by CL Skelton
Jan took it from him gently, studying it momentarily. ‘Yam Kinneret,’ he said. Isaac raised a quizzical grey eyebrow, stirring in Jan a memory of that same brow, dark, sharp and wryly cynical, raised for some witticism. ‘Yam Kinneret,’ Jan repeated. ‘The Sea of Galilee.’
‘I am going to the Sea of Galilee?’
‘A kibbutz. On the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee.’
‘This is a camp?’ Isaac said, patting his suitcase.
‘No. No, not a camp.’ Jan struggled with concepts and said, ‘A farm, Isaac. A sort of farm where everyone works together.’
‘I am to live on a farm?’ Isaac looked incredulous, and when Jan nodded he made a small intake of breath and nodded again. His fingers scrunched up a small fold in the white tablecloth. The waiter came with their coffee and the plate of pastries and Isaac dropped his fold of cloth. He sipped his coffee solemnly, holding the cup in two hands, and reminding Jan of the old Jewish men he used to see in the parks of Munich sitting at café tables with chess-boards beside them. He wondered if Isaac, the old Isaac he had known, had really been like them after all, and the elegant gentleman he recalled only a creation of a romantic child’s mind. Throughout the whole time since their meeting on the quay, Isaac had never once questioned Jan’s presence in Palestine, nor even appeared to wonder how it was that Jan had known about his arrival and come to meet the ship. Perhaps curiosity, like youth and elegance and the old Isaac’s broad, child-delighting laugh, was also a victim of the camps.
‘Miriam Krautz told me you would be on this ship,’ Jan said then. Isaac nodded politely. ‘You remember Miriam, don’t you, Isaac?’ Jan pressed. ‘Surely. Miriam Krautz, the artist.’
‘Ah, the artist,’ Isaac echoed softly, but his eyes were on an Arab woman riding by on a donkey, and slowly widening with European astonishment. He said, ‘What will I do on a farm, Ian?’
‘You’ll grow things, Isaac.’
‘I don’t know how to grow things,’ he said pathetically.
Jan said, ‘They will show you how.’
Isaac sipped at his coffee again and patted his suitcase, and Jan braced himself to ask of his mother, at the same time wondering if this new, lost, broken Isaac would have any memory of her. He opened his mouth to speak but Isaac said suddenly, ‘Once, in Berlin, I grew a cactus. It was a pretty cactus with a red flower. But it died. Your mother gave it to me, the cactus with the red flower that died. It was no good, you see, me growing things. I am a goldsmith, Ian.’
‘My mother …?’ Jan whispered, struggling for words.
‘I put it on the window-sill, as Heidi said. But it died. First the red flower. Then all of it. Perhaps, on the window-sill was too cold?’
‘My mother, Isaac, have you … heard of my mother? Since the war, have you heard?’
Isaac looked confused. He scratched his hair, behind his ear where the hot heavy hat yet sat on it. ‘Heidi?’ he said, uncertainly.
‘My mother, Isaac. Heidi Muller, my mother. Do you know what’s become of her?’ Jan’s voice rose, the words separate and sharp, small knives to cut through the fog in Isaac’s befuddled mind.
‘You do not know?’ Isaac said. Jan shook his head, fighting back frustrated tears.
‘Isaac,’ he pleaded. ‘Try to remember. I am Ian Muller. Heidi’s son. I was arrested in 1933 for defacing a poster. I was sent to a prison, surely you heard.’
Isaac nodded suddenly, and said, ‘Foolishness. And childish, too. A poster, you risk your life, your mother’s security, for a poster.’
‘Yes, it was foolishness,’ Jan said, quickly, ‘and you remember. I was in prison; a year, eighteen months. Men came, good men, Jews, and they freed me and brought me here. I wrote then, from Palestine, first to my mother and when letters were not returned I wrote to everyone I had known, but no one had seen her. The house was empty. I even went back, near the end of the war.’
‘During the war?’ Isaac said, jolted into reality. ‘You were in Germany during the war?’
Jan waved away his incredulity, and said only, ‘I was everywhere,’ which was close to the truth. ‘But where was she, Isaac? Before the war, she was gone already. Surely you heard? Surely you must have heard?’ He realized suddenly that he was gripping the old man’s cuffs, plucking at his wrists with his urgency, and Isaac’s eyes were filled with fear. Jan forced himself to release his grip.
