Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  Ruth’s house would always be a piece of Europe lost in the hallucinatory placement of days. The Foxes had carried the gravity of their nostalgia for a homeland in their trunks and valises. This new country had succeeded in turning the Fox children into Americans, yet had not laid a finger on the parents. The English language was slippery on their tongues, too miscellaneous for precision, yet too colloquial and inaccessible to lend any sense of mastery to the immigrant. English was a fourth language for George, a third for Ruth. George Fox still dreamed in Polish; Ruth, in Yiddish; and both found it miraculous that they still dreamed at all.

  It was during the Spoleto Festival that Ruth Fox called me and asked if I would allow her husband to take Leah to a chamber music concert in Charleston. When I readily agreed, she asked me if I would come to lunch at her house and said that there were some things she wished to discuss with me. In the formal manner we had adopted with each other, I realized that Ruth was going to tell me about her childhood during the war in Europe. We had developed a shorthand code so information could be passed between us with very little being said. Because of Shyla we tried to be gentle with each other. Because of Leah we tried to find the diplomatic means of truce and detente that would one day enable us to love each other again.

  The subject of Leah was our safe ground and we discussed her long after we waved good-bye to Leah and George as they pulled out of the Foxes’ driveway to begin the ninety-minute car ride to Charleston. We ate lunch on a white wicker table and she poured us glasses of California chardonnay. A dog barked far off in the town and the drone of lawn mowers could be heard on unseen lawns. The air was full of summer smells and honeybees sang in the full glory of jasmine. In this loneliest and safest of Southern towns, Ruth began to speak of Poland after the German invasion. She gave almost no introduction to her subject matter, but began in a far-off voice that I barely recognized as hers. I only tried to stop her once, but she silenced me with an uplifted hand. She needed to tell me the events that had brought her out of Poland to this veranda in Waterford—how a Jewish girl’s fate could be so complex as to bring her to such an afternoon when she would face her Christian son-in-law and tell him of what she knew about damage and terror and bedlam in a world set afire and turned upside down by cataclysmic events. By telling me what happened to her, I soon recognized that Ruth was handing over to me a gift of extraordinary value. By informing me of her history, she was demonstrating her own need to close the door on our embattled past. It was the most generous thing anyone had ever done for me: Ruth was providing me with some key to the mystery of Shyla’s death.

  • • •

  Ruth Fox had grown up in the town of Kronilov in Poland, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi named Ephraim Graubart whose love of the Talmud was famous in many towns. Her mother’s name was Hannah Shem-Tov. Her grandfather was a merchant who sold vodka and brandy, a rough, outspoken man with a thousand opinions. Ruth’s grandmother was named Martha, a pious woman loved by Jew and non-Jew alike.

  Ruth’s childhood was happy and uneventful until she was thirteen and the war broke out. She remembered it as her whole world catching fire from all the bombs dropped on the town and the roads that soon began filling up with terrified refugees.

  After the first day of bombing, Ruth and her family slept with the smell of burnt horseflesh raw in their nostrils. Her grandfather, Moshe Shem-Tov, argued with her father, the rabbi, that they should make a run toward the Russian border, where Moshe had friends who could smuggle them across. But Ephraim Graubart had his congregants and as a rabbi he had never felt so needed or appreciated by the poor Jews who flocked to his synagogue. Because his daughter would not desert her husband and because his wife would not leave her only daughter behind, Moshe’s run to the border never materialized, though his urge toward flight never left him in the terrible days that followed. The Polish Army had already been defeated, and the Germans had turned their fury on the Jews, their most defenseless citizens. The Germans who occupied Kronilov seemed omnipresent, invincible.

  From the day following the first bombing and strafing, Ruth’s mother began busying herself with sewing clothes for her children. When she was almost finished making new dresses for Ruth and her sister Tonya, Hannah made her way to her father’s house and took him by complete surprise by asking him for all the money he was planning to leave to her upon his death. Moshe was taken aback and questioned his daughter sharply. But Hannah had inherited some of her father’s cunning and sense of self-preservation. She had listened to the Jews of Kronilov discuss the rise of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler, she knew that those who remained in the town would have a very short future. As Ruth poured out her story, I let her voice take me.

