The Kingdom of Childhood (6 page)

He tore away from me and in an instant was standing beside the worktable, hands folded over his face, rubbing as if to force himself awake. I followed more slowly, my shaking hands and legs providing unsteady support. The high and open space around me seemed foggy at the corners, surreal. I asked, “Who’s that?”

“My mom.” Turning toward the door, he called, “Hold on a sec, I’ll be right there.” He sank onto a stool and, setting his elbows against the table, dropped his head into his hands and groaned.

“What’s she doing here?”

“Picking me up. She’s right on time.” With a deep sigh, he rummaged in his backpack, pulled out his thermal shirt, and tied it around his waist. Then he clawed his hand back through his hair and uttered a grunt of disgust.

I stood a good distance away, out of sight from the door’s rectangular window. My arms, crossed tightly over my chest, shook steadily. I felt sick with gratitude that I had not bothered to unlock the door from the inside. Gratitude to whom, I had no idea.

For the first time since the noise at the door, Zach looked at me. Inwardly I winced at the frankness of his large eyes, his gaze still a little uneven. He gave a short laugh and said, “Seeya.”

“’Bye.”

He shouldered his backpack and hopped down off the stool, his posture a bit bent under the weight. He pulled open the door and, with a muttered greeting to his mother, was gone.

I forced my quivering knees to guide me over to the stool where he had been, and, teeth chattering, carefully sat in the imaginary haze of his warmth. I looked at the tools still strewn around, then at the playhouse, where the sawdust on the floor swirled into whorls where our knees had been.

With an awful darkness clouding my mind, I thought:
What have I done?

1965
Mainbach, West Germany

The line of evergreens lay beneath a cold blue sky, cloudless despite the snow-covered earth below it. At the top of the hill Judy exhaled hard, her breath blurring the scene before her, the flocked fabric of her scarf moist with condensation.

“Go on,” said Rudi. “All by yourself. Exciting!”

She shook her head.

“Just one time.”

She shook it again. “Not without you.”

He sighed and laid down the toboggan. She climbed on and grabbed the string, and he nestled himself in behind her, his legs in his butternut canvas trousers firm along hers. He wrapped his gloved hands over her mittens and, chest thumping against her back, surged the sled forward. Cold wind shocked her face, and she screamed with pleasure.

Toward the bottom he hit an icy spot, banked right, and again they tumbled out into the snow. His weight against her
was brief but reassuring as a thick wool blanket. As he staggered to his feet he laughed and reached for her hand, and despite all her obstructing layers of coats and wraps she felt weightless, no less so with his arm around her shoulders than when he pulled her up from the ground.

“Let’s go home,” he suggested. “Get warm.”

They trudged back to the farmhouse, through the cold silence of winter. Her legs felt numb where the snow had melted through her tights. With sidelong looks she studied Rudi’s face: the pink flush of his cheeks, the nubbled sheared wool that lined the earflaps of his cap, the way his hard steady breathing revealed his crooked canine teeth. When they passed beneath a tree beside the barn, a scurrying squirrel knocked a branch’s worth of snow onto their heads, and she laughed.

“Hang your coat on the nail,” said Rudi. Inside the house it was so warm her bones ached with the sudden contrast. Nevertheless she approached the woodstove with outstretched hands, exhaling a slow breath of relief at the draw of the fire.

“Your tights are wet,” he observed. “Take them off, or you will get sick.”

“I’ll be cold walking home.”

“We will let them dry by the fire. Your boots as well.”

She sat in a chair and looked around the kitchen as she tugged off her boots. The walls were lined with wooden cookie molds, carved with designs she recognized. A heart encircled with flowers. Adam and Eve beside a tree. The Musicians of Bremen, stacked like a pyramid. Even Struwwelpeter, his blank eyes less haunting without color.

“Who would want to eat a cookie shaped like Struwwelpeter?” she asked.

Rudi grinned. “In my grandmother’s time they made them. A treat and a punishment all together.” He watched
her struggle with her tights, then sat on the floor before her and helped pull them off. Wrapping his toasty hands around her toes, he grimaced. “Like ice cream. So cold.”

“They sting. Maybe I have frostbite.”

He rubbed them between his hands and cocked his head. “What is frostbite?”

“When your toes turn black and fall off from the cold.”

“Ah.
Erfrierung.
No, I don’t think.” He stood and washed his hands at the sink, then poured himself a cup of coffee. “Would you like Ovaltine? Or a cookie?”

She accepted the cookie from him and sat swinging her legs, stretching her toes. As the milk warmed he shrugged out of his suspenders, pulled off his shirts, and hung them on chairs by the woodstove: a button-down, a thermal, and finally a cotton undershirt. His suspenders lay in a tangle at his hips.

