"What on earth are you doing here in the middle of the night!" She opened the door and looked past him, down at the trellis. "Where's Sol?"
Erich shrugged. "Not here."
Miriam frowned. There were little lies and big lies, and times when both were necessary. What she could not abide was a wasted lie. A pointless one. Someone else had been out there, and who else but Sol would consent to come out with Erich at this time of night?
Boldly, though awkwardly, Erich leaned toward her as though to kiss her on the lips. Miriam pushed him away. "You know you shouldn't be here. You especially shouldn't be here doing that."
"You liked it at the shop."
"Maybe I did like it," she said honestly. "Just don't do it." She had liked it all right, but not enough to be the booty in a bet, which was probably what this was all about. Still, she had to admit she was enjoying the idea that Erich--and Sol--had braved the dogs and the trellis to get to her.
"How did you get past the dogs? I thought I heard them barking. And why aren't you wearing a shirt?"
"I can handle dogs." Erich took a step backward and looked over the rail as if to see the animals below.
"You're lucky they didn't attack you! Well, now that you're here and in one piece, you want to tell me why?"
Erich grinned, and she felt foolish. Talk about giving someone a--what did they call it in America?--a straight line.
"Brought you a present," Erich said.
"My birthday's not till the end of September."
"It's an un-birthday present."
Removing the rucksack from his shoulders, he reached inside and took out a tiny puppy. He held it by the nape of the neck, its legs dangling.
A stuffed dog--from Erich? She might have expected that from Sol, but not Erich. A snake, an alligator, a live dog maybe, but not--- She reached for it.
"Here!" she said. "No! Take it away!"
At the point of tears, she thrust it back at him. This was no stuffed dog; it was living, breathing. Like Susie--
"What's the matter? I haven't done anything wrong."
"I'm sorry," Miriam whispered. "It's just that my parents were taking my English sheep dog to the veterinarian when they were--" She took a sharp breath. "Well, you know."
But he did not know, she was aware. Not about the fire or her fears. How could she explain to this too-young boy that she wanted a dog more than anything else in the world, yet was terrified that owning one would cause her to lose someone she loved?
Erich kissed the puppy on the nose. "Her mother's dead, too. T-take her...go on. Please." A sense of worried begging shone in Erich's eyes.
A rustling from the trellis provided Miriam with the distraction she needed. She stepped toward it and was about to say something more about Sol when the guard dogs growled.
"They're just jealous," Erich said, too quickly. He waved a hand near the trellis as if shooing away a fly.
Signaling his friend, Miriam thought. Hope the dogs don't tear Sol apart. "Those dogs are jealous." She decided not to mention Sol again. Sooner or later, she would find out what was going on.
"She needs to be fed," Erich said.
"Who? Oh, you mean the puppy." Miriam reached out tentatively and stroked the dog; it was soft--and warm. "Look at your tiny paws." She wished she had the courage to hold it.
"She's going to be a beauty," Erich said. "I bet you and I love dogs more than anyone else in Berlin."
Miriam steeled her resolve. Carefully, as if the animal were made of eggshells, she took the dog from Erich. "You're right, I do love them, but--" Frustrated with herself, she sighed deeply. "I can't accept the gift, Erich. I just...can't."
"Sure you can."
"No!"
She handed the puppy back to him. He kissed it on the nose again and rewrapped it with the towel. She watched him place it in the corner of the balcony and did not retreat when he stepped forward and took her awkwardly in his arms. For a moment, not wanting to think about the puppy, she gave in to his boyish embrace, then pushed him away.
"Stop it. If anyone sees us--"
"No one will see."
She felt a mixture of agitation and pleasure as he put his arms around her again. "Please, Erich. Don't." He kissed her throat insistently. "This is stupid." She tried to ignore the warmth creeping through her. "We're asking for trouble."
She pulled roughly away and did her best to glare at him.
"I'm sorry." His bravado was gone and he sounded on the verge of tears.
