by Elly Welt
“Oh, Father,” she said in a shaky, small voice, “don’t you think it is time we began the dancing?” She extended her right hand most properly, the left holding the violets crossed beneath her breast. I remember that she wore long gloves of pale blue silk, without fingers, that her nails were polished in the softest pink, and that the violets were achingly right.
Her father had used Sheereen’s thirteenth birthday as a pretext for a political farewell party for himself, and had he not been surrounded by Nazi brass and diplomats from other embassies, I think he would have yanked her arm out of its socket, thrown her into her room, and locked the door. It was another time in my life when the black-coated S.S. officers were useful: Gestapo in the house can save one from a Caesarean section. But form is everything for the people of my parent’s generation, and for an ambassador protocol is all. He bowed to his beautiful daughter, clicked his heels, took the little hand hanging so delicately in the balance, touched it with his lips, and said loudly, in French, “It would be my greatest pleasure, my dear.” Then he whispered gruffly, in German, so I would be sure to understand. “I like to think we Arabs, unlike our cousins”—and he threw me an ugly glance—“are in control of our emotions.”
She smiled at him tremulously through her tears and had the presence of mind not to turn her head even slightly to look at me.
Everyone, of course, was relieved. Nazis and other bureaucrats detest scenes. A little procession followed them into the ballroom. One could hear the orchestra begin a Viennese waltz. I was still in the corner with Ahmed and Miss Vinny, who began to prattle. “She hasn’t slept. She hasn’t eaten for two days. I’m half out of my mind. Talk to her, Ahmed. Tell her she must obey her father. He is very angry.” The poor woman was so distraught.
Ahmed, who was a stout fellow, said to no one in particular. “If she’d eat something, it would go better for her. See if you can get her to eat.”
I moved away and Ahmed followed me. We could hear Miss Vinny saying to some of the guests, “Yes, it is so sad. Of course, she hates to leave her little school friends,” and “We have been very happy here in Berlin,” and so on.
Ahmed said, “Let’s go into the garden. I’ve got some good Turkish cigarettes.” We were not friends. He was three years older, which is quite a difference at that age, and he never approved of my relationship with his sister, of whom he was very fond.
We passed through the ballroom. Her father, no doubt, had been to dancing class as a boy, for he was making his way quite passably around the ballroom, overweight, puffy as he was. Sheereen, whom he held at the greatest distance, was a slender blue reed.
We wandered about the garden, smoking, while Ahmed talked. “She threatened to kill herself every other minute—wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t drink and read Romeo and Juliet about seventeen times. Miss Vinny finally talked Mother into convincing Father to let her spend most of this evening with you. You even get to sit with her at dinner. What a mess. Oh, damn, damn. All I ever wanted was to be able to go to Cambridge when I finish high school. And now it’s out of the question.”
“Why should it be? Iraq was a British Protectorate. You could still go there, couldn’t you?”
“My dear old chap,” he began. We spoke French to each other most of the time, but he said “old chap” in English quite often when he was feeling British. “My dear old chap, you are most naive. Of course, Iraq was British—but the old guard like my father hate the British, and, as a matter of fact, if you had any sense at all, you’d realize from all those uniforms here tonight that my father is pro-Axis.”
“You mean your father is pro-Nazi? How can he be after living here and seeing what goes on?”
“I might ask you the same thing,” he said angrily.
“What do you mean? My father a Nazi? How could he be?”
“That’s not what I mean. Your mother is a Jew, isn’t she?”
“What does that mean?”
“Don’t get up in arms, old chap; we Muslims, through the ages, have not been racial bigots.”
“Oh, no? Then what did your father mean when he made that remark about his ‘cousins’?”
“Don’t pay any attention to that. He has good reason to be furious with you. What I meant was, your father sees what is going on here. Why the devil hasn’t he taken you and your mother away? Don’t you see? It isn’t the separation from you that is driving my sister crazy. You know Sheereen, she’s as solid as they come. But she knows that if you stay here, sooner or later . . . they will get you. She’s been hysterical because she wants my father to save you. It’s not a matter of money, is it? I mean, with your father?”
