Child of the Light Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHILD OF THE LIGHT

  LICENSE NOTES:

  ALSO FROM JANET BERLINER & GEORG GUTHRIDGE

  BUY DIRECT FROM CROSSROAD PRESS & SAVE

  About the Authors:

  PART I

  BERLIN

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  PART II

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHILD OF THE LIGHT

  By Janet Berliner and George Guthridge

  First Digital Edition Published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2011 by Janet Berliner & George Guthridge

  Cover Design by David Dodd

  LICENSE NOTES:

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ALSO FROM JANET BERLINER & GEORG GUTHRIDGE

  Novels:

  Sol's Song

  Child of the Light

  Child of the Journey

  Children of the Dusk

  Unabridged Audiobooks:

  Child of the Light – Narrated by Jane McDowell

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  About the Authors:

  Janet Berliner is the author of six novels and the editor of six anthologies, including two with illusionist David Copperfield and one with Joyce Carol Oates. Born in South Africa of parents who fled Germany in 1936, Janet now lives in Las Vegas while she plans her escape to the Caribbean.

  George Guthridge is a nationally honored educator and author. His book The Kids From Nowhere tells the story of his work with Siberian-Yupik children who were considered uneducable until George led them to three national academic championships. In addition, he has written nearly 100 pieces of short fiction, which have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.

  Together, Janet and George are the authors of more than a dozen stories and the Madagascar Manifesto Series: Child of the Light, Child of the Journey, and the Bram Stoker Award-winning Children of the Dusk.

  PART I

  "But every shadow is in the final analysis also child of the light, and only he who has experienced light and dark, war and peace, ascent and descent, has really lived."

  --Stefan Zweig

  Die Welt von Gestern

  (The World of Yesterday)

  BERLIN

  December 1918

  Nine-year-old Solomon Freund removed his glasses and pressed his face against the wrought-iron bars of his open bedroom window. Without the wire rims digging into his nose he felt more comfortable, but no less impatient. He had been at the window since sundown, waiting for the evening star, the wishing star, to take its place beside the moon, and watching the soldier guarding the fur shop that adjoined the Freund-Weisser tobacco shop across the street.

  The star had not yet appeared, the soldier had lost his appeal, and Solomon had grown weary of waiting.

  Earlier, his sister, Recha, had cored apples for the sauce that went with the potato pancakes his mother was making for tonight's birthday-Chanukah-Christmas celebration with the Weisser family upstairs; he had grated the potatoes. Now he could hear the latkes sizzling in the heavy frying pan his mother kept salted and greased for her specialty. The smell of browning butter wafted into his room and his stomach growled in anticipation. The soldier must be cold, and hungry, too, he thought.

  He glanced up at the ceiling that separated him from his best friend, Erich Weisser. Here, on the ground floor, the Chanukah Menorah had been lit and the smell of butter and applesauce filled the air; up in the Weissers' second-story flat, there was the scent of pine and the glow of Christmas candles--and Erich, furious that once again his parents had said no to his birthday and Christmas wish: a dog of his own. He needed a dog, he said, the way Sol needed glasses. Besides, he said, Sol could talk to his sister when he got lonely. Whom did he have? At least if he had a dog he would have someone to talk to, he said. Strange how he always talked about dogs as if they were people. He swore he could talk to them and that they answered him--which wasn't all that crazy, Sol thought, not if their friend Beadle Cohen was right and anything the mind could conceive of was possible.

  It didn't matter. What did matter was that Erich get over his sulk by the time the party started.

  What a party this was going to be--the first night of Chanukah, Christmas Eve, Erich's tenth birthday. Best of all, Papa was back from the Front for good, recovered from influenza without infecting the rest of the family.

  A true miracle, Mama called it.

  Maybe the glow of Christmas and Chanukah candles together would make another miracle and stop Erich's papa from drinking too much tonight. Then he would not make all those snide comments about Jews, and Frau Weisser would not go on about all the things she wanted and could not have, all the while looking at Mama accusingly, as if she--and not Herr Weisser's gambling--were responsible for their reduced circumstances. Herr Weisser would keep off Erich's back, and--

  Across the street, the soldier shook his fist at the moon.

  Was he blaming the moon for keeping him from his family on this Christmas Eve? Sol replaced his glasses and waited to see if any of the people milling around Friedrich Ebert Strasse had noticed the soldier's strange action.

  Nobody seemed to care.

