Jacob's Oath: A Novel

by Martin Fletcher

  What happened, happened.

  Has anybody else come back?

  At number 9, the curtains were drawn but he sensed movement. He looked around and saw a head pull back from the window in the house opposite, where the Kohns used to live. Two Amis strolled by, taking photos of the picturesque former Jewish quarter.

  He sighed as deeply as he ever had, steeling himself. This was it. He’d walked five hundred and fifty kilometers to come home. Could Papi be here? Ruth? He took the lion’s-head knocker, paused as his heart thumped, rapped twice, and stepped back.

  Is Papi home? Is he even now bustling to answer the door? His prayers answered too, his son here in one piece? As Jacob waited tensely at the door he knew: I can hope, but this is the end of my dreams.

  His father was a tailor and had lived well on a small devoted clientele of wealthy people who appreciated his perfectionist stitching and especially his eye for fashion, a strange quality given that haute couture, at its height in Paris and Berlin, was a world away from the isolated Jewish quarter of Heidelberg. But he worked from the latest designs mailed to him by contacts in the trade. In retrospect, it had occurred to Jacob as he walked, there probably hadn’t been much demand for high fashion among the professors and lawyers who frequented his father’s little workshop. Anyway, they soon stopped coming to the Jew.

  He glanced over his shoulder and caught another light movement at the window opposite. As he wondered who lived there now, and what had happened to the Kohns and Gustav, their nuisance little son, the door opened.

  It was Schmutzig, grown up. The Bergers’ boy, he must have been twelve or thirteen, eighteen or so now, with the same blank face. For a moment Jacob was lost for words. He hadn’t really expected his father anyway. It was just a fantasy. He couldn’t remember his real name so he said, “Hello, Schmutzig.” Dirty—because the boy was always dirty. Now he looked well scrubbed. Plump even.

  “Remember me?” Would he? He hadn’t shaved since Hanover.

  Schmutzig’s mouth was open. He’d always been a bit slow. It took him a moment to close it.

  It came back to Jacob. When the Jews here had been rounded up, they had waited in the Heumarkt at the top of Grosse Mantelgasse, next to the Weisser Bock restaurant. The tables outside were crowded, even though it was a cold October day, and their neighbors had laughed and toasted each other as the Jews shivered with fear. Jacob remembered because at the time a gang of young boys on the edges threw stones at the Jews until the waiter told them to stop. Schmutzig was one of them.

  Schmutzig swallowed and said, “I thought you were all dead.”

  “Apparently not.”

  Schmutzig stepped into the street and gestured with his hand. “You’re the only one here.”

  He heard Frau Berger call, “Who is it?”

  Schmutzig didn’t answer; he wasn’t sure how to put it. Jacob waited.

  She came to the door, took one look at Jacob, and shouted, “Oh, my God. He’s alive,” before covering her mouth with her hand.

  The lady opposite shed all pretense. She stood at the open window.

  “They told us you were all dead,” Frau Berger shouted. “Willi, Willi,” she called.

  He heard careful footsteps down the staircase and the voice of Dr. Berger calling, “Ein Moment,” and then he was at the door. He took in the little group of people gathered stiffly on the doorstep; his eyes lingered on Jacob and widened. “Ach, Du liebe Gott,” he said.

  He stepped forward with his arms raised and Jacob flinched.

  “Dear boy,” Dr. Berger said, throwing his arms around Jacob. He noticed the neighbor at her window staring wide-eyed at the commotion outside, and put his arm in the small of Jacob’s back. “But come in, come in, where have you come from? Ilse, make some tea, or would you like coffee? Come in, come in,” and he propelled Jacob through the door and into the drawing room that faced onto the street.

  Jacob sat awkwardly on the hard sofa and looked around, at the framed photos on the mantelpiece, the pictures on the wall, the books and candlesticks. There was nothing familiar. It had been six years and there wasn’t a trace of his family in the home they had lived in for generations. Dr. Berger kept asking questions—where have you been, what was it like, how did you get here, what have you seen—but Jacob could only answer with a few quiet words. Why, could he tell them what he had been through? Over a cup of tea? Who could believe it? They would think him a lunatic. Frau Berger offered some dry cookies while Schmutzig had disappeared. Probably to get his friends and some big rocks.