“You know better than that. You’ve been to my house.”
“Then what is it?”
“I’ve wondered. Sometimes I think it’s because my father’s law degree won’t do him any good in another country.”
“But your mother—she’s a doctor, isn’t she? That’d be good anywhere. She could go to America.”
I shrugged. “Her younger brother was a doctor—Uncle Philip—and he got a visa to the United States. Some people in the State of Iowa helped him get a job on a medical faculty there.”
“He’ll help you. If you make it to Switzerland, he could help you from Iowa.”
“They caught him the day he was supposed to leave.”
“Bloody rotten,” he said in English. “But look, old chap, we’re going to Switzerland in the morning—Mother, Sheereen—and I’m escorting them. Father will come later. Yes, if you could make it to Switzerland, I could help you there, and then those people from Iowa could help you, couldn’t they?”
“My father won’t even discuss it with me, much less give me the money. I’ve tried. And you know that you have to have money in Switzerland or they ship you right back!”
“Maybe my father—”
“Look, Ahmed, thank you. But I won’t leave my mother behind. And she won’t leave my father. And then there’s her other brother here, too.”
He threw his cigarette on the grass and ground it out, and we both took another. “Our parents are all fools. All I want is to go to Cambridge. Ah, listen, old chap, my father told Sheereen that if your own father didn’t care enough to save your hide, why should he? And he’s right, you know. Come on. I’m starving. Let’s go in the kitchen and get some lamb and rice.”
It was an hour and a half, ten or so, before Sheereen was released from her social obligations. Ahmed brought her into the garden—still, she held the violets—and disappeared into the kitchen again, returning with two servants and plates of lamb and rice and a bottle of champagne for the three of us.
It was chilly outside this April evening, and I was so happy to put my wool suit jacket about Sheereen and allow myself to suffer the cold on her behalf.
We fed her—Ahmed and I—choice bits, with small sips of champagne in between, until some color returned to her face and she seemed a trifle stronger.
“Would you like to dance?” I asked her. “I promise not to throw you against the wall.”
And we all three began to laugh. The tale of my waltzing accident had made the rounds at school, so Ahmed knew of it, too. It had happened so long ago, when we had been children.
But then she began to cry. “I think I could not bear to dance with you in front of all those people.”
Ahmed looked despairingly at me. “We still have the bloody dinner to get through. And if she makes another scene. Father will kill us and fire Miss Vinny.”
“All right. How should we do it? Sheereen,” I said in a fake, deep voice, “you may not cry until after dinner. It is a command.”
She laughed and cried, and the three of us marched up and down the garden paths. Sheereen decided that after the dinner she would defy her father and sit in the garden with me until dawn, when her train left for Switzerland.
“If he refuses,” she said, “I will kill myself.” And after that resolve, she was calmer. It was a matter of being in control of one’s own life. It is so
important.
We continued to walk about until fifteen minutes or so before the midnight supper, when Ahmed and I urged her to go upstairs and refresh herself. It was then that I gave her the little book of sonnets, wrapped with ribbon.
“What is it?” she asked.
“The sonnets.”
“I knew it! Oh, Seff, I have spent the past two days trying to write a poem for you. But it is not at all good. I couldn’t get it right.”
“Please bring it to me. Please, Reenie.”
“If you promise not to read it until I’m gone.” She began to sob.
“I promise.”
She turned and ran off. Ahmed and I, following at a distance, could see that she bolted up the stairs like a small child, two at a time.
After the dinner, which was the lamb and rice we had been eating all evening, her father clapped his hands and demanded attention. He wished his daughter a very happy birthday, thanked everyone for being so kind to him and his family in this foreign land, and then he announced that they would all be leaving. There were, of course, sounds of protestation and regret around the tables, but everyone knew by now because of Sheereen’s scene early in the evening.
