Chocolate Girls

by Annie Murray

  But this year, hands clammy with nerves, she accompanied him as his guest. The occasion was strange to her. She had never been to anything like it before. When they arrived at the hall of Singers Hill Synagogue, she thought they must have strayed into a wedding by mistake. The tables were laid out round the hall and decorated beautifully with flowers, sparkling glasses and small dishes of food. On a table to one side stood a huge candelabra which David told her was the Menorah, and alongside it a tray covered with small dishes of food for the Seder ritual.

  Mr and Mrs Leishmann greeted Edie with enthusiasm, and when she saw Esther Leishmann again after such a long time, Edie found that she liked her better than she remembered. She had somehow built the woman up almost into a demon in her mind through her own fears and jealousy, and she felt ashamed. Proudly, David introduced her to some of his other friends, some his own age, others older. She tried to remember names – this is Ruth, and this is Werner, this is Lily . . . She was made to feel very welcome. They sat together at the table and the Seder began with the lighting of candles and the blessing of the wine. As it progressed, Edie forgot most of her unease and became interested instead. She couldn’t understand all that was going on, but she watched the questions and answers given by the people, one by the youngest person there, a tiny girl of about five years old with wide eyes, but who spoke her question like a tiny adult. ‘Why is this night different from any other night?’ There were many smiles as she did so.

  David kept whispering to her throughout. ‘That’s the bitter herbs, and we dip them in salt water to represent the tears of the people who were in exile in Egypt. And that nutty stuff is charoset – it’s supposed to look like the mortar they had to use for the bricks. And it’s delicious.’

  David passed her some of the unleavened bread. ‘That is called a matzah,’ he told her. They drank far more wine than Edie had ever been used to, which made her feel woozy but happier as well, and after there was singing and dancing. David’s eyes shone with pride all evening at showing her, sharing it with her. And she smiled back and responded to the people who were friendly towards her. She understood that David somehow needed to bring the two sides of his life together.

  Forty-Two

  While Frances was away visiting the Congo, Edie had received the first letter she had had from Janet which was addressed only to her. Before, Janet had written to the two of them together, but this time she was able to write with a frankness she had never allowed herself before.

  ‘Doctor’s House!’

  Ibabongo

  19. 1. 1957

  Well, mother’s here and I think she’s doing marvellously. She does have that stiff old hip but she bore up amazingly well throughout the journey here, which can be really punishing. Martin was amazed at how well she’s coped with everything, although she does keep fretting about her malaria tablets and what she should or shouldn’t eat or drink. But I suppose that’s to be expected. After all, she’s barely ever been anywhere before! I’m full of admiration for her. She’s worrying about how you and David are getting along! I must say, I’m so glad of a chance to write just to you, Edie. I’ve missed you so much since we’ve been out here. It was odd when Mother came because as I was showing her round, telling her which plants are manioc, which plantains and rice, which of the red roads leads to the lepers’ area and which out of town, I saw all the trees and flowers and the children coming out to greet her through my first-day eyes again. It all came back to me, those first weeks, how despite all the excitement of a new start with Martin, how desperately homesick I was. Especially as I was so ill and had all that horrible trouble with my skin!

  Edie frowned on reading this. She just about remembered these details. Janet must have made light of it in her letters.

  I’m cutting down on a few of my hours in the hospital and school while Mother is here. The work has been a godsend though, to fill my time, and of course there is such suffering, you couldn’t not help. Leprosy is a terrible disease in all it does to the body and the mind, and many of the people feel honoured if someone so much as touches them to show that they don’t regard them as unclean. I shake hands, on the quiet, as often as possible with people, against medical advice! My friend Chrissie, the evangelical missionary, does the same. The lepers certainly help to relieve any self-indulgent bouts of self-pity. I am thinking I should really stop playing about doing my bits of volunteer work and take the bull by the horns – train as a nurse myself so that I could be more use. I do feel I should be of use to someone at least!

