The Kingdom of Childhood

by Rebecca Coleman

  “Listen,” she said, “I just want to take a few photos. If you don’t want to go, fine. Zach and I will go, and I’m sure Scott will be happy to come along.”

  Temple looked to Zach for help.

  “I think it’d be pretty cool,” said Zach. “It’s supposed to be based on Germania, after all. It says in there that they offered human sacrifice. Maybe if we make it real creepy, she’ll think it’s genius.”

  Temple folded his arms against the desk and dropped his head onto them in resignation. Above it, Fairen smiled at Zach. It wasn’t that Zach believed Fairen’s idea was better. On the contrary, he thought it was risky and dangerous, and not in a fun way. But he felt compelled to support her anyway, based on a bit of wisdom taught to him by his dad: never side against a strong woman, because it never ends well.

  4

  1964

  Mainbach, West Germany

  They lived in a tidy half-timbered home at the end of a country road, there in the rural reaches of Bavaria. Five days a week, sometimes six, Judy’s father climbed into his navy-blue Mercedes sedan and drove to Augsburg Air Base, twenty minutes away by Autobahn. Although he was a civilian, he could have elected for his family to live on base, to have Judy attend the fifth grade at the American school, but John Chandler spurned these things. His daughter was no military brat. He was an expert on the cultures of the Soviet republics, and no expert on culture would wall up his family in cinder-block Americana for two years while the heart of West Germany beat just outside the guard towers.

  The rented house came fully furnished and appointed, with a lovingly tended garden out back and views of farmlands and a distant steeple. Sonic booms from American aircraft thundered frequently overhead. At John’s urging, the family cultivated the habits of the Bavarian people. Every morning at half past eight Judy’s mother hung the featherbeds out the windows to air. On weekends they ate their largest meal at noon, often after a brisk hike at Jägerkamp or Miesing. Around the supper table John frequently enthused about the fine healthy practices of the Germans, such as playing sports well into adulthood and not being nosy about their neighbors.

  When they first moved into the home, the garden was in full bloom: bright red poppies, the purple globes of thistle, delicate and poisonous cups of foxglove, bleeding heart blossoms hanging on a stalk like a string of predictions. Blueberries burst ripe on the bushes, and Judy liked to eat them as she played, imagining herself to be a caveman’s child traveling through a wild land never before seen by human beings. Her own Eden, a child’s Eden with no lurking specter of defilement, no serpent watching her; she slipped the slender cups of foxglove over her fingers, licked the backs of poppy and nasturtium petals to make designs on her bare legs. Her sandals slouched in the dirt beside the hens-and-chicks that lined the rock garden, the plants swollen with rain and primeval as her fantasies.

  At breakfast her mother served her a hard roll from the market and a soft-boiled egg in a leaf-green eggcup. She hung out the featherbeds and lined the birdcage with page four of the Stars and Stripes. She tapped the cat’s bowl five times on the back porch and then walked Judy to the bus stop one mile away.

  At the new school nothing was familiar. Judy could not write in the impeccably tidy rounded hand with its looping G’s and calligraphic H’s. She spoke no German, could not read music, knew no prayers. At reading time the class read moral tales from Der Struwwelpeter, a large flat book on whose cover a pigeon-chested boy stared outward with a hollow expression, his fingernails grown to hideous claws, his yellow hair like steel wool. A billowing red shirt and green tights clad his stumpy body. She could not understand the poem about him, and was glad.

  As cooler weather crept in, the blueberry bushes turned a flaming red. The bleeding hearts shriveled, and the remaining plants revealed their skeletons: the dry rattling husks of the poppies, the fragile mother-of-pearl leaves of the bony beige Silbertaschen. Only the chrysanthemums remained, their slim white petals bursting like fireworks from a tight little but ton of a head, the last flower before winter. Judy was largely bored, and so often her mother sent her to play at the home of a German girl, Daniela, their nearest neighbor a few lots away.

