Ashes (10 page)

I looked around the bakery to try and see if anyone else seemed shocked or disturbed, but their expressions were unreadable. I didn't know what to do. My first instinct was to flee the shop, but Mama had put in a big order and I was to pick it up. Steinhoff's was the only baker in town. Baba was arriving for a couple of days' visit and some neighbors were coming for dinner.

“What can I do for you,
mein kleiner Schatz
?” It was my turn. I swallowed. And looked down at my sandals.

“My mother's order, please.”

“Oh yes, of course, sweetie.” He turned and shouted into the kitchen, “Frau Professor Schramm's
Gugelhupf
!” Then he turned to me again. “And I believe some strudel, too, she ordered. Right?”

“Yes, sir.”

As he wrapped up the strudel, he smiled at me. “Ahh, what a pretty little thing you are with your blond braids. I always say”—he turned to another customer who was looking in the pastry case—“that this little one reminds me of the
Volkspuppen
, you know the sunflower dolls for the
Sonnenblummenfest
. You should wear a dirndl for our sunflower parade.”

“I hate parades,” I muttered, thinking of the goose-stepping and drunk Brown Shirts I had seen when Uncle Hessie and I left Berlin.

“You what? Naw. The
Sonnenblummenfest
parade is one of the oldest folk parades of the region. You could be our sunflower princess with those blond braids.”

“Put it on Mama's charge,” I said and, taking the boxes of baked goods, I left the shop.
Parade! Never!

First the perfectly good word
Volk
, then parades, and now even braids. Me a perfect sunflower princess, a
Volksprinzessin
. What would be ruined next? I must tell Mama, I thought, that we cannot buy from Steinhoff's anymore. There was a bakery in Potsdam that wasn't far, and I vowed that I would never ever eat another bite of Steinhoff's
Mutti Brötchen
. No more rolls. Fresh bread had in a matter of seconds turned rancid. Like Huck, I guessed I wished that I'd never come ashore.

 

 

“Your mama and Frau Blumenthal are down by the lake,” Hertha said as she took the bakery goods from me. I must have looked at Hertha oddly, for she immediately said. “Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing.” But in fact I wondered if there had been a slight edge, a sneer perhaps, in Hertha's voice when she said Baba's very Jewish-sounding last name. Was I going crazy? Imagining things all because of that horrid man Steinhoff? It wasn't fair of me to put Hertha in the same boat, was it?

I rushed upstairs to change into my bathing suit from last summer. I was saving my new one for when Rosa came to visit. We had bought them together earlier in the spring. But first I got the scissors from Mama's sewing basket. I went into the bathroom and looked at my face. All right, so no one would mistake me for Joan Crawford, but did I really look like
Volkspuppe
? A folk doll? I looped my braids onto the top of my head and attempted the infamous shoulder twitch that Rosa had so easily mastered. I squinted a bit, partly to look sexy, but partly so I could see myself more clearly. Mama was right. She said I had to get glasses before the start of the new term. Glasses would certainly diminish the folk-doll look, even if they would not enhance the Joan Crawford one. I let my braids drop and picked up the scissors. First I cut the left one off and then the right one. I blew a stream of air out through my lips making a blubbering sound. I felt better. More fit. Fit for anything except a parade!

After I got into my bathing suit, I ran straight out of the house across the lawn and jumped into the water. It felt wonderful. My head felt light and free. No slimy yellow snakes flopping about. Mama and Baba were floating on big rubber tires.

They were gabbing their heads off as usual. Baba was talking about a party that she had gone to that week, the Press Ball, and how someone named Magda Goebbels had worn an “atrocious” gown. “Absolutely atrocious, my dear. Fake silk. You'd think with how much Hitler admires Mussolini that she could go to Italy—Como—and get herself some fabulous silk. That's the best silk, of course, from Como. But no, she looked like a strumpet. She had better shape up, because they say that her husband is going to be made top minister in the Nazi Party. Joseph Goebbels will be the most powerful man next to you-know-who.”