  “My mother prepared for the coming of the Germans by sewing. She made herself ready by making a dress for my sister and me. My grandfather, Moshe, could never say no to his only daughter, and when she explained that she must stay with her husband, the rabbi, she said she had a plan for the escape of her children. And so Moshe gave her the sixteen gold coins that he kept in a special book, gold coins that carry the image of Tsar Nicholas II. And she takes the coins and covers them with cloth, and turns them into buttons, eight for my new dress and eight for my sister’s.

  “By the time the dresses are finished, the Germans have set up their own provisional system of government in the broken, paralyzed town, and have begun their amusement of humiliating the civilians who fear them. They break the spirits of unarmed men for the fun of it. They take pleasure in the bayoneting of Hasidic Jews, whose foreign looks they hate. They take pleasure in hearing the most God-fearing of men plead for their lives in a German the soldiers cannot quite understand.

  “During all the shooting and torment my mother always goes out into the street to help the wounded, and one day she brings home a young Polish boy who is badly hurt when soldiers open fire on a crowd. His name is Stefan and my mother sits with him caring for him as if he were her own son. For several days Stefan looks as though he might die, but my mother’s care will not let him die and she feeds him and watches over him. My mother Hannah is like this always and does not care who is Jew or Gentile if someone is hurting and in need of help. For days he is not conscious, he is delirious and does not even know he is in this world. Finally, he begins to recover. He is a peasant from outside of Kronilov, and when he is strong enough to leave my mother sends a message to a tin peddler named Fishman, who travels from village to village doing his work. Fishman tells Stefan’s mother that her son is recovering in a rabbi’s house. When Stefan’s mother, Christine, arrives at our house and finds her son alive, she is overcome with joy and gratitude, and drops to her knees to kiss my mother’s hands in thanks.

  “As the war goes on, conditions become worse and worse for all the Jews in Poland. The Nazis set up a gallows near the headquarters of their commander, Landau, and they take pleasure in hanging Jews who they catch stealing bread or trying to smuggle valuables. Ghettos are formed and Jews are crowded into them, in the worst, poorest sections of town, where the filth is unimaginable and the water impure. After the first winter passes, there is almost no food and people are transported to slave labor camps, as families struggle desperately to stay together. Jews are cut down in the streets every day for the crime of being Jewish.

  “My mother had a good friend, a Christian, when she was a child, who lived next to her family. The girl, whose name was Maria, had no mother all the time she was young because she had died of influenza. Then Maria’s father marries a widow with five other children, and because there were so many to feed Maria is put into a convent where she becomes a nun. Her name as a nun is Sister Paulina and she writes to my mother several times each year giving news of her life and asking for letters in return. Maria always says in her letters that if she could ever be of service to my mother, she will do whatever she can though she has no money, only prayers and her God. So as well as sewing the coins of Tsar Nicholas II hidden as buttons, my mother puts in my dress the address of the convent
where Sister Paulina lives in Warsaw. She hides it on the inside, near the hem, but writes it clearly so if we ever get to Warsaw, we can find Sister Paulina. She also makes us memorize the address and she tests our knowledge of it every day, like a school assignment.

  “And then, after a time in the darkness of morning the town is awakened by cries of, ‘Out, Jews. Out of your houses, scum. Vermin. Juden. Juden.’ You cannot know how the word ‘Jew’ sounds coming from a mouth that hates you. The Germans said the word Juden like it is the vilest profanity.

  “They called for all Jews to come outside in the square for a selection. By the number of trucks assembled my grandfather knew this would be a very large selection and he was certain that this time his family would be taken. Unknown to us, this grandfather of mine had secretly prepared a place for us in an attic hidden next door. As the Jews filed out into the streets, our grandfather orders us to sneak out the back door and follow him up a back staircase that leads to a secret attic that he and a friend have prepared. They had paid a large price for this place, which was hidden from view and only reached by a ladder. It is stocked with food from the black market. Together, they make strict rules about how many from each family will be saved.

