Father Under Fire

by Neil Boyd

  My room was dark now. Normally I would have put on the light but I dared not move.

  ‘In the nights,’ the Rabbi said, ‘it is mostly in the nights, I cannot forget. I took long time to forgive God, you know?’ I nodded. ‘Not for Sammy’s death.’ I shook my head, not knowing why. ‘Who cries for martyrs? But why did God not let me say to him only, “Sorry, Sammy”?’

  Late in the war, the Rabbi’s hideout was discovered by an Alsatian dog when a squad of soldiers were foraging for food. The Gentiles who had harboured him were immediately taken out into the yard and shot, among them a boy of fifteen. The Rabbi was put in a concentration camp for Jews and gypsies.

  There he came across a teenage boy, Isaac Brader. Isaac’s father was lucky; he died young. The boy and his mother had been hounded for years before being captured and imprisoned.

  The camp was small, off the beaten track, and the Commandant, not of the S.S., was unusually kind. Perhaps one reason for this was that the war was going against Germany.

  The Rabbi was not sent to the gas-chamber as he had expected and prayed for. The Angel of Death passed him by. Isaac’s mother caught influenza. Unable to shake it off due to malnutrition, she died in Isaac’s arms. The Rabbi said Kaddish for her and for a hundred other victims of the epidemic.

  Isaac lived. He helped the Rabbi slowly to forgive God. And the Rabbi taught the boy what he knew by heart of the Torah, the Talmud and the Commentaries. He barmitzvahed him in the camp. It was overdue, the boy being nearly seventeen. They became as close as father and son.

  ‘Even my Sammy, peace be with him, is not closer me than my Isaac.’ He looked up to Heaven. ‘Perhaps only a bit of a bit closer.’

  After the war, when the camps were emptied, the Rabbi nursed Isaac till he was strong enough to travel.

  ‘Between us,’ the Rabbi said proudly, ‘we had not one zloty. We was too poor to run a chicken but I mended my Isaac.’

  They hitched lifts and, like thousands of Poles, made their way to England.

  Isaac picked up the language easily, went to school and landed a job in a bank. At the Rabbi’s insistence, he found a flat of his own while the Rabbi rented a room in a tenement building. It was very comfortable.

  ‘Warmer than a grave and cleaner than a camp,’ he assured me. ‘God is good.’

  His story concluded, he took out a big red handkerchief and blew his nose.

  ‘God is good,’ I said only because he had said it.

  He sensed my reluctance to echo him. ‘Everything we lost in Holocaust. But God camped with us, eh? We could not light Him one candle, but He stayed.’

  I realized, dimly, that we Christians had the same belief.

  ‘Yes, Father Boyd, God is a very funny chap.’ The Rabbi laughed aloud at his own quaint use of English and, to compensate, muttered something, in Hebrew I think, which sounded as if he were swallowing soup with lumps in. ‘If I meet God, I will put a pumpkin on His head with seven candles on and dance with Him.’

  I felt sure God would be honoured.

  The Rabbi blew his nose again even louder, tapped the side of it and said:

  ‘In my synagogue, I am needing no Shofar. One ram’s horn enough is, eh?’

  As soon as Fr Duddleswell entered my room, Rabbi Epstein greeted him with:

  ‘He good rabbi, Father Boyd. He listen and say nothing, like God.’

  Seeing that the Rabbi and I were on friendly terms, Fr Duddleswell invited us both to his study. Perhaps the Rabbi’s unexpected presence unsettled him. Or he had a premonition of surprises in store and needed support.

  ‘Coffee, Rabbi?’

  Rabbi Epstein turned down Fr Duddleswell’s offer with polite regret. I guessed it was something to do with Jewish dietary law.

  ‘How can I help you, Rabbi?’

  He replied inconsequentially as before. ‘I am become Na-v’-nad, as we say in Hebrew, a wanderer. Jews are like fleas. They turns up everywhere. Always they give surprises. Unpleasant. Except to other fleas.’

  ‘I must be a flea,’ Fr Duddleswell said gallantly. ‘You are very welcome here, at any rate.’

  ‘In the world to come, says Talmud, you must answer triple questions: Did you buy and sell in bona fide? Did you study orderly? Did you lift up, no, pardon, did you raise a family? I have come about my son, Isaac.’

  That shook me. Fr Duddleswell, for his part, naturally bewildered, said, ‘You have?’

