by Shira Nayman
I wonder how my friends will react to my simply disappearing. I can only imagine what Marilyn and Simon, along with Barnaby, might feel five years hence, when they discover that I have bequeathed the house to them.
The scheme has become complicated, which Wallace reminds me is a critical element to its success. He has made a close study of the entire staff of the ship, a cargo vessel that accommodates a dozen or so guests, having been fitted out with a corridor of cabins, a modest dining room, and a goodsized lounge where the passengers gather in the evening. Wallace has settled on a member of the cleaning staff, a Polish boy of eighteen or nineteen who cleans the living quarters and is confined entirely to the below-deck. Because he cleans when the cabins are empty, he is more or less invisible. Wallace appears to have befriended him—and assures me we can trust him to “within an inch of your life” (he winced when he said this; we both let it go unremarked). Money has, of course, changed hands—a good deal of it—but I suspect Wallace is depending more on some other kind of incentive: a promise, perhaps, that drags in the boy’s nearest and dearest, some classic detective-story move so that a betrayal of me would bring harm, or else loss of significant advantage, to some person or cause close to the boy’s heart.
Wallace has given me to understand that the Polish youth is timid to the point of fear, which of course aids our plan; his contact is apparently limited to his supervisor, a beefy woman of advanced years, whose complicity Wallace also has secured.
I should follow Wallace’s instruction—to leave the plan and its execution in his hands, focus on the part I am to play and not worry about the details.
The scenario he has concocted is an elaborate piece of theater, to take place one full day before we pull into the Port of Southampton. The timing is important: the goal, to minimize the necessary duration of the charade while ensuring that the full force of land resources is not immediately brought to bear. The boy will go into hiding at exactly the moment of the unfortunate accident, whereby the reclusive passenger, who has spoken to no one the entire voyage, is lost to the sea. I am to resume the youth’s place, carrying out his molelike duties for the course of one day.
Again, I find myself indebted to Wallace, for whom my admiration continues to grow. In executing his plan, he has demonstrated both an eye for the critical detail, and some mastery of the art of diversion.
I spend the whole of each evening on deck; it is the one place I can count on being alone.
The gods appear to be on our side.
Beyond furnishing us with a highly suitable stand-in whose place I will take, better in all ways than we could have dreamed up ourselves, we have also been graced with unusually bad weather. The captain claims, according to Wallace, that in twenty-nine years of seafaring, he’s not seen the ocean more turbulent. Those passengers not felled by seasickness—and most have been—are unwilling to brave the challenging condition of the deck: great slaps of icy sea water, violent gusts that feel, in the moment, sufficiently powerful to capsize even a vessel as large as this, though I imagine that it feels more dangerous than it is.
The fact that I spend so much of my time on deck, and in such dreadful weather, will make my alibi—if one can call the staging of one’s own death an alibi—all the more convincing.
Up here, in the open, the elements in full force, I find the past flinging up in fragments, as if from the raging sea. There have been so many layers of forgetting, of attempts to keep memory at bay, that I find myself confused, at times, by the snatches of different epochs, snatches of different selves.
The first attempt to eradicate: it was set in motion, I now see looking back, the very moment I stepped out of the redbrick house on Kirchstrasse to embark on my initial escape.
I did not flee to save only myself.
I fled because I could not bear to do nothing.
I fled in the name of my family, so that one of us might find a safe ground from which to stage a rescue of the rest.
I see now that I had even then, without fully acknowledging it to myself, given up hope regarding my father. The Gestapo, I am certain, made an example of him soon after his arrest—probably while Mother and Else and I were still hiding in the attic, with our wooden buckets of vegetables and dried meat.
From the moment I made it to safe soil—that’s how it felt when I docked at Dover—I wanted only to find them. To find my mother and sister and put things right. Though I closed my mind to Germany, I erected in my mind a kind of altar of intention: I spent hours upon hours strategizing how I would go about finding them long before I could actually do much about it. I dreamt about them, saw myself back in the house of my childhood, a pleasant twenty-minute walk from the Court House. I dreamt I was chasing Else up and down the stairs. I would hear her laughter, watch my mother as she leaned to snip the spray of sterling roses she would carry indoors and set in a crystal vase on the sideboard.
Then, last night, up on deck, I remembered this.
I was a teenager; we were visiting my father’s sister in Frankfurt. Already, there were disturbances, but nothing, yet, like that night.
Respectable people stayed indoors. It was my mother who wanted to go out. I hadn’t seen her like that before, her whole body wracked with distress.
We walked the streets, the four of us: Mother, Father, Aunt, myself. (Else had stayed behind, in Heidelberg, with the family of a friend.) We picked our way through the fresh rubble—broken glass, mostly, but also upended pieces of furniture and store goods. I remember a collection of ladies hats, trampled, for the most part, also a basket of fresh apples, unharmed and rosy cheeked. For all the disarray, it was eerily silent; the crowds had cycloned onward toward the city center. We followed the path of destruction. Here and there, we stepped over sticky patches of what must have been blood.
