Ashes Page 5

  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.

  By the time I came back from the courtyard garden with the trays of the begonias that had offended the color scheme, I expected that all would be ready for us to go to Caputh.

  “But Mama, you see it all works out for the best,” Ulla was saying.

  “It is not for the best that you flunked your exam!”

  “Ulla flunked!” I gasped.

  Ulla turned and gave me a withering look. “Yes, I flunked my literature exam. This is not the end of the world. I’ll just retake it in three weeks. I’ll study very hard. So it’s all for the best that I am stay
ing here.”

  “Did you flunk it so you could stay home?” The question just popped out before I could stop it.

  “Don’t be an idiot!” she snarled.

  Mama was now shaking her finger at both of us. “Gaby, you stay out of it. Ulla, make yourself useful and call up to find out where the car from the Institute is.”

  But Mama and Papa did not seem that upset about Ulla flunking her exam—perhaps because it was not so bad compared to the rest of the day’s events, which I had apparently missed while I was in the gardening digging up begonias. You see, almost as soon as Uncle Hessie left, Papa turned on the radio. It was blaring with the news that indeed the SA was back in business! And not just the SA but the SS that Himmler headed. The Old Gentleman, Hindenburg, now truly a puppet of von Papen, had lifted the ban on the SA and the black-shirted, Schutzstaffel, or SS.

  If these events seemed to some to happen quickly, to stack up on top of one another with a frightening speed in the space of a single afternoon as we waited to go to Caputh, to me there was this awful slowness as if we were marching, dragging inexorably but steadily toward doom.

  That afternoon as we waited for the car, I called Rosa twice to say good-bye and figure out exact dates when she could visit me at Caputh. She said that her mother was as worried about Papen as she was about her grandmother who had recently been diagnosed with a heart condition.

  There is an old notion that when a person falls from a great height, his or her life flashes before him in the seconds of the fall. But I don’t believe that “flash” is the right word. I believe it is a long, drawn-out affair. Think how slowly those seconds must seem to pass as every scene of one’s life and its inevitable end are perceived. Lento! Molto adagio.

  chapter 10

  Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he’d got to be a slave, and so I’d better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion . . . .

  So I kneeled down [to pray]. But the words wouldn’t come . . . It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. . . . I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie-I found that out.

  -Mark Twain,

  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  By now it was late afternoon and we were ready. Our bags were downstairs, including half a dozen boxes of books—mostly Papa’s, but some were mine—and at least two boxes of Mama’s music. There was a hamper of food so we wouldn’t have to go out and buy anything for our first night’s dinner. I was just planning a third good-bye call to Rosa when Papa came up and said he needed to call the office at the Institute again. The car that was supposed to pick us up had still not arrived despite Ulla’s earlier call, when the person she spoke with said it would be right over. It wasn’t a long drive to Caputh—an hour in light traffic. Hertha had already left on the train that morning to prepare the house.

  Papa dialed the phone number and was speaking to someone from the Institute. He nodded into the receiver while Mama stood by listening, trying to make out the entire conversation from his end.

  “Yes. Problems you say? Did the car break down, Frau Hagen? Not that you know of, eh.” He turned to Mama, shrugged his shoulders, and opened his eyes wide as if confounded. “Well, can you connect me with Professor Haber, kindly.” There was a long pause and Papa grimaced. I noticed a ruddiness flush his cheeks. “Not available, you say,” he snapped. Mama sighed. “All right. Thank you for your efforts. Good-bye.” He slammed down the phone.

  I could tell that Papa was really upset. I couldn’t help but wonder if the car not coming was something to do with “Jewish physics.”

  Just the two words “Jewish physics” seemed crazy enough. Now, after Papa’s talk with Uncle Hessie, there were two more words: “white Jew.” I didn’t quite understand these terms. Papa was a gentile scientist and member of the Institute, but it seemed as if there were just as many Jewish members as gentiles—Einstein, Max Born, Lise Meitner, Fritz Haber. And yet it wasn’t as if Papa looked at gentile stars and Einstein looked at Jewish stars. Stars were just stars. And Lise Meitner studied isotopes. Were there Jewish isotopes that she studied and gentile ones that Max Planck studied? I knew there were scientists at the Institute that Papa said might look at things this way. Philipp Lenard was one, I think. I had heard Papa say that Lennard was very critical of Einstein’s approach to relativity, which he claimed “offended common sense.”

