Ashes

by Christopher de Vinck

  ‘Once your friend’s hair had been cut, I was ordered to put her body on a wooden cart headed for the oven.’ He stopped, unable to continue.

  ‘I need to know every detail.’ I told him, as I looked into his eyes.

  I remembered Hava telling me about the time she and her father had stood tall and straight together as they lifted their heels and recited the prayer to the moon.

  Mr Becker said, ‘I didn’t want to, but I was told what to do. I shovelled your friend’s ashes, and those of all the others, out from the bottom of the oven and dumped them in a pond on the outskirts of the camp. All those ashes . . . so many ashes.’

  I closed my eyes and wept.

  PART VI: IN MEMORIAM

  CHAPTER 58

  I am an old woman now. I live in a small town in America. I was able to tell this story because I carried it with me in my journal, all the way from Belgium into my future. People remember Anne Frank. Perhaps they will also remember Hava Daniels.

  Each 4 July I go to bed early, but I do not sleep right away. As the sun sets, after I’ve read a bit, I lie on my pillow and wait for the fireworks. The first explosion is the hardest. It always makes me think of that first bomb in Belgium, the black planes overhead, and I think of Hava and me climbing a silo to reach for the stars.

  I sometimes think of that carousel in the park, and the children riding the painted horses, and how my father rode Charlotte sitting high in his uniform and white gloves.

  I lie back on my pillow and my room is illuminated with a fountain of light from the fireworks. I think of Hava pretending that she is Juliet, dead on the table in my father’s cellar; how we laughed after my father took us upstairs and she and I had our tea and biscuits. I remember how the steam of the hot tea curled up towards Hava’s lovely face as she smiled at me across the table. I remember the lipstick we made and the lilacs we placed in our hair.

  Each time a firework explodes, another image of Hava seems to appear in the flash of the red and blue lights that illuminate my room: Hava dancing with the lamp-post; Hava riding the bronze horse in the city square; Hava holding the dead soldier in her arms.

  I rest my head on my pillow and still hear the screams and echoes of people calling out, pointing at the sky, watching the approaching planes. I remember a man sitting on the cobblestone as the bombs dropped, his knees pulled up to his chest as he rocked forwards and backwards. What was moving? The earth or the man?

  With each new explosion of the fireworks I close my eyes and see myself at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, scanning a list of those who perished at Auschwitz: Jews, Poles, Gypsies, intellectuals . . . Sister Bernadette, Joff, Yaakov Yosef Daniels, Avital Daniels, Benjamin Daniels, Hava Daniels.

  CHAPTER 59

  When my father retired from the army, he’d come to America every two years to visit me here in my little town. He loved flowers and tending to the garden, and I always looked forward to his visits.

  My father didn’t speak often about the war, and I didn’t like pressing him too much about it. But I remember one afternoon, during one of his visits, that I found the courage to ask him about those years long ago. I was in my early thirties and my husband had just taken our eight-year-old daughter to a small carnival for her birthday.

  ‘Papa? Can you tell me about the war?’

  The afternoon was hot. As I was sipping my cup of tea, I watched my father from the kitchen window. He wore a white shirt, loose khaki pants, and braces. He was stooped; his useless arm dangled at his side; his good hand worked the pruning secateurs. As I watched the limp, dying roses fall to the ground, I thought about the death of my friend Hava. I thought about the bombs I had heard dropping from Nazi planes. I thought about Sergeant De Waden trying to kiss me.

  I placed my tea cup on the counter, opened the back door, and stepped down from the porch onto the fresh grass.

  My father had commanded thousands of men, had earned the Croix de Guerre twice, and had been a powerful man in the ranks and heroics of his country, yet there he was, gently pruning flowers. I noticed a shovel by his side, and I smiled.

  ‘Papa?’

  He turned slowly from his private waltz with the rose bush, squinted, and said, ‘Yes, Simone?’

  ‘Papa, can we talk?’

  He turned for a moment to look at the abandoned rose bush, turned again, and pulled out a white handkerchief from his pocket. I smiled, thinking that the general was waving a surrender flag. He wiped the small beads of perspiration from his brow.

  ‘What is it, Simone? What’s the trouble?’

  ‘No, Papa. No trouble. I just want to ask you a question.’

  My father slipped the secateurs into his pocket, the same way I had seen him slip his revolver into his holster before he left the house for the day. Generals wore uniforms and revolvers strapped to their sides . . . and now secateurs.

  ‘What is it, Simone?’

  ‘Papa. Can you tell me about the war? About when you went away?’

  My father looked back at the rose bush, then said, ‘Let’s sit on the grass.’ He extended his good, right hand. As we walked a few steps, I felt the stiff bones in his fingers intertwined with mine.

  ‘Here,’ he said as he leaned down, then carefully sat in the middle of the lawn.

  ‘We were afraid,’ I said. ‘The Nazis were approaching Brussels. You grabbed your briefcase, Papa, then you kissed me and suddenly you were gone. Hava and I were so afraid we took a train, trying to escape the Nazi invasion. You were gone for four years. You never told me much about those four years.’

