She flung the final chunk of bread, uncrumbled, over the side, provoking a frenzy of flapping, and strode off, leaving me to spend the afternoon assailed by conflicting emotions: elation that we had met together with depression at what she had said. I felt the particular injustice of her position: suffering for being Jewish without ever having known the joys: the richness of the five thousand year history; the bonds that stretched beyond borders; the strength of a belief embedded not in books or prayers but in the blood. I wanted to share some of my own conviction, assuring her that, wherever she went in the world, even in Cuba, she would not be alone. I wanted to go still further, telling her she would never be alone again now that she had me. I was fired by a hope that the voyage might take me to an even more desired destination than Havana.
I took care to keep my feelings in check when we gathered in the dining room. News of my grandfather’s condition had spread, and my mother responded to expressions of concern as though they were already condolences. I felt doubly guilty when my loss of appetite was attributed to worry and Mother, for once finding something in me to approve, squeezed my hand. All that changed, however, when I greeted her remark that there was a rabbi sitting with my grandfather by asking if he were a member of the crew. Shaking with incredulity, she demanded that I avoid the cabin for the next few hours. I went instead to the cinema with Sophie and Luise, who objected loudly to being separated from her friends. The room quickly filled with an audience that for too long had been starved of entertainment. My own anticipation was compromised by my search for Johanna. Disregarding her parting words, I planned to slip casually into a seat beside her and, when the moment was right, take hold of her hand. My nerves were so on edge that I jumped up at each new entrance, in spite of Sophie’s strictures and the complaints of the man behind, who did not want to miss a fraction of even the empty screen.
Far from seeing Johanna, the only figure I recognised was Schiendick, who stood menacingly in front of the projection box, as if ready to cancel the film at the first sign of enjoyment. There was no chance of that during the newsreel, which was dominated by a face that we thought we had left behind us forever: his dank cowlick dangling and mean moustache bristling, as he inveighed against the worldwide conspiracy of Jews. There was a noisy shuffling in the seats and a widespread murmur of defiance. Luise, whose revulsion to the man had to derive from some instinctive sense of evil, emitted a low moan. Several passengers walked out, but I was determined to sit firm, even after spotting Schiendick grinning broadly in the light of the open door. My forbearance was rewarded by a romantic – and, according to Sophie, highly romanticised – account of the lives of Robert and Clara Schumann, which so perfectly fitted my mood that I found myself picturing Johanna in a crinoline. It must also have chimed with Sophie, who announced that, after putting Luise to bed, she was going to the nightclub, but, when I asked hesitantly if I might escort her, she laughed, explaining that, in the first place, her nursemaid duties were over for the day and, in the second, I had to be eighteen.
‘I can pass for eighteen,’ I said.
‘In a total eclipse.’
‘Ask Frau Singel!’
‘The same Frau Singel who believes that the Garden of Eden was in Bavaria and the Tsar escaped the Bolsheviks dressed as her butcher?’
‘How many Frau Singels do you know?’
‘Exactly. Besides, it’s eleven o’clock: time for all good little boys to be in bed.’
Neither her jibe nor her departure stung me as much as I might have expected. I returned to the cabin to find my grandfather propped on the pillows, looking far more animated than before. My mother instructed me to wake her if there were the least change in his condition, at which he told her not to ‘worry the boy’ and insisted that he would last the night. After she had gone, he beckoned me closer and extracted my promise to do something for him. Respect made me forego any proviso, so I felt perturbed when he asked me to fetch a cigar from his case. I was sure that it contravened doctor’s orders, but even I could see that doctor’s orders were little more than doctor’s delaying tactics. I brought him the cigar, which he rolled lovingly under his nose, before sending me back for the cutter. ‘One day,’ he said, holding it up, ‘one day very soon – now it’s no use contradicting me – this will be yours. And it may well be the most precious thing I leave you since, by the time you reach my age, you’ll know that there’s no pleasure in the world to equal a good cigar.’
