Random Acts of Heroic Love

by Danny Scheinmann

  25

  IN AUGUST OF 1919 I WAS RELEASED FROM A MILITARY re-education camp having been no less brilliant than I had been in Moscow. I was suddenly able to refute every dogmatic Marxist assertion with convincing ease. I could even prove, citing biblical sources, that God loved capitalists. It is so easy to flatter one’s teachers. No longer considered a communist threat, I was allowed to go home to Ulanow.

  The streets and the houses were exactly the same as I remembered them, but in the five years I had been gone the population had grown tired and old. There were no children in the streets, no young lovers in the squares, and where once there was a spark in the eye now there was grief. I passed an old man carrying a loaf of bread in the street. He stopped and turned. ‘Moritz?’ he said shakily.

  ‘Mr Kaminsky,’ I spluttered.

  ‘My God you’re still alive . . . welcome home. What is this terrible cough? Are you ill?’ I had grown so accustomed to it that I hardly noticed it. Kaminsky stared at me. He seemed shocked. ‘Here, have some bread . . . You look . . .’ He stopped short of saying ‘old’. ‘So tell me your adventures . . . where have you been all this time?’

  ‘Siberia,’ I said, eating his bread greedily.

  ‘Siberia? Oh my poor boy, we heard about those camps . . . terrible. So you came back with the rest of our soldiers on the special trains, there’s been a few boys returning to Ulanow, you know.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t with them. I walked back.’

  ‘From Minsk? Good God.’

  ‘No, from near Mongolia.’

  Kaminsky was incredulous. His jaw dropped open and for a moment he was speechless. Eventually he said, ‘Here, have some more bread . . . take it all. Your parents are in Berlin, Moritz. They left a couple of months ago. We thought you were dead.’

  ‘What about Lotte Steinberg?’ I felt my stomach churn in trepidation of the answer.

  ‘Oh, she left last year. She went to Vienna.’

  ‘Really . . . so she’s still alive, then.’ I was overjoyed.

  ‘Oh yes, alive and well. She’s engaged to a lawyer,’ Kaminsky said cheerfully.

  My legs almost gave way underneath me. I stumbled and began to cough more violently.

  ‘Are you all right, child?’ Kaminsky asked, placing his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Yes, yes, don’t worry, I’m fine . . . just a little weak that’s all,’ I assured him.

  ‘Come, I’ll take you to the doctor.’

  ‘No, no, really it’s just a stupid cough. You must send her my regards and wish her well . . . so when is the wedding?’ I asked feebly.

  ‘February.’

  I don’t really remember what happened next. I must have fainted, for the next thing I knew I was lying prostrate in the street, and my pack had come loose and spilled its contents on to the cobbles. Hundreds of letters were scattered around me. Kaminsky was at my side. ‘We need to get you to the doctor. Let me help you with this,’ he said, picking up a handful of letters and stuffing them back in my bag. After a minute he stopped and stared at the letters in his hand. He shook his head in disbelief, then, as if needing more confirmation, fanned out the heap of letters that were still on the ground. ‘Lotte, they’re all addressed to Lotte,’ he murmured, aghast.

  There was no point posting them in Russia so I had kept them, every single one of them. And each day my bag had grown a little heavier. See that case over there, Fischel, they are in there, go and lift it . . . you see how heavy they are? I want you to take this case, Fischel . . . so when you’re older you won’t forget my story. The closer I got to Lotte the more burdensome my love, until that day in Ulanow when I could bear the weight no longer. The doctor said I had tuberculosis but the truth was I was dying of a broken heart.

  26

  LEO CLIMBED THE STEPS TO HIS BEDROOM IN LEEDS FEELING thoroughly defeated. He had barely uttered a word since Eve and Frank had collected him from the station. Frank was racked with guilt because he knew that Leo had learnt silence from him. He was determined to come clean with his son once and for all. In the few months since Leo had been gone he had worked every evening in his study with the old suitcase open at his side preparing everything that he wanted to give his son, and at long last he was ready.