He is just a boy on the edge of manhood, Miriam thought. And she did like him--a lot. Well, maybe she didn't like him all that much--he was too mixed up and too...Aryan. What she liked was the person he could become, if he discarded the arrogant set of his shoulders--if the slight hardness around his mouth when he was refused disappeared--
If! Ifs didn't count, she knew that. Like the "if" at work right now: if he didn't give her that warm feeling when he looked at her, when he touched her, she would have sent him away at once. In fact, she would have had nothing to do with him in the first place.
Relenting, though only slightly, she placed his arm around her shoulder and kissed him on the cheek. He was barely taller than she as she leaned into him. Barely taller, Gentile, too-young...but still, if--
She felt his arm tighten around her. Oh, hell! She stared up at the moon. What did it matter; she was not exactly going to marry him!
Turning to face Erich, she closed her eyes and let herself enjoy their first real kiss. Just one, she told herself, and then she would go back to bed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The rose vines irritated Sol's cheek, and his forehead itched. The dogs panted, circled, whined, rose on hind legs to paw the ivy. Moonlight and silence veiled the balcony.
Around the corner from the balcony, he went further down the trellis. The wolfhound growled and the Doberman climbed onto the latticework in bright, angry anticipation. Sol cursed softly.
Above him, Miriam gave a small sigh.
Definitely not his idea of a good time. Erich was up there playing Romeo, while he was playing--what? Monkey?
Carefully he maneuvered closer to the corner and peeked around. Miriam's head was cocked flirtatiously to one side while Erich held her. Earlier, his heart had skipped a beat when she had insisted that he, Sol, was here too. Now he could feel his heart turn inside-out with a quite different emotion. What was it? Anger?
He knew what Papa would call it. Jealousy.
Fighting tears, he dropped from the trellis. The dogs, apparently sensing that he had discarded his fear of them, left him alone. They continued to whine and stare up at the balcony.
Grateful for that, at least, Sol charged through the gardens and climbed the gate. He picked up the bike, shivered with fury and slammed it down. Never again did he want to touch anything belonging to Erich Weisser.
If it weren't for Papa, he told himself, there wouldn't be any Erich Weisser hanging around the store, tormenting people, treating Miriam Rathenau as if she belonged to him. The Weissers would still be hawking vegetables and speaking Plattdeutsch.
He chided himself for being so small-minded. Yet as he began to walk, all he could think of was how to get back at Erich for everything--but especially for dragging him out to the estate and then dismissing him with that imperious wave of his. He felt stupid for having fallen for Erich's friendship routine one more time, so stupid that even the Grünewald's mansions and chateaus, set among manicured gardens and neatly trimmed trees, seemed to mock him with their mien of regal repose.
Leaving the Grünewald, he found himself outside the Goethe Gymnasium, at the corner of Westfalische and Eisenzahn. The streets were empty, as were his pockets. No way to take a taxi or tram, and by the time he walked home, Papa would be awake.
Then he remembered. The money in his shoe! His mother had put it there. For emergencies, she had said, God forbid you should ever need it.
Sitting on the curb, he removed his shoe and worked the lining of the instep free
. There, protected by a bit of chamois, was the ten-mark note that had initially given his arch a callus.
He retied his shoe and, with a feeling of slow, suffocating desperation, unfolded the money. Even if he could get home before Papa arose, he would have to try and stay awake all day under his teacher's scrutiny. Worse, Erich would be in school. Sleep or no, Erich would go to school just so he could brag about what he had done with Miriam. A knot of admirers had surrounded him all morning after he told everyone that Ursula Müller had offered to drop her drawers for him.
Liar!
And I was right there among them, eager as the others, wanting to believe him.
Curling his fingers around the money, he made a decision. He was probably the only student at Goethe who had never skipped a class. As Erich would say, there was a first time for everything. Assuming Papa was not wise to the fact that he had been out almost all night, he would pretend to go to school--only never arrive.
A bus turned onto Eisenzahn Strasse. Rising to board it, he wondered if he shouldn't avoid going home altogether. No, that would worry his parents too much. Being caught playing hooky might earn him a paddling. He could handle that. He could not handle the pain of deliberately hurting Mama and Papa.
