She now noticed a bottle of champagne on a small round table with a lacy cloth covering. The men took a seat. The door opened again, and an older woman in a black dress wearing a starched apron and a white scalloped collar came out with a tray of hors d’oeuvres. She set down the tray and left. Himmler stood and picked up the champagne bottle.
“A toast, gentlemen.” He began to uncork the bottle of champagne. “News today from the commandant of Auschwitz. Rudolf Hess reports that the Zyklon B is proving itself most efficient, as are the gas chambers themselves. As of a few days ago, up to six thousand Jews, Romá, and homosexuals are being exterminated each day. The infestation of vermin is being vanquished. Purity is being restored—every minute of every single day.”
The cork popped loudly and sailed into the air. Alice felt nausea sweep through her as she perched in the tree. The leaves above her shivered as the cork dropped through the green canopy and landed directly in her lap. She picked it up and looked at it, then shifted her gaze to the tree across from her. Her breath caught in her throat. He was there! The shadow boy. The tree boy! A lost boy. Tears rolled down his face. She pointed down toward the trash bin. He nodded.
It was as if they didn’t need words. A silent agreement was made. They would both stay in their trees as long as it took for the men to go back into the house. Then they would meet. Alice felt a strange sort of excitement pass through her, as if she was on the precipice of an adventure that had nothing to do with her mission. A boy who lived in trees was about to perhaps become her friend. There was something almost magical about it.
Was he a changeling of some sort? How she had loved all those changeling tales when she was very young. Stories were told of a changeling child left in the place of a real child by fairies. They were stories that had made her weep. Weep for both children, the real one and the fairy child. The illustrations in the picture books always made the children look frail, both young and old at the same time—as if they had seen too much in their short lives, and yet had gained an unnatural kind of wisdom. In fact, their faces and eyes seemed almost luminous with this strange kind of knowledge.
Alice and the tree boy did not fall asleep. They did not grow tired.
The light dwindled, the stars broke out. She knew her parents wouldn’t miss her, as they had the reception and would be home long after dinner. At one point the maid came out with a painting and held it up so the other two men could see.
“A Jewish painter?” Himmler asked as he looked at the landscape.
“I don’t think so,” Schmelling replied. “Egon Schiele. Austrian. Died more than twenty years ago. Worth quite a bit, I’m told.”
The men drank another bottle of champagne and another, and then began to drink schnapps. They were reeling by the time they walked back into the house. Alice and the boy heard the door slam, and then within three minutes or so the sound of the Mercedes-Benz on the street started up. Alice was sure it was Himmler’s car. She knew the sound of a Mercedes, as opposed to, say, a Daimler.
She knew these sounds well, just as she had learned the racketing noise of the Heinkel bombers and the Messerschmitt fighter planes that had carpeted the skies over England two years ago. Like most Rasas, she had developed a sonographic memory. It was the reason they all learned languages so quickly, with just the right intonations for any accent or dialect. Similarly, she knew the sound of a loose fuel injector pump. This one had it. Her father had described it as the sound of an asthmatic sparrow, a slightly wheezing noise. Himmler’s Mercedes would be back in her dad’s shop in a couple of days.
She looked at the boy. He held up his hand and spread his fingers. Was this a signal that they should wait five minutes? Within about three minutes he was climbing down the tree, and then he began to climb up the one where she sat.
Twelve
God Would Eat a Pig
“My name is David,” he said as he swung up onto the branch beside her. With anyone else, Alice might have worried that the branch would break. But it was as if a small bird had alighted from the sky. The limb hardly registered his weight.
“I’m Ute.”
“Thank you, Ute.” The name sounded so wrong in her ears. She desperately wanted to tell him her real name. The true me! Louise’s words exploded in her head.
“No need to thank me. You’re hungry.” But why? she wanted to ask.
“You won’t tell anybody, will you?”
“No! Why would I ever tell someone that you’re hungry?” But the truth was slowly dawning on her. The tears, the house, the small gasp he had emitted when the maid brought out the painting. Alice tipped her head toward the whipped-cream house. “You lived there, didn’t you?”
He nodded and looked down. In barely a whisper, he spoke. “I lived there with my parents. It was our house and so was the painting. The Nazis took the house. I live there now. But they don’t know it.”
“How can that be?”
He lifted his head and his eyes sparkled. “Because I’m a clever lad.”
“Tell me!” Alice said. “Tell me.” She leaned closer to him. “And the garden. Tell me about this beautiful garden.”
“My mother designed it. Planted it. Next to music, that was her passion—gardening, flowers, making things grow. There is a wild part that you cannot see. It is my favorite part of the garden. Thick with ferns and woodland flowers—like lady’s slippers, and woodland phlox with blossoms like stars. Truly a heaven on earth.”
“It sounds like a fairy tale.”
“It was, once upon a time.” His eyes turned dreamy. “My mother, my papa, and my sister, Ellie, lived in this house and this garden. My papa was a doctor. My mother was a musician, a pianist. And we . . . we . . . Ellie and me were just children.”
He spoke these words in such a wistful way, but when he uttered the words “just children,” it was as if some strange alchemy occurred and he instantly looked like a little old man.
“Ellie was just a toddler. Now she would be . . .” He shook his head and sighed. “I seem to lose track of time, but now she would be almost four. I was eight. Just children. Baby Ellie was . . .” His voice broke. Tears began to leak from his eyes. With his fist, he wiped snot from his nose—the way any kid would. Except he was not any kid.
“You see, a notice was given that we, like all the Jews in the city, were to report to a deportation center. Ours was on Levetzowstrasse. Not far from our synagogue. We went. We lined up. We were told that we would be going to Lodz, or possibly Riga. All cities that would welcome us. So they told my father. On the day we were to report, we went. There was no way we could not go, especially in this neighborhood, as they sent special squads of SS to take us to the deportation centers. That man you saw in our garden—Schmelling. He loved the house. When he walked in he was exclaiming constantly, ‘What an elegant place! How could vermin be here?’ He meant us—a Jewish family.
“My father could not hold back. He stepped forward and said, ‘High Colonel Schmelling, are you by any chance related to Ernst Schmelling?’
“‘Indeed, he’s my father,’ the colonel replied.
“‘I am Dr. Bloom, and I believe I repaired a myocardial laceration your father had suffered—a direct suture. One of the first of this kind of heart surgery,’” David continued. “But this got us nowhere. Schmelling wanted our house. And so we were delivered to the deportation station, along with our neighbors, the Goldsteins and the Cohns. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of people there. I could see my father growing desperate. Mother was holding Ellie and my father was grasping my hand so tightly, but suddenly he dropped it. He dipped into his pocket and took out a wad of paper money, reichsmarks—large denominations. My father told me to turn my jacket inside out so the star wouldn’t show and to go to the butcher on the corner of Haffenstrasse, by the flower shop, and buy bread and sausage. ‘Make sure it’s pork,’ he whispered.