Ashes

by Kathryn Lasky

  Nobody laughed for the rest of the evening. Indeed dinner was a wretched affair—not just because of the pork knuckles and potatoes, which was not my favorite dish, but no one seemed to notice that I hardly touched the food. The misery factor increased exponentially when Ulla, who had already aggravated Mama and Papa by arriving late for dinner, announced that once the university term was finished, she did not intend to go to Caputh, where we have our summer cottage. She planned to stay in Berlin. And the worst of all was that she simply announced this and did not ask permission.

  “To do what?” Mama barked. “Be with Karl?”

  “Well, I imagine I shall see him,” she said nonchalantly as she passed the butter to me. Baba and I exchanged glances. Ulla’s sauciness—no, her impertinence—was staggering. She was usually very respectful to Mama. “But I have a chance for a job.”

  “What?” Papa blurted.

  “A job.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Working at the Chameleon.”

  While all this was going on, our maid, Hertha, was slowly making her way around the table with a bowl of steamed potatoes. She was pretending none of this concerned her, but I could see she was listening and deliberately slowing her pace to get as much of the story as possible before going out of the dining room to the kitchen again.

  “The what?”

  “It’s a sort of café, like the Romanisches.” The Romanisches was a café thick with smoke and artists and writers arguing about politics and philosophy and everything under the sun—except it was always very dark in the Romanisches. No sunshine.

  “And what else is it sort of like?” Papa persisted, trying to affect a calm demeanor despite the tremor that made his fork quiver in his hand.

  “Well, it’s kind of like a cabaret.”

  Mama’s and Papa’s faces froze.

  “It’s not that kind. It’s not an erotic revue, no naked girls. It’s political humor,” Ulla said, examining her pork knuckle as if it were the most interesting thing in the world.

  “Better it be naked girls,” Papa thundered. “Political humor! What are they going to make of the Storm Sh—”

  Mama gave him a sharp look and with a quick jerk of her head nodded toward Hertha. Mama did not like us discussing politics in front of Hertha. I was not exactly sure why.

  Papa stopped himself before the word came out. Then, looking at Ulla with steady eyes that had turned ice blue, he said, “There is no such thing as political humor these days.” Mama gave him another fierce look and once again nodded toward Hertha’s back as she disappeared into the kitchen with the empty potato dish.

  “Well, say what you will!” Ulla sniffed. “But I’ll have you know that the conférencier happens to be Max Weltmann.”

  “What’s a conférencier?” I asked.

  Ulla gave me a withering look. “The emcee, the master of ceremonies. And Max Weltmann is known for his sharp political humor. Ask Baba—the Vossische Zeitung did an article on him.”

  Mama pulled herself up straighter. Her clear blue eyes drilled into Ulla. “Pray tell me, what exactly are you going to do at this place . . . this Reptilian.”

  “Chameleon,” Ulla corrected, but she appeared relieved by the question. “I’m the bookkeeper!”

  “Gut!”Papa slammed the table with his good hand. “Then you do not have to be there in the evenings. Books are kept during the day.”

  Ulla appeared occupied with poking at the potatoes on her plate. But I caught the look in her eye. I knew immediately that she did not plan to be at the Chameleon only during the day.

  “I shall talk to Hessie about this,” Papa muttered.

  Ulla looked up in alarm. “Why do we always have to talk to Uncle Hessie? Can’t we ever think for ourselves?” Uncle Hessie, or Count Erich von Hessler, was not our real uncle, but he was Papa’s best friend. Uncle Hessie was very handsome, very rich, a diplomat, an art connoisseur, and an unofficial member of our family. Papa had first met him many years ago through Baba, who knew everybody in society because of her job as a social columnist for the newspaper.

  “Ulla!” Mama scolded.

  Papa threw his napkin down, jumped up from the table, and headed for his study. “I have a lecture to prepare for tomorrow, since Herr Professor Goldman was told in no uncertain terms by the SA not to show up tomorrow or there would be violence.” Papa took a drink from his water glass. “And they call this a university!” His voice seethed. I sensed that now was not the time to say, “By the way, I met up with Professor Einstein and he mentioned that he was right about something he told you earlier. It seems that the universe really is expanding.”

