Janet Berliner - Child of the Light (Book 1 of The Madagascar Manifesto)

By Janet Berliner and George Guthridge

First Digital Edition Published by Crossroad Press

Copyright 2011 by Janet Berliner & George Guthridge

Cover Design by David Dodd

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Novels:

Sol's Song

Child of the Light

Child of the Journey

Children of the Dusk

Unabridged Audiobooks:

Child of the Light Narrated by Jane McDowell

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Janet Berliner is the author of six novels and the editor of six anthologies, including two with illusionist David Copperfield and one with Joyce Carol Oates. Born in South Africa of parents who fled Germany in 1936, Janet now lives in Las Vegas while she plans her escape to the Caribbean.

George Guthridge is a nationally honored educator and author. His book The Kids From Nowhere tells the story of his work with Siberian-Yupik children who were considered uneducable until George led them to three national academic championships. In addition, he has written nearly 100 pieces of short fiction, which have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.

Together, Janet and George are the authors of more than a dozen stories and the Madagascar Manifesto Series: Child of the Light, Child of the Journey, and the Bram Stoker Award-winning Children of the Dusk.

"But every shadow is in the final analysis also child of the light, and only he who has experienced light and dark, war and peace, ascent and descent, has really lived."

--Stefan Zweig

Die Welt von Gestern

( The World of Yesterday )

December 1918

Nine-year-old Solomon Freund removed his glasses and pressed his face against the wrought-iron bars of his open bedroom window. Without the wire rims digging into his nose he felt more comfortable, but no less impatient. He had been at the window since sundown, waiting for the evening star, the wishing star, to take its place beside the moon, and watching the soldier guarding the fur shop that adjoined the Freund-Weisser tobacco shop across the street.

The star had not yet appeared, the soldier had lost his appeal, and Solomon had grown weary of waiting.

Earlier, his sister, Recha, had cored apples for the sauce that went with the potato pancakes his mother was making for tonight's birthday-Chanukah-Christmas celebration with the Weisser family upstairs; he had grated the potatoes. Now he could hear the latkes sizzling in the heavy frying pan his mother kept salted and greased for her specialty. The smell of browning butter wafted into his room and his stomach growled in anticipation. The soldier must be cold, and hungry, too, he thought.

He glanced up at the ceiling that separated him from his best friend, Erich Weisser. Here, on the ground floor, the Chanukah Menorah had been lit and the smell of butter and applesauce filled the air; up in the Weissers' second-story flat, there was the scent of pine and the glow of Christmas candles--and Erich, furious that once again his parents had said no to his birthday and Christmas wish: a dog of his own. He needed a dog, he said, the way Sol needed glasses. Besides, he said, Sol could talk to his sister when he got lonely. Whom did he have? At least if he had a dog he would have someone to talk to, he said. Strange how he always talked about dogs as if they were people. He swore he could talk to them and that they answered him--which wasn't all that crazy, Sol thought, not if their friend Beadle Cohen was right and anything the mind could conceive of was possible.

It didn't matter. What did matter was that Erich get over his sulk by the time the party started.

What a party this was going to be--the first night of Chanukah, Christmas Eve, Erich's tenth birthday. Best of all, Papa was back from the Front for good, recovered from influenza without infecting the rest of the family.

A true miracle, Mama called it.

Maybe the glow of Christmas and Chanukah candles together would make another miracle and stop Erich's papa from drinking too much tonight. Then he would not make all those snide comments about Jews, and Frau Weisser would not go on about all the things she wanted and could not have, all the while looking at Mama accusingly, as if she--and not Herr Weisser's gambling--were responsible for their reduced circumstances. Herr Weisser would keep off Erich's back, and--

Across the street, the soldier shook his fist at the moon.

Was he blaming the moon for keeping him from his family on this Christmas Eve? Sol replaced his glasses and waited to see if any of the people milling around Friedrich Ebert Strasse had noticed the soldier's strange action.

Nobody seemed to care.

A crowd had gathered at the corner, around a hurdy-gurdy man grinding out a polka on his barrel organ. Several beer-drunk locals had grabbed their fat, frumpish wives and begun to dance. Two women in ragtag coats begged at the door of the butcher shop whose shelves had long since held only black-market horse meat and a skinned cat or two; a couple of street vendors hawked indoor fireworks and sugar-coated ginger cookies. They stepped delicately around the beggars to approach a passing coterie of laughing Fraleins in their fashionable calf-length holiday skirts. Having sampled the spicy cookies, the ladies boldly offered a taste to a trio of cadets walking stiffly upright to balance the weight of their gold-mounted Pickelhauben helmets.

The cadets ignored them and continued to make their way toward a group of men in uniform who stood at the far corner, beneath skeletal trees. Arms crossed, they listened to a Freikorps band play a solemn Lohengrin medley.

The scene held endless fascination for Sol. It was as if his entire pewter soldier collection had come alive in the street: Cuirassiers in armored breastplates, Death's Head Hussars, Foot Artillery, Hasans--

He thought about his little army, so proud and smart in the closet he carefully kept locked. Though he knew that daydreaming could bring the voices again and leave him shaking, he let his mind drift. He resisted the urge to imagine himself in the Great War. Papa had said the fighting had been too terrible to contemplate--and no glory in it, despite the Kaiser's decrees to the contrary--so Solomon imagined himself... saw himself...among his soldiers outside Paris forty-five years earlier, the great city surrounded, he with saber in hand, leading a heroic charge against a mitrailleusse machine gun. Bullets whizzed past his ears. He called out encouragement to his men and they in turn invoked the name of the Fatherland. The French abandoned their posts and scattered before the brave Prussians racing through the field.

The battle froze as if caught in a photograph. Everyone stopped running. The artillery bursts stayed in place, as though the sky were permanently bruised, yet light, a different light, flashed before Sol's eyes, spangling like a foil pinwheel. The flashes brightened, got bigger...seemed to swallow him. He no longer saw either the battlefield or the street of Berlin. Only a cobalt-blue twilight surrounded him--the world without form, without substance. He tried to shut his eyes, but the glow held him. A man's voice cried out from the twilight--shrill, plaintive, filled with pain: