Ashes (9 page)

 

 

We had no guests for dinner that night, so I brought two books to the table. We were having the grubbies I had caught and cleaned. These were always cooked whole, and then it was up to each person to fillet his or her own fish by removing the bones from the split body.

“Your fish is getting cold,” Hertha said. “Here, I'll fillet it for you while you read.” She whisked my plate away. I looked up from my book.

“Oh, thanks, Hertha,” I replied. My eyes followed her. She was standing at the sideboard, deboning my fish. She had earlier thanked me for cleaning the fish. I hadn't told her why I had stayed outside and done it; that I couldn't enter the kitchen as she calmly rolled out the pie crust and listened to the news. Maybe she hadn't been that calm. Maybe I would have appeared calm to someone watching me gut the fish. But the question I had asked Hessie was still scraping at the back of my mind. How many Herthas? It seemed somehow an unfair question, I told myself. She was just Hertha—sweet, kind, always ready to help.

 

 

“What are you reading, little mouse, two books?” Papa asked.

“Yes,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and this book of Heinrich Heine's poetry.”

“How can you keep them straight?” Mama asked.

“Well, that's sort of the point,” I replied.

Mama blinked. “I don't understand. You want to be confused?”

“Not confused, really. You see, I have a theory about reading.”

“Yes?” Papa said leaning toward me. Now he was interested. He loved theories.

I took a bite of the fish, chewed, and arranged my face into a thoughtful countenance. I really was thinking. I had already worked out the theory but I was not quite sure how to explain it.

“You see, I think it is good to read two books at almost the same time. One funny and maybe a bit raucous.” I tapped on the cover of the Huckleberry Finn book. “And one romantic.” I tapped on the poetry book.

“
Zucker und Gewürze
, sugar and spice,
rauh und glatt
, rough and smooth,” Papa said.

“Yes, exactly.” I nodded. “And in August when Rosa and I go back to the gymnasium, we will spend a lot of time first term on Heine's poetry. So we are both reading to get ahead this summer.”

Mama now nodded approvingly. “Oh yes, I remember Ulla reading all that when she had Fräulein Hofstadt for literature. I guess you will have her, too.” A worry shadowed Mama's eyes. I knew she was thinking now of Ulla and hoping she would pass the exam she had failed. But no one said anything. Ulla had been a top student at the Kaiser Wilhelm School.

“Oh yes!” I couldn't wait to enter what I thought of as the upper realm of the gymnasium in the new building. Although it was all part of the same school, the move seemed to signify so much. The Kaiser Wilhelm School had introduced some new educational theories, and it was in the upper levels where the classes started to feel different.

Fräulein Hofstadt was said to be the best literature teacher in the entire school. She was so beautiful, and I had heard that she often gave little parties in her classroom. Heinrich Heine was one of her favorite poets, and Ulla said that she gave a party on his birthday. But most exciting was that Fräulein Hofstadt's class always put on a play under her direction. When Ulla was in her class they did a play by Friedrich Schiller,
The Maid of Orleans
, about Joan of Arc. Ulla's friend Marta played Saint Joan. So Fräulein Hofstadt loved Heine and Goethe and Schiller—all the great German writers.

“But how do you think Fräulein Hofstadt will take to Mark Twain?” Papa asked.

“Oh, we won't read him in class,” I replied. “I'm not sure how she'd like him.”

“A bit rough for her, maybe?” Papa asked.

“Maybe, but he is so funny!”

“And more complicated than one might think, if I recall,” Mama offered. “He can surprise you.”

“Heine never really surprises me,” I said

“Surprises can be good,” Papa said.

And bad!
I suddenly thought as Hertha came in with a bowl of applesauce, still thinking of how calm she seemed as she listened to that horrible news on the radio. Was it possible that she had looked upset and I just hadn't noticed?
She's just Hertha,
I kept telling myself. It was quickly becoming an annoying refrain in my head.

At least an hour or more after dinner that evening I came out and lay in the grass, looking up at the Milky Way that stretched like a cobweb across the sky. Papa was out there with his big telescope. I brought a pair of binoculars but preferred to view the stars with my naked eyes. Professor Einstein nearly stepped on me as he walked over from his house.

“Put it out, Albert,” I heard Papa say, referring to Einstein's cigar. Its glowing tip polluted the blackness, and this was a precious nearly moonless night. Only a scrap of moon floated like a sliver of a fingernail above. Our house was darkened, all the lights having been extinguished except for a very small one for Mama's piano that shone only enough to illuminate her music. She was playing now. The notes spilled out of the window and, weaving through the air, found a new harmony with the light breeze off the lake.

Despite Einstein nearly stepping on me, I soon realized that these two men with their heads in the exosphere had not noticed me, or perhaps Papa had simply forgotten I was there. Now Papa was adjusting the scope for Einstein and saying something about how with the powerful telescope at the observatory one could easily see the blue tinge of Rigel in Orion's belt.

“Can't you see it?” Papa asked.

“Not really, Otto.”

“I know it's not easy. Close your eyes. Look away from it . . . now come back,” Papa instructed. Papa was right—it wasn't easy to see the stars' color. But it was not impossible. At first all stars look alike—little points of white. But if one learns to be a very careful observer it is possible to distinguish some of the colors of the brighter stars. Papa was an expert at this.

“Aah, yes . . . and so you think that with the right kind of cameras . . .” Einstein asked.

“And film,” Papa said.

