Out of Such Darkness

by Robert Ronsson

  His first concern is what Rachel is going to make of it. He enters the house through the back door and into the warmth of the den. He decides to wait until dinner to find out.

  Although Jay would prefer to move the focus of their weekly meal routine to Friday evening, Rachel maintains that a winter Sunday demands a roast dinner and so they’re sitting at the dining table in a formal setting. A steaming dish of carrots, broccoli and peas is at its centre. Jay has finished carving the chicken and slides portions of meat onto each plate.

  ‘Just white for me,’ Ben says.

  ‘No, you have both.’ Jay picks some of the paler dark meat and flips it onto Ben’s plate. ‘How did the rehearsal go?’

  Ben, who was out of the house for most of the afternoon, says, ‘Not too bad?’

  ‘How’s your solo coming along?’ Jay ignores Rachel’s warning frown from across the table.

  ‘All right.’ Ben uses his fork to select a raggy-edged sliver of the brown meat and isolates it on the side of his plate.

  ‘Have you heard any more about some people in the town being unhappy about it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Jay can see that his son is pretending to be untroubled.

  ‘They’re still complaining apparently,’ Ben says. ‘But it’s not bothering Mr Costidy?’

  ‘Good.’ Jay is seeking a way he can encourage his son without alienating him.

  ‘You just ignore them, Ben. They’re ignorant.’ Rachel says.

  ‘I suppose if I’m Jewish …?’

  ‘You are.’ Rachel brandishes her knife like a fencing sword and it wavers between her son and her husband. ‘It sounds wrong to say “admit it” but we have to admit it – we’re Jewish.’

  It’s not about being Jewish. It’s about Rabbi Stern and his prejudices.

  ‘It’s not about being Jewish or not being Jewish!’ Jay blurts out. His wife and son look up from their plates. ‘What I mean is that you being Jewish or not should be irrelevant.’ He turns to Rachel. ‘I was talking with Howard Edler after soccer today. He kept me talking in the rain.’

  Rachel is nodding encouragingly, hurrying him along.

  ‘He said that it’s the rabbi of the other synagogue – the orthodox one – he’s causing the stink about Ben doing the Nazi song because Ben’s a Jew.’

  ‘But we’re not proper Jews. We don’t do the religion thing – not unless you decide to keep going, and when do they officially make you Jewish – a Jew?’ Rachel says.

  Ben leans forward. ‘I’m Jewish enough for the Nazis to have put me in a camp sixty years ago.’

  The boy talks sense.

  ‘He’s got that right,’ Jay says.

  Rachel is serving herself more vegetables. ‘But the other rabbi – the orthodox one …’

  ‘His name’s Stern,’ Jay says.

  ‘OK. This Rabbi Stern, he doesn’t think Ben’s Jewish enough to join his church.’

  ‘To be fair, we don’t know that. He’d want more proof than Elayna Zwyck asked for, that’s for sure,’ Jay says.

  ‘So what’s the point of the protest?’ Rachel strikes the handle of her knife down on the table top. ‘Sorry. But is it about the swastika or about Ben being Jewish? If it’s the flag the whole thing has nothing to do with Ben. If it’s about Ben … if Rabbi Stern doesn’t think Ben is Jewish why’s he making a fuss?’

  ‘I think everybody accepts that Ben is a Jew and I think that’s Stern’s main problem. He sees it as Jew plus swastika – a toxic mix.’ He turns to his son. ‘More to the point, Ben, is how does all this fuss make you feel?’

  All the brown meat Jay had selected for his son now forms a gravy-fringed ghetto of left-overs walled-in by Ben’s knife and fork. ‘You have to see how the song works in the play? The first time it’s quite innocent – like a country ballad? It’s only when they put it in the new context of it being sung to threaten the old Jewish couple at the party that it’s sinister. It shows that context is everything? That’s what Mr Costidy says anyway. It’s the strongest piece of theatre in the show and I want to be part of it.’ His face is flushed and his eyes are moist.

  Jay leans across and puts a hand on his arm. ‘Good on you, son,’ he says.

  ‘So, now what?’ Rachel asks.

