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 B

my mother help her climb on the padded table and cover her with a frayed, clean sheet. When my mother called for the old man, he sent her to wait with my father in the kitchen.
    Raised on her elbows, my grandmother watched the healer. From a bottle he shook a few drops of oil into his hands. It smelled of almonds. Inside the bottle floated the pit of a peach or something that looked very much like it. He rubbed the oil into his palms, and when he began massaging my Oma’s foot, his hands felt warm against her skin as if the oil had been heated. His fingers were blunt, his nails cut short.
    He closed his eyes as he laid both hands on my Oma’s left knee. “Oh yes,” he said. “I thought so… There’s a lot here, a lot of things you’ve carried with you, that you’re holding on to. Your body—you’ve been pushing too hard, wanting to do it all alone.” His hand cupping her heel, he tried to push her toes back with his other hand. “So stiff,” he murmured. “So stiff. Not yielding like the foot of a woman.”
    At first my Oma must have been embarrassed to have this stranger touch her foot, which has hardened with age. But his hands were soothing, and she sank deeper into the padded table. He asked her to lie on her stomach and gave her a folded towel to rest her head upon. One cheek against the mended terry cloth, she lay on the table, oddly at ease as the healer shook warm drops of oil on her back and kneaded them gently into her skin. Since my grandfather’s death, no man had seen my Oma undressed. Pleasure from touch had only come from her own hands, but now she felt herself stretching, widening under the hands of the healer, hands that rose from her back like the pearl gray wings of a dove, then lowered themselves like feathers brushing her skin.
    Suddenly one of his fingers grazed her spine between her shoulders, and it felt as if a knife were pressing into her. She roared up.
    “That’s part of it,” he whispered. “A lot of things have become part of your body, things we need to dissolve.”
    She made herself sink back down, her face on the towel. His finger traced the outline of her spine like a white-hot blade—light, piercing.
    “Are you using something? It feels like—”
    “Only my hands,” he said, moving them in front of her where she could see them, the nails so short that the fleshy tip of each finger protruded. “Do you want me to go on?”
    Though she remembered the pain, she could not recall its intensity as she looked at his broad hands. She closed her eyes, nodded, and willed herself to absorb the healing, to believe in it, to dissolve whatever stood in its way. When she had first heard about the healer from one of her old students, she couldn’t imagine anything beyond a laying on of hands the way Jesus did with the lepers, but this felt as if he were slicing through layers of muscles, shifting things dormant inside her.
    I’m healing
, she promised herself, trying not to flinch from him. That evening, when she returned to our apartment where she would stay with us through the rest of October and most of November, she undressed and checked her body for marks in front of the closet mirror, expecting to find red scratches, if not gashes, covering her back. Yet her skin would be unscathed, certain proof of his powers. Something within her already knew this, though she would have to test it later. And so she lay silent, my grandmother, face pressed into the towel to muffle involuntary screams, fingers gripping the edges of the padded table on either side of her head.
    Each time the healer lifted his hands from her, she felt no pain at all. Her skin didn’t even tingle. It was hot in the room, hot and still. When the healer asked her to turn around, she followed his voice, somehow not minding that all she wore were white cotton underpants—not that new—and that her pale breasts flattened themselves against her ribs.
    The healer rubbed almond-smelling oil on her belly; hisright