewalk. Mist hung low above the streets and garden walls, yet left the trees and houses untouched. Frau Weskopp passed us on her bicycle, her black coat flapping around her. I could tell she was on her way to the cemetery because a watering can dangled from her handlebar. When Renate reached her front door,
she turned around as if she wanted to make sure I was close by before she slipped inside.

I left my books at our house and walked toward the river. The streets were damp; it had rained nearly every day that April. When I got close to the Tegerns’ house, the architect’s seven German shepherds threw themselves against the chain-link fence, barking. The skin above their gums were drawn back, and their teeth glistened. Though Renate and I always ran past the fence, I made myself stop on the sidewalk, close enough to smell the wet fur and see the strings of saliva on the dog’s tongues. I snarled back at them. The hair on their backs rose as they scrambled across each other, trying to climb up the fence, barking and howling at me.

“Cowards,” I hissed, wishing Renate could see me. I raised my hands, curled my fingers into claws. “Cowards.”

A curtain shifted in the window above the solarium and Frau Tegern knocked against the glass, motioning me away as if afraid for me or, perhaps, herself. I gave the dogs one final ferocious growl and turned my back to them.

Along the river the mist was thicker, and the water looked brown-green, darker than the meadow where a herd of sheep grazed. I heard the tearing of grass blades as their teeth closed around them. The shapes of poplars and willows were blurred. Above the water line the rocks were gray and damp, the upper ones splotched with a white crust.

Frau Brocker used to bring Rolf and me to the river when we were small. While she smoked one of her Gauloises, Rolf and I searched for scraps of paper and dry leaves, packing them into the crevices between the stones before setting a match to them.

I sat on a boulder and dug my sneakers into the heaps of pebbles around me. Maybe if I gave Renate a present … I could let her have my radio. Or any of the dolls in my
room. I didn’t play with them anyhow. But neither did Renate. I picked up a pebble, tried to flit it across the waves; it sank without rising once. Perhaps we could switch bicycles. She liked mine better than hers. It had even been touched by holy water at the pastor’s last blessing of the vehicles and didn’t have any rust on it.

If I were Renate, the thing I’d want most in the world—it was so simple—her leg, of course, her left leg, to have it grow and fill out like the other one. I thought of my Oma’s healer—not even a saint—who’d touched her leg and dissolved a blood clot in the artery below her knee. Oma had told me it was as much her belief in the healing as the healing itself that had saved her leg from having to be amputated. Miracles happened that way. Even without saints. As long as you believed in them. I bent to search for a flat, round pebble and found a white one with amber veins. After spitting on it for luck, I skipped it across the water. It sprang up in wide arcs four, five … a total of eight times.

That evening I looked around our cellar for an empty bottle. Our housekeeper stored things there which she said she might use some day: cardboard boxes with old magazines and brochures, empty bottles and jars, a four-liter pot with a hole in the bottom, a stained lampshade, even the tin tub I’d been bathed in until I was two. Most of the bottles were too large, but finally I found an empty vinegar bottle behind the washing machine.

I soaked off the label, rinsed the inside, and hid it in my room until Wednesday morning when St. Martin’s Church was empty because mass was held at the chapel. The bottle in my knapsack, I sneaked into the side door of the church early before school. In the morning light the blond wood of the pews gleamed as if someone had rubbed it with oil. The stale scent of incense made it hard to breathe. Though
I knew Herr Pastor Beier was at the chapel two kilometers away, I kept glancing toward the purple curtains of the confessional.

Marble steps with a red runner led to the altar, which was built of solid black marble. Centered between two silver bowls with tulips stood five candles thicker than Renate’s legs. From
The Last Supper
mural above the altar, the dark eyes of Jesus and the apostles traced my movements. I’d heard enough stories about church robbers to know the wrath of God could strike at any moment and leave me dead on the floor. As I walked toward the back of the church to the basin of holy water, the white veins in the marble floor reached for my feet like the nets of a fisherman.

Quickly I submerged my vinegar bottle in the cold water. Silver bubbles rose to the surface as the bottle filled—much too slowly. On the wide balcony above me, I felt the silent weight of the organ pipes.

“You want to come to my house?” I whispered to Renate as I followed her out of school that afternoon.

She shook her head and kept walking, tilting to the left with each step, her white knee socks bunched around her ankles.

“It’s about a surprise.”

She glanced at me sideways. “What is it?”

“I can’t tell.” My knapsack over one arm, I continued walking next to her. “I have to show it to you.”

“Why?”

“Because. It’s a secret.”

“What if I don’t want it?”

“You will. I swear.”

She stopped. “Is it a harmonica?”

“Better.”

