Free Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi Page B

his taste. The cup in his hands, he turned to leave.
    That’s when he saw her. “What are you doing?” He set his cup on the floor.
    “Growing.”
    That sudden look of pain—like when his knee would buckle underhim—settled around his mouth. “You don’t need to do this.” His voice sounded hoarse, and she suddenly knew the Frau Doktor had told him about her visit.
    “I’ll stop once I’m tall.”
    “Not everyone needs to be tall.”
    “I do.”
    He opened his lips as if to tell her to get back on the floor, but instead he stood watching her and stroked his face. “Be careful, Trudi.”
    She sensed that his warning didn’t have anything to do with the kind of careful that keeps you from getting injured, but that it implied a far deeper danger. “I won’t fall. See?” She swung her legs. “See what I can do?”
    He caught her by the waist, lifted her down.
    “No.” She squirmed from his arms and stomped one foot on the floor. “No.”
    “Come,” he said. “I need your help outside.” He asked her to carry his teacup into the backyard, where he raked the dry dirt. As his long arms drew the rake toward his body, he kept stepping backward toward the grassy area that ran all the way down to the brook. His hair had been cropped at the barbershop the day before, and the tight, pale curls clung to his scalp like the fur of Trudi’s toy lamb.
    “It’s not the falling,” he said. “We all have to do some of that.”
    Her eyes followed the bamboo teeth of the rake as they caught clumps of debris and left fine, even ridges of earth.
    “You are perfect the way you are,” he said as if to convince himself.
    She swallowed, hard, and clenched her fingers around her father’s cup. He had never lied to her before.
    From that day on, she made sure to hang from the door frame of her upstairs bedroom and to get down whenever she heard her father’s steps. Already, her arms were getting stronger, and she took pride in carrying heavier stacks of books from the counter to the shelves when she helped her father arrange them back into place. Soon her legs would be long enough to pedal her own bicycle when she rode with her father to the cemetery or the river, instead of sitting between his outstretched arms on the leather seat—shaped exactly like his seat, only smaller—that he’d bolted to the front of his bicycle.
    She liked to help him dry the dishes after he’d washed them in thetwo metal tubs: one filled with hot water that he’d heated on the kitchen stove, the other with cold water for rinsing off the soap. Afterwards he’d settle her on his knees and read to her from the special books that he didn’t lend out to customers, books by Stefan Zweig and Heinrich Mann and Arthur Schnitzler, which he kept in the living room on shelves with glass fronts. Even if Trudi didn’t understand much of what her father read to her, she listened closely and turned the pages for him.
    Some of those books were bound in leather and felt precious to the touch. It bothered Trudi when her father took them into the bathroom. He’d always stay too long, smoking and reading, and if she had to use the toilet after he’d get out, she’d hold her pee because the air in there would be hazy with the stench of cigarettes and shit.
    Every evening she tried to stay up as late as her father would let her, coaxing him into reading her another story after he told her it was time for bed, or climbing on his knees to snatch the comb he carried in his shirt pocket and press it into his fingers so he’d comb her hair. She was afraid of the empty sewing room on the floor above her bedroom because, with each night, it grew larger, its emptiness threatening to absorb the entire house. Only her mother’s presence could have stopped that emptiness from expanding. Even as an old woman Trudi would be haunted by images of herself as a small girl returning to that door behind which her mother used to be confined, receiving no answer when she