A Sea Change

by Michael Arditti

  We sat in silence while the Rabbi prayed. Straining my schoolboy Hebrew, I made out passages from the Psalms, but the words flowed so fast and so many were lost in his beard that I thought it best to view them as a background accompaniment like the cocktail music in the lounge. My mother and aunt gazed rapt at the body, with an occasional stifled sob to bear witness to the weight – and the discretion – of their grief. My own, meanwhile, was submerged in thoughts of base inconsequence. Instead of recalling my grandfather’s life, I worried how to send word to Johanna cancelling our meeting. Instead of mourning his death, I wondered whether my closeness to it might lend me a tragic aura that made me more attractive in her eyes. The realisation of whose death it was that I was writing into my romantic scenario made my self-disgust swell to Göring-like proportions, and I bit my lip so hard that it bled, leading me to fear that she would be repulsed by the scar. Whereupon I bit it again.

  Murmuring a few words that were as hard to decipher as the prayers, my mother left the cabin, returning a few minutes later with Luise and Sophie. Luise, whose aversion to black had led to several fraught incidents with rabbis in Berlin, clung closely to Sophie. Then, catching sight of the body on the floor and regarding it as the prelude to a new game, she let out a string of giggles. She knelt beside it and tickled the tummy. Unnerved by the lack of response, she prodded it, raising an arm, which she then let drop. I rose to grab her, but my mother warned me off with a sharp ‘No!’, insisting on Luise’s need to register the truth for herself.

  ‘Why she on the floor?’ she asked, perplexed by the strange reversal. My mother crouched beside her and, with uncharacteristic patience (Luise’s deficiency being as much of an affront to her as my defiance), explained that Grandfather was dead. Luise stared at her as if grandfather and dead had as little place in the same sentence as Hitler and good, before asking very slowly, ‘Why she on the floor? Why not in Heaven?’ My mother, even now refusing all easy consolation, told her that it was to give us a chance to say goodbye. Kneeling beside them, I determined to offer a balance. ‘His body’s on the floor,’ I said, ‘but his soul’s in Heaven.’ Far from taking comfort from my words, Luise emitted a plaintive moan and banged her head repeatedly against the bed. Sophie, as alert to the nuances of moans as a poet to those of language, sprang to the rescue, scooping her off the floor and out of the cabin. My mother adjusted the shroud.

  ‘At least we tried,’ she said, in a voice that spoke of a double bereavement.

  The rest of the evening passed without incident. At midnight, the Rabbi left with a promise to return at seven the next morning. My mother proposed that I should snatch some sleep in her cabin, while she and Aunt Annette kept vigil. Exhaustion undermined my refusal, and I awoke at dawn in subtly unfamiliar surroundings to find my father sitting by my side. He told me with a hint of pride that he had carried me there himself. Aching with self-reproach, I jumped out of bed and ran back to my cabin, where my mother and aunt appeared not to have stirred all night. Dwarfed by their grief, I made for the bathroom, but my father, who had followed unbidden, informed me that family mourners were supposed neither to wash nor change their clothes for seven days. The injunction, which would once have offered enviable licence, now merely made me feel unclean. I pulled up a chair and contemplated my grandfather who, though barely twelve hours dead, seemed as remote as Bismarck. An hour later, the Rabbi arrived, filling the room with his guttural petitions, to be swiftly followed by two sailors carrying the coffin, which was as crudely constructed as a crate. They lifted the body off the floor and laid it inside, unnerving me with their routine efficiency. They were about to lower the lid when the Rabbi exclaimed that we must first place a bag of earth beneath my grandfather’s head. Since earth was in short supply on the ship, I proposed using sand from the children’s pit. My mother rebuked me for frivolity but, to both our surprise, the Rabbi overruled her and, handing me the bag from my uncle’s prayer-shawl, dispatched me upstairs. Relieved to be of service, I knelt by the pit and pressed the damp grains into the bag as tenderly as if I were planting seeds. Then, alerted by the black trousers looming over me, I looked up at my least favourite face on the ship.

