The Night of Broken Glass by Sophia Muhle Bruce (ebook reader 7 inch .TXT) 📖

Hers was the kind of face that glowed like the stars when she laughed and shined when she smiled like hot sun on blacktop. It was the kind of face that was beautiful in the way that maybe she didn’t know it was, or maybe she did but was afraid of knowing it.

Either way, people noticed.

Her face was what I thought about, on long nights when my eyes wouldn’t close to accept sleep, when scenes of fires and swastikas and black nazi boots were too much to hold on to, but too hard to forget, when sometimes I even willed her face to disappear so that maybe, finally, I could get some sleep.

Yet it never left my mind.

Her eyes were the kind of green that didn’t look like anything besides green, the shade that no unspoken metaphor could never hope to explain. I used to stare into her eyes while she spoke, so much that sometimes she would laugh and shut them, until I’d turn to tracing the lines freckles drew on her face instead, the bridge they formed over her nose and the mismatched pattern that danced along her cheeks when she smiled.

She used to never frown.

Elsi was the kind of person that was always so unfalteringly happy that when she cried, it shook you with such crazy surprise that the whole world wanted to cry with her. More than once, after she’d left me alone in the basement at night, I’d give into that feeling.

Elsi could make you feel everything without doing a thing.

When she cried she tried to hide it, like she didn’t want anyone to know that she, too, was human. That she could hurt.

I saw Elsi cry three times.

*     *     *     *     *     *

The first time, I was ten years old, dirty and tanned and trying to hard to hide the Star of David that hung from a gold chain around my neck because Mama told me to, not because I knew why.

Elsi was the same Elsi: little and lovely, with shiny hair the color of honey. That was the year she won the schoolyard soccer shooting competition, and I remember watching her perfect legs make each shot in admiration. She was so happy that day.

Elsi never won again.

Our fifth-grade teacher, Frau Stein, judged the competition with her husband, Old Bill. I never did learn what his real name was.One day, in spring of that year I waited for Elsi after school, like always. She never came. I remember watching the sun turn from red to pink to blue and slowly dying behind the hills. Finally, when it was dark, I went home alone.

       My house was on the Jewish street, two down from the road Elsi’s family lived on. I walked through the big doors of her house-they seemed to shrink as I grew older- without knocking because I never did, and there she was.

       Elsi’s face was collapsed with sadness. Her arms hung like broken swings off the edge of the table she rested her head on, and she was crying the kind of tears that don’t make a sound.

       It was like I’d seen a ghost.

       Somewhere in between my bursting into tears and rushing to see if Elsi, my Elsi, could really be crying, Frau Korasick sat me down in front of her and tried to explain.

       It was Old Bill, she told me. Elsi didn’t make a sound.

       He’d been accused of acts against the fuhrer and taken to a concentration camp on the edge of Berlin. At ten years old I didn’t even know what that was yet, but the sharp words scared me.

       Then Frau Korasick’s voice became soft, because that wasn’t the real reason they took him. It was because Old Bill was Jewish.

       At ten years old I knew I was Jewish but no one ever bothered to tell me what that really meant. I was Jewish and Elsi was Protestant the way she was a girl and I was a boy. We stuck together through everything, and somehow the ways we were different only made us more the same. Yet the first day I saw Elsi cry, that word started to mean something.

*     *     *     *     *

It was five years before I saw her cry again.

       When I think about it, and think about how the first time was the easiest and the third time was the worst, sometimes I decide the second time was my favorite, the way Elsi took my pain and her own and made them the same, made them terribly and hear-wrenchingly equal.

       Other times I can’t bear to think about it at all.

       Elsi grew up the way everyone knew she would: beautiful and wild; loved by everyone in Berlin and probably all of Germany. Somehow she could trick and tease the pants off you but at the same time you really didn’t care because she would always just laugh it away. By then she laughed less, but less for her was still all the time.

       Years later they started calling it Kristallnacht, what happened that night, “The Night of Broken Glass”. I just remember it as the day everything stopped and stood still.

       I remember the sounds woke me up before Mama could, the screams and cries of nothing but pure terror. I stumbled out of bed in a haze, not sure what was real and what was a dream, but I ran to Rachel and Marie’s room right as Mama collapsed on the ground in a heap of tears, dirt on her face and sweat beading along her hairline. I could barely hear her beneath her sobbing, yet somehow I understood the words. We fell with her, and I clutched my sisters’ tiny heads, not knowing what to do except hold them and listen to them scream my father’s name, over and over into the broken night.

