Ashes

by Kathryn Lasky

  I illustrated his point, quickly, neatly, precisely. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t been listening. Papa had shown me this stuff already. Such are the advantages of having a professor of astrophysics as a father. At the blackboard I explained that although both answers were “truthful,” only one was correct for the equation Herr Doktor Berg had written.

  “And why is that, Fräulein?”

  “Because, Herr Doktor Berg, if x equals ten or if x equals sixty, either will make the equation into a true statement. But x equals ten is the right answer in this case.”

  “Why?” Doktor Berg pressed. He paused and raised his incredibly bushy eyes brows above his spectacles. “Why can you not apply the second answer? Why is the second answer like extra baggage?”

  “Well, I guess because it is not reasonable for the particular situation you described when setting up this problem.”

  “Precisely, Fräulein.” His eyes drilled into me. “It seems that although you have mastered the operations of demonstrating the oddities of quadratic equations, you have not mastered certain elements of real life, the real life of this classroom. You are cluttering it with your extra baggage. I think I need to help you out by collecting some of it. At the end of this period, you will kindly deliver to me the book you have been reading.”

  My heart sank. It was almost as if I could feel a little plop at the base of my rib cage. I was only into the second chapter and Buck the magnificent dog, half Saint Bernard, half sheepdog, had just watched as his best friend, the dog Curly, was killed, her face ripped off by a pack of huskies. What would happen to Buck? What would happen to me? This was the second book Herr Doktor Berg had “collected” (his word, not mine. I would have said “confiscated”) from me since the beginning of spring term. Where could I find another one? A friend of Papa’s had sent this one from Heidelberg when we couldn’t find a German translation in Berlin.

  The bell rang. School was over, but before I could get up from my desk Herr Doktor Berg was standing beside me. His hand was stretched out, ready to receive the book. I gave it to him. He made a small, snuffy sound high in his nose, took it, and began to leave. “Herr Doktor . . .” The words sounded more like raggedy tatters of phlegm in my throat. He turned around, clasping the book to his chest, and raised his eyebrows expectantly but said nothing. “Uh, Herr Doktor Berg . . . at the end of term, might I have the two books back . . . please?”

  He blinked, his pale gray eyes unreadable behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. The lenses were divided not into two parts like Papa’s but three parts. Three different focal lengths—one for reading close up, one for reading the blackboard, and one for distance, I imagined. Three different solutions for one problem—seeing. He blinked again, perhaps trying to fit me into a perspective, a plane. Perhaps not. I am not really that complicated. I just wanted my books back. But he said nothing as he turned and walked away.

  chapter 5

  He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club. He had learned the lesson, and in all his after life he never forgot it. That club was a revelation. It was his introduction to the reign of primitive law, and he met the introduction halfway. The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect; and while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused.

  -Jack London, The Call of the Wild

  Rosa was waiting just outside the main school door to walk home with me. We lived near each other in Berlin in a neighborhood called the Schöneberg, also referred to as the Bavarian Quarter, or the Jewish Switzerland. I was not sure about the Switzerland part. Perhaps it was because many people who lived in our neighborhood were well off, and Switzerland was considered wealthy compared to postwar Berlin. But the Jewish part was more understandable. There were many Jews who lived in the Schöneberg. Most were associated with the University of Berlin and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. I was not Jewish and neither was Rosa. But Papa was a professor of astronomy at the university and held an office at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. Rosa’s mother, a widow, was a stenographer for the university. Her father had died when she was an infant. And ever since then her mother had worked in the classics department. This was very convenient, for Rosa got lots of help on her Latin homework from students in this department, and then I could get help from Rosa. I was not as good in Latin as I was in mathematics, but Rosa was lousy in math. It was a nice little deal Rosa and I had. She helped me in Latin and I helped her with math.

