“You think Hitler cares about our sound? Jakob, I don’t want to do anything but continue our lives. But I’m not thinking about what we want to do.” I imagined them staring at each other over the table, their words failing.
“Please, darling, no decisions tonight.” My father’s voice was weary. “We’ve got time to think about all of this. I promise I’ll read the newspaper on Sundays if it will make you happy.”
There was the rattle of china cups against the sink, and then nothing but their footsteps as they retreated to their room.
I pulled the quilt over my head and curled around my rabbit Lebkuchen, trying to make sense of my parents’ words. Was my mother right, would Hitler try to come here? Did my father work with people who might endanger him somehow? I was confused. I wished Anneliese were here, or Stefi. Someone to reassure me. Apparently there was more to worry about in the world than impressing the other students with my ability to sound out words.
Friedenglückhasenland. I whispered the word out loud. That’s where I needed to go.
Five
On September 15, 1935, Hitler announces the Nuremberg Laws, which strip German Jews of their citizenship and prohibit relationships between Jews and other Germans.
On September 26, 1935, Klaus Barbie joins the SS.
There was only one year Anneliese and I were not in the same class at Volksschule. Our teachers separated us in our second year, when we were seven, in the vain hope that we would make other friends. It wasn’t healthy to have just one friend, our teacher Frau Fessler told us. “It takes many poles to hold up a tent.”
Anneliese stifled a snort. “We’re a tent?” she whispered, kicking me under my desk. “I always thought of us more as a castle.”
She and I started school on the same day and in our first year we shared a table, our pencils, and our books. When the teacher wasn’t looking, one of us would draw the head of a bunny and then fold the paper down so the other couldn’t see it. Without looking at the head, the second person drew the bunny’s stomach, and then the first person drew its legs and feet. Sheets and sheets of folded paper bunnies, hatted or crowned, dressed in finery or swimsuits, holding baskets or flowers, piled up on our table. Everything I did—every math problem, every verb conjugation, every recitation of history—I showed to Anneliese for her approval before turning it in. Her opinion mattered so much more than the teacher’s.
Frau Fessler was not the only person irritated by our constant togetherness. Heinrich Müller, a thuggish little boy with fair hair and fat cheeks who went to the boys’ school nearby, often stalked after us on our way to school, delighting in interrupting our games. There have always been bullies, after all, even before they started wearing the official badges of the SS. Heinrich threw rocks into our marble games and stole the pictures we drew. He yanked out strands of my bright hair yelling, “Look, Orly’s on fire!” One morning on the sidewalk outside the school gates, he emptied a bucket of water on the chalk map of Friedenglückhasenland we’d been sketching on the pavement. Furious, and without thinking about the repercussions, I stood up and slapped his fat face, as hard as I could. “What is wrong with you?” I shouted at him. “Why can’t you just leave us alone?”
He stood there for a moment, his pink face growing pinker, stunned that a girl had had the audacity to hit him. I could tell he was tempted to hit me back, but he was too clever. He knew he would get in just as much trouble as I would, if not more. “Because you’re a Büchsenmasseuse.” He hurled the word at us as if it could pierce our intimacy.
I couldn’t move. The word slipped around in my brain; I couldn’t grasp it. It had something to do with us, with our bodies, with how we were together, but I wasn’t sure how it was meant to wound.
This time it was Anneliese who hit him. “And you’re nothing but a Bürger von Krokodilland!”
I turned to her, astonished. “He’s a what?”
At that moment, Frau Fessler appeared at the gate to drag us both away by the arms.
* * *
• • •
IT DIDN’T SURPRISE ME that Anneliese would strike a boy. After all, she had learned punishment young. The previous summer, when my family took us out of Vienna to Zell am See, she swam with something over her suit, a blouse or even a dress. I teased her for this—I cringe when I remember it, but it’s true—prancing around her in my skimpy suit, trying to pull the blouse from her shoulders. As she twisted away from me, I glimpsed the raised stripes of angry pink welts underneath. “Ana?” I had started, unsure of what they were.
She wrapped her arms around her rib cage. “Doesn’t your father hit you?”
Mute, I shook my head. I knew that many fathers hit their children. Even some mothers. But I’d never seen such scars on someone my age.
Anneliese squinted into the sun. “They’ll get better.”
I couldn’t think of what to say. “But why? Why does he do it?”
She shrugged her small bony shoulders and looked away. “I don’t listen?”
That night while she slept next to me I lifted her nightdress to kiss that blameless flesh of her back, my lips barely brushing her skin. How soft and small she was. Letting her nightdress fall, I curled beside her like a sentry, careful not to press too close against her wounds.
Later on the afternoon that Anneliese and I smacked Heinrich, after Anneliese’s father had taken a belt to her again and my mother had told me I would be going to bed without stories for a whole week, we sat at my kitchen table drawing on the backs of sheet music my father no longer needed. “I think my father might be from Krokodilland,” she said in a low voice so Stefi wouldn’t overhear.
When I thought of Anneliese’s father, a fat banker whose only role in the household other than funding it seemed to be to mete out punishment, I felt like throwing up. I wished I were brave enough to slap his face. I had given Anneliese my pillow to sit on, feeling very grateful that my father didn’t hit me.
“What’s Krokodilland?” The question had been burning a hole in my tongue.
She looked up. “You know. The country next to Friedenglückhasenland. The one with all the mean people. The Krokodills. I figured I couldn’t get in trouble for calling Heinrich a citizen of Krokodilland. We’re the only ones who know what it means.”
“Oh, I know, I remember. The country that doesn’t have any trees.” I leaned forward and trapped one of Anneliese’s feet between mine, anxious to contribute. Friedenglückhasenland was circular, a belt of a country with a hole in the middle. A vast sea filled that hole, and three large islands. But surrounding it all, I reminded her, was Krokodilland. “The Krokodills always want to start wars against Friedenglückhasenland.”