  ‘I do not want Isaac to enter a mixed-up marriage.’

  The Rabbi explained that his beloved Isaac Brader, like a son to him, had met a Gentile girl. She worked in the same bank as Isaac and he had told the Rabbi he intended marrying her.

  ‘I know her?’ Fr Duddleswell asked.

  ‘Her name is Christine Hammond.’

  The revelation of Isaac’s fiancee gave me a great jolt. As for Fr Duddleswell, he went deathly white. For of all his parishioners, no one was nearer to his heart than Christine Hammond.

  EIGHT

  Christine and Isaac

  Mrs Pring had told me Christine’s story.

  One night in 1940, Fr Duddleswell was firewatching when a string of incendiary bombs fell on York Street where the Hammonds lived. Risking his life, he entered the blazing building and rescued Christine from her ground-floor bedroom. He made further attempts to release the parents who were trapped upstairs but was driven back by the flames.

  He spent two days in hospital after that with burns and respiratory troubles.

  Christine’s legs were badly burned. She was in and out of hospital for months and had several skin grafts. Every afternoon, except when she was being operated on, Fr Duddleswell visited her and took her for walks in a wheel chair.

  ‘He worships the girl,’ Mrs Pring had said.

  ‘And I bet she’s fond of him, Mrs P.’

  She smiled reluctantly. ‘There is a little bit of him that’s worth saving, Father Neil.’

  When Christine finally left hospital, she went to live with an aunt, Mrs Mabel Coyne. She was widowed when her husband fell at Arnhem. Mrs Coyne, a parishioner of St Jude’s, brought Christine up as a devout Catholic.

  ‘When Christine left school,’ Mrs Pring said, ‘she entered the novitiate of the Sacred Heart Sisters.’

  ‘How long did she last there?’

  ‘Only a year or less. Father D was upset when she left. But he realized she was really looking for security. She was only twelve, you see, when she was orphaned.’

  Mrs Pring went on to say that Fr Duddleswell had seen Christine through the crisis in her vocation, pulled a few strings to get her a job in a bank and was with her when her Aunt Mabel died of leukaemia early in 1950.

  I was quite moved by Fr Duddleswell’s part in the story and joked, ‘He’ll be canonized some day, after all.’ Mrs Pring had replied, ‘If you melted old short-pants down you’d make half a dozen ordinary sized priests out of him.’

  When Fr Duddleswell said to Rabbi Epstein, ‘Christine Hammond. I know her well,’ I understood something of the pain he felt. I wanted to tell him why Isaac Brader was so dear to the Rabbi but there was no opportunity.

  The two men began to speak, haltingly at first and then with fluency, of the trials and tribulations bound up with mixed marriages. Especially between Jews and Gentiles.

  How could it be otherwise? Christine, for example, believed that Jesus is God made man, while Isaac thought the idea blasphemous. For Christine, Jesus was the longed-for Jewish Messiah; for Isaac, the Messiah is still to come. For Christine, Jews are the people who reject the Way; for Isaac, Jews are the elect of God, the apple of His eye.

  Between priest and rabbi there was complete accord. Even on a practical level, the differences were unbridgeable. Would the young couple marry at the altar before Fr Duddleswell or under the Jewish canopy in front of Rabbi Epstein? Would a boy-child be baptized or circumcized? Would they worship on Sunday or the Jewish Sabbath, in a church or a synagogue?

  Marriage between Jew and Gentile entailed the mix-up of ever
y possible gene and chromosome of race and creed. An unthinkable amalgamation. What hybrids would their children be?

  Yet I must confess, as I listened to these two elderly men – each of whom seemed strangely older than their combined years – I saw through their differences to certain common factors. A plump Irish priest and a wafer-thin Jewish rabbi joined in some mysterious brotherhood? It was absurd and still the conviction grew in me the longer they were together.

  Two recent classroom incidents sprang ridiculously into my mind. ‘Father,’ George said, ‘if a telegraph pole grew branches it would look just like a tree.’ And Esther, the only Jewish child in Mrs Hughes’s form, seeing a picture of Pius XII wearing his white skull cap like a yarmulka, gleefully called out, ‘I didn’t know your Pope was Jewish. When was the wedding?’

  Priest and rabbi, as I remember them after the years, were both deeply religious. Religious at a level beneath that of ‘religion’ which is all that most men, myself included, ever reach. They were religious in the subterranean caverns of the spirit. There God flowed through them like clear spring water, spoke to them like music, cancelling all their doubts before there were words to voice them.

