The Day the Flowers Died

“I love you,” he confessed a third time, but to her the words were still as fresh as if they had just been said. “Even when I am away from you, you are all I see.” With his words, Rebecca bit her lip and carried them to his, as he wrestled with her beauty, and she became lost in his touch. Every minuscule motion of his fingers over her skin felt like a wave of water rushing over her, a saturation of sensation. Every brush of their bodies collided as if particles from their separate bodies mixed and pieces of themselves became one another’s, drifting in and out and it was as if there was never any separation between them.

  Thursday, June 2, 1932

  Eli and Rebecca had spent the last two weekends together since their makeup, never parting, waking up in each other’s arms. But Rebecca had to work both Saturday and Sunday this weekend. Her shift gave her Thursday and Friday off and Eli stopped by her place Thursday evening to spend time with her, calling his father to let him know he wouldn’t be at work on Friday. His father, not asking him why, had a hint of the reason and, though displeased, finally agreed and found someone to cover Eli’s work for the day.

  With President Hindenburg calling Chancellor Bruening to resign in the end of May, one of the few men who had stood up to Hitler, this new month carried in its air a sense of loss for democracy. Eli knew Hindenburg was not to blame, but that the pressures from Schleicher and Hitler had resulted in this. Schleicher, a man for the conservative nationalist government, was now in control. His devious nature and backhanded maneuvers with Hitler only heightened Hindenburg’s concern for the future of Germany, but Eli imagined that, to Hindenburg, Schleicher seemed the lesser of two evils.

  Eli and Rebecca planned to spend the evening together and Friday morning to attend the Anti-Fascist demonstration in Berlin organized by the Communist and Social Democrat parties. Though neither of them favored communist politics to democratic politics and neither encouraged the often violent and agitated efforts to stop the Nazi party, this effort took a stand against Hitler. A few of Eli’s friends would attend, too. Aaron and Jacob, like Eli, felt it was their civic duty to break the hold Fascism had on the country and Robert and Rosalyn wanted to show their support of the Communist party.

  Thursday evening, when Eli arrived at Rebecca’s place, he brought with him a new camera he bought at the shop in downtown Munich. He took it out of his carry bag and Rebecca’s face lit up. On the side was engraved Leica II and it was small enough to carry in one hand. It had a silver metal rim on the top and bottom and a metal button on the right hand top side. The lens popped out of the center of the camera also with metal rims and Rebecca played with it, admiring its ingenuity.

  Rebecca also had a camera, a 1922 Conley Kewpie, her mother had bought her ten years ago when she was just thirteen, stored away in her closet. It was more like a box and she usually had to stroll it around with her using both hands, taking postcard size images.

  Eli slipped his new camera out from her grasping hands and took an impromptu photo of her. He caught her just as she leaned in toward him, trying to grab the camera, while her hair needed brushing, and cascaded over her shoulders. Her smile revealed her white teeth. The flash made her close her eyes and she called out to him in disgruntled amusement.

  “Eli,” she said with disapproval and Eli broke into laughter at the surprised expression on her face. Rebecca darted toward him but he scurried out of the way and ran into the bedroom. He leapt on top of the mattress with the camera still in his hands and pointed the lens at her as she jumped into the air, landing next to him to steal the coveted item.

  He snapped another photo of her and then released the camera into her hands. She rubbed her fingers over it like she had confiscated a hidden, valuable treasure. “This is so clever,” she said. Eli pranced off the bed like a child at Christmas and raced out to the porch.

  Rebecca followed him, ready to take his photo. “Stay there. This is a good shot.” She waved her hand, motioning him to lean backward into the banister.

  “Like this?” He leaned his head and body into the railing, his face still focused in her direction. The soft summer sun dropped behind the horizon and over his face, lighting up his dark chocolate eyes with orange and yellow sun light.

  “Not so far back,” she exclaimed while her summer dress swayed in the breeze. Eli leaned into the metallic banister. He pulled himself forward a bit and Rebecca snapped the camera button. “It’s stuck,” she declared. Eli grinned and ambled toward her.

