The Bells of Bournville Green

by Annie Murray

  When they had made love, she padded away barefoot and brought back tall glasses of water with chips of ice floating in them. She had on a blue cotton frock but was naked underneath. A few moments later they heard a chuckle from Shimon.

  ‘I’ll fetch him!’ Gila bounded from the bed with that special, excited smile that meant she was to see her son. ‘You rest – you are studying so hard.’

  David tried to protest, but she flapped a hand at him to quieten him as she went out. And he did feel tired, as if a weight lay on him and he could not get up from the bed. The weight was all the physiology he knew he must learn for his classes, added to the responsibility of fatherhood. He lay drowsily listening to the sounds of his family: Gila’s happy greeting and his son’s chortles of delight. After his first words, ema, abba, mummy, daddy, the rest had come in a torrent. Gila carried him to the kitchen and made him some food – he was crazy about eggs – and he heard her soft voice and Shimon’s replies. For some reason this morning David was acutely aware of how precious it all was, as if at any moment his little family could be snatched away. In Israel there was constantly a feeling that life was built on eggshell.

  ‘Doodi?’

  He must have dozed because he had not heard her coming.

  ‘There is some mail for you.’

  ‘Not my mother again?’ he joked. The frequent letters from Edie in Birmingham were a gentle joke between them. I wish you lived over here, David. Wouldn’t it be easier for you if you brought Shimon to England and you could study here? . . . And so on.

  ‘No.’ There was an edge of worry to Gila’s voice which made him sit up and reach for the thin envelope. ‘It’s from Tante Annaliese.’

  The letter was addressed in deep blue ink, in Anna-liese’s looping script, to Mr David Mayer. They had agreed that he would be called David, the name he had known all his life, but that he would take his true surname, Mayer, and he had changed his name in his British passport. He opened the envelope. As he read he could imagine Annaliese writing the little note at the table in the living room in the flat in Haifa. She wrote in German:

  My dear David,

  I am writing, my boy, because I am worried about your father’s health. Each day he is growing weaker and really he should be in hospital, but I promised to him that he will never be taken away from here. He is more frail daily. I thought you should know and perhaps it is possible for you to come and visit him.

  I hope your studies are progressing well and that you and Gila and our little Shimon are in the best of health.

  Loving greetings from your,

  Aunt Annaliese.

  ‘It’s my father.’ David leapt out of bed. ‘I shall have to go.’

  Gila nodded, her wide brown eyes full of anxiety. It was serious if Annaliese was asking for him. There was no telephone in their apartment, but she knew the number of one of their neighbours and could have called. But how like Annaliese it was to write a letter and wait in patience even if she was deeply worried! They both held Annaliese in great respect and gratitude. It was she to whom David had gone when he first arrived in Israel in search of his father, Annaliese’s brother, and she had welcomed him immediately as her lost nephew, with a warmth and affection he felt he could never repay.

  ‘Should we go together?’ he called agitatedly, from the bathroom where he was already sluicing himself with water. ‘All of us? Would Shimon be too much for them?’

  ‘I think it is better if you go alone,’ Gila said. ‘You can’t stay for long can you? Your lectures . . .’

  ‘But if Annaliese needs my help?’ He appeared in the doorway, hair dripping. ‘What if I have to miss weeks of lectures?’

  ‘But that is not what will happen,’ Gila said firmly, taking the towel which hung uselessly in David’s hand and drying him like a child. ‘Stop panicking! Annaliese would not let you disrupt your studies. She will be on your back about it if you stay long. She just wants to see you. You go! Shimon and I will be OK. I will make you food.’

  An hour later, David stepped out into the baking hot morning in faded blue trousers and an old short-sleeved shirt, the small haversack, packed by Gila, hanging from one shoulder, and the sensation of kisses from his wife and small, curly-haired son still fresh on his cheeks. He walked through the streets, with their dusty, fledgling eucalyptus trees, to the main road to catch the bus in to the main bus station in Jerusalem.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Before he lived in Jerusalem, David had dreamed of it as a city full of scholars. He imagined squares edged by crumbling stone apartments where educated people from all over Europe and further afield sat debating life’s deep questions, where the sweet notes of pianos drifted from open windows on the warm breeze. And there were parts of the city like that, even though there were forever soldiers scattered among the intellectuals. But this was not the Jerusalem where he lived.

