The Gathering Storm

by Bodie Thoene

  “Inga.” I reached out to her and drew her into my arms as I had in the choir loft of St. Mark’s. “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”

  She answered dully, “What life? Look at me. Where I am. And it’s my fault this happened.”

  “It isn’t your fault. And I promise you it will all be set right. If you hold on, Inga!” I remembered the promises of Psalm 91, which Papa had prayed over us every night. “I will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress. My God in whom I trust.’ For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence…under his wings you will trust.”

  For a moment I believed Inga heard me with her heart. She sighed and raised her face to look into my eyes. “But God has not delivered me from the snare. He has not been my fortress.”

  “Oh, Inga! But you are alive! Still you are alive after everything that has happened. Can you not see the hand of the Lord on your shoulder?”

  She drew back, suddenly resistant. “No. No, I feel nothing. I don’t want to live anymore. I want to sleep the long sleep and be finished. The world is too cruel for me to live in it.”

  I clasped her hands, not willing to give up. Had I not felt the same when news of Varrick’s death had reached me? But now I could see some reason to go on; some purpose for living as I helped bind the wounds of those who were more wounded than I. “I promise, Inga! This is not the end.”

  “No,” she said, her fingers limp in my grip. “I fear you are right. This is only the beginning. My father tried to get us visas to go home to Eretz-Israel, even though England governs there. That was our hope, but England would not let us enter our ancient homeland. So my father and my mother…my family is dead. How many millions more will die before we Jews are allowed to live in our own homeland? I can’t go on, Lora. I don’t want to live without the ones I love. If England hates us as the Germans do, then there is no place we Jews will ever be safe.”

  I could not deny anything Inga said. Hundreds of thousands of desperate Jews fleeing the Nazis had attempted to return to British-controlled Eretz-Israel. They had been rejected, so now would surely die. The cruelty of England’s actions would go down in history as a crime born of apathy. It allowed the Nazis to do as they wished to everyone of Jewish heritage. Still, England was on the right side of this war, and the only European nation still standing. I was convinced that, in the end, they would do the right thing.

  I sighed as Inga pulled her hands away and balled her fists. “We will work to get you out of here, Inga. Soon. Soon. And then, when this war is over, we will work hard to tell the whole world what happened here. Someday there will be a Jewish homeland in Israel. And the Bible says when that happens, we will see our Messiah return to reign in glory in Jerusalem.”

  Inga, so very young, looked at me with the eyes of someone who had seen too much tragedy to believe me. Or perhaps she had not lived long enough to believe that in the end all things work together for the good. I hugged her farewell and said, “If only you will hang on, I promise things will turn around for you. It is written: ‘Tears last for the night, but joy will come in the morning.’”5

  Inga did not emerge from her shadowed nest as I greeted mothers and children, offering them hope that this travesty could not, would not, be allowed to stand.

  One thin, gaunt woman with a baby on her hip said quietly to me, “They sweep our heartbreak under the rug so they will neither see nor hear. Speak for those who have no voice.”

  My heart was heavy when I left that black, stinking hole. Thunderheads loomed in the twilight sky. I rode the top deck of the bus, welcoming the rain on my face. With a sense of dread, I prayed for Inga as I made my way back to St. Mark’s. Surely the Lord could not allow this heartbreak to continue.

  _____________________

  5 Psalm 30: 5

  26

  Morning dawned hot and muggy, the kind of humidity that made me certain the day would end in a thunderstorm. Munching our ration of bread spread with a paper-thin layer of butter, Eva and I strolled across Regent’s Park. Sunlight glistened through the broad leaves of the ancient plane trees and dappled the anti-aircraft emplacements with light.

  Reaching Baker Street, we decided to ride the bus rather than descending into the heat of the Baker Street tube station. Eva and I climbed the stairs of the red double-decker to enjoy the sunshine.

  We passed Madame Tussaud’s famous waxworks, where the wax replica of Adolf Hitler had recently been placed in the Hall of Tyrants between Genghis Khan and Emperor Nero. Eva remarked, “It will be hot enough today to melt Madame Tussaud’s tyrants.”