‘None?’ I asked, thinking of Johanna.
‘None so pure, nor so purely indulgent…. Although it tastes better lit.’ His addendum sent me scurrying for the matches. I watched as he inhaled deeply. ‘How strange to think that this should be the closest I come to Havana!’
‘You mustn’t say that!’
‘Oh I’ve no regrets, at least not about dying. I’ve far more about how I lived. But that’s no longer for me to judge. In any case, I’m too old to start again or even to settle somewhere new. I shall die happy to know that the people I love: the people I love more than I can say – although I’m sure I should have said so more often – are safe.’
You may suspect, in view of the horror that was soon to engulf the ship, that I have altered my grandfather’s words to bring out the irony, but I must insist that, while I acknowledge the limitations of memory (although, in time-honoured fashion, the events of the voyage are clearer to me than those that took place last week), I refuse to resort to hindsight. How can I hope to inculcate you children with a regard for the truth if I ignore it myself?
As my grandfather lay back, I switched off the light and climbed into bed. I fell asleep almost at once and, when I woke in the night, my chest tight from the fumes but my lips clamped together to check any discouraging cough, I saw the faint glow of the cigar in the shadows and, every so often, a flicker of life.
The next morning, the thin rasp from his bed proved that Grandfather had been as good as his word and I was able to present a positive report to my mother. She led me up to the dining room, where I rushed through breakfast, confiding her warnings about indigestion to my file of phantom ailments, along with migraines from eating too much chocolate and baldness from not washing my hair. I ached to go out on deck to watch the ship anchor at Cherbourg, where it was to take on a final contingent of passengers, so I was doubly incensed when the Professor’s wife asked Mother if I would be kind enough to fetch the novel which she had stupidly (itself said with a stupid giggle) left in her cabin, and Mother agreed, handing me over as casually as a tissue. Dismissing my protest, which by a superhuman effort I had kept silent, she dispatched me with her most ingratiating smile.
I raced down the corridor, bumping into stewards at every turn. The fact that the wretched woman might easily have asked one of them for her book showed that her real aim was not to read but to demonstrate her power. The pathetic thing, as I acknowledged with perverse satisfaction, was that her victim was already the most put-upon person on board. I made a vow then and there that, when I grew up, I would never treat children as drudges (I trust you’ll agree that I’ve kept it). I entered the Professor’s wife’s cabin, which smelt of mildew, and grabbed the book, Feuchtwanger’s False Nero, which was so prominently placed that it could not have been left behind by accident. My haste to be out on deck allowed me no time to snoop around, and I hurried back to the dining room where, purring over the book, she underlined my servility by declaring that I would ‘make some young lady very happy.’ My current concern was to make one old lady thoroughly miserable, but I seized on the image of Johanna to boost my mood.
After promising my mother – for the third time – to meet her in the tourist lounge at noon, I went out on deck. The harbour was hazy, but I joined the crowds at the rail straining for a last glimpse of Europe, which was mercifully devoid of the Nazi flags that had marred our departure from Hamburg. Having witnessed the workings of a large department store, I failed to share the general fascination with the supply boats pulling up alongside us, so I strolled
about the ship in search of Johanna. She proved to be as elusive as my father, whom I had mentally confined to his cabin in a drunken stupor. As I made my way to the rendezvous, I was filled with apprehension at the prospect of what my mother might have planned. Her refusal to explain the unlikely venue led me to suspect that she was in charitable mode and wanted me to welcome the new arrivals. I prepared myself for the same embarrassment as when she had forced me to man (a particularly inapposite word given the coercion) her soup kitchen. My greatest fear was that she would saddle me with a group of teenage boys. I wondered how old one had to be before age ceased to determine friendship and then amused myself by reversing our roles. ‘Look, Mother, there’s a middle-aged woman. Why don’t you take her flower-arranging?’