  I do so miss you, Edie – your kindness and good sense – and wish I’d confided in you more, though it would have felt disloyal to Martin. I don’t know if you really knew how bad that patch was for us over children, or rather the lack of them. I suppose I’m over that now, but he is still the work obsessive he ever was. He seems to feel he’s not living fully unless he goes flat out at it. So I don’t always see much of him and life can be lonely at times. I understand it, and he’s very good to me, always has been. BUT . . .! Thank goodness for Chrissie! She’s quite quaint in some ways but very passionate about everything she does and she’s been good for me. But I’d like to see you, and sit talking away the afternoons like we sometimes used to! I can’t help wishing things could have been different – that we could have had a family and not had to live all the way across the world for Martin to feel happy with himself.

  Still – Chrissie says I am bound to have been brought over here (by the Lord, she would say) for a reason and sooner or later I’ll find out exactly what it is!

  With more affectionate greetings she signed off.

  Her letter had allowed Edie to write back with more candour concerning her feelings about David at that time, which was a great relief. Janet replied, gently advising her to ‘give him a long rope’, as she put it. He needed time to adjust to his new sense of himself. Ever since, their letters had been closer, more confiding, and Edie found comfort in this with David gone.

  She waited with great expectation for letters now. They heard from Marie Falla occasionally. Marie and her husband had settled in Walsall and had three children, but Marie usually wrote when the family visited Guernsey on holiday. But Edie heard nothing from Ruby any more, though she wrote to her from time to time, and though a little hurt, took this to mean that Ruby had settled into American life as if born to it. However, it was David’s letters to which she looked forward most. When the first one arrived she was trembling with impatience as she opened it, and after reading with pleasure and surprise, handed it to Frances, saying, ‘How is it I never noticed before how funny Davey is?’

  ‘Yes, his sense of humour comes out in letters.’ Frances peered at the closely written lines. ‘You’ll have to read it to me. I’ve left my reading glasses upstairs.’

  As Edie read, she and Frances laughed at his light-hearted depiction of Kibbutz Hamesh, which meant Kibbutz Five, near Tiberias, and his tedious, back-breaking work of clearing fields, strewn with rocks and scrubby bushes, for cultivation. He described his workmates, especially a girl called Gila, a year his junior, whom he portrayed as an utterly terrifying Amazon.

  She’s not very big but she still seems to be as strong as several horses. A proper Sabra. (That’s what they call the native-born Israelis – the same name they give the prickly pears, because they say both are hard and spiny on the outside and soft and tender inside!) She strides about in dusty grey trousers with a scarf round her hair and keeps thrusting an army canteen at me and barking, ‘Water – you must take water!’ When she saw me rubbing my sore back the first day she looked at me with absolutely no pity at all and said, ‘Is good you come in springtime, David’ (she pronounces it Daveed). ‘In summer, you die.’ Then she strode off with a bucket of stones in each hand. So – I can hardly wait ’til summer now!

  And he wrote about some of the linguistic misunderstandings that kept cropping up in a community peopled with occupants from all over the place.

  ‘I have now been enrolled on an Ulpan,�
�� he told them. ‘I’ve heard so many languages here – Polish, Russian, German, French – so this is the course used all over Israel for immigrants to learn Hebrew. It’s not too difficult, and especially as we’re all trying to struggle on and speak it together. But life is full of mistakes. We have big breakfasts here – bread and cheese, yoghurt, salad. This morning at breakfast I asked someone to pass me a cucumber and had evidently asked them for a screwdriver instead!’

  ‘Well,’ Frances said at the end. ‘He sounds happy, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ Edie sighed. ‘He does. And I suppose I’m glad!’

  Forty-Three

  David went to search for his father for the first time at the end of March. Back in the winter, Mr Leishmann had entered into a brief but tantalizing correspondence with the authorities in Tel Aviv, and after a delay of some months, during which time his letter must have passed through a number of different hands, they received a reply. Of course, more than one Hermann Mayer appeared in their records, but there was one who appeared to fit, given the details of age and former place of residence, and who had spent the required number of weeks in the Absorption Centre for new immigrants in Tel Aviv. There was a forwarding address in Haifa.

  On reading this letter, David had felt pulses of strange emotion. Part of it was like the excitement of a hunter tracking an animal. Haifa! So he knew which town the man had gone to. Perhaps he was getting closer to finding him . . . But there was also a chill of fear. Was this Hermann Mayer his father? And if so, would he ever be able to meet him, find out about his blood family? Supposing it all felt wrong – that the man didn’t feel like his father at all? In part, he wanted to run away and hide from all this. Sometimes he didn’t want to know his name was Rudi Mayer. It would be far easier to remain plain English David Weale.