I dived like a
Tümmler
—the animal, not the boat—around Mama and Baba and then I began to swim under them, tickling their toes. They were giggling and yelling.

“Don't splash, naughty girl! She swims like a fish, that one!” Then there was this terrible choking sound, followed by a big splashy plop.

“Elske! Elske!” Baba screamed. Mama was spluttering and coughing. “Gaby! Gaby!
Was im Gottes Namen
. . . ?
Dein Haar
!” Yes, my hair, what, in the name of God, was I thinking? What had I gone and done?

“I decided I need a new hairstyle, Mama.”

“That is not a style!” Baba said, her eyes bugging out of her head. That was true. I had been in such a hurry to cut off my
völkisch
braids that I had not even bothered to undo them. I had just chopped each one off at the scalp. Needless to say, there was probably a certain, well, a certain asymmetry. That was actually an understatement. In the back my hair felt as short as a boy's, but on the sides it hung down in tatters. The tatters were the only remnants of my
völkisch
braids, which my parents for the rest of the summer would treat like a holy relic.

“What ever possessed you?” Mama asked. She and Baba had immediately gotten out of the water and insisted I follow them up to Mama's and Papa's bathroom, where they would try to salvage the remnants of the hair left on my head.

“I'm not sure you want to know,” I said.

Mama glared at my reflection in the mirror. “Of course I want to know! What happened?”

So I told them the story of what had occurred at the bakery.

“That fool inspired you to cut your hair?” Mama was aghast.

“Don't use the word ‘inspired' with him, Mama. He's hardly an artist, even if you do like his strudel,” I shot back.

“We'll never go into the shop again. I won't buy a crumb of his lousy
Mutti Brötchen
,” she fumed.

Baba sighed heavily. “I agree you shouldn't patronize the shop, but that will hardly bring Gaby's hair back. Send her down to Berlin and I'll have Monsieur Marc try and do something with it.” She extended a finger toward a stubby hank that stood out at the top of my ears.

“Oooh!” I cried gleefully. I had never been to a real hair-stylist in my life.

“She can come with me when I leave,” Baba said.

“No!” Mama and I both said at once. Ulla and Karl were arriving two days after Baba left, and I really wanted to see Ulla. I knew it couldn't quite be like old times, since she would be with her boyfriend, but we could still sail and fish together. Ulla was better at fishing than I was.

“All right,” Mama said, “when Karl and Ulla leave, I'll send her down with them. Karl is driving. She can get her hair cut and see the eye doctor, too.” I felt as if I were a package of damaged goods being shipped off for an assessment, like an automobile that had had an unfortunate collision—could the chassis be straightened out? The dents hammered out of the fenders? And oh yes, a new windshield please! But at the same time, I felt terrific. No more folk-doll stuff for me. If I couldn't be Joan Crawford with my glasses, at least I would never be a
Volkspuppe
. I might appear slightly intellectual. Maybe I'd start a new style.

 

 

Later that afternoon when Papa came back from an errand and heard of the amputation, he ran upstairs and looked at the box with the braids that Mama had rescued from my waste bin. Then he stood on the landing holding them, groaning and whimpering as he looked at the gold streaming through his fingers, not quite believing that alas they were separated from the head on which they had grown.

“
Milchstrasse . . . Milchstrasse . . . Warum, warum . . . die kleine milchstrasse?
” The little Milky Way had been chopped off. I felt a bit bad then because in Papa's mind these were not the braids of some little folk doll that celebrated the sunflower festival in September, they were braids of starlight. But in the end they were
my
braids, and I figured I could do with them as I pleased, and if that meant cutting them off, I would. Papa did keep them, however. He folded them into thin layers of tissue paper, and Mama stuck them into a dresser drawer where they kept their freshly pressed handkerchiefs.

And for the rest of that summer it seemed like at least once a day each of my parents would run their fingers through my bangs or the hair on the back of my head where the braids had been, trying to hold on to what was once there—the gold that was now just stubble.

I love this white and slender body, These limbs that answer Love's caresses, Passionate eyes, and forehead covered With heavy waves of thick, black tresses.

