Jaffa Beach: Historical Fiction

by Fedora Horowitz

  After his Beriot performance, Beatrice D’vora Sonnenfelt was the first one to congratulate him. He stammered, “You are a bee in a sunny field.” The translation of her name was all he could find to say.

  Surprised, D’vora asked, “Do you speak German?” Shlomi nodded. He’d heard Otto, Gretchen and Lotte speak it for so many years, he not only understood, but if need be he was able to speak it, too.

  “It’s not proper for two individuals of the opposite sex to cohabitate,” an upset Otto wrote to him.

  “But it is cheaper to share an apartment,” Shlomi had written back to him.

  The Old World man replied, “You know that we never touched Gretchen’s German war reparations. They are yours to use.” Otto relented only after he heard that Shlomi and D’vora were playing chamber music together. By then, the love between them had flourished. “I’ve always liked you,” D’vora told Shlomi with sparks in her eyes, after their first night of lovemaking, “I only waited for you to grow taller.”

  “Don’t come to the airport,” Otto said when Shlomi offered to pick him up on the day of the concert.” Better practice a bit, scales and arpeggios. Try to rest and save your strength for the concert. I’ll call you from the hotel.”

  On the day of the concert, Shlomi woke up at dawn. He liked to run early in the morning, when most of West 104th Street was still in the throes of sleep. The pavement was wet, but it didn’t bother him. Shlomi was a good runner; it was the only sport he allowed himself.

  He began running on the Tel-Aviv beach, where Mazal brought him as a young child almost every day. She believed that inhaling the salty air would heal him, especially after his long sickness. But Shlomi had no recollection of his illness, which Otto told him happened after his mother’s sudden death.

  Running became a passion. If somebody had asked him why, he would not know what to answer. Maybe it gave him the same feeling of complete freedom and control he had when playing the violin.

  Seated across the aisle from the three women, his flight companions, Otto took a furtive glance at them. Animated, Mazal and Charlotte were talking to their guest, the woman in the middle, an attractive lady in her forties. Nobody would have guessed that she wore a shaitel unless they knew that she was an orthodox woman.

  It wasn’t Otto’s first visit to America. He had already been on tours with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, from which he would soon retire. Sighing, Otto tried to find a comfortable position on the eleven-hour-long flight to New York. He knew that he would have little time to rest before the concert. Although the solicitous El-Al stewardess had given him an extra pillow and blanket, sleep eluded Otto.

  He closed his eyes, but his mind was awake. He thought of the last twenty years, during which Shlomi, the name his mother Shifra called him, an orphan, became the center of his and Gretchen’s universe. Was it wrong to keep the truth away from him all those years?

  Though it was against her wish, Otto’s first thought was to try to contact Shifra’s family, but the child became frightfully ill after his mother dead, and not understanding what had happened. Otto decided to wait. Shlomi had fought death with temperatures soaring up to 42 degrees Celsius. If not for Mazal’s and Charlotte’s devotion, changing places day and night to wash his small body in baths of vinegar, change his soaking clothes, pouring with painstakingly slow motion drops of water and medicine between the child’s dry lips, Shlomi would have joined his mother. Would Shifra’s family have labored to save the child’s life as Charlotte and Mazal did?

  After he recovered, Shlomi became everybody’s child. When Gretchen, with tears in her eyes, in one of her bright moments whispered to him, “I think Ruthie has sent him to us,” Otto’s decision was taken. But as in past years when Ruthie’s vision disturbed his sleep, Shifra’s pale image in the hospital bed, as life dripped out of her body, haunted him.

  She was doing so well as a volunteer at Shaarei Zedek Hospital in Tel-Aviv, preparing to become a student nurse. “I prefer to work nights,” Shifra said, “while Shlomi is asleep. During the day he needs me. He’s confused and at times asks how much longer we’ll visit, before we return home. It’s nice that Mazal and Charlotte try to entertain him, but he feels more secure with me around.”

  What a courageous girl she was! She threw herself whole-heartedly into her work, only two months after she arrived trembling, in the middle of that night, when Mazal and Bruno brought her with the child asleep in her arms.

  As much as he tried, Otto couldn’t understand how the accident occured.

