by Maisie Mosco
“If you want to study medicine when you’re older, that’s what you’ll do,” David told him. He had come to terms with disappointments all his life and would reconcile himself to this, too, if he had to.
Ronald’s face lit with relief. “Thanks, Dad.”
Then the doorbell rang, and he went to open the door. He returned with Sigmund Moritz leaning heavily on his arm.
“What’s wrong?” David asked Sigmund anxiously. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
Sigmund was puffing and panting. “I hope I’m going to, David. And in the plural.” He sank into an armchair and brushed some snowflakes off his overcoat. “The weather is terrible tonight and I ran all the way here.”
“Tell me why already!”
“Give me a moment to recover, David. I’m trying to collect my thoughts. You know I haven’t heard a word from Vienna since the Anschluss and I’d begun to give up hope. So just now a man who arrived from there today comes to my house with a message from my brother.” Sigmund paused to contain his emotion but could not stop his voice from trembling when he resumed speaking. “I must meet a boat early tomorrow morning, in Dover, the man said. And, God willing, Kurt and his family will be on it.”
“You want me to drive you there?”
“How else would I get there in time?”
David was already changing from his carpet slippers to his shoes, which he had left in the hearth. “Don’t worry. We’ll leave right away. But why didn’t you send Martin to tell me, instead of running here yourself?”
“He’s out tonight. At a musical evening in aid of refugees, with Carl and Hannah, and Miriam went, too. Sammy would take longer to get here than me and Helga’s looking after the twins, you know they’ve got measles. I didn’t think I could still run, but it only took me a few minutes,” Sigmund conveyed without pausing for breath. “So, let’s go! Who are you making phone calls to, just now?” he demanded as David picked up the receiver.
“I’ll have to ask Nat to come with his car, as well. There won’t be room in mine to bring back four extra people.”
Nathan had been called out to a confinement.
“I’ll ring Ben,” David said.
“You know what I’m thinking right now?” Sigmund mused aloud whilst he was getting through. “When a person needs help, what a wonderful thing it is to have a big family.”
David arranged to meet Ben in Knutsford, so they could travel to Dover in convoy. “Fetch me your atlas,” he instructed Ronald. It had suddenly occurred to him that they did not know the route, “And ask Lizzie to make a flask of tea and some sandwiches.”
“A picnic he thinks he’s going on!” Sigmund fumed impatiently.
“Can I come with you, Dad?” Ronald asked when he returned from the kitchen. “I might as well. I’ve never been to Dover and I’m on holiday from school.”
David hesitated. Bessie would be furious if he took Ronald on trip that would keep him up all night. But it would be an interesting experience for the boy. “All right. But wrap up warm and find a muffler for Zaidie Sigmund, he forgot to put one on.”
“Who cares about mufflers?” Sigmund said exasperatedly. “Come on already!”
“Calm down,” David said to him as they drove off. There’s no certainty your relatives will be on the boat, he wanted to add, but did not have the heart to. Hugo Frankl had received a similar message from his uncle in Vienna but had returned from Dover with an empty car.
Ben’s Ford was parked at the rendezvous when they reached Knutsford. Marianne was curled up on the seat beside him.
“Harry couldn’t come, he’s got to be in the shop tomorrow with Dad away, so Arnold and I tossed up for it and I won,” she smiled.
“Ronald might as well travel with us, then they’ll both have company,” Ben said.
Marianne wished it was Martin who had come, but if it had to be one of her other cousins, she was glad it wasn’t Shirley. Her mother was always saying it wasn’t right not to like someone you were related to, but Marianne didn’t see why you had to just because of that.
“I’ve heard about the white cliffs in Dover, but I never thought I’d see them,” Ronald smiled.
“First you’ll see London,” Ben said. “We have, to go that way. It’ll still be dark when we get there, but you’ll see it on the way back.”
“When we went there for Uncle Nat’s wedding, all we saw was the shul and the reception hall,” Marianne recalled.
“You won’t see very much this time, either, love,” her father answered. “But that’s not what we’re going down south for, is it?”