  What Rosa was very good at was fashion. Fashion and movie stars. We were both mad for movies. Our favorite actress was an American, Joan Crawford. We’d seen her in Montana Moon and Dance, Fools, Dance. They didn’t normally let children in to such movies without their parents, but Rosa’s cousin Helmut was an usher at the Gloria Palast Theater. He let us sneak in. Now I was so excited because Joan Crawford was in the movie Grand Hotel, which had just come out in America. The movie was based on the book People at a Hotel, which I had received this past Christmas. It was written by one of my favorite authors, Vicki Baum. I had read it twice already. I had heard that Joan Crawford played the secretary. I was glad that Marlene Dietrich didn’t get cast instead. Marlene was prettier in a way than Joan Crawford, but there was something a little scary about her, at least in the movie The Blue Angel when she sang that song “They call me wicked Lola.” She was very daring—sexy daring. My parents and Rosa’s mother would have died if they had known we’d seen The Blue Angel. We’d go to matinees, then yes, we would lie to our parents and say we’d been to get ice cream with friends, or we’d gone roller skating. We made sure to take our roller skates with us on the days we used that excuse. Clever liars we were.

  Ulla, my older sister, had seen The Blue Angel a few months back, and Mama nearly had a fit about that. But Papa had just said, “She’s a university student now, Elske. At eighteen she’s old enough.” Ulla got away with a lot just because she was a “university student.” One thing she was not getting away with, however, was neglecting her studies. A university student is supposed to study. That is a reasonable expectation. Nor was she practicing her violin that much. Except for me, everyone in our family was very musical. The music gene “had taken a powder” with me, as my mother would say. That means it vanished. In any case Ulla was very musical. She hoped to go to the Vienna Conservatory, where Papa and Mama had gone, to study violin when she finished her program at the University of Berlin. Mama had performed in many concerts, but now she just taught piano. Papa, before he contracted infantile paralysis—they call it polio sometimes—as a teenager, had been considered a violin prodigy. But his bow arm became useless after his illness, for all the muscles in it had been affected.

  Mama and Papa were very upset with Ulla when she started to practice less. At the rate she was going with her academic studies, her degree might be in doubt, as well as her chances for the conservatory. This had all started when she met Karl. When Karl became her boyfriend, Ulla was suddenly not so interested in her studies—German literature. Her marks had slipped. Karl was a student too at the university. He studied engineering. I didn’t know about his marks.

  Rosa and I were coming to the corner where we normally would part ways. But the day was lovely, end of May, and the air had more than a hint of summer.

  “Do you have any money?” Rosa asked suddenly.

  “Not much. Just a little. Why?”

  “Helmut is working this afternoon. We could catch the last bit of The Blue Angel and then have a coffee at the Little. The movie would be free. Didn’t you say you wanted to see it again? And we could share the coffee.”

  “I have enough for that.”

  We walked two more blocks to the tram. Ten minutes later when the tram pulled up to the stop in front of the theater, we saw not a neat, orderly line of people buying tickets for the next show but a sea of brown.

  “Schweine,”I muttered as I looked out the tram window.

  “Hush! Gaby! Don’t go calling them swine,” Rosa whispered.<
br />
  “Let’s stay on for another stop,” I said quickly. There was no way I was getting off that tram. Not with those Schweine. There were not enough bad words. Scheiss-Sturm, the Shit Storm. That was what Papa called Hitler’s private army, the Sturmabteilung, or SA. There was also the SS, the Schutzstaffel that functioned as Hitler’s personal guard and had been established some years before.

  “Why so many all of a sudden? I don’t understand,” Rosa said.

  “Look at the marquee,” I said. “It’s not The Blue Angel playing. It’s All Quiet on the Western Front.” I’d read the book. Papa said it was the best war book ever written. Very sad. Really antiwar. It was all about a young man, a soldier in the Great War. There was a lot of gory stuff about trench warfare—blood, dressing stations where the medics and doctors did field surgery, amputation of arms and legs. I didn’t want to see the movie. I knew there would be parts I couldn’t watch, and there definitely wouldn’t be any glamour girls like Joan Crawford.

  “But still, I don’t understand,” Rosa said, looking out the tram window at the SA in their brown shirts milling about under the marquee. It wasn’t a march, really. The men did not seem organized. But why were they there at all? “I thought they were supposed to have been banned, but Mama went with her friend for lunch at Ciro’s and she said it was all Brown Shirts in there. Suddenly it seems as if they’re all over the city.”

