A Sea Change

by Michael Arditti

  ‘It’s like Abraham sacrificing Isaac.’

  ‘Except that, this time, there was no ram.’ She described how my uncle had served, first, on the Western Front and, then, in the East, where he was killed. She declared that any guilt I was feeling at my grandfather’s death was nothing compared to my grandfather’s at the death of his son. All the Karl Frankel trusts and scholarships in the world could not begin to assuage it. Which was why he could not break faith with Germany. Even after he had been sent to the camp – even if he had been stripped of everything he owned – he would have stayed, had he not learnt that, at the express request of the Rector, all Jewish names had been expunged from the Heidelberg University war memorial. There was less trace of my uncle than of the heroes of Troy.

  Her revelations moved me, although more on account of my uncle than of my grandfather. Given the weight of our family history, I had often wished that I had been called after someone else, but now I was proud to bear his name. I pondered the new set of relationships, while my aunt wrapped up my grandfather’s hairbrush as lovingly as if she were brushing his hair. Her grief clogged the cabin and, when a steward brought me a summons to the Captain, I seized the chance to escape. The message was unexpected and I speculated that, sharing my disdain for all the hidebound old men, he wanted me to join the passenger committee. In anticipation, I took two of my grandfather’s cigars and slipped them into my pocket.

  My excitement increased when the steward led me through a door marked ‘Restricted to Ship’s Personnel’, although the only visible distinction lay in the drabber décor. He asked me to wait in a small sitting room. I identified its owner at once by the prints that covered the walls: petrels; shearwaters; garnets; skuas … names that held far more romance for me than any capital city or mountain range. I was examining the pictures when the Captain walked in. I jumped back as though he had caught me rifling his desk, but he moved to reassure me, putting his hand on my shoulder and telling me of his own encounters with the different birds. In his thirty-seven years at sea, he had observed fifteen varieties of tern and fourteen of albatross, including the elusive Tristan. Unable to keep the note of envy from my voice, I confessed that it was my dream to see an albatross, although it would have to wait until I travelled further south.

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ he said. ‘Birds, I’m pleased to report, don’t read books of ornithology. I once came across an albatross as far north as the Azores.’

  ‘I saw you staring at the dove during the service,’ I said and then cringed, both at having revealed my own lack of concentration and in case he should suppose that I was condemning his.

  ‘It must have blown off course on its flight back to Europe.’

  ‘How will it find its way now?’

  ‘It probably won’t. You needn’t look so sad. There are between one and two hundred million birds on the planet. We can bear the loss.’ I wanted to explain that, right now, I couldn’t bear the loss of a single ant but, fearing that he would misunderstand, I simply asked him who had counted them. ‘Not me, I’m happy to say. Though, according to my wife, I might as well have done.’ I was surprised to hear that he had a wife and wondered whether she were equally tiny. All such conjecture was set aside, however, when he moved to the desk and handed me a map neatly tied with a ribbon. He declared that it marked the exact spot where my grandfather was buried and hoped that it would be of some comfort to my family and myself. Having assured him that it would, I judged that the moment was right to offer him a cigar.

  ‘Do you smoke them?’ he asked in surprise.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, adding in case he should be in any doubt: ‘I’m very grown-up for my age.’ He thanked me and took one for after dinner. Suspecting that the interview was over, I realised that I would have to broach the subject of the passenger committee myself. I cited the rumours that the ship might be heading for trouble in Havana.

  ‘Who told you that?’ He frowned as though one of his officers had been indiscreet. I immediately identified the Professor’s wife, whom I would have been happy to see clapped in irons and confined to the hold for the rest of the voyage.

  ‘Her husband’s on the advisory committee you’ve set up,’ I said, giving him the perfect opportunity to increase its number.

  ‘There’ll be no trouble. None whatsoever. Everything’s being handled by the Hapag officials on the ground. I’d be grateful if you’d reassure anyone who might be anxious.’

  I refused to let the matter drop, as much to prevent his underestimating me as from genuine concern. ‘People are saying it’s to forestall further difficulties that we’re sailing so fast.’

