Between Sky and Sea

by Herz Bergner

  ‘Bless you. My heart swells when I look at you, and I saved you just by a hair’s breadth. But where is your father? Where is my breadwinner? God in heaven save him!’ And the little child clasped her hands, rolling her eyes to the sky, and pretended to wipe away her tears with her handkerchief, just like her mother did.

  All day the children were busy, running around the deck, immersed in their own world. They had become so accustomed to the ship, the relentless sea and sky, that they could hardly remember the land. But the adults searched for the shore on the far horizons, in the sky and in the water, so that everything swam before their eyes. They suffered from seasickness, vomiting green gall until they hardly had strength to bear any more. Reb Lazar, the grocer, recited the psalms, intoned prayers from the sacred book, studied the Talmud and argued loudly that a Jew must never lose his beliefs, as long as life remained. A man must have faith, must trust in the Almighty! He told himself that he was not afraid of death if that was the Almighty’s wish, if it was written in heaven so. But it is a pity for a Jew not to be buried in sanctified earth according to the custom.

  And Fabyash shouted that it was his fate to die at sea instead of in his home which had been destroyed. He had been robbed of all his belongings, beaten down and left with only the shirt on his back. His heart bled every time he looked at his children.

  ‘Me—well—never mind me! But what have the children done?’

  He didn’t believe the sea was safe and the Greek captain didn’t look like a Greek to him. He could hardly bear to say it, but the captain looked like a German, an enemy of the Jews! It seemed to him that the gentile went about his ship silent and angry.

  One day Fabyash ran down to the cabins, shouting: ‘It’s a story without an end! I swear the ship has turned back! With my own eyes I saw the ship turn round! I always said we’d have to watch the captain. Heaven knows where the gentile will take us yet. All he wants is to be rid of us Jews. I will bet anything that he is a German! He is as much a Greek as I am a Turk.’

  The passengers had been wandering about the ship trying to give each other courage and unable to understand why the ship moved so slowly. Fabyash’s words alarmed them for a moment, but they soon began to disagree with him, especially the women.

  ‘Hold your tongue!’ they shouted. ‘The man has taken giggle-water and goes about babbling like an old woman. Look at the hero! A fine man you are! Fancy calling yourself a man!’

  Fabyash couldn’t escape from the women, nor could he say any more, so he kept his thoughts locked inside. He even refused to answer the distinguished Warsaw doctor who pestered him. The doctor was half senile and had long hair and a thick grey aristocratic moustache. He had been reminded of his Jewish ancestry by Nazi soldiers who had called him ‘Hund kerl!’ and ‘Sau-jude!’ and hanged his only son in his home before his eyes. Ever since, the doctor had refused to wash himself or to comb his long hair. He wandered around unkempt and dishevelled, his trousers unbuttoned and a half-mad smile on his face. His wife followed him with a wet towel, as a mother follows her child to wash its face and hands. On board the ship the doctor tried all the time to get closer to the other Jews. He stroked the children’s heads and patiently listened to the women telling him about their illnesses. And always he made the same bitter joke to Fabyash.

  ‘You don’t feel like diving into the sea just now, Pan Fabyash, eh? The water must be wet.’

  The doctor never left Fabyash alone; he was always peering into Fabyash’s face with his foolish, good-natured smile and talking about his son as if he were still alive. But at the same time he had noticed, with passion in his tear-filled old eyes, a couple who never mixed with anyone else and were completely taken up with each other. The whole ship talked about them, amazed that a man and his wife who were no longer young were never seen apart, and that they looked as lovingly into each other’s eyes as on the day of their wedding.

  Nathan and Ida nursed the great sorrow that had overtaken them. Perhaps their pain was forgotten as long as they could sit close together for, deeply hidden, some joy lived within them. But they buried their happiness and cursed themselves for their sinful thoughts. They clung to each other, always with the excuse that they had to take care of each other.

