Child of the Journey

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Child of the Light (Book 1 of the Madagascar Manifesto)

Children of the Dusk (Book 3 of the Madagascar Manifesto)

Sol’s Song

What You Remember I Did
(with Melanie Tem)

"What is the price of five sparrows? A couple of pennies? Not much more than that. Yet God does not forget a single one of them."

--
Luke 12:6

April 1938

W
as there any vestige left of the girl-woman who had enchanted the boys that night in Kaverne, Miriam wondered, or had the shadow of these last years erased it all?

Tilting her head, she inspected herself in the ornate mirror of her childhood. She had twisted her hair into a dancer's chignon and decorated it with a sprig of lilac, as she had done the night she first met Erich and Solomon. Leaning closer to the mirror, she inspected the inevitable fine lines that proved the passage of the years. She was more than twice the age now that she had been then. How was that possible, when only yesterday she had been fresh and young and fifteen?

Yesterday, and forever ago.

Time was a vagabond, at once a memory saboteur and a comforter, like an eiderdown that keeps you cozy and warm while it makes you weep and your skin itch.

Here, alone in her old room at what had once been her family estate, she felt relatively safe. She was aware of the comings and goings of Erich's Abwehr colleagues, and of occasional visits by Hermann Göring and Paul Joseph Goebbels, but when she stood on her balcony and stared out across the gardens, she saw only the quietly suburban, upper-crust veneer of the Grünewald. Erich kept to his own quarters, rarely intruding upon her privacy except by invitation, and she had plenty of time for solitude.

An excess of time, probably, judging by how often she caught herself avoiding the present and dwelling on a past that was, at least for the moment, lost to her, and a future that had become increasingly inaccessible.

As if venting her anger on it would somehow help, she picked up her hairbrush and flung it across the room. It thudded against the wall, bounced on the carpet, and lay there like the inanimate object it was.

The futility of the gesture served only to increase her misery. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was attend a party honoring Adolph Hitler, she thought, contemplating her partially dressed image in the mirror. It would be delusional to believe that the Führer's birthday celebration would be anything but a stiff and formal dinner party, with nary a guest on the list who could provide her with either entertainment or intellectual stimulation.

So she had dallied too long. Now she was sure to be late, which would infuriate Erich, and cause the evening to turn out more unpleasant yet.

She retrieved her brush from the carpet and sat back down in front of the mirror, but instead of busying herself with the business of dressing, she allowed herself to drift sixteen years into the past, to a dinner party which had been anything but dull.

"Wenn der weisse Flieder wieder Blüht
," she sang softly, reprising the song from her memories of that night at Kaverne, the cabaret her grandmother had built in the converted basement beneath a fur shop. It was an unusual place for a nightclub, across the street from the block of flats where Erich Weisser and Solomon Freund lived, and next door to their parents' cigar shop. Only she had not known any of that at the time. Nor would she have cared if she
had
known. They were around twelve, going on thirteen. Mere
boys
. She, on the other hand, had been fifteen, just back from dance training in America, her head filled with visions of stardom. Still, she knew enough to be grateful to her grandmother, Oma Rathenau, and to what the social gossips called her grandmother's crusade to bring respectability to Berlin's entertainment industry. Nor did she resent the suggestion that the real purpose of the cabaret was to showcase her talents. Why not? She was the old lady's granddaughter and the niece of Germany's newly appointed Foreign Minister, not to speak of being the heir to the Rathenau fortune.

What would her life have been like now, Miriam wondered, had she not performed at Kaverne's pre-opening dinner party? There might have been no Solomon in her life. There certainly would have been no Erich, for it was there that she had met both of them: Solomon, clutching his cello and dressed as if for his own bar mitzvah; and Erich, hair slicked-back, wearing pressed trousers, a white shirt with starched, rounded collar, and his father's silk paisley cravat.

From strangers, to acquaintances, from friends to intimates. It was a strange, wonderful, and terrifying progression, fraught with the best and the worst that human nature had to offer.

Enduring the customary pain that accompanied even the most fleeting reminder of Sol, she opened one of the drawers of the tiny porcelain music box he had won for her in the ring-toss booth at Luna Park.

"Glühwürmchen, Glühwürmchen, glimm're....
Shine little glowworm, glimmer, glimmer...." The Paul Lincke song was one of Solomon's favorites, the first of the two songs she sang at Kaverne. There, for the first time, she met Erich. It was not until later that night that she actually met Solomon, Erich's brother-in-blood and, now, her dearest husband-of-the-heart.

