Critical Mass

LITTLE CHARLOTTE IS wrapping her teddy bear’s head in bandages. “He fell from the building, Opa, and hurt his head,” she explains to her grandfather.

 

“It burst open like a rotten pumpkin,” K?the laughs. “Juice and seeds all over the ground.”

 

Frau Herschel frowns. “Language, K?the!”

 

“That’s what happened to this man who got pushed off the building yesterday. Everybody who was there laughed and one man said that, that his head was a rotten pumpkin, a rotten Jew pumpkin head. I can take a knife and slice open Teddy to show you.”

 

Ever since the Germans attacked Austria, K?the has been talking back to Frau Herschel. It’s as if seeing the rudeness of Austrian Christians to the Herschels makes her feel that she can attack them as well.

 

“Where was that, Lotte?” Grandfather asks his granddaughter.

 

“By Fr?ulein Martina’s lab. She took us there yesterday for science lessons. It was fun. We got to see the films she made of the insides of atoms, you know, the ones she took when we all went to the mountains for the Easter holiday. But K?the got bored, she’s so stupid that sitting through science class bores her own pumpkin-seed head.”

 

“You’re the pumpkin head,” K?the shouts. “I’m smart enough to know that science gets you nowhere. You have to have money to get away from the Nazis, or show them your titties. Science will only get you killed.”

 

“Charlotte! K?the!” Oma says sternly. “I will not have this language from you. We may have to live in the ghetto, but we will not speak like the ghetto.”

 

Little Charlotte apologizes to her grandmother with a curtsy, but K?the bends over her knitting, her lips pressed in a furious scowl.

 

They have been doing a literature lesson with Grandfather Herschel, reciting lines from Schiller that neither girl understands. Herr Herschel is teaching the children German and literature now that the schools have expelled Jewish students. Fr?ulein Martina is supposed to teach science and mathematics, but she often forgets how young they are. She talks to them about alpha particles and electrons. She wonders aloud about the instability of the uranium nucleus, and has the girls count scintillations in her lab.

 

Frau Herschel, “Big Charlotte,” doesn’t like it; she doesn’t like her granddaughter coming home with stained fingers, her pinafore smelling oddly of chemicals and the stink of the cigars that the men in the Radium Institute smoke. Herr Herschel agrees that with water scarce and laundry soap almost nonexistent, it is a nuisance, but working in the lab keeps little Charlotte from worrying too much.

 

This evening, after the literature lesson, they are waiting for K?the’s grandmother to get back from trying to trade her embroidered napkins for food.

 

Grandfather takes Teddy from little Charlotte. “I’m sure your bandages will make him well very soon, Lotte. So Fr?ulein Martina took you to her lab yesterday and let you play with atoms?”

 

“It’s not like that, Opa. Atoms are too tiny to see, and then they have tinier things inside them. You can’t play with them, not like they were Teddy, but you can study them; then you know how sunlight is made. Fr?ulein Martina showed us on a piece of paper, black lines from the sun. See, there’s this atom in the sun called helium, and when you make it on earth you have radiation. Then you see the lines it makes on a piece of paper, it’s like a ghost, so they call it ‘Spectral.’”

 

“Those lines won’t keep you warm in the winter when there’s no coal,” K?the says. “So what’s the point?”

 

A laugh from the doorway startles all of them; they turn to see K?the’s mother standing there.

 

“Lotte, Liebling, the lines are from a spectrum of light that the sun and the stars emanate, that’s why they’re called spectral, but I like the idea that the ghost of the sun’s explosions makes them. And you, my little daughter, you’ve been listening too hard to your own Oma, nicht wahr?”

 

Fr?ulein Martina comes forward to her daughter and tries to smooth the wisps of hair that have escaped from her braid, but K?the jerks her head away.

 

“Oma is right,” K?the says, small chin at an obstinate angle. “We can’t eat your atoms.”

 

“Everything you eat is made up of atoms,” Fr?ulein Martina says, “but I understand what your Oma is telling you. Still, they pay me a little stipend at the Institute; that helps put some atoms in your bellies.”

 

“What did the girls see yesterday?” Frau Herschel pulls Fr?ulein Martina back to the doorway to ask in an undervoice. “K?the said something about a man falling from a building?”