  When Leo opened his door he was surprised to see the floor covered in little neat piles of paper. His desk had been cleared but for the brown leather suitcase, which lay shut in the middle. He’d never seen the case before – it looked very old, the corners were battered and the leather was peeling off in places – and he wondered what could be inside. He dropped his bags by the bed and navigated his way through the paper to the desk. As he sat down he noticed an ant crawling out of the case. ‘Eleni,’ he whispered, ‘have you already had a look?’

  He clicked open the metal catch and slowly lifted the lid. A musty smell filled his nostrils. He was brimming with anticipation, this must be the inheritance his father had spoken about. He half-expected to find it filled with money or treasures and trinkets from the past. But instead all he found was hundreds of old yellowing envelopes. As he rifled through them he realized that nearly all of them were addressed to a Lotte Steinberg. A couple of them bore the name Moritz Daniecki. Leo was intrigued. He took an envelope at random, opened it and slipped out the letter inside. It appeared to be written in an Eastern European language, perhaps Polish. Leo looked down at the papers on the floor and picked up one of the piles. It contained a handful of pages. These appeared to be translations of the letters in the suitcase because each began with a date and the words ‘Dear Lotte’.

  ‘Dad?’

  The door opened immediately. Frank had been hovering nervously outside.

  ‘What’s all this?’ Leo asked.

  Frank sat down on the bed. ‘These are love letters written by your grandfather Moritz Daniecki. Deakin comes from Daniecki.’

  ‘Where was he from?’

  ‘He was born in Ulanow in 1896. It’s now in Southern Poland. But he died in Berlin in 1938.’

  ‘But you always told me you were too young to remember your real parents?’

  ‘I was lying, Leo. I remember them very well. I was at my father’s side when he died.’

  ‘I didn’t even know you were from Poland.’

  ‘I’m not, I was born in Berlin in 1927 but we spoke Polish at home, I even know a little Yiddish.’

  ‘Yiddish?’

  ‘I am Jewish, Leo.’

  Leo could feel the tectonic plates shifting beneath his feet.

  ‘So how did you get here?’

  ‘On a boat from Hamburg.’

  ‘With your mum?’

  ‘No. I was on my own. It was the twenty-ninth of August, 1939, to be precise . . . just a few days before the war started. The boat I was on was full of Jewish kids like me. My mum and my brothers were . . .’

  Leo raised his eyes in disbelief.

  ‘Yes, I had two little brothers, Dovid was five and Isaac . . . Isaac was only three . . . they were supposed to come on the next boat but there never was a next boat because the war broke out . . .’

  Frank’s voice trailed off and he brought his hands to his face. Suddenly he was standing at the docks in Hamburg. His mother was hugging him hard. He couldn’t remember her face but he could remember that hug. Little Isaac looked on mystified, he didn’t understand what was happening, and Dovid was crying because he wanted to go on the big boat with his brother but their mother said he was too young. Frank remembered telling her that he was scared. ‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ she had said, but her furrowed brow and wet eyes betrayed a thousand worries. ‘I promise that we’ll come and join you in a week.’

  Leo put a reassuring hand on Frank’s shoulder. ‘Go on, Dad,’ he said softly.

  ‘When I got to England I was placed with a family in Leeds . . . I say family but actually it was three middle-aged Jewish sisters, all spinsters . . . You never met them because they all died in the sixties. They were from that generation that lost its men in the First World
War. They were delighted to have a little boy to look after but I proved to be hard work; you see, every day I expected my mum to come for me just as she’d promised, and I kept seeing her on street corners.’

  ‘You must have felt so sad,’ Leo reflected.

  Frank sighed and moved over to the window. ‘Sad, yes, but after a few weeks I began to feel angry with her. Why hadn’t she come? I thought maybe I had done something wrong, that my mum was trying to get rid of me. The old spinsters told me that it was because of the war and that it would be over soon, but I didn’t receive a single letter or any sign from her. You have to remember, Leo, that at that time we had no idea what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. I just felt terribly abandoned. And things only got worse because then I was sent to school, but I couldn’t speak a word of English. The other kids bullied me because I was German – as far as they were concerned I was the enemy.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I spent all my time studying English and perfecting my accent so that no one would ever know I was a German. This went on all through the war, then in 1946 I got a letter from the Red Cross saying that my mum and brothers had died in Auschwitz.’