  “It’s going to rain.” I peered up at the blue sky. “I forgot my umbrella.”

  “I will welcome the rain.”

  “I wonder how our people will fare with the heat in the warehouse,” I mumbled.

  Eva glanced upward. “I am praying the rain will come early today.”

  We stepped off the bus in Grosvenor Square. When we reached St. Mark’s, Hermione had organized an efficient cleaning crew. Pews were being polished, marble floors mopped, and stainedglass windows shone from behind the criss-cross pattern of masking tape.

  Above the high altar a team of workmen labored in the organ loft under the supervision of a master pipe organ builder. They were dismantling the great instrument, which had been built to perform the music of Fredrick Handel. The German composer had once lived nearby in Mayfair, where he composed his most famous pieces, Zadok the Priest and The Messiah. More than any other venue in London, Handel’s Messiah was most often performed on St. Mark’s magnificent instrument. Now, as I watched the famous organ being dismantled and packed in wooden crates for storage in the crypt, I thought of Inga and the precious human lives packed into a tanner’s warehouse. I bitterly wondered what Handel’s enemy alien classification would have been.

  My job for the next few days was to translate and prepare for the tribunal, the stories of the St. Mark’s refugees who were being held as prisoners.

  Hermione, at the altar, mop in hand, spotted Eva and me as we observed from the entrance to the auditorium. She waved broadly but did not smile as she hurried toward us.

  “Good morning, Eva. Lora.” There was something ominous in her eyes as she greeted us. Without taking a breath, she said to me, “Lora, Eben Golah is in the office. He asked me to send you to him the minute you arrived. He wishes a word with you.”

  Her tone gave me the same uneasy feeling in my stomach as the messenger boy at the door of our flat when I learned that Varrick had been killed. “What is it?” Eva asked.

  “Come with me, Eva.” Hermione led Eva away and whispered quietly.

  I made my way to the church office, where Eben sat with a uniformed police officer. All three looked up at once as I stood framed in the doorway.

  “Good morning?” My greeting was a question.

  Eben stood and offered me his chair. “Lora. Sit down. This is Inspector Watts.”

  The policeman was a tall, bespectacled fellow with frayed cuffs and rundown shoes. He observed me through thick lenses as though he suspected me of something. But what?

  “What is it, Eben?” I asked, my heart pounding.

  He put a hand on my shoulder. “Inga.”

  “Inga? But what—”

  “Steady, Lora,” Eben whispered.

  “Eben?”

  “Inga is dead.” Eben pronounced the words with such finality.

  The room spun around me. If Eben’s hand had not been on my shoulder, I would have fallen.

  “But…how can she be dead? Inga!” I gasped for breath as I asked the question.

  The inspector sniffed and in a matter-of-fact tone said the word I most feared. “Suicide.” He paused. “At least we think it is a suicide.”

  Eben added, “There are confirmed anti-Semites—virulent Nazis—interned in the warehouse with our people. With Inga. There is no note. So the inspector must ask you a few questions.”

  I was trembling as if it were the co
ldest day of the year. “How? What happened?”

  The inspector offered me a cigarette to calm my nerves. I did not smoke. He lit one for himself and answered through the first puff, “Found hanging, she was, behind a bale of hides. Rawhide rope thrown over a beam. Seems she climbed onto the bale and threw herself off. Hung herself. Or so it seems. We just don’t know why she would have done it. No motive. To come so far. Survive so much. Escape the Nazis. Why would such a young girl hang herself after all that?”

  I had no doubt that Inga had killed herself. Our conversation flooded my mind. I told them everything she had said: her fear that the Germans would invade; the threat by the Nazis that the end of England was very near.

  “I should have known,” I cried. “I should have seen it coming.”

  The account of my last meeting with Inga satisfied the policeman. He closed his notebook. “Clear case of suicide, then. Not homicide.” His interest was without emotion or compassion.

