Ashes (3 page)

“I have enough for that.”

We walked two more blocks to the tram. Ten minutes later when the tram pulled up to the stop in front of the theater, we saw not a neat, orderly line of people buying tickets for the next show but a sea of brown.

“Schweine,”
I muttered as I looked out the tram window.

“Hush! Gaby! Don't go calling them swine,” Rosa whispered.

“Let's stay on for another stop,” I said quickly. There was no way I was getting off that tram. Not with those
Schweine
. There were not enough bad words.
Scheiss-Sturm
, the Shit Storm. That was what Papa called Hitler's private army, the
Sturmabteilung
, or SA. There was also the SS, the
Schutzstaffel
that functioned as Hitler's personal guard and had been established some years before.

“Why so many all of a sudden? I don't understand,” Rosa said.

“Look at the marquee,” I said. “It's not
The Blue Angel
playing. It's
All Quiet on the Western Front
.” I'd read the book. Papa said it was the best war book ever written. Very sad. Really antiwar. It was all about a young man, a soldier in the Great War. There was a lot of gory stuff about trench warfare—blood, dressing stations where the medics and doctors did field surgery, amputation of arms and legs. I didn't want to see the movie. I knew there would be parts I couldn't watch, and there definitely wouldn't be any glamour girls like Joan Crawford.

“But still, I don't understand,” Rosa said, looking out the tram window at the SA in their brown shirts milling about under the marquee. It wasn't a march, really. The men did not seem organized. But why were they there at all? “I thought they were supposed to have been banned, but Mama went with her friend for lunch at Ciro's and she said it was all Brown Shirts in there. Suddenly it seems as if they're all over the city.”

“I don't think it's all of a sudden,” I replied as the tram pulled away from the theater. “Last night we were listening to the radio and heard about Brown Shirts breaking up a synagogue service on the east side of the city. And Papa said there was no way the ban could be enforced, and the Brown Shirts would come back twice as strong.”

“Oh no,” Rosa said, and slumped down in her seat.

“Does your mother say anything about the Brown Shirts coming into the university, to her department?” I asked.

“Mama's department? Why would they ever? It's so boring. Classics. Nothing's changed in a thousand years.”

True,
I thought. Meanwhile everything in Papa's department of astronomy and astrophysics was changing almost every month. New discoveries, new technologies for measuring light, the orbit of planets, the trajectories of astral bodies . . .

“Look!” Rosa said. “We're almost at the zoo. Let's go there instead of the movies. We can get off here and walk the rest of the way.”

“Good idea.” I loved the zoo. Much better than a movie theater on a sunny day. We got off at the next stop. Only a short two blocks to the zoo. The blocks were good for shopping, and we lingered in front of a fancy dress store.

“You see,” Rosa said. “Shoulders—it's all in the shoulders.” There were three mannequins all wearing daringly tailored outfits that were nipped in at the waist, with shoulder padding that lent a powerful look to a woman's figure. Feminine but with uncommon force.

This was the Rosa Ebers theory of shoulders. She believed that Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, and all of our favorite movie stars had wonderful shoulders and they knew how to move them.

“Shoulders are much more important than the bosom.” Rosa spoke with a great authority that seemed at odds with her round, freckled face. “And now see how they are taking shoulders into account.” She was pointing at a mannequin with a long black skirt topped with a glittering silver jacket that looked slinky—like falling rain. “You have to have shoulders to wear that!” Rosa proclaimed. She began twitching her shoulders, right and then left, being careful to angle her chin just so. Her soft, springy brown curls bounced a bit. Rosa had me beat in the height and hair department. She was taller than me, and my hair was straight as a stick. I wore it in long braids that were more white than golden blond. Papa called them “
Milchstrasse
,” the Milky Way, because they were so bright.

“Ah, a pretty little vamp!” Someone laughed behind us. As I caught his reflection in the window, I felt a wave of nausea. A Brown Shirt. A higher-up one. Lots of ribbons and bars decorated his uniform. He was smoking a tiny dark cigarette. Or was it a cigar? I had never seen a cigarette this color. He was handsome. Angular jaw, very tanned skin, light brown hair. Just one feature ruined it. His eyes were like two tiny, dark, malevolent bugs, and they crawled over Rosa.