  He caught the bus to Haifa from the Jaffa Road before eleven o’clock, and pulled his books out of his haversack, planning to revise his most recent notes on the nervous system. But he could not concentrate and sat with the notebook in his lap, looking out at the passing streets. He did not travel away from home much since the army, except to the hospital a short ride away at Ein Karem. His life shuttled back and forth between classrooms and hospital corridors and the apartment block with its echoing staircases. There was scarcely time for anything else. He felt immersed in their featureless neighbourhood of young couples and elderly people, the main inhabitants of the apartments. When he first came to Israel he had worked on a kibbutz in Galilee, where he met Gila. There he had felt part of something bigger, as he had in the army. Now it felt as if life had shrunk and he found it hard to see a bigger picture.

  The bus roared round a corner on its way north. Sunlight flashed off windows. And on a dirty white wall, painted in faded black Hebrew characters, were the words, ‘EICHMANN MUST HANG!’

  David felt the words like a blow. Oh they had hanged him all right, Adolf Eichmann, the man who had come to be known as one of the key orchestrators of the Nazi death camps and the ‘final solution to the Jewish problem’. The anniversary of his death had just passed, in June. The trial had gone on in Jerusalem for much of 1961 and had electrified Israel and the world. Set against the early months of David’s marriage and the second, tender year of his son’s life, from their little transistor radio had poured a horrific torrent of detail about the death camps from surviving witnesses. Blame for many of these atrocities was laid at the feet of this nondescript-looking little German who had been fished out of hiding in Argentina, when the vengeful fury of the Israelis found voice against him.

  The trial had shaken David to the core. For the first time since he had settled in Israel, full of idealism and a new sense of belonging, he began to question. Amid all the baying for Eichmann’s life, pleas for clemency were coming in from round the world. Should another life be taken? he had found himself asking. How did this advance anything? Gila, however, had no such doubts. They argued about it again and again.

  ‘Doodi,’ she said, emphatically tapping a finger on the table between them during one such dispute. ‘Think of the ghetto in Warsaw. Think of the shootings, the starving of thousands of people. Think of the camps, the pits full of bodies, the ovens at Auschwitz . . .’ Her voice choked, her eyes brimmed with angry tears. He knew that her anger was both utterly reasonable and utterly beyond reason. ‘Thousands, millions died because of this man. What is his one life in return for that? What?’ She snapped her fingers. ‘It is a straw. It is nothing! He is a piece of scum!’

  ‘Yes,’ he nodded, sick at the thought. ‘There is nothing that can compensate for that. His life is nothing. But . . .’

  ‘But what?’ She was ablaze with emotion now and he was afraid. He had always been an emotional man, but she touched the edge of hysteria in a way that made him recoil. ‘But nothing! You think they should spare him? Keep him to live out his life in some comfortable cell?’

  ‘No, but . . .’ He wanted
to talk about the Quaker teaching of his childhood, about non-violence, but he knew she would dismiss this as the luxury of those living in safety. And Eichmann, what he had done was so enormous, almost beyond compare . . .

  ‘You think he should be treated with mercy when all those people remember him, remember what he did to their wives and husbands, their sons and daughters?’ Gila was shouting now and Shimon started to wail, hearing her voice raised. Gila leaned down and scooped him up on her lap.

  ‘It’s OK, little one.’ She kissed his curls, smoothing a trembling hand over his forehead. ‘Ema is just a little bit worked up.’ She glared across at David over the top of their son’s head. ‘I can’t believe you would say something like this . . .’

