‘You’re always telling me I should change.’
‘Not one of your few good habits.’
‘So Sophie has bad habits?’
‘Sophie is old enough to decide what’s good and bad for herself. You should listen to people who’ve been on this earth a little longer than you.’
‘By that reckoning, I should listen to Hitler and Goebbels.’
‘There’s no arguing with you,’ my mother said. ‘Just don’t come running to me when you lie awake all night.’
As she walked away, I turned to the others. ‘It’s not fair. She says that there’s no arguing with me when what she should say is that there’s no winning an argument.’ Aunt Annette, as emollient as ever, claimed that Mother was under a great deal of strain, worrying about Grandfather.
‘But you’re worried about him too,’ I said.
‘Thank you, my dear,’ she replied, and, to my embarrassment, tears welled in her eyes as she kissed my cheek.
As soon as she left, I turned to Sophie and offered her my arm. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said and strode off so fast that I had difficulty keeping pace. Her mood softened as we entered the lounge, which was already quite crowded. The gentle motion of the ship appeared to have heartened the passengers, who greeted us with smiles and nods. Once we had found a table, Sophie asked if I ever thought about anyone but myself, a question that was not only cruel but stupid since she, of all people, knew how often I thought about Luise.
‘We’re like a couple,’ I said.
‘A couple of what?’
‘Friends,’ I replied, feeling very small.
‘Karl, I’m twenty-eight years old,’ she said, a statement as pointless as her question, since her age was as familiar to me as my own. I could name each of the five birthday presents I had given her and, with a pang, I realised that my memory of them was probably sharper than hers. ‘I don’t suppose it occurred to you that I might want to be alone?’
‘You mean to meet a man?’
‘What?’
‘Who’ll kiss you in the moonlight, even though he’s married. Then we’ll all have the right to stone you. As it says in the Torah, “the adulteress shall surely be put to death”.’
‘And where are you going to find stones on the ship?’, she asked, staring at me in amazement.
‘We can throw lifebelts.’ She burst out laughing. ‘Don’t laugh at me!’ I shouted. ‘You laugh, and Mother laughs, and no one takes me seriously.’
At that moment, the waiter brought the coffee. I gritted my teeth and asked for mine black, which I knew to be the grown-up way. Sophie looked surprised but said nothing.
‘I’m sorry if I’ve been sharp with you,’ she said, as the waiter moved off. ‘I must be on edge about leaving.’
‘Aren’t you excited about Havana?’
‘What’ll there be for me to do there?’
‘Look after Luise, the same as always.’
‘I love Luise with all my heart. I love you all. But I want something more out of life.’
‘You could be a film star.’
‘Oh Karl …’
‘I mean it. You’re pretty enough. You could go to Hollywood and be in magazines like Lilian Harvey.’
‘You’re very sweet … and that’s just it. One day I want a child of my own.’
‘I am not a child!’ And, to prove it, I gulped my coffee, which tasted so bitter that it burnt.
‘Don’t forget I’m leaving behind more than you are.’
‘Just more years.’
‘And my family.’
‘We’re your family.’
‘Maybe now. But there’s also the one I was born to.’
‘I thought they were dead.’
‘Only to me. Or rather, I am to them.’ She went on to explain that, although declaring them dead eased the pain of their disaffection, her parents, two brothers and three sisters were all alive and living in Füssen. She added that, as a Berliner born and bred, I could have no conception of small-town mentality, before admitting that, now that it had taken over the entire country, perhaps I had. She herself had escaped to university at the age of twenty, only to learn, on returning home, that her father had joined the Nazis. I expressed astonishment that a Jew could ever be a member of the Party. After a momentary confusion, she declared that anything was possible in a world gone mad. Her disputes with her father had turned so violent that he had thrown her out of the house, forcing her to abandon her studies and find work. She insisted that she had no regrets about her decision, except for the people that it meant she would never see again. I tried to imagine never seeing Mother or Grandfather or Aunt Annette or Luise and, while a part of me felt a disconcerting rush of relief, the rest filled with horror. Then I thought of my father and the figure I had glimpsed on deck. I confided in Sophie, explaining that, while I knew it to be an illusion, it was preying on my mind.
