Stones From the River Read Online Free PDF Page B

memories, even if you’ve only been a soldier for a few months.
    One of his hands floating above a chess piece as he contemplated the next move, Leo would listen to the men, and even when he wouldn’t say much, the men would feel restored when they’d leave.Leo revealed himself to very few people—not because he was shy or wished to hide, but because he didn’t know the desire to have others understand him. Still, the men wanted to find out from him what had happened in Burgdorf after they’d been sent off with flowers and music in 1914—celebrated heroes before they’d ever encountered the enemy—as though the real story could only come to them from another man.
    Hidden on the footstool behind the counter of the pay-library, enveloped in the lavish scent of tobaccos, Trudi would soak in the words that her father chose to tell the men about the town during their absence. His arc of vision was higher than hers, wider, and though he spoke of events that she, too, had witnessed, they took on a richer texture and became richer still if—afterwards, alone—she fused them with her own observations.
    Although Leo Montag liked to eat, his body was extremely thin, and his skin so colorless that he usually looked as if he were recovering from a prolonged illness. The women in the neighborhood were always urging him to drink milk or eat meat. Yet, he was surprisingly strong and agile. As a gymnast, he’d won numerous trophies—gleaming statues of men whose muscles, unlike his, distended their bronze or silver plated skin, their bodies in various positions of flight that made them look as though, any moment, they might soar from the shelf in the pay-library where he kept them polished. People who borrowed books would find it more difficult with each year to connect those magnificent shapes to the man who limped behind the counter and bent over his ledger to sign out their books.
    Early one morning in October, when Leo was frying apple pancakes, Gertrud swooped Trudi from her bed and carried her, propped on her hip, into the world of muted light and spider lace and strawberry bugs. Licks of frost had turned the grass blades silvery, but beneath the house the ground was still soft and molded itself to Gertrud’s feet. There was a greater urgency to her touch, a tightness to her hands that almost pinched and, for the first time, made Trudi afraid of her.
    “People die if you don’t love them enough,” her mother whispered to Trudi, her long body curved against the ground as if she’d already established her burying place.
    “You won’t die,” Trudi said.
    Her mother’s eyes glistened in the dim light.
    “I love you enough,” Trudi said.
    Her mother pushed her skirt aside and exposed her left knee. “Here,” she said and guided Trudi’s hand across her kneecap. “Feel this.”
    Trudi shook her head, confused. Her father was the one with the bad knee. Sometimes you could see the edges of the steel plate through the fabric of his trousers.
    “Harder.” Her mother pressed Trudi’s hand against her knee.
    Deep below the warm skin she did feel something—like uncooked kernels of rice—shifting under her fingers. She glanced up into her mother’s eyes; they revealed such anguish that she thought she should look away, but she couldn’t.
    “It’s gravel,” her mother whispered. “From when I fell… Emil Hesping’s motorcycle …”
    Trudi’s eyes stayed on her mother’s face, taking in the story beneath the anguish, though her mother gave her only few words, but those words she said made the other words, which she would never bring herself to say aloud, leap into her eyes. One hand on her mother’s knee, Trudi felt the secret shaping itself into images that passed through her skin, images filled with color and movement and wind—yes, wind. She saw her mother on the back of a motorcycle, her arms spanning the middle of Herr Hesping. Her mother was younger than Trudi had ever known her, and she wore a yellow