  ‘But I haven’t said anything!’ David burst out. ‘You haven’t let me get a word in! Look, I know all those people need to see Eichmann dead – that nothing else will do. I can feel the rage and hatred for him, for the evil things he has done. The thought makes me sick to my stomach. But I’m just asking, asking, that’s all—’ It was his turn to bang on the table. ‘What kind of example is Israel, or any other state, making by executing criminals? What kind of people are we if we just do what they do?’

  Gila got up, completely enraged, still clasping Shimon, who stared anxiously into her face, his eyes full of tears. ‘Criminals? I can’t believe you Doodi! As if he is some thief, or pickpocket, not the cause of the massacre of millions of Jews! This is not an ordinary case. You are Jewish, Rudi . . .’ He heard her emphasize his birth name. ‘Think what they did to your father . . .’

  His father . . . He only had to think of his father . . .

  They made up their argument, of course, but the anger had bitten deep. He understood, he felt it in himself also, the blood lust for Eichmann, for Dr Mengele, the doctor who committed so many atrocities in Auschwitz in the name of research, and for all the others who had done things from which the mind recoiled in horror. But this hatred and vengefulness was set to go on and on . . . Was this what being an Israeli meant – an endless cycle of vengeance against the Nazis, the Arabs . . . ?

  Such thoughts were usually buried under the business of his life, but today as he sat on the Egged bus, they flooded through him. Perhaps he was too much of an outsider, not having known he was a Jew until so late in his life. Sometimes a feeling of panic would flow through him, a whirling feeling of being lost, untethered to anything. What did being a Jew mean? It was a thing of blood, his link with his family, his German mother. But he had not known his mother and had no memory of her. He was not religious. Gila, like many others on the kibbutz, would say, ‘We don’t need religion, not in Israel. We have the land. That is our place.’ But this too meant violence, the displacement of others. And instilled deeply into him, through his upbringing, had been the tenets of the Quaker way of life: the peace testimony, which said that violence was the wrong course of action.

  He remembered with longing the passion and certainty he’d had in his teens, when he first found out about his mother, when he met Joe and Esther Leishmann, who helped him in Birmingham, and when he first when to Kibbutz Hamesh. Everything, for the first time in his life, had felt so clear and strong. This was who he really was – Rudi Mayer! A German Jew who would become an Israeli! Whose father had survived the concentration camps. But now who was he? Sometimes now he was overwhelmed with longing for England, for a milder life, for the quiet decency of the Society of Friends. Where did he really stand or belong?

  Unable to bear his confused thoughts any longer, he leaned forward and rested his head on his arms on the seat in front and went to sleep.

  The journey up the slopes of Mount Carmel in Haifa always reminded him of the first time he came looking for his father. How long ago that seemed! He wondered, as he stepped out of the bus at the top of the hill, whether this would be the last time he would ever come and find him alive.

  ‘Shalom, shalom, mein Liebchen . . .’ Annaliese kissed him and reached up to rumple his hair as if he was a little boy, and he was deeply touched by it.

  ‘Tante,’ he spoke with her in German. Annaliese, now in her mid-fifties, was a handsome woman with dark, lively eyes, her hair greying but still containing much rich chestnut brown. She had the pronounced cheekbones of a once very beautiful woman, her eyebrows plucked to thin lines and pencilled in and her dress deep green and elegant. She moved without stiffness and appeared calm, though her face held sadness and the crinkled skin round her eyes showed fatigue.

  ‘How is he?’ David spoke very softly, in the familiar lobby of the apartment.

  Annaliese beckoned him into the kitchen, just as she had done on his first visit there, when she had not wanted Hermann to hear them.

  ‘Here—’ She passed him a glass of orange juice with ice in it. The peelings were still on the side: she had obviously just squeezed it. They sat at the little Formica-topped table.

  ‘He is dying,’ she said, again with great calm.

  David watched her. He had guessed really, but his father was often ill. It was hard to be sure.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh – it came on very quickly. A cold, his chest, pneumonia. The doctor has just left – they are sending me a nurse. He wants me to move him to the hospital, but that is unthinkable. I had to explain . . . He understood of course . . .’