  “You have to pull this latch back before the next frame.” He laid his fingers over hers as he directed her. She played with the latch and then focused the lens over Eli as he returned to the banister and she took the photo just when a breeze blew his long brown scarf into the air and he smiled.

  “Got it!” Rebecca swayed over to Eli and dangled the camera in front of him. Her sky blue eyes intensified in his stare and he took the camera out of her hands as they returned to the bedroom.

  * * *

  Friday morning, June third, hundreds of demonstrators from the Communist party crowded Berlin. People shouted and waved their angry fists in the air. The country was torn between opposing parties of Communism, Socialism, the Nazi’s National Socialist German Worker’s Party, and Democracy. The country was failing and so was the parliament of Reichstag. People wanted leadership that could provide jobs, security, and change. The angst for this change, mingled with the vehement resistance to the growing Nazi party, led many of the communist demonstrators to violence.

  Eli and Rebecca arrived in the midst of these streets. He pulled his Audi into a back road and walked with Rebecca, exercising their disagreement with the changing politics. Eli felt it was their civic duty, their obligation to his country to fight against the threats that strangled it. Roslyn, Robert, Jacob, and Aaron met them in the back street and the six of them joined the crowds and threw their fists while walking through the streets of Berlin, though Rebecca’s fists were not as tight as the many around her.

  The crowds grew loud. Their clamorous cries demanded to be heard, demanding justice. Aaron and Jacob ambled side by side like brothers, though they had not known each other very long, introduced through their mutual friend Eli. Their common Jewish heritage and struggles through the web of German Nazi propaganda bound them. Eli tightened his fists with his friends, chanting alongside the protestors. Rebecca watched this new side of Eli, a side that walked in the face of danger and welcomed the fight.

  She had seen Eli argumentative before, with his lawyer’s instinct for debate and diplomacy often seeping into their lives, but in this rally he was different. This time, he added actions to his words, not behind a courtroom desk, but on the open vulnerable streets, opposing the politics of the country. This side of Eli she did not want to see again. She admired his courage, but in these streets in this crowd, a rush of chills ran through her body and she grabbed Eli from behind.

  “Eli, I want to go home. I don’t like this. Can we go?” She implored, her eyes begged. Rosalyn gestured to Rebecca with a shrug and without words, asking, what’s wrong?

  “Rebecca, nothing is going to happen. It’s just a demonstration.” Eli reassured her with almost a chuckle, but she couldn’t believe it would end peacefully. Marching on the streets, the sounds pounded and permeated throughout the city, alerting everyone not marching that something paramount was occurring in Berlin.

  Many who opposed the two marching parties shouted along the sides of the streets, throwing fruits, bottles, cans. Demonstrators retaliated, throwing items in return to the discord of the disapproving observers. Groups of Nazis hidden in common German clothing took offense to this protest and threw punches at some of the people who passed.

  One Nazi, no older than twenty, with perfect teeth and short blond hair like that seen in the military, lunged at Eli when the six turned a corner and continued up the street. He wrestled Eli to the ground, smacked him across the face with a locked fist, and knocked Eli’s face against the hard ground.

  Rebecca gasped. “Eli!”

/>   Aaron pounced on the Nazi and pulled him off with the help of Robert. Aaron held him while Robert threw two fists at the young man, busting his nose and splitting his strawberry lip.

  Two more Nazis sprinted out from behind a corner and leapt on top of Aaron and Robert. Soon the streets flowing with peaceful marches erupted into brawls. This violence incited more angry spectators and protestors to fight and retaliate, and soon much of the street became disordered. Eli, Aaron, and Robert rolled over the ground with three young men who, from a disconnected society and a city of turmoil, had turned to a party that offered hope.

  Jacob joined in the disturbance, pulling a stronger attacker off of Aaron.

  The four of them, after bloodied faces and ripped clothes, finally thwarted the three young men and they ran off behind the corner from where they came. Jacob wanted to retaliate, but Eli yanked him back, almost in a wrestle like fashion.

  “Let it go. This has gotten way out of hand,” Eli shouted over the loud noises from the crowds. “I should have listened to Rebecca. We need to get back to Munich.”

