by Matt Killeen
Something horrible was coming.
Sarah found her mother standing on the bank above the crashed Mercedes. She glistened in her fur and feathered hat, smiling eyes wide and bright as she sang.
The girl was a pirate princess . . .
There was howling, screaming, hot breath on the air, rising in volume and growing closer.
So when the pirates came and destroyed everything . . .
Her mother hissed the last lines over the noise of paws scratching through the glass.
The pirates asked the girl . . . should they show anyone mercy?
Sarah glanced at the shapes looming though the fog. By the time she looked back, her mother’s hat had slid off her head to reveal the horror underneath.
The girl said, No mercy.
That’ll teach you.
The first dog, all muscles and teeth, broke into view and launched itself at Sarah.
Sarah jerked and banged her head against the window of the train. Every time. Every time she closed her eyes now. She looked at her traveling companion, apparently sleeping opposite her.
“Stay awake,” he said, without opening his eyes. “They can’t get you if you stay awake.”
“Who can’t?”
“Your demons.”
“What do you see when you close your eyes?” she asked, part curiosity, part jab. He snorted and folded his arms.
“Brecht.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Sarah replied.
“You were mumbling Brecht. All very Jewish-Bolshevik. You have to stop that.”
“It was a song that my—” Sarah stopped as a surge of loss rose like vomit. She waited for it to fade and continued. “My mother sang it onstage a few times.”
“Your mother wouldn’t be welcome in the new Deutsches Theater. Neither would you, singing that song.”
The journey seemed to last forever. Four trains. No, five. A long and dreary play in a narrow theater powered by strong coffee and apple cake. The drama was punctuated by brief snatches of activity, tickets and checkpoints, stations and inspectors, with Sarah playing her part when needed but mostly waiting in the wings for her cue. She remained silent, as she had always been taught by her mother, in case the audience hears you. In between, the gentle rocking of the carriages marked the slow turn of the clock.
Her fear, the desire to run from everyone they met and to check the corridors outside their compartment constantly, had washed away slowly, like the tide, to be replaced by a throbbing tension, cloying boredom, furry teeth, and itchy grubbiness. Her limbs ached and her eyes threatened to close, but the threat of the dogs in the mist was greater. The journey was everything, the only show in town. Sarah didn’t want to think about the final curtain.
At the start they couldn’t talk. There were passengers and guards on the trains, customers in the cafés, prying eyes and open ears everywhere. Now they were alone, but Sarah felt that if she started asking questions it would break the kischef, the spell, and everything would fall apart. Everyone, their eyes thus opened, would turn around and wonder why the dirty Jew was sitting on the train.
That had to change, though. The deeper they got into Germany, the farther from real safety she was. Back to the smashed windows, the abuse, the fear, the hunger, the midnight arrests—and now she had no papers, with no excuses. The voices that she had resisted were whispering again. You are running right back to the start, back to the place you escaped in ’36.
She stretched. She felt her cheek twitch, and the skin under her eye seemed to flutter. She wondered if it was visible to anyone else, so she tried to see her reflection in the window. Germany at its grayest slid past, blurred by grime. Breathing on the glass, she dragged a fingertip through the condensation. She was about to draw an S but stopped herself. She sighed loudly.
“I take it back. Go to sleep,” he said shortly.
“What about my demons?”
“I no longer care.” The carriage darkened as the train overtook another traveling at a slower speed. Sarah watched dark, squat, frog-like shapes rolling past.
“More tanks,” she thought out loud. Their progress across Germany had been unhindered, but they were not traveling alone. The stations, trains, roads, bars, and cafés were packed with soldiers, sitting, waiting, walking, laughing. An army was on the move. “Do you want to see?”
“Not anymore.” His eyes stayed closed. “I think we all know what it means.”
The shapes drifted by the window, light, dark, light, dark.
“Do you have a plan?” she murmured.
