Kindergarten (21 page)

“I shall never forget the grief and anger of what I saw and heard in those years in Berlin before I left, and I can never forget what happened to all those I loved. It would be a betrayal to forget. All my love was with them, and I felt that my love died when they died. No one had the right to expect me to be wise and noble and understanding when they died, and died in such a way. I wanted to kill the whole world. If I had believed there could be a God who had allowed all that to happen to serve His purpose, a cleansing fire from which the world would emerge clean and ennobled as if by a flood, I would have hunted God down and destroyed Him. ‘This is what mankind is like.’ Yes, I thought all mankind was worthy of contempt for what had happened, and the cleansing flood has brought filth and fear into every person’s life.

“It is a Jewish custom, I think—this is something I have read, not something I have done or experienced; Jewishness is not something I know a great deal about—to leave a pebble at the graveside when you have visited the grave of someone you have loved, someone you love still, to show that you have been there and remembered him.”

Lilli thought for a moment.

“My family, I believe, died in Auschwitz, after being in Theresienstadt, some of them, and I know no graves where I could lay a pebble, but I think of the Polish memorial for the dead on the site of Treblinka. I have seen a photograph in a book: the little area where one million people were put to death. Flat fields surrounded by evergreen trees are there, and thousands of pebbles, stones, and rocks sweep through the fields in broad paths. Each pebble is not a person. Each pebble is a village, each stone a town, each rock a city, and their sizes show the numbers brought there to that place to be killed, from the villages, towns, and cities of Europe—all those men, women, and children, rich and poor, all those different languages converging on a tiny remote place in Poland. In the centre of the fields amidst the stones and pebbles is a rock like a mountain: the stone for the people brought there from Warsaw to be killed, one third of all the people in that city. I think of all those empty houses, all those deserted streets.

“I felt that the wolf was knocking at the door, and I had no stones to sew inside him. I wanted him to come through the door and destroy me also. I felt that I could never find any stones: there is only sand in a desert. But, in time, I did find pebbles to lay beside their graves, and tiny pebbles mount up until they outweigh any boulders you can find at the edge of a mountain. Instead of turning my heart to stone, the pebbles sank all my bitterness, and I remembered the good things with happiness.”

She turned to Corrie.

“Look again at the photograph. Do you notice anything about it?”

He answered at once, without even glancing at the photograph.

“It’s the same room as in ‘Godfather Death.’”

“Yes, but there’s more than that. Look at the plate in the centre, near the front. Look at the knives and forks. Think of your birthday cake.”

He looked at the plate in the photograph, and then went back to the table, carrying the photograph with him, and sat down.

It was the same plate as the plate on which his birthday cake stood, the plate that had been used for the Hansel and Gretel gingerbread house on Christmas Eve. The knives and forks they had used on Christmas Eve were the knives and forks in the photograph, with the letter “D” engraved on them in elaborate script.

“As things got worse for my family in Germany, they arranged to hide some of their possessions with friends who lived in the same street, a Christian family. Each night the neighbours came over with their baby granddaughter in her pram, and smuggled things back into their house in the pram, and hid them in one of their cellars. At the end of the war, a letter reached me from Germany, the first letter I had seen with a German stamp since the last letter I received from my mother. It was from the daughter of the woman with the pram, telling me she had possessions which were mine, kept safely for me. She and her husband and daughter came over to England to stay with Michael and me, and brought them with her. She told me that her mother had died in a concentration camp. She had spoken out against what was happening. She, with other Christians, had tried to help, tried to resist what was going on around them. ‘This is what mankind is like,’ Jo. There was a pebble there. I have the plates and the silver, and some of my mother’s jewellery, and I know of people who tried to stop what was happening in their street. They belonged to no organisation. They were just our neighbours saying that something was wrong and should not happen, and some of them died for believing this. God would spare a city for one righteous man, but there were many little candle flames in all that darkness.”

