A Sea Change

by Michael Arditti

  Luise’s lumbering gait and dragging foot looked more pronounced than ever as Sophie steered her through the maze of tables and trolleys. I was appalled that my fears for her safety had not been shared, and reproached my mother for entrusting her to strangers when I had promised to take her exploring myself. Her no doubt withering reply was pre-empted by the Professor’s wife’s interjection that, last night on deck, she had met two charming boys of about my age – I winced – who were planning a game of shuffleboard. She was sure that they would welcome a third. ‘Oh that won’t suit Karl,’ my mother said. ‘He’s always been a loner.’ I stared at her in amazement and wondered whether she knew anything about me at all. In her words, I saw the origins of a myth: Karl’s a loner so we’ll buy him a book for his birthday; Karl’s a loner so he prefers birds to people; Karl’s a loner so he won’t be interested in girls. Were she to give it a moment’s thought, she would see that Karl was a loner because his friends had betrayed him; Karl was a loner because a class of twenty-two pupils had become twenty-one in all but name; Karl was a loner because his faithless blood brother, Johannes von Hirte, had sworn that, if he ever told a soul about their thumb prick, if he ever breathed a word about the mingling of Jewish and Aryan blood, then he would denounce him to the SS.

  I spent the morning on deck, confirming my mother’s view of my disposition by standing alone among hordes of happy people who were relaxing, taking photographs and making friends. I replied politely to the occasional remark but refused to join in the general chatter. The problem of my father preoccupied me and I decided to seek him out, making it clear, lest he should harbour any illusions, that he would never be able to claw his way back into our hearts. I reminded myself of the effect that he had had, not just on Luise, his most blatant victim, but on Grandfather, who had been forced to assume a new set of responsibilities, and on Mother, who had withdrawn into her art. I looked back with longing to the time before he left home – not to my father himself, on whose image I placed as many prohibitions as the Orthodox did on food, but to my mother, who had since become a different person. It was like comparing pictures of before and after a fire. She had not only turned against my father but me. No longer did she come upstairs at tea-time to question me on my day and plan how we would spend the evening; no longer did she rub every bruise and soothe every slight. Instead, she shut herself up in her studio where she must only ever be disturbed in an emergency; instead, she raged against every interruption to her ‘flow’, whether it be a visit from a friend, a meeting of a committee, or a request from her son.

  The only time that she chose to spend with me was when she was painting my portrait – which she did with alarming frequency. To make matters worse, the results were hung in an annual exhibition in the central hall of my grandfather’s store, in full view of all my classmates. For one interminable term at the age of ten, Blueface became my universal nickname. The following year, however, even the most inveterate mockers were silenced by the giant canvas in which I appeared to be attacked by a swarm of butterflies. They no doubt regarded its public display as humiliation enough. I was relieved to be beyond their reach when, during her final show in the summer of 1938, my fourteen year-old face looked as creviced and cracked as an ancient mosaic. I had no redress. Any attempt to elicit a meaning would precipitate a lecture on my place in her iconography, while a refusal to sit unleashed a tirade on my efforts to sabotage her work. I blamed her behaviour entirely on my father. Without him, she would have been content to play Scarlatti and embroider napkins like other boys’ mothers, rather than holding up her pictures as though they were the Scrolls of the Law.

  Desperate to prevent my father’s return from reopening the wounds of his defection, I resolved to seek him out and give him the chance to hide honourably in his cabin until we reached Cuba, when he could head straight for some remote part of the island. I scoured the ship without success and was contemplating whether to knock on his door when I caught sight of Mark, gazing out to sea. I hurried up to the rail, as eager to talk to him as I was to avoid the rest of the passengers.

  ‘You look sad,’ I said, ‘is there anything I can do?’

  ‘Such consideration,’ he said. ‘You first-class Jews are so kind.’

  ‘My grandfather built holiday homes for his employees.’

  ‘Then he’s assured of his place among the righteous.’

  ‘I don’t think you should say that.’

