A Perfect Madness

by Frank H. Marsh

TEN

  Scotland and England, 1940

  Mrs. McFarland, a stout and stoic Presbyterian with gentle manners, opened the front door to her small cottage the moment the three women turned from the road onto the stone pathway leading to the cottage. Rising early to tidy the rooms and prepare a makeshift nursery for Anna, she had sat reading and knitting by the living room window for hours, anxiously awaiting her arrival. Childless and a widow of World War I, Mrs. McFarland’s life consisted mostly of small farming and the church and gossiping, which was not a sin in her eyes. It was a Christian way of knowing your neighbor’s hurts and needs, she would say, even though they might be personal. As a Scot and Presbyterian, Mrs. McFarland believed that man by nature was a mess, though she thought of herself as a good woman. Attending Wednesday prayer meetings and Sunday services and any other time the church doors were open, Mrs. McFarland tried to make sure she wouldn’t be forgotten when God’s grace was passed out among the Presbyterians in Scotland. Besides, the saintly John Knox had preached twice in the small stone church she attended. What could be a better reference for getting into heaven than that?

  When the call went forth from the government for Scottish homes to house children from cities in southern England targeted by Germany’s deadly bombers, Mrs. McFarland’s doors swung open wide and never shut until the war ended. But Anna would be her only child, and from the moment she lifted Anna from Julia’s arms she loved her. Watching from her front window, she saw Eva and a Red Cross worker, followed by Julia carrying Anna, come into view as they topped the long, winding road up from the small village below. At Julia’s insistence, all three stopped to inhale the beauty of the surrounding green hills and glens below sprinkled with grazing sheep and tiny brooks that looked like moving ribbons of silk. “Mt. Sinai couldn’t be any closer to God than this,” Julia whispered to Eva as they moved on to Mrs. McFarland’s cottage.

  Neither Julia nor Eva could speak much English then, but words weren’t needed when Mrs. McFarland reached out with her strong arms to embrace Julia. Seconds would pass before either one would release the other. Later, riding back on the train to London, Julia would recall the strangeness of Mrs. McFarland’s embrace, telling Eva it was as she imagined God’s would be, should He have real arms to hold her. Placing Anna in Mrs. McFarland’s arms became a gift then, a moment wrapped in a burst of joy she couldn’t explain. Eva only smiled and nodded and felt good too because Julia did, but she knew the pain of separation would not be far behind.

  Later in the evening, back in London, Julia began to cry the minute she opened the door to her apartment and saw Anna’s empty crib.

  “What have I done, Eva? God will never forgive me.”

  “For what?”

  “The sin of bringing Anna into this world out of wedlock and then giving her away.”

  “You’re talking crazy now.”

  “No, no, it’s as if Anna was a sacrifice to God that shouldn’t have been made. I’m not sure He will trust me anymore.”

  “It will pass,” Eva said, deciding to humor Julia.

  “God hasn’t always been gentle with Jewish people. You know that, Eva,” Julia said, sobbing quietly.

  “Yes, but she’ll be living with a Protestant, that should soften Him up some. Just think, a Presbyterian and a Jew under the same roof.”

  Julia frowned at Eva’s words, her eyes widening as if expecting God to strike them both down at any moment.

  “Luther was a Protestant, too, and he burned ten thousand Jews,” she protested.

  “Luther wasn’t a Presbyterian, he was a German,” Eva responded, trying hard to keep from laughing at her friend’s silly chatter, but her resolve quickly gave way to loud guffaws that shook the room.

  Julia laughed, too, and felt clean again. Anna would be fine with Mrs. McFarland. They both had the same God, didn’t they?

  Later in the evening, after Eva had left, Julia pulled Anna’s crib next to her, and began singing softly to the emptiness before her.

  All love is of one thing, a singularity, Erich had told her one night while they lay together among the graves in the Old Jewish Cemetery. “You can’t separate it into two parts, any more than you can divide the basic matter of the universe,” he had said. Such heady chattering was always too much for Julia, especially when wanting to make love to him. The idea of love was simple and shouldn’t be cluttered up with the heavy baggage of philosophical conjectures. Yet listening to his distant voice now gave hope to Julia that such idle talk might be true. Mrs. McFarland could be singing to Anna this very moment, gently rocking her, too, covering her with the same love they both possessed. Sleep came easy then to Julia, a deep and welcoming sleep that left her rested in mind and body for all that was to come tomorrow and the tomorrows after.