Isaac said, clutching his suitcase as if in a moment he would run, ‘I tried, Ian, I tried to save her. After they came for you, and I heard, I went to Munich. I found her there alone, in a terrible state, and begged her that she should come away with me to Berlin and stay in my flat. Where, who knows, perhaps I can protect her. You see, what you and your friends were doing, it washed over on to everyone you touched. Who knows what they would do to her? But she would not come. Always she insists you will come back, and what if she is not there when you do? In the end, I go away to Berlin and she stays. One day, my letter is returned. I go back to Munich. The house is empty, boarded over, paint, things written on the door. You know how it was in those days. I go to the neighbours. They, brave people, have heard nothing, seen nothing. Heidi Muller? Who is she? I go away in the end. I drive around the city, that was before they took the car, and when we could still travel a little. I find a shabby street eventually. All the windows broken. Ah, I think, this is where Munich keeps her Jews. Yes, and I find Heidi, with two other women and many children in a flat. No water, no heating. Again, I beg her, come away. I think then, already I think of leaving Germany, funny how long before we think of it, how many years we think always it will stop soon, this craziness. Then of course, when we know it will never stop … there is no way to leave, nowhere to go …’ he trailed off and Jan gently prodded him.
‘So she did not come to Berlin.’
Isaac shook his head. ‘No. Again she insists she must be in Munich for you, when you return.’ Jan nodded painfully and Isaac continued, ‘Then, when I returned myself to Berlin, I find my flat locked, my home confiscated, all my property, some pretence, pretences were easy to find. Later they did not even bother with pretence. So then it begins. So, I cannot travel, I must stay in the ghetto with all the rest. I write to Heidi. Eventually the answers stop. What am I to think? And then,’ he shuddered, shaking his head, his eyes feverishly alive with memory, ‘then, Ian, it all begins. The hammering on the doors in the night. The journeys, the trains … and then those places.’ He stopped, suddenly removed his hat and his spectacles, and leaned back in his chair in the café in Haifa. He closed his eyes, taking two long breaths. Jan saw for the first time the blue number on the back of his hand as his heavy coat cuff slipped up, almost as if it had waited until this moment to reveal itself.
‘In August of 1944, in the place where I was, I met a woman who had stayed in that flat with Heidi. I say I met. I glimpse her beyond the dividing fence, where sometimes those who are unfortunate enough to have wives too in that place risk their lives for a word of greeting. I call to her, only the name. “Heidi Muller”, and she calls back one word, before she sees the guard and must flee. “England”.’
‘England?’ Jan whispered.
‘It is the best day in three years. The best day for the remaining year. Heidi in England. Heidi safe. I think then I will never see her again, but it does not matter. Heidi is safe. And then, Ian, I see you there by the ship and I think all is well for Heidi, for surely she is here?’ He plucked at the tablecloth, his old fingers fumbling past memories. ‘Was it all a mistake, then, that woman in the camp? Was Heidi not saved?’ Then he echoed what Jan had thought earlier, and said, ‘What have we done, Ian, that we must pay always for one loved one with the life of another?’
‘England,’ Jan whispered again. Surely it was possible. It would explain everything. It was then he remembered Lady Macgregor and knew in that instant not only that she was in Britain but where in Britain precisely, she was. He leapt from his chair, threw his tough sun-browned arms around the old man’s head and should
ers and hugged him passionately, kissing the thin grey hair.
When Jan arrived back home at Kibbutz Aaron it was late, after working hours, and he went at once to the dining-hall, where everyone gathered to make coffee and talk into the night, and found Hannah. His excitement, and his conviction that not only was his mother alive, but that he would at last almost certainly find her, had grown on him throughout the coach journey. He had not shared his thoughts with Yigel, and they had expanded richly inside him and now clearly glowed from his eyes and showed in his face. Hannah saw at once the change upon him, but she was guarded.
She went to the kitchen, behind the hall, and came back with coffee for him. It was the kind of domestic thing that she was inclined to do which, set against her farm-worker’s strength and masculine ability with tractors and weaponry, so charmed him. Around him, in the communal warmth of the dining-hall, she yet spread another, more personal, more intimate warmth.