The children fell silent, affected by the gravity of his tone.
“Oy,” Ben sighed eloquently. “Only for something like this would I be taking time off from the shop.”
“It’ll be terrible if Zaidie Sigmund’s relatives don’t turn up,” Marianne reflected.
“More terrible for them than for him,” Ben said quietly. “English Jews don’t know how lucky they are,” he added. “Going on a journey like this makes a person stop to think and realize it.”
A sliver of moon had emerged from behind a cloud and lent a ghostly ambience to the Cheshire countryside through which they were driving.
“Everything looks different at night, doesn’t it?” Marianne said, gazing at a dark clump of trees on a hillside. “And when everything is peaceful, like it is now, it hurts to imagine places where dreadful things are happening.”
“So, don’t bother imagining,” her father advised her.
“She can’t help it, Uncle,” Ronald said. “Marianne’s an imaginative person.”
Marianne looked at him with surprise. How did he know she was? They saw each other every week at the tea party, but rarely exchanged a word and she’d never bothered thinking about what sort of boy he was. To her, he was just Shirley’s brother. “Are you looking forward to your Bar Mitzvah?” she asked him.
“If anyone else asks me that, I’ll scream.”
Marianne laughed. “Boys aren’t supposed to scream.”
“No, they have to do it silently, inside themselves. My Bar Mitzvah isn’t for ages yet, but it’s ruled my life for years and for the last six months everyone in our house has talked about nothing else,” Ronald said disgustedly.
“Now now, lad,” Ben placated him.
But he was not to be placated. “All I hear is who’s coming and who isn’t. And what kind of frocks Mam and Shirley are going to wear for it. And what the menu’s going to be. And how much it’s going to cost my dad!”
“In my day nobody had those problems,” Ben said dryly. “Sometimes I think it’s when you get a bit in the bank your worries really start.”
“How much is it going to cost?” Marianne asked Ronald.
“Hundreds of pounds, by the sound of it.”
“How disgusting, when poor people are starving,” Marianne declared.
“I’m glad somebody as well as me thinks that,” her cousin said.
How could I have thought Ronald was the same as Shirley? Marianne asked herself. They were nothing like each other. She had another cousin who was nice, and she hadn’t known it. But there would never be anyone whose friendship mattered to her the way Martin’s did.
They were nearing the Potteries and she could see the tall chimneys towering against the night sky with the fiery glow from the kilns diffused around them. “It looks like a painting,” she breathed, enraptured.
Her father was staring through the windscreen and could see only a grim, industrial panorama. “Nobody but our Marianne could get excited about Stoke-on-Trent!”
“Sometimes there’s beauty in ugliness,” she informed him.
“Oy vay!”
“The way something that’s sad can be funny, too,” Marianne went on, undeterred by her father’s prosaic reactions.
Ronald looked thoughtful. “But not to whoever the sad something is happening to.”
“Why don’t you kids have a snooze?” Ben suggested. He was begi
nning to feel out of his depth with them.
“I didn’t come to snooze,” Ronald replied.
“Me neither,” Marianne agreed.
But before they reached London, both were sound asleep and did not awaken until Ben stopped the car at the docks in Dover.
David pulled up behind him. Sigmund’s excitement had changed to tension and he had not spoken a word during the latter part of the journey but had sat huddled in the rug David had thrown around him, his hat dipped low on his forehead, shadowing his eyes. David could feel a tautness within himself, too. Uncertainty was affecting them both.
“Find out where the night-ferry from Calais docks,” he requested when Ben came to speak to him.
“Please God, let them be on it,” Sigmund prayed, breaking his silence.
David gazed through the windscreen at the sunrise, assailed by hazy memories of his own arrival in England as a refugee. He’d been eight years old. A frightened kid in a long, baggy overcoat and a coarse wool cap with a shiny peak, getting off a stinking herring boat at Hull with his family and the Lipkins, Cohens and Lenskys. Now, he was nearly forty-two and had come to meet Jews who were seeking sanctuary for the same reason the Sandbergs had. How unreal it all seemed. But the reality was all too stark. Would the repetitive pattern of Jewish history never end?
