Read Online Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi - Free Book Online Page B

remembered what Frau Blau had said about his eyes—exquisite—but they were ordinary, gray with blue specks, and they didn’t see her, not even when she climbed on the piano stool. When she hit the first piano key, it sounded louder than ever before.
    Herr Hesping walked up to her father with two shot glasses and a bottle of
Schnaps
. He filled both glasses, handed one to her father, and clicked his glass against her father’s. They nodded to one another, their expressions grim, and—at the exact same moment—tossed the clear liquid down their throats.
    Trudi’s father shuddered as if awakening from a long dream.
    “There, now,” Emil Hesping said and clasped his shoulder. “There.”
    They stood in their half embrace like dancers, waiting, their trim gymnasts’ bodies shrouded by their mourning suits, until Leo Montag held out his glass again.
    Trudi struck all the raised black keys, then the white ones. AlexanderSturm stepped next to Eva and bent to listen when she said something to him. It was said that, when he’d taken over his father’s toy factory, Alexander had changed from a boy into a man overnight: his voice had turned deep, and his mustache had filled out, causing some jealousy among other boys whose sparse mustache hairs looked like accidental smudges.
    Spreading her arms as far as she could, Trudi drew her forefingers from opposite ends of the keyboard toward the middle, drowning the voices around her in an exhilarating crescendo that made her forget everything until Frau Abramowitz lifted her from the wooden stool and carried her to her house across the street. “It’s important never to lose your dignity,” Frau Abramowitz told her.
    High in the air like that, Trudi managed to graze her hand across the narrow box that hung at the right post of the Abramowitzs’ front door, just as she’d seen Herr Abramowitz do it. Carved into the wooden box were tiny flowers and symbols. From her father she knew that the box was called a
mezuzah
and that, inside, was a scroll with a prayer, called the
shema
. “It means God protects the house,” he had said.
    Frau Abramowitz opened the arched door and let Trudi down on the Persian carpet that covered the parquet floor in her entrance hall. The shutters of the living room stood open but the damask drapes were too heavy to sway in the breeze. Trudi could see the snapdragons and purple geraniums in the window boxes. Frau Abramowitz even kept a vegetable garden, though she could afford to buy whatever she wanted, and she was always giving red cabbage or beans or kohlrabi to the neighbors.
    She had a piano too, a white baby grand. The lid was closed, and on top of it stood two silver candlesticks and rows of small silver frames with pictures of her children at various ages. On the piano bench lay a doctor-and-nurse novel, the most recent book Frau Abramowitz had borrowed from the pay-library against the trade of her Venetian mirror. From her locked glass cabinet, she brought out an album with her husband’s photos of elephants and palaces. Trudi was allowed to turn the pages, and as Frau Abramowitz told her about all the exotic travels, her voice went so soft that Trudi had to stop swallowing in order to hear her.
    When Trudi got sleepy, Frau Abramowitz spread a shawl over her and rocked her in her arms, feeling much closer to this girl with theshort, thick body than to the children who had come from her own womb. Capable and self-sufficient and quick to debate any issue—“That’s how we learn to think, by questioning,” their father had told them—Ruth and Albert had acted embarrassed early on by their mother’s affection. Though her body still screamed to embrace them, they had forgotten how much they’d loved to feel her arms around them when they were small. They had chosen to go to boarding schools in Bonn and Köln, and when they visited, they were more at ease with their father, who was preoccupied with his law office and radical politics. He