  ‘Perhaps, Simone, some memories are like dead flowers. It’s better to dead-head them from memory.’

  As my father and I sat on the grass in the sun on that summer afternoon, I remembered the flower that had been my best friend Hava. I remembered the dangerous journey we had shared on a train to Dunkirk; the SS officer dragging Hava by the hair to a waiting truck. I had spoken about Hava Daniels often during the rest of my life, and yet my father rarely spoke of the war, the prison camp he endured in Spain, the beatings he endured, the starvation he experienced.

  ‘It was a time of survival, Simone. War is a curse, a wound in the history of our souls. When I looked at the blood oozing from my arm, when I heard the thunder of grenades and the agony of others, I made a promise to God: if I was spared, I would fight ugliness in silence for the rest of my life. You ask about the war, Simone. Listen to the peace here in this garden. That is victory enough for me.’

  ‘Hi, Mom! Hi, Grandpa. Hey, Mom! We’re back!’ I turned to see my daughter running towards us.

  ‘Daddy said he’s getting the mail and will be right back. The carnival was great; the best birthday present. I loved the big wheel and I had cotton candy.’

  My daughter sat down between my father and me, like a new rose in the garden. ‘Grandpa, you look sad.’

  ‘No, no, my sweet. Just getting ready to get back to work.’ He stood up, pulled out his secateurs, made two quick snip, snip sounds with the tool in his good hand and walked back to the edge of the garden.

  ‘And Daddy and I both had funnel cake.’

  ‘I’m so glad, my darling, that you had a good time with your father. I’m so glad.’ I reached into my pocket. ‘Here, darling, a small birthday gift for you. Open your hand.’

  My daughter opened her little hand and I placed a necklace in her palm, right where it belonged. A gold necklace.

  ‘It’s so pretty. Such a pretty star. Can I wear it now?’

  I nodded and fastened my long-ago friend’s gold chain around my daughter’s neck and watched as the Star of David hung gently on her chest.

  ‘Thank you, Mommy. I love it.’

  ‘You’re welcome, Hava. I love you too.’

  CHAPTER 60

  When I received a call on a Saturday morning from my aunt to tell me that my father had died in his sleep, I spent much of that day in the house. Pierre was in the city attending a meeting with his company. I remember reading The New Yorker mag
azine, trying to laugh at the cartoons. I flipped through some travel books about pyramids in Egypt and mountains in Peru.

  That evening as I prepared dinner, I felt an urge to go out into the garden and see if I could find any late summer flowers for our dining-room table. I grabbed my father’s small pair of pruning secateurs and stepped outside. There wasn’t much left. My father had been away for two years already. The apple tree had fallen a week after he’d flown back to Brussels. The raspberry bushes had withered the following year. The day lilies had succumbed to the cold September air. There were no more irises, but there, clinging to what was left of the rose bush, was one white rose. I thought of the white gloves on my father’s hands as he rode Charlotte in the Royal Park when I was a girl.

  I looked at that single flower: white petals overlapping like folds in the ocean tide, the stem with its strong grip onto the flower. I thought about how my father had planted that rose bush so many years earlier. Hava would have said it was beautiful.

  CHAPTER 61

  I only have one piece of physical evidence that Hava Daniels lived: a photograph.

  On the day that Hava and I made our way to the opera for the first time, we came upon a self-photo booth inside a small grocery shop. Hava thought it would be fun if we had our picture taken.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ I answered. ‘Then we can send it to a Hollywood agent and be discovered.’

  I pushed the curtain aside, bowed, and invited Hava to step in first. She bowed, giggled, and the two of us entered the little booth. We were both wearing blue shirts. In the background was a trellis and what looked like pink roses.

  I inserted a coin, there was a little click, and in a few minutes our picture dropped down into a small slot.

  I still have the photograph. I like how Hava’s golden hair curls on each side, and I like her small white hair clip.

  We both look happy.

  I asked Hava once to make of list of things that she liked. This is what she wrote:

  Sounds I like:

  Sap crackling in a log fire;

  Brittle leaves crunching as I walk in autumn;

  The spine of a new book breaking;

  The ball rolling down the chute of a pinball machine;

  The symphony of crickets during a summer night.

  Smells I like:

  The musty delight of old books;

  The romance of honeysuckle;

  The nostalgia of baked bread.

  Things I like to touch:

  The tops of freshly cut bushes;

  Flowing water;

  Fine sand;

  Cats.

  Things I like to taste:

  Chocolate ice cream;

  Ice cream made from chocolate.

  Things I like to see:

  Dancers;

  The light green during the first days of spring;

  Yellow daffodils.

  Whenever I see daffodils, I think of poetry and of Hava. I think of walking through the field of daffodils with her on our picnic.

  The poet Percy Bysshe Shelly wrote, ‘Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.’ Hava taught me to look at an ordinary lamp-post and see how it could be transformed into John Charles Tillman waltzing with her in the streets of Brussels.

  She taught me that what may have seemed familiar to my neighbours, what appeared to be an ordinary back garden, was filled with beauty, worthy of attention. Hava lifted the veil of hidden loveliness each moment I was with her.