  Shifra thought she heard a voice screaming “Suha,” her Arabic name. That’s what she told Otto through her great pain minutes after he arrived at the hospital, called in by the emergency ward. The scream petrified her. She looked to see where the voice came from. Could it have been Musa, her husband? The whistle of bullets made her throw herself onto the pavement, yet a bullet went through her shoulder. The pain was sharp. Though she heard the honking of a car, she was unable to get to her feet. Later, crying, the driver told Otto that the car brakes were malfunctioning and he could not stop the car from mounting the curb and pinning the fallen victim against a wall.

  It must have been a hallucination. It couldn’t have been her husband’s voice. Otto moved in his seat. Through the loudspeaker, Otto heard that dinner was being served. He glanced at Charlotte and Mazal, his friends and neighbors for more than twenty years.

  Charlotte had already tied a napkin around her neck, neat as ever, even in that narrow space. Mazal’s earrings dangled, while her hands gestured to him. He could not hear what she was saying, but the O formed by her thumb and forefinger meant everything was under control.

  4 7

  It was Lotte’s first visit to New York, her first visit to America. When Otto asked Shlomi’s “adoptive mothers” to join him, she had misgivings.

  “Shlomi is a grownup,” Lotte told her husband, “he doesn’t need us to wipe his nose.”

  “He didn’t need you to wipe his nose since he was seven years old,” answered Hugo Gruber. “But I’ll bet his eyes will light up when he sees you two.” He was addressing Mazal, too, who had just entered their apartment. “Especially if Lotte bakes some of his favorite pastries and brings them along.”

  “He wanted to come back last year when the Six-Day War broke out. He said he was going to fight like his father and die for his country, but I stopped him. I said, ‘Stay where you are and make our country proud.’ I know he got upset.” Charlotte, already baking treats for Shlomi, wiped the flour off her hands onto the apron.

  “I am going,” Mazal declared. “How can we miss his New York debut? He is our boy. Besides, I’ve never been out of the country. Otto is treating us. He’ll feel hurt if you refuse.”

  “But what do you think about Otto’s crazy idea? Now, after so many years! Why contact Shifra’s family, twenty years after her death? Let sleeping dogs lie, that’s what I think.”

  “Maybe he feels guilty. His lies were enough to dry the Mediterranean. It’s time to tell Shlomi the truth,” Charlotte’s husband said.

  “And what if Shlomi has a breakdown? For so many years he has asked us about his parents and we’ve been mum. Why now? He’s happy, has a girlfriend, a career. Why wake up ghosts?”

  “After Gretchen’s death I observed a change in Otto,” Mazal said. “He was withdrawn, a tortured soul. He never told Gretchen that on that fateful night in Berlin, he saw the S. S. dragging Ruthie out of the house and didn’t try to save his daughter from their hands. He’s an old man now. The time has come to make peace with his ghosts. And Shifra is one of them.”

  It was Mazal who contacted Chana. The only thing Mazal knew was what Shifra told her about the chance encounter on Jaffa’s beach with her childhood friend, a friend whom she refused to acknowledge. It was very little to go on, Charlotte said at the time, but Mazal wasn’t the type to give up. She went to Jerusalem to look into the registry of Geula, the neighborhood where the girls had lived. She found Shifra’s name in th
e records, but there were more than a few Chana born the same year. Disappointed, she was ready to leave, when the clerk asked, “Maybe I could help you. Who are you looking for? I was born one year ahead of the year you look at, and except for one girl, Shifra, who died, I know everybody else.”

  “You are right,” Mazal answered, “Shifra is dead. I’m looking for her best friend, a girl named Chana, whose father came from Germany and who sometimes played the violin.”

  Mazal continued, “I could see red blotches appearing on her face. Her eyes blinked like she was trying to hold back tears.

  “Chana is my younger sister,” the clerk finally said. “My father played the violin and I remember Shifra coming to our house and listening to him enraptured.” The clerk remained silent for an instant, before she suspiciously asked, “What do you want from my sister?”

  “I couldn’t convince her to lead me to her sister,” Mazal told Charlotte and Otto. “She didn’t want to have anything to do with it. One can’t bring back the past, she said. But I read her hyphenated name-tag and immediately got an idea. I was sure that I’d find Chana if I asked the grocers in Geula, now that I knew her maiden name. Grocers, and especially grocers’ wives, are always happy to gossip. Not only did I find out where she lived, but I was told when she got married, how many children she had, that her boys had fought during the Six-Day War, and the year Chana’s father died!”