  Disappointment damned Julia and Eva when they first offered their services to Colonel Moravec, the Czechoslovak intelligence chief who had escaped Prague. Their expected early return to Prague was quickly squashed by their total ignorance of the English language and Eva’s somewhat dismal German. Nonetheless, they were happily welcomed and initially assigned to a unit of the Czech government in exile that had begun working closely with British Intelligence. For twelve weeks, beginning every day at dawn till dinner, they were unmercifully subjected to a pounding of English into their tired brains, branding the mind as if hot cattle irons had been used so nothing would be forgotten. Sunday was the day of rest, not Saturday, their Sabbath. But Eva, who had long figured that God, at this particular moment in history, didn’t give a rat’s ass, jokingly convinced Julia that Moses certainly didn’t stop looking for food on the Sabbath when he had all those hungry Jews bitching at him for being lost in the wilderness. So Sunday became a day of rest. For Julia, Sundayswas also when she had the joy of writing short nursery rhymes in Czech to Anna, singing along as she did, as if Anna were there with her. Whether Mrs. McFarland could pronounce the rhymes properly, brogue and all, was of no matter to Julia. It was the love that she would bring to Anna’s young soul that emboldened her heart. In time, though, the rhymes turned into broken English, then a wholeness as Mrs. McFarland sang them to little Anna with a sweetness and joy in her voice that any mother would envy.

  At first, Julia would not write a letter to Mrs. McFarland until it was proper and correct, believing she might think her ignorant and poor as a mother. Only short notes penned by the Red Cross worker asking Mrs. McFarland to recite the rhymes the best she could went to her. On the day Julia chose to write the first of many letters to come, one hour would pass before she accepted the first page of what she had so meticulously put down. By comparison, Mrs. McFarland’s letters, which arrived regularly on Wednesdays, were always short sentenced and folksy simple, filling Julia’s mind with bright, colorful images of what Anna must look like.

  Twelve weeks into Julia’s absence from Anna, a letter arrived from Mrs. McFarland inviting Julia to spend the approaching Easter holidays with her. She need not concern herself with the Christian festivities of the weekend, and would have two glorious spring days to be with Anna, Mrs. McFarland wrote. So Julia went, choosing to leave on Friday afternoon. Arriving alone late in the evening this time, and trudging up the long, sparsely graveled road to Mrs. McFarland’s cottage, she stopped to rest. Looking across the rolling hills and deep valleys, made mysterious by the night, Julia felt for the first time a lightness of being, the insignificance of her own existence. How can we live in so many distant and disconnected worlds, she sang out loud to no one. Erich’s, Anna’s, her family’s—all separate from hers. It’s in these moments that wonder comes along, she believed, when we must live beyond time, where all that we are arises with our thoughts.

  A distant dog’s barking startled Julia, shaking her from the moment she was in, and she moved on quickly towards Mrs. McFarland’s cottage. Within seconds, a light marking the cottage appeared at the rise of the road, breaking through the thick blackness surrounding her like a lonely harbor light. An eerie quietness returned as she reached th
e stone path leading from the road to the cottage. Standing on the door stoop, cradling a restless Anna in her arms, Mrs. McFarland fired the chilly spring night with her radiant smile as Julia approached.

  “I thought maybe, my dear, you would like to put Anna down tonight yourself. She’s been waiting up a long, long time to see you, you know.”

  Taking Anna into her arms and kissing her, Julia burst into tears, crying openly. “I know, and I thank you for that.”

  Later that night, with Anna fast asleep, Julia listened for hours to the first of many stories she would one day tell Anna, stories about her infant years and a kind and gentle woman named McFarland who loved her and raised her and who just happened to be a Presbyterian and not a Jew. For each visit, Mrs. McFarland carefully wrote the stories on sheets of faded stationery, giving them to Julia to put with the ones that would someday come from Julia about Anna.

  As the evening passed, neither one seemed willing to end the day, passing back and forth their own life stories until each felt they had known the other a lifetime. Julia had come to wonder how such a small house, empty of family, could hold so much love. Her own had been greatly different, full of family voices whose echoes would long be heard in the silence after they were gone. Perhaps it was so with Mrs. McFarland. Three years of marriage can become a lifetime of love, when that’s all you are given. Entering the Great War at nineteen years of age, Robert McFarland died somewhere on the fields of Flanders face down in a rain-soaked crater with the back of his head blown off. Mrs. McFarland never married again, nor cared to be in the company of single men. “Surely if I did,” she would say when asked why, “there’d come another war or two and take him from me. And I want no more of that kind of sadness.” So the love she kept within for Robert burst forth like a nightingale’s song the moment she first took Anna in her arms. Julia knew then that when the day came for her to take Anna back, Mrs. McFarland would die once more inside.

  Morning brought more unexpected surprises to Julia, though not altogether pleasant. Sitting down to a late breakfast, Mrs. McFarland placed before her a small, warm bowl of haggis, smiling as she did.

  “A good breakfast is that you need, dearie, if you are to walk the hills with me this day,” was all she said.

  “Would I be rude to ask what it is?”