  From that time in Greece when the Jewish merchant had received them so hospitably and almost forcibly put them on the ship, they had been inseparable. They had stuck together while the ship floated, its rusty bowels creaking, tossed like a broken box on the frothing waters. Nathan was afraid to leave Ida for a single moment; she might do something terrible. In her agony she must always be able to turn to him, and he felt better sitting near her with only one wish in his mind: that the ship should never reach the shore where he would be forced to crawl back into life again. Better that the ship should remain eternally at sea.

  On moonlit nights they would sit together looking at the water and watching the moonlight break over the waves like fragments of white glass, then pour like molten silver into the depths of the sea. Even when the sea was stormy and raged, opening great chasms, tossing the ship from side to side and covering it with foaming water, they would not retire to their cabins. They remained in a corner and watched how it became suddenly dark. A mist spread over the sea, joining it to the sky in a blanket of haze. Then lightning split the heavy bulging sky, like fiery whips, lighting the darkness and leaving the world for a moment in a blaze of light. The sea boomed with a thousand voices. Thunder reverberated across the sky as though iron-hoop barrels were being rolled, until it seemed that the whole world was quivering and breaking

  Nathan and Ida liked to watch this wild game until their heads swam and everything danced and turned before their eyes. They stood behind the rope barrier that kept the passengers from the part of the deck that the waves flooded. Everyone else suffered from seasickness, but Ida and Nathan didn’t suffer so badly and looked every danger in the eye.

  Every time a wave washed over the deck as if to swallow the ship, Ida nestled closer to Nathan. He embraced her gently with the same emotion he had felt years ago when he had comforted her after her father struck her. Then he had stroked her dishevelled hair and felt her soft quivering shoulders. Her hot tears fell on his fingers, a tremor passed through him and he had been overcome with passion. Ida then realised that she was not indifferent to him. Although Nathan was her eldest sister’s husband, she leaned closer and wished that his caresses would go on forever. So soothingly they healed the shame that her father had caused by striking her, a girl old enough to be a bride.

  And now on the ship, where fate had brought them together, Ida felt happier by Nathan’s side, although she would not admit it to herself and tried to stifle the truth. Just as Ida reminded Nathan of his home and his wife and child, so Nathan reminded Ida of her husband and child. They had very little to do with the other people on the boat; they always sat apart from them, absorbed in their own great sorrow.

  Although Ida sometimes did not want to see Nathan, and sat alone in her cabin, he tried to keep her under his eye. And whenever the seas raged Nathan wanted her by his side on the deck, hoping that she would forget her troubles. In the presenceof danger, he felt how close Ida was to him, and he thought of his wife and child who were lost when they fled from their home. And more than ever she reminded him of the years when she was a girl in her father’s home, which was already falling apart even before it was destroyed by the Germans.

  CHAPTER II

  That had been many years ago in Warsaw when Nathan’s father-in-law, Jacob, had a little leather shop attached to his home in Franciskana Street. Nathan was a student but he had abandoned his studies to look for a future because he had no strength left to starve. The name ‘student’ stuck. He was called the student in his father-in-law’s house, and he was known by that name to the neighbours, and even to the children in the courtyard.

  ‘Nathan, Jacob’s son-in-law. The student with his pants torn.’

  No matter how hard he tried to wipe away the traces of
his student days, he could never get rid of that name. Jacob, a strong, plebeian man, made fun of him to his face but behind his back he boasted of Nathan’s achievements, and God help the man who spoke a harsh word against him. Nathan knew that his father-in-law boasted of his ‘refined, intellectual’ son-in-law before the country merchants who came to his shop. He would pull out Nathan’s student cap, long discarded, blow the dust off it, straighten out the gold braid and polish with his sleeve the shiny lacquered peak. He would hold the cap in his hand as though it were a rare antique and show it to everybody. But none of this was in Nathan’s presence. To his face, his father-in-law mocked him, made fun of him, laughed at his delicate hands that still could not lift the heavy bundles of leather, although he, an old man, could lift them as if they were feathers.

