The Night of the Burning

by Linda Press Wulf

  1922

  I didn’t know who was supposed to arrange my next visit with my sister. I think the orphanage assumed the adoptive families would take care of it, and maybe Mrs. Stein and Mrs. Kagan each thought the other should call and set up a date. Three months passed after I was adopted before I saw Naomi.

  On the day my sister turned ten, I asked Mrs. Kagan if I could call her on the telephone. “Certainly, dear … show you how to … this telly-phone … always trouble … Hello! Operator, do you hear me? Oper-rrrrrray-ter …”

  Mrs. Stein answered. “Hello, Devorah, how nice of you to remember the date. We are cutting Naomi’s cake at this very minute. Hold the line, and I’ll let her talk to you just for a moment, as we’re all gathered around waiting. Oh, and Devorah, I’ve been meaning to call Mrs. Kagan—would you like to spend Sunday at our house? Mr. Stein will be happy to get you in his car after his tennis match.”

  At 11 a.m. on Sunday, I went downstairs and waited at the entrance to my building. My hands were perspiring as I clutched the little gift I’d made. A deep, rich growl announced the arrival of Mr. Stein’s motorcar and, resplendent in a snowy white sweater and long white shorts that reached almost to his long white socks, he jumped out of his seat and came around to open the passenger door for me.

  “Devorrrah, menorrrrah!” he sang as he drove.

  I smiled awkwardly. The trouble was that I never knew when I was supposed to laugh at his teasing. I was relieved when the big black car turned into the driveway leading to the Stein home. Naomi was waving excitedly from the front door.

  We caught each other in a tight hug and I closed my eyes. How I had missed the familiar tickling of her soft hair, and especially the feel of her arms around my neck. Surreptitiously, I rubbed away the wetness on my eyelashes as I followed Naomi to the pink bedroom.

  Photographs were strewn across the bed, ready to be pasted into a new leather photo album. “This is me at my ballet class,” Naomi pointed out. “I can’t really go up on my toes alone, so Mummy is holding my hands.”

  I suddenly remembered Naomi on the day of the ballet performance at the orphanage. She was shining with pleasure and excitement. No wonder the Steins had wanted to take her home with them.

  “And here I am with my cousins at a picnic,” Naomi continued, pointing at a photograph of a big merry crowd sitting among wicker baskets on a red-checkered cloth. I murmured politely, although the family pictures made my stomach churn.

  My attention was caught by the labels on some school-books strewn on my sister’s desk. “Naomi Stein” was printed neatly on each one. Her adoptive parents hadn’t been stingy with their family name.

  The loud brass bell rang for lunch. “Let’s go!” Naomi yelped, knocking over the photographs and pulling me by the hand. “It’s roast beef!”

  I laughed, finding again the old exasperated love for my little sister. Naomi was still an ever-hungry puppy.

  At lunch, Mrs. Stein put the choicest pieces of beef onto Naomi’s plate without even trying to hide what she was doing. Mr. Stein cracked more jokes, and Naomi laughed easily at all of them. Finally he got down on his knees, pretended to be a bear, and crawled around the table to tickle her.

  “Help! Help!” Naomi squealed delightedly. “Devorah, help me!”

  I smiled uncertainly. What was the right thing to do? Was I supposed to join in? I was saved from deciding when suddenly Naomi’s squirming knocked over a glass of water.

  “Now, that’s enough,” Mrs. Stein said, but she was also smiling. She rang a little bell on the table and the maid appeared. “Mavis, will you bring a cloth and wipe up here, please. Mr. Stein,” she ordered affectionately, “sit right back down or you won’t get dessert.”

  Mr. Stein sat down hurriedly with a naughty face. Catching my eye, he winked. Embarrassed, I looked down at my beef and began to cut it carefully. I saw Mr. Stein lift a small silver jug and lean across to fill my glass. “How about some milk, Devorah?”

  I almost choked, my eyes popping in amazement. How could I drink milk while eating beef? Surely he knew that Jews can’t eat meat and milk at the same meal. It was the Law.

  “Umm, no, thank you,” I managed to mutter. Then I watched Mr. Stein fill Naomi’s glass with milk. Without any hesitation, Naomi took a long drink. I squeezed my lips together so tightly I bit them. Didn’t she remember anything at all from home?