  I don’t remember how we parted. Eben walked into the corridor with the officer. Their voices seemed very distant as I leaned my head upon my hand and tried to rewrite my time with Inga so the ending would be different. What could I have done that would have changed everything for her?

  Hermione entered the room. She towered over me and said sorrowfully, “Death is so final. Why? Why would she do such a thing when there is a light at the end of the tunnel?”

  I did not reply. The burden of my failure weighed heavily on my heart. “I should have known. Should have done something. Warned someone. Stayed with her.”

  “You did all you could, dear,” Hermione said as she left me alone.

  I felt Eben enter the room. He simply stood silently behind me for a long time.

  “Come with me, Lora,” he said gently. “We must get out for a while. You have been working nonstop.” He pulled me to my feet. I fell against him, barely able to stand. Strong arms held me. Gentle hands stroked my hair as I wept for a time. He gave me his kerchief to wipe my eyes.

  “I must get back to work,” I managed. “Their stories. The tribunal.”

  “Not today. Come with me, Lora. A cup of tea. Selfridges, eh?” He led me out of the church the back way. We emerged into the chaotic wartime traffic of Oxford Street.

  The tearoom at Selfridges was crowded with women shopping to fill their rations for the week. Eben sat across from me at a small table mercifully tucked in the corner. The tea came without sugar or cream. He produced a small jar containing his personal sugar ration and spooned some into my cup. I took a tiny sip, determined to make this cup last. The taste of Eben’s shared ration in the warm brew calmed me.

  He was silent, waiting for me to speak. His eyes were on my fingers as I caressed the cup. I held the liquid in on my tongue as if to savor the sweet memory of days before the war. The tea was tepid before I allowed myself a second taste.

  At last I asked, “Do you suppose life will ever be the same as it was?”

  He answered, “No. Never.”

  “Well, then.”

  “But that doesn’t mean life can’t be good.”

  Long minutes passed before I spoke again. He waited patiently.

  “What I mean is, Eben, will it ever be easy again?” I inhaled the aroma rising from my cup as if it were a garden and this were the last rose of summer.

  “The season will come when sugar is no longer rationed and sweetness is taken for granted again. A poor metaphor for life, maybe, but the secret to getting through difficulty is knowing that both good times and bad are only seasons. You live through the night, knowing dawn is coming.”

  “I promised Inga joy would come in the morning. Now this.”

  “You told her the truth. She didn’t believe you. Didn’t believe dawn would come. I am sorry for her. She gave up too soon. She has missed out on the joy meant to be hers and which she would have given to others. Joy would have risen in her heart like the dawn.”

  “It’s been so long since I have believed it myself. I have forgotten how to hope.”

  Eben placed his hand over mine. “Do not give up now, Lora. I need you to promise me you won’t give up. There is yet so much joy ahead for us.” He searched my face as if to ask if I understood what he was saying.

  I could not form my thoughts into questions. Us? What was he saying? Did I dare to hope that my future joy might somehow be bound to Eben?

  He said, “Your life is a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces all jumbled together in a box. It will take a lifetime to put the picture together, but I know it will be a beautiful picture when it is complete.”

  I asked, “What is it? What do you see?”

  “I stood on the edge of a clear sea one morning. Water so clear I could see the boulders seventy feet down. Your eyes, Lora, remind me of…that. Beautiful. Deep. Clear. I see into your soul.”

  “I look up into a clear blue sky, then I carry my umbrella because I think it might storm.”

  “It will. Thunder and lightning. A downpour, Lora. Bucketing down. Someday.”

  “We are speaking in metaphors again, aren’t we?”

  Eben’s smile was as gentle as if he was calming the fears of a small child. “Yes, Lora. The trick is not to fear the storm when it comes. Knowing it will pass.”

  That day, as we sat together for hours in the noisy tea room, something happened in my heart and was confirmed in Eben’s gaze. Time seemed like nothing when I was with Eben. We walked for many hours in the park. At sunset he took me home and ordered me to sleep, leaving me with these words: “Joy will come in the morning.”