  Leo was staggered. ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Dad? And why did you change your name to Deakin?’

  Frank dropped his head in shame. ‘Not just my surname, Leo, once upon a time I was called Fischel Daniecki. When I got the letter about my mum I went crazy for a while, and then I reinvented myself as an Englishman. I suppose it was cowardly but all I had known of being Jewish was that it brought misery on my family. I thought it might happen again and I didn’t trust anyone. I’m so sorry, Leo, I know I should have told you all this ages ago, but for as long as I can remember I’ve been in the habit of hiding my past. At first it was to escape the bullying, but then it was to avoid the pain. As time has gone on I’ve found it harder and harder to break that habit. If it wasn’t for your mum I probably wouldn’t be telling you this now.’

  Leo stared at his father. It was too much to absorb in one go. It was as if he had fallen headlong into a parallel universe where everything looked the same but was in reality completely different. And his father, who he had always thought of as dull and mildly irritating, had transformed into a man with an extraordinary history. Frank’s idiosyncrasies, his fragility and anxieties, his evasiveness and silences suddenly began to make sense. Instinctively Leo got to his feet and threw his arms around his father. It took only one hug from his son to bring half a century of grief, anger, frustration and denial tumbling out of Frank. He burst into tears and wept uncontrollably, just as he had done as a child when he turned his back on his mother for the last time and boarded the boat. At long last man and boy had reached over the years to each other. Frank and Fischel were united.

  Frank took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Leo, I shouldn’t be crying.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Frank couldn’t think of a good reason any more. ‘I wanted to tell you about your grandfather. In fact he asked me to tell you his story. Would you like me to carry on, or do you want to unpack and have something to eat first?’

  ‘No, no, please keep going. You’ve started this now, I want you to finish before you change your mind and decide to hold your peace for another twenty-five years.’

  Frank laughed. ‘All right, here goes . . . I don’t know where to begin.’

  ‘You said you were there when he died.’

  ‘Yes, he died in his bed at our home in East Berlin, it was the thirtieth of November. Three weeks after Kristallnacht. His furniture workshop had been burnt down and he had been arrested along with all the other Jewish men. Some time round about then I stopped talking . . . I must have been in shock. He returned twelve days later battered and beaten with his head shaved. He had been taken to a labour camp – this was before the death camps, but it was a warning of what was to come. His health had deteriorated terribly but even so I remember him coming home with his spirit unbroken. It was not his way to complain. Perhaps I idealize him, but no matter what happened he always managed a smile for his children. When he walked in the door it was as if he was coming back from a normal day at work; he lifted his cap to show us his ‘new hairstyle’ and if he hadn’t laughed we would have been shocked. His wavy waxed hair had been shorn down to a patchy stubble. These were frightening times, but he tried to reassure us with, “Don’t worry, remember, above the clouds the sun is still shining.” He often said that but I didn’t believe him, and by then I’m not sure he believed it himself. He must have been in a lot of pain that day even though he didn’t show it, because the next day he couldn’t get out of bed for coughing and spitting blood. In fact he never got out of bed again. I didn’t understand what was happening. I was full of questions but still refusing to speak, so these questions flew around my head like bats trapped in a barn. Why did the world hate us? Why did my father have to go away? Why was he ill? Why did he have to lie in bed all day? Why did Mum stop me from seeing him when I wanted to? I was furious with them and could only think of myself. Silence was my revenge. I was so frustrated with the world.

