Child of the Light (19 page)

Erich waved furiously. "Come down!" He went over and shut the apartment building door--evidently he had just come from within--then jumped over the hedge and grabbed up his bicycle, which was lying on the sidewalk. Mounting, he motioned again for Sol to join him.

"What is it? Tell me!" Sol cursed under his breath. He sensed trouble. Erich seemed to be less and less the boy with whom he had grown up. Everything might have been so different if he had come along to the Adlon, Sol thought sadly and with a renewed pang of guilt at not having tried harder to persuade Rathenau to include Erich in the invitation.

"We're still blood brothers, aren't we?" Erich raised his wrist in the old gesture. "Come down. It's important!"

Sol pulled himself into his trousers, a corded sweater, and a pair of old shoes. He put on his cap and took a rucksack from the crowded shelf that held his schoolbooks and his pewter Hessian soldiers. Tucking his jacket under his arm, he poked his head into the hall and stared at his parents' door.

No, he decided, returning to the window; if his parents heard him, this adventure would be over before it started. He was tired of kowtowing to Erich's demands, yet he felt flattered when his friend insisted on including him in his unlikely adventures.

The sill was wide and he was able to balance in a squat while he shut the window behind him. Tossing down the rucksack and jacket, he launched himself two meters to the ground and landed briefly on his feet before his knees gave out and he tumbled onto the dirt.

"Hurry!" Erich stood with one leg in the hedge, urging Sol forward. "It's Grace. She's about to have her pups--and there's no one to help her. I heard her crying. Something's gone wrong."

"You
heard
her? All the way from Wannsee?"

"You have to help,
Spatz. Please,
Sol."

"You want me to go with you to Wannsee? To the
camp?"

"I don't really understand the Jew-hating and the awful things they say, honestly I don't."

"If you don't understand, why parrot them?"

"I'm going to change things, Sol!" Erich's voice was tense. "When I'm a leader I won't let them do those things. Our group used to be different. We weren't like those others who do things--"

"Things?"

Sol had heard about those "things"--the initiation rites, like the older ones peeing on the younger ones to delineate authority; like demanding that they give up loyalty to everything but the group.

"Come on!
Please!"
Erich trundled the bike onto the street and, one foot on the curb for support, kept it steady.

Sol mounted the handlebars. Erich's bike was a second-hand Machnow Herr Weisser picked up at an auction over on Muhldamm. Erich had painted the bike red and black, the new colors of his Freikorps unit. Sol had no bike of his own. His mother felt they were too dangerous in a city.

Erich shoved away from the curve. The bike wobbled as he fought to balance it, and Sol.

They passed the open square of Potsdamer Platz and wound through the Kurfurstendamm's more squalid section, where soap-streaked windows, spiderwebbed with shadows, were made lurid by the moonlight. Dilapidated marquees announced burlesque shows. Handwritten signs pasted on shop windows advertised going-out-of-business sales. Butcher shops boasted of specials on high-quality meat--Grade A cats and dogs, more than likely, Sol was sure. Homeless huddled in doorways or lay curled on the pavement. Whores with black, slicked-down
windstoss
--pixy-cut--haircuts and throats heavy with Charleston beads leaned against
Litfass-Saulen
, adding their bodies to the peeling advertisements pasted around the thick, two-meter posts. The women exchanged gossip and cigarettes with homosexuals sporting sheepskin jackets, striped sailors' shirts, and tan dungarees.

Life in the city was unkind, Sol thought, yet at that moment he felt far less frightened by the loiterers than by the friend he had known most of his life. Lately he hardly knew Erich at all.

"Queers! I hate them." Erich picked up speed. "They should all be shot."

With seemingly superhuman balance he steered the bike with the palm of his crushed hand and, reaching under Sol's left arm, held an object before Sol's nose. His thumb was hooked through the trigger guard of Herr Weisser's pistol. The weapon looked very large and very silver beneath the street lamp.