  Hertha had waited discreetly in the pantry, not wanting to come in with the torte while we were in the heat of a family argument, I imagine, but within two minutes we had all scattered from the table. No one seemed in the mood for dessert. Baba left to catch a late party at the British embassy. Mama went to the music room to sort the pieces of sheet music she would need for the next day’s students. Ulla went to get her books and her coat. The books were a cover, I suspected. I seriously doubted she was going to study. You see, I saw her tuck into her book bag a little suede pouch that had a tiny brush, lipstick, and mascara in it. Most likely she was meeting Karl someplace.

  I did have to study. It was almost the last week of school, and final examinations began in two days. Latin was the first one. Fräulein Weigler had already told us that we would have to give commentary on the use of the predicate dative and the accusative in selected short passages. There would be five of these passages and we could choose three to translate from Latin into German, and then give commentary on them. There was sure to be one from Caesar’s history of the Gallic wars and one from Seneca. I hoped that there would be one from Pliny the Younger’s description of the eruption of Vesuvius.

  So I went to my room with the best of intentions. I would start with the most arduous passage for me, Caesar’s. I stared at it for half a minute trying to figure out this stupid accusative and dative stuff as I attempted to translate the Latin into German.

  When Caesar inquired of them what states were in arms, how powerful they were, and what they could do in war, he received the following information: that the greater part of the Belgae were sprung from the Germans, and that having crossed the Rhine at an early period, they had settled there, on account of the fertility of the country, and had driven out the Gauls who inhabited those regions . . .

  Oh God, I hated this. I was going to have to call Rosa. But then I remembered that Rosa was out with her mother and grandmother. My eyes wandered to the mirror over my bureau. I needed a little break. What happened to those nice phrases we had been required to translate in beginning Latin? “The maiden milked the cow by the well.” “The centurion stood by the gates.”

  I had stuck pictures, mostly cut from magazine pages, into the mirror frame, and under the glass top of bureau I had slid another dozen or so as well. Joan Crawford was there, of course. The largest picture was of Vicki Baum, my very favorite author. Vicki, like Mama and Baba, was from Vienna. Mama had not known her there, for Vicki was about ten years older than Mama. But Vicki was living in Berlin now, and Mama had met her through Baba. Mama said she was very beautiful. I had read almost all of her books. But People at a Hotel was my all-time favorite. It was through Baba that I got the information about the making of the movie and that Joan Crawford got the role of the secretary and Greta Garbo was cast as the ballerina. In Baba’s words, or rather Baba quoting Vicki, “This is the role that will make Joan Crawford!” She was already made, as far as Rosa and I were concerned.

  The picture of me with the lion cubs was next to Vicki’s. One of the cubs died in its first year. It was sad to think about this. I had already lived a decade plus three years longer. If the cub had lived, she might have had her own cubs by now. Funny to think about how the time scale is so different for animals. I would imagine that I had at least another ten years before reproducing! Then I wondered how long Caesar had
lived before he was murdered. I knew I should return to my studies. But I didn’t. My eyes lingered over the pictures, especially one of Papa when he was about ten or eleven, before his illness, playing his violin—or Papa B.I.P. That stood for Papa Before Infantile Paralysis. Before he had to give up the violin, before the stars, before all that. You see, my Papa has had two lives.

  Until Papa was fifteen, he studied violin at the Conservatory in Vienna. That was where he met Mama. She was studying the piano. In 1902, many people in Southern Austria were diagnosed with the disease known as infantile paralysis. Despite its name, infantile paralysis struck not only babies and children and teenagers, like my father, but grown-ups as well. My great-grandmother died of it. My mother’s cousin died of it. My papa did not die, but his life as a violinist was finished. Mama, too, contracted the illness, albeit very lightly. There was no damage to her muscles or nerves. But for Papa, it was terrible. He said it was as if his life had ended at fifteen. He fell into a deep depression. His parents sent him to a small sanitarium that was more of a guesthouse than a hospital, run by friends of theirs. It was in the mountains. He was supposed to be taking the baths, thermal baths that were part of the therapy for people whose muscles were weakened by the illness. But he began hiking. His right arm was paralyzed, but his left arm and his legs were fine. It was in the clear air of the Tyrol, in the west of Austria, where there were no city lights to bleach the night, that he discovered the stars. He loved to tell the story of his time in the mountains when he discovered what he called “the other universe,” the one made of stars and not music.