  “Not at all, most people do. A full meal is what it is—oatmeal, onions and sheep mixed together and cooked. That is all you need to know.”

  Later during their walk to the nearest neighbor and beyond, Julia asked again what it was she had tried to eat but couldn’t. When the truth came, Julia smiled.

  “I can understand now why the Scots fought as much among themselves as they did against the English, eating such a meal.”

  Then realizing she might have offended Mrs. McFarland, Julia stopped smiling and quickly apologized for her rude remark.

  “Nae, you needn’t say you’re sorry. They would’ve fought the same without the haggis, just to be fighting. Battling flowed through their veins, not blood,” Mrs. McFarland said, putting her arm around Julia, laughing.

  But then she grew silent for a moment, watching a young spring lamb trying to steady itself and suckle from its mother. Julia noticed the beautiful moment, too, but also the small tears in Mrs. McFarland’s eyes.

  “I am afraid the hills will be full of widows again,” she said. “Most of the young men, and those fit to fight among the older ones, have already gone. But you know that, with your Erich gone.”

  Julia felt ashamed. She had not told Mrs. McFarland the full truth about Erich, or Anna’s birth out of wedlock, or the terrible night of her rape. No one knew outside of Eva and never would.

  “Will you be leaving tomorrow for London?”

  “Yes, but after you have gone to church to celebrate your Easter.”

  “Come with me then, you and Anna. We will sit together.”

  “Have you forgotten, I am Jewish?”

  “Aye, today is your Sabbath and tomorrow is mine, and I’m sure the good Lord doesn’t care which is which.”

  “Your neighbors might. No, I will sit with Anna and talk of God to her and wait for you. Besides, I know nothing of your service and would feel foolish,” Julia said, yet fascinated with Mrs. McFarland’s suggestion. What a wonderful story, though, it would be to tell her good father and mother someday. Sitting and singing and praying on Easter Day in a Christian church, and a Presbyterian one at that.

  “You need not feel foolish, dearie. The preaching you can ignore. It’s the reading of the Old Book and the singing that would be for you.”

  Most of the congregation was already seated when Julia arrived and took her seat next to Mrs. McFarland, who was holding Anna. Many of the women were dressed no better than she, with scarves of poor color covering their heads. Others, wearing the brightest of their Sunday best, sat proudly with their families, all the while looking around at Julia. But the pride was Angie McFarland’s this day, sitting next to Julia—a distant young warrior from Prague who would be fighting alongside their own Scottish lads against the Germans. Nevertheless, for the rest of the congregation, seeing a Jew sitting in a Presbyterian church this far north in Scotland, where even a Catholic might still fear to be, was a rare treat for the tongues of those who cared. And Julia felt it, even though their tongues kept silent. The final amen would not come too soon for her.

  Riding back to London on the late afternoon train, the wonders of the weekend played on Julia’s mind like the soft chords of a Brahms’s lullaby. The sweetness of Mrs. McFarland was everywhere. She had boxed a small dinner of raw vegetables, with buttered raisin bread and oatmeal cookies, none store bought, for Julia to eat on the long ride home. Looking back at the day, getting through Easter services wasn’t too bad, Julia thought. Everybody was polite, some more than others, and smiled. It was the preaching that was miserable. An hour and a half of condemning sin and about everything else rotten in the world didn’t leave much room for talking up what was good. That is, unless there was a lot of explaining to do among the church folks. Praying was special, though, because the good Lord was asked to protect all those souls soon going to war enough times to include her and Eva, Julia believed. Then everyone recited the 23rd Psalm, her father’s favorite, which sent cold shivers down her spine with the “valley of death” waiting in Prague for her.

  Julia felt good now. In all her life, with churches circled around her, she had never once sat through a Protestant or Catholic service, not that she didn’t want to, or was prohibited by her father. Julia knew she wasn’t welcome unless she was ready to become a Christian, which she would never do. Mrs. McFarland was different, though. Being a Jew was who Julia was, and being a Presbyterian was who she was. Nothing else mattered and Julia loved her for it. As Julia was leaving, Mrs. McFarland had taken her hand and said, “We are family now, you and me. So you must not call me Mrs. McFarland anymore. Angie is my name, you know, and I love you dearly.” What wonderful stories she would keep to tell Anna someday.

  Julia watched the early evening shadows racing along beside the train and over the open green fields and hills, where every now and then a gathering of sheep stood together watching the train pass by. As the shadows darkened to night, lights began to appear among the sprinkling of cottages on the hillsides near the tracks. Easter day was over for these good people, Julia thought; and her own Passover, too, she guessed, unsure when the Jewish festival celebration of freedom was to begin and end. A nostalgic sadness smothered Julia, pulling the air from her lungs. Longing for home is a terrible thing; only now did she know and understand this.

  ***