Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi

you—you’re just a girl.”
    “That’s why I wear a dress.”
    He glared at her.
    She glared right back. “And long hair,” she said.
    “Get a string,” he ordered.
    “What for?”
    “To measure our heads.”
    “You get it.”
    “My mother won’t let me out again.” He tilted his head and directed a sudden smile at her. “Please, Trudi?”
    She hesitated.
    “Please please please, Trudi?”
    She knew how to defend herself against his bullying, but not his charm. Dashing into the pay-library, she emerged with an end of string that had been tied around a recent delivery of romances.
    “You first,” he said.
    Her head held high, she walked over to the entrance of the grocery store and climbed on the step above him. Still, her nose didn’t even reach his shoulders. A dog barked from the direction of the market place. Wind slipped between her collar and her skin, cold and sudden, and rattled the wooden shutters outside the pay-library.
    Bringing the string around her forehead, Georg measured carefully and marked it with a knot; when she wound the string around his head above his ears, it was a finger’s width longer.
    She laughed aloud when she showed him. “I knew it,” she said, feeling that her head was at its perfect size.
    “Yours,” he said, handing her his marble.
    “You’re not mad?”
    He beamed at her. “I’ll win it back.”
    As he had predicted, Georg won back his glass marble; in addition, Trudi lost five of her clay marbles to him. From then on, they played nearly every day. Georg was lucky when it came to rolling the tiny balls into the hole he’d scooped into the damp soil between the two sets of steps, but he was just as generous in letting Trudi borrow marbles from him if she lost all of hers. To keep playing was far more important to him than winning. He could always win things. Trudi no longer teased him about his hair and his dainty smocks that buttoned in back. She was glad to see him when he stood outside her window and hollered for her to come out and play.
    The morning after December 6, they shared sweets that St. Nikolaus had left for them in the shoes they’d set outside their bedroom doors overnight, and the last week of December they licked fresh snow from pine cones that looked as though they’d been dipped into sugar icing. They built a snowman with a carrot nose and coal eyes that smudged their mittens. Trudi’s father gave them an old hat for the snowman and let them borrow the kitchen broom, which they stuck into his arm, bristles up.
    They wore their boots and mittens to church on Epiphany, when the priest and altar boys took down the manger that had been set up on the side altar, Jesus as big as a real baby, Maria and Joseph as tall as real parents. Both children liked church: the extravagant smell of incense and the splendid garments of the priest, the stained-glass windows and the mural of Christ’s Last Supper above the altar, but most of all the choir with its voices that drifted toward heaven. They even enjoyed the moments of silence, which were far more meaningful than any other kind of silence when they knelt in a pew, half hidden by the blond wood, feeling the pulse of the community around them.
    You could tell a lot about people, they discovered, by the way they occupied pews, how much space they took and how close they knelt to the altar. There were those who liked to get to church early to watch everyone arrive, and others who knelt with their faces buried in their hands and never looked up. The proud and the humble—all of them dressed in their best clothes. In church, you could tell quickly how well people were doing: you’d notice new ailments as well as new hats; you’d sense new friendships and new animosities.
    The men’s pews were on the left, the women’s on the right. Until you had your first communion, you could kneel on either side with a parent. That meant Trudi and Georg could still kneel in the same pew. The men’s side of the church