"As a child, Trudi Montag believed that everyone could read what went on inside everyone else's head. This was before she understood the power of being different. The agony of being different."
So begins Ursula Hegi's novel Stones in the River, where the life of a dwarf child named Trudi becomes woven into the history of Germany across those harrowing decades between the two world wars.
Trudi is born in Burgdorf, a small village on the Rhine's banks. She is the daughter of Leo, the town librarian, and the beautiful Gertrud, who will soon die in an asylum. The child is four years old. Her growing awareness that her mother will never return home becomes inseparable from her painful recognition of her own difference—Trudi's body will never grow.
This is a girl adored by her father, curious about the world, sociable and stubborn. First she is fiercely determined to do whatever it takes to grow tall. Later she insists on her right to love and be happy. Trudi's story intertwines with those of her neighbors, and all their stories must reckon with History itself and its laws—the hardships of the first war, the anguish of soldiers returning home and struggling to find their place, the catastrophe of Nazism and persecution, another war, the spread of a cruel and twisted ideology to which few have the courage to resist. Among these few are Trudi and her father Leo. They sense the danger before it becomes tragedy, and they prepare concrete ways to oppose the dictatorship. This allows Trudi to encounter countless figures, and not least herself. To feel different, mocked, ignored, or pitied is a difficult and often solitary path. Yet it leads to self-awareness—to seeing yourself, and therefore being seen, beyond your measurements.
Trudi is thirteen when she meets Pia, a dwarf like herself, a lion tamer in the circus that arrives in Burgdorf every July. "People laughed at the clowns and the monkeys, but they didn't laugh at the dwarf woman. They stood in awe of her skill and her courage, and when she put her head into the lion's jaws, an absolute silence fell over the tent. In the long moment that passed before she withdrew her head from that dangerous cave, the entire audience held a single breath. When Pia ran to the center of the ring, the crowd stood and applauded. Trudi knew they weren't applauding Pia because she was a dwarf, and she clapped until her hands hurt, wishing the people would notice her too for what she could do—add sums in her head and remember almost all the train schedules in Germany—and not because she was a dwarf."
It is a turning point for the girl. The townspeople see only Trudi's body and reject her for being different. Pia, by contrast, truly sees her. "Don't you ever want to look people straight in the face?" "Instead of always looking up at them and seeing their chins and their nose hairs?" "And their boogers," Trudi laughed. "And you don't look up." "But then I'll only see their bellies, their knees, their belts." "Their fat asses. My dear girl..." Pia laughed until tears came to her eyes. "But not for much longer. Tell me, what do you do if someone speaks to you very softly?" "I move closer." "Exactly." Trudi waited, but Pia just looked at her without saying another word, her expression amused. "You mean...?" "Try it." "They'll lean down to me?" "Not all of them. But many will. As long as you remember not to look up."
This is the turning point of the novel. After the circus leaves Burgdorf, Trudi begins to sew her own clothes, to find furniture proportioned to her size. Walking and moving, she begins to feel a little taller. Because each of us, in order to accept, understand, and cherish our own limits, needs not only ourselves. We need others.