As I walked into the lounge, not only was there no sign of any new passengers but the first person that I saw was Johanna, sitting with a woman whom I presumed to be her mother. Johanna looked lovely. She was wearing a green blouse which brought out the reddish tints of her hair (it was impossible to live with my mother and not learn about colour combination, even if the last thing to which she would apply it was clothes). Johanna’s mother, who was dressed in self-effacing beige, looked kind, with round, rosy cheeks and fair hair packed on her head like a plaited loaf. I pictured her with a crotchet hook. Rubbing my palms on my trousers, I walked over to their table. Just as I was about to greet them, my mother stood up and summoned me in a voice that sounded far more piercing than it would have done in First Class. Desperate to avoid a reprise, I gave Johanna what I hoped was an endearingly nonchalant smile and, stifling my fury, made my way across the room to find my mother sitting with Luise and Sophie and, partially concealed by the wings of his chair, my father.
I swayed so violently that I forgot the ship was at anchor. I stared dumbstruck at the four figures grouped as casually as a family party and felt utterly betrayed. Time seemed to be frozen, until my father stood up with a grin that put me in mind of the lips that I used to paint on potatoes. He stretched out his arm, which shook. My horror at the thought that he might clasp my hand – or worse – made me recoil. I wondered why Orthodox Jews, who had such strict laws about the contact between men and women, had drawn up none to regulate that between a son and his errant father. As I gazed round the table in confusion, his arm fell to his side.
‘You look extremely smart,’ he said lamely.
‘I’m wearing the same clothes as yesterday. I didn’t want to disturb Grandfather. He’s very ill.’
‘Then it must come naturally.’ He attempted another grin before sinking back into the chair.
‘Do sit down, Karl,’ my mother said. ‘You’re hovering like a steward.’ I was appalled by her insensitivity. What would she have me do? Shake his hand? Hug him? She surely wouldn’t ask me to kiss him? This was the man who had abandoned me without a word. This was the man who had assaulted her. Nevertheless, I pulled up a chair and, pointedly ignoring my father, fixed my eye on Luise and Sophie. Seeing them so calm, I wondered if I had been sucked into a parallel universe or else knocked out and lost my mind. The familiar timbre of my mother’s voice cut off that line of escape and I turned to confront my father, partly out of defiance – I longed to see him wilt under my gaze – and partly out of curiosity, a desire to assess the many reports of our resemblance. I was relieved to find them wide of the mark. His face may have remained young, but it was far broader than mine and his features were thicker set. I looked no more like him than I did like Herman Göring: a thought that filled me with both comfort and shame.
‘You’ve grown up so much. You’re quite the young man,’ he said, with woeful predictability.
‘No, really? In case you’ve forgotten, I’m fifteen years old.’
‘Karl …’ My deep grievance made me deaf to the warning note in my mother’s voice.
‘I’m sorry but, if I’d shrunk, it might have been worthy of mention. “Oh, Karl, you’re so much smaller than the last time I saw you. Pull up a flower-pot and sit down.” But not “Oh Karl, you’re one of the hundred million boys in the world to have grown up.”’ Luise clapped her hands and gurgled…. You never knew your great aunt, but, if you had, you would realise that she was responding to the tone of my words, to the rhetoric rather than the meaning.
‘During the war,’ my father replied, ‘there were soldiers at the Front who didn’t see their children for five years.’
‘They were fighting for them. It was different.’
‘And I was fighting for the children I hoped to have.’
‘Then it’s a pity you lost.’
‘Karl dear,’ my mother said, ‘remember he’s your father.’
‘What do you mean? All I’ve ever done is remember. I haven’t seen or heard from him for eight years.’
‘Try to forgive me,’ my father said. ‘I know that the past is never past. But it doesn’t have to be the only present. I’ve missed you so much.’