  ‘It’s the Jew with two names,’ he said, with a smile like an open blade. ‘What are you doing stealing Hapag company property?’

  ‘It’s only sand.’

  ‘You Jews never miss a trick.’

  ‘For my grandfather’s coffin.’

  ‘Oh yes? So, when he wakes up in hell, he can tell the Devil it’s a bag of gold?’

  Stung by his slur, I divulged far more than was wise. ‘It’s to represent Israel, so that, symbolically at least, he’ll be buried in the Holy Land.’

  ‘Germany is the Holy Land,’ he replied. ‘And you are defiling it. If I had my way, it’s not just dead Jews we’d toss in the sea.’ He strode away, leaving me to create a land of milk and honey from the empty sand.

  As I returned to the cabin and put the sand inside my grandfather’s coffin, I was tormented by the thought that he might have known the land itself if only he had taken my advice. I closed my eyes – in pain not prayer – while the sailors nailed down the lid, packing him up like an item from his own store. After leaden minutes in which we stared helplessly at the wood, the Captain arrived with a quartet of officers. With due ceremony they draped the Hapag flag over the coffin, a strangely apt touch given our outcast status, before forming a procession: first the Captain; next the Rabbi chanting prayers; then the officers carrying the coffin. As I stood with my mother, father and aunt, I realised that the order in which we followed would have implications far beyond the funeral. Only last night, my mother had named me the man of the family, a position now threatened by my father, whose morning shadow darkened his cheeks. As if to avoid the issue, she spurned us both, giving her arm to Aunt Annette. All thoughts of precedence were set aside, however, as I watched the coffin make its precarious ascent of the stairs to the sports deck, where a trestle-style bier had been erected next to the swimming pool. The officers lowered the coffin on to it and took up position by the rail, one section of which had been removed and a plank pushed through the gap like a makeshift slide.

  The grey sky cast an appropriate pall over proceedings. The air was intensely still and I realised with a shock that the engines had been switched off. Surveying the assembled crowd, I spotted the Professor and his wife; the Banker and his wife; Helmut; Viktor and Joel; and, conspicuous by his isolation, Sendel. I wondered how they’d known to come: had a notice been pinned on the board next to that of our current position? Moreover, I wondered why they’d come: was it to pay their respects to my grandfather whom few of them had ever met; was it a rare distraction from the routine of the voyage; or had the Rabbi simply rounded them up to form a minyan? I blotted out the image of Johanna, who stood in the front row next to her mother. Any sympathy that she might feel for my bereavement would wither when she saw me with the man whom I had so recently, so publicly, disowned. I stared at my shoes while Sophie led out Luise, whose subdued demeanour revealed an instinctive sense of occasion. She tottered up to me and I gripped her rag-doll hand. Then, as the Rabbi recited the prayers, I followed the Captain’s gaze to the chimney stack on which a solitary turtle dove was perched. My pleasure in its plumage was underscored by its biblical significance: not just in Genesis where it brought hope to Noah but in Leviticus where it was offered as an expiation for sin. I was roused by the Rabbi’s announcement that it was time to perform keriah. Both my father and I were resolved to share the obligation with my mother, but, to my dismay, I found that, despite the Rabbi’s incision, my shirt was too thick for me to rip. Fearful that Johanna would take me for a weakling as well as a liar, I redoubled my efforts, tearing it from neck to navel, far wider than the statutory hand’s breadth. Any hope of its staying closed was dashed when I scattered sand on the coffin and found that even the smallest gesture exposed an expanse of pallid chest. To my relief, I was able to deflect attention on to Luise who, having been
forbidden to tear her dress, made up for it by her relish of the sand game.

