The Kingdom of Childhood

The Kingdom of Childhood

The Kingdom of Childhood

A Novel

REBECCA COLEMAN

To Catherine

“The wiser being in us leads us to this person because of a relationship in a previous life… We are led to this person as though by magic. We now reach a manifold and intricate realm…our youthful energies begin to decline. We move past a climax, and from there we move downward.”

“You have no idea how unimportant is all that the teacher says or does not say on the surface, and how important what he himself is as teacher.”

—Rudolf Steiner

Contents

Prologue              

PART I: THE QUEEN OF FASCHING              

Chapter 1              

Chapter 2              

Chapter 3              

Chapter 4              

Chapter 5              

Chapter 6              

Chapter 7              

Chapter 8              

Chapter 9              

Chapter 10              

Chapter 11              

Chapter 12              

Chapter 13              

Chapter 14              

Chapter 15              

Chapter 16              

Chapter 17              

PART II: ZXP              

Chapter 18              

Chapter 19              

Chapter 20              

Chapter 21              

Chapter 22              

Chapter 23              

Chapter 24              

Chapter 25              

Chapter 26              

Chapter 27              

Chapter 28              

Chapter 29              

Chapter 30              

Chapter 31              

Acknowlegements              

Questions for Discussion              

Prologue

In Bavaria the snow is always very deep. Once the first flakes fall it quickly buries everything that rests on the country earth: hedgehog nests, lost underpants, drawings of a crucified Jesus clumsily wrought in colored pencil, worn bars of Fels-Naptha laundry soap good for removing most stains. I have seen all of these things vanish beneath that snow that rots everything, and if ever there was anything colder or more beautiful than a German winter I have yet to experience it.

But when I was a girl of only ten, stumbling through my first months in that country where I was more alone than I have ever been before or since, where even my teachers babbled nonsensical words at me and my mother’s mind grew knottier by the day, I could hardly understand that I should appreciate such loveliness with my whole heart, because, rest assured, things would get worse for me. That year I felt home sick for Baltimore, where the winter sky teased for months and then, perhaps late in February, would shake loose its clouds in an orgy of the stuff that snapped power lines, threw cars into a whirl, and brought our modest, industrious little city to its knees. I preferred a good crisis to a dependable case of cabin fever. But in any case I spent much of that winter outdoors, with my mother gone, my father putting the house to other uses.

Every day I had to stomp through the drifts to catch the school bus. Back then we all wore dresses like Caroline Kennedy, our skirts swirly and pert and often impractical, and what a cross that was to bear. The icy water would seep through my tights and then I’d be bone-cold until lunchtime.

One morning, it must have been a Saturday I suppose, I went out to play in that snow. It was a fresh snowfall and still looked magical. We had learned a song in school, in Ger man of course, about a walk through the snow, and I sang it as I marched through the field across from my house, turning around to look at my boot prints. I didn’t understand all the words, but the song had a very sweet tune, ethereal, you would say. And amid snow everything seems so very silent, you know, I imagine I must have enjoyed how clear and alone my voice sounded.

Down the road lived my classmate Daniela and her brother Rudi, who was older and went to the high school. I often spent time in the barn with him in the afternoons, biding the last of the daylight in the quiet and the peace of nature, away from our rented home. Well, I suppose he must have heard me while he was working in the barn, because next thing I knew he was waving his big hand from across the field, and then he bounded over to me in those thick rubber boots, calling, Judy, Judy. He asked me if I liked to sled. I told him I did, even though my mother always forbade it because she said it was too dangerous. But I thought it sounded exciting, because when I was small she had often read to me from a book of children’s poetry, and I remembered the poem that began—

Come fly with me, said the little red sledI’ll give you the wings of a bird, it said

—and beside it there was a drawing of a little Flexible Flyer with a smiling face. He told me his sister Daniela had a cold and couldn’t go, but that he would take me if I liked. And so I ignored my mother’s warnings, and I went with him.