“Yes, and so you could refine the data on the absorption lines?” Einstein's voice brimmed with excitement. I had no idea by this point what they were talking about. Something to do with the spectral class of stars, which was a way of sorting stars based on their temperatures and had some relation to color. But as for absorption lines, I was clueless.

“Yes, yes. But you know with the way things are going.” Papa sighed

“Oh, God . . . that fool Lenard again! I heard. Though I try not to hear.”

“Oh, it's not just Lenard. A lot of
völkisch
talk. People in the department are getting very, you know,
völkisch
.”

I pricked up my ears. What had once been a perfectly nice, reasonable word had become tainted. It was almost as if a bad smell clung to it. The word
Volk
meant simply “folk.” And
volkstümlich
meant something rather like “folksy.” The word conjured up images of cuckoo clocks, boys in lederhosen, and pretty girls with braids wearing dirndls. But suddenly it seemed as if the word had been corrupted. When it was seized upon by the Nazis, it became equated with all that was pure German and pure Aryan.

Papa had explained to me that actually “Aryan” was another word that had been corrupted by the Nazis. Originally it had referred to people who spoke a language from Northern India, but the Nazis gave it a new definition—of pure northern European, not Jewish, descent. Quickly the broken cross, or swastika, an ancient Indian symbol, became a symbol of this purity. I never realized how powerful a graphic arrangement of lines could be. It was strangely hypnotic.

These days the words
Volk
or Aryan almost automatically conjured up the image of the swastika. Two perfectly decent words were ruined.

So when Papa said people in the department were getting
völkisch
, I became very interested. I prayed I could continue to listen and they would not realize that I was a scant few feet from them in the grass. I suddenly was beset with itches and imaginary ants crawling up my legs, but I didn't move a muscle. They had lowered their voices. I had to strain to make out the words.

“CalTech . . . next March?” It was Papa's voice.

“God willing . . . but this fellow Abraham Flexner from Princeton . . .” Einstein replied.

Wisps of conversations floated over me.

“No . . . I'm considering giving it up . . . but I still have Swiss citizenship.”

Had Einstein given up his citizenship? He was no longer German? I tried to listen harder. My ears almost hurt.

“But, Otto, did that SA fellow who came to your office really demand that your secretary turn over the notes from the London conference?”

“Yes, that was the one that Goldman and Eddington . . .”

“And then they broke up the lecture?” Einstein sighed deeply. “It's going to be a military dictatorship. . . . I am starting to think that it is inevitable. That it's not a question of if but when. . . .”

Their words wound into the night, mingling with the ancient light of the stars. Einstein nearly stepped on me a second time when he left. Papa was peering through his telescope again and did not hear him. Soon Papa left as well. If he had known I was there, he had forgotten completely.

How much simpler the rest of the universe felt compared to this small part here on Earth. I picked up my binoculars and turned them toward the night sky that was puddled with light, adrift with shoals of stars. What were we, I thought, but a speck in an insignificant galaxy, among countless galaxies with millions perhaps billions of stars.

Once when I was very young Papa accidentally dropped a half kilo bag of sugar on the floor, and it split open. Before he fetched the broom to clean it up, he got down on his knees and swept the sugar into a pinwheel pattern. He called me over to kneel beside him.

“Imagine, Gaby, that this whole mess”—he gestured toward the sugar that was all over the floor—“is the Milky Way, our galaxy. Now this part here”—he drew with his fingertip a very small circle around some of the granules—“this lot is our solar system, and . . .” He took his Swiss Army knife from his pocket and pulled out the tiny tweezers. He tried to pick up one little granule of sugar. It was impossible, of course, because the points of the tweezers weren't fine enough. “Well,” he said with a sigh, “you get the idea. Our Earth is just a little speck of sugar riding this sugar swirl that is part of an immense sugar sea. And actually,” he added, “to be really accurate, numerically accurate, I would need maybe an additional five thousand half-kilo bags of sugar to give you a more precise model of our galaxy.”

I thought of that swirl of sugar on the kitchen floor from years before. How could Hitler cause so many problems? I put down the binoculars. The scrap of moon had slipped away, making the dark even darker and the stars even brighter. They scorched the blackness with their fire. Ninety-two elements to bake a universe and one madman to blow it up?

All of a sudden, bang! bang! bang! goes three or four guns- the men had slipped around through the woods and come in from behind without their horses! The boys jumped for the river-both of them hurt- and as they swum down the current the men run along the bank shooting at them and singing out, “Kill them, kill them!” It made me so sick I most fell out of the tree. I ain't a-going to tell ALL that happened- it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn't ever come ashore that night, to see such things.

-Mark Twain,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

 

 

 

 

“Y
es, yes, Frau Blick, I've got your order right here.” The scent of cinnamon swirled through “the air. I was in line at Steinhoff's Bakery in Caputh. The baker was known for his cinnamon strudel. Mama had sent me to get a half dozen strudel plus a ring cake called a
Gugelhupf
. There were three people ahead of me in line.

“Frau Blick, you want some fresh
Mutti Brötchen
?”
Mutti Brötchen
, or Mama's bread, were the white rolls that the bakery was famous for. They were named after Herr Steinhoff's wife, whom all referred to as
Mutti
.

“These are the last of the fresh batch.” He nodded at the bin for day-old bread. “I'm sending yesterday's up to the Jew house on the lake. She don't know no difference.”

I froze. There was only one Jewish house on the lake. It was Einstein's. I wanted to say, “She does know the difference.” Elsa Einstein came from a very old and refined family and, as Mama always said, she knew how to set a table, which meant she entertained beautifully.