Ashes

by Kathryn Lasky

  “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?

  chapter 12

  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

  “Yes, 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.

  I looked around the bakery to try and see if anyone else seemed shocked or disturbed, but their expressions were unreadable. I didn’t know what to do. My first instinct was to flee the shop, but Mama had put in a big order and I was to pick it up. Steinhoff’s was the only baker in town. Baba was arriving for a couple of days’ visit and some neighbors were coming for dinner.

  “What can I do for you, mein kleiner Schatz?” It was my turn. I swallowed. And looked down at my sandals.

  “My mother’s order, please.”

  “Oh yes, of course, sweetie.” He turned and shouted into the kitchen, “Frau Professor Schramm’s Gugelhupf!” Then he turned to me again. “And I believe some strudel, too, she ordered. Right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As he wrapped up the strudel, he smiled at me. “Ahh, what a pretty little thing you are with your blond braids. I always say”—he turned to another customer who was looking in the pastry case—“that this little one reminds me of the Volkspuppen, you know the sunflower dolls for the Sonnenblummenfest . You should wear a dirndl for our sunflower parade.”

  “I hate parades,” I muttered, thinking of the goose-stepping and drunk Brown Shirts I had seen when Uncle Hessie and I left Berlin.

  “You what? Naw. The Sonnenblummenfest parade is one of the oldest folk parades of the region. You could be our sunflower princess with those blond braids.”

  “Put it on Mama’s charge,” I said and, taking the boxes of baked goods, I left the shop. Parade! Never!

  First the perfectly good word Volk, then parades, and now even braids. Me a perfect sunflower princess, a Volksprinzessin . What would be ruined next? I must tell Mama, I thought, that we cannot buy from Steinhoff’s anymore. There was a bakery in Potsdam that wasn’t far, and I vowed that I would never ever eat another bite of Steinhoff’s Mutti Brötchen. No more rolls. Fresh bread had in a matter of seconds turned rancid. Like Huck, I guessed I wished that I’d never come ashore.

  “Your mama and Frau Blumenthal are down by the lake,” Hertha said as she took the bakery goods from me. I must have looked at Hertha oddly, for she immediately said. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, nothing.” But in fact I wondered if there had been a slight edge, a sneer perhaps, in Hertha’s voice when she said Baba’s very Jewish-sounding last name. Was I going crazy? Imagining things all because of that horrid man Steinhoff? It wasn’t fair of me to put Hertha in the same boat, was it?

  I rushed upstairs to change into my bathing suit from last summer. I was saving my new one for when Rosa came to visit. We had bought them together earlier in the spring. But first I got the scissors from Mama’s sewing basket. I went into the bathroom and looked at my face. All right, so no one would mistake me for Joan Crawford, but did I really look like Volkspuppe? A folk doll? I looped my braids onto the top of my head and attempted the infamous shoulder twitch that Rosa had so easily mastered. I squinted a bit, partly to look sexy, but partly so I could see myself more clearly. Mama was right. She said I had to get glasses before the start of the new term. Glasses would certainly diminish the folk-doll look, even if they would not enhance the Joan Crawford one. I let my braids drop and picked up the scissors. First I cut the left one off and then the right one. I blew a stream of air out through my lips making a blubbering sound. I felt better. More fit. Fit for anything except a parade!

  After I got into my bathing suit, I ran straight out of the house across the lawn and jumped into the water. It felt wonderful. My head felt light and free. No slimy yellow snakes flopping about. Mama and Baba were floating on big rubber tires.

  They were gabbing their heads off as usual. Baba was talking about a party that she had gone to that week, the Press Ball, and how someone named Magda Goebbels had worn an “atrocious” gown. “Absolutely atrocious, my dear. Fake silk. You’d think with how much Hitler admires Mussolini that she could go to Italy—Como—and get herself some fabulous silk. That’s the best silk, of course, from Como. But no, she looked like a strumpet. She had better shape up, because they say that her husband is going to be made top minister in the Nazi Party. Joseph Goebbels will be the most powerful man next to you-know-who.”

  I dived like a Tümmler—the animal, not the boat—around Mama and Baba and then I began to swim under them, tickling their toes. They were giggling and yelling.

  “Don’t splash, naughty girl! She swims like a fish, that one!” Then there was this terrible choking sound, followed by a big splashy plop.

  “Elske! Elske!” Baba screamed. Mama was spluttering and coughing. “Gaby! Gaby! Was im Gottes Namen . . . ? Dein Haar!” Yes, my hair, what, in the name of God, was I thinking? What had I gone and done?

  “I decided I need a new hairstyle, Mama.”

  “That is not a style!” Baba said, her eyes bugging out of her head. That was true. I had been in such a hurry to cut off my völkisch braids that I had not even bothered to undo them. I had just chopped each one off at the scalp. Needless to say, there was probably a certain, well, a certain asymmetry. That was actually an understatement. In the back my hair felt as short as a boy’s, but on the sides it hung down in tatters. The tatters were the only remnants of my völkisch braids, which my parents for the rest of the summer would treat like a holy relic.

  “What ever possessed you?” Mama asked. She and Baba had immediately gotten out of the water and insisted I follow them up to Mama’s and Papa’s bathroom, where they would try to salvage the remnants of the hair left on my head.

  “I
’m not sure you want to know,” I said.

  Mama glared at my reflection in the mirror. “Of course I want to know! What happened?”

  So I told them the story of what had occurred at the bakery.

  “That fool inspired you to cut your hair?” Mama was aghast.

  “Don’t use the word ‘inspired’ with him, Mama. He’s hardly an artist, even if you do like his strudel,” I shot back.

  “We’ll never go into the shop again. I won’t buy a crumb of his lousy Mutti Brötchen,” she fumed.

  Baba sighed heavily. “I agree you shouldn’t patronize the shop, but that will hardly bring Gaby’s hair back. Send her down to Berlin and I’ll have Monsieur Marc try and do something with it.” She extended a finger toward a stubby hank that stood out at the top of my ears.

  “Oooh!” I cried gleefully. I had never been to a real hair-stylist in my life.

  “She can come with me when I leave,” Baba said.

  “No!” Mama and I both said at once. Ulla and Karl were arriving two days after Baba left, and I really wanted to see Ulla. I knew it couldn’t quite be like old times, since she would be with her boyfriend, but we could still sail and fish together. Ulla was better at fishing than I was.

  “All right,” Mama said, “when Karl and Ulla leave, I’ll send her down with them. Karl is driving. She can get her hair cut and see the eye doctor, too.” I felt as if I were a package of damaged goods being shipped off for an assessment, like an automobile that had had an unfortunate collision—could the chassis be straightened out? The dents hammered out of the fenders? And oh yes, a new windshield please! But at the same time, I felt terrific. No more folk-doll stuff for me. If I couldn’t be Joan Crawford with my glasses, at least I would never be a Volkspuppe. I might appear slightly intellectual. Maybe I’d start a new style.

  Later that afternoon when Papa came back from an errand and heard of the amputation, he ran upstairs and looked at the box with the braids that Mama had rescued from my waste bin. Then he stood on the landing holding them, groaning and whimpering as he looked at the gold streaming through his fingers, not quite believing that alas they were separated from the head on which they had grown.