Stones From the River Read Online Free PDF Page A

mother by the elbows to stop her from dancing and pulled Trudi from her arms. “Your mother needs her rest,” he said.
    Outside, Georg had stopped his somersaults and was peering toward their window, his head raised as if to hear better. Blond ringlets touched his round collar.
    “Holier than any holy man …” Trudi’s mother sang. “Blessed art thou among popes, and blessed be the fruit of—”
    “The child,” he said. “Don’t—With the child here.”
    In the weeks to come, Gertrud’s body took on a quicksilver swiftness that made her dash from room to room, chattering incessantly or singing hymns four times as fast as the organist at St. Martin’s could play them. After the cast was removed from her wrist, she decidedto redecorate the house. Though Leo didn’t care for the wallpaper she chose for the living room—spidery white ferns against a brown background—he was so relieved by her interest in creating a special space
inside
the house, that he helped her to hang the wallpaper. He built her a wooden stand that held two clay pots with ferns and the stuffed squirrel his grandfather had shot as a boy, but before he was finished painting the woodwork white to make the living room look brighter, Gertrud took to hiding beneath the house again as if he had failed to duplicate the one place where she still felt safe.
    Leo would find her, take her upstairs, and—as usual—lock the door of the sewing room from the outside; only now the key was tied with a frayed shoelace to the door handle so that, even if she managed to push it out, it could not drop to the floor.
    If Trudi stayed with her inside this room, Gertrud would cease her agitated pacing between the door and the window, which was too small to let even a child squeeze through. Instead she’d show Trudi how to dress the paper dolls. Frau Simon had given her a satin hatbox, and she kept the dolls in there, always disrobing them before closing the lid as if getting them ready for bed. She sang
“Hänschen klein
…” for Trudi and
“Fuchs du hast die Gans gestohlen …”
and she taught her how to count to twenty on her fingers and toes, and how to clap her hands in rhythm with
“Backe backe Kuchen
…” Often, she’d lift Trudi to the window, open it, and show her how far you could see—all the way across Schreberstrasse and past the church tower, toward the Braunmeiers’ wheat fields and dairy farm, to the dike that kept the town safe if the Rhein spilled beyond its boundaries in the spring.
    Trudi was never afraid of her mother, not even when she scratched words into the walls, always the same word:
Gefangene
—prisoner—as if leaving an urgent message for a mysterious rescuer. She’d use hairpins, the end of a spoon, her fingernails even.
Gefangene:
it tore through the pansy wallpaper into the plaster and caused pale dust to trickle down the wall.
Gefangene:
it was a word you could learn even if you were far too young to write, a word you felt in your heart by tracing the letters with your fingertips.
    Trudi was three when the men of Burgdorf returned from the war. A few of them—like Herr Abramowitz, who had two rows of teeth and was too outspoken with his left-wing politics, people said—had comeback wounded like her father. Many more—including Herr Sturm, who owned the toy factory and was one of the richest men in town—had been sent home in wooden boxes that brought the people of Burgdorf together at the cemetery, where carefully tended flowers on family graves were uprooted in order to break the earth for new coffins.
    Most of the men reached the town in orderly formations, which quickly disbanded. It was a season of small revolutions: trucks would appear with rifles and pistols which were distributed among ordinary men, who carried those weapons even in the harsh light of day as though the war had caused extra limbs to sprout from their bodies.
    Children, who had taken the absence of their fathers for granted, had to reacquaint