  Why had he come? Did he think he’d come home and the Germans would just move out? Actually, yes, something like that. But now he understood what a forlorn hope that was. His home had become someone else’s home. They’d as good as stolen it, but there it was. He thought, Maybe they’ll pay for it? and he laughed inside. Now what? His only feeling was extreme fatigue. He’d reached his goal only to find a nice enough couple who didn’t know what to do with him. In a town that seemed from another continent. And how strange; to be in his own home and see nothing of his own, no sign of his family’s existence. What happened to their things? It was dawning on him. What does it mean, to return? If what you left no longer exists, has been rubbed out of existence, like a drawing erased leaving a blank sheet of paper. To what have you returned? And why?

  Jacob sighed. “Nice cookies,” he said.

  “I made them. You can’t get much these days,” Frau Berger said. “It’s been hard for us.” She shook her head and sighed. “Very hard. The planes, you know. Flying overhead, we never knew if they would drop bombs on us or not. And the food. Sometimes we couldn’t get fresh fish.” She caught herself. “Well, mustn’t complain, you know better than us, it has been hard for everybody.”

  “I suppose so,” said Jacob. He couldn’t help himself. “What happened to all our things? Our furniture? Our photographs? All our stuff?” Before she answered, he remembered: the Nazis had auctioned it all.

  Dr. Berger came back, holding a pair of shoes. “Here, Jacob, try these, we’re about the same size. I think you could do with these, yes?”

  It was Jacob’s first laugh. He had forgotten how strange he must look, his legs crossed, a torn black shoe on his left foot and a green hiker’s boot on his right. “You noticed,” he said.

  The doctor smiled. “Do they fit?”

  As Jacob took off his shoes and said a silent thank-you that he had washed his feet and changed his socks that day, Dr. Berger remained standing and said, “It is so good that you have come home in one piece. Those were bad days. It was hard for all of us who did not like what the National Socialists were doing. But now that is over, thank God, and we have been liberated by the American soldiers.”

  Frau Berger poured some more tea and nodded hard in agreement.

  Dr. Berger said again, “It has been a very difficult time for all of us.”

  Jacob thought, Yes, right, for all of us. He said, “The shoes fit well, a little big but thank you, thank you very much, I would like to pay you for them but unfortunately…”

  “Don’t even think of it,” Dr. Berger said. After some polite chatter he rose, “Well, it’s getting on…”

  Jacob said, “I’ll find some money and come back to pay you. I would never take anything for nothing.” Unlike some. He went on, “I wonder, would you mind if I take a look around…”

  Frau Berger interrupted, “Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly … I haven’t dusted today, I haven’t made the beds…”

  Dr. Berger said, “I’m afraid it’s getting late. There is one thing, though. I suddenly remembered.” He left the room and went upstairs. Jacob could hear his footsteps above and heard him rummaging and a door closing. Frau Berger smiled at Jacob and poured more tea. “Sugar?” she asked. “Our last bit of rations.”

  With an inward smile, Jacob said, “Three, please.”

  The doctor returned with a battered dark green leather-bound book. He handed it to Jacob. “I believe this was your father’s
? His client book?”

  Jacob started. His eyes darted to the corner of the living room where the Bergers had a side table. There, at the end of each day, Papi had sat at his desk, hunched over his accounts, noting the day’s sales and measurements. He could almost see him now. How many times did his father chuckle about a loyal client, “His belly has grown and his neck has shrunk.” Jacob’s eyes drifted back and his hands closed around the book, all that remained of his father. He hadn’t even a photo. His hands trembled.

