Child of the Light

by Berliner, Janet

  If only one of their papas had sealed off that sub-basement, Sol thought again, feeling less sure of his theory that the voice he had heard was Erich's. Something awful could be waiting for them down in that brick bowel.

  "I--" Sol clamped his lips shut as the bell over the door of the tobacco shop jangled and his father re-emerged, waving a card embossed with calligraphy.

  "You see?" His father ran a thin, long-nailed finger along the lettering as if to prove the invitation were indeed a reality, then placed it carefully in the breast pocket of his three-piece suit. "Already our foot is in the door. Oma Rathenau has invited all of us, the Freunds and the Weissers, to a private dinner party in celebration of the cabaret's opening. Good thing she is not as stingy as her husband was. He would never have invited us!"

  Though Sol had never met the Rathenau family, he had seen them occasionally at synagogue--not Walther, who did not deny he was a Jew but never went to shul--but Mathilde, Walther's mother, his father, Emil, and his younger sister. He knew that Emil, who'd died when Sol was little, had built an empire after using a small loan to buy the German rights to the Edison invention; everyone knew that.

  "Mathilde Rathenau is the grand dame of the Allgemeine Elektrizitats Gesellschaft--the General Electric Company combine," Jacob Freund said. "She will insist on preserving the integrity of the Rathenau name. You watch. There will be only genteel people at her nightclub." He patted his pocket with pride. "Two weeks from tonight we shall dine with the cream of Berlin."

  "I dine with the cream of Berlin every evening," Ella Freund said, coming out of the shop. "Now why don't you take care of the customers, Jacob, while I put supper on the table. You're welcome to join us, Erich."

  The boy shook his head and mumbled his thanks. "Have to go. See you later, Sol."

  "Later, he will be at his studies," Sol's mother said. "Why don't you two take a walk or something. Wake him up, Erich. He has a lot to do before bedtime. Have you practiced your cello?"

  "Not yet, Mama."

  "You had better not neglect your music." She turned to Jacob. "Have you told him?"

  "Told me what, Mama?"

  "To express our thanks to Mathilde Rathenau, Recha will dance and you will play your cello at the opening of the cabaret."

  "But I'm not good enough to play for those people--"

  "We do not ask you to be a genius--simply that you show you are a cultured young man."

  Cultured, schmultured, Sol thought, a sick feeling settling in his stomach. Was it not enough that he loved music? Did he have to be forced to make a fool of himself in front of--what was it his father had called them, "...the cream of Berlin"?

  Erich decided he did not have to leave quite yet, so the boys continued watching the construction. At the first sign of dusk, the workers started packing up their tools.

  "Now," Sol said, making a decision. "We go down now or forget it."

  "Are you crazy? It's light enough for them to see us!"

  "They're used to us. If we wander in like we're just curious, they'll probably ignore us."

  "You really mean it, don't you?" Erich looked dumbfounded. "Listen, you don't have to punish me just because your parents want you to make an idiot of yourself with your cello."

  "Never mind about the cello. Do you want to do it--or not?" Sol enjoyed the shift in power. Suddenly he, and not Erich, was in command.

  Sol was right. Nobody noticed them as they wandered into the half-finished cabaret and down into the sub-basement.

  "Over here." Erich knelt beside the padlocked drain.

  "Well, open it." With a little luck, Sol thought, the padlock will be too rusty to budge and we won't have to go into the sewer.

  However, it took Erich no time at all to pry the lock open. The grate was as heavy as the one in the tobacco shop, but Erich opened it easily.

  "I'll go first," Sol said, deciding he might as well go all the way with his playing the leader. Besides, he was a lot taller than Erich; the drop would be shorter for him and he could help his friend down.

  The sewer smelled damp and fetid. Hardly any light filtered down, but Erich's pocket, which always seemed to hold an endless array of surprises, yielded a candle.

  "See, I told you." Erich lit the candle and held it up to extend the circle of light. "There's nothing here."

  Erich's voice was a little tremulous. The place didn't exactly hold pleasant memories for him either, Sol reminded himself. And his friend was right. There was nothing down here--except slime and mold, he thought, touching the wall and wiping his fingers on his pants.

