The Gathering Storm

by Bodie Thoene

  “Ah, Eben! I prayed for your success with the young lady all the long night through. I hope this is the one you were after, and you’ve not had to fall in love with another.”

  “This is Lora.” Eben seemed proud to introduce me.

  Father Brocke beamed. “Heaven is smilin’. I see you won her over! Took you all night, as I said. Lovely! Lovely! A brilliant mornin’ to be wed, eh?”

  Suddenly shy, I shook his hand. Pleasantries were exchanged, then Father looked at his wristwatch and declared that the exiled leader of the Free French, General Charles DeGaulle, would be arriving for morning worship and we had better hop to it. He called a janitor and the organist to serve as witnesses.

  And so we were married. No music. No march down the aisle. No guests. No public celebration. Eben’s vows were so muted with emotion I could barely hear him. And I could not speak above a whisper. Yet my heart was so filled with love for Eben that the covenant we made seemed so much higher and deeper than any promises ever made between a man and a woman. I felt the presence of angels; Papa and Mama at my side.

  Father Brocke recited the words “…till death do you part?” Eben shook his head slowly from side to side. “Not even death shall part us.”

  Only minutes passed before Father Brocke blessed us and said, “Before God and man I now pronounce you man and wife. Mr. and Mrs. Eben Golah. Glory be, it’s a good thing I’m not hard of hearin’! That’s the quietest weddin’ I’ve ever presided over. Any questions? Well then, Eben, my boy! You may now kiss the bride.”

  Church Row was just waking up as Eben led me home to his garret flat. Workmen were already at work removing ornate iron railing outside the Georgian townhouse to be melted into bullets and tanks.

  A narrow private stairway led to the tiny room tucked beneath the eaves. He turned the key in the old-fashioned lock. Hinges groaned as the door swung open to reveal a brass bed. Fresh white linens were neatly turned back over a white bedspread.

  “What would you have done if I had said no?” I smiled.

  He did not reply but kissed my mouth. I grew weak. He swept me into his arms and carried me across the threshold. It was a moment before I opened my eyes. He held me, my arms around his neck, as I took in the details of his flat.

  I smelled a hint of new paint. The walls were the color of fresh cream. The open window was framed by cornflower blue curtains. A small table with two plain wooden chairs overlooked the Row. Two teacups and a centerpiece of white roses told me Eben had been expecting me.

  A chest of drawers stood against the opposite wall beneath framed magazine engravings of scenes from Shakespeare. A pale green alarm clock ticked loudly in front of a neat row of books that lined the top of the dresser. Stacks of volumes formed a sort of multi-colored wainscot around the four walls of the space. A tall walnut wardrobe was beside the yellow door leading to the WC.

  Eben carried me to the bed. He lay down beside me. I still clung to him. The pillows were crisp and smelled like fresh lavender.

  His face was above me. I was lost in his eyes.

  I admitted, “Eben, I don’t know….”

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” He brushed his mouth over my lips. “First?”

  My pulse quickened. “Eben, I love you,” I whispered, as a rush of desire swept through me.

  His words stroked my cheek. “Lora…I have waited. Waited for you so long. So long. It’s all right, my darling. No hurry.”

  Eager, I fumbled with the buttons of his shirt. He kissed the palm of my hand. “Love is a slow dance on a warm night. Listen—you will feel it in my heartbeat. I will lead and you? You follow…move with my touch.” He traced the curve of my hip with his fingertip. “You see?”

  I nodded, unable to speak.

  Undressing me slowly, he savored each new revelation. His hands and lips explored the landscape of my body tenderly, awakening feelings I had never known.

  The late summer day passed slowly, divided between passion, drowsy contentment, and desire reawakened by a sigh. Love was our music. Eben and I danced to a rhythm only we two could hear.

