How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  I also had no memories of my father, or of family life with him, except for four fragmentary scenes. One was of him showing me how to hold my penis when going to the toilet, so as not to splash the seat, and, as an afterthought, telling me to stop holding it while walking in the street. Another was when it began pouring with rain into his open-topped convertible, a hulk of a car with red leather seats that had a whiff of well-hung meat, and we had to stop and haul the roof closed, faking breathlessness as we struggled with the heavy tarpaulin. The third was when we landed at London’s Heathrow airport and I realized that I had left my beloved one-eyed teddy bear in the departure lounge at Frankfurt and he resolved to fly back at once to look for it, in the teeth of opposition from my mother, who said that children had to learn to accept losses. And the last was when, as was the custom on Sunday mornings, my brother Marius and I were allowed into our parents’ bed and we all had a boiled egg, and after I had wolfed down mine he spotted me looking covetously at the remainder of his and handed it to me with the warmest wordless smile, and it tasted even better than mine, as the food of those you love so often does.

  Aside from those memories and the pictures, he’d left few traces. I couldn’t remember his voice, though I remembered the voices of many others at that time, for example of his doctor, Ernst Lucas, who would visit my parents every Saturday morning with his strangely silent wife, Lilly Reifenberg, who died not long after my father without me ever hearing her speak. I remembered Lucas’s gravelly intonation and the chocolate cigarettes, thin as Gauloises, that he gave me and my brother with a warm, knowing chuckle that only German refugees seemed to have, before the two men disappeared into our severe living room to play chess, still addressing each other, after decades, with the formal ‘Sie’.

  Occasionally he would visit me in dreams, almost always in the back garden of the house to which we had moved after he died. We exchanged few words and no kisses or hugs or presents or smiles or tears; but the pure current of life flowed between us, the only current that ultimately matters, the one that enlivens and affirms your existence and speaks of that too easily used word, ‘love’. The questions I’d wanted to ask him – where he was now, how he felt there, how much of my life he could see, whether he missed us – usually died on my lips. No answer would ever tell me what I wanted to know.

  It was always over in a few minutes, as if he’d been granted only brief terrestrial visiting rights. Our leave-taking was as silent and unsentimental as our meeting had been. He disappeared and I crept back to my bedroom, taking care not to scare my mother or brother. I accepted that he had to keep to his allotted time, and once back in bed I’d usually wake up.

  It had happened so long ago: that day five years before – I was about six and a half – which marked for me the end of the semi-pretence that there is a separate realm of experience called ‘childhood’. The eighteen-year-old girl who looked after me and my brother while our parents were out had taken us to a nearby park, just a few minutes’ walk from our house, to break the news.

  We were approaching my favourite path, flanked by a riot of brightly coloured flowers, when she stopped and said there was something she needed to tell us.

  ‘Your father has gone to heaven,’ she announced nervously.

  Sally then half put her arm round us. Sally Marshall was her name.

  It was like being hit by a car at speed, followed by a reflex struggle to master the impact. I knew at once that this was the shock of the real. It didn’t provoke the disbelief that floods the freshly bereaved adult: the sense of being swept up in a bad dream and the expectation that the loved one will surely return; that he will need to eat, fetch a fresh shirt, and find his credit cards. A child’s life doesn’t have the momentum that years of habit give an adult’s expectations; it’s freer of the illusion that what was once normal cannot possibly have vanished, freer of the sense of unreality when the anchors of existence are destroyed in a moment.

  Unlike many adults, I didn’t ask ‘why me?’ I didn’t seek a justification or feel self-pity, not because I was being stoical but because self-pity isn’t really in a young child’s repertoire. Grief is, though. At once the world felt very dark and the future blank and void. The thought floated through my mind that I’d got to know him as well as I ever would, and that he would never hear anything more about my life. He’d never teach me anything again. We’d never do anything else together. This poured-out world was the new order.

  And I remember my brother standing next to me. I was sure he hadn’t grasped the cataclysm. He didn’t react. He seemed helpless and innocent, in a way that I’d never noticed before. I wanted to protect him forever.

  Unsure what to say next, Sally muttered, ‘You will see him again, in heaven.’