  He had not told Edie, then, that he had discovered the possible whereabouts of his father, and when he and Joe Leishmann composed a letter to the address in Haifa and waited in anticipation, there was no reply. Perhaps Hermann Mayer had died or moved house, or didn’t want to know about a son who he had never seen. David asked himself why he should pursue this stranger and insist he take on the role of father.

  But as soon as he had been in Kibbutz Hamesh for just a few days, had met other kibbutz members who had lost most or all of their families in the Nazi death camps, he knew for certain that he must go and search for Hermann Mayer. There were so many dead, so many families destroyed and lost to one another. His father and aunt were very likely to be alive and living somewhere in this small country. How could he stay here and not try to find them?

  He looked out with intense interest from the smelly, rumbling old bus as they left Tiberias and travelled west. They passed through small towns and villages of square little houses where dogs and chickens scattered out of the bus’s path and children stood staring. He saw young plantations of date and banana trees, bare stony fields where rows of women bent over hoes, tilling the earth. As they left Nazareth clouds piled in the sky and there came a harsh downpour, rain beating the windows and, for about twenty minutes, making it impossible to see anything outside at all. Eventually the clouds passed, leaving watery sunshine and the smell of the wet earth blowing in through the windows. It felt strange to be out on the road again after the enclosed, intense life of Kibbutz Hamesh, and he welcomed a chance to be quiet, away from the raucous, argumentative kibbutzniks.

  When they reached Haifa he drank in the sight of it. In fact it was quite a disappointing prospect: a sprawl of industry surrounding the port of Haifa, its scooped-out bay formed by a little protuberance of land in the otherwise straight Israeli coast.

  It was early afternoon when David climbed down from the bus, and the sun was shining. Amir, the land foreman, had given him a day and a half off to make the trip, when David told him what he needed to do. When he’d left, after that morning’s chores, the tanned, wiry-legged Amir had said, ‘Shalom – and good luck, Daveed,’ with unusual tenderness.

  Standing in the blast of blue fumes as the bus moved off again, David realized foolishly that he didn’t even have a map of Haifa. He took out the slip of paper he had pushed into his pocket. He would have to keep asking until he found it.

  Setting off along the busy road, he asked directions several times and was guided by pointing fingers and the usual Israeli mix of languages. It seemed that the address was in the old city, close to the industrial zone. He started to feel hungry and thirsty, hot now the sun was out, and rather jaded. Haifa was mainly a Jewish city, he had been told. Most of the Arabs had left when the State was established. In his idealistic mind that had made it sound fine, a jewel of a place, but in reality it seemed like a large, cacophonous building site. There was the oil refinery, and all the cranes and industrial buildings of the port, and on all sides blocks of sandy-coloured apartments were going up, spare and hollow-eyed without their windows in. He stopped at a café on the busy Allenby Road, with lorries roaring past, for a drink of coffee and a sticky slice of apple cake which put him in a better humour. By the time he found the address, in a crumbling, ochre-painted building in the old city, it was already three o’clock.

  As he stood outside the heavy brown door in the shade of the buildings, the situation seemed absurd. Here he was, some English boy, with a light tan and stronger muscles from a few weeks’ work on the land, standing at a door he had never seen before and expecting to find his father behind it. A father he had written to but who had never replied to his letters at all, let alone with enthusiasm! He felt incredibly foolish and vulnerable.

  He forced his hand to take the old brass knocker and banged it hard, twice. There was a long silence. The house felt deserted. As he looked up he saw that the paintwork was in a far worse state than the houses around it, all the shutters were closed and the ones near the top seemed to be covered in bird mess. Perhaps the place had stood empty for years? He pictured inside the hallway, filling up with letters that were never answered. Perhaps his letter was there, in a deep drift of lost correspondence? But then he saw there was no letterbox: instead there was a metal container attached to the wall, with a slit in it. He thought about trying to look inside it, but before he could move, the door of the adjoining house opened and he saw an old woman looking out at him. She was tiny, clad completely in black with a shawl round her shoulders, her grey hair in a bun, tiny black mules on her feet. Her face was as lined as a desert wadi.