He was quiet. Light, dark, light, dark. Just when Sarah began to think she hadn’t actually said anything, he sighed noisily. “Yes.” He put his head to one side and resettled his body.
“Does it involve me?”
“You want to discuss this now? Here?”
Sarah waved her hand at the empty carriage in frustration and opened her mouth to speak. She slammed her jaw shut and inhaled slowly.
“Yes. I want to talk about it now,” she whispered carefully. “Where are we going?”
“Eventually? Berlin.”
“Why?” This seemed absurd to Sarah.
“We’re going home.”
“I don’t have a home,” Sarah muttered witheringly.
“You’re from Berlin, from Elsengrund.”
“We left for Vienna in nineteen thirty-six because of the Nuremberg Laws.”
“Family? Friends?” he asked testily.
“No family. The rest will be gone, or they’ll have their own problems to deal with.”
“Don’t you have any . . . Christian friends?” He sighed.
“I’m talking about Christian friends.” She snorted in an imitation of what seemed to be his usual exclamation. “We didn’t run a”—she wrestled for a suitable example—“bagel factory.”
They fell silent as somebody bustled past the compartment.
“Herr Neuberger. Is that your name?” she asked.
“If you like.” The shutters lowered.
“What do you do, Herr Neuberger?”
“This conversation is over.”
His folded arms tightened. Sarah sat on the sudden spurt of anger and squashed it. It was getting harder each time to do so. Down where the voice came from, she was seething.
The tanks vanished. The carriage filled with dull light and quiet.
“Do you not have anything to read?” she complained. After a moment, he made a gruff noise and fished into the carpetbag at his feet. “You do? Wonderful.” He tossed her something and promptly closed his eyes.
The cover had been torn from the book to make it lighter, and the binding was beginning to come apart in a spiderweb of white thread. She looked at the title page.
“Achtung—Panzer! by Heinz Guderian,” she read. “Is this a story?”
“In a way. We’re all going to be hearing it.”
* * *
• • •
Berlin seemed bigger, brighter, grander under floodlights and full moon than it had three years earlier. It was more imposing, more severe, and more frightening than she remembered, unrecognizable as the city where she grew up. Columns stretched into the air as if the sky were a vaulted ceiling.
Sarah slipped in and out of sleep. The dogs ran through its streets chasing the taxi, and her mother bled on every corner. She was carried from train to rattling cab to green marble mansion block, head buried in the overcoat shoulder. She could have been carried into hell itself for all she knew.
The foyer was brightly lit and smelled of leather and polish, all straight lines and green lamps. His feet made no sound on the thick carpet that ran down the center of the hall.
“Guten Abend, Ulrich,” he said without stopping.
“And good evening to you, Herr Haller . . . and who have we here?” The concierge hurried to
his feet and attempted to make it to the lift before him.
“My sister’s child. Will you get the elevator, please?”
“Certainly. A good trip?”
“Not at all. The work of the Reich had to wait for family concerns. Most disagreeable.”
The lift gate slid open on well-oiled rails. They passed Ulrich, who smelled of stale tobacco.
“Good night, Herr Haller. Sleep well.”
The gate slid shut with an expensive thunk. Sarah felt the floor shake gently, and with a distant whine, the lift rose.
“Herr Haller?” Sarah murmured.
“If you like.”
“Onkel . . .” She snickered slowly.
Plush carpets, delicate light fittings, and smooth walls that were a fan of shadows. The jingle of keys and the whispering noise of an opening door. They traveled into a large cool space, dim but for the shafts of moonlight, more right angles, thick rugs, and luminous marble.
They passed into a smaller space, and she was lowered onto something soft and white. It yielded to her shoulders, scratches, and bruises. She stretched out an arm, but the softness went on forever. There were receding footsteps, and then a voice spoke from the doorway.
“Sleep well, Sarah of Elsengrund. And welcome home.”
The door closed. Sarah turned her face into the clean smell of soap powder and gave in to it, not caring if the dogs were waiting for her.