All but a few of her father’s closest friends began to leave at two in the morning, and I slipped into the garden with Ahmed. Sheereen, after a battle with Miss Vinny, changed into ski pants and two sweaters and brought me a warm coat of Ahmed’s, which she insisted I wear. It was chilly and damp outside—typical Berlin weather—and we sat together on a stone bench in the garden. She nestled in my arms—the tired violets crushed between us—crying quietly, drifting in and out of sleep. Ahmed walked nervously about for a time and finally stretched out on another bench and fell asleep.
It was unreal. So close to her. I could not imagine the separation. I held her in my arms for three hours, now and then interrupted by the adults. But we did not let them win this last, small battle. Miss Vinny came out and demanded that Sheereen retire to her room. “This is highly improper,” she said, taking in the three of us: Ahmed wrapped in a greatcoat on his bench, and Sheereen and I, cuddled together on ours, a white mist exhaled with each of our breaths. “You will catch your death,” said poor Miss Vinny.
Sheereen spoke calmly. “If you force me to my room, I will quite happily kill myself, and I mean this.”
Miss Vinny stormed off, uttering threats, returned shortly, and halfheartedly ordered her to obey, but, finally, she gave in. “Ahmed, you stay with your sister. If your father finds out, I’m finished.” As she walked away, we could hear her muttering, “What is the world coming to? Everything is falling apart.”
My mother telephoned. She had arranged a ride home for me, but I had refused it. I said to her, “It is not over yet. Please do not call again.” And I told the servant who answered the phone not to disturb me. So I don’t know if she called back or not. I knew that, in any case, I would have hell to pay when I did go home—which was not until the next afternoon, after school was over.
At five, wordless and without demonstration, Sheereen left me to prepare for her journey. I took off on foot for the railroad station from which she would leave, the Anhalter Bahnhof—a fifteen-minute walk from the Iraqi Embassy—where I waited on the platform. Her train was to leave at six thirty.
She arrived just in time, surrounded by servants, minor embassy officials, and family, and looked wildly about. When she saw me, she broke away and ran into my arms.
“I am the lucky one,” she sobbed.
“No, I’m the lucky one,” I said, and she was dragged weeping and falling out of my arms and into the train, and I did not ever see her again, ever.
I stayed until the train pulled out at exactly six thirty. It was too late to go home and too early to go to school, so I took the S-Bahn that circled the perimeter of Berlin and rode around for over an hour reading the poem which she must have composed in Arabic and then, painstakingly, translated into German, a difficult language for her.
For Seff from His Reenie
Tonight from the sky of your eyes,
Stars fall on my poetry,
Making lights on this virgin paper.
This is the beginning of love,
And the end of the way is foggy.
Through the windows of your eyes
I run into deserts
Sink in the heart of waves,
Lie in the field of wild tulips,
For this is the beginning of love
In the spiritless black of this cruel world.
The chandelier of my memories of your eyes
Will light the dark temple of my mind,
For this is only the beginning,
And I cannot think of ends.
Our love, itself, is the light and is eternal.
I closed my eyes against the light. The train had emerged from the tunnel and was above ground.
“Is something wrong, son?”
I was startled and realized that tears were streaming down my face and that, perhaps, I had even sobbed aloud. An older woman sat opposite me.
“My father,” I said, wondering, as I said it, why I had, for Papa was well.
“In the war?”
I nodded. “Wounded at the Russian Front. He was sent home, and last night . . .”
“He died? Poor dear. These are terrible times.”
“Air raid,” I mumbled.
“And your mother?”
“She’s fine, thank God.”
“Thank God.” The woman crossed herself, a dangerous thing to do in public.