  ‘We’re making good speed because there are two other ships on our tail: one German; one French.’

  ‘Both aiming for Havana?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘And both with Jews on board?’

  ‘So I understand. It makes sense to be the first to dock.’ He appeared to lose his thread as he told me how distasteful he found the whole business, how he felt more like a warder than a sailor, and how he longed to go back to transporting normal passengers.

  ‘Aren’t we normal passengers?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  I spent the rest of the day attempting to dodge a stream of elderly passengers who seemed to believe that my grandfather’s death gave them a licence to maul me. My cheeks were pinched, my arms squeezed and my hair was ruffled in dubious expressions of sympathy. The one person whom I wanted to see, not to say, maul me, was nowhere to be found, but I finally ran into her mother, who informed me that Johanna was feeling sick and resting in her cabin. I asked her to give her my best wishes (love was too precious to be entrusted to a third party), which she agreed to do, although, judging by the disparaging look she threw me, I felt sure that Johanna had told her about my lies and she was responding with one of her own. I walked away and straight into Sendel, whose contempt for social convention left me with no qualms about turning on my heels. To my dismay, he called me back. My grandfather’s death was so raw that I had no wish to indulge a madman who held himself to be immortal. At least he offered no condolences on the demise of such a relative youngster, restricting his remarks to the dignity of the service.

  ‘I expect you’ve been to hundreds of funerals,’ I said.

  ‘Thousands. But it’s ages since I’ve been to a burial at sea.’

  ‘Would that have been on the way between Ukraine and Germany?’ This time he acknowledged my irony, although only with a laugh.

  ‘Oh no. Long before. The Battle of Lepanto. Nearly four hundred years ago. I’m hopeless with dates.’

  ‘You frighten me.’

  ‘So I should. But don’t worry, it’s a fairground fright. I can’t do you any harm.’ I refrained from telling him that he had already done serious harm to my head. Instead, I asked if the reason he rarely washed was that he was in mourning. ‘So many deaths,’ he replied. ‘So much mourning.’

  Against my better judgement, I continued the conversation on his terms. ‘What’s always struck me about your murder of Abel is that you hit at the wrong man. He did nothing to hurt you. He prepared his sacrifice as required. It was God who favoured his at the expense of yours.’

  ‘Bravo! I congratulate you. You’re still very young but you’ve already learnt more than most men do in a lifetime: we fight one another but the real enemy is God. Let me tell you about my life … don’t worry, only the most recent one. The entire cycle would take the rest of the voyage. As I’ve already mentioned, I was born in a little village in the Ukraine – the perfect place for a man at odds with history. My father was a rabbi: a scholarly man and in his way a holy man, but such a dull and blinkered man that it was in my blood, as well as my destiny, to rebel. I had three brothers and five sisters but I was the brains of the family.’

  ‘Some might say that you had an advantage,’ I said slyly.

  ‘Very good. Yes, they might…. I was sent to the yeshiva in Kiev. But, far from immersing myself in th
e Talmud, I studied politics and economics. Revolution was in the air and I was determined to play a part. My father was appalled. He’d suffered grievously under the Tsar, but he respected one thing above all else: authority. Any attack on authority was an attack on God. We fought bitterly, until the advent of the War dwarfed our private quarrels. One of my brothers was killed and another lost his legs fighting the Austrians, but my father’s grief at their fates was nothing to his shame when I refused to enlist. A certificate of exemption from the medical tribunal on account of my chest saved his face in the village, but he knew what was in my heart.’

  ‘My grandfather forced my uncle to join up. He never forgave himself.’