  It seemed hours until lunch was over and we were alone. Then I burst out, “How could you drink milk at lunch? You know we don’t eat meat and milk together.”

  “We do here,” was Naomi’s casual answer as she sprawled on her lacy bed, surrounded by her photographs.

  “We’re Jews; we don’t do that,” I said.

  “Mummy says there’s no need to be too Jewish,” Naomi answered.

  I stared at her. No need. Too Jewish. The strange words hung in the air.

  Sitting up, Naomi looked defiantly at me and said in a small, determined voice, “Maybe Mama and Papa and everyone else wouldn’t have died if they weren’t so Jewish.”

  I gasped. My brain felt paralyzed and I shook my head to clear it. I needed time to work out what she was saying, to understand how she could say such terrible things. I perched uncomfortably on the pink kidney-shaped stool of the dressing table set. Naomi wouldn’t meet my eyes. There was silence. Then, with a huge effort, I started on a completely different subject. “How do you like your teacher?” I asked formally.

  Naomi brightened. “I love her. She reads books and poetry to us and she talks really quietly. All the girls want to be her pet. Her leg is shrunken from an operation that went wrong, but she’s very pretty.”

  Before I could stop myself, I said, “Mama’s legs were shrunken. Before she died.” My voice trailed off. Naomi wouldn’t want to talk about that.

  But Naomi asked with genuine interest, “Is that what she died of?”

  “No, she died of typhoid fever … and hunger, I suppose.” It was almost too painful for me to say the second part.

  Naomi was quiet. Then she asked another question. “Is Daddy Ochberg our uncle?”

  “Of course not. He chose us at the orphanage in Pinsk, but we hadn’t met him before then. How can you not remember that?”

  Naomi’s lip quivered at my sharp tone, but she persevered. “We don’t have any real uncles?”

  I flicked scornfully at the album photos of Naomi being held by smiling men and women.

  “Everyone’s dead, Nechama!” I snapped. “Everyone’s dead.”

  Perhaps it was my use of the old name; perhaps Naomi couldn’t bear the anger in my voice. Burying her head in her lacy pillows, she sobbed loudly.

  “Shh, don’t cry,” I said quickly, moving over to the bed and patting her shoulder. It was the way it used to be when I was the strong older sister drying Nechama’s tears. I was glad to be back in that role.

  But Naomi wasn’t the same little girl. Shaking off my hand, she pulled away, snatched a lace handkerchief, and blew her nose. Then she turned to me, her swollen eyes blazing. “You make me feel bad. Like I’ve forgotten my family,” she stormed. “But I only remember Papa a little bit, and Mama when she was sick in the bed. I’ve got my own mother and father now, and my own room and my own pretty things.”

  I opened my mouth, but Naomi wasn’t finished. “I’m happy now!” she cried. “Even if you don’t like it, Devorah, I’m happy here.”

  There was a sudden silence. Then I realized Mrs. Stein was standing in the doorway. I couldn’t tell how much of the conversation she had heard, but her voice was very quiet as she said, “I think I’ll take you home now, Devorah. Where did you put your coat?”

  A FRIEND

  1923

  In January 1923, when I was close to fourteen, I began attending the enormous local high school, with ivy softening its gray stone walls. Fortunately, a few students from Miss Rosa’s school moved there together. We were all scared of the mazelike corridors, the blur of rushing bodies on the stairways, the loud shouts of
mockery tossed like hard balls among the older students. For the first few days, we shuffled from classroom to classroom in a tight little group like a flock of sheep.

  Gradually the high school revealed its wonders. Its library was almost as big as the public library branch near my home. The science laboratory had a mysterious little gas tap for each high table. Fragile glass pipettes stood like ballerinas in a row, en pointe, each supported at the waist by a strong wooden arm. There was an auditorium with a real stage for school plays, framed by rich red velvet curtains. And the tree-dotted lawn where we sat during lunch stretched green and immaculate down to the sports fields.

  “So much homework,” Shlayma complained one morning at the end of the first month. “They’re giving us double the work we used to have at the old school.”

  Zeidel nodded. “I worked so late last night that Matron turned off the light. I wasn’t even finished.”

