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 B

at
Hochwasser
, high water: floods swirl across the meadow between theriver’s bed and the dike, uprooting unsteady trees and cleansing the winter’s debris from the meadows and clumps of trees. The other painting shows the quarry hole during a storm, the somber sky highlighted by streaks of silver that make the water look as if it were bubbling. If I look closely, I can almost see myself floating in my mother’s palm. Yet, when I shut my eyes, I find a different image of my mother releasing me as we dance in the storm and twirl in separate circles that cause the water to ripple from us in widening rings which merge in one ebbing bracelet of waves where the borders of the quarry meet the water, far from the center where my mother and I continue to spin our bodies in the radiant sheen of lightning.

  Dogs of Fear
    S iegfried Tegern’s seven dogs tore him apart one sweltering summer evening in a meadow between the Rhein and the dike. We’d become accustomed to seeing him walk through Burgdorf, gripping a leash that fanned into seven strands like a whip with so many tails; they coiled themselves into the collars of his dogs as they pulled ahead of him, controlled by his commands. He was an architect, a tall man with gray hair and smooth skin, who wore a suit even when he trained his dogs. He and his wife, Angelika, kept themselves separate from the people in Burgdorf. Newcomers to the town nine years before, they’d built a stucco house with a solarium near the Rhein.
    “It was his dream that started it,” Angelika Tegern told Herr Pastor Beier after the police had shot her husband’s seven dogs. The pastor’s sister—since it was not told in the confessional but in the pastor’s living room—repeated the story to Frau Brocker, who rushed to the pay-library to be the first to bestow the news upon Trudi Montag. From then on it became knowledge we all shared, knowledge that made us bolt up in our beds late at night and grasp thesheets against our shoulders when, from a distance, the howling of a dog drifted through our open windows.
    Sometimes we saw Angelika Tegern walk along the top of the dike as if retracing the steps her husband had taken, and when she came to that meadow she’d stop, standing motionless, her chin raised toward the gray shifting bands of waves as though, in the stretch of high grass between the dike and the river, she saw the seven dogs gathering around her husband in one last ritual dance.
    “It was his dream,” Angelika Tegern told the pastor. “Not just one dream—they came rather frequently, all of them alike. In the dream Siegfried died. He could feel it each time, not the pain, but the sense of powerlessness. He’d wake, screaming, his hands flying to his face, his chest, as he wiped away the blood he believed he was covered with.”
    Siegfried didn’t know why. Didn’t know how. Except that his death would be violent, and that he was unable to avert it. In the dream he stood in a meadow between the dike and the river. Not the meadow he saw when he climbed the dike near his house, but the meadow he’d never been to. The path, which ran from the dike to the river, was unfamiliar to him; yet, he could describe it in detail to his wife when he woke up shaking with the certainty of his death. The path angled to the left where four poplars leaned into each other although no other trees grew close to them; a flat rock lay embedded in the grass just before the path branched into the trail that ran parallel to the Rhein.
    To protect himself, Siegfried Tegern bought a guard dog, a German shepherd that he walked every evening, staying away from the Rhein, though he and Angelika had chosen the land for their house because it was close to the river. When the dreams wouldn’t cease, he bought six more German shepherds within the next few months. Still, he’dwake up during the night, his body sweating with fear, and find his wife’s arms around him as she held him in his trembling until