  Aaron, a logical mind like Eli, could see there was not much advancement to be made since violence had broken out, and he stepped behind Eli to follow him away from the street. Eli tried to coax Jacob into coming with them, but Jacob shook his head and pulled away.

  “We’re staying to fight!” Jacob shouted to Rosalyn and Robert.

  Robert and Rosalyn, though appearing delicate to the eyes, pushed forward as if fire burned behind them, shouldering through the crowds and shouting out for their freedom and for the politics of the Communist party. Eli grabbed Rebecca’s hand and, with Aaron behind him, retreated off the streets onto the sidewalk, staying close to the buildings until they found Eli’s car.

  “What about our friends?” Rebecca inquired to Eli, “Aren’t they coming?” Her voice shook from the violence in front of her.

  “They’ll come in Robert’s car when they’re finished.” Eli turned his motor on and as he backed up, a wild, blond young man sure to be another Nazi jumped over the hood of his car with a glass bottle in his hands. He threw it through the windshield and Eli accelerated, thrusting the boy off the car. Eli whisked through the back streets back to Munich. He drove up to his apartment building and shook the bottle out of his car window before he, Rebecca and Aaron escaped into his room.

  No one tended to the broken windshield, frantic from the recent events and both Eli and Aaron wanted to wash the blood off their faces and change their spoiled clothes. Rebecca tended to Eli’s wounds with a wet towel from the kitchen sink and Aaron washed in the bathroom. Her gentle hand caressed the rough wounds left on Eli’s face that marked his political resistance.

  “Those bastards,” Rebecca almost lost her temper. Her face burned red. “I told you we needed to get out of there. You can’t protest like that without getting involved with the Nazis.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. If I had known, I never would have taken you there.” He whimpered with hard honesty as Rebecca calmed the bleeding.

  “None of us could have known,” she whispered, wiping the blood under his nose, patting it like she had been taught in nursing school.

  The next day brought more deplorable news when Hindenburg dissolved the Reichstag and called for new elections by the end of July.

  However, the next week passed quietly for Eli and Rebecca and they were glad for it. With pressures mounting and tensions escalating in politics, they didn’t want any more discord in their lives.

  But in the middle of the following week, on Wednesday, June 15, the country altered for the worst. As a result of Hitler’s backhanded maneuvers with Schleicher — promises of sympathy to his conservative national party — Schleicher awarded Hitler the ban to be lifted on the SA and SS, essentially allowing Nazi violence to prevail on the streets. Murder and violence soon erupted on a scale never seen in Germany. Patrolling groups of Nazi Brownshirts walked the streets, singing Nazi songs, searching for brawls.

  In an attempt to sooth Rebecca’s worries, Eli found himself hiding away in their rooms most of the month. Even Eli’s father closed down the office for the last few weeks in an effort to prevent violence befalling any of his Jewish employees. Rebecca spent most of her time between Eli and the hospital, bandaging up victims from the venomous attacks.

  As she walked up to the hospital from the curb she would often hear the rumble of song from the Nazi storm troopers and cringe: Blut muss fliessen, Blut muss fliessen! Blut muss fliessen Knuppelhageldick! Haut'se doch zusammen, haut'se doch zusammen! Diese gotverdammte Juden Republik! Blood must flow, blood must flow! Blood must flow as cudgel thick as hail! Let's smash it up, let's smash it up! That goddamned Jewish republic!

  The month of Eli’s sequestering left him feeling out of place in a country where he once always felt a part. The sting, like a scorpion striking his pride, kept him in the most dismal of dispositions and, apart from Rebecca’s returning home from work and sharing time with him, he began to feel disconnected from the world outside. Germany grew more and more into a country he did not recognize, leaving him unsure if he even wanted to belong to it anymore.

  He occupied his idle time with phone calls to his parents and quiet readings from some of his favorite poets and writers, curled in the bed or sitting on the porch. Rebecca offered solace and she found herself wishing she could take away all his pain, but her small hands and thin arms could never be strong enough to hold up a crumbling country. They both knew they would have to somehow endure while the country fell apart around them.