  “The Nazis round up all the Jews in the ghetto while we—two families—go up the ladder that leads to safety. The attic is small and there is no ventilation and we hear the murderous cries of the Germans and the trucks in low gear leaving the square loaded with Jews. My grandmother is so fearful that she trembles as she hides her face in my sister’s hair. Everyone is afraid, but all are quiet. A sound can mean death.

  “Soon we hear the Germans searching the buildings looking for people who have hidden. There are screams in the distance, then the sound of machine-gun fire. My father, the rabbi, has a look on his face that I know he is far away in prayer, not of this world anymore. But the rest of us are in the here and now and our fear is such that you can touch it.

  “Below us on the first floor, we hear the Germans begin to search our own building, the one where we are hiding. No one dares breathe. Then, as they come to the stairs on the first floor, the infant of the oldest Smithberg daughter begins to cry.

  “I see the look pass between the Smithberg daughter and her husband. Between Smithberg and his wife. My grandmother is in despair when she listens to the baby. When she hears the Germans coming up the stairs, she says, ‘You have killed us all, my husband.’ The mother covers the baby’s mouth with her hand, but it does no good. The baby gets angry as any baby would. She offers her breast but the baby won’t take it. The crying gets louder until her husband takes the baby and puts his great hand over the baby’s mouth. He pinches the baby’s nostrils. He covers the mouth with his palm. The baby grows silent. Her flesh turns blue. No one says anything as the baby dies before all of our eyes with the Germans searching the second floor. Somebody is found in hiding because we hear the quick burst of machine-gun fire. We also hear something much worse. We hear the barking of a dog. A moment later, the Germans are below us and we hear the dog’s barking become frenzied as it lunges in fury toward our secret place.

  “They herded us out of that place, but there was so much screaming that I don’t remember anything except a German knocking my grandfather to the floor with the butt of a rifle. I run to my grandfather and fall into his arms, trying to protect him from further blows. My mother screams my name aloud. My name was the last word she spoke. A soldier put a bullet through her brain. A huge blade passes in front of my eyes and my grandfather’s throat explodes in a jet of blood that sprays out against a far wall. The dog tears at the genitalia of Smithberg, who tries to defend himself. Then two of the soldiers take my sister and the other girls and me down the stairs, where they rape us. My sister is raped beside me. When the soldier is finished with her, he draws his knife and cuts her throat. The other girls are shot and left there.

  “This soldier who did me is very young. A German boy with frightened eyes. When he is done, he looks at me. We are alone in a room with the dead girls. He had torn my pants off and he could not look at me when he was done. He fixes his pants and wipes the dust off his uniform. He raises up his rifle to shoot me. Then he lowers it. He puts his fingers to his lips for me to remain quiet. Then he reaches down and with his hand he takes my sister’s blood and smears it all over my face. My sister’s blood is still warm as he covers me with it. Then he fires a bullet into my dead sister and motions for me to play dead. I lie there until the trucks are all gone and it is quiet again. I rise up and I walk to the sewer opening that leads down to the river. Now I have no fear at all. Like a dead person, I walk through the filth beneath the streets and when I reach the river I wait until nightfall. When night comes, I walk until I am away from the town. I bathe. I clean myself of blood and the filth of the town and the German boy that is inside me. Then I make my way to the last bridge into the town and I cross over it when I am sure there is no one coming. I walk in the dark beneath the stars to find the farm where the wounded Pole, Stefan, and his mother, Christina, live. I hear my mother’s voice saying to me, ‘Go find Christina. Find Stefan. They will take care of you for a while. But they are very poor. You cannot stay with them too long. Other Poles will betray you to the Germans. The Germans will come to kill all of you.’

  “It is a black night without stars, the road is black and I can see nothing, but I walk. It is of them I dream as I walk and I pray for them all night as I walk toward this Stefan and Christina.