‘There’s one simple way to settle it,’ she said, as, with enviable authority, she summoned a waiter and asked him to fetch a passenger list.
‘He may be travelling incognito,’ I said, sure that everything about my father must be underhand.
‘It’s hard enough to obtain a passport in a real name,’ she said, ‘let alone a false one.’
The waiter returned with the list. A quick flick through the names confirmed that my sighting had been correct. There he was: Hirsch, Georg, Passenger Tourist Class.
I was suddenly, sickeningly, aware of the ship’s motion. I dug my fingers into the arms of the chair but failed to regain my balance. Never had the scale of Hitler’s policies struck me more forcibly than that a family so at war with itself should be fleeing from the same fate. I felt as though a stowaway had hidden in my cabin and held me captive. I had to think fast. My prime concern was to protect my mother from a meeting that would, in all probability, kill her. I voiced my fears to Sophie, who insisted that my mother was stronger than I supposed before adding – inexplicably – that protecting others was often a way of protecting oneself. Eliciting her promise to do nothing until I had consulted Grandfather, I left her in the lounge and returned to the cabin where I found that, although the light was on and his eyes were open, Grandfather appeared to be fast asleep. His head rested darkly on the pillow and the only sign of life was in his hands, which flitted over the sheets. My entrance must have disturbed him, for he called out my name. ‘I’m here, Grandfather,’ I answered, adding that I had been downstairs drinking coffee, in the hope that he might be reassured by this new sign of maturity. ‘Is there something you want?’
‘Karl,’ he said. ‘I want Karl.’
‘But I’m here,’ I declared, doubly disturbed by his confusion. I leant over to meet his gaze when, with unexpected force, his hands sprang up and grabbed me by the throat.
‘No, you’re an impostor! My Karl: what have you done with him?’
I realised with a jolt that he was referring to my uncle, in whose shadow I was once again lost. Loosening his hold, I tried to comfort him. ‘He’s well, Grandfather,’ I said. ‘Uncle Karl is well. We’ve received a letter from the Front. I’ll read it to you in the morning.’
‘Thank God!’ my grandfather said, slumping back.
‘Amen,’ I replied mechanically. While giving thanks for the simple ploy that had relieved his mind, I saw no other reason for gratitude. It was clear that, however else I was to solve the problem of my father, I could no longer look to my grandfather for help.
Sleep was fitful, punctuated by my grandfather’s moans and mutterings. When I finally dozed off, I was gripped by a nightmare in which my father fell overboard, although I have to admit that it was not the prospect of his drowning that scared me so much as an uneasy feeling that I was the one who had pushed him. Prompted by passengers who had heard his cries, I dived in to save him (the elegance of the dive should itself have alerted me to its being a dream). As I raised his head above the waves, his teeth turned into a shark’s and he tore a chunk out of my chest. No sooner had he sw
allowed it than he underwent a further transformation and I found myself in the belly of a whale, confronting an elderly, rubicund man with a short temper. He accused me of trespass, insisting that the stomach was too small for both of us. When I protested that I had as much right to be there as he had, he hurled insults at the Jews who stole other people’s living space. I replied that he was a Jew himself, called Jonah, and his story was in the Bible, at which he raged even louder and showed me his Party membership badge. Then, just as he started to strangle me, I woke up. A dull grey light filtered into the room. I crept to the window and peered out on the misty seascape. I was weighing up whether to return to bed for another hour’s sleep when two terns swept majestically into view. Their grace and zest shamed my sluggishness and I resolved to join them. Justifying my reluctance to wash as a fear of waking my grandfather, I pulled on my clothes and, grabbing the binoculars that Aunt Annette had bought me from the ship’s shop the night before, I ran up on deck.
A soul-stirring sight awaited me as a flock of tern soared through the sky, sublimely indifferent to the human travellers below. I watched rapt and, although able to hear nothing, I seemed to be seeing in sounds as they formed into notes from a Chopin étude. I was grateful that they were so familiar for, while I would never have admitted it to Aunt Annette, the replacement binoculars were barely powerful enough to make out the basic markings, and I feared that she had wasted her meagre allowance of shipboard marks. I was so lost in my fantasy of flight that I failed to notice that I had company, until I found myself face to face with a sailor, no taller than myself though a good forty years older, with sparkling eyes and a speckled beard and a drop at the end of his nose that, had we met indoors, would have disgusted me but that, out here, felt at one with the elements. He made up for his lack of height by the dignity of his bearing. I had never seen such a ramrod back, which put me in mind of a wooden figure beating the hour on a town hall clock.