  30

  It was late afternoon when the workmen on Church Row tossed the last desecrated morsel of decorative iron onto the wagon. Cockney voices faded away toward Flask Walk, the pub, and a pint of Guinness. Silence, punctuated by footsteps on the pavement, fell like a curtain as the sun sank lower in the west.

  Exhausted from ecstasy, I fell asleep with my face on Eben’s chest. The steady beat of his heart in my ear was like a lullaby.

  It was almost dark when I awoke. Reaching out for Eben, I opened my eyes with a jolt of panic. I was alone in the bed. Alone in the garret. Where was he?

  Wrapping myself in the sheet, I stood in the center of the now gloomy room.

  “Eben?” I listened for some movement in the WC or the hallway. His trousers and summer jacket were gone. How had he slipped out without me knowing? And why? Where had he gone?

  I bathed and washed my hair in the cold water of the tin tub. All the while I grew more anxious.

  What if the bombers came while Eben was away? What if he was hurt in a raid and could not make it back to me? How would I live without him now that he had aroused me from my long dormant sleep? How would I live through even one night without him?

  The hour of blackout drew near. The last rays of sunlight tinted the clouds red above the heath. How incredibly my life had changed in these few short hours.

  I dressed in yesterday’s blue dress and went to the window to scan the Row for some sign of him.

  And then I saw the note and a single red rose beside the vase of white roses.

  Darling Lora, Didn’t want to awaken you. Such a day. I have gone to fetch a few things you’ll need. Took your ration book along. Forgive me. I fear we have forgotten to eat today. I know you must be hungry. Make tea. Kettle on the electric plate. Back soon. E.

  I inhaled slowly with relief. The scent of roses filled my senses. I glanced down and saw a crisp white envelope with the words inscribed, A GIFT FOR LORA.

  I opened the envelope and found a black and white photograph of myself, giddy and gangly, as I perched on the front steps of the White Rose Inn four years and a lifetime ago. Eben’s image was also captured in the frame. Though he was exiting through the doorway behind me the moment the photo was snapped, he had not escaped being recorded there.

  I gazed at the faded memory, struck by one thing more than any other: though I had bloomed into a woman, Eben had not changed at all. He had not aged one minute from the instant the shutter clicked. He had neither gained a pound nor lost an ounce. His perfect teeth gleamed in the photo as they did when he smiled at me this morning.

  The envelope contained a slip of parchment decorated with a vertical rose trellis of thirty-six words without punctuation. The roses were intermingled red and white and trimmed with delicate Hebrew letters.

  Sunset

  Raspberry

  Sky

  Ripens

  Delicious

  Thoughts

  Awaken

  Long

  Dormant

  Seeking

  Light

  Desire

  Stirs

  Impatient

  Shoots

  Spiral

  Upward

  Penetrating

  Warm

  Yielded

  Soil

  I

  Taste

  Your

  Summer

  Mouth

  Breathless

  Sweet

  Longing

  Lingers

  On

  My

  Tongue

  You

  Consume

  Me

  I pressed Eben’s poem to my heart and glanced out the window as the last red-tinged beam of light faded from the sky.

  Thirty-six words contained worlds and galaxies. They spun and collided and hummed and sang a hundred different messages to me.

  Who was this man I had married?
What sort of soul could capture my longing and our love in thirty-six words?

  I turned at the sound of his footfall on the stairs. The key turned in the lock and the door swung wide.

  He remained in shadow for a moment and I waited for him to come into the light.

  “I see you found it.”

  “Eben?” I sighed. “What am I going to do with you? It is so high.”

  He entered and placed a bag of groceries on the table. Crushing me against his chest, he kissed me hard, his tongue probing my mouth.

  When at last we breathed, he said, “I never knew it could be like this.”

  “I was desperate that you weren’t next to me.”

  “And I. In the line at the bakery, I could think of nothing but you. You!”

  We drew the blackout curtains and lit two candles. At eight o’clock the church bells rang the same instant the air-raid siren wailed.

