Oh, My Darling

by Shaena Lambert

  Sanford was the prince of Christ Church Parish Boys Academy—an absolute dark prince of power and prestige, though by and large he didn’t abuse his authority, never throwing the younger boys’ hymn books in puddles as Miguel Santos did. Like Prince Hal, he was universally loved, and though one day (so we felt) he would wear the crown of king, still he deigned to go among the rabble. He was the champion rounders player, best at cricket, captain of the rugby team. When he ran his legs spun like a comic strip figure’s—forming wheels of air. He was, in his excellence, the sort of boy Mutti would have liked for a son, and Father would have embraced for the Wandervogels, except for the fact, rather crucial, that Sanford was Jewish.

  For the most part Mutti’s anti-Semitism was casual, almost respectful: she appreciated survival. But in Barbados it was different. At least a third of the boys at my school were Jewish, from families that had immigrated to the Caribbean at the end of the nineteenth century, making it rich in wholesale exports. Some, like Sanford’s family, lived on Oistins Row, in houses overlooking the beach. They had to cross the road to swim, and the beach was rocky, and you couldn’t put a foot down but you’d step on a prickly sea urchin (in which case you’d have to urinate on the puncture wound), but still: east of Oistins meant prestige. This acted on Mutti, bringing out old humiliations, how her parents had lost their property to a Jewish mortgage company. It seemed hard for her that she, an aristocrat, did not live on Oistins Row.

  Now here was Sanford Fortescu, leaning forward in his bus seat, asking if I understood the homework. We had to compose stories from magazine pictures stuck to pieces of cardboard. I took one glance at Sanford’s scene (a cat by a hearth, pie steaming on a window ledge) and a story started to grow: I peopled his cottage with a couple of gnomes, invented a prince and a dragon, filled the lane with a pageant of hunters, pages, trumpeters, children strewing petals.

  “How did you come up with that?” Sanford said. “When I look at this picture I see a cat.” He lowered his voice. “You’re Rudy, aren’t you. Do you suppose you want to meet me at Oistins—bike to my house after school? Course you’d have to put up with my five sisters.”

  Five. Had I heard right? It sounded like a fairy tale.

  “Oh, I have five, all right.” He listed them off on his fingers: “Tamara, Rosalia, Lucia, Luisa, Seraphina. They’re all older than me, except Seraphina. She’s a pipsqueak. Stands about this height—” He raised a hand to his shoulder. “She’s horribly spoiled.”

  Seraphina. Isn’t that lovely? I asked where her name came from, but Sanford just said: “My parents, of course. Didn’t yours name you? Her hair is your colour,” he added. “She can sit on her pigtails.”

  The names of the older sisters sounded dank and mature, but Seraphina’s glowed. To this day I see Hebrew letters in a margin, arcane notes regarding spheres of heaven, seraphim and cherubim.

  Getting off the bus, Sanford repeated his invitation. Then off he strode, trailing clouds of glory.

  Come home with me. One might discern a pattern: Father saying those words bold as life from the shadow of that hulking pinball machine in the dressing room, and Sanford whispering them years ago on the school bus. If I were the type, I’d see an analyst, pour out the contents of my life, hawks and hand grenades, Mutti’s torchlit parades mixing with Father’s groans. Then there is Peter—poor thing. Why is it that in every relationship a dismal moment arrives when one’s lover suggests the seaside? The Baltic, with its dreary pebbles, becomes an absolute must-see. I think Peter imagines the sea spray washing us clean, scrubbing the crenellations of our furrowed brains.

  Peter is six foot two, wiry and athletic. He wears button-down shirts and high-waisted corduroys that do not do justice to his lovely ass. He is a technician in a computer firm, not a shoe salesman or a cobbler, though his last name is Shumaker, which I find charming: as though Peter left me late at night to make shoes in a little shop, accompanied by elves. His parents were Presbyterians from Munich. According to Peter they were persecuted for their beliefs during the war. I had no idea that Presbyterians were a persecuted minority. Can you picture it? Clandestine Presbyterian meetings in the dead of night. The handing out of inflammatory Presbyterian literature. But Peter believes adamantly in these tales of Presbyterian derring-do, so I do not pop his balloon.

