by Tara Heavey
‘All killed in the camps.’
‘Oh, God. Where?’
‘Do you mind if I tell you about it another day? I don’t want him to think we’re talking about him.’
‘Okay. Yes. You’re right.’
‘Now come here.’
‘Someone might see.’
‘I don’t care.’
It was an hour later when Lance and Mrs Prendergast came out to the garden. Lance’s air was nonchalant, but in a way that was almost too studied. He examined the plants intently, looking at everything there was to look at – at everything except the people. They – Uri, Seth and Aoife – were standing in a small circle, chatting. The talk died away when they spotted Lance.
He and his mother drew close. Greetings were exchanged. Lance seemed well, Aoife thought. He’d put on a little weight and his cheeks had filled out. He’d lost that gaunt, waxen look. He seemed more relaxed too. Less twitchy and no longer brimming with nervous energy. Although he was somewhat nervous. He met Uri’s eyes with difficulty. Then he held out his hand. The others held their breath as they waited to see what Uri would do.
Uri took Lance’s hand and shook it.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Lance. ‘What I said to you before. It was wrong. Unforgivable. It’ll never happen again.’
Uri nodded. ‘Apology accepted.’
Lance’s face relaxed into a relieved smile. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you so very much. That means a lot.’ He turned to his mother. ‘I’ll be up in my room if you need me.’ He put his hands into his pockets and walked back to the house.
‘Thank you, Uri,’ said Mrs Prendergast.
Uri smiled.
‘I think he’s going to be all right,’ she added.
44
Along with thousands like him, Uri was sent to a displaced-persons camp in Germany. The conditions were better than they had been in the concentration camp but only just. Crucially, he was no longer in fear of his life or anticipating a beating. But there was never enough food and it was too cramped.
He scanned every female face, every girl child. Sometimes he would get excited by the back of a head and run around to the front, but he was always disappointed. He did this for weeks. And the weeks stretched into months. His hope was fading. Then, one day, he had an idea. What if his mother and sister had gone back to their home in Berlin and were waiting for him there? There was only one way to find out. Without saying anything to anyone, he saved up three or four days’ rations, packed a knapsack with what few belongings he had, and set off to find his family. It was easy to sneak out. Nobody took much notice of an eleven-year-old boy. He knew he wasn’t far from Berlin – he had made some seemingly innocent enquiries – and the thought that his mother might be waiting for him, just a short distance away, was too much of a temptation to resist.
It took him a week. It was summer so there was no problem with sleeping outdoors. If it was a bit chilly, he’d find a nice snug barn and fall asleep to the sound of animals breathing. He would wash in a stream in the morning, laughing as he splashed his face with icy drops. He was good at finding his way. He’d been on many camping trips with his father and grandfather before the war and they had taught him more than he had realized. He felt at home in the fields and the woods.
But it shouldn’t have taken him a whole week. He must have gone wrong somewhere. But make it he did, although he didn’t know it at first. Because all was changed. The house was no longer standing. It was nothing but a pile of rubble – as were their neighbours’ houses. There was no one around. Birdsong filled the air. Uri sat on a piece of the old kitchen wall and cried his heart out. Until then he hadn’t known how strongly he’d been clinging to the hope that the house would be standing, his mother cooking in the kitchen, his sister playing in the garden. Throughout it all. Through everything that had happened to him. He’d never felt so alone. He had to face the possibility that he’d never see his family again, and it was almost too much for his little-boy heart to bear.
When he was all cried out, Uri got up and looked around the rubble, remembering where everything used to be, imagining it as it once was. Some of his parents’ furniture was amazingly intact. There was the kitchen table, and his parents’ bed seemed to have fallen through the roof and landed where the dining room used to be. A thousand memories of his family all together. He cried again when he found the shredded remains of a poster that used to be on his bedroom wall. He looked for signs that his mother and sister had been there before him – perhaps looking for him. But there were none. He did find a teddy that Hannah had left during their hasty move to Ghetto. He remembered her crying for it one night. There was nothing his parents could do. They weren’t allowed to go back. Uri hadn’t understood that at the time. He saw now how they had tried to shelter him from everything. Now, less than a year later, there was so much he knew. So much he wished he didn’t.