  Although Nathan worked beyond his strength, wanting to show that he was not just an extra mouth to feed, that he worked honestly for his wife and child, nevertheless Jacob called him the ‘orphan child’. Nathan didn’t fit in the house. He didn’t get on well with his wife, Faigele, nor would he show himself anywhere with her. He had married her because he could starve no longer. He was quite unsuited to business; he did everything back-to-front and upside-down. Sometimes he attempted complicated business transactions, naively believing that he could trick the world. But the merchants caught him out immediately and he would look foolish and not know how to get out of the difficulty. Then sometimes he was honest—just an innocent soul. But neither one thing nor the other was any good for business, and in the end he could never judge a piece of leather.

  It was the same in his relations with the people in the house. Sometimes he behaved humbly, spoke softly, and wouldn’t touch a fly on the wall. But he soon saw that this wouldn’t do, that he was being treated like a messenger boy, so he raised his head and told them not to forget who he was.

  The only bright spot in the oppressive house—with its massive mahogany beds, huge wardrobes, the clumsy big table and the heavy grandfather clock that hammered out the hours sadly and monotonously—was Ida, his wife’s younger sister. He thought she understood him and was sorry for him. At night he would sit reading a book and Ida would come in. When she stepped in from the street with the wind in her brown hair, her amber eyes half closed with girlish charm, her lower lip full and chapped, he felt all his aching yearnings disappear at once.

  As soon as she came home, Jacob would shuffle out of his bedroom, fully dressed, for he would not close his eyes until his daughter returned, and burst out: ‘Where have you been playing about, eh?’

  He would push his cap up and down in anger. ‘Where does a girl roam so late at night?’

  Ida had graduated from college and wanted to study further, but her father would not allow it.

  ‘I see no need for colleges. There is no future in that,’ he shouted, and the neighbours would run out in amazement.

  ‘No more college! I don’t want another orphan child that can’t tie a cat’s tail. The Polish thieves won’t allow a Jew to study. It’s just a waste of time. You won’t get anywhere with the Polish thieves.’

  Ida became very stubborn and refused to eat. For weeks she would not enter her father’s room. But Jacob kept an eye on her and knew her movements. When she wasn’t about he searched her belongings.

  Once, while he was standing reading a letter from one of her admirers, Ida came in. Her father pretended not to see her and continued to read the letter aloud, deliberately distorting the words so that they sounded comical. Then he saw her and pulled a frightened face, cheerfully pushing his cap back from his forehead, and innocently asked her: ‘Who is this young man?’ He pointed to a photograph. ‘He looks like a madman from the asylum. Look at his clothes. Look at his face. He looks as if he hasn’t had anything for breakfast.’

  Ida grew pale with anger and her eyes narrowed to venomous slits. Furiously she spat out one word: ‘Impudence!’

  That was the end. Jacob was a hot-tempered and stubborn man, who was liable to use violence, even in the neighbourhood prayer house, if he didn’t get his own way. He hurled himself at her and began to beat her. If Nathan hadn’t dragged her out of his hands she wouldn’t have escaped so lightly.

  But her father won in the end. Neither her refusal to take food nor her disappearance from the house for weeks helped her. Jacob wouldn’t give in and finally Ida married the man he wanted her to marry.

  Ida changed after she left the house. She forgot Nathan’s caresses which had so sweetly healed the wounds her father had inflicted on her. When she visited her parents’ home she did not even glance in Nathan’s direction. She had eyes only for her husband, gazing into his round, red face as if it were a mirror. She told her mother all about her baby, to the smallest detail, and sought her advice. And all the time she kept turning, with exaggerated affection, to her husband, who was always sleepy and smiling foolishly. She would straighten his tie and talk to him in a playful voice, turning up her broad, snub nose.

  ‘Hershl, are you comfortable?’

  ‘Don’t eat so much, Hershl, or you’ll get heartburn. You glutton! You!’