  It isn’t just me at the seaside that Peter wants: it is me stripped of my finery. As though there were a greater truth to seeing me in jeans and a badly fitting T-shirt. Yet Peter knows what I’m capable of creating—or should I say, of teasing into the open. Each Friday at the Ex’n’Pop I push my way from the dressing room, through the crowd on bar stools and at tables ( the place, let me tell you, is a lot more crowded than it ever gets on Punk Night). The stage is at the front of the bar, next to the door. It is an old window alcove, backed with corrugated tin shutters, but we have draped it with plum-coloured velvet curtains. Up I go, balancing the feathered headdress ever so carefully. Then I dance, shedding fishnet stockings, taking forever to unzip my organza dress. When I’m down to my G-string, I spring onto my hands (that old trick, no easy feat in that tiny space), and yes, the headdress stays in place, it’s practically nailed to my head. And all this is fine, it impresses the Beck-drinking crowd. But this is not what they’ve come for, what has made me, I confess, a sensation. It is when I stop, and the piped-in music dies, and I ask Ulf to pass me a bar stool—this is when I make them ache. Even Peter that first time, wandering into the Ex’n’Pop with tennis friends, the straightest gay man in Berlin, his lean mouth, which I know to be kind, pursed in contempt, even he ached when I sang my “Little Bird” song.

  I got the idea from a photo in a National Geographic, which I found at my dentist’s office on the Ku’damm: it showed a bird with turquoise, cobalt and brown-speckled plumage hanging upside down from the limb of a tree. Prince Rudolph’s Blue Bird of Paradise. All the way home I was so excited, I kept swallowing the paste the dentist had scrubbed onto my teeth. I saw Father and me upside down walking across the sand. I saw the Hanged Man in Mutti’s Troccas deck, dangling from a gallows tree. (No, he isn’t dead, Mutti whispered to me. Look, the gallows is sprouting branches.) I heard Father’s tenor rising out of nowhere, singing the folk song he had learned in the Wandervogels. Sometimes he sang it at my bedside as a lullaby. Sometimes Mutti joined him, both of them looking down at me tenderly.

  “Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär

  Und auch zwei Flüglein hätt,

  Flog ich zu dir.”

  If I were a little bird

  And I had two little wings,

  I would fly to you.

  It is a touching folk song, quite famous, which many composers, including Beethoven, have set to music. The last stanza goes like this:

  There is not one hour of the night

  When my heart is not awake

  And thinking of you.

  Sanford and I biked past the Oistins bar with its picnic tables out front. The locals shouted at us, acknowledging my flare of blond hair, which attracted attention wherever I went. A playing card clacked in Sanford’s spokes. Between the bar and the motel I glimpsed the sea. Herculean, I thought, liking the word and all that it implied of muscles, and Greece, and uncomplicated strength.

  In memory this scene is all blue sky and blue sea, but next moment the sky has darkened. Frantically we bicycle up the slope while things from our lives blow past us, like the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz. Poor us! Seraphina pitches by in her blue dress, and Mutti, shuffling her deck, and Father pulling on his boots. At the base of the seaside cliff, the shoreline is coated with the brittle, cupped shells of sea urchins—the size of cat skulls.

  Word had gotten out on our sunny island. Pilar Romeros, a friend of my mother’s, had come to the house the afternoon before, wearing a pink-and-green pantsuit with paisley swirls. I let her in, seeing with alarm the paisley outline of her crotch. From the bar in the living room, just inside the sli
ding glass doors, I watched as she and Mutti took turns shuffling the cards, pausing to take sips of their gin and tonics.

  Pilar riffled the deck expertly. “It is grossly unfair.”

  “My heart is breaking,” Mutti whispered.

  “Who is this ‘eyewitness’?”

  “Rudy has been happy.”

  “Enough.”

  Pilar turned the cards over: swords and penta-cles. More swords. I strained to see the layout. Pilar flipped the last card: yes, there he was, the Hanged Man, dangling upside down from the gallows tree. Mutti laughed out loud, it was so awful.

  “Are you satisfied?” she said. “My mother used to call this card the Traitor.”