  “I don’t think it’s all of a sudden,” I replied as the tram pulled away from the theater. “Last night we were listening to the radio and heard about Brown Shirts breaking up a synagogue service on the east side of the city. And Papa said there was no way the ban could be enforced, and the Brown Shirts would come back twice as strong.”

  “Oh no,” Rosa said, and slumped down in her seat.

  “Does your mother say anything about the Brown Shirts coming into the university, to her department?” I asked.

  “Mama’s department? Why would they ever? It’s so boring. Classics. Nothing’s changed in a thousand years.”

  True,I thought. Meanwhile everything in Papa’s department of astronomy and astrophysics was changing almost every month. New discoveries, new technologies for measuring light, the orbit of planets, the trajectories of astral bodies . . .

  “Look!” Rosa said. “We’re almost at the zoo. Let’s go there instead of the movies. We can get off here and walk the rest of the way.”

  “Good idea.” I loved the zoo. Much better than a movie theater on a sunny day. We got off at the next stop. Only a short two blocks to the zoo. The blocks were good for shopping, and we lingered in front of a fancy dress store.

  “You see,” Rosa said. “Shoulders—it’s all in the shoulders.” There were three mannequins all wearing daringly tailored outfits that were nipped in at the waist, with shoulder padding that lent a powerful look to a woman’s figure. Feminine but with uncommon force.

  This was the Rosa Ebers theory of shoulders. She believed that Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, and all of our favorite movie stars had wonderful shoulders and they knew how to move them.

  “Shoulders are much more important than the bosom.” Rosa spoke with a great authority that seemed at odds with her round, freckled face. “And now see how they are taking shoulders into account.” She was pointing at a mannequin with a long black skirt topped with a glittering silver jacket that looked slinky—like falling rain. “You have to have shoulders to wear that!” Rosa proclaimed. She began twitching her shoulders, right and then left, being careful to angle her chin just so. Her soft, springy brown curls bounced a bit. Rosa had me beat in the height and hair department. She was taller than me, and my hair was straight as a stick. I wore it in long braids that were more white than golden blond. Papa called them “Milchstrasse,” the Milky Way, because they were so bright.

  “Ah, a pretty little vamp!” Someone laughed behind us. As I caught his reflection in the window, I felt a wave of nausea. A Brown Shirt. A higher-up one. Lots of ribbons and bars decorated his uniform. He was smoking a tiny dark cigarette. Or was it a cigar? I had never seen a cigarette this color. He was handsome. Angular jaw, very tanned skin, light brown hair. Just one feature ruined it. His eyes were like two tiny, dark, malevolent bugs, and they crawled over Rosa.

  We grabbed each other’s hands and started to run. His laughter followed us like tin cans tied to a dog’s tail. The sound disappeared finally into the clank of the tram, the burble of conversation of the pedestrians, and the excited cries of children as they danced at the end of their mothers’ hands in anticipation of the zoo. We said nothing about what the SA officer had said. To speak of it was to acknowledge it. We wanted to wipe those words and his image from our minds.

  Finally we were at the zoo gates. Two stone elephants crouched in front of an ornate pagoda. We automatically went up and touched their trunks for good luck. This was not a tradition in a public sense, it was Rosa’s and my tradition. We invented it. This time, I think we each gave the wrinkled trunks an extra pat. As soon as we passed through the gates we felt better. I liked the smell. The animal dung did not offend me. It reminded me a little bit of my Oma’s house in the country in Austria, which was near a dairy farm. I liked the smell of real manure, not Storm Scheiss.

  We spent the money that would have bought coffee on peanuts. It was more fun feeding the monkeys than trying to look grown up drinking coffee in a café anyway. We walked by the cage of an elderly lion, toothless now, with one eye filmy like my Opa’s before he died. The lion keeper had told us he could not see anything really except maybe shapes and movement. Rosa and I had been visiting the lion for years. We believed he knew our voices. So we pressed up as close as we could to the cage and whispered to him. We were certain that once the lion had been beautiful. I had invented a life for him. In my mind, he prowled the savannahs of Africa a long time ago. He stalked through the long golden grasses, blending in so perfectly that his prey did not even know he was there until he was almost upon them. Then the gazelle, the eland, or the duiker would run. And Old Lion would begin to run like a golden comet come to Earth, stretching out sleek and fluid, devouring distance until he reached his prey. Now the lion keeper told us they only feed him mash with lots of vitamins.