  They didn’t speak the same language. That was part of the problem, although Judy doubted she and Daniela would have been friends in any tongue. The girl was overbearing and precociously athletic, while Judy frequently missed any ball rolled to her in kickball and felt her bladder seize at the very thought of climbing a rope. Daniela’s idea of fun was to demonstrate a gymnastic trick and encourage Judy to try it, and then, when she failed, to jeer at her in the universal language of mockery. She was the baby of her family, with an older sister and brother who rolled their eyes at her outbursts in a way Judy could not. By October Judy had given up on Daniela and, when forced to play at her house, walked straight around back to the barn and hung out with the girl’s older brother, Rudi, who spoke serviceable English. Sometimes she did her homework in the barn, and as she worked he helped her untangle the incomprehensible words before her.

  “Der Struwwelpeter!” Rudi exclaimed one day, when she pulled out the text and her copybook. “A terrible book!”

  Judy smiled broadly with relief. So she wasn’t alone in detesting the thing. “Did you have to read it?”

  “Of course. It’s to frighten children. To make you behave and have bad dreams at night.” He sat beside her on the bale of straw and flipped it open to a story about a girl who played with matches. He read with enthusiasm:

  “Doch Minz und Maunz, die Katzen,

  Erheben ihre Tatzen.

  Sie drohen mit den Pfoten:

  ‘Die Mutter hat’s verboten!’”

  Judy said, “I don’t know what any of that means.”

  Rudi rolled his hand in the air, suggesting a broad translation. “It means that when Pauline lit her match, the cats Minz and Maunz put out their claws, and cried, and said, ‘Your mother has forbidden it!’”

  Judy nodded. “And then she burns to death and turns into a pile of ashes.”

  “Yes,” affirmed Rudi. The humorous creases at the corners of his eyes belied his serious tone. Quoting from the book, he said, “‘It’s very, very wrong, you know. You will be burnt if you do so.’”

  “You made it rhyme in English.”

  “I did not even realize. You should not read these things. Look at der Struwwelpeter on the front. Your hair is not like this. Your nails are short and neat.” He lifted her hand in his own rough one and examined her fingernails, then briskly rubbed her fingers with a clasp of his thumb. “You see? No reason to read this. You are a good little girl, not a bad one. You should read a happy book.”

  “My teacher says I have to read this one.”

  The bale shifted beneath his weight as he leaned toward her. His smiling face came close enough that she could see the blond shadow on his jaw, the midnight-blue ring around his cornflower irises. In his low, conspiratorial voice he said, “Sometimes teachers are wrong.”

  The blasphemy was so absolute that she laughed. His eyelashes batted once at her laughing breath. He sat up, his grin still fixed in place, and rubbed her back in broad, firm circles, the way he stroked the cow before he milked her.

  By December even the dead garden was gone. Night fell quickly and left her no time to be bullied by Daniela or watch Rudi care for the sheep and muck out the barn. There was only her home, where her mother had taken to daily plucking imperfect leaves from the houseplants and arranging the kitchen tools in order by shade of black. And there was school.

  On the first day of Advent her class made windows of colored tissue and Popsicle sticks, covered in squares of black construction paper split down the middle. The teacher hung their creations on the long wall of glass windows, regimentally neat as Judy’s mother’s spatula drawer. But each day a child would fold back the construction paper to reveal the bold fractured rainbow inside. They practiced songs for the Weihnachtskonzert to be held just before Christmas and rolled salt dough into
kings and shepherds for nativity scenes. Every Friday their teacher laid an evergreen wreath, set with candles, on a desk, then took out her guitar and dimmed the lights. Together as a class, in the dark and accompanied by the plaintive guitar, they sang a quiet and meditative Advent hymn. Then the teacher struck a match and lit one candle, then two, then three, as Christmas drew closer and closer.