  For a moment her face crumpled, and she put her hand over it. When she removed it, her expression was composed again. ‘Hermann is sedated a little. Without the drugs, he is—’ She made a helpless gesture. ‘He is overcome with memories. He is back there again – he is tearing at himself, pulling out the catheter . . . Terrible.’

  ‘I can stay,’ David said. ‘As long as you need . . .’

  But already she was raising her hand to stop him. ‘No. That is not necessary, Liebchen. Your life is very full – your lovely Gila and Shimon, your studies. I wanted you to see your father, but then you go. You hear? There is no point in your staying – he will not know you.’

  ‘But for you,’ he started to protest.

  She would not hear of it. ‘I am all right. I have help. Just now I need a doctor who has already passed all his exams!’ She twinkled at him so that he did not take offence.

  ‘You come back and see me soon – all of you, when it is over. That would make me very happy. Now, you will want to see him. He may be sleeping. He mostly sleeps now.’

  She led David to Hermann Mayer’s room. David realized that in all the times he had visited the little third-floor apartment he had never been in his father’s bedroom, and he felt like a nervous intruder.

  The room was of a modest size and cramped. Hermann’s bed lay under the window, which looked out from the side of the apartment on to the buttery stone of the apartment next door. Close to it was a very large armchair which took up much of the room. It was upholstered in a heavy, brown hessian, and its arms and the place where the head rested were threadbare and slightly greasy. There was little else in the room except some clothes folded on a wooden chair in the corner, and a little table by the bed which held the staples of Hermann’s life: the radio, his glasses, a folded newspaper, medicines. There was a strong smell of eucalyptus oil, which overpowered everything else.

  The first thing was the sound of laboured breathing. The figure on the bed looked very small. Hermann was covered neatly by a sheet and a light brown blanket, his chin resting on it as if the bed had just been tidied. What remained of his hair was white, his cheeks sunken and the skin so thin that the purple forking veins could be seen through it. It was the face of an eighty-year-old: Hermann was in fact fifty-three, younger than Annaliese.

  ‘Come – just sit by him for a while,’ Annaliese encouraged him. ‘Take this chair. He may not wake – but you can take your leave of him, darling.’ He heard her voice catch, despite her attempts to be matter-of-fact.

  She slipped out of the room and David sank into the big brown chair.

  He felt a sense of awe in the face of the enormous, quiet
event unfolding in front of him. Hermann’s death, he realized, did not feel sad. What tore at him was the life his father had endured. Death had been this close before, when Anatoli, Edie’s husband, then in the British army in 1945, had gone with the liberating forces into Bergen-Belsen transit camp. He had rescued Hermann from among a pile of the dead and taken him to the camp hospital, where he survived malnutrition and typhus.

  As he watched his father struggling for breath, David tried to see him in his youth, a gifted scientist in Berlin who had married his love, a beauty called Gerda, the mother he had never known. What followed in his young life then was Theresienstadt concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, and even one further camp after the liberation. These years of brutality broke his health, mental and physical, and it was Annaliese, reunited with him after the war, who had looked after him ever since.

  He listened to his father breathing, thinking of all the places he had breathed before.

  ‘I don’t know you . . .’ David whispered. ‘I shall never know you.’

  Tears filled his eyes for a moment, but he wiped them fiercely away I am crying for myself, he thought angrily. Out of self-pity! Then he was less hard on himself. No, I am crying for you too, for the suffering of your life.

  Hermann Mayer had reacted with pathetic emotion when he first realized his son was still alive, and David had visited him regularly ever since. He remembered the warning of the lady who had directed him to Hermann Mayer before he had met him: You should not expect too much of your father. It had been the wisest of advice. He and Hermann had met, both needing and wanting, but finding themselves to be like two planets that pass and never touch. It was too late for anything much, for a real father. But at least, after all those years of uncertainty about his background, David had met and known Hermann. For that he was grateful.