To my alarm, he introduced himself as the Captain and asked what I was doing out here so early. I was terrified that I had broken a rule and, in my babbling apology, swore that I had not been spying but rather looking at birds. He was clearly perturbed by my agitation, assuring me that I had done nothing wrong and that, on the contrary, we shared an interest, since he had been a fervent birdwatcher from the age of five. Growing up on the land, he had known the names of the different species the way that city boys knew cars. He had never supposed them worthy of study, however, until, one Sunday, the Pastor had taken as his text Jesus’ injunction to observe the fowls of the air who did not sow or reap but were fed by God. That single line had served to legitimise his love. He dug fields and chopped wood for neighbours until he had saved up enough to buy a pair of binoculars. He made himself a hide in the woods and his interest had remained undimmed ever since. Then a shadow crossed his face and he apologised for mentioning Christ.
I assured him that there was no need, worried that he might suppose me either ignorant or blinkered. ‘Sometimes I think there is,’ he said, fixing me with his most powerful gaze. Then, with a smile, he added that he suspected he had only gone to sea to savour something of a bird’s freedom.
‘You could have piloted a plane.’
‘It wasn’t so easy back then. Besides, I had no money. Some paths aren’t open to everyone.’
‘I know,’ I said, feeling both sad and wise.
‘Yes, I suppose you do.’
Encouraged by his friendliness, I explained how, when I was young (a phrase that made him smile, but sympathetically), I had a recurrent dream of flying. I once delighted a group of my mother’s friends, although not my mother herself, by informing them that, in my true life, I was a bird and my human body was a mere disguise. My father bought me a book by Leonardo da Vinci, whose name alone fed my boyhood fantasies, with drawings of a flying machine that had been invented over four hundred years before. I think he believed that, by steering my mind in a practical direction, he would save me from future disappointment (in relating the story, I felt an unexpected surge of filial affection), but no sooner had he handed me the book than my mother confiscated it, fearful that it would shift my dreams of flight from the safety of my bed to the danger of the balcony. A compromise was found when my aunt gave me a pair of binoculars and a guide to native German birds. My imagination was fired. I set up a bird table in our garden in Berlin and went on field trips in the country. I enlisted two of my friends and, when they defected, carried on alone.
‘The birds were there for me,’ I said, ‘when people proved false. However low I might be, I felt better just for looking out of the window and seeing them. There might be nothing more than a pair of sparrows. On the other hand, there might be something really special. One holiday in Saxony, I saw a white-tailed eagle.’ I searched for a sign of scepticism that a mere boy should have seen a bird that had eluded seasoned ornithologists, but he simply nodded. ‘What’s odd is that I’m not naturally patient. I can go mad when a train arrives late or I’m waiting for a meal to begin. But, out birding, I lose all sense of time. I’m happy to spend hours watching for a bullfinch or a brambling to return to its nest.’
To stress my credentials, I explained that I’d built up an extensive library, as well as a set of research notes and a collection of eggs…. I shuddered as my tongue outstripped my memory, but I felt that it would be discourteous to elaborate. Instead, I expressed my determination not to leave Cuba without seeing the bee hummingbird which, as well as being the world’s smallest bird, had a heartbeat over ten times faster than ours. Fired by my enthusiasm, he quizzed me on the world’s largest bird, which, as you all know, is the ostrich … although I had to admit that it interested me as little as an unseaworthy ship. He then told me about an even larger bird that had lived 150 years ago in New Zealand, the Dinornis Maximus, a giant moa, that grew to twice the size of a man. I feared that he was able to read my mind for, just as I was wondering whether that was twice the size of a normal man or simply twice the size of someone as small as him, he specified ‘almost four metres tall’, adding that it became extinct under human pressure.
‘It’s hateful to think of something as beautiful as a bird being destroyed by something as cruel as a man,’ I said.