  ‘Perhaps I have to go and see Mr Costidy to make sure he doesn’t bow under pressure from Rabbi Stern and his people,’ Jay says.

  Which is exactly what you should do, actually.

  The Jefferson High School campus sits alongside Route 22. Jay’s holding to the 15 mph speed limit along a driveway that could have been built in a straight line uphill to the visitors’ parking lot but it’s deliberately kinked to pass alongside the running track and the separate arenas for American football, soccer and field-hockey that have been cut into the slope.

  Jay recalls that the school also boasts indoor basketball and swimming halls with banked seats for spectators. He wonders whether it’s a good idea to hurry Ben away from all this and back to the claustrophobia-inducing rooms of his previous school in England.

  With your money he could go private.

  He wonders whether he could muster enough arguments to persuade Rachel that they can afford a public school but decides that he should concentrate on the matter in hand. When he phoned Mr Costidy earlier in the day it was as if the teacher had been waiting for the call. ‘Yes, Mr Halprin, it would be good to talk. Can you come in today – at 11.00?’

  Pedestrian students, scantily dressed, considering the temperature, and with their breath clouding in the air, bustle along the walkway between the main entrances of the three buildings. They scurry like insects satisfying some unknown greater need. When one group bumps into another they exchange scents with brief touches, hand to arm. Females, the more socially secure gender of this species, hug and sometimes touch cheek to cheek. This cements their places in the hierarchy. They bustle on, each individual confident in his or her own purpose. Jay compares this with the slovenly foot-dragging of Ben and his contemporaries in the English school.

  He parks in one of the visitor bays in front of the Arts Building and enters through glazed double doors into a reception atrium that, if you took away the milling students, would have graced the foyer of a Manhattan office building.

  I know this is wicked of me – but I’m reminded of the World Trade – sorry the ex-World Trade Center. If I had a wrist I would slap it hard.

  Jay registers with a receptionist. She has spectacles that cling to the end of her thin-tipped nose held in place by a chord round the back of her neck stretched as taut as the hawser on a suspension bridge. She asks Jay to wait, indicating a row of chairs.

  Mr Costidy appears after only a few minutes. His arrival coincides with a bell sounding and the reception area empties of students. ‘Mr Halprin?’ Costidy nods towards the wall-clock. ‘That’s the five-minute bell for the next session. I have a free. Thanks for coming.’

  ‘Thanks for agreeing to see me.’

  Costidy clasps his hands in front of his chest and squeezes his shoulders together and upwards. ‘We have to talk about Ben and the show, right.’ He tugs at the sleeves of the expensive-looking, pale-pink sweater that’s draped over his shoulders. ‘Have you seen our theatre? It’s empty. Let’s go there. Call me Mark, by the way’. He hurries through one of the internal glazed doors and leads Jay with quick, tiny steps along a corridor. The windows on their left look out over the playing fields. It’s a bright day but, in the distance, where the traffic pulls up at the crossroads, the exhausts billow white clouds. The marked-out soccer pitch is stubbled with iced ridges of turf.

  There are teaching rooms to the right and when they reach the end of the corridor it opens up into a large space with two sets of doors. These are set in the wall which Jay, guided by his internal navigation system, imagines to be the end of the building. Mark opens the nearer door and ushers Jay into the back of an auditorium that falls away in rows of tiered seats down to the proscenium of a stage that juts out beneath closed cur
tains. Jay whistles. ‘It’s a proper theatre.’

  Mark smiles. ‘Not what you’d expected, I imagine. I was in the UK for an exchange in my early teacher training. This must seem very different if your only experience is a school assembly hall.’ He points to the end seats in a row a few steps down to indicate where to sit.

  ‘This is where you’re staging Cabaret?’ Jay examines the stage area as he lowers himself into the cinema-style seat. There must be room for five hundred, he thinks. A picture of Ben, alone on the bright-lit stage in front of a darkened auditorium, flashes in front of him. Would it be better for his son to not take part rather than to fail?

  Mark tugs at the sleeves of the sweater and half-turns to face him. ‘Your son is very good, you know …’ he tails off with an upward inflection.