  ‘Then, on the day he died, he summoned me to his bedroom. I was secretly excited that he wanted to talk to me, but I made out that I didn’t care. He was propped up against the pillows, his forehead dripping with sweat. Next to his bed was a large bowl of cold water and a flannel. They were on a table that he’d made himself; he made all the furniture in our house. It was a talent he had, he could make beautiful things from bits of rubbish, a skill he had acquired on his travels. We’d heard him coughing all night, it was worse than usual. Mum said that his back had given way and that his bones were too weak to carry him.

  ‘He grinned at me and beckoned me over. He took hold of my hand and squeezed it. His palms felt clammy. Then he pointed to the large wooden chair in the middle of the room – another of his creations. I jumped on to it and dangled my feet off the edge. He said that time was running out and he wanted to tell me his story. I suppose I knew that he was dying but the last thing I wanted was for him to admit it.

  ‘He was wheezing and coughing all the time he spoke. Every so often he would splutter uncontrollably and bring a hanky to his mouth to wipe away the phlegm, or ask me to hold the spittoon while he gobbed up bile from his rotten stomach. It was a foul reddish-green and when it hit the bucket there was an acrid smell that made me turn my head away in disgust. It’s quite a shock for a boy to suddenly become aware of the ugliness of his own father. I was selfish; I felt no pity at first but as the afternoon went on his health deteriorated before my eyes and I began to worry about him.

  ‘He was quite a storyteller, my father, but what struck me most was the way he addressed me as if I were an adult. He spared me no gory detail, and even though there were things I didn’t understand he knew that what he said would one day make sense to me. I think he was telling the story as much to himself as to me. As if he needed to validate his life before saying goodbye to it.

  ‘Before long I was caught up in his story and I had forgotten why I was angry. I could see that he was getting tired, but the more he told me the more I wanted to hear. His voice was weakening, and he broke off ever more frequently to catch his breath. The cough was worsening and he was spitting up blood. Towards the end I think he wanted to stop and rest but I wouldn’t leave his side, I wanted him to finish.

  ‘I don’t know how long he talked; it must have been most of the day. He kept me busy too, sending me on little errands here and there to fetch him water or empty his spittoon. In the afternoon he asked me to bring in Dovid and Isaac. Of course they were too little to understand his story, but I think he just wanted to see them one more time. Isaac fell asleep on the bed beside him. He lay there until Father died.

  ‘Towards the end he was coughing and spitting a lot, I could hardly hear him, and sometimes he croaked as if death himself was speaking through him. Every now and then he took a sharp breath, I think he was getting shooting pains in his kidn
eys. His eyes would bulge and go red but he never spoke about the discomfort, he never complained. He would just wait for each episode to pass and then carry on with a kind of dogged determination. It was hard to bear; something in me knew that death had lost patience with him and wouldn’t walk away empty-handed again. I was losing my daddy, my hero; I was still at an age when a boy worships his father. I began to fret, although I did my best not to show it. But even though I knew he was in severe pain, and even though he had told me several times that he wanted to finish off later, I pushed him and pushed him to the very end. All I wanted to know was what happened next.’

  ‘And did he ever finish?’ Leo asked.

  ‘Very nearly,’ Frank whispered.

  ‘So what did he say, Dad?’

  ‘I would never have remembered the details but thankfully he gave me these,’ Frank said, indicating the letters. ‘Why don’t you read them, Leo? It’s all there, I’ve laid them out in date order. Each pile represents a month. You don’t have to read them all if you don’t want to, but you should try, because you and him have a lot in common. I haven’t looked at this for years, but when I started translating I got totally carried away with it. My dad was an amazing man. Go on, get started.’ Frank squeezed Leo’s arm and left the room.

  Over the course of the next few days Leo read the letters obsessively. They were so vivid and heartfelt that it was as if he had been given privileged access to his grandfather’s soul and he could step inside the man and consider him in every detail. He could swim down rivers of longing, sink into the immeasurable pain, and bask in the rays of hope that drove Moritz to walk across Russia. Leo had been feeling like a one-dimensional speck in time with no past and no future, but now he had context and history. He had roots that went deep into the earth. Roots that would hold him in place and help him stand firm against the misfortune that was threatening to blow him away.