A Trace of Smoke (Hannah Vogel)

by Cantrell, Rebecca

  I read the mother’s name twice. My eyes could not focus on the words. They danced in front of me. The mother’s name was Hannah Vogel—my name. That could not be. It must mean another Hannah Vogel.

  The address listed was my address. Someone had lied. Someone had forged my name on this birth certificate. My knees collapsed, and I slid down the wall. Beads from my evening gown dropped on the dirty floor of the hall. Mitzi hissed and backed away.

  “Are you ill?” the little boy asked. “If you open the door, I can fetch firewater. That helps my aunt.”

  “I am fine.” I used the wall for support and stood. “Thank you.”

  He nodded his head. His matted hair flopped against his shoulders.

  “Are you Anton?” I looked at his pointy chin. Ursula, Ernst, and I inherited a square chin from our mother. Anton looked nothing like us.

  “That is my white man name,” he said. “My Indian name is Little Eagle.”

  “I see,” I said, although I didn’t see a thing. I unlocked my front door and turned on the light. “Let’s go inside.”

  Anton picked up a battered stuffed bear and walked through the front door behind Mitzi. She twitched her long white tail in annoyance at his presence. He had no bag with him, no clothes of any kind. And he smelled of unwashed hair and stale urine.

  “Tell me about your mother.” I refolded the note and counterfeit birth certificate and placed them back in the envelope.

  “You are my mother.” He said it so matter-of-factly that my head spun.

  “Oh.” I closed the door.

  “Sweetie said you will take care of me. That you are my mother. She always said she will bring me to my mother someday. And here I am.”

  “Here you are.” I had trouble breathing. “Where do you live?”

  “In a tall wigwam,” he said. “With Auntie Sweetie.”

  I felt like I was talking to Flying Deer from the Kästner book, Emil and the Detectives. He too, spoke as if he’d ridden out of a cowboy movie from America. I tried to ignore the sense of unreality and focused on my most important objective: returning him to his real mother. “What is Sweetie’s full name?”

  “Sweetie,” he said slowly. “Pie.”

  “Where does Sweetie Pie work?” I stepped out of my shoes and lined them up next to the front door. Slipping off my coat, I folded it carefully in half and hung it over the back of a kitchen chair. Order seemed important all of a sudden.

  “She works under the moon,” he said. “She locks me and Winnetou in the wardrobe. We do not come out or make noise until morning.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “No matter what we hear,” he recited in a singsong voice. “We never come out or make a sound. The brave understands the importance of silence.”

  “Who is Winnetou?”

  He held up the bear by one greasy paw.

  I decided to ask only questions that led to finding his mother and getting him safely out of my apartment. “What does your aunt look like?”

  “Her eyes are blue and she makes her hair black. Like a raven. She wears tall green boots to work. With golden shoelaces.”

  A boot girl, like the one I’d seen with Francis. I did not know what the green boots meant, but I knew it was shorthand for a horrible perversion I did not want to think about. Had Ernst slept with a prostitute when he was fourteen? He had threatened to once, to make himself into more of a man. He’d said it after a ferocious beating at school. Perhaps the boy was his child, from some ill-fated and probably short assignation.

  Did the prostitute I saw with Francis know her? There were many places to buy a boot girl in Berlin. Prostitution was rampant since the Great War. I had middle-class friends who turned tricks for food money in 1923. I had been lucky to have avoided it, grateful for the newspaper and the American’s love letters.

  His mother must have a pimp. “Do you have an uncle?”

  “No.” He hugged his bear close. “Thomas has an uncle, but I don’t. His uncle hits his mother.”

  “Do you know how to get home?”

  He looked down at his dirty shoes and shook his head. “We took many trains.”

  He was so small and pale and drawn. Ernst had never been so thin. I relented, even though I knew that I would regret it, and probably soon. “Have you eaten today?”

  “I ate yesterday.” He bit his lip, but stared bravely into my eyes.

  “You can have a bite to eat.” But then I will have to send you out again, I thought. Surely your mother will come for you. If not, how do I find her? How do I find a woman my brother might have slept with six years before?