  ‘I don’t think you should stand here harassing me.’

  ‘I’m a loner. We’re two of a kind.’

  ‘You must have heard the expression: “the half is often better than the whole”?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, it applies to us.’

  Although I was hurt by his tone, I was grateful to be talking to someone whose horizons weren’t limited to carpets. I braced myself to ask the question that had been haunting me from the first moment I saw him: had he been sent to one of the camps? He congratulated me on my perception, but his irony was exposed when, having established that he had been released for almost a month, I asked why he had not grown back his hair. Receiving no answer, I supplied my own: that he wanted to make the rest of us feel guilty. It was for the same reason that, in spite of the ready supply of hot water, he had still not bathed.

  ‘I’ve obviously met my match in you,’ he said, before adding with flagrant perversity: ‘So why do you seek me out? Have you been so brainwashed by all the talk of dirty Jews that you’ll only be happy when you are one? Am I what you want to become?’

  Refusing to stoop to a reply, I told him that my grandfather had been imprisoned for six weeks last November. He had suffered no ill-effects apart from fatigue (loyalty drew a veil over the lice) and, as ever, smelt of eau-de-cologne. I offered to bring a bottle for Mark and, when he asked why, explained that it might encourage the other passengers to talk to him. ‘Or do you think you have nothing in common?’

  ‘I have everything in common but nothing to say.’

  Baffled, I focused on his accent and asked where he was from. ‘Somewhere East of Eden,’ he replied and, failing to provoke a reaction, added ‘a town in the Ukraine’. He stared at me intently and then, as though deciding that to tell his story would cause me more distress than to withhold it, described how he had been settled in Germany for nearly twenty years. At first he had made a living as a pedlar, selling ribbons and cloth, but he had been driven out by the competition. ‘You know my greatest complaint against the Nazis?’ he asked with a sly smile. ‘That they took the decency out of peddling. It used to be an honest profession until all the riffraff – the doctors and lawyers, no longer able to fleece their clients – packed their suitcases and went on the road.’

  Eager to establish a bond, I told him that my family had started out as pedlars and felt that, for the first time, I had caught him by surprise. Quoting from the history that my grandfather had commissioned in the 1920s, only to see it suppressed in the following decade, I told him how the source of our prosperity could be dated to 1812, when Napoleon’s army was retreating from Moscow. The soldiers had abandoned their weapons in order to carry back as much booty as they could. By the time that they reached Prussia, however, they were demoralised and famished, and ready to trade the most precious treasures for a handful of potatoes, beans or peas, or even, according to family legend, for a kiss from a pretty girl. So my canny ancestor bought up all his neighbours’ provisions and loaded them on his sledge (along with his ruby-lipped daughter), returning home three days later, laden with gold and silver and jewels. Although aspects of the story made me uneasy, I took heart from the thought of Jacob, whose deception of the ravenous Esau was the model for all such transactions. It was his house that God had favoured just as, four thousand years later, he had ours.

  ‘So now you intend to begin again: to become good Americans as you were once good Germans, saluting the Flag and celebrating Thanksgiving. Until they throw us out in their turn.’

  ‘They’ll neve
r do that. Haven’t you heard of the Statue of Liberty? In any case, we must stand up and show the world that we’ll thrive, no matter how cruelly we’re treated.’

  ‘You think that the world will thank us for it? Such naivety in one so young!’

  ‘And if we don’t – if we stay in the dirt where they kick us – who’ll be the ones to suffer? Ourselves.’

  ‘Oh no, we’ll be hurting someone much greater and more powerful than ourselves.’

