The Kingdom of Childhood

He fetched a sled from the barn—it was a toboggan, really—and we walked through the field to the churchyard. First we passed the shrine to the Virgin Mary, and then there was an old graveyard, and downhill from it, an empty lawn covered by a smooth snowdrift. The hill was quite steep in some places, and in others, not so steep but very long. I was afraid to go down by myself, so Rudi climbed on behind me—goodness knows how, because he was so big and I remember the toboggan was shorter than I was—and down we went. What a thrill it was, the way the cold air rushed across my face and filled my lungs as we flew past everything at once. I thought, this is the way the astronauts must feel, because that was during the Space Race, and adults were always telling children what an amazing time we lived in because of it.

In a short while I could go down the slower hills alone, but the steeper ones I only dared if Rudi sat behind me. I felt like I could do anything if he was there. It sounds silly to say it, but sometimes, when it was time to go home after visiting him in the barn, I felt like clinging to his leg like a toddler and burying my face in his waist, and begging him, please don’t make me go back there.

I tell you, he must have thought I was the peskiest child. Lord knows why he tolerated me. I suppose it was his weight that made the sled feel so much safer with him on it. And he could brace his legs along mine, which must have made me feel as though I couldn’t fall out.

In my memory we went up and down the hill for hours, although it couldn’t have been nearly that long. A few times the toboggan overturned, tumbling both of us into the snow, and I remember his laugh when that happened. Jolly, as if he were really having fun. I don’t recall the trip back to the house, only that it was warm when we got there.

I mean his house, not mine. I had never been inside past the mudroom, but this time he brought me into the kitchen and sat me down at the little table. It was a modern kitchen but on the wall there hung those carved wooden molds for spice cookies—lebkuchen,

they called them. One was carved with Struwwelpeter, a horrible character from a book they made us study in school. A boy, but with yellow hair in a frizz like a monster’s fur, and sad, vacant eyes. His fingernails twisted like claws and he wore a prim schoolboy outfit on his deformed little body. I remember I asked Rudi, who would want to eat a cookie shaped like Struwwelpeter? And he laughed.

He said, Your tights are wet, take them off.

And so I did. He helped me pull them off when they twisted around my ankles, then sat on the floor before me and rubbed my feet and toes to warm them. Your feet are like ice cream, he said. He meant that they were like ice, but the word for both is the same in German. Then he took my tights and hung them by the woodstove, and gave me a cookie to eat while we waited for them to dry.

The cookies were lebkuchen,

although the round type, not made in molds like the ones on the walls. They tasted of cinnamon and cloves and the dark, syrupy flavor of the honey the bees made in the deep pine woods nearby. I remembered such cookies from Christmas, and Rudi said they were left over; but this kind had a smooth, white, starchy disk on the underside, and I asked him what it was. He said the disks were called oblaten, that sometimes people spooned the cookie dough onto them before baking and sometimes they didn’t. He liked them either way. Then he said, do you know, they are the same type of wafer used by the priest during Mass. Exactly the same, only not blessed. So if you put a blessing on it, it becomes the Body of Christ. And if you do not, you can use it to make a cookie.

I thought that was interesting, that my cookie could have been something sacred. But instead, here I sat beside the woodstove with my tights dangling from the back of a chair, with my classmate’s older brother beside me, eating a honey cookie. And there was nothing holy about it at all.

Well, that’s all I remember. After my tights dried I put them on and went home, I suppose. In the spring, when Easter came and I happened upon the shrine again, I realized that lawn beyond the old graveyard was actually the new graveyard, where the markers were metal plaques that lay flush against the ground. So that day Rudi and I had gone sledding, we had all the while been sledding across the graves of the dead. I don’t know if he realized that, although I imagine he did, having lived in that town all his life. Maybe it didn’t matter to him. Or maybe he thought the dead would not begrudge the living a bit of joy.