‘Did you find him?’ she asked. She was tentatively stroking one long, golden-brown braid. Her skin was creamy brown, pink along the cheek-bones. For her, all the exotic glory of Biblical poetry rose readily to Jan’s lips; Daughter of Zion, Rose of Sharon. He smiled.
‘I found him.’
She paused again, turning her cup around. ‘What was he like?’
‘Old.’
‘You didn’t tell me he was old.’
‘He wasn’t when I knew him.’ He drank his coffee. ‘Seventeen years. I wonder. Perhaps he would have been old by now, anyhow.’
‘Where is he going?’
‘Yam Kinneret.’
‘Will he be all right?’
Jan shrugged. He said eventually, ‘To be alive is to be all right. He is alive.’ He looked down at the plain table, one of several, alike, utilitarian, and coffee-stained. ‘It is hard for the old. For the young it is almost too easy.’ He was watching, across the room, a middle-aged couple sitting alone, watching their young daughter going off for the night to the adolescents’ house. She was dressed like the young Sabras, in rolled cotton shorts and a cotton blouse, a checked cotton scarf wound Arab-style around her head and shoulders, her hair, like Hannah’s, in a long plait. She swaggered a little as she walked, and flagrantly displayed affection for the youth at her side, her arm about his waist. Her parents, new immigrants from Poland watched still, torn between condemnation and pride. Daughter of Israel.
‘I am going to England, Hannah,’ said Jan.
Later, in the night, they made love. Not in his hut, a barren, unprivate place, but out in the fields, under the clear black desert sky, at the edge of the citrus orchard where the grass was wild. Hannah was all giving; she never cared for her own pleasure, only his, crying out for joy at his coming, whether she came or not. Afterwards she stroked his hair and murmured over and over again that she loved him, wanting no answer. Hannah knew he had never loved anyone since the woman in France and the thing that had happened there, back in the war. Later, she cried.
He said, ‘I’ll soon come back. I’ll bring her with me.’
She clung closer, shook her head, and wept.
On the morning Jan left Kibbutz Aaron, at the beginning of his journey to England, Hannah was in the fields. Yigel drove him away in the kibbutz car, and he leaned out of the small dusty window, watching her driving the tractor with a chain harrow rattling behind. Her back was to him, her strong young shoulders tense with strain. Her long plait of golden-brown hair bounced on her sweaty cotton shirt with the motion of the tractor. She was so near he could have almost touched her as she turned the machine at the roadside. She never looked back, spinning the heavy wheel around, raising between them a cloud of obscuring yellow dust. Yigel drove off down the long, rutted track and Jan whispered once, ‘Hannah,’ because he so liked the sound of her name.
A day later, he sailed from Haifa.
Chapter Eight
‘Hardacre Salvage?’ said Heidi. ‘It sounds terribly official, doesn’t it?’
‘Well, my dear,’ said Jane drily, ‘it takes little more than an afternoon’s work to sound official. Though I wouldn’t expect Sam to create a limited company simply for the fun of it. I imagine he has something practical in mind.’
‘But what?’ Heidi said, rising quickly to pour fresh coffee for Jane who said at once, ‘Stay where you are and relax for one moment. I’m not a guest. Certainly not a paying one, anyhow.’
The two women were sitting in the empty residents’ lounge of the Strathmore Lodge, enjoying a log fire and the surprising warmth of early spring sunshine shining through the many-paned windows. Outside, the landscape of bare fields, river and forested hillsides rising to barren moorland was still white with winter snow, though in the sheltered flower-beds of the inn’s gardens crocuses and snowdrops were already in bloom. Jane rose from her chair by the fire and crossed to the window to look out.
‘It really is lovely here, Heidi. You have a marvellous location, marvellous. I know you’ll do well. What with the fishing and shooting, you can’t go wrong.’
Heidi smiled. She was a small, thin woman whose ready smile saved her lined face from a look of severity. She dressed as Jane did, in tweed skirts and lambswool jumpers and looked, and spoke, almost exactly like a British woman. There was only the faintest touch of her German accent remaining with her, and at times Jane was quite certain that it was being superseded by a trace of Scots, from her many years in the North. ‘The Macgregors have been a great help. I’ve had three parties from the castle already.’