  Nathan understood her. He would not look in her direction, knowing that she was torturing herself to spite him. And when she could not hurt him, she would take it out on his child. She said the fair-headed boy was too thin, she didn’t like the way he spoke, gabbling his words, nor did she like the clothes he wore. She didn’t see that she was hurting the child.

  Nathan was not offended, but his wife, Faigele, sat as if on hot coals, her normally calm white face flushed with sickly red blotches from shame and humiliation. And when Ida could find no more fault with the child or with anything else, she picked on her mother and complained about the crowded house where nothing was ever in its right place. She was always angry and complaining, and even when she played with the cat she blew into its ears savagely, tormenting the animal as she had as a child.

  ‘Leave the cat alone!’ Her mother couldn’t stand it any longer; she couldn’t understand what had happened to her daughter. ‘Have pity! The girl hasn’t improved a bit. As one is at seven, so is one at seventy.’

  Sometimes Ida came uninvited to her father’s business in the middle of the day. She dragged her little girl Sarah by her soft hand, angrily shouting at her. She would sit down at the table for hours as if she were a princess and watch Nathan lifting and carrying heavy bundles of leather.

  Later Ida ceased coming to her parents’ house altogether and Nathan didn’t see her. Then he met her unexpectedly when his father-in-law’s prayer-house politics proved correct and the German army besieged Warsaw.

  Political discussion was as precious to Jacob as life. He often sat in the local prayer house far into the night talking with other Jews, and for his own opinions he would go through fire. He would even use his fists to prove that he was correct. He often became heated, saying that Poland was becoming too close to the Huns. He said they were kissing each other, dwelling together like doves. The Germans would entice Poland into a trap, and attack her when she least expected it. ‘It is the habit of big fish to be friendly with little fish until they are ready to swallow them.’

  Jacob had said, ‘The Pole is going too far. He has become full brother to the Hun. He’s learning from him to beat up the Jews. But his good brother will teach him a lesson yet. You can’t play with the Hun. The German bandit will one day sit at the table in this house…’

  Nobody paid much attention to him; most people thought he was rather foolish. But his timid wife gazed admiringly into his face. The lowliest uniform and the smallest brass buttons terrified her: once when a tram conductor came into the shop just to buy something, she was so overcome that she became faint and had to be revived. Having listened to her husband’s grave pronouncements she began to store food away. You never knew what might happen… It wouldn’t hurt to have it there…She didn’t want to talk about it, for God forbid that the hour should ever come, but there would always be something for the children…She could w
ell remember how it was in the last war…

  When the German army stood before Warsaw, and the radio urged all young people to leave the city, Jacob commanded his children to flee. Every time Nathan came home from digging trenches, his father-in-law pleaded with him to go.

  When, after several hours, the bombing ceased and people crawled like mice from the dark cellars, they were unable to look the morning in the face. And when they did, they could hardly recognise their streets, so changed were they.

  Then Jacob started to pack. He threw off his long, black coat, rolled up his sleeves and tucked the fringes of his prayer shawl into his pants so that they wouldn’t get in the way. In a great hurry he pulled an old suitcase out of the cupboard. He had inherited the suitcase from his father, and although the leather was old and cracked, it was still strong and could stretch like a concertina so that a world of things could be stored in it. He filled it to the brim, all the time remembering something else to take along. He didn’t even forget Nathan’s dusty prayer shawl bag, which he carefully squeezed in. Then, from somewhere he brought out a rucksack. When that was full he took a new linen sheet, tried it to see if it was strong enough, and made more bundles which he tied firmly with string. He emptied the kitchen cupboard of food, packing everything with great care. He allowed no one near him for he would rely on no one, and he even tricked his wife into going away to a neighbour’s to spare her any heartache. He worked so hard that sweat poured from his face.

  When everything was ready he picked up the heavy suitcase and ordered the children to leave immediately for it was dangerous to lose a moment. When they insisted that he and his wife go with them, he refused to listen.

  ‘I will end my days here,’ he said, ‘You go and God be with you. If everything passes over, and God wills it, there will be something for you to come back to...Go! Go, children. Don’t delay.’