Child of the Light (24 page)

Definitely not his idea of a good time. Erich was up there playing Romeo, while he was playing--what?
 
Monkey?

Carefully he maneuvered closer to the corner and peeked around. Miriam's head was cocked flirtatiously to one side while Erich held her. Earlier, his heart had skipped a beat when she had insisted that he, Sol, was here too. Now he could feel his heart turn inside-out with a quite different emotion. What was it? Anger?

He knew what Papa would call it. Jealousy.

Fighting tears, he dropped from the trellis. The dogs, apparently sensing that he had discarded his fear of them, left him alone. They continued to whine and stare up at the balcony.

Grateful for that, at least, Sol charged through the gardens and climbed the gate. He picked up the bike, shivered with fury and slammed it down. Never again did he want to touch anything belonging to Erich Weisser.

If it weren't for Papa, he told himself, there wouldn't be any Erich Weisser hanging around the store, tormenting people, treating Miriam Rathenau as if she belonged to him. The Weissers would still be hawking vegetables and speaking
Plattdeutsch.

He chided himself for being so small-minded. Yet as he began to walk, all he could think of was how to get back at Erich for everything--but especially for dragging him out to the estate and then dismissing him with that imperious wave of his. He felt stupid for having fallen for Erich's friendship routine one more time, so stupid that even the Grünewald's mansions and chateaus, set among manicured gardens and neatly trimmed trees, seemed to mock him with their mien of regal repose.

Leaving the Grünewald, he found himself outside the Goethe
Gymnasium,
at the corner of Westfalische and Eisenzahn. The streets were empty, as were his pockets. No way to take a taxi or tram, and by the time he walked home, Papa would be awake.

Then he remembered. The money in his shoe! His mother had put it there. For emergencies, she had said, God forbid you should ever need it.

Sitting on the curb, he removed his shoe and worked the lining of the instep free. There, protected by a bit of chamois, was the ten-mark note that had initially given his arch a callus.

He retied his shoe and, with a feeling of slow, suffocating desperation, unfolded the money. Even if he could get home before Papa arose, he would have to try and stay awake all day under his teacher's scrutiny. Worse, Erich would be in school. Sleep or no, Erich would go to school just so he could brag about what he had done with Miriam. A knot of admirers had surrounded him all morning after he told everyone that Ursula Müller had offered to drop her drawers for him.

Liar!

And I was right there among them, eager as the others, wanting to believe him.

Curling his fingers around the money, he made a decision. He was probably the only student at Goethe who had never skipped a class. As Erich would say, there was a first time for everything. Assuming Papa was not wise to the fact that he had been out almost all night, he would pretend to go to school--only never arrive.

A bus turned onto Eisenzahn Strasse. Rising to board it, he wondered if he shouldn't avoid going home altogether. No, that would worry his parents too much. Being caught playing hooky might earn him a paddling. He could handle that. He could not handle the pain of deliberately hurting Mama and Papa.

A few hours later, having catnapped at home, Sol trundled off to school--with his mother's blessing and without Erich, who "will be a little late for school today," as Frau Weisser had come down to inform Sol.

Avoiding the usual route, Sol made his way into the center of the city. He had decided to spend the day at Luna Park, but it did not open this early. While he stood among the crowds of the Tauenzien Strasse, yawning and bleary-eyed, his attention was caught by one of the KadeWe's window displays--a window devoted to Käthe Kruse dolls. The window dresser had seated them like an audience around a life-sized model of Grog, Berlin's most famous clown.

"Schö-ö-ön
--beautiful," Sol thought he heard the department store dummy say, although its mouth did not move.

"Schö-ö-on,"
he repeated, completing the famous circus routine. Snapping his mouth shut and feeling foolish, he looked around. Too little sleep, he thought, excusing himself. As if it were not bad enough to hear voices in an abandoned sewer, now he was hearing a clown mannequin talk! The live Grog only left Circus Busch at Christmas to work department stores and other places where crowds gathered.

