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 Page A

the sturdier trees, swung themselves over the water, and dropped with shrieks.
    Luminous bubbles form around my arms, my legs, and when we reach a place too deep for us to stand, my mother teaches me how to dance. She twirls around, and I try to imitate her movements
.
    At first I’m clumsy, slow, but soon I find that I, too, can dance in the storm, alone, without holding onto her. When we leave the quarry hole, the brilliant lights have stopped flashing across the sky, and the only sound is that of our sandals slapping against the sidewalk. Though we don’t talk about this, neither of us will mention our swim to my father
.
    One fall the pastor’s sister, Hannelore Beier, came to visit my mother and asked if she could look at her paintings. Her crippled, birdlike hands flew toward each canvas in admiration and then they’d halt as if she had to catch them before they could take off on their own. I liked watching those hands which had a peculiar grace of their own. She was our Sunday school teacher, a slight woman who seemed colorless and tired until she read poems to us; then her voice would swell and her hands would draw us into words that were filled with magic and passion, words that held radiance the way my mother’s paintings could.
    The pastor’s sister convinced my mother to exhibit her work at the church fair, and helped her stack the paintings in back of our car. They made eight trips and hung her pictures in the church hall, a dim room in the basement of St. Martin’s where Sunday school was usually held and where the bright reds and yellows of my mother’s paintings looked even brighter. Though the pastor’s sister set up extra lights, they only emphasized the shadows in the corners.
    The day of the fair the pastor’s sister carried in a soft chair from the rectory; my mother sat at one end of the hall, her blond hair brushed back from her forehead, wearing her purple dress. Neighbors who’d wondered for years what my mother was painting came and stared at the pictures. “But the colors aren’t right,” they whispered to each other and the pastor’s sister raised her hands as if to quiet them. I wanted to kick their shins, trip them on their wayto the stairs, but my mother smiled as if this was just what she had hoped to achieve in her work.
    I’m five when my mother teaches me to swim. She ties my red ball into her shopping net; the sisal feels rough against my fingers when it is dry, but once we take the ball into the quarry hole, the fibers become wet, sleek. Big boys dive from the rocks at the other end of the quarry. Their shouts echo, and when their bodies hit the surface, columns of silver splash across the sky. I hold on to the net. One of my mother’s hands supports my belly
.
    Sometimes my mother was far away from me though she was in the same room, as if she were still painting inside her mind, guiding her brush across an imaginary canvas. Although I knew that, soon, I’d have her with me again in those intermittent flashes of intensity which she directed toward me, it wasn’t enough.
    One day, when she seemed to have forgotten that I sat waiting for her in the corner of her studio, I imagined myself lighting a match and raising it to the painting she was working on. I could see the flames race across the canvas, spread to the pictures stacked against the wall, curl their edges, black—I hid my face in my hands. What was wrong with me? I loved my mother’s paintings, loved most of them better than the actual places. Yet, I would have set fire to her studio if it had meant she would belong to me from then on. What kept me from destroying her work, I believe, was the certainty that it would crush an integral part of her, a part that could not be healed.
    As an adult I would return to Burgdorf and find a stack of my mother’s pictures which my father stored in the attic after her death. Two of her paintings I took back with me to hang inside my house. One is of the Rhein