Sol swallowed in fear. "You stole it?"

"No. I wrote my beloved papa a letter," Erich said, his head down as he pedaled, "explaining that I thought I should inherit it a little early!" He straightened and, thrusting out his lower lip, blew a breath up over his sweaty face.

"You make me sick when you talk like that." Sol looked at his friend in disgust. "Good thing you can't fire it."

"The hell I can't."

"I thought your papa said he had taken out the firing pin, after...." Sol did not feel like finishing.

"I made a new firing pin on the metal lathe at school...out of a Groschen nail.
And
I've got bullets...."

"What were you really angry about that night?" Sol asked.
 
"We've never talked about it."

"Papa, mostly. He's so...
weak
. And Miriam...that whole thing was so unfair. Rathenau not inviting me, I mean. It makes me mad, sometimes. It's like you people have a special club and there's no way in--"

"You people?" Sol felt his stomach forming another knot.

"Don't get mad at me," Erich said. "I just mean that it's as if you have this club and the rules are that you help each other--like we do at camp. It's a club, too--"

A club where you help each other to hate better, Sol thought, glancing uneasily at the people they passed. Judging by his friend's anxiety to get through this part of town as fast as possible, Erich's bragging about roaming Berlin's alleys after midnight was doubtless just that--bragging. Like saying he had slipped a hand beneath the tie-strings of Ursula Müller's underwear. His evenings out probably consisted of nothing more than beer, song, and knockwurst around a Freikorps campfire.

"Slow down!" Sol shouted as the handlebar nut rammed into him.

Erich pedaled faster. They rode on in silence through the city, past an abandoned Bolle Wagen, the milk cart's giant ladle and pails of milk and buttermilk gone with the nag that had once pulled it daily to Sol's neighborhood. According to the
Tageblatt,
when the nag collapsed, hungry Berliners fought its owner and each other for the horse meat and the warm, protein-rich blood.

At last they entered Zehlendorf and headed toward the Grünewald. Three-and-a-half kilometers long and fifty meters wide, the Kurfurstendamm stretched from Kaiser Wilhelm-Gedachtnis Kirche all the way to Koenigsallee. At its eastern end were some of Berlin's most elegant shops; at its western end stood the graceful suburban homes of Zehlendorf. In between was the city's sordid section.

Sol felt a stab of resentment and loss. Although many Jewish businessmen and industrialists lived in the two suburbs, this was a world he would never inhabit. Among the shadowy lushness of oaks and chestnut trees, slender white-stemmed birches stood guard, shining silver, like armored lords before the moon. Except for the occasional Audi or Model-T puttering past them, or the prestigious Buick that swerved to avoid their unexpected presence, the streets were deserted. Twice, flashlights lanced toward the road--probably watchmen determining what creaky machine would dare disturb the sleep of their employers.

He imagined being married to Miriam, living in a villa and surveying the tree-lined avenue from behind a tall window. Erich could be Otto von Bismarck, a royal guest with a taste for fine wines and rare books. The three of them would be out riding near Jagdschloss Grünewald, their headquarters for the hunt.

But such imaginings served only to deepen his sense of loss. The time had come, he thought, to accept the fact that the door Walther Rathenau briefly cracked open was forever shut.

By the time Erich steered into Wannsee Park and dumped the bike, his chest felt tight with the effort of pedaling, and his breath was coming in short harsh huffs. He looked around uneasily, in case the other boys were still on this side of the lake, saw that the picnic area was empty, and sprinted across the sand to the edge of the Wannsee.

Beside the small dock was the beach for swimmers and, beneath the trees, an open-air restaurant with signs that listed rules for picnickers. The largest one read: "Families May Brew Their Own Coffee Here."

"See those willows?" Erich whispered when Sol joined him. He pointed across the lake. "That's where we're going."

"I know--" Sol did not sound happy. "What was that ride? 'Joy in Hardship' lesson one?"