  “I only came across it last year. I found it behind the bookshelves,” Dr. Berger was saying. Jacob held the volume out in both hands as if it might disintegrate, as if it were the first Gutenberg bible, the finest Meissen porcelain, a stem of delicate Bohemian glass. He tried to steady his hands as he opened it and read on the first page in black ink:

  Solomon Klein

  Kundenliste

  He turned to the next page and the next, gazing at the columns of names and numbers, sighing. He glanced up with shiny eyes and Dr. and Frau Berger tiptoed from the room.

  Tears came as he read his father’s almost illegible handwriting. His father would always try to make Jacob write more clearly and Jacob would retort: You can talk! Isaak Mendelsohn; Jonas Brenner; Robert Feinstein, who taught literature at school; Robert Mueller; Wolfgang Niederland, who bought three suits each Christmas; Samuel Kohn from over the road … pages and pages, hundreds of names, some familiar, noting the length of their inner legs, their arms, their shoulder span, their neck size. When Jacob was a little boy, Papi would call out the precise measurements and Jacob would jot them down. He could see Papi on his knees now, with a tape measure and his bald spot.

  And sometimes there was a deliberate, childish writing: here, and here; that must be his own.

  Jacob wasn’t much for religion but he knew that God inscribes the fate of each Jew in the Book of Life.

  And Papi had written the names and sizes of each client in his own book of names. And after the Jews had met their fate this was all that remained of them: their measurements.

  Jacob didn’t look up. A wave of fatigue rolled over him and he began to slump. “Excuse me,” he murmured to the empty room. Light was fading and his head felt heavy. He shifted on the sofa and felt his neck drooping. The book grew heavy and rested in his lap. His last thought was of God, who waits until Yom Kippur to seal his verdict. Until then, the Days of Awe, a Jew can mend his ways and seek forgiveness to avoid God’s judgment. Papi didn’t find a way, and nor did those in his book of names.

  Jacob fell into a deep sleep, the sleep of the reprieved.

  TEN

  Frankfurt,

  May 10, 1945

  In the recovery ward of the U.S. army’s 123rd Field Hospital in Frankfurt, Sarah had her own little curtained-off space. She was the only woman among dozens of male soldiers, the lightly wounded. The more serious—the amputations, the skin grafts, the multiple shrapnel wounds—were across the yard in the main buildings. Fed, cleaned, and clothed, the American doctors had tended her every physical need. Her soul was another matter.

  She was straining forward, her eyes fixed and intense as she told the rabbi her dream.

  “I could see her beautiful smiling face and I wanted her and I stretched out my arms but I couldn’t reach her and every step I took toward her she faded away a bit more until I reached where she was but she was gone. And then I was walking into water, into a lake, I was going in up to my knees and then my chest, and then my chin, and just as the water covered my head I saw her ahead of me again, in the water. She had silky black hair and she smelled so clean and sweet and she was smiling at me with her little round face. And I kept walking with my arms stretched before me, like I was sleepwalking in the water, it was cold, very cold, but I wasn’t.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I wanted my baby, but I couldn’t reach her, and I called to her and then Hoppi, Hoppi, her father, he was calling and shouting my name, it sounded like an echo, Saaaraaah, Saaaraah, it went on for a long time, in the middle of a forest, I was surrounded by trees, big ones, it was dark, I was lost, and I didn’t know where he was, I could just hear him calling me, and then there was a face, a big baby face, it was smiling, smiling at me, from the top of a tree, and then it was gone, it exploded, there was a bang, and then Hoppi shouted, Help, and then, and then…”

  With tears streaming down her face, dripping from the curves of her cheeks, her eyes red, shivering, Sarah gripped the rabbi’s hand even tighter. “And then, then…”

  The curtain rustled and an American nurse pushed in a steel cart laden with meals on tin trays. “Here you are, honey,” she said, “eat up for once. You haven’t been touching your food. Doctor says to tell you he has the final test results, and there’s just one important thing he needs to talk to you about and then you can leave in a few days. You’ve been an angel, you really have.”

  U.S. Army Chaplain Rabbi Michael Bohmer gave Sarah’s hand a gentle squeeze as they waited for the nurse to rearrange the pillow and leave. “Thank you,” he said to the nurse.

