“Every night she would fall asleep with the prayer that, while she slept, her body would stretch itself, grow to the size of that of other girls her age in Burgdorf,” writes Hegi in Stones from the River (507 pages. Poseidon. $23). “To help God along, Trudi would hang from door frames by her fingers until they were numb, convinced she could feel her bones lengthening.” From her vantage point deep inside Trudi’s consciousness, Hegi describes a little girl growing up with a terrible, painful difference; she describes the to-and-fro of a small German town where neighbors flock to every house of mourning with soups and cakes; and she describes the local disintegration of civility and soul as Hitler ascends.
“Stones from a River” sweeps from 1915, the year of Trudi’s birth, to 1952 and postwar rebuilding. Trudi makes a powerful narrator of this beautifully detailed chronicle, for her angle of vision is different from everyone else’s. She can see what her neighbors overlook, or hide; she can see into their hearts, and even as a small child she is aware that she can sense the future. May she hold Frau Eberhardt’s new baby boy? The kind Frau Eberhardt places her infant in the little girl’s arms. “The baby’s name was Helmut, and as soon as Trudi touched his skin, she felt a chill that came from a place so deep within him that she no longer wanted to hold him … she knew that he had the power to destroy his mother. . . . ‘If you want to,’ she offered gravely, ‘I will keep him.’ Frau Eberhardt laughed.” Eighteen years later Helmut reports his mother to the police: she is nice to Jews, he complains, and once made a joke about the fuhrer’s mustache. Soon afterward his mother is arrested and never seen again.
Trudi’s insights into her neighbors unsettle them, but her sharpened awareness is no magical quality, it’s a product of her difference. At first, people coming into her father’s pay library don’t see her; they gossip without knowing she is just behind a bookshelf That’s how she begins to store up their secrets. When she is grown and working in the library herself, they find themselves telling things to her they wouldn’t tell anybody else. Everyone can feel superior to Trudi, hence everyone can confide safely in her. Each day the books that pass back and forth over the counter are accompanied by real-life tales that Trudi stockpiles, then trades for new ones. “Some stories kept growing inside Trudi, finding their own passages, like moles tunneling through the earth. . . . She could encounter people on the street and then, in her head, follow them home and know what they would be doing and thinking,” writes Hegi. Stories are Trudi’s power, her currency. When she is arrested by the Gestapo, only a story saves her. Stories keep the life of the town flowing, and they keep this novel buoyant.
Hegi never loses control of this bountiful history and its dozens of vivid characters-the nine unmarried Buttgereit sisters, the piano prodigy, the crazed nun who tries to celebrate mass as if she were a priest. But for all its density and bustle, the novel has a reflective tone that lends breathing space to the torrent of events.
Only a few passages break the consistency of the narrative voice, and they crop up during the time of greatest tension in town, the Nazi years. Describing the way many townspeople placidly fall into line, willing to scapegoat the local Jews and tolerate atrocity, Hegi occasionally slips from a storyteller’s voice to a more formal, moralist’s voice. About Trudi, for in stance, who despises the Nazis and hides Jews in her cellar, Hegi writes, “She felt dizzy with a longing for peace. … And what she wanted more than anything that moment was for all the differences between people to matter no more-differences in size and race and belief-differences that had become justification for destruction.” it’s a commendable sentiment, but an obvious one. How much more gripping it is to see Trudi’s anguish in action-hastily packing Frau Eberhardt’s belongings, for instance, as the police near her house. “When they searched for a sleeping bag and couldn’t find one, Trudi opened the sewing machine, tears of rage blurring her vision as she stood there, her right foot pumping while the needle raced through the two blankets that she stitched together, and with each jab of the needle she wished it would go straight through Helmut’s heart.”
Hegi’s skill is immense, and she uses it to put the most terrible story of the century into a fresh, and freshly damning, context-namely, an ordinary small town. Perhaps her greatest achievement in “Stones from the River” is that the most placid days of Burgdorf, in her telling, are fully as memorable as its wartime horrors. At the end of this wonderful novel, it’s not just Fascism that a reader thinks back upon, it’s the sheer, dizzying abundance of life itself.
URSULA HEGI DOESN’T SHY away from doing her homework. To prepare for her new novel, “Stones from the River,” she read “hundreds” of books, made several trips to Germany and consulted with friends and associates. Sadly, one of her prime sources -her German godmother-died two weeks ago, with a finished copy of the novel on its way to her. Hegi herself was born in a small town near Dusseldorf in 1946 and left for America at 18. When she began the novel, “I asked the questions I had wanted to ask as a child.” It was the first time her godmother, then in her 80s, ever opened up to her about the Nazi period. “She was troubled by the neoNazis,” explains Hegi, who sent her questions; her godmother sent back tape-recorded answers. “A couple sentences on one tape might become a major chapter,” she recalls.
Hegi, who teaches writing at Eastern Washington University near Spokane, has already finished another novel, set in the Pacific Northwest. Now it’s on to two works - one a novel, one nonfiction-about the German immigration to America. Given that people of German descent make up the largest ancestor group in this country, it’s a theme that has been surprisingly neglected. Hegi’s work should be a bracing corrective.
