The Kingdom of Childhood by Rebecca Coleman Page A

then rubbed it against her mouth, the fingers of his other hand gently cupping the back of her head. “There,” he said in English. “All clean now.”
    She knew what was next: he would tell her that her tights were dry and it was time to go home, and then she would be alone again, with only her mother growing fragile as a drying flower, ready to crumple to dust at the lightest touch. Impulsively she threw her arms around Rudi’s waist and buried her face in the soft spot below his ribs, with the warmth and the smell of him to blind and to smother her.
    “There, there, now,” he said, his voice ever so uneasy. “You can always come back tomorrow.”
     
    At the beginning of March the Chandler family piled into the navy-blue Mercedes and drove to Munich to see the Fasching parade. The jubilant crowds gathered along the streets and waved cardboard noisemakers in a rainbow of colors. Men wore masks with spindly noses and twisted smiles, their eyes vanishing into shadowed holes. Grown women dressed like babies, in pacifiers and bonnets, while clowns towered high above on stilts. It was as though Judy had entered a nightmare world in which all of the adults had gone awry. Her father bought her a rabbit-ear headband and a donut filled with orange marmalade, which she ate slowly as the floats and revelers passed by. Everywhere it smelled like beer.
    They walked to a churchyard set up with booths for a children’s carnival, with face-painting and games. Balloons attached to the tables batted in the March wind, their tethering ribbons twisting together. A lady brought out a sheet cake divided into squares and asked each child to choose one.Judy bit into her square and found a lima bean inside. The lady clapped and told her that meant she was the Queen of Fasching. Another lady painted her face with a bunny nose and whiskers to match her headband. Then they got back into the Mercedes and drove home.
    “It’s what they used to do in the old pagan days,” explained her father as they accelerated onto the Autobahn. “They baked a cake with a nut hidden in it, and whoever chose that piece got to be the tribal king for a year.”
    “That’s pretty lucky.”
    “Not as lucky as you’d think. After a year they sacrificed him to their gods and sprinkled his blood onto the earth.”
    Judy turned the lima bean over in her hand. “Oh.”
    “Maybe we’ll skip the Fasching parade next year,” her father added. “Just in case.”
    She smiled. She loved these Saturdays: the hikes in the mountains, the visits to elegant castles, the meandering tours of medieval streets during which she could hang on her father’s hand. His breezy humor made her feel light and safe, after the everyday dread of her mother’s rigid order. She accompanied them on these trips but stayed very quiet, almost as if she had left her mind at home. Home, where a pencil carelessly left in a side table drawer provoked a fit of shaking, impotent hysteria, as though Judy had accidentally punched through a thin membrane and left her mother hemorrhaging sanity onto the living room floor.
    “Moo cow,” said her father. “Look out your window, Judy. There’s a calf. First I’ve seen all season.”
    She glanced at the baby cow with mild interest and thought of the one in Rudi’s barn. Now that the days were growing longer again, she had returned to visiting him in the afternoons before supper. She changed from her Mary Janes to her green rubber rain boots, filled her backpack with herhomework books and thick beeswax crayons and a fountain pen, and clomped down the road to the barn. She kept an eye out for his sisters: Daniela, who would shout at her in bell-voiced, barely comprehensible German, and Kirsten, older than Rudi and recently graduated from school, who tended to bustle around collecting eggs and sweeping the walk. Judy preferred her time with Rudi to be private. If she came at the right time she would find him sitting on the milking stool with his head