“Better than a kitten?”

“Much better.”

“Better than—”

“The best thing that could happen to you,” I promised.

She still had some doubt in her eyes as we took the steps down to our cellar. I thought of the nights my mother and grandmother had hidden there with neighbors while the wail of sirens pierced the dark. The war had ended a year before Renate and I were born. Several kids in our school had lost their fathers at the Russian front. Adults never mentioned the war unless we asked about it, and then they fled into vague sentences about a dark period for Germany. “Nobody wants to relive those years,” they’d say gravely. My mother was the only one who answered some of our questions and told us about the terror of air raids, the hunger and cold everyone had suffered.

“Sit over there.” I pointed to the crates next to the apple shelves. Every fall my father and I filled those crates with apples we’d picked at an orchard in Krefeld. Afterward we’d wrap the apples in newspaper and lay them on the shelves. It was my job to rotate them every two weeks, sorting out the rotten ones, so the others would last through the winter.

Renate sat on the crate closest to the door. The wall at the far end of the cellar was still black, right up to the two high windows that were blind with layers of coal dust and cobwebs. Until the oil furnace had been installed two years before, I used to help my father stack coal briquets to within a hand’s width of the window.

I picked up the other crate and moved it in front of Renate. “You have to take off your left shoe and sock.”

“Why?” She straightened her shoulders.

“Because. It’s part of it. You’ll see.” I took the bottle from my knapsack.

Renate pulled her bare foot from the cement floor. “It’s cold.”

I sat down on the crate across from her. “Let me have
your leg.” When she hesitated, I whispered, “I’ve figured out a way to make it all right—your leg, I mean—heal it.”

She swallowed hard. “How?”

“It’ll be like your other leg.”

She drew her lower lip between her teeth, but then she raised her left leg and, carefully, laid her bare foot on my knees. It was a pale foot, a thin foot with toenails longer than mine, a foot that felt warm and sweaty as I put one hand around it to keep her from yanking it back.

With my teeth I uncorked the bottle. “All you need to do is close your eyes and believe it will work.”

“What’s in there?” Renate stared at me.

“Holy water.” I poured some of it into my palm. It felt cold and smelled musty.

“Wait.” She reached into her mouth with her right forefinger and thumb and took out a pink wad of chewing gum. After sticking it on the side of her crate, she closed her eyes and raised her face as though about to receive communion.

I rubbed the holy water up and down Renate’s calf, between her toes, along the arch of her foot. Light filtered in uneven splotches from the dust-smeared light bulb above us. I’ve always had an enormous capacity to believe. Stories, miracles, lies—with the right details, I can be convinced of the authenticity of nearly anything, even
Hasenbrot
, rabbit bread, which my father brought me many evenings when he returned from working on people’s teeth. Handing me half a sandwich wrapped in oil-stained brown paper, he’d tell me that on his way home he’d seen a
Hase
, a rabbit, by the side of the road, carrying this package—he’d motion to the sandwich—between its front paws. He leapt from his car to catch it, but the
Hase
ran off with the bundle; my father followed it across the brook and chased it along Schreberstrasse until the
Hase
finally dropped the package next to the brook and disappeared. The bundle was about to slide into the water when my father saw it.

Every time my father chased the
Hase
through a different
area, and every time there was that one breath-catching moment when the bundle was almost lost all over again because a car nearly ran over it or a dog tried to tear it from his hands. I’d unfold the brown paper with something bordering on reverence. Though the bread was always a bit stale, the meat limp, and the cheese soggy, I’ve never tasted anything as delicious as my father’s
Hasenbrot
.

And it was with that kind of faith that I dribbled holy water over Renate’s foot and leg. I kneaded it into the crescent-shaped callus at her heel, into the bony disk of her knee. Her teeth had released her lower lip, and she breathed evenly.

Already I felt a difference in her leg: the skin seemed warmer and didn’t look as pale anymore. With each day her leg would stretch itself, grow fuller, stronger. It would be able to keep up with the other leg when she pedaled her bike. She’d play hopscotch. Tag.

“You can look now.”

Renate blinked, staring at me, then at her leg.

“See?” I bent over her leg, my heart fast.

Cautiously she probed her ankle with her fingertips, then her calf. “I think so.”

“It’s already begun to change.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Should we do it again tomorrow? To make double sure?”

“No,” I said, instinctively knowing the difference between a miracle and a treatment. “All you need to do is believe it worked.”

She raised her leg from my knees. “It feels different.”

“See?”

“What do we do with the rest of the holy water?”

I hadn’t even thought of that. The bottle was still half full. It didn’t feel right to pour it out or leave it here in the basement.

“We could drink it,” Renate suggested.