       Secretly, in the days and weeks that followed, I prayed for people to stop telling me what a hero my father had been. How he had rescued the rabbi from the burning Synagogue, how he had arrived just as the rioters were shattering the stained glass windows as if they were ice, burning its holy walls as if they were made of paper. They told me I should be honored for him, that perhaps he would be freed in time. Yet everyone knew the truth.

       No one came back from the concentration camps.

       After Mama could breathe again that night, she did not wait to leave. I wish I could say she had sorrow for me in her eyes as she left me alone, but there was only fear. “Aunt Ruth cannot risk having a Jewish young man in her home, Jacob,” she breathed. I felt numb as I lifted first Marie, and then little Rachel into the air.

       Somehow part of me knew it would be the last time.

       I heard Elsi cry when she thought I was asleep, after I had appeared at her door as dawn broke through behind clouds. The Korasick’s had been waiting for me. They fixed me coffee and led me wordlessly to a bed in the dark, empty basement.

       She told me later I didn’t say a word that night, but I barely remember anything, except the way she held my hand as I cried and didn’t let go as I cried and cried and cried and she never let go. Every time I thought I was finished I thought of Papa reading the evening news over his thick glasses, or Marie and Little Rachel squealing with glee when I chased them through the grass fields behind our house and the tears came back stronger.

       I had never cried to Elsi before but all of a sudden that just didn’t matter. She felt strong and good and I think it was then that I realized Elsi would never leave me. She was there to laugh with me, and she would be there to cry with me too. I lay my head on her lap and cried until my eyes were red and dry and her pale blue nightgown glowed in the moonlight with the wetness of my tears.

Elsi never told me to stop, never told me to get some sleep, and not once did she tell me that everything would be okay because we both knew we were too far past okay by now. She just kept saying one thing, over and over until I could stop my choked, broken breathing and pretend to fall asleep: “I’m here, Jacob. I’m here.”

Elsi’s hands had always been small, but as I lay there, unable to sleep but so beyond trying to stay awake, I really noticed how tiny they were. I could hold them both in one hand if I tried, which I so wanted to do but never got the chance. Feeling her little hands stroke my hair, I decided Elsi’s hands were my favorite part of her because they were the part that held on to me.

Her hands were the part that never really let go.

It was then, with Elsi’s perfect hands stroking my hair and me pretending to be asleep as I marveled at how she was the best friend I ever had that Elsi began to cry. I never opened my eyes, just listened to her quietly sob and felt every tear slide from her face onto mine. It was a funny thing, but in that moment, feeling every tiny quake her tired body made, Elsi’s pain made mine heal just a little bit. I never knew how to thank her.

That was the second time I saw Elsi cry.

*     *     *     *     *

Two weeks later I turned 16.

I was a year older but didn’t feel it. My brown hair was still brown, my arms and legs were still somewhere between the lines of wiry and weak, and every time I smiled, even if that was close to never anymore, I could still feel my crooked teeth form a jagged grin.

Elsi, though, thought it was a miracle. Maybe because she was surprised I made it this far; surprised I hadn’t simply ceased to exist when the world started crumbling around me. I guess Elsi wanted to make it special, because I woke up to my dark basement circled with light. She’d put white candles in a halo around my bed. Slowly and half-asleep, I counted. There were 16 of them.

Elsi was standing against a wall covered in colored paper streamers, the light of a candle framing her sweet face in yellow. There was a chocolate cake sitting in a table in the corner, and as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes I saw words etched across it, forming the letters of my name. “Happy Birthday Jacob!” I smiled, and wondered where she got the chocolate from.

Elsi was leaning against the door frame looking gorgeous, and I sat there and watched her, just let her be gorgeous for a while.

My last thought before the bomb hit us was that I loved her.

All at once everything was very dark, and then very light. I felt like I was laughing harder than I ever had, so hard that maybe my eyes were filling with tears but I couldn’t see anything or feel anything or seem to know how. All I felt was light. Then I was rising and rising like it was the most normal thing in the world, like I’d done it a thousand times before. My whole body felt empty in the best way, and yet I was so filled with light.

The blur in front of my eyes softened, and then cleared. I was still in the basement, but now it was below me, a hyper-focused image I was no longer a part of. It was the same basement, the same