The eye of the storm, when we reached it, was not silent. Huge panes of glass being hit by brick and rock make terrifying music, beautiful in its way. And light, great streaks of light: torches and headlights and who knows what else. The action slowed to unreal motion, a crackling, flickering film reel: people dragged into the street, men and women both—now a shoe brought down as a weapon, now a chair leg, a crow bar, a hammer—their children made to watch. My mother’s hand gripped my arm and dragged me back along the route we had come, sidestepping the dangerous shards. I scrambled beside her, happened to turn my head to see a dress-store mannequin thrust through a broken opening. Her glazed eyes gave an unseemly glare.
Kristallnacht, they later called it, a word that could conjure the image of beautiful Austrian crystals tumbling from the night sky.
I was a teenager. This terrible theater was not about us, it was happening to the cruelly victimized them.
After the Allies finally realized what it was going to take, and America set about the business of bringing the whole thing to an end, I managed for a short while—in the interest of holding on to my sanity—to keep an almost unfeeling distance from it all. Of course, my family was never for a moment out of my mind. I’d been in England for almost four years and had taken to my role as an immigrant with a vengeance; I was able, therefore, to busy myself in the myriad tasks of my new life, endeavoring to put Germany and all its goings-on out of my mind.
But when I saw the photographs of the massive Dresden offensive of February 13, I could not avert my eyes from the devastation. (I was sitting in the club with Christine, as it happens.) It was clear from the pictures that the aim of the Dresden bombing was to pluck Germany’s prize jewel and trample it underfoot. Seeing those images was for me a confusing business: the Zwinger, its golden dome in tatters; the mighty Frauenkirche reduced to three giant disembodied pillars; the Semperoper flattened to rubble; the entire city a disgrace of severances heaped around its own squat remains.
The truth is, I don’t really know who the enemy is. I do not recognize the blood that runs through my veins.
I am reminded of Gandhi’s quip when asked what he thought of English civilization: “I think it would be
a very good idea.” But Germany is more deserving of such judgment; there was always so much savagery there, beneath the cultivation. If I had any mirth left in me, I would laugh at the arrogance of anyone believing that Germany’s cultural ascendancy could be crippled through leveling Dresden, its most beautiful city, a city crammed with music and art. I see those swaggering GIs, conquering and proud. But they were only sweeping up the scraps. Germany can take the credit for its own demise.
And yet, examining those pictures of destruction, something caught in my throat: the memory of the redbrick house of my childhood on the mottled sunny street. Heidelberg sustained significant damage, I know that. The house, therefore, may well have been destroyed. But that was something I could not imagine, no matter how hard I tried to visualize it. I could only see the house as it had been—the white lace curtains, the petunias in the window boxes. All the other ruins I could visualize—the remains of other families’ lives: charred mementos and the undone pages of books, shoes scattered among split beams and stones, broken china and rotting foodstuffs. But not the redbrick house. How could it not have been spared?
I feel oddly grateful for the opportunity that Wallace’s Man Overboard scheme affords: of tasting my own death, so that I might begin to live more sweetly. I find myself feeling mournful about every sensation, each perception, and even the most quotidian action. A mouthful of soup tastes exquisite; washing my face in the morning is exhilarating; even talking to Wallace about nothing in particular (now that the plan is in place, we studiously avoid that subject) seems to embody the fineness of human intercourse.
I am also aware of how different the business of erasing myself is, this time around. When I struck the name Robert from my life, there was a violence to it; something heartless about the way I systematically dismantled everything about my person—all that I had been and all that I was but had not known about. (I speak, here, of my Jewishness; even now, the sound of this word has, for me, a hollow and unreal feel.)
This time, the identity I am undoing—that of Oscar—was a lie from the start. A lie of convenience—and also of longing. Which brings me to an interesting question, one which has of late quite gripped my imagination, though for all the mental attention I have given it—pacing the heaving deck, swallowing gusts of wind and breathing in the stinging salt spray—has yielded no inkling of an answer: Does the erasure of deceit result in the revelation of truth? Or is there, behind the crafty Oscar edifice-façade I erected, only a bare windy plain, populated by nothing more honorable than lowly tumbleweed moving pointlessly through timeless time and no-place space?
I find myself thinking constantly of Christine. I am beset by a new and most unrealistic sentiment; that this ship I am on is delivering me not just out of harm’s way but home, to Christine. Of course, this is an entirely absurd fiction: I have no idea where Christine is, what her life has become, whether she would have any interest whatsoever in seeing me. But the fact is that here, in the confines of my solitude, wrenched from the life I have led these past six years—from the person into whom I had fully evolved—I have only to conjure Christine’s lively, impatient features and I find myself feeling truly alive again.
So many evenings in Christine’s cozy rooms in Bethnal Green—and then later, in my own rather grand rooms in Kensington. I’d shut it all out, not knowing that Memory has her secret hoarding tricks; standing up there, on deck, deafened by the sky’s wet tantrum, moments—long stretches of time—pour themselves out into my consciousness, vivid in the reliving.