  I can remember exactly the first time he told me the story. We had all gone to the Tyrol for a summer holiday and we were on a long hike. My legs got tired, but he promised me that if I completed the hike I could stay up very late and go on a “star hike” with him the next night. Just Papa and me! It sounded so exotic, so un-babyish. I never got to stay up late. And that star hike was the first time I had heard the story. I always thought of it as a sad-happy story. I cried when Papa described to me the pain of the illness, how his right arm began to lose strength and wither, how it soon became so weak he could not draw the bow across the violin strings. But then there was his discovery of this other universe!

  Papa said it was the stars that saved him. I imagined him on some mountain peak at night, a moonless night, the kind all astronomers love, when every constellation burns with a silver radiance, and I saw my father listening for some kind of far-off music. It was the music of light, the music of the night’s soul. Music, Papa said, is the most abstract of all the arts. And light is like that too—elusive, fragile, fleeting. So on that night, his bow arm dead at his side, he began to play the strings of darkness. Soon he bought a modest telescope and with it he found first the single notes, then the chords, and finally the melody within the harmony of the sky.

  After a few months at the sanitarium he returned to Vienna and quickly finished his secondary school studies at the Adolphus Wilhelm Gymnasium, then passed his Abitur examinations to enter the University of Vienna. When Papa returned he and Mama began to really fall in love, although they had met years before through music. But it would be a few years before they married, because first he went on to Cambridge University in England, where he enrolled in Trinity College, the same college where Sir Isaac Newton had studied.

  But Papa, like everyone else who studied physics at Cambridge, including Arthur Stanley Eddington, his favorite professor, was fascinated by Einstein’s work on the theory of general relativity. The professor knew that Einstein needed just one thing to validate his theory, and that was to be able to prove that gravity affected light. General relativity predicted that when light passed near something massive, its path should bend. Einstein had calculated how much the mass of the sun should bend starlight passing near it. But to show he was right, you would have to be able to see the light of the stars right next to the sun. For this, an eclipse was needed. Thus began Papa’s first work in refining the techniques, the film, and the lenses of the camera that could gather the incontrovertible evidence that gravity bent light.

  So next to the pictures on my dresser of Vicki Baum and Joan Crawford and me holding the cub and Papa playing the violin B.I.P., there were a dozen or more prints of Papa’s photographs of stars. The one picture that was actually bigger than that of Vicki Baum was my birthday picture, taken on May 29, 1919. I knew all about that night, but perhaps not the way one would expect. It was not the events on Earth surrounding my birth here in Berlin, but the celestial happenings my father was observing from that island off the coast of West Africa that became the background narrative of my birth story. The picture on the mirror was not an image of me but of the sun being swamped by the moon so that only a fiery halo was left floating eerily in the sky. The predicted totality—the time of the complete eclipse of the sun—had been a period of 410 seconds, almost seven minutes, which is quite a long eclipse. But bad weather had set in with a blanket of roiling clouds. The seconds were shaved away. For 400 of the 410 seconds the eclipse could not be seen because of the clouds. Then in those final seconds the skies cleared. Six pictures were taken in all during those last ten seconds. There were two pictures that proved that indeed the mass of the sun had pulled the light of the stars toward it. The deflection of the light, about 1.61 arc seconds, matched Einstein’s projection and thus his theory of general relativity was validated.

  When Papa returned to Berlin and met me for the first time, he looked at the birth record and insisted that I must have been born during those same ten seconds.

  I realized I had to stop this daydreaming, or night dreaming. “Back to the Gallic Wars, Vicki!” I muttered, looking at her picture. But then I thought of the dessert none of us had eaten. I knew I had better hurry out to the kitchen, because Mama always let Hertha take any leftovers home for her mother and the elderly aunt with whom she lived.