  ‘My father never forgave me…. Let’s jump ahead to 1918. The Armistice was signed and the Great Powers were counting the cost, of which the dead were only a fraction, but, in the Ukraine, the war had barely begun. The country was plunged into chaos, with the Reds and the Whites and the Peasant Partisans all struggling for power. The only thing that united them was their loathing of the Jews. The Whites were the worst: they massacred as though they were on a mission. When they butchered a nearby village, a lone survivor managed to send us a message: “Tell your Jews to hide.” But the postmaster failed to pass it on, leaving us helpless when the soldiers marched in. As the handful, and I do mean handful, of survivors bound their wounds and buried their dead –’ And made love, I remembered from his earlier account. – ‘I tracked down the postmaster, who turned out to be a cousin of one of the partisan leaders and had taken refuge in his camp. All the hatred I’d felt for the Tsar, all the hatred I’d refused to direct against the Austrians, was now heaped on one man. On the pretext of selling them secrets, I sneaked into the camp and killed him. I fled back to my village, but the partisans followed me. They tortured my father, sister and brother in a bid to discover my whereabouts, but none of them gave me away. So they had to be satisfied with slaughtering them and defiling their corpses.’

  ‘How did you escape? Where were you hiding?’

  ‘In the cemetery. In a freshly dug grave.’

  I pictured my grandfather crammed in his coffin and was afraid that I might be sick. ‘It’s not your fault that your family died. You didn’t kill them.’

  ‘As well as politics, I studied psychology. I could have run far away. I could have returned to the city. But I chose to go there. At the back of my mind I knew that the Partisans would come for me…. Different kinds of hatred. Different kinds of revenge.’

  ‘Was that when you left for Berlin?’

  ‘No, first, I went to the Reds. They were the least bad of the warring factions. That’s not my clumsy German; it’s the truth. I begged them to bring the killers to justice but they needed the peasants’ support against the Whites. They ordered me to leave, which I did, ending up in Berlin, where I eked out a kind of existence. I could have done so much with my life but I chose to waste it – and make no mistake, it was a choice. What better revenge can anyone take on God than to squander the life he gave us? If we live well, he’s won. If we kill ourselves, he’s won too. But if we live badly, if we spit on our gifts and scorn our talents, then it’s we who’ve defeated him. So I let myself go. I neglected to wash myself or my clothes. I made brutish love to miserable women – not rape: that would have required too much effort. I became an object of shame to my fellow-Jews and contempt to the Christians. But I felt free – do you understand that? – even in the camp I felt free. Because my quarrel isn’t with the Nazis any more than it was with the Partisans; it’s with the God who made them, and you and me, and looked at us all and saw that we were good. Can you credit such arrogance … such self-delusion? He looked at us all and saw that we were good! So you mustn’t despair about your grandfather or being on this ship or anything else that happens to you. That plays straight into God’s hands. Instead, you must use it – as I have – to bolster your cause against him.’ He turned away, leaving me to stare blankly at his back until, summoning all my strength, I roused myself and bolted down the deck.

  His words rang in my head until they were drowned out by the bell for dinner. I hurried to the dining room, where I found my mother presiding at our table, more elegantly dressed than at any time on the voyage. The rip in her blouse was covered by a diamond brooch, at which the Professor’s wife cast covetous glances. Between them – in my grandfather’s chair, which made his intrusion all the more glaring – sat my father. Aunt Annette, sensing my unease, patted the seat next to her, which was somewhat superfluous given that it was the only one left, although I was grateful for her concern. My mother was explaining my father’s presence to our fellow-diners, a tortuous tale of how he had joined the ship at the last minute when all the first-class tickets had been sold, that was greeted with manifest scepticism by the Professor’s wife, for whom the further we sailed from Germany, the more money reasserted its traditional power. Nevertheless my mother was undeterred, describing how she had requested, and the Purser granted, that my grandfather’s ticket be transferred to my father, whom the Banker and his wife now welcomed as if he had been pulled out of the sea rather than merely jumped up a class. ‘So you’ll be sharing your cabin again tonight, Karl,’ my mother said, staring at her soup as intently as a gypsy at tea-leaves.

  ‘It’ll give us a chance to get to know each other better, son,’ my father said.

