Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi Page A

was always emptier than the women’s—not only because some had not returned from the war—but because many of them spent the hour of mass in Die Traube, the old tavern with wooden ceilings that had stood for over five centuries. Die Traube—“this is where I pray,” the men would joke—was the closest bar to St. Martin’s and in full view of the church, ideal for those men who wanted to walk their wives and children to Sunday mass; meet with their friends for a few quick beers at their
Stammtisch
—their regular table; finish their final glass as the doors ofthe church opened; and be there to pick up their families and walk home for the Sunday roast.
    Of course, there’d always be a few husbands who’d have to order one more glass after the last, whose wives would stand in the church yard with expressions of brittle cheerfulness, pretending they liked nothing better than chatting with the priest after mass. Yet, as soon as their husbands arrived, they’d link their arms through theirs and drag the poor sinners home, hissing words of reproach through their church smiles.
    That winter, the ice on the Rhein grew so thick that people would drive their cars across the river to Kaiserswerth and Düsseldorf. Herr Immers took his new truck on the ice despite predictions of disaster from his wife, and Herr Hesping borrowed his uncle’s horse-drawn sled and brought his friends and their children on wild sleigh rides on the river. When the ice finally thinned, it tore in flat chunks that tried to mount each other like packs of wild dogs while the water hurled them downstream.
    With each day the river rose, and as it left its bed, it washed across the winter matted meadows, freed the roots of young trees from the slack earth, and climbed the stone steps toward the crest of the dike that protected the town from the river. There, the people of Burgdorf would gather at dawn, shrouded by the smoke from their cigarettes and pipes as they’d stare at the shifting masses of gray waters and measure how far their river had risen during the night.
    When Trudi’s father carried her to the Rhein on his shoulders, the coat of the Russian soldier wrapped around both of them in such a way that, from a distance, they looked like one very tall man, she could smell the dank fields long before she saw the flood. Threads of cold rain stitched the earth to the gray sky. The lower trunks and branches of the half-submerged willows were darker than their crowns, up to a meter above the waves where the water had splashed. Last fall’s dead leaves and debris had caught in the limbs, forming swampy pockets that bobbed in the waves like discarded hair nets. Some of the thinner branches were snagged by the currents and drawn beneath the surface before they whipped up again, completing a never ending circle. Ducks roosted in the V-shaped cores of trees as if holding court; whenever they braved the rapid waters, they werespun around madly or thrust in the opposite direction until, with great effort, they extricated themselves from the white crests and fluttered up again, seeking shelter in the willows.
    Trudi counted twenty-three trees hurtling past her, two dead chickens, and four dead cats. She was good at remembering numbers. Though her mother had only taught her to count to twenty, she’d practiced counting the books in the pay-library, until she knew the names of the numbers all the way to one hundred. She counted eleven bushes that were carried by the waves, nineteen things she couldn’t identify, and one dead goat, its belly the bluish-white tint of sour milk. Bloated, its stiff legs extended, it floated among the debris.
    She didn’t see the one human victim—Georg’s father—because he hadn’t been found. Two nights before, a group of men had straggled toward the river in the rain with a bottle of
Schnaps
after Potter’s bar had closed, and Franz Weiler—always docile until he drank—had entertained everyone by doing handstands on