  Those words made me angry. Yes, I’d already realized that he wasn’t about to stumble back into the house and confess to having departed in error. As for seeing him in heaven, that wasn’t something she was in a position to promise, and her reassurance felt mockingly empty.

  Then I thought of my mother. Where was she? How was she? I could protect her too, I was certain of that.

  The three of us stood there in silence, huddled but not touching. Dread and a strange exhilaration took hold of me, egging each other on. This was overwhelming fate at work; not malevolent, just heedless; knowing nothing of its impact on little mortals. It had brought the curtain down on the old world, with its breakfasts and quarrels and laughs and playtimes and silences, and catapulted me into a new universe of horror and of freedom – the horror of destruction and the freedom that I would have to explore, to make a life for myself. And I would rise to the challenge. An enormous whoosh of energy welled up within me, coming to my rescue and taking command of my bewilderment. I would be fine, not because others were to hand with consolation or promises of heaven, but because that energy would prevail, no matter what.

  We remained a little longer at that spot, still marked today with a sacredness visible only to me. Nothing more was said. I looked at my brother again, unable to fathom what he was feeling. As we turned to walk home, the world felt as if it was vastly expanding, shedding its predictability and becoming flooded by emptiness and doom, but also, inseparably, by reality and light.

  ii.

  After that day in the park, my father died a more leisurely death. The few vestiges of him began to fade. Talk of him dwindled, like the volume on a music player being gradually turned down. It dawned on me, as it hadn’t while he lived, that there were no relatives. Didn’t he have siblings, like my mother did, or perhaps parents or cousins, nephews or nieces?

  My mother told me that his parents had died long before I was born. Eventually it emerged that there was a brother, Edward May, who was a doctor and a brilliant amateur cellist, and lived near us. Eddy had a wife and two sons, but nothing was said of them. I met him only once, a couple of years after my father died, when we dropped in to his house near London’s Marble Arch and he took me for a spin in his Jaguar, racing from one end of Park Lane to the other and then back up again, at a clip that today would set off a frantic relay of speed cameras. He was clearly a class rascal, big-spirited and humorous. Like all Mays, he loved the holy trinity of food, wine, and music. As for other relatives, Mother didn’t know who or where they were. Either my father hadn’t liked them much, she said, or they had emigrated from Germany to Palestine or America. Their names were unknown so they couldn’t be traced.

  Occasionally I would try to keep the subject of my father alive by asking schoolfriends how many fathers they had, a question the absurdity of which would provoke the retort, ‘One of course; how many do you have?’ And then I could tell them that I had none.

  There was a single clue to a hinterland of family, but I didn’t join the dots. The Christmas after my father died, the postman delivered two large boxes containing presents for me and my brother. The presents were a suitcase for each of us, and the sender, our mother said, was father’s eldest son from his first marriage, which had be
en to his second cousin, a Hilde May. My half-brother was called Tommy, and he was about twenty years older than me and lived somewhere in the English countryside. Every year, at the same time before Christmas, the presents would arrive. I was exhilarated that Tommy’s hands must have touched the paper that I was unwrapping; and that I now had my own suitcase – which meant that I too could emigrate, though to where I had as yet no idea.

  A few weeks after my father died, I awoke to torrential rain of a viciousness that I have never experienced since, not even in monsoon season in Japan. My mother and brother were already downstairs and peering excitedly out of the kitchen window. It was about ten in the morning, but the sky was dark and the shape of everything outside was distorted by the rain sluicing down the windowpanes. Mother had turned all the lights on, which made the safety of being indoors all the more delicious. But the clouds were getting denser and blacker and closer, until it was hard to imagine that they would ever allow the sun through again. Soon the pouring rain became a tempest, pummelling the house and soaking the land. A shaft of lightning shot to earth, turning the sky into a kaleidoscope of colour, followed by a huge thunderclap. Streams of water began to flow down the sloping yard in front of our house, and one more crash from the heavens sent all the lights out. Had we been directly hit? Excitement quickly turned to fear. Then we saw water seeping under the front door. My brother and I started crying. Worst of all, Mother started crying. It seemed to get even darker outside. The carpet by the door was becoming soaked and water began invading our living room. Within an hour it had risen several inches and was threatening to destroy the Pembroke table and the Persian carpet and leather-bound volumes of German classics that my father had rescued from Nazi Germany, and the pictures on the wall that he had left us – all the remaining traces of his life.