I see the moon in full throat through the small high window of Christine’s bedroom, the window so aglow one could read by its light. I feel us lowering to the bed, Christine, wordless, moving slowly into my embrace. She is wearing her beige silk blouse; I feel the silk in my fingers, smoothing it with the palm of my hand, the button a shell slipping through colorless sea, another shell, a third. Her warm breasts beneath the flats of my fingertips, the fluid sweep of her beneath my hands. On her white skin, the moon’s light seems wet; in her fair hair, it is muffled to smoke. The wailing begins: the air-raid siren. And then, some distance away, the first strikes. The delicate shuddering of the earth. Christine moves in my arms; the break in her voice, when it comes, is the sound of a rising wave curling up and over itself—a salt spray, a powerful sliding. Christine is touching my face. I close my eyes, shut her out so I might take her in, sink myself into her so that I might rise to the surface and float.
Now, we are floating together. The tiniest movement, then Christine’s liquid response; I am holding her there, I do not want to release her and she, her arms tight on my back, does not want to let go.
The world, what there is of it, shuts down. And now, nothing but the free fall, a movement through silence and darkness: impersonal and yet intimate, with nothing and everything to do with us, like the music that hangs in the space above the orchestra, having issued from instruments but become pure sound in air, attached to no person or thing. We hang that way in the air, merged, as the sounds of the strings merge with the winds, but also wholly separate, as the wood of the violin never makes contact with the metal of the flute.
I open my eyes to see that Christine has closed hers. Beneath the fringe of her lashes, a whisper-soft shadow on white.
She left. Christine went to Shanghai.
She’d talked about it once or twice but never in a way I took seriously. Christine was given to passionate enthusiasms, many of which led to nothing beyond the moment of their expression. I suppose I placed her musings about visiting the Far East in this category.
I’d have stopped her if I could have. Stay, Christine, I would have said. I, too, know the call of pleasure; but let me show you a different way.
She’d only have looked down her elegant nose and laughed. Not scornfully, but as if to say, I know your trepidations, I know the kind of safety you seek: the bricks, the mortar, the history. The illusion of permanence, of culture, of belonging, of inalienable dignity and rights. I’m done with such playgrounds. I see her sitting back in her chair, sipping a martini, the agitation around her mouth at odds with the deep seductive sparkle in her eyes.
But the fact is, I was not given the chance to stop her, not given the chance to ask her to stay.
I don’t know why I became possessed by the idea of telling Christine everything. But once it took hold of me, it wouldn’t let me go.
I confess that at times I entertained the fantasy of a clean new life—of Christine and me married, perhaps even a child or two—moving forward into clarity and happiness and light. But then a terrible gloom would settle over everything, snatching the fantasy away, leaving me deriding myself for such baldly foolish hopes.
Somehow I convinced myself that if Christine knew the truth—the truth about me—together we could bury it, snuffing out the shadow of undoing once and for all.
We stopped at my house on our way to a dinner party, having met at the club at the end of my workday. Christine had changed before meeting me; she was resplendent in yellow chiffon, a cluster of crystals glittering at her throat. We paused for a drink in my study before I was to repair to my dressing room. I remember pouring Scotch whiskey from my crystal decanter, the shimmer of amber liquid as it splashed onto ice in the cut-glass tumbler. I loosened my cravat, brought the glass over to Christine, who was seated on the divan beside my rolltop desk.
On occasion, a stillness would settle over Christine, quieting the current of agitation that otherwise seemed constantly at play in her being. As I handed her the drink, I could see the steady calm in her eyes, feel the fullness of her vitality—and then the distinct sense that she was offering all of herself, all of her being, to me.
“Darling,” I said quietly (I can hear my own voice, all these years have passed and yet still I am there, uttering those words). I peered deep into those terribly alive eyes, eyes that were taking me in, and I knew it was time to put words to the all of me that was holding me hostage. I believed she was offering—willing—hoping—to
see.
“Darling,” I repeated—it was there, in my throat, preparing to tip from my very core.
But then I saw it: the flutter of anxiety, the unsettling ripple in her eyes.
“Sshh,” Christine said, her face now unreadable. The tip of her finger floated to my lips.
“Not now, darling,” she said, silencing me (silencing me, though she was not to know this then, and neither was I, forever). “Not when it’s all—so—perfect.”
A rattle of confusion. I did not know what Christine meant, exactly, but I sensed she’d intuited the contours of the confession I was about to make, and that instinctively, she was warding it off, pushing it—pushing me—away.
Her finger still on my lips—and me, trying desperately to mask my bewilderment—she said: “Why don’t you go and dress? There’ll be time later to talk.”
I rose, paused to take a sip from my glass, which I’d left on the side table. Before leaving the room, I turned to see Christine, her equanimity restored, lovely in yellow against the brooding deep red of the divan. The curve of her bare shoulder beneath the sheer sheath of her stole, the play around her lips of the sweetest, most loving smile she’d ever given me. And something secretive, even shy, in her face, as if she were planning some little declaration of her own. My disappointment and shame of a moment before vanished, replaced by a renewed and even more vigorous hope. I’d misread her, I thought; yes, we’d talk later. Later, I would have my chance.
But we wouldn’t talk later, for that glimpse of Christine, a vision in yellow on the divan, was the last time I ever saw her.