Then, to my horror, he began to cry. While my mother and Sophie vied to find him a handkerchief, I sat unmoved, since I was sure that, if they were analysed, his tears would be 30 per cent proof. Luise, however, who dwelt so close to tears herself that other peoples’ were never a threat, gesticulated at him. ‘She’s crying,’ she said. Then she slipped off her chair to plant a kiss on his cheek. He let out a loud howl, to the consternation of our neighbours, and clasped her to his chest. Neither my mother nor Sophie heeded my warnings that he was squeezing the life out of her. I, alone, seemed to be blessed with a memory … although it began to feel more like a curse, for, as I watched my father cradling Luise, my memory stretched beyond its regular eight-year span to flood me with sensations from early childhood: the heady mixture of danger and security as my father threw me up in the air, and of wickedness and licence as he encouraged me to slide down the ballroom banisters; the wonder as he showed me a bird’s nest; the pride as he told me stories of a mischievous Berlin boy called Karl. Then, just as I was in peril of warming to him, a very different set of sensations came back to me: the horror, greater even than that at the sight of a storm trooper, when my parents fought with each other; the longing for them to turn their anger on me since I was a boy and so couldn’t help doing wrong; the fear of discovery when I hid behind doors and inside cupboards to make sense of a world that was fragmenting; the pain when, in the middle of one exchange, my mother screamed ‘Keep quiet or my father will hear you!’, yet made no mention of her son; the despair when, on one ever-to-be-repressed, never-to-be-forgotten occasion, an insult was followed by a slap and the cold, crystalline cry of ‘I hate you,’ after which they swiftly unravelled their marriage, making it clear that they had never been in love but had played a grown-up version of ‘let’s pretend’. As I shrugged off the memories and turned again to my father, it was clear why I would never be able to forgive him. I had no capacity for love. Luise may have been born of his drunkenness, but I was born of both my parents’ hate.
My memories were interrupted by a waiter who came to take our order. While my father’s request for lemonade failed to impress me, it delighted Luise, who poked her finger, first, at his chest and, then, at her own, repeating the word ‘lemonade’. He asked her hesitantly if she knew who he was and, to my surprise, she replied, ‘Daddy.’ I presumed that either Mother or Sophie had coached her and comforted myself with the thought that the word meant no more to her than Chancellor or Gauleiter. Indeed, in view of their respective influence on her life, it probably meant far less. It nevertheless moved my father, who hugged her even tighter.
‘Oh, my beauty,’ he said, ‘my beautiful, beautiful girl.’ Luise became agitated and began to moan.
‘She not beautiful.’
‘But you are,’ he said. ‘You are to me.’
‘No!’ The intensity of the denial sent a shudder through her body, and Sophie, recognising the signs, stood up. ‘She ugly. All ugly. All over her skin.’ As her spasms grew more frequent, my father looked unsure whether to hold her tighter or to let her go.
The decision was taken from him when Sophie eased her gently out of his arms. Luise, meanwhile, continued to mumble. ‘Not beautiful. Ugly. Want to go to heaven and be beautiful inside.’
My father, who at least had the grace to look shocked, apologised. My mother assured him that it was not his fault, at which point I could no longer stay silent. ‘Oh but it is,’ I said, ‘it’s entirely his fault. He’s the one who made her like this, just as if he’d been driving too fast and run her over or left a pan of hot fat on the stove which spat in her face.’ They stared in horror, not so much at the speech itself as at my having made it. I was no longer a little boy scavenging for information but an equal possessor of the facts.
‘You gave me your word you’d say nothing,’ my father said to my mother. ‘We agreed it was best that he didn’t know.’
‘And I’ve kept it,’ she replied. ‘To the letter. I don’t understand.’ Although I relished this sign of their dissension, quite different from the uncontrollable eruptions of the past, I felt obliged to defend her honour, adding that it was Grandfather who had told me: he, at least, didn’t expect me to behave as an adult while treating me as a child. My mother, for whom her father could usually do no wrong, reacted with fury, claiming that he had gone behind her back, which, as I pointed out, was unfair since he had only told me the truth in order to reconcile me to her.
‘Whatever do you mean?’ she asked, amazed at the need for such intercession.
A Sea Change Page 8
