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 Page A

this time she knew it could mean the loss of her left leg and asked my parents to take her to St. Lukas Hospital.
    Her doctor prescribed antibiotics and confined Oma to a narrow white room on the second floor with a view of the
Hofgarten
. But she was too ill to look out the window and watch the swans and ducks in the pond or the children who rode their bicycles along the tree lined paths of the park. Some mornings, when my mother visited her, Oma lay covered with five blankets; yet, her body shivered. My father arrived in the late afternoons after treating his last dental patient and sat on the edge of her bed.
    One rainy October day, when he closed his practice early to be with his mother, he laid one hand against herpale face. Her white hair had thinned so much that her scalp was beginning to show. Her fingers trembled on the layers of blankets. All his life he’d seen her strong, taking care of him and his two sisters after his father had died young from a burst appendix. Eyes burning, he bent to kiss her dry cheek. She looked away from him as if ashamed of her weakness.
    Outside the window, trees stood gray and stark against the sky as they had that Thursday in 1941, nearly seventeen years before, when one of Oma’s students had called my father to tell him she’d been arrested during her philosophy class. She’d been warned twice but had refused to adapt her lectures to Third Reich views. Four months later, when she returned from the prison camp where she was held with other German intellectuals whose ideas were considered treacherous, she was forced to resign from the university.
    When my father left Oma’s room, her doctor walked toward him in the corridor. The skin around his eyes was unlined, but where his face thickened around the jaw, it had settled into deep creases. “She’s putting up a good fight, your mother.”
    “Do you see any improvement?”
    “Some.” The doctor’s eyes were gray. Watery. “Still—we need to think about last rites.”
    “No,” my father said. “No.
    “She’s ill. Very ill.”
    “It would frighten her.”
    The doctor shook his head. “Even if we decide to amputate—I doubt she’ll leave here alive.”
    My father turned from him and walked back into his mother’s room. Swiftly he gathered the blankets around her and lifted her from the bed.
    “What are you doing?” The doctor tried to block his way.
    “She is leaving here alive.”
    “You can’t—”
    “If she has to die, it will happen at home.” Through the layers of blankets my father felt his mother’s fever. Her flushed face sank against his shoulder as he carried her past the doctor.
    In the week after my father brought Oma to our apartment, she grew stronger with each day as the fever released her body. While my mother painted upstairs in her studio, Oma and I looked through the books she’d asked my father to get from the shelves in her living room, books with magnificent photos of old paintings, and she’d tell me stories about the women and men who’d painted them.
    My grandmother must have first noticed the smell in the healer’s apartment—a blend of camomile tea and worn socks that she’d describe to me later, a smell that threaded itself through the hallway and into the living room where the old man had taken her and my parents. The skin on his bald head looked as if it had been made for the skull of someone larger, heavier; yet, his eyes were brown and clear—the eyes of a much younger man. While he led my father into the kitchen for a cup of tea, my mother undressed Oma in the living room.
    She took off the silk dress and slip.
    She unhooked the salmon-colored corset with the stays.
    She unlaced my Oma’s left shoe, then exposed her right leg where the shiny layer of skin at the end of the knee stump was drawn together in one puckered knot like an inside-out stocking pulled over a darning egg.
    Despite the doubts that had almost kept her from coming to the healer’s apartment, Oma let