He picked up the teddy and stuffed it into his knapsack. Then he wandered down to the river behind the house. It was still there, remarkably unchanged. The same water, the same rocks. Just as he’d seen it in his dreams. He stripped off and dived in. He imagined he was a fish, quicksilver and light. Fish didn’t have to worry about being Jewish. They were just fish. Or he could be an otter. He rolled, he splashed, he played. He felt nine years old again. But once he was out of the water, the familiar heaviness descended upon him and he was eleven-year-old Uri once more, with everything that he knew.
He lay on a rock until the sun had dried him off. Then he dressed and walked back to the house. His stomach was starting its eternal rumbling and he’d had an idea. He went to where his father’s kitchen garden used to be. There was a small chance… yes! Just as he had hoped. The raspberry canes were laden with fruit and there was no one to eat it. No one but Uri and the birds. He gorged himself, then moved on to the gooseberries. He’d never have considered them before the war, but now… When he’d eaten his fill, he stuffed as many berries as he could into his knapsack. Then he headed back to the camp. He had nowhere else to go.
The return journey took him four days. His raids on abandoned kitchen gardens sustained him as he went. He thought a lot as he walked, mostly about his family. By the time he reached the camp, he’d come to a decision. The next day, he approached one of the teachers at the camp’s makeshift school.
‘What is it, Uri?’
‘My father has family in Ireland. Will you help me get a letter to them?’
* * *
It took weeks to get an address for Samuel’s cousin. They finally tracked him down through one of the Jewish agencies. Then the letter was sent. Uri wrote it but the teacher helped him and made sure the return address was legible. Uri felt as if he was sending out a letter in a bottle.
For two whole months he waited, each day checking the post, each day more anxious. He’d never met this man or his people. Would they even care about his existence? Be willing to take in a boy they’d never met?
At last a reply, with a return address in Dublin. Uri went off on his own to read it – his entire future in his hands. He opened the letter and this was what he read:
My dearest Uri,
I am overjoyed to hear of your survival. I can only assume from your letter that your father and the rest of your family were not so fortunate. Nothing would make me happier than for you to come and live with us. Of course you must come. I will set things in motion immediately. In the meantime, please write often.
G-d be with you,
Jacob Rosenberg
Uri clutched the letter to his chest and closed his eyes. He was no longer alone in the world.
But the plan was to take another three years to come to fruition. Not until 1948 did Ireland agree to take in a hundred and fifty refugee Jewish children. The government didn’t want to, but its leader, de Valera, made them.
Uri arrived at the port at North Wall, a tired, undernourished fourteen-year-old. His new family were there to meet him on dry land. He recognized them from photos they had sent. They embraced him
as if they had known him for ever and brought him back to their home – the first proper home he’d known in years. It was a heady experience. At first, it overwhelmed him and he didn’t know what to do or say. But they were so welcoming, so kind, so full of unconditional love for this boy whom they had never met that they saved him.
There was his uncle Jacob – because that was what he was instructed to call him – his aunt Martha and his two young cousins, ten-year-old David and eight-year-old Sarah. They astounded him, these happy, robust, pink-cheeked people. He wasn’t used to seeing such well-fed Jews. And the children played so happily, as if they’d never had to endure hardship or witness a bad thing in all their lives. Which, of course, they hadn’t. Uri vaguely recalled having been like that once.
At first, he didn’t believe in them, his faith in humankind smashed almost to nothing. But, little by little, they won his trust and later his love.
