The Vision of Emma Blau

Linton Weeks The Washington Post Book World Rife with life and death and magic realism in the tradition of Gabriel García Márquez.

Auteur

Ursula Hegi is the author of The Worst Thing I've Done, Sacred Time, Hotel of the Saints, The Vision of Emma Blau, Tearing the Silence, Salt Dancers, Stones from the River, Floating in My Mother's Palm, Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories, Intrusions, and Trudi & Pia. She teaches writing at Stonybrook's Southhampton Campus and she is the recipient of more than thirty grants and awards.

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Now in paperback comes the bestselling companion novel to "Stones from the River". Hegi creates a fascinating picture of immigrants in America: their dreams and disappointments, the challenges of assimilation, the love that bonds generations, and the cultural wedges that drive them apart.

Résumé
The Vision of Emma Blau is the luminous epic of a bicultural family filled with passion and aspirations, tragedy and redemption. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Stefan Blau, whom readers will remember from Stones from the River, flees Burgdorf, a small town in Germany, and comes to America in search of the vision he has dreamed of every night. The novel closes nearly a century later with Stefan's granddaughter, Emma, and the legacy of his dream: the Wasserburg, a once-grand apartment house filled with the hidden truths of its inhabitants both past and present. Ursula Hegi creates a fascinating picture of immigrants in America: their dreams and disappointments, the challenges of assimilation, the frailty of language and its transcendence, the love that bonds generations and the cultural wedges that drive them apart.

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Chapter One: 1894-1909

It didn't look like the kind of house that would carry a curse. Built by a German immigrant of brick and dark timber, the Wasserburg was six stories tall with six apartments on each floor. In the small New Hampshire town that carried the name of the lake it bordered, the U-shaped building took up an entire block and stood high above the clapboard houses and the shoreline. It was the kind of structure you might expect to see in New York -- with marble bathrooms and stained-glass inserts in the tall windows -- and it was too flamboyant, the townspeople said, too conspicuous for this part of New England where dusk set early upon the vast lake that was flecked with hundreds of islands and that the Indians had named Winnipesaukee -- Smile of the Great Spirit.

When Emma Blau was a child, her grandfather's Wasserburg -- water fortress -- was still splendid with carpet runners in the hallways, the design and colors of peacock feathers. Often Emma would pretend she walked on the tail feathers of an immense peacock who sweeps himself with her into the air. She soars above the sand-colored trim at the roofline and the glazed blue tiles set into the facade; above the courtyard with its brick walks and the birdbath fountain; above the elevated garden with its swing set and flower beds where her German grandmother Helene is planting snapdragons and geraniums and camomile and pansies -- Stiefmütterchen -- an affectionate term for little stepmother, a role Helene had taken on for the children of her husband's dead wives.

Ever since Emma's grandfather had brought her to the secret place where the house breathed, Emma had returned there alone, though it was a forbidden place where children might fall and get mangled by the green machines and wires that spun dust motes in the half-light. She'd steal the key to the roof door from behind the pewter cups in her grandparents' china cabinet, ride the elevator to the top floor, and slip into the brick structure that sat like an immense smokestack on the flat roof. As she'd climb the wooden ladder to the platform above the elevator, the breath of the house would raise the fine hairs on her arms with a whoosh, and she'd laugh with delight. Steady puffs of warm breath emanated from a wheel that turned to the left. Wound around this wheel was a chain -- similar to the one on Emma's bicycle -- that ran up to an oval loop and connected to moving rods that clicked and hummed in an always changing song. Whenever the elevator stopped, she'd feel a shudder rise from the shaft as if the building were stirring itself awake.

Emma knew the house from within and from above: she had crawled into its guts, played behind the boiler in the vaulted furnace room, climbed out of the second-floor window onto the curved balcony above the entrance, and balanced on the edge of the roof far above the town. Sometimes she felt she was the center of the house, breathing its breath-song, while other times the house was at the center of her like a pulse that warmed her as she held it safe within her body.

Her grandfather, Stefan Blau, was only thirteen when he ran away from his hometown in Germany one rainy November night in 1894. Convinced he lived in the most fascinating time possible -- an age of transformation and discovery -- he'd felt restless in Burgdorf. Too many traditions. Too many restrictions. America, he believed, was the country where people brought about changes instead of resisting them. But his parents didn't want to listen when he read to them about immigrants earning fortunes, about inventions, about gold in the hills; they didn't know that America had grafted itself to his mind so tenaciously that he had dreams of it every single night, dreams of an odd and magnificent landscape that fused what he had culled from various books, a landscape inhabited by buffaloes and by buildings so tall they pierced the clouds.

When Stefan bought an English dictionary and memorized forty new words each day, his parents shook their heads and told him they were not about to leave Germany, and when he suggested he'd make the passage alone and send for them and his sister once he'd made his fortune, they smiled. "What a child he still is," they said to each other.

They were asleep when he left.

Although short for his age, he was sturdy and talked his way into work on a coal barge that floated north on the Rhein past Oberhausen and Xanten into Holland, where the river split into two tributaries that swirled into the North Sea. The language of the Dutch -- even more guttural than his native German -- sounded harsh to Stefan. When he reached Rotterdam and was unable to trade labor for passage to America, he started toward Amsterdam and walked through cold nights and days, resting in barns or churches only when he was too chilled and exhausted to keep moving. But he never lost his enthusiasm because with each step -- so he reminded himself -- he was getting closer to America. Besides, people helped him along the way as if to make certain that he'd really get there: a bald priest gave him woolen earmuffs that some other boy had forgotten in the confessional, and a farm woman fed him Schwarzbrot with Blutwurst -- black bread with blood sausage -- and packed him enough for a second meal to take along in his wooden toolbox that already contained his clothes and books.

It was sleeting the afternoon he got to Amsterdam, but he felt lucky because before nightfall he was hired as a kitchen hand on a passenger ship bound for New York. So what if he wasn't sixteen as he had claimed to be? What if he hadn't worked on river barges for two years? Things only became a lie if you couldn't follow them through. Someday he would be sixteen, and as long as he could do the work he was hired to do -- and do it well -- it was his to decide what he told others about himself. Besides, he could pass for sixteen. He had more hair on his body than most sixteen year olds. Especially on his back. Black and soft and curly like the hair on his father's back. Though not as thick. Not yet. "You can recognize a Blau by his back," his father liked …