  The Rabbi intoned Psalm 91, during which the officers moved forward and placed the coffin on the plank. Then, as the Captain gave a graciously neutral salute, the men raised the plank, sending the coffin sliding overboard. It bobbed in the water like driftwood and I had a vision of its following the ship like a friendly dolphin. Finally, to the accompaniment of Luise’s frenzied clapping (so much more poignant than the prayers), it turned on end, twisted around and sank. As the Rabbi led the congregation in the Kaddish, I fell back from the rail and looked to the chimney-stack for reassurance, but the bird had flown.

  Following my mother, I washed my hands from a jug held by the Professor. We stood in line while the congregation filed past. Christina’s sympathy was clear from her watery eyes, but then, to her, every death was a portent of her own; Johanna’s contempt was clear from her chilly handshake, although her capacity for warmth was apparent, as she had no doubt intended, in the kiss that she gave Luise. Feeling doubly bereft, I proceeded to breakfast. My one solace was to see family divisions restored when my father headed off to the second-class dining room, which my mother glossed over with the claim that he had no appetite. She evidently suffered no such lack herself. As she gorged on herring, tomato salad, corned beef, potatoes and finally, spaghetti, I remembered what Sendel (I refused to call him any other name) had said of his villagers’ love-making after the massacre and wondered whether she might be equally crazed by grief. I would, nevertheless, have preferred her to exercise restraint and felt offended, not just for my grandfather, whom she had supposedly revered, but for myself as I pictured a similar response to my own demise. My speculations were interrupted by the Professor’s wife, who was relishing her place among the mourners. She opined that my grandfather had died because of our setting sail on May 13th. ‘Rubbish!’ I said, stung by such trivialisation, adding gruffly that the jinx attached to thirteen derived from the Last Supper. It was absurd when cited by Christians but even more so when cited by Jews. Aunt Annette, who had hitherto kept silent, claimed – quite unnecessarily – that grief had made me forget my manners. The Professor’s wife assured her that she understood, while informing me that she was perfectly justified in her belief, since Jesus’ betrayal and crucifixion had been the gravest of all the misfortunes to hit the Jews. A warning glance from Sophie made me swallow my retort so, instead, I turned my attention to her.

  ‘It was kind of Helmut to come,’ I said, hoping to make amends for my earlier disapproval.

  ‘Try reckless. One of the stewards is the Party representative …’ As she spoke, I saw his features as clearly as the Führer’s. ‘Last night he called a meeting to remind the crew of the law against attending a Jewish funeral.’

  ‘What about the Captain and the officers?’

  ‘Official participants are exempt. Helmut could have volunteered to carry the coffin, but he wanted to make a point.’ I wondered meanly if that point were aimed at Schiendick or Sophie. ‘The steward didn’t leave it at that. Apparently, he went to the Captain to remind him of company regulations that any coffin had to be covered with the swastika flag.’

  ‘But that would be sacrilege!’

  ‘Which is precisely what the Captain said. The steward then threatened to report him to Berlin.’

  ‘Can you talk to a captain like that?’

  ‘You can if you wear the right armband.’

  ‘We’re very lucky to have a captain who’s a friend to the Jews.’

  ‘The strange thing is that he isn’t … not especially … at least not according to Helmut. He blames them for bringing a lot of their problems on themselves. But, while they’re passengers on his ship, he’s determined that they should be treated with respect.’

  ‘You said they!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Instead of we.’

  ‘I was being Helmut … that is I was repeating his words.’