  I led him to the sink and instructed him to wash his hands. He wet his hands with cold water and vigorously rubbed my Elida Queen soap between them, occasionally lifting his hands to his mouth and blowing lather into the sink. He squirted the soap from one hand to the other, smiling.

  I lit a fire in the stove. While the stove warmed I slipped into the bedroom and changed out of my evening gown and into a worn housedress. As raggedy as it looked, I felt worse.

  I poured Mitzi and Anton milk and cooked the boy an omelet with the onion, cheese, and eggs from my pantry. I’d hoped to get two or three meals out of them for myself. I put the omelet and a roll on a plate and fetched the scrap of butter from where I kept it cooling on the windowsill.

  “Are you done washing your hands?” I asked.

  He dropped the soap in the soap dish with a thud and dried his hands. He had a high-water mark of clean white skin halfway to his elbow that contrasted with the filth on the rest of his arm. “Yes, ma’am.”

  I gestured toward the table. “Sit and eat.”

  Staring at me with anxious eyes, he gulped his food as if I might snatch it away from him. His thin hands trembled. My heart went out to him. So many children were malnourished in Berlin. He looked like a Käthe Kollwitz lithograph, from the series she’d done of starving children and mothers.

  “The food is only for you, Anton,” I told him gently. “Eat more slowly or you will be ill.”

  He ate with exaggerated slowness.

  I wanted to hold him in my arms and tell him he was safe. Instead, I pulled my old wooden laundry tub from the corner and filled it with warm water and fetched a washcloth and my bar of soap, which had shrunk from his handwashing session.

  He stared at me with big round eyes.

  “Time for a bath,” I said.

  “In the bowl?” He pointed at the laundry tub on the floor. I’d put it close to the stove, so he would not get a chill.

  “It’s called a tub,” I said. “Please get undressed and climb in.”

  “Will I slip under and die? The brave can’t swim.”

  “No,” I said. “The tub is very small, and I will hold your head until you feel safe.”

  He took off his filthy shirt and pants. Angry red flea bites peppered his arms and legs. His clothes must be infested too. “I will have to burn your clothes.”

  He seemed unconcerned as he squirted the soap from one hand to the other. “Do you have new skins for me to wear?”

  “We will find something.”

  He climbed in the tub, and I scrubbed the grime caked on his wrists, elbows, and knees. When I ran my fingers through his greasy hair, I saw nits. He had lice. “Soak here,” I said. “You have lice biting your head.”

  After I dropped his clothes in the stove, I washed his head with kerosene kept for my emergency lamp. “Keep your eyes closed, Anton,” I said. “This will burn, but it will kill the lice.”

  I knew that it burnt his head, but he did not struggle or protest.

  I rinsed his hair again and again, lifted him out of the water, and wrapped him in a towel warming next to the stove, reminded of Ernst’s days as a little boy. I pursed my lips. I was not his mother. All I could do was fix him up and send him back to her. That was all I had the right to do.

  I sat him on a chair and cut his hair as close to his scalp as I could, then carried the clippings to the stove and burned
them.

  “Can I hold Winnetou?” he asked. “Please.”

  “He must have a bath too.” I dunked him in the laundry tub. I saturated him with kerosene and let him soak, then rinsed him thoroughly. When the harsh kerosene smell dissipated a bit, I set him next to the stove to dry.

  “He will dry tonight,” I said. “And be fresh and clean for tomorrow.”

  “But how will I sleep?” he asked.

  “In the bed.”

  “I can’t sleep without Winnetou.” He sniffled. “He protects me.”

  I lifted his light bony body and set him on my lap. “We will wait for him to dry, Anton,” I said. “Right here.”

  He turned his face to my dress and sobbed. “Thank you,” he said between sniffs. “I don’t want to be a rude boy. Please don’t hit me.”

  I pulled him back to see his tear-streaked face. “I will not hit you,” I said. “Ever. I do not hit children.”

  His eyes widened in disbelief.