  I lay down on the tile floor with its beige-and-white cloudy swirls. A glass of Coke had spilled there once and a mass of ants had swarmed in, covering the spillage with legs and bodies. Leiscec. That was the word that had gotten out. The word I wasn’t supposed to hear. Leiscec—a Lithuanian village. I always imagine it tinted: a green sun shining on green fields, green houses.

  So, even on that bike ride to Sanford’s house, with the sea over our right shoulders and the sky above, there was an enormous eye floating above us like a second sun, fleshily glistening. The eye of the eyewitness.

  We cycled up the driveway, past palms with trunks as thick as elephants’ legs, then threw our bikes on the gravel by the side of the house. We descended three stone steps to enter a cool kitchen with a stone floor. Standing behind a table was a heavy-breasted black woman wearing a flowered skirt. She held a knife.

  “He’s all right.” Sanford slid into a chair at the table. “He’s my new friend.”

  “Where’s your old friend?”

  “Miguel? I hate Miguel.”

  “That boy’s no end of trouble.” She hacked a papaya in two.

  “She’s imagining that’s Miguel’s head.”

  Flash. Chop. Flash. The papaya was cut in eighths.

  “I hate papaya.” I could hear a younger child in Sanford’s voice.

  “You supposed to eat fruit.”

  “But not papaya.”

  “It ain’t ackee season.” The cook took two slices of white bread from the breadbox and sprinkled them with chocolate, then put the plates in front of us.

  Sanford had flaws; I could see this now. He had been spoiled by his many sisters. He was rude to the chocolate-sprinkling cook. Yet seeing these defects, I liked him more: they added interest, as moles do on perfect faces. As we ate, I wondered what part of this scene got its character from being Jewish. Was it Jewish to sprinkle chocolate on bread? Was it Jewish to have a servant like this, a gatekeeper to the house above? Was the stone floor Jewish? I kept wondering what the sisters’ bedrooms were like, and the study, where I pictured Sanford’s father bent over a Talmudic script. I felt equal portions of fear and desire at the thought of the fiercely spoiled Seraphina, with braids she could tuck under her bum. I listened for footsteps in the hall, but as soon as we were done eating, Sanford gestured for me to follow him out again, across the back lawn to a trail. It led to a garden house made of whitewashed wood. I followed him in.

  Light filtered through the banana leaves outside. A lizard scurried across the wall. Piles of mildewed boxes filled each corner of the room.

  “See?” Sanford reached into one and pulled out a large-format comic book. “They’re my sisters’. My aunt in England sends them.”

  I bent and picked out a comic book. The Adventures of Julia James: School Girl Sleuth. The cover showed a girl in a skirt and blazer jumping a stile.

  “They’re good.” Sanford took a stack and placed them on the floor. He lay down, his head on the pile of comics, then asked me to toss him a bunch. I pulled out a dozen comics, brought them over, and he smoothed them into a neat pile, placing them on his stomach. “You’ll like them, Rudy.”

  I took a pile for my head, another for my stomach, and lay on the floor beside him. I heard the shifting of branches, a skitter on the roof.

  “Monkeys,” Sanford said.

  Their toenails scratched the roof. The stack of comics on Sanford’s stomach rose and fell. I opened a comic book. Julia James, head prefect, listened as schoolgirls gathered round her, accusing a second-form child of stealing a necklace. It turned out (thanks to Julia’s sharp eyes) that a crow had stolen the sparkly necklace from the top of a wardrobe and carried it to its nest. Then Julia uncovered the identity of a mystery hurdler (Who is that girl leaping stiles in the distance? We need her for the track team!). It was the baker’s daughter, delivering loaves at dawn. Each story ended with Julia and the other prefects sprawled in the common room eating crumpets.

  I read until I was glutted with a sickly sweet disgust. Sanford seemed glutted too. He nudged my arm. “Stop. It’s boring now.”

  He rolled over and put his wrist beside mine. “You’re so pale.”

  “I know.”

  He turned my wrist over, tracing his fingertip on a vein. I watched him do this, willing him to keep going, but his finger stopped. “Let’s arm wrestle,” he said.

