Listen to thisIf you didn’t see Chapter One of this serialised and previously-unpublished book, you can vist it here before you read Chapter Two. – Eds
Chapter 2
California
Mutti
He gots fat white arms
He smiles and smiles
He wears a white undershirt
I hate him
Mutti Elfriede take me
Take me
Don’t go
Don’t go
My mouth so big with crying
I can’t say it
Don’t go
Mutti mutti
My breath takes steps
Mutti mutti
I hate him
Don’t go
Something was never right between the Kirbergs and the Bottgers. I imagined that my father, fifteen years older than my mother and speaking Low German, not High German, didn’t seem good enough for the only daughter of my proud Prussian-like grossvater.
Paul Kirberg had been a cavalry officer, and decorated by the Kaiser in the first World War. He came to California with his family and a wallet of useless Deutch marks. A jeweler in Germany, he earned a living in America by going to downtown Los Angeles and stopping at shops and hospitals, to collect snapped golden chains, rings that needed stones restored, surgical instruments and scissors that needed sharpening. These things he brought home to work on.
His wife had died not long before his daughter. But it was Hildegard's ashes he couldn’t bear to take to the cemetery. Her ashes he ran through his hands from the canister that sat on her baby grand piano, in his house in Highland Park.
Now Elfriede Bottger had brought him his daughter’s two little girls.
Mutti
The lady’s voice here
It goes like a bird's
Her arm is soft
On my cheek
Grossmutti she is
She puts a bow in my hair
Big as Shirley Temple's
Jewel likes grossvatti
But he sees her wet pants
At night we show him our pants
See, no pee pee grossvatti
We put our shoe laces in our shoes
two shoes together
Like two sisters
One for me, one for Jewel
One dead mutter for Nora
One dead vatter for Jewel
My grandfather’s second wife took a liking to me. I was a feminine and affectionate five-year-old and became Clara Heimbrod's baby. But at age 50, the childless Clara had no use for my bumptious sister, who never found time to go to the toilet. Our grandfather who had survived World War I and the German depression, handled the matter in army fashion with a nightly inspection. We had to show him the underpants we had taken off. And they should be dry. Whatever my sister's punishments were, they made me be very very good.
My grandfather’s Highland Park home was my birthplace. In the upstairs bedroom where sun shone through a trellis and dappled a feather bed, my mother labored with the help of a midwife and gave birth to me.
The house was on Abbott Avenue. It was two stories high. My grandfather had built most of it himself. Our albums have pictures of my mother holding me in the garden below the house. In this garden were pepper trees, iris', and lots of snails.
When we returned from the east to live in our birth house again, I was ready for kindergarten and would learn English for the first time, by going to kindergarten. Close to our house was a public cement walk and stairway that my sister and I walked to school.
Dear Mutti,
Mutti Elfriede left me here
Still I cry
The bed here
It is gold bars,
metal this bed
where the bars cross, there is a circle
Grossvatti says he will put our names there
Jewel has her side
I have mine side
Who will come and get me now ?
My sister and I often shared a bed when we were children. The first time was when were brought to my Grandfather's home in California. My Aunt brought us there, thus resolving the fighting that went on between our aunt and uncle, and this maternal grandfather, over the expenses of our care.
When our Grandfather showed us the bed we would sleep in together he seemed pleased about it. It had a gold colored metal head of rods that had a round disk where they crossed. My grandfather, as we came to call him, said he would put our initials in that little place. It was supposed to cheer us up, this golden bed, because our aunt who had cared for us for a year would be leaving, but I hated my grandfather's bare arms, as he stood there is his white undershirt, on a hot summer day, smiling and trying so hard to please us. I cried and hated him and felt there was no one to give me hugs anymore.
My sister was not affectionate. Why should she be? My mother must have told her to take care of me, and she did, but she didn't like it. I was a fast grower and at four years of age about the same size as she was at six. I think of a baby eagle, all fluffed out and almost large as the parents, who must feed the ravenous giant baby. I was a dependent loving child. I liked to be cuddled and dressed up. My sister liked to be on the move, doing things, making things, and too busy to think about the rules. I tagged along after her and she got into trouble.
On Abbott Street when I first shared a bed with my sister, I began to learn what all bed mates learn about hanging onto the covers.
Eventually we were taken to the Home for Children and we got our own beds. They had a white metal heads and feets, with a mattress that crackled. For a while I wet the bed and my sister still wet her pants.
Today I sleep with a husband I can exchange hugs with, grateful that I learned to hang onto my share of the bedding, from sleeping with that wild sister of mine, the one I can hug now and then. We are still about the same size.