Jacob was a tailor, and the following year, Uri began his apprenticeship in that trade. He was hard-working, quick, dextrous and, most of all, grateful for being given a second chance. He learned quickly and advanced rapidly. It seemed as if his luck had turned. He wondered sometimes if it was possible for a person to use up all of their bad-luck quota for a lifetime. If it was, he had certainly used up – exceeded – his. But he wasn’t optimistic enough to believe that.
Jacob’s business partner – a Mr Stern – had a daughter. Her name was Deborah. She would come to the shop sometimes. She had glossy curls, which bounced every time she laughed, which was often. And her dimples. Uri could have watched them for hours. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Now he knew that perfection existed in this imperfect world.
‘Close your mouth, Uri, you’re catching flies.’ The other men had laughed at him. Which embarrassed him because he wasn’t normally so transparent in his emotions. Uri was a reserved, serious and well-mannered young man, prone to dark moods but also to great kindness. Had his destiny been different, he might have been different. But that was something neither he nor anyone else would ever know for sure.
Miraculously, she liked him too. Her light was drawn to his darkness. He pulled her in. It was lucky that she was a forward and loquacious girl, because he might never have had the courage to approach her.
She would come up to him in the workshop and engage him in conversation. This wasn’t always easy: Uri’s innate reticence, combined with the dumbstruck nature of his regard for her, rendered him monosyllabic, but she must have sensed that there was something there, something beyond words, in the same way that Uri saw something beneath the girlish dimples. Depth. A woman deep enough and strong enough to take him on. She might even be his bashert. His soul-mate.
So it was that he found himself knocking on Mr Stern’s office door one afternoon.
‘Come in.’
The fear that Uri felt surprised him. He hadn’t felt such fear for a long time – because nothing had meant so much to him for a long time. Once he had thought that there was nothing – no one – left for anyone to take away from him. But now there was.
Mr Stern’s face opened out into a smile. ‘Uri. What can I do for you?’ The older man leaned back in his chair, glad of the distraction, and placed his hands behind his head.
Uri closed the door behind him and, cap in hand, approached the desk. ‘Mr Stern.’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s about your daughter.’
‘Ah.’
‘I would like your permission to ask Deborah to go dancing with me this Saturday night.’
Uri waited and waited, as Mr Stern regarded him solemnly for what seemed like an age. Finally, he spoke: ‘You have my permission.’
Uri allowed himself to breathe. ‘I do?’
Mr Stern laughed. A deep, raspy chuckle. ‘Why the surprise?’
‘Because I have nothing.’
That shocked them both and hung in the air between the two men, waiting for a response. It was a long time coming, as Reuben Stern thought back on the years he’d known this boy – now a man – how from the very first day he’d observed his capacity for hard work, his respect for his elders, his loyalty, his integrity. His gratitude.
‘I think you have everything my daughter needs,’ he said quietly.
‘Thank you, sir.’ Uri inclined his head and backed towards the door.
‘And besides,’ said Mr Stern, as Uri was about to leave, ‘you’re Jewish, aren’t you?’
That Saturday night, Uri’s heart caught in his throat every time he looked at Deborah and when his arm encircled her waist, her hand resting gently on his shoulder. Many years later, the widowed Uri could still remember the feel of her in his arms. He didn’t even have to close his eyes: Deborah was as real to him as if she were still living and breathing beside him.
They were betrothed a year later, but it was another full year before the wedding ceremony took place. A year in which Uri worked outlandish hours to earn enough to set up home with his bride.
The week before the ceremony, in which the bride and groom were not permitted to see each other, nearly killed Uri, but it made his first glimpse of Deborah on their wedding day, her eyes sparkling with unshed tears beneath her veil, all the more mesmerizing. As they stood under the chuppah, the seven blessings recited, Uri had the strangest feeling that something was being returned to him – the feminine element of his life, which had been missing since that first day in the camp. And in the riotous celebration that followed, he laughed as he hadn’t done since he was ten years old.