  27

  The meeting place of the Select Committee for the Consideration of Refugee Affairs was in an Army Stores Depot in Deptford. Located east of London and south of the Thames, the area was dank, dirty, smelly, and subject to miasmic fogs.

  Eben told me that part of the lingering acrid aroma was due to the fact that the area had been a cattle market until the British army took it over in 1914. “Before that it was a British navy chandler’s yard clear back to King Henry the Eighth,” he added. “Amazing how the effect of combining manure and tar survives long after the visible evidence is gone.”

  The Select Committee consisted of a lean, pinch-faced magistrate, with the peering eyes and hunched shoulders of Ebenezer Scrooge. Flanking Magistrate Hawley on his right was a larger-than-life-sized woman, Mrs. Somersett, from the British Home Secretary’s office. On Hawley’s left was Major John Vincent, who had lost his right leg in 1918, but who now represented the Local Defense Volunteers detailed to guard the “dangerous” refugees.

  Despite the benign-sounding name of the committee, I could not help but think of them as a tribunal, like in Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. These three judges had the power to round up and commit to imprisonment, without trial and without appeal, all foreign refugees within the environs of London.

  It was terrifying.

  I was glad my part in preparing for today’s proceedings had been that of arranging for the participation of Madame Rose and Mac McGrath. That Eben Golah came with me was a given. Since most of the detained evacuees were Jews, Eben’s position as representative of the Jewish Refugee Placement Agency was expected.

  None of the detainees were present. None of the evacuees were allowed to speak on their own behalf. That weight fell squarely on the shoulders of Eben and Madame Rose.

  “Come, come,” Hawley intoned. “Let’s begin. We haven’t got all day.”

  “With respect, mi’lawd,” Eben said, “since we are considering what may be the lengthy incarceration of innocent people, let us proceed with all…deliberate…speed.”

  “Innocent,” I heard Major Vincent mutter. “Fifth columnists, more like.”

  “Who will speak first?” Hawley demanded.

  Madame Rose, who had returned at my request, specifically for this meeting, stood and cleared her throat. In the enclosed space with the high ceiling the effect was akin to firing off a small cannon. “I am Madame Rose, lately of La Huchette orphanage in Paris. I a
m an American, so you would not dare to detain me! But since many of the children imprisoned by your orders were brought to this country by me, it is for me to present their case.” Madame Rose turned her withering gaze on the lone woman member of the committee. Mrs. Somersett quailed and dropped her eyes.

  “You have perhaps heard,” Madame Rose continued, “of how we, my children and I, escaped from the chaos of Paris and survived a Channel crossing in a canal barge at the height of the Dunkirk miracle. We even”—here Madame Rose fixed her sights on Major Vincent—“managed to cram some British soldiers on to our decks, so my children actually participated in the rescue efforts. In proof of which, I have pictures.”

  Mac and Eva stood and between them unfolded and displayed the Times front-page photograph of the Stinking Garlic being towed into port, its deck jammed with waving children and cheering Tommies. “And I am a witness,” Mac sang out. “I’m the one who took the pictures.”

  “And who might you be?” Hawley demanded.

  “Nobody, really,” Mac said with a wicked grin. “Mac McGrath. American too. I work for TENS. Maybe you’ve heard of them? American news agency with—oh, I dunno—maybe forty million readers. America, while officially neutral, has a keen interest in watching how England treats immigrants.”

  When Madame Rose, Mac, and Eva sat again on the wobbly wooden bench, it was Eben’s turn to rise. He introduced himself, then said, “Here is how I see it: quite apart from what could be considered ingratitude.” He nodded toward Madame Rose. “And without regard to possible damage done to Anglo-American relations, there are still two more points to consider. The first is that these fathers, mothers, boys, and girls have no countries to which they can return. Jews cannot go back to Germany without being interned…or worse. France has fallen, Holland has fallen, Belgium has fallen, Poland has fallen. You may not want them here, but where would you suggest they go?”

  “We’re in a war,” Vincent argued. “Can’t have unknown foreigners traipsing across the countryside, now can we?”