How disappointed she had felt at the tepid applause of the audience that night, though it was what she had learned to expect from the Germans, disciplined, and so unlike the Americans, with their wild enthusiasms and their appreciation for youth and beauty.

Smiling at her instantaneous fifteen-year-old rebellion against the self-control of her audience,
she remembered...
.

...Tossing aside her shawl, she erupted into a cancan, whirling, kicking, repeating the routine until, with a suddenness calculated to send an ache through the groin of the shy-looking bespectacled young man who had just crept into the cabaret, and to shock the other boy who had risen to his feet and was clapping wildly, she dropped into a split. She was playing to him and to Solomon, and they both repaid her with naked adoration, staring at her as if she were the beautiful film star, Lilian Harvey, in the flesh.

Her diminutive uncle raised a black eyebrow and blew a perfect smoke ring into the air before applauding his favorite niece's performance. She smiled prettily at him and at her bejeweled old grandmother as the band began to play and couples gravitated toward the dance floor.

She approached her uncle's table. Having introduced herself to Erich's parents and exchanged a few pleasantries with them--the woman looked a little too nervous; the man, at best, uncomfortable, his nose red, as if he had been drinking too much, and his eyes hard--she glanced sideways at the boy. He was good-looking, not like either of his parents, yet he had his father's square jaw and his mother's light hair.
  

Miriam turned her attention to Solomon's family. His sister Recha looked like Goldilocks with a nose-cold. Her father looked nervous but proud, as did her mother, who had leaned over and whispered something in her husband's ear. His eyes flashed angrily behind his thick lenses as he turned toward Sol, who had finally stepped all the way into the room.

She looked from one boy to the other. How very different they seemed. She liked Erich's Aryan good looks but there was something about Solomon that appealed to the gentlest side of her. He looked sensitive. And
forlorn
.

Too late, she rose to speak to him, for he was following his father through the doorway.

Curious, Miriam followed them. Herr Freund had left the door slightly ajar. She pushed at it gently, let herself through, and found herself standing in the shadows at the top of a flight of stairs which led to a sub-basement.

She went down just far enough to be able to see Solomon and his father who stood arguing under a dangling naked light bulb.

Herr Freund clicked open an engraved gold watchcase that hung from a chain across his waist, wiped dust from his shoes with a Reichsbanner handkerchief he removed from the breast pocket of his pinstriped
Shabbas
suit, and reprimanded Solomon for keeping an important man like her uncle waiting. "Herr Rathenau is not merely an important man," Herr Freund said. "He is an important Jew."

"You are an important Jew, Papa." Solomon looked up. "You won the Iron Cross, First Class"....

She touched the Iron Cross that lay inside her music box, remembering how--a dozen years later--Solomon had removed it from the body of his dead father. Even now she gagged at the memory of the gentle and generous Jacob Freund, hanging upside-down in his own shop. Dead. Blue. Strangled with the war medal's cord...and her uncle also dead, victim of an assassin's grenade. Why were men of peace always targeted!

She clutched the Iron Cross in her palm, letting its sharp edges dig into her skin, the way Sol had done before he had handed it to her to keep in trust. For Sol it was an instrument of pride, of terror, of death. For her it was a reminder of Solomon and of all that she held most dear.

She shut that drawer of the music box and opened a second one. Carefully, as if it were made of butterfly wings, she took out her cigar-band wedding ring and slipped it onto her finger next to the ostentatious diamond Erich had given her. On an absolute basis she supposed it was quite extraordinary, but to her it was as synthetic as their mockery of a marriage.

If anything ever happens to me, go to Erich
, Sol had told her.
It is tradition that a man take care of his brother's wife.

She remembered the expression on Erich's face that childhood night in Kaverne, when she returned from eavesdropping on Solomon and his father. Strange, like a swimmer on the verge of diving into icy water. Stammering as he begged her to take a walk with him on the darkened streets outside. She had wondered if he always stammered under pressure, when he did not feel in control.

Her decision to do as he asked had been colored by the knowledge that Konnie, her chauffeur, was out next to the limousine, and would protect her.

Dear Konnie. After so many years of driving her uncle--driving her--around, he was at the beck and call of the boy she had teased that night.

That boy was a man now. A potent force in the Party--or so he told her. Still stammering when he lost control. But alive. As Konnie was alive. Not dead like her uncle and her grandmother, or half-alive, like her.