  I was horrified by his use of a word that any other passenger might more legitimately apply to my age than he to our nominal relationship. I was disgusted by her issuing her decrees in public where I had no right of reply. So I said, as calmly as any twenty-one year old, that he could have the cabin to himself because I intended to sleep out on deck, the better to observe the birds at dawn. My words met with a chorus of objections, led by my mother, who managed to make ‘ornithology’ sound like a perversion. She announced that it was against shipboard regulations and a steward would undoubtedly order me inside. ‘Very well,’ I declared, ‘I shall stand all night in the corridor as if I were being questioned by the Gestapo.’ The table at once fell silent, causing Mother, who believed that embarrassment, like indigestion, was a condition unknown to the young, to tell me coldly that I had ruined everyone’s meal. I followed her example and fixed my gaze on my bowl, deciding that the vermicelli at the bottom spelt Trouble.

  At the end of the meal, I returned to my cabin and locked the door, a precaution that proved to be unnecessary since neither my father nor anyone else came near. In the event, I would have welcomed another presence, even his, since my dreams were a private Walpurgisnacht, crammed with witches and ghouls, which I knew that someone of my age should laugh off but which so infiltrated my consciousness that I had to sleep with the light on like Luise.

  Anxious to avoid the dining-room, I breakfasted on chocolate from the shop and then joined the crowds at the rail craning to catch a glimpse of the Azores. I had been too absorbed in my own affairs to pay much heed to my fellow passengers, but I was deeply touched by their elation, the whoops of joy and weepy embraces, as they made out the windmills on the cliffs. Havana was still a week away, but there was no denying the promise of land. Unable to invest the craggy headland with suitable emotion, I strolled aimlessly about the deck until I stumbled on another crowd watching the swimming pool being filled. Far from obeying a Nazi edict forbidding Jews to enter, the crew had simply left it empty until the weather improved. A thump on my back alerted me to Joel, who challenged me to a race after lunch. I eagerly accepted, my love of the sport intensified by the chance to make up for my trouncing at chess. I asked, as casually as I could, if he had seen my friend Johanna and, when he made me describe her, found myself using language more appropriate to a lovelorn poet. Stung by his smirk and keen to escape any further ragging, I decided to look for her myself. After a morning of frustration, I wondered whether her sickness might have been serious, or even fatal, with the news of her death suppressed for fear of alarming the other passengers. No sooner had I conceived the theory than I acknowledged its absurd
ity. The plain fact was that Johanna was shunning me. Friendship depended on honesty and she knew me to be a liar. Bereft of hope, I punched the wall with such ferocity that a small boy who had lifted his younger brother on to a lifebelt ran off, leaving the victim to emit a terrified howl.

  Lunch passed without incident, apart from the Professor’s wife’s fear that the pungent smell meant that the platter of cold fish was ‘off’. I reassured her that the smell came from me and, directing my remarks less at her than at my mother, who had not only washed but thrown her ripped blouse in the bin, exclaimed that it was my sacred duty to my grandfather. She, in turn, accused me of ostentation, particularly when she alone was required to sit shivah and had decided, in view of my grandfather’s own practice, that one day was enough.

  ‘I expect it’s a custom that makes more sense in Palestine,’ the Professor’s wife said, relishing our discord.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘It’s hotter there. Mourners wouldn’t just smell; they’d reek.’

  ‘Don’t try to be clever, Karl,’ my mother said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I replied. ‘I thought it was good to be clever. I thought that was why I went to school. I thought that was why I read books. I thought –’

  ‘There’s clever and there’s snide,’ my father interposed. When I realised that even he now had a right to criticise me, I vowed to myself that the moment the ship reached Havana, I would run away. I would work on a sugar plantation or in a cigar factory, condemned to a life of backbreaking drudgery, so long as I could be on my own.

  After recovering for an hour in the company of Ivanhoe, I went up to the pool for my rendezvous with Joel. To my dismay, I found that it was packed, putting paid to any hopes of a serious swim, let alone of impressing him with my prowess. Nevertheless, as I watched men and women enjoying a pleasure that had been denied them for years and coaxing children whose only aquatic games had been in puddles, I began to relax. Then I saw that among their number were my father and Luise. The one thing that stood between my sister and drowning was a rubber ring. I rushed to the edge, where Sophie was dipping her feet dreamily, and asked what was going on. She replied that it was perfectly obvious, but I refused to be deterred by her tone.