  As the water accumulated, we panicked. What should we do? Run upstairs? The flood surely wouldn’t reach that high. We were all paralyzed, until we realized that we were going to have to scoop up the water as quickly as it was flowing in. And for an hour at least, we tipped it into the kitchen sink and into the toilets, until only the carpets and the legs of the furniture in the living room were submerged and most of father’s possessions had, for the time being, been spared.

  For years afterwards I thought of ‘The Flood’, as we called it. That furious sky and its deluge of terror echoed – confirmed – the violence, the suddenness, of father’s disappearance. It wasn’t punishing humans for their misdemeanours, like the biblical flood; it was hitting us indiscriminately, regardless of right and wrong. It was saying to me: ‘Yes, this is how the world works. Your blameless father isn’t the only one who is vulnerable to disaster: everybody is, at any time.’ The flood was an omen after the event – a sign that something very extraordinary and very catastrophic must have happened to bring about my father’s demise.

  iii.

  ‘He fell like this,’ said Ursel, standing up and then tumbling backwards into a wicker chair in the corner of the kitchen, her head thrust back, her neck stretched out, and her mouth gaping. ‘He gestured to say something, but he collapsed before he could say it.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ Ilse chimed in indignantly. ‘He’s a child. I find that tasteless, Ursel. Outrageous.’

  ‘You were there?’ I asked, irritated by Ilse’s protests, which I feared would inhibit the flow of revelation. ‘You saw him die?’

  Ursel then explained that my father was helping her and her husband at a meeting that needed to be conducted in German. He was someone they both trusted. They had asked him to join them. She was in the room when it happened.

  ‘Who was your husband? Which room? Why did my father die?’

  ‘He had a broken heart.’

  ‘How can someone’s heart break?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s like a plate,’ she said. ‘Under great pressure, it breaks.’

  ‘But a heart is flesh, and flesh can’t break.’

  She looked flustered. Why did she have to bend the truth for a child?

  ‘It just fell apart,’ she explained lamely.

  She then repeated her enactment of his fall, but in slow motion, with more emphasis on his shocked face, his open mouth, his stillness – and the finality.

  Ursel was a mimic of genius and her evocation of the scene was so vivid that it was bringing my father back to flickering life, for the first time since he disappeared.

  ‘Where was that room?’ I asked.

  ‘At the German Embassy in London.’

  ‘Why the German Embassy?’

  The reason, she explained, was that she and her husband needed to consult a lawyer qualified in a specialized branch of German law. In those days it was hard to find one in London.

  ‘Your father was a Jew,’ she added – strangely, as if I didn’t know. ‘How bizarre, what an astonishing coincidence, to die on German territory – on the territory of the country he fled in the 1930s.’

  Images of my father’s expression in that last, horrific moment flashed inchoately through my mind. I couldn’t settle on one. Shock. Fear. Incomprehension. Nothing at all. Did he realize this was the end? Was his face pale? Was it flushed?

  ‘My father was a German too,’ I protested, indignant at him not being identified as a German as well as a Jew, which seemed to evict him from his homeland for a second time, depriving him – and therefore me – of our heritage as Germans.

  ‘No, he was no longer a German,’ Ursel snapped, with a defiance that unnerved and confused me. ‘He became an Englishman, but he remained a Jew after the emigration.’

  My tussle with Ursel over my father’s identity humiliated me. But I was also elated that she had evoked him and his last moments at all: in making his death so vivid, she seemed to restitute to me at least a shadow of his reality, perhaps the greatest gift anyone has ever made me.

  This was all I’d been told about my father at the age of eleven: that he was a Jewish German, born in Cologne in 1905, who’d fled to England just before the Second World War; that with a small loan he’d bought a bankrupt brush factory in Wales, and by the early 1950s had made it into a gleaming, efficient place, churning out the highest quality brushes; and that with the money he made he’d bought paintings and sculptures, our house, and his car. Art, I was told, was his passion. If he hadn’t come to England without a penny to his name and left school at fifteen with no further education, becoming a bank clerk to earn money for his parents and to pay for his older brother to go to medical school, he’d have become a museum curator or an art historian.