  Herr Weisser had cleared out everything except the dismantled packing crates. Sol sat down and heaved a sigh of relief.

  Erich laughed. "Did you really expect to find some woman hiding out? Lucky for you I took back the bet or you'd owe me one set of pewter soldiers. I'm going to search for bones. You coming?"

  "Not yet." Sol was convinced now that his theory about Erich's voice was correct, but he was playing the game. He could soon hear Erich scratching around the bricks.

  "Oh God, let me die!"

  Sol went rigid with fear.

  "I did not know...I did not know."

  He waited, holding his breath. Then a man with a strange accent whispered something about blood, and another, his voice old and worn, rambled on about lice and corpses and cold, and pleaded for borscht to quiet his belly-pains.

  "Erich!"

  "What is it?" Erich held up the candle. "Bogey man get you?"

  Sol didn't answer. He knew without asking that Erich had not heard them--not the woman, or the man whispering, or the other one, who spoke of death and of hunger. They were speaking to him, to Solomon, in voices only he could hear.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Two weeks later, dressed and ready for the private opening of the cabaret, Sol returned to the sewer. He and Erich had come back several times together, but this was the first time Sol had come alone. They had left the padlock in place but unlocked, so he had no trouble opening the grate and climbing down. Though he had brought a candle, he did not light it.

  He sat in the blackness and listened.

  The voices would come, he knew that now. What he did not know was why he was stupid enough to come back, or why he would worsen the terror by sitting in the dark. He considered himself the brains of the Weisser-Freund team. Some brains!

  Then again, he decided, he had reason to hide tonight. Not only did he loathe performing, he was terrible at it. And he got stage fright. But no amount of begging had changed his parents' minds about his cello performance at tonight's function. "The children of a cultured household," Jacob said, "must understand music and be ready and eager to perform at a moment's notice." It was tradition, he said; though why people should suffer for tradition's sake was never adequately explained. After hearing Gregor Piatigorsky play, he could harbor no illusions about his own ability. Gregor, who had fled Russia by swimming the Sbruch River, holding his cello over his head while border guards shot at him, had performed in the Freund's music room, and had played like an angel.

  If Sol lived to be a hundred, he would never play that well, nor would he forget his mortification when his father insisted he perform for Gregor. He had squeaked and sawed through part of Haydn's Concerto in D Major, bowed--cheeks burning at the guests' tolerant smiles--and retired to his bedroom before bursting into tears.

  Tonight would be worse. One of the honored guests was Walther Rathenau, Germany's newly appointed Foreign Minister and heir to the Rathenau fortune.

  He gazed forlornly up into the darkness, toward the cabaret. If only he had refused to play for Gregor, there would be no issue now--

  A baby began to shriek.

  Sol shuddered violently and jammed his hands over his ears.

  The wailing grew louder.

  Pressing his back against the bricks, he kicked his legs as if to drive away the sound. It made him think of the lambs at the slaughterhouse he had visited before Passover a few years ago, of a lost kitten, of
an infant too young to put words to whatever terror it was feeling.

  Hearing voices, words, that was one thing. But this was really crazy. "Go away!" he shouted. "Leave me alone."

  He took his hands away from his ears. The crying had died to a sob and soon only his own breathing rasped in the darkness. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and thought about lighting the candle, but the dark was almost comforting--like when he removed his glasses and images were out of focus--his own special, personal world. It was the silence that was making him suffer: he kept expecting it to fill with voices. If some outside noise would only restore a sense of reality to the sewer, he would feel better.

  Sitting perfectly still, he looked up through the sewer's opening into the sub-basement. With over a hundred guests in the cabaret upstairs, the music, at least, should be filtering down from above. There--he could hear it now; first the melodious cry of a violin, then the tinkle of a piano. A timpani joined in.

  Someone, probably a waiter, dropped a tray and, instinctively, Sol ducked.

  Elbows on knees and head down, he examined his choices. He could stay in a hideaway that had probably once been part of a medieval torture chamber or enter a modern torture chamber, complete with audience and an instrument of terror--his cello.

  "Solomon?"