  Her reply brought me little comfort and I returned to my cabin: the my being an even more painful pronoun. The stewardesses had cleaned the room. Only the water-stain on the floor gave a hint of any unusual activity and that was fading. I lay on my grandfather’s bed, in a bid to avoid looking at it, and drank in the ferny scent of the freshly laundered sheets. A sense of despair enveloped me as I realised that, in focusing my anger on the Nazis, I had ignored a still greater injustice. I acknowledged the full horror of a world in which a man had no more control over his fate than a fly. Death flung open the door and he was wiped out like a roll of film in a darkroom. Old age was no compensation. Methuselah was a living, breathing being: he knew hope and fear; he made jokes and cried; he had children. Then, in a flash, he was gone. Whether the transition was expected or sudden made no difference; the fact was that it was absolute. Methuselah was no more, and all the rest, the memories and the monuments, was just wrapping on a broken gift. My grandfather was no more. A reunion in Heaven was a very remote prospect to one who could scarcely bear the wait until we reached Havana. Moreover, it would depend on my own obliteration. If God loved his people as much as the rabbis said, why must he prise them from a world which, however imperfect, was at least familiar? Why could he not visit us on earth as he did in the Torah? Death was less the gateway to God than the mockery of man. It was the ultimate expression of our helplessness and no amount of over-indulgence, in love-making or food, could conceal it. My grandfather’s death might have raised my position in my family but it had diminished my sense of my own worth. I turned on to my stomach and buried my head in the pillow that would never again be his.

  A gentle pressure on my shoulders made me start. I looked up to see Aunt Annette, her customary air of resignation having assumed an added significance. She asked if there were anything wrong, a question of such supreme superfluity that I neither ventured, nor did she wait for, a reply. She explained that she had come to pack away my grandfather’s things in order to spare my mother.

  ‘So she can spend more time eating?’ I asked. She rubbed my forehead, as though trying to rub away the thought, and wished that I didn’t feel everything so deeply. ‘I thought it was good to feel,’ I said. ‘Don’t we accuse Hitler of being unfeeling?’

  ‘I expressed myself badly. What I meant was “take everything to heart”.’

  I was poised to say something cutting about everything being my grandfather’s death when, to my surprise, I found that I was berating myself for not having treated him better. She held me tight and told me that everybody felt like that when a loved one died, which made me feel predictable as well as guilty. She reminded me of how much my grandfather had loved me. Although not a religious man, he had regularly quoted a verse from Proverbs: ‘Grandchildren are the crown of the aged.’

  ‘In his case, it must have been a crown of thorns,’ I said, picturing the crucifixions in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum. Then, to my horror, I began to howl. The suddenness of his death and the speed of the funeral, together with the advent of my father and Johanna, had left me no time to mourn. Now, alone with his closest friend – and my closest ally – I let myself go. ‘He was so stubborn,’ I sobbed. ‘If only he’d left when I begged him, he need never have died. He wouldn’t have been dragged off to the camp. He’d have been safe in Palestine.’

  ‘Everything looks clearer looking back.’

  ‘The Torah warns against making a god of gold.’

  ‘Is that what you think he did?’

  ‘Didn’t he? He was afraid to give up his house, his store, his status.’

  ‘His son. The one thing your grandfather couldn’t leave behind was your uncle.’

  ‘But he’s dead! Isn’t he?’ I recoiled from the image of a shell-shocked uncle, more befuddled even than Luise, who was secretly locked in an asylum.

  ‘Yes, of course. But your grandfather loved him more than your mother … more than your grandmother … more than anyone.’ Her eyes filled with such tenderness that I failed to understand why she had no children. ‘Your gr
andfather was prepared to abandon everything but the country his son had died for … the country for which he’d forced him to fight.’ She went on to explain so much that might otherwise have died with my grandfather, things which showed my family – your family – in a new light, and so I set them out here for you. Uncle Karl had studied archaeology at Heidelberg and, although he had agreed to join my grandfather in the store, he was determined to devote his life and his fortune to the excavations at Troy. All that had changed with the War. My grandfather had insisted that it was his patriotic duty to enlist. When Christians were fighting for ‘Kaiser, Fatherland and God’, it was essential that Jews followed suit: the God might be different but the other two principles were the same. He regarded the War as a golden opportunity for Jews to prove themselves as equal citizens of the Reich. My uncle was deeply sceptical. He believed that, win or lose, there was grave danger in Germany’s militarisation. Nevertheless, his father put him under such pressure that he gave way.