  Their principles were of steel, but were they themselves bigots? I think not. Perhaps because their religion made them channels of love. Before their God, they did not exist; but everyone else did.

  Yes, I was thinking even then, my beloved, bewildering, often fuddled Fr Duddleswell would give up his life for anyone in need as easily as he removed his shirt at night. And the Rabbi? I don’t suppose Rabbi Epstein understood the meaning of death at all.

  The two men got on so famously they were now on first name terms: Zorach and something that sounded like ‘Charoly’.

  ‘Well, now, Zorach, I suggest we meet these two young people and impress on them the utter impossibility of their marrying.’

  A meeting with Isaac and Christine was arranged provisionally for Wednesday evening at the Rabbi’s place.

  When the Rabbi had bid Charoly goodbye, Fr Duddleswell was in a sombre mood.

  ‘That Rabbi is an exceedingly holy man.’ That from Fr Duddleswell was the highest praise. ‘He seems very fond of that lad, right enough.’

  Now that the opportunity presented itself, I did not repeat what Rabbi Epstein had told me. I felt, somehow, it was his story. If he wished to tell it, so be it. I would not.

  I asked if I could attend the Wednesday meeting. Fr Duddleswell was none too keen but he said yes.

  Why did I want to be there? It was not mere curiosity. More like pride. I fancied Rabbi Epstein and Fr Duddleswell saw things with such piercing clarity they were, in a sense, blind.

  The door of 57 Russell Buildings was ajar. We knocked and, receiving no answer, went in.

  The Rabbi, draped in a prayer shawl and wearing a yarmulka, was poring over an enormous, faded Bible. In the light of candles, I noticed that his fingers were tracing the words on the page which his lips were forming. Just above his right wrist was a blue serial number.

  Back and forth he swayed as if in a trance, the tears pouring down his cheeks. He made no attempt to brush them away. They remained there, glistening like orange beads at the base of his beard.

  The room contained only the bare essentials: divan bed, table, chairs, a sideboard and small cupboard, a gas ring, a two-bar electric fire and a book shelf. It smelt strongly of snuff, cloves, garlic, fish and incense. It was very cold.

  ‘Charoly, may I be forgiven?’

  The Rabbi leapt to his feet. Off came his prayer shawl and in its place he put on a black quilted jacket with frayed cuffs and lapels.

  ‘I have no clock piece,’ he said, apologizing. ‘But what is time? Even God who invent it does not understand head nor foot of it.’

  The Rabbi kissed his Bible, carried it across the room as if it were a silver salver filled to the brim with precious wine and placed it on the shelf. We sat down at the square oak table.

  ‘Honoured,’ the Rabbi said. ‘Full is my heart. Like new moon in Yom Kippur.’ He jumped up suddenly and lit the gas under a saucepan. ‘Cholent,’ he exclaimed. ‘You like?’

  We managed to convey to him, tactfully, that we were not expecting a meal.

  ‘You don’t like?’ He seemed hurt.

  ‘We’ve never had it,’ I explained.

  ‘You will like,’ he affirmed, and ran through the ingredients to whet our appetites. Butter beans, potatoes, onions, meat, seasoning and, he seemed proud of this, ‘a famous dumpeling’. It came out as three syllables.

  ‘You prepared it yourself?’ Fr Duddleswell asked warily.

  ‘In Poland we say, “Six cooks, no meal”.’ He fixed his eye on Fr Duddleswell. ‘Your lady no give you cholent?’ ‘My lady?’

  ‘Every man has lady, Charoly.’

  ‘I do not have a wife, Zorach, as you know.’

  ‘Ah, no. You do not marry your lady or she not share your bed, that is all.’ He pointed an accusing finger. ‘Mind, for turning down precious delights of the bed, God will accuse you very naughty at the Judgement. So say Talmud.’

  ‘Nor do I eat with her,’ Fr Duddleswell added for good measure.

  The Rabbi did not pick that up at once. ‘If all Catholics naughty like you, Charoly, soon no Catholics left.’ He caught the remark made to him at the second attempt. ‘You don’t eat with your lady, Charoly?’ He was astonished.

  ‘No, Zorach,’ Fr Duddleswell said, looking strangely pleased with himself.

  ‘You eat alone, yes?’

  ‘Not at all, I eat with Father Neil here.’