  It was like undressing together, this frankness about spirituality. To John Chandler, Christianity was a tourist attraction that came in the form of holiday street festivals and medieval churches. He took his family along as though on safari, looking upon the holiday goods as though these were relics of a primitive tribe which viewed volcanic eruption as evidence of the Sun God’s anger. Judy guessed he didn’t know about the overt Catholicism of the Bavarian public schools, and that if he had, he would have assumed her intelligent enough to pay it no mind. But in the snowy darkness of the German winter, singing in unison in the candlelight, Judy was starting to suspect she might love Jesus.

  Alle Jahre wieder Kommt das Christuskind Auf die Erde nieder, Wo wir Menschen sind.

  She made a salt dough shepherd and named it Rudi. She opened her tissue window and counted eight remaining. She sang the rough German hymns that sounded to her ears like the original language of humanity, like cavechildren gathered on a solstice dawn waiting for a razor of light to appear between two tall stones. Because who could say there wasn’t a Sun God? Who could call it primitive to believe, long ago, one man might have brought light into a dark world?

  The effect of it all—the numbered translucent windows, the nativities with empty cradles prepared, the three lit candles and a fourth awaiting—was a feeling that time was welling beneath her feet, about to burst forth into light and fate and fury, shedding the darkness—for better or for worse—like a husk. It was the feeling that something was about to happen.

  And it did.

  5

  It was a boiling-hot day for mid-September and, as a cost-cutting measure, the school’s air-conditioning had already been shut off for the season. At the end of the school day I steeled myself for a visit to Bobbie’s old classroom and stepped in with a commuter mug full of iced tea and my hair piled up in a clip, trailing strands that curled with sweat. The iced tea I had purchased at McDonald’s on my lunch hour and, to hide my patronage of such a corporation, guiltily dumped into my rinsed coffee mug before returning to work. In my car I covered the plastic cup with an insulated reusable bag from Whole Foods and slipped out to the parking lot for refills when nobody was looking. If there wasn’t a clause in my contract that required this behavior, there may as well have been. But I didn’t mind. If a veteran like me didn’t respect the folkways of the Steiner school, then why would anyone?

  Sandy Valera stood at the front of the room erasing the blackboard with quick, efficient strokes. High above, inked onto a long banner bright with a rainbow of watercolors, scrolled the quote, “Man is both a fallen God and a God in the becoming.” Rudolf Steiner’s name was written beneath it in small but reverent capitals. It was hard to get used to seeing Bobbie’s handiwork hanging above the head of the woman who had replaced her. So many years I had known Bobbie, never imagining the absurd idea that she might die. Even after her cancer diagnosis, we all thought she was getting better until all of a sudden she wasn’t anymore—she had taken a turn, and then it went so fast. We had been a proud band marching behind our standard-bearer, and then suddenly the street ended in a jagged line and down she slipped into the black nowhere, leaving the rest of us stumbling backward, cacophonous and disoriented.

  “You ready for the staff meeting?” Sandy called out to me.

  “I hope so.”

  “I think Dan’s got something up his sleeve,” she said. “The grand plan to bring us all wealth and happiness.”

  “Why is it always about money.” I sighed. “All the things we need to address with these kids and it always boils down to the issue of money. I can’t think of a subject that bores me more.”

  “You’re happy with what you make, then?”

  “Of course not.”

  She laughed. From a hook on the wall she retrieved her purse and looped it onto her shoulder. The hanger was brass and bore the image of three monkeys, each above its own hook: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Bobbie, who had carried no purse, always hung her jacket from the third hook. Sandy hung her purse from the first.

  “Maybe he’ll give you a raise,” she teased.

  “My husband would like that.”

  “How was your anniversary weekend, by the way?”

  “It didn’t happen. He had to work. I spent it making new dolls for the Hansel and Gretel puppet play. Exciting stuff.”

  She straightened her skirt and frowned sympathetically. If she had been Bobbie, I would have expanded on that with my pent-up frustrations: how much it dragged me down that every time I walked into a room, contempt oozed out of Russ like snot out of a kid’s nose. How my children were almost grown and now I yearned to embark on all my long-deferred adventures: to see Stockholm and Amsterdam, to try absinthe and get puking drunk in the tradition of the great poets, to have wild sex in sketchy locations—with Russ would be just fine, if he was willing—and to grow myself a garden as paradisiacal as the one I remembered from my childhood. I would tell her how I felt as though Russ and I were two captives tied back-to-back to a pole, and while I was willing to whistle at the sky and look helpless until Scott left for college, I felt ready to start chewing through the restraints when nobody was looking.