Slowly she ate her cookie and watched Rudi prepare her Ovaltine. Experience had taught her Germans were immodest by her American standards, but Rudi half-naked still came as a shock to her. He was a man like her father: hairy around his navel and under his arms, smooth across his chest and unashamed to be shirtless. When he turned to face her she looked down, embarrassed, and paid attention to her spice cookie.

“Why is the bottom white?” she asked, turning it over so he could see it.

“So it won’t stick to the pan,” he explained. “We call it in German
oblate
. They are the same as at church.”

“I don’t go to church.”

He looked mildly surprised. “It is the same as the Body of Christ blessed by the priest. But of course these are not blessed, or it would be a sin. So you can eat it for a cookie, and there is no sin.”

She considered this idea and felt a mild thrill. Many times her family had visited historic churches, admiring the architecture and the artwork, but stopped short of participating in the religious rites that amused her father so. Now she was getting a taste of the mysterious white wafer the Germans approached with such veneration, slipped into her afternoon snack like a comic into a schoolbook. It seemed starchy and plain, but the dark spice of the cookie made it quite palatable. She accepted her cup of hot Ovaltine from Rudi and drank deeply.

He retreated to his place beside the counter and sipped his coffee. The scene struck her as being almost like that of a husband and wife, silent in their kitchen together. She imagined her Ovaltine might be coffee, and the limp crocheted dishtowel her own handiwork, and the bare-chested man beside the stove her husband, warming up after a day of work on the farm. Because if she could choose any husband in the world, of course it would be Rudi.

“The animals must be getting very cold,” she said, in tentative German, like a concerned housewife.

He offered her an indulgent grin. In German he replied, “They’ll be fine. They stay warm by their own body heat.”

“Even when they sleep so far apart?”

“Yeah. There’s not much warmer than a barn in the winter, especially if you’ve got as many animals as we do. And in the summer it’s hotter than Hell.” He pursed his lips, gazing at her as if to evaluate her level of understanding. Then he added, “You’re getting very messy, Judy. Come here.”

She stood and heard a shower of crumbs hit the floor. Suddenly she felt the stickiness of Ovaltine above her lip and crumbs at the corner of her mouth. Some grown-up housewife
she
had been, covered in food like a toddler. She felt a wave of shame.

From the distant airfield a sonic boom rumbled like thunder, shivering the measuring spoons on their nail. Rudi turned on the tap and ran his hand beneath the hot water, then rubbed it against her mouth, the fingers of his other hand gently cupping the back of her head. “There,” he said in English. “All clean now.”

She knew what was next: he would tell her that her tights were dry and it was time to go home, and then she would be alone again, with only her mother growing fragile as a drying flower, ready to crumple to dust at the lightest touch. Impulsively she threw her arms around Rudi’s waist and buried her face in the soft spot below his ribs, with the warmth and the smell of him to blind and to smother her.

“There, there, now,” he said, his voice ever so uneasy. “You can always come back tomorrow.”

At the beginning of March the Chandler family piled into the navy-blue Mercedes and drove to Munich to see the Fasching parade. The jubilant crowds gathered along the streets and waved cardboard noisemakers in a rainbow of colors. Men wore masks with spindly noses and twisted smiles, their eyes vanishing into shadowed holes. Grown women dressed like babies, in pacifiers and bonnets, while clowns towered high above on stilts. It was as though Judy had entered a nightmare world in which all of the adults had gone awry. Her father bought her a rabbit-ear headband and a donut filled with orange marmalade, which she ate slowly as the floats and revelers passed by. Everywhere it smelled like beer.

They walked to a churchyard set up with booths for a children’s carnival, with face-painting and games. Balloons attached to the tables batted in the March wind, their tethering ribbons twisting together. A lady brought out a sheet cake divided into squares and asked each child to choose one.
Judy bit into her square and found a lima bean inside. The lady clapped and told her that meant she was the Queen of Fasching. Another lady painted her face with a bunny nose and whiskers to match her headband. Then they got back into the Mercedes and drove home.

“It’s what they used to do in the old pagan days,” explained her father as they accelerated onto the Autobahn. “They baked a cake with a nut hidden in it, and whoever chose that piece got to be the tribal king for a year.”

“That’s pretty lucky.”

“Not as lucky as you’d think. After a year they sacrificed him to their gods and sprinkled his blood onto the earth.”

Judy turned the lima bean over in her hand. “Oh.”

“Maybe we’ll skip the Fasching parade next year,” her father added. “Just in case.”