The ferry had already docked when they walked on to the quay and the gangway was being fixed into place.
Sigmund’s face was paper-white, except for the grey morning-stubble on his chin and he seemed unaware that Marianne and Ronald had linked their arms through his.
“It takes me back,” Ben said to him.
“Which Jew who found refuge here would it not affect that way?”
“It’s so long ago, I don’t think I’d recognize Vienna,” Ben reflected.
Sigmund sighed. “Me, I can shut my eyes and see the Ringstrasse, where I used to walk with Rachel and the children on Sunday afternoons,” he said nostalgically. “Such a beautiful street, who could ever forget it? And the scent of the lilac in spring mingling with the aroma of freshly ground coffee when you strolled beneath the trees beside the cafés.”
“My dad was only a little boy when he left there, that’s why he doesn’t remember,” Marianne reminded Sigmund. “I’d like to go there when I grow up,” she added. “And see where my ancestors lived.”
“With a chain across the street to separate the ghetto from the rest of the city,” Sigmund reminisced bitterly. “Even before the trouble with Hitler started, Kurt wrote me that the one at Eisenstadt, where our family used to live, was still there. Only if you were rich or famous did Viennese society accept you. In my time there, the rest of us were second-class citizens, though not officially. We could go anywhere we pleased, the opera and the art galleries, everything was open to us, but the chain that cut us off was there to remind us of our status when we returned to our homes. So, my brother got wealthy in recent years and moved away from Eisenstadt, a lot of good it did him!”
Sigmund controlled his emotion and gave his attention to the bustle of activity building up around them. Crates and boxes were being unloaded from the ferry and a crop of porters now waited expectantly with their trolleys at the foot of the gangway. There was mounting noise, too, as daytime sounds began filling the early-morning stillness. Clanking and grunting from freight wagons; the thrum of the traffic that had begun entering the docks; a ship’s siren hooting and the cry of some lonely gulls overhead.
I can’t bear it, Marianne thought as the first passengers disembarked from the ferry. Supposing the people they were hoping to meet had not come? She felt Sigmund grip her hand tightly and saw Ronald cross his fingers.
David was studying everyone who walked down the gangplank. Most were Gentiles, or obviously French. But a few Jewish refugees had already disembarked and were being greeted by small groups of English relatives weeping for joy. It was easy to pick out the Jews, even before those waiting for them shrieked an emotional welcome. They were all dressed in garments that had seen better days and had faces that looked as if they had forgotten how to smile.
He could hear a middle-aged couple in a group behind him talking about their journey.
“My wedding ring they took from me at the border,” the woman was saying distraughtly.
“I made her give it to them,” the man said. “I was afraid to argue in case they sent us back.”
Several Yiddish conversations were audible and the word “afraid” featured in all of them.
“It makes you go cold,” Ben shuddered to David.
But Sigmund was oblivious to everything around him. “He’s here! My great-nephew Peter Kohn!” he shouted suddenly and rushed forward, dragging Marianne and Ronald with him.
David recognized the stocky, fresh-complexioned youth from a photograph Sigmund had shown him. But he would have done so anyway. It was like looking at Carl when he was that age.
“Why is he hanging around at the top of the gangway?” Sigmund exclaimed excitedly.
“He must be waiting for his Zaidie and his parents,” Ronald said.
They saw the boy turn around to take the arm of someone behind him and caught a glimpse of a dark skirt.
“Ilsa’s here, too,” Sigmund beamed. “Kurt and Rudy are probably waiting behind for the baggage,” he added. Then the brightness dimmed from his face as he saw that Peter’s companion was not Ilsa, but a young girl.
“Who is she?” Marianne inquired.
“I don’t know,” Sigmund replied waving to Peter.
Peter and the girl had the same stiff expressions on their faces that David had noted on those of the other refugees. As if some inner paralysis had rendered their features immobile, he thought.