We grabbed each other's hands and started to run. His laughter followed us like tin cans tied to a dog's tail. The sound disappeared finally into the clank of the tram, the burble of conversation of the pedestrians, and the excited cries of children as they danced at the end of their mothers' hands in anticipation of the zoo. We said nothing about what the SA officer had said. To speak of it was to acknowledge it. We wanted to wipe those words and his image from our minds.

Finally we were at the zoo gates. Two stone elephants crouched in front of an ornate pagoda. We automatically went up and touched their trunks for good luck. This was not a tradition in a public sense, it was Rosa's and my tradition. We invented it. This time, I think we each gave the wrinkled trunks an extra pat. As soon as we passed through the gates we felt better. I liked the smell. The animal dung did not offend me. It reminded me a little bit of my Oma's house in the country in Austria, which was near a dairy farm. I liked the smell of real manure, not Storm
Scheiss
.

We spent the money that would have bought coffee on peanuts. It was more fun feeding the monkeys than trying to look grown up drinking coffee in a café anyway. We walked by the cage of an elderly lion, toothless now, with one eye filmy like my Opa's before he died. The lion keeper had told us he could not see anything really except maybe shapes and movement. Rosa and I had been visiting the lion for years. We believed he knew our voices. So we pressed up as close as we could to the cage and whispered to him. We were certain that once the lion had been beautiful. I had invented a life for him. In my mind, he prowled the savannahs of Africa a long time ago. He stalked through the long golden grasses, blending in so perfectly that his prey did not even know he was there until he was almost upon them. Then the gazelle, the eland, or the duiker would run. And Old Lion would begin to run like a golden comet come to Earth, stretching out sleek and fluid, devouring distance until he reached his prey. Now the lion keeper told us they only feed him mash with lots of vitamins.

In the
Raubtierhaus
, the house where the lions and tigers live, there was a photo studio where it was possible to have one's picture taken holding newborn cubs. There is a picture of me when I was four years old sitting on the sofa in the
Raubtierhaus
holding a cub. It was my birthday present. I had begged and begged for it. And this was when there was hardly enough money for bread, 1923, just a few years after the end of the Great War when every day the mark became worth less and less. One loaf of bread was said to cost five hundred thousand marks! But Papa worked out a deal with the photographer. In exchange for my picture, he supplied the photographer with some film from his own lab.

Rosa and I walked on. We looked for feathers shed by inhabitants of the birdhouse. Our favorites were flamingo feathers, but we had no luck this day. We lingered. We didn't want to leave. It felt comfortable here with the smells of fur and manure, the slightly more acrid odors of the birdhouse. There was a playground at the zoo, but at thirteen, we had grown too large for the swings, the monkey bars, and the jungle gyms. We were truly at an awkward age. Too big for the playground, too young for the cabarets. Our shoulders were not broad enough yet for fashion, and we had no bosom to speak of. So why did that SA fellow look at us with his venomous insect eyes? And why had
he
made
me
feel dirty? He was the dirty one, I thought. He was crap.
Him, not me
.

Suddenly a change passed over the tree. All the sun's warmth left the air. I knew the sky was black, because all the heat, which meant light to me, had died out of the atmosphere. A strange odour came up from the earth. I knew it, it was the odour that always precedes a thunderstorm, and a nameless fear clutched at my heart. I felt absolutely alone, cut off from my friends and the firm earth. The immense, the unknown, enfolded me. I remained still and expectant; a chilling terror crept over me.

