Read The Kingdom of Childhood for Free Online Page B

It’s to frighten children. To make you behave and have bad dreams at night.” He sat beside her on the bale of straw and flipped it open to a story about a girl who played with matches. He read with enthusiasm:
    “Doch Minz und Maunz, die Katzen,
    Erheben ihre Tatzen.
    Sie drohen mit den Pfoten:
    ‘Die Mutter hat’s verboten!’”
    Judy said, “I don’t know what any of that means.”
    Rudi rolled his hand in the air, suggesting a broad translation. “It means that when Pauline lit her match, the cats Minz and Maunz put out their claws, and cried, and said, ‘Your mother has forbidden it!’”
    Judy nodded. “And then she burns to death and turns into a pile of ashes.”
    “Yes,” affirmed Rudi. The humorous creases at the corners of his eyes belied his serious tone. Quoting from the book, he said, “‘It’s very, very wrong, you know. You will be burnt if you do so.’”
    “You made it rhyme in English.”
    “I did not even realize. You should not read these things. Look at der Struwwelpeter on the front. Your hair is not like this. Your nails are short and neat.” He lifted her hand in his own rough one and examined her fingernails, then briskly rubbed her fingers with a clasp of his thumb. “You see? No reason to read this. You are a good little girl, not a bad one. You should read a happy book.”
    “My teacher says I have to read this one.”
    The bale shifted beneath his weight as he leaned toward her. His smiling face came close enough that she could see the blond shadow on his jaw, the midnight-blue ring aroundhis cornflower irises. In his low, conspiratorial voice he said, “Sometimes teachers are wrong.”
    The blasphemy was so absolute that she laughed. His eyelashes batted once at her laughing breath. He sat up, his grin still fixed in place, and rubbed her back in broad, firm circles, the way he stroked the cow before he milked her.
     
    By December even the dead garden was gone. Night fell quickly and left her no time to be bullied by Daniela or watch Rudi care for the sheep and muck out the barn. There was only her home, where her mother had taken to daily plucking imperfect leaves from the houseplants and arranging the kitchen tools in order by shade of black. And there was school.
    On the first day of Advent her class made windows of colored tissue and Popsicle sticks, covered in squares of black construction paper split down the middle. The teacher hung their creations on the long wall of glass windows, regimentally neat as Judy’s mother’s spatula drawer. But each day a child would fold back the construction paper to reveal the bold fractured rainbow inside. They practiced songs for the Weihnachtskonzert to be held just before Christmas and rolled salt dough into kings and shepherds for nativity scenes. Every Friday their teacher laid an evergreen wreath, set with candles, on a desk, then took out her guitar and dimmed the lights. Together as a class, in the dark and accompanied by the plaintive guitar, they sang a quiet and meditative Advent hymn. Then the teacher struck a match and lit one candle, then two, then three, as Christmas drew closer and closer.
    It was like undressing together, this frankness about spirituality. To John Chandler, Christianity was a tourist attraction that came in the form of holiday street festivals and medieval churches. He took his family along as though on safari, looking upon the holiday goods as though these were relics of aprimitive tribe which viewed volcanic eruption as evidence of the Sun God’s anger. Judy guessed he didn’t know about the overt Catholicism of the Bavarian public schools, and that if he had, he would have assumed her intelligent enough to pay it no mind. But in the snowy darkness of the German winter, singing in unison in the candlelight, Judy was starting to suspect she might love Jesus.
    Alle Jahre wieder
    Kommt das Christuskind
    Auf die Erde nieder,
    Wo wir Menschen sind.
    She made a salt dough shepherd and named it