  While I was working out whether he meant Hitler or some other leader, he looked me up and down and, with a curt ‘You bore me!’, walked away. Though initially stung, I soon shrugged off the charge. That I was callous (my mother), parasitical (the Nazis) and ugly (myself) had struck home, but I utterly denied being boring. For a start, I could recite the name of every species of bird in Germany, along with an account of its natural habitat, breeding habits and approximate population. The accusation was especially unfair, since I had only approached him out of charity. I took comfort from an image of myself in some conversational soup kitchen, doling out platefuls of nourishing words. But the image faded and the sting returned and, in an attempt to forestall further harm, I retreated to my cabin, where I was shocked to find Grandfather lying in bed, tended by Mother, Aunt Annette and the Ship’s Doctor. I realised that his condition must be grave when I fired off a battery of questions and, rather than silencing me, Mother hung attentively on the Doctor’s replies. He explained that Grandfather’s heart was failing. Having used up all his strength in preparing for the voyage, he had collapsed from a mixture of strain and relief. The most that anyone could do for him now was to make him comfortable.

  ‘That’s not true,’ I protested, ‘the most we can do is make him well.’

  ‘You can always pray,’ he said, breaking off in embarrassment as though our prayers were by definition defective. Neither my mother nor my aunt spoke. I studied their faces which, for the first time, were fixed in identical expressions, and that scared me most of all. The Doctor packed his bag and Mother saw him out of the cabin, establishing that she was the one to whom he should report. Meanwhile, I looked to Aunt Annette for reassurance. I failed to see how strain and relief could do such damage to a person’s body … but then I was fifteen, the age when, to escape the frustrations of puberty, my body was at its most detached from my emotions. She insisted that the hurt had been inflicted in the camps.

  ‘He told us that he had been well treated.’

  ‘Do you think that he told us the truth?’

  ‘Perhaps not to me, but surely to you?’

  ‘I saw the truth; I didn’t hear it.’

  I was stunned by her disloyalty, not just to my grandfather but to the adult cause. I had presumed that grown-ups reserved their lies for children; here was evidence that they practised them on each other.

  ‘It was the same with your Uncle Karl. He wrote letters from the Front that gave no inkling of the horror of the trenches. Right to the end, your grandmother believed that, every night after a hard day’s fighting, he went back to a well-heated hut.’

  My mother’s return put paid to further revelations. I joined her and Aunt Annette in their vigil, envying their unfeigned concentration on the comatose figure in bed. My own patience soon gave out and I dropped heavy hints about lunch. My mother refused to quit the cabin and, when even Aunt Annette claimed to have lost her appetite, I knew that I must be totally uncaring. The realisation increased my desire to escape but, on reaching the dining room, I found that Sophie had taken Luise to sit with her playmates, leaving me totally at the mercy of the Professor’s wife. She began by relating, with relish, the ‘tragedy’ of the two little girls who were travelling alone to Havana to meet their father, since their mother, a Catholic, had chosen to stay behind with her boyfriend. She pronounced the woman’s religion with such contempt, as if it explained both her adultery and her desertion, that I wondered whether we were not as guilty of intolerance as our enemies. Then, shamelessly sliding across two empty seats, she filled the gap between courses by quizzing me on my grandfather’s financial arrangements in selling the store. Convinced that my confusion was a ploy, she pressed for answers until her husband finally told her to ‘leave the boy alone’. She snapped that she was only showing an interest and, besides, she had a right to ask since she had yet to be reimbursed for a chipped teapot. Deciding that no chocolate cake in the world was worth such torture, I fled, postponing a return to the cabin in favour of a visit to the tourist deck, where I was more determined than ever to confront my father, whose reappearance in our lives would now be a disaster.

  I was deflected by the sight of a girl my own age, standing at the rail, throwing bread to the terns. She was so beautiful and poised that, in normal circumstances, I would have slunk away, but her solicitude emboldened me to approach her.

  ‘They’re wonderful, aren’t they?’

  ‘They’re all right.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me butting in, but it’s my hobby.’

  ‘Accosting strangers?’

  ‘No!’ I exclaimed. ‘Birds! Ask me anything you want to know about them. Go on.’

  ‘I had a friend with a passion for trains,’ she replied, disdaining my offer. ‘He spent days taking down numbers. He knew the entire Berlin timetable by heart.’