  “It was awful,” Sarah said, when they were alone again, enclosed in a box of white curtains. “I’ve been having lots of bad dreams.”

  The rabbi nodded. He was a young man, recently ordained, yet he had an older man’s serious face, with thin lips, a straggly mustache, and round glasses. His hair was receding fast. Sarah liked him. He spoke fluent German. He had learned at home from his parents, who emigrated from Stuttgart to Pennsylvania the year he was born. “What do you think it means?” she asked.

  “The dream, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of trees were they?”

  Glancing at him, she pulled herself up to a sitting position. “That’s a funny question, why do you ask?”

  The rabbi stopped himself. He was about to say that Jews believe if a man appears in a dream among fruit trees then he is in paradise. But that would mean that the man in Sarah’s dream was dead. And he didn’t want to say the wrong thing. “I was just wondering. You know, dreams are an important part of our lives. Hisda the Babylonian said that every dream means something, apart from those that occur during fasting.”

  “Well, I haven’t eaten much the last few days. Years, really.”

  “Then maybe it doesn’t mean anything. In those days the most common way to prevent bad dreams was through fasting. But if you’re fasting, and you have a bad dream anyway, then I guess Hisda isn’t too relevant today. That was some time ago. In the third century.” He smiled at Sarah. “Tell me. Have you been having this dream a lot?” In Jewish lore, a recurring dream means that it will soon come to pass.

  “Yes. No. Well, dreams like it.”

  “What do you mean? Or rather, maybe, tell me what the dream means to you.”

  He had been around damaged souls long enough to know that his role was not to interpret dreams but to give hope. He had accompanied the U.S. Third Army for eighteen months as they fought their way through Europe. Much of that time had been spent comforting the wounded and the sick, soldiers of any denomination. But now that the fighting was dying out, here at least, he was beginning to see different kinds of people, with different issues. Civilians, even though this was Frankfurt’s military hospital. This young woman was not the first Jewish woman he had come across. How many more like her were there, filling Europe’s roads, trying to go home? He’d seen the smashed towns. And the columns of refugees traipsing in circles. They were like homing pigeons with no homes. Sarah had been lucky. He knew only that an American driver had brought her to the hospital after bringing her from the north. She had been bleeding heavily from between her legs. He never asked about a patient’s medical condition unless he or she volunteered information.

  Sarah had told him a little about herself. But the man in her dream. The baby. Did they exist? Who were they?

  Gently, taking Sarah’s hand again, he asked, “The baby … in your dream…”

  That’s all it took. His caring touch, his warm eyes, his gen
tle inquiry. Tears flowed again as she talked. All she had held in for so long poured out: the years of terror in Berlin, afraid of every stranger’s glance. Her years as a submarine when she ran out of friends to hide her. And most agonizing of all, her sobs as she told how she lost her baby in the cemetery at night. Through her hand he felt her trembling, and she trembled for as long as she spoke.

  The man’s name was Hoppi, just a nickname, of course. She started to say how he got it, but stopped herself. She just knew he was dead, she had such a sense of absence and loss. But she had promised to meet him in Heidelberg, their home, and she had to keep her promise. It was a holy oath. Now her tears stopped, her gaze went icy, as she gripped the rabbi’s hand and fixed him with her eyes, withholding nothing, recounting the rape, her desecration, her sense that her body was no longer hers. How hard it was to be alone. In her pain, without knowing, she stroked his hand, as if willing him to make things better.

  As Rabbi Bohmer listened, struck yet again by how unequipped he was, despite his post, to offer real solace, another interpretation of her dream occurred to him. A more recent school held that to see a dead baby in your dream symbolized the ending of something that was once a part of you. He wondered what part of Sarah’s life was over. A good part? Or a bad part? Her tragic life under the Nazis? Her happy life with Hoppi? Something to do with her baby? If the part of her life that was ending was bad, then the part that was beginning could be good. What good thing was about to happen?