  A crowd had gathered at the corner, around a hurdy-gurdy man grinding out a polka on his barrel organ. Several beer-drunk locals had grabbed their fat, frumpish wives and begun to dance. Two women in ragtag coats begged at the door of the butcher shop whose shelves had long since held only black-market horse meat and a skinned cat or two; a couple of street vendors hawked indoor fireworks and sugar-coated ginger cookies. They stepped delicately around the beggars to approach a passing coterie of laughing Fraüleins in their fashionable calf-length holiday skirts. Having sampled the spicy cookies, the ladies boldly offered a taste to a trio of cadets walking stiffly upright to balance the weight of th
eir gold-mounted Pickelhauben helmets.

  The cadets ignored them and continued to make their way toward a group of men in uniform who stood at the far corner, beneath skeletal trees. Arms crossed, they listened to a Freikorps band play a solemn Lohengrin medley.

  The scene held endless fascination for Sol. It was as if his entire pewter soldier collection had come alive in the street: Cuirassiers in armored breastplates, Death's Head Hussars, Foot Artillery, Hasans--

  He thought about his little army, so proud and smart in the closet he carefully kept locked. Though he knew that daydreaming could bring the voices again and leave him shaking, he let his mind drift. He resisted the urge to imagine himself in the Great War. Papa had said the fighting had been too terrible to contemplate--and no glory in it, despite the Kaiser's decrees to the contrary--so Solomon imagined himself...saw himself...among his soldiers outside Paris forty-five years earlier, the great city surrounded, he with saber in hand, leading a heroic charge against a mitrailleusse machine gun. Bullets whizzed past his ears. He called out encouragement to his men and they in turn invoked the name of the Fatherland. The French abandoned their posts and scattered before the brave Prussians racing through the field.

  The battle froze as if caught in a photograph. Everyone stopped running. The artillery bursts stayed in place, as though the sky were permanently bruised, yet light, a different light, flashed before Sol's eyes, spangling like a foil pinwheel. The flashes brightened, got bigger...seemed to swallow him. He no longer saw either the battlefield or the street of Berlin. Only a cobalt-blue twilight surrounded him--the world without form, without substance. He tried to shut his eyes, but the glow held him. A man's voice cried out from the twilight--shrill, plaintive, filled with pain:

  "Is this your season of madness, Solomon Freund? Is this your season of sadness?"

  A real machine gun rattled, cutting off the twilight voice--another of the voices he had been hearing off and on for at least as long as he'd been wearing glasses...which seemed like forever.

  Solomon blinked. The cobalt-blue light dissipated as the music and the strollers along Friedrich Ebert Strasse paused. Rifle fire filled the momentary silence. Couldn't people, he wondered, trembling and angry with himself for hearing another of the voices again, at least stop shooting for the holidays? Sometimes he had a hard time remembering what things were like before the start of the Communist revolution. Seven weeks was not forever, but it was too long to be confined to the apartment house, where he had been since the Great War ended and the revolt in Berlin's streets began.

  "Snipers!" A man dressed as St. Nicholas ran down the street, waving his arms. "They've positioned themselves atop the Brandenburg Gate!"

  Two or three people turned and stared in the direction of the Siegesallee--the Victory Alley. Then the music began again, the barrel organ and the Freikorps band, and people continued to saunter down the boulevard as if they had heard and seen nothing more unusual than a man shooting wooden ducks at a carnival stand.

  The shooting must have something to do with the Kiel sailors holed up in the Imperial Palace, Sol decided, vaguely remembering a discussion between his father and Herr Weisser about some mutinous sailors who had sacked the Royal Palace, "under the guise of socialism," whatever that meant.

  Grownups often said things he and Erich didn't understand, he thought. Like Papa, getting agitated about Herr Lubov, the furrier, calling his shop Das Ostleute Haus because Ostleute meant "people of the East." The Lubovs were rumored to be Communist sympathizers who waved what Papa called "the red flag of revolt." Then he and Mama turned right around and talked about Rosa Luxemburg as if she were a heroine in a book--yet she was one of the founders of the new Communist Party in Germany. It was all just too confusing!

  Taking a deep breath to calm himself and put the twilight voice from his mind, he refocused his attention on the soldier.

  One by one, as dusk turned into night, shopkeepers doused their lights and closed up for the day. Finally, all the stores were dark except the furrier's. Mannequins dressed in sable and centered in blue-white light stared at Sol from behind the plate-glass windows. He squinted, distorting the image until the windows across the street became the irises of a Persian cat, a royal Eastern princess whose gleaming eyes hid ambition and avarice. Prinzessin Ostleute.

  Intensified shooting again pulled him back to reality. He gripped the wrought-iron grill and leaned away from his open window, as much to give his nose a chance to warm up as to remove himself from the sound of the guns.