  ‘There’s no comparison,’ I said, more concerned to fight my corner even than to discover the nature of the friendship. ‘Trains are inert. Mechanical. Birds are alive. They sing. They fly. They’re intelligent.’

  ‘What about birdbrains?’

  ‘These ones are terns. I couldn’t swear to the species –’

  ‘You said I could ask you anything.’

  ‘I’m not an expert on seabirds. At least not yet.’ I trembled at my immodesty. ‘If I’m right, these are Arctic Terns on their way home from the Antarctic. They go there every winter on a journey of nearly 20,000 kilometres. That’s 40,000 there and back.’

  ‘I can count!’

  ‘What I mean,’ I floundered, ‘is when you think how much effort we make for a few days’ holiday, let alone a voyage like this. And they fly all that way without the least fuss. We can learn a lot from birds.’

  ‘What about thieving magpies or cuckoos that abandon their chicks? Or vultures?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Should we learn from them too?’

  ‘They’re exceptions. Most birds are loving and loyal. You know, of course, about turtle doves?’

  ‘All that billing and cooing. Yuck!’

  ‘But have you heard of the huia bird, which died of grief when its mate was killed?’

  ‘Says who? Have you ever seen one?’

  ‘How could I? I’ve never been to New Zealand. In any case, it’s extinct.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ She gazed at me triumphantly and I realised that I would be happy to admit defeat provided that I could see her smile. I studied her intently, to her alternate pleasure and annoyance. She was exactly my height. I was convinced that, if we stood back to back (or mouth to mouth, as my mutinous mind suggested), there would be nothing between us. She had frizzy auburn hair, pulled back in a band from which a few wisps strayed on to her forehead, and a patch of freckles around her eyes, which gave her a permanently summery look even when she scowled. She had a small turned-up nose, such bright red lips that I felt sure her teachers must have constantly asked her to wipe them, and a slight gap between her two front teeth. Shifting my attention lower, I could see that her figure was shapely – not a word much in vogue today but one which perfectly reflected my feelings, since I was impressed less by the nature of her shape than by the mere fact that she had one. Her amusement at my attentions made me blush and I quickly asked her name.

  ‘Johanna,’ she replied. ‘Johanna Paulsen.’

  ‘I’m Karl.’ Then, suppressing a pang of disloyalty, I dropped the Frankel and all its baggage. ‘Karl Hirsch.’

  ‘I’ve seen you already. Yesterday. You were walking on the sports dec
k with a crippled Mongolian girl.’ Her description of Luise made me shudder. Under normal circumstances, it would have put paid to both the conversation and our friendship, but my conviction that she spoke out of ignorance rather than malice prompted me to set her straight.

  ‘She’s my sister. She’s neither Mongolian nor crippled but was born with a minor brain dysfunction, which impedes some of her faculties and enhances others.’

  ‘What could it possibly enhance?’

  ‘Her capacity for love,’ I said, wishing that I could cite the piano-tuning skills of the blind rather than something so vague.

  ‘I think it’s wrong for a person like that to have a place on the ship when there are normal people stuck in Germany.’

  ‘You sound like a Nazi,’ I replied and, when she made no attempt to answer the charge, told her about Frau Herzen who had had a genuinely Mongolian son. Having been forced to put him in a home, she received a letter claiming that he had died of appendicitis, which was a medical impossibility since he had already had his appendix removed. It was then that, in the only act of protest left to her, she had come to work for Jews.

  ‘I’m not a Jew,’ she declared and I found myself transfixed by the medallion of the Virgin Mary dangling provocatively around her neck. When I urged her to explain, she replied: ‘My father’s Jewish, although I didn’t have the least notion of it until I was thrown out of school. But I’m not anything. I’m not a German: the Germans don’t want me; they treat me like a Jew. I’m not a Jew: the Jews don’t want me since my mother isn’t Jewish. She’s taking me to Cuba to meet my father, but I won’t be a Cuban. I’m nothing … no one. So leave me alone!’