  “In the morning I stop before a small farm and watch as a man walks out from a barn smoking a cigarette. I hope to ask directions to Stefan’s farm. I look at his face, but I do not trust him. So I walk further, hiding myself always until there is another farm. Here I see a young girl a little older than myself. Out in the fields, I see men, but a long way off. Hungry, I walk up and call out to her. She is surprised but comes to me and stares at me as though something is wrong. There is blood running down my leg, just a little bit, from what happened the day before. She takes me inside to see her mother and two little brothers. I ask about Stefan and Christina and the mother tells her daughter that I am a Jew and to take me back where she has found me.

  “So we leave. But the Polish girl takes me to a barn and she gives me a chicken egg. Then she takes my hand and walks me through the fields. When we pass farmers she waves to them and makes me wave as though nothing is wrong. Without any word between us, I know she is taking me to Christina’s house. We pass by a stream and she makes me wash my leg. We walk what seems like a long way, but only because I am hungry. We arrive at Christina’s and Stefan’s house and they are happy to see me. Before the girl can go, I go into a room and unravel a button. When she leaves I go with her and thank her. The first gold coin goes to her. The first five-ruble coin with the picture of Tsar Nicholas II.

  “I know I am a danger to Christina and Stefan. They hide me in a barn above the pigs. The stink of the pigs is so bad that even the German dogs could not smell a little Jewish girl. Both warn me that Christina’s husband hates the Jews and cannot be trusted with knowing the hiding place. I understand but tell them that I did not see my father die and that I would like to find my father and share his fate no matter what that is. Christina and Stefan look at each other strangely and the mother tells Stefan to show me but be careful.

  “They feed me lunch, then Stefan walks me through many fields and up a long hill where there are many trees. Long before we get to these trees, I hear shots. Stefan tells me to be careful and quiet and that we must stay hidden or the Germans will kill us. Way down in this valley, I see those trucks unloading hundreds and hundreds of Jews. Big pits have been opened and the Germans make the poor Jews take off all their clothes and line up at this ditch. Little children are crying and holding their mothers’ hands. Old women. Old men. Babies. Everyone goes into that great ditch. Then other prisoners throw lime and shovel dirt on the murdered bodies. So many people are shot that you cannot even count. I look for my father, but who could choose a fathe
r from all these truckloads and we are so far away that these all look like ants. Finally, I turn my eyes away and weep myself until there are tears no more to cry. I am thirteen years old. Stefan watches everything and I cry until the sun goes down and all the trucks drive off.

  “When Stefan starts to return home, I will not go. Instead, I leave the hiding place and run down the long hill. I run and run and it still seems like it is miles away. At first Stefan tries to stop me, then he understands and just runs behind me. He knows I am only trying to see if my father might be alive somewhere on that field. The moon is not full but close when I get to the field where the slaughter took place. It smells of blood and lime and excrement too. I hear something but I do not know what it is. I walk out into that field and I feel that Stefan is behind me like some kind of angel, some kind of messenger from God, watching me, keeping me safe. I begin calling for my father. I call out the names of all the members of my family as I walk on the freshly dug ground. I am hearing something. Then I feel something as the earth begins to move beneath me. What I hear are the screams of Jews beneath the earth. Their mouths find an air pocket and they beg for help before the air is gone. All beneath me, the living are writhing in agony, and the turned earth moves as I walk over them. In horror, every step I take I am walking on someone not yet dead. My movement causes them to move. I call for my father as I make my way over these half-dead Jews who are my neighbors from Kronilov. Stefan finally leads me back to the hiding place and he feeds me each day, until one day his father follows him and discovers me.

  “The father is a powerful, strong man and he is very angry at Christina and Stefan. How dare they hide a Jew on his farm when he knows nothing about it? Both tell him of my mother saving Stefan’s life, but nothing moves this man. He says that he will kill the Jew and feed her to the pigs if she is not gone the next day. That evening they take me out to the woods and hide me. Then one morning, Christina tells me her brother will take me to Sister Paulina. Her brother Josef is taking a wagonload of cattle hides into a market in Warsaw, and he will hide me between the skins. Before I leave them, I give Stefan and Christina each a coin to thank them for saving my life, and I give to Josef the address my mother sewed into my dress where Sister Paulina lives in the convent.