Ashes (6 page)

So next to the pictures on my dresser of Vicki Baum and Joan Crawford and me holding the cub and Papa playing the violin B.I.P., there were a dozen or more prints of Papa's photographs of stars. The one picture that was actually bigger than that of Vicki Baum was my birthday picture, taken on May 29, 1919. I knew all about that night, but perhaps not the way one would expect. It was not the events on Earth surrounding my birth here in Berlin, but the celestial happenings my father was observing from that island off the coast of West Africa that became the background narrative of my birth story. The picture on the mirror was not an image of me but of the sun being swamped by the moon so that only a fiery halo was left floating eerily in the sky. The predicted totality—the time of the complete eclipse of the sun—had been a period of 410 seconds, almost seven minutes, which is quite a long eclipse. But bad weather had set in with a blanket of roiling clouds. The seconds were shaved away. For 400 of the 410 seconds the eclipse could not be seen because of the clouds. Then in those final seconds the skies cleared. Six pictures were taken in all during those last ten seconds. There were two pictures that proved that indeed the mass of the sun had pulled the light of the stars toward it. The deflection of the light, about 1.61 arc seconds, matched Einstein's projection and thus his theory of general relativity was validated.

When Papa returned to Berlin and met me for the first time, he looked at the birth record and insisted that I must have been born during those same ten seconds.

I realized I had to stop this daydreaming, or night dreaming. “Back to the Gallic Wars, Vicki!” I muttered, looking at her picture. But then I thought of the dessert none of us had eaten. I knew I had better hurry out to the kitchen, because Mama always let Hertha take any leftovers home for her mother and the elderly aunt with whom she lived.

When I got to the kitchen Hertha was packing up a slice of the torte.

She looked up. “You want some, Gaby?”

“Well, I was hoping, but . . .”

“Have a piece. There is plenty for me to take home.” She went to the cupboard and got a plate. “Some milk?” She turned around to ask me.

“That would be nice, thanks, Hertha.”

I sat at the kitchen table on a stool. Hertha settled across from me with a mug of coffee. “So your mama and papa are worried about Ulla?”

“That and everything else.” Almost as soon as I said it, I realized I probably shouldn't have, for “everything else” was politics.

“
Aachh!
” Hertha made a scolding sound in the back of her throat. “They shouldn't worry about everything else. Just Ulla.”

I kept my eyes on the torte and mumbled into the crumbs as I cut it with my fork.

“Well, they do,” I said softly.

“What is your papa so worried about?”

I felt my heart beating loudly in my chest. I couldn't look up.

“Well, the Brown Shirts, for one thing.”

Hertha leaned across the table. She patted my hand. “Oh, they're just rambunctious boys. And they want to get these Communists. The Communists are bad, Gaby. You don't remember how awful it was. You were a little girl in the twenties. I didn't work for your family then, but even they were poor. No one escaped, believe me. Maybe not as poor as many, not as poor as me and my mother and her sister, but they were. Every week the price of the simplest things like eggs, milk, bread, was five or six times more than the week before. Sixty marks to buy what ten marks had bought a week earlier!”

I knew she was right. The money had become outrageously inflated, worth almost nothing. One had to spend it immediately because it would be worth even less the next day. I had seen a picture in a scrapbook of Papa taking a knapsack stuffed full of bills for a loaf of bread, because all the money he needed would not fit in his wallet.

Hertha lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “And the Communists will make it even worse than it was back then. I am sure. But now I think there might be a chance for things to get better.”

I withdrew my hand from hers. I couldn't quite believe what I was hearing. “You think there's a chance with Hitler?”

“Maybe,” she said almost gaily.

“Hertha, don't say anything to Mama and Papa about this.”

“Oh no, I wouldn't.”

“So why are you telling me?” I couldn't help ask.

She looked at me almost dreamily. “Because you are young, you are not set in your ways, and maybe you don't understand how hard it is for people like me.”