  "Erich?" Sol rose to help his friend descend by guiding his feet to the two-by-twelve they had installed as a step at this--the cabaret--end. "Am I ever glad it's you."

  "Expecting one of your ghosts?" Erich hopped down. Using the cigarette lighter he had taken from the shop, he lit a candle he had stolen from the Seifenvogel laundry opposite Bellevue Station. "Your papa sent me to look for you. He's pretty upset that you aren't there yet," he said.

  "I'm not exactly happy myself," Sol said, though now that Erich was here he felt a little stupid at his reaction to what was probably only a stray kitten up in the sub-basement.

  He transferred his gaze to Erich, saw what his friend was wearing, and suppressed the urge to laugh. His amusement did not escape his friend.

  "None of this was my idea." Erich touched his slicked-back hair. He had on pressed trousers, a white shirt with starched, rounded collar, and his father's silk paisley cravat. "At least I'm at the party, not hiding in the dark like a cockroach."

  "You're not at the party. You're here with me."

  "You know what I mean!" Erich raised the candle and looked at Solomon's face. "You been crying?"

  "Of course not!" Sol stared down at the crate boards on the floor.

  "Worrying about ghosts again? Guess I was wrong--I shouldn't have talked you into coming back down here. God, you're a baby!"

  Shoving past Sol, Erich walked over to a clothes rod they had set up. Dangling from a coat hanger were a white shirt, a black tie, and suspenders: the uniform of his Freikorps-Youth unit.

  "Pull yourself together, Spatz," He picked lint and dust off the outfit. "Fears are for queers."

  "It's the cello. You know how much I hate performing. I can't go up there. I just can't!"

  "Then don't perform," Erich said coolly. "If your papa says you have to play, tell him to--" He paused. "Just tell him no."

  "Easy for you to say. You do whatever you want these days."

  "That's right." Erich clenched his fist and narrowed his eyes. "They say I can't have a dog? I'll have any dog I want, and Papa won't be able to stop me. No one's ever again going to drown something I own. And no one tells me what to do! Like they said I couldn't join the Freikorps, 'Not until you're fifteen!'" He did a whining imitation of his mother. "What an idiot."

  "You shouldn't talk about your mother like that," Sol muttered. Erich had secretly joined the Freikorps the morning after he and Sol picked the lock of the cabaret and re-entered the sewer that first time. Since then, he seemed to think of himself as older, wiser, more daring than ever, as if joining the movement had turned him into some kind of hero.

  "I wish she could see me in this." Erich was admiring his uniform again.

  "Your mother?"

  Erich eyed Solomon with disdain. "Miriam. Rathenau's niece. She's really something." He made a slurping noise as if he were about to wolf down a piece of his mother's plum cake. Setting down the candle, he slid the suspenders off the shirt and held it across his chest. "Girls love uniforms."

  "Clean uniforms, maybe. I wish you'd wash that thing. It stinks of dogs."

  "One of the bitches at the camp just had puppies." Erich's voice was heavy with longing. "They'll keep the perfect ones and destroy the rest. If it weren't for my parents..."

  "You'd take a reject?"

  Staring off into the shadows, Erich did not seem to notice the implied insult. "I could give one of the puppies to Rathenau's niece. Papa said her dog died in the accident that killed her parents. Can you see me arriving at Miriam Rathenau's house in my uniform? With a puppy...maybe even two?"

  His friend talked about girls as though he were Romeo, Sol thought, but if he had to choose between a dog and a girl, he would almost certainly choose the animal. "She probably wouldn't even speak to you if you went there dressed in that thing," he said.

  "Her uncle financed a Freikorps unit during the war. Everyone knows that."

  "That was before things changed. Besides, you're in the Freikorps-Youth. That's different. People in her part of society look down on you. The Berliner Tageblatt called you and your pals 'Pawns in short pants.'"

  "Who cares about that conservative rag!"

  "Which of your precious Freikorps leaders said that?" Sol asked. Erich parroted them more and more. "Your parents read the Tageblatt, you know."

  "I told you, they're idiots."

  "Maybe you're the idiot."