- Helen Keller,
The Story of My Life

 

 

 

 

I
turned onto our street, Haberlandstrasse, after I had said good-bye to Rosa. Did I smell rain? I wasn't sure. I closed my eyes and sniffed. This was a small experiment that I enjoyed doing after I had read—well, almost finished reading—
The Story of My Life
by Helen Keller. I say almost finished because it, too, by route of a mathematics book, had found its way into Herr Doktor Berg's hands. I had only one more chapter to go when it was confiscated, and I had become completely fascinated by this woman who had gone blind and deaf at such a young age—less than two years old—and who could not speak. She was locked in a dark, soundless prison until a teacher named Annie Sullivan came along and taught her what language was. The first word Annie taught Helen was “water.” She spelled the letters W-A-T-E-R out with her finger in the palm of Helen's hand.
Water
, what an ordinary word. But at that moment it was as if those five letters illuminated everything for Helen. She describes her soul as awakening. She learned to read, to speak. She went to Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She became an author. But what intrigued me the most was how she unlocked the world of sight and sound through her other senses.

So as I walked I ran my left hand over the hedge that grew alongside the sidewalk and just like Helen Keller, I tried to feel my way home. I did smell a dampness in the air—a slightly metallic odor.
Is it a storm, or am I imagining this?
With my eyes closed tight I could see bright, squiggly threads. Then suddenly I saw brown, that sea of brown uniforms. Those milling SA officers had invaded my mind's eye.
Was that the storm?
I squeezed my eyes harder, willing away the scene I had witnessed earlier in front of the theater.

This reminded me of retinal fatigue, which I knew about from Papa and his studies of light. It had been proven that if a person stared at an image on a white screen for about thirty seconds and the image was then removed, its negative afterimage could be seen briefly. It had been demonstrated that this was due to the overstimulation of color receptors in the eye, which could cause them to become “fatigued.” Of course retinal fatigue happened immediately after an image had been removed and, luckily, I had not seen the brown shirts for many hours. But this was how I explained it to myself.

Suddenly I caught a sharp, acrid smell. Tobacco smoke, but not a cigarette, not a pipe. I instantly knew what, or rather whom, I was smelling. I smiled and kept my eyes shut a second longer, so sure I was right.

“Gaby?”

“Herr Professor!”

I opened my eyes just in time to see the ashes fall silently off the tip of Albert Einstein's cigar. “Papa said you came back just two days ago, right?”

Professor Einstein was both a colleague of Papa's at the university and a neighbor who lived just down the street from us. Of late he had been making many trips to the United States. Most often he visited CalTech, the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, which was close to Los Angeles—and to Hollywood!

“I did indeed.”

I scuffed the toe of my shoe softly against the sidewalk and felt the creep of color rising in my face. “And did you see the stars?” I looked up smiling. This was our joke, the professor's and mine. You see, near CalTech there is a huge telescope on top of a mountain.

Professor Einstein tipped his head up toward the sky. “Let me think. I saw Alpheratz. . . . I saw Sirius. . . . I saw Charlie Chaplin. I saw Mary Pickford. . . .” I must have wrinkled my nose. “And what's wrong with Mary Pickford? She's a beauty!”

“Did you see Joan Crawford?”

“No, not this time. Maybe next.” He had removed the cigar from his mouth and now held it behind his back. His other arm was also behind his back. This was a favorite posture of the professor: his feet planted a half a meter apart, his hands clasped behind him, his shoulders rolled slightly forward and his face turned directly to me, looking with great intensity. But at the same time there was always something in Einstein's eyes that seemed to gaze beyond you, as if he glimpsed past the range of ordinary people to a distant horizon that only a seer could perceive. “But I promise you, Gabriella, that if I meet her I shall collect her autograph for you.”

“Thank you, Herr Professor. I think she is so beautiful.”

He shrugged his shoulders and snorted softly. “Not my cup of tea, but
chacun à son goût
.”

“That's French, isn't it? ‘To each his own taste'?”

“
Bien sûr, mademoiselle
.” He smiled. His dark, slightly drooping eyes twinkled. “And when do you go to Caputh?”

“Soon. As soon as school is out.” I couldn't wait to go to our summer cottage on the lake near the small village of Caputh. The lake is formed by the Havel River that flows between Berlin and Potsdam to the south. Caputh is not even two hours from Berlin but it seems a world away with its fragrant pines and peacefulness. Papa always says Berlin is for working and Caputh is for dreaming. Einstein also dreamed in Caputh. His summer house was next door to ours.