Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi

Trudi’s father stopped her by grasping those wrists. Then Trudi ran.
    From the room.
    Down the corridor.
    Past opened doors.
    At the end of the corridor, the nurse caught her by the locked metal gate. Holding Trudi, she whispered words that the girl couldn’t hear because her own breath had taken up the pattern that her mother had abandoned.
    The nurse led her into a green room and made her swallow a bitter green liquid that looked as though it had bled through the green walls. After a while Trudi found herself sitting on a wooden slat seat in the streetcar next to her father, a heavy glow behind her eyes and in her legs. Her father stared straight ahead, his fingers tight on the rim of his black hat, which lay on his knees. When the
Schaffner—
conductor—came through to collect money for tickets, he had to click the silver change maker that hung on his chest by a leather strap before Trudi’s father noticed him and fumbled for his wallet.
    At some of the stops, people leapt off the streetcar before it came to a full stop. Frau Abramowitz had warned Trudi never to do that. It was dangerous, she said. Her daughter, Ruth, had chipped a front tooth when she jumped from the streetcar, and her son, Albert—who’d jumped that same moment—had fallen on top of her. Trudirubbed her front teeth. They were smooth and even. “Trudi has good teeth,” the dentist had told her mother. She didn’t like Dr. Beck, who had kinky hair sprouting from his long nostrils.
    At home her father wouldn’t speak to anyone. He sat at the table in the dining room, his hands no longer tight but limp on the polished mahogany as if they contained no bones. Frau Weiler and Frau Abramowitz called the undertaker, chose a coffin and flowers, sent black-rimmed death announcements to relatives and friends.
    When I get back, things will be better between us
.
    Trudi had believed her mother.
    Her father took Trudi to the room in back of the cemetery chapel, where the coffin was propped up, but when Trudi looked into the coffin, she had to smile: the woman only resembled her mother a little. Her features were sharp and waxen. She wore a white dress and lay on a white pillow with a white cover to her waist. Like a bride, Trudi thought. The bride’s wrists were crossed on her chest, and three candles in tall holders burned at the head end of the coffin.
    Trudi lifted the cover from the bride’s legs, but before she could touch the left knee and prove to herself that no fragments of stone were hidden beneath the skin, her father pulled her back and replaced the cover. How could he mistake the woman in the coffin for her mother? Didn’t he see? What if her mother had only pretended to die to get out of the asylum and—by some elaborate scheme—had substituted the body of a black-haired bride already dead? Then, surely, she’d let Trudi know soon. All she had to do was wait and check for her mother in the gap below the house, and there she’d be—the scent of strawberry bugs on her fingers, singing
“Pants Angelicus”
or
“Agnus Dei”
    Early the next morning, before Herr Abramowitz left for his law office in Düsseldorf, Leo Montag asked him to bring his camera to the cemetery chapel, and the following day Frau Simon fastened a new black hat with a rubber band below Trudi’s chin, while Herr Blau fussed with the buttons of Trudi’s black coat, which he’d cut down to size from a jacket that his son, Stefan, had outgrown a quarter of a century ago.
    Wreaths and bouquets of roses and lilies covered the earth around the oblong hole into which the coffin was lowered. Some of the war widows had brought their watering cans to sprinkle the flowers and keep them from wilting. Five nuns from the Theresienheim stood motionless,their heads bent while their fingers traveled the strands of their rosaries. From the maple trees, double-winged seeds the color of bones spun sluggishly in the sweltering air.
    As the people of Burgdorf stepped forward—one by