  I was silent. They would think I was strange if I told them that I loved the challenge. Schoolwork was clean and straightforward: if you worked hard, you did well. It was my secret aim to earn the second- or third-highest grades in my class: that was where I would be happiest. And I was getting closer and closer as my English improved.

  Often I made the long walk to school with a scrap of paper in one hand, reading a list of new words over and over again. In the other hand I carried my hard little school case, which grew heavier and heavier with each step. I wished I could carry my books in one of those backpacks that hung by straps from the shoulders. But only boys wore them, the popular boys slinging them casually over just one shoulder. When Mr. Kagan saw the calluses on my palm and fingers one night, he showed me how to tape a thick sponge around the handle of my case, and that made it a little more comfortable.

  For one reason, I actually enjoyed the long walk to and from Caledon Street. On the way home I always rested for a while in my favorite place in Cape Town, which was called simply the Gardens. The Gardens was a park mainly composed of a gracious, long, wide pedestrian avenue through the heart of the city. Huge oak trees formed a cool arch above the avenue, and many people of different colors sat on the benches and chatted or dozed.

  I loved the Gardens mainly because of the squirrels. The first morning that I walked along the avenue, I was startled to see a little creature peering at me from a grassy side path, balancing on its hind legs and wrinkling its nose in a thoughtful way over raised front paws.

  I stopped and stared. The squirrel stared back. I blinked. The squirrel blinked, too. I laughed out loud. I was shocked to hear myself laughing. What if someone noticed me? I hurried off down the path toward school. When I dared to look back, only the squirrel was watching.

  As soon as school ended that day, I hurried back to the Gardens, to the same spot, and sat down on a bench. Almost immediately, a squirrel scurried past and scrambled up a tree. Then another—a beautifully glossy squirrel—stopped to consider me, dug furiously for a few seconds, and carried the booty he had retrieved to a spot right under my bench, almost touching my legs. Delighted, I peered through the slats of the bench. He was eating a peanut in a wrinkled crunchy shell. I remembered seeing a vendor selling those peanuts in little paper cones at the entrance to the park. Were they meant for people or for squirrels? I wondered.

  The next day I brought a few coins, knotted up in a corner of my handkerchief for safety, and timidly I purchased a cone of peanuts to feed the squirrels. It was the first time I had bought anything in my life, the first time I had had my own money. It came from the small allowance Mr. and Mrs. Kagan insisted on giving me each week.

  “Got to have a few pennies,” Mrs. Kagan had said genially.

  “I don’t need anything,” I said awkwardly. It was embarrassing enough to take the clothes Mrs. Kagan bought for me. I reached out to return the money.

  But Mr. Kagan pressed it gently back into my hand with his sweet smile.

  “Thank you very much,” I stammered.

  Mrs. Kagan smiled proudly. “S’all right, dearie. Buy yourself some chocolates tomorrow, I’m sure, hey, dearie?”

  But I kept every penny hidden in a box under my bed. What if things became bad again and there wasn’t enough food? What if South Africans turned on the Jews as the Poles had done? What if I needed to get Naomi to a safe place?

  The box was starting to feel wonderfully heavy. When I finally opened it to take out a few coins, I carefully subtracted the amount from the total I’d scribbled on a little piece of paper.

  Today, in the Gardens, I had an offering for the squirrels, to thank them for the gift of their dark, steady eyes and the S-curve of their fat gray tails. And, I admit, to entice them closer.

  One afternoon, as I was feeding the squirrels, a girl walked past, then stopped and sat at the far end of the bench. When two squirrels bumped noses in their eagerness to reach a single peanut, I heard a soft laugh join my own giggle. I looked up. The girl was wearing the same school uniform that I wore and she seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t remember her name.

  “Hello,” she said shyly, pushing her short blond hair behind her ears.

  “Hello,” I answered. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “You’re one of those orphanage children from Europe,” the girl stated.

  She said it without unkindness, but I had to correct her. “I don’t live at the orphanage. I live with the Kagans, in a flat.”

  “I live in a flat, too. We moved to Cape Town from Oudtshoorn last month,” she offered, pushing her hair back again, although it was clearly too short to stay there. “My name’s Monica Meisner.”

