Other People’s Houses Read Online Free Page B

“Willi used to do my drawing exercises. It wasn’ta bad setup we had there.”
    The next day, my grandmother happened to meet Willi in front of the shop, and she said, “You owe us twenty-five schillings for your winter coat and galoshes. Can I send Mitzi over in the morning to collect?”
    But when she came into the store and boasted of what she had done, my grandfather said, “You know they had the rot in their potatoes. They can’t pay.”
    The followingmorning, the front of our house had “Jew” and dirty words written in red paint all over it. The bloody color was still wet and dripping down the stone when my grandfather went out to take the shutters down. He washed it off—the letters disappeared slowly but the color blotched the wall—and that’s as far as it went that time; neither we nor they had yet realized the possibilities.
    In late Augustcame the first of the war scares. We had got into the habit of drawing the curtains in the sitting room at six o’clock every evening and gathering around the radio to catch the British news broadcasts. I don’t know if the weather clouded over or if the grim mood of the adults created in my mind the distinct memory of yellowish-gray clouds standing for days over the low roofs of the village houses.

    One day, the first German regiment moved in. By noon, the square outside our windows was black with tanks, armored cars, radio trucks. Our yard was requisitioned for the paymaster’s headquarters. The soldiers borrowed one of our kitchen chairs and the card table on which Paul and Liesel had written the story of Vaselina.
    Two helmeted guards stood on either side of the table while the German soldiersin their gray-green uniforms filed past to collect their money. I sat in the passageway that led from the storeroom into the yard, watching. I had the cat on my lap. My father leaned out and told me to wash my hands. My mother said for me to go and play upstairs or the soldiers might see me. What bothered me was not that they might see me, but that in fact they did not, and I got hold of thecat and turned its ears inside out and tied my skipping rope around its neck until it yowled.
    The paymaster looked around. “Well now,” he said. “Now, you don’t want to do that to the poor pussy.”
    “Pardon?” I said politely. Though I had heard very well what he said, I wanted to hear him say “ Kätzchen ” again—the unfamiliar harsh-sounding diminutive of “cat,” so different from the tenderly comicsound of the Austrian “ Katzerl. ” The animal meanwhile was choking. The paymaster rose and came over, saying, “ Armes kleines Kätzchen ” (“Poor little kitten”), and untied it. He asked me if I knew how to skip rope, and I said yes. He ordered one of the helmeted guards to hold the other end of the rope. The line of soldiers stood at ease against the vine-covered walls. I skipped and recited:
    “ Aufder blauen Donau
    Schwimmt ein Krokodil … ”
    This was about the time that Neville Chamberlain paid his visit to Hitler in Munich.
    I opened my eyes in the night because a voice below my window was saying, “SQ calling XW, SQ calling XW, move east twenty kilometers on Route 46, over,” or some such gibberish. Startled out of sleep, I sat straight up in my bed in the darkness. The words seemed so pregnantwith meaning that I tried to hold them against the forgetfulness already overtaking them as an engine started up and raced away down the street. There was a great cranking up of heavy engines, and a rolling of truck after truck, and an earth-cracking, wall-wrenching rumble of tons of iron tank on iron caterpillar chain through the narrow streets. It worried me that the vehicles moving awayfrom the square threw the light of their headlamps across my ceiling not in the direction in which they were going but in an opposite direction, and before I tucked myself back to sleep I promised myself to try to remember to mention it to Paul.
    It was autumn, which