I pushed the plate away. I wasn't hungry anymore. There was so much I wanted to say, so much that crowded up in my mind, but the thoughts became tangled as soon as I began to even try to say anything. I knew that Hertha was a sweet, gentle person. I knew that she liked my parents a lot. She had said time and again that they were the most generous people she had ever worked for. But if Hertha felt that Hitler was good for Germany—Hertha who was not a fanatic—how many others might feel the same way?

O Dearest, canst thou tell me why The rose should be so pale? And why the azure violet Should wither in the vale?

And why the lark should in the cloud So sorrowfully sing? And why from loveliest balsam-buds A scent of death should spring?

And why the sun upon the mead So chillingly should frown? And why the earth should, like a grave, Be moldering and brown?

And why it is that I myself So languishing should be? And why it is, my heart of hearts, That thou forsakest me?

-Heinrich Heine,
translated by Richard Garnett

 

 

 

 

M
y Latin examination was on June 3. I did fine. Not as well as Rosa, who achieved a dazzling 14 out of 15, but I got an 11. Anything hovering around 12 was OK as far as I was concerned. The next day, sometime during our history exam, the Reichstag, the German parliament, was dissolved. Bella, the class wit, joked that at least there wasn't time for this bit of history to be included on the final exam. I would soon lose count as to how many times the Reichstag would be resurrected and dissolved over the next six months. The day after the history exam was the class picnic, with ice cream. And on June 14, school let out for the summer holiday. It was our last day at our old school building. When school resumed in September, Rosa and I would move to a different building, where the older students of the gymnasium attended classes. It was still the same school, but we would have different teachers. Because this building was closer to the library, we would be allowed to go there during our fifteen-minute break.

I had hoped that Herr Doktor Berg would return my books on that last day of school, but he did not. Two days later my family, minus Ulla, would leave for our cottage in Caputh.

Papa was still worried about Ulla staying behind. On the very day we were to leave, I had just finished packing my books and summer clothes for the trip, so I was in the living room reading the newspaper. There was still hours before the car was to arrive to take us. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute always sent a car to take us to Caputh. This was a special perk of Papa's membership. Mama was giving her last music lesson before the summer break and Papa was talking to Uncle Hessie about Ulla. Hessie was once again reassuring Papa that the cabaret Chameleon was not such a bad place. Neither Papa nor Uncle Hessie had noticed that I was in the room when they entered, as I was swallowed up in the large wing chair reading. I was small for my age, and times like this was when it paid off.

“
Lento! Molto adagio
,” Mama kept telling her student, a rather intense young girl named Lotte who was trying to play the Moonlight Sonata. “Slow it down. What's the rush? We want to feel the moonlight.
Molto adagio
! Very slow.
Molto adagio
!”

As the conversation continued, Uncle Hessie seemed uncharacteristically irritated with Papa. He was losing his usual cool demeanor. I heard him raise his voice slightly, which was rare for a man like Hessie. He was a count by birth and like so many extremely sophisticated people, he was always very calm, cool—fizzing with ideas but rarely rattled. That morning, however, he was rattled. He stood with that old Prussian rectitude in his stylish three-piece suit and wing-collared shirt, and fingered the large knot of his tie. Papa always looked rumpled next to him, but I now saw color creeping above the collar of Uncle Hessie's shirt.

“Honestly, Otto,” Uncle Hessie groaned in that languid way the very rich and stylish have of speaking. “How can you be concerned about a cabaret when that complete idiot Papen, who looks more like a billy goat than a chancellor, is proposing that unemployment insurance be scrapped? He is focused on the most extreme right-wing ideas and he's slandering all social democracy as bourgeois liberalism that is morally undermining the
Volk
. Do you know I lost count of how many times he used the word
Volk
in his address? When he says
Volk,
he does not mean people. He means exactly what the Austrian corporal means. Aryans, not Jews, not negroes, not
degenerate
artists, as Hitler calls most creative people.”

Papa gave a short, harsh snort. “And of course along with the degenerate artists, there are the degenerate scientists.”

“Yes, I heard one does not need to be Jewish to practice Jewish physics apparently.”

“Certainly not—am I Jewish?” Papa said. “And yet guess what they call me and Heisenberg?”

“What?” Uncle Hessie asked.