She looked as well-to-do as one could in these times, and I wondered if I could possibly ask her to loan me a mark. I had been giving my stipend from the Institute to Mother, keeping only what I needed for commuting. My parents, supposedly, were well-to-do, but Mother no longer was permitted to practice medicine; Father’s law practice had fallen off, and, my mother told me, the family money was ‘safe’ in Swiss banks. If I asked her for the ‘extra’ mark, she would want to know what I needed it for, and I preferred not to lie to her. In the future, I would hold out a bit more from my stipend, but, somehow, I would have to get my hands on one mark, fast, to buy the Fromm’s Akt. Not for Marlene—I was not interested in her—but for Sonja Press, who I was naive enough to think was a virgin, and ignorant enough to assume might have carnal interest in me.
“You must be strong and be a comfort to your mother now,” the woman said, and then, probably embarrassed by her kindness to a stranger, she turned her head abruptly and stared at the window.
We were pulling into Ostkreuz, the east station that connected to the trains that made the great circle above ground around the perimeter of Berlin. The morning Sheereen left—after her train to Switzerland pulled out at six thirty—I rode the Berlin Circle until it was time to go to school, reading and rereading the poem she had written for me, and that night I stormed into Father’s study and demanded that he take Mother and me away to Switzerland.
“You can afford it,” I shouted. “You are rich!”
He, sitting in his tapestry chair reading legal papers, did not even look up when he answered. “You are too young to understand, and, furthermore, I owe you no explanation.” He went right on reading.
“Of course,” I said through clenched teeth in my most contemptuous manner, “I knew you would say that. But if those swine murder my mother, you will be to blame.” It was the first time I had spoken to him in this way, and it was the only time in my life that he abused me physically.
He jumped from his chair, throwing his papers to the floor, slammed me back against the wall, and slapped my face. I, at thirteen and a half, was wiry and strong, but I did not raise my hand to him. Instead, I retired, without a word, to my room, and the next day began the activities with Mitzka which Father stopped six months later, after I was informed on twice in the same week—once by the Bavarian Baron next door and once by my mother.
Baron von Chiemsee informed Father that he had seen Mitzka and me rip out wires from under
the hood of the Horch a Nazi official had parked down the street and throw them down the storm sewer. That same week, Mother informed my father that she caught me smuggling his Parabellum—the huge sidearm he wore as an officer during the First World War—out of the house in my rucksack.
What they didn’t know was that for six months, beginning the day after Sheereen left, I joined Mitzka Avilov, at least twice a week, in riding the Berlin Circle in order to drop food to the forced laborers and prisoners of war who worked the track. Mitzka had an unending supply of cornmeal, which he wrapped in old newspapers, and, occasionally, he had a flask of molasses or vodka. In late summer, when the trees were full, we would crawl through his secret hole in the fence and collect the apples to add to our food drop.
It was doubly dangerous, for neither of us had money for the fare and we were sneaking on and off the trains. If I had been caught, it would have been as deadly for Mother as for myself. That is why I allowed Father to shock my spirit into hiding.
My conversation with him, after the denunciations, was in his study, as always, and ended in a brief exchange of non sequiturs:
“You must obey the law and avoid drawing attention to yourself. Remember what happened to your Uncle Philip!”
“Send us to Switzerland!”
“You are forbidden to see Mitzka Avilov outside of school!” And then, his final thrust: “If you continue as you are, it is you who will be the destruction of your mother.”
Our nasty little game, each holding the other responsible for her life. If she were to die, whose fault would it be?
I knew that giving in to him would not save Mother in the long run, but at fourteen I was not yet ready to assume responsibility for her death. So, despising my decision, I obeyed Father. I read once in Mother’s medical books that a leper’s aesthetic sense revolts and he begins to loathe himself.
I detrained at Gesundbrunnen. I would not return to the Institute that afternoon. Krupinsky was a shiny ape, but he was not unkind, and I would not get him into trouble. But my God, I didn’t want to go home, so I decided to ride the Berlin Circle and study the biology books the Chief had given me. The fifty pfennigs should cover the fare, and I would go home at the regular time.