Children and Fire by Ursula Hegi
Author:Ursula Hegi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
1904–1907
Chapter 18
IT WAS RAINING like that the afternoon Frau Abramowitz hoisted Thekla onto her desk in the living room and told her the most beautiful word in all languages was rain. “Pioggia in Italian. Now you say it.”
Thekla moved her lips around the Italian word like Frau Abramowitz did, heard the sound of herself saying, “Pioggia,” and the sounds of pots and dishes from the kitchen, where her mother was washing the dishes.
“That’s excellent,” Frau Abramowitz said. “Try it again, a bit softer. Pioggia.”
“Pioggia?”
“Very good. Now in French: pluie. ”
Above the desk hung the little mirror Frau Abramowitz had bought in Venice, shiny with gold around it
“Pluie . Pluie —” Thekla tilted her head. “Like rain . on the roof.”
“Such a brilliant little girl.” Frau Abramowitz smiled at her. Fine wrinkles, so many that her skin looked all of one piece, not one wrinkle standing out.
“Thekla,” Mutti called.
Frau Abramowitz jerked her head aside.
Empty. Thekla’s hand empty now. Something wrong, I’ve done something wrong—what is it?—and the shame of that.
Quickly, Frau Abramowitz lifted Thekla from her desk. “Go to your mother now.”
—greedy like her mother—grapes, stolen grapes like water, green and cool and light—
—Nein nein jetzt nicht. Weg damit— No no not now. Away with this—
—and already no longer remembering but knowing it can come back—
Frau Abramowitz flung open the glass doors to her garden. In the cold rain she picked violets. Mutti rinsed a crystal vase and filled it with water for her. After Frau Abramowitz arranged the violets in the vase, she set it on top of her piano and fussed with her little picture frames. The oldest photo was of her husband’s mother, Judith, as an infant in a wicker carriage outside the arched front door of this house.
*
It was that very photo Judith Abramowitz had kept by her bedside during the final months of her life—not pictures of her husband and children, only this one of herself—because in that final paring down her most enduring link was to herself. Instead of wearing the quilted bed jacket her daughter-in-law, Ilse, had bought for her, Judith Abramowitz asked for her silk piano shawl with the white fringes, and she draped it around her shoulders and breasts and arms.
During the past year she’d given thought to choosing the most beautiful piece of glass she could find, hoping its beauty would ensure the beauty of her death once Fräulein Siderova arrived to read poems to her in her final hours. When that day came, Sonja Siderova could see that Judith Abramowitz was afraid of encountering her Vater after death. Still, she kept reading, and in her voice, Judith recognized the wisdom of one who had crossed countless times, one who could guide her, too, on that passage until she was ready to continue on her own. She yielded, let the fear be until it let her be, until she saw how it had all passed in one blink, from the baby in the wicker carriage to this old woman who—although motionless in the shimmer of folds and fringes of the shawl—felt herself moving with startling grace.
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