  I vaguely remember asking Eben if we should go to the High Street tube station. If he answered me, his words were lost beneath the alarm and the sound of hurrying feet running toward the public shelter.

  Eben and I lay awake, the only souls in Hampstead still above ground, as the boom of artillery and the crump of bombs shattered the night.

  I was not afraid when, later, Eben led me to the White Stone Pond at the top of the hill, and we watched with horror and fascination as London burned at our feet.

  I held Eben’s hand. His face was golden in the light of the flames. “Are you afraid, Eben?”

  He hesitated a moment before he replied. “Not until now. And now I fear only one thing. Only one…living the rest of my life without you.”

  “It won’t happen.” I rested my head against his arm. “Not now. Not after so much.”

  “Well, then,” he said quietly as we started toward home. “I’m not afraid of anything.”

  The next evening German bombers again ravaged London. That night Eben and I decided to stay outdoors.

  “We are watchmen on the walls,” he said as he guided me to a park bench at the top of Primrose Hill. There was not a glimmer of light from any window in the village behind us. Below, the face of London was veiled.

  He sat beside me, so close I could feel his knee against mine. Looking up, we drank in the innumerable stars above us. “So, in the darkness of war the heavens awaken with light. This is the sky as it was two thousand years ago.”

  He said those words with such conviction that I almost believed he had stood on this hill in ancient times and looked into a starlit sky.

  I settled in. “Heaven is too far away. Something like that. Eva said it to me about when Poland fell, and no one came to help. She said, ‘God is too high up, and England is too far away.’ I said something like it myself when we fled from Brussels.”

  He did not reply for what seemed like a long time. He sighed and spoke quietly, as though our voices might stir a curtain and let a gleam of light out to guide an enemy. “God was never too high, but always waiting for England to take a stand for His kingdom.”

  “My father always hoped.” I fixed my eye on the brightest star and imagined it was a window through which Papa could see me below. “But nothing came of it. Only talk while the devil made his plans to conquer the world.”

  Eben answered, “I was sorry to hear the news about your father.”

  “It was inevitable. The earth can’t bear men who are so good, so filled with God’s light.”

  “No. So it has always been. I have seen it again and again and no one learns. The next generation all is forgotten and the cycle begins again. The godly are the first to fall.”

  “You speak as if you have lived it.” I inhaled deeply and let my breath out slowly. “Varrick is dead. He was barely more than a boy when I last saw him. I loved him as a girl can love a boy. Not like you and me. But I don’t know what he died for. Or why. So young. Only that he is dead.”

  Eben said, “I am sorry.”

  “You said so.”

  “I mean it. I am sorry.”

  “That makes two of us who care.”

  “You sound bitter.” He seemed surprised.

  “Not bitter. Just so weary, Eben. Before you loved me, I never really knew happiness. My whole life. And now…all the rest. Varrick barely had a chance to live. I don’t know the details. Not how he died, or when. Nothing really. Just that I heard he was dead, then believed he was alive, and now he isn’t.” I turned my face to Eben. “Do you think they see us? Or is it too sad for them to look?”

  “They are alive. I know this. They are a cloud of witnesses who cheer the living on toward the goal.”

  “And what is the goal?” I raised my hand toward the pinpoints of light.

  “Heaven. Heaven is our goal. It is…quite different than we imagine.”

  Eben’s certainty annoyed me. How could he say such a thing? How could he know? “I suppose it is. It would have to be very different from earth or it would not be heaven. I have about decided that, except for you, earth is more a mirror of hell. If anything happened to you, I hope I would not live long if the Nazis invade England. That’s all. I hope I will die at the barricades fighting the men who killed my father.”

  “Don’t be in such a hurry.”

  “Why? What would I have to live for?”

  He stood up abruptly. There was irritation in his tone. Unmistakable. “You must live to speak for those who have no voice. For people who have lost more than you, Lora.”

  “You make me sound selfish.”

