The Kingdom of Childhood

out a sheet cake divided into squares and asked each child to choose one. Judy bit into her square and found a lima bean inside. The lady clapped and told her that meant she was the Queen of Fasching. Another lady painted her face with a bunny nose and whiskers to match her headband. Then they got back into the Mercedes and drove home.

“It’s what they used to do in the old pagan days,” explained her father as they accelerated onto the Autobahn. “They baked a cake with a nut hidden in it, and whoever chose that piece got to be the tribal king for a year.”

“That’s pretty lucky.”

“Not as lucky as you’d think. After a year they sacrificed him to their gods and sprinkled his blood onto the earth.”

Judy turned the lima bean over in her hand. “Oh.”

“Maybe we’ll skip the Fasching parade next year,” her father added. “Just in case.”

She smiled. She loved these Saturdays: the hikes in the mountains, the visits to elegant castles, the meandering tours of medieval streets during which she could hang on her father’s hand. His breezy humor made her feel light and safe, after the everyday dread of her mother’s rigid order. She accompanied them on these trips but stayed very quiet, almost as if she had left her mind at home. Home, where a pencil carelessly left in a side table drawer provoked a fit of shaking, impotent hysteria, as though Judy had accidentally punched through a thin membrane and left her mother hemorrhaging sanity onto the living room floor.

“Moo cow,” said her father. “Look out your window, Judy. There’s a calf. First I’ve seen all season.”

She glanced at the baby cow with mild interest and thought of the one in Rudi’s barn. Now that the days were growing longer again, she had returned to visiting him in the afternoons before supper. She changed from her Mary Janes to her green rubber rain boots, filled her backpack with her homework books and thick beeswax crayons and a fountain pen, and clomped down the road to the barn. She kept an eye out for his sisters: Daniela, who would shout at her in bell-voiced, barely comprehensible German, and Kirsten, older than Rudi and recently graduated from school, who tended to bustle around collecting eggs and sweeping the walk. Judy preferred her time with Rudi to be private. If she came at the right time she would find him sitting on the milking stool with his head halfway under the cow, legs sprawled wide in a careless display of male confidence.

Sometimes he grinned and squirted her with milk straight from the udder. Sometimes he gave her corn to scatter for the chickens, or the balls of wool collected from bits caught in the wood of the sheep pens. High above on the barn wall hung a crucifix, which he paid no mind, as though living beneath the twisted body of Christ were the most natural thing in the world. Rudi was right: even when deep snowdrifts lay outside, the barn was as warm as a bedroom. Before milking, Rudi grabbed a shovel and energetically mucked out each stall. Judy sat on a makeshift bench of straw bales, her knees pulled up beneath her skirt, and allowed her clear mind to absorb the image: a crucifix, Rudi and cow shit.

It was all so plain and bare, the life in the barn. The wool was greasy because it was made that way, the corn she threw to the chickens dusty by its nature. The animals ate, then shat where they stood, because that was what animals did. There was no hidden reason for anything at all, nothing inscrutable or perplexing. It was the opposite of her own life, over which she was trying hard to pull a curtain of normalcy. Her mother had begun flicking every light switch three times. If a crust of food remained on a plate, she threw all the dishes back in the sink and started over. When she opened her weekly package from the butcher and it contained an extra chicken leg, she fell into a chair, mute and sweating, breathing through her flared nostrils like a fish tossed to the bottom of a boat. Toward the end of March, Judy’s father sent her to the psychiatrist.

Three days a week she had to go to Augsburg Air Base for treatment. Because her husband was important, they sent a car for her. For the first week they left Judy alone in the house, but the laundry stacked up and gave her mother panic attacks. At that point her father walked down to the house beside the barn and inquired, in his German that was quite clear and good, about hiring Rudi’s sister, Kirsten, as a domestic. Judy watched through the window as the two fathers discussed the specifics. She eyed the young woman who stood beside them with her hands folded behind her back: a tall girl, thin but wide-hipped in her flared knee-length skirt, with blond hair in two braids that crossed at the center of her crown. A deal was struck, and she shook John Chandler’s hand with a solid wag of her arm that struck Judy, trained by a father who cared about such things, as a bit unrefined.

The young woman, Judy soon discovered, was very capable. She managed things just as Judy’s mother did, airing the duvets and keeping the birdcage clean, folding her father’s shirts like a shelf display at J.C. Penney. She visited on the days Judy’s mother had treatment, and on those days she always set some dish to simmer in the Dutch oven for their supper—pork chops with syrupy apples, beef stew flecked with little golden spatzle. She tutored Judy in German as she went about her work, and as she cooked she played American hit music on the radio. For the first time in Judy’s memory, her home was filled with delicious scents and cheerful melodies, and on Kirsten’s workdays she looked forward to coming home after school. Each day stood in contrast to the next, because in between the afternoons of the Beatles and veal cutlets with lemon slices, there were those in which the silence echoed in her ears, the tension gathered in each room as though the air had not stirred for hours, and her mother sat at the table alone eating leftovers from the refrigerator. Gone was the old mother, slim and lovely with her Jackie Kennedy bouffant, and in her place was a new one whose teased hair looked like an accident and whose backside filled the entire chair. It was because of the lithium, her father told her, privately. Judy wasn’t sure what it was, but the word sounded like something very light. She pictured a pink helium balloon floating into the sky, its string trailing. It sounded like something that would be good for her mother, to feel effortlessly lighter, skipping through her chores with her feet barely touching the ground. But instead, her mother only grew heavier. She sat in the orange-print armchair covered with clear plastic, sipped from a cup of coffee, and watched television shows in German. Her hands shook slightly, and sometimes the coffee sloshed onto the chair cover.

But then the next day arrived again, and with it Kirsten. She brought them brown eggs from her chickens, and the apple strudel Judy’s father loved. She smiled at Judy often, and called her Mausi, which meant “little mouse,” with the affection usually reserved for a sibling. In the kitchen she scrubbed their dirty laundry with the Fels-Naptha bar before loading it into the machine, sprinkling it with water and working in the lather with the kind of force her father called elbow grease. As she worked she swayed her hips to the radio music, and in the living room Judy danced, too, waving her arms up and down in front of her as she had seen on The Ed Sullivan Show. On one afternoon, partway through such a performance, her father came home. He laughed at Judy’s antics, grinning as he walked through the living room, into the heart of the gaiety, to greet Kirsten. She stepped out of the kitchen, her hands still bubbly with lather, her heart-shaped face shining as though freshly scrubbed. She held up her palms in a jazz-hands pose and, dancing, sang along in her approximate English to “I’m Happy Just To Dance With You.” Judy laughed, and so did her father; and then he held his fingertips up against Kirsten’s and danced along with her. Kirsten did not look surprised. She only smiled and followed his steps as though now they were the act from The Ed Sullivan Show, and they both knew this routine, having practiced it a hundred times before.

Judy had stopped dancing. She stood and watched them, her mashed-potato fists hanging at her sides, her slice of strudel heavy in her stomach. When she fell asleep that night, and the next, and the next, it was not the dancing that lingered in her mind, nor the smiles they exchanged. It was the image of her father’s hands touching