  “Mine’s Devorah Lehrman.”

  Another awkward silence. We both turned to the squirrels.

  “There are more squirrels than people here,” I noticed suddenly, and we both started to laugh. Monica wasn’t perfectly pretty, but when she laughed, her healthy white teeth showed and her brown eyes crinkled and her hair escaped, and she made me want to laugh, too.

  “Maybe this is squirrel country and we are the ones who are the visitors,” Monica said.

  “And maybe the squirrels should buy chocolate at the café and throw us tiny bits with their claws,” I added.

  “And we’d have to pick up the chocolate with our teeth!” Monica giggled. Then she stopped. “Hey, that makes me hungry. Let’s walk to the bakery and I’ll share a raisin bun with you.”

  My mouth watered. Mrs. Kagan sometimes bought those buns for tea. They had plump, squishy raisins inside and liquid sugar dribbled on the top. My hand went into my pocket to feel the precious pennies there. I probably had enough if we were going to share. “Let’s go,” I said.

  By the time Monica and I parted, we had agreed to walk as far as the Gardens together the next day after school. And after that, it was simply understood that we would leave school together every day. The Gardens was our giant hideout, an enormous private club where we were the only human members, or at least the only ones we noticed.

  “Other kids have a tree house; we have a whole park!” Monica said one day when we lay at the foot of our favorite old oak. As we gazed up into the different world of leaves and branches, my hair ribbon slipped off and I sat up and began capturing my long hair into a neat braid.

  “Why do you always tie your hair back so tightly?” Monica asked. “If I had waves like yours instead of my thin straight hair, I’d show it off all the time. Here, have a look in my pocket mirror. See how pretty it is hanging loose. Especially with your dark eyes.”

  I peeked in the mirror. My cheeks were rosy and healthy and my eyes were framed by rich, flowing locks. Why had I never noticed before? Where was the strained, drawn face that used to look back at me? I grunted self-consciously and returned the mirror. The sun was warm on my back as I leaned comfortably on my elbows with my chin in my palms and looked down into the lawn. Between the green blades I could see cool, damp earth.

  “God, I can push the grass apart

  And lay my finger on Thy heart!”

/>   “What are you mumbling?” Monica asked.

  “Nothing really.” I laughed. “It’s just a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that I like. Hey, look at this beetle. I’m forcing him to turn left or right, but he’s so cautious that he can’t decide which way to go. So he’s stuck!”

  “I know someone as cautious as that,” Monica said mischievously. “I’ve even seen her looking over her shoulder sometimes.”

  “I don’t!” I protested.

  “Oh, so you’re admitting it’s you,” Monica teased. “Well, only occasionally. Like once an hour.”

  I had to laugh at the exaggeration. I still felt anxious at times, scared of a danger I couldn’t predict. But with Monica I felt much safer. It wasn’t simply that she, too, was Jewish. It was that Monica gave me the feeling she would help me out just as I would help her, if need be. Before, I’d been taking care of my sister. Now I had a friend.

  Then came visits to Monica’s flat. It was a home like no other I had ever been in, and I was a different person there, laughing and chatting easily in the friendly chaos. Monica’s adored older brother, Max, and her easygoing parents, Mr. and Mrs. Meisner, lived in an extraordinarily untidy, noisy, and warm space, with a puppy, two parakeets in a cage, a goldfish tank, which was Max’s pride, and a large cardboard carton holding Monica’s two white mice and their nine offspring.

  “Nine,” Mr. Meisner had groaned when they dragged him over to see the tiny, bare morsels, blindly nudging at their mother. “Do you realize that means I’m supporting eighteen creatures in this household and that doesn’t even include the goldfish? Eighteen! No wonder mouse fathers eat their babies!”

  “They don’t!” I protested.

  “It happened when my friend Tony’s mice had babies a few years ago,” Max confirmed, and Monica turned to him. Monica trusted everything Max said.

  “How can we stop the father from eating our babies?” she asked.

  “I’ll move the father to another box for a week or two,” Max offered. He reached for a cardboard carton that was lying under a table and casually dumped out of it a pile of newspapers and a mess of coins, pencils, and keys. “Here, cut some newspaper into thin strips and we’ll make another bed for him.”