She picked up a book lying on the table beside her chair. It was
Children’s Voices
, the new English edition of
Kinderstimmen
.

“One of the poems in this book, the very first one I illustrated, is by a Jewish woman poet from Berlin. She taught deaf-and-dumb children. She was taken to Theresienstadt at about the same time as my family, and then to one of the camps, and killed. I don’t know—no one knows—when exactly she was killed, or where. She was taken to the concentration camp because she refused to leave her father when he was taken away. He was eighty years old. Her love for her father overcame everything else. ‘This is what mankind is like.’ There was another pebble there.”

She turned the pages in the book, until she was looking at the final poem.

“‘Will you sing ‘Auf meines Kindes Tod’ again for me, Jo, just as you did on Christmas Eve? The tune is so beautiful.”

Jo looked at Corrie.

“My cello’s in the Ferry House.”

“I’ll sing it unaccompanied, then.”

He stood up, and sang, his voice very true and piercing, the words that Corrie had set to music for “Hansel and Gretel.”

“Von fern die Uhren schlagen,
Es ist schon Liefa Nacht…”

“Do you know what the title of the poem means, Jo?” Lilli asked when he had finished.

“On the Death of My Child.”

“Do you know the meaning, word by word, of what you sang?”

Jo shook his head.

“Corrie wanted me to learn the German version for you. I only had a German edition to learn all the words. He explained what the poem was about. We looked at the painting.”

He indicated the painting of the empty cradle, the man and the woman sitting across from each other on either side of a fire.

“It is a poem I often thought about when I was first in England. I had put all my illustrations away. When I looked at the empty cradle in my painting, I thought of the little empty cradle I had brought with me out of Germany, the little children’s toy.”

She looked across at Corrie.

“Corrie knows exactly what the words mean. He has read the English translation. His music fits the mood so precisely, and he has been able to express the emotions of other people. Listen, Jo, these are the words for which Corrie wrote the music.”

Holding
Children’s Voices
, she read the translation, slowly and quietly, the words that went with the music Corrie had written for the song in “Hansel and Gretel,” the song for Florian and Dorothea Weisser.

“The clock strikes far away,
It is already deep in the night,
The lamp burns dimly,
Your cot is made
.

Only the winds still go on
Keening round the house.
We sit lonely inside
And often listen out.

It is as though you were
Going to tap gently at the door,
As if you had only lost your way
And were coming back tired.

We poor foolish people!
It is we who are still wandering,
Lost in the horror of darkness—
You have long ago found your way home.”

She passed the book over to Jo.

“They are beautiful words, and you wrote beautiful music, Corrie, but now it is only the first three verses that remain true for me. I cannot agree that death is where a child belongs, that a child is best out of the world, that death is the most comforting home for a child. We
are
wandering, we
are
lost in darkness, perhaps, in England, in Germany, over much of the world, but it is the children who will lead us out of this darkness, who will put an end to our wandering. With each child’s birth, they say, the world begins again, and it is you who must use your life in trying to find a way, trying to light that darkness. This is what I truly believe.”

She turned towards Jo.

“Will you sing again for me, Jo—in English this time?”

Corrie was still sitting at the table.

As Jo sang, Corrie looked at the painting of himself in the candle-light, and at the candle-light of the photograph, all Lilli’s family grouped around the table at the beginning of a meal. In “Godfather Death” the poor man had refused to allow God to hold his child as His godson at its christening because God left the poor to starve; rejected the Devil because he led men into evil; and chose Death as his child’s godfather because Death made all men equal, and made no distinction between rich and poor. When his godson was grown up, Godfather Death led him deep into the forest and gave him his present, the skills which would make him a rich and famous physician: a secret herb to cure ills, and the power of telling if a person was going to live or going to die. Whenever the godson was with a patient, Godfather Death would appear, and if he stood by the patient’s head, he would recover, but if he stood by the patient’s feet, that person belonged to Death and the godson was forbidden to use the herb to cure him. At the end of the story, after the godson had defied Death to save the life of a king’s dying daughter, Death took the young man deep below the surface of the earth into a cave where countless candles burned, millions upon millions of them, flickering, rising up, and dying away perpetually, the lights of the lives of all the people in the world, and showed him the candle of his own life, tiny and guttering, and when the young man pleaded with him to light a new candle for him, out of love, so that he could marry the king’s daughter and live the rest of his life in happiness, Godfather Death threw the little piece of candle down to the floor of the cave, so that it was extinguished and the young man belonged in the hands of Death for ever.