  In the Raubtierhaus, the house where the lions and tigers live, there was a photo studio where it was possible to have one’s picture taken holding newborn cubs. There is a picture of me when I was four years old sitting on the sofa in the Raubtierhaus holding a cub. It was my birthday present. I had begged and begged for it. And this was when there was hardly enough money for bread, 1923, just a few years after the end of the Great War when every day the mark became worth less and less. One loaf of bread was said to cost five hundred thousand marks! But Papa worked out a deal with the photographer. In exchange for my picture, he supplied the photographer with some film from his own lab.

  Rosa and I walked on. We looked for feathers shed by inhabitants of the birdhouse. Our favorites were flamingo feathers, but we had no luck this day. We lingered. We didn’t want to leave. It felt comfortable here with the smells of fur and manure, the slightly more acrid odors of the birdhouse. There was a playground at the zoo, but at thirteen, we had grown too large for the swings, the monkey bars, and the jungle gyms. We were truly at an awkward age. Too big for the playground, too young for the cabarets. Our shoulders were not broad enough yet for fashion, and we had no bosom to speak of. So why did that SA fellow look at us with his venomous insect eyes? And why had he made me feel dirty? He was the dirty one, I thought. He was crap. Him, not me.

  chapter 6

  Suddenly a change passed over the tree. All the sun’s warmth left the air. I knew the sky was black, because all the heat, which meant light to me, had died out of the atmosphere. A strange odour came up from the earth. I knew it, it was the odour that always precedes a thunderstorm, and a nameless fear clutched at my heart. I felt absolutely alone, cut off from my friends and the firm earth. The immense, the unknown, enfolded me. I remained still
and expectant; a chilling terror crept over me.

  - Helen Keller, The Story of My Life

  I turned onto our street, Haberlandstrasse, after I had said good-bye to Rosa. Did I smell rain? I wasn’t sure. I closed my eyes and sniffed. This was a small experiment that I enjoyed doing after I had read—well, almost finished reading—The Story of My Life by Helen Keller. I say almost finished because it, too, by route of a mathematics book, had found its way into Herr Doktor Berg’s hands. I had only one more chapter to go when it was confiscated, and I had become completely fascinated by this woman who had gone blind and deaf at such a young age—less than two years old—and who could not speak. She was locked in a dark, soundless prison until a teacher named Annie Sullivan came along and taught her what language was. The first word Annie taught Helen was “water.” She spelled the letters W-A-T-E-R out with her finger in the palm of Helen’s hand. Water, what an ordinary word. But at that moment it was as if those five letters illuminated everything for Helen. She describes her soul as awakening. She learned to read, to speak. She went to Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She became an author. But what intrigued me the most was how she unlocked the world of sight and sound through her other senses.

  So as I walked I ran my left hand over the hedge that grew alongside the sidewalk and just like Helen Keller, I tried to feel my way home. I did smell a dampness in the air—a slightly metallic odor. Is it a storm, or am I imagining this?With my eyes closed tight I could see bright, squiggly threads. Then suddenly I saw brown, that sea of brown uniforms. Those milling SA officers had invaded my mind’s eye. Was that the storm?I squeezed my eyes harder, willing away the scene I had witnessed earlier in front of the theater.

  This reminded me of retinal fatigue, which I knew about from Papa and his studies of light. It had been proven that if a person stared at an image on a white screen for about thirty seconds and the image was then removed, its negative afterimage could be seen briefly. It had been demonstrated that this was due to the overstimulation of color receptors in the eye, which could cause them to become “fatigued.” Of course retinal fatigue happened immediately after an image had been removed and, luckily, I had not seen the brown shirts for many hours. But this was how I explained it to myself.