Jane nodded. ‘Quite right, too. I’m sure they are as pleased to have you here as you to have their assistance. Now that they are letting practically all the stalking, there’s a stream of visitors wanting accommodation. It’s not like the old days, when it was all friends and family and the Castle was always full. Rather sad now, actually, a lot of empty rooms and the family living in a single wing. Like Hardacres. I thought for a while it was just the aftermath of the war, but now I know it’s more than that. It will never come back, the way we used to live. Even if the Tories get back in next time, it’s all done with. Not that I mind that much. Rather exciting, actually.’ She tugged down the hem of her green tweed jacket in a brisk, assured gesture. ‘New times take new methods. A good time to be starting off in business, provided one’s willing to work.’
‘Oh, I’m that,’ Heidi laughed. ‘I’ve baked three dozen scones this morning, and done porridge and scrambled eggs for eighteen. And packed lunches. They’re all off to climb the ben. No doubt they’ll get as far as the first burn and turn back, but they’ll feel they’re real mountaineers. I think most of them prefer what comes after, the hot baths and brandies around the fire, anyway.’
Jane laughed, returning to sit again by the hearth. ‘Oh, I didn’t mean you, my dear,’ she said, prodding with the brass poker at the edge of a burning log. ‘Hardly. I’ve had my life’s work cut out trying to get you to stop working some time,’ and when Heidi shook her tight grey curls, she insisted, ‘I have.’ She paused, studying the fall of grey ash in the stone hearth. ‘No, it’s Sam I’m thinking of. I really do wish him well.’
She sounded doubtful enough for Heidi to ask timidly, ‘Does he know anything about salvage, I mean, perhaps in the war …’
‘I kept thinking of that, but no, I’m afraid he spent most of his war in the middle of the desert. Not much to pick up there about marine salvage. No. As far as I’m aware this is just a bolt from the blue. All I’ve heard has been from Philip Barton who toddled down there one afternoon to have a chat and ended up in the middle of the North Sea, anchored over a wreck, hauling up crates of tinned salmon. Apparently he went home with his car boot full for his trouble, and Sam’s number one in his books just now, I dare say. They’ve been living on leeks and neck of mutton since February.’
‘Poor things,’ Heidi murmured. ‘But surely the business is not that bad?’
‘Oh, no,’ Jane said, turning towards the window at the sound of car tyres on the gravel of the front court. ‘It’s inf
initely worse. Apparently Emily bridled at having men only in the snuggery, thereby destroying a thousand-year-old tradition of masculine solitude or whatever. The locals all walked out when she let the women in and haven’t been back since. They’ve even threatened to take their dartboard out and meet somewhere else. The ultimate sanction, I gather.’ She grimaced. ‘Poor Philip’s in the middle, his wife on one side and the pride of Yorkshire manhood on the other. I think there’s someone coming to the door, my dear.’
‘Oh, good heavens, I’m still in my pinny. Answer it for me Jane, will you please. I’ll be through in a minute.’ She jumped up and ran to the kitchen, divesting herself of her apron as she did. In a moment, Jane knew, she would re-emerge into the foyer of the hotel, neatly groomed, as manageress. Heidi was playing several roles in her little establishment, wisely limiting her staff to the bare minimum until the success of the venture were ensured. Jane rose, straightened her skirt, and went to the front door. If Sam Hardacre could work as hard as Heidi Muller, she reflected, he should make a fortune, whatever his unlikely new trade.
An ageing grey shooting-brake was parked a little way down the gravel drive. Jane recognized it as the local village taxi, and nodded to the friendly wave its driver accorded her. A young man had stepped from the vehicle and was leaning in, conversing briefly with the driver. He turned, saw Jane in the doorway of the inn, appeared to hesitate, and then began walking quickly with a long, determined stride towards the door. He was tall and slim, dressed in a buff-coloured raincoat hanging loosely unbelted over sports trousers and pullover. He was hatless and the sun shone on strikingly blond hair. He looked about thirty, she judged, thinking automatically, ‘about Peter’s age’. It was a sad habit that never left her; she watched him grow older in the faces of his contemporaries, her son who would never age.
‘Can I help you?’ she called, as the man approached the small flight of stone steps leading up to the heavy front door, which stood open now, letting sunlight into the tiled small porch.
