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 by Ursula Hegi

seemed to heat up around her, mysterious bubbles like quicksilver stirred by the movement of her long arms and legs.
    At home Frau Brocker would hide a sharp knife under the tablecloth to cut the lightning before it could strike the quarry or our house. While thunder cracked across the sky, she’d sit with her hands folded, whispering prayers of fear to the Virgin Mary.
    She carried so many fears that my mother didn’t have: fear of the dark, of moths, storms, and deep water, fears I too felt immune to, fears that led Frau Brocker into superstitious rituals which my mother asked me to respect.
    “It’s her way,” she said. “She needs to do those things.”
    My mother swims in churning water, her face damp from cool drops that descend upon her as if magnetized by the quarry hole. Wet now, her long blond hair looks dark. Her legs kick the water into frothing swirls which she leaves behind. She dives—a long smooth shape—arching her back underwater before her head and shoulders emerge above the surface like a reed springing back into place
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    My mother was taller than most of the other women in Burgdorf, and she wore her blond hair loose across her shoulders instead of taming it into a permanent or bun. She walked the way she swam—with long, easy movements.
    I grew up watching her paint. Her easel used to stand in our living room, and I played around her feet while she worked. But when I was five, she hired Frau Brocker to take care of me and our apartment, while she claimed a cluster of rooms on the third floor and hired Siegfried Tegern to design a studio for her. He brought two carpenters who tore down the walls and replaced most of the facade with a sheet of glass.
    For weeks after they were finished, a fine plaster dust continued to drift through the staircase, settling in my throat until I felt as if I were swallowing through a layer of cotton. I wasn’t even allowed inside my mother’s studio unless I knocked at the door. Hands behind my back, I’d stalk around, looking at the canvases stacked against the walls, breathing in the familiar, lost scent of oil paint.
    At first people stopped on the sidewalk, staring up; they hadn’t seen a window that size, except in department stores. Perhaps they believed that, by secluding herself in a place above them, my mother considered herself better than they. Or maybe their uneasiness came from the fear that my mother would expose too much of them. The window was up so high that none of them could look throughit. Even from the upper floors of the houses across the street, it was impossible to see my mother inside her studio.
    Here, surrounded by light, she painted the town which fascinated and confined her, always more brilliant in color than in reality, as if she wanted to force it into the shape of the vision she carried within.
    Lightning divides the sky like a new scar, and my mother raises her face toward the cool drops that fall faster now, harder. She can dance in the water without her feet touching the ground. She does this by twirling her arms in such a way that her body propels itself around. One early summer evening, when I’m nine, she shows me how. My father is at a dentists’ convention in Bremen, and Frau Brocker has left for the day. My mother and I walk to the quarry hole, shed the dresses we wear above our bathing suits, and run into the water as raindrops strike our bare shoulders. The water is warmer than the air, and I feel giddy and daring as I race my mother toward the middle
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    When my mother was a girl, trucks would come to the quarry empty and leave filled with gravel which huge cranes dredged from the hole that grew wider and deeper with each month. But one day water bubbled up from the bottom, and gradually the hole filled with water as if trying to replenish itself with the core it had been robbed of. It didn’t take long for the children in Burgdorf to discover the quarry as a swimming hole. They leapt off the edges; some tied ropes to