Ursula Hegi The Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set: Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River, The Vision of Emma Blau. Children and Fire Read Online Free

when I returned to Burgdorf as an adult, I found a glistening red pebble by the river in the crevice between two wet rocks. In my hand it dried and turned brown, ordinary. Yet, I knew the promise to shine had been there all along. Rubbing my thumb across its drab surface, I thought of Trudi Montag: I remembered sitting next to her on the blue velvet sofa, remembered the sweet taste of rose-hip tea, remembered a morning, not too long ago, when I’d bent to lift my son from his crib and—all at once—had been caught by a sense of dread as I saw Trudi Montag falling, falling from her mother’s arms in slow motion. For a moment I’d stood frozen before I’d dared to gather my son in my arms, although, by then, I knew that Trudi Montag’s deformity had nothing to do with a fall. She was a dwarf whose size had been used as a warning for many children:
If you eat butter with a spoon you’ll look like Trudi Montag when you grow up… If you don’t wash your knees … If you don’t finish your red cabbage … If you pick up this baby it might end up just like Trudi Montag…
Fragments of warnings, they had come together to form the essence of one woman.
    I sat down on a rock and linked my arms around my knees. Across the Rhein, clumps of sheep grazed in a meadow, circled by a long-haired dog. The current flowednorth, but a southern wind stirred across its surface, and as the sun caught the ripples here and there like lights dancing in a mirror, I saw Trudi Montag moving through her rooms—a short, heavy woman with white hair—seeking her reflection in the many small mirrors that covered her walls, mirrors in golden frames, none of them large enough to embrace all of her at once.

  Oma
    A fter my Oma’s right leg was amputated, she was fitted with a wooden leg which she wore when she left the building; inside her apartment she got around by resting her knee stump on a chair and sliding the chair across the floor. She was my father’s mother and had grown up in a family where good manners and proper clothes were esteemed above everything else. Early on she had rejected those values when she decided to study music and philosophy, wearing out-of-date clothing so she could afford books. She had more books than anyone I knew—leather-bound collections of poetry, thick volumes of philosophy, large books with prints of famous paintings, stacks of yellowed journals from her years of teaching philosophy at the university. Her hair, which had been red like my father’s when she was younger, had turned white and she wore it in a braid around her head.
    One evening, while my father watched her make her awkward way from her kitchen to the living room, it came to him how much easier it would be for her if the chair were closer to the ground. He sawed two centimeters off the chair’s legs, wrapped the ends in layers of green felt,and fastened the material with electrical tape. It not only made it easier for Oma to slide the chair across the floor, it also eliminated the familiar scratching of wood against linoleum. She’d appear almost soundlessly, startling us who had grown accustomed to hearing the chair legs announce her arrival.
    Though my parents had urged her several times to move in with us, she insisted on living alone in her Düsseldorf apartment. Many Saturday afternoons I visited her, and we’d listen to music that swelled through the rooms and roused feelings within me so powerful I couldn’t name them; yet, the best of our moments together were tinged with my sadness that, soon, I’d have to leave her again.
    Two years after the amputation Oma felt a tingling in her good leg below the knee, a sensation that grew into a burning pain and woke her from nights of troubled sleep. The pain spread into her toes. Sores and blisters bred on her foot. And when the pain subsided, a numbness set in that made her leg turn cold and white. With her right leg my Oma had welcomed that numbness until it was too late to save it; but