we pay enough for schools these days—to pick up where the parents fail. What the hell are we supposed to do, Elena? Let every angry mother and father try to run the show?”
My grandmother’s hopes of me walking into Kansas State School 46 are just that. Hopes. “I don’t think I can walk in there and fetch Freddie out,” I say.
Oma pushes away the tea my mother offers and demands schnapps. Dad gets two words of protest in before realizing he’s lost the fight, and returns from the bar with a short glass of the same thing he gave me when I arrived.
“Ah. Bitter and good,” Oma says, ignoring me. “And now I am going to tell you all a little story.”
I don’t want a story just now; I want my parents’ computer, I want to look shit up, and then I want to go to bed and forget everything that happened since I woke up this morning. But Oma’s eyes tell me to stay put and listen. How foolish of me to think she had lost that commanding way she always had. When my father gets up to put golf on the television, Oma vetoes it with a sharp rap of her cane. “This is about you, too, Gerhard. So sit down.” She says this in German, perhaps to make Dad understand she means business.
And then she begins to talk.
“I am old and I am going to die soon, and when I die, this story will die with me,” she says. “This is what I have always wanted for my family. To let something ugly die and to bury it. Aber.” But.
She tells us in English words and German words, words that develop colorful pictures and clear sounds in my mind as I listen to stories of young girls in uniform. Their heads are high and proud, even the youngest ones in the Jungm?delbund, only ten years old, stand with haughty self-importance as they are photographed at rallies, demonstrations, marches. Starched blouses barely ripple in the breeze, and the pleats in the navy skirts are crisp as the girls parade down streets and riverbank paths. There are echoes of a hundred steel taps on concrete, click-click click-click click-click, and young virgin voices rising in soprano and alto notes. They are the future, a man tells them. They are Germany, and they are perfect. And they march as if they know this.
The voices turn harsh, becoming low, menacing growls in schoolyards, outside shops and synagogues. Hands that spend evenings sewing and playing piano pick up stones. Maria Fischer, now just fourteen in the year 1933, walks past her friend Miriam’s house without so much as a glance toward the girl standing in the doorway. She does this every day, until there’s no more Miriam to ignore.
“Do you see now?” Oma says, inviting my father to refill her glass. When he does, and after she has sipped greedily from it, she continues, and I see the scene she paints pull itself together in detailed strokes:
Now we are in a building, a three-story beige block with a decorative mansard roof and flags waving in salute at the building’s right and left. Two men enter its doors, both gray and bearded, almost look-alikes. One speaks English with an accent; the other as I might, the flat and intonationless English of this country. The first, the one with the accented speech, has a little girl’s hand in his own. He smiles at her, telling her stories of the rich Americans who offered money to help finish the construction, and of the meetings that will fill its rooms in years to come.
Oma sinks back into the sofa’s cushions, her gray eyes glassy. “I remember that day,” she says. “We went to Berlin to see this new institute named for Kaiser Wilhelm. I must have only been seven, perhaps eight. My father had business appointments and left me in the care of a great-uncle. This uncle took me on a tour, and he introduced me to some of his work colleagues.” She pauses. “It was all rather boring for a young girl, but in the afternoon he took me to tea and told me he had a surprise for my birthday. All little girls like surprises, so I brightened.”