  In the end, the car from the institute never came, but good old Uncle Hessie sent his own Mercedes Benz and his chauffeur, Marcel. Hessie followed in his super sport touring car, the SSK Count Trossi model. Since he was helping transport us to Caputh, he would stay a few days with us at the lake. He came often throughout the summer.

  We said good-bye to Ulla, who promised to call every other day. It all felt a little odd to me. This would be my first summer ever at Caputh without Ulla. We shared a bedroom at the lake cottage, and she joked that I could have it all to myself and keep it as messy as I wanted. Ulla was a lot neater than I was.

  I got to ride with Uncle Hessie, which was much more fun than going in the big Mercedes, and it was big. The model was called the Grosser-Mercedes 770 and it seemed like a salon or parlor with its gray upholstery and little silver rosebud vase. But the SSK sports car was made for a jolly good time. The top came down and Uncle Hessie and I both got to wear goggles. That’s how fast he drove!

  “There is a scarf in the glove compartment for your hair if you want it.” He reached over and popped it open. I took out a peach-colored chiffon scarf with flowers on it.

  “Oh, it’s beautiful!”

  “Do you know who that belongs to?”

  “Who?”

  “Josephine Baker.”

  “No!” I exclaimed. Josephine Baker, the American singer and dancer, was one of the most famous entertainers in Europe. I had heard that Uncle Hessie was very, indeed very good friends with her. Although just a few years before she had danced in an infamous nude revue, she somehow was not considered just an ordinary, vulgar chorus girl. She had become a symbol of erotic Berlin and yet was never considered crude. Naughty, yes. But lewd? Smutty? Never! That was most people’s opinion, including Baba’s. But I doubted Mama and Papa had ever gone to see her. Einstein had—with his wife, Elsa, no less! But I could hardly believe that I was about to wear the scarf of the Creole Goddess, the Black Pearl. Those were nicknames that celebrated Josephine Baker ’s exotic beauty.

  “Are you sure she won’t mind?” I asked as I finished tying it over the straps of my goggles. I felt fabulously glamorous.

  “No, of course not. She left for Paris three years ago and swears not to come back until the little corporal and his ‘naughty boys,’ as she calls Hitler and the SA, are gone.”

  First Josephine, now Vicki, I thought. Who’s next?

  We headed south, down the wide avenue of the Aschaffenburger Strasse. But we had only gone a block and were at Bayerischer Square when I heard Uncle Hessie sigh. The leather seats of the sports car were so deep that I could not quite see what had provoked this sigh. I rose up a bit to tuck my knees under me just as Hessie began to slow the car. Like sludge running from a river’s mouth, hundreds of SA were moving through the street. I didn’t know how our car would get past them—traffic had nearly come to a complete stop. Flags with swastikas stippled the air. It was a parade! The men wore high black jackboots to the knees. Above the top of the boots, their brown pants flared absurdly so that it appeared as if the men had wings attached to their hips. No wonder they called the stiff-legged march der Stechschritt, the goose step. They looked like a bunch of stupid geese coming down the street. As we got closer to the parade, the stomping boots were deafening. It was as if the pave
ment groaned beneath them.

  “Not to worry, Liebchen.” Hessie patted my knee. I scanned the spectators on the sidewalk. Their faces were wreathed in some sort of anticipation. I couldn’t help but remember Hertha’s words: “Now there might be a chance.” Was this why they were cheering? This chance they all anticipated. The rambunctious boys, as Hertha had called them, were thickening into knots on the streets.

  We soon had to halt, as many of the Brown Shirts seemed to have broken away from the parade formation and were now wandering through the street. Some of the geese appeared quite wobbly and I could see they carried beer steins.

  “Mein Gott!Are they drunk, Uncle Hessie?”

  “As I said, not to worry, dear.” He patted my knee again.

  A young, smooth-faced SA approached the car with his friend. He slapped the hood hard with his hand. His eyes were sliding about in a frightening way. A string of foam from the beer threaded down his chin.

  “So you like my car!” Uncle Hessie said brightly.

  “Yes, yes!”

  “Won’t find a red Commie having one of these, will you?” Uncle Hessie said. The fellows were obviously drunk, and I sensed that the situation could turn ugly in a split second. Maybe Uncle Hessie was pretending to share their opinions. I knew he’d never really say something like that.