  I told him the story of Little Red Riding Hood while combing nits out of his hair. He fell asleep before Little Red Riding Hood reached the grandmother’s house. I combed out all of the nits and carried him to my bed. I dressed his limp, sleeping form in an old shirt of Ernst’s from my sewing bag. Ridiculously long, it flopped down below his knees, but it smelled clean.

  I wanted no more surprises, but the time had come to open the box Rudolf had given me Monday afternoon. I rubbed my gritty eyes. I longed for sleep.

  Instead, I pulled back the cardboard flaps. Inside was Mother’s black lacquer Chinese jewelry case. When I opened it, I found a long, red-beaded necklace, the kind that flappers tie around their necks. Ernst had made it himself, stringing and then crocheting the string of beads. It was different shades of red, from deep burgundy to pale pink. I pulled out a choker of what looked like large diamonds set in square onyx beads. Very geometric. There were four small bracelets, one with large diamonds and onyx, the others all simple diamonds. If they were real, they could have fed Ernst for years. Any one piece would have paid for Sarah and Tobias’s tickets to America. They looked sumptuous, but I suspected they were fake. As much as he loved precious things, Ernst always lost them.

  Underneath the lacquer case was a neatly folded red silk dress, a pair of burgundy women’s underwear, and a red handkerchief. I brought the handkerchief to my nose and breathed in the scent of lavender orange Kölnisch Wasser. The scent Ernst sprinkled on his handkerchiefs to smell fresh. A tiny lead soldier fell out of the corner of the handkerchief.

  I held the cold captain in my palm. It was part of his lady battalion, although I’d not known he kept this one. Ernst had painted it when he was seven and glued on scraps of cloth to make a dress. The Kaiser’s soldier wore a purple dress over his proper uniform and a wide-brimmed straw hat covered his Prus sian helmet. Ernst showed amazing artistry, even then.

  I remembered what had happened when Father found the soldiers, so long ago. I had moved out of the house when Walter died, taking my unused trousseau and my parents’ disapproval with me. Back then I still came home every Sunday night to cook dinner for the family and to try and keep Mother sober enough to eat it.

  From the kitchen I heard Father roar, “What have you done?”

  I busied myself dropping dumplings into boiling water. Father had the right to yell at Ernst, to beat him as he had Ursula and me.

  “Soldiers should not be defiled,” he bellowed, and I wondered what could have gone wrong. Ernst had no interest in soldiers.

  I listened to the slap of Father’s belt striking Ernst until I could bear it no longer and ran down the hall, not certain what I would do when I reached the room.

  Father had Ernst bent over the bed and struck his bare bottom with a belt. Ernst lay silent and stoic. He had learned early to take his punishments in silence, although if Father had ever looked at him, he would have seen the rage that blazed in his eyes.

  “General Heinrich called,” I lied. “You are to report to him at once.”

  Father put his belt on and walked out the front door without a backward glance. He could not ignore a direct order from his general.

  I gathered Ernst in Mother’s smelly bedclothes and carried him back to my tiny apartment. He never made a sound. When I tucked him into my bed, I noticed that he clutched three painted lead soldiers. Later, he told me that the one in the purple dress was named Mirabelle.

  Until Father came to retrieve him the next week, he spent most days on his stomach in my apartment wearing an old pair of my underpants, cutting movie stars out of Film Woche magazine. His bottom was so swollen that he could not wear pants or go to school. While he cut out pictures I read him his Karl May books. May wrote about the American Wild West, and Father loved his Winnetou character. Winnetou was an Apache brave, a strong and faithful warrior. Until Father died, he gave Ernst a leather-bound Karl May book every year for his birthday and for Christmas. They were very popular books for German boys, and he had hoped, in vain, that reading them would teach Ernst how to be a man.

  I invented the Code of Manliness and drilled Ernst on it every day. I tried to list everything that he should and should not do in order to avoid Father’s wrath. I taught him how to play with soldiers like a boy. He learned it all, but he believed none of it.