  But she wasn’t Bobbie. I liked Sandy, but she was only the woman I had been assigned to help get oriented on short notice; and though we might be real friends one day, we weren’t now. She was youngish and pretty and unmarried and still winked at life to suggest it come and get her. If she and I had anything in common beyond our place of employment, I did not have the ego to presume it.

  And so I followed her brisk walk to the multipurpose room, hurrying on my shorter legs to keep up. Partway there she reached over and patted me on the back, as if to say she understood, or, perhaps, that she pitied me.

  “We had an auditor from the Department of Health in our office this morning,” our headmaster told us teachers as we settled in for our meeting. “She is concerned about the number of religious affidavits we have on file in lieu of vaccination records. Also, it seems we have a number of families who have turned in neither a vaccination record nor an affidavit. Clearly our record-keeping leaves much to be desired.”

  We stared uncomfortably at our shoes.

  “We will be following up with those families in the coming weeks,” he continued. “The longer this continues, the more it makes the pro-vax and anti-vax families feel at odds with each other. We cannot afford to give anyone the impression that the atmosphere at this school is contentious. And when I say we can’t afford it, I mean that very literally. Which brings me to our next item.”

  I looked up from the floor, glad to move on.

  “In light of the current situation,” Dan began in an artificially cheerful voice, “we have decided to hold our first annual class ring sale for the Upper School, beginning Monday.”

  The murmur was immediate, but I looked left and right despite it, calculating from my colleagues’ expressions whether they felt as shocked as I did. Surprise, but not disapproval, was apparent on the faces around me. I lifted my hand and spoke without being acknowledged.

  “I disapprove,” I said.

  Dan met this with a thin smile, clearly prepared for my reaction. “I understand, Judy, but the board of trustees has decided it.”

  “Then the board of trustees needs to reconsider,” I countered. “Those rings can cost hundreds of dollars. They represent exactly the sort of consumerist culture we oppose here. The parents are not going to like that one bit.”

  “We receive eighteen percent of each ring sold.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t care if we make a hundred percent. It’s a complete contradict
ion of the values of the school. I understand we need to raise funds, but that is the wrong way.”

  Andrea Riss, the first-grade teacher, spoke up. “Judy…with respect, our other options haven’t been realistic. The recorder and lunch basket sales netted us very little. I don’t know how it is in the kindergarten, but my classroom is suffering. Most of my chairs have threadbare seats and I only have two knights left in my castle. And my harp hasn’t had strings for a year now.”

  A clamor of complaints went up. I looked at Dan, expecting him to call for order, but he remained silent in his chair, tapping a pen against his notebook and gazing in my general direction. Finally I spoke above the din.

  “I do understand,” I said, and waited for the noise to die down. “But tight budget or not, this is a Waldorf school. For almost twenty years I’ve been explaining to parents why their five-year-olds can’t wear their Spider-Man and Little Mermaid shirts to school. I’ve led more seminars than I can count about the kiddie industrial complex. I will break out in hives if we send these kids home with glossy brochures for some artificial trophy they can buy on an installment plan. The idea is—” I considered my adjective for a moment. “Repugnant.”

  “Well, the trustees have approved it.” Dan met my glare with a look of false good humor. “Let’s move on.”

  “Let’s discuss it further.”

  His gaze turned icy. “Let’s move on.”

  At the end of the meeting, I gathered up my bags a bit too slowly and got caught behind the cluster of teachers filing out of the room. His hand fell heavily on my shoulder. “Judy, can I speak to you in private?”

  He closed the door behind the last teacher and turned to me with an apologetic frown. “I knew you weren’t going to be happy about that. I felt it coming as soon as the trustees gave me their recommendation.”