‘Often it’s not just the birds that are victims.’
His implication emboldened me. ‘Some people think that Hitler won’t rest until he’s made all the Jews extinct,’ I replied.
‘That’s nonsense,’ he said sharply. ‘Hitler is just one man. Besides, the Dinornis Maximus couldn’t fly. It was stuck on the island. You can migrate like the terns.’
‘But they come back again every spring,’ I said, gazing skywards. ‘It won’t be so easy for us.’ My words alerted me to a sorrow that I hadn’t realised I felt.
‘I must go inside,’ the Captain said. ‘I’m neglecting my duties…. No, don’t worry, this has been a most agreeable encounter. But I’m in the middle of an inspection.’ He pointed to my binoculars. ‘Keep up the good work. Should you see something remarkable, be sure to let me know.’ His confidence increased my frustration and, without thinking, I told him what had happened at the docks, adding that I doubted I would make any discoveries since the lenses in the new binoculars were too weak. He replied, with perceptible bitterness, that orders had come down from Hapag head office that the shop was not to carry its usual range of merchandise but to buy in inferior stock. ‘I’m sorry, but my jurisdiction only stretches so far.’ As he turned to go, I was struck by an image that I was eager to share.
‘You’re like Moses leading the Children of Israel out of Egypt.’
‘I’m an Egyptian, Karl. Whether I like it or not.’
At breakfast, the excitement of my meeting with the Captain was eclipsed by the appearance of my grandfather. As the ladies of our party fussed over him and the others at the table cooed their pleasure at an introduction to the owner of the legendary store, I consoled myself with the thought of the supposed madman who declared that he talked to himself in or
der to enjoy intelligent conversation. My poor grandfather must have wished that he had stayed in the cabin as Mother and Aunt Annette bickered over how best to build on his recovery, their respective suggestions of a brisk walk and a rest being almost too neat a reflection of their characters. With Grandfather’s morning mapped out like a school timetable, I mused on the comparison between children and the sick in a way that was flattering to neither. My reverie was interrupted when the Professor’s wife berated the waiter about the state of her egg, claiming that her request for it to be boiled for three and a half minutes, which (and, here, she appealed to the rest of us for support) she trusted that she had enunciated clearly, had been wilfully ignored. ‘Three and a half minutes means three and a half minutes, not three and certainly not four.’ Having subjected the hapless waiter to a humiliating rebuke, she then demanded that he return with a second egg, correctly cooked.
‘How soon some people forget,’ my grandfather murmured.
‘I beg your pardon?’ the woman asked, proving that her ear was as sharp as her tongue. Grandfather, assuming a diplomatic deafness, simply asked her to pass the jam. Meanwhile, the Banker’s wife regaled my mother with an interminable story of how her husband had sold her Persian carpets for the price of coconut matting. Watching him slice his cheese, I suspected that, after two weeks of such close confinement, it would not be the Nazis that my fellow passengers would want to flee so much as their husbands and wives. Then I gazed at the one wife who had no idea that her husband was aboard and all my anxiety returned.
A gentle-looking woman, all cardigan and curls, came up and introduced herself to Mother as the shipboard guardian of two young girls who, having spotted Luise at the table, hoped that she would play with them. She pointed across the room to where the girls, in identical dress despite their age-gap, smiled and waved. I alone opposed the plan, although I was aware of undermining my case when, provoked by a sceptical glance from Sophie, I concluded a list of hazards with ‘falling overboard and being eaten by sharks’. Mother chose to let Luise decide for herself, which she only ever did when she could be sure of obtaining the desired response. Luise, who could barely tear her gaze from her would-be companions, startled the woman by thumping the table and roaring ‘She wants!’ Mother blithely explained Luise’s verbal idiosyncrasies. ‘She always speaks in the third person and the present tense. There’s no I, you, he or they in my daughter’s vocabulary, just a blanket she. It’s as if, in her innocence, she’s removed all distinctions between past and present and herself and the rest of the world.’ The woman’s uneasy smile betrayed her doubts. I felt my usual contempt for my mother’s disingenuousness in attributing Luise’s defects either to innocence, which implied that the rest of us were guilty, or slowness, which implied that she might one day catch up.
A Sea Change Page 6