July, 1982
Erik meets Magda Maximoff with a wood-handled hammer in one hand and a rusty slab of sheet metal in the other. The fig trees don't provide nearly as much shade as he had hoped they would, and the sun mercilessly beats down on his exposed neck as he cranes his head down to study his two objects. The sheet metal is taller than he is, sitting down cross-legged in his front yard, and he struggles to examine it when he still has his father's large hammer clutched in his left hand.
He doesn't miss sight of the strange little girl skirting the edges of his peripheral, but he opts to ignore her until he can figure out just exactly where to aim the head of the hammer. He picks out a particularly rust-marred spot, closes one eye like he's seen his father do in the shop, pokes his tongue out the side of his mouth, and swings his left arm with all the strength a five-year-old can muster.
The thin slab of metal topples uselessly to the side, not even close to being in contact with the hammer, and Erik lets out a huff of annoyance. There's a peel of laughter to his side, and he narrows his gray eyes at the source: the girl. He scowls, drops the hammer to the grass, and pushes himself to his feet. They're bare, his shoes left inside, and he wiggles his toes in the coarse grass.
"Why are you laughing?" he demands in his native German.
He steps forward when she doesn't reply, her laughter coming harder and her face as red as the back of his neck, and he nearly steps on the jagged ridges of the metal. She's too busy gasping for breath, so Erik studies the new girl with reluctant mirth; her laugh is quite infectious. She's his height, if not just a tad shorter, with thick brown hair that is braided down to her waist. Flyaways frame her round cheeks, and curl around her pink-tipped ears. She has blue eyes that remind him of his sister's, and an adorable gap between her two front teeth. There's dirt smudged across her freckled cheeks, and grass stains on her dress, which Erik thinks might be too thick in this kind of heat.
He steps closer and thrusts out his hand.
"I am Erik," he announces.
She finally catches her breath, and grasps his outstretched hand like she's seen the grownups do. "I am Magda," she replies in Polish.
Erik thinks he may like her.
"Can we be friends?" Erik asks. He understands and speaks Polish as well as he does German, but he decides to stick to his original language because it seems she does as well.
"Sure," she replies with a roll of her shoulders.
And because they are now friends, Erik fishes in his pocket and pulls out a coin that is nearly bent in half. He presents it to her with a grin, and announces that he did that all by himself with his daddy's hammer. She plucks it from his fingertips, and closes her small fist around it tightly.
"I don't have pockets," she explains when he glances down at her closed fist.
Erik doesn't care. They're friends now.
She points with her free hand to the pendant he wears around his neck.
"Are you a Jew?"
Erik almost feels as though he should be frightened by the question. He's heard the stories of his grandparents and the war and the Holocaust, but he's five and he doesn't understand. He knows that when he acts brave, like when he kills a spider for his sister Ruth, that his mother affectionately calls him Max after her own father.
He doesn't understand that either, so he simply nods and asks if she's one too.
She nods enthusiastically.
TBC...
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