-Heinrich Heine,
translated by Louis Untermeyer

 

 

 

 

“
A
personal request,” I said when we sat down at the table the night before Ulla and Karl arrived.

“What might that be?” Papa asked as he put some cauliflower, which I hated, on my plate.

“Can we not talk about my hair when Ulla and Karl come this weekend?”

“Of course,” Mama said. “What makes you think that would be a topic of conversation?”

I rolled my eyes.

“I don't know. Just don't bring it up, OK? Because with Karl coming and all, I just think there are more interesting topics of conversation, that's all.” The election was one topic. However, I didn't say so.

The Reichstag had been dissolved just before we left for Caputh, and new elections were coming. Would Hitler and the Nazi Party gain seats? That was all anyone was talking about on the streets of Caputh.

But Mama and Papa did not say much about the election or the happenings in Berlin. In the last two days, my braids' amputation seemed to command more attention. Was this a kind of denial on their part?
Let's not talk about Hitler. Let's talk about Gaby's hair instead. I think it's grown a little bit. Don't you think so, Otto? And oh yes, too bad about Hitler. So maybe he will gain a few seats in the coming election, but wasn't he just a passing fancy?

No, they did not really say all that. They just refused to talk about Hitler at all.

 

 

“
Mäusi
, your hair!” Ulla exclaimed. I had run out the back door as soon as I heard the car drive up. Of course I should have known that no one would have to say anything about my hair. It would be the first thing Ulla would notice.

“What did you do?”

“What does it look like I did?” I exclaimed.

Karl laughed hard at this. It made me like him. I had only met him once or twice when he came to the apartment to pick up Ulla, and he would only stay a minute or two. Karl had blond hair, nearly as blond as mine, but his eyes were a very dark gray. It was odd but they seemed opaque, maybe overcast like a sky with weather moving in. But he had a nice mouth and he laughed a lot, and he had a quick dimple that animated his face.

Although Ulla's hair was exactly the same as always, she looked in some way changed to me. I wasn't sure what it was. She carried herself differently. There was a languorous motion to everything she did, as if she was beyond getting too excited, beyond rushing. It was almost as if she had arrived at some milestone and was deeply confident, satisfied with herself. And it wasn't simply that she had indeed passed the examination she had flunked earlier. This went far beyond achieving a high mark—although she had done rather spectacularly and earned a 14 out of 15.

“Guess what, Gaby?” Karl asked.

“What?” I was pleased that he had directed a question to me right away.

“When we drove through the center of town, we saw that the movie
Emil and the Detectives
is playing.”

“It is? I can't believe it. I haven't seen it.”

“Let's go!” Karl said.

“Oh, Mama, can I?” Mama had just come around from the garden and to greet them. Her face was streaked with dirt.

“Sure, you can go.” She laughed. “Pardon my filthy appearance, Karl. I've been pulling weeds. They grow so fast once midsummer approaches.”

“There's a matinee tomorrow afternoon. We checked. I told Karl how much you loved the book,” said Ulla.

Emil and the Detectives
was one of my favorite books ever. The movie had come out last year but I had missed it in Berlin because I had measles. It's about a young boy, Emil Tischbein, who is robbed when he falls asleep on a train. Through very clever means, he and his friends manage to catch the robber.

 

 

By dinnertime Mama was cleaned up and in one of her prettiest summer dresses and Papa had put a cornflower in the buttonhole of his lapel. I wore a pair of trousers that I thought looked sort of like something Joan Crawford would wear, and had done what I could with my hair, which was not much. I was hoping the dinner might distract from any comments on my appearance. I had for the first time all summer caught not one but two silver bass.

Hertha brought in the platter with my extraordinary catch all decked out with parsley and thinly sliced lemon.

“Silver bass, how delightful,” Ulla remarked. “Delightful”—what kind of a word is that? Before she would have exclaimed, “Silver bass!
Wundervoll
, fantastic!” But now she seemed beyond such embellishments that marked unbridled enthusiasm. Instead she showed just this modest, cool note of appreciation. It irritated me a little bit. She knew how hard silver bass were to catch.