  Sunday, July 17, 1932

  Rebecca readied herself for work. Eli, unwillingly put on room arrest by Rebecca until the violence stopped, stayed in bed. She had seen Jewish store windows smashed and shattered glass all over the streets. She heard the Nazis yell out slurs, “Germany awake!” and “Kill the Jews! Heil Hitler!”

  The words stung her young ears. Rebecca requested Eli to not go outside until the intensity settled, because of Eli’s descript Middle Eastern Jewish features. Rebecca was sure he would become the target of a Nazi stampede and she could not bear it to see him bloodied and bruised again.

  Eli obliged while she held his face in her palms and admired his jagged nose, heavy brows, and hint of color in his complexion. To her, everything that the country was being taught to hate she adored. He lay in bed, watching her roll up her nylons over her long, lean legs. “C’mere,” he called out to her with passion in his eyes.

  “No, I have to get ready for work.” Rebecca tugged the nylons and straightened out her white hospital skirt.

  “Please,” he used sympathy as a childish ploy.

  “I can’t. I’ll be late.”

  “Call in and let them know you’re running late.” He used all his lawyer tactics. He slipped off the bed and, in his socks, made his way to her and rubbed her shoulders from behind. Her body collapsed at his touch and she felt herself giving into him with each impassioned kiss. She called into the hospital and Eli waited for her on the bed.

  She arrived at the hospital an hour late, but the front desk expected it and the secretary smiled when she walked in. Patients flooded the hospital. Several young boys sat in the waiting room with scrapes and bruises over their faces and arms. An elderly man walked around the room with a limp needing usual care. Two older men had been escorted to the back room for stitches from gunshots.

  Strolling from the lockers to the front office, she noticed the patient rooms were all taken and Rebecca soon found her hands full, assisting doctors, filling out paper work, and ushering the wounded. Her white hospital skirt and top blended with all the other nurse uniforms which provided a sense of solidarity, binding them as a team. Many nurses were German, some Austrian, a few French, and one Jew. Rebecca wondered if Ms. Eppes’ fate would soon befall the only Jewish woman working in the hospital. The thought took her to Eli and her worries for him cooped up in the apartment alone.

  Ezekiel told Eli to take off whatever time he neede
d under the violent circumstances that engulfed Germany. His main concern was for his son’s safety, not for the law firm. Ezekiel said he would give Eli’s work to some of the other staff until attacks in the city abated.

  Rebecca was grateful to Eli’s parents for their understanding, except in the case of her. She wished her own mother could support her the way Eli’s family supported him living in Munich and helping with everyday needs.

  If Rebecca had chosen to live at home and marry according to her mother’s wishes, Rebecca would be doted on by her father and mother alike. If she wanted a trip to France, her mother would not hesitate to arrange it. Instead, Rebecca decided to go to Munich, study an unapproved profession, and be with a man who displeased her mother. This overt disobedience came at a cost and, if Rebecca wanted to follow her own will, she would also have to arrange her own life.

  Sometimes when Eli slept, Rebecca wandered to the photo of her as a baby in her mother’s arms. She tried to remember how wonderful and secure that feeling must have been, knowing her care was certain. Now, she still longed for her mother’s acceptance, but refused to pay the high costs to acquire it. She gave Eli up once and she would never make that mistake again. Nursing and Eli were her life, a life that took her four years to create in Munich and she didn’t want to regret it.

  As she bandaged and tended chipped teeth, abrasions, cuts, and broken limbs, she knew this was where she needed to be, helping the people who could not help themselves. She was called into one of the back rooms to assist the doctor whom she had aided once before with the convulsing old man. She slid on her gloves and took out the doctor’s supply kit filled with instruments for cutting and sewing. She clutched each instrument, waiting for the doctor to complete each cut and stitch, switching instruments as the need arose.

  After an hour long procedure, the doctor finished with the boy lying on the hospital bed with a slash in his arm. The doctor looked up to her with a glimmer in his eyes and asked her to escort the boy to the front office. The doctor helped her lift him, grazing over her hand. Rebecca followed the instructions and ignored the encounter. She did not want to create any problems for herself at work; the country offered enough of that for her. But when she returned to clean the instruments, the doctor interrupted her.