  “Before this war is finished, the world will be filled with broken men and weeping women.”

  “It already is.”

  “We have only begun. And you are weary?”

  “Who isn’t?”

  He took my hand and lifted me to my feet. “Come on. Let’s walk. Tonight may be our last night. I think it will be the last for a very long time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Suddenly his voice was animated. “Do you hear that?”

  I shook my head, and then I heard a nightingale singing.

  “He sounds anxious,” I said. “And nearby.”

  We traced the warbling to the limb of a plane tree encircled by a fringe of brush. “He’s not afraid of us,” I said.

  “He’s waiting,” Eben noted, standing very still and listening. “Waiting for us to do something for him? I don’t know.”

  A faint scrabbling reached me. It seemed to come from a pile of fallen leaves just at the base of the tree trunk. A mouse?

  As soon as I moved toward the leaves the nightingale trilled even louder.

  “Careful,” Eben warned.

  The muted flutter came again. “I think it’s a…” And it was. Buried in leaves, covered in dust, was a female nightingale with a broken wing. Her weak cries were pitiful. “Can’t we take her home, Eben?” I said. “Perhaps we can save her.”

  “Of course, but we’ll have to hurry.”

  I recognized immediately what he meant: from out of the distance in the direction of the sea came the ominous rumble of approaching airplanes.

  “The blackout will not stop them, Lora. Nor will the sea. Nor any barricade. They will keep coming, now. Stand and be strong.” The last word fell from his lips as the air-raid siren began to wail.

  Sheltering the injured bird beneath my jacket, so that I could feel the throbbing of her heart against my own, we carried her into the shelter. And when the all-clear sounded, we took her home with us.

  31

  There could not have been a gloomier day. Eben had been gone for eight days. The nights passed in the restlessness of longing. Why hadn’t he written?

  The postman slid the mail through the slot just as the teakettle came to a boil. I set the tea steeping and hurried downstairs.

  Among the letters was a postcard from Jessica and a thin white envelope addressed to me in Eben’s handwriting. Thin meant a poem. I laughed and held the envelope to my heart. Closing my eyes, I imagined him alone in a dim hotel room, thinking of me.
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  I scanned Jessica’s brief note in tiny cramped handwriting:

  Weather fine. Baby healthy. Met a very nice American airman from Texas at a community dance. Fellow lost his arm…had so much in common might go out with him again.

  Jessica signed off with “wish you were here!”

  I smiled to think of my sister grasping hold of her life again with both hands. It did not matter if the Texan only had one hand to hold her with, Jessica sounded so happy.

  I propped Eben’s unopened letter on the table and prepared my tea. I savored the aroma of Darjeeling and the delicious anticipation of reading.

  I only lasted through two sips of hot tea and a cookie before I opened the envelope with a butter knife and took out the lined sheet of legal paper.

  “It is! It is another poem!” I whispered. Unfolding the sheet, I began to read, and summer nights filled the room.

  My darling Lora, Remembering summer nights, I am thinking only of you…

  lilac

  breeze

  white

  sighs

  linen

  stirs

  your

  breath

  silken

  nuance

  brushes

  my

  cheek

  urgent

  you

  whisper

  me

  awake

  Lips

  part

  one

  kiss

  suddenly

  fierce

  we

  dance

  soaring

  swirling

  swaying

  I read it. I read it again. Each time I emphasized a different word or phrase until a hundred messages of Eben’s longing took shape.

  It was twilight before I set it aside.

  I spoke his words aloud: “You consume me…”

  How I wished that we could be together every minute. He understood my hunger for him and felt the same for me. Our delight in one another was a banquet.

  My tea was cold when I replaced the poem. I heard the sound of an airplane passing overhead. It was one of ours, but I thought again about the bombing raids and burned-out hulks of buildings. What if a bomb fell on our little flat? What if Eben’s poems were burned in a fire? What if…?