He marvelled at the forces that had brought him to this point in his life. An orphan, but with a family. In a strange land, but with a home. And now setting up his own home and about to start his own family.
On their wedding night, Uri told Deborah what had happened to him and his family during the war. Even the part about his father being shot and his own hand in it. He hadn’t told another soul. But she was his wife now, and part of him. She listened to the grim reality of a life she had only half guessed at and they cried in each other’s arms. Deborah promised Uri that it would be her life’s work to heal his pain with her love. She was as good as her word.
They waited a long time for the children to arrive, so long that they’d begun to think they wouldn’t come at all. Part of Uri was content with this – a part he tried to keep hidden from Deborah. Did he really want to bring his children into a world in which so many terrible things could happen? He didn’t know that he could survive another loss. But the children arrived in their own good time. Deborah thought them a miracle.
They had two sons – Seth and Aaron. The day Seth was born, Uri finally knew how much his father had loved him. He’d always thought he’d known, but now he knew it in his soul. And when he saw Deborah with their child, he understood how much his mother had loved him.
The boys grew, as boys do. They gave him unimaginable joy and unimaginable sadness – first, because they would never know their grandparents and, second, because their grandparents would never know them. He wondered what kind of aunt Hannah would have been. What type of woman would that precocious child have become?
There were times when Seth looked so like his grandfather, Samuel, that Uri felt as if God was ripping out his heart with his bare hands. Such piercing, bittersweet pain. And when Seth exhibited a flair for gardening, Uri knew for sure that his father lived on. He taught Seth everything he knew, everything his own father had taught him, and he watched that talent grow and blossom.
But a part of him could never fully connect with his children, the same part that couldn’t talk about the past. They felt it and he felt it too. It was at its worst when they were teenagers, their moodiness colliding with his own. They were all so lucky in having Deborah to coddle, correct and act as a warm, cuddly buffer between them.
By the time Deborah died, they had reached an accommodation, Uri and his sons. They gathered around each other and held each other up, urging each other to go on in their own individual ways. Privately, Uri did
n’t know if he could. Deborah had sustained him for so long that there were days when he felt he could no longer go on living. He survived for his sons, and in memory of those who hadn’t had any choice as to whether they lived or died.
Then one day, about a year after Deborah’s death, Uri saw a notice in a local food store. Or was it a sign?
Could it be that, for a second time, a garden would save his life?
45
Pearl, the quiet but intense Protestant lady, had set Aoife thinking. Even if she didn’t want the gathering to be religious in the strictest sense of the word, perhaps they could inject a little meaning into it to make it something more than a mere autumn party.
The name itself was something they discussed endlessly. The children were vociferously unanimous in favour of the Autumn Party. Emily, who was now on the phone almost daily with her constant ideas and enthusiasms, wanted to call it Cornucopia, in reference to the ancient symbol of food and abundance, otherwise known as the horn of plenty.
‘I have one of those,’ said Seth.
‘Stop!’ Aoife hissed – Mrs Prendergast was within earshot.
‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about,’ the older lady said. ‘Why can’t we just call it a harvest festival and have done with it?’
‘That’s too traditional,’ said Aoife.
‘What’s wrong with tradition?’
‘Nothing. But it might give people the wrong impression. Make people think it’s something it’s not. Like what happened with your friend Pearl.’
‘She’s no friend of mine, dear.’
‘Okay. But you know what I mean.’
Mrs Prendergast was silent, which indicated that she did know what Aoife meant but wasn’t going to admit it.
Then Aoife suggested, ‘Fall Harvest.’
‘No,’ said Uri, very firmly, surprising Aoife as he normally offered no opinion on the matter, instead listening to their endless discussions with tolerant amusement. Seth seemed uncomfortable too. It wasn’t until she got home and looked up ‘Fall Harvest’ on the Internet that she discovered why. Her face burned, even though she was alone in her own house: it was a term the Nazis had used to describe a particular phase of Jewish murders.