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Her hair is curling, like the horns she should have.
(They’re just hidden under her hair — Jews have lots of it, around their ears to cloud like dirty halos from the posters in the square, frame their faces to look like devils. Big noses, beady eyes!, yells the instructor, his scythe of a pen sharply hitting the surface of a blackboard, but she’s got eyes like the tide.)
Jojo is not too sure about whether the things about Elsa is true or not, but he is not too sure about a lot of things in his life. The shapes of his life stand uneasy with stuttering legs and they’re all blurred — the child can only fixate on one thing at a time, let him sharpen his perspective until another catches his attention. Sometimes, he feels like he’s swimming, like he’s under.
But he’s recovering—
“You were never recovering. You were just too strong to handle it.” Adolf, always his hero. Always there to help him up, the iconography of the perfect able idol. Midas' golden cigarette tray splays in one hand, the other on Jojo’s little shoulder as the two stare at Elsa, staring at him. “Look at her. She’s filthy, a thing and a burden.” Jojo tries to find those monstrous qualities in her face, in the spot where her shoulder meets her neck, in those hands.
They’re delicate, and Jojo can’t imagine them curled and clawed and mutilated like a creature. Jews look human, talk human, love human. Nathan is as dear to her as Mama is to him, and it shows in how she glows, and Jojo wishes she could do that all the time. Glow, he means. But she doesn’t glow in the artificial way, not like the little lamplights in his room, anything that would make her not like him. She glows when she is happy, like an angel — when Mama cooks pudding for both of them, when Jojo brings in the radio and Elsa nods her head like the composer wouldn’t want to wring her neck.
(Jojo should want to. Adolf needs him to, for the good of the country.) Adolf isn't good. (Is Jojo still?)
The ends of Elsa’s mouth perk up. A little laugh escapes her, like the windchimes of the bell above the door of the lolly shop down near where the office lies. “Jojo? Are you lost?”
“Sorry,” Jojo chatters, a squeak perpetually on the soprano scale, shaking his head as he nods and hears Adolf shift behind him, gone to fight another day.
(Should Jojo fight this?)
He doesn’t know if he should.
He puffs out his chest, and Elsa smiles at him. “You’re foolish, zoning out like that.”