  Charlotte was fond of Mazal, whose enthusiasm was infectious. Gone were the times when she looked with superiority at Bruno’s concubine. “Finally, you made an honest woman out of her,” Charlotte told Bruno at their wedding, as she embraced the newlyweds.

  Now, in the airplane, Charlotte looked at the picture Chana brought, a snapshot of the three girlfriends, taken by her father, when they were twelve years old. Like the other two, Shifra, the sun shining on her blond tresses, wore a dark skirt and a long-sleeved blouse. “She was so beautiful. She was the prettiest of us all,” Chana sighed.

  If Mazal wouldn’t have been embarrassed she would have prayed Tfilat Haderech, the prayer for a safe trip, as Chana did, when the airplane took off.

  Next to her Chana and Charlotte snored but Mazal couldn’t sleep. Anxious, she thought about Shlomi’s reaction when meeting Chana. The movie Salach Shabati played on the large screen. She had enjoyed this movie many times, but not now. She closed her eyes and like so many times in the past twenty years, she heard Shifra’s quick steps following her and whispering, “G’veret, G’veret Mazal, did Adon Otto send you to find me?”

  “You can’t wait any longer,” Mazal had answered. “There is no time to wait.”

  Mazal opened her eyes. Charlotte was awake. She signaled Mazal to follow her to the alcove in the back of the airplane. Mazal‘s legs skipped over Chana without waking her. A mother of six needs her sleep.

  “What’s your opinion?” Charlotte asked. “Will Shlomi be happy to meet Chana, or will he curse us for the rest of his life?”

  “We have to stay positive. It’s too late to have doubts,” Mazal answered. “We are on a mission, like the one when we rescued Shifra.”

  Charlotte looked ready to cry, and Mazal thought that with age she was becoming more and more emotional. “Do you remember?” Charlotte whispered.

  Mazal hugged her, “How could I forget?”

  The two returned to their seats and saw Chana, already up, looking again at the photograph she had brought with her.

  “You told me that Shifra loved her husband,” Chana said, bewildered.

  “I can see her, like it was yesterday. She cried, “He saved me, I owe him my life,’ answered Charlotte.

  “But convert?” Chana asked with distaste. “Did she have to go that far?”

  Charlotte looked to Mazal for help. “That is the only way a Muslim could marry a woman of another faith. Though she took the Al-Shachada, Shifra said that in her heart, she remained Jewish.”

  “The day before we rescued her, Shifra came to see Otto. She kept wringing her hands. She was told nothing, she said; every decision had always been between her mother-in-law and her husband. Shifra knew that it was only a matter of days before they would be leaving the country. She looked so young, so unprotected, and afraid. “My mother-in-law doesn’t talk to me,” she said. “In her heart I am the Yahudia who brought the neckba upon her family”

  Mazal took over, “Otto said, ‘I am wondering about your talented son, I hope somebody will discover his talent, wherever he’ll be.’

  “When Shifra clung to Otto’s hands, I thought about the conversos in Spain, hundreds of years ago, who never gained the trust of their new co-religionists,” added Charlotte. “But I couldn’t bring myself to tell the poor girl.”

  “Gretchen stood up. She looked formidable, her eyes sparkled,” Mazal said. “That scene still brings shivers down my spine when I think of it. I couldn’t understand because she spoke German, but Otto, Charlotte and Shifra did, and I could read on their faces that what she said was frightening.

  “She screamed, ‘Heinz, Heinz, stop! Ruthie is as German as you and I. Heinz, my little brother, I beg of you. You laugh? Yes, she is German, she is not a mischling. I kneel in front of you. Have pity on us. Let me have my little girl. Heinz, Heinz, what are you doing? Your boots are breaking my hands. Why, why Heinz? Because I married a Jew, you say. You want to punish me! Go ahead! Break my hands, but don’t take Ruthie.’

  “I saw Gretchen falling on her knees, crawling, her shaking hands trying to reach up. It was like watching a horror movie.” Mazal’s hands covered her eyes.

  “Otto was as shaken as the rest of us,” Charlotte whispered. “We made her lie down. When Otto tried to give Gretchen a sedative, she refused. With so much turmoil, we forgot Shifra.”