  When I got to the kitchen Hertha was packing up a slice of the torte.

  She looked up. “You want some, Gaby?”

  “Well, I was hoping, but . . .”

  “Have a piece. There is plenty for me to take home.” She went to the cupboard and got a plate. “Some milk?” She turned around to ask me.

  “That would be nice, thanks, Hertha.”

  I sat at the kitchen table on a stool. Hertha settled across from me with a mug of coffee. “So your mama and papa are worried about Ulla?”

  “That and everything else.” Almost as soon as I said it, I realized I probably shouldn’t have, for “everything else” was politics.

  “Aachh!” Hertha made a scolding sound in the back of her throat. “They shouldn’t worry about everything else. Just Ulla.”

  I kept my eyes on the torte and mumbled into the crumbs as I cut it with my fork.

  “Well, they do,” I said softly.

  “What is your papa so worried about?”

  I felt my heart beating loudly in my chest. I couldn’t look up.

  “Well, the Brown Shirts, for one thing.”

  Hertha leaned across the table. She patted my hand. “Oh, they’re just rambunctious boys. And they want to get these Communists. The Communists are bad, Gaby. You don’t remember how awful it was. You were a little girl in the twenties. I didn’t work for your family then, but even they were poor. No one escaped, believe me. Maybe not as poor as many, not as poor as me and my mother and her sister, but they were. Every week the price of the simplest things like eggs, milk, bread, was five or six times more than the week before. Sixty marks to buy what ten marks had bought a week earlier!”

  I knew she was right. The money had become outrageously inflated, worth almost nothing. One had to spend it immediately because it would be worth even less the next day. I had seen a picture in a scrapbook of Papa taking a knapsack stuffed full of bills for a loaf of bread, because all the money he needed would not fit in his wallet.

  Hertha lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “And the Communists will make it even worse tha
n it was back then. I am sure. But now I think there might be a chance for things to get better.”

  I withdrew my hand from hers. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. “You think there’s a chance with Hitler?”

  “Maybe,” she said almost gaily.

  “Hertha, don’t say anything to Mama and Papa about this.”

  “Oh no, I wouldn’t.”

  “So why are you telling me?” I couldn’t help ask.

  She looked at me almost dreamily. “Because you are young, you are not set in your ways, and maybe you don’t understand how hard it is for people like me.”

  I pushed the plate away. I wasn’t hungry anymore. There was so much I wanted to say, so much that crowded up in my mind, but the thoughts became tangled as soon as I began to even try to say anything. I knew that Hertha was a sweet, gentle person. I knew that she liked my parents a lot. She had said time and again that they were the most generous people she had ever worked for. But if Hertha felt that Hitler was good for Germany—Hertha who was not a fanatic—how many others might feel the same way?

  chapter 9

  O Dearest, canst thou tell me why The rose should be so pale? And why the azure violet Should wither in the vale?

  And why the lark should in the cloud So sorrowfully sing? And why from loveliest balsam-buds A scent of death should spring?

  And why the sun upon the mead So chillingly should frown? And why the earth should, like a grave, Be moldering and brown?

  And why it is that I myself So languishing should be? And why it is, my heart of hearts, That thou forsakest me?

  -Heinrich Heine,

  translated by Richard Garnett

  My Latin examination was on June 3. I did fine. Not as well as Rosa, who achieved a dazzling 14 out of 15, but I got an 11. Anything hovering around 12 was OK as far as I was concerned. The next day, sometime during our history exam, the Reichstag, the German parliament, was dissolved. Bella, the class wit, joked that at least there wasn’t time for this bit of history to be included on the final exam. I would soon lose count as to how many times the Reichstag would be resurrected and dissolved over the next six months. The day after the history exam was the class picnic, with ice cream. And on June 14, school let out for the summer holiday. It was our last day at our old school building. When school resumed in September, Rosa and I would move to a different building, where the older students of the gymnasium attended classes. It was still the same school, but we would have different teachers. Because this building was closer to the library, we would be allowed to go there during our fifteen-minute break.