Free Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi

considered himself a Communist and had joined the Independent Social Democrats. When he made his children sit still for yet another family photo to document the sequence of their development, they didn’t object as they would to their mother’s kisses, because they felt comfortable with his distance behind the camera.
    Through half-closed lids Trudi watched the early-afternoon light flit across the roses in the crystal vase and Herr Abramowitz’s pipe rack; it made the honey-colored wood on the lower halves of the walls gleam, and revealed the tiny creases in the dear face above her; it carried the shrill cry of a rooster and the voices of departing guests across the street.
    Frau Abramowitz kept holding Trudi long after she had fallen asleep. She promised herself to teach Trudi proper manners now that the girl no longer had a mother. There wasn’t even a grandmother in the house. It was too much to handle for a man alone. Not that Leo Montag wouldn’t be the most tender of fathers.… Or husband, she thought. Or husband. And her face grew hot.
    The week after the funeral it was Trudi’s fourth birthday, and her father took her on the streetcar to Oberkassel, where, next to the Rhein bridge that led to Düsseldorf, fireworks drenched the sky and the river in every possible color. Music from trumpets and drums played fast and loud. Like thousands of others, Trudi’s father spread a blanket on the grass. When the air grew cool, he took off his woolen vest and slipped it over Trudi’s head so that it hung from her shoulders, longer than her dress, drowning her in the wonderful scent of tobacco and books as he lifted her toward the sky, toward those red and green and yellow showers of stars that shot up and spilled high above—miraculously without dropping on her—and even though herfather had told her the fireworks were in celebration of the new Opernhaus, Trudi felt certain that all these people were celebrating her birthday with her, and she felt a slow sadness settling on her because no birthday could possibly be quite like this again.
    The following day her father covered the walls of his bedroom with the photos of the stranger from the coffin. Someone had stuck the long stem of a lily beneath the bride’s crossed wrists, and the white blossom lay against the curve of her chin. The flames of the three candles were milky—even whiter than the bride’s face. Trudi began to pray for her mother’s return. She didn’t have to pray for it as something separate from her other prayers because it was all connected to the size of her own body. Once that stretched itself, her mother would be well again. She was only staying away until then—so that no one would confine her to the Grafenberg asylum again. One day, Trudi knew, she would hear her mother’s familiar steps in the sewing room. She’d run up the stairs. The door would swing open, and her mother would stand by the window. She’d turn and look at her. “Well… Trudi, how tall you are,” she would say.
    But until then, Trudi had to pass through each new day without her mother, had to fight the habit that made her want to run upstairs the moment she woke up. Not being able to reach her mother—it filled her with a bottomless panic that prayers couldn’t soothe, a panic that made her climb into her mother’s wardrobe simply to stop the yearning. Standing motionless among the hangers, she’d feel the silky fabric of the dresses against her face, smell the clear scent of the Rhein meadows in early summer, and feel suffused with joyful certainty that her mother would soon be back. When she’d leave the wardrobe, she’d smile at the pictures of the dead bride, who was the only one to share her secret that her mother was still alive.
    “Well… Trudi, how tall you are”
    There had to be some kind of pill to make people grow faster. Frau Doktor Rosen would know. One morning, Trudi slipped from the house while her father was busy with a customer, crossed