  ‘Jay – call me Jay.’

  ‘We want him to have a significant role in the production.’

  ‘What makes me think there’s a “but” coming?’

  Mark smiles ‘But there has been this unpleasantness and we have to be sensitive–’

  ‘I hope you’re not going to give in.’

  Mark stiffens. ‘It’s not a matter of “giving in” as you put it.’ He turns the wrist of his right hand so he can examine his nails and sighs. ‘Rabbi Stern is an influential man. He’s on the Board of Trustees. Many of the parents are in his congregation.’

  ‘More are not.’

  Mark nods. ‘That’s true.’

  Jay leans forward, his elbows on his knees. He doesn’t look at the teacher but speaks in the direction of the stage. ‘There are so many reasons why you shouldn’t give in to the protest. Not least is freedom of speech–’

  ‘I’m way ahead of you on this one, Jay. The First Amendment also enshrines religious tolerance and the synagogue seems to be going against this as well.’

  ‘Does the rabbi know that Kander and Ebb are both Jewish?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s the musical per se that the rabbi is against.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A Jewish student wearing the swastika?’

  ‘You know what’s laughable here? You know what’s making me angry? Ben isn’t Jewish enough to be welcomed into Rabbi Stern’s temple. But he’s Jewish enough for all this fuss to be made.’

  ‘We shouldn’t demean the rabbi’s position on this. His is an honestly held view. He would like us to cast another boy, a gentile, as the Hitler Youth singer.’

  Jay bangs his hands against the back of the seat in front of him. ‘You can’t do it. Ben has set his heart on the role. The school has to stand firm. You mustn’t allow yourself to be intimidated.’

  ‘You’re preaching to the choir here, Jay. I’m with you. I needed to find out how you feel about it. If the school stands up to the rabbi, we need to know you as a family are not going to back down.’

  Jay draws his palms down over his face. ‘We won’t do that.’ He sits upright. ‘There is a compromise.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That you use symbols that are fascist-style – lightning bolts, for instance – but they’re not swastikas.’

  Mark’s jaw sets firm. ‘I couldn’t do it. It would compromise the integrity of my directorial vision.’

  What!

  Jay nods. ‘Hmm. I can see it would be impossible.’

  Chapter 20

  How long Leo and I stood in the crowd by the Brandenburg Gate watching the Brownshirts parade I can’t say. Still they came, row after row. To my right the flow swept through the Brandenburg Gate and to my left more still, voices strong. It was an overwhelming show of strength. One by one, the people around us stretched out their right arms. They were self-conscious at first but as more and more of them did it, so the arm-spasm spread like a contagion. And swept up in it, I too pushed out my hand. I could feel the flush on my face, the exhilaration of the moment as this display of manpower strutted in front of me. I felt the sex of it and I’m sure many of the women and men like me experienced it too. I glanced at Leo. His face showed no emotion. His hands were stiff at his sides.

  The Brownshirts had passed at last and here came the Hitler Jugend – hundreds and hundreds of them, with each platoon divided by a gap in which a solitary leading figure carried a banner. I studied each of these individually and there he was: Wolfgang, his chest puffed out, marching at the head of his group. I nudged Leo and pointed. He nodded.

  All too quickly Wolf’s squadron had passed, yet more Hitler youth girls and boys marched by until, finally, the parade finished with Brownshirt officers mounted on horses. As they passed, the police cordon broke and the watchers dropped their right hands and joined the procession. It looked as if all Berlin was marching that night.

  Darkness descended. I turned to Leo, careful to speak in German. “Did you see him? Did you see my Wolf?” My right shoulder was painful from having held out my extended arm for so long.

  Leo shook his head and turned away.

  We hardly spoke on the train back to Zoo Station. We had broken away from the crowd early – most of them had gone on, presumably, to listen to speeches at the Reichstag.

  “What’s troubling you, Leo?” I said.

  He shook his head. “There were so many of them.”

  “Brownshirts? Yes, but they looked good, didn’t they? Somehow, not so thuggish when you see them together like that.”