A few hours later, having catnapped at home, Sol trundled off to school--with his mother's blessing and without Erich, who "will be a little late for school today," as Frau Weisser had come down to inform Sol.
Avoiding the usual route, Sol made his way into the center of the city. He had decided to spend the day at Luna Park, but it did not open this early. While he stood among the crowds of the Tauenzien Strasse, yawning and bleary-eyed, his attention was caught by one of the KadeWe's window displays--a window devoted to Käthe Kruse dolls. The window dresser had seated them like an audience around a life-sized model of Grog, Berlin's most famous clown.
"Schö-ö-ön--beautiful," Sol thought he heard the department store dummy say, although its mouth did not move.
"Schö-ö-on," he repeated, completing the famous circus routine. Snapping his mouth shut and feeling foolish, he looked around. Too little sleep, he thought, excusing himself. As if it were not bad enough to hear voices in an abandoned sewer, now he was hearing a clown mannequin talk! The live Grog only left Circus Busch at Christmas to work department stores and other places where crowds gathered.
"Schö-ö-ön." With slow marionette motion the mannequin lifted a hand in an awkward greeting, its mouth fixed in a rictus-grin.
Sol stood staring at the colorful marble eyes, ignoring the hoi polloi on their way to coffee, cake, and gossip at Kranzler's, and forcing them to walk around him. Was it Grog? A mechanical man? He might have stood there all day, had a man with an umbrella not bumped into him and shouted at him, breaking the spell.
Feeling a sudden need to get away, he turned and ran past the counter at Aschinger's where he had intended to stop for a bowl of their inexpensive pea soup and sausage, which would have held him until he got to the sour-pickle barrel at Luna Park.
"Das ist die Berliner Luft.. ," a barrel organ man--the oldest one Solomon had ever seen--played outside Kranzler's. Sol slowed down to listen and to watch the animal perched on a stool beside the hurdy gurdy. Black and white, with jade-green eyes, the tethered animal looked like a cross between a large monkey and a teddy bear.
The man played on, head lolled to one side as if his neck were broken. He was toothless, and a great bib of creased wrinkled flesh hung below his chin. But his music was beautiful. A Paul Lincke medley filtered through the air and Solomon swayed, mesmerized--
The man's eyes popped open, revealing milky unseeing pupils.
"Lieber Leierkasten Mann, sieh mich nicht so traurig an," Sol said. "Dear barrel organ man, don't look at me so mournfully."
The animal reached down and closed the man's eyelids. Wondering why German children had a verse for everything, Sol stretched to offer the animal a Groschen.
The animal emitted a weird wail that sounded like someone sliding a hand up and down the scale of a saxophone, and snatched the coin. Sol lurched back in pain, clutching his hand. He looked at his palm, then at the animal in frightened disbelief. A gouge brimming with blood ran the length of his lifeline.
"Gotcha, did he, boy?" The blind man laughed. "He does that with people he doesn't like."
The animal leaped onto the old man's back and curled across his shoulders, looking like a fluffy winter wrap.
"What is it!" Half in horror, half in fascination, Sol held his palm to his lips. He had a feeling he had seen something like the animal before. But where?
"It's an indri," the hurdy gurdy man said. "A type of lemur. The name means--'behold!'" His lolled to the other side and he began cackling. "A Frenchie went into the jungles of Madagascar looking for the cynocephalus--a mythical dog-headed boy. When the Natives pointed out one of these little fellows, they shouted, 'Indri! Indri!' to get the man's attention. So that's how it got its name." He hawked deep in his throat and spat a brown stream of tobacco juice onto the street--and onto Solomon's shoes.
"Are you a dog-headed boy, Solomon?" the old man asked as Sol backed away in terror.
"You know me?"
"I know everyone who's anyone in Berlin--even if you don't know who you are."
Shaking his head against what had to be a nightmare, Sol turned and began running toward the Zoo Station. Behind him, the indri caterwauled and the old man shouted, "Well, are you a dog-headed boy? Is that what your dreams say?" and cackled insanely.
