The Kingdom of Childhood

to conquer the whole fucking world.

11

1965

Mainbach, West Germany

Judy’s father was skilled at many things. He was fluent in Russian, German and French, and conversant in several languages of the smaller Soviet republics. He knew everything about college basketball, played an excellent game of tennis, and could fold a square of paper into a little balloon that one could inflate with a puff of air. When they visited famous buildings he could point out the features of the architecture—dentil, fret, triglyph—and, when Judy grew tired of sightseeing, he could hoist her onto his back and carry her for seemingly infinite lengths of time, looping her knees over his arms that rested on each side of his trim waist. He could do anything, Judy was certain, that was of any importance.

It was not conceivable that he might do something which was terribly wrong. Kirsten, however, was a human like any other, and so onto her Judy projected a double helping of mute rage. The girl had always been kind to her, but now grew openly solicitous, asking in simple German whether Judy preferred ham or salami butterbrot for lunch with a look of rabbit-eyed fear. Her father never addressed what she had seen, and the events of that afternoon—the empty kitchen, the muffled squeaking, the violent shattering of her vision like a flashbulb in reverse—never repeated themselves; Judy might have finally shrugged it away as a bad dream had it not been for that look. The fear acknowledged the crime, and the crime made Judy writhe inwardly with her own unspeakable terrors: that her father would choose to return to the U.S. and abandon her mother, nodding and inert, to her small room at the military hospital. That he was not the father she knew at all, but a seething mess of primitive urges leaking out around the seams of his tennis whites. That Rudi’s family would discover what their girl was up to and send the men over in a rage to match Judy’s, pitting against each other the men she loved most.

Not that she had seen a great deal of Rudi that season. When she caught up with him in the barn he was as friendly as ever, but he did his chores expediently now. Not anymore did he linger to stroke the cow’s nose or to show Judy how to fashion a few pieces of straw and a length of wool into a small star, telling her, as he turned it in his hands, the fairy tale about the generous girl who was showered with stars from heaven that turned into coins as they fell. She missed him awfully. One day when the air was warm and breezy she took the long way home from school, following the gray and winding road to the church behind which she and Rudi had gone sledding the winter before. Her two French braids, plaited by Kirsten that morning, still pulled tight against the skin of her temples; her folded socks were the whitest they had ever been. As she approached the church she could see, jutting from the ground at odd angles behind it, the tombstones of the old cemetery: lozenge and cross-shaped, decaying at the edges, flecked with moss. Between these she and Rudi had dragged their toboggan, moving among the dead as if through a crowd at the market. She remembered the weight of his body when they took a curve too tightly and tumbled into the snow. His gloved hand, grasping hers to pull her to her feet, was so strong. In her belly the ache set in. There would be no second winter with Rudi. By then Judy’s family would be long gone.

For the first time, looking out over the cemetery, she noticed the grave markers at the base of the hill that lay flat against the ground. During the winter they had been covered in snow. The realization alarmed her for a moment before she shoved it aside in her mind. Human beings, after all—for this was the lesson she had gained from months of taking dictation from Struwwelpeter—got what was coming to them. One’s fate was the consequence of one’s actions, and the poorer the choices, the poorer the results. The dead had ended up there for a reason. And she was not to feel guilty if she and Rudi had treated their resting place as a playground, for it was the task of the living to look with a cool eye over the cautionary tales they represented, and shrug, and remember to eat one’s soup and not play with matches or go out in rainstorms.

At the side of the church was a little stone chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Judy leaned against the entryway and looked around inside. The little room was cool and quiet. On one side stood a black iron stand filled with flickering candles; straight ahead, two short pews offered visitors a place to sit or kneel. At the very back stood the statue of the Virgin, its stone pure white and soft-looking, like chalk. Beneath one of her feet was a crescent moon; beneath the other, a serpent. A crown of dull metal stars circled her head. Several times since the early spring Judy had made this journey, never crossing the threshold but simply looking in—not quite with the detachment her father showed toward such things, but not quite with the belief of her classmates, either. Like an infant she had begun to form the most primitive impressions of these human icons, based formlessly on blind need. In the barn there was Christ, under whom thrived warmth and friendliness and raw gentle life. In this low stone building there stood Mary, who commanded peace and quiet, who was a mother but never trembled or stumbled or violated or was violated. The human tribe owed its people one or two who were beyond reprimand. One or two—and that was all—not subject to the vagaries of the body or the mind, through whom the light could slip as it does between immovable stones. Such people, if they could be relied upon, would be the beginning and end of everything. They would look down from heaven upon a selfless girl, one who stood nearly naked beneath the stars, and shower her with blessings. For the world was fair.

From the doorway, she whispered the Ave Maria her teacher had taught her.

Then she hiked her rucksack higher on her shoulders and walked home.

A rat-a-tat sound emerged from her house, faint at a distance, while Judy was still as far away as Rudi’s place. The noise ceased as she started up the walk that wound to the back door. She pushed it open, and there on her mother’s coffee table stood a young woman of about Kirsten’s age, gathering her skirt while Kirsten knelt on the floor beside her with a mouthful of pins. Kirsten barely looked up. “Guten Tag, Judy,” she murmured through her closed lips, and continued pinning up the hem.

“So that’s his daughter,” said the other girl, in German. “She’s small.”

“She can understand you,” Kirsten replied in a warning tone. To Judy she said, “This is Eva. She’s a friend of mine.”

Judy offered no greeting, letting her rucksack slip from her shoulders and thump to the floor beside the radiator. She had lately taken to leaving messes for Kirsten to clean up—harmless disorder for the most part, with occasional minor catastrophes for which Kirsten would be blamed. On the dining table sat a sewing machine, the one from the storage room, which Judy’s mother had never used. Large scraps of cloth, eggshell white and sprigged with tiny pastel flowers, lay in heaps on the table. A pair of pinking shears sprawled open, like the gaping mouth of a wolf in a fairy tale. The rounds of its handles looked to Judy like cartoon eyes. She ran a finger across the line of triangles along the blade.

“Don’t touch that, Mausi,” said Kirsten, using the nickname Judy had lately come to hate. Where once it had seemed so fond, it now seemed calculated to emphasize her insignificance.

She looked up at the girl who stood on her coffee table, bare-shouldered in the half-finished sundress. The girl’s dark hair was neatly rolled and arranged. Her features were strong, with a shapely jaw and brows that made her eyes look daunting, but her bow-shaped mouth was almost petulant. She looked down at Kirsten’s pinning and said, “I think you should make it shorter.”

Kirsten gave a scandalized little cry. “Eva. Wouldn’t be ladylike.”

“Rudi would like it.”

She laughed. “Oh, Rudi.” With a few smacks at the base of the skirt to shake out the wrinkles, she added,