  “Not I,” Mazal said. “Shifra was as pale as the moon, and trembling. I took her in my arms. The silence was overwhelming. We didn’t notice, but Bruno and Hugo, alarmed by Gretchen’s screams, rushed into the apartment.”

  “We were still dumbfounded by what we’d witnessed when Gretchen opened her blue eyes, which in spite of everything she went through, had remained clear and beautiful, looked at Otto and said, ‘sweetheart, I’m sorry. You don’t deserve this pain.’ Weeping, Otto kissed her hands.”

  “With a voice as gentle as a sea murmur,” Mazal said, “Gretchen turned to Shifra and said in a mixture of German and Hebrew, ‘Young girl who remind me so much of the daughter I lost, think of the future of your child while there is still time. My own brother took my daughter to the slaughterhouse. Yes, yes,’ Gretchen dismissed Otto’s denying gesture. “He did. That’s what happens when hatred seeps into people.”

  “As Shifra returned our glances we saw a new determination in her eyes. ‘I’ll be ready,’ she said. Mazal held her tight. After she left, our husbands discussed plans for rescuing Shifra and her child,” concluded Charlotte.

  Chana’s eyes were moist. “You saved her,” she said.

  “Unfortunately, for a short time only. That untimely accident,” Mazal shook her head in disbelief. “Her life cut so short, so—”

  “We are starting our descent to New York. Please return to your seats and buckle your seatbelts.”

  Chana turned to Mazal, “You two saved Shifra’s child. Who saves one soul, saves the entire world.” She took Mazal’s and Charlotte’s hands in her own. “I feel privileged to know you, and I am looking forward to meeting Shifra’s son—your son.”

  Shlomi felt better after his run. Back in the apartment he made himself a cup of coffee. “No more than one cup on the day of a concert, you don’t want to have jitters,” Otto always warned.

  He shaved and turned on the shower. The water warmed up slowly and Shlomi lost patience. He loved a hot shower, and his girlfriend B.D. as their Juilliard colleagues had nicknamed her—short for Beatrice D’vora—frequently kidded him that one day he might get burned.

  The rehearsal was scheduled for 10 a.m., and Shlomi wanted to arrive earlier to warm up. “Scales played slowly and w
ith full tone will do it,” Otto’s words rang in his ears.

  Otto, why can’t I stop hearing his words? He glanced at his watch. No wonder, Shlomi thought, by now he is probably resting at the hotel, he and my childhood’s protective angels. Shlomi smiled, remembering that in a phone conversation, he squeezed out of Otto the surprise he was bringing with him.

  Dear Charlotte, loaded down with the pastries she had baked the night before leaving Israel, would raise a scolding finger and say, “You are too skinny, you have to come back home and let me feed you properly,” while Mazal, smiling, would ask if he lost weight running the New York Marathon. Always sly, that Mazal, but he was fond of both of them.

  After a while Shlomi realized that lost in thought he was headed for Carnegie Hall on foot. Any other day he wouldn’t mind walking the almost forty blocks, but not today! “Carnegie Hall,” he said as he opened the door to a yellow cab.

  “Wow,” the cab driver said with respect. “Have you practiced enough, young man?”

  Both laughed. Everybody knew the jokes about Carnegie Hall, the Sancta Sanctorum of all concert halls. The great violinists who graced Carnegie Hall, Jascha Heifetz, Isaac Stern, Nathan Milstein, make one feel humble, thought Shlomi. He felt a thrill of pleasure thinking of Isaac Stern. He and his wife Vera would surely be at the concert tonight. Vera was the director of the Israel-America Cultural Foundation, and it was Isaac who insisted that Shlomi should study in the United States. “How long do you want to hide him in Israel?” Isaac chided Otto. “It’s time for Shlomi to spread his wings.”

  It was still early when he arrived at Carnegie Hall. People swept the aisles. It was cold and dark. He’d better warm up. Carefully, Shlomi took the violin from his case. It was Otto’s violin, made by Vuillaume, a famous 18th century French violin-maker, which he had presented to Shlomi on his eighteenth birthday. “You deserve it,” Otto had said. “My teacher gave it to me. I hope you get as much pleasure from it as I did.”