Authors: Ursula Hegi
Ursula Hegi The Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set: Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River, The Vision of Emma Blau. Children and Fire
Scribner
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Floating In My Mother’s Palm
copyright © 1990 by Ursula Hegi
Stones from the River
copyright © 1994 by Ursula Hegi
The Vision of Emma Blau
copyright © 2000 by Ursula Hegi
Children and Fire
copyright © 2011 by Ursula Hegi
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
First Scribner ebook edition June 2011
SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc. used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.
The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at
www.simonspeakers.com
.
Designed by
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-1-4516-6159-0
An excerpt from
Stones from the River
entitled “Trudi” appeared in the Spring 1993 edition of
Story
Magazine.
These titles were previously published individually in a different format.
1. Floating in My Mother’s Palm
Praise for
Floating in My Mother’s Palm
“A graceful, lyrical, heartbreaking book that offers many pleasures, not the least of which is the opportunity to read a very talented author writing at the top of her form, telling stories she seems born to tell in a voice that is completely her own. Marvelous.”
—A
LICE
McD
ERMOTT
“A treasure of a book. At once amazingly delicate and eerily powerful, it envelops the reader in the raw, painful, and poignant life of a small town in postwar Germany—benumbed, bewildered, and, sadly, not much wiser. Ursula Hegi is a beautiful writer with much truth to tell.”
—L
YNNE
S
HARON
S
CHWARTZ
“Exquisite … Hegi’s language signals a rare and particular power. There is a sonorous, hypnotic hum about these sentences that resound as prose, poetry, and hymn—and when we put the book down, its after-images burn the mind’s eye.”
—San Francisco Review of Books
“If Stravinsky were a writer, I imagine he would have written a book such as this, for Ursula Hegi gathers all the tonal moods and emotional power to her work that we expect of music that moves us to appreciate our hearts and souls and their troubling complexity.”
—B
OB
S
HACOCHIS
“An unusual, beautifully written book that sets the coming-of-age of a perceptive child, full of merriment, pain, and compassion, against the brilliantly realized small German town relatively untouched by the world outside … remarkable.”
—New York Newsday
“A gentle, German
Our Town
with moments of truth that transcend the time and place of the story … delightful.”
—The Washington Times
“Ursula Hegi re-creates childhood and history in this poised and lyrical book.”
—H
ILMA
W
OLITZER
“Deft and delicate.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Radiant … [the] opening is a touch of genius beginning Hegi’s use of altogether stunning imagery that will go on to luminously pervade the rest of this remarkable novel.”
—The Detroit News
“Sometimes charming, sometimes deeply moving… Hanna Malter, an adolescent trying to make sense of the disturbing world around her, emerges as a strong and authentic presence.”
—J. M. C
OETZEE
Other books by Ursula Hegi
Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America
Salt Dancers
Stones from the River
Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories
Intrusions
Ursula Hegi
For my mother, Johanna
Chapter 2: Trudi Montag’s Romantic Episode
Chapter 6: My Father’s Reckless Act
Chapter 7: The Order of Punishment
Chapter 8: Floating in My Mother’s Palm
Chapter 10: The Thread of his Grieving
Chapter 11: Through the Dance of her Hands
Chapter 13: A Crime of Passion
Chapter 16: The Woman who would not Speak
Chapter 17: The Truth About the American Soldier
With deep gratitude to Susan Wheeler and Lesa Luders, who read early drafts of the manuscript and offered their insights and encouragement, and to Gordon, Eric, Adam, and my women’s group, whose love and support have nurtured my writing.
I would also like to express my appreciation to the Washington State Arts Commission, Artist Trust, and the Northwest Institute for Advanced Study for grants which aided in the completion of this novel.
Floating in My Mother’s Palm
White Lilacs
W
hen my mother entered her tenth month of carrying me, I stopped moving inside her womb. She awoke that morning to a sense of absolute silence that startled her out of dreams filled with flute music and colorful birds, dreams she’d never had until she became pregnant with me, dreams she would have again when, two years later, she carried my brother.
When I imagine my mother that morning, I see her lying alone in the double bed with the birch headboard. I have tried to imagine my father in the room with her, but I can’t see him—only my mother who raises her nightgown and spreads both hands across her taut belly, waiting for me to move. On the window is a smudge where, just yesterday, she rested her forehead against the glass while gazing at the white lilac bush that grows behind the house. Nearly fourteen years later I will tear lilacs from that bush, wrap the stems in tissue paper, and carry them to the cemetery where I will drop them into my mother’s open grave.
But this morning my mother’s hands move across her abdomen as she tries to reassure herself of my life. All she feels is a cloak of fear that drapes itself around her. My
mother waits. But her flesh does not stir against her palms. Sister Agathe will know, she thinks. She’ll know what to do. The sister has taken care of my mother since the beginning of her pregnancy, answering her many questions with kindness.
When my mother leaves the house to walk to the hospital, Frau Talmeister, who used to be one year ahead of her in school, leans in the open living room window of the house across the street. Her elbows rest on pillows she has propped on the window sill. In one hand she holds a cup of coffee. Most of her days she spends like this, disappearing only for quick trips to the bathroom or to refill her cup.
Warm gusts of wind mold my mother’s dress against her spine. She is a tall woman and carries me high. When I’m three she will tell me I slept under her heart, and I’ll envision a warm and well-lit place where I waited to be born.
Her dress billows in front of her belly as she walks the five blocks to the Theresienheim, which contains the convent in one wing and the home for the aged in the other. A few of the rooms are kept available for childbirth and minor emergencies. Occasionally the nuns consult a doctor, but they prefer to deal with matters on their own. For surgery the people in Burgdorf travel the ten kilometers to one of the large hospitals in Düsseldorf.