Girl Gains Vision With A Little Help From Her Friends

Hanna Malter's story begins with the image of her pregnant mother's hands moving across her swollen abdomen, searching for signs of life in her unborn daughter. The nuns in the clinic think the fetus has died; the mother rejects that view - and forevermore the nuns - and seems to will Hanna into life.

The story concludes 14 years later, after Hanna's mother has died, as the girl swims out into the Rhine and attempts to hitch a ride upstream on the steel cable between two barges. The cable cuts through the water with surprising force, dragging Hanna beneath the surface and shredding her palms before she is able to kick free and swim ashore.

She saves her own life, in a sense repeating her mother's act of determination of years earlier. And in doing so, Hanna releases herself into an independence beyond the social and emotional boundaries of the German village of Burgdorf: ``. . . I had saved a life,'' she recalls later, ``not the life of a stranger as I had imagined - but the life I had taken for granted and which, in the years to come, I would take for granted again.''

Ursula Hegi's beautiful new book, ``Floating in My Mother's Palm'' (Poseidon Press, $17.95), traces Hanna's evolving consciousness over two years in the late 1950s. A work of fiction that falls lightly between novel and short-story collection, it is a series of brief, closely observed portraits that together form a mosaic of a community and of a young person growing within it.

More than anything, it is a book about learning to see. Young Hanna's world is filtered first through the imaginations of Burgdorf's adults - Trudi Montag, the dwarf librarian and town gossip; Frau Brocker, her family's superstitious housekeeper - but gradually she develops trust in her own insight and instincts. The voice we hear in ``Floating in My Mother's Palm'' is that of the mature Hanna, looking back with a mix of love, understanding and forgiveness.

Fictional Burgdorf is similar to the town near Dusseldorf where Hegi herself grew up in the 1950s. Hegi, who now teaches in the graduate writing program at Eastern Washington University, has created a community in which the recent past is never acknowledged.

Burgdorf, Hanna says, ``was a town of pretend where many adults, after tremendous failings, would fabricate proper lives, and the town would pretend along with them, protecting that shallow veneer of respectability.'' Part of that social and historical denial extended even to the names of children - such as, Adi, the brother of Renate, Hanna's best friend.

``His full name was Adolf, but no one called him that,'' says Hanna. ``Quite a few boys in the grades above us were called Adolf - a name that had been popular for babies born in the early war years - but we had no Adolfs in our class or in the younger grades. The name Adolf Hitler was never mentioned in our history classes.''

The name Adolf may be avoided, and World War II and the Holocaust never addressed, but by their very absence, those facts form the emotional backdrop of Hanna's small world.

``For kids of my generation growing up in Germany, it was as forbidden to ask about the war as it was to ask about sex,'' explained Hegi in a recent conversation before giving a reading in Seattle. ``We all grew up with that silence.''

Hegi develops some memorable characters living within that silence. Young Hanna puzzles over the kind but mysterious Matthias Berger, a former seminarian (``It became apparent that I wasn't chosen''), who is her family's tenant. She senses Matthias is ``filled with a light he would only let very few people see,'' yet she doesn't possess the knowledge to decipher the dispiriting series of sadomasochistic relationships that form ``the order of punishment he had chosen for himself.''

More understandable is Hannelore Beier, who teaches Sunday school, rings the chapel bells and keeps house for her corpulent, self-centered older brother, the town's pastor. Hannelore's recitations of Rilke before her Sunday-school class only hint at the suppressed passion which finally finds physical expression with Lucien Cheronnet, a new teacher at the Catholic school.

Caught and disgraced, the couple departs - not at all unhappily, you feel - from the Dusseldorf train station and into the worshipful imaginations of Hanna and her classmates.

The fiber that holds this tapestry together is Hegi's tender portrait of Hanna's parents: her mother, an independent-minded artist who teaches her daughter to swim in the current of the Rhine, and her father, a gentle and sensitive dentist who had the good sense to commit the ``reckless act'' of marrying that much-younger woman.

Together they provide Hanna with the love and self-confidence that eventually allow her to float free, away from the small world that Ursula Hegi has painted so vividly and memorably.

Donn Fry's column appears Sunday on the Books page of The Times.