  But Ilse had become really angry, and demanded that Ursel stop at once. Horrified though I was by the thought of his final moment and by his eviction from Germany, I was also euphoric at the determination this called up in me: the determination to square up to truth, like wrestlers squaring up to each other in the ring; to stare back at his disappearance as hard as it stared at me; but also to allow myself to feel its real presence, however painful, so that it might reveal itself more fully.

  From that day on, Ursel was my favourite aunt – my favourite relative – no doubt about it. A lifeline to the past. To my father. And so to his homeland.

  iv.

  ‘My father was a German too.’

  This wasn’t said out of mere nostalgia – that deadly and vital force, at once seductive trap and source of the most powerful energies (and we can seldom be quite sure which it is). It was the life-giving truth that must be preserved at all costs. Without it I would be lost in a dimensionless world, unable to sleep. Heritage as powerful as this can’t be excised. Nor can its universe of memory and meaning, no matter how painfully or patchily preserved, be ignored. By my eleventh year, or perhaps long before, I felt as much of an exile as my parents – or rather I felt more of an exile than they did, because at least they had lived in their homeland before their displacement, whereas I had been born displaced, a German who had never lived in Germany and was barely able to speak a word of the language. My two aunts, I decided, couldn’
t understand this. They thought Germany was behind me, a non-issue, just because I had been born in London.

  As I lay in bed, picturing my father collapsing, I was overwhelmingly grateful to Ursel for conjuring his presence back into my life. But I continued to refuse her denial of his homeland, and so of a whole world of experience and feeling that it had bequeathed, raw and unshapen, to me. Though my parents were both German Jews who had fled their country of birth, my mother in 1934 and my father in 1937, they hadn’t fled their identity as Germans. They hadn’t fled the German language – the only language that they spoke to each other and to nearly all of their friends. They hadn’t fled German music – which never stopped being at the centre of their lives. They hadn’t fled German recipes or cleanliness. They hadn’t fled their accents, which after decades in England remained stubbornly stronger than those of young Germans I would later meet at university who had only been in the country for a matter of months.

  Nor had they entirely fled their home towns. The names of Berlin places and streets in which I had never set foot, repeated by my mother like incantations, came to have a magical resonance for me: the Bendlerstrasse, the Landwehrkanal, Motzstrasse, Maassenstrasse, Nollendorfplatz, Pallasstrasse – places that only a local would know – meant more to me than any equivalent in London. I could feel myself walking over the Bendler bridge a few steps from my grandparents’ home, holding on to its wrought iron balustrade and peering down at the Landwehr canal, with its lazily flowing water. I could picture the Flugverbandhaus, at the corner of Blumeshof and Schöneberger Ufer, where my mother saw the veteran airmen from the First World War as well as Russian émigrés gather for their reunions throughout the 1920s. I can see her as a twelve-year-old, still living in a world that could be taken for granted, meeting her friend Luise Borchardt, who later became my godmother, and the way they used to ask each other every morning as they walked to school together, ‘Gehen wir Motz oder Maassen?’ – ‘Shall we go down Motz or Maassen Street?’ Above all, my mind’s eye clings to the neighbouring Tiergarten – the huge park in the centre of Berlin where my mother and her sisters would play, where her family would go for long walks, and where I sense that moments of deep contentment were enjoyed. In winter the children would skate on the frozen lake around the Rousseau island, which as a little girl she thought was spelled ‘Russo’, named after an anonymous Russian, rather than after the Swiss-French philosopher (an error that amused her until her death); and afterwards the family would go to a nearby cafe, nestled among the trees, which sold foot-long frankfurter sausages and lentil soup and cakes topped with whipped cream. Though Berlin has become my second home, or maybe my first, to see the word ‘Tiergarten’ on a road sign or at the S-Bahn train station is still to be accosted by an entire world. Our world. This was the world that my parents brought with them to a street in central London and that lived immortally, it seemed, in our English home with its leaky windows and erratic plumbing.