Sarah was sitting on the hall carpet facing the front doors. She was waiting.
What was she waiting for?
Nearby someone was crying. Playing minor chords on a piano and sobbing. Crying and singing. A high, beautiful, but cracked voice stumbled through a song, missing words here and there, between sniffs.
Nice while it lasted, an’ now it is over . . .
Sarah picked herself up and went looking for the voice.
What’s the use o’ grievin’, when the mother that bore you
(Mary, pity women!) knew it all before you?
Her mother was leaning over the edge of the piano keyboard. In the jet-black gloss surface before her, Sarah saw her own small, confused, and worried face. It was smeared at the edges by the curving side of the grand piano, her golden hair escaping the red ribbons, making a halo like a Christian angel.
“Ha! Sarahchen. Pity us women, yes?”
Her mother hammered a huge dark chord with the sustain pedal down. Then she laughed. It wasn’t a happy sound.
“He’s not coming, my princess. No, not today . . . or tomorrow . . .” She picked up a glass of amber liquid and poured it down her throat. “No, maybe not ever again. You know why?” She raised her eyebrows.
Sarah shook her head slowly.
Her mother was beautiful. There was porcelain skin framed by curls of fiery red escaping from a mane of shining locks piled with studied and meticulous carelessness on her head. There were the greenest of dusky green eyes, like liquid knife-points of polished marble. There was a mouth of perfect shape below high cheekbones, and to this was added a thick diamond-studded choker and glinting earrings that turned and flashed in the candlelight. Her forest-green velvet dress susurrated as she spun on the piano stool.
She stuck a gloved fingertip into her nostril and pulled her face violently into profile. “This. Genetics. The perpetuation of the international Jewish conspiracy.” She let go and rolled her head back to face Sarah. “We are the World Plague and your father’s dirty little secret.” She swallowed down the rest of the glass and reached for the bottle.
Sarah took an uncertain step toward the piano. Her mother swung back and pointed at her with sudden venom in her eyes.
“And you know what, princess? That’s you, too, Rapunzel with her golden hair . . . Doesn’t matter what you look like. Out there, they’re still going to hate you.”
She spat the final words with such disdain and fury that Sarah felt it in her cheekbones and her eyelids, all the way to her groin. Tears began to run down her hot face and she couldn’t stop them, even as she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, her mother was at her side and coiling velvet arms around her shoulders.
“Oh, baby, I’m sorry, oh, Sarahchen, Mutti’s sorry, oh, I’m such a dumme Schlampe . . .” Sarah looked into her mother’s face, which was also streaked with tears. She watched her eyeliner dissolve in muddy rapids. She smelled of musk, alcohol, and hopeless emptiness. “We’ll be okay, baby. You and me. We don’t need anyone. Who’s my princess?”
“Me,” Sarah squeaked between breaths.
“Yes, my Sarahchen.”
The red hair and green velvet closed over her head.
* * *
• • •
Sarah woke in the dark, her face wet. Her mother was gone. The absence, the hole that this left, was a wound, like the back of her mother’s head. Sarah’s existence felt dominated by that void. But this emptiness also meant her mother could make no more demands on her, could no longer control or endanger her. Sarah struggled with this sense of relief as it was swamped by guilt and ingratitude, before capsizing under the bitter weight of the nothingness.
She shuffled out of her clothes and fought her way into the sheets, tearing at the hospital corners in frustration. Eventually, they came loose, and she wrapped herself by rolling over and over, before curling into a ball. Once still, she began to cry all over again.
Tearful, fitful sleep followed, but it was soft and clean.
Finally, her eyes opened to a dazzling silver light that flooded the room, washing out the edges and details to leave a blurred white coating to everything. She rose unsteadily and propped herself on an elbow. Past the foot of the bed, where the radiance was at its most intense, almost lost in the glow, stood a figure, arms outstretched. It looked for all the world like giant feathery wings had sprung from its shoulders and stretched off into the distance. Sarah was enthralled at the magnificence of the image, one torn from the halls of an art gallery.