  ‘But, Charoly,’ – the Rabbi was finding the notion difficult to grasp – ‘your unmarried lady, she not eat alone?’

  Fr Duddleswell did not answer, none too happy to have to admit something which he had never questioned before.

  Rabbi Epstein said, half to himself, ‘Your lady live in your house, she work for you, she cooking for you, she serve you food – and she not eats with you?’ The shake of his head indicated there was nothing in the Talmud itself quite as puzzling as that.

  ‘Mrs Pring eats in the kitchen, Zorach.’

  The Rabbi saw the light at last or thought he did. ‘So your lady a Muslim and she eat with this Mrs Pring.’

  ‘Mrs Pring is my lady,’ Fr Duddleswell said, adding quickly, ‘I mean, me housekeeper’s name is Mrs Pring.’

  ‘And what you call her, Charoly?’

  ‘Mrs Pring.’

  ‘How long she with you, one week, two week?’

  ‘Twenty tedious years.’

  ‘Twenty … And she no call you Charoly like me?’ The Rabbi shrugged his shoulders as if he were squeezing out a mop. ‘What you hold against this lady, tell me?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Fr Duddleswell said, flustered. ‘Nothing you would understand, I mean.’

  ‘You are good man, Charoly. A good man eat food with even his enemy also.’

  ‘She is not me enemy, Zorach,’ Fr Duddleswell said lamely, as if that might be sufficient reason for excluding Mrs Pring from his table.

  ‘Is it not as I say before, Charoly?’ the Rabbi said, smiling. ‘Why you so right about the marriage business when you know lesser than nothing?’

  The leg-pulling was interrupted by the arrival of the young couple. They were holding hands, a gesture of defiance directed at anyone who dared try and separate them. Instinctively, Isaac touched the mezuza by the door as a Catholic might dip his fingers in the holy water stoup in the church porch.

  I already knew Christine by sight. A tall, slim, pretty brunette with big almond eyes and fleshy quivering lips. She wore thick woollen stockings. As soon as she came in, without a word, she put her arms round Fr Duddleswell’s neck.

  Isaac surprised me. I was expecting a youngster of slight build, in the mould of the Rabbi. Instead, there stood this broad-shouldered young man of about my age, dark, handsome with long, somewhat pointed features.

  As he removed his overcoat, I saw he was wearing a broad leather strap on his right
wrist. I found myself thinking: he was starving in a prison camp while I was living comfortably in a seminary.

  At the table, Christine and Isaac continued to hold hands. They listened in silence, first to Fr Duddleswell and then to Rabbi Epstein who sat opposite them.

  Fr Duddleswell explained gently but persuasively that it’s not possible to stop being a Catholic. A Catholic cannot deny that Jesus is the Christ and Son of God. He cannot, as the New Testament puts it, go back from light to darkness, from truth to shadows.

  ‘A Catholic like Christine,’ he said, ‘might go her own way and marry a devout Jew without prejudice to her own faith. But what about the children? Can a believing Catholic mother compromise the faith of her unborn?’

  Rabbi Epstein explained that a Jew is a Jew. One of God’s chosen. How can a Jew reject Torah, the covenant, the promises to his fathers? How can a Jew, especially one who has felt the lash of persecution, turn his back on his own persecuted people?

  This last point, far from impressing Isaac, aroused him to wrath. He released Christine’s hand and brought his fist down on the table with a crash.

  ‘Enough, Rabbi. I have had quite enough of this pious verbiage.’ His accentless English contrasted strongly with the Rabbi’s flawed and halting diction.

  This outburst brought fully half a minute of pained silence. The only sound was of the cholent simmering and bubbling in the pot. For the first time, I noticed its suffocating smell filling the room.

  Isaac, gently touching the Rabbi’s wrist, broke the silence. ‘I am not even sure I believe in God any more, little father.’

  ‘Sammy,’ the Rabbi whispered, horror-struck, and, realizing he had mixed up the names of his beloveds, found no more words for a while. ‘Isaac, Isaac,’ he said at length, ‘if there is no God how comes He sends Jews so much sorrow?’

  ‘Oy, oy, oy,’ Isaac cried in a plaintive voice. ‘You throw sorrows at me again. God shows He loves Jews because He sends us more sorrows than He sends Gentiles! In the War, God let one mad Gentile kill six millions of us to prove He loves us. What a pity, Rabbi, He didn’t let Hitler slaughter twelve millions of us to prove He loved us twice as much.’