His Youth camp's motto was "Strength through joy in nature." Sol consistently called it, "joy in hardship." Before the war, the cluster of Spartan three-sided huts had been an apolitical Wandervögel camp for children who liked nature, hiking and singing around a campfire. Now the Freikorps ran it.

Erich squinted toward the willows. Shouldn't have dragged Sol into this, he thought, praying that none of the really tough guys had decided to spend the night at the camp. Even if some of the boys had decided to go home, there were always two or three who had run away from their families and had nowhere else to go, and at least one leader who stayed to guard the camp. If he and Sol were caught hanging around, it would simply be a question of who was in the most trouble--Sol, or himself for bringing Sol there.

Crouching, Erich crept along the beach. "We'll have to row across." He pointed toward a rowboat beached at the fence that enclosed Wannsee Park. "But first swear you'll never tell anyone about tonight. If you do, I'll turn you into a vampire, just like--
blaah!"
He jumped on Sol, teeth bared and fingers curved like claws. "Just like Nosferatu!"

"Idiot!" Sol shoved him away. "I won't tell. What's the big secret, anyway?"

"Shake on it." Erich clasped Sol's hand in the Wandervögel handshake. He felt a momentary resistance and stared deeply into his friend's eyes. Then Sol grinned and Erich felt his grip harden. "I better never find out you broke your word," he said.

They pushed the boat onto the moon-dappled water. As Erich rowed, Sol clutched the oarlocks to help keep them from creaking. "We should have wrapped the oars in silk," he whispered, apparently beginning to get caught up in the adventure. "That's what Hessian spies--"

Erich put a finger to his lips and glanced over at a sleeping fisherman whose canoe bobbed gently in the water. Watching people fish sure wasn't interesting, as it used to be. Not since Berlin banned the used of grenades.

When they reached the other side they tied the boat to a branch and crept into the foliage, wilder and denser on this side of the lake and still wet from the previous evening's rain. By the time Erich parted the last set of branches and peered into one of the huts, he was as damp as if he had been walking in a drizzle.

"Do you see her?" he whispered, examining the tiered bunks inside, three on each side. A few of them held sleeping figures.

"I see
them!"

"Shsh!" Erich clamped a hand over Sol's mouth and pointed toward a young sentry who sat, hunched over and asleep, beside a blackened fire pit.

Sol sputtered and backed away. "I didn't think anyone would be here," he whispered. "I should go home."

"Alone? Out there?" Erich started crawling through the undergrowth. He felt Sol's hand on his shoulder, holding him back.
 
"We're crawling around some woods in the dark, looking for a pregnant mutt--"

"Don't call her that!"

"We're in danger of being beaten up by your buddies and our families are probably worried sick," Sol said, ignoring him.
 
"But that's okay because we're here to see your favorite dog."

"Please, Sol," Erich said. "She's the top of the Thuringia strain, the camp mascot,
and
pregnant. I asked for one of her puppies but they said no because they'd taken her all the way to Holland, to Doorn, to mate her."

"They mated her with one of the
Kaiser's
dogs?"

"Not just
one
of the Kaiser's dogs--last year's German Grand Champion. Remember that Movietone segment about the Sieger Dog Show? Remember Harras von der Juch? That's the sire."

"If she is so valuable, how come one of your leaders didn't stay around to take care of her?"

"They're stupid, that's why."

Sol could not fail to be impressed, Erich thought as he started crawling again. In front of him, twigs crackled softly as he moving ahead. Grace, mated to Harras, the offspring of Etzel von Oeringen, son of Nores of the
Kriminalpoletzei!
Then again, what did Sol know?
 
He
couldn't commune with dogs or rattle off their family lines as if they were his own.

Well, Sol
did
know Etzel, but everyone knew the dog that had been taken to America and became the star of the Strongheart movies, each of which Erich had seen close to a dozen times. He was saving for another movie marathon when the new German shepherd film came to Berlin, the one starring Rin Tin Tin, a dog bred in the trenches during the war.