The figure shook its arms out with a flourish, and the wings flew away. It turned away from the curtains and spoke. “Get in the bath. You smell disgusting.”
FIVE
SARAH SHUFFLED DOWN the hall, the sound of running water recalling her thirst and panic near the docks. This time there was just a steamy fog and mirrors bejeweled with drops of water, a comforting heat and the gentle scent of soap. She locked the bathroom door.
He had taken her photo against a white wall, a head-and-shoulders shot in her stained dress. Now Sarah pushed the grimy material into a sink of warm water, but after a perfunctory rub she realized it was hopeless. The blacker the water, the worse the dress looked. She gave up and climbed into the huge, filling tub. It was scalding hot, so she stood on one foot and then the other, waiting for the pain to ebb away as the cold tap spat into life. Facing her was a giant mirror that filled the wall, and between water-drop trails Sarah could see her whole body.
Her legs and arms were crisscrossed with scratches, scabs, and livid bruises turning black. Her knees were swollen out of shape. Underneath somewhere was her mother’s porcelain skin, but it was lost from view. The contusions couldn’t hide the muscles, though, the taut wire and whipcord that Sarah was pleased to see hadn’t faded in the years since she was banned from gymnastics class. She hadn’t wasted the time spent hanging from the banisters of their Vienna apartment or flipping down its halls after all. She had wanted to be ready for the call, to hear it had all been a dreadful mistake and she had to come back immediately.
Yet the Fatherland managed quite well without you, didn’t it? No shortage of winners at the Olympics in ’36, were there? Didn’t miss the mongrels and Mischlinge at all . . .
What about Owens? Jesse Owens the American Negro. She’d watched him. Faster and better and longer than all the blond-haired, blue-eyed, statuesque supermen.
The voice fell silent. Sarah could now drop both feet into the water, and she
slowly crouched into the steam. The rest of her body was flat and uninteresting to her, which was fine for now. Her head spun with grown-up problems and injustices, but she still looked like a little girl. Getting unwieldy body parts, getting confused and angry, getting tall and heavy . . . it could all wait. She needed to be light and lithe.
The water burned her knees, and she hissed into it. She looked up one last time to see her face. Her nose was now black, fading to yellow at the edges. Given time to stare, she realized that she looked different, almost unrecognizable from certain angles. The eyes were the same, pale blue but fierce and deep and alive like her mother’s. Her hair was long and knotted and greasy, but unmistakably golden blonde, like a crown of precious metal that had been dropped on the floor. She teased out the braids and shook it out over her back into the water.
With that familiar mixture of shock, pain, and tremendous comfort, Sarah sank into the water, submerging herself entirely before settling on the surface. She dissolved into the soapy liquid and risked letting her mind off its leash. She found herself thinking of Owens.
Going to the Olympic Stadium had been hugely risky for a Jew, even back in ’36. There had been so many trains and buses and public places that were forbidden to her where she could have been recognized or stopped or hassled, but in the end, she was just another little blonde girl swept up into the crowd. In an audience of a hundred thousand, she was invisible.
It was clear in the early seconds of the 100-meter final that Jesse Owens was the strongest. There was no ignoring it. He accelerated away from the Aryan field with ease, challenged only by Ralph Metcalfe, another black American. The crowd stuttered momentarily as Nazi Party members and worried faces looked around for direction. How were they supposed to react to the defeat of the supposedly superior race?
But the excitement was too much, and soon no one could help themselves. Owens shot through the tape, and Sarah screamed herself hoarse along with everyone else.
However, as Owens and his teammate stood on their podium giving a simple military salute, surrounded by white faces and Heil-Hitler arms, Sarah saw the danger they represented. Not just for the National Socialists and their delusions, but for her and those like her. This humiliation of the hosts was a potent counterargument that had been missing from Germany for many long years, and Sarah could almost feel the coming backlash, their need for revenge.