"Schö-ö-ön."
With slow marionette motion the mannequin lifted a hand in an awkward greeting, its mouth fixed in a rictus-grin.

Sol stood staring at the colorful marble eyes, ignoring the hoi polloi on their way to coffee, cake, and gossip at Kranzler's, and forcing them to walk around him. Was it Grog? A mechanical man? He might have stood there all day, had a man with an umbrella not bumped into him and shouted at him, breaking the spell.

Feeling a sudden need to get away, he turned and ran past the counter at Aschinger's where he had intended to stop for a bowl of their inexpensive pea soup and sausage, which would have held him until he got to the sour-pickle barrel at Luna Park.

"Das ist die Berliner Luft.. ,"
a barrel organ man--the oldest one Solomon had ever seen--played outside Kranzler's. Sol slowed down to listen and to watch the animal perched on a stool beside the hurdy gurdy. Black and white, with jade-green eyes, the tethered animal looked like a cross between a large monkey and a teddy bear.

The man played on, head lolled to one side as if his neck were broken. He was toothless, and a great bib of creased wrinkled flesh hung below his chin. But his music was beautiful. A Paul Lincke medley filtered through the air and Solomon swayed, mesmerized--

The man's eyes popped open, revealing milky unseeing pupils.

"Lieber Leierkasten Mann, sieh mich nicht so traurig an,"
Sol said. "Dear barrel organ man, don't look at me so mournfully."

The animal reached down and closed the man's eyelids. Wondering why German children had a verse for everything, Sol stretched to offer the animal a Groschen.

The animal emitted a weird wail that sounded like someone sliding a hand up and down the scale of a saxophone, and snatched the coin. Sol lurched back in pain, clutching his hand. He looked at his palm, then at the animal in frightened disbelief. A gouge brimming with blood ran the length of his lifeline.

"Gotcha, did he, boy?" The blind man laughed. "He does that with people he doesn't like."

The animal leaped onto the old man's back and curled across his shoulders, looking like a fluffy winter wrap.

"What
is
it!" Half in horror, half in fascination, Sol held his palm to his lips. He had a feeling he had seen something like the animal before. But where?

"It's an indri," the hurdy gurdy man said. "A type of lemur. The name means--'behold!'" His lolled to the other side and he began cackling. "A Frenchie went into the jungles of Madagascar looking for the cynocephalus--a mythical dog-headed boy. When the Natives pointed out one of these little fellows, they shouted, 'Indri! Indri!' to get the man's attention. So that's how it got its name." He hawked deep in his throat and spat a brown stream of tobacco juice onto the street--and onto Solomon's shoes.

"Are you a dog-headed boy, Solomon?" the old man asked as Sol backed away in terror.

"You
know
me?"

"I know everyone who's anyone in Berlin--even if
you
don't know who you are."

Shaking his head against what
had
to be a nightmare, Sol turned and began running toward the Zoo Station. Behind him, the indri caterwauled and the old man shouted, "Well, are you a dog-headed boy? Is that what your dreams say?" and cackled insanely.

Boarding an open-topped bus and too afraid to look back, Solomon followed a long-legged prostitute in a short skirt and leather boots up the stairs and to the front seat. She placed her whip across her knees and patted the seat beside her.

"Don't worry," she said. "I like 'em young, but it's been a hard night. I couldn't lift my whip even if you begged me."

Embarrassed and upset, Sol looked around the bus.
 
The seat next to the woman was the only empty one left. He sat down and examined his hand. It was stinging, but already the bleeding had begun to stop. He would probably get blood poisoning and die, he thought, sitting up stiff and straight and trying not to think too clearly--for fear something might make sense and he would discover he was not dreaming.

While he watched the city pass in a blur, the woman next to him drifted into sleep, her head against his shoulder. The bus bounced them both around as it negotiated the three-and-a-half kilometers to Halensee at the upper end of the Ku'damm. The journey seemed interminable; Sol could hardly wait to see the Halensee Bridge.