  We rolled onto our stomachs and clasped hands. The struggle lasted a moment, then he had my arm down. His hand kept clasping mine, which hurt.

  “Give?”

  “Give.”

  “Good. Do you want to leg wrestle?”

  We lay on our backs, my head beside his feet, our hips touching, then we each raised a leg, linking our ankles. The hairs of his thighs brushed my skin.

  “One, two, three—” He pulled my leg over. I sprawled across him, my ankle pinned beneath his.

  “You’re not very strong, are you. Seraphina puts up more of a fight.”

  We lay side by side, panting; then he jumped up and straddled me, not sitting on my stomach, hovering just above. He pinned my arms and looked down, his breath in my face.

  “So now I get to ask you questions. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re not going to like it, Rudy.”

  “Okay.”

  “Rudy?” He gave my arms a pinch.

  “What?”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  That seemed almost impossible. But I nodded to show I understood.

  I thought he might lean down and kiss me, he put his face so close. Instead he whispered, “Miguel says your father’s a Nazi.”

  Cold liquid washed down my spine. Nothing had changed, except that his face held a deeper concentration. He waited for me to speak.

  “Is it true?”

  I wriggled and he put more weight on my arms. “You’re supposed to submit to questioning.”

  “I am.”

  “Then don’t keep moving. Now listen: the fellows at school want to know. They say it’s true. There’s a village with a weird name where all sorts of people got killed.”

  Again a chill rushed to my tailbone, an ache.

  “They say he got the children to line up in front of a pit.”

  I rolled from side to side, getting my arm free, but he pinned it again. “That’s a lie, Sanford. Miguel’s a filthy bastard.”

  “Is it a lie? Tell me.”

  “Anything he did, it was following orders. Like anyone would do in a war.”

  “Have you asked him? Have you said to your old man: ‘Look, did you shoot a whole pile of children? Did you stab them with bayonets?’”

  “Stop it!”

  “It’s not me that did it. It’s your old man.”

  “No he didn’t!” I couldn’t believe this was happening; it was nightmarish, but also real, something I’d waited for. His penis felt hard as he straddled me. He leaned forward, rope-burning my forearms.

  “Does he have medals? An Iron Cross?”

  “If I tell you, will you let me up?”

  “I might.”

  He looked down with the demandi
ng face of an angel, beautiful, pouty and fierce.

  “He has an Iron Cross. He got it for being brave.”

  Sanford inched his crotch closer to my face, pressing down on my arms. “But how do you know?”

  “Stop it!”

  “Does he explain? Does he say why? Miguel says your dad threw children up in the air and they landed on bayonets—don’t you want to know why?”

  As he lightened his grip, I got my hand free and knocked him off balance. Bucking and pushing, I managed to scramble to my feet, where I stood like a boxer, fists up, expecting him to lunge. But he just laughed.

  “You’re daft,” he said. “A daft midget. Go home.”

  And me thinking I’d been invited to eat chocolate sprinkles and read The Adventures of Julia James!

  I never did meet Seraphina, or any of the sisters, though for years Sanford’s family turned up in dreams. Once I rode my bike up Sanford’s driveway and it thinned to a path at the back of the property, overhung by trees. Trembling aspen, a voice said, and I knew I was near Leiscec. When I reached the garden house, moss had grown on the eaves. It was twilight, and through the windowpane a light shone invitingly. I put an eye to the glass and saw Sanford and his father and five sisters.

  Seraphina was turning to and fro, holding the hem of her filmy dress, admiring herself in a mirror. Her gold hair hung down her back, and her skin was lit from within. She must have just said something to the others, because both Sanford and his father were smiling at her indulgently. Then Seraphina began to twirl, making the skirt of her dress fan out, tilting her chin up and laughing.

  I stared in, my task simply to watch, to bear witness to her beautiful spinning.

  That night, when I got home from Sanford’s I left my bike in the carport, where Mutti had scalded the foot-long centipede. I passed through the wrought-iron gate, which Father locked at night to keep out robbers and cutthroats. In the living room Mutti and Father were silent as the dead; Father was curled on the vinyl couch, his back to the room, and Mutti sat at the card table. I knew by how she held her head that she was angry with me.