  ‘You want someone?’

  Her voiced had a cracked note but the Hebrew was quite clear. She did not leave her own doorway though, hovering as if ready to scuttle back inside, and David went over to her, arranging his newly acquired Hebrew sentences in his mind.

  ‘Is anyone inside?’ He pointed up at the other house.

  ‘Lo.’ She shook her head emphatically. ‘Not now.’ She made signs to indicate that the inside of the house was very bad. It seemed one of the floors had collapsed. ‘Who you want?’

  ‘I am looking for a man called Hermann Mayer. I think he lived here when he came from Germany.’

  ‘Hermann Mayer?’ She did not have to think for long. Although she appeared so old she was completely alert. ‘Ken! Yes – he was here.’ She nodded, but without much animation. ‘Hermann Mayer . . . Ken, ken . . . I remember him.’ He expected her to be more curious. In England people would be nosey and want to know what you were about. He supposed that here most people’s lives were disjointed. Everyone was looking for someone.

  ‘There was a lady,’ she added. ‘Miss Annaliese. Two, maybe three years they were here.’ The woman saw he was a beginner in Hebrew, and explained slowly, with accompanying gestures, that she had been a sort of concierge for both the houses for many years, but now, given the state of the other place, for only one.

  David felt his blood pulsing hard round his body. They had been here – they existed! He was so close!

  ‘I wrote to them,’ he said. ‘Did you send letters to them?’

  ‘Ah—’ The old lady made a sorrowful gesture.
She drew a line back and forth in the air with her hand. ‘Lo. Herr Mayer was a bitter man. He said no letters. Nothing good could come to him so to throw anything which came. He thought there would be nothing.’ He saw her respond to the pain in his eyes as she spoke. It was lost, he was thinking. He’d never find him now. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You know him?’

  It was his turn for an emphatic, ‘Lo.’ He shook his head. ‘But I believe he is my father.’ Sadly, he asked, ‘Do you know where he is now – b’vaka’sha? Please?’

  ‘I have not seen him,’ she said. Her tone was gentle. ‘But I think they went to live on the Carmel. Michaelangelo Street. I do not know which house.’

  David smiled, renewed in hope. ‘Thank you – you are very kind. What is your name?’

  ‘Mrs Spielman,’ she told him. ‘And yours?’

  He hesitated. ‘Rudi Mayer.’

  She reached out and for a moment he felt her warm, wizened hand on his wrist. ‘Perhaps you should not expect too much of your father. But I wish you good luck, my boy.’

  I can’t go tonight, he thought. The day was waning, and already seemed to have gone on a long time. He was tired and felt stirred up and unready, needing time for these new fragments of information from the old lady to sink into his mind.

  The kibbutz had given him the address of a very cheap hostel he could stay in at the foot of Mount Carmel. It was rudimentary but clean, and he was to share a dormitory with five others. He gathered from them that the hostel was used mainly by Israelis on trips to look round the country, and idealistic young people, often American, on their way to try out life on a kibbutz. Keeping his canvas bag containing his few possessions with him, he went out again to explore further. Not far from the hostel one of the steep, zigzagging roads led up the Carmel and he began to climb. The evening was cool, scented with flowers and pleasant for walking, and when he had climbed a good way up he was at last rewarded with views that provided the sense of pride and exhilaration he had hoped for. Panting, he stood at a bend in the road and looked down over the gold dome of the Bahai shrine and the chaotic sprawl of the city where evening lights were coming on, twinkling in the dusk. Beyond these lay the wide sweep of the bay, lamps strung along the coast road like a necklace, and beyond them the dark sea. David smiled. Excitement welled up in him. Eretz Yisrael. He formed the words with his lips, proud of the feel of Hebrew. It seemed to require more energy and fire to speak than English, forcing out those sounds from the throat and teeth. And he would learn it until he was fluent like Amir and the others. Like Gila! The thought of her excited him, even though she seemed untouchable, almost another species. He took a deep breath of the sulphurous evening air. What a place this is! he thought. Our land. My people. What we can make here!