Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi Read Free Book Online

sugar on the windowsill, the stork would certainly bring her a brother or sister who’d soon be taller than she. She took to climbing from her bed whenever she’d wake up in the middle of the night. On bare feet, she’d steal into the kitchen, push a chair against the wall below the window, and—if the sugar cubes which her mother had handed her in the evening were still there—she’d cram them into her mouth, scanning the night sky for the white shapes of storks while she chewed, hard, to keep a sibling from arriving and pushing her out of the house.
    Storks
. Though she hadn’t seen any of the tall birds in months, Trudi now looked for them everywhere: on chimneys, in trees, between clouds. She figured they couldn’t hide babies beneath their wings because, as soon as they’d spread their wings to fly, those babies would fall out. No, they’d carry the babies in slings attached to their long beaks or riding on their backs.
    Sometimes, while sitting on the front step, prepared to chase off any stork with her mother’s rattan carpet beater, she’d hear the melodious voice of the Italian ragman.
“Lumpen, Eisen, Papier
…—Rags, iron, paper …” sang the ragman as his wooden cart rumbledthrough the streets of Burgdorf. He rang his bell as he chanted,
“Lumpen, Eisen, Papier.…”
In back of his cart stood a scale where he weighed old clothes and metal and paper before counting out coins from the leather pouch at his waist.
“Lumpen, Eisen, Papier
…” The ragman’s name was Herr Benotti. He was from Italy and always wore a white shirt, even when he unloaded his day’s gathering in the fenced yard behind his house on Lindenstrasse.
    Every day Trudi’s mother talked about the new baby, and Trudi increased her vigil for storks. The morning after Easter her father told her the baby had died. “Your brother,” he said. Though Trudi hadn’t seen the baby—how could a baby die before it was here?—there was a funeral. Frau Blau brought her best linen cloths to cover the tables in the dining room and kitchen, and the neighbor women spread out a funeral feast: sheets of plum cake and deep bowls of potato salad; tureens with pea soup and barley soup; platters with blood sausage and head cheese; loaves of black bread and baskets of crisp
Brötchen;
cheese from Holland and Switzerland; and delicious white asparagus from the Buttgereits’ garden.
    Frau Doktor Rosen urged Trudi’s mother to rest, but she flitted through the rooms, rearranging the daffodils from Frau Abramowitz’s flower beds, offering food to the guests, her beautiful eyes feverish, her skin nearly translucent. From whispered comments Trudi understood that her brother had arrived too early to be alive. Now she knew six dead people altogether. But the other five had died old, like Herr Talmeister, who used to spit on the sidewalk before he’d enter the pay-library.
    She was sure her brother’s death had to do with the sugar she’d stolen; because of it the stork had punished the baby. It would follow her, that guilt, even as an adult, making a sick-sweet bile rise in her throat whenever she tasted sugar; and yet, the craving for it would return, a craving for the forbidden delicious taste on her tongue, followed by the shame she’d felt that day of the funeral feast, when she’d eaten three pieces of plum cake and two chocolate eggs from her Easter basket and—with one unexpected hiccup—had spewed purple-brown vomit over the front of her dress.
    Her mother took her out the backdoor. Their feet flattened the thin ribs of earth that Trudi’s father had raked early that morning. He raked the yard once a week and had already finished it two days earlier, but this morning, when Trudi had woken up, he’d been out thereagain with his bamboo rake, snagging twigs and stones and pigeon droppings.
    By the muddy edge of the brook, her mother squatted down, trapped the swift cold water in her fingers, and cleaned Trudi’s face and dress.