She smiled. She loved these Saturdays: the hikes in the mountains, the visits to elegant castles, the meandering tours of medieval streets during which she could hang on her father’s hand. His breezy humor made her feel light and safe, after the everyday dread of her mother’s rigid order. She accompanied them on these trips but stayed very quiet, almost as if she had left her mind at home. Home, where a pencil carelessly left in a side table drawer provoked a fit of shaking, impotent hysteria, as though Judy had accidentally punched through a thin membrane and left her mother hemorrhaging sanity onto the living room floor.

“Moo cow,” said her father. “Look out your window, Judy. There’s a calf. First I’ve seen all season.”

She glanced at the baby cow with mild interest and thought of the one in Rudi’s barn. Now that the days were growing longer again, she had returned to visiting him in the afternoons before supper. She changed from her Mary Janes to her green rubber rain boots, filled her backpack with her
homework books and thick beeswax crayons and a fountain pen, and clomped down the road to the barn. She kept an eye out for his sisters: Daniela, who would shout at her in bell-voiced, barely comprehensible German, and Kirsten, older than Rudi and recently graduated from school, who tended to bustle around collecting eggs and sweeping the walk. Judy preferred her time with Rudi to be private. If she came at the right time she would find him sitting on the milking stool with his head halfway under the cow, legs sprawled wide in a careless display of male confidence.

Sometimes he grinned and squirted her with milk straight from the udder. Sometimes he gave her corn to scatter for the chickens, or the balls of wool collected from bits caught in the wood of the sheep pens. High above on the barn wall hung a crucifix, which he paid no mind, as though living beneath the twisted body of Christ were the most natural thing in the world. Rudi was right: even when deep snowdrifts lay outside, the barn was as warm as a bedroom. Before milking, Rudi grabbed a shovel and energetically mucked out each stall. Judy sat on a makeshift bench of straw bales, her knees pulled up beneath her skirt, and allowed her clear mind to absorb the image: a crucifix, Rudi and cow shit.

It was all so plain and bare, the life in the barn. The wool was greasy because it was made that way, the corn she threw to the chickens dusty by its nature. The animals ate, then shat where they stood, because that was what animals did. There was no hidden reason for anything at all, nothing inscrutable or perplexing. It was the opposite of her own life, over which she was trying hard to pull a curtain of normalcy. Her mother had begun flicking every light switch three times. If a crust of food remained on a plate, she threw all the dishes back in the sink and started over. When she opened her weekly package from the butcher and it contained an extra chicken leg, she fell
into a chair, mute and sweating, breathing through her flared nostrils like a fish tossed to the bottom of a boat. Toward the end of March, Judy’s father sent her to the psychiatrist.

Three days a week she had to go to Augsburg Air Base for treatment. Because her husband was important, they sent a car for her. For the first week they left Judy alone in the house, but the laundry stacked up and gave her mother panic attacks. At that point her father walked down to the house beside the barn and inquired, in his German that was quite clear and good, about hiring Rudi’s sister, Kirsten, as a domestic. Judy watched through the window as the two fathers discussed the specifics. She eyed the young woman who stood beside them with her hands folded behind her back: a tall girl, thin but wide-hipped in her flared knee-length skirt, with blond hair in two braids that crossed at the center of her crown. A deal was struck, and she shook John Chandler’s hand with a solid wag of her arm that struck Judy, trained by a father who cared about such things, as a bit unrefined.

The young woman, Judy soon discovered, was very capable. She managed things just as Judy’s mother did, airing the duvets and keeping the birdcage clean, folding her father’s shirts like a shelf display at J.C. Penney. She visited on the days Judy’s mother had treatment, and on those days she always set some dish to simmer in the Dutch oven for their supper—pork chops with syrupy apples, beef stew flecked with little golden
spätzle.
She tutored Judy in German as she went about her work, and as she cooked she played American hit music on the radio. For the first time in Judy’s memory, her home was filled with delicious scents and cheerful melodies, and on Kirsten’s workdays she looked forward to coming home after school. Each day stood in contrast to the next, because in between the afternoons of the Beatles and veal cutlets with lemon slices, there were those in which the silence echoed
in her ears, the tension gathered in each room as though the air had not stirred for hours, and her mother sat at the table alone eating leftovers from the refrigerator. Gone was the old mother, slim and lovely with her Jackie Kennedy bouffant, and in her place was a new one whose teased hair looked like an accident and whose backside filled the entire chair. It was because of the lithium, her father told her, privately. Judy wasn’t sure what it was, but the word sounded like something very light. She pictured a pink helium balloon floating into the sky, its string trailing. It sounded like something that would be good for her mother, to feel effortlessly lighter, skipping through her chores with her feet barely touching the ground. But instead, her mother only grew heavier. She sat in the orange-print armchair covered with clear plastic, sipped from a cup of coffee, and watched television shows in German. Her hands shook slightly, and sometimes the coffee sloshed onto the chair cover.