  He whispered even though the nearest passenger was at the other end of the carriage. “No, so many Berliners. Look, Cam, this is meant to be Germany’s liberal city. This is where the communists are strongest. It’s the city of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. How can there be so much support here for Hitler and his crazy gang? They’re like a Music Hall turn. Did you see the hysteria? Even you were taken in.”

  I spluttered. “I was melting into the crowd like you said.”

  He snorted. “You couldn’t see the look on your face. It was pure rapture. You looked like you were going to … well, you don’t want to know what you looked like.”

  I scratched my ear and adjusted my hat. “It was a magnificent show, though, wasn’t it?”

  “Hmm. That’s the problem. I think things are coming to an end here for me in Berlin.”

  The city settled down but for only a month. The Reichstag fire at the end of February gave the Chancellor a pretext for outlawing the Communist and Social Democrat parties and this passed into law at the end of March. Leo was convinced that most of the leading communists were arrested weeks before it was legal.

  All this was going on in the background. Another harsh Berlin winter was blossoming into spring and Wolf and I emerged into the streets. Our weekly ‘lessons’ first moved to the indoors of the cafe in Savignyplatz and, as the sun became warmer, to a table outside. There we would discuss the affairs of men airily while we both smoked my Turkish cigarettes. The only evidence of the changing political times was that the Brownshirts became even more arrogant as they strode along the pavements.

  Occasionally we might see a Jewish man, one who was clearly identified by his brimmed hat and ringlets, forced to step into the gutter by a Brownshirt wielding a swagger stick but this was not a regular sight.

  More regular were the collections for the Nazi Party at almost every street corner and in every bar, restaurant and cafe. It was never wise to refuse on any pretext and Berliners became accustomed to having a pocketful of change to keep the collectors happy.

  It was easy to see the growing tension between the brown-uniformed SA and the sharp-edged crows of the SS. The latter, who appeared to be chosen as much for how they filled the uniform and their militaristic bearing as for their aptitude as soldiers, were generally magnificent creatures. If one came to the cafe, Wolf and I would suspend conversation and watch him strut to the table, cast an arrogant look about him as he removed his cap and gloves and sit down before crossing one extravagantly jodhpured thigh over the other. I wondered whether they had classes in deportment. The sight of this routine was usually enough to set us both drooling. These sophisticates
treated the Brownshirts as their country cousins.

  One of the advantages of the ascendancy of the Nazis was the colourful street scene that resulted. Every building along the Ku-damm, for instance, displayed one of the vertical pennants in black, white and red and these fluttered in the breeze of that Nazi spring.

  Wolf was radiant. His father’s firm was booming, having recently secured another Wehrmacht contract and his party was in the ascendant. He spoke of how he would be prepared to serve Der Fuhrer in any capacity but that, after he had served his term in an elite post in Roehm’s SA, he would probably have a political role. He saw no conflict between his being of our kind and the likelihood that the Nazis would stamp out the laissez-faire attitude to ‘deviancy’ for which Berlin was famous.

  Wolf was an enthusiastic and, as far as I could discern, leading member of his Hitler Youth squadron. If he held extreme views he kept them largely to himself, perhaps because he knew I was unlikely to be sympathetic. For instance, one Wednesday in May that year, Wolf excused himself from the lesson because there was a large demonstration he wanted to join. This turned out to be the book burning in Opernplatz off Unter den Linden. I read about it afterwards and realised that he must have taken part but we didn’t talk about it.

  Our relationship remained platonic even though I fantasised about taking it further. I was fixated with the notion that he was innocent of grown-up physical relations and was also conscious that, if I acted upon my desires, it would be an abuse of my position of trust. There was also the simple mathematical fact that he was sixteen and I was eleven years older. He could not be interested in me sexually. I knew that he enjoyed my company and looked forward to our lessons, because he told me this every week, but that was as far as it would go.

  It was a Saturday in the August of that year, as I was approaching my 28th birthday, that Wolf was unwell during one of our lessons. We had been watching the people passing by at the Savignyplatz cafe when he complained of a headache. Perhaps it was the sun or the noise from one of the loudspeakers in the square. Every Platz had them, relaying one of the speeches of Hitler or Goebbels always with the same message ‘Germany is awake’.