Stones From the River Read Online Free PDF

themselves with their authority and tenderness, and women had to relinquish the responsibility they’d taken on during the war years—some with relief, many with reluctance. When they stood waiting in line to buy their daily food supplies at the bakery and the butcher shop and the grocery store, they no longer talked to one another about their accomplishments and fears, but about what their husbands or fathers liked for dinner.
    With the men back home, the town felt as though its borders had been pulled in overnight; streets seemed narrower, rooms more cramped; boots, waiting to be polished by daughters or wives, took up space next to the kitchen stove; the two taverns—Potter’s and Die Traube—were full again; voices sounded louder and even the church bells had a deeper ring to them.
    Herr Abramowitz reopened his law office, dusted off his expensive camera equipment, and purchased a used 1908 Mercedes with a roof rack and white tires. On Sundays, he’d take his wife and two children on rides into the countryside, where he’d pose them against lakes and forests and hills for countless pictures.
    When Anton Immers traded twenty pounds of sausage for the uniform of one of the returning officers—Kurt Heidenreich, a cheerful and generous man who was a taxidermist by trade—he asked Herr Abramowitz to photograph him in the uniform. Though the lawyer didn’t care for the butcher’s superior attitude, he never turned down a request for a photo because he took pride in seeing himself as the neighborhood photographer and chronicler. Holding his aching back as straight as he could, the butcher—who had felt disgraced ever since he’d been turned away when he’d tried to enlist—stared past thecamera with an expression of triumph as if he could see battlefields too distant for anyone else to discern. Six years before the war, a cow had rolled over on him while he’d slaughtered her, breaking his back, and though he refused to speak of the accident, you could tell by the way he walked—slightly bent to his left—that he was in constant pain.
    Herr Immers framed an enlargement of the photo, and whenever he looked at it in his shop, where it hung next to the patron saint of butchers—St. Adrian, the pagan soldier who’d become a Christian and had been tortured to death—he could imagine that, indeed, he had fought in the war, not as a common soldier, of course, but as a highly decorated officer. With the passage of years he would come to believe that fabrication, and it would be unwise for his wife and customers to remind him otherwise. Eventually, the entire town would pretend along with the butcher, even the taxidermist who’d traded him the uniform, and the next generation would be fed that illusion as history.
    It was like that with many other events, and it took courage for the few, who would preserve the texture of the truth, not to let its fibers slip beneath the web of silence and collusion which people—often with the best of intentions—spun to sustain and protect one another.
    Trudi’s father, who had been back so much longer than the other men, was nudged into an informal leadership as the returning soldiers looked toward him to reintroduce them to the life they had left. His quiet acceptance drew them to the pay-library, where they’d buy portions of tobacco so small that they’d have an excuse to return the following day. Many of them couldn’t fathom how Germany could have lost this war against the world, and they kept speculating about conspiracies and malicious forces that had brought about the shame of their defeat. Wearing stiff lines of exhaustion like masks, they walked with the tired sway of somnambulists because they’d forgotten how to sleep through an entire night without listening for the enemy. They didn’t have to tell Leo about their dreams of splintered bones and empty eye sockets because he knew all about those dreams that hunt you out of your shallow pockets of sleep into foul