Read Online 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 by Ursula Hegi - Free Book Online Page A

mother. I stood on my toes, trying to see their heads when he reached her, but they disappeared between the waves and then bobbed up together on white crests. I walked to where the water covered my waist. For a long time my parents stayed out there, and sometimes their heads were so close they looked like one shape. When they walked out of the water, the towel which my mother clasped around her was so heavy with sea water that she had to hold it up with both hands. Her hair covered her shoulders as if molded from one sheet of brass.
    “Next time all you get is a washcloth.” My father smiled at her.
    She touched one finger to his lips. Drops of salt water glistened in his reddish beard, filling it with specks of light.
    The clock on my bookshelf showed a quarter to ten. My parents wouldn’t be home for at least another hour. I tried to read another page of the romance novel though my eyelids felt heavy. The light from the lamp on my bedside table painted a yellow circle on the ceiling. It was quiet in our apartment, a silence that had a texture of its own, a different texture than when my parents were asleep and their breaths—even though I couldn’t hear them—took the starch out of the cloth of silence and made it smooth like a familiar blanket.
    But when I was alone, the cloth of silence was always new, and it could be exciting, boring—even eerie. Most of the time I enjoyed it. I could stay up longer than I was allowed to; I could read Frau Brocker’s trashy novels; I could sit on my windowsill and write lists of suspicious persons. When my parents were home, the light in myroom had to be out by nine, but I often read afterwards with a flashlight under my blanket. A few times my father had caught me, but the punishment—early bedtime the next evening—was well worth all the nights I wasn’t caught.
    I hid the book under my pillow, switched off the light, and pulled my blanket higher. As I shut my eyes, I wondered what Brigitte Raudschuss would have done had she lost her bathing suit. But she probably wouldn’t have taken it off. She’d swim next to the shore. She’d listen to my father’s warning. She’d be cautious enough not to need any warnings.
    Reckless
—I rather liked that about my father, and from that night on, I found myself thinking of him in a different way. As I imagined him in other reckless acts, I discovered in him the touch of daring I’d only connected to my mother. Marrying a woman who was reckless must have been the ultimate reckless act, requiring a lifetime of balancing to keep both of them safe.

  The Order of Punishment
    O ur tenant, Matthias Berger, who rented the third-floor apartment next to my mother’s studio, was given to sudden violent headaches that made his hands rise to his temples and his fingers press against the fair skin as if he were trying to squeeze out the pain and connect his palms in a prayer of absolution. I’d see the headache behind his eyes, a dark shape that sucked the green from his eyes.
    I met Matthias the day he moved into our house; his piano got stuck where our staircase bent between the second and third floors, and the movers threatened to leave it there after struggling with it for half an hour. On the landing above the piano stood Matthias, a blond man with solid shoulders, tugging at one of the piano legs as if he believed it would make a difference. And it did—the bulky instrument moved slowly, leaving deep scars in the plaster wall as the movers wedged their bodies against it and Matthias pulled. His glasses were plain, but even on the dim staircase his eyes were a splendid greeen with gold flecks.
    The next afternoon I found him on the stairs with a knife, spreading white paste into the gashes his piano hadtorn into the wall. He looked at me with those splendid eyes and continued patching the holes. Except for the scraping of the knife against plaster, it was silent around us. Downstairs in our apartment, Frau Brocker was canning beans