“White Jews, because we subscribe to Einstein's work on relativity.”

Werner Heisenberg was a physicist and a colleague of Papa's who taught at the University in Leipzig. He was very handsome! I'd seen him once when he came for dinner. He had invented something called the uncertainty principle, which was much too hard for me to understand.

“By the way, speaking of artists, have you heard Vicki Baum has already cleared out of town?” Uncle Hessie asked Papa.

At this I jumped up from my chair, where I had been reading Baba's column in the newspaper. “That can't be! It says right here in Baba's column that Vicki Baum was in attendance at the Italian ambassador's party.”

Papa turned to me. “
Kleine Zaubermaus
! What are you doing here, little mouse? You are a magic mouse tucked in there so small we didn't notice. You're supposed to be helping Mama pack for Caputh. We are leaving this afternoon.”

“That ambassador's party was two nights ago,
Liebchen
, darling,” Uncle Hessie said. Being called “darling” by Uncle Hessie was preferable to being called a magic rodent by my father. They both meant well, however.

“Now, stop reading about parties and go help Mama,” Papa ordered. “She wanted you to go down to the garden and put in the pansies where she is taking out some of the begonias, or something like that.”

At that moment Mama walked in, having finished with her music student.

“Gaby, I told you I needed your help with those begonias. I have others to replace them. Come on, we need to get down to the garden. You should have started yesterday.”

My mother was the unofficial and unpaid gardener for the small courtyard garden behind our building. Hausmeister Himmel knew nothing about plants, and I was certain that any flower would wither immediately from his touch. But Mama, whose fingers could coax the most beautiful music from the piano, could also wheedle flowers from the most deficient, poorest soil imaginable. Papa said Mama could make a flower grow in ashes. And Mama would always say, “Ashes are part of the carbon cycle, aren't they, dear? You should know that, Herr Professor Astronomer.”

Mama actually used ashes from our fireplace to fertilize the garden. She collected ashes from the four other families in the building as well. They were only too happy to contribute. For in the spring through summer and well into fall, the flowerbeds of our courtyard were a continuous pageant of color. In spring the pansies flourished, in addition to the dozens of bulbs that Mama had planted some years before and replenished every fall. Come June the roses were climbing the stucco walls of the garden and would bloom throughout the summer. There were neatly shaped boxwood hedges that Mama “coiffed”—her term for pruning—with long shears into geometric designs. In the center of each design she planted great bursts of candytuft, nasturtiums, and all varieties of annuals, which she changed every year. Her imagination seemed limitless.

She had now decided that the begonias clashed with the candytuft, or maybe it was the nasturtiums that clashed with the begonias. In any case, I was to help her dig these flowers up and we were going to transport them to Caputh and replace them with pansies. All this had to be done before we left, and I had completely forgotten that it was my job. So I went out to the garden and began digging up the begonias. I carefully placed them in a carton and took them to the lobby to load into the car when it arrived.

My mother tended this garden as much for the tenants as for herself, especially Professor Blumen and Frau Meyeroff, who were the oldest people in our building. The professor had to walk with two canes because of his arthritis, but he really enjoyed sitting in the garden in nice weather. Frau Meyeroff was at least ninety-five and in a wheelchair. The two of them spent endless hours enjoying the garden. They had no summer home to go to in the country as we did.

Of course, in Caputh there was another, even bigger, garden in which Mama grew vegetables and flowers in what Papa called a “merry chaos.” No intricate geometry of boxwood hedges, just all sorts of country flowers tossing their heads in the winds off the lake. Great tangles of sweetpeas clambered up trellises made from twigs. Pumpkins and squash swelling to golden rotundity rose like bulbous mountain ranges. She grew at least three or four different varieties of berries—gooseberries, raspberries, and even cloudberries, the latter of which everyone said could only be grown in Scandinavia. Well, my Mama grew them. All summer long we would eat from the garden and hardly ever go to the market for food. A fishmonger came by door to door all summer and Mama could call the butcher for deliveries of meat. We had already made a trip to Caputh three weeks before to do the planting. So when we arrived, there would be several rows of lettuce ready to pick, as well as radishes.