Boarding an open-topped bus and too afraid to look back, Solomon followed a long-legged prostitute in a short skirt and leather boots up the stairs and to the front seat. She placed her whip across her knees and patted the seat beside her.
"Don't worry," she said. "I like 'em young, but it's been a hard night. I couldn't lift my whip even if you begged me."
Embarrassed and upset, Sol looked around the bus. The seat next to the woman was the only empty one left. He sat down and examined his hand. It was stinging, but already the bleeding had begun to stop. He would probably get blood poisoning and die, he thought, sitting up stiff and straight and trying not to think too clearly--for fear something might make sense and he would discover he was not dreaming.
While he watched the city pass in a blur, the woman next to him drifted into sleep, her head against his shoulder. The bus bounced them both around as it negotiated the three-and-a-half kilometers to Halensee at the upper end of the Ku'damm. The journey seemed interminable; Sol could hardly wait to see the Halensee Bridge.
Directly below that lay Luna Park.
"Hallensee! Luna Park!"
Sol disengaged himself from the sleeping woman and disembarked.
"Achtung...Achtung! Hier spricht Berlin! Attention...attention! This is Berlin speaking!" Alfred Braun's voice boomed through the loudspeakers of the Funkturm. The radio tower was Berlin's tallest building and loomed high over the city, the bridge and the park.
"Luna Park!" yelled the main-gate barker, using a megaphone so his voice would carry from the amusement park below the bridge. Anxiety rippled through Sol; was today, he wondered, one of those during which people could take their clothes off in the Park?
At least the barker was clothed, so probably this was a regular day after all.
"Open seven days a week! Ride the carousel and the Ferris wheel! Risk your lives on the roller coaster! Win prizes!"
"Achtung!"
"Luna Park! Open seven days--"
"Achtung!"
Blinking and slack-muscled from sleeplessness, Sol staggered down the hill to the Park. The barker's hand emerged as if disembodied and took one of the notes Sol had changed--when? Last night? Sol couldn't recall.
"Luftballons. Nur ein Sechser." Inside the gate, a man holding a rainbow of balloons in a deformed, white-fleshed hand gripped Sol's arm. "Balloons. Only five pfennig."
Sol shook loose and ran into the Park. When he stared back over his shoulder he saw the man was wearing a white glove and gr
inning like a clown.
Trying to clean his glasses, Sol staggered among the booths.
"Wheel of Fortune. Three turns, three winners."
"Glühwürmchen, Glühwürmchen...."
The song drew Sol away from the booths to the carousel. Around and around it whirled while the song played over and over, a giant music box without a stopping mechanism. He thought he saw a dark-haired girl in a cream-colored peignoir on the other side, sitting on a white horse and reaching for the brass ring that dangled from a rope amid the galloping circle of wooden steeds.
But the carousel was empty, its animals riderless.
He rubbed his eyes. Whatever had possessed him to skip school!
"Berg und Tal Bahn!" a barker shrieked, offering Sol a roller coaster ride.
"Three turns, three winners!" another called from the closest booth. "Win an ostrich feather for Mama!"
The roller coaster went up and down and the carousel kept turning around and his head spun and the ground tilted--
"A stuffed doggie for your Fräulein. Every time a winner!"
"Three turns, three--"
"Visit the Panoptikum, the Hall of Mirrors. See yourself as you really are!"
Yes, Sol thought. Yes! That was what he wanted, what he needed--to see himself as he really was. He paid and stumbled through the door. The mirrors leered and wavered, but it was dark inside, and cool. If he could just lie down for a while. Here, where the carousel was muted.
He sagged in a corner, his back against a mirror and, sighing, let his eyes close.
"Up! Out! What do you think this is, a hotel?"
A huge hand held fast to Sol's lapels and a bearded barker in a pinstriped coat pulled him to his feet. His glasses slipped off his nose and he struggled to rescue them. When he looked up, the man grinned at him and dissolved. Images appeared in a convex mirror, tall as the Funkturm. A goatee, the white flesh of a deformed hand, Erich and Miriam--arms around each other, pointing and laughing--
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