  Staying home and playing with Erich all day had been fun at first, but he was beginning to miss school, and he and Erich were getting on each other's nerves. They needed something special to do, something different, like going back to the hideaway they had discovered just before all the trouble started. They had been sent down to clean the shop's cellar, a job that in the past had been done by hired help. While moving a crate to one side, they had noticed a rusty drain-grate that led into a section of ancient brick sewer, sealed off from Berlin's modern system. Though fetid and damp, the sewer ran beneath both the furrier's and their shop, and made a perfect hideaway.

  Best of all, it was their sewer. Their secret.

  "Tonight will be like old times," Sol's mother said.

  He turned to look at her. She stood framed in the doorway of his room, wiping her hands on her apron. Her face was flushed, her hairline damp from the heat of the kitchen.

  "Come, Sol. You must be hungry. Wash your hands and face and help me carry the food upstairs."

  Sol glanced at his hands. "I'm starving."

  "Wash," his mother said. "Even if you think you're clean."

  Frowning, Sol moved away from the window.

  His mother laughed. "Watch out--your face might stay ugly," she said. "And close that window, Solly, or there'll be icicles on your bed when we come home. Already in here it's like Siberia."

  CHAPTER TWO

  "Aren't you going to help us put this on the tree?" Erich's mother held out a handful of tinsel.

  Erich shook his head and went on rocking in the chair he had placed as far away from the tree as possible. He hated Christmas. Mama knew that! He hated his birthday, too, because it was Christmas Eve and he always lost out. He had liked them both all right until he was about six, when his parents started lumping everything together, cheating him, giving him one present instead of two. Sure, the present was bigger, but that still meant he only had one package to open.

  "Here, Friedrich, you do it. I have other things to do before they come."

  Inge Weisser handed the tinsel to her husband. He took it from her and threw it at the tree. "There! Is that good enough for them?"

  "What do you mean for them? It's for us, Friedrich, and for the boy."

  "Jews--what do they know about Christmas! Not even a tree in the shop--he wouldn't allow it--"

  It's almost as though he wishes Herr Freund had died in the trenches, Erich thought. One of these days he's going to forget himself in front of Herr Freund and say something even Sol's papa--for all his niceness--cannot excuse, and then what will happen to us?

  "I hear them coming up the stairs." His mother set her face in a smile and looked at her husband as if she hoped it were contagious. "Quick, Erich, open the door."

  He let the Freunds in and for a while it was like old times. The two families sat on the Weissers' astrakhan rug, among stray tinsel and pine needles. There were warmed schnapps, potato pancakes, and easy laughter in front of a roaring fire. And songs--not religious ones of Jesus or God particularly--just non-secular, happy, holiday ones.

  When the stories began about the children when they were little and Germany was at peace, Recha climbed onto her father's lap and snuggled against him. "Tell us about when you were little, Papa."

  Jacob Freund smiled. Reaching into his pocket, he took out a tiny, four-sided brass top. "This dreidel is even older than I am. Can you imagine that, children? My grandfather brought it all the way from Russia."


  Erich and Sol grinned at each other. This was their favorite story, the one about Sol's great grandfather Moshe, who was both a rabbi and a horse thief. Why didn't he have an interesting family like that, Erich thought.

  Holding the dreidel, Jacob said, "We'll never be sure which of his two occupations made it necessary for him to leave Russia in the middle of the night, but--"

  "Couldn't you spare us the story of your illustrious ancestors just this one time?"

  Friedrich Weisser downed another schnapps and Erich felt as if a cold wind had blown through the room. There were hours to go before midnight and the opening of presents. An argument now would spoil everything.

  "I'm first," he said, hoping to avert a quarrel. Taking the dreidel from Herr Freund's hand, he spun it hard. "Nun, gimel, he, shin," he chanted, repeating the letters of the Hebrew alphabet that were engraved on the old brass surface of the dreidel. He had learned the words from the Freunds; maybe being the first to say them tonight would make up for his father's rudeness.

  Recha, whose eyelids had begun to droop, got her second wind. She climbed off her father's lap and joined in the game, yelling loudly as the top slowed down and she, too, tried to guess which letter would be visible when the spinning stopped and the dreidel finally lay still.

  "Ridiculous game!" Herr Weisser placed his rough hand over the top and stopped its spinning.

  Ella Freund's face hardened. "All right, children," she said, standing up. "It's getting late. I think it's time to leave."

  "Don't be so sensitive, Ellie." Her husband took out a fresh cigar. "Fred's just had a little too much schnapps. He doesn't mean anything by it."

  Oh doesn't he, Erich thought, watching his father pace up and down the room.

  "You Jews all think you're so special--" Friedrich Weisser stopped in his tracks and glared at Herr Freund.