Directly below that lay Luna Park.

"Hallensee! Luna Park!"

Sol disengaged himself from the sleeping woman and disembarked.

"Achtung...Achtung! Hier spricht Berlin!
Attention...attention! This is Berlin speaking!" Alfred Braun's voice boomed through the loudspeakers of the Funkturm. The radio tower was Berlin's tallest building and loomed high over the city, the bridge and the park.

"Luna Park!" yelled the main-gate barker, using a megaphone so his voice would carry from the amusement park below the bridge. Anxiety rippled through Sol; was today, he wondered, one of those during which people could take their clothes off in the Park?

At least the barker was clothed, so probably this was a regular day after all.

"Open seven days a week! Ride the carousel and the Ferris wheel! Risk your lives on the roller coaster! Win prizes!"

"Achtung!"

"Luna Park! Open seven days--"

"Achtung!"

Blinking and slack-muscled from sleeplessness, Sol staggered down the hill to the Park. The barker's hand emerged as if disembodied and took one of the notes Sol had changed--when? Last night? Sol couldn't recall.

"Luftballons. Nur ein Sechser."
Inside the gate, a man holding a rainbow of balloons in a deformed, white-fleshed hand gripped Sol's arm. "Balloons. Only five pfennig."

Sol shook loose and ran into the Park. When he stared back over his shoulder he saw the man was wearing a white glove and grinning like a clown.

Trying to clean his glasses, Sol staggered among the booths.

"Wheel of Fortune. Three turns, three winners."

"Glühwürmchen, Glühwürmchen...."

The song drew Sol away from the booths to the carousel. Around and around it whirled while the song played over and over, a giant music box without a stopping mechanism. He thought he saw a dark-haired girl in a cream-colored peignoir on the other side, sitting on a white horse and reaching for the brass ring that dangled from a rope amid the galloping circle of wooden steeds.

But the carousel was empty, its animals riderless.

He rubbed his eyes. Whatever had possessed him to skip school!

"Berg und Tal Bahn!"
a barker shrieked, offering Sol a roller coaster ride.

"Three turns, three winners!" another called from the closest booth. "Win an ostrich feather for Mama!"

The roller coaster went up and down and the carousel kept turning around and his head spun and the ground tilted--

"A stuffed doggie for your Fräulein. Every time a winner!"

"Three turns, three--"

"Visit the Panoptikum, the Hall of Mirrors. See yourself as you really are!"

Yes, Sol thought. Yes! That was what he wanted, what he needed--to see himself as he really was. He paid and stumbled through the door. The mirrors leered and wavered, but it was dark inside, and cool. If he could just lie down for a while. Here, where the carousel was muted.

He sagged in a corner, his back against a mirror and, sighing, let his eyes close.

"Up! Out! What do you think this is, a hotel?"

A huge hand held fast to Sol's lapels and a bearded barker in a pinstriped coat pulled him to his feet. His glasses slipped off his nose and he struggled to rescue them. When he looked up, the man grinned at him and dissolved. Images appeared in a convex mirror, tall as the Funkturm. A goatee, the white flesh of a deformed hand, Erich and Miriam--arms around each other, pointing and laughing--

"Glühwürmchen...."

Sol could hear the strains of the carousel's calliope, pulling him back outside, away from the laughing images in the mirror. He glanced at the door, wondering how he was going to find the strength to get out of here and make his way home. He looked back at the mirror, afraid he might see a manifestation of the dybbuk.

A thin convex version of himself stared back at him. Nothing but a jealous and tired thirteen-year-old who was more than ready to go home.

October 1924

Miriam surveyed the disarray of her room. Her navy-blue private school uniform lay crumpled on the floor. Her suitcases, half-packed, stood beside the door. Make-up was strewn all over her vanity.