He remembered the candles of his birthday cake, and of Christmas Eve, when the fir-tree was covered with candles and the whole room swayed and swam with their flames. That was how they had staged the final scene of
The Winter’s Tale
. Leontes, Perdita, Paulina, and Polixenes moved silently towards the statue of Hermione in the chapel, hardly visible in the dark centre of the stage, beneath the white wood of the dying tree, behind the banks of unlit candles, and in a long sequence without any dialogue, as his music was played by the consort off-stage, as Jo began to sing, they took tapers, knelt before the statue of the wife who had died of grief, and stood to light the candles, one by one; and Hermione became bright and visible in the warm, shifting glow. After sixteen years of winter, a barren mountain and perpetual storm, tears shed daily at the grave of a wife and child buried together, Leontes’s wife returned to him from death, as music played, as the tree burst into blossom and fruit—a warm and living woman, candles lit to light all the candles that had gone out in their world.

A
LMOST
blinded with tears, Gretel stumbled towards the well, the water falling unheeded from her eyes. She tried to remember what her brother had said to her, to comfort her, when he was there beside her, and could speak to her, and give her courage. “God will not forsake us,” he had said. “Don’t believe that we can ever be totally abandoned.”

“Dear God, please help us,” she cried in her despair. “If the wild animals in the forest had torn us to pieces, at least we would have died together. I’m so frightened of being all by myself.”

“Stop that noise!” the woman sneered. “It won’t do any good at all. No one can hear you, and no one will come and help you. Your brother dies tomorrow.”

Early the next morning, when it was still dark, the woman made Gretel get up, light the fire, and hang up the cauldron full of water. Outside the windows, the snow was still falling.

“We will bake first,” the woman said. “I’ve already heated the oven, and the dough is all kneaded and ready.”

She took Gretel over to the oven, from which the flames were already darting.

“Creep in,” said the woman, “and see if it is properly heated for the bread.”

Gretel thought of her brother’s words, and then of her brother. She looked at the oven, and then at the woman, thinking rapidly.

“Into there?” she said. “Into the oven? How on earth can I do that?”

“You little fool!” said the woman. “Are you totally helpless? It’s easy enough for anyone, even a child. There’s plenty of room to get in through the door. Look, I’ll show you.”

She pushed Gretel to one side, and leaned forward into the oven.

“Like this,” she said, her head entirely inside. “Like this,” her voice echoing and hollow.

With all her strength, Gretel gave the woman a tremendous shove that knocked her right into the middle of the oven, and shut the iron door, and fastened the bolt.

The woman began to howl with pain and anger, but Gretel instantly ran out of the house, and the godless witch perished in the flames.

Gretel ran like the wind to the back of the house, through the deep drifts of snow to the little stable, to the iron cage where Hansel was imprisoned.

“Gretel?” Hansel called out when he heard someone approaching. “Is that you, little sister?”

Gretel flung open the door of the cage, crying, “Hansel, we are safe! The witch is dead!”

Then Hansel sprang out like a freed bird, and they flung their arms around each other, laughing and crying in their joy.

Hand in hand, they ran through the snow back into the house, and, in one of the rooms in the long corridor, found hoards of precious stones.

“These are a lot better than pebbles!” said Hansel, dropping them into the pockets of his coat until they were both crammed full, and Gretel filled her pinafore.