“How do you do, Uncle Sigmund?” Peter said in perfect English when he joined them. “I knew you from your picture. And also, you resemble my grandfather.”
Sigmund kissed him on both cheeks and allowed a few tears to run down his own. “You’ll have to excuse me for weeping. But I’m thanking God, inside me, because you’re here. Where are your parents and my brother? They’re attending to the bags? I can’t wait to see them.”
The boy looked at him mutely for a moment. “There are no bags, Uncle. And I do not know where my parents and grandfather are.”
David saw Sigmund’s knees buckle and caught hold of him to prevent him from falling. The silence that followed seemed endless, but Peter just wet his lips as if he was thirsty and made no attempt to break it.
Marianne was eyeing the girl and thought it was rude of them all to have ignored her. But she seemed not to mind and was standing like a statue beside Peter, clutching a brown-paper parcel.
“I’m Marianne Klein, what’s your name?” she smiled to her, but received just a scared glance in return.
“It is all right,” Peter said to the girl gently. “These people are friends. There is nothing to be afraid of any more. In Vienna these days, there are even Jews whom one may not trust,” he explained to the others. “It was not a pretty lesson to learn, that some people would betray their own mother in order to save their skin.”
“Your English is a lot better than my German,” Ronald complimented him.
“At school, languages were my best subject. And hers also,” he said looking at the girl. “This you will find out when you hear her speak.”
But the girl maintained her frozen silence.
Sigmund managed to collect himself. One of his relatives safe from the Nazis was better than none. This was cold comfort, but he tried not to show it. “The two of you travelled together?” he asked his nephew.
Peter nodded. “She is Hildegard Blauer and has relations in Manchester. I hope we can take her to them.”
“Why not? Are they called Frankl?” Sigmund turned to David and Ben. “Blauer was Paula’s maiden name.”
“Mrs. Frankl is Hildegard’s great-aunt,” Peter supplied.
“My grandfather was her brother Otto,” the girl said as if the mention of her family had remov
ed a stopper inside her.
Sigmund took her hand. “I went to school and cheder with him,” he smiled. But the smile hid the chill that had gripped him when she referred to his old friend in the past tense.
Hildegard stared down at her scuffed, brown brogues. “My mother was his only daughter.”
Her relegation of her kin to the past affected David and Ben, too. It was conceivable that her grandfather, who had been Sigmund’s age, had died a natural death. But her mother had probably been the same age as their own wives and they did not let themselves think about what must have happened to her.
“Why’re we standing here?” David said gruffly and led the way to where the cars were parked. “We might as well get going. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to wait for.”
The four young people walked along together, and Sigmund positioned himself between them.
Ben fell into step with David, ahead of them. “I don’t think I can drive back to Manchester without having a sleep,” he said yawning and stroking his blue jowls.
“I feel the same way,” David answered.
“So why don’t we book in at a hotel and let everyone get some rest?” Ben suggested. “And drive home tonight.”
“It would mean Ronald missing shul this evening and you know what rabbis are like when it’s nearly a boy’s Bar Mitzvah.”
Ben recalled Ronald’s complaints in the car. It was the same with me and my boys, he mused briefly. It dominated a lad’s life and, he thought for the first time, somehow it wasn’t right. “You’ll get him there in time for the Service tomorrow morning,” he said to David. “And if his rabbi isn’t capable of understanding why he missed shul tonight and had to travel on Shabbos, then our religion’s even narrower than I’m beginning to think it is!”
David was too fatigued to argue.
“Hildegard’s only just dozed off and I don’t think we should disturb her, she’s been crying nearly all day,” Marianne said tiptoeing from the hotel room the girls had shared and encountering David in the corridor that evening.
David had just peeped into Sigmund’s room and had found him slumbering fitfully, fully clothed, as if he had thrown himself on to the bed in distress the moment he was alone. “We’ll let Zaidie get some more sleep, too, Marianne. Meanwhile, the rest of us can have something to eat.”