  Once she said, ‘Simone, listen to the sound of your back door when it opens. Do you hear a gentle swooshing sound as the rubber weather strip brushes against the tiled kitchen floor?’ And then Hava said, ‘A tiled kitchen floor! Over one billion people in the world live on dirt floors. You live like a queen as you walk on your tiled floor.’

  The deck behind my house is made of pressurized wood, with spindles in its railing like sturdy soldiers in a row protecting the planks and stairs to the garden. Hava would have said that she wanted to dance with all the spindle soldiers.

  I like walking along my deck, looking down at the wide expanse of my small garden, saying hello to a passing neighbour, and I like listening to the chimes from the nearby Dutch Reform Church tolling out the hour in a beautiful tone of mixed joy and sorrow.

  I endured four years of Nazi occupation in Brussels during the Second World War. During the war the church bells were silent, but at the end of the war, on the first day of liberation, all the church bells in Brussels rang, and rang, and rang – in joy and victory. Bells in the world’s cathedrals, or the bell in my local church, all have the same effect, all cause the same piercing thump in my chest.

  I wish I could have said to Hava, ‘Walk with me down the steps of my deck. Step onto the grass. Look at the grass. Look at each blade, the green colour, the sharp, soft edges. Look at the green carpet as beautiful as any Persian rug, as lush as any floor of malachite in any palace.’

  I wish I could have shown Hava the daffodils in my back garden. They look like happy trumpets in the orchestra of the flowerbeds. I wish I could have asked, ‘Hava, remember the daffodils in the woods when we were running from the Nazis and the planes? Remember, Hava?’

  China, Japan, France all bulge with daffodils – the same daffodils. A Chinese daffodil is the same as the daffodil in my little garden. A Jewish daffodil is the same as a Christian daffodil.

  A Jewish girl is the same as a Christian girl.

  Different soil; different garden – the same girls.

  I wish Hava were here with me today. I would tell her, ‘Take one of my ordinary daffodils, fix it in your hair, and earn a final mark of 100 for Sister Bernadette’s exam.’

  Hava taught me that we are not ordinary human beings. We all need to make a choice. She taught me to choose life and live with gratitude – to gather daffodils.

  Wordsworth saw a thousand daffodils ‘tossing their heads in sprightly dance’.

  I saw one daffodil, one flower – one young woman who represented six million human beings. Six million flowers that were not allowed to bloom.

  My garden is my paradise; a single flower, my Eden – Hava, my Eve.

  I often think of my return trip to Brussels, after my visit with Monsieur Becker. I was drowning with the final truth about Hava’s death. I had difficulty breathing, difficulty looking to the future, but then I remembered Sister Bernadette telling me once about how much she liked the English burial service, after I told her that I had never known my mother.

  ‘Simone, remember the words of hope: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life . . .”’

  To find my way to eternal life, I had to resurrect Hava back into my life of inner peace, and two weeks later, I was ready to say goodbye to Europe, as Pierre and I sailed to America on the Queen Elizabeth.

  As the ship slowly entered New York harbour, I looked for a young woman hooked on the arm of John Charles Tillman, and standing on a yacht moored beneath the Statue of Liberty.

  I closed my eyes, and there she was.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A writer does not write in isolation. From books and experiences, he culls a vision into words, hoping his narrative will express universal truths and sympathies. From there, a book does not become a reality without people who hope to duplicate this vision for others to share.

  I am deeply grateful to Elissa Greenwald and Melene Kubat, the first readers of Ashes, and the first to encourage me to continue refining the text.

  My agent Peter Rubie has been with me for over nine years, offering guidance, kindness, and encouragement, and always speaking about my work with his professional conviction that I am a writer.

  Even though my twelve previous books have been published, when Rose Sandy, editor and publisher at HarperCollins Inspire, accepted Ashes, I was startled with delight and humility more than ever before because of her wide experience in publishing, and because of her
belief that this book could whisper words of hope in a world that seems, at the moment, so hopeless. I am forever grateful to Rose.

  Bengono Bessala of HarperCollins Inspire took on this book with her marketing skills, extraordinary enthusiasm, and joy. She is among the best professionals I have worked with in my 35-year career as a writer, and I thank her with a flare of gratitude.

  Finally, I need to thank my daughter Karen Mock. Karen must have read the manuscript at least five times, spending days editing the work, making suggestions, and following Rose Sandy’s editorial suggestions. Karen and I laughed often when I wanted to retain a word or sentence, and she insisted with humour and conviction that ‘Dad, you have to make this line sound better’. Karen is not only my daughter, but a terrific editor, who pulled me out of numerous slumps when I was discouraged over the progress of the book.

  So, alongside editors, agents, friends, and daughters it is my ambition that Ashes will capture the hearts and imagination of those who read about Hava Daniels and her friend Simone.

  I hope this little book will help us all remember that, among the sorrows of the world, we all can rise up from the ashes and discover, once again, what it means to be people of compassion, dignity, and love.