  I turned Mirabelle over in my hand, wondering how long it had taken Ernst to transform her from Prus sian soldier to proper lady. I imagined his chubby fingers cutting purple cloth for her dress, wondered where he had found such a tiny straw hat. I set Mirabelle on the table. He had kept her for a dozen years, until the little lead soldier had outlasted him. I had outlasted him too. But I was the elder sister, the one who was supposed to be first in everything, but most especially in death. I missed him, and that was all I would ever have: his absence. I wept into the silk handkerchief, inhaling my brother’s comforting scent.

  But eventually I had to stand up, tidy the kitchen, and stumble off to bed. Holding Anton’s tiny sleeping body reminded me of the times I’d held Ernst in this same bed after he cried himself to sleep on nights Father came home drunk and angry.

  I tightened my arms around Anton. I knew he should not stay with me. Look how Ernst turned out. Dead in a gutter. I had failed to protect him from Father, and I had failed to protect him from his killer. Perhaps Anton’s real mother missed him, would come back for him anyway. Perhaps this was a scam to extort money from Ernst, who surely was no more the father than I was the mother. Watching Anton eat, I did not know how I could afford to feed him. When I dropped my chin to the top of his head, I smelled kerosene. I had no claim on this child. But I wanted one.

  Father had often reproached my sister and me when we were children. “You will never carry on my name. All that I am will die with me.”

  But when I was eleven, Mother became pregnant for the third time, and Father felt hope again. He pampered her with her favorite foods and watered the sherry. “It will be a son,” he said in the bellow he used to shout commands across the parade ground. “I’ve waited long enough.”

  I hoped for a younger sister, but I did not contradict him. Later I followed Mother into the tiny patch of a garden that she created no matter where the army posted Father. The sun gleamed, and she wore a broad-brimmed straw hat with a blue ribbon to match her new maternity dress. She trimmed a branch from her favorite red rosebush. “You must always cut off the first blooms before they become full blown,” she said. “Or the bush will not make more.”

  I nodded and gingerly took the thorny stem from her hand.

  “How does Father know the baby is a boy?” I smelled the heavy fragrance of the rose and the lighter, green scent of the cut stem.

  She laughed, a musical sound that I rarely heard. She stood and caressed her belly with one graceful white hand. “He doesn’t know,” she said. “He only hopes. He said the same when I carried Ursula and you. As if his loins could only produce male children.”

  I looked at her in shock. “So Father is wrong?”

&nbs
p; “About everything,” she said, not laughing now. She tucked her beautiful golden curls behind her ears and turned back to her roses. “Everything of consequence.”

  Mother’s belly ballooned, and Father strutted around like a rooster, trying out boys’ names. Ernst, Konrad, Hans, Adolf.

  I could not wait for my new sister, as I was convinced the baby would be. I wanted to usher her into a world not wholly determined by Father, but when the day arrived Father sent me to my friend Bettina’s house. Ursula was allowed to stay home with our parents, and our grandmother came from Heidelberg to help. I loved Bettina and her quiet, happy family and had secretly always longed to live with her, but now I yearned to be home. Every day at school I quizzed my sister for news of the baby.

  Father had been correct. I wanted to meet my new brother, but I was not allowed home for a full month, not until after our grandmother left to take care of our sickly and querulous grandfather.

  I dashed to our parents’ bedroom, my feet skimming the polished oak floors. The green velvet curtains were drawn, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I could not yet see Ernst, but I could hear him. He squalled so loudly I could not believe such a huge sound came from that tiny bundle of blue flannel held so loosely by Mother.

  I lifted him out of her outstretched arms and held him close to my face to see him in the dim light. I fell irretrievably in love in that first instant. Ernst was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. He had long blond hair, even then, and mysterious blue eyes that later darkened to a soft brown, like a pony’s. He knew I loved him more than anyone else did. He quieted, clutching my little finger and staring into my eyes with complete trust.

  Mother looked pale, drawn, and drunk. Another one of her bad spells, probably brought on by some cruel action of Father’s. “Take him away.” She rolled over and went to sleep.

  I bore him out of that room, away from the smell of sweat and sherry. “Father,” I said. “He must have a nurse for when Ursula and I are in school.”