  For a moment there was fierce anger in Erich's eyes. Then he said, "Just forget it." He replaced the suspenders on the hanger. "Want to go to the matinee tomorrow? The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari is playing at the Marmorhaus."

  Sol shook his head. "I don't know why you enjoy films about murder and madness. I'd rather save my money for one of Elizabeth Bergner's plays."

  "You really are a baby! No wonder you don't care about meeting Miriam Rathenau. You wouldn't know what to do with her."

  "And you do?"

  Before Erich could answer, a girl began singing in the cabaret.

  "Glühwürmchen, Glühwürmchen, glimm're..." Shine little glowworm, glimmer, glimmer...

  "Glowworm" was one of Sol's favorite songs. The composer, Paul Lincke, often visited his two spinster nieces late at night in their flat in the building next door to the Freunds to try out his latest melodies on them. The sound of their old piano would fill Sol's room. When he fell asleep to the strains of Lady Moon, his dreams were enchanted. But Lincke's music had never sounded like this--innocent, earthy, a firefly love song that filled Sol with feelings he did not understand.

  The song ended to applause. "That was her singing," Erich said. "I'm going back up. I'll tell your papa I couldn't find you, but you don't know what you're missing!"

  Sol tried to imagine what Rathenau's niece looked like. If she were half as wonderful as her voice--

  "Some day I'll be a man and wear what I want and do what I want all the time," Erich said in a hoarse whisper. "Papa won't be able to order me around anymore." He boosted himself onto the plank and crawled up through the drain.

  Sol stepped onto the board and poked his head through the hole. Erich, guided by the light seeping through the gap beneath the door upstairs, was climbing the steps to the cabaret. Miriam Rathenau had begun a second song. If he stayed in the sewer, Sol thought, the voices would return--and even if they did not, the fear would. He spat on his fingers, snuffed the candle, and crawled out. Closing the grate behind him, he ascended the steps and stretched out on his stomach across the top several stairs.

  With his cheek pressed against the top landing, he tried to peer through the gap beneath the door.

  Finding it hard to focus, he pushed his glasses as high as he could up his nose and held them there with hi
s index finger. Now he could see plush red carpet, a metal table leg, three pairs of trousers resting on shiny black shoes, and white high heels festooned with seed pearls. But nothing resembling a beautiful young girl.

  He stood and inched open the door.

  "Wenn der weisse Flieder, wieder blüht," Miriam Rathenau sang. "When the white lilac blooms again...." She held the microphone lightly with one hand. The other was slightly raised. There was about her a combination of delicacy and boldness--her face expressive, her body graceful and lean.

  Something inside Solomon exploded. Standing there in the middle of the dance floor beneath a spotlight, the girl created a new universe for him. For an instant nothing existed except white tights, a form-fitting tunic, a knee-length swirl of pale pink niñon. Gradually he began to notice other things: the rose-colored shawl that draped her shoulders; her dark hair, pinned in a dancer's chignon and decorated with a spray of white lilac; the piano player, dressed in sequined tails and top hat and smiling up at her from the Blüthner baby grand.

  It wasn't until she turned her head slightly to return the piano player's smile that reality intruded. Until that moment she had been facing Sol, and though he knew he was hidden in the dark of the stairway, he had felt she was singing for him alone.

  He looked around the cabaret. Twenty tables ringed the dance floor. Each was set with an ecru tablecloth and a spray of lilac. It was easy to see his mother's hand in the decorating, for while some of the flowers were white, most were that shade between pink and white that was her favorite. Fine crystal, silverware, and gold-rimmed china gleamed beneath chandeliers fit for the palace of the Kaiser. Waiters in black tie and tails moved among the guests, offering a fish course. Silver platters were laden with exquisitely poached salmon, filet of sole, and sturgeon embellished with olive-green capers; there was even beluga caviar, sprinkled with chopped eggs and served on tiny rounds of pumpernickel.

  The guests were arrayed in diamonds and lace, taffeta and ostrich feathers. White tuxedos trimmed in magenta vied for attention with chiffon and brocade cut from patterns designed to conceal or reveal secrets of the flesh. Smoke from cigarettes in silver holders curled into the glow of the spotlight. Everyone eyed Miriam Rathenau with rapt attention.