The Kingdom of Childhood

melted through her tights. With sidelong looks she studied Rudi’s face: the pink flush of his cheeks, the nubbled sheared wool that lined the earflaps of his cap, the way his hard steady breathing revealed his crooked canine teeth. When they passed beneath a tree beside the barn, a scurrying squirrel knocked a branch’s worth of snow onto their heads, and she laughed.

“Hang your coat on the nail,” said Rudi. Inside the house it was so warm her bones ached with the sudden contrast. Nevertheless she approached the woodstove with outstretched hands, exhaling a slow breath of relief at the draw of the fire.

“Your tights are wet,” he observed. “Take them off, or you will get sick.”

“I’ll be cold walking home.”

“We will let them dry by the fire. Your boots as well.”

She sat in a chair and looked around the kitchen as she tugged off her boots. The walls were lined with wooden cookie molds, carved with designs she recognized. A heart encircled with flowers. Adam and Eve beside a tree. The Musicians of Bremen, stacked like a pyramid. Even Struwwelpeter, his blank eyes less haunting without color.

“Who would want to eat a cookie shaped like Struwwelpeter?” she asked.

Rudi grinned. “In my grandmother’s time they made them. A treat and a punishment all together.” He watched her struggle with her tights, then sat on the floor before her and helped pull them off. Wrapping his toasty hands around her toes, he grimaced. “Like ice cream. So cold.”

“They sting. Maybe I have frostbite.”

He rubbed them between his hands and cocked his head. “What is frostbite?”

“When your toes turn black and fall off from the cold.”

“Ah. Erfrierung. No, I don’t think.” He stood and washed his hands at the sink, then poured himself a cup of coffee. “Would you like Ovaltine? Or a cookie?”

She accepted the cookie from him and sat swinging her legs, stretching her toes. As the milk warmed he shrugged out of his suspenders, pulled off his shirts, and hung them on chairs by the woodstove: a button-down, a thermal, and finally a cotton undershirt. His suspenders lay in a tangle at his hips.

Slowly she ate her cookie and watched Rudi prepare her Ovaltine. Experience had taught her Germans were immodest by her American standards, but Rudi half-naked still came as a shock to her. He was a man like her father: hairy around his navel and under his arms, smooth across his chest and unashamed to be shirtless. When he turned to face her she looked down, embarrassed, and paid attention to her spice cookie.

“Why is the bottom white?” she asked, turning it over so he could see it.

“So it won’t stick to the pan,” he explained. “We call it in German oblate. They are the same as at church.”

“I don’t go to church.”

He looked mildly surprised. “It is the same as the Body of Christ blessed by the priest. But of course these are not blessed, or it would be a sin. So you can eat it for a cookie, and there is no sin.”

She considered this idea and felt a mild thrill. Many times her family had visited historic churches, admiring the architecture and the artwork, but stopped short of participating in the religious rites that amused her father so. Now she was getting a taste of the mysterious white wafer the Germans approached with such veneration, slipped into her afternoon snack like a comic into a schoolbook. It seemed starchy and plain, but the dark spice of the cookie made it quite palatable. She accepted her cup of hot Ovaltine from Rudi and drank deeply.

He retreated to his place beside the counter and sipped his coffee. The scene struck her as being almost like that of a husband and wife, silent in their kitchen together. She imagined her Ovaltine might be coffee, and the limp crocheted dishtowel her own handiwork, and the bare-chested man beside the stove her husband, warming up after a day of work on the farm. Because if she could choose any husband in the world, of course it would be Rudi.

“The animals must be getting very cold,” she said, in tentative German, like a concerned housewife.

He offered her an indulgent grin. In German he replied, “They’ll be fine. They stay warm by their own body heat.”

“Even when they sleep so far apart?”

“Yeah. There’s not much warmer than a barn in the winter, especially if you’ve got as many animals as we do. And in the summer it’s hotter than Hell.” He pursed his lips, gazing at her as if to evaluate her level of understanding. Then he added, “You’re getting very messy, Judy. Come here.”

She stood and heard a shower of crumbs hit the floor. Suddenly she felt the stickiness of Ovaltine above her lip and crumbs at the corner of her mouth. Some grown-up housewife she had been, covered in food like a toddler. She felt a wave of shame.

From the distant airfield a sonic boom rumbled like thunder, shivering the measuring spoons on their nail. Rudi turned on the tap and ran his hand beneath the hot water, then rubbed it against her mouth, the fingers of his other hand gently cupping the back of her head. “There,” he said in English. “All clean now.”

She knew what was next: he would tell her that her tights were dry and it was time to go home, and then she would be alone again, with only her mother growing fragile as a drying flower, ready to crumple to dust at the lightest touch. Impulsively she threw her arms around Rudi’s waist and buried her face in the soft spot below his ribs, with the warmth and the smell of him to blind and to smother her.

“There, there, now,” he said, his voice ever so uneasy. “You can always come back tomorrow.”

At the beginning of March the Chandler family piled into the navy-blue Mercedes and drove to Munich to see the Fasching parade. The jubilant crowds gathered along the streets and waved cardboard noisemakers in a rainbow of colors. Men wore masks with spindly noses and twisted smiles, their eyes vanishing into shadowed holes. Grown women dressed like babies, in pacifiers and bonnets, while clowns towered high above on stilts. It was as though Judy had entered a nightmare world in which all of the adults had gone awry. Her father bought her a rabbit-ear headband and a donut filled with orange marmalade, which she ate slowly as the floats and revelers passed by. Everywhere it smelled like beer.

They walked to a churchyard set up